MARIPOSA

A novel by Greg Bear

Copyright © 2009 by Greg Bear.

Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 0-7592-9890-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7592-9890-3

DEDICATION:

For David and Diane Clark, profiles in courage

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

14 Days

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

7 Days

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

PART TWO 6 Days

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

4 Days

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

36 Hours

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

CHAPTER SIXTY

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

One Year After

CHAPTER SEVENTY

CHAPTER ONE

Washington, D.C.

Number One Observatory Circle

Official Residence of the Vice President of the United States.

Edward Benjamin Quinn wiped his hand on a towel and stood back to survey the damage.

The woman on the floor had a slight pulse and was still breathing, but with a slow, jerked rhythm. Soft brown hair fanned in a dark halo around her contorted face.

Irreparable.

He knew a thousand ways he could have killed her outright, and so he must have decided he was going to let her live a little longer. The question was why, of course. He and Beth-Anne hadn’t argued. He wasn’t drunk, he didn’t feel crazy, he wasn’t even upset—and he didn’t think he had been drugged.

He felt fine, better than fine; he felt strong, justified, square with the big-all world. Without guilt, you learn the quality of your soul. Cross that border and you learn what you are really capable of.

There would be consequences, of course.

Outside, the president was still in the hospital, recovering from three bullets. It had happened in Dallas, of all places. Fortunately she was out of the woods—out of the hospital and out of Dallas—and able to make decisions, but for eight hours Eddie Quinn had been president. Under the circumstances he did not enjoy that honor, but nothing had gone so wrong that he needed to do this.

He couldn’t feel the love or the excitement he and Beth-Anne had once known, but that didn’t seem reason enough, either.

He walked into the bathroom and inspected the folds of his robe for blood. After washing his hands, he returned to pick up the towel and toss it into the laundry hamper. While he was making this circuit, Beth-Anne stopped breathing. For that he was grateful.

“You’re one screwed-up bastard, Eddie,” he said.

If this had happened during the eight hours he had been president…

“Whoa.”

A full-length mirror hung on the back on the bathroom door. He let his robe fall around his broad shoulders and looked at himself as if for the first time. His was still a strong body, with thick, strong arms and short, powerful legs. A paunch had settled over his stomach, from years on the campaign trail and sitting rather than pumping iron and running. Hairs curled around his back, forested his arms, and almost hid the long, coiled scar that stretched from his neck down his right arm. A nice bit of needlework, that. A good stitch. A man’s blast-sharpened rib had once stuck out of his chest, just below the clavicle. The hair on his abdomen pointed toward midline and navel, monkey’s fur silky and thick. Another scar coiled there, pink and bald, like a burrowing pink centipede. He could almost imagine it creeping under his flesh. It was that vivid, almost pleasant to think about. More pleasant than remembering how the scar got there. The suicide bomber had actually bitten him. Fragments of exploded mandible. Hard to forget things like that, very hard: but he had gotten treatment and it had worked, hadn’t it?

Then why this?

He tied the robe shut and sat on the edge of the antique maple-frame bed where he and Beth-Anne had made their last child, Jacob: now nine months old, asleep down the hall in the bedroom that he shared with his sister Carina. It was the nanny’s night off.

Carina, eight years old, adored her new brother. In a few minutes, Edward would go in and read her a bedtime story.

On the nightstand, his security badge beeped. The house monitored it all. The children’s clothing, furniture, and bedding were tagged with small sensors, but he and his wife had chosen to keep their privacy—except when wearing the badges. Still, the house knew something bad had happened. The Secret Service would be here in a few minutes.

One thing at a time.

He walked slowly down the hall to the children’s bedroom, arms out like a bird, face creased by a quizzical frown. Pushing open the heavy wooden door, he smiled at Carina where she sat in the outer nimbus of her ceramic moon-glow lamp. He leaned over the crib to check on Jacob—mostly asleep and beautiful—then stooped to pick up The House on Pooh Corner and resume where they had left off the night before.

A lovely peace descended upon Eddie Quinn. The promise of Mariposa held true even now—no guilt, no borders, the past wiped away.

It was so rare that he had time to spend with his family.

CHAPTER TWO

FBI Academy

Quantico, Virginia

William Griffin walked across the concrete to the Jefferson building, footsteps echoing in the eerie morning quiet. The air smelled sweet and cool. A few green-brown leaves whispered past in a gritty swirl between the towers.

The sun cast a long, flicking shadow.

The old FBI Academy in Quantico—the Q—was practically empty. Just a few administrative offices remained, everything else boarded up, mothballed, or on the move to Alameda, where the jewel in Hoover’s tarnished tiara was supposedly being reanimated—if congress approved a massive appropriation. Twenty-five billion dollars. But that was looking less and less likely, stalling the Bureau’s transfer indefinitely.

For the moment, that was its name—simply the Bureau.

The Academy buildings had suffered neglect: peeling paint and cracked concrete, patchy brown lawns on the surrounding low slopes, varmint mounds and runnels everywhere. Last year, movers had hauled away the monuments to 9/11 and 10/4, the simple black stone replica of New York’s twin towers, rising from a Pentagon base, and a donut of twisted steel from the Seattle ferry Duwamish. The Duwamish had been blown up not by Muslim terrorists but by a demented creep from Missouri, infuriated by gay marriage.

All the old signs had been covered with plastic or pulled out, leaving pits in the walls.

For now, the Bureau was divided like the Roman Empire of old into East and West: two competing directors, two budgets, and next to no money.

Another day older and deeper in debt.

A tall, graying security guard unlocked the heavy glass door as he approached. “You know where to go, Agent Griffin,” the guard said. “Don’t get lost. Mr. Hoover’s still spookin’ around. I hear he’s been getting the goods on a few devils, kicking butt and takin’ names.”

William chuckled. “What’s he got on you, Clarence?”

“The ladies, my man.” Clarence winked. “Sleek, smart ladies in tight-fittin’ power suits. Black or white, Hispanic or Asian, I love ’em all.”

“And they love you.”

“No time, and still I wish they was more!” Clarence called after him.

While the investigative divisions of other agencies—ATF, Homeland Security, Diplomatic Security, Treasury, even the IRS and the Postal Service—had been happy to suck up some high-profile, high-publicity cases, none had the forensic expertise or the laboratory throughput, and crime never slept.

Nobody knew how that song would end.

Much of top FBI management had evacuated to sunnier positions, leaving behind a few dedicated souls and some spectacular incompetents. William was fortunate that his boss, Alicia Kunsler, fell into the first category.

He hung a left past the broad conversation pit, empty but for two upended couches and rolls of old carpet, and walked along a hallway now bereft of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite pastoral prints. Just a long row of rectangles on a sunned and peeling wall.

Kunsler kept her lonely office at the end of an empty corridor. The overhead lights had been dimmed or removed, but the glow from her half open door guided him around an abandoned desk, a few old gray steel swivel chairs, a tied stack of cardboard, and a bin filled with newspaper clippings someone had deemed unnecessary.

William wondered how much history had already been lost.

Brain transplant. That’s what the fetch bloggers called the move to Alameda. Zombie Bureau. Shoot it in the head and put it out of its misery. Serve it right for surveilling Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, the Dalai Lama, and, of course—at the request of a former Attorney General, now serving time in Cumberland federal prison—for keeping extensive “Patriot” files on the current president of the United States, the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, and six ranking senators.

Burn the old FBI, then jolt it back to life on the operating table of national bankruptcy.

William knocked lightly on the jamb. Kunsler saw his shadow in the doorway, held up a long, thin index finger, then crooked it—come in—and resumed typing in the empty air over her desk. An angular, black-haired woman of forty-one with a hook nose, big hands, and small, dark, intelligent eyes, she sat behind an old avocado-green steel desk, staring through a pair of projector glasses—her spex—and air-typing on a virtual keyboard, fingers jabbing two inches above the antique blotter.

William sat.

Kunsler had proved herself a master at gathering power and influence in a vacuum. After the firing of four directors in the last two years, she had assumed the task of deputy director of the Bureau in Transition East, or BITE, and had moved into this old, stripped-down room in a deserted, musty building filled with unhappy ghosts.

Not the sort of woman—nor the sort of agency, now—that William had thought would have the balls to conduct a months-long, clandestine investigation into the doings of one of the most powerful and secretive men on the planet.

She finished tapping her line, pulled off her spex, and focused full attention on him. “Tell me something cheerful,” she said in a small, precise voice.

William sat. “The president has relieved her Secret Service detail.”

“Do you blame her?” Kunsler asked.

“She’s considering hiring Talos executive security to protect her.”

Kunsler sniffed. “I’ve asked to meet with her twice—and been refused both times.”

“Daniel Haze went to congress asking them to override the hire. They can’t, of course.”

Haze was director of the Secret Service—one of the branches competing with the Bureau for funding and cases.

“The fox will be in the cluck house,” Kunsler said. “I’m not feeling the cheer, Agent Griffin. Price’s octopus arms are slithering through every branch of government, and I know that bastard is about to make his move. I just wish I knew what it was.”

“What about Nabokov?”

This was the code-name for an agent who had already spent a year in Lion City, infiltrated into Talos. Kunsler told William what she thought he needed to know, and nothing more.

“On schedule. He’s going to have to act fast, though. Someone’s spreading manure. Price hires a lot of retired agents.”

Kunsler took a zip page out of her desk drawer and passed it across. “I’d like you to look into this personally,” she said. “Keep you busy until we know what’s up with Nabokov. It’s a long shot, but it feels hinky.

“Price put four million dollars into the research of a scientist named Plover—some kind of pharmaceutical wizard. Plover started with cancer drugs, then expanded into a new field called EGCT—epigenetic glial cell therapy. Does that mean Price or someone near him has cancer? If so, they’re shit out of luck. Plover’s foundation in Baltimore reported he left the premises last week with two and a half million in grant money…They have no idea where he absconded to. I like that word, absconded, don’t you?”

“Fine word,” William agreed.

“We know where he is, of course—he may be a genius, but he’s not used to acting like a bad guy. His wife bought a house in Boise four months ago. She’s still using her old credit cards. I’d like you to fly to Idaho and pay them a visit.”

“Just me?”

“For now. Maybe Plover’s just tired of being a genius. If he can tell us something useful about Price, we can offer immunity and protection. If he’s got nothing, take him into custody. Flight at 0600 tomorrow morning from Reagan. Hope this doesn’t interfere with your social life.”

“Not a problem,” William said. “Haven’t had a date in two months.”

“Some lucky cowgirl will come along and find her buckaroo,” Kunsler said, stone-faced.

William broke into laughter. “They pulled down nearly all the posters around here,” he said. “But they left the ones on alcohol and domestic abuse. What’s that tell you about the private life of an agent?”

Kunsler waved that away and looked unconcerned. “Let me be your matchmaker,” she said. “It’ll happen.”

The secure phone on her desk chimed. She picked it up and listened. Her eyes wandered around the room, met William’s.

“Oh my God,” she said, then hung up. For a moment, she could not speak. Her eyes welled up with tears. She looked down and rearranged some loose papers. “Does the shit never stop?”

“What is it? The president?”

“She’s fine.” Kunsler’s voice cracked. “It’s Beth-Anne Quinn. The vice president just murdered his wife.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Ziggurat

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Nathaniel Trace walked slowly to the condo window and stared out over Dubai Creek. A few dhows, pleasure boats, and light freighters plied their trade, far below.

From his perspective—six hundred feet up the side of the Ziggurat, a huge steel and glass pyramid—the morning sun burned like a blowtorch on the horizon. The twelve lanes of the Ras al Khor Bridge, mostly empty, cut through the waterway’s blinding shimmer.

The strangest feeling pushed through his entire body, as if he were a giant skyscraper and all the light switches were being turned on—or off—in quick succession.

Windows bright, windows dark.

How appropriate, here in Dubai, home of ten thousand audacious, half empty monuments to the world-class architecture of a failing oil empire.

An incredibly rich city fallen on hard times, where Nathaniel had lived and worked for six months now, interacting with part of the most sophisticated computer system on Earth—and filling his accounts with cash. His work was all but finished. He would be called up if they needed him for a few last details—but that was unlikely.

No, Jones was in control now, buried somewhere in the mountains of Switzerland.

He examined his naked reflection in the glass. Pale, lumpy body. Brush of disheveled ginger hair. Round face with a bump of nose—thin bridge, bulbous tip, flaring nostrils. Smooth, round cheeks. Generous lips that had once tended to a boyish smile.

Now he looked more like a bewildered Irish car salesman.

Nathaniel shivered and refocused his eyes. He could stare and stare at the sun without blinking and it didn’t hurt a bit. If he chose, he could destroy his eyes and not even feel it.

He chose not to.

Something similar had happened a year before. Like the flip of a switch—all the misery, gone. Back then, it had been the pain from a nasty run-in with the wicked old world of the Middle East. Relief from worry and torment might explain his current round of mental pyrotechnics.

But this time, it felt very different.

You will experience liberation.

That’s what the doctor had told him. All his old fears and traumas wouldn’t just be managed, just painted over—they would be gone. He would remember them at any level of detail he willed, like tracing scars with a finger, but the scars would mean nothing emotionally.

Freedom from all his blunders, his mistakes…freedom from guilt.

That was what Mariposa was supposed to do. Better men, better fighters—everything better. And the doctor’s promises had come true.

But now, his recovery and all his personal progress were twisting into something truly weird. Maybe what he was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened in Arabia Deserta, or with Mariposa.

Maybe it was unique to him.

But he didn’t think so. His thoughts jumbled, tumbled all over each other like acrobats or hyperactive children. He felt great but he could not think straight. The confusion did not cause him actual pain but it scared him.

He felt great but he was scared to death.

He loved being scared to death.

Stop it.

The fear went away—but only for a moment.

A bank of dust blowing up from the south obscured the brilliant morning sun. It was going to be a murky day in Dubai. All the glittering steel and glass, and yet the desert still ruled.

Nathaniel felt a sudden urge to test himself, test this new awareness and see how physically in control and adaptable he was.

Get away from the luxury and the air-conditioning. Walk out into the desert. Feel the hot sand on his bare feet. Strip off his clothes and directly face the sun’s rays. See if his skin grew a new silvery layer and his nose became broad to radiate heat.

Probably not a good plan, he told himself—the desert would leach him in an hour. He had been incredibly thirsty of late, drinking gallons of Masafi well water and peeing like a race horse.

Yesterday the pee was tinted purple. Then it turned bright yellow and opaque—like paint. Who knew what would happen to him under the pounding glare and the wind-blown grit.

Still…

Baby steps.

He let the curtain drop and closed his eyes. Before he lost his last lick of sense—before he decided to actually leave the city and walk out into the desert—he decided he should ride out this part unconscious. This part of whatever was happening to him. But it was all so fascinating. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

This new person he was becoming might be human or might not—but he promised more real adventure and change and fun than anything Nathaniel had ever experienced.

He consciously willed his heart to speed up—then slowed it down.

Good.

More!

He picked up a long brass bird sculpture from the desktop near the window and, with a slight grunt, bent it double. The effort popped two of his knuckles and strained a ligament in his right arm, but there it was—the sculpture twisted into a pretzel. Something he could never have done before—at least not consciously.

He had read that in an emergency, people can increase their strength tenfold. A frightened mother can lift a car off her injured child. Drugs can have the same effect.

Nathaniel no longer needed the excuse of an emergency—nor drugs.

The needs of the body no longer ruled.

He gripped the two fingers and popped one back into place, then the other. The arm would have to take care of itself—he didn’t mind the pain.

I have a cosmic mind, he told himself. He could make himself believe every word—and then smile in perfect awareness that this was crazy. That he was going insane.

But whatever—I am bringing a lot more systems online and under my conscious control than is humanly possible.

He took the sedative with another glass of water—the water tasted like pink platinum, whatever that might be—and lay down on the bed in the condo’s coolness, privacy, and extraordinary luxury.

Leased through the efforts of that poor blown-up, beaten-down, guilt-ridden son of a bitch who was being paid, along with the rest of the Turing Seven, to corrupt the world’s finances—but couldn’t hear a motorbike rip past without breaking into a rank sweat.

His past self.

There was still plenty of money left. The Quiet Man had trained them well. Millions of dollars in hidden bank accounts, just in case. However this turned out, he would soon be leaving it all behind—United Arab Emirates, the Middle East, the desert.

All but the money.

He would make his way back to America. There, with what he knew, and this new sense of liberation, maybe he would finally be able to do something different.

Meet important people outside the usual circles.

Spill the beans. Tell the world what he had been up to. Tell them all about the incredible nastiness that was in the works.

Do some good for a change.

Although doing more evil would certainly be exciting.

14 Days

CHAPTER FOUR

Spider/Argus

Tyson’s Corner, Virginia

Jane Rowland climbed down from the humming blue-and-green bus and walked with three colleagues, known to her only by their badge numbers, across a walkway through plantings of young trees and turf-squared grass, around a small fountain, to her home away from home.

Under a gray canopy of moody humidity, the new headquarters of Spider/Argus blended with all the other blandly efficient buildings of Tyson’s Corner: gray modern architecture both blocky and tidy.

Hotels and malls and restaurants spread throughout the small city catered to some of the most powerful and anonymous people on the planet.

Typically Jane worked the nightshift. Her personal monitor bots were even now preparing reports that only she would see—until she passed them along to her director, who had permanently commissioned her last year to do what she did best.

Spider/Argus had been conceived twenty years ago as a supplement to the National Security Agency, which had proved slow to transition from SigInt—Signals Intelligence: landlines, satellites, cell phones, radio—into the dataflow age of Internet Everywhere.

In the eight years since its creation, S/A had budded off completely from its parent, taking on not just Internet and Web-based research and intelligence, but defensive CPI: counterintelligence, prevention, intervention.

Letting a highly trained watchdog off its leash.

Spider/Argus was not even its official name. Jane knew of just a small fraction of its operations.

Security barricades surrounded all. Nobody approached the building without clearance at the highest levels. Hidden sonic disrupter and microwave heat and pain projectors had been installed at all entrances and in undisclosed locations around the grounds—capable of incapacitating attackers at a distance of several hundred yards.

Lethal force was authorized inside the barbed-wire flanked corridors, patrolled by roller bots and dogs and soldiers. The tunnels of wire that covered nearby freeway overpasses were monitored by thousands of bug-eye cameras.

At regular intervals along all the local freeways and access roads, concrete arches hid .50 caliber, high-speed, radar-guided gun mounts, similar to those used to shoot down missiles and capable of cutting cars and trucks—even armored, military-style trucks—to hamburger-filled scrap within seconds.

Jane passed through the automatic steel and glass doors and submitted her badge and arm chip at the two security gates beyond.

“You’ll need a code refresh by tomorrow evening,” the female guard told her in a droop-eyed monotone.

For the guards, this had to be one of the most boring jobs in the greater DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Nobody interesting passed their way. Nobody spoke to them other than brief pleasantries.

Not even sports or weather could be discussed.

But the droop eyes stayed alert and sharp.

Jane waited for her assigned elevator at the automated station, then rose to the third floor. No music and no smell—clean, cool, purified air. Elevators carried singles at all times. Conversation in other than work areas was not just discouraged, it was tracked and fined. Posted lists of recent fines glowed from monitors over the elevator doors—though of course with no names or numbers attached.

There was fun to be had, of course. Floors and divisions with the highest levels of fines had to buy Christmas gifts for charities in the DC metro area. Top analysts with the highest fines had to spring for hallway treat tables.

No holiday parties, however.

Those guilty of prohibited violations spent three months in “time-out” at comfortable locations in the Adirondacks, until their cases were processed. Most did not return.

Jane did not find any of this exceptional. Her new office was far more comfortable than the one at the old Naval station on the banks of the Potomac.

The security was no worse, and definitely more effective.

At the end of each work period—usually in the small hours of the morning—she returned to her apartment and her daughter, dismissed the government-provided nanny, a woman with excellent bodyguard credentials, and assumed her favorite role—devoted single mom.

She was very good at everything she did.

Jane approached the door to her office. Beside the door, a black sign with silver letters warned that this was a “Faraday Room.”

The room snitch checked her security codes one last time, unlocked the door, and opened access to the banks of office computers, clearing her for work.

Her machines never shut down.

She watched as wide ranks of rectangular displays brightened, switching from low-power mode.

Results of the day’s searches started cascading down the line like flipped cards in solitaire. She sat in her special chair—the one item she had brought with her from the old Potomac building—and flexed her fingers before highlighting with airy gestures the top items on her evening work chart.

The room swiftly interpreted her motions either as writing, drawing, or command and control.

On the small bulletin board hung to the left of her monitors, ten months ago—while preparing for her current operation—she had tacked a printout from a Congressional Budget Office report.

Many nations, coming out of a long financial downturn, and having acquired assets such as at-risk real estate from beleaguered banks and other institutions, find themselves asset rich but increasingly cash poor. The United States, with debts on the order of fifty trillion dollars and an unfortunate habit of triggering recessions, is thought by a majority of nations to be the greatest threat to financial stability in the world.

Investor and debt-holding institutions fear that a disruption similar to that of 2008-2009 will push the world economy over the edge, bringing on yet another worldwide crisis, this one of dire proportions.

Created in 2009, the International Financial Protection Corporation (IFPC) is an international fund that contains and controls a cumulative 85% of U.S. debt through all of its participants and investors.

The United States has agreed to certain strict conditions, contingent to obtain necessary further loans from IFPC. Those conditions have not been revealed to the public.

Below that, she had pinned a second printout framed top and bottom with blue scribbles from her boss.

The following internal warning from the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury has never been released to the public and, god willing, never will be.

In order to qualify for all necessary further loans from IFPC, the United States executive branch, with the agreement of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and three congressional committees, has agreed to a special troubled nation loan protocol.

Certain national assets are valued and offered up as collateral. Central authority is ultimately invested in an automated system known as MSARC—Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control—which can trigger massive reallocations and call in loans, effectively putting a debtor nation into instant receivership.

Should MSARC decide to act, collateral assets guaranteed under the loan agreements will immediately be transferred to IFPC.

Financial corporations and investment funds around the world can then call the political shots through a Reallocation Committee.

If MSARC so decides, for the first time in our history, foreigners will hold almost complete economic and political control of—and so they will own—the United States of America.

MSARC poses the greatest threat to this nation since the Cold War—maybe greater.

And it’s our own damned fault. We do hate paying taxes, and we do love all our precious government services. Squealing piggies at the trough.

Her boss was prone to expressing himself vividly. Nevertheless, she read the posted pages before beginning her work every evening. They neatly bookended the current plight of the United States.

The monitor on her far right—smallest and most antique, losing pixels and fading in the corners to autumn gold—was devoted to displaying a simple digital clock.

The clock counted backward, second by second.

It now read 14 days 13 hours 5 minutes.

The amount of time left before MSARC began formally judging America.

MSARC was allowed access to information that once would have been considered closely-held national secrets. Its central computer banks in Geneva relied on a network surveillance capability that in two years had come to rival many in her own agency.

MSARC also had access to the records of major corporations with government contracts—all but Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas, one of the biggest holders of U.S. government contracts. That exemption had been passed by congress with hardly a ripple, so many members were beholden to Talos CEO Axel Price. Price had taken a particular interest in MSARC some years back, even serving on a fully briefed government advisory committee.

The first item on Jane’s evening agenda was following up on a list of MSARC queries. Stopping or interfering with those queries—or even tracking them—violated the loan agreements, so Jane was discreet, using the full range of search and masking capabilities available to Spider/Argus.

This evening, the list included only thirty queries, concentrating on the Federal Reserve and a number of major software corporations.

The latter might be of interest to other analysts. She copied them to a separate office that evaluated long-term patterns of foreign interest in private business.

More sobering still, MSARC’s command center in Geneva was only now ramping up to full capacity—the moment of truth tracked by her backward-counting clock.

No one knew how extensive and powerful those systems were. It was possible Spider/Argus would be completely shut out by a superior program.

Whenever Jane conducted surveys on that particular question, her web “helpers”—thousands of subroutines running in machines everywhere from Cheyenne Conserve to Iron Mountain to right here in Tyson’s Corner—came back with results that gave her the spooky feeling she—Jane Rowland herself—was being closely watched by something with almost preternatural instincts.

Human or machine, she could not even begin to guess.

There was evidence this presence was working on behalf of MSARC.

There was also evidence that MSARC was not even aware of its existence.

That contradiction intrigued Jane.

She loved this sort of puzzle.

The second item for this evening was the most important. She was arranging for a brief but powerful ripple of net inactivity—amounting to a thirty-second denial of service—spreading across hundreds of server farms in the northwest and the southeast, with the ultimate goal of helping an agent infiltrated into Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas.

His code name was Nabokov.

Jane knew almost everything about how the Talos computers accessed the outside world, and how they protected themselves against being accessed. Nabokov was poised to take advantage of a maintenance hole in Talos’s infranet to download data crucial to a joint investigation, a rare instance of S/A cooperation with an outside agency—in this case, Alicia Kunsler at Bureau East.

Killing a few minutes time, Jane pushed her wheeled chair over to her relaxation station—a hot plate, sink, small refrigerator, and rack of cups—and made herself a cup of her favorite, white tea.

Cup in hand, she rolled back.

One-handed, she used a keyboard to type in a warning of the impending system-wide interruption, alerting national security masters throughout Tyson’s Corner that this was not the beginning of a foreign assault.

She then paused her finger over the ENTER key, waiting for the precise second…

Now or never.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lion City, Texas

Talos Corporate Campus

Footsteps echoed hollowly down the Buckeye main hallway to the central instructor lounge. Fouad Al-Husam was alone. The building seemed deserted.

He had finished his afternoon class teaching regional Farsi and Arabic to a select team of Haitian troops destined to serve as mercenaries in Middle Eastern theaters.

Normally, at the end of each day he returned to his apartment in Lion City and ate dinner alone. His free time he mostly spent reading or watching Islamic history on cable, hungry for another place, another time.

Remembering his strange return to the hot, pure air of the Hejaz—his visit to Mecca.

This evening, he had reserved the central computer annex for half an hour to conduct academic research over the Talos infranet.

The Haitians had surprised Fouad with their intelligence and devotion. Talos was paying for their education. They sent more money home to their families each month than many in Haiti earned in a lifetime.

They reminded Fouad of the Janissaries he had commanded in Turkey, it seemed an age ago—but was just two years.

Two eventful, deceitful years.

It could be said about Axel Price that he was a powerful man, a strange man, even perhaps a corrupt man, but he paid generous wages and maintained strict military discipline in his company and his people.

Fouad was ten times better paid now than he had ever been as an agent.

The Buckeye main lounge surrounding the annex was also empty. Evening classes resumed at eight.

The annex—a smoked glass hexagon on the north side of the lounge—served both faculty and advanced students. It gave access to online instructional materials and teacher/adviser briefings, as well as a host of information services equal or superior to anything available to CEOs of other major American corporations.

Of course, all searches were logged.

The classrooms in Buckeye radiated in eight spokes from a central rotunda, forming a wagon wheel. Three similar wheels in other quarters of the campus were devoted to particular collections of Talos customers.

Each was named after a regional butterfly.

Axel Price loved butterflies. He had the largest collection in the world—hundreds of sealed glass cases, so it was said—but showed it to no one.

Price’s other hobby was collecting rare antique cars. They were kept in a huge garage near the Smoky, his ranch and principal residence.

Fouad’s fingerprint and arm chip logged him into the annex. The lock took a small DNA sample from his skin oils. Micro-PCR and pore sequencing technology within the lock took less than ten seconds to confirm his genetic identity and compare it with the information on the chip.

The annex’s glass and steel door unlocked with a smooth click and slid open. Had he been denied, alarms would have sounded throughout the building.

The chip also enabled Talos to track him anywhere on the ten thousand acre campus. Every few feet, the chip was queried by sensors imbedded in walls and sidewalks, grass, and asphalt. Millions more sensors were scattered over the training fields and surrounding lawns, gardens, and tracks, maintaining a tightly woven net of constant surveillance.

Around Lion City, planes and helicopters had dropped enough sensors to saturate the entire area with the thin disks, two centimeters in diameter—one or two per square yard.

All in the interest, so it was said, of preventing illegal Mexicans from causing trouble.

Fouad carried ice in a cup from the cafeteria to cool his hands. He applied it briefly to his forehead. Within any of the campus buildings, Talos security could record his heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature for face, hands, and feet. The ice in the cup reduced his blood flow and brought his stress profile more in line with normal activity.

The hexagonal space was equipped with three chairs. There were no tables or monitors. The entire room served as a display. The neutral gray walls were equipped with hundreds of tiny lasers.

Fouad sat in the middle chair.

In a few minutes, a general ripple in the dataflow would pulse through selected servers regularly utilized by the Talos infranet. That would cause no damage, but it might give him a few minutes of deep, unfettered access into the corporate goody bag—without the access being logged.

The ganglion of Talos’s network had a specific pattern of behaviors outside of its recorded design specs—what Jane Rowland called “excess personality.” During a universal dropout and reacquisition of external servers, the Talos library would likely suffer a “momentary lapse of confidence,” as Jane had described it, and—like an infant looking around to see where Momma was—it might open a point of entry for a technician to check up on all systems.

This point of entry would be brief, but it would require neither an identifier nor a password other than the original programmer’s—which was known to Spider/Argus but not to anyone at Talos.

That password was “Nick72TuringHorta.”

The original programmers had created and then concealed such portals, perhaps to allow them to make last-second upgrades and improve their chances of getting the rich Talos contract. Or perhaps because they did not trust Talos any more than the Bureau did.

The blip would be brief and the system would easily recover, so no technician would come calling, but Fouad would be there, ready and equipped with a new way to steal and export data.

He sipped from the melting ice and waited.

CHAPTER SIX

Spider/Argus

Tyson’s Corner, Virginia

Jane pressed ENTER.

The ripple began to run its course. For the next ten seconds, Talos servers would try to access their familiar gateways, and fail.

She sipped her white tea and noted with satisfaction that Nabokov now had an opening—a receptive command node in the Talos infranet, awaiting instructions from a local programmer.

Jane could not get information out of that portal—no one she knew of could breach the Talos firewalls from outside—but if Nabokov was in place, for the next five minutes, the campus servers just might become an open book for him.

The infranet returned a simple bit acknowledgment it was being inspected.

Technician on duty.

Then a little gong went off—a simple oriental chang.

Jane sat upright.

That spooky presence again, in a place it definitely did not belong. She swiftly drew a number in the air, then a slash, initiating her visual dialer.

“Give it a miss,” she murmured. “Don’t go in.”

The Spider/Argus call center connected her to Alicia Kunsler in Quantico.

Kunsler picked up on the first droning buzz. “Hey, Jane. He’s in?”

“He’s in, but here’s a hash query search—a patch on the portal. He may be tagged. Something else strange—an analog signal has been laid over the feed, available through the firewall—which would be doubly peculiar, but not really, because it isn’t coming from Texas. It’s coming from a source I can’t trace.”

It’s coming from that watcher who always knows where I am and what I’m doing.

“Analog? Who in hell sends analog?”

Jane looked over the diagnostics and pathways. Names popped up, hypotheticals:

San Luis Obispo.

San Francisco.

Corpus Christi.

Pendleton Reserve.

“Could be random garbage from a discontinued coastal junction,” she said. “A ghost from a TV show or something. It’s just odd it popped up now. I don’t like it. I think they’ve made him.”

“Recommendations?”

“Yank him, whether he’s got what he came for or not.”

“Shit. You know there’s no way I can reach him. Can you?”

“No,” Jane said.

“Then he takes the risk.”

Kunsler hung up.

Jane’s machines automatically extracted the analog signal, cleaned it up, and played it through her earpiece.

It sounded like a young boy weeping.

Her hands went cold. She cradled the tea mug for warmth.

When she suddenly felt she was about to get dizzy, she let out her breath with a low, agonized whoosh.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Talos Campus

Fouad leaned back in the chair.

He had carefully planned his masking search—downloading updates to Yemeni academic and literary e-journals, accessing slow, ancient university servers half a world away.

He had been watching the friendly, scampering images of network busyness flow around him. The incongruity of manic cartoon characters in full battle gear was not lost on him.

The images flickered and froze.

A black rectangle appeared, seeming to hover about a foot from his face. A simple green cursor blinked on its upper left side.

Fouad reached into his shirt pocket and removed the four-pronged connector in its plastic packet. To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a thumbtack.

He stripped off the plastic and shoved the tiny prongs under the cap into his forearm. Then he clamped a digital sensor to the plug, raised his arm to eye level, returned his attention to the screen, and keyed in the six-number technician identifier.

Almost immediately, without knowing whether he was in or not, he ran his true thirty-line search code, memorized months ago under Jane’s tutelage.

The figures began to scamper again. They sped up—and then the records he sought floated into view in ranked folios.

The folios opened and pages began to flip. He caught a few frames as they flew past—financial records for accounts in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China; transactions with federal employees in Virginia; payments to anonymous vendors in Idaho, California, Iran, Iraq, the new state of Arabia Deserta.

Then, lists of Web news organizations and other media, accompanied by figures that seemed to represent the amount of corporate debt owed to offshore institutions.

Fouad could get only a general impression of all the corporate and international connections: banks, holding companies, big investors—many of whom worked for the oil cartels—and several chairmen and CEOs of the International Financial Protection Organization, organized a few years ago to oversee the distribution of the huge U.S. debt.

More lists followed: heads of state and government ministers from the Middle East, Singapore, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Beijing; lobbyists, lawyers, and licensed foreign representatives working for China and Russia.

They comprised just a few of the hundred or more names that had apparently received a direct invitation from Axel Price himself.

Three retired generals, an admiral, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve were also invited.

Joining them would be political agents from nearly every nation that used Talos services or held American debt. Conspicuously absent was Israel—which seemed more than odd, given Talos’s many past contracts there.

A line of question marks was followed by the designation: “HR undecideds.” Fouad could not pause the flow; HR might refer to the House of Representatives, members of congress.

Many of the modern masters of world finance, politicians, world leaders, and even a few prominent military figures were about to come together at Price’s call, a gathering of eagles and moles—and weasels.

But where and when?

Fouad tried to pick out the location and date, and then realized he already knew.

Price was sponsoring a big gathering in Lion City in two weeks. Ostensibly he would be showing off the Talos Campus and hawking his wares: reviewing cadres of mercenaries, along with spectacular displays of new security and military equipment in which Price had made substantial investments.

Something else flick-paged by—a cluster of references to MSARC. Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control. The central MSARC computers were supposedly buried deep inside mountains in Switzerland.

All part of the new world economic order.

The acronym seemed to him reminiscent of Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the working strategy of the decades-long nuclear stalemate during the Cold War.

End of this sample Kindle book.

Enjoyed the sample?

Buy Now

or

See details for this book in the Kindle Store

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN