Anarchy- Another Burroughs Rice Mission Read online

  BOOKS BY

  THEO CAGE

  On the Black

  On the Black: Africa

  On the Black: Anarchy

  On the Black: Ghost City

  Tomorrow Never Knows

  Ghost of a Girl (with Toivi Smith)

  The Daredevil’s Daughter

  Kill Command

  Berzerker

  Splicer

  Crispy Critters 1&2

  Satan’s Road

  Buzzworm

  The Woman in the Trunk

  WARNING

  A good deal of this book is about hacking.

  Don’t look now, but you may be hacked as you read this ebook.

  If you downloaded this novel from one of dozens of illegal websites , and wondered how they can give books away, it’s because they’re financed by hackers who stole this ebook then enticed you to sign up for their services, then planted a virus or a backdoor in your computer.

  They might be watching or listening to you right now. Tomorrow they might be using your internet connection to attack other websites for ransom. That money could be used by terrorist groups they are affiliated with.

  The only authorized free copy of this book would be available on Amazon or LibraryThing. And only for very short periods of time.

  I’m an independent writer who depends on book sales to make a modest income. Please don’t support copyright theft.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Burroughs Rice, ex-black ops agent

  Quinten Hunter, DARPA scientist

  Master Sargent Grace Daly, Marine sniper

  Britt Johnson, ER Nurse

  The Three Sopranos:

  Wey Lee, Zerzy Zerkolazinski, Toshi Suzuki

  Richard Yang, President of Lutu Technology

  Concepcion Vargas – head of the Sinaloa cartel

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE – It Starts

  PART TWO - Search

  PART THREE - Bogie

  PART FOUR – The Ruler

  PART FIVE - Handcuffs

  PART SIX - Prisoner

  PART SEVEN - Quantum

  PART EIGHT -Bird

  PART NINE – Duty

  PART TEN - PlanB

  PART ELEVEN– The Nurse

  PART TWELVE - Rule

  “The mind is a trillion-stranded sculpture made of information, constantly changing and beautifully complicated. But nothing in it is so mysterious that it can’t in principle be copied to a different information-processing device, like a file copied from one computer to another.”

  Michael Graziano, Neuroscientist

  它开始

  I T S T A R T S

  Pacific Coast Highway

  Near Big Sur, California

  THE CAR WAS EVERYTHING HE DREAMED OF, the woman even more.

  They were gliding silently down the Pacific Coast Highway, north of LA, the Pacific Ocean’s frazzled surface reflecting a neon-bright moon.

  His baby, a new Osprey Sport EV, Corona metallic-red in color, operating in full self-driving mode, was flawlessly hugging the winding strip of black pavement that mirrored the coastline as they sped towards Big Sur.

  The woman next to him was Invicta King, the President’s daughter: the brightest person Jordan Kennedy had ever met, international chairperson for MENSA, IQ off the charts, and strikingly beautiful.

  And at this very moment, this incredible woman had her lips on his mouth, one hand on his chest, the other stroking his neck.

  He was overcome with emotion. For someone he had only met hours before, he was surprised to feel his throat tighten to the point where he could hardly breath or speak. It was like he was drowning in her. Was this love? If it was, he had never experienced anything even close to this before. Nothing.

  After all, they weren’t teenagers fondling in the back seat of his daddy’s car. She was almost thirty years old, had traveled the world, was romantically linked with a famous musician and more than a few up-and-coming politicians.

  He, on the other hand, was on the Forbes Youngest Billionaires list, not in the top fifty yet, but almost, having started a company five years ago that manufactured and designed nanorobots for medical applications.

  They were movers and shakers, media darlings, Facebook stars.

  They had met at some fundraiser; he couldn’t remember the exact cause. He was invited to so many of these occasions full of the rich and the wannabe powerful. He wore a tux, which he hated, feeling like he had been zippered into a wetsuit with wingtips. Then the cliché moment: He caught Invicta’s eye across the room and she held his gaze for more than the obligatory fraction of a second. He felt an instant buzzing in his ears. What the hell was that? He quickly lost track of the conversation he was having with a pompous Senator from Georgia obsessed with military strength in the Middle East.

  He thought it might be the champagne. How much had he drunk tonight? He didn’t know, they just kept shoving fresh refills at him, women who were poured into black dresses, slithering among the attendees with their silver trays.

  He bumped into Invicta again later in the evening, both running for the exits. She was dodging her security detail. He was bored with politics.

  “Wanna go for a ride?” was the best he could muster and to his shock, she agreed.

  Invicta worried he had too much to drink; he explained he had just bought a new electric vehicle, fully autonomous, built in the good old USA, an electronic bullet bristling with technology.

  She was like that car now, embedded in his consciousness like a bright flare that refused to dim. He loved the car. With her sitting beside him, the two of them joined, would be like performing a symphony.

  Here’s the craziest part: They had both come to the same crazy idea at the identical instant, turning to each other, her face lit by the headlights of an oncoming car, her hair incandescent, eyes like green search beams.

  The Osprey was fully self-driving; Jordan had demonstrated its capabilities to her, like he did to everyone he met, hands off the wheel, sliding around a tight turn.

  The Osprey had prodigious processing power: its many silicon brains were constantly reviewing multiple cameras and radar, thousands of times a second, comparing road imagery with detailed GPS data, oncoming objects, patterns of light, road signs, highway conditions, humidity: the list was endless. Every hundredth of a second the computers reviewed the cars location against data maps assigned to the current road. Other duties were triggered by alerts: rainfall, tire pressure changes, loud noises, signaling data from other smart vehicles on the road.

  Invicta crawled into the backseat first, partially unzipping the back of her dress to give herself more flexibility. He laughed. This was outrageous, he thought.

  “What are you worried about?” she asked. “Your precious EV unable to perform?”

  Jordan stared at the array of LED screens spread out before him. He had negotiated this road countless times, the twisted fractal logic of the California hills, although the Osprey seemed to be cruising faster than usual.

  She dared him again, her hand lightly grazing his neck. He could have sworn he saw sparks thrown off in the dark. Maybe it was just light-headedness or the champagne.

  His eyes darted from readout to readout on the display screen. Everything was as it should be. The car was a hundred times better driver than he would ever be, never wavering on a tight turn. He couldn’t remember a time when under automatic control a front wheel ever so much as kissed the shoulder for even a second, throwing up an inconvenient little cloud of gravel dust.

  The Osprey EV was perfect.

  Jordan tore off his tux, lost his necktie on the floor in the process, and wiggled over the center
console. Invicta was down on the leather back seat, her arms open, waiting for him. The smell of new leather combined with her pheromones the greatest aphrodisiac he could imagine. Maybe that accounted for the flood of emotions he was feeling. The furthest from cool. Needy. Almost at overload.

  “No need to hurry, right?” she said. “Your precious car will look after everything; I see on the screen an ETA of forty-two minutes and change?”

  Jordan nodded, staring down at her. “We should use that time wisely.”

  They kissed for the longest time, her breath tasting of champagne, before beginning to explore each other. Jordan felt the hairs on his neck tingle. A frisson of something? Was this fear or intoxication? They were going to have sex in the back of a car driving over a hundred miles an hour. His mind kept coming back to the algorithms guiding the three tons of steel and aluminum sliding down the hills at maximum speed, but she would touch him or breath something in his ear and he would be lost.

  When he came, she pulled him in and nuzzled his ear. All he heard was “That was amazing”. Her voice was full of emotion, a dialect he couldn’t immediately translate. He felt her tears on his neck. Something was happening to him; something totally new to his experience, Mr.Wordly, Mr. I’ve Been Everywhere and Seen Everything, was now a trembling child.

  Silently, the Osprey EV devoured the serpentine blacktop, the winding whip of the Pacific Coast highway coursing through Northern California, like a black hole sucking in whole planets. And the silence was hypnotic; Jordan was convinced he was witness to the soft friction of billions of air molecules sliding smoothly over the aluminum hood and sides, the vehicles massive tires hardly touching the surface of the road.

  Then he felt the change in momentum. The hiss of the tires on the roadway, as subtle as it was, had evaporated. And it felt like they were floating, rotating ever so gently in space, as if they were weightless.

  Then the car filled with a new sound: the thunder of a full orchestra exploding from a dozen speakers, a trio of male voices. His mind exploded; his eyes blasted wide open. Opera! Why is there an opera playing? And then he swore he could hear the surf below rushing up at them.

  On a tight turn, a quarter of a mile before the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, came a novel signal to the Osprey. From somewhere deep in the vehicles processing chain. A priority message. Unusual in every way. But the Osprey was essentially a high-speed robot, following instructions blindly. The command said veer sharply to the left to avoid a collision, perhaps an animal ventured onto the highway. The cameras detected nothing of the sort, but the Osprey still swerved, leapt over the smooth concrete guardrail and sailed into the night sky above the churning Pacific Ocean hundreds of feet below.

  谜

  M Y S T E R Y

  Rice Risk & Security HQ

  Fountain Hills, Arizona

  GRACE DREAMT ONE DREAM countless times, her eye pressed up against a Zeiss scope, a target standing off at such a distance that the movement of air molecules between rifle and human seemed to make the distant body quiver and squirm.

  In the dream, as in real life, she squeezed her left eye shut and squinted through her right. The shape she was focused on refused to coalesce. She could not recall who the target was, but the urgency was painfully clear: something was about to happen, something that would change her life, the lives of her friends, her family, her community, her country. She was the only one who could change history: her and her watery and unfocused eye, the vibrating barrel of her rifle, her hands slick with perspiration.

  She knew the man in the sight was miles away. Grace felt the curvature of the earth mocking her. Nothing is straight, a voice leered at her. No one can shoot a target that far away. Not with one shot.

  Grace felt her fingers knotting up. One impossible shot. Her head hurt from the calculations: the drop of the trajectory from gravity, the relentless pressure of wind against the shell. She couldn’t will the bullet to the target. No matter how hard she focused. She had tried before.

  She had never witnessed mind over matter and believed she never would.

  She resisted squeezing the trigger, the weight of the pull adjusted to precisely 2.2 pounds. The .338 Lapua Magnum bullet was born to twist out of the barrel, charge through the smoke, and after that, chaos would rule.

  An instructor once drew a formula on a whiteboard, an impossible calculation full of randomness and circles of confusion. The bullet will strike eventually. But where?

  And who was that man? A symbol really, a dark quivering shape, two arms extended, feet slightly apart, the head a blur. Impossible.

  Yet everything hinged on her and the solitary bullet once crouched in the chamber, now spinning into destiny.

  Grace woke with a headache, one of those hoary monsters that seems to fill the entire room with pain and flashing lights.

  She turned, her arm brushing Hunter’s chest, the man she shared a bed with. He felt cool to the touch as usual, seemingly lifeless. She could hear the shallow rhythm of his artificial breathing. He wore a mask when he slept: a positive ventilation respirator that made him appear more helpless and frailer than he ever would be.

  A voice rang out from the speaker on Hunter’s tracker wheelchair standing at the foot of the bed.

  “That dream again?” the disembodied voice asked.

  Hunter had lost the ability to speak years ago. He used a voice synthesizer now, controlled by an implant in his neck and shoulders. By manipulating impulses in a bundle of nerves that used to control his left hand and arm, he could assemble words and whole phrases that a computer would turn into very life-like speech.

  Hand to mouth was his explanation.

  “Why is it haunting me?” she asked.

  “Snipers regret,” answered Hunter, motionless as always.

  “Is that a professional opinion?” she asked.

  “It’s an opinion from someone who has gotten to know you. It’s the shot you never took, the target you let go.”

  “I never let a target go.”

  “Now you’re disassembling.”

  Grace sat up, her head propped on her elbow. Her skin was the color of chocolate, her head shaved clean every morning. Down to the wood as her Marine buddies used to say.

  “It’s just a dream,” she said.

  “A dream that drags you out of your sleep, drenches you in sweat, is not a triviality.”

  “Here’s what it feels like: the fate of everyone depends on a single, nearly impossible hit. The whole world, all life, you, me, our friends and family— everything disappears if I can’t take down one target.”

  “Who is it?”

  Grace laid her head back on her pillow. “I don’t know. I can’t see a face. It’s a man, average height and weight, moving slowly, like he’s reluctant or sleepy or dazed. Or drugged.”

  “Is he your enemy?”

  Grace thought for a minute, her dark eyes closed.

  “No, it feels like I know him or know of him or have seen him before. But he won't look in my direction, he’s moving away.”

  “And why not pull the trigger?”

  “I only have one bullet and the shot isn’t right. Something is wrong—the wind, the ground is moving. Everything is out of sync somehow. I—”

  “You’re troubled by the hit.”

  “What—”

  “It’s not the wind or whatever. It’s you. You’re the problem.”

  Grace looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. “You are a frightening man, Quinten Hunter.”

  Maybe an ordinary man, a man who spoke through his larynx and voice box, a man with a conventional mind might have chuckled at her observation, might have enjoyed the subtle humor of her comment: frightening man. But Hunter was not ordinary. His mind was already rushing ahead, combing through a billion bits and bytes, exploring the world’s entire digital nervous system before breakfast, while others craved a second cup of coffee or a hot shower or morning sex.

  He had an implant in his brain connecting him to the Internet,
a DARPA invention. DARPA was a division of the US Military that dreamed up crazy new ideas and then built them. Hunter contracted to DARPA part-time. When he wasn’t writing or saving the world.

  “When did your feelings change?” asked Hunter.

  “What?”

  “When did you stop feeling like a sniper?”

  “Even for you, that’s an odd question.”

  “Let it go, Grace. Next time you experience that dream, just put the rifle down. Retire your AWSM. Walk away.” The AWSM was Grace’s weapon of choice, a single-shot, bolt-action sniper rifle often used in competitions because of its accuracy. And noted for having the record for the second longest sniper kill in history. 3001 yards. Over one and a half miles. Held by Grace, of course.

  “Walk away?” she murmured, unbelieving.

  “Yes, put that part of your life behind you.”

  “I can’t do that.” Grace bit her lip, felt a heaviness in her chest pressing down on her. What was she if she wasn’t a protector, a guardian, up on the roof watching over her team?

  “One bullet won’t change the world. Or a million bullets.” Hunter was obsessed lately with some pending disaster he could see in the future. He wouldn’t say what it was. He was uncharacteristically mum on the subject. Was he giving Grace advice or telling himself to stop obsessing?

  “You want me to stand on the sidelines? Watch your apocalypse play out and do nothing?”

  There was a pause filled with the gentle sound of Hunter’s respirator. “I didn’t say that, Grace. There will be much for you to do.”

  She knew better. He meant there will be much for us to do. He just couldn’t say that at 6 AM in the morning. Or ever.

  But that was enough for her. She reached over and stroked his prosthetic hand, the surface covered in sensors that fed directly into his brain, one of the few places on his body where he could feel her touch. She tried to imagine what that might feel like but couldn’t.