We waited.
“If we let her go, you’ll kill us anyway.”
“No, I won’t,” Lisa said. “Oh, I’ll want to, don’t get me wrong. But if you let her go I won’t have to. And I don’t kill people in cold blood unless I have to.”
Dmitri asked, “How can we believe that?”
“Look at it this way. Do it and you have a chance. Don’t, and you don’t.”
They spoke briefly and indecisively in Russian, then fell quiet.
Silent seconds crawled past. I stared at Lisa and wondered if she really meant to do it, and if so, how I could stop her. Obviously not by fighting her.
“You stay where you are,” she instructed me.
I looked at the launcher. Maybe if I got in the way of the drone -
“Fuck it,” Lisa said, “this is some kind of trick, and I don’t want to have to break James’s arms. You have five seconds. Four. Three. Two.”
“All right!” Anya cried out. “All right, we’ll do it.”
I exhaled with relief.
“Uncuff her first,” Lisa ordered. “And don’t you fucking try anything cute. If I have to kill us too to make sure you don’t get her, I fucking will, and if you don’t believe me, you go ahead and try.”
Five minutes later Sophie appeared, alone, on the other side of the freight elevator’s doors. She looked awful: scorched hair, torn clothes, cheeks stained with ashes and tears. I took her into my arms and held her wordlessly for a moment. The Russians watched nervously from the other corner of the roof.
“We could still take them out,” Lisa suggested. “If necessary.”
“No time,” Sophie said. Her voice was weak but angry. “They’re launching. I have to get back down to the clean room.”
“The clean room?” I didn’t understand. “I thought you needed some of their drones to experiment on to get the right signal, and then we’ll need to get you back to the hotel, and if they’ve already launched… ” My voice trailed off. It was already too late. It would take even Sophie hours to dissect the enemy drones and get what she needed to fix her control signal.
“I don’t need to waste time with hardware,” she said, “Their
Five minutes later we were in the clean room watching Sophie download their neural-network source code onto a thumb drive. Five more and we were outside the factory, sprinting towards the cluster of ambulances and fire trucks waiting at the gate.
The nearest vehicle was an ambulance with biohazard symbols painted besides its Red Crosses. We were rushed into its open doors, which were then slammed shut behind us with considerable violence. Our cover was still holding, and the police and firemen were still terrified of radiation and infection.
“We have to get to the Burj Al-Arab,” I ordered the driver, and ransacked my mind for any conceivable justification. When I came up blank I decided to resort to aggression instead of rationalization: “Don’t ask any questions. Just go.”
Danielle turned her head and grinned. “Why would I ask questions?”
The ambulance squealed forward while my mouth was still open with surprise.
Chapter 85
“Please tell me you brought the laptop with my test harness,” Sophie pleaded.
“Right here,” LoTek said from the passenger seat, and passed her her MacBook.
“Good. Danielle, slow down,” Sophie commanded as she fumbled with the thumb drive that contained the Russians’ source code.
“Sorry. No can do.”
“Slow down. In fact, stop, why are we driving anywhere? It’s hard to work when we’re in motion.” “Sophia,” Danielle said, “the Dubai police have already realized they’ve been used, and in only moments will connect that fact with this ambulance. We need to get as far away as we can, as fast as we can, or we’ll all be busted before you can so much as log in. So why don’t you shut the fuck up and let me drive?”
Sophie swallowed, nodded, stopped arguing, and started typing.
“What about the cell networks?” I asked.
“Working on it.” LoTek too sat hunched over his laptop, typing.
Seconds ticked past. We made a left-hand turn, and a bulky metal box in the corner rattled loudly. I recognized it from the hotel suite; the electromagnetic pulse cannon.
There were no windows in the sides of the ambulance but I could see from the Blade Runner-esque canyon of skyscrapers ahead of us that we were on Sheikh Zayed, the city’s main thoroughfare. The graceful arc of the Burj’s thousand-foot span was visible in the distance, dwarfed by less elegant spires.
“You’re not going to give me any bullshit about trading algorithm for access, are you?” Sophie demanded of LoTek without looking up. “Jesse died for this to succeed.”
“Jesse died to keep them from getting you,” he said sharply. “Not because his ideals ever wavered. I hope you’ll remember that.”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “I will.”
“You better. We can bargain later. Right now I just want to stop these fuckers.”
A klaxon yowled out of the silence, and through the small windows in the rear doors I saw the blue flashing lights of a police siren.
“Fuck,” Lisa said, echoing my own thoughts.
The car was soon joined by two others.
“Faster,” Lisa said grimly to Danielle.
“I’m driving as fast as I safely can.” Danielle sounded calm, almost meditative.
“Right, sure, safety first,” Sophie said sarcastically without looking up. “It’s not like the world as we know it is about to end.”
“Shut up,” Lisa told Sophie, “and hurry up.”
“I’m hurrying already.”
“Hurry faster.”
LoTek reported, his voice low and hard, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news, bad news, and worse news.” His voice echoed in my earpiece; that conference call had still not ended. “Good, the American cell network awaits our command. Bad, there’s a roadblock up ahead. Worse, it’s not just the cops we have to worry about. I’m tracking a swarm of six drones coming straight at us from dead ahead. ETA maybe three minutes.”
I went cold.
“Shit,” Lisa said, “shit shit shit, Dmitri and Anya saw the ambulance get away. This is my fault. I should have pulled the fucking trigger.”
LoTek said to Sophie, “The longer we wait, the greater the chance of the cell companies noticing something is wrong and seizing control back.”
“Give me five minutes,” Sophie said, without ceasing to type.
“We don’t have five minutes,” Danielle objected.
“Then we lose.”
I winced.
“All right,” Danielle decided, “let’s try to buy a little time. Everyone hang on. Lisa, James, you know what to do.”
I didn’t, actually, but I didn’t have time to protest, because just then Danielle stomped on the brakes and screeched into a U-turn. Lisa and I had neglected to buckle ourselves in, and we both went tumbling to the floor. I barked my shin painfully against something metal. A dozen car horns howled at us as we bounced over Sheikh Zayed’s raised meridian. Then we were accelerating the other way, pedal to the metal, the engine throbbing
