Jon Evans - Swarm

JK:your turn. how do i know it’s you?

SW:you never clean the french press right after you use it, no matter how many times i ask. when you open beer bottles you put the caps on top of the fridge.

SW:enough, or do you want more?

It was enough. I licked my lips, then asked the big one:

JK:how could you do it?

SW:do what?

JK:like you don’t fucking know.

SW:probably but i’m not sure.

JK:selling axon to drug cartels and rogue nations and funnelling the money into the bank accounts i never knew i had. pretending i was doing it. never telling me anything.

SW:i couldn’t. james I am so sorry, you have no idea because words can’t express, but there was just too much at stake. no one was supposed to find out. it just all got fucked up.

When I read that I snarled audibly at her use of the passive voice.

SW:are you with them now? jesse and anya?

JK:no.

It wasn’t technically a lie, not that I should have cared about lying to her. I felt my pulse quickening into a drumbeat of rage that threatened to overwhelm me.

SW:then where are you? what happened? can i help? send money, anything? just name it.

JK:the fucking nerve on you. help? sure. you can stop pretending like we’re still even friends. you deceive me for three years, ruin my life, nearly get me tortured to death, and now you want to do something for me? ok. turn yourself in, admit everything, clear my name. make me an innocent man again. that would be a fucking good start.

SW:i can’t do that yet. i will when I can, but that’s not yet.

JK:then how about you just fuck off and die.

I was breathing hard, felt like I was floating in a wave of fury. I very nearly closed the window and blocked any further communications. Why had she even started this conversation? Did she seriously think there was any chance that I might forgive her?

But of course that was exactly what she thought. In Sophie’s mind she had done no wrong. In Sophie’s mind she was incapable of doing any wrong, because her genius mind was perfect, and therefore so was everything it had ever thought.

SW:james, i am wracked, wracked , by guilt for what i have done. i stay up crying every night. but we have no time for that now. are you in contact with jesse and/or anya? i have found out some seriously scary things. i need to know how much they know.

I stared at that message for a long moment.

JK:like what?

SW:we have strong evidence that ortega is planning to attack g8. maybe you can confirm?

JK:wouldn’t surprise me.

SW:well. that’s clearly insane, no? he’ll be bin-laden-level global pariah. and ortega is, by all accounts, both smart and sane. So why do it?

I blinked. The same question had occurred to me.

JK:let me guess. you have an answer.

SW:yeah. a really bad one. remember how we tracked the drones coming from colombia via haiti on satellite pix?

I remembered the conversation in Clark’s office, what felt like a million years ago. Squadrons of thirty drones a day had been caught on camera flying across the Caribbean to the USA. That was how we had concluded Ortega had at a hundred and twenty drones at his disposal; it was four days roundtrip between Colombia and Florida.

JK:sure.

SW:well, we have not ever found pictures of any flying back to colombia. looked hard. no dice. initially we figured they just took a different route, maybe overland via mexico. but that makes no sense. you increase discovery risk by an order of magnitude, for nothing.

SW:am starting to think: maybe the real reason ortega is attacking the g8 is because someone else put him up to it.

SW:am starting to think: maybe we never found drones going back to colombia because none of them ever went back.

I read that three times. It didn’t make any more sense the second or third time.

SW:thirty drones a day for more than a year makes approximately 12,000 drones in total.

I goggled at that number for a second before responding.

JK:no way. not possible.

SW:i wish you were right but you’re not.

I shook my head violently at the screen.

JK:no. the money doesn’t add up. twelve thousand drones at half a million $ per is six billion dollars. plus costs to build the factory and fabrication plant, plus shipping, security, sundry. call it ten billion. even ortega’s not that rich. And they would have had to have started years ago.

SW:exactly, exactly, exactly. ortega couldn’t have done it. only major nation-states can plan and commit resources like that.

SW:my increasingly terrifyingly plausible worst-case scenario is this: the g8 is just a test run. a nation-state – china? russia? iran? – has been using ortega as a deniable sockpuppet to smuggle 12,000 drones into america, and is now preparing a massive drone attack that will bomb the usa back to the bronze age.

SW:it’s the only theory that explains everything.

SW:please tell me i’m wrong.

I stared at the screen. I felt like the whole world was wobbling around me, and the blood in my veins had frozen into icewater. I had watched six drones destroy a heavily guarded military compound. Six more had killed more than a hundred New Yorkers. I could hardly begin to imagine the havoc that twelve thousand might wreak on an unprepared nation.

It was crazy, it sounded like some apocalyptic conspiracy, far too terrifying and gargantuan to be true – but it explained so much. Who had retrained Sophie’s drones with new capabilities: a whole team of military experts somewhere. Why Dmitri had lied to me: they had always intended to let me go eventually, so I could support the “it was all the drug cartels” story. Why they had attacked New York and planned to attack the G8: nothing to do with Ortega showcasing his wares, both of those attacks were probes, testing the waters to see what defenses the West could muster. They had a gun to America’s head and were checking to make sure it wouldn’t blow up in their hand if and when they pulled the trigger. The G8 attack doubled as a decapitatation strike, eliminating leadership and sowing chaos before the real assault began.

My fingers typed my thoughts:

JK:holy

JK:fucking

JK:shit.

SW:indeed.

SW:where are you? can i come see you?

At that irrational rage flared in me again.

JK:anya and jesse and i are a little busy trying to save the g8. also, I’m the world’s third most-wanted man or something, thank you so much for that, so i’m kind of trying to minimize my social calendar just now.

SW:sorry about that. don’t worry, we’ll get it all sorted out when this over. please believe me. everything was necessary. i’ll explain when i see you.

I couldn’t believe she actually thought she could explain all this away. As if what she had done to me just needed to be fixed, like an engineering problem, and everything would be hunky-dory again.

I logged out. Between the sudden enormity of the stakes, and the poisonous feeling that curdled in me every time Sophie said anything personal, I couldn’t take any more. Besides, it didn’t matter what I said or thought. Sophie and Jesse and Anya would take things from here. They were the extraordinary ones. What I did had never been relevant. Even my triumphant escape from Mexico had been redundant.