Authors: Daniel Suarez
“I don’t know.” She considered it. “Did Grady have a twin brother?”
“Twins don’t have identical fingerprints.”
The elevator doors opened, and they walked out into the guest cubicles. There were still quite a few agents moving about. Davis had put her Winnower team in a group workstation with no partitions between them, and she and Falwell took off their jackets.
“So what do we do?”
She stared for a moment but finally shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think we have to inform the prosecutor’s office.” She fell back into her office chair. “Thomas, you ever hear of something called the Federal Bureau of Technology Control?”
He squinted. “What is that, Commerce Department?”
“Have you heard of it or not?”
He thought some more before finally saying, “No. Why? Who are they?”
“I don’t even know if they exist.” Davis keyed her password into her laptop and then launched her Internet browser. She entered “usa.gov” on the URL line, then navigated to an A-to-Z index of government departments and agencies. She entered the term “Bureau of Technology Control” in the search box—clicked “Search.”
It returned about a quarter million results. Davis scanned down the list of hits with headings like “U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security” and “Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Falwell was looking over her shoulder. “Try it enclosed in quotation marks.”
She enclosed the search term and searched again. Now it returned zero results.
Falwell shrugged. “Why are we looking for them?”
“That Grady guy mentioned it to me. That was supposedly the federal agency that kidnapped him.”
Falwell let a smile escape. “Right. If it’s a top-secret agency, I’m guessing they wouldn’t be listed in the directory.”
“Look, I don’t believe his story, Thomas, but I did want to see if they were a real organization.”
“Let me get this APB out.” He opened up his own laptop. “So what do we do if we don’t have him by next week?”
“You mean, do we meet him at Columbia University? I want to see the DNA results first.”
“You’re actually thinking of going?”
“We might be, yeah.”
“What about the depositions next week?”
“Reschedule them.”
“Denise, you’re not meeting this guy alone.”
“No, of course not. We’ll use a team. It’s a university library, so there’ll be security cameras. We’ll see him coming.” She paused. “There’s something here that’s gnawing at me, though. Something about Cotton—how he could disappear for so long without a trace. And with so many faceless followers—none of whom made mistakes.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just—”
“We arrested three of his people with him.”
“And none of them seemed very bright. They all had felony drug rap sheets.”
Falwell laughed ruefully. “You’re starting to worry me.”
“It’s just strange, that’s all.”
Just then Davis’s desk phone rang. She glanced at the LCD readout—and then did a double take. She sat up straight. “Thomas.”
“What?”
She held her hand above the receiver. “It’s D.C.”
“FBI headquarters?” He checked his watch.
She picked it up on the start of the third ring. “Denise Davis.”
“Agent Davis, please hold for Deputy Director Royce.”
She blanched. “Yes. I’ll hold.” Davis covered the receiver and glared at Falwell. “It’s the deputy director.”
He gave her a quizzical look. “Of the
FBI?
”
“No, of
Grease
, the musical—who do you think?” Davis was on hold for about ten seconds before a man’s voice came on the line.
“Denise Davis.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were contacted by a man claiming to be Jon Grady tonight. Is that correct?”
Davis frowned at Falwell—who frowned back, probably because he had no idea what was going on. “Yes, sir. We had a positive match on fingerprints. We’re running a DNA test on a hair sample.”
“Do you have any information on his present whereabouts?”
“Not at the moment, sir. We’re putting out an APB.”
“Don’t do that just yet. Did he say why he was contacting you?”
Davis paused for a moment, then looked over at Falwell again. Then she said, “Deputy Director, I must apologize, sir, but I absolutely must respond to something. Can I phone you at your office in under a minute? I sincerely apologize, sir.”
There was silence for a moment. Then,
“Call me back as soon as possible, Agent Davis.”
“Thank you, sir. Very sorry.” She hung up.
Falwell squinted at her. “Are you nuts?”
Davis stood up and started rifling through the shelves for a bureau directory. “Thomas, I don’t even want to hear it. Would you look for a directory over there?”
He started navigating through the intranet directory on his laptop. “I’m confused, Denise.”
“It’s past midnight in D.C. Why are they even
in
the office?” She glanced up at him. “Not the Web directory. I want something printed. Preferably a few years old.”
“You’re really losing it.”
“Ah!” She pulled a small binder off a shelf and started flipping through it.
“It’d be in the front probably. Near the bureau seal . . .”
She heard a
ding
as an email landed in her inbox. Davis glanced up. It was from Jeffrey Royce, deputy director of the FBI—and it was over their internal system. It was cc’d to the Chicago Special Agent in Charge, with the subject line “Priority One Special Assignment.”
“Damn.” She found the FBI headquarters’ main number and pounded it into her desk phone. “I am such an idiot . . .”
Falwell leaned down to look at her laptop screen. “Hey, you got some spam from the deputy director. Should I delete it?”
“Ha. Ha.” She waited for the FBI operator to pick up. “Yes, this is Special Agent Denise Davis returning a call from Deputy Director Jeffrey Royce.” A pause. “I believe he’s still in the office.” A pause. “Yes, I’ll hold.”
Falwell leaned back in his chair and spread his hands.
In a moment another man answered.
“Yes. Yes, I’ll hold.”
And a few seconds later the deputy director picked up.
“Agent Davis.”
“Yes, sir. My apologies. I just needed . . . never mind. You were saying, sir?”
“Mr. Grady asked you to meet him in New York—next week at Columbia University—is that correct?”
Davis felt the shock go through her. “I . . . How do you know that, sir?”
“We have a highly sensitive surveillance operation under way, Agent Davis. You’ll still need to be in Chicago preparing for the Cotton trial, but we’re going to put you temporarily under the direction of a special task force—and we want you to meet Mr. Grady as he requested. Your supervisors have been notified, and any scheduling conflicts will be resolved through our office. You’ll report to a safe house in New York—you’re not to contact the New York field office or discuss this with anyone except your supervisor. Is that clear?”
Davis looked to Falwell uncertainly, then nodded. “I understand, sir.”
“The email I just sent has instructions about where to meet your plane next week and the supervising agent for this operation. Can I count on your discretion and cooperation, Agent Davis?”
“Yes, sir. But . . .”
“What is it?”
“I just . . . What’s going on, sir? Is it Jon Grady? What’s his connection to Cotton?”
“I can tell you that he isn’t Jon Grady—but the rest is well above your pay grade. The only reason you’re involved is because he contacted you. But you should know he’s dangerous, and that you need to listen closely to your task force leader when you reach New York. Can I count on you, Agent Davis?”
She took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. Yes, of course you can count on me.”
G
raham Hedrick sat in his
office chair gazing out at Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor. Junks and container ships plied the glittering water below. His jaw clenched as he listened to the report on Grady’s escape.
“Grady didn’t do this alone, Mr. Director. He was helped.” The head of Jon Grady’s security detail, a Morrison named Beta-Upsilon, stood nervously before Hedrick’s desk. The elder Morrison stood nearby looking even angrier than Hedrick felt.
“We had no reason to expect he’d have a personal utility fog.”
Morrison barked, “Did you scan him before transport?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Be advised: I will check the surveillance log.”
“We scanned him, sir.”
“Then I’m not understanding. Do you mean someone on your team helped Mr. Grady?”
“No, sir. Someone at Hibernity must have helped him. That van was clean. The hypersonic transport was clean.”
Morrison got in his face. “You’re suggesting the guards at Hibernity had access to
unregistered
foglets?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“The garrison there doesn’t even have access to tech level eight.”
Hedrick rotated his chair to face the young BTC officer.
Morrison placed a glittering diamond on Hedrick’s desk. “The response team found Grady’s q-link in a ventilation shaft.”
Hedrick picked up the diamond, studying it—then looked up at the young Morrison clone. “Am I to believe Jon Grady dug this out of the base of his spine on the spot?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“And how did he even know about his q-link?”
Varuna’s voice chimed in from above.
“Beta-Upsilon is speaking the truth to the best of his knowledge, Mr. Director.”
Morrison glowered. “An honest idiot is still an idiot.”
“Dad, we had no way of anticipating—”
“I sprayed surveillance dust onto the headliner. I know you were all watching the Tigers game instead of the prisoner. I have the whole god-awful mess on video. Grady had unregistered utility foglets collapsed on his person, and you didn’t spot them.”
“The scanner said he was clean.”
“Some clever son of a bitch manufactured unregistered nanotech. That’s why you have to do this thing we call ‘searching’ prisoners. With your eyes and hands.”
“We patted him down.”
“And how much cash did he take from your wallet?”
The guard looked suddenly sheepish. “Uh, I don’t . . .”
“Yes, I saw that, too. How much?”
“Probably four or five hundred in dollars, sir.”
“All of it.”
“Maybe half that in other currencies.”
“You really make me ashamed of my genomic sequence.”
“Dad—”
“Don’t try that ‘Dad’ crap on me.” Morrison looked to Hedrick. “And someone tipped off Grady not to take the guards’ equipment. We have no direct method to track him.”
“Enough. Get him out of my sight.” Hedrick dismissed the guard with a wave of his hand.
The young man nodded grimly and left; the doors opened and then immediately closed behind him.
Hedrick sighed. “Varuna, reassign Beta-Upsilon and his team to the Hibernity garrison for a year.”
“Yes, Mr. Director.”
Morrison came up alongside Hedrick’s chair to gaze out the window at the faux Hong Kong below.
“Who is the warden at Hibernity, Mr. Morrison?”
“Theta-Theta.”
“We need new leadership there, apparently. And a top-to-bottom review of their operation.”
“How could they get their hands on a utility fog? That’s advanced weaponry.”
“I don’t think they did.”
Morrison cast a confused look at Hedrick.
“Min Zhao is in Hibernity.”
“Okay . . .”
“He perfected foglets less than a decade ago.”
“You really think prisoners are creating their own technology? Prisoners?”
“I don’t know.”
“But . . .” Morrison pondered this gravely. “I don’t see how it’s possible.”
Hedrick felt a fear he could hardly contemplate. “Your number-one priority at the moment, Mr. Morrison, is to find Jon Grady. Escaped, Mr. Grady is an existential threat to this organization. I don’t think either of us relishes the idea of a gravity weapon like Kratos in the hands of our enemies.”
“When we locate him, I suggest we fry him from orbit.”
“No. I still need him alive. If he won’t work for us voluntarily, we have no choice but to use force. But it appears his consciousness is truly unique. So I want him captured. Is that clear?”
Morrison nodded. “I’ll need a higher tech level approved for the forward team.”
“I don’t want you annihilating city blocks to get at him. Nonlethal weapons only. And no publicity. I’ll allow tech level four.”
“Four? They’ll barely be able to overpower the authorities.”
“Then they’ll need to be smarter this time. I can’t have any more advanced technology going missing. Tech level four will be sufficient. Is that clear?”
Morrison sighed in irritation but nodded. He turned to leave.
“One more thing . . .”
Morrison halted.
“Once you’ve got Grady, I want you to pay a surprise visit to Hibernity—in force.”
“Do we clean house?”
Hedrick picked up a small model that he kept on his desk. It was supposedly of his first fusion reactor design. “Yes. And I want a manual prisoner count.”
“That’s a big job. Opening up every cell will take—”
“I want you to lay eyes on
him
—personally.”
Morrison studied Hedrick. “Archibald Chattopadhyay is dead. His cell has been dormant for a decade. No food. No water. He’s entombed in nine hundred feet of solid rock.”
“I want you to lay eyes on him.”
“There’s no way he could have—”
“Just do it.”
Morrison stared for a moment, then nodded.
At that moment the office doors opened to admit Alexa. Both men looked up; Hedrick brightened at the sight of her.
“What is it, my dear?”
“The deep packet AIs have a lead on our Mr. Grady.”
Hedrick felt the relief wash over him. “Well done. Where?”
“Last night an FBI agent in Chicago ran fingerprints on a suspect and got a match for Jon Grady.”
Hedrick slammed his hand on his desk. “Then they have him.”
“No. And an FBI agent started doing Internet searches for the ‘Federal Bureau of Technology Control.’”
Hedrick scowled.
“It was the arresting agent in the Richard Louis Cotton case: one Denise Davis.”
Hedrick looked shocked. “You don’t think Cotton has—?”
“No. Cotton’s a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot. His sense of self-preservation is legendary.”
Morrison nodded to himself. “Chicago’s just a few hours by car from here.”
She turned toward Hedrick. “This Davis woman has been all over the media lately for the Cotton trial. Perhaps Grady saw her and thought he could trust her.”
Hedrick motioned impatiently. “Do we know where Grady is?”
“We know where he was.” Alexa brought up a holographic video window that showed thousands of video thumbnails all running simultaneously. “I had the AIs go back through the last twenty-four hours of street-level surveillance on all systems they could access within five miles of Agent Davis’s location in downtown Chicago, looking for Jon Grady’s likeness in the streets. A lot of federal and city cameras in the area, so we had good coverage.”
“And?”
“No hits on Jon Grady.”
Hedrick threw up his hands.
“I decided to do a search for Agent Davis’s movements, figuring he must have followed her for a while, waiting for the right moment to make contact. And that’s when I found this . . .” She selected and then expanded a single video image and froze it.
The surveillance camera image wasn’t anywhere near as detailed as what the BTC’s cameras could produce, but it was clear enough. It showed a woman with short hair walking with several men in suits on a crowded Chicago sidewalk. The woman was highlighted by the system in a red rectangular box.
But Alexa pointed to a man walking several yards behind her, wearing jeans and a hoodie. The man’s face was notable in the crowd because it was obscured by pinpoints of blinding light.
Hedrick frowned in confusion. “What am I looking at? And how could a person be walking in a crowd with such bright lights without drawing attention?”
Alexa looked up. “Varuna, can you explain what the subject in this image is wearing?”
The disembodied voice of the AI said,
“Yes, Alexa. It is an exploit first seen in Hibernity prison, used by prisoners to defeat early facial recognition systems.”
Hedrick narrowed his eyes. “Used by prisoners?”
“Correct. The device consists of goggles punctuated by near-infrared LEDs emitting at roughly eight hundred fifty nanometers, which can be found in common motion sensors. This light is invisible to the human eye but matches the spectral sensitivity of CMOS or CCD cameras or other silicon-based photo detectors. When placed around the face, these make it impossible to obtain accurate measurements on the spacing and shape of a subject’s facial features.”
Hedrick turned back to Morrison meaningfully. “Grady’s obviously received assistance. There is something going on at Hibernity.”
Alexa looked between the two of them. “What makes you think that?”
“Mr. Morrison will handle it, Alexa. You just concentrate on locating Mr. Grady.”
“Without facial recognition, it’ll be difficult.”
“What about this Agent Davis?”
“From the moment of her fingerprint match on Grady, she’s been under surveillance by AIs—microphones in her laptop and cell phone, the works. Apparently Mr. Grady requested that she meet him in the Columbia University Mathematics Library a week from today. I took the liberty of using AIs to instruct her through official channels to meet with Grady in New York. She’s to report to a special task force.” Alexa swept her hand through the air and dropped a virtual document onto Hedrick’s desktop.
He examined the document—an email from the deputy director of the FBI ordering Denise Davis to report to a task force safe house. “If we know where Grady is going to be, why involve her?”
“Grady might not show if he doesn’t see her.”
Hedrick looked up from the document. “But why New York?”
Alexa closed all the holographic windows. “Back when Bertrand Alcot was a physics professor at Columbia, he took Mr. Grady under his wing—mentored him. Grady never attended, but he spent time there. I’m guessing he still has friends in the area—or he knows of someplace there where he can go to ground.”
“Set AIs loose on any communities of interest his past activity might generate. See what they turn up. Past addresses, run geolocation on his phones for the past ten years. I want anyone he’s ever been with under surveillance.”
Hedrick then turned to Morrison. “Prep your people to become this FBI unit. Grab him when he shows.”
Morrison nodded. “You still need him alive?”
“Yes, damnit!” Hedrick looked back to Alexa. “Excellent job.”
“I’d like to go on that operation, Graham.”
He looked surprised. “That’s not up to me, Alexa.” Hedrick turned to Morrison.
“No.”
“I feel I’ve earned the right to go on this operation. Mr. Grady represents a grave risk to the BTC and society at large. I think he’ll listen to me.”
“Ah, you’re going to charm him, like you did to so many in the old days?”
Hedrick shook his head vigorously. “You’re too valuable, Alexa. It can’t be risked.”
Morrison added, “And we don’t need your help.”
Hedrick took her by the elbow. “I need your people monitoring Agent Davis’s every move. Look how well you’ve done so far on the intelligence side.”
Morrison gave Alexa a sly smirk.
Alexa focused on Hedrick. “I was a top field operative. It’s what I’m good at. Why won’t you let me do what I’m good at?”
“You’re much too valuable.”
She studied him and then turned to exit.
His words followed her. “You’re dismissed.”