Sean Ellis - Callsign - King

›››There is a 93.9% probability that Sigler will pursue further action against Brainstorm. The need for this information is urgent.

I’ll get it to you.

Graham Brown read the text message reply. He deleted it without responding and put his smartphone away.

A week after the destruction of the facility site in Algeria…a week after Jack Sigler had showed up to ruin the most audacious enterprise he had ever conceived…he found that he still could not keep the anger and desperation from creeping into his Brainstorm communiques. He had spent decades cultivating the myth that Brainstorm was something larger-than-life; a sentient, even omniscient computer, and not just an ordinary- well, maybe extraordinary -gambler from Atlantic City with an uncanny ability to accurately assess the probabilities of almost any event.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” he muttered.

Like the Wizard of Oz, his real power wasn’t his genius, but the illusion that he was something more than human. Maintaining that illusion required him to behave like a computer, to be logical and emotionless when interacting with the men and women whose service and loyalty he had surreptitiously purchased over the course of thirty years.

That kind of clinical detachment hadn’t been a problem for him until Jack Sigler entered into the picture. Fortunately, there was an easy solution.

Kill Jack Sigler.