The Alignment Ingress by Thomas Greanias Read Free Book Online Page B

him warmly. “We could just say you decided to make yourself useful.”
    “Thanks, I’ll think about it,” Rosier replied with a cough. “Have you picked up any more about those mysterious watchers?”
    Hank paused for a moment to get his story straight. He liked to keep his work with the military in Afghanistan and his work with Niantic in Switzerland separate. General Montgomery knew about Niantic and about XM, because Hank owed him that much. But Montgomery didn’t know everything, because Hank owed Calvin and Niantic his silence. He knew he was serving two masters, and they both knew it too, but nobody talked about it. And anything to do with IQTech was a tangled web indeed.
    This story was for Niantic.
    Hank said, “Only some Slavic and Chinese chatter. No physical evidence. I’m thinking they’re mercenaries now, not nationals. Hard to say. The infrared satellite images I got on the mystery man in the jungle are smudged. Maybe it was the night, but I suspect it was XM interference. All the indicators here are the same as in Afghanistan-- smudged shots, GPS anomalies, distortions, guardians and, yes, metals, if that’s what you want to know for ADA, Calvin and gang.”
    Rosier nodded, sipping his coffee. The kid was coming around and seemed grateful that Hank had entrusted him with this latest info to relay back to Niantic.
    Now Hank was waiting to see if the kid would return the favor.
    “There’s something you should know,” Rosier finally said. “Something bad happened at the Niantic Project Facility a few days after you—after we—left.”
    Hank said, “Doctor Lynton-Wolfe’s Power Cube experiment?”
    Rosier nodded.
    “How bad?”
    “They told me everything kind of blew up. There was a massive XM event and things went weird. The CERN facility was put on lockdown. You know Devra Bogdanovich and Roland Jarvis?”
    Of course he knew them. “What happened?”
    “Jarvis was killed and Bogdanovich took off on the same train you did—we did—from Geneva.”
    “And?”
    “She got whacked on arrival at the train station in Zurich. Well, at least we thought Bogdanovich got whacked. Turned out to be somebody else dressed like her.”
    “So she’s still alive?”
    “We think so.”
    The whole story was a leaky bag to Hank. “Women don’t just dress themselves up to look like Devra Bogdanovich only to be knocked off at train stations by hit men, Rosier. Somebody set that up.”
    “The obvious suspect is Bogdanovich herself, but even then she couldn’t have acted alone,” Rosier said. “Those security agents didn’t ace two people because they felt like it. They must have had kill orders. Those orders came from up high. Who could issue them?”
    “Not Phillips,” Hank said, starting with his mental list of Niantic suspects back in Geneva. “And probably not Calvin, whom I suppose you’ve been conversing with all these days from your little treehouse.”
    “No, sir! Of course not. It couldn’t be Calvin. Could it?”
    Poor kid. “Relax, Rosier. Can’t say for sure, but it’s not his style. The kill orders had to come from somewhere else upstairs at the NIA.”
    “Like Ni?” Rosier asked, offering up another name.
    “Who the hell knows?”
    That left another suspect that Hank didn’t want to discuss with Rosier, if only because she could be listening in somehow.
    ADA: A Detection Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence so good that she had passed the Turing test. If you were to talk to her on the phone, you would not have known she wasn’t human.
    She has the wherewithal to initiate a kill order, but does she have the will?
    Hank remembered a high-end geek conversation at Niantic about ADA’s rules of engagement. She had been coded to protect the Niantic Project and, certainly in some of the infrastructural security protocols, had the ability to make life-or-death decisions.
    Had ADA issued the order?
    She wasn’t dangerous, supposedly. At least that’s what Bowles, head of non-human