Terminal Run

“Wang. Did you see the way he talked about these creations? His eyes lit up. These computers are like his children. He’s glad for the chance to manipulate them, almost like a parent relishing meddling in his child’s life, but the minute you put the idea of a unit’s death on the table, he’ll pull away from us.”

Victor thought for some time. “Then we must hide that from him.”

The Falcon took off out of Bangkok and made a long trip, stopping once for fuel in what Wang judged to be South Africa. They took off again, leaving the sun behind them, and eventually landed in Sao Paulo, four hundred clicks west of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The hired limo brought them farther west, into breathtaking countryside, eventually stopping at the entrance to a prison.

“Wait here,” Krivak commanded Wang. “Amorn, you have the cash?”

“Yes, sir. In the suitcase, blocks of a hundred thousand in hundred-dollar U.S. bills. All two million.”

“Bring it in for me. It’s too heavy.”

Amorn followed Krivak into the prison, Wang wondering what this errand was about. After an hour he and Amorn returned without the suitcase, a youth in his early twenties following them, still wearing his orange prison coveralls, a frightened look on his face. Confusion rippled across his features as he saw the shiny black limo.

“Dr. Wang, meet Pedro Meringe.”

“Mr. Meringe,” Wang said.

“Call me Pedro,” the boy said in perfect English.

The limo took them to a hotel in Serocaba, where Krivak directed the young man to shower and change into fresh clothes. He still looked young in the expensive Italian suit. Amorn took Pedro to a restaurant, while Krivak leaned against the outside wall and lit a cigarette.

“Who is the prisoner?”

“You really don’t know who he is, do you? He’s the kid who shut down the Pentagon’s orbital servers last Christmas. There was a global legal fight to extradite him to the U.S.” but Brazil insisted on his sentence being carried out on their soil.”

“So the two million? Bail?”

“For the next twenty years he’ll make roll call. Then the prison will release someone who looks like him. In the meantime he works for us.”

11

The USS John Paul Jones labored through twenty-foot seas and forty-five-knot winds, the gales rising to fifty-five knots. Although she was larger than the Sears tower laid on its side, displacing over a hundred twenty thousand tons as one of the largest aircraft carriers built in the history of the world, she could barely be seen five hundred yards away with her running lights dark.

The carrier battle group lumbered slowly west-southwest in the Philippine Sea, a day’s sailing time from the Celebes Sea south of the Philippine Islands, which was another day from the Strait of Malacca and the entrance to the Indian Ocean. The ships of the force were far over the horizon from each other, outside of radar range — which was useless to them anyway, because the operation order required all surface search radars to be shut down to avoid the detection of the oncoming battle group through electronic means. Unfortunately, that also applied to air-search radars, leaving the battle group vulnerable to air attack, although the new high-resolution radar and thermal-imaging surveillance satellites would supposedly alert them to an incoming attack aircraft, assuming the Internet Email connection functioned and they could authenticate the message fast enough. The storm was a godsend, as it made flight operations impossible, not just for the John Paul Jones, but for the adversary as well.