Authors: Robert Cain
Rod turned and found himself looking down at a slender, mousy-seeming man in glasses and a sport coat. "I am not a man at all,” Rod replied. He held up his right hand, where the synthetic skin had been torn away, exposing the black, carbon-lubricated sl
ick
ness of his titanium-steel alloy fingers. "I should think that would be self-evident.”
"Yeah,” the man said. His eyes were bugging out from his face as he stared first at Rod’s hand, then at his left arm where the workings of miniature hydraulic pistons were exposed, sliding back and forth as the arm flexed. "Yeah, buddy, I can see that!” The man blinked. "What
are
you?”
"A cyborg!” another voice called. "It’s incredible!” "I am a robot,” Rod said. "Part of a classified robotics and artificial intelligence program carried out by scientists and engineers of various advanced technology research groups. I have just stopped the attempted assassination of government officials by gunmen in the employ of a drug distribution network.”
Rod had been instilled with an understanding of security procedures and knew that RAMROD was classified top secret. No one had ever bothered, however, to teach him how to lie in the event that his cover as an ordinary human was exposed. To Rod’s way of thinking there was no use in trying to deny the obvious.
The man was fumbling for a notebook and pen as Rod spoke. Nearby, another man closed in with a Nikormat, the camera’s automatic drive going
click-whir- click- whir-click.
The richly paneled conference room
was part of the office suite belonging to the Director of Central Intelligence on the top floor of the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Law books and television monitors lined the walls, and the windows on two walls overlooked the lush, northern Virginia countryside.
Admiral Randolph Hewett Cunningham was not watching the scenery. He shoved that morning’s
Washington Post
across the conference table with an angry flourish.
C
ybernarc busts drug lord hit!
the paper’s headlines proclaimed. The subheader was more explicit:
Intelligent Robot Secret Weapon in Feds’ Drug War!
Rod’s picture was there beneath the headline, looking human and somewhat remote, almost bored.
"What idiot decided that we were going to let a goddamned
robot
speak to the press!” he thundered.
"It was an accident,” Weston replied. "I’ll take full responsibility.”
In retrospect, it was hard to imagine what he could have done differently. It was plain bad luck that a couple of
Post
reporters and a cameraman had been in one
of the other cars on the bridge. In the chaotic aftermath of the firefight, there’d been no way to stop the newsmen from asking their questions, no way to stop Rod from answering in his usual direct way. Weston had descended on the newsmen with threats of legal action against the reporters and their paper if the story was printed, citing national security, but his bluff had been called.
"Damn right you will,” the DCI replied. Cunningham, a large man with black horn-rims and white hair, was the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence.
The third man in the room, with crew-cut salt-and- pepper hair and a permanently combative look on his bulldog features, was Harold Gallagher, the CIA’s Executive Director, or EXDIR. He was responsible for the day-to-day internal management of CIA activities. Both EXDIR and the DCI worked with Group Seven and were aware of its projects.
And as the CIA’s two senior executives, they had a special and proprietary interest in RAMROD.
"Your robot has become notorious!” Gallagher had never believed in RAMROD and took every opportunity to remind people of the fact. He shook his pen at Weston like an admonishing finger. "Half of Washington is screaming about the 'CIA killer robot’ tearing people apart with its bare hands. The other half is laughing itself sick at our two-billion-dollar top-secret motormouth!”
Dr. McDaniels leaned forward at the table, her hands folded in front of her. "Admiral, if I may, this was a totally unforeseen circumstance. Rod fully understands the concept of security. He was simply, at that time, unable to see how it applied to that particular situation.”
"What does that mean?”
"It means, sir,” Weston said, "that so far as the robot was concerned, it was obvious to anyone just looking at him that he wasn’t human, so why pretend that he was? He doesn’t . . . understand deception.” "You’re telling me that we have a machine that can cheerfully tear people into great bloody chunks without batting an eye, but that it can’t tell a
lie?
"Rod doesn’t know how to suppress or distort the truth, Admiral,” McDaniels said.
"You know,” Cunningham said. "RAMROD establishes a whole new meaning for the term
smart weapon.
What I don’t understand is how it can be so stupid!” "He’s not stupid,” McDaniels said. "But the way he thinks is . . .
different.”
Weston leaned back in his chair, only half listening to McDaniels as she explained the steps that were being taken to prevent a recurrence of yesterday’s blunder with the press. The raid intended to pick up Braden had turned into a complete fiasco, and he was wondering what to try next.
As expected, Braden had been warned. Weston had been pretty sure he would be, given Diamond’s efficiency in the past. More than ever, he was convinced that the mole had an office somewhere right here in this building.
Weston bad ordered the Georgetown raid aborted after the ambush on the bridge. The attack by motorcyclists armed with automatic weapons had obviously been patterned after similar ambushes in Colombia, though this was the first time Weston had heard of it being used in the States. Three of the four FBI HRT men in the rear car had been killed in the crossfire, the fourth seriously wounded. Three agents in the lead car were dead as well, murdered in the opening seconds of the firefight by a gunman who was carrying forged FBI IDs as good as anything ever produced in Langley’s printshop. Kenzie and the middle car’s driver had escaped without injury, as had Drake and Weston.
There’d been collateral damage as well: nine bystanders wounded—none seriously, fortunately—by stray rounds, flying glass, or bumper-crunching collisions during the eight-second firefight.
It was lucky Rod had been there. Motormouth or not, they all would have been dead without his intervention. Four of the eight cyclists had been killed instantly, and two more had died before reaching Georgetown University Hospital. The two survivors, one of them the driver who’d plunged thirty feet into the Potomac, had been captured and were being held now at FBI headquarters. They’d all been identified as members of the Washington chapter of
Los Salvajes.
The Savages, once again. It seemed that Diamond had a working relationship with that bunch.
The fake FBI agent, of course, was also dead. As Drake had pointed out to Weston that morning with grim, black humor, the guy had panicked in the fight and lost his head. If he’d stayed down, he might have escaped in the confusion.
The operation blown, Weston had radioed for another car to take them back to their helo at Washington
National immediately, leaving Kenzie to deal with the Georgetown police and the gathering crowd of rubbernecking motorists. Eventually, the police had had to shut down the bridge so that they could remove the bodies, wrecks, and discarded automatic weapons. Later, Kenzie had rounded up another FBI team and raided the Georgetown safe house.
It was empty, of course.
Most disturbing, most frustrating of all, Braden had been found late that same night. The Capital police had fished his body from the tidal basin near the Jefferson Memorial, his hands handcuffed behind his back, his brain punctured by an ice pick inserted through his left ear.
And that left Weston and Group Seven right at the beginning again, with no clues to Diamond or his whereabouts.
"Cybernarc!” The EXDIR snorted, looking at the newspaper headline again. "What the hell kind of name is
Cybernarc?
Was this your cyborg’s idea? Or yours?”
"Actually, that was our newspaper friends,” Weston said.
"And inaccurate,” McDaniels said stiffly. "Rod is
not
a cyborg.”
EXDIR scowled. "What’s the difference?”
"Cybernetics is any system having to do with functions of control or coordination,” McDaniels said in her best lecture-hall tone. "By that definition, the timers for a city’s traffic lights or the CPU in a computer are 'cybernetic.’
Cyborg
comes from 'cybernetic organism,’ a mixture of man and machine. A man in an iron lung would qualify. Rod is a robot, an android robot if you like, a machine designed to look and act like a human. I’d like to know when the news reporters are going to start getting their facts straight when they deal with scientific matters.”
"Actually, sir,” Weston said, "the story’s inaccuracies may work to our advantage.”
"How do you figure that?” Admiral Cunningham asked.
"We can use them. 'Cybernarc.’ It’s kind of flashy. And it’s misleading. Hell, 'narc’ is street slang for a narcotics agent. No self-respecting Federal agent would ever call
himself
a narc.” He slapped the newspaper on the tabletop with the back of his hand. "This is garbage, Admiral. Half-truths and distortions. We can deny what we want and be believed, simply because this is all so damned unbelievable in the first place.” "You can say that again,” Gallagher said.
"And not only that, but we can put out a few distortions of our own. Like that we have an army of these things out tracking down dope pushers, dealers, corrupt city officials. It’ll make the bad guys nervous, if only because they’ll be wondering what we’re really up to. And nervous people make mistakes.”
Admiral Cunningham pushed back in his executive’s chair, fingers drumming. He pursed his lips. "I like it,” he said at last. "Especially the disinformation angle. I’ll speak to Ed about it.” He leaned forward and made a note on a legal pad in front of him. Edward Hernshaw was the CIA’s Public Affairs Officer.
"Is that going to be enough, Admiral?” Gallagher asked. "This damned robot silliness could blow up in our faces.”
"My guess is that the papers will drop the story completely in a day or two. It reads like silly season stuff.” He looked hard at Weston. "I don’t want you to think this has you off the hook,” he added. "But we’ll see how the headlines run for the next few days.”
"Yes, sir.”
"Right,” Cunningham said. "Where is the robot now?”
"At the Farm,” McDaniels said. "We took him back last night. He suffered minor external damage in the gun battle—nothing serious. They’re patching him up.”
"And how would you evaluate his first, ah, field test?”
"From what I’ve heard,” McDaniels replied, "he handled himself well. Certainly he came up with some ingenious expedients. I’d say he passed with flying colors.”
"Mo
re like flying car doors, MAC-10
s, and motorcycle tires,” Weston added. "Not to mention a flying head. I checked. He got off exactly three rounds with a captured Ingram before the thing jammed. Everything else he improvised on the spot. As a raw, two- fisted-death combat machine, he is incredible!”
"If you can teach him to watch his mouth, then, we might have something.” Cunningham folded his hands for a moment, seeming to study them. "It’s still your opinion that RAMROD could be applied to Group Seven’s special projects?”
"After seeing him in action yesterday? More than ever.
"Doctor? What do you think?”
She did not answer immediately.
"You have reservations?”
She hesitated before replying. "If Rod has any weaknesses, they’re in his ability to work with people. To
understand
people. He still has trouble with slang and ambiguous language. Metaphors throw him. So does humor. He tends to look for the literal meaning of words.”
"This . . . gaff of his on the bridge yesterday,” Cunningham said. "It still worries me.”
"Rod’s big advantage is that he learns very,
very
fast. He will never repeat a mistake. But because he
is
intelligent in every sense of the word, he
will
make mistakes . . . like any thinking being.”
"Isn’t that a contradiction? He makes mistakes
because
he’s intelligent?”
"Intelligence means being free to make mistakes, Admiral. He doesn’t just blindly follow rote programming. And because Rod’s not human, his mistakes won’t be human ones. He may act in ways that we would find . . . bizarre. Certainly unpredictable.”
"All the more reason to scrap the idea of using the robot in any covert op,” Gallagher said. "It’s too dangerous. God . . . what if the thing had run wild on the bridge yesterday, killing innocent bystanders?”
"He wouldn’t <£o that,” McDaniels insisted. Cunningham looked at Weston. "Have you considered this in your planning, James? It would be a shame to end a two-billion-dollar program because a damned
intelligent piece of covert hardware wasn’t, . . predictable.”
"Like she says, Admiral. Rod learns fast.”
"That may not be enough.” Cunningham looked at McDaniels. "Let me ask you this, Doctor. You say the robot thinks for itself. Could you program it so that it had to obey the orders given to it? Some sort of
failsafe
, a backup, just in case.”
Her lips compressed. "It would be possible,” she said after a moment. "I don’t believe it’s necessary.” "The plan was to team RAMROD with a human operative, correct?”
Weston nodded. "We thought that would minimize the risks. We’ve used several subjects in the PARET training so far. One of them is a combat veteran, a Navy SEAL who works quite well with Rod.”
"Lieutenant Drake.”
"That’s right.”
"I’ve read the reports. He went through a pretty rough time. How is he handling it?”
"He’s recovering. And he has a serious . . . commitment to tracking these people down.”
"Can you trust him?”
Weston thought about the question. How well Drake was coping with what had happened was something only Drake himself could know. He seemed to be handling it, but Weston knew that people did not simply walk away from that sort of shock.
"Yes, sir,” Weston said. "I think I can.”
"You’d better be sure,” Cunningham said. He glanced at McDaniels. "See what you can work up for a
failsafe
. Some way for your boy to pull the robot’s plug if things go wrong.” He shook his head. "Trust is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity around here.”
Diamond was very much on everyone’s mind. The mole had been busy lately, organizing the
snowdrop
ambush and covering Braden’s trail, tracking down Drake and organizing that attempted assassination, setting up the hit on the bridge in Georgetown. The downgraded assessment on Drake’s report was probably Diamond’s handiwork, as were the forged credentials on the bogus FBI man and the death of Braden hours after the CIA contract pilot had been identified as a suspect.
Diamond had to be found, and quickly. God knew how much more damage he could do before he was run to ground.
Since the CIA was in charge of RAMROD, the op tagged
amber harvest
had to be reviewed
by
Agency executives. Its importance was evidenced
by
the ranks of the people in attendance.
Drake was there as RAMROD’s military expert, feeling distinctly uncomfortable in a vaultlike security room full of suits. Some of the executive types at the table he knew: Weston, of course, and he knew Admiral Cunningham by reputation. Harold T. Gallagher, the EXDIR, was present, going over notes he’d made at an earlier meeting with Weston and the DCI. Drake had met EXDIR during the
Achille Lauro
incident, when Gallagher had been the CIA’s chief logistics officer and responsible for arranging the airfields, planes, boats, or rendezvous sites for covert SEAL and Delta ops on
Agency business. Later, he’d been promoted to Deputy Director of Administration (DDA), and when Admiral Cunningham had been appointed DCI, he’d been picked as the Agency’s Executive Director.
Drake also knew Dr. Theodore Godiesky, the CIA S&T man who was now working at RAMROD, and General Maxwell Sinclair, the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command liaison with the CIA and the only man in the room besides himself in uniform.
The rest of the men were strangers to Drake. Dr. Vincent Weis, from the Office of Imagery Analysis. Greg Sandervall, the Deputy Director of Intelligence (DDI). Peter Babcock, the assistant DDA. Taylor Smolleck, from the Office of Logistics. And there was the spy- master himself, Walton Crawford, Deputy Director of Operations, or DDO. It was Crawford who was in charge of the clandestine aspects of CIA activity, including covert operations in other countries, and Drake understood that he was running the Agency’s narcotics division.
The buzz of conversation among the men in the room stilled as Cunningham stood at the head of the table. "If we can begin, gentlemen,” the DCI said. "Okay. As all of you know, we have a situation here. That situation calls himself Diamond. The purpose of this meeting is to brainstorm ways to flush our friend Diamond into the open.”
The silence became, if possible, even more intense. Drake knew what each of them was thinking. There was a real possibility that one of the men in that room—or one of these men’s subordinates—was Diamond. By openly discussing the problem, Cunningham was daring Diamond to eavesdrop.
Which, of course, was the idea. Only Weston, Drake, and the DCI were aware of that aspect of the plan.
"First off,” Cuntaingham said, consulting his notes, "we have an ID on the bogus FBI agent. He’s been identified as Charles Wilson Vanecki. For the past twelve years he’s been a CIA employee, Office of Security.”
There was a low murmur around the table at the news. "What’s the chance that he was Diamond?” EXDIR asked.
Cunningham looked thoughtful. "It’s a possibility, but not a good one. If Diamond is the mastermind everyone thinks he is, he wouldn’t have risked himself in the bridge ambush. But OS does think that Vanecki might have been Diamond’s pipeline into the Company.”
"You mean Diamond might not be part of the Agency after all?” Godiesky asked. "He just had access to Agency records through this Vanecki?”
"A distinct possibility,” Cunningham replied. "For the time being, we are working on that assumption.”
Drake could almost sense the relaxation in the atmosphere around the table. Perhaps the Agency didn’t have a mole after all. That meant there would be no fingers pointing at the department head who had hired a
traitor. . . .
"What about this Delgado?” Pete Babcock asked.
"Yes, Delgado,” Cunningham said. He nodded at Weston. "We have RAMROD to thank for that lead. Delgado has been positively implicated in this case, a high-ranking DAS man who is suspected of working for the Salazar drug cartel as well.”
"Shit,” EXDIR said. "He was going to be our inside man in the DAS. We should find him. He could tell us how badly our intelligence operations down there have been penetrated.”
"Can we locate him?” Sandervall wanted to know. "Have the FBI pick him up for questioning?”
"Unfortunately,” Cunningham replied, "Delgado is no longer in the country.”
"How did that happen?” Gallagher demanded. "I thought he was on our watch list, along with Braden! Damn it, he’s our only other link to Diamond!”
"It looks like he knew that. A man matching Delgado’s description boarded a Viasa flight at Dulles last night, bound for Bogota.” Cunningham gestured toward the Imagery Analysis man. "Doctor?”
Dr. Weis opened the briefcase in front of him, removed a manila folder, and extracted several photographs. He passed these around the table.
"We got these in this morning from NPIC,” Weis said. He pronounced the acronym of the National Photographic Interpretation Center "en-pick.”
When one of the photos came to him, Drake held it by its edges and examined it closely. Looking down into a courtyard as though shot from a second-story window, it had the characteristic negative-image quality of an infrared photo. An automobile, a Mercedes, was parked in front of a building, its front end glowing with the engine’s heat. Twelve men stood about the courtyard in various poses, caught in mid-motion: sentries carrying assault rifles, the car’s driver standing by the door, two men nearby shaking hands. An arrow pointed to one of them.
Drake felt a chill. Despite the distortions of thermal imaging, he recognized the mustache, the lean features. Delgado. The man he’d known as Esposito. "Satellite photos, Doctor?” Taylor Smolleck wanted to know.
"Taken from an altitude of 126 miles by a KH-12 at 0230 hours this morning. This is an enlargement of the courtyard in front of the Salazar family hacienda on the Gulf Coast. The arrow points to the man we believe is Delgado.”
"The evidence indicates that Delgado bugged out as soon as he heard about the Key Bridge ambush,” Cunningham said. "Our satellite reconnaissance suggests that the private army guarding
La Fortaleza Salazar
has stepped up its defenses in the last twelve hours, doubled its guard, put extra patrols into the jungle. . . . In short, gentlemen, Delgado has jumped into a hole, and now the Salazars are slamming the lid.”
"Why?” Gallagher asked. The EXDIR looked up from one of the photos. "Is he afraid we’re going to grab him? Make him tell us who Diamond is?” Crawford laughed. "More likely he’s afraid of Diamond!” the DDO said. "Probably he figures Diamond wants to get him before we can. He might know about what happened to Braden. That’d be enough to make our Colombian friend very nervous!”
"That is my assessment as well,” Cunningham said. He looked at the men around the table once more, as though measuring them. "Gentlemen, we are opening a new operations file, code-named
amber harvest.
This will be a covert operation aimed at securing the person of Luis Delgado-Valasquez.” He waited out the sudden stir and murmur of voices. "I am aware of the risk that Diamond will learn of our plans, but I believe it is a worthwhile risk . . . and one we must take. The operation will be organized in such a way that Diamond will not be able to sabotage the mission without giving himself away. And if we get Delgado, I am convinced we will get Diamond as well.” He cracked a smile. "So if one of you is Diamond, you might as well give up now!” A ripple of nervous laughter circled the table.
"No takers? Then perhaps we can assume that Diamond is elsewhere. Now, the operation will be run by a JSOC team under the direction of General Sinclair. Included in the team will be an operational unit of Project RAMROD.”
"RAMROD?” Gallagher snapped. "Why bring
that
into it?”
"Because
amber harvest
provides us with an ideal opportunity for field-testing RAMROD. This is part of our agreement with Group Seven, Harry, as you will recall.” Cunningham gestured toward Drake. "Lieutenant Drake here, who has considerable experience with the system, will be in charge.”
"How do you feel having a robot in your squad?” General Sinclair asked. The others laughed.
"No problem, General,” Drake replied.
In truth, he wasn’t sure how he felt. He’d seen Rod in action and he’d been impressed, damned impressed. But suppose the robot pulled another goof . . . the jungle equivalent of talking to reporters? The mission could be aborted ... or worse.