Wired (28 page)

48

Alan
Miller took a sip of his drink, a delighted gleam in his eye, obviously
reveling in finally being able to share his warped maneuverings with a rapt
audience. He was savoring the telling of a story that would twist the knife in
his prisoners over and over again. “As I said, I knew with certainty that you
couldn't be coerced. So I had to ask my unfathomably brilliant transformed self
this question: under what conditions would my little sister give up her secret?
Once I answered this, all I had to do was establish these conditions.” He
rolled his eyes. “A lot easier said than done, I must admit.”

“So
what were the conditions?” asked Kira, but a sick feeling had grown in the pit
of her stomach. She realized she had just given Desh the location of the flash
drive. She knew exactly what combination of conditions this had taken. But for
Alan to suggest he had orchestrated things from the start to bring about these
conditions was
preposterous
. Besides, she had whispered the coordinates
directly in Desh’ ear, and no listening device was sensitive enough to catch
that
.

“First,”
began Alan, “you had to respect someone enough to trust them with your secret. If
you were forever a loner and didn’t have anyone to trust, no combination of
circumstances would do.”

He
turned to Desh. “That’s where you come in. You were handpicked for this role.”

“What
are you talking about?” snapped Desh in confusion.

“Who
do you think set you up in Iran?” he said smugly, a Cheshire grin on his face.

“Impossible!”
barked Desh. “You’re saying you expected me to team up with your sister even
then?”

Alan
Miller nodded. “I wanted to ensure she had someone to confide in. Believe me,
Desh, I know my sister’s taste in men. I’ve met the guys she’s dated and she’s
told me, in nauseating detail, the kind of man she’s looking for. I studied the
records of scores of Special Forces operatives before stumbling onto a ringer
like you. You’re her exact type physically. Brilliant in your own right. Personable.
You studied philosophy for Christ’s sake. You like poetry. Incredibly well
read. Sickeningly righteous.” He grinned. “You’re catnip to her. The
transformed me was convinced that if you two were thrown together under
desperate circumstances, there’s no way she doesn’t fall in love with you.”

Alan
gazed at his sister knowingly. “Go ahead, Kira. I know I chose well. Tell him. You’re
in love with him already.”

Kira
lowered her eyes but said nothing.

A
startled look flashed over Desh’s face, and he appeared totally dumbstruck. His
eyes darted to the side as if desperately trying to read Kira’s expression.

Alan
laughed. “I’ll be damned!” he said, studying Desh. “You’re in love with
her
,
also. I can see it in your face.” He laughed again. “I should be a fucking
matchmaker.”

Kira
gazed at Desh and her eyes widened. She had been feeling like an idiot,
desperately trying to hide her feelings from him, convinced that true love was
something that happened over years rather than days. But she sensed her
brother, evil as he was, had guessed correctly. Desh had fallen for her as
well.

Alan
shifted his attention back to his sister. “I had hoped this would happen. When
both parties can subconsciously pick up on each other’s signals of infatuation,
the effect is accelerated. My in-depth study of Desh suggested he liked
girl-next-door types who were his match intellectually, but frankly, Kira, I
was convinced your irritating personality would turn him off.” He raised his
eyebrows. “Despite not having a firsthand knowledge of Desh’s taste in women,
my brilliant, transformed self calculated there was a good chance he would fall
for you too.” He shook his head in wonder. “Ironic that a being of pure
intellect could so accurately predict a largely irrational, involuntary
response.”

“You
should feel very proud of yourself,” spat Desh bitterly.

Alan
looked back and forth between his two prisoners and smiled in delight. “What’s
the matter, you two? You look angry and confused. Feeling manipulated? Feeling
like experimental animals? Does the fact that
I
orchestrated your
feelings for each other to serve
my
purposes taint them?”

At
this, Desh’s expression became thoughtful, and he shook his head ever so
slightly, as though the moment Alan had voiced what he had been feeling, he had
realized these feelings were misguided. “No taint Alan. My feelings for Kira
are my own. If you were responsible for allowing me to meet such a remarkable
woman, than I thank you, regardless of your motives.” Desh paused. “And if you
predicted we would fall for each other,” he continued, “so what? Someone might
be able to predict my loathing of you, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

Alan
Miller laughed. “Your loathing of me is about to take a sharp turn for the
worse,” he said icily. “Allow me to continue. Once I knew you were the right
man, I made sure you encountered tragedy, so you would be a wounded soul and
would break all ties with other women. To make you more appealing to my sister.
After all, what could possibly be more appealing than a tortured, unattached
hero?”

“You
really did set us up in Iran, didn’t you?” whispered Desh in horror.

“Putnam
arranged for that particular—what do you grunts like to call it—oh yeah . . .
clusterfuck. He didn’t have any idea why. Those stupid-assed terrorists were
well paid to make sure you escaped alive, but they almost blew it. I needed you
injured, but not as injured as you were.”

“You’re
saying they
let
me escape?”

“That’s
right.”

“Why
did you need me injured? So I’d cut an even more sympathetic figure for Kira?”

Alan
smiled. “I’ll answer that a little later. I don’t want to get too far ahead of
myself. And I really do want to share with you how brilliantly you were both
manipulated. After all, you’re the only two people in the world who will ever
have a chance to appreciate my mastery.” He paused. “Shall I continue?”

Desh
nodded while Kira glared at her brother hatefully.

“The
optimized me figured there was a fifty-fifty chance Desh would leave the
service. Either way, it didn’t really matter to my plan.”

“If
your plan was to get me to team up with Kira, why did you wait so long?”

“She
wasn’t ready yet. I wanted her harried. Chasing her; almost catching her;
isolating her. Making her feel persecuted and alone. Crushing her spirit. I
needed her primed for the arrival of her white knight. When I judged she was at
the end of her rope, I pulled the strings to have you come in.”

Kira
knew this is exactly what had happened. She had recruited David because she was
lonely and fatigued. Alan’s execution had been flawless.

“Are
you saying you could have captured her earlier?” said Desh.

Alan
shrugged. “Possibly,” he said. “If I had made more balls-out attempts. I tried
to capture her in the early days, but failed. My enhanced self had calculated
that if I captured her, tortured her a bit, and then let her find a way to
escape, this would accelerate her readiness to seek out an ally like you, and I
could move up my time table.” An annoyed look came over his face. “But she was
a lot better than I thought she’d be. And when I got close she would take bold
risks with her own life to elude capture, which I couldn’t have. So I changed
gears and made harassment my primary objective.”

“How
did you get me assigned?” asked Desh.

Alan
grinned. “With the powerful people Putnam and I have in our pockets, it was
laughably easy. I had an influential politician with plenty of skeletons in his
closet arrange for it all with Connelly’s bosses. And I had long since made
sure the identities of all of the agents sent after her were recorded in a
database I knew she could breach.”

“Because
you knew she would study them,” said Desh. “You
needed
her to study
them.”

He
nodded. “She studied others that were sent after her without effect, but I knew
if she was properly primed and studied your photo and history, she would try to
recruit you.”

Kira
Miller felt bile rise in her throat. This thing pretending to be her brother
was distilled evil. What twist of fate had led to her parents giving birth to two
mutant children: a daughter with unequaled genius for molecular biology and a
son born entirely without a conscience.

“She
took the bait just as I knew she would,” boasted Alan. “I had planned on having
the two of you captured by my black-ops dupe, Smith, and held together as
prisoners for a few days to allow love to blossom. But you kept eluding him.” Alan
shrugged. “Served my purposes anyway. In fact, your escapes from the motel and
woods probably cemented your relationship.” A content, self-satisfied
expression came over his face. “Then all that was left to do was have Putnam
capture you both and pretend to be me, initiating a perfect storm of
circumstances that would cause Kira to tell her lover-boy her secret.”

The
helicopter banked, reminding the prisoners they were tearing through the air at
great speed to an unknown destination, something easy to forget given the near
perfect stillness of the opulent, enclosed cabin. “How did you know you would
be able to find us when you needed to?” asked Desh.

“This
is where the need for you to get seriously injured in Iran comes in. We ordered
a military surgeon to add a few implants in addition to fixing you up. The
orders came from the highest military channels. He was told this was being done
because you were a known traitor.” Alan smirked. “He was even told you had set
up your own men.”

Desh
lunged forward in fury, his neck catching enough of the wire in front of him to
draw blood, if only shallowly. “You sick bastard!” he screamed, his rage
finally spilling out.

Alan
Miller continued calmly as if Desh’s outburst had never happened. “The surgeon
implanted a tiny, remote homing device on your elbow, just under the skin. The
device was designed to lie completely dormant until pinged by a coded signal,
upon which point it would activate. You could scan for bugs all you wanted when
it was dormant and it wouldn’t register. While the bomb in Kira’s head was a
bluff, the advanced receivers Putnam told you about are very real. As Kira well
knows, when you’ve taken one of her pills, improving electronics becomes
child’s play.”

“So
you could have captured us at any time David was with me?” said Kira in shock.

“That’s
right. But after you avoided capture, I didn’t want to reacquire you too
quickly. You two had to have some time to bond.” He paused and watched blood
slowly roll down Desh’s neck with fascination. “When you escaped from the safe
house, I was forced yet again to alter my plans. I had planned on the two of
you remaining prisoners for several days there and then arranging for your
escape, with Putnam being killed in the process.” He shrugged. “No matter. I
was able to make some adjustments and everything still worked out as planned.”

“You
still don’t have the coordinates,” said Kira defiantly.

“Don’t
I?” said her brother, smirking. “The homing device wasn’t the only thing the
surgeon in Iraq implanted when he was operating on Desh. He also gave him
cochlear implants—one for each ear. It’s a standard procedure for people deaf
or very hard of hearing. Only the implants
he
received were silicon-chip
based recording units. They record digitally and can be downloaded to a
computer for playback.” He sipped his drink and smiled. “They have a finite
battery life and only record from ten to eighteen hours, depending on the
amount of input, so I had these set to be activated by my signal as well.”

“And
you activated them within the past ten hours, I presume,” said Desh.

“Right
you are,” said Alan happily. “Using the homing device I had implanted, I easily
tracked you to Putnam’s house. After all my painstaking planning, at long last
I had created the perfect storm.” He gazed at his sister smugly. “A man you
trusted and were falling in love with. A credible threat to species survival. And
you convinced that you had but minutes to live.”

Much
of the fire had left Kira Miller as the realization hit her with full force
that this monster had won. And she had dutifully played her role as the perfect
little pawn. She glanced at her bonds and the razor wire at her throat. Escape
was impossible. And even if she could escape, what would she do? Would she kill
her own brother?

She
clenched her fists. This
wasn’t
her brother, she told herself
forcefully. This was a twisted imposter. Believing this was the only way her
psyche could survive a betrayal this vast. Her brother had died in a fire in
their childhood home. The monster in front of her was a complete stranger.

“The
finishing touch to my masterpiece,” continued Alan, “was for you to think your
arch-enemy was dead.”

“Why?”
said Desh.

“If
Kira suspected a powerful enemy with access to her treatment was still at
large, she would have been far less comfortable disclosing the GPS
coordinates.” He raised his eyebrows. “Putnam had no idea what my real plan
was. Certainly not that his extermination was a key ingredient. With the
arch-enemy who had killed your brother dead, you were free to whisper your
secret right into Desh’s cochlea.”

Alan
paused to let his prisoners ponder just how utterly they had been manipulated;
just how complete his victory.

“What
if Kira hadn’t killed Putnam?”

“I
suspected she would. I made sure he boasted about killing me just to rub salt
in her wound. And my sister is so fucking predictable. So fucking noble. I
can’t tell you how disappointed I am that we sprang from the same womb.”