Wired

Desh nodded while Kira glared at her brother hatefully.

“The optimized me figured there was a fifty-fifty chance Desh would leave the service. Either way, it didn’t really matter to my plan.”

“If your plan was to get me to team up with Kira, why did you wait so long?”

“She wasn’t ready yet. I wanted her harried. Chasing her; almost catching her; isolating her. Making her feel persecuted and alone. Crushing her spirit. I needed her primed for the arrival of her white knight. When I judged she was at the end of her rope, I pulled the strings to have you come in.”

Kira knew this is exactly what had happened. She had recruited David because she was lonely and fatigued. Alan’s execution had been flawless.

“Are you saying you could have captured her earlier?” said Desh.

Alan shrugged. “Possibly,” he said. “If I had made more balls-out attempts. I tried to capture her in the early days, but failed. My enhanced self had calculated that if I captured her, tortured her a bit, and then let her find a way to escape, this would accelerate her readiness to seek out an ally like you, and I could move up my time table.” An annoyed look came over his face. “But she was a lot better than I thought she’d be. And when I got close she would take bold risks with her own life to elude capture, which I couldn’t have. So I changed gears and made harassment my primary objective.”

“How did you get me assigned?” asked Desh.

Alan grinned. “With the powerful people Putnam and I have in our pockets, it was laughably easy. I had an influential politician with plenty of skeletons in his closet arrange for it all with Connelly’s bosses. And I had long since made sure the identities of all of the agents sent after her were recorded in a database I knew she could breach.”

“Because you knew she would study them,” said Desh. “You needed her to study them.”

He nodded. “She studied others that were sent after her without effect, but I knew if she was properly primed and studied your photo and history, she would try to recruit you.”

Kira Miller felt bile rise in her throat. This thing pretending to be her brother was distilled evil. What twist of fate had led to her parents giving birth to two mutant children: a daughter with unequaled genius for molecular biology and a son born entirely without a conscience.

“She took the bait just as I knew she would,” boasted Alan. “I had planned on having the two of you captured by my Black Ops dupe, Smith, and held together as prisoners for a few days to allow love to blossom. But you kept eluding him.” Alan shrugged. “Served my purposes anyway. In fact, your escapes from the motel and woods probably cemented your relationship.” A content, self-satisfied expression came over his face. “Then all that was left to do was have Putnam capture you both and pretend to be me, initiating a perfect storm of circumstances that would cause Kira to tell her lover-boy her secret.”

The helicopter banked, reminding the prisoners they were tearing through the air at great speed to an unknown destination, something easy to forget given the near perfect stillness of the opulent, enclosed cabin. “How did you know you would be able to find us when you needed to?” asked Desh.

“This is where the need for you to get seriously injured in Iran comes in. We ordered a military surgeon to add a few implants in addition to fixing you up. The orders came from the highest military channels. He was told this was being done because you were a known traitor.” Alan smirked. “He was even told you had set up your own men.”

Desh lunged forward in fury, his neck catching enough of the wire in front of him to draw blood, if only shallowly. “You sick bastard!” he screamed, his rage finally spilling out.

Alan Miller continued calmly as if Desh’s outburst had never happened. “The surgeon implanted a tiny, remote homing device on your elbow, just under the skin. The device was designed to lie completely dormant until pinged by a coded signal, upon which point it would activate. You could scan for bugs all you wanted when it was dormant and it wouldn’t register. While the bomb in Kira’s head was a bluff, the advanced receivers Putnam told you about are very real. As Kira well knows, when you’ve taken one of her pills, improving electronics becomes child’s play.”

“So you could have captured us at any time David was with me?” said Kira in shock.

“That’s right. But after you avoided capture, I didn’t want to reacquire you too quickly. You two had to have some time to bond.” He paused and watched blood slowly roll down Desh’s neck with fascination. “When you escaped from the safe house, I was forced yet again to alter my plans. I had planned on the two of you remaining prisoners for several days there and then arranging for your escape, with Putnam being killed in the process.” He shrugged. “No matter. I was able to make some adjustments and everything still worked out as planned.”

“You still don’t have the coordinates,” said Kira defiantly.

“Don’t I?” said her brother, smirking. “The homing device wasn’t the only thing the surgeon in Iraq implanted when he was operating on Desh. He also gave him cochlear implants—one for each ear. It’s a standard procedure for people deaf or very hard of hearing. Only the implants he received were silicon-chip based recording units. They record digitally and can be downloaded to a computer for playback.” He sipped his drink and smiled. “They have a finite battery life and only record from ten to eighteen hours, depending on the amount of input, so I had these set to be activated by my signal as well.”

“And you activated them within the past ten hours, I presume,” said Desh.

“Right you are,” said Alan happily. “Using the homing device I had implanted, I easily tracked you to Putnam’s house. After all my painstaking planning, at long last I had created the perfect storm.” He gazed at his sister smugly. “A man you trusted and were falling in love with. A credible threat to species survival. And you convinced that you had but minutes to live.”

Much of the fire had left Kira Miller as the realization hit her with full force that this monster had won. And she had dutifully played her role as the perfect little pawn. She glanced at her bonds and the razor wire at her throat. Escape was impossible. And even if she could escape, what would she do? Would she kill her own brother?

She clenched her fists. This wasn’t her brother, she told herself forcefully. This was a twisted imposter. Believing this was the only way her psyche could survive a betrayal this vast. Her brother had died in a fire in their childhood home. The monster in front of her was a complete stranger.

“The finishing touch to my masterpiece,” continued Alan, “was for you to think your arch-enemy was dead.”

“Why?” said Desh.

“If Kira suspected a powerful enemy with access to her treatment was still at large, she would have been far less comfortable disclosing the GPS coordinates.” He raised his eyebrows. “Putnam had no idea what my real plan was. Certainly not that his extermination was a key ingredient. With the arch-enemy who had killed your brother dead, you were free to whisper your secret right into Desh’s cochlea.”

Alan paused to let his prisoners ponder just how utterly they had been manipulated; just how complete his victory.

“What if Kira hadn’t killed Putnam?”

“I suspected she would. I made sure he boasted about killing me just to rub salt in her wound. And my sister is so fucking predictable. So fucking noble. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that we sprang from the same womb.”

“Believe me,” said Kira Miller, scowling, “your disappointment pales in comparison to mine.”

“But to answer your question, Desh,” said Alan, as if his sister had not spoken, “I was the one who sent Putnam into his house to talk with you in the first place. I had a sniper targeting him while the rest of my men came up through his tunnel. If Kira had failed to shoot him, my sniper would have done so the moment he opened the door.” He paused. “You wouldn’t know who had killed him or why, but that wouldn’t matter. With the only man capable of resetting the supposed explosive charge in Kira’s skull dead, she would once again tell you her secret, believing she had but minutes to live and having no guarantee that the sterilization plot could be stopped.”

Desh nodded miserably. “It appears you thought of everything,” he said, looking defeated for the first time.

“You’re damn straight,” said Alan smugly.