Mariposa (2 page)

Chapter Three

The Ziggurat
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Nathaniel Trace walked slowly to the condo window and stared out over Dubai Creek. A few dhows, pleasure boats, and light freighters plied their trade, far below.

From his perspective—six hundred feet up the side of the Ziggurat, a huge steel and glass pyramid—the morning sun burned like a blowtorch on the horizon. The twelve lanes of the Ras al Khor Bridge, mostly empty, cut through the waterway's blinding shimmer.

The strangest feeling pushed through his entire body, as if he were a giant skyscraper and all the light switches were being turned on—or off—in quick succession.

Windows bright, windows dark.

How appropriate, here in Dubai, home of ten thousand audacious, half empty monuments to the world-class architecture of a failing oil empire.

An incredibly rich city fallen on hard times, where Nathaniel had lived and worked for six months now, interacting with part of the most sophisticated computer system on Earth—and filling his accounts with cash. His work was all but finished. He would be called up if they needed him for a few last details—but that was unlikely.

No, Jones was in control now, buried somewhere in the mountains of Switzerland.

He examined his naked reflection in the glass. Pale, lumpy body. Brush of disheveled ginger hair. Round face with a bump of nose—thin bridge, bulbous tip, flaring nostrils. Smooth, round cheeks. Generous lips that had once tended to a boyish smile.

Now he looked more like a bewildered Irish car salesman.

Nathaniel shivered and refocused his eyes. He could stare and stare at the sun without blinking and it didn't hurt a bit. If he chose, he could destroy his eyes and not even feel it.

He chose not to.

Something similar had happened a year before. Like the flip of a switch—all the misery, gone. Back then, it had been the pain from a nasty run-in with the wicked old world of the Middle East. Relief from worry and torment might explain his current round of mental pyrotechnics.

But this time, it felt very different.

You will experience liberation.

That's what the doctor had told him. All his old fears and traumas wouldn't just be managed, just painted over—they would be
gone.
He would remember them at any level of detail he willed, like tracing scars with a finger, but the scars would mean
nothing
emotionally.

Freedom from all his blunders, his mistakes . . . freedom from guilt.

That was what Mariposa was supposed to do. Better men, better fighters—everything better. And the doctor's promises had come true.

But now, his recovery and all his personal progress were twisting into something truly weird. Maybe what he was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened in Arabia Deserta, or with Mariposa.

Maybe it was unique to him.

But he didn't think so. His thoughts jumbled, tumbled all over each other like acrobats or hyperactive children. He felt great but he could not
think
straight. The confusion did not cause him actual pain but it scared him.

He felt great but he was scared to death.

He loved being
scared to death
.

Stop it.

The fear went away—but only for a moment.

A bank of dust blowing up from the south obscured the brilliant morning sun. It was going to be a murky day in Dubai. All the glittering steel and glass, and yet the desert still ruled.

Nathaniel felt a sudden urge to test himself, test this new awareness and see how physically in control and adaptable he was.

Get away from the luxury and the air-conditioning. Walk out into the desert. Feel the hot sand on his bare feet. Strip off his clothes and directly face the sun's rays. See if his skin grew a new silvery layer and his nose became broad to radiate heat.

Probably not a good plan, he told himself—the desert would leach him in an hour. He had been incredibly thirsty of late, drinking gallons of Masafi well water and peeing like a race horse.

Yesterday the pee was tinted purple. Then it turned bright yellow and opaque—like paint. Who knew what would happen to him under the pounding glare and the wind-blown grit.

Still
 . . .

Baby steps.

He let the curtain drop and closed his eyes. Before he lost his last lick of sense—before he decided to actually leave the city and walk out into the desert—he decided he should ride out this part unconscious. This part of whatever was happening to him. But it was all so fascinating. He didn't want to miss a thing.

This new person he was becoming might be human or might not—but he promised more real adventure and change and
fun
than anything Nathaniel had ever experienced.

He consciously willed his heart to speed up—then slowed it down.

Good
.

More
!

He picked up a long brass bird sculpture from the desktop near the window and, with a slight grunt, bent it double. The effort popped two of his knuckles and strained a ligament in his right arm, but there it was—the sculpture twisted into a pretzel. Something he could never have done before—at least not consciously.

He had read that in an emergency, people can increase their strength tenfold. A frightened mother can lift a car off her injured child. Drugs can have the same effect.

Nathaniel no longer needed the excuse of an emergency—nor drugs.

The needs of the body no longer ruled.

He gripped the two fingers and popped one back into place, then the other. The arm would have to take care of itself—he didn't mind the pain.

I have a cosmic mind
, he told himself.
He could make himself believe every word—and then smile in perfect awareness that this was crazy. That he was going insane.

But whatever—I am bringing a lot more systems online and under my conscious control than is humanly possible.

He took the sedative with another glass of water—the water tasted like pink platinum, whatever that might be—and lay down on the bed in the condo's coolness, privacy, and extraordinary luxury.

Leased through the efforts of that poor blown-up, beaten-down, guilt-ridden son of a bitch who was being paid, along with the rest of the Turing Seven, to corrupt the world's finances—but couldn't hear a motorbike rip past without breaking into a rank sweat.

His past self.

There was still plenty of money left. The Quiet Man had trained them well. Millions of dollars in hidden bank accounts, just in case. However this turned out, he would soon be leaving it all behind—United Arab Emirates, the Middle East, the desert.

All but the money.

He would make his way back to America. There, with what he knew, and this new sense of
liberation
, maybe he would finally be able to do something different.

Meet important people outside the usual circles.

Spill the beans. Tell the world what he had been up to. Tell them all about the incredible nastiness that was in the works.

Do some good for a change.

Although doing more evil would certainly be exciting.

Chapter Four

14 DAYS

Spider/Argus
Tyson's Corner, Virginia

Jane Rowland climbed down from the humming blue-and-green bus and walked with three colleagues, known to her only by their badge numbers, across a walkway through plantings of young trees and turf-squared grass, around a small fountain, to her home away from home.

Under a gray canopy of moody humidity, the new headquarters of Spider/Argus blended with all the other blandly efficient buildings of Tyson's Corner: gray modern architecture both blocky and tidy.

Hotels and malls and restaurants spread throughout the small city catered to some of the most powerful and anonymous people on the planet.

Typically Jane worked the nightshift. Her personal monitor bots were even now preparing reports that only she would see—until she passed them along to her director, who had permanently commissioned her last year to do what she did best.

Spider/Argus had been conceived twenty years ago as a supplement to the National Security Agency, which had proved slow to transition from SigInt—Signals Intelligence: landlines, satellites, cell phones, radio—into the dataflow age of Internet Everywhere.

In the eight years since its creation, S/A had budded off completely from its parent, taking on not just Internet and Web-based research and intelligence, but defensive CPI: counterintelligence, prevention, intervention.

Letting a highly trained watchdog off its leash.

Spider/Argus was not even its official name. Jane knew of just a small fraction of its operations.

Security barricades surrounded all. Nobody approached the building without clearance at the highest levels. Hidden sonic disrupter and microwave heat and pain projectors had been installed at all entrances and in undisclosed locations around the grounds—capable of incapacitating attackers at a distance of several hundred yards.

Lethal force was authorized inside the barbed-wire flanked corridors, patrolled by roller bots and dogs and soldiers. The tunnels of wire that covered nearby freeway overpasses were monitored by thousands of bug-eye cameras.

At regular intervals along all the local freeways and access roads, concrete arches hid .50 caliber, high-speed, radar-guided gun mounts, similar to those used to shoot down missiles and capable of cutting cars and trucks—even armored, military-style trucks—to hamburger-filled scrap within seconds.

Jane passed through the automatic steel and glass doors and submitted her badge and arm chip at the two security gates beyond.

"You'll need a code refresh by tomorrow evening," the female guard told her in a droop-eyed monotone.

For the guards, this had to be one of the most boring jobs in the greater DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Nobody interesting passed their way. Nobody spoke to them other than brief pleasantries.

Not even sports or weather could be discussed.

But the droop eyes stayed alert and sharp.

Jane waited for her assigned elevator at the automated station, then rose to the third floor. No music and no smell—clean, cool, purified air. Elevators carried singles at all times. Conversation in other than work areas was not just discouraged, it was tracked and fined. Posted lists of recent fines glowed from monitors over the elevator doors—though of course with no names or numbers attached.

There was fun to be had, of course. Floors and divisions with the highest levels of fines had to buy Christmas gifts for charities in the DC metro area. Top analysts with the highest fines had to spring for hallway treat tables.

No holiday parties, however.

Those guilty of prohibited violations spent three months in "time-out" at comfortable locations in the Adirondacks, until their cases were processed. Most did not return.

Jane did not find any of this exceptional. Her new office was far more comfortable than the one at the old Naval station on the banks of the Potomac.

The security was no worse, and definitely more effective.

At the end of each work period—usually in the small hours of the morning—she returned to her apartment and her daughter, dismissed the government-provided nanny, a woman with excellent bodyguard credentials, and assumed her favorite role—devoted single mom.

She was very good at everything she did.

Jane approached the door to her office. Beside the door, a black sign with silver letters warned that this was a "Faraday Room."

The room snitch checked her security codes one last time, unlocked the door, and opened access to the banks of office computers, clearing her for work.

Her machines never shut down.

She watched as wide ranks of rectangular displays brightened, switching from low-power mode.

Results of the day's searches started cascading down the line like flipped cards in solitaire. She sat in her special chair—the one item she had brought with her from the old Potomac building—and flexed her fingers before highlighting with airy gestures the top items on her evening work chart.

The room swiftly interpreted her motions either as writing, drawing, or command and control.

On the small bulletin board hung to the left of her monitors, ten months ago—while preparing for her current operation—she had tacked a printout from a Congressional Budget Office report.

Many nations, coming out of a long financial downturn, and having acquired assets such as at-risk real estate from beleaguered banks and other institutions, find themselves asset rich but increasingly cash poor. The United States, with debts on the order of fifty trillion dollars and an unfortunate habit of triggering recessions, is thought by a majority of nations to be the greatest threat to financial stability in the world.

Investor and debt-holding institutions fear that a disruption similar to that of 2008-2009 will push the world economy over the edge, bringing on yet another worldwide crisis, this one of dire proportions.

Created in 2009, the International Financial Protection Corporation (IFPC) is an international fund that contains and controls a cumulative 85% of U.S. debt through all of its participants and investors.

The United States has agreed to certain strict conditions, contingent to obtain necessary further loans from IFPC. Those conditions have not been revealed to the public.

Below that, she had pinned a second printout framed top and bottom with blue scribbles from her boss.

The following internal warning from the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury has never been released to the public and, god willing, never will be.

In order to qualify for all necessary further loans from IFPC, the United States executive branch, with the agreement of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and three congressional committees, has agreed to a special troubled nation loan protocol.

Certain national assets are valued and offered up as collateral. Central authority is ultimately invested in an automated system known as MSARC—Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control—which can trigger massive reallocations and call in loans, effectively putting a debtor nation into instant receivership.

Should MSARC decide to act, collateral assets guaranteed under the loan agreements will immediately be transferred to IFPC.

Financial corporations and investment funds around the world can then call the political shots through a Reallocation Committee.

If MSARC so decides, for the first time in our history, foreigners will hold almost complete economic and political control of—and so they will own—the United States of America.

MSARC poses the greatest threat to this nation since the Cold War—maybe greater
.

And it's our own damned fault. We do hate paying taxes, and we do love all our precious government services. Squealing piggies at the trough.

Her boss was prone to expressing himself vividly. Nevertheless, she read the posted pages before beginning her work every evening. They neatly bookended the current plight of the United States.

The monitor on her far right—smallest and most antique, losing pixels and fading in the corners to autumn gold—was devoted to displaying a simple digital clock.

The clock counted backward, second by second.

It now read
14 days 13 hours 5 minutes
.

The amount of time left before MSARC began formally judging America.

MSARC was allowed access to information that once would have been considered closely-held national secrets. Its central computer banks in Geneva relied on a network surveillance capability that in two years had come to rival many in her own agency.

MSARC also had access to the records of major corporations with government contracts—all but Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas, one of the biggest holders of U.S. government contracts. That exemption had been passed by congress with hardly a ripple, so many members were beholden to Talos CEO Axel Price. Price had taken a particular interest in MSARC some years back, even serving on a fully briefed government advisory committee.

The first item on Jane's evening agenda was following up on a list of MSARC queries. Stopping or interfering with those queries—or even tracking them—violated the loan agreements, so Jane was discreet, using the full range of search and masking capabilities available to Spider/Argus.

This evening, the list included only thirty queries, concentrating on the Federal Reserve and a number of major software corporations.

The latter might be of interest to other analysts. She copied them to a separate office that evaluated long-term patterns of foreign interest in private business.

More sobering still, MSARC's command center in Geneva was only now ramping up to full capacity—the moment of truth tracked by her backward-counting clock.

No one knew how extensive and powerful those systems were. It was possible Spider/Argus would be completely shut out by a superior program.

Whenever Jane conducted surveys on that particular question, her web "helpers"—thousands of subroutines running in machines everywhere from Cheyenne Conserve to Iron Mountain to right here in Tyson's Corner—came back with results that gave her the spooky feeling she—Jane Rowland herself—was being closely watched by something with almost preternatural instincts.

Human or machine, she could not even begin to guess.

There was evidence this presence was working on behalf of MSARC.

There was also evidence that MSARC was not even aware of its existence.

That contradiction intrigued Jane.

She loved this sort of puzzle.

The second item for this evening was the most important. She was arranging for a brief but powerful ripple of net inactivity—amounting to a thirty-second denial of service—spreading across hundreds of server farms in the northwest and the southeast, with the ultimate goal of helping an agent infiltrated into Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas.

His code name was Nabokov.

Jane knew almost everything about how the Talos computers accessed the outside world, and how they protected themselves against being accessed. Nabokov was poised to take advantage of a maintenance hole in Talos's infranet to download data crucial to a joint investigation, a rare instance of S/A cooperation with an outside agency—in this case, Alicia Kunsler at Bureau East.

Killing a few minutes time, Jane pushed her wheeled chair over to her relaxation station—a hot plate, sink, small refrigerator, and rack of cups—and made herself a cup of her favorite, white tea.

Cup in hand, she rolled back.

One-handed, she used a keyboard to type in a warning of the impending system-wide interruption, alerting national security masters throughout Tyson's Corner that this was not the beginning of a foreign assault.

She then paused her finger over the ENTER key, waiting for the precise second . . .

Now or never.