Terminal Run

Dr. Frederick Wang walked uncertainly down the steps of the private jet that had whisked him from his Denver home to Rayong, Thailand. He shook the hand of the large Thai driver and climbed into the Rolls-Royce. He had never even seen a car like this, much less ridden in one. It had been a terrible week, but this turn of events was so strange that he wasn’t sure he could call it fortunate. Ten days ago Wang had been summoned from the DynaCorp artificial intelligence lab in the Denver Tech Center to the downtown office, escorted by a mean-looking security guard. He was hustled into the vice president’s office, told his security clearance had been pulled, and that they would pack his personal belongings for him. Wang had signed a restrictive employment agreement when he had come to work for DynaCorp, one that disallowed lawsuits on the basis of compromising secrets that were vital to national security. In exchange, the agreement indicated that he could be fired for reasons that DynaCorp did not have to disclose. At least he received a year’s severance pay, but the withdrawal of his security clearance meant he could not obtain another defense contracting job, and there was nowhere he could work in the private sector that had anything like the funding he’d had at the DynaCorp Denver lab. That assumed he could get hired by a private corporation after losing the security clearance.

The reason they had fired him was that he was second generation Chinese and he spent hours on the phone with his immediate family in Beijing, and DynaCorp suspected his loyalty. It was a miserable situation, but there seemed little he could do about it. He was out of a job and expected to be out of his field as well. He was too depressed to try to plan ahead, and had despondently wandered around his house, unable to concentrate. When the phone rang, he considered not answering it, but the code read that the call had come from Thailand, and he was curious. The large man on the video display had spoken words for several minutes, but it was not the words that had intrigued Wang, it had been his manner — warm and accepting, the way DynaCorp executives used to be toward him back in the days when he was their most brilliant AI engineer.

The man’s name was Sergio, and he wanted to interview Wang. The job he had in mind required a considerable amount of travel, which would be perfect for Wang — he wanted to get away from Denver and the DynaCorp memories. He told Wang that a car would be waiting for him in an hour. The car had arrived, a sleek black stretch Mercedes limo, and had taken him to Denver International, driving through the security fence right to the open door of a swept-wing supersonic private jet. A beautiful Chinese flight attendant had served him dinner and drinks on the plane. He had slept, awakening as the jet’s wheels thumped on the Rayong runway.

An hour later he was in an opulent beach house on the sand in Pattaya, Thailand, talking to Sergio in person, and his partner, a polished and encouraging executive named Victor Krivak. The talk seemed less an interview than the first day of work. Finally, Sergio simply asked him if he would come to work for them at United Electrics, and if a starting salary of five million U.S. dollars a year would be adequate — with a bonus on earnings to go with it, of course, Sergio had added, as if the salary alone might be inadequate. The only catch was that United Electrics would be, as Sergio cautiously put it, “interfering” with the American military using Wang’s extraordinary credentials. If Wang could do that without qualms, he could have the job as a senior director of AI technology.

Wang took less than a heartbeat to think about it. His father had come to America and worked in a convenience store in East Los Angeles, getting beaten up and robbed in a city rife with crime, scraping and saving so Wang could go to college. At Cal Tech Wang was a perpetual outsider, as he had often seemed at DynaCorp. There had been nothing but work in Wang’s life, and when he had been terminated, there was little allegiance for America left in him. The thought of working for men who were adversaries to the people who had rejected him had a certain appeal. And as Wang now knew, when his small severance salary ran out, he could be working in a convenience store himself.