Kill Decision(120)

“Evening, Mr. Clarke.”

Clarke nodded as he passed the buff Latino and his female colleague in navy blazers.

“Should I turn on the lights for twenty-two?”

“Don’t bother. I like the darkness.”

Clarke nodded to them as the elevator arrived, and he tapped the button for the top floor. In a few moments he was moving through the lobby of his company’s full-floor office. The full floor wasn’t necessary, but then, they had lots of subtenants who didn’t want nameplates and addresses of their own. It was hard to say what any of them did, but none were here at the moment. The place was deserted.

Although it was originally Marta’s idea, Clarke had started to enjoy coming in to the office in the wee hours. It was relaxing not having his phone constantly ringing. Instead he was issuing most of the messages without having to deal with real-time responses.

He drew a key card out of his pocket and unlocked his office door with a muted bleep-bleep. Tossing his leather satchel onto the sofa, he moved across the large corner office in the dim emergency lighting. There along the far wall was his favorite piece of art—a slab of cut blue-green glass six feet wide, four feet tall, and one inch thick on a three-foot-tall granite pedestal. Projected into the heart of the glass by an ingenious arrangement of blue, white, and red lasers and spinning mirrors was a map of the world, onto which was projected the current “mood” of every continent as derived from word forms flowing through the public Internet—data from Web search queries, blogs, social media entries, Wikipedia edits, news articles, and on and on. Tag clouds of the ten most common words and phrases flowing through the veins of the Net filled the boundaries of each continent. Positive words such as hope and great were depicted in blue, neutral words in white, and negative words in red. Even as he watched, large red letters for attack seemed to encompass half of North America. He could spend hours watching the mood of the world shift and spread like a lava lamp of news. When the Japanese earthquake and tsunami occurred, he had seen the red data race across the globe faster than the actual shock waves.

The artful device had cost him two hundred and ninety thousand dollars, but he would have paid double. With it, the moment anything happened in the world, he knew. It was his personal crystal ball. Nothing could surprise him as long as he gazed into its depths.

“A fascinating piece,” a voice spoke from behind him.

Clarke spun in alarm toward a darkened corner where his reading chair stood.

“I saw something like it in Germany. Except it wasn’t so beautiful.”

“What the hell? Who are you? How did you get in here?” Clarke started edging toward his desk and his phone.

“Looking for this?” The man tossed Clarke’s desk phone into the center of the room, where it clattered to a stop. A tail of severed cord trailed from it. “Don’t reach for your cell phone either. You wouldn’t live to dial.”

“What are you doing in here? Do you have any idea how serious . . .” Clarke was still backing up as an intimidating man with cold blue-gray eyes emerged into a shaft of light. The intruder was dressed in a white plastic smock with rubber gloves and plastic booties. A six-inch killing knife held firmly in one gloved hand. “Oh, God.”

“Surely you knew there would be consequences for what you’re doing?”

Clarke looked around and considered shouting for help.

“Go ahead. No one can hear. I imagine that’s the whole point of this place.”

Clarke bumped into the edge of his desk. “I don’t know who you’re working for, but I can pay you more.”

“I’m not here for money. What I want is information.”

“I’ll tell you everything I know. No problem.”

“Your firm is part of a private intelligence-gathering operation. One designed to detect and neutralize opposition to your clients’ enterprises. Correct?”

Clarke struggled to find words. It was a familiar-sounding process but with an entirely different emphasis. “Wait, wait. We gather information from legal sources. We market ideas. We predict likely scenarios—what we do is simple business intelligence.”

The man stared. “You’re a propagandist, Mr. Clarke, and personally, I don’t give a shit how you rationalize it in the wee hours of the night. What I want to know is who hired you to push autonomous drones.”

Clarke was at a loss. “Is that what this is about?”

“Who hired you?”

“Surely you—”

“We could breach your network, examine your banking transactions, trace payments to and from offshore shell companies—but frankly, fuck that. I don’t have the patience. It’s three times now that some asshole has tried to kill me with a drone strike, and I’m ready to start sending back severed heads. And unless you tell me something I don’t already know, I’m gonna start with yours.”