29
Reno, Nevada
USA
THE BAR WAS CLASSIC RANDI. Out of the way, dark, and sparsely populated—a stale smoke-scented, cracked-black-vinyl-encased facsimile of the ones she haunted in the forgotten corners of the world.
Every male customer immediately turned and followed her with his eyes, something that was impossible not to do. Despite the comically oversized handbag thrown over her shoulder, she carried herself with a mesmerizing, almost predatory grace.
Smith bucked the trend and looked away, casually examining a woman pulling slots next to an overflowing ashtray. The jingle of coins momentarily overpowered the eighties music straining hidden speakers and she joylessly transferred her winnings to a plastic cup.
The men around him suddenly lost interest and he turned back to see Randi disappear into a booth tucked into a shadowed corner of the room.
“Nice place,” Smith observed, sliding in next to her. “I have an office, you know. They even gave me a window.”
She frowned disinterestedly in his minor victory but he suspected that she felt the same way he did about being there together. Despite a soul-crushing personal history and the tendency for near-death experiences to follow every time they so much as set foot in the same state, they were as close to each other as to anyone. As close as people in their profession could be.
“I guess I forgot to congratulate you on the new job,” she said. “I just did a night op with a guy who uses one. As much as I hate to admit it—and you know I do—I was impressed.”
“But you’re still not sold.”
“I’ve always felt like sticking things I don’t understand in my brain isn’t a good idea.”
“What if I told you that I understand it and that it’s safe?” he said, picking up a menu lying in the middle of the table and looking at the list of beers.
“I’d say maybe you don’t know as much as you think you know.”
Smith gave an unsurprised nod and flipped to the wine list. There was only about a two-second delay before LayerCake recognized what he was looking at and flashed dully in his peripheral vision. Curious why, he launched the icon and watched as the Wine Spectator ratings of the listed bottles appeared next to their names. How civilized.
“Are you using it now?” Randi asked.
“Yeah.”
“Could you turn it off?”
His brow furrowed for a moment and then he shrugged and shut it down. “Okay. It’s off. Why?”
Randi scooted close enough to press up against him. “Because I have something I want to show you.”
“I’m intrigued.”
She unzipped her bag and pulled that something out, setting it on the table in front of him. In the poor light it took his mind a few beats to reconcile what he was seeing.
“Jesus, Randi!” he said in a harsh whisper, twisting around reflexively to look behind him.
Murphy’s Law—the principle that seemed to rule his life—was in full effect and a bored-looking young waitress was making a beeline for them through the empty tables.
He must have looked a little panicked, because Randi put a hand on his arm. “Relax, Jon. Don’t you ever look at your calendar?”
The young woman arrived at their table jotting on a small tablet. “Can I get you—”
Her voice faltered as she spotted the severed head resting on the cracked Formica. Smith tensed but then a broad smile spread across her face.
“That thing is too cool! Where did you get it?”
“Off the Internet,” Randi replied casually.
“The weird musty smell…”
“Comes in a little spray bottle.”
“Awesome!”
He was a bit perplexed by the conversation until he remembered Randi’s comment about the calendar. He’d been to immersed in his work with the Merge to bother keeping up with holidays. It was October 30. The day before Halloween.
“I’ll just have a beer,” Randi said. “Don’t care what kind.”
“Same,” Smith agreed.
The girl gave the head one last admiring glance and then returned to the bar. He waited until she was out of earshot before he spoke again.
“What the hell is this? Something for the mantel?” he said.
“Take a closer look.”
“Can I turn my Merge back on?”
“No.”
A quick glance around him confirmed that no one but the returning waitress was paying any attention at all. He waited for her to slide the beers onto the table and disappear again before pulling the head toward him.
“Looks like the spine was severed with a saw of some kind and then it was left somewhere dry. Skin color and features are a little hard to distinguish with the shrinkage, but based on the hair and the beard, I’d say you found it in Afghanistan.”
“Very good. Anything else?”
He kept going over it and was about to say no when the dim light picked up something on the side. He pushed back the matted hair and found himself looking at a Merge stud.
“Christ. They’re already smuggling them in?”
She shook her head. “This man died more than three months ago. On July twenty-first.”
“You have your dates wrong. The Merge didn’t go on the market until after that. Hell, Dresner didn’t even make his announcement until the twenty-second.”
“I don’t have my dates wrong.”
If it was anyone else, he would be asking if she was certain, probing for a mistake in her timeline or logic. But this wasn’t someone else. It was Randi Russell.
“So you’re saying you’ve had this since July twenty-first?”
She shook her head. “I went to a village on the twenty-second that had been wiped out by the Taliban. All the men had been decapitated and the heads were gone. I finally tracked them down in a cave a few days ago.”
“Did they all have studs?” he said, trying to conjure an explanation for what he was hearing. The best thing he could come up with was that someone had snuck into that cave ahead of her and installed studs on a bunch of severed heads. Not particularly high on the plausibility scale.
“I didn’t look. That was just the first one I picked up.”
The truth was that it didn’t really matter. One was as ugly a mystery as a hundred.
“I knew these people, Jon. This village. They were tough sons of bitches and they’d been going at it for centuries with the Taliban who wiped them out. Why did the balance of power suddenly shift?”
Smith considered that for a moment. “Okay…Let’s accept for a moment that this Afghan village somehow got hold of Merges before anyone in the developed world and someone is going to great lengths to hide it. Even if they were commercial versions, it should have been to their advantage. You’ve seen how effective they are.”
Her expression turned skeptical. “I talked to one of the Taliban who attacked them. He said that the women and children fought but the men didn’t. And one who was looking down the barrel of the gun said there was no God.”
“Sounds far-fetched, Randi. Maybe your Taliban friend was just trying to insult them after the fact—saying they were cowards with no faith.”
Again, she shook her head. “It wasn’t bravado. He was shaken by what happened in that village.”
Smith moved the head out of sight and leaned back in the booth again. When he looked at her, there was more than just a hint of accusation in her eyes.
“Any ideas, Jon?”
“I know what you’re thinking. That the military knew about this before the announcement and we were doing some kind of secret testing on the Afghans that we want covered up.”
“The truth is, I’ve known you a long time and I don’t think you’d get involved in something like that. But do you know who originally sent me out to Sarabat?”
“No.”
“Fred Klein. And I haven’t known him for a long time.”
Her caution was understandable. She hadn’t been working with Covert-One for long, and he’d displayed similar caution himself at first. Since then, though, Klein had proved himself over and over again.
“Here’s what I can tell you for certain: I don’t know anything about this. And here’s what I can tell you almost for certain: Neither does Fred or Montel Pedersen.”
She shrugged noncommittally. “Then what happened out there? What would make a group of people who come out of the womb fighting, and who have a piece of gear that even I acknowledge is a massive tactical advantage, stand there and get slaughtered? And why did Fred send me out there, then call me off before I went looking for the heads?”
“Maybe they weren’t what he was looking for, Randi. Fred keeps a lot of irons in the fire and even I don’t know about most of them. As far as the behavior of the people in that village goes, you know what an individual eyewitness account is worth. Maybe we should go talk to a few more of the Taliban who were involved and see if their stories match.”
“There are no more. They were wiped off the face of the earth a few days later by a bunch of mercs that no one seems to know anything about. Well, no one but Fred Klein.”
Smith took a hesitant pull from his beer. This just kept getting worse. “Drugs? Maybe gas? That could explain the strange behavior.”
“Far-fetched since it didn’t affect the women and children, but it was a possibility that occurred to me, too. That’s why I had an autopsy done.”
“And?”
“Clean.”
“So I’m guessing that you think they were connected to Merges during the attack and that’s what’s responsible for the unusual behavior.”
“They acted completely opposite of who they are and they had something attached to their brains that shouldn’t have been there. It seems like the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”
“That’s not the way it works, Randi.”
“Come on, who do you think you’re talking to? It hasn’t occurred to you that you could use that thing in the other direction? What about tDSC?”
The program that she was speaking of was the military’s experiment with sending a weak electrical current through the brain to enhance the ability to learn new skills. It was an incredibly promising technology that had already allowed them to double the rate of improvement in sharpshooters.
“Okay,” he admitted. “We’re playing around with a tDSC app. But I can do the same thing with a nine-volt battery and ten dollars’ worth of stuff from Home Depot. We’re not fundamentally changing someone’s personality. We’re just improving focus.”
“What about the sleep function everyone likes so much? That’s affecting the brain and you’re not doing it with a bagful of crap from the hardware store.”
“You’re just optimizing wave functions already built into your brain. And don’t forget that you have to be connected to a power source or you’d drain the battery in just a few minutes.”
She pushed her beer bottle around the table with her index finger. “I don’t know what worries me more, Jon. That you’re lying to me, or that you’re telling the truth and the head of Merge development for the armed forces doesn’t know anything about this.”
It was a fair observation. “Let me do some quiet asking around.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, bringing her lips to her bottle again. “You do that.”