The God Wave (31 page)

They did not fly together. They'd planned to reconfigure themselves into different groupings at each airport. So when they flew out of Hagerstown, Dice and Lanfen were a couple of Asian tourists, Mini and Chuck formed a second pairing, and Eugene traveled alone.

At LaGuardia, Mini and Lanfen became two businesswomen on a corporate junket while all three men appeared to be on their own. By the time they set down in Omaha early on Monday morning, Chuck was exhausted, and his nerves were frayed. Still he hoped their absence might not have been noticed until they failed to return to their car by Sunday evening.

Inshallah
—that was something one of his Muslim colleagues at Johns Hopkins had often said. If God wills it. He hoped God would will that any security detail Howard might have put on them would become bored enough to resort to Internet card games or playing on their smartphones. He wondered for a second whether God was even aware of Candy Crush. But that was a question for another time. Right now, he had a couple of phone calls to make.

MATT STREEGMAN'S CELL PHONE RANG
at six thirty on Monday morning. He was not pleased to see Leighton Howard's office number on the caller ID, but he answered dutifully and with
false good humor because the customer is always right to call you whenever they damn well please. At least when the customer was paying as much money as Deep Shield was.

“General Howard, you're up bright and early.”

“I usually am. I'd like you to come in this morning, Dr. Streegman. One of our security analysts was just showing me something I think you should see.”

Matt tried to call Chuck while he was waiting for the Deep Shield car to pick him up. Chuck didn't answer. Matt only just remembered that his partner and some of the other staff had gone off for a Sunday hike at Prettyboy Reservoir. He was probably sleeping in. Leave it to Chuck to come up with something like that. Movie nights. Dinners. Team-building weekends where they could get away from it all.

Matt's brain cartwheeled over the words, and he had a sudden moment of vertigo.
Get away from it all
. Would Chuck do something that radical—haul his little fan club out into the woods, where the Deeps couldn't monitor them? Make a run for the border? What border? There was nowhere they could run that Howard couldn't find them. Matt was pretty sure of that.

And he realized how much that surety was not pleasant.

He shrugged off the uneasy thoughts. The Deep Shield car had arrived, which meant Howard had sent it before he'd even called. Typical.

At Deep Shield HQ, he was hustled straight to Howard's office, where the general and a tech in an unadorned khaki uniform sat at a small conference table before a large cinema display.

Howard waved Matt to a chair at the table.

“I want you to watch this footage and tell me what's screwy about it,” Howard said without preamble.

The video showed a lengthwise view of an empty restroom. The door nearest the camera—which must have been mounted
in the corner of the room opposite the row of sinks and stalls—opened, and Mini Mause stepped into the room, holding the door open for Lanfen. Mini complimented the other woman's boots and crossed to open a stall door. There she paused and began rummaging in her oversize purse for her hairbrush, apparently. She moved back toward the center of the room, tilting the purse toward the ceiling lights.

Behind her, Lanfen slipped into the stall Mini had opened, and Mini, giving up on finding the brush, entered the stall next to it and closed the door. He heard her say something about borrowing Lanfen's brush but didn't hear Lanfen's answer. They talked about the movie they'd watched the night before. They talked about boots. Then they came out and moved to the sinks.

Matt felt his brow furrowing. “What was I supposed to notice?”

“Run it again,” Howard told the tech. To Matt he said, “Watch the stall door on the left.”

Matt watched. Mini dug in her purse. Behind her, Lanfen slid through the half-open stall door, pushing it a bit farther open. Mini went into her stall—Matt fought to keep his eyes on the other door—and . . .

He blinked. The door on the left was half-open; then it was closed and locked. It didn't swing shut or slam shut or shut at all. It simply was open, and then it wasn't.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don't know,” said Howard. “I was wondering if you did.”

“Why would I?”

“You know both these women. You know they're both . . . talented.”

“You think they messed with the camera for some reason?”

“Not mechanically. All I know is that particular ladies' latrine was the scene of several odd occurrences that same night—the
night Lieutenant Reynolds's robot went AWOL. A maintenance man found that the keys to the storage closet in that latrine suddenly wouldn't open it. The next morning, between the time your two colleagues entered the restroom and came out again, someone put a maintenance cone outside in the hall. None of our maintenance people recall having done that.”

Matt's brain felt like it was in a hamster ball—running, running, running every which way and hitting into walls. “I assume you're planning on asking them about all this?”

Howard nodded. “First thing tomorrow morning.”

“That's probably your best bet, because I honestly have no clue what's going on here. What is it
you
think they've done?”

“I don't know. But I'm wondering if it had something to do with the lab break-in. I'll be frank, Doctor. The timing on your friends' escapade couldn't be worse. I just had to stop the countdown on an important trial deployment.”

Matt took a deep breath. “A trial deployment. A trial of what exactly?”

“Of Deep Shield forces in a covert combat situation. That's all you need know.”

“What I do know from our contract is that you shouldn't be running missions like that with this technology. It's beyond the scope of our agreement.”

“Our agreement? Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. Depending on the success of the mission, we may wish to discuss changes to the work your group is doing here. Changes that will benefit both of us.”

Matt forced his anger down. This was what he worked for. This was where Lucy's last brain waves led him.

“But there will be no mission if they've done something to the bots in those labs,” Howard finished.

Matt swallowed hard. “What do you want me to do?”

“What I've always needed you to do: control them. I had thought it was just Dr. Brenton that was the problem. I can see now that it goes further than that. His whole group is infected. I need you to get in with them. Talk to them. Listen to them. Be part of their plans, and make damn sure you know what they're up to, so I know how to counter it.”

“Counter it? I don't know what that means. Haven't they been working with your people? Haven't we been fulfilling our end of the bargain?”

“Not if there are extracurricular activities that can harm this project.”

You're one to talk. Covert . . .

“And I think that's exactly what's going on,” Howard continued, “right under your nose. That's always been the problem with you, Streegman. You're disengaged from your people, your business, from life. You need to reengage, and you need to do it now.”

Matt nodded and rose, his brain feeling abnormally sluggish, as if someone had filled it with ice. Something about this whole situation suddenly seemed wrong. Yet Howard was right. Right about Chuck. Right about him.

He found his dutiful guide outside in the corridor, waiting patiently to take him back to the outer layers of the Deep Shield onion. He was standing in the hangar area, waiting for his driver, when his phone rang. He unpocketed and glanced at it. Not a number he recognized. He answered it anyway.

“Streegman.”

“Matt, it's me.” Chuck's voice was layered atop a background that was almost certainly an airport.

Matt lowered his voice and his head, something that probably made him look guilty as sin. “Chuck? Where're you calling from? I didn't recognize the number.”

“It's a burner. Listen, we're gone, okay? I can't tell you where. I can only tell you what I heard from my contact at the FBI this morning: Deep Shield is not on any list of government agencies he's aware of. You know what they're building. And you know they're planning a deployment—”

“Howard just told me he's stopped the countdown—”

“For how long? No, it doesn't matter. These are not rescue robots, Matt. Or medevac units or construction bots or exploration bots or even disaster mitigation forces. They are offensive weaponry. And they are weaponry in the hands of a deeply secret paramilitary organization.”

Matt felt as if someone had opened a deep freezer in his gut. “Dammit, Chuck, have you gone completely mad? I told you this comic-book shit—”

“Is
real
. The sooner you get that, the sooner we can figure out what to do. You can help us, Matt, or you can throw in with Howard and try to bring us in. It's up to you. I just wanted you to know. Our contracts don't cover our involvement with the sort of tech Lanfen saw in their labs the other night, and more important, our ethics won't countenance it. If you're not concerned about us or about ethics or about national security or about a supremely powerful paramilitary, then for God's sake think of the copyright infringement.”

Copyright infringement? Was that what Chuck thought of him?

And yet . . . why shouldn't he?

He wavered for a moment. Helping Howard would be an act of good faith, possibly enough that the rest of the contracts could be salvaged after this act of insurgence. He could get information, find out details about where the team was hiding. Chuck thought so little of him? So be it. Then he could sum up his feelings for his
ex-
partner in two simple words: fuck Chuck.

On the other hand—
in
the other hand—there was that manila folder Chuck had surprised him with. Matt hadn't opened it on that day or at all during the Forward Kinetics fair. He hadn't touched it for weeks afterward. Then one night, after an endless series of identical nights all spent alone, he wanted to hear what Lucy had to say.

Chuck had written it all out alongside Matt's algorithms. Lucy's brain in a sleep state, a prolonged alpha coma, punctuated by sharp spikes or K complexes—what Chuck had termed
arousal bursts
. Neurologically, he'd noted, this had corresponded with activity in her parietal and temporal lobes—those processing memories, thoughts, and emotions. There had also been exertion in her primary motor cortex; she'd perhaps been trying to open her eyes and lift her arms to hold something. Her brain had been attempting to move a body that wouldn't listen, as if her interface were in need of repair. It had been a partial awakening but not an agitated one. The rhythmic theta runs following these bursts showed calmness, peace.

Matt knew what it meant: she had been aware that he had been there. Lucy had responded to his presence in that hospital room and had tried to reach out and comfort
him
. She had been serene, and she'd wanted to tell him, as she had so many times in their life together, to calm the hell down, stop fighting everything, and just accept what he couldn't change because maybe there was a bigger reason for it that didn't fit so neatly into his mathematical formulas. After all this time, Lucy had finally been able to tell him that no matter what was happening to her brain, he was still on her mind.

Chuck had been the one to deliver that message. And no matter what life owed Matt, he knew he owed Chuck something for that.

He took a deep breath, lowered his voice even more, and hunched himself around his phone. “They know something
was screwy the other night. Howard just made me sit through a screening of ‘What Nerd Girls Talk about in Bathrooms.'”

“What?”

“They have security cams in the bathrooms, Chuck.”

“Well, of course they do. We knew that going in.”

“Okay, well, you guys missed something. But Howard didn't. And he
will
come after you. Where are you? Maybe I can help.”

“Sorry, Matt. I can't tell you that. I just wanted you to know who you're dealing with. I'll try to find a way to contact you later—give you a number you might be able to use if you want to get out. You can reach me through social media if necessary.”

“I don't want to get—” Matt started to say, but Chuck had already hung up.

Matt stared at the phone in his hand for a second before deleting the most recent incoming call. God, this was bad. Could it possibly get any worse?

“Sir?”

“Yeah, yeah. I'm ready to leave.” He looked up, expecting to see his driver, and found himself confronted by two soldiers and a pair of fu-bots. Since one of the men was Lieutenant Reynolds, he assumed the robot was Thorin. Both men were armed, though their weapons were holstered for the moment.

It had just gotten worse.

“What's the problem, Lieutenant?” he asked Reynolds.

“I need your phone, sir,” the young man said with imperturbable courtesy.

The phone. Which was no doubt tapped. Which had the number Chuck had called from somewhere in its memory along with possible clues to their location. He considered dropping it to the floor and crushing it underfoot, but in Matt's moment of inaction the other soldier had already reached out and snatched it from his hand.

Before Matt could object, Reynolds said, almost apologetically, “There's one more thing, sir. You need to come with us.”

“I was going to go home.”

“No, Dr. Streegman. You have to come back in. There's been a development, sir. Deep Shield is in lockdown.”

WHEN SARA ENTERED THE ZETAS'
large lab at Deep Shield on Tuesday morning, it felt wrong. Too quiet. Tim was sitting at his instructor's terminal on the left-hand side of the room, moving a couple of scaly dudes in loincloths through wild kickboxing moves. He was getting that 3-D thing down pretty good. She knew it had galled him that an untechy artist like Mini had beaten him to the punch.