Page 7 of The Dauntless (Spy Girl 5)
“No. I told her, if she chose him, we were through. Obviously. She made her decision. Have you talked to Lorenzo?”
I shake my head. “Peter and Viktor want to celebrate the Fourth at the White House with us. I wasn’t sure of your plans.”
“Fourth at the White House is the best. Sounds fun.” He jumps onto my bed and pulls me into a snuggly hug. “I’m tired.”
“Go back to sleep,” I suggest.
“I’m not sure I can. I’m awake now and starving. Let’s order food, eat it in bed, and watch a movie.”
“As long as by watch a movie, you mean you will watch a movie while I sleep.”
He kisses my cheek and then reaches over me and grabs the phone to place his order.
I never do get to nap. By the time he’s eaten, he’s ready to get over to the pool to practice.
“Did I tell you I managed to buy your seat for the rest of the week?”
“You didn’t. When did you do that?”
“Well, I didn’t. The Secret Service handled it. You can hang in the suite in between, but I’d love it if you were there for each race.”
“What are you running today?”
“The two-hundred butterfly, hopefully will make the semifinal, and the two-hundred-freestyle final.”
“And you have to win the final to go to the Olympics?”
“No, the top two from each individual event make the team if they are fast enough to qualify at Olympic standards.”
“I guess you weren’t lying when you said you can’t slack through this.”
He gives me a kiss on the cheek and a smirk. “Told ya so.”
I smack his butt and wish him luck.
I make my way to the box where I read the printed schedule for today, set my alarm for an hour before the race, put my head down on the counter, and take a nap.
I’m awoken a very short time later by Mike Burnes, director of the CIA.
“You’re back, huh?”
“I never left. Just had an international crisis I had to deal with. About our previous talk. Here’s the deal. Your father was a brilliant inventor, and the government helped fund much of his research. The usual deal is that we help fund the research and get exclusive use of the inventions for a contracted period of time.”
“And what happens when the time is up?”
“Von Allister Industries can release that technology in their products and sell them on the open market. Usually, by the time the contract is up, we consider the technology to be old and are already working on the next upgrade, so we don’t care if the other side has it. The board of directors of Von Allister Industries votes on which contracts get renewed and which don’t.
“There is one specific contract we need to have renewed. It’s a matter of national security, but the chairman of the board is being unreasonable. The government has threatened to pull other contracts, yet he seems resolute.”
“Well, as a stockholder, I can see why. To be the first to sell whatever this technology is, I assume, would mean a windfall of revenue for the company.”
Burnes slightly cocks his head. “Have you been talking to McClellan?”
Bells go off in my head as I remember the name from my mother’s list. “As in Harrison McClellan, the billionaire owner of the world’s largest biotech firm who started the conspiracy-theory-ridden World Seed Vault?”
“Yes,” he replies. “Your father turned the board over to him when he became a recluse.”
“I didn’t know that.”
This gets a laugh from Burnes. “You don’t even know who runs the company?”
“Ari and I were possibly given incorrect information about our father’s company when he died.”
“In what way?”
“We were led to believe that, before he had passed, Ares had liquidated most of his assets. We assumed that included his company.”
“He did sell a large chunk of stock, but he still retained majority ownership. That means, you and your brother control the voting for those shares.”
“Yes, so what is it you want us to vote on specifically?”
“A top-secret project called the TerraSphere.”
“I’ve heard of that. Saw blueprints for the project in Ares’s office. In fact, Peter Prescott, Viktor Nikolaevich, and I are going to visit the project next week before the board meeting. I’ll be able to see it firsthand.”
“You’re going to Iraq? You do know the State Department warns against that.”
I don’t tell him I’ve been before. “I know, but Peter’s dad wants him to see the project, and I’m assuming they will have some kind of security in place. I’m curious though. How can Von Allister Industries be the one to vote on it? My understanding was that the project was a joint venture with a few different companies.”
“They invested in it, but the contract is solely with VA. In other words, you.”
“And why don’t you want the TerraSphere project allowed to be shared? It’s supposed to be great for the environment. The government doesn’t want us to, isn’t a good enough answer. If it’s good for the people—which, in this case, it would be—it should be done. We’re becoming one world. Projects like this could bring us closer.”
Burnes lets out a frustrated breath. “You sound like your father. He was difficult to deal with, too.”
“I’m told he was brilliant, so thank you.”
“He was a pacifist. Actually believed we could become one perfect country. One new world.”
“Like Arcadia,” I say dreamily but purposefully, waiting to see if the word gets a reaction.
“Yes,” he says, not giving me even a tic. He obviously doesn’t know about the currency, which is a really good thing. It means there are some people I can actually trust. “Renaissance drivel by philosophers who had the time to ponder such arcane ideas and weren’t in touch with the real world.”
“Hmm. Or is it because people living in harmony means there would be no need for politicians, the CIA, or the war machine?”
“You don’t want to cross the CIA,” he says ominously.
I give him a tight-lipped smile. “Did you threaten my father, too? Is that why he’s dead?”
“What?” he says, his eyes going wide.
He’s either a really good actor or truly surprised I would suggest such a thing. In theory, if he had been faking his reaction, there would have been a twitch, a tic, a barely perceptible squint of the eye. But he’s the director of the CIA for a reason.
“No. Of course not.”
“Look, I don’t care who you are. If you want to convince me to vote against the board, you’re going to have to present me with facts because threatening me isn’t going to make me vote the way you want. In fact, all it does is piss me off and make me want to vote against you.”
&nbs
p; “What do you know about quantum computing?”
Merde. Something else they made me study at Blackwood.
“I know that it’s being developed. That it uses a different approach to processing information based on quantum mechanics in nature. That they believe, by following this natural behavior, that computers will be able to process more holistically. When it happens, it’s supposed to be like when it used to take whole warehouses to run a computer that is now about equal to our laptops. In this case, you’d be able to run, like, a whole city, which would be pretty amazing since my iPhone has a hard time storing all my movies and music.”
“A whole city,” Burnes repeats.
I cock my head to the side in wonder. “Are you saying that my father used quantum computing to run the TerraSphere?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Wow. That’s pretty amazing. Why doesn’t the government want that knowledge spread around?”
“Because the industry still believes the first useful machines won’t be ready for years. That the computers are unstable and unpredictable and don’t always work. Like nature, they can change the programming. It lacks precision.”
“How did Ares combat that to make the TerraSphere then?” I ask.
When I was there six years ago, it seemed to be working fine. The buildings were always cool regardless of the heat outside. The lights never flickered. The water tasted like it was fresh from a Rocky Mountain stream.
I have a sudden flashback where I’m lying on the floor, staring at a decorated, domed ceiling.
“Isn’t it pretty?” the girl said, staring upward. “It’s called Arcadia. A place where the animals and people roam free together in a beautiful meadow—-a perfect, unspoiled world where there are no more wars.”
“No more wars? That would be perfect. I don’t understand war, do you? Like, why can’t people just get along? Love instead of hate?”
She patted my hand. “You’re young. You have a lot to learn. My dad says wars are waged for one reason.”
“And what’s that?”
