7
November 19th.
Lawrence Henderson:
“What are you trying to accomplish with this?” he bitches on my screen, more righteously irritated because I won’t face-to-face with him even though we’re in the same facility. He should be happy I took his call, given the mood he’s in.
“It’s just debriefing, Major Burke,” I don’t reassure. “Things we need to know.”
“I’ve seen it,” he goes off as expected. “It’s chemical. Bordering on torture. What is it you think you need to know?”
“Him,” I go minimalist to keep him strung. “We need to be sure of a few things before we proceed.”
“It gets better?” he does the attitude I’m thinking of naming after him.
“You saw his autonomic responses during VR interrogation?”
He doesn’t answer, knowing that I know he has.
“So what do you think we have here?”
He actually mulls it over before he blurts it out:
“Some kind of wetwork. I don’t know. I still don’t buy his backstory. I did some checking—but you know that—and his sister told me he’d been unaccounted for. Extended periods. Plenty of time for someone to get their hooks in him and train him.”
“He is what his files say he is,” I insist easily. “Crap childhood followed by crap adult life. What makes him more than a depressed twenty-nine-year-old is how he’s apparently wired. Happy accident of Nature versus Nurture. For him and for us.”
“So he’s some kind of comic book mutant?”
I shake off his melodrama and call up live feed of our mutual friend, apparently deep-out in his VR web.
“He’s been kept whacked hard enough to drop an elephant. VR immersion for twenty-hour stretches, barely three hours in actual awake reality in between. Any sleep he’s getting is dozing in the gear. I imagine it’s something like Spec Ops Hell Week, except he’s been running three times longer and with no sense of time. I wonder what it does to his dreams.”
“For what?” he challenges—he appears to have gotten “attached” even faster than Datascan predicted. “So he can relive his grand adventures twenty-four-seven until you break him?”
“It’s not about breaking, Major. And it’s not just his own shit: We’ve run him through a library of hairy ops. Mogadishu. Iraq. Even hot new sims of some of the scariest battles of World War Two, Korea and Vietnam. And some Class-A atrocities: You remember Cambodia? Darfur? Rwanda? Ethnic cleansing with rape and machetes? Datascan’s recreated a choice selection, dead babies and all. And terror attacks with bits of bodies left all over. He’s seen it all, Major, up close and personal. Mass-headings. School bombings. Chechnya. Beslan. Jerusalem. And not like on the news-nets: un-edited and immersed. Living them. Walking through them. Smelling the blood and the death.”
“Why?” he measures out through his teeth, then protects himself with his sarcasm: “I mean, besides giving you all something to jack to.”
“You saw what happens when he’s in the shit: His limbic responses go through the roof, but then he hits this plateau and slips into a zone. Clarity. Three dimensional thinking. Controlled dissociation. Do you know that he talks to himself?”
“So do I.”
“He talks to himself in the second person. Shows he’s stepping back, becoming his own tactical commander. He should be losing it. But it’s like he feeds on it. And you’ve seen what he can do when he gets there.”
“Which I still don’t buy: He didn’t learn that in some Kung Fu class. He’s got military moves. And moves I haven’t seen. Lethal shit. And he can shoot. He even used a Claymore on those Wabs…”
“He read the instructions, Major,” I rub his nose in what he should know. “They come with the detonator kit, printed in bold-face grunt-basic so you can’t fuck it up under fire.”
He sits and stews for a minute. I give him a break.
“Granted, he’s damn fast on the upload: We’ve been feeding him the new training VR series, kind of like a break between stress sessions. He eats it all up as fast as we can load it. Weapons. Tactics. History. Tech. And yes, even I’d swear he’d already had years of training. But I know he doesn’t. He’s a natural. He’s got a feel. He learns and adapts scary fast. We fed him the VR version of the SOF junior officer’s mission planning course and ran him through some fairly extreme boards. He not only passed the standards—this while whacked silly and sleep-deprived—he played every scenario we threw at him and owned every enemy coming and going.”
“So?” he downplays, still refusing to buy in. “That’s all structured—by-the-book moves. Nothing fancy, nothing creative: absorb and apply. Means he’s smart. Figure he must play a good game of chess.”
“Not chess, Major. Chess—as you say—has limited fixed rules. Do you know what TEGWAR is?”
“Joke. Made-up card game to bush the bushable. ‘The Exciting Game Without Any Rules.’ You make up rules as you go.”
“Same thing he does, Major. Keeps changing the game, keeps his targets off balance. Like I said: we gave him the basic rules of engagement, detailed the scenario, broke down his resources. He did the rest. And not only gave us multiple options for each step, but was able to do what the instructors do: break down all the possible outcomes of each variation, then weighed a best-choice based on how he thought the enemy would respond. Know who else thinks like that? Or should I say: What else?”
He gets it faster than I thought he would. Shakes his head. Starts laughing.
“You’re trying to tell me your new Hal found itself some kind of long-lost soul mate? Just stumbled upon him in a random CT investigation and got all hot or hard or whatever it is machines get? Now that’s just wrong.”
“Is it?” I challenge him. “Remember: Datascan is selecting its operatives based on profiles as well as skill sets. It’s not just about being able to run a mission, shoot a gun.”
“And you’re telling me it wants some kind of serial killer?”
“True serial killers are sociopaths, Major,” I tell him firmly. “No empathy. No remorse. It’s hardwired in the brain. Does that sound like him? Look at his responses. He’s running on rage. But he doesn’t feed off the actual killing. It isn’t even revenge. Or justice. During debriefs he uses the word ‘remove’ a lot, like he just needs to make the bad guys go away and not come back. Most disturbing thing is he doesn’t take prisoners, unless he’s specifically ordered to, and then he cripples them first, like he needs to make sure they won’t hurt anybody ever again. He really is a fucking hero, all about protecting the innocent. And when he’s done he crashes. Hard.”
I let him stew, then prod him the way he needs to go, wants to go:
“You two really aren’t that much different, Major, at least in terms of why you do what you do. Maybe you should get to know him a little better.”
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 24
