BETA - Project Avatar, page 33
Both technicians froze in their seats, staring as if they had suddenly gone cataleptic.
The blond once spoke first. “Oh, Jayzus. That’s . . . that’s . . .”
The dark-haired one snapped out of his trance and began keying orders into his machine at top speed. “That’s an alpha-priority field report,” he said firmly. “Quick, read off the response protocol.”
“Shit, I don’t know! I’ve never seen one of these before. Where’s the folder? You know, that red folder?”
“I don’t know where the goddamn folder is! The folder is your responsibility. Hurry up; we’re supposed to be calling somebody!”
“Shit, shit, shit!”
Giacomo came into the back room of the third floor of the CIA field station in Catete and peeked in. Holtz was lying on one cot among many in the darkened room. Giacomo was carrying a yardstick. He tiptoed up to Holtz’s cot, getting no closer than absolutely necessary, and poked gently at his boss with the long ruler until he woke up.
Holtz sat up suddenly. He stared furiously at Giacomo in the dim light. “What the hell’s the idea?”
“Sorry, I know you need sleep. But I had to wake you up.”
“With a stick?”
Giacomo frowned. “The last time I woke you up in the middle of the night, you just about took my eyes out. Remember?”
Holtz’s shoulders relaxed a little. “Yeah, well. Reflexes. Nothing personal.”
Without further words, Giacomo handed over a sheet of paper. It was too dark to read anything, so Holtz accepted it without saying a word and waited for Giacomo to explain.
“The avatar called in.”
Holtz rolled to his feet and, the next second, was standing in the light of the hallway, examining the sheet of paper.
“The avatar somehow managed to hack past her communication quarantine,” Giacomo whispered excitedly, standing behind Holtz’s shoulder. “Fort Meade picked up the message not five minutes ago. And look! She’s still here in Rio!”
“Get ready to scramble,” Holtz said. “Wake up Bolling and Anderson.” He shook the paper under Giacomo’s nose. “The timing is perfect, now that we have control of the UMBRA team and resources. I want you to get everybody else awake and working on this. Make sure we get all the data from Fort Meade, everything the avatar sent through, and start a full analysis. We’re not likely to pick up Lockwood tonight unless we’re mighty lucky, but that data package and everything it sends us, now that the tracking is on, will be our ace in the hole.”
Giacomo hustled away to follow his orders.
Holtz smiled to himself in the dim hallway. His hands slowly closed into fists. “Now she’s ours.”
Dee logged off from Botelho’s computer link to XCorp. “Well . . . drat,” she said.
“Has something gone wrong?” Botelho asked her sympathetically.
“I guess I have to believe you,” she muttered. “There doesn’t seem to be anything in your files to suggest that you’re involved in these activities at all.”
“Perhaps, then, you would like to reconsider selling this software to my company? It would be a most profitable way for you to rid yourself of the burden.”
She stood up from the computer desk, crossed the carpet, and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, making Botelho’s rolls of fat ripple back and forth in a way that reminded her of a waterbed.
“Look,” she said. “Mr. Botelho, I’m really sorry I broke into your house.”
“Think nothing of it! And please, call me Moacir. Admittedly, I would have let you in through the front door, but this has been . . . so much more exciting.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re not mad. And . . . if it’s not too much to ask, do you have something to drink? My nerves are shot.”
“How rude of me not to have offered! There’s a decanter of brandy just over there, and two glasses. In fact, if you would be willing to cut my bonds, I could more graciously perform my duties as host.”
Dee walked over to the sideboard. “Sorry, Moacir.”
“Such a shame! In all honesty, I can think of so many positions we could be in that would be more comfortable than this one.”
“Yes, I imagine you can.”
She carried two drinks back to the bed and poured a goodly sip of brandy between Botelho’s lips, then lifted the other glass to the mouth hole of her ski mask and drained it.
“Oh, well,” she sighed. “I guess I’d better be running along.”
“If you must,” Botelho replied. “I know you will not harm my boy, but, as a personal favor, could I ask you please not to kill any of my men as you are leaving?”
She waved her big pistol glumly in the air. “Don’t worry about it. I hate guns.”
“Is that so? I always thought Americans loved guns. Well, if you ever change your mind about them, please call me. I can arrange a very attractive discount for bulk orders.”
“Beta, I’m leaving now. Any instructions?”
“Is the target still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Advance into the hallway, rapidly but with caution. First, confirm that the target’s mouth is secured with a fifteen-centimeter strip of duct tape.”
“Do I have to? He’s being pretty cooperative.”
Botelho gave her a cherubic smile. “I hope your virtual friend isn’t instructing you to cut my throat. No? Well, that is a relief. Now, dear woman, please listen to me for a moment. There’s no reason for you to hurry away like this. We may not have this chance again. Don’t let this corpulent body fool you! Underneath my surface you will find the soul and ardor of a wild stallion. Let me lead you on a journey of passion that will free you, release you. Let me carry you beyond the stars. Here, now, wait!”
She tore off a piece of duct tape from the roll.
“Let’s not be hasty . . . please listen to me. . . . At least let me see your face . . .”
She pressed the strip of tape firmly over his mouth and headed for the door.
Chapter 33
A couple of hours later, Dee was sitting on the roof of a small, chic hotel near the beach at the west end of Ipanema, waiting for a call from Abe. She was looking out at a panorama of decadent festivity that showed no sign of waning, though dawn couldn’t be far away.
She leaned back against a low brick wall on the tarred roof, and might have fallen asleep if Abe hadn’t called her just then.
“I’ve got it!” Abe said excitedly.
His face on the little screen of her smartphone showed dark bags under his eyes, but otherwise he looked alert and even enthusiastic. He was sitting in what appeared to be an empty closet.
“Wow,” Dee commented, “you sure look better than you did an hour ago.”
“Yeah, I think I’m getting a second wind. Plus, I just drank an entire pot of this incredibly strong coffee.”
“So, tell me what you found.”
Abe leaned in close to the camera, conspiratorially. “It was the project title—that’s what did it. That was all I needed. Project Avatar. From there, it was easy to find everything. And that’s not all! A certain little bird whistled a tune to me about Operation Hydra, and now I think I’ve put together the story on that one, too. And man, is it ever ugly! Which one should I start with?”
Dee sat up a bit. This was more like Abe. “Tell me about Beta first,” she said immediately.
“Project Avatar,” he corrected her. He whispered into his computer’s microphone: “It was Bernstein’s secret project at the Pentagon! You know, the Nobel Prize winner? The military had him under wraps for years and years, and I guess he was working on this. Then the whole project went belly up a few months ago. Your little gizmo there is a chunk of his code. It leaked out of the labs when the project closed down, see?”
“Okay. But what is it?”
“You’re not going to believe this.”
Dee waited. After a few seconds, she shook the smartphone, which was as close as she could get right now to throttling Abe. “Come on, what am I supposed to do? Guess?”
“It’s a spinoff from that old Cold War technology that was supposed to launch missiles automatically if all the commanders had been killed in a first nuclear strike.”
Dee hesitated. “Please don’t tell me that Beta knows how to launch nuclear missiles.”
“No, no. Well, maybe. Anyway, that’s not the point. It’s a spinoff, you see. The idea was to have a mobile unit that top officers could carry around with them as a personal assistant. Not just the strategic nuclear guys—it’s designed for anyone in a key position, in combat or intelligence or whatever. The avatar application slowly learns to emulate the officer, transmits his commands, takes over as much of his day-to-day work as possible—all that. Then, if the officer is killed in the middle of some crisis situation, the application can take over for him. Get it? The avatar program replaces the officer until the crisis has been resolved.”
She tried to make this fit. “Are you sure? I mean . . . that doesn’t really sound like Beta. Maybe you were hearing about some other piece of software.”
He gave an impatient wave of his hand. “No, I’m telling you, that’s it. You’re just not using it right. If you really want to put that thing through its paces, ask it to invade Nicaragua or something.”
“How come it’s so good at cloak-and-dagger-type stuff?”
The sky to the east was showing the first signs of dawn. She stood up to stretch her legs and looked out over the ocean.
“That’s a support feature. To help keep the owner alive under crisis conditions—behind enemy lines, for example.”
“Ah, I see. That would explain it,” she said.
Abe leaned almost completely off screen, and then came back with a big box of what appeared to be doughnuts. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, stuffing half of one into his mouth. “I’m starving. Oh, and before I forget . . .” He paused to take another mouthful and continued. “Some weird shit is happening to your communications. We seem to have lost your Substructure connection. Remind me to talk to you about that.”
“Okay.” She paused while he finished his mouthful. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know. This is some German girl’s bathroom. It’s okay. I think she’s asleep.”
“But we have no idea how I ended up with fully militarized software?”
“Well, like I told you before, Ed is still in a coma, so I can’t ask him what he knows. Apparently, somebody on the Project Avatar team figured they’d smuggle the classified software out of the Pentagon lab. They hid the military code inside legitimate civilian code that was being sold to Endyne. Sort of a Trojan horse thing.”
“That kind of makes sense.” Dee was watching Abe’s face with morbid fascination, trying to figure out how it was possible to form sentences with one’s mouth stuffed with so much doughnut.
“Oh, and get this. Last Friday, all of Endyne’s hard drives were wiped by a malicious virus. All of them!”
Dee leaned over the rooftop railing and looked down toward the empty beach. “That was the day before the hijacking.”
“Exactly. So if you ask me, the most likely scenario is this: whoever smuggled the software out of Bernstein’s lab never intended for it to end up at Endyne in the first place. They screwed up somehow. So they attacked the Endyne hard drives and sent someone to hijack your plane and recover the last copies.”
“That sounds about right. What about UMBRA? How do you think they got involved?”
Abe stopped chewing for a moment and shook his head. His cheeks were bulging like those of a hamster preparing for hibernation. “You got me there.”
“Could someone from Project Avatar be giving them orders? Bernstein, maybe?”
He suddenly dropped his head so far that his face went completely off screen. He had always had the disconcerting habit of dropping his eyes and disengaging himself from conversation when an inspiration was coming to him. Dee knew him well enough to wait patiently and see what was coming.
He lifted his face. “You know who came out of Project Avatar, and who has the authority to give orders? Your little Beta gizmo, that’s who.”
She paused. “Well . . . maybe technically. But come on, that’s ludicrous.” She touched her chin with her fingers, mulling the idea over. “It’s just a computer program. It can’t order people around.”
“Of course it can. That’s the whole point. That’s what it’s built to do.”
“Oh, come on, that’s absurd . . . isn’t it?”
There was a long pause. Abe went back to eating doughnuts. She was inclined to say that the whole thing was out of the question, though she couldn’t articulate a good reason why.
“Beta.”
A small image of Beta appeared in one corner of the screen. Abe and Dee both turned their eyes down to look at it. “Yes, Melody.”
“Did you order the NSA black-ops group known as UMBRA to kill me?”
“No, I did not.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Abe objected. “Of course it’s going to lie.”
“Just a second. Beta, have you issued any military commands regarding me?”
“Yes, Melody. I have issued a general order through the National Security Agency for your tactical suppression and detention, with Priority Alpha. It was successfully delivered three hours ago.”
They stared at the screen without blinking, both of them unable to say a word. Dee suddenly felt faint. She sat down on the ground and tried to concentrate. At last Abe whispered, “Holy . . . shit . . .”
“Three hours ago, we were at Moacir’s house.” Dee was confused. “Beta, why did you send it three hours ago?”
“Previous attempts to deliver the order were blocked,” it replied.
She suddenly realized that using an infrared link into Moacir’s home network had circumvented the Substructure comms link that Abe had set up for her. She wondered what other damage had been done in those few minutes.
“Holy shit,” he repeated. “Those must have been the messages we quarantined.”
Dee put a hand on her forehead. “But, Beta . . . why?”
“I don’t understand the question. Would you like to see a menu?”
“Why did you issue a general order against me? What did I ever do?”
“You are in possession of a document detailing a fatal weakness in the Public Key Infrastructure system. This document is listed as one of the top five potential threats to U.S. national security.”
Abe apparently sucked a large chunk of doughnut down the wrong tube. For several seconds he choked violently, even beginning to turn a little blue before he managed to clear his airway. “Turn it off,” he croaked. “Quick! Turn that thing off!”
“Beta, go back to standby mode.”
“Yes, Melody,” it replied obediently.
The image of Beta disappeared, leaving them to stare at each other on screen in stony silence.
“I’m so sorry. I swear to you, I had no idea,” she said.
“Don’t say it. Best not to say anything at all. And for God’s sake, don’t say anything specific. Let me think.”
In all the years since they had cracked PKI back in college, Abe had lived in fear that the secret would get out. It certainly wasn’t the only thing that fueled his paranoia, but it was right up there among the most substantial. Now that fear was realized, in the worst conceivable way.
Dee racked her brain, trying to figure out where she had gone wrong. She stood up again and began pacing up and down the roof of the little hotel, glancing occasionally out over the water or at rooftops of Ipanema. She would have sworn that she had long since destroyed all those old PKI files. On the other hand, she had felt a certain reluctance to do so—a kind of nostalgia for those college days. She hadn’t shared Abe’s conviction that if some vague and unspecified authority learned of the files, there would be hell to pay. So maybe she hadn’t been very conscientious at cleaning up her hard drive. Apparently not.
“We’ll have to publish it,” he said at last.
“What! Are you kidding?”
“If we distribute the file online, we’re off the hook. If everyone already had access to the secret, there would be no reason for anyone to kill us. Maybe we can send the file to Brice Petronille, to publish on WikiBlab.”
“Abe, shut up. Do you know how much economic chaos that would cause? Not to mention the national security nightmare we would be unleashing. We’re not doing anything of the kind.”
He began pensively nibbling at the edge of a doughnut. His appetite seemed to be returning. “I suppose it would be kind of evil,” he said. “Pure evil, actually. All right, then, what’s your idea?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’m just going to turn Beta back on for a moment. I still have some questions I want answered.”
“Don’t do it! Too dangerous.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Things can’t get much worse than this.”
“Oh, I hate this,” Abe muttered. “Where am I going to move to now? Antarctica?”
“Beta.”
“Yes, Melody.” Beta’s image blinked back on screen.
“Has anyone ordered me to be killed?”
“No, there are only orders for your detention,” Beta said.
“Okay. And have you sent a copy of my PKI file to the NSA? Did you send it to UMBRA?”
“No. Electronic transfer or copying of the file is prohibited, even at top level classification and encryption status. The file must be collected, by hand, by authorized federal agents and carried to NSA headquarters for analysis and destruction.”
“That’s great!” Abe shouted, blowing out a cloud of powdered sugar. “Hurry up! Destroy your hard drives! Take a sledgehammer to them, or something.”
“It wouldn’t help,” she told him. “They have to know that it’s been destroyed. And surely they also have to verify that I haven’t made copies of it. As of right now, it sounds as though they don’t even know what it is. They just know I have some kind of extremely high-risk file that has to be contained and eliminated.”
