“I think I’m being called back to work,” he told Zongchen.

“Senator, I hate to interrupt you, but, uh, your wife was looking to talk to you,” said Jason, huffing from the long run from the terminal buildings. “She has a limited time window. Your phone must be off.”

“Guilty,” said Zen. “Talk to you later, General.”

He turned and started wheeling himself toward the building with Jason. When they were out of earshot, his aide whispered to him, “It’s not Breanna. I’m sorry for lying. It was the only thing I could think of.”

“Not a problem,” Zen told the young man. “What’s up?”

“There’s been an accident with the Sabres. You need to talk to Colonel Freah.”

Zen wheeled a little faster toward the building.

Ten minutes later, after negotiating the difficult bumps at the rear entrance to the building and then to the main corridor leading inside, the senator and former lead pilot for Dreamland entered a secure communications suite that had been set up for the American teams supporting the alliance. The room was literally a room inside a room inside a room—a massive sheet of copper sat between two sections of wallboard, which in turn were isolated from the regular walls of the Italian building. The space between the original room and the American inset was filled with nitrogen. Outside, an array of jamming and detection devices made it even more difficult to eavesdrop.

Two rows of what looked like ordinary workstations sat inside the room. All were connected to a secure communications system back in the States. Despite the high-level encryption, the system was so fast that the users experienced no lag at all.

There were drawbacks, however. Despite two small portable air-conditioning units, the room was at least ten degrees hotter than the rest of the building, and Zen felt sweat starting to roll down his neck practically as soon as he wheeled himself in front of the far terminal.

Seconds later Danny Freah’s worried face appeared on the screen.

“Hey, buddy,” said Zen. “What’s up?”

“One of the Sabre unmanned aircraft went crazy,” said Danny.

“ ‘Crazy’ in what way?”

“It attacked civilians.”

“What?”

“I know, I know.” Danny looked grave. He was aboard an aircraft; Zen guessed he was on his way over from the States. “We’re still gathering the details. Turk Mako is due to land in about twenty minutes.”

Zen had helped develop the original Flighthawks some two decades before at Dreamland. It was another lifetime ago, though he still felt somewhat paternal toward the aircraft.

“You lost the aircraft?” he asked.

“Negative,” said Freah. “At least we have it to pull apart.”

“How is it possible?”

“I don’t know.” Danny shook his head. “We have an incident team already being assembled. There’s going to be a media shit storm. I figured you’d want a personal heads-up, especially since you’re in Sicily.”

“I appreciate that.” Zen was planning to leave in the morning for Rome, but the heads-up would at least help alleviate some embarrassment.

“I was also wondering . . .” Danny’s voice trailed off.

“What?” asked Zen.

“Could you meet Turk when he lands? I talked to him a few minutes ago over the Whiplash satellite system. He’s a little shook up.”

“Sure.”

“I already talked to the White House,” Danny added. “They suggested it.”

“All right.”

“I know it puts you in an awkward position. I know you’re not there in an official capacity.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“I’ve seen some footage of the attack from the Sabre,” added Danny. “It’s not pretty.”

“I’ll bet.”

“There’s more out,” he said. “Posted on YouTube within the last few minutes. Supposedly by an outraged citizen.”

“Supposedly?” asked Zen.

“Well, it was put up awful quick if you ask me. But it was definitely taken with a cell phone, so I guess it wasn’t a setup. We’re going to figure out what the hell happened, I promise.” Danny took a deep breath. His face looked tired, but intent. “The Tigershark and the Sabres will be grounded until we’re absolutely sure what happened. And until it’s fixed. We will fix it. We absolutely will.”

3

New Mexico

War had always been a complex calculation for Ray Rubeo, one more difficult to compute than the most complicated calculus.

Rubeo had devoted himself to science from the time he was twelve, precocious and full of excitement over the possibilities knowledge offered. He had indulged his various interests, from computers to electronics, from biology to aerodynamics, for most of his life, first as an employee, then as a contractor, and finally as a businessman. Directly and indirectly, he had worked for various arms of the government, starting with DARPA—the Defense Department’s research arm—then the Air Force at Dreamland, then the NSA and, briefly, the CIA. For the past decade he had run his own private company, with the government and its various agencies its primary customers.

The arrangements had allowed him to do a great deal. Unlike many scientists, he was able to turn the results of his pure research into practical things—computer systems, artificial intelligence programs, aircraft. Weapons.

And unlike many scientists, his work had made him an extremely rich man. Though he professed to have little use for wealth, he was not a fool. While science remained his passion, he was also very much an entrepreneur, and had no trouble reconciling capitalism with the supposedly more lofty goals of science that involved knowledge and mankind’s quest to better itself.

Nor did he feel that there was an inherent conflict between science and war; he knew from history that the two pursuits were often necessary collaborators. Da Vinci was a pertinent model, but then so were the scientists who had unleashed the power of the atom on the world, saving hundreds of thousands of lives while killing many others.

Ray Rubeo could be cynical and hardheaded. More than one of his former employees would certainly swear that he was heartless. And in many ways he was and had always been a loner—a fact attested to by his home on a ranch of several thousand acres in the remote high plains of New Mexico.

But Rubeo also believed that science was, ultimately, a force for good. He had seen evil many times over the years, and in his heart he believed that science must fight against it. Not only in the vague sense of defeating the confusion and chaos of the unknown, but directly and immediately: if science was a product of man’s better nature, then surely it found its greatest calling in fighting man’s worst nature.

That was, for him, the simple reason that science and war coexisted: science opposed evil.

It was true, he conceded, that occasionally science was misused. Such things were inevitable. But they did not negate the fact that he counted himself among the good. He was not a religious man—at least from a conventional point of view he was arguably the opposite—but he was nonetheless moral.

And so, looking at the images he had just been sent, he felt his stomach turn.

It was not the destruction, or even the body of the child burned so badly that it was barely recognizable as human.

It was the fact that this destruction had been caused by his own invention, the intelligence system that guided the Sabre UM/F–9S.

Rubeo reacted to the video uncharacteristically—he deleted it. Then he flipped his tablet computer onto the table, got up and walked across the kitchen to the coffee machine. As it began brewing a fresh pot, he went out on the patio behind his house.