The Shadow Protocol (19 page)

“How?” asked Morgan.

“We can’t just mug him, like we did with Syed,” said Baxter. “We have to deal with his bodyguards at the same time. We’ve got to take them all out simultaneously.”

Bianca was shocked. “Wait, you mean—
kill
them?”

“That’d be kind of a giveaway to Zykov that something untoward was going on,” Kiddrick sniped. “Of course not.”

“He means knock them out,” Tony assured her. “There are various fast-acting drugs we can use. It means setting things up very carefully—we can’t just shoot tranquilizer darts at them. But if we play things right, Zykov will have to follow Adam from the casino in a cab. And we can make sure he gets into one of ours. Billy”—he glanced at the team’s technician, a skinny, taciturn young man who was typing on a laptop with intense concentration—“has worked out a way to rig the cab so that all the passengers will be unconscious just a couple of seconds after the collision. He’s sending the details on to our people in Macao. They should have started fitting it by the time we land.”

“So, a staged car crash?” Morgan asked.

“Yeah. There are risks, but we’ve done it before. Like in Rio.”

Adam spoke for the first time. “How did it go?”

“Fine,” said Tony. “The target suffered some minor scrapes, but he bought the story that he’d been knocked out. It gave us enough time to get his persona.”

Bianca suddenly realized the comment’s implication: The Persona Project had been carrying out missions before Adam joined it. So he wasn’t its first agent?

“If you’re sure you can make it work, then yes, do it,” said Morgan. “So how are you going to make sure Zykov gets mad enough to follow Adam? Can you actually beat him?”

“We think so,” said Tony. “The persona Adam will be
using is a top-flight card player. He knows every trick in the book—and some that aren’t.”

“He’s a cheat?”

“He spent three months in a Nevada prison for it.”

Kyle was unimpressed. “So maybe he’s not that good.”

“He was sold out by his accomplice—nobody caught him during the game itself,” Tony reassured him.

“And we can help Adam out as well,” said Levon. “I’ve got a program that counts cards. It won’t be perfect, ’cause the casino switches decks every few games, but it’ll still give him an edge. If we rig him with a camera so we can see the other cards in play, the computer can calculate what the other players might have in their hands. Then Holly Jo tells Adam that through the earwig.”

“It’s still not a guarantee that you’ll win, though,” Bianca pointed out. “I read Zykov’s file—as well as being just a really unpleasant guy, I’d say that he has intermittent explosive disorder. It means he sometimes has a disproportionately angry response if he’s provoked,” she added by way of explanation. “It’s often linked with other disorders like pathological gambling, and he fits the bill for that as well. But it
doesn’t
mean that he’s going to explode with rage whenever he gets a bad hand, or start sweating uncontrollably if he’s bluffing. His responses might be very subtle. I mean, he usually wins, so he’s probably got a very good poker face.”

“He’ll have everybody at STS watching that face,” countered Kiddrick. “The slightest tell, and we’ll see it.”

Tony looked doubtful. “Maybe not. The Imperial’s VIP rooms have metal detectors at the entrance, according to the architects’ plans. With that much money at stake, they don’t want anybody sneaking in gadgets to help them cheat. The only camera we’d be able to get in there without tripping an alarm would be a skittle.”

“Excuse me?” said Bianca.

“A skittle—it’s our nickname for a micro video camera and transmitter. It’s about the size of a Skittle; you know, the candy.”

“Oh right. Wow, that’s tiny.”

“Yeah. But because it’s so small, the picture quality isn’t great. It should be able to read cards on the table, but I don’t know about spotting tiny changes of expression on somebody sitting on the far side.”

“We need more eyes in there,” suggested Morgan. “Someone who can watch the other players as well.”

Tony nodded. “We’ve got enough contingency cash to cover a second player.”

Kyle immediately stuck his hand up. “I volunteer!”

“Point one,” said Holly Jo, “you’re not exactly an expert at picking up subtle changes in people’s emotions. Point two, nobody would ever believe you were worth a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“Besides,” said Tony, “we need you tracking Adam and Zykov with the UAV once they leave the hotel. No, it would have to be someone else. Someone with …” He turned slowly to Bianca. “… a background in psychology. How are your poker skills?”

“What?” she said, almost laughing before realizing that he was serious. “Wait a minute! I’m only supposed to be here to work out the drug dosages, and now you want me to be an
agent
? Forget it!”

“No, it could work,” said Morgan. “Everyone else on the team will have an active role, either during the poker game or in capturing Zykov. But you don’t need to do anything until we actually have him. Someone else at that table working with Adam increases our chances of taking Zykov to the cleaners.”

“Think of it as a night on the town—with two hundred and fifty k, on us,” Tony added. “All you’ll have to do is make sure you lose to Adam. It might even be fun.”

“I was thinking more that all that money could do an awful lot of good for society,” replied Bianca. “Rather than risking it ending up in the pocket of some arms-dealing scumbag.”

“It
will
be doing good,” said Morgan, with a firmness
that warned Bianca the decision had been made, no matter her opinion. “It’ll be helping to prevent the world’s most dangerous terrorist from committing a major attack. I think that’s worth an evening of your time, don’t you?”

She couldn’t come up with any objections that didn’t sound selfish and petty. “You seriously want to give me a quarter of a million dollars and have me lose it all at poker?” she asked instead. “How do you know I won’t just run off into the night with it?”

“Because that wouldn’t be like you,” said Adam. The quiet comment surprised everyone, not least Bianca.

“Okay, then,” Morgan said. “Unless someone comes up with anything better by the time you land, that’s the plan. Clean Zykov out, get him mad, set up a car crash, get what’s in his head. Tony, give me an update on the operational details in … six hours.”

“Will do,” said Tony.

“All right. Good luck, everybody.”

He disconnected, his third of the screen going blank. Kiddrick followed suit almost immediately. “If you guys need anything, let me know,” said Levon. “I’ll get to work on this card-counting program.”

Holly Jo raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said you already had it.”

“Well, I’ve got it in my head—I’ve got to
write
it, obviously! Don’t worry, it’s just calculating probabilities. Ain’t no big thing. Catch you later.”

He disappeared from the screen. Tony looked at the others around the table. “Everyone knows what they’re doing? Good. Let’s grab this guy.”

The meeting broke up, its members dispersing into smaller groups. Bianca watched Adam as he stood. Since the incident with her car more than a day before, he had revealed no more of the brief glimpses of an actual personality behind the expressionless face—until his comment about
her
personality. It suggested that he was not as disinterested as he appeared … but now the blinds had
come down again. If he was thinking about anything other than the mission, it didn’t show.

“Bianca?” said Tony, gesturing toward the forward compartment.

She nodded and went with him. She hesitated at the dividing curtain, looking back at Adam.

“Something wrong?” Tony asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said, still regarding Adam before finally turning away. “When you were talking about setting up the car crash, you said you’d done it before, to get a copy of someone’s persona, but Adam didn’t know anything about it.”

“No, he wouldn’t have.” He motioned for her to take a seat, waiting politely until she was down before sitting beside her.

“So Adam isn’t the Persona Project’s first agent?”

“There was someone else before him.” A pause. “Me.”

She was surprised. “You?”

He turned his head and used his thumb and forefinger to part his hair in a particular spot, revealing a small scar. “I’ve still got the electrode filaments inside my skull; they decided it was too risky to take them out. So in theory, I could still use the PERSONA device to take on someone else’s personality. In practice, though …”

“What?”

He chewed on his lower lip, reluctant. “It’s a long story.”

“It’s a long flight.” They were still more than eight hours from Macao.

“Okay. Just keep it to yourself. Not everybody out there”—a nod toward the other cabin—“knows the whole story, and some of it I’d prefer to keep that way. Not for security reasons, just … personal ones.”

“I won’t say a word,” she promised.

“Thanks.” He smiled briefly. “So, before I became the Persona Project’s head of field operations, I was its first field agent. In other words, I was the guinea pig.”

“How short a straw did you draw to get that assignment?”

“Actually, I volunteered. I used to be US Army—First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta,” he said proudly, before clarifying to the uncomprehending Englishwoman, “Delta Force. Like the British SAS.”

Again, she was surprised. “Really? You don’t look like …”

One side of his mouth creased into a sardonic grin. “A grunt?”

“I was going to say
some sort of grim-faced super-soldier
, actually. Aren’t they all supposed to have macho names like Flint or Stone, or Gristle?”

“What’s wrong with Carpenter?” he said in mock-offense. “There have been some badass carpenters in history. One had a whole book written about him. Two thousand years ago, or thereabouts.”

“No besmirchment of your good name intended. I meant, you don’t look … I don’t know, like a strip of old leather that’s been chewed by the dog. That’s the mental picture I have of those guys. Like John Baxter.”

Tony burst into laughter. “Oh, that’s fantastic!” he said. “But you’re right, he kinda does, doesn’t he?”

“Don’t tell him I said that,” she added hurriedly.

“If you can keep a secret, so can I. Anyway, yes, I volunteered.” He became more sober. “The reason was simple enough—I’d seen too many of my friends die in places like Afghanistan. All we were doing was picking off low-level soldiers. I wanted to go after the
leaders
. Persona gave me that chance.”

Bianca had been fervently opposed to the wars in the Middle East, but she couldn’t help feeling sympathy for him. The deaths that had altered the course of her life had been from long-term, debilitating diseases; they were horrible to witness, but you knew roughly when the end would come. To see people your own age, friends and comrades, violently cut down without warning was something else entirely. “So you took the risk?”

“Yeah. Roger and Kiddrick were there from the start; they made it possible, after all. Martin was brought in from the CIA to oversee things and make sure they didn’t kill each other. The two of them don’t exactly get on. Kiddrick thinks he’s the brains of the operation, and that Roger’s just a glorified pharmacist.”

“Yes, I got that impression,” she said, smiling.

“But the theory was all there, and it was time to see if it worked in practice. So I had the procedure, and … it did. All those disks in the lab at STS? Most were recorded as tests for the system; they got volunteers from all kinds of potentially useful backgrounds—like our card player—by telling them it was a psychological research experiment. Measuring their brainwaves in response to certain stimuli, that sort of thing.”

Bianca’s sense of ethics was jabbing at her again. “Nobody told them they were having their minds copied for someone else to read? All their secrets, everything?”

“No. They didn’t even remember the actual process, because Roger blanked their short-term memories after the transfer.”

“Did he now.”

“It doesn’t sound like you approve.”

“I can’t say that I do, particularly,” she told him. “So you had all these personas. Were they useful? Did everything work?”

“Perfectly. At first. Some of the personas gave me specialist knowledge that helped me carry out missions. Languages, local lands and people, how to fly a chopper—all sorts of things.”

She asked the question that had been on her mind since the demonstration at STS. “What … what did it
feel
like? Having someone else’s memories?”

Tony considered it. “Odd,” he finally said. “In a lot of ways it seemed totally natural—drawing on a person’s memories or skills was just like recalling my own. It’s automatic, unconscious; it just happens. It only got weird if
I actively thought about how they weren’t
my
memories. So I tried not to do that too often.”

“I can imagine it must have been bizarre, having someone else’s thoughts in your head. A whole different personality, even—like when Adam started behaving like Conrad Wilmar.”

“Actually, Adam shows that a lot more strongly than I did—acting like the other person, I mean.”

“Why?”

“Different personality, updated procedure, I guess. But,” he went on, with a renewed intensity that suggested he wanted to leave that line of inquiry behind, “the missions we ran were all successful. PERSONA worked, and provided intel that would have been impossible to get any other way. And then … we had the big one. The mission where we caught Mahjub Najjar.”

“Where you caught—” She broke off as the full implications of what he had just said hit her. “The al-Qaeda leader? But I thought he was killed by a drone! It was all over the news. I mean, you even had your president gloating about it.”

“I wouldn’t call it gloating,” Tony said sharply. “It was a cover-up. We’d just captured the world’s most wanted terrorist. More to the point, we had a way to find out everything that he knew. Every planned attack, the names and locations of all his cell leaders, how he was moving al-Qaeda’s money around the world … every single secret that was in his head, we could put into mine. We knew it all. But if we’d announced that he’d been captured, his second in command—Muqaddim al-Rais—would have changed all the plans on the first day he took control. So we told the world he’d been killed. Dead men can’t be interrogated.”