Chapter 27
THEY STOOD IN SILENCE, LOOKING down at Major Ames’s weapons stash.
Taylor said, “He didn’t know who he could trust, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.”
“Or his brain was so cooked that he was having paranoid delusions.”
“They weren’t delusions, Scott. Look what happened to him.”
Brodie glanced again at the Latin phrase. Major Ames seemed to have had a flair for the dramatic. And, maybe, an affinity for ancient Rome.
Praetorian.
Whatever Praetorian was, Ames had either created it or discovered it. But what was it, and what the hell was he prepping for here?
Brodie looked again at the weapons. How could Ames have amassed this kind of cache? How did he even access the armory? Maybe PFC Greer had helped with this too. And maybe it was another sign of Camp Hayden’s breakdown in morale and discipline that no one had noticed all this stuff go missing.
The doorbell rang.
Taylor began hastily closing the trunks. “Buy me a minute.”
Brodie brushed himself off, then walked back into the house and to the front door. He placed his hand on his SIG Sauer as he checked the peephole. It was Major Klasky.
He let go of his weapon and opened the door. “Hello, Major.”
“I went to your house first. Then I spotted the torn police tape.”
“Good deduction.”
Klasky cleared his throat. “Two things. One, I’ve located the body-cam footage from March twelfth. There was no exercise on the thirteenth. Two, Colonel Howe has conferred with Major General Ramsay and now wishes to speak with you and Ms. Taylor.”
“What’s first?”
“The colonel is waiting.”
“Maggie’s in the bathroom. She’ll be out shortly.”
Brodie stepped out the front door and shut it behind him.
Klasky looked at the closed door. “The MPs cleaned this place out.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you find something they missed?”
He nodded. “Tuna sandwich in the fridge. Smells off.”
“Do people find you funny?”
“I never bother to ask.” He added, “You know I can’t share the details of our investigation, Major.”
“I know. But I’m curious.”
“I guess you’ll have to stay that way.”
Klasky smiled. It wasn’t exactly a sincere smile, but he was trying. This guy seemed all right. Less tightly wound than the colonel, not a wacko like the general, and certainly less of an insecure dipshit than his subordinate Captain Pickman.
As they waited, Klasky scanned the houses.
Brodie asked, “Which one’s yours?”
The major jerked his thumb behind him. “I’m in the other cluster.”
“With the colonel.”
Klasky looked at him. “That’s right.”
Brodie noted that the major’s hazel eyes were a little close together, his ears were a bit oversize, and he had a noticeable gap in his teeth.
Altogether it gave him a vaguely Alfred E.
Neuman–like appearance. Except there was a sharpness in his eyes, and despite his slightly dopey appearance Brodie had a feeling this guy didn’t miss much.
Brodie asked, “Did you agree with Colonel Howe’s actions this afternoon?”
“It would be insubordinate of me to tell you I didn’t.”
“When speaking to a CID agent, your loyalty is to the truth.”
Klasky nodded. “Well said. So, here’s the truth. Brigadier General Morgan should have never been placed in command of Camp Hayden, and Colonel Howe waited too long to do what she did.”
“Why was he placed in command?”
“You’ll have to ask Major General Ramsay.”
“I’m asking you.”
Klasky thought a moment. “Morgan is a smart and capable officer. He’s headstrong, obviously, but that’s not a problem. The problem is he came in here with an agenda, and it was a different agenda than the Army’s, and they should have seen that from a mile off.”
“He wanted to kill the program,” said Brodie.
Klasky looked in his eyes, weighing his words.
“He wanted the Rangers to kick some ass, lay waste to the tin men, and embarrass Futures Command, because he hated this whole program. But he underestimated what DARPA and DEVCOM had designed. And by the time he realized what he was really up against, he was dug in, so he’s been pushing the men beyond the breaking point to bend reality back to what he thinks it should be. ”
That tracked. General Morgan had been losing control, even before one of the bots killed two people.
And then once Bucky went loco, the only supposed safeguard against these things—their predictability—was out the window, and Morgan’s back was against the wall.
Given all that, it wasn’t too surprising that he’d done what he did.
The tin men were a threat—to his soldiers and to his pride.
Taylor came out the door. It looked like she actually had used the bathroom, at least to wash all the sand off her hands and arms. “Hello, Major.”
Klasky repeated their two-part itinerary to her, then led them toward the administrative building.
As they walked down a dirt road running along the northern edge of camp, Brodie asked, “Were you with Futures Command before this assignment?”
“No,” the man replied. “I rotated in. The command is new, so that’s common.”
“Where were you before?”
“Fort Carson,” replied Klasky, without elaborating.
Taylor asked, “What was your impression of Major Ames?”
Klasky thought a moment. “Smart. Eccentric. Stubborn. He often came to me to give feedback and complain about the training exercises. He could have gone straight to Colonel Howe, but probably because we shared rank, he thought I was more approachable.”
“What were his issues?” asked Brodie.
“He wanted to push things. Give the D-17s more complex parameters for target acquisition, use unarmed Rangers as civilian stand-ins, see if we could get the bots to mount a simulated hostage rescue. Things that would have required massive code rewrites and led to unpredictable outcomes.” He looked at Brodie and Taylor.
“So, as you might imagine, when Dixon reported finding some secret program in the code, my first thought was that it was Ames’s handiwork.
It would fit his character and his motives. ”
This was the third individual with the same theory that Ames himself was tinkering with the D-17s. That didn’t make it true. But it couldn’t be dismissed either.
“And if it was his doing,” continued Klasky, “I’m not surprised he was able to cover his tracks so well. He was brilliant.”
“Reckless too,” said Taylor, “if your theory is correct.”
Klasky thought about that. “I’d use the word ‘na?ve,’ Ms. Taylor. He thought the more we could make the machines like us, the less dangerous they’d become. I figured the opposite was true. I’m out of my depth when it comes to understanding the tech inside the tin men, but I do know people.”
Right. And part of what made people dangerous was their tendency toward irrational behavior—often to their own detriment.
General Morgan’s pride and vengefulness had cost him his command, at least temporarily.
Major Ames’s idealism—and perhaps arrogance—had cost him his life.
Even the MP, Specialist Kemp, would still have been alive had he put in the minor effort to procure a vehicle rather than take the major risk of activating Number 20 while alone with it in a confined space.
And that raised a larger question: Were Bucky’s actions the product of some internal logic?
Or had some element of chaos, of humanlike irrationality, been introduced into its central processor that caused it—like General Morgan, Major Ames, and Specialist Kemp—to take actions that led to its own destruction?
Why don’t you resist?
Morgan’s question again, which Brodie could not get out of his mind.
He said to Major Klasky, “General Morgan conducted a live-fire test on a piece of military hardware. This equipment had the capacity to avoid, or at least attempt to avoid, being destroyed, yet it didn’t. That is an interesting insight.”
Klasky looked surprised. “Are you defending what the general did? Depending on your point of view, he either carried out an extrajudicial execution of the murderer in your homicide investigation, or he destroyed the murder weapon.”
“I’m aware,” said Brodie.
Klasky shook his head. “The only insight we gained was to the limits of the general’s impulse control. The bots are not programmed to protect themselves outside of the battlespace unless specifically ordered to do so.”
Taylor said, “The bots are also not programmed to bash a person’s head into a concrete wall.”
Klasky had no reply to that.