Mind's Eye (15 page)

“Well, then it seems to me that you can’t be the prototype with this technology. Otherwise, they would be trying to catch you rather than kill you. To study you. If they knew about the ESP, they’d want to take you alive as well.”

“Exactly what I’ve been thinking.”

“If you
were
the prototype, the question wouldn’t be who would want to grab you for study. The question would be, who
wouldn’t?
Every industrialist and every corporation on earth, not to mention the government and military of every country on earth, would want you desperately. The industrialists because the technology behind your web surfing abilities would be worth trillions of dollars. And governments and militaries because of the huge advantages this technology would give them. And if the Internet capability alone is enormously valuable, combining this with ESP is
unstoppable
. You could be a one-man army. A one-man force of nature.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I don’t think you’ve fully grasped the possibilities,” said Megan. “Which is a good thing. I think if you really were a power mad asshole, you’d have done so right away. But think about what you can do. Forget about ESP for a second. While you’re sitting here sipping your Mountain Dew and talking, you could be booking a flight, calling a cab, communicating with multiple people, transferring funds, trading stocks. You get the idea. And anyone with your implants gets an unlimited knowledge boost. You have instant access to trillions of pages of information. You can obtain instant biographical information on anyone you meet, the way you did with me. And the more powerful the person, the more information is online. Plus, you can turn the cloud into your virtual memory, storing anything you want to remember there. Like the train and bus schedules from last night.”

Hall nodded. “And if this technology can convert video and audio into vision and hearing without the use of my eyes or ears, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to go the
other way
. To convert my vision into
video
. If so, I could record anything I’m seeing and hearing and save it in the cloud.” His expression reflected awe and fear at the possibilities inherent in the technology.

She stared at him thoughtfully. “It looks like I haven’t fully grasped the possibilities either.”

“They are pretty staggering,” he said. “And sobering.”

“And I think we’re only scratching the surface. Let’s think about special forces soldiers with your implants. They can access any information they need in real time, without anyone knowing they’re doing it. Maps, floor plans for raids, what have you. They can access language translation programs to convert signs and conversations to English for them. You think that might be helpful? They can communicate to each other without anyone knowing it. Their ability to use stealth and deception would increase dramatically. A soldier with these implants could go into a war zone pretending to be with the Red Cross, and while helping to move rubble and not outwardly in communication with anyone, could be deploying entire teams of soldiers. Anyone with implants could direct drones, call in air strikes, and paint targets—not with bulky lasers—but with their
eyes
, while they’re having tea and crumpets and engaging in polite conversation.”

“And
with
ESP in the picture?”

“Then all bets are off,” replied Megan. “You could get every intimate secret of every billionaire and politician—and believe me, most of them have
lots
of secrets. You could probably find enough to get many of them thrown in jail, even if it’s as relatively minor an offense as cheating on taxes or insider trading. But even if not, I’d bet, at minimum, they have secrets that could embarrass the hell out of them. So you could blackmail the most powerful men in the world. Or you could fish through the mind of the NSA’s top programmer for backdoor access codes to their computers, and have access to unparalleled records, phone conversations, and intelligence from around the world.”

Megan paused for a drink of water and then continued. “Cheating at poker to win a few thousand dollars is like an adorable schoolyard prank compared to what you could do. You could read the minds of CEOs to get insider information for stock trading. Read combinations to wall safes, the same way you read the combination to deactivate the alarm to this house.”

Hall was staring off into space now, pondering the possibilities. “And that’s not all,” he said softly. “I could be the ultimate identity thief. I could go to a charity event filled with rich people and read their account numbers, passwords, their mothers’ maiden names—the works. I could be dining on expensive lobster while raiding their accounts, transferring their money to accounts I set up in the Caymans, and wiring money to a team of mercenaries to take over a Pacific Island for my own personal use.”

“Why stop with individuals, even if they are super rich. You could get into corporate accounts.
Government
accounts.”

Hall whistled. “You’re right about this. I never thought through the angles. And I’m sure there’s a lot we’re still missing. Right now, I’ve been a hunted animal. Running blindly and barely staying ahead of the dogs. But if I could get off the mat, get my bearings . . .”

“Now you’re getting the picture.”

“Yeah. I could be pretty formidable. With a little time to set myself up in some hidden evil lair and gather my minions around me, I could be . . . Well, I could be— ”

“A veritable one-man army,” Megan finished for him. “You could give
Superman
a run for his money.”

Hall grinned. “He’d still kick my ass in a fight, though.”

“Maybe. But you could rob him blind, learn his secret identity as Clark, and call in an air strike on him.” She raised her eyebrows. “Kryptonite-laced missiles?”

Hall laughed, and then excused himself to make use of one of the Glandons’ bathrooms. His expression was somber when he returned. “Now I know why someone might choose to kill me rather than capture me. I’m potentially very dangerous. But you have to wonder if I’m
already
the bad guy here. What if I
did
set up an evil lair somewhere and the men after me—at least the people pulling their strings—are trying to stop me for noble reasons. Like if the Joker wakes up one day without a memory and wonders why this evil Batman dude is trying so hard to kill an innocent guy like him.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” said Megan, shaking her head vigorously.

Hall looked unconvinced. “Why not?”

“You’d make the worst supervillain
ever
,” she said. “You don’t know anything about weapons. You risked your life to save someone you didn’t know. And while fighting for survival, you’re determined to repay a few hundred dollars to some paramedics as soon as you can.”

Hall sighed. “I hope you’re right,” he said. “You have no idea how much I hope you’re right.”

Megan had meant what she had told him earlier. She really did believe that when all was said and done, only experience with a person could give you a sense of their spirit—their values, their dreams, their demeanor, and their sense of humor. And she had already gotten a strong sense of Hall’s spirit. So much so that she was willing to bet her life that he wasn’t the bad guy in these proceedings.

She swallowed hard as she realized that she couldn’t bet her life on this.

Because she already had.

17

Colonel Justin Girdler entered his office, as he did on most Saturday mornings. And Sunday mornings as well. He was in the middle of more important projects than he could manage in two lifetimes, but he guessed this went with the territory.

The colonel had been head of PsyOps for six years before being asked a year earlier to do the same from the Black Ops side of things, which he supposed suggested a certain level of trust in his judgment.

He had to admit it was a great change of pace. The projects were more interesting, on the whole, and his power was virtually unlimited. Being completely off the radar did have its advantages. First and foremost among these was not having to suffer the ridicule he knew many poorly informed members of the military heaped on him and his unit behind his back.

PsyOps used to have a glamor to it. An intimidating, nefarious connotation. You really couldn’t find a cooler sounding name, even though many of its responsibilities were pretty mundane. It stood for Psychological Operations, under the purview of special forces. It dealt in deception and mob psychology, among other things, to sow dissension in the ranks of the enemy, lower morale, and exploit psychological weaknesses, although he had heard the term “mind fuck” used in conjunction with his group on more than one occasion.

The great Chinese strategist and tactician Sun Tzu had probably been the father of PsyOps, and Girdler had made everyone in his command memorize what he believed to be a central tenant of PsyOps, written by Sun Tzu thousands of years earlier:

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; and when far away, we must make him believe we are near
.

And even though fictional, the Greek’s use of a wooden horse to breach an enemy’s defenses was a striking example of the power of a simple PsyOps mission; one that had ended the ten-year siege of Troy.

In popular culture, psi, with an “i,” stood for psychic phenomenon. It stood for the paranormal. For
para
psychology. Psy with a “y,” on the other hand, was just plain old
psychology
. PsyOps: Psychological Operations.

Yet many had come to believe the military spelled its
Psy
with an “i,” especially after the turn of the century when the organization had been painted as a bunch of loons, helped along by books and movies such as
The Men Who Stare At Goats
. This movie may have been the single biggest public relations blow PsyOps had ever been dealt, and had the military of a hostile country wanted to conduct their own PsyOps mission to hurt the standing of America’s PsyOps branch, they could not have done a more impressive job than releasing this film.

So in 2010, PsyOps had been renamed, for the
stated
reasons of making the name more user friendly, more descriptive, and less intimidating at home and abroad. The group officially became Military Information Support Operations, or MISO—and jokes about Japanese soup abounded—although, after all this time, the new name still hadn’t been fully adopted, since PsyOps personnel tended to hate it.

Colonel Girdler had disliked the name change as well. But having been high up in the organization at the time, though not quite yet its head, he had to publicly pretend otherwise, something he had detested. He and his group found ways to exploit the political nature of those they opposed on the world stage, but he personally hated politics. Which was one of the reasons moving over to Black Ops had been so appealing. The less accountability, the fewer political games that needed to be played.

He was sipping his second cup of coffee at his desk, having spent the first several hours of the morning with his nose buried in printed briefings, when Maggie, his PDA, interrupted him. “Colonel Girdler, you’ve been forwarded an eyes-only e-mail message, marked urgent. Please acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged,” said Girdler. “Forwarded by whom?”

“No human has seen this message yet, Colonel,” replied Maggie’s flawless female voice pleasantly, “so there is no
whom
. But there is a
what
. It was forwarded by the NSA’s Expert System in Fort Meade.”

“Very interesting,” mumbled the colonel to himself. “Did Nessie forward it to anyone else?”

“NSA’s Expert System forwarded it to you as the primary recipient,” replied his PDA, her programming not allowing her to use the computer’s nickname unless Girdler instructed her to do so. “Major General Nelson Sobol was cc’d. No one else received it.”

This was unusual, thought Girdler. Nessie had obviously intercepted the original message and decided to limit the group who received it to only two people, him and Sobol. Nelson Sobol was his boss, although Girdler rarely reported to him and functioned almost entirely autonomously. But Sobol was technically in charge of all American Black Ops units around the globe, and while his job didn’t officially exist, only a handful of people on earth wielded as much power as he did.

“So when you said no human has seen the message, you just meant that Sobol hasn’t read it yet?”

“Correct, General Sobol has yet to acknowledge receipt. And given that he is at his annual three-day retreat with high-ranking members of Congress and the military, this status may not soon change.”

The colonel smiled, reflecting once again how lucky he was. Sobol could have his power, but Girdler would rather have acid poured in his eyes than attend a retreat like the one his boss was at now.