The Dragon Factory

Church explained.

“Jesus H. Christ, Esquire,” Brierly growled, “the President will fry him for this. I mean fry him. Even if he has the Attorney General in his corner, Collins can’t possibly believe that he’s going to make a case against you.”

“He seems to think so.”

“This is weird. I know him pretty well, and this is not like him. For one thing, he doesn’t have the balls for this.”

“Then he grew a set this morning. For now let’s assume he wouldn’t attempt this kind of play if he didn’t have some interesting cards in his hand. What they are and how he’ll ultimately play them is still to be seen.”

“I’m starting to get a bad feeling about why you called me.”

“Listen to me, Linden. If the VP gets MindReader he also gets everything stored in MindReader. Take a moment and think that through.”

Brierly didn’t need a moment. “Christ!”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you take it offline? Dump the hard drive and wipe it with an EMP?”

“Sure, and we’d lose active tactical analysis on forty-six terrorist-related database searches, including the two assassination plots your office sent to us. If MindReader goes blind, then so does the Secret Service, a good chunk of the DEA, CIA, FBI, and ATF, and Homeland will essentially have its head in a bag. We lose our data sharing with MI6 and Barrier, not to mention certain agencies in Germany, Italy, and France. We’d be playing Texas hold ’em with blank cards.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Church… you should have shared this system with everyone from the start.”

“Really? You’d personally like to see everyone from the VP on down have total access to your records? You’d want to grant everyone in every agency the ability to read all secrets and access all files without leaving a footprint? You’d want all of the President’s personal business made public?”

“I-”

“Two words, Linden: ‘Houston Marriott.’ ”

Brierly hissed, “Don’t even joke.”

“I’m not joking, and I’m not threatening. With the President out of power, MindReader and the DMS are vulnerable. I’ll hold the line, but I don’t think either of us want to see what happens if this turns into a shoving match between the NSA and my boys.”

“They have you outnumbered and outgunned, Church.”

“You’ve met Major Courtland and Captain Ledger, I believe. You’ve seen them in action. Where would you place your heavy bets?”

“This isn’t the O.K. Corral.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Church agreed, “but the VP is making a hard play. He’s well organized, too, and using a lot of field resources. None of this went through e-mails or active command software packages, so he must have set it all up via cell phone or word of mouth. He knows enough about MindReader to do an end run around it for this operation.”

“You sound calm about it,” Brierly said.

Church bit a cookie, said nothing.

“You’re describing a coup.”

“No, this isn’t directed against the President, and the VP will probably yield power in the proper way and at the proper time. But ultimately this could bring down the presidency. Maybe the VP knows that, maybe he doesn’t… but the effect will be the same. So, indirectly this is an attack against the President.”

“No kidding.”

“This is time critical for another reason,” Church said. “We’ve just started picking up the threads of something that could be a significant threat. That’s Threat with a capital T. We’re probably already coming into this late-that’s the nature of these things-but with all of my people dodging the NSA or gone to ground we could fall completely behind the curve. I need the Vice President to call off the dogs so we can get back to work.”

Brierly sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

“What do your loyalties suggest you do?”

“Switching jobs sounds good right now. I hear they’re hiring at Best Buy.”

Church crunched his cookie, drank some water, waited.

“It’s not like I can strong-arm a doctor and force him to revive the President. He’s in recovery now, but there are protocols.”

“Yes, and Brushfire is one of them.”

“I’m going to lose my job over this.”

“Not if the President takes control before we lose MindReader.”

Brierly was a long time thinking it through. Church had time for a second cookie.

“Okay,” Brierly said, “but when the Commander in Chief is back on the checkerboard I’m going to dump all the blame on you.”

“Not a problem.”

“And what if we fail? What if the Veep gets control of your records?”

“That might require alternatives you cannot hear from me. Not even unofficially.”

Brierly cursed.

“Linden,” said Church quietly, “this is not a fight of my choosing, and I don’t know why the VP is risking so much here, but we cannot let MindReader be taken. It’s your job to make sure I don’t need to get creative while trying to keep it.”

“ ‘Creative’ doesn’t sound like a very nice option.”

“It isn’t,” said Church. “So let’s both do what we need to do to keep that option off the table. I’ll do what I can for as long as I can, but I’d like to hear a clear weather report from you soon.”

“Okay. I’ll find the chief of surgery and see if I can appeal to his patriotism.”

“You know my number,” Church said, and disconnected.

He set the phone down on his desk blotter. He laid his hands on either side of it and sat quietly in the stillness of his office.

Chapter Seventeen

The Deck

Saturday, August 28, 10:16 A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 44 minutes E.S.T.

“They’re landing,” Otto said as he set down the phone.

He and Cyrus stood in the command center of the Deck. All around them hundreds of technicians were busy at computer workstations. A second tier of workstations was built onto a metal veranda that circled the central area. The clackity-clack of all those fingers on all those keys was music to Cyrus’s ears.

Below the command center, visible through clear glass panels in the floor, were two isolated cold rooms. The left-hand one was crowded with fifty networked 454 Life Sciences sequencers. Technicians in white self-contained smart suits worked among the computers, constantly checking their functions and monitoring every minute change. The right-hand room looked like a brewery in which vast tanks worked around the clock to grow viruses.

The tank directly below Cyrus’s feet was dedicated to mass-producing a weaponized version of the human papillomavirus that had been genetically altered to target Hispanics. Sure, there was crossover to some white population because racial purity was-sadly, as far as Cyrus and Otto were concerned-more myth than truth, but the rate of cervical cancer for female Hispanics was 85 percent and the crossover to Caucasians only 6 percent. The synthetic growth medium they were currently using allowed for a 400 percent increase in growth time. The tanks had been running so long now that Otto estimated that they would have enough to use it to launch the second phase of the Extinction Wave in sixteen weeks rather than the previously anticipated thirty months. Cyrus only