The rest of the Whiplash team, six men, were all with Danny. Once Boston and Sugar were in place, the two teams would move up to the north side of the warehouse. They’d plant charges on the sides, and at a signal, blow themselves a doorway.

Whiplash used a patterned explosive string that was designed to act like a can opener on a metal wall. The explosive in the device was metered and focused in a lenslike pattern that peeled down the top of the panel as it blew in.

The Whiplash team members were armed with SCARs configured either as submachine guns or as submachine guns with grenade launchers. Each wore special lightweight body armor that could resist anything up to a .50 caliber machine gun bullet at fifty yards. Their smart helmets had full face shields whose screens could provide either infrared or optical feeds from the cameras embedded at the top; the circuitry also provided some protection against sudden bright flashes—handy when using flash-bang grenades during an assault. The helmet com systems connected them with the others in the team, MY-PID, and a dedicated Whiplash com channel that connected with Room 4.

There were still only two men inside, both at the south end of the building. If they resisted, they’d be killed. If they surrendered, they’d be bound and then left after the operation—they were of no value once Whiplash had the UAV.

Danny flexed his fingers, waiting for Boston to check in. The air felt cold, even though it was well into the fifties. His stomach started to churn—that always seemed to happen lately, the acid building right before the action.

“I have someone moving inside the building,” said Turk, watching from above in the Tigershark. “Uh, going to the north, maybe that front door.”

“What’s up with Building Two?” asked Danny quickly, asking about the nearest building, which was roughly seventy yards away, diagonally across the road.

“No movement. Guy is definitely heading for the door in Target Building.”

“Copy,” said Danny. “Boston? Sugar?”

“Yeah, I copy,” said Sugar. She was huffing, obviously running to get in position. “Hang on.”

“Subject at the door,” said Turk.

Danny switched his view to an overhead feed from the Tigershark. He could see Sugar moving up to take the man when he came out, Boston covering her nearby.

“Team, get ready,” he told the others. “You hear a gunshot, move in. Blow the panels and go.”

“Subject is outside,” said Turk.

The circuit was silent. Danny waited, acid eating at his stomach. The Tigershark, orbiting to the north, lost sight of the front of the building.

“Down,” huffed Sugar finally. “He’s down. I bashed him on the back of his head. Went down like a bowling pin.”

“Truss him and drag him away from the building,” said Danny. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

More waiting. The acid started creeping up toward his windpipe.

“I’m good,” she said finally.

“We’re good, boss,” added Boston. “Go for it. We got your back.”

“Teams up,” said Danny. “MY-PID—what’s the other tango inside the target building doing?”

“Subject is immobile. Appears to be sleeping.”

The explosives were set. The team backed away, just far enough to stay clear of the blast.

“On three,” said Danny, reflux biting at the back of his mouth. “One, two . . .”

Chapter 11

Room 4, CIA Campus

Jonathon Reid pushed the sheaf of papers across the conference table toward Ray Rubeo.

“This is the white paper,” Reid said. “Is the program discussed here feasible?”

Rubeo frowned.

Perhaps it was because of the hour, Reid thought. It was not yet 5:00 A.M. But Rubeo himself had suggested the time.

The scientist always frowned. In fact, he seemed to be in a perpetual bad mood. He was a genius—his track record at Dreamland alone was proof—but he was a sourpuss even so. He gave the impression that he walked around in a different universe than mortal men. When he spoke to someone, it was as if he was coming down from Mount Olympus. How he had ever managed to get along with the Air Force command, let alone the bureaucracy of the Defense Department, was unfathomable.

Rubeo’s company was one of the Office of Special Technology’s main contractors, and among other things was responsible for building the highly secure facility they were sitting in. Rubeo had enormous influence at the Pentagon, but how he managed to deal with the generals there without being knifed—literally—Reid would never know.

The scientist turned the paper around and looked at the title. He frowned again. He turned over a page, looking at the names of the authors.

The frown deepened.

He turned over another page, reading a sentence or two of the executive summary, then flipped into the body of the paper, seemingly at random.

The frown seemed to reach to his chin.

Rubeo turned to the references at the back.

“It would have been nice if they had at least got the citations right.” He pushed the paper back toward Reid.

“So your opinion?” asked Reid.

“About the paper? Or the possibility of the program you’re referring to?”

“The latter, Doctor.”

“Of course it’s feasible,” said Rubeo. “The individual elements are trivial. The main difficulty is designing a tool that can interface with unknown control systems.”

“Layman’s terms?”

“Hmmmph.” Rubeo took hold of his earlobe, as if pulling it might turn a lever inside his brain that allowed him to speak in plain English. “The difficulty is re-creating in software the flexibility of the human mind, and at the same time enabling that software to use the benefits of its computing power.”

Rubeo paused. Translating his thoughts seemed several times more difficult than working out a complex mathematic problem for him.

“A man can drive a car,” he continued. “He can fly an aircraft. He can shoot a gun. He can fire a missile. The same man can do all this. If you have the right man. If he has the proper training. His software, if you will, is designed precisely for this function. To duplicate that is not a trivial matter.”

“Can we duplicate it?”

“Of course. The question is whether it’s worth the effort. And, as these authors point out—somewhat sloppily, I might say—whether it’s worth the risk.”

“Is it?”

Rubeo reached for his coffee cup. It was filled with hot water—probably some sort of health fad, though Reid didn’t ask.

“Why is this important?” Rubeo asked after a small, birdlike sip.

“I’m not sure I can tell you. I don’t know all the facts yet either.”

The frown became a smirk.

“Doctor, have you worked on a program similar to this?” Reid asked.

“I’m not sure you understand, Mr. Reid. The ultimate goal of any advanced artificial intelligence regime implies this ability. Creating an autonomous intelligence in and of itself implies that you have mastered the prerequisites for this. A program that can learn to fly an airplane can learn to do other things.”

“So the program used to guide the Flighthawks could do this?”

Rubeo raised his right hand to his face, running his index finger along his eyebrows. It almost seemed to Reid that he was underlining some thought behind his cranium.

“Of course not,” said Rubeo finally. “Those codes are strictly limited. There are difficulties with propagating the intelligence in an autonomous manner such as what’s laid out here. I don’t want to get too technical for you, and you’ll excuse me, as I don’t intend to insult you, but there has to be a certain amount of space for the program to function. Constraining it—well, it might work, but not as intended.”