She turned onto it. The road wound through mature forest; at every tenth of a mile or so, another sign of prohibition was posted. No entry. No hunting or fishing. No trespassing. The signs were impossible to ignore.
Andrea ignored them. The gravel quickly gave way to a narrow, winding, but immaculately paved lane. Yet still she saw nothing around her save virgin forest. Could she have been mistaken? She would not be deterred. She had gone through a quarter-tank of gas simply driving along this uncharted lane, making turns at random, hoping that sooner or later, by sheer chance, she would happen upon the place.
And now—no mistaking it—she had.
She instantly recognized something about the building she saw; it wasn’t the same style as that of the Katonah headquarters, and yet there was something similar about the way the building related to its surroundings. It was a low-slung structure of brick and glass, and impressive in a way that was hard to pinpoint. As with the Katonah structure, you could be very near and not see it—doubtless it was entirely concealed from overhead observation—but once you did, it was impossible to miss the subtle grandeur of the place. As with the foundation headquarters in Katonah, there was a sense of quality and magnitude without ostentation. They both represented an architecture of discretion.
The throaty growl of a powerful engine told her that she was not alone. A large black Range Rover loomed in her rearview mirror, and then swerved to her left. Another hard turn and the Range Rover was inches away from her vehicle. It was impossible to see into the vehicle—perhaps because of the angle of the sun’s reflection, perhaps because of the tinted glass. But the powerful vehicle was now forcing her small sedan into the drive that led to the brick-and-glass facility. Her heart was in her throat. Yet this was what she had been looking for, wasn’t it?
Be careful what you wish for…
She could gun the motor and—what? Ram into an SUV that weighed twice as much as her small car? They wouldn’t dare hurt her, would they? The Range Rovers looked like security vehicles; they must have taken her for an intruder of some sort, yes? Andrea told herself these things: She did not quite believe them.
Moments later, two stocky men climbed out of the Range Rover and ushered her out of her car, in a manner one could take for either politesse or coercion.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. An air of presumption would help her more than one of timidity. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
One of the men stared at her appraisingly. Andrea shuddered at his blotchy skin and bat-wing eyebrows.
“Dr. Bancroft is waiting for you,” the other man told her, gently but firmly guiding her to the facility’s door.
Chapter Twelve
And so he was.
As the glass door sucked closed behind her, Paul Bancroft stepped around a corner and beamed, holding his arms open as if to embrace her. She did not come to him. She saw the smile on his face, crazing his delicate skin with fine lines, the unclouded warm gaze, and she did not know what to believe.
“My goodness, Andrea,” the philanthropist exulted. “You never cease to impress me.”
“Wherever you go, there I am,” Andrea said dryly. “Like a bad penny.”
“There are no bad pennies. Only misunderstood ones.” Paul Bancroft chuckled merrily. “Welcome to the factory.”
She studied his face for a trace of ire or menace, saw none. Instead, he was brimming with bonhomie.
“I don’t know whether to be more impressed by your curiosity, your hardheadedness, your determination, or your resourcefulness,” the gray-haired savant told her.
“Curiosity will do,” Andrea said carefully. “That part’s real enough.”
“I see genuine leadership potential in you, my dear.” With a wave of his elegant, long-fingered hand he dismissed the stocky men who had accompanied her to the door. “And, at my age, you start looking around for a successor.”
“A regent, anyway,” Andrea said.
“While Brandon’s still a minor, you mean. I’m still hoping my boy will take an interest in the family business, you know, but there are no assurances. So when you find someone with the right stuff, attention must be paid.” His eyes sparkled.
Andrea’s mouth was dry.
“Let me show you around,” he said, in a cordial tone. “There’s a lot to see.”
It had to have been a good ten years, Todd Belknap decided, since Ruth Robbins tried to persuade him that riding on the back of a horse—a vehicle without shock absorbers or air conditioning—might be something to be done as recreation rather than as a last resort. He had never been a convert, never came to enjoy horses, but he did enjoy his time with Ruth. She had grown up in Stillwater, Oklahoma, daughter of a high school football coach in a place where high school football coaches were royalty of a sort. The sort who occasionally got loaded onto tumbrels. Her mom, a Quebecoise, taught French at another high school. Ruth had a knack for languages—first French, from her mother, and the other Romance languages, Spanish and Italian. But after she spent a summer in Bavaria as a fourteen-year-old, she got a decent handle on German, too. She was nuts about soccer—loved it as much as American football—and brought a mixture of high spirits and dry irony to everything she did. When she went riding, it was always in a Western-style saddle; not for her the affectations of the Eastern equestriennes. She was a people collector; something about her made people just naturally open up. Teenage girls would tell her about their love lives; women in their thirties would tell her about their marital issues; old women would tell her about their financial problems. She sassed but she didn’t judge, and even her most cutting remarks were delivered with kindness.
At almost exactly noon, Belknap heard the clop-clop-clop of equine hoof against packed earth. He stirred himself from the rocky ledge beside the trail and waved lazily as his horse-mounted contact came into sight. Her face was drawn as she dismounted and tied one of the bridle straps to a slender tree trunk. There were eleven miles of bridle trails, and this was probably the most secluded area to be found along them.
Ruth Robbins once cracked, not inaccurately, that she didn’t have breasts, she had a bust. She wasn’t fat, exactly, but she was heavyset in an old-settler way, like one of those nineteenth-century mothers of eleven kids who set off for the West in a covered wagon. There was even something Old West about her attire, though he’d be hard pressed to put his finger on exactly what. It wasn’t that she wore petticoats or hoops.
She dismounted and stood near him, though without facing in his direction. They could each scan a hundred-and-eighty-degree vista, alert to any anomaly. “First things first,” she said, without preamble. “The Ansari network. We really know zip. Unconfirmed intercepts, though, are pointing to some unidentified Estonian tycoon.”
“How many of those can there be?”
“You’d be surprised.” A dry chuckle. “Might be one who hasn’t come onto our sig-scope yet. But there’s some logic to it. The Soviets left behind enormous caches of weaponry when they yanked up the empire—and it mostly didn’t end up in the hands of the Estonian army, I can tell you that.” A breeze rustled through the pin oaks, wafting the scent of loam and horse sweat.
“Why did they want to have an Estonian arsenal in the first place?”
Now she turned to face him. “Remember your geography. The Gulf of Finland was considered strategically vital. All goods shipped into St. Petersburg—Leningrad, I should say—had to pass through that gulf. And for two hundred or so miles, it’s Finland to the north and good old Estonia to the south. Estonia was on the playbooks for the Gulf of Riga, too—the whole Baltic Sea, for that matter. Anything naval in the Baltics was going to have to involve Estonia. So you had a goddamn enormous Soviet naval base there, and nobody was better at commanding munitions and military resources than the Soviet navy. Probably came down to Kremlinological office politicking more than solid strategic arguments, but when it came to handing out the goodies, the Russian sailor was always given pride of place.”
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“I assume that the privatization of the Estonian arsenal wasn’t exactly official policy.” His gaze settled on an old walnut tree that was being slowly strangled by kudzu. The vine draped over its boughs like a tarp.
“It was wholesale larceny during a time of chaos, when a lot of people in the East didn’t quite grasp the difference between capitalism and theft.”
“So what are we dealing with here? You’re saying that Genesis is an Estonian oligarch? Or just works through one? What’s the picture?”
“I’ve told you what I know, which isn’t much. Hints and guesswork, you understand. Funnily enough, the Ansari network has never seen fit to send us a nice company brochure in the mail.”
“How does Genesis fit into the picture?”
Ruth winced slightly. “My dad used to be an amateur photographer. Had his own darkroom in the basement. Once in a while, one of us kids would barge in while he was developing his negatives. Turn all his great shots of hurtling footballs into blobs of shadow and fog. He used to tan our hide but good. Point is, we don’t have a goddamn picture here. We’ve got shadows and fog.”
“And I just want to know whose hide to tan,” Belknap pressed. “Talk to me, Ruth. Tell me about Genesis.”
“Genesis. Lot of stories associated with that legend. See, there’s kind of a mystique there. There’s a story about someone who crossed Genesis and was held captive for two years in a steel crypt shaped around his body, kept alive by IV nutrition. All the while he couldn’t move any part of his body more than an inch or so. After two years, he just atrophies, major lost muscle tissue, and that’s how he died. Can you imagine? There’s a real Poe-like imagination here. I’ll tell you another story. Came from Athens sector. The story is, one of the victims was a member of a powerful Greek shipping family. But the story’s not really about him. It’s about his mother. Apparently the mother was inconsolable. Time’s supposed to heal all, but not in this case. She wanted to see the person who took her son’s life, and she wouldn’t shut up about it. She talked about nothing else.”
“She wanted revenge. That’s understandable.”
“Not even that. She knew she couldn’t get revenge. She just wanted to see the face of Genesis. Just wanted to gaze into this person’s eyes. Just wanted to see, to see what nobody was known to have seen. And she was so persistent, so badgering, that one day, a message arrived for her.”
“A message from Genesis?”
“Message was that Genesis had heard her demand, and that she could get her wish. But at a price. And the price would be her life. Those were the terms. She could accept or she could decline. But those were the terms.”
Belknap shivered, and it wasn’t because of the gentle breeze.
“So the mom, who was hysterical with grief, agreed,” Ruth continued. “She agreed to the condition. And I guess she was given a cell phone and series of instructions that took her to a procession of isolated places. Her body was found the next morning. She had tucked a statement into her brassiere, a statement written in her own hand, something to the effect that she had indeed seen the One Whom None Could See and Live. So everyone knew that Genesis had lived up to its side of the bargain. And the weird thing is—or so the story goes—nobody could determine a cause of death. She was just dead.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” the Consular Operations analyst told him. “It’s like a goddamn urban legend. We’ve all heard these stories, but we’ve never been able to verify them. And you know me. I don’t trust where I can’t verify.”
“There are more things on heaven and earth…”
“May be so. Maybe so. But I count only what I can count. If a tree falls in a forest and Ruth Robbins gets no reliable confirmation from signals intelligence, then that tree’s still standing as far as I’m concerned.”
Belknap gave her a sharp look. “Tell me about Inver Brass.”
Ruth Robbins blanched. Suddenly, there was something dead in her gaze.
It took few seconds—and the appearance of a rivulet of blood from the corner of her mouth, like a misplaced stroke of lipstick—before he realized why. Her body crumpled, but she had been dead even before she hit the ground.
The crimson rivulet winked in the midday light.
Paul Bancroft’s pride in his North Carolina facility was boyish, exuberant, unabashed. He strode commandingly down hallways of lacquered slate, along walls and floor dividers of frosted glass. Yet what was this place? Andrea wondered. Why was he here? She saw shelves filled with paper documents, clusters of computer terminals, a hum of preparedness like at a NASA command station. The light was low but of a constant intensity, reminding her of a rare-book-and-manuscript library. At regular intervals, stairs to a lower floor were visible: wood and steel railings, slate landings. Much of the building was no doubt underground. Seated at computers, men and women in business attire glanced up casually as the two passed.
“I’ve assembled a truly formidable team of analysts, if I do say so myself,” Paul Bancroft declared as they reached a central area. Slatted skylights allowed a carefully titrated amount of sunlight through filtered glass.
“And hidden them well.”
“It is rather secluded here,” the maven allowed. “You’ll understand why when I explain.”
He stopped and gestured around him. Surrounded by a semicircular bank of monitors and chairs, half a dozen people were apparently conferring at a U-shaped table. One of them—a slight man with a neatly trimmed black beard who was wearing a dark, lightweight navy suit but no tie—stood up as Bancroft approached.
“What’s the latest from La Paz?” Bancroft asked him.
“We’re just collating the analyses now,” the bearded man replied in a fluting voice. His hands were delicate, almost feminine.
Andrea looked at the men and women at the table. She was getting that Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass sensation again.
“I’m just giving my cousin Andrea here a bit of a tour,” Paul Bancroft explained to the others. He turned back to her. “Most of those terminals are connected to a massively parallel system of computer processors—not just one Cray XT3 supercomputer but a roomful of them. The fastest computer in the world today is probably the one in the Department of Energy’s Livermore National Laboratory. The second is said to be IBM’s BlueGene system in Yorktown. Ours would probably come in third, neck and neck with one at Sandia and another at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. We’re talking about machine clusters that can execute hundreds of teraflops per second—hundreds of trillions of calculations. Take all the calculations that were done anywhere during the whole first half-century of modern computing—this cluster does more in an hour. Machines of this computational power are used to do genomic and proteomic analysis, or to predict chaotic seismic activities, to model nuclear explosions—events of that nature. What we’re modeling is no less complex. We’re modeling event horizons and event cascades affecting the seven billion inhabitants of this planet.”
“My God,” Andrea breathed. “You’re trying to work out the greatest good for the greatest number—the calculus of felicity.”
“It’s always been a pretty phrase. Nobody had ever been able to make a decent attempt at actually calculating it. The counterfactuals are simply too complex. Computational explosion remains a problem. But we’ve made real headway, with real results. It’s been a dream of great minds since the Enlightenment.” His eyes gleamed. “We’re turning morality into math.”
Andrea was speechless.
“You know, they say that human knowledge doubled in the fifteen hundred years between, say, the birth of Christ and the Renaissance. Between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, it doubled again. In the century and a quarter spanning that revolution to the acme of the industrial revolution, with the birth of the automobile, knowledge once more doubled. By our best estimates, Andrea, these days human knowledge doubles every two years. At the same time, our moral faculties remain unevo
lved. The technical prowess of our species has vastly outstripped our ethical prowess. These computational resources that we’ve enlisted are, in effect, a sort of mental prosthesis, extending our intellectual capacities by artificial means. But what’s ultimately more important is that the combination of our algorithms and analyses and computer models can produce the equivalent of a moral prosthesis. Nobody objects when NASA or the Human Genome Project assembles scientists and computers in order to solve certain engineering or biological problems that confront us. So why not tackle the welfare of our species more directly? That’s the challenge that we’ve taken up here.”
“But what do you mean exactly? What are you saying?”
“Small interventions can have big consequences. We’re trying to plot out those event cascades so that we can gauge such intervention. Forgive me, this is still too abstract, isn’t it?”
“You could say that.”
The look he gave her was kindly but firm. “I’ll have to trust your discretion. The program couldn’t work if its activities were made public.”
“Its activities. You’re still speaking in code.”
“And you no doubt suspect the secrecy,” Paul Bancroft observed. “You would be right to, as a general rule. You’re wondering why I’ve hived off this group, kept it all below radar—quite literally off the map. You’re wondering what I’ve got to hide.”