Post: The First Byron Tibor Thriller Read online

  The round would have passed close to the center of Lewis’s brain. The angle of trajectory would likely have taken out the amygdala implant and a chunk of the parietal lobe, then passed into the temporal lobe and hit a section of the cage-like trans-cranial implant that ran all the way round to the frontal lobe, trampolining back into the brain when it hit the molded armor that wallpapered the skull. In layman’s terms, Lewis hadn’t so much blown his brains out as forced them to implode.

  ‘The implant will have to be recovered,’ said Muir.

  Graves sighed. Why don’t you come down here and scoop through the guy’s freaking brains and find it then? he thought. ‘I was hoping I could ship him back and you could take care of that.’

  ‘We don’t have time. If we can recover it intact, and while it still has charge, there’s a chance we can run an update. If it loses power, it will take weeks, if not months, to troubleshoot.’

  Troubleshoot? That made Graves chuckle. He could still hear the words, he just wasn’t listening anymore. Terrific, he thought. Just what everyone needed. The program was a bust. A big, fat, expensive bust. Politicians and the American people liked shit that worked.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find. You want to maintain a visual?’ he said.

  Rice, one of the three-man team he had come in with, walked past him — he was running liaison with the civilian cops. ‘Talking to yourself again, Harry?’

  Graves offered him a raised middle finger.

  ‘I have other work to attend to. Let me know as soon as you find it,’ said Muir, signing off.

  That was Muir. A good man at heart, no question of it, but fixated to the point where he no longer saw the bigger picture. This project did that to people. The upside was so huge, not just to the military but to the United States and therefore to the world, that even something like this was regarded by those at the center of it as a blip. Graves often wondered if this was what it had been like for those who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and those who had shepherded them. Was the only way to change the world not to think about anything beyond the next step?

  At the front door, one of his men was having a heated discussion with a captain from the SMPD who wanted to access the crime scene. He was making some long speech about chains of command. Graves turned his attention to finding the goddamn needle in the haystack.

  He pulled a pair of surgical gloves from his pants pocket and snapped them on. The bank staff had already been moved out of his line of sight, the cameras switched off. He could work in peace but he might have only a few minutes.

  He stepped over the body. The left arm was thrown out in surrender, the fist closed tight, like a baby’s. The right hand, the one that had pulled the trigger, had flopped down by his side, the gun at his feet. Lewis’s eyes were open and he had that ‘Who, me?’ look of surprise that was so often etched on the faces of the dead. If you’d pulled the trigger, what the hell did you have to be surprised about?

  The round had entered the soft tissue of the palate. He couldn’t jam his hand through the mouth to find a tiny silver sliver.

  He leaned over, his battered knees creaking as he rolled Lewis so that he was face down. The back of his head was pretty much gone. It wasn’t so much a head as a mask now, which was kind of poetic under the circumstances. Although maybe that wasn’t entirely fair. There had been a lot going on upstairs, probably too much, with all those billions of neurons firing like crazy, 24/7. That was how specialist Lewis had ended up like this – too much going on up top.

  Usually it was the reverse. People died because they didn’t think — not because they did. Harry guessed suicides were different: everything closed in on you until your whole goddamn world compressed itself into your skull. Then the only way to relieve the pressure was to flick the off switch. This had been a grab for control from a guy who didn’t have any. And it had worked. Lewis had probably blown away hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work with his brains. Unless …

  With the clock ticking, Graves used his fingers to scoop through the blood and brains. He should add a colander to his list of equipment. He found what he was looking for on the third attempt, a snippet of silver among the bloody grey. The metal edge of the coil caught against his middle finger. He pinched it and pulled it out.

  He put it into a clear plastic sandwich bag, and tucked it into his jacket pocket. He stripped off his gloves. One of the others joined him, his assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Bag him and tag him for me,’ said Graves.

  ‘You got it. Where’s he going?’ the man asked.

  ‘Where’d you think?’ Graves prodded Lewis’s left arm with the toe of his right shoe. ‘You imagine what a coroner would make of him? They’d roll in one stiff and have to roll out two.’

  The man smiled. ‘No shit.’

  Graves grimaced. ‘I’ll leave the wetware with you. I gotta get this little baby scanned and wired. They want to troubleshoot it, do a recall, and run an update before we got another of these on our hands.’

  ‘Wetware, Harry?’

  When he’d first heard the geeks using it, the term had puzzled Graves as well, until Muir had explained it to him. He’d thought it was pretty funny at first. Now, with this, and more out there like Lewis, it didn’t seem quite so amusing.

  ‘Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess.’

  Professor Bernard Williams

  FIVE

  Kunar Province, Afghanistan

  Byron

  They came to kill me an hour before sunrise. There were three of them, silhouettes hewn in silver by a late autumn moon high above the valley.

  Checked keffiyehs wrapped tightly around their faces left only their eyes, noses and lips visible. White trousers, greyed by the dust of the plain, fluttered in the breeze as they picked their way up the moonlit slope toward the first house. Two looked to be little more than teenagers while the third, the leader, would have been in his late twenties or early thirties — a good age in this part of the world, where four decades pretty much secured you elder status.

  The younger men had AK-47s slung casually over their shoulders, barrels pointing earthwards. The leader was carrying what looked like an old Soviet Makarov semi-automatic handgun tucked into his waistband. A pulwar, a single-bladed curved sword, dangled from his other hip.

  Somewhere in the near distance, a rhesus monkey began to chatter. It was joined by a companion, howling in solidarity. They were either greeting the dawn, pressing at the edges of the horizon, or reacting to the foreign presence, but I couldn’t be sure which.

  The men stopped for a moment, frozen in place. Grey-blue moonlight splashed across the edge of the pulwar as the leader adjusted his belt. The monkeys lapsed into silence.

  Steadying the sword with his hand, the leader beckoned his two compatriots with a wave. They began to walk again, closing in on the village with each step. The gradient of the slope grew more severe, but the men maintained the same pace, unhindered by the terrain. That told me they were native to the area.

  The village consisted of around two dozen houses, which had been built into the side of the hillside from traditional mud bricks. Using the slope, and the natural hollows of the hillside, the houses were stacked on top of, as well as alongside, each other. The mud bricks kept them cool during the scorching summer weather, which parched the valley below, and warm during the winter, when snow covered the peaks of the mountains that led north into Pakistan.

  The arrangement of the houses and the steepness of the gradient was such that one villager could walk out of his front door directly onto the roof of his neighbor’s house. Like a series of tiny two-room castles, the slope provided a natural defense against intruders. Not that the men approaching seemed worried by this. The village was completely still and everything about them, from the open display of weapons to the way they strolled languidly toward the makeshift school house perched on a rocky outcrop, suggested that they anticipated little resistance.

 
; They were wrong. I was waiting for them.

  SIX

  I had walked into the village three weeks before. At first the villagers hadn’t quite known what to make of my presence. Much of that stemmed from the nature of my arrival – alone, on foot and unarmed.

  My path into the village had been from the mountains to the north. On the other side lay Pakistan. Even though this was one of the remoter places on earth, it was not unusual for young men with British, French or even American accents to arrive here to take up arms.

  To the villagers, my arrival was of no more than passing interest, which began to evaporate as soon as I opened my mouth and spoke to them in their own language, Pashtun. Although I spoke it with an accent that lay somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, I was fairly fluent, with a command of regional variations. What struck me, in those first hours, as children crowded round, and I took off my boots to check my blisters, was how few questions they asked, and how easily they seemed to accept my presence. Perhaps they were simply accustomed to visitors or, more likely, they had long since realized that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. If I was a jihadi, they didn’t want to know about it. If I was American and a Christian, that probably went double. What they truly wanted was to be left alone to grow their poppies on the flat plain below, and to live their lives as they had done for the past thousand years.

  But a stranger’s presence would change that, and even on that first day, we all knew it.

  SEVEN

  The village was called Anash Kapur. It had a total population of just over a hundred. Of that hundred, twenty-two were men, thirty-four were women, and the rest were children. The children ranged in age from four babies of up to six months and a gaggle of toddlers, whose quick movement made them difficult to count. After the age of about seven, the demographic spread thinned out fairly rapidly. Child-mortality rates were high, and reaching the age of maturity made you one of the lucky ones. Not only was medical care almost non-existent, and diseases rife that had been long eradicated in the developed world, but the area was still seeded with thousands of landmines from the Russian occupation. They had been made to be especially appealing to children, a strategy that meant Afghanistan had one of the largest numbers of child amputees outside Africa. One of them was a little girl called Sasha, and she, as it happened, was the first person I ran into when I arrived.

  Sasha had beautiful brown eyes, and thick, straggly black hair. As I picked my way down a shale path toward the village, she was sitting on a rock on her own, her legs dangling over the edge of a sheer drop of around thirty feet. When she saw me, she smiled. It was an expression that betrayed neither fear nor curiosity, just a warm, open smile.

  I said hello to her in Pashtun and she replied. Then, as if this was a scenario that had played itself out before, she jumped to her feet, folded her remaining hand into mine and began to drag me toward the village.

  Soon the rest of the children had clustered around us. Hands tugged at my clothing or simply stretched out to me through the tangle of spindly limbs and stubby fingers. Already protective, Sasha pushed the children away and shouted at one or two. One of the older boys said something about ‘the little mother’, which raised giggles. Slowly, the merry band began to settle, fanning out and arranging itself into less of a swarm and more of a procession, bare feet scrabbling over the worn stony path into the village. With her position as official village tour guide secured, Sasha looked up at me, as if to say, ‘It’s okay, I have your back,’ and we moved toward an altogether less certain welcome.

  The village was quiet as we approached. Down below, on the valley floor, I could make out figures in the fields, hunched over the vivid red crop. The path widened a little and the children quietened. The village houses fell away down the slope in a stepped arrangement. The highest house was also the largest. Built on one level, it enjoyed a mountain frontage of perhaps sixty feet. An elderly man with white hair and a long beard crouched outside the front door, one hand on a walking stick, staring straight ahead.

  At first he didn’t seem to register my presence. The older children hung back, one or two of the girls shooing away the younger ones. The excited chatter and laughter died. The elder continued to stare directly ahead. Above the mountains that lay to the east, clouds whipped across the jagged peaks. Sasha’s hand felt warm and sticky in mine. I stopped, took off my rucksack and dumped it on the path at my feet. I could feel where the straps had dug into my shoulders and was aware of the pleasant sensation of lightness.

  The little girl stood back from me as I walked across to join the elder. I didn’t speak. It wasn’t my place. Instead, I let him take his measure of me. Silence descended between us. I lowered myself into the same crouched position, parallel to him, as I followed the old man’s line of sight. I would stay like this until he spoke. Until sunset, if it took that long. There was power in silence, which Americans had long since forgotten.

  After ten minutes in that position, even with the days of trekking behind me, I could feel the burn at the back of my thighs, but I stayed where I was. It didn’t take long for discomfort to give way to pain, then agony. I used the time to scan the terrain, mapping it in my mind as best I could, picking out routes of escape from the village and places where it would be easy to ambush someone.

  A few minutes later, the elder’s right hand tightened around his stick and he began to lever himself upright. He glanced at me, milky eyes sliding across my face. He hadn’t been staring at the mountains to the east. He hadn’t been staring at anything. He had been listening. Listening for others. This wasn’t a village even the most intrepid voyager would stumble across and men like me didn’t arrive alone and unarmed.

  EIGHT

  As the light of that first afternoon died over the mountains, I sat at the edge of a semi-circle inside the old man’s house, along with three other older men. As we talked I began to lay out the story I had developed back in Virginia. My name was Byron (a different first name was more likely to trip someone up than almost any other detail). I had been born in the Middle East to a Saudi father and an African-American mother. My parents had moved to the United States when I was young. I had been educated originally in a madrassa and later, in America, at various private schools. My father had been a devout Muslim and I had found myself returning to my religion. My spiritual journey had brought me here, via Pakistan. I was careful to say nothing about jihad, insurgency or anything that even hinted of politics. I allowed them to fill in the blanks for themselves. As a general rule, Western Muslims, especially the converts, talked more of a spiritual journey than of jihad. After all, for them, the two things were often one and the same.

  The elders had listened to me with patience. They offered tea and food. After they had eaten, they smoked a hookah. They offered very little about themselves. They were here. They were farmers. That was all I needed to know.

  By now it was late and the children had been shooed inside by the women. After a time, the men rose and left. The elder motioned for me to follow him. We walked outside into the moonlight. He led me up a rickety wooden ladder to a terraced field. At the end was an empty shack. That would be my quarters. There was straw on the floor and several blankets already laid out. A jug of water and a bowl stood in one corner. I shook hands with the elder and he left me alone.

  I washed my face, and brushed my teeth. I undressed and wrapped the blankets around myself. No one would come for me on the first night. They would wait. As far as I could tell, my story had been accepted. Nothing in the villagers’ body language or manner had suggested otherwise, and I was adept at reading such things. Exhausted, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  I woke to sunshine streaming under an inch-wide gap between the bottom of the door and the sill. I poured some water from the jug into the bowl and washed. It was almost nine — late. Most of the villagers were probably long gone, in the fields below, tending their crops. I dressed quickly, pulled a mat from my backpack, knelt on it and prayed, my forehead rising and fal
ling as I ran through the words.

  A few moments after I had finished someone knocked at the door. I opened it, and there was the little girl I had met on my approach to the village. She had brought me food. I beckoned her inside. She strode past me and laid out a breakfast of bread and cheese, and what I guessed was goat’s milk. She motioned for me to eat. Her manner and gestures were so adult that I couldn’t help but smile. I offered her some of the food but she waved it away, then marched out, leaving me to my breakfast. I had already noticed that here the men ate first.

  When I had finished eating, I went outside into sunshine. After days spent hiking through the mountains, it felt good to be at rest. I shielded my eyes and scanned the horizon, catching a glint of light from a nearby peak. They were already watching me, trying to figure out who I was and why I was there.

  During the night, I had woken to find someone rummaging through my pack. It was one of the men who had sat with the village elder. I pretended to be asleep as the villager conducted a search that I had known was coming. I had already dumped any gear that might reveal my true identity about a quarter-mile back up the pass into the village. For now, though, I was happy for them to know what I’d walked in with — clothes, soap, some protein bars, a water bottle, a copy of the Koran, a prayer mat, and some propaganda pamphlets from a number of fundamentalist groups. The villagers would draw their own conclusions.