Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“What do you mean you don’t know who it’s from?” Cohen asked the desperately nervous kid who showed up at the door of his suite to tell him about it. “Has security checked it?”

“Yes. Er. I really…perhaps you’d better come see for yourself.”

Gavi noticed with a first shiver of foreboding that the scared youngster was no mere bellhop. Someone had seen fit to draft management to deliver this particular package.

“Should I come with you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cohen said.

They both knew he would have argued in normal circumstances.

The package—a gift box, actually, wrapped in rather tasteful gold foil and bound up with a red satin ribbon—was sitting on the head security officer’s desk in the middle of a sea of nervous uniforms.

Cohen went over to the desk, peered at it for a moment, standing completely still, and slumped limply into the nearest chair.

Gavi realized no one was taking the slightest notice of him, and stepped close enough to see over the top of the wrapping paper and into the box’s interior.

The box was lined with more gold foil, as if whoever packed it had considered its contents fragile and in need of extra padding. It took Gavi some time to see what the object carefully nested in the golden foil actually was. Part of the trouble was the normal difficulty of recognizing even the most familiar objects seen out of context. But mostly it was the glistening, razor-sharp halo of ceramsteel filament that veiled the object. It was only the smell that finally roused his old battlefield memories and made him retch reflexively.

“Is it Li’s?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cohen said dully. He was jackknifed over in the chair, his face buried in his hands, but he spoke with the same crisp, elegant precision Gavi had heard from the lips of a dozen different faces.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s the left hand, the one with the Schengen implant. Now do you trust her?”

When he left Cohen, Gavi walked halfway across town, then doubled back toward the Old City. He passed through the Damascus Gate into the International Zone at eight minutes to two, carefully avoiding the telltale times of the hour, and the half hour and the quarter hour.

Then he began to wander aimlessly, trying to mimic an idling, strolling interest in his surroundings that he was very far from feeling.

He kept clear of passersby and kept a sharp eye on his pockets. More than one courier had ducked into the crowded alleys of the Old City to shake a tail, only to find that he’d lost his package to a stray pickpocket. And though Gavi wasn’t nearly foolish enough to be carrying anything incriminating, he didn’t need the aggravation of a lost wallet and a futile attempt to explain to the Foreign Legion gatekeepers that he was an Israeli citizen and not simply one more in the endless flood of paperless anonymous Arab males caught up in the International Zone’s endlessly repeating bureaucratic feedback loops.

It took a lot of practice to make a convincing show of just stumbling on a place. In this case, the rendezvous was located in a run-down café in the Arab Quarter. Gavi walked in, looked around, took a seat at a back table, and downed three cups of strong black coffee, ordering a new one every time the waiter started to look impatient with him.

He was making a hash of it, of course. He should have done his business and left after the first cup. He knew he was attracting attention. He knew that attracting attention, any kind of attention at all, was a major failing in tradecraft. But still he sat there, sipping the execrable coffee, gripped by an indecision more savage than any he could remember in a long career fraught with life-and-death decisions.

Cohen’s certainty about Li shook him. The whole conversation had shaken him. Every minute of every day since Osnat and Arkady had fetched up on his doorstep four days ago had shaken him.

The waiter was staring at him, he realized, examining him surreptitiously. His field instincts began to sound the old alerts, but then he saw the sickened and fascinated look on the man’s face and realized that it wasn’t his presence that the man was concerned with but his leg’s absence.

Pretty is as pretty does, my friend.

How many millions of times had his mother told him that when he was growing up? She’d been terrified, old kibbutznik that she was, that her too-pretty boy would grow up to be one of the frivolous and useless people she so despised. And he’d internalized the message, just as he’d internalized her ardently idealistic Zionism. He’d fallen in love with and married a woman who was intelligent and cultured but by no stretch of the imagination beautiful. And he’d always faintly despised the people who would glance back and forth between them on the first meeting, toting up the all-too-obvious aesthetic calculus and wondering: Why him? Why her?

Arithmetic of the body, he’d called it. Implying (God, how egotistical he’d been!) that he cared only for the arithmetic of the soul.

But now he was doing that same arithmetic in reverse. Hanging on Osnat’s faintest nod or smile. Watching the eyes that were so wary when she spoke to him, and the strong hands that were so carefully impersonal when she so much as passed a plate to him. Inventorying his broken body and his broken reputation, and wondering what he could possibly offer to a woman whose body and honor were so vibrantly whole.

He had to get her out of his home and out of this operation. If there’d been any question about that, his demeaning little tantrum of the other night had answered it. He was acting like an idiot. And he was too old and shopworn for the young-pup-in-love routine to be anything but ridiculous.

He got up, paid, and asked for the bathroom in Arabic.

“The toilet’s plugged,” he said when he came back. “Can I make a local call before you call the plumber, though?”

The waiter was gray, middle-aged, nondescript. But when their eyes met for a moment across the counter Gavi had a sudden uncomfortable intuition that this was a man who was far too smart to be waiting tables.

“I’m not supposed to…” But the man was already setting the terminal on the scratched bartop.

Gavi rang up the number, waited for two rings, then hung up. “No one home,” he said before leaving. “But thanks anyway.”

Two hours later he was climbing the steps of a grimy, narrow-fronted apartment building on Ibn Batuta Street.

He rang the bell, waited while unseen eyes inspected him and unseen fingers buzzed him in.

A young man waited for him in the shadows behind the door. He looked like a Yeshiva student, except for the aura of cold-blooded confidence that even the thick glasses couldn’t completely camouflage. Gavi raised his arms and leaned against the wall and submitted to the search that was never quite perfunctory enough to be a mere formality. Then he climbed the steep stairs to the third floor and stepped into the familiar room and closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.

“Hello, Gavi,” said the man in the armchair.

Gavi looked into the sad eyes of the man he loved and hated more than he’d ever loved or hated his own gently distant father.

“Hello, Didi.”

Short and sweet and rare. That was how Didi liked to keep their meetings.

“It’s difficult to live a double life,” he’d said the first time they’d sat together in this room. “It’s terribly tempting to begin to rely on your control for emotional support, even for simple relief from the loneliness. But every meeting is a fresh chance to buy yourself a bullet in the head. So when you walk out of here, this room must no longer exist for you. Imust no longer exist for you. The less we disturb the unity of the life we wish you to lead, the less we risk revealing ourselves.”

Now Didi just looked at him, smiling.

“How are you, Gavi?”

Gavi stood, knowing he should sit down but too nervous to do it. “How are the girls?” he asked, forcing himself to take a genuine interest, repressing the surge of resentment that flooded through him whenever he was faced with the offensive and depressing fact of other people’s children.

“They’re fine, Gavi. You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

Didi’s eyes rested gently on him, but was it the concern of an old friend or just the cool professionalism of a katsaassessing the condition of a valuable resource? And why, after two years of this, was Gavi still asking himself that question?

“You know about Li?”

“I just heard.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet.”

“Your mole hunt’s getting ugly, Didi. Has it occurred to you that Li’s…wherever she is because someone took one of your barium meals too much to heart?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“That’s all? It just crossed your mind? Like the weather report?”

“I have a job to do.”

“That’s pretty cold, Didi. Even for you.”

“If it makes you feel better to make me the heavy, go ahead.”

Gavi dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples. “Sorry. What about this Maracaibo bar bombing, then? Any news on that?”

“The boys are working on it.”

“Osnat said there were people from the Office there. She brought Arkady to me because she decided she couldn’t trust anyone else. You included. She brought him through the Line on nothing but guts and shoe leather. Crazy. Only a lunatic would try it.”

“She’s a little hotheaded,” Didi agreed, “but she’s a good girl.”

“Can I trust her?”

“It’s not like you to ask that. The Gavi I used to know wouldn’t have trusted her no matter what I told him.”

“I’m not the Gavi you used to know.”

“You arelooking a little frayed around the edges.” Didi acknowledged this as simple fact, in the same disinterested voice with which he would have acknowledged that the weather was warmer than usual.

“I’ve had it, Didi. If I were in your position, I’d cash me out before I brought the whole case down on top of our heads.”

“Your slang is out-of-date,” Didi said on a smile as gentle as snow falling on the desert. “These days the youngsters call it ‘better worlding.’ Or, in the case of death by apparently accidental causes, ‘giving someone the measles.’ And in any case I know you far too well to believe that you would do any such thing. You always took care of your people to a fault.”

“Not Gur.”

“No. Poor kid. I guess I don’t have to ask what’s got you thinking of him.”

There was a sofa along the wall facing Didi’s chair. Gavi subsided into it and turned sideways so he could put his bad leg up. The skin under the normally comfortable cuff was raw and bruised from the long day of pounding over concrete and cobblestones, and it stung atrociously as the feeling came back into it. Why was it that trudging on concrete was so much worse than running on any natural surface?

“What I still don’t get,” he said, “is how Osnat got mixed up with GolaniTech. Moshe, I can buy. But what idiot decided to push Osnat off the Office payroll?”

He looked over to find Didi watching him with an intensity that would have been infuriating in anyone else. He took in the shapeless figure slouched in the armchair, looked past the stained and wrinkled suit to meet Didi’s eyes for the first time since he’d entered the room.

“Oh,” he breathed. “She never left. She’s still yours. Yousent her.”

“Let’s just say I may have pointed her in your direction and given her a gentle push.”

“I’ve been on the receiving end of your gentle pushes. And how could you even think about sending her through the Line without someone to cover her back?”

“Osnat can cover her own back, I imagine.”

And then, for the first time, Gavi stopped thinking of the risks Osnat was running—and started thinking of the risks he was running. “My God. She’s kidon. And I’m still on the prime minister’s list. You sent a Mossad assassin into my house, with only his initials to stand between me and the knife!”

“Actually, the PM initialed your name last month.” Didi spread his hands in a gesture that was half excuse half apology. “Old friends aren’t what they used to be.”

“I saved that son of a bitch’s life!” Gavi said—and even as the words left his mouth he realized that he sounded ridiculously like Dibbuk when someone stepped on her tail.

“He told me. Twice. If it makes you feel any better, I had to spend half the night at his house letting him cry on my shoulder before he’d sign the order.”

“What’s going on, Didi? You taking out insurance on me?”

“Gavi, please believe me when I say that I want you to come out of this alive and well more than I want anything except the safety of Israel. But my grip on things is slipping. The IDF is rattling their cage. There are two more Interfaithers on the Knesset Intelligence Committee. We could run out of turf before we catch Absalom. And if there’s going to be a hit order out on you, I’d rather it was my hand on the trigger than my enemy’s hands.”

Gavi looked out the window. His leg was spasming from the long walk. He rubbed at the cramp, but it didn’t seem to improve things much. “Does Osnat know about this?”

“About the PM’s order? No. She really is there to help, not hurt. She’s the best I could send you without everyone on the eighth floor knowing I’d sent someone.”

“You still shouldn’t have picked Osnat. I can’t work with her. I don’t want her there.”

“Don’t you like her? That’s funny. I always thought you had a bit of a crush on her.”

“I was her commanding officer,” Gavi said, doubly outraged by the accusation because of the little grain of truth in it. “I would never have thought about that. And just because I have a thing for the heroic kibbutznik types doesn’t mean I’m easy picking for any—”

And then he finally put that puzzle together too. One step too late, as always.

“No dumb blondes and rented Ferraris for you,” Didi murmured.

“For you I only send the real thing.”

Gavi held his hands away from his body and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. They were trembling.

“You’re going to push too hard,” he told Didi. “And then I’m going to break, and you’ll have nothing. I’m not complaining or threatening. I’m just reporting as objectively as I can on the status of an agent in place.”

“I can’t back off now, Gavi. I’m sorry it’s been so hard, and I’m sorry it took so long. But we’ve reached the crossroads. If we do it right, then we can all go home. If not…”

Gavi sighed deeply and stretched out on the sofa with one arm over his eyes. He thought of the horror he’d seen in the King David Hotel security chief’s office, then forced his mind away from the thought.

“Can’t you take Osnat back and send in Yoni?” he asked. “Or anyone, for that matter. Please?”

“I’m going to write that off as kvetching. Unless you actually want to make it official. In which case the answer is no.”

Hard to argue with that; it was the answer Gavi himself would have given in Didi’s place.

“I can’t tell you how desperately I regret these years.” Didi spoke softly. “But they have not been wasted. Only a little longer, Gavi. Only one last night out in the cold. Then we bring you home.”

Down in the street a bus pulled up to the intersection with a whine of brakes, and a moment later Gavi heard the chuttering roar of its acceleration. He was sticky with sweat, and the light that seeped through his eyelids was as red as lung blood.

“Meanwhile,” Didi continued, “a curious piece of news has been leaked across the Line to us. It seems the Palestinians have managed to get Korchow to send Arkasha to Earth.”

Gavi’s eyes flew open. “My God. And the Palestinians have him? What are they going to do with him?”

“Give him to Turner, apparently.”

“Why the hell would they want to do that?”

“Not all of them do. Safik’s office seems to have been responsible for getting Arkasha here. Then Sheik Yassin horned in and brokered the deal with Turner over Safik’s protests.”

“So you think the leak comes from Safik? You think he’s trying to sabotage the exchange?”

Didi shrugged.

“I still don’t get it. What could Turner have that Yassin wants enough to get and trade Arkasha for?”

“I was wondering when you were going to stumble around to that question. Turner’s promised to give Yassin Arkady.”

Gavi rolled over on his side to look at Didi, the sofa’s springs protesting at the movement. “But Turner doesn’t have Arkady.”

“Not yet.”

“What the hell is he up to?”

“I don’t know. But I’d watch my back if I were you. And Arkady’s back.”

“Didi.”

“What?”

“Please tell me you’re not getting ready to burn Li and Arkady in order to catch Absalom. I don’t want to be part of another operation like that. I’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“I’m sorry, Gavi. I’ve completely forgotten to make you tea. And I always make you tea. What a brute I am.”

“Water’s fine. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“Really just water? How about I make you a little tea, and you can see if you want it?”

“Didi—”

“Jasmine or Ceylon, which do you prefer?”

When Didi came back he brought not only tea but also a slim file folder with the familiar black band across its front.

A testing, questioning silence filtered through the room. Gavi sat up. He could feel the old reflexes kicking in. His breath slowing. Time itself slowing. His eyes cataloging details that would have utterly eluded him in normal life. His muscles taking the measure of the room’s distances with a precision that still scared him just as much as it had all those years ago at Midrash when he first discovered that he had these horrible talents…he who had always thought of himself as an intellectual, an idealist, a bit of a peacenik even.

“Are you going to show me what’s in there,” he asked Didi, “or are you going to make me guess?”

Instead of answering, Didi opened the file and scanned it, as if refreshing his memory of its contents. Then he removed a paper clip, set it neatly aside for subsequent retrieval, and handed Gavi the photograph that had been pinned beneath it.

A young man, slim, graceful even in freeze-frame, handsome in a way that made one wonder if he wouldn’t perhaps be a bit too pretty in person. Something about the curve of his mouth and jaw that Gavi knew from his own bathroom mirror. And those vivid green crusader’s eyes.

Leila’s eyes.

“And just who is this supposed to be?” he asked icily.

“That’s beneath you, Gavi.”

The two men looked at each other. Gavi’s heart was pounding so loudly in his ears that he thought Didi must be able to hear it on the other side of the room.

“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said in the dull tone of a bureaucrat reading a routine report. “Only son—only child, actually—of Brigadier General Walid Safik. There’s no official record of the adoption. Yusuf attended private school in Bethlehem, and then in the SaudiArc Ring-side, then—this is interesting, Gavi, listen up—a stint on KnowlesSyndicate. Then back to Palestine for security service training. He graduated fourth in his class.” Didi pursed his lips, a taster evaluating a fine wine. “I like that fourth. It’s subtle. Your sort of instinct, I’d almost say.”

“You’re assuming the fourth was by choice, not merit.”

“I’m assuming nothing. One of our agents had a fling with a classmate of Yusuf’s who was posted to the Palestinian Authority’s HQ in the International Zone. It seems that the consensus among their fellow students was that Yusuf purposely fluffed the finals. Now why would he do that, I wonder?”

Gavi felt dizzy. The world had rearranged itself while he wasn’t looking, and now it was barreling on toward God knew what kind of damage without even giving him time to figure out where he stood or what he ought to do about it.

“And now he turns up smack in the middle of my hunt for Absalom.”

“Coincidence,” Gavi said. But he was hanging on by his fingernails and they both knew it.

He had laid the photograph across his knees, and not only to hide his shaking hands. Now he looked down at it and wondered how the photographer had stolen the unguarded shot. He touched the image of the familiar stranger’s face, knowing that Didi was watching him and not giving a damn what it looked like, and then felt a searing pang of regret when he realized he’d smudged the photograph.

“You’re surprised.” Didi sounded like a man probing at a sore tooth and wondering how long he could afford to wait before he called the dentist.

Gavi looked up at him, doing his best to keep his eyes steady and level. “You expected me not to be?”

“Oh, I expected surprise. I just wasn’t sure if you’d be surprised by the news, or surprised that I knew about it.”

A child’s voice rang out somewhere in the sun beyond the windows, and both men instinctively looked toward it. The glass, Gavi noticed, was caked with yellow khamsindust. He thought idly that you could probably make a decent map of Tel Aviv’s safe houses by just looking for unwashed windows and unswept doorsteps. He told himself that he was sick, sick to death of streaked windows and grimy walkup flats with garage sale furnishings. That all the other times he’d sat in identical rooms and thought identical thoughts had just been leading up to this time. And that this time it was well and truly over.

He knew better.

More to the point, Didi knew better.

“So why are you showing me this now? The file’s not exactly empty. You must have been holding this ace for a while now.”

“I wasn’t, actually. We had the file, yes, but I only figured out last week that he wasn’t Safik’s natural child. And I’m telling you now because I want you to have time to think about it in cold blood. Here. With me to talk to. I trust your second thoughts, and your third and fourth thoughts. It’s that first passionate impulse that terrifies me.”

“Joseph might recognize me too, Didi. Have you thought about that?”

“I doubt he will. If he remembers you at all, it’s as a young man not much older than he is now. And he doesn’t look that much like you. Only a little bit around the mouth, really. I didn’t see it myself at first.”

Gavi looked down at the photograph. He’d allowed himself to be distracted from it, and he realized this was a mistake as it was extremely unlikely that Didi would allow him to keep the photograph or ever see it again. His mind was doing a strange thing to him, filling his nose with the remembered scent of Joseph’s infant skin, goading him into an animal certainty that the young stranger in the photograph was his child.

Like the goats, he thought nonsensically, who knew their kids in the dark by smell alone. But it had never occurred to him that they might remember the smell for years or decades after he’d taken their kids to slaughter. What was the purpose of allowing their senses to torment them like that when it was too late to do anything or save anybody?

“Can I read his file?” he asked.

“Oh, Gavi.”

“Don’t ‘Oh, Gavi’ me. Why shouldn’t I read it?”

“Why should you?” Didi held the slim sheaf of papers up and shook it until the pages rattled like dead leaves. “You want to know what’s in here, Gavi? The life of another man’s son. Walid Safik’s son. Everything in this file says that Safik has pampered and adored and doted on the boy since the day he adopted him. Everything in here says that Yusuf Safik returns his father’s love. For God’s sake, Gavi, we’ve got phone records showing the kid calls home every night, and, let me tell you, I’m grateful if my daughters call me once a month! The boy’s Palestinian, Gavi. Just as Leila intended him to be. And his father is Walid Safik. You’re just a stranger who happens to look like him.”

“I know,” Gavi whispered.

And he did know.

He really did.

But that didn’t make it any easier to let go of the photograph.

Cohen materialized in a shimmer of security protocols. Or perhaps the shimmer was in the air, Arkady told himself, and not in Cohen. He still couldn’t get used to the instream version of Yad Vashem that Gavi had decided to hold this meeting in.

“How come it’s all different?” Arkady asked. “Where are Gavi’s goats? And…nothing’s falling down. They’d have to have an army of gardeners and groundskeepers to keep the place looking this way.”

“You don’t have to shout,” Osnat said. “Gardeners are expensive. And if you want them to work on the Line, they’re more than expensive. Eighty percent of Israelis may be infertile, but no one wants their neighbors to know they’renot in the lucky twenty percent. It’s all about keeping up appearances.”

“But it’s not real.”

“What’s real? This is the Yad Vashem that millions of tourists all over UN space know and believe exists. The illusion beats the reality any day on the numbers.”

“What’s the news on Li?” Gavi asked Cohen when he had settled into phase with their own surroundings.

Cohen looked sick. “It’s the Americans.”

“Turner?”

“Turner.”

Gavi swallowed convulsively, as if the news were a dry pill that had gotten stuck in his throat. “Has he told you what he wants?”

“That’s the funny part.” Cohen sank onto a bench so smoothly that it took Arkady a moment to realize that Cohen had somehow changed the standard tour on the fly and now they were all standing still in one of the rambling compound’s many gardens.

“He wants Arkady. And he wants Gavi to bring him. He was very insistent on that point. He’s arranged a three-way swap with Yassin. I walk away with Li. Turner gets Arkasha. And Arkady goes back to Syndicate space with Korchow.”

“But what do the Palestinians get out of it?”

“I suspect a better question would be what does Yassin get out of it. Arkady’s defection seems to have dovetailed neatly with the power struggle between him and Safik.”

“So Turner wants us to help Yassin take Safik down,” Gavi said. “Nice to know we’re on the side of the angels. I assume you’ve talked to Didi about this?”

“Yes.” Cohen paused and glanced at Arkady. “Didi thinks there ought to be a way to play along with Turner but still come out the other side holding the bag with Arkasha in it. He also authorized me to tell Arkady that if we can pull this off, he’ll guarantee Arkasha full political asylum.”

“What about Arkady?” Osnat asked.

“Arkady has to go back or Didi won’t help us. Frankly Didi wasn’t even happy about leaving Arkasha on-planet in light of…well…the obvious.”

“Can I trust Didi to protect Arkasha?” Arkady asked Gavi.

“I don’t know,” Gavi said. He looked sick to his stomach. “But I can’t think of anyone you can trust more.”

“Okay, then. I’ll do it.”

“And just what is Didi actually offering in the way of help?” Gavi asked Cohen.

“The Office won’t get directly involved in the swap.” The AI’s voice was tight with apprehension. “But Didi will provide backup…or cleanup if things get messy. The story for public consumption will be that the Office got an anonymous tip about where Li was being held and organized a rescue. Ash is going to handle the operation so it doesn’t go through official channels.”

Another pause followed this news. Gavi sat down, bowed his head, crossed his arms over his chest, chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said finally, glancing up at Cohen. “On the one hand it stinks. On the other hand, Didi’s doing about as much as he can realistically do for you. Israeli policy’s ironclad. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. Interfaithers are terrorists and the Americans are Interfaithers. Ergo the Americans are terrorists. Ergo, we don’t negotiate with them. We don’t even have the channels of communication we’d need to figure out if Turner’s following his government’s orders or freelancing.”

“So what do we do?” Osnat asked.

“Agree to Turner’s terms,” Gavi said, “then figure out how to control the ground so no one gets shot before Ash shows up with the cavalry.”

“We’d need an army,” Osnat muttered gloomily.

Gavi looked up, solemn-eyed and bristling with nervous tension. “We have an army,” he said. He jerked his head toward the outer walls of the compound and the Green Line beyond the walls. “EMET.”

The plan was simple. It was a classic exchange of prisoners. Except that in this trade there were three prisoners instead of two. And the exchange would take place not across some lonely field or border checkpoint, but in the claustrophobic shooting gallery of the house on Abulafia Street. The only thing keeping the parties honest would be the Enders, Palestinian and Israeli, that Turner finally agreed to let supervise the exchange. The Enders, of course, would be kept honest by their source code.

Which meant that anyone who could hack EMET would be halfway to controlling the battlefield.

They needed to hack a squad for, say, ten minutes. And all they had to do to hack a squad was hack the EMET squad leader that controlled the shunt-driven bodies of the squad’s Enderbots.

“But the beauty of a true Emergent,” Gavi said, “is that you don’t have to change its source code to change its behavior. Here’s what we’re up against.” He did something with his hand and a translucent flat screen took shape under his fingers. The screen glowed with a long list of cryptically named categories—terms like advance, cluster, combat, pursuit, retreat, support, enemy_flag, injured_ally, fear_index—all with numerical values attached to them.

“This is a typical set of squad-level agent behavior parameters. Notice particularly the two obey indices and the fear index. The global obey index determines how likely the agent is to obey global EMET orders. The local obey is the same thing but in regard to local orders—mainly squad-level orders in most situations. The fear index…well, I guess that’s pretty self-evident.

“Now look at the real-time run-files. I’ve superimposed run-files for the last eight squad leaders to be selected for preemptive termination—or, in less diplomatic terms, the last eight squad leaders that the IDF killed before they could self-terminate.”

“What’s that spike in the fear index?” Cohen asked, having absorbed the chart, and who knew what else, in the time it took Arkady to realize there wasa chart.

“That,” Gavi said, “is truth.”

“Aah,” Cohen said. And then he didn’t say anything else for a minute while the rest of them watched him. He seemed to have more or less forgotten them; if he had been human, Arkady would have called his state distracted, but he wasn’t sure that distraction applied to an entity for whom their conversation—any conversation—was a mere drop in an ocean of simultaneously unspooling threads of data.