The Nicholas Linnear Novels (199 page)

“Come on,” Howe said. “I’ve got to get to S One to see Stedman.” He was talking about John Stedman, currently the most senior senator on the Hill. S1 was Stedman’s hideaway office in the Capitol Building. Ever since the dawn of the republic, the seventy-five hideaways were the most precious perks in Washington. “Life begins at S Forty,” Howe often said, because he didn’t have one. But Cotton Branding did, because of his prestige, his contacts. Another unhealed wound in Howe’s flesh, another inequity for which he despised Branding.

“Forget Shisei,” Howe said in the car as Michael, his driver, pulled out into traffic. “She’s not your concern.”

“That’s what you always say. You know she calls you ‘Dougie’?”

“Does she?” Howe stared at his assistant. “It’s a joke, David. She’s pulling your goddamned chain.” He shook his head. “Jesus, sometimes I can’t believe you.”

“Still. I want to know what her status is around here.” Brisling’s jaw was firmly set and a vein pulsed in his temple. He could not believe how deeply Shisei had gotten under his skin. He had resented her from the moment Howe had started using her, and that resentment had steadily percolated. But the way she had talked to him just now had been the last straw. It was inexcusable.

“Shisei’s a servant, David”—Howe shrugged—“just like all the other dedicated, patriotic servants I employ to help me navigate the perilous waters of Washington.” There was a smirk on his face; privately, he was amused by Brisling’s obvious jealousy.

“Leave that bullshit for the press,” Brisling said hotly. “She’s nothing like the rest of us, and you know it.”

“Yeah,” Howe said with a peculiar combination of satisfaction and malice, “her pussy’s prettier than all of you put together.” He was fed up with Brisling’s whining. In fact, the only thing that was keeping him from firing Brisling was plausible deniability. Brisling was a born pawn. When his usefulness is at an end, Howe decided, he’s out.

Howe picked up his mobile phone, spoke to General Dickerson for several minutes. Then, because he was in the mood to have some malicious fun, he leaned over, said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’ll tell you a secret, David, sometimes her pussy is smarter than the whole bunch of you.” He laughed so hard he had to wipe tears out of his eyes.

“Your jokes aside,” Brisling said somewhat stiffly, “I don’t trust her. For the life of me, I can’t understand why you do. I’ve seen her twist you around her finger when you thought the opposite was happening. You set out to use her, which is okay, but this has turned into something else. She’s gotten under your skin, into your blood. I see the presents you give her whenever she does a job for you. I think you want her, and that’s all that’s on your mind when you’re with her.
That’s
power.
That’s
control.”

“Are you finished?” Howe said. He was angry now. Who was this little pissant to tell him what was what? Shisei was right about Brisling, he was eminently expendable. He reined in his emotions with a great force of will. “I just sent the bitch off to make sure Branding takes her to the gala State dinner for the German chancellor at the end of the month. There I will ruin him forever. So forget your little operation at the Johnson Institute. I have something else for you.

“You hate Shisei’s guts, you think she’s affecting my judgment. Maybe you’re right. I think it’s time we found out the truth about her.” He smiled warmly, settled his features into a mask of confidentiality. “I’m giving you that job, David, because I know I can trust you. I happen to know that Shisei keeps her intelligence notes at home, in her bedroom. Wait until the night of the dinner, when we know she’ll be out with Branding. Just after she leaves, find a way to get those notes.”

“But…” Brisling’s face showed his concern. “You want me to break into her house?”

Howe raised his eyebrows. “David, I don’t know what you mean. Use your own initiative—that’s the way to get ahead in this city.” He stared out the window at the passing parade of Washington’s monuments. They all seemed to be saluting him. “It seems to me I’m giving you what you want most: a chance to prove to me what you’re really worth.”

He swung around, cultivating his avuncular look. “You’ve always found my advice helpful to you in the past, haven’t you? I took you out of the Senate cloakroom, made something out of the young drone you once were. That’s because I saw the potential in you.” The benevolent smile broadened as he slipped an arm around Brisling’s shoulders. “Listen to me, David. You’re going places. Today, my director of operations. Tomorrow—well, who knows?”

And Death had a name.

Nicholas opened his eyes, staring up into a face he had been certain he would never see again.

“Kansatsu-san?” His voice was a dry, reedy rasp. “Is it really you? Am I dreaming? Am I dead?”

“You are not dead,” Nicholas’s first
ninjutsu sensei
said. “Neither are you alive. Yet.”

His face—which was all of him Nicholas could see—was exactly the same as the last time Nicholas had seen it, in the winter of 1963. Impossible, Nicholas thought. But his thoughts were hazy, half formed, still partially encased in ice.

“Where are we?”

“In Limbo,” Kansatsu-san said. “My home upon the Black Gendarme.”

“A house? Up here?” How odd my voice sounds! Nicholas thought. How hollow, how timbreless.

“Though Limbo is my home,” Kansatsu said, “it is a retreat. Think of it as a monastery, a holy place of serenity and of strength.” He peered down at Nicholas. “Isn’t that what you need most now?”

Nicholas tried to nod his assent, fell asleep instead. He dreamed of the Black Gendarme, rising from the center of his soul.

Two weeks after they returned to Washington, Cotton Branding took Shisei with him to the Johnson Institute. It was the first time since he had been back that he had been able to break away from his duties on the Senate floor.

The Institute, the ne plus ultra destination of the best minds graduating from MIT and Stanford, owned a large red-brick building constructed at the turn of the century in the Georgian style. It was essentially a country house that now sat in the center of Washington, on Devonshire Place, just a block from the Connecticut Avenue Bridge with its gigantic Art Moderne urns.

That a structure originally built for displaying works of art was now used for highly advanced and elaborate laboratory facilities perhaps said more about the capital than a year’s worth of speeches in the Senate.

Though the mansion was still beautiful on the outside, all its interior charm had been lost in the renovation. Still, as far as Cotton Branding was concerned, the Johnson Institute was the center of the world, as beautiful as any museum he had been in or contributed to.

He was here to see the latest demonstration of how far the Hive Project had actually come. It was meant only for him, since this phase was still in its embryonic experimental stage. Yet Shisei was with him. He was proud of the work being done here, saw it, perhaps, as a reflection of his own efforts, the fruit of his hard work.

They entered the long, echoey marble foyer where a formidable state-of-the-art security network had been installed. Shisei gave the attendant her vital statistics, full name, date and place of birth, place of employment, watched in fascination as the young woman typed the information onto a computer screen. There was only a fractional hesitation, then the printer began spewing out hard copy, including a facsimile photo of Shisei. The computer operator handed the hard copy to a uniformed officer, who scanned it, then scrutinized them. He nodded, indicated that they should step through a metal detector. They were asked to empty their pockets. Shisei’s handbag and the contents of their pockets were X-rayed. In addition, Shisei was made to hand over her jewelry to be analyzed by a spectrometer.

They were fingerprinted, then directed to look into the eyepiece of a great, arching machine so their retina patterns could be photographed—and in Branding’s case, compared with those on file. Then they spoke in turn into a grill so that a sophisticated computer could record and store their voiceprints.

At length they were given laser-etched tags to wear, each imprinted with an invisible one-time-only code.

“Is that all?” she asked ironically as they passed through into the Institute proper.

Branding smiled thinly. “If you come back next month, they’ll take blood as well,” he said. “I understand they’re about to perfect instant DNA identification.”

Dr. Rudolph, a tall, whip-thin man with a pencil mustache and high-arched eyebrows, was waiting for them just past the next computer-operated checkpoint. His bald skull gleamed in the overhead illumination. A brim of salt-and-pepper hair hung down over his ears and the nape of his neck. Shisei thought that he had the air of a man who bred dogs or roses in his spare time: meticulous, patient, gentle. He peered at them as if they were laboratory subjects, quickly shook their hands with a dry, firm grip. He nodded absently as Branding introduced Shisei.

“Do you smoke?” Dr. Rudolph asked. “No? Good. No smoking of any kind is allowed here.”

He turned and led them down a quiet corridor. Shisei thought the subdued light and acoustically-muffled carpet were more appropriate to an executive suite.

Dr. Rudolph opened a door, ushered them into what looked like a boardroom. The space was dominated by an oval mahogany table around which high-backed chairs were arranged. On the table, in front of each chair, were a glass ashtray, a copper-colored water carafe, two glasses, pad and pencil. In the center of the table, where a floral arrangement would otherwise be, sat a sleek black oblong box made of ABS plastic. On its face were three rows of color-coded buttons and toggle switches.

“Sit,” Dr. Rudolph said laconically.

Shisei looked around. She saw that one wall of the room was entirely composed of a clear plastic sheet on which had been etched a detailed Mercator projection map of the earth. In all other respects the room was nondescript. She had expected a laboratory, and was slightly disappointed.

“As you know,” Dr. Rudolph began, “the Hive Project is involved in constructing an altogether new form of artificial intelligence. There have been attempts before this. Indeed, other projects are going on even as we speak. But, sadly, all are doomed to failure. All except the Hive. This is because true artificial intelligence is impossible utilizing conventional computers. While these clumsy machines may be programmed to aid in disease diagnosis or the like, outside the laboratory they cannot reliably perform even routine tasks involving movement and recognition. Simply put, computer processors, even a series of linked processors, executing one preprogrammed task at a time, cannot achieve a useful kind of artificial intelligence.

“For that, one needs a brain, and what is a brain but billions of neurons—the human equivalent of processors—running a multiplicity of tasks simultaneously. This has been our goal here, to accumulate and store information much as humans do, as a pattern of interconnections that can be accessed all at once. Hence the name Hive Project, because our ‘brain’ has the approximate complexity of a bee.”

Dr. Rudolph rubbed his hands together. “Enough talk. I brought you here, Cook, for a demonstration.” He nodded at the plastic object in the center of the table. “Would you take the remote?”

Branding did so, then passed it to Shisei. “I think I’d prefer my friend to participate in the demonstration,” he said.

Dr. Rudolph nodded. “As you wish.” He pressed a stud and the lights went down. Simultaneously, as if it were a Broadway stage, the map of the world began to glow. Then several spots began to pulse. “We are in the war room below the White House,” he intoned. “Our DEW-line defense has automatically come up in response to the firing of several ICBM’s”—red circles blinked, moving toward the United States—“from three different locations.” Yellow lights flashed to indicate the launch sites. They were in Siberia, the USSR’s southwest coast, Shisei saw.

“You want me to figure out a defense or offense with the help of the Hive computer?” Shisei asked, looking over the array of buttons and switches on the black box.

“No,” Dr. Rudolph said, “you have in your hands the Russian initiative. Of course, you will be aided by conventional computers. You will even get their advice on the box’s printout screen. But you will decide how and when to launch the second and, if you survive, the third launch waves.”

“If I survive?”

“The defense of the United States is now in the hands of the Hive computer,” Dr. Rudolph said. “World War Three has begun.”

The red dots indicating the Russian missiles were more than halfway to their targets. Now she could see, arcing to meet them, green blips. Soon there were a series of yellow explosions as the first wave of missile strikes was detonated in the atmosphere.

Shisei asked for computer advice even as she launched a second wave of missiles, double the number of the first launch. She glanced at the wall map in time to see clusters of green dots moving toward the Soviet Union: American missiles; the Hive computer had successfully defended America, and was now retaliating.

She punched the button for missile identification, got it, asked her computer to match a defense. She waited impatiently as the green dots streaked ever closer to impact. She sent bombers aloft, dividing them into four sectors, separating them. But already she could see the orange lights of American fighters launched off aircraft carriers, rushing to intercept her bombers. The Hive computer was doing all this, thwarting her at every turn? Impossible!

Again she asked her computer for advice, then, desperately, deployed her fleet of atomic submarines, punched up the Soviet automatic defense net against the American missiles. Identifications were flooding in, too many for the computer to handle, too many for her to defend all at once. Her computer managed to detonate some in the atmosphere, but one by one she saw her launch sites impacted, destroyed, or crippled beyond use. Before she knew it, American stealth bombers had decimated her subs. Then Moscow was wiped out and she had only a minimum number of bombers left. She was sweating. What was there to do?