“Most likely the battery died. The charge isn’t indefinite and he didn’t have a place to recharge in camp. Obviously, we’ll have to look into it.”
“Oh, very well,” said Rubens. “I have to go upstairs. Keep me informed.”
“Yes, boss.”
Rubens ignored her tone and left the Art Room, passing through the elaborate security chamber and the manned checkpoints to return to his office. While Desk Three operations tended to consume a major portion of his time, Rubens had a large number of other responsibilities as the number-two man in the agency. Nearly two dozen phone messages and twice as many E-mails were waiting for him on the secure systems. Several had to do with meetings he’d had to blow off and there were a fair number of useless updates on projects that were going nowhere, but nonetheless it took time to wade through them all.
One of Rubens’ administrative assistants, meanwhile, had organized a queue of reports in his secure computer system — urgent, more urgent, and ridiculously urgent. Rubens was just starting to take a look at the items in the last category when his outside phone buzzed. He picked it up and heard Sandra Marshall tell him things had gone well with the media.
“A home run,” she said.
“That’s very good,” said Rubens.
“Are you going to make the working group meeting in the morning?”
“It looks tight,” he answered. He’d already decided he’d rather try getting some sleep downstairs than sit through the session, but he was suddenly feeling as if he didn’t want to disappoint her.
“We are going to be preparing a final report on the Internet DNA,” she said. “Are you still opposed?”
It truly did pain him to have to disagree. This was, of course, uncharacteristic. Rubens examined the emotion — partly it was because, politically, it was never a good idea to step on someone’s pet project, which this obviously had become. But partly—
A very dangerous area.
Why should he oppose the report? The President liked the idea; it would be floated out to Congress whatever William Rubens said. All the committee wanted to do was authorize a study, after all. Why draw a line in the sand on something that surely would die eventually on its own?
Because it was the right thing to do?
“I was thinking maybe we would have dinner,” she suggested. “And I could explain my position.”
Rubens started to object.
“I had in mind my place later this evening, if that is convenient,” said Marshall. Her tone was formal, but then she added, in a voice that seemed to come from someone else, “Please?”
A strange weakness came over him. Fatigue? Misplaced lust or, worse, sympathy? Interest?
“What time should I be there?” he asked.
63
The path toward Tommy Karr’s locator took Puff/1 over the helicopter wreckage, and Malachi slowed momentarily to let the sensors get a good look at the site. It took all of twenty seconds, but it threw off the ReVeeOp’s rhythm; the slow aircraft just couldn’t synch with G*ng*f*x. He started flipping through his Mp3 index to find a better beat, heading down toward the golden oldie section before settling on Beck.
The helicopter seemed to have been taken down by a shot on the rear engine area; that argued for a heat- seeking missile. Several bodies lay near the wreckage. The guerrillas had split into two groups. One continued to harass what was left of the Thai Army unit moving in the direction of the border. The other, about a dozen men, shadowed toward Karr’s locator.
“We got what we need,” said Telach from the Art Room.
“Yeah, roger that,” said Malachi, pushing his speed control back up to max, such as it was. The robot airplane had a tendency to nose down slightly as the engines revved, but he was 12,000 feet above ground level and had plenty of room to deal with it. Careful not to overcorrect — the drone would gallop up and down like a roller coaster if he did — Malachi pushed his joystick to the right, nudging the remote aircraft into an arc aimed at giving him a good position between the guerrillas and the NSA op.
“Satellite has those guerrillas getting close,” warned Sandy Chafetz, Karr’s runner. “I’m losing sat coverage in about ninety seconds.”
“Roger that. I’m still about zero-three minutes from the area,” said Malachi. “If I can find my rhythm.”
“You’d better find it,” snapped Telach. The Art Room supervisor was edgier than normal, not a good sign.
A blue dagger marked out Tommy Karr’s position near an open area beyond a small hill. Malachi started to swing south of it, toward the red dots that the computer had used to mark the guerrillas’ position as they followed.
The marked positions were actually about 205 seconds behind real time. That was the overhead imposed by the system as it transposed data from one set of sensors to another, integrating the satellite information with the other inputs, in this case primarily the robot aircraft. A three-and-a-half-minute gap didn’t seem like much, but a well-conditioned runner could cover more than a half-mile in that time, and even an armed soldier in rough terrain could move a quarter-mile without breaking much of a sweat. For that reason, Malachi would rely on Puff’s native sensors as his primary indicators once he was inside the target area.
The ReVeeOp pushed Puff/1 through some unexpected turbulence as he continued on course. There was some speculation among the jocks at Space Command — the Air Force unit that controlled some of Deep Black’s remote aircraft — that the next generation of remote gunships would be designed to stay airborne for twelve to eighteen hours and that there would be enough of them to provide global coverage twenty-four/seven. The idea wasn’t necessarily popular, however — blanket coverage on that order would require even more automation than currently employed, which meant computers, not ReVeeOps, would be controlling most of the flights.
Malachi had a better solution — space vessels with rail-guns, fueled by plasma gases heated in reentry. That looked to be ten years down the road, at least.
He’d be in his thirties. Ready to hang it up.
Wow.
“Got some action coming out of that village toward our guy,” Malachi told Sandy, going over to Puff’s sensors. “Uh, three, four people. One of ’em with a gun.”
“Yeah, we’re looking at it,” said Sandy.
“You want me to stay on them or check out the guerrillas?”
“Line up a shot,” said Telach. “I don’t want to take any chances.”
“May be one of the people who were with Karr earlier,” suggested Chafetz.
“You sure?” asked Malachi.
“Just line up the shot,” said Telach. “We’ll make the call.”
Karr heard someone calling to him. He thought the voice was coming from the Art Room; he snapped up, put his hand to his ear.
No, it was outside, a real voice — back from the village.
His Marine.
Karr heard something else, the light fanlike noise of a robot gunship. The Art Room had obviously tracked him here.
They wouldn’t know Gidrey was on his side.
“Gidrey!” he yelled. He pushed himself to his feet. Blood flew from his brain and he felt himself tremble.
“Karr!”
“Stay where you are,” said Karr.
“What?”
“Stay there.”
“I got some help.”
