Kill Decision (13 page)

Marta, as usual, stood behind her desk, no chair in sight, pacing as she listened to someone on the phone, interjecting with the occasional “No. Yes. Yes.” She glanced up at the far wall in measured intervals.

Clarke’s gaze wandered to a dozen flat-panel television screens occupying the wall across from Marta’s desk, in between bookshelves and framed vanity photos of her standing alongside senators, presidents, and celebrity CEOs. Every one of those television screens was tuned to a cable news channel with the sound turned down and closed captioning turned on. It was a collage with variations on the same story—the drone “discovery” in Karachi, and a rehash of the drone attack in Iraq.

Clarke wondered about that.

Marta edged closer to her phone’s base station. “Get back to me when the hearing ends. Yes.” Marta hung up the phone and stood staring at him.

Clarke spread his hands toward the footage from Pakistan. “Well, what a coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences.”

“I don’t think the Arab street’s going to buy it.”

“It’s not meant for the goddamned Arab street. It’s intended for Main Street.”

Clarke shrugged. “Personally, I would have leaked bootleg video onto the Web first—give it illicit appeal. Coming from mainstream media makes it look suspect to a younger demo.”

“Suspect? You forget that the only voting your generation does is of the up-and-down variety. It might seem like an ancient Kabuki dance to you, but traditional media is where actual registered voters get their information. In response to the discovery, we’ve got talking heads pushing for greater homeland security and funds for autonomous UAVs. And meanwhile I see this. . . .” She curled a finger at him and walked over to the windows.

Clarke sighed and followed her. They stood side by side looking down onto the green expanse of McPherson Square below. There, a few hundred protestors had gathered with signs and banners, the largest of which Clarke could just make out:
America—The Biggest Terrorist.

“Comic Sans. Never a good choice.”

“It’s not their choice of font that concerns me. It’s that this attitude might spread.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised anyone still bothers to protest in the street. It requires so many people.”

Marta glared at him.

He held up a finger and walked over to his Dior Homme leather satchel and withdrew his iPad. With a few clicks he flipped it to show her a map of the D.C. metro area with clusters of thousands of red dots on it. “Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.” Clarke gazed down at the protestors in McPherson Square. “Meaning everything’s normal. I wouldn’t worry about them—they’re not the reality. Just a statistical outlier.”

She stared down at the protestors, unconvinced. “You’re the social media director. It’s your job to contain this shit, and here I am looking at a counter-messaging campaign in my own backyard.”

“If it makes you feel better, do it the old-fashioned way—have your guy hire a dozen drug addicts down at the train station to join the protest. A few dirty, scary people ranting and raving on television. It’ll reverse the message to a boomer demographic. Or just ignore it. What happens on the streets doesn’t matter anymore.”

Marta stood glowering. “Don’t these people have jobs?”

“Probably not. Some of your clients might have had something to do with that.”

She looked up at him and grunted, then returned to her expansive desk. “Don’t get too smug, Henry. You and your sock puppet army are just another tool. The basic principles of public relations never change.”

He slipped his iPad back in its case. “Perhaps, but you never had metrics like this before me. I can tell you moment by moment how your message is playing with not just a national but an international audience.”

“Part of the audience, Henry. Only part.”

“The part that matters, Marta.”

“I can’t remember if I was as self-important as you when I was your age, but I do know I never learned anything by talking.”

“Well, that’s one of the benefits of social media. We can automate the talking.” He zipped his satchel shut and tossed it back onto the sofa. “How are your votes lining up on the Hill?”

“The bill is moving fast through the Appropriation subcommittees, but it’s been tied up in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Some congresswoman from Ohio, or wherever the fuck, with qualms about automating war—as if the Chinese or the Iranians had any qualms about it.”

“If she’s come out publicly against it, our opposition team will already have a file on her. Do you need us to move on her?”

“Not yet. We’ll work back channels for now. But if I can’t sell it to the intel committees, I’ll appeal directly to the public. So get your people ready. If I can convince the working class that taxing corporations is destroying the country, I can sell autonomous weapons. Even if we have to spread the manufacturing over something like thirty-five, forty states.”

“A few thousand jobs won’t help you sell it to the public. They need to know what’s in it for them.”

“That stopping the bombings here in the U.S. will be difficult without autonomous systems. The Defense Department is already drowning in surveillance video. And then there’s the limitations on satellite bandwidth. That’s what’s preventing us from deploying ten thousand drones over Central Asia and the Middle East—JSOC alone is blowing through a hundred million dollars a month in commercial satellite bandwidth. They’ve maxed out available capacity, and it needs to escalate fast. That means drone autonomy is preordained. And then there’s always saving American lives.”

Clarke shrugged. “It all sounds complicated. And in some ways, Marta, the fact that people think these are regular, old-fashioned terror bombings works against you. There’s a significant demo that believes our drone attacks overseas are causing these attacks, and the sooner we reveal these bombings as drone attacks, the sooner that demo can be flipped.”

“Patience, Henry. This gives us leverage against politicians who think they’ll get punished by the electorate for letting drones successfully attack us. For some reason, it’s a popular notion that American voters won’t react adversely to acts of medieval barbarism, but that somehow high-tech attacks will freak them out. Undermines feelings of American exceptionalism.”

Clarke shrugged. “They might be right. What if the public panics?”

“Oh, please, why does everyone always worry about the public panicking? No politician is ever safer than when bombs are falling.”

Suddenly a window-rattling BOOM echoed across the city. It silenced them both. The sound faded away.

Clarke looked up. “Another bombing.” He grabbed his satchel again and liberated his iPad as he headed back toward the window.

Marta was close on his heels as several lines on Marta’s phone lit up. She ignored the phone as she studied the horizon. The clear winter day helped her see a column of black smoke rising from several miles away. “Other side of the river. This could move things along.”

“It was damned close. Don’t you ever worry that one of these things is going to come flying through your window? It scares the hell out of me.”

“There’s no point worrying about dying, Henry. We’re all going to die eventually.”

“Well, at least you got a chance to live first.” Clarke was tapping furiously at his iPad. “Twitter should have something in a second. I follow every media analyst in the Beltway, and they’ve always got their ears to the ground. Here. Crystal City, down by Reagan International.” He read out loud. “Flames visible upper floor office tower. Broken windows. Bodies.” He looked up. “Everyone races to have the first Tweet in a disaster.”

Marta nodded to herself. “Defense contractors—across the highway from the Pentagon.”

“An attack near the Pentagon—how the hell did they get past air defenses?”

“Could be stealth. Or it could be stand-off weapons. Or maybe they’ve been attacking all week without our knowing it, and this one got through.”

Clarke was still busy jabbing at the tablet. “I’m telling you, until the public knows what’s really going on, they will not see how a fleet of UCAVs will protect them from terrorists planting bombs with backpacks. They won’t make the connection.”

She gestured out the window. “The terrorists are striking at America’s military industrial complex again—and after what was just discovered in Karachi. One senator already dead. It’s building up pressure that begs for catharsis. You need to understand the power of revelation, Henry. The public assumes the truth is always being kept from them, and when the truth is finally ‘uncovered,’ they’ll be more than willing to accept it. They’ll embrace it.” She turned and went back to her desk, watching the cable news channels silently tiled on the opposite wall. There was still nothing on them about the attack on Washington just a few minutes old.

Clarke noticed it and chuckled to himself. “Old media will get to it eventually, I’m sure.”

Amid her ringing phones she called to him. “Get out of here and go create me a groundswell of popular support, please. I might need it, after all.”

He smirked as he exited. “I thought you might.”

CHAPTER 10

Deconfliction

L
inda McKinney stared out the window
of a clerk’s office at a U.S. Army air base in Wiesbaden, Germany. At least that’s what they told her this place was. It was night, the offices deserted. The runway quiet. Blinding vapor lights illuminated the snow-blown tarmac outside. Inside Christmas decorations hung from doorways. Photographs of children and unit logistics awards studded the desks.

The phones were dead. Tapping keys and pressing line buttons achieved nothing. They were inert. Likewise with the computers. All the hard drives appeared to have been pulled, and there were small locked safes beneath each desk. Every drawer was locked too. They had things battened down tightly.

McKinney parted the window blinds so she could see the tarmac more clearly. Uniformed servicemen rushed about in olive drab parkas as wind gusted around them. Young Americans of diverse ethnicity, pointing and talking as they pushed pallets of equipment on hydraulic jacks. Occasionally laughing as their breath stabbed plumes in the cold air. Their words were inaudible through the double-paned glass.

None of it seemed real. Everything had happened so fast. Right now in Tanzania it was the hot dry season—a time for getting research finished before the spring rains. Here it was snowing. She pondered the fate of her weaver project now that the government had abducted her. It had taken her years to get the funding.

She realized she was being selfish, but she couldn’t resist a bout of self-pity. Yet, it could have been far worse. If Odin and his team hadn’t rescued her, she’d be dead, and there would have been no project, period.

So her work was being misused by someone to attack the United States. Over a hundred people were dead. She recalled images of the carnage—photos of burned bodies—not the sanitized video from the news, but graphic images of the grievously wounded. What had been in the headlines as terror bombs all these months had ultimately been traced back to her own research. And now, after a short flight to the Tanzanian air base at Morogoro, they’d boarded a waiting, unmarked Gulfstream V jet and flown seven hours here to Germany. She’d sat almost the entire way in brooding silence. Mercifully they left her alone with her thoughts.

Not even twenty-four hours had elapsed since she’d been lying in blissful ignorance on a lumpy cot in Africa. Hard to believe that that humid, cramped little cabin, along with everything in it—along with her foreseeable future—had been incinerated in a flash. None of this seemed real. Not even the room she stood in.

McKinney thought back on all the times she’d experienced this feeling of sudden, surreal dislocation, of everything being torn up. Heading out into the unknown. That was her entire childhood. Her dad worked as a chemical engineer helping to design oil refineries—a job that had taken their family around the world. It had given her diverse life experience at an early age. As an outgoing, curious girl, she thrived on it, gathering insects, plants, and friends from every continent to add to her collection—a collection that grew into a lifelong fascination with the people and creatures of this world. To this day she maintained friendships from her years in South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia.

Her childhood experiences taught her one thing above all: that the world was not filled with danger. Danger was there sometimes, but it wasn’t the norm. The common thread she’d found in every culture was that the majority of people were decent and simply wanted to raise their children in peace. That basic desire was what linked us all.