“Will it be stable enough?” asked Lieutenant Jian, ignoring Markov’s advice, as usual.

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” said Markov. “Besides, even if it doesn’t work, nobody is going to see. You’re not going to tell the general on me if it doesn’t, are you?”

Lieutenant Jian avoided Markov’s look.

“Of course you are,” said Markov. “Just do your job and don’t get in the way of me doing mine. When this is all over, they are going to ask you what you did in your war. I bet you thought you would get to do something heroic. It’s your first war, and that’s what everyone thinks. Well, that’s not going to happen. But instead of being some dumb underling, give yourself something to be proud of. At least make me proud. There’s still time.”

Lieutenant Jian gave him a sideways glance, as if the Russian had said something treasonous. Maybe he had.

“Yes, Colonel, as you say,” said Lieutenant Jian. “The model is ready now.”

“Start it,” said Markov. “Let’s go hunting.”

The lights went off and all was dark. Then the projectors arrayed around the spherical room’s perimeter blinked on in sequence.

The holographic model wrapped itself around the bodies of the two men. For a moment, Lieutenant Jian gazed at Markov in disbelief, but the face looking at the Russian was melded with the holographic image of the face of the young Directorate marine who’d had his throat gouged in the stairwell of Duke’s Bar on Waikiki Beach. Another horrific image to forget, thought Markov. Then a different dead body was overlaid on the map; the system had been directed to pull from the casualty list all the Directorate personnel who had gone missing or been killed by any method other than firearms or explosives.

“Now overlay with the movement analysis.”

A spread of small pictures seemed to spray across the room as if from an imaginary tube. The software allowed the capture and processing of hundreds of thousands of hours of multiple-image-viewpoint recordings simultaneously. The American military had gotten the idea from the way media companies covered the Super Bowl and had first used it in Iraq. You could saturate a city with drone cameras flying overhead and record everything, but all those images were useless unless you could process the embedded information. That was where the artificial intelligence came in: it found patterns in the noise of daily life.

As the small dots filled the room, the faces of the dead soldiers began to flicker.

“It’s crashing,” said Markov. “Fix it.”

Lieutenant Jian barged through the holographic image, leaving a wake of warped faces and streaming video dots behind him.

“There, okay,” said Lieutenant Jian. “It was the overhead tracking feed from the drones; it does not want to sync up with the traffic cameras.”

Markov waded into the middle of the model, hands raised slightly to the level of his heart, as if he were inching into an icy pool.

“Drop the topography now, set to bird’s-eye view.”

As he stood there, faces and names, numbers, and grid points were overlaid on a 3-D map of Honolulu.

“Here, here, and here.” He indicated points on a map of the city and its environs. “This is where your personnel were found. Here and here too, this is where these unlucky gentlemen went missing. No women, note.”

“What’s the relation? Insurgents are everywhere, they can attack at any time,” said Lieutenant Jian.

“Watch,” said Markov. “Set the system to correlate with known insurgent activity.” A series of red lines began to appear between the various points, forming a random cluster around Markov.

“I don’t see the pattern,” Lieutenant Jian said.

“That’s the point,” Markov said. “These deaths were not consistent with any pattern of normal insurgent activity.”

“What about insurgent activity is normal?” said Lieutenant Jian. “They don’t follow any rules.”

Markov laughed and walked through the model that now connected the body icons with rainbow-like arcs. From each arc dangled a holographic image, akin to a driver’s license, of every person whose DNA had been tracked in the area.

“Lieutenant, I have seen the work of plenty of killers. Insurgencies bring out the truly savage side of humanity. Hands used to kill despite fingernails having been ripped out only days before. Broomsticks topped with shotgun shells. Rusty blades dipped in shit to ensure an infection,” said Markov. “And yet, they all followed a simple rule: anything goes in the name of freedom.”

“You sound like you admire them, these assassins killing our troops one by one,” said Lieutenant Jian. “They are just monsters, all of them.”

“I don’t admire them, but I seek to understand them,” said Markov. “However, this is something different. Lieutenant, you may finally be right about something. I think we are indeed looking for monsters. Just not the kind or number you think. Pull up the file of Ms. Carrie Shin.”

“The woman from the hotel?” asked Lieutenant Jian. “If you’re playing another joke on me, this is not the time.”

Carrie Shin’s face appeared on a wall screen. The photo had been taken by the Directorate security teams for the special ID used by the workers at the Moana hotel. Stunningly beautiful, her tan face beamed. Yet to Markov, something was not right with her eyes; they were almost dead in their expression.

“Now remove the insurgent activity.” The swirl of red lines disappeared.

“And now populate for all facial-recognition traces of Ms. Shin.”

Images of Carrie appeared in tiny flashing pictures and video-stream dots, the viz screen spiraling through still shots from traffic cameras, videos of drone coverage overhead showing her crossing a street, checkpoints where she had shown her ID badge. A person’s entire life couldn’t be recorded, but it left traces. As more and more data was fed through, lines of the patterns of her life formed, all of them crossing again and again with the victims’ locations.

“Do you see the spider’s web?” said Markov. “She is who we have been looking for.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Lieutenant Jian. “Just one girl? It’s only because she works in the same areas. I will reboot the system.”

“Why? Because you don’t like the answer?” said Markov. “You don’t understand what you’re looking at, do you? This is something special, Jian. A true killer hiding in the death of war. A rarity to be observed and understood.”

This was indeed something new, thought the Russian. It seemed like this war wasn’t going to be such a waste after all.

He reached into the hologram on his tiptoes and pulled the photo down, expanding Carrie’s image to larger than life-size.

Markov began pacing around the perimeter of the model, trying to remember the lines from his tattered book of poetry, speaking quietly to himself in Russian.

Calmly he contemplates alike the just / And unjust, with indifference he notes / Evil and good, and knows not wrath nor pity.

He changed back to English. “Pushkin should have said ‘she,’ Lieutenant,” said Markov. “The hallmark of a true professional is the ability to admit when one is on unfamiliar ground, and that is where we are now.”

“Colonel, I have to ask, have you been drinking?” said Lieutenant Jian. “I cannot tell the general that we think this woman, this American beach babe, not only killed the minister’s son but also has been brutalizing all our forces.”

“You coward, all you can think about is what you’re going to tell your master. Look into those eyes,” said Colonel Markov. “She is what you should fear.”

Lieutenant Jian’s mouth puckered with dismay, but his eyes showed he could not find the right disapproving words, much less the courage to say them.

“You and I, we can put on a uniform, but we will always be prey. Mere bodies to be sacrificed by our leaders. She, though, she is a huntress and she wears — what, a bikini? A cocktail dress?” said Markov.