The Wall, page 15
“I always dreamed of going into space,” she said.
“I don’t think they issue passes for that.”
“No.” Suddenly she felt close to tears. Like giving up on a dream.
“They built the Wall to keep others out. Now it’s more to keep us in.”
She’d never thought of it like that. but he was right.
“We’re prisoners in our own country,” he continued. “All the decisions are made by the president’s inner circle now. Just a small number, deciding the fate of America. The final decisions are always Harry’s, and I’ve come to suspect that Harry is not a moral man. I’m not even sure he’s entirely sane anymore. So I guess that’s why I didn’t report you.” He drained his mug and sat back. “Or maybe I just want to sleep with you.”
It was so much to take in. She’d felt alone for so long that it was hard to trust someone else. What if she did, and he helped her? She’d drag him down as well. But the truth of the matter was, she couldn’t do it alone, and if she tried and failed, there was a good chance he was dead anyway. They were all dead.
“So,” he said. “Are you going to tell me why you lied about Stella? Why you drugged me? Then we can see if there’s a way out of this.”
She took a deep breath. “I lied about Stella because she told me to. She was scared that day. She wouldn’t tell me why, just said that I should pretend we’d had a falling out. That if anyone asked, we hadn’t spoken in a while.”
“But that was after you drugged me.”
She raked her hands through her hair. “I drugged you so I could get a retinal scan.”
“And you needed a retinal scan because…?”
“I needed to get into the Secret Service files.”
“Why? Are you working with the rebels?”
“No.” She pushed herself up. “I think maybe it might be easier if I show you, because there’s no way you’ll believe me otherwise.” He probably wouldn’t believe her anyway. Maybe she could find some way to prove she wasn’t crazy. That Auspex’s predictions were accurate. “Give me a minute to get dressed and we’ll go to my office. I’ll tell you everything.”
When she came out of the bedroom ten minutes later, he’d tidied himself up; pulled his jacket on over his rumpled shirt, straightened his tie.
As she led him out of the apartment, the door opposite opened, and her neighbor appeared. Paula Chen, looking colorful as ever in her crimson jacket and purple leggings, was a student with a rich family and a love of causes. Her Chinese father had moved to the States thirty years ago, before the lockdown on immigration. She was an active member of the Democracy for America group and sometimes managed to drag Kate along to meetings. It was something she believed in and was at no way odds with the Party. As Gideon had said, Martial Law had only ever been meant to be temporary. Now it was time for the people to show that they were ready to take back their place in the decision-making process.
“Kate.” She grinned. “And a gorgeous guy.”
“This is Gideon. He’s a friend.”
Paula moved closer, gave her a quick hug, and stepped back. “Sorry about your sister.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, are you coming to the rally? It’s on K Street. We need all the people we can get.”
“Maybe I’ll pop over if I can get out of work.”
“Good.” She pulled a sticker out of her pocket and slapped it onto Kate’s black jacket. “We’ll expect you. Bring Gideon.” She headed out of the building.
“Bring back Democracy,” Gideon murmured, staring at her chest as he read the sticker.
“They have a valid point.”
“Maybe.” But he reached across and pulled the sticker off, crumpled it up, and shoved it in his pocket.
They didn’t talk on the drive, so she just stared out of the window. The sun was shining again. There were no checkpoints, and she could almost fool herself that her world wasn’t about to end.
Gideon showed his ID and security let him through. She led him down the stairs and into her office, then waved him to a spare chair and powered up the systems.
Then she sat down opposite him. He might need a little background for any of this to make sense. Where to start? In the end, he decided for her.
“Why this job?” he asked. “I would have thought it a little…boring.”
“A couple of reasons. My old college professor works here, and he offered me the job when I graduated.” While she was aware that the next bit might get Oliver into trouble, she had to trust Gideon. “He knew I wanted the chance to continue my research, and anything associated with artificial intelligence had been banned. The servers here are the only ones that aren’t monitored. And I have access to most of the systems. Even the Secret Service calls are run through here, though everything is in code, so I can’t actually tell what they’re about. Well, I couldn’t until recently.”
At that moment, Auspex came online. The middle screen lit up.
Good morning, Kate. Welcome back and condolences on the death of your sister.
Kate frowned. That was new; Auspex had never offered personal interaction like that before. He was growing, learning.
Gideon was staring at the screen. “What is this?”
“Auspex. My predictive engine.”
“What does it do?”
That was promising. At least he hadn’t called security and had her tossed into jail. But she hadn’t told him the most incriminating part yet. “Auspex has access to all the systems within the United States.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Including the Secret Service?”
“Yes. Thanks to your retinal scan,” Kate said. “He uses that information to predict what’s going to happen in the future.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. There. Her illegal activities were out. All that was left to do was see what Gideon did with this information. And whether he could help her stop the nuclear threat before it was realized.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together, we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America.” Donald Trump
Gideon couldn’t decide whether Kate believed this, or whether it was part of some elaborate scam.
She looked perfectly serious. And nervous.
“Just a second,” she said. “I want to check for calls.”
She was typing into the keyboard. The system beeped. Kate pressed a key, read something on the screen to the left, and went totally still.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a call from Stella. Oh my God, she must have made it just before the accident.” She pressed another key, and the call started playing. They heard Stella’s voice, speaking quickly as though she was about to run out of time.
“Kate. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I don’t think I’m going to see you again. There’s something you need to do for me. There’s a file on the computer in my office. It was loaded at 4:15 today. My system is set up to give you access. You need to copy the file onto a drive and hand it over to Gideon Frome. It’s encrypted; the code is 65879241. Tell him it’s from his brother. If they need to meet, you’ll find the time and coordinates in the file and the necessary travel passes for Gideon to get to the meeting place. Don’t tell anyone else about this. No one. I love you.”
The words flowed through his mind but didn’t make sense. There was a file? From his brother? A way to meet with Aaron? Had Stella been in contact with Aaron all this time? Had she been working with him? He hadn’t even known that Aaron was alive.
Kate’s hands were clasped in her lap as she stared straight ahead. “Oh God. If only I’d gotten this, maybe I could have helped her, done something. She must have known she was going to die.”
He shook his head, trying to get his brain to function. “What time was it made?” When she didn’t move, he got up and crossed to her. He squeezed her shoulder. “Come on, Kate. What time was the call made?”
She pressed a key. “Eleven minutes past seven.”
“Then you couldn’t have helped. The accident was logged at twelve minutes past. No way could you have stopped it. She knew that.” He leaned past her, pressed the replay button, and listened to the call again. Then a third time.
“Do you know what she’s talking about? What’s on this file?”
“No.”
“Did you know she was in contact with Aaron?”
“No. Of course not. Honest, Gideon. I’ve heard nothing from Aaron since he vanished.”
“But your sister obviously has.”
She frowned. “It doesn’t make sense. Was she working with the rebels? Is that why she was killed? Why not just arrest her? Why make it look like an accident?”
Ten years ago, Stella had been ambitious. He would have sworn she was loyal to the Party. Could she have been working with the rebels all along? For what purpose? And what was in the file?
Kate was supposed to give it to him. Why?
There was only one way to find out. They had to get the file. However, that would not be straightforward. There was a good chance that, if the Secret Service had suspected Stella of anything, her office would have been sealed off, her systems monitored.
While he might get in, he wouldn’t be able to extract the file. Not without Kate. He presumed it would require fingerprints and/or retinal scans. Which meant she had to go with him.
She wouldn’t get past security. Not without a really good reason.
“I have to tell you the rest,” Kate said, pulling him from his thoughts.
“The rest?”
“I don’t know what the file is, or why Stella has it. I don’t know anything. That has nothing to do with the reason I drugged you. You have to listen, Gideon. It’s important.”
He took a deep breath and cleared his mind, then sat down in his chair and tried to get his head back into what they’d been discussing before the call. Predicting the future. “Go on.”
“I developed Auspex from a system I found on the university servers. It was a project Oliver—my boss—had been working on before the research was made illegal.” She took a deep breath. “That was about eight years ago. I’d made progress with him, but when I came to work here, I had access to the government servers, and I integrated Auspex into the government surveillance systems. That was when the exciting stuff started to happen. Though, until recently, he didn’t do anything useful.”
“He?”
“Auspex.” She gave a shrug. “I’ve always thought of him as a “he”. Anyway, he didn’t really function until about a month ago.”
He frowned. “What happened?”
Kate gave him a shaky smile. “He started giving me predictions on the alerts I send on to NTAC. Usually they were a negligible chance of a threat. I thought he was functioning correctly, but when I compared the results to NTAC’s, they were completely different. I ran a debugging program and that changed something. Up until then, I hadn’t been able to read the chatter—it was all encrypted. After that I could read it. But most of it didn’t make sense.”
“So what changed? Why seek me out?” What she’d told him so far wasn’t enough to risk drugging a Secret Service agent, although it was likely enough to get her locked away for life. If not worse.
“I got a yellow alert—that’s a threat of terrorist activity. Auspex gave a probability of 68 percent that it would result in harm to the American people. That was the first time he’d given anything like that—usually he predicted a negligible risk. So I looked at the info dump and I found multiple references to some sort of nuclear attack. Not only that, but I found a reference to Stella.”
“That she was tied into some sort of nuclear attack on America?” He wouldn’t believe it. He couldn’t be that wrong about her.
“It was inconclusive.” She bit her lip and looked away. “I deleted the line related to her and sent the alert to NTAC as usual.”
Definitely locked away for life. Or executed for treason. But he could understand why she had done it. “Continue.”
She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t get hold of Stella. No one knew where she was. I thought maybe she’d already been picked up by the Secret Service. But there’s more.”
A sliver of dread wound through him. How the hell could there be more?
“I got the report from NTAC,” she continued. “It said the probability of the alert being a threat was negligible. Which didn’t make sense. I’d seen the info dumps. The references were there. I ran the alert through Auspex again. This time there was a 79 percent chance. It was going up.”
“You believed it?”
She gave a brief smile at his obviously incredulous tone. “I was skeptical as well, but I’ve done all the tests. I asked the same question in all sorts of different ways, and in the end, I couldn’t not believe it.”
She appeared so earnest. Did she really believe this? Did he?
Hell no.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Let’s just presume I do for the moment. What happened next?”
“I’d spoken to Oliver. He’s my boss, my old professor. I think he suspects what I’m working on. He said I needed to get more specific. So I asked Auspex to prepare predictions on a time basis. It’s going to happen in less than two weeks. And I don’t know what to do. I needed more information.”
“So you drugged me?”
“Yes. And took a retinal scan.”
He glanced around the room as if some eavesdropper might suddenly pop up from out of nowhere. This was sufficient to get her executed as a traitor.
She must have sensed his unease. “Auspex checked—the room is clear. No one can hear us. Which means it’s up to you to report me if you feel you have to.”
He turned his attention back to the screen, which was now blank. Could the rebels have actually taken control of the Homeland Security systems? Maybe whatever Kate had been using them for had left them vulnerable to attack and what she thought were predictions was actually false information being fed to her for… He couldn’t come up with a reason. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”
She shook her head. “Well, there was nothing about Stella being taken, but that hardly matters now. There was also nothing on the nuclear threat, which doesn’t make sense. Unless there’s a part of the server you don’t have access to.”
He could believe that. Boyd had almost admitted as much. He’d also implied that he’d only get access once he passed his probationary period and that, if it was up to Boyd, that wouldn’t be for a long time. “The Inner Circle,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “So there is such a thing?”
A group that bypassed the controls. Made their own rules. Killed anyone who stood in their way. “I’ve heard rumors.”
“Auspex is searching for a way in, but so far he’s found nothing. Time is running out. I thought about sending an anonymous tip to somebody, but if they don’t believe the alerts, why would they believe an anonymous tip? Then I thought maybe I could contact the rebels—warn them that if it’s something they’re planning, then…” She gave a helpless shrug.
“Let me get this straight. Your machine tells you the world is going to descend into nuclear war, and so you decide to introduce yourself to the nearest rebels and ask them nicely not to detonate their nuclear bomb?” He got to his feet and ran a hand through his hair, paced the room a couple of times. He came to a halt in front of her, hands on his hips. “Are you goddamn crazy?”
She stared up at him. “Maybe? I wish I didn’t believe it, but I do. So what am I supposed to do, just sit and wait for us all to go up in smoke? Just hear me out. I know it’s a lot to take in. Afterward, I’ll see if I can get the proof to persuade you that Auspex is right.”
He felt too restless to sit. Instead he leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest. “Go on.”
“Even with your access to the Secret Service files, we can’t work out a way—”
“We?” he interrupted. Was she working with someone else?
“Me and Auspex.” She waved a hand at the computer screen. She talked about the damn thing as if it could think for itself. Though wasn’t that what artificial intelligence did? “As I was saying, we can’t find a way to contact the rebels. I know they’re in New York, but nothing more.”
“You could always go and stand in the middle of Times Square and shout ‘Is anybody here planning to blow up a nuclear bomb?’” He sank into the seat behind him.
She gritted her teeth and glared at him. “Don’t be an asshole. I’ve been living with this hanging over me. Living, breathing, sleeping. Now Stella’s dead, and I don’t know why.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I keep thinking that maybe she was a rebel all along, and if only she’d spoken to me, trusted me, instead of trying to protect me, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to involve you.”
No, maybe she would have his brother, Aaron, instead. Who’d run off to play with the rebels and turned everybody’s worlds upside down.
“And maybe, somehow, she’d still be alive,” Kate continued. “Which means it’s my fault. So guess what? Right now, I’m not feeling a whole lot like joking.”
No. He could see she was deadly serious. Gideon got up again, suddenly restless. “I need some fresh air, and you need to come with me.”
“Why?” She huffed. “I have things to do.”
“Look, from now on, until I decide just what I believe and don’t believe, I’m not letting you out of my sight. God knows what you might get up to. I could turn my back and the next minute you’d be heading off for the nearest rebel camp. Then it’s likely that you’d be dead.”
