3
GOOD INTENTIONS
Jonathan Knox sat waiting in the anteroom to the Psyche Industries executive suite, feeling marginally more alert after five hours’ fitful sleep at the San Jose Fairmont. He yawned, glanced at his watch, and surveyed the scenery again. It hadn’t changed since the last time he’d looked: one Art Deco receptionist’s desk, three wall-mounted holographic animations, and Jazmine McGovern talking on her handheld. The holo nearest Knox was depicting a river-level flythrough of the Grand Canyon, but as eye candy it couldn’t hold a candle to Jazmine.
Consultants came in two flavors. On the one hand, you had your user-surly backroom coders; indispensable, but definitely an acquired taste. Then there were the “presentables”—the ones you could trust to spend face time with a deep-pockets client. It was an index of just how deep this client’s pockets were that Archon CEO Richard Moses had seen fit to post Jazmine McGovern as engagement manager on the Psyche contract.
Because Jazmine raised presentability to a whole other level. Even California’s balmy climate and laid-back corporate culture hadn’t put a dent in her air of cool, crisp professionalism.
This morning was no exception. Calm, composed, and impeccably coutured in a brushed-silk beige business suit that set off her café-au-lait complexion and dark curls, Jazmine was the epitome of power femininity, managing to look both supremely competent and subtly erotic all at once.
Most people wouldn’t have seen past the veneer of calm superimposed on her classic Ethiopian features, wouldn’t have noticed the elevated blink rate of her large brown eyes, the nervous way she fingered the tiny twinkling pendant hung round her neck—all the small tells that betrayed how agitated she was beneath that seemingly unflappable exterior.
But, then, seeing beyond surface appearances was Knox’s stock-in-trade. Not to mention that he’d had ample opportunity to become acquainted with the reality behind the facade, some years back. All in the past, what with his being in a relationship now, but not so long ago that he couldn’t still read her moods.
This morning’s mood spelled trouble.
Then again, if it weren’t for trouble he wouldn’t be here. And with the East Coast still slogging through the coldest winter of the new millennium, there were worse places to be than California’s temperate Silicon Valley.
Though not necessarily worse assignments to have: Putting out fires for Davoud Ansari, the famously demanding chief of the world’s fastest-growing nanoelectronics empire, wasn’t exactly Knox’s idea of a dream vacation.
From what little his boss Richard Moses had shared with him, this particular fire could well turn into a four-alarm blaze—what with Psyche Industries being Archon’s biggest account by an order of magnitude or so.
Archon’s and, not incidentally, Jazmine McGovern’s—who, having finished her call, flashed him a mega-candlepower smile. “Sorry about that, Jon. I’m all yours now.”
Knox chose to ignore the possible implications of that remark. “What’s up, Jazmine? You hollered for help. I assume it’s to do with this, uh, QuMRANN thing?”
“Not really. Why would you assume that?”
“Process of elimination: Richard said that’s all we’ve got going on out here—the project with the funny name.”
“Acronym,” she corrected. “Stands for Quantum Magneto-Resonance Artificial Neural Network.”
“Was that supposed to help?”
“It’s an AI, Jon—the closest thing to real artificial intelligence ever, in fact.”
Knox frowned at the odd turn of phrase: “real artificial” anything, much less intelligence, sounded kind of oxymoronic.
“Artificial intelligence?” he said. “I thought Psyche Industries was into nanotechnology.” And not just “into.” As the newsfeeds told it, Psyche CEO Davoud Ansari could lay fair claim to having singlehandedly pioneered the whole field of next-generation nanoware manufacture. It had all begun with Ansari’s invention, while still a CalTech undergrad, of the first prototype “nanotrode”—a self-contained, ambient-powered nanoscale electrode that, with the backing of Los Angeles’s insular but powerful Iranian-American financial community, had become the seed from which an entire industry had sprung.
“Nanotech was their initial focus,” Jazmine agreed. “But their business models become more like Google’s. You know: turn your baseline business into a cash cow, and leverage it to get a finger into everything even remotely related. In Psyche’s case, that meant gene therapy, biofuel synthesis, and—most especially—cognitive systems to rival the human mind itself.
“Best of all,” she went on, “as far as that last one goes, we were in on the ground floor. You recall how Archon signed with Psyche a year and a half ago?”
“Vaguely.” A year and a half ago Knox had been cruising the North Atlantic, with other things on his mind. Like living to see the next sunrise. Jazmine took that as a good-enough. “It was just a time-and-materials toehold at first, but that was before I got started building the client relationship. As of ten months ago, Archon was named system integrator for the QuMRANN project as a whole, which was, not incidentally, the crown jewel of Psyche’s Federal Systems Division.”
She smiled wistfully. “Wish you could have been here with us back then, Jon. It could’ve been like the old days. You remember: just you and me, on top of the world, riding high.”
“I remember.” He said, more brusquely than intended. Riding high and staying on top had been the challenge, all right—in more ways than one. But … “You’re talking about this QuMRANN business in the past tense. Did something happen?”
“You might say that.” Jazmine barked a bitter laugh. “Nine weeks ago—nine weeks from turnkey, if you can believe that!—the Feds pulled the plug on the whole damned thing.”
“Christ! They give a reason?”
“I wish!” she said. “No, they just played their standard get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“The old ‘convenience of the government’ shtick?” Knox shook his head. “I don’t know, Jazmine, that termination clause is pretty much airtight—especially when a couple months have already gone by since they invoked it.”
“Don’t worry, Jon, we didn’t call you in to fix the QuMRANN fiasco. It’s just I thought it was important for you to know the background, to give you a feel for how much is riding on what we did call you in for.”
He blinked. “Something else has gone wrong?”
Jazmine nodded. “Very wrong.”
“Tell me.”
“If you don’t mind, Jazmine,” said a voice from behind, “I’ll tell Mr. Knox myself.”
☯
What with the wee-hours raid and the obligatory After-Action Review, Marianna could have done without the summons to a ten o’clock at CROM headquarters. As it was, she barely had time to swing by Federal Plaza and change out of her raid gear on the way to LaGuardia. The catnaps she’d caught on the crack-of-dawn shuttle down to Dulles and in the limo out to Chantilly were a poor substitute for six hours of real sleep, and certainly not enough to brace her for a one-on-one with her boss—which, going by his dial-in remarks at the AAR, was not going to be pretty.
She stifled a yawn and pushed open the office door with the bronze nameplate reading “Euripedes Aristos, Director, Reacquisition Working Group, DOE Critical Resources Oversight Mandate.” There, seated behind the big mahogany desk was Euripedes Aristos himself—“Pete” to his friends, whose number evidently didn’t include her this morning. Leastways, Pete didn’t raise his head to nod a greeting toward where she stood in the doorway. Didn’t acknowledge her arrival at all, in fact, just kept staring at the three pages of hardcopy fanned out in front of him. She could guess what he was reading: the post-mortem on last night’s raid.
Still not looking up, he said, “Sit down.” He didn’t have to add “and shut up”—his body language said it for him. From his clenched fists to his hunched shoulders to the furrows seaming his balding forehead, Pete’s whole physical presence was reinforcing the frown that creased his blunt-featured face.
Quiet as she could, Marianna sidled over and settled into the visitor’s chair across from her boss.
Pete took his sweet time imprinting whatever the report was telling him onto long-term memory, time during which Marianna focused her gaze on the hands folded in her lap.
Finally, Pete straightened and fixed her with his stare. His words, when they came, were almost gentle. “Tell me about it.”
“What’s to tell? The tip turned sour. Somebody playing both sides against the middle, looks like.”
“Looks like.” Pete grunted assent. “Looks like you walked right into it, too.”
“And walked back out,” she said. “Don’t forget that, Pete.”
“Most of you. Not all.”
“No, not all,” she acknowledged. “Is Luis going to be okay?” He’d still been in surgery at Bellevue when she’d gotten her boss’s drop-everything call.
“Mondragon?” Pete shrugged. “He’ll live.”
Thank God. Marianna knew Luis’s fiancée, a case officer in Reacquisition’s Far East section. She wouldn’t have been able to look Mae Ling in the face again, if … She shook her head and said, “Good. We’re going to want him back on the team.”
Pete looked her in the eye again and frowned. “I don’t think you appreciate the situation here, Marianna. As of now, there is no team.”
☯
Knox turned toward the source of the voice, and saw that the door to the inner office had swung open while he and Jazmine were talking.
Framed in the doorway was a man he recognized, if only just barely, as Psyche CEO Davoud Ansari. It was hard to believe the diminutive figure standing there was the same smiling captain of industry depicted in newsfeeds and trade media. The smile was gone this morning, replaced by a haggard expression that added years. Missing, too, was the immaculate tailoring: this man looked as if he’d slept in his clothes last night, if he’d slept at all.
“Jon, right?” Ansari clasped Knox’s hand with his small, fine-boned one—and hung on with the grip of a drowning man. “Davoud Ansari.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ansari.”
“Just Dave, okay?” The celebrated smile put in a fleeting appearance then, before the dark eyes welled up, not for the first time that morning by the look of them.
Ansari gripped Knox’s elbow then and steered him toward the suite, motioning Jazmine to follow. “Better if we talk about the … the situation where we won’t be disturbed,” he said.
Crossing the threshold into a cathedral-ceilinged space, Knox waited till Jazmine had closed the door behind them before prompting, “What situation is that, Dave?”
Ansari didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he released Knox’s arm and turned away. It looked from behind as if he were wiping his eyes. A shuddering sigh all but confirmed it.
This was awkward. “Everything okay, Dave?” Knox asked, though clearly it was not.
Ansari shambled on over to his desk and just stood there, hands braced on the dark-veined Carrara marble of the desktop. His shoulders shook and his breath came ragged as he forced out the words, “Maybe—sorry, Jazmine, maybe you’d better do the talking after all.”
“Jon?” Jazmine put a hand on Knox’s arm and led him over to a double-height Palladian window, the steel and glass monoliths of the Psyche Industries campus visible beyond its panes.
“His daughter’s missing,” she whispered. “She’s only six years old.”
“Missing?”
Jazmine nodded. “Kidnapped, we think.”
“Jesus! How long’s she been gone?”
“Since yesterday afternoon. Around 3 pm.”
“Have the cops got any leads?”
“Cops?”
Knox was getting a sinking feeling. “You mean you haven’t called the police yet?”
“No, Jon,” Jazmine said. “We called you.”
☯
Marianna couldn’t believe she was hearing this. “Tell me you’re not pulling the plug, Pete. Not after one op.”
“One op too many, you ask me. Reacquisition does analysis, remember?
We leave fieldwork to the operationals.”
The hell of it was, Pete was right. If Marianna really wanted to get out into the field, she was in the wrong box on the org chart.
You’d have thought that an agency charged with keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists would have to get its own hands dirty from time to time. And you’d be right. Trouble was, all that went on elsewhere within CROM. If boots-on-the-ground surveillance was needed on a WMD researcher posing a proliferation risk, it was Compliance Directorate that stepped up. Reacquisition got called in only if the “prole” managed to slip through Compliance’s net. And even then, all Reack got to do was analyze movement patterns, relocate the target, and hand the case off to what Pete had just referred to as “the operationals”—the seldom mentioned Interdiction taskforce that did CROM’s actual wetwork.
All of which left Deputy Director for Reacquisition Bonaventure, notwithstanding the fancy job title, sitting on the sidelines of the Global War on Terrorism. Or had done, until some eighteen months ago, when, on her first, and so far only, undercover assignment, she and a certain management consultant named Jonathan Knox had—well, between the two of them, they’d sort of saved the world.
It was that successful, to put it mildly, conclusion to the Rusalka Affair that had levered her boss into letting her stand up her own Reack rapid response team in the first place. But it wasn’t buying her any slack now.
“From now on,” Pete was saying, “you’ll stick to your desk and do your job.”
“I was doing my job, Pete.”
“And what’ve you got to show for it, other than some KGB small fry and a couple of perforated agents?”
“We’ve got, uh—” Marianna groped for something Pete wouldn’t just dismiss out of hand. Maybe something to do with the laptop she’d confiscated. “Well, what about that, that multi-meg file with the funny name?” What was it, now? “Um, QuMRANN.”
“What about it?”
“It doesn’t smell right. I mean, what could the Shadow KGB want with the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Those ancient artifacts, including the earliest known fragments of the Book of Isaiah, had been found in a cave back in 1947 by a young Bedouin shepherd searching for a stray goat in the hills overlooking a place called Khirbet Qumran.
Pete shrugged. “Unrelated, probably. A codename would be my guess.
We’ll know more once Technical’s done with the decrypt.”
“How’s that coming anyway?”
“Look, Marianna, we’re way off topic here. I was talking about the raid.”
“So was I. You wanted to know if the op was worth it, and I’m telling you the answer could be locked up inside that file.” There, that sounded good, and maybe it was even true. Worst case, it bought her time to think up some better reason to keep the team in business.
Or not. Pete grimaced. “All right, let’s settle this once and for all.”
☯
“Me? You called me in—on a kidnapping?”
Knox swallowed hard. He really didn’t need somebody else’s personal problems right now, not when he still hadn’t worked through his own.
Okay, so maybe problem wasn’t the right word. Whatever it was, Knox had needed to step back from it, gain a little perspective on it, consider it from a reasonable distance—say, a continent’s worth.
Jonathan Knox had always been something of a loner. Up to a year and a half ago, that is. Then a rookie government operative had chivvied him into accompanying her on an undercover mission, and in the process had put an end to his detached, unattached days forever. Nothing in Knox’s prior experience with women had prepared him for CROM agent Marianna Bonaventure, for the disconcerting enthusiasm with which she embraced risk, and passion, and life itself.
In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates relates how the first humans were hermaphrodites whom the gods had torn in two to create men and women, and how love was but the longing of each half to be reunited with the other. Knox had a feeling that in Marianna he had found his other half, the missing piece—different, yet complementary—of his soul.
Still, those differences gave him pause. Could they make it work? Balance her exuberance off against his own more contemplative temperament? It wouldn’t be easy, might not even be possible. One thing was sure: Knox needed some time to himself to think things through.
And another sure thing: He wasn’t going to get it out here.
He looked up. Jazmine, and now Ansari too, were staring at him, expecting him to say something. “Why me?” was probably not the response they were looking for.
“Uh, I’m really sorry to hear about your daughter, Dave,” he began again. “I can’t begin to imagine what you must be going through. If there were any way I could help—”
“Jazmine thinks maybe there is, Jon.” Ansari walked over to join them by the window. “—A way you can help, that is. With that clairvoyance thing you do.”
It was Knox’s turn to stare back at Jazmine, hard.
“Come on, don’t be so modest, Jon,” she said. “Knox’s ‘on-board pattern matcher’ is the stuff of office legend.”
“Legend about sums it up,” Knox said under his breath. This wouldn’t be the first time his weird talent had gotten him in over his head.
It wasn’t even a talent, for that matter, not in the sense of an ability he could exercise at will. It was just that every now and again, unpredictably, uncontrollably, his subconscious would scan through a seeming chaos of random data and suddenly flash on the underlying pattern it concealed. It certainly wasn’t anything you’d want to bet on, not for these stakes.
He sighed and turned back to Ansari. “Look, Dave, I don’t know what Jazmine here’s been telling you, but you’re better off sticking with the professionals on this.”
“Professionals. Like the FBI?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Forget them, I need this kept internal. Anyhow, half the Bureau’s tech was developed right here: predictive modeling, data-driven analytics, forensics, you name it. We can put all that at your disposal, plus a world-class research team—think of it as eliminating the middleman.”
“Investigation isn’t all the FBI does. What about enforcement?”
“Psyche’s got its own paramilitary, if it comes to that.” Ansari paused and gave Knox a hard look. “We’ve got everything we need, except somebody to head up the effort. That’s you.”
“But I’ve got no experience in criminal investigation. And with a child’s life at risk …”
“Look, I realize this is way outside your comfort zone. But would it be all that different from what you did for the Energy Department a year or so back?”
“How in hell did you find out about that?”
“Like I said, world-class research.” Ansari shoved his hands in his pockets and walked back over to his desk. “Enough so you won’t have to sweat the small shit. We’ve got a really good, um, detail man for that. You’d just need to pull it all together, figure out what it means.”
How did he keep winding up in situations like this? No matter—he could pull the plug on this one at the outset. “Dave, I’m sorry, but in good conscience I can’t do it.”
Ansari didn’t respond immediately, just eased himself down into his chair and sat there with the look of a man pondering his alternatives.
When he did speak, it was to say, “Jazmine, would you excuse us, please?
There’s something I need to discuss with Jon in private.”
☯
Marianna sat there with bated breath while her boss picked up the interoffice line, speed-dialed CROM Technical, asked to be connected to whoever was working on exploiting the QuMRANN capture.
Marianna could only hear Pete’s side of the ensuing conversation, and he wasn’t doing much of the talking. But judging by the escalating volume of the few things he did say—“Can’t be cracked?” and “It’s just a zip file, for chrissakes!” and “You called who?”—it wasn’t going well. That impression was confirmed when he slammed the handset down and glowered, first at the phone, then at her.
“No luck?” she said.
“Turns out whoever zipped that file of yours didn’t go with the built-in encryption. They used AES.”
Marianna gave a low whistle. The Advanced Encryption Standard was top-secret certified, and for good reason: a brute-force decrypt was estimated to take longer than the life expectancy of the universe.
“It gets better.” Pete rubbed his balding pate as if his head hurt. “Once Technical saw what they were up against, they called Fort Meade.”
Even though she was still on the hot seat herself, Marianna’s heart went out to whatever poor geek had gone and broken CROM’s first commandment: never, ever admit you might be having a problem. Not to another intelligence agency. Especially not if the other agency was, as here, the National Security Agency.
Just to break the lengthening silence, she said, “Was NSA any help?”
Pete snorted. “About what you’d expect: stonewall city. Until they heard the filename, that is. Turns out QuMRANN’s also the name of some project they just canceled, and they’re trying to figure the connection. Bottom line: they want the QuMRANN package up at Fort Meade. Like, yesterday.”
“So? Have Technical beam it up to them.”
“Not just the file—the laptop it’s sitting on. Along with the individual that acquired it.” Pete shook his head. “Looks like you get to drive up to Maryland over lunch.”
Marianna nodded. At this point, she’d take any reprieve she could get. “We’re not done yet, you and me,” Pete told her, in lieu of a fond farewell.
“You drop the damned thing off, tell them what they need to know, and get your butt back here ASAP.”
☯
Knox stood there regarding Ansari across an expanse of marble desktop, wondering what the man had to say that not even Jazmine could hear. And why he thought it might cause Knox to reconsider his decision to stay out of this.
For the moment, the Psyche CEO wasn’t saying anything, though, just sitting there quietly, staring down at his hands where they rested in front of him on the desk. Gathering his thoughts, maybe?
When at last he stirred, it wasn’t to speak, but to lift his hand and snap his fingers. That must have triggered some gesture recognition system, because the big windows polarized to darkness and the wall opposite lit with a video montage of—Knox supposed it must be Ansari’s daughter, Fatimah.
The clips danced across the wall-sized display: Fatimah as she might look today, brown hair and dark eyes like her father’s, strolling through a rose garden; a younger Fatimah in PJs, cuddling in her father’s arms; Fatimah as an infant, her head encircled by a silvery tiara; then back to present-day Fatimah, standing midst flowerbeds, a worried expression flitting across her round face as she talked earnestly with somebody who wasn’t there, and on through a dozen more shots before cycling around to the beginning again.
Knox stole a glance at Ansari. The man was sitting there in the flickering light, smiling through tears, whispering, “My little girl, my Timah.”
Knox could feel his own eyes tearing up at the thought of the lost little girl, somewhere out there all alone, even as he resented the obvious attempt to play on his emotions.
He cleared his throat. “Dave? You wanted to talk to me about something?”
Ansari blinked at the interruption, as if only now recalling that someone was in the room with him. It took him a moment or two for him to regain his composure—straighten up, rub his eyes—but then he seemed back in control of himself.
He froze the picture show with another snap of the fingers and, leaving the room still in semi-darkness, turned to Knox. “Anyone in your family have epilepsy, Jon?”
Knox had been trying to anticipate every conceivable gambit Ansari might try in order to coax him on board the investigation. This had not been one of them.
“Uh, no. Not that I know of.”
“Believe me, you’d know if they did.” Ansari grimaced ruefully. “Have you ever been around someone when they suffered an epileptic seizure?”
“Again, no.” Knox said, still unsure where this was leading.
“Scary as shit. And maybe the worst part is, the only thing you can do for them is … nothing at all.”
“Aren’t you, uh, supposed to keep them from swallowing their tongue at least?”
Ansari shook his head. “Old wives’ tale. No, there’s really nothing you can do to help—Oh, keep them from falling down and hurting themselves, sure. But other than that, you’ve just got to stand there and let them ride it out. That hurts, especially when it’s someone you love.”
Now Knox could see where this was going. “You’re saying Fatimah—?”
“It’s not epilepsy,” Ansari said in a low voice. “Not exactly. Epilepsy is caused by a physical insult to the brain—a lesion or some such, due to birth trauma or a sudden blow to the head. Epilepsy’s a hardware problem, is what I’m trying to say.”
He sighed. “The MRIs all show the hardware of Timah’s brain is fine.
It’s her software, her mind, that’s the problem.”
“Come again?”
“It’s called PNES, Jon. Short for psychogenic non-epileptic seizure disorder. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it, it’s rare enough. Believe me, I wish I’d never heard of it either. But Timah’s got it. Bad.”
“Sorry, I’m still not following. PNES?”
Ansari heaved another sigh. “Fatimah’s mind gets stuck in the equivalent of a computer’s ‘forever loop.’ Her thoughts keep cycling round and round endlessly. It’s like … well, have you ever experienced what musicians call an ‘earworm’? A tune you can’t get out of your head?”
Knox nodded. “Annoying. Harmless enough, though.”
“For most people. And even for them, an earworm triggers persistent brain activity that, as Oliver Sacks pointed out, bears more than a little resemblance to an epileptic fit.”
“But it’s just thoughts, right?”
Ansari shook his head. “Not just thoughts, Jon. Obsessive thoughts, obsessively repeated. And that’s only the benign form. Increase the earworm effect by a couple orders of magnitude, and it turns malignant.” He swallowed. “Timah’s PNES starts out as a software glitch, but if left to run its course, it’ll begin rewiring her underlying neural hardware. And from there, it’s one short step to what the doctors call status epilepticus—a seizure that won’t stop, ever. Because the thoughts that trigger it won’t stop, ever. Not till they kill her.”
“How long has she been this way?”
“Going on four years now.”
“Then how—” Knox broke off, unable to think of a way to ask the obvious next question.
Ansari asked it for him. “How has Timah survived this long? Technology. I’ve come up with a—not a fix, just a holding action, but it can keep her condition under control. Trouble is the treatment’s got to be reapplied every couple-three days. If we can’t get her back in the next forty-eight hours, we won’t have to worry about the kidnappers—Timah’s mind will become its own worst enemy.”
That struck a nerve. Not to mention exposing an unexpected connection between the missing girl and Knox himself, a connection that traced its way a quarter century back, to the last night of Knox’s year as a graduate exchange student at Moscow University.
The shriveled brown mushroom his friend Sasha had persuaded him to try was only supposed to be a wake-up drug. Down it and party on, dude. Party on all the way to the clinic at the US Embassy, as it turned out. The fly agaric cap he’d ingested was not only a psychedelic, it was a powerful toxin too.
Even before they’d medevac’d him back to the states, his body had largely recovered. His mind, not so much. The visions of the void he’d endured in the endless hours of that monumentally bad trip had stayed with him through the ensuing weeks and months. Was with him, in some sense, still. It was as if that single hallucinogenic episode had tapped into some fundamental flaw or fissure deep within his mind, and riven it beyond hope of healing.
And that was maybe the bond that had arced between the two of them a moment ago: Fatimah Ansari, like Jonathan Knox himself, was damaged goods.
He turned to face the freeze frame of the little girl still glowing on the far wall. He at least had Marianna to turn to when things got really bad. Timah, at this moment in time, had nobody.
Nobody, except maybe him.
Knox squared his shoulders and turned back to where Ansari was sitting, watching him.
“Okay, Dave,” he said, “what is it you want me to do?”