Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (2 page)

Clay stiffens
when he sees the unmarked car. He prefers to be out of sight when strangers come calling, not in the open like a tool. He’s had enough contact with law enforcement to last him, though it’s been a long time since a house call. Dude gets out, studies tire tracks in the dirt, looks straight at Clay. Talks into his Bluetooth, finishing a convo Clay can’t hear. Walks up to Clay, stands close.

“Garcia, Sheriff
’s Homicide. Cicero Clay?” Waves a shield.

Clay
doesn’t blink, just looks at the guy. Makes him as mid-forties, balding, black hair, Gucci shades on a Castilian nose, leather jacket that doesn’t hide a shoulder holster. Needs a shower. Cookie-cutter example of cops Clay has known since his spotty youth.

“You can go light on the
Cicero
. What do you need?”

“You should be proud of that name.”

Clay waits.

“
That your car?” Detective is looking at Clay’s old Lexus Coupe.

“M
m.”

“Car fittin
g that description figures in an incident last night. Where were you?”

“
You get a plate? Where did this happen?”

Garcia takes a
half step closer, lowers his voice to a growl. “I’ll ask, you answer. Where the fuck were you?”

Clay can smell garlic fries the
dude had for lunch. Now he sees a guy who compensates for his lack of altitude by being tough. Doesn’t much appreciate the overdone persona, but tilts his head at the shop. “Worked on my plane until late.”

Detective
glances across the clearing to the metal building, one of the wide double doors pulled partway back, dark inside. “Anybody corroborate that?”

Clay considers. “Daughter.”

“Oh sure, Clay. Never been married, three years in state lockup, paroled two years ago, now you have a daughter? What is she, six months? Where’s the mother?”

“
Died. Daughter is nineteen.”

“
You have foster papers? She’s underage, right?”

“She’s an adult.”

“You employed Clay?”

“
My aircraft parts business.”

“Got a city business license?”

“This is the County,
Sheriff
. But you already know all these things, because you checked. Now what do you need? Got work to do.”

Garcia looks at Clay
, unmoving. Reflected in the detective’s phat sunglasses, Clay can see he needs a haircut. Detective suppresses a tired yawn by clenching his jaw tight.

“Alright. Argument last night at a bar downtown, car matching yours was followed
from the location by a black ‘85 Harley. The rider was found this morning deceased, no sign of the bike.” Garcia studies Clay for his reaction. Clay gives him nothing, waits.

“
Who was that sprinted out of here in the Mazda sedan? You threatening someone?”

Clay laughs.
“Garcia, you got any teen-agers at home?”

“That’s the underage
girl lives here, right?”

At this point a switch flips in Clay’s
mind. Mental image of twisting the detective’s head around and around until it comes loose. Sees the switch, with effort reaches through rising blood mist to turn it off. A thing he’s working on. Fits of temper counter-productive.

Clay leans down in the guy’s face.
“Know what? Either you like to needle people or your facts are fucked up. Do your homework.”

“Cicero,” Garcia says slowly, half to himself.

Clay bristles. “What?”

“
You ever read a book? It was your namesake Cicero who most influenced European literature. Should be proud.”

Clay nods,
shows nothing. The detective stands rock solid, jaw clenching, pissed that he has to look up at this white boy.

Garcia
touches the Bluetooth at his ear, looks down, intent. A buzzy electronic voice. The detective turns away distracted, pointing a finger back towards Clay as though telling him not to move. His walk accelerates as he hurries to his cruiser.

“
Jesus,” Garcia spits out. “Murder-suicide? Again?”

Christopher Strand, pacing his A-Ring Pentagon office, looks around in frustration. He can do no more than hold the phone to his ear and wait this out. A mathematician and entrepreneur who sold his first business for $15 million at age 23 and served in the U.S. Special Forces, Strand has little choice other than to shut up and take it. Tommy Kites, A&R man from his client and first investor, Fantasia Records, is streaming an uninterrupted harangue of profanity-laden demands, which orbits relentlessly around a single question.

“O
ur lead artist is dead, they say possibly murdered, along with others in her retinue, and Next History had no warning for us. How can you justify your retainer?”

Next History
, Strand’s well-funded data mining company, has on its client list, along with Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, several individual-artist accounts such as Fantasia, one major bank, a nationwide realty firm, and two hedge funds. At thirty-seven and now expert in the science and strategy of predictive data modeling, Strand’s drive is to capture and model enough Internet information to calculate future realities.

“
Tommy, Tommy. Black swan events are impossible to simulate. It was off the grid.” An irritating squawk from the phone at Strand’s ear. He knows who it is. General Solberg wants to talk. Glancing to the windows, Strand is certain what the general wants to discuss, the solitary figure that has stood motionless in the Pentagon’s central courtyard for the last hour. Nothing in Strand’s event clusters showed any hint of that abrupt arrival. Next History is zero for two on the day.

Strand
’s dark eyes make out forms of armed men on adjoining rooftops. In the corridor, alarms are going off.
Clear the building
.

“Tommy I have to go. All hell is breaking loose over here.
Evacuating the place.”

“
Chris where the hell are you?” The stress intensity of Kites’ voice like acid bile.

Strand
is not about to give up his location to a music exec, no matter that he has a dead superstar on his hands. “I’ll talk to you when we have something.”

Strand
flips to his incoming call, but the party has either hung up or bumped to voicemail. At his laptop he scans four text windows open with members of his remote staff, private contractors scattered from North Carolina to Vermont. With brisk keystrokes he invites them all into a single window.

ninj98
: setting up a neural net for her web and voice traffic

charlebois
: three confirmed sightings in the city this morning all neutral – then she went to her apartment

sami
: forget it this is off grid

stranded99
: set up new adaptive model. adjust chi-square tolerance. look for hits in prev. unclassified dataset, use k-neighbor, new induction rules

sami
: off grid boss – black swan

stranded99
: IKR sami dont give up – agree but dont stop running sims

ninj98
: wild data - no chance with genetic algorithms

sami
: and what’s with the pentagon

stranded99
: BLACKOUT ABSOLUTE. no electronic channels. f2f only until cleared by me – break –

Loud knocking on
Strand’s office door. He scans the five wall-mounted screens, reading data flows and inference vectors, looking for weird trends but there’s nothing unusual, everything tame. Wonders what are the odds, two major events the same morning, both completely silent on his event scans. A fifth monitor shows the corridor outside his office. Half an hour earlier there had been a rush of uniforms and suits in A-ring corridor, several had banged on his door. Now the view is empty save for two Pentagon Force Protective Agency uniforms that stand with his Department of Defense liaison and sometime racquetball partner, U.S. Air Force Two-Star General Ralph Solberg. Strand closes his laptop and opens the door.

Solberg
steps in with the Pentagon police, a head shorter than either of them, but with the unmistakable mark of authority from thirty years as Air Force pilot, officer, and commander. One of the uniforms speaks first.

“
Sir, on orders of General Solberg here, we must escort you from the premises. Immediately, sir, we must go now.”

Strand
looks to Solberg, who says, “We’re all leaving, Corporal, but Mr. Strand and I have matters to discuss. Kindly wait outside.”

“Sir, all respect, personnel are in danger here, we must leave at once.”

“The snipers aren’t going to miss. This glass is bulletproof. We’ll have box seats. Now, give us the office.” The two police execute a smart about-face and exit. On the monitor, Strand sees them take parade rest outside his door.

“Snipers?”

Solberg ignores the question, leans against Strand’s polished desk, resignation on his face. He’s been onsite since shortly after the lone figure appeared beside the courtyard gazebo. “Well, Chris, what have you got for me?”

Strand
shakes his head glumly. “A tree of empty pointers, Ralph. This came out of nowhere. Whoever that is down there, he’s not connected. Nobody knows him, no one misses him, no one is talking about him. He’s a blank.”

Solberg
nods. Friends with Strand since active missions over the Persian Gulf, having respect for the big-data inferences Next History has developed, Solberg is ready to believe that the courtyard appearance is an unpredictable anomaly, if Strand thinks so.

“They’re taking him out
,” Solberg says, scanning the scene below.

“
What?”

“Intrusion p
rotocol. He has failed to acknowledge or respond to spoken commands. And there’s something else. FBI ran his image through face recognition. Came up with nothing from domestic databases. Ran him against East Bloc, Interpol passport, airline check-ins. Nothing. As you say, a blank.”

Strand
looks down three stories at the perfectly-muscled figure standing motionless and relaxed. A complete nobody. Cloud cover all morning long, it’s a shadowless gray kind of day with drifting mist that could turn to rain. The intruder wears no coat, although the temperature is below 50 degrees.

“Why don’t they just go arrest him?”

Nodding, Solberg replies in a patient tone. “Tried that several times. Nobody can get within fifty yards of the guy.”

Strand
’s reply a searching look.

“There’s a wall.”

The mathematician scans the courtyard, sees nothing. “Wall? Are the corridor exits stuck?”

“Oh yah,
Chris, everything works. Police and Marines have entered the courtyard from every spoke. A few paces from the building, something stops them. One said it felt like a wall of taffy. Pentagon police have probed every inch of that courtyard. Climbed the trees. Scanned it with sonar, radar, laser light, UV, infra-red. Instruments show nothing. We think it’s a foreign agent showing off a new passive weapon. We pulled everyone back.”

“Passive weapon?”

“Force shield. Or a portal from somewhere.”

Strand
reaches powerful binocs from his desk, surveys the courtyard minutely. The sky brightens, trees cast faint shadows.

“I see nothing.”
Strand passes the binocs to Solberg.

“And we won’t.” In spite of his words,
Solberg lifts the powerful optics to the lone figure below. He’s watched the guy, commandeered a tactical room full of security monitors blanketing the courtyard, studied telephoto images from every angle. The general’s current mental stance is resigned amazement. And to himself he admits something he hesitates to speak. In all his years, Solberg has never seen such a perfect image of a fighting man. Dressed in dark slacks, polished leather shoes and a rather foppish silk shirt, the figure communicates elegant grandeur. Height estimated at six feet six inches, musculature evident through his clothing. Not the over-amped proportions of a body builder, but someone who would seem the perfect soldier, swimmer, quarterback. Or an artist’s idealized life model.

Steadying the glass
, Solberg again notes the symmetrical features. The most supremely handsome male face he can recall. Waves of perfect ash blonde hair frame the symmetrical head. A single image comes to mind:
Greek statue
.

Muzzle-
flash from a rooftop hundreds of feet away. “What a shame,” Strand says quietly. The men watch grimly, waiting for the explosion of living flesh and the inevitable collapse to the ground.

And they wait.

Nothing changes. The lone figure raises its head toward the sound, makes no other move. Long seconds tick away. On an unheard signal, rapid gunfire begins from twenty locations across the rooftops.