Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment - By Kyle Mills Page 0,44

would come to light…” His voice faded for a moment. “Things that need to stay in the dark.”

“The offshore debt?”

“It’s not the financial issues, David.”

“What then?”

Bailer took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Even in the confines of the car, it was hard to say these things out loud.

“The human mind is a very complicated piece of engineering. Maybe the most complicated thing we know of. It’s difficult to find an adequate substitute for it. When the research started, we used chimps—”

“So what?”

“So, there’s only so much you can learn from experimenting on the mind of a monkey. Eventually, we had to move to human subjects.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“Some of the tests—particularly the early ones—weren’t entirely successful.”

Again, Tresco seemed to be struggling to process what he was hearing. “Are you telling me that some of the volunteers were harmed?”

Bailer shook his head, accelerating around a tight curve and looking down the steep slope leading to the valley below. “What I’m telling you is that they weren’t volunteers, David. And they were more than harmed.”

21

Fort Bragg, North Carolina

USA

TAKE IT EASY,” Jon Smith said. “You don’t want to get spotted.”

Above him, Duane was all nervous energy and heavy breathing as he struggled unflaggingly upward. In truth, the wind was moving the branches around enough to obscure all the flailing, but they were more than ten meters from the ground and Smith wasn’t anxious to test his theory that he could arrest the kid’s fall.

He obeyed, his panting evening out as they continued to rise. Beyond his rifle getting caught a few times, Duane was surprisingly solid. It appeared that tree climbing was like riding a bicycle—once you’d nailed it, no amount of sitting in front of a computer screen was enough to make you forget.

“This looks like a good spot,” Smith said when they came to a place where enough of the bright fall leaves had dropped to provide a clear view of the landscape without exposing them. Grayson had tucked the team into cover and the only person visible below was Carrie, still lying in the riverbed. Dresner’s training software had immediately degraded her Merge to thirty percent operability, but she was now down to twenty-seven as it simulated her decline in the absence of medical attention. At this point, even if she hadn’t been told to stay down, he doubted she’d even have the ability to crawl. For a self-professed pacifist, Christian Dresner could design a hell of a nasty military app.

“Okay, Duane. I know it’s hard in this kind of terrain, but think about where you heard the shot come from and what line of sight the sniper would have had to hit Carrie. Then look for…”

His voice faded when he realized that his advice was pointless—instructions on how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together given to a student with a lighter. The rain had stopped and the Merge was having no problem at all picking up the sniper at a range of just over four hundred meters. There was a pink body-heat plume seeping from the edges of what Smith assumed was a rain poncho scattered with dead foliage. Even more obvious was the enhanced outline of a rifle barrel, which the Merge now also identified by make and model—an enhancement the coding team had just finished. It should have also determined whether they were in range of the weapon but a glitch they hadn’t been able to find was causing that data to come up garbage.

“Yeah, I got him,” Duane said excitedly. “He’s right there!”

“Okay, good job. Anyone else?”

A brief pause. “Not that I can see. Just him.”

Smith squinted uselessly, but came up just as empty. “The others must have pulled back to set up a defensive position closer to the flag.”

The young man nodded, his helmet floating on his head a bit. “What do we do?”

The sniper was technically within range of the M16s their training weapons were made to simulate, though only for a good shot lying on firm ground. But what the hell? They were out here to experiment, right?

“Shoot him.”

“What? I can’t hit him from here. He’s like a mile away, sir.”

“Then you’ll miss him. And if you do, we’re going to get the trunk of this tree between him and us, and we’re going to very carefully climb to the ground. Him scoring against you is less of a problem than you falling. Understood?”

Duane gave a short, frightened nod as Smith altered the