Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“Why, yes,” I said. “Have you heard anything about these things, by chance?”

“No,” al Gharsi said calmly. “But I must admit, I am quite a fan of whoever is so brilliantly attacking New York City and bringing this corrupt-to-the-core Great Satan to its knees.”

Al started chuckling again.

“You think I have something to do with it. Me! You come up here with your helicopters and men kicking in the door. But you are clueless. You are losing. You are flailing. You don’t even know which direction to duck. Allah willing, you are about to be defeated, I think.”

A minute later, I left the living room and followed Emily out of the house and onto the back porch.

In the farmyard’s sole electric light, thirty yards to the south, some shoeless middle-school-age kids, al Gharsi’s, probably, were kicking a basketball around as troopers interviewed blackclad, burka-wearing aunts and mothers. I wished suddenly that I were home with my own kids.

“What do you think?” I said to Emily.

“I think what you think,” Emily said. “I think we just dug ourselves another dry hole.”

Sixty-five miles due south, between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, three glowing windows stood out sharply on the top floor of the Pratt Institute’s otherwise dark North Hall building.

On the other side of the translucent window shades was a large, white-walled lab space that was the showpiece of Pratt’s brand-new robotics facility. At its center, a young man and two young women sat at the largest of the stainless steel lab tables, side by side, working busily.

They had an assembly line going. Aaron started off with the brushless motor controller and flywheel and the flywheel’s braking mechanism. Gia, who had a light touch with the soldering iron, fit in the tiny electronics board and the radio receiver, while Shui popped in rolling-pin-like magnets and put additional magnets onto the face of the small, square white plastic panels.

The finished product was a white-and-silver cube about the size of a quarter. It looked innocuous enough, like a tiny futuristic children’s block.

But these definitely were not Junior’s LEGOs, Shui thought as she clicked on the mini robot’s test software on the iPad.

Immediately there was a whirring sound as the computer-initiated radio signal activated the bot’s interior flywheel. When the computer-dictated amount of RPMs were reached, the flywheel halted suddenly, catapulting the bot across the table. Another whir and flip, and the bot snapped into position onto the end of a line of six minibots that were already arranged in a straight row.

Then, with another click on the iPad, the magic really began as the tiny minibots started leapfrogging each other, moving steadily across the table just as a half-track would roll over a tank. Shui knew she was supposed to place the bots carefully into a foam-lined box at the end of the counter, but the boss wasn’t around, was he? One by one, she made the minibots whir and flip into the box.

“Ah, my aching wrists!” said Gia, a 4.0 junior, as she removed her magnifying goggles. “There has to be a labor law against this. How long have we been at it? Ten hours now? I feel like one of those kids in India forced to hand-roll cigarettes. I mean, I really think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“Now, now. Time is money. We’re not getting paid by the hour but by the minibot, remember? Keep rowing the slave boat so Aaron the Baron here can score himself some nice front-row seats at Coachella,” Aaron said, snapping components together and flicking them toward Gia as though they were lunch-table footballs.

“No one is going to get paid a dime if these bots are damaged, damn it,” said Dr. Seth Keshet as he stormed in.

Fresh from running the world-renowned PhD program at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, tall, dark, and cocky Keshet was one of the top three people in the world in digital topology. But with his meticulously tailored casual suits and visible chest hair, he acted more like a scuzzy Eurotrash club lizard than a famous scientist.

“How many?” he wanted to know.

“A hundred and eleven,” said Aaron.

“I need another hundred.”

“Another hundred? We’ve been hitting it since three this afternoon. By when?”

“Six a.m.”

“Six? You’re effing kidding me. We’ve been going ten hours now.”

“Stop whining. We’re on a deadline,” the doctor said, checking his Patek Philippe. “That’s why I pay you the big bucks.”

Aaron pondered this for a moment with a thoroughly depressed look on his face. Then he finally stood.

“I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m done,” he said. “You keep your fifty a bot. I can’t take it anymore. I’m done. Total toast. I’m going to drop right here.”

“Exactly, Seth,” said Shui, with an uncharacteristic defiance in her voice. “We’re not bots, we’re humans. You seem to have lost sight of that.”

“Okay, okay,” the professor said, changing his tune instantly from demanding to charming. “Sorry for being such an ass. I’m under a lot of pressure. I’ll double your pay for tonight. A hundred a bot, but only if you finish.”

Aaron looked at him and blew out a breath.

“Fine,” he said. “But we’re going to need more pizza.”

“And Red Bull,” said Gia.

“As you wish, my children. Daddy will go get the refreshments,” said Keshet as he left the lab.

His iPhone jingled as he hit the school building’s concrete stairwell.

How are we looking? the client had texted.

We’re on target, Mr. Joyce. No worries. Everything will be ready by six as you said, Keshet texted back.

The sun broke over the top of the trees on the High Line in Chelsea as a dingy white van with the words HARRISON BROS PLUMBING on its side pulled to a stop on West 27th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues.

As the van idled, a waiflike man-child in a designer business suit biked past over the side street’s half-lit, worn pavement. Then a whistling homeless man followed, towing a dirty white leather PING golf bag piled with jingling empties.

Once the men had passed, Mr. Beckett opened the rear door of the van and stepped out onto the street dressed like a plumber.

With the minibots secured, he was there to retrieve the last item on their shopping list. And it was, as the Americans said, quite a doozy.

The plumber’s getup was probably a little overkill, he thought. But his image had to be in the hands of the authorities by now, so every caution was most prudent, he knew, as he hit the buzzer of a familiar faded brick tenement building on the street’s north side.

Upstairs, Senturk, the bodyguard, was already standing in the open doorway at the end of the second-floor corridor. He wore gray slacks and nice Italian shoes and a white silk dress shirt that was just a little too tight for his soda machine of a torso.

Mr. Beckett felt a rare bead of sweat roll down his back as the green-eyed, muscular Turk wanded him with the metal detector. He knew the man had been in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati back when the Turkish version of the CIA had been run by the brutal military. Since then, he had been a bodyguard for Middle Eastern billionaire businessmen and sultans and was a hard man of legendary reputation.

Senturk led him in through a door into the back. The rest of the building was a rotten, dusty dump, but back here, it had been transformed into a posh loft. It was the size of an indoor basketball court, with fabric wallpaper and million-dollar lighting and massive modern paintings on the walls.

Ahmed Dzurdzuk, the young man Mr. Beckett had come to see, was sitting behind an impressive, shining chrome desk that looked like it had been made out of a World War II airplane wing. Dzurdzuk didn’t bother looking up from whatever he was doing on his iMac as Mr. Beckett sat in the midcentury modern chair in front of the desk.