Predator One
Then Boy.
Then the years as a prisoner.
The new work. Regis. The master-control program. The masterpiece of the quantum computer.
Boy.
Those days with her. The nights.
There were such tangled memories there. Horrible and …
And what?
His mind had been going for alliteration.
Horrible and … hot.
So hot.
Those nights when she came to him in the blank hours between a dying midnight and a mysterious new dawn.
The first time was after a meal with Boy. She’d made quinoa pasta with turkey-meat sauce, broccoli, and crusty whole grain bread. They washed it down with a good Italian red, and all during the meal Boy sat close to him, her knee touching his thigh. They’d listened to Cambodian music and talked about the scientific and artistic requirements of performance. Sometimes they laughed. They never talked about work over meals. Never.
That night, she crept into his bed and made love to him. If “love” was a useful word for what happened. Boy never spoke when they were in bed. The lights were always out, the room in total darkness. She never let him touch her. He had to lie there and experience what she did with her small, clever hands, with her mouth, with her skin, with her wetness. Over the years, she’d come to him seven times.
Seven.
That first time, it seemed utterly random, a product of too much wine and the enforced closeness in the apartment. But then Davidovich realized that it had to be a response to what had happened earlier that day.
Had to be.
That was the day he’d cracked the encryption that DARPA had put on Regis in the days following his abduction. Davidovich cracked it and used one of several back doors he’d built into his system to intrude and access passive programs hidden within the code. The fact of those back doors and the passive codes were something the Seven Kings seemed to already know about. Or maybe they presumed they would be there. Davidovich was known for being possessive. It was a character trait they had clearly expected to exploit when they’d taken him. It might have been as important to them as the nature of his genius. Though it was also well known in the world of advanced software design for the creator to build such deliberate portals into their work. Partly as a way of accessing the system should there be a failure in the primary control software, and partly because they could. The only real trick was to design a back door that could not be discovered by the aggressive security software used to find such things.
Davidovich found even the most belligerent hound-dog security programs to be both a personal affront and a challenge. He was absolutely positive that no one—not even the top tier of computer experts like Bug at the DMS, even with MindReader—could find his escape hatches.
On that day, when he’d cracked the encryption, Regis lay back and spread its legs for him, welcoming him like a familiar lover. Davidovich had gone into the system, touching subroutines with knowing hands. This was his. It did not matter to him that it was a work for hire for the Department of Defense. Who were they? At best, they were patrons. How many people could name Da Vinci’s patrons? One in ten thousand? How many knew Da Vinci? Everyone.
That night, Boy had come to him and did things to him that Davidovich’s wife never even did with her dentist lover. She’d left him sprawled on the floor, one leg hooked on the edge of the bed, the sheets soaked and torn. The next morning, when he tried to talk about it, Boy did not respond. After he tried several times to engage her in playful next-day postcoital banter, she’d kicked him in the groin. Very fast, though not very hard. Enough to bend him over and make him nauseated for hours.
After that, he learned his lesson.
It was four months before she came to his bed again.
That time, and every time thereafter, he followed her unspoken set of rules. Not merely because he was afraid of her beatings. And not entirely because he hungered for her touch and all the physical mysteries she shared with him on those dark and silent nights.
No, what he wanted was her approval. He knew that about himself; he understood it. He wasn’t proud of it, but he accepted it.
Sex wasn’t the only way she showed her gratitude and approval. Eighteen months ago, after he’d devised a simple hacking virus that would allow Regis to infect any autonomous automobile program with a new version of Enact, Boy gave him a DVD to watch. On the DVD, Davidovich saw surveillance footage of two people being mugged. His wife and her lover. The attack happened in a parking garage. One man came out of the shadows, clamped a hand over his wife’s mouth, and wrapped an arm around her throat, while two other men—both of them in black clothes, gloves, and ski masks—systematically beat the dentist into a red heap. They didn’t kill him, but they paid particular attention to his groin, his hands, and his knees. And they knocked out every one of his teeth. They did not injure Davidovich’s wife, but she was a screaming wreck when they finally released her and melted away.
Davidovich was positive that the two men doing the beating were Mason and Jacob.
Davidovich wanted to be shocked, horrified, appalled.
Instead, he watched it again.
Then he went into the bathroom and masturbated.
Afterward, he threw up and sat in a hot shower for an hour, boiling away his shame. He never commented on the DVD, nor did Boy.
Another time, after he had presented the schematics for a miniature version of the QC he was building and explained that it could be used in drones as small as a common pigeon, he’d received another gift. An extremely pretty girl asked his son to the dance. It did not matter to Davidovich if the girl was actually a twentysomething passing for a teenager. It didn’t matter that she was a Seven Kings employee, probably a prostitute, who was part of the team keeping tabs on Matthew. All that mattered was the sheer joy on his son’s face.
Davidovich was certainly smart enough to know that he was being manipulated. Threats first, then a show of consideration. Then sex. It was all part of a careful but—to him—obvious plan of corruption. He had, in fact, been corrupted by it. He was thoroughly corrupt now. His postabduction work with Regis, the other software he’d written over the last few years, the QC, the drones, the takeover of autonomous vehicle software—all of that proved that he was every bit as much a monster as Pharos and the charcoal briquette. Each of those things was another drop of water onto the smoking embers of his soul. Absolutely. No doubt about it.
And yet.
As he sat there in the dark, he thought of two people.
The first was Boy. He wanted her. He ached for her. Even though he was only ever a passive lump of flesh to her. Although he was never allowed to touch her, not even in the fiercest moments of their coupling, he wanted her. He felt something suspiciously like love for her. And it did not ameliorate it one whit to know that this was some perverse spin on Stockholm syndrome. Understanding a thing did not necessarily mean that you were free of it. Ask any addict. Ask an alcoholic who has been ten years dry but who reaches for a bottle after a few consecutive personal setbacks. They understood.
He thought of Boy and wondered how far into hell he would go if he knew that she would come to his bed one more time. Just once.
Davidovich knew that he would shovel coal into the devil’s furnace for one more touch.
In the darkness he shook his head.
Then, in the next moment, he thought of the other person who was never far from his thoughts.
Matthew.
His son.
“Goddamn it,” breathed Davidovich. In the darkness, he spoke his son’s name.
“Matthew.”
Matthew.
The tears started then.
“I did it for you,” he told the image of his son that he kept safe in his mind. Not the teenager, not the college-bound young man. The picture in his mind was his son as he had been on the day he was born. A tiny thing. Pink and helpless. Crying because he had no power at all in the world. Crying because everything was
strange and new and he didn’t understand anything.
Davidovich had taken him from the nurse and kissed the squalling face. Each cheek. The forehead. The little heaving chest, over the fluttering heart. Then Davidovich had cuddled the infant to his own chest and soothed him and whispered to him. Promises of love. Promises of protection. Promises of always being there.
Promises.
Gone, now. Cracked by Boy and her thugs, but comprehensively ground into dust beneath Davidovich’s own feet. Month by month, day by day since the CIA safe house.
Maybe before.
“Matthew,” he said. Davidovich did not recognize his own voice. He was certain it was not the same voice that had whispered those promises to a newborn a million years ago.
Part Four
Solomon’s Minefield
There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
—MAHATMA GANDHI
Chapter Eighty-five
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
March 31, 5:42 P.M.
Toys felt as if he’d lost any contact with the real world.
He’d been at the hospital for a full day, and so far, except for that one call with Mr. Church, he felt as if the full sum of his usefulness was a few ticks below zero.
He sat on the floor outside Circe’s room. The massive dog, Banshee, lay on the other side of the wall. Inside the room. Junie was in there, too. Everyone else was outside in the hall. Lydia was pacing incessantly up and down a twelve-foot line in front of Circe’s door, her booted feet making soft sounds as she passed within inches of where Toys sat.
Toys closed his eyes, unwilling to endure the vile looks the DMS agent threw him on every turn. He went into his head and thought about the wild stories Hugo Vox had told him about Nicodemus. Impossible stories. Mythical fantasies and outright horror stories. All of which Hugo swore were true. Since he’d heard Rudy Sanchez speak the name of the monstrous little priest, Toys had felt as if the world was cracking and falling apart around him.
Toys had even seen the little priest at Hugo’s estate in Iran, though he had begged off from an actual introduction. He’d heard too many tales about how those introductions often went. Nicodemus liked to make a lasting impression on a person. Some people never quite recovered from those encounters. There were rumors of at least two suicides directly following private meetings. In those days following the fall of the Kings, when Hugo and Toys lived in Iran, Toys had begun his downward slide into regret, shame, and self-hatred. Even at his worst, though, he was too clever to risk an encounter with someone for whom the word “chaos” seemed to have been deliberately invented. The priest was a trickster. A monster in every sense that Toys could imagine. And Toys was not entirely sure he was human.
So, no, he had chosen not to shake the man’s hand or stand in his company.
Even now, with nothing more than the sound of his name on the air, Toys felt filthy, diseased, leprous—as if that name could taint the hearer.
Toys suddenly felt something, and it pulled him out of his terrified musings. It was more of a sensation rather than a noise. It was a something. A feeling, or an awareness. He straightened and looked around and immediately understood what it was.
A disturbance in the bloody Force, he mused, getting to his feet.
A big man came out of the elevator, flanked by soldiers with weapons in their hands and grim faces. The big man carried no obvious weapon and wore a dark suit of the best quality. His face was equally grim, though. His eyes were hidden behind the lenses of tinted glasses.
Mr. Church.
Behind him was an even bigger man. Brick. When Toys encountered Brick in the past, he’d tried—and failed—to strike up casual conversation.
Toys scrambled to his feet but stayed where he was, uncertain what to do.
As he approached, Church glanced at Rudy Sanchez’s room and nodded to the soldier who stood by the door but walked directly toward Circe’s room. Junie came out to meet him, and she gave him a powerful hug that the big man—after only a slight hesitation—returned. Then he gently pushed her to arm’s length and looked past her to where Toys stood.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. There was no reproach, no accusation, no hostility. But there was also no room to sidestep or evade the question, even if Toys had wanted to.
“I came to talk to Junie, and stuck around after things started happening.”
“He’s been keeping me company and—” began Junie, but Church cut her off.
“Has he been in here alone at any point?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Toys. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
Church’s mouth was a hard, unsmiling line. “If I thought I should worry about you, Mr. Chismer, you would not be here.”
From the way he said it, Toys chose to take it as a threat to his general existence rather than merely to his being present at the hospital. He nodded, accepting any meaning Church wanted to imply.
“Toys is a friend,” said Junie, shifting her body as if wanting to put herself between the young Brit and the head of the DMS.
There was a movement, and they all turned to see Banshee come and stand in the doorway. The massive dog looked at Church.
“Violin brought her,” said Junie. “She wanted to stay but couldn’t. She left Banshee here for Circe.”
“I know,” Church told her. He walked toward the dog, which held her ground and watched him. Church stopped and held out his hand to be sniffed. Banshee paused for a moment and then took his scent. Then Church bent close to the dog and spoke rapidly but softly to it in a language Toys did not recognize. The dog licked his hand, turned, and went back into the room. Everyone stared at her and then slowly shifted their eyes to Church. To Junie, Church said, “I’ll be a few minutes.”
Church entered the room, closed the door, and drew the heavy curtains.
Chapter Eighty-six
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
March 31, 5:46 P.M.
Doctor Aaron Davidovich opened his bedroom door and walked into the hall. There was a guard stationed ten feet away, and he turned toward the scientist with crisp military precision and natural suspicion.
“Sir,” he said, “may I help you?”
Davidovich smiled. “I want to take a walk. Get some air. Am I allowed?”
The guard hesitated, and Davidovich watched several emotions flicker on the man’s hard face. Davidovich was sure he could catalog them. He was sure that the man had been given what would feel like conflicting orders. Until today, Davidovich had been a prisoner; after all, he’d been brought to the island with a black bag over his head. This guard might even have been part of the escort detail. At first Davidovich had been locked in his room with strict orders to stay there. The guards would know about that restriction. Then were was Pharos’s big speech about how Davidovich was now part of the family. An equal. Blah, blah, blah. All bullshit. Manipulative and clumsy. The guards would know some of that, too. Being allowed to spend so much time in the bathroom before had been a test of the supposed tolerance and freedom. Everyone would know that. Pharos, the Gentleman, all the guards.
Exactly as they should have.
Just as Pharos would probably expect Davidovich to further test that freedom in some way. A stroll around the building would be one predictable way. A stroll on the grounds would be another.
How would the guard react? How were the orders phrased?
The guard took a step back, thereby increasing the subjective control that a guard would have over a prisoner.
“Of course, sir.”
“So,” pushed Davidovich, “I’m allowed to go outside?”
The little muscles at the corners of the guard’s face tightened, but otherwise his face showed exactly zero emotion. It was a very “soldierly” thing for him to do.
“Absolutely, sir,” said the guard.
> Davidovich smiled, but he exhaled, too. To show relief. Everything here was theater, so he felt it important to run with that. To play his role.
“Which way is it?” asked Davidovich. “Can’t seem to remember the way.”
He laughed as he said that. Reminding the guard about the black hood. Making a joke of it. Sharing the joke.
There was the slightest flicker on the guard’s lips. “Let me show you.”
No “sir” this time. A more human response.
Good, thought Davidovich coldly. That will make it easier.
The guard led him to a closed door, unlocked it with a keycard, pushed it open, and held it for him. There was a set of stairs, and the guard followed him up, through another door, along a corridor that looked identical to the one downstairs, and then out into the humid, misty day.
The sound was covered by a writhing layer of mist that flowed like pale snakes under a thin blanket. High above them, pelicans glided in formation. Boats swung at anchor across the water, and, far out toward the horizon line, an oil tanker lumbered its relentless way from Alaska to some port in California.
Davidovich did not know which island he was on, but during the trip he’d overheard enough bits and pieces to know they were in Washington State and that this was very likely Puget Sound. Collecting disparate data and assembling them into cohesive information were nothing to him. And since being in captivity, his survival depended on observing and assessing every fragment of data. About everything.
Every single thing.
There was a wide wooden porch with a slat rail built completely around the hotel. It was painted a rather bland tan color. Artless. Darker brown benches were bolted to the deck against the wall at regular intervals. Beyond the rail the terrain varied. In some spots there were lush flowerbeds, in others patches of neatly mowed grass. They passed another guard, who stood watch at the entrance to a finger pier. Davidovich nodded to him. The sentry didn’t even look at him but instead cocked an eyebrow at Davidovich’s guard.
“Taking a walk, Max,” said the guard.
The sentry responded with a single curt nod.