Jon Evans - Swarm

“Figured we might as well spend what we’ve got,” Jesse mused. “Life is short. As we have both just been viscerally reminded.”

“They’ll be looking for us.”

“We’re off the grid, for now. Temporary invisibility. Enjoy it while you can. Want some breakfast? The room service here is out of this world.”

“Yes, please,” I said, heartfelt. “And a nap. But first, you don’t know what’s going on.”

“So enlighten me.”

I told him about Sophie’s theory: that Russia had used Ortega to smuggle twelve thousand drones into America – the number still seemed unreal – for an attack that would cripple the entire United States.

“Holy fuck,” he said, as awed and horrified as I had been. “Holy fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Well.” He laughed harshly. “At least she didn’t fuck me over for something trivial. What a fucking relief.” It took me a second to realize he meant Anya. “Explains Sophie, too.”

“What about Sophie?”

“According to a Grassfirer on that Afghanistan airbase where they took her, she’s been arrested and imprisoned.”

“Arrested,” I repeated dully. Of course.

“Makes sense. She’s a wild card the Russians didn’t want loose, so they leaked that she was behind all the Axon sales. Now she looks like the evil genius behind Ortega, which is just close enough to the truth to be seriously fucking uncomfortable. I bet she’s finally telling them everything, and I bet they don’t believe a word, and won’t until it’s too late.”

“Dmitri said they had moles inside the US government,” I remembered. “Highly placed, pulling strings. Fuck. Shit .”

“Yeah.” Jesse shook his head, and his mask cracked for a second, and I realized that like me he was running on fumes. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Twelve thousand drones already in place, and no way to stop them. First a decapitation strike, then a fucking disembowelment. With that much pinpoint firepower they can bring the whole country to its knees. Christ Almighty.”

“She said we had options,” I remembered. “Even after I told her Anya had the override code. Sophie said she thought she’d found their drone factory, somewhere in Dubai, and we still had options. One last hole card. But we had to move fast.”

Hope flickered in his eyes. “Options like what?”

“She didn’t say. Probably because they picked that particular moment to beat down her door.”

“Shit. We are so fucked. Everyone is so fucked.”

“Yeah.”

“The G8 starts in three days, and if they nail them they’ll probably hit America right after, when they’re already in maximum disarray. If we can’t stop them, at least we have to warn people. Trouble is, we don’t actually have any fucking proof, and neither of us exactly counts as a reliable source, and if we pop our heads up the Russians will come cut them off. So how do we cry wolf in such a way that we’ll be believed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. Jesus. Fucking World War Three.” He sat down heavily across from me. “Listen, thanks for getting me out of there. I bet I wouldn’t have enjoyed my visit to the scenic Lubyanka.”

“Yeah.”

“They didn’t interrogate me or anything. They didn’t need to.” I had never heard his voice so hollow. “Anya knows everything already.”

“Yeah,” I said again, inadequately.

He tried and failed to make a joke out of it. “I sure can pick ‘em, eh?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Anyway.” He visibly pulled himself together. “No time for recriminations. This is so fucked up. Options. What did she mean by that? I don’t see any options at all.” He shook his head as if to dislodge a brilliant idea, to no avail. “We need some serious help. There’s some high-level Grassfire people in town, I’ll call them, maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

“Who?”

“LoTek, for one. Maybe he’s got some wild card up his sleeve. And one of our feds came over with the G8 security team, she might have some ideas.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, and swung my legs onto the couch. “I’m just gonna lie down here for a bit.”

There I spiralled down into the black-hole gravity well of sleep. When I next opened my eyes Jesse had somehow morphed into Lisa Reyes.

“Kowalski,” she said briskly, “did I not specifically tell you to stay out of trouble, last time I saw you?”

I stared at her, uncertain whether I was dreaming or hallucinating, then pinched myself experimentally. It hurt.

“You actually look worse than the last time I saw you,” she went on. “I didn’t think that was even possible.”

As I gaped Jesse walked into my field of vision, accompanied by a man and a woman I didn’t know. “James, meet Keiran and Danielle.” He nodded to Lisa. “I gather you two have already met.”

I stared at him, and then at her again.

“You weren’t the only one keeping secrets,” she admitted, with a tinge of guilt in her voice. “I’ve been part of Grassfire pretty much since it got started. Me investigating Kostopoulos? Not a coincidence.”

I looked up at Jesse, still speechless.

“Up, Maverick! The world awaits!” he declaimed, sounding himself again: cheerful, insouciant, confident that the world revolved around him. But I knew him well enough to know it was only a facade. “And soon it will tremble before us. For you see, we have a cunning plan. You know how they’ve imprisoned Sophie in a maximum-security prison in the heart of a massive US military base in the world’s most dangerous and unstable nation?”

I nodded. Coherent speech still seemed beyond me.

“Well,” Jesse said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to break her out.”

As Tolstoy might have said, all five-star hotels are the same. This one should have seemed superior – it billed itself as the world’s only seven-star hotel – but our suite’s spacious ultra-luxe interior was not noticeably distinguishable from that of the Meridien in London.

The view, however, was very different. I stood on our balcony and looked down the coastline at the colossal lattice of light, steel and concrete that was Dubai: half ultramodern city, half postmodern arcology. A forest of cranes and construction projects surrounded a dense thicket of skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest, straining into the sky as if it sought to escape earthbound living forever. Further out to sea, the lights of a manmade archipelago protected by a colossal artificial reef gleamed in the night. In the other direction, two artificial peninsulas shaped like palm trees jutted into the ocean, each several kilometres long. It was hard to believe they were real. They looked crudely Photoshopped.

The night air was warm and smelled of the sea. I stepped closer to the edge and looked straight down the vertiginous thousand-foot wall of our hotel, the famous Burj Al-Arab, shaped like a magnificent sail of shining metal and glass, set on its own private island. If I squinted I could see the pair of Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts parked out front.

“Jump!” Lisa suggested, from behind me.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Your Christmas present came.”

I took the card from her hand. It had an embedded chip, a magnetic stripe, and my own face staring out next to the words U.S. ARMY CONTRACTOR.

“Oh, goody,” I said glumly. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to be part of the military-industrial complex.”

According to the card, and also the US passport I had been given in London, my new name was Jason Kasperski. Close enough to my real name that my instinctive reactions shouldn’t raise eyebrows. I wondered how long I would use it. Days? Weeks? Years?