Mariposa (5 page)

This finally seemed to make sense. The programmer was pale as a sheet and starting to shiver. He rubbed his temple. "My head
really
hurts. What's your name?"

"Fouad. I'm an instructor . . . in languages, as you guessed. What's yours?"

"Nick. I'm pretty important. Systems about to come on line. Back in Texas to check it out, the last details—then, wow! I get my own internal Krell brain boost. Do you know Axel Price? If you see him, tell him the treatment worked—I'm better than ever."

"I will," Fouad said.

A full squad of guards rushed clockwise along the circumference behind Fouad. From the other direction, behind the fallen guards and the programmer, ten more gathered, assault weapons drawn—pointing at Fouad as well as the skinny man.

They were well trained, not trigger-happy—for which he was grateful.

Fouad waved them back. "He's unarmed and he's injured. He's prepared to surrender."

The guards moved in, assault rifles at ready, unconvinced. Three of the five on the floor were again trying to get up.

"Shoot the bastards! Shoot 'em both!" Big Guard shouted, but his hand slipped in his own sweat and he fell and cracked his jaw. That was it for him.

Fouad secretly enjoyed this. For a moment, his sympathies were with the programmer—with Nick.

A short, blocky man in a dark red shirt—senior staff, chief of security—joined the group gathering beside Fouad.

Three of the guards pulled steel flashlights with big flat heads from their belts. The programmer yelped with delight. "Try it! Try me!"

The three circled at the maximum distance the hall allowed and swept him with super-dazzling flashes of light, brighter than a dozen suns. Nick yelped and covered his face, too late. The brilliance flooded his retinas, stunned the nerves behind his eyes, temporarily locked his brain in something like paralysis.

Helpless, off balance, he stumbled and fell. The guards swarmed him like ants over a grasshopper. In seconds the programmer was strung up like a roped steer.

The chief lifted one gloved hand, game over, then gave him Fouad a knowing wink, one warrior to another. "Some show, huh? We'll take care of him from here. Get back to whatever you were doing—and not a word to anybody."

Fouad agreed that would be best.

Chapter Ten

Lion City

Sunset painted the empty land like a sheet of flame, oranges and reds on the horizon, blazing gold overhead. Dusty late summer days in Texas were bookended by wind-blown glimpses of hell. In the morning, the hell began yellow and pink and nearly silent; before nightfall, the sky gates opened, fierce and fiery.

South and east of Lion City, the main campus of Talos Corporation—classrooms, barracks, dining halls, mock towns, firing ranges—sprawled over ten thousand acres, larger than Lion City itself, and prouder, as well. Proud and remote.

The walled, moated, razor-wired campus lay quiet under the hot dusk sky, divided into four compounds like a gigantic cross carved into the west Texas flatland. Each compound was devoted to an aspect of Talos's overall mission: to train the world's police and armies in special tactics.

The gunshots, cannon fire, and explosions of the morning and afternoon had stopped. A couple of helicopters still hovered like lost dragonflies, dropping searchlight beams. The beams danced in the ascending heat. Hours would pass before the Earth cooled enough to kill all the shimmers and dust devils, the djinn of mirages.

Fouad was glad to be driving away from this day. He needed to communicate with his handlers and tell them he had what they wanted.

He pulled up to the lonely blockhouse at the Monarch gate, rolling slowly between three pairs of arched silvery wands, fringed like moth antennae. A guard scanned his iris, then swept batons over his arm chip and the windshield, while another ran mirrors and sensors on low carriages under the frame. Nothing broke this routine, unless they did not want to let you pass.

The guards pulled back the trolleys and mirrors and grimly waved him through. Nobody at the gates ever smiled. Their attitude was always, you made it through this time, but we're waiting for you to
slip up
big time
.

Even after years in America, to Fouad, many English phrases still seemed wonderfully colorful, both cryptic and visual.

The chief of security back in Buckeye had not detained him. So perhaps he had not
slipped up big time
, after all.

He drove in sinusoid arcs around the concrete and steel barriers, then down the long, straight black access road that led to Old Tejano Trail, the main north-south artery of Lion County.

Fouad smiled and bared his teeth. Air rushed dry and hot through the open car window. He hung his arm out the door and waved his hand in the oven breeze. In the rearview mirror, his skin glowed and his eyes glittered like a demon's.

Only now did he allow himself to reflect on what had happened back in Buckeye. He had not dared to do so earlier, since one's thoughts were often reflected in one's features, and guards were trained to be alert to such.

As for the programmer, Nick—given his superhuman strength, skill, and startling speed—madness seemed out of the question.

Lion City had received its name from the color of the surrounding land—tawny brown-gold, like a lion's pelt. It was no more than a midsize town, laid out respectably on a square grid, with two big parallel streets lined with shops topped by apartments whose windows looked out over square overhangs and faded awnings.

Nine or ten longer, narrower streets cut crosswise like railroad ties, lined with Chinkapin oaks and modest but neatly kept homes fronted by dying lawns.

Bumped up around them came a scatter of outlying neighborhoods, more industrial, less reputable. People who did not work for Talos Corporation lived out in those neighborhoods, and for them, these were hard times.

Fouad's stomach growled, but he never stopped at the eateries and truck stops that serviced local traffic and the Talos day and night shifts. All they offered was beef or pork and potatoes. Some had salad bars, but he had become superstitious of late about cross-contamination, perhaps because of long acquaintance with the American manner of fixing and eating food: their was a world ingeniously designed to frustrate any Muslim's attempt at keeping to
halal.

Though no doubt the prochines within him were also
haram—
forbidden
.

Still, these were good people, mostly; hard-working and religious, roughly pious, all of the same God, (there is no God but Allah), but Fouad rarely spoke of religion.

For twenty years, Talos's biggest contractor had been the Pentagon, whose officers and troops were trained in the Monarch compound. In the past five years, however, the U.S. military presence at Talos had been reduced to a minimum.

Expansion of the mercenary training program—mostly Haitians—had filled the gap, filling both Buckeye and Monarch.

The second largest bloc of contracts had traditionally come from security agencies of the U.S. government; they had once occupied Swallowtail. Those numbers had been reduced as well of late.

The third largest, considered as a cluster—police from states and municipalities around the United States—took up Birdwing. Several hundred were still in residence, receiving local antiterror (and anti-illegal immigrant) training.

The fourth largest—foreign police and security forces—had expanded in the last two years, and now helped fill the barracks and grounds of Buckeye. Buckeye was also the home of the Talos security and computer system.

Fouad had worked in all four compounds, training forces both foreign and domestic in Islamic languages and culture, with a side emphasis on special tactics in Middle Eastern war zones.

Talos had been pleased with his performance, awarding him two substantial bonuses.

A mile from the campus, Fouad switched on the radio and listened to the news. Food prices were up. They rose each month as more nations cut food exports, preferring to focus on feeding their own.

Bloody civil war finally raged in Burma, as did yet another drug-fueled insurrection in northern Mexico; three assassinations in Russia in the past twenty-four hours; oil prices falling to levels not seen since 2010.

America was finally on a course to energy independence from the Middle East and South America, thereby threatening economic instability in both regions.

As he drove, apartment buildings and condos and gated housing developments popped up like forts on the bare Texas land.

New slender black roads linked them all to Old Tejano.

He switched off the radio, turned west, and swung into the apartment complex that served as home, away from the instructor dorms.

He had spent more time here a few months ago while dating, but that relationship ended and the woman went back to her family, of old Mexican descent; they had not approved of Fouad. No risk—good for his cover. Talos encouraged and expected roots in the community, like Alexander in the east.

Fouad climbed the steps by the enclosed garage and opened the door with a brass key, then stood for a moment on the first floor, in the stuffy, air-conditioned darkness, peering into shadows, checking corners.

The blinds were drawn on the windows and the rear patio door.

He switched on lights in random sequence—never the same. A quick tour showed that nothing had been searched, nothing moved or rearranged except perhaps with micrometer precision.

He assumed the apartment was wired and that sensors were embedded in the paint, the furniture, the carpet. Elsewhere, computers would assemble amorphous streams of visual data into crystal-clear pictures, like so many virtual lenses.

Being watched was a perpetual assumption for anyone who worked for Price. Best not to bet otherwise.

Fouad opened the refrigerator and removed a Coca-Cola. He then climbed the narrow apartment stairs and sat in an armchair by the small den window, sipping with eyes closed, wondering if he should read or watch television. Act as if relaxing.

Settling in from hard day's work and of course the incident in the circumference hall.

After a few minutes he got up and walked into the bedroom to retrieve from his nightstand a yellow-jacketed university press paperback of Ibn Khaldun. His father had given it to him in Cairo many years ago. He had so few things from his father. It contained a small sample of elegant Arabic script, translated into English with square, precise roman letters:

Allegiance to God above all. But don't tell that to the kings, generals, and tyrants.

He returned to the den to read and think for a few minutes.

He had what he had come here to get. It was time to arrange for his discreet extraction. He could not just drive or walk away. He would likely be intercepted before he reached the county line, either by the Lion City sheriff or by Talos security.

Detectors around Talos used natural dust in the air to reveal and pinpoint laser communications from the ground. Radio and microwave transmissions were detected by other sensors, which quickly triangulated sources.

All unknown transmissions were investigated.

Internet traffic was tightly controlled by Talos as a public service to the Lion County area, to prevent "foreign hackers" from causing trouble and to protect locals from downloading or viewing material of a questionable political nature—or pornography.

Price very likely had access to quantum decrypt, which could crack almost any transmitted cipher in hours.

Talos had once offered a class on breaking foreign encryption, limited to U.S. military and government agents with high security clearances . . . That work had been okayed as a favor to Price back in the days of the Bush administration, when significant aspects of nearly everything about security and defense had been outsourced to corporations like Talos.

In truth, a potentially nasty security breach had spurred the investigation in the first place—the discovery that people beholding to Price had accessed top secret research documents in the NDI and NSA.

There were still over twenty retired generals—and several former CIA and NSA officials—on Price's payroll.

With communications in and out of Lion City closely monitored by people and agencies who either worked for sympathized with Axel Price, there was only one channel left open for what Fouad needed to do: an old method, though not as antiquated as smoke signals and less traceable.

Somewhere within a ten mile radius of Fouad's apartment complex, a private home had been rented by the Bureau and equipped with a hidden earth current transceiver—capable of receiving and transmitting high-voltage, 700-hertz DC signals sent through the dirt itself. An agent was posted there at all times.

Earth current telephony had a long history but was mostly known to history buffs and a few ham radio amateurs. Fouad's own unit was disguised as an antique Grundig radio receiver. Even this had a cover story. It had originally been purchased by his father in Egypt. He kept it for sentimental reasons.

Through a hole drilled by hand in the concrete floor of the garage—where he was relatively certain there was no surveillance—Fouad had sunk two copper spikes deep into the stony soil, disguising the arrangement as an ordinary ground wire for a gas pipe. The device's maximum range was likely less than twelve miles. When atmospherics were wrong—during the frequent thunderstorms that lashed this part of the world—sending or receiving a signal would be difficult or impossible. Lightning surging through the Earth overwhelmed any other transmission. But the weather today had been calm all across Texas.

No lightning strikes for hundreds of miles.

Trailing two runs of lamp cord, Fouad descended the steps from the first floor into the garage. One cord was attached to the radio speaker. All he needed to do to send a signal was tap the other cord against the twisted cable. The return signal would come as a series of clicks over the speaker, above the murmuring crackle of natural noise.

Under clear conditions, voice communication was theoretically possible, and even painfully slow data transmission, but clicks were more difficult to distinguish from background noise: air conditioners and refrigerators switching on and off, motors starting everywhere.

Just in case Talos kept an electronic ear to the dry Texas ground.

Fouad laid a small foam exercise mat on the concrete floor, squatted, and sent his brief message. Within ten seconds, someone at the opposite end began to respond.

He pulled the wires away and coiled them in the cardboard box with the old radio. Then he went upstairs, opened his closet, removed laundry from his small suitcase, took a quick shower, and changed clothes. After, he looked through the almost empty cupboards, contemplating what he might have for supper. Canned fava beens imported from the United Arab Emirates looked likely, mixed with canned chicken and onion and dried vegetable flakes.

This was simmering in a pot on the stove when he heard military vehicles in the parking lot outside. He went to the window and peered down through the open ironwork of the balcony rail. Two armored Torq-Vees—high-riding armored personnel carriers, originally designed for the deep mud roads of Afghanistan—had rumbled into the lot and blocked both exits. The closest Torq-Vee lurched a few yards forward, bumping the garage door, and three helmeted security personnel in black assault gear dropped from the open hatches.

Their boots send heavy thumps and rattles up the stairs and around the apartment.

Frowning, Fouad met them at the open door, bowl of beans steaming in one hand, spoon raised in the other. This was it, he thought. He would be interrogated while still hungry.

"May I help you?" he asked.

The lead, a trim thirtyish man with jet-black hair and pale skin—eyes hidden behind darkened spex—approached the door as his team flanked the steps.

"Mr. Al-Husam, Mr. Price has requested a meeting. We've had communication problems—phones are out. Apologies for the show of force." The guard was smiling but by little movements of his head, Fouad could tell his eyes were scanning Fouad's face and the apartment behind him. "We should get going, sir, if you're going to make your appointment."

"Of course," Fouad said, and replaced his frown with a smile. It was always a privilege to meet with Mr. Price—bragging rights would be his. "Lead on."