Jon Evans - Swarm

“I never lied to you.”

The fact that this was probably technically true only heightened my fury.

“I had to,” she said quickly, reading my expression. “The stakes were too high. We’re talking about the future of everything. Where we go as a species. No one was supposed to find out, but if they did, I had to have a cover story, and you were the only possibility.”

“Of course. Yeah, obviously. People like me are expendable. Not you, of course, not with your epic fucking messiah complex.”

“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she said quietly. “I really do. But I had no choice. I couldn’t sit by in Pasadena and do nothing. I love you, James. I never even believed in love until I met you. If I could have sacrificed myself instead of you, I would have. Of course I would have. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that I just couldn’t?”

“So you fed me to the wolves.” I shook my head. “Jesus. You’ve got one funny fucking definition of love.”

“It couldn’t be about just us. I wish it could have been. But I had to worry about more than us, or me, or you. You don’t understand what it’s like. That kind of responsibility. The world on your shoulders.”

I looked straight into her eyes for the first time since her reappearance. “Actually, thanks to you, I now have a pretty fucking good idea. And you know what? I wouldn’t sell my friends out, and I would never, ever, have sold you out, no matter what, no matter what the stakes were, no matter what I saw coming. That’s the difference between you and me.”

She didn’t look particularly chastened. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Meaning you think I’m wrong.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter any more. We can’t roll the clock back. But for what it’s worth, yes, if I have to choose between losing the man I love and saving everyone else, then I have to save everyone else. So do you. So does everyone. It’s our duty. For most people the choice between love and duty is never more than hypothetical, but for people like us, sometimes it’s real.”

“People like you. Homo superior.”

She half-laughed. “I wish I was. But being smart doesn’t make it any easier. I mean people like you and me. People who find ourselves in this kind of crazy situation. I’ve hated myself, I’ve despised myself every step of the way for what I’ve done to you. But I had to. It was necessary. Can’t you see that?”

“Fuck necessary,” I said. “You can justify anything as necessary , if you try. Whatever happened to doing what you think is right ?”

Sophie had no answer.

“Excuse me,” Danielle’s cool voice intruded from the door. “Sorry to interrupt. But we think we’ve got something.”

Our Rolls-Royce rolled across the causeway towards the mainland, driven by a dapper young man named Ahmed who spoke excellent English. I wondered how frankly we could speak in his presence. He didn’t seem to be listening to us, he almost certainly wasn’t a police informant or FSU agent, but paranoia was becoming reflex.

Dubai by night was lit up like the world’s largest Christmas tree. Boulevard Sheikh Zayed, the main drag paralleling the coast, was lined by towering architectural marvels and magnificent monstrosities, and full of badly driven luxury cars, but the industrial district we entered was devoid of any such aesthetic appeal. Grim factories, sprawling warehouses, and mountains of shipping containers contrasted starkly with the barren desert that lay between and beneath the wide roads and huge complexes, as if biding its time before reclaiming its territory.

The factories and assembly plants hummed and churned. We passed converted school buses full of Indian labourers with shadowed faces; barren walls; anonymous compounds; corporate names emblazoned in Arabic and Roman script; a mosque whose elegant mosaics and yearning minarets seemed out of place amid all this industrial ugliness. It felt like driving through an Arabic variant of a classic sci-fi Mars city, like we were in some domed biosphere and all these machines and people were working overtime to keep our atmosphere breathable.

Some months ago, we had learned, a nameless informant had told Michael Kostopoulos that shipping containers full of mysterious equipment were being smuggled from Venezuela to Colombia. He had investigated, tracked these containers back to their port of entry, and connected them to bribes paid to a Venezuelan cabinet minister named Ramirez. That was as far as Kostopoulos got before he was assassinated; but LoTek had connected the bank account from which those bribes had come, via a chain of shell companies and international money transfers, to Greenwood Technologies, which owned the factory that was our destination.

At first glance tit looked impregnable: a huge, squat, featureless building devoid of windows, surrounded by a high chainlink frence topped by barbed wire. Four armed guards patrolled the fence with dogs. A gatehouse by the main entrance was manned by more guards and crested with a pair of video cameras. Bright lights – searchlights, really – illuminated the entire property, and the dozens of cars, vans and buses parked inside the fence.

We instructed Ahmed to drive right around the property twice. While he did so, wearing what seemed to me a polite but incredulous these-people-are-crazy expression, Jesse aimed his Android phone through the open window at the dense mass of the factory, beaming video straight back to LoTek in the Burj al-Arab. This was a recon mission. Our hope was to find some chink in its armour.

We had almost finished our circumnavigation when a big blue dragonfly buzzed through the open window into the Rolls-Royce. I made a halfhearted attempt to shoo it back out, but it took up residence in an upper corner, and I gave up. Jesse closed the window and told Ahmed to stop the car a moment. Ahmed, who behind his discreet mask was clearly both puzzled and curious, pulled over next to the immense construction site across from the Greenwood factory.

“What now?” Lisa asked.

Jesse shrugged. “Wait for LoTek.”

Sophie said, “I’d like to go back and analyze that footage myself.”

“Or, we could get another perspective,” I suggested. Sophie and Jesse looked at me with surprise. I pretended not to notice and craned my neck up at the two huge cranes that loomed above the construction site like origami colossi. “Anybody up for a little climbing?”

They were surprised, I supposed, because historically speaking I was never the one to make suggestions or take the initiative; they were the genius world-beaters, they took the lead. But I was sick of the role of sidekick, and having rescued both of them within the last 48 hours, I suddenly felt much less overawed and intimidated by the thought of taking charge.

Lisa grinned. “Beats sitting here doing nothing.”

Jesse and Sophie exchanged a dubious look. “Maybe later,” she said. “One step at a time. Iterate to a solution.”

He nodded. “We can always come back. No sense risking it now.”

Maybe they were right, but for a moment I wanted to yell at them to shut the fuck up and play along with what I wanted for once. I squelched the impulse violently. The stakes were too high.

We rode back to the Burj al-Arab in silence, except for the faint hum of the dragonfly in the corner. I wondered where it had come from: this was a desert country. We were near the Jebel Ali port, but they weren’t salt-water creatures.

Or were they? Now that I thought of it, we had seen one far offshore of Haiti, too, on board the Ark Royale, just before we were attacked.

…And come to think of it, I had also seen a big blue dragonfly, one very like the one currently resident in the Rolls-Royce, in that schoolroom in Colombia, only moments before the mortar attack began…