“Yeah, sounds—” But then, as Spencer had anticipated, the connection was gone.
Spencer grinned. This was great news, and it shoved the memory of the tumbledown Ford Fiesta parked in front of Rita’s house out of his mind. He couldn’t wait to see Raj at lunch.
As he wound his way along the four-lane road through the canyon, two lanes in either direction divided by a concrete median, the grey-haired woman in the red Tesla, having switched lanes several more times, got caught in a knot of traffic, and ended up behind him and one lane over.
This presented him, he realized wickedly, with a golden opportunity to cut her off, and trap her behind the knot of cars. Teach her a lesson. Show her how it felt.
He gripped the wheel harder as he began to change lanes and nudge his car into the small gap of road in front of the Tesla.
But, no.
He shifted the Prius back into his lane.
He was a better man than that. He would not cut her off. He didn’t do road rage. Or any kind of rage.
Instead, he maintained his lane, turned the radio—which still wasn’t working properly—off, and focused on running through the steps of his first (and only) operation that morning.
SEBASTIAN
Sebastian wondered what kind of conversation Finney and Wu were having right now, compliments of the device.
The device.
The device, truly, was a piece of work. A goddamn technological marvel.
Sebastian had never encountered anything like it; and as someone who’d had access to a lot of secrets over the years, he’d seen some weird sci-fi-type shit in his time. When this thing got out (and it would eventually get out), every government, crime syndicate, and multinational corporation in the world was going to want one.
There were all kinds of applications. Mostly military, of course: surveillance, field communications, interrogation.
Interrogation.
It was while developing interrogation techniques that, he knew, the designers had stumbled across the device’s most intriguing—and unexpected—asset.
Not to mention its most goddamn disturbing one.
This line of research had been pursued in a different group of test subjects: all young men, of all ethnicities. They’d had the look of soldiers about them, he’d thought. They’d seemed more defiant than the others. Harder. Terrorists? Rebels? It depended on your point of view.
To his practiced eye, though, they looked to be true bad guys. Cold-blooded killers with empty stares, the kind that filmed themselves hacking off the heads of screaming prisoners in orange jumpsuits. There were more of these men in the world than Sebastian cared to count, men you didn’t waste time shedding tears over, and they’d provided a steady stream of fresh material on which the designers could experiment.
The research methods differed with this group. There were interrogators. You could hear them off camera, barking questions at the subjects in various languages. From the materials provided him, it was impossible for Sebastian to tell for certain which countries were involved. Which was just as well, since that information might have landed him facedown in a ditch with a bullet through the back of his head.
He knew the device was going to render obsolete every technique of information extraction conceived since the dawn of time. The goddamn thing practically read minds.
But there were … side effects. Irreparable ones that, even when they befell men such as these, gave Sebastian pause.
The interrogators had first tried a direct approach: asking the same questions over and over, like a song set on an endless repeating loop. Sleep held no escape because it was a physiological impossibility while the device was receiving voice broadcasts. Eventually, the subjects told their interrogators everything. The longest any had lasted before talking was twenty-four hours—and that guy had ended up spending the remainder of his short life with his hands clamped over his ears, screaming in repeated, ululating bursts the answers to questions that were no longer being asked. Which made the interrogators curious: Were there other methods that were even quicker?
Sebastian suspected that they had drawn their next inspiration—pumping loud heavy metal and hard-core rap into the subjects’ heads—from U.S. soldiers, who had employed similar tactics (albeit over loudspeakers) in places like Gitmo. This had an unfortunate tendency to drive the subjects insane with breathtaking rapidity, and usually before any useful information could be extracted. It was quickly abandoned. Still, Sebastian, recognizing many of the song selections, admired the interrogators their appreciation of these musical genres and gave them props for at least mixing some pretty decent shit.