Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

Strickland picked up his phone and checked the time-four-thirty in the morning. This couldn’t wait, so he called the calmest person on the team: Gerhard Keopple. Maybe Koepple could convince the others to reconvene…

Infuriatingly, it took over twenty-four hours for Strickland to get the entire team to agree to a meeting. Prakash had been the lone holdout, and it required the combined efforts of Koepple and Kasheyev and finally even Professor Lei to convince him to show up. Bao-Rong and Chatterjee weren’t a problem. Like Strickland, they weren’t really critical team members. They were ready to hear what anyone could do to salvage this situation-and their academic careers.

Strickland had told them only that he’d discovered how the code had been stolen-and by whom. In fact, the discovery had made him paranoid, and he refused to hold the meeting at their offices. Instead he’d insisted on a public place in the quad just north of Memorial Church. The wide paved courtyard there had a rosette pattern in its center, and that’s where they found themselves standing in the predawn light as the occasional university worker walked past them on the way to the church or points beyond. Here they could see anyone approaching from a long way off.

Kasheyev betrayed no emotion. “How’s your face, Josh?”

He hadn’t thought about it all day. “Fine. I’m fine.”

Professor Lei nudged Prakash. “I think you have something to say to Josh.”

Prakash sighed impatiently and refused to look Strickland in the eye as he spoke. “I apologize for striking you, Josh. It was wrong, and I regret it.”

Strickland nodded. “That sounds very… well rehearsed, but apology accepted.”

Professor Lei raised her eyebrows. “So we’re meeting out here why, Josh-because you think the offices are bugged?”

Strickland nodded. “The university network’s been compromised-possibly by a foreign government. I’ve got the proof.”

Prakash stared. “Oh, it’s foreigners now.”

Professor Lei interjected, “Vijay, let’s hear-”

“Why should we trust a damn thing he says?”

Koepple cast an annoyed look at him. “C’mon, Vijay.”

“Josh could be spinning tales of espionage to get himself off the hook. To make himself out like he’s some sort of hero.”

Strickland was starting to feel badly treated. “Someone is interested in our work, Vijay. Is that so hard to believe? We both know how much it could be worth. Somehow someone found out about it and focused on obtaining it.”

“And they found you.”

“Maybe that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that other members of this team weren’t also compromised. Does anyone else here have copies of the Raconteur source code stashed somewhere?”

The team looked from one to the other. It had suddenly gotten quiet.

“I rest my case. Doctor Lei, we’ll need the university to provide support-quietly, so that whoever’s doing this won’t know that we’re aware of the compromise. But this is now a matter of national security.”

She nodded. “What do you have in mind?”

“I say we uncover who these people are. Use all our collective skills to reveal their identities and see what the Defense Department wants to do about it. Forget lawyers. I don’t think lawyers can help us.”

The others exchanged looks.

Kasheyev shook his head. “It’s too late, Josh. The code is already out there.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean this is over. This isn’t just any network breach. Our work has defense applications. And that means it’s a matter of national security-which means other options are on the table.”

There were murmurs among the others.

Professor Lei looked doubtful. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting into, Josh.”

“We put too much into this just to walk away. If someone’s trying to steal our future, I say we fight back.” He looked to the rest of the team. “Are you guys with me, or are you just going to take this? Because I, for one, am not going quietly.”

They looked uncertainly to each other.

Prakash was the first to speak up, but not without first letting out an irritated sigh. “Count me in. You might be an idiot, but at least you’re willing to do something.”

Strickland cast a give-me-a-break look at him.

Prakash shrugged. “I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get back what’s rightfully mine.”

Strickland nodded. Prakash nodded grimly back.

“Well, if Vijay and I can agree on something for once, how about the rest of you?”

Strickland never got his answer.

Reality itself suddenly disintegrated around them all.

On the observation deck of Hoover Tower less than a quarter mile away, Odin lowered his Leupold binoculars to reveal blue eyes framed by a thick black beard and the brim of a Red Sox baseball cap. He surveyed the main quad beside the Memorial Church where flames, body parts, and a blackened section of cobblestones seemed to be all that remained of the men who’d stood there just moments before. The glass windows of the church had shattered in an explosion. A nearby palm tree was burning. There were shouts in the distance, car alarms wailing, but nothing stirred in the courtyard.

He looked up to scan the dawn sky still speckled with stars. In a few moments he saw a distant flash. Odin counted softly to himself as he stowed the binoculars. “One thousand eight, one thousand nine, one thousand ten…”

Still counting, he withdrew a cell phone from his jacket pocket and keyed a number from memory.

The boom of the distant aerial explosion echoed off the buildings like a hammer blow. He stopped counting, having reached “twelve,” and noted the direction of the explosion. Odin let the noise fade before he spoke into the handset. “Our client just received an air mail package.” He listened. “No one’s left in the office. I need to catch the next flight out.”

As he spoke, a large raven flapped down to perch on the tower railing next to him. It had a small transponder strapped to its leg and a nearly invisible wire filament headset hovering above its head. Odin extended his hand, and the black bird caw ed its harsh call as it climbed onto his arm. It fluffed the feathers at its throat and let out a keek-keek sound.

He lifted the raven and studied it as he spoke into the phone. “Schedule the next meeting as soon as possible. Our deadline was just accelerated.”

He proceeded toward the tower steps, still holding the raven. Behind him a column of black smoke rose against the dawn light as horrified screams intermingled with the sound of approaching sirens.

It was war, then. She had modeled this behavior and detected the cues-but even so, the swiftness of the assault caught her off-guard. Perhaps the stigmergic propagation rate needed to be tweaked.

Professor Linda McKinney stared intently at a procession of salmon-colored, dark-eyed weaver ants, coursing like blood cells along branching pathways. They scurried against a craquelure background of mango bark on highways only they could see, surging into combat against black ants many times their size-swarming over their enemy. The video image revealed the carnage in ultrahigh resolution. The dead were piling up.

Weaver ants- Oecophylla longinoda. Along with mankind they were one of the few extirpator species on earth-meaning they deliberately sought out and destroyed rival organisms (including their own species) to maintain absolute control of their territory.

McKinney zoomed the camera in on a growing knot of weavers, watching as dozens of workers swarmed a much larger, black ant-a Dorylus major, the warrior caste of the driver army ant (which the locals called siafu). The monstrous black ant had one of the weavers in its mandibles, but following a timeless script, the much smaller and faster weavers grabbed hold of their enemy, first immobilizing the massive intruder-and then tearing its legs off. They dropped it among the dead and moved on to their next victim.