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“So…what’s the problem? Go to Mexico. Bring him in. Ask him what he knows.”
Genrich shook his head. “He’s being watched. He doesn’t know who they are. They’ve pinned him down, or at least they know the neighborhood he’s in. Surveillance is all over the place; he’s spotted men in the street who don’t belong; he thinks he heard a drone fly overhead. He’s terrified, and he’s got every right to be. He wants SVR or GRU to personally retrieve him and get him out of the country, but I can’t get SVR or GRU there to do it, because Russia doesn’t have intelligence officers who can travel without being uncovered thanks to the revelations from Switzerland about the Kremlin’s ops.”
“A Russian intelligence officer saw me down here, or so you said.”
“A Russian who was aware of the Odessa order saw you. An intelligence operative, but one tied to the embassy here, known by the local government. A pencil pusher, I’m sure. Not someone who could pose any threat to you. And not someone who could extract a man out from under a kill team in Mexico City and bring him to safety.”
Zoya sipped her drink. “Then it sounds like your engineer is fucked.”
Genrich shook his head. “Not if you go, Zoyusha. I will tell him I’ll have the best operator in Russian foreign intelligence spirit him out of the city. He’ll comply. You can do it, too. Slip in, disguise yourself and him, and then get out. There’s an airport fifty kilometers outside the capital, Felipe Ángeles International. I’ll have a private jet there waiting for you both.”
“I’m no longer a Russian intelligence officer.”
“Yes, well, we won’t be mentioning that to him, will we?” He paused, then said, “Name your price.”
“You’re going to give this stolen code to Russia?”
Genrich did not respond, but Zoya took that as an answer.
She leaned back, spoke a little louder now. “You can’t pay me enough to help Russia. Not after what’s happened in the past two years.”
Genrich kept his voice low. “Don’t think of it as helping Russia. You are stopping, slowing down, at least, the development of a revolutionary weapon.”
“So says this nameless, faceless Russian engineer.”
“If it weren’t true, why would there be a kill team after him?”
Zoya still didn’t get the urgency. “Artificial intelligence…some new tech. I’m sure there are developments all the time. What’s so special about—”
He barked out a quick whisper. “Because what the engineer is describing is a lethal autonomous weapon that can operate at machine speed.”
“What does that mean?”
“The human is totally taken out of the process. The weapon, whatever it is, works on its own. It can destroy anything in its path because its algorithm takes nanoseconds to decide who or what to attack. It would be almost impossible to defeat. The technology itself, no matter the platform it’s applied to, will make war infinitely more deadly, and humans, all humans, unable to combat it.”
Zoya wasn’t buying it. “Russia doesn’t want this guy so they can make the technology disappear. They want this guy so they can have it for themselves.”
To this Genrich nodded, almost apologetically. “That is true, of course. But if both sides have the same technology, the technology won’t be employed. The West loses its advantage. The world is made a safer place. You do remember that the U.S. and the Soviets both having a nuclear arsenal ensured the state of mutually assured destruction, so that neither dared use their weapons, don’t you?
“You can do some good. We all can.”
Sarcastically, Zoya replied, “Right. This is just one big humanitarian operation. A peace mission. For the Kremlin. I wasn’t stupid twenty years ago when you knew me, and I’m not stupid now.”
Genrich put his palms on the table. “I don’t have time to explain the specific dangers of this technology. I only understand how destabilizing it will be in a general sense. Once you get the engineer, he’ll tell you everything on your drive to the airport, and then you will see what I already see. The act of leveling the playing field by obtaining what he knows will be a net benefit for everyone on the planet.”
“The engineer is in Mexico because…”
“Because he slipped out of a nearby country and went there to hide. Somehow he was found.”
“A nearby country? You obviously mean the USA.”
“Look. There are details…matters that don’t pertain to your operational exigencies, that I’m not at liberty to discuss. On top of that, there are things the engineer has not yet revealed, even to me. He knows his information is valuable, and he’s using it to buy his way to safety.”
Zoya was neither surprised nor annoyed. All operations worked thusly. “What do you know about the people after him?”
“Some local hit men, plus the surveillance detected near the safe house. We’ve picked up information that a well-known American asset code-named Lancer is involved, as well, but he hasn’t been spotted in the area.”
“Never heard of him.”
