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“Jesus Christ,” Pace muttered.
“Anton Hinton,” Hightower clarified, though Pace didn’t get it. “And it’s not for China. Hinton is just using China to give him the power he needs to spread Cyrus all over the world. He’s got some way to take back control of it later and force China to serve the system.”
Pace spoke up now. “Cyrus…it’s like…like a god?”
“Lowercase g, but yeah, that’s what that crazy dickhead is going for. He calls it a ‘new order.’ ”
“How many bots on the property?” Court asked.
“He said something about a thousand.”
“Fuck!” Court shouted.
“Okay,” Pace replied. “Victor One. We’ve got to double-time it to that Cluster Room, stop the upload. Expect to meet resistance.”
Zack said, “You also need to find the Assembly Room. It’s going to be someplace where the semi trucks can access it.”
Travers looked to Zack. “There are three big bay doors on the north side of the building. Ramps lead down from there.”
“That’s going to be it.”
“You want in the stack?”
Hightower reloaded his Staccato, racked the slide. “Put me in, coach!”
Nine men and one woman moved out, north through the doorway into a narrow hallway that ran alongside the tracked tunnel, while Travers tried in vain to raise the Ground Branch men at the SIGINT building.
•••
Anton Hinton rolled through the main tunnel in the middle row of a six-person electric golf cart. He was unarmed, but the Cuban security officer behind the wheel and both Sentry bots on board behind him carried pistols.
They bounced over the tracks that were not quite flush with the concrete flooring. The Soviets had used gas-powered carts down here for decades, but Hinton had the carts removed when he took over the facility and replaced with the electronic carts that were more versatile. Some of his vehicles were even driverless, and they could move both people and equipment between La Finca and the lab in just five minutes.
They passed a group of four more Sentries running past them up the hall towards the threats behind at their top speed of six miles per hour.
Hinton spoke into a handheld two-way communicator that was more reliable down here than his phone. He’d already commanded the control room of the assembly area to get the available machines online as fast as possible, and he’d called for Kimmie, who had not yet responded.
Now he tried to raise Gareth Wren, because he knew he’d left the man behind in the middle of a raging gun battle.
“Gareth! Gareth! Come in!”
On his third try, he heard his chief of operations. “I’m all right! Running through the pedestrian passage. We need to deploy Cuban military into the building.”
Anton shook his head vehemently. “No! The Cubans stay out! As we agreed.”
To this Wren shouted, “We’re in the bloody tunnel, we don’t know how many there are outside.”
But Anton was adamant. “Our platforms will handle everything inside without the Cubans. The first bots have already been loaded up in assembly. We will send them out in teams as they come online. I’ll send a cart for you straightaway. Meet me at the Cluster Room.”
“But the Cuban army can—”
“They stay outside the building!” Hinton shouted, and he dropped the communicator onto the seat next to him and rubbed his hands through his hair.
He wasn’t really worried about the Cubans knowing what was going on in here; a bunch of dumb soldiers, like that American Hightower, could look right at Cyrus and not have a fucking clue they were in danger, but he was worried about a company of special forces down here adding to the shooting and blowing up that the CIA and his bots would already do.
Hinton’s new LAWs, all the LAWs in the building except for the original sixteen models he got from Massachusetts Automation, were all run by Cyrus, and Cyrus could handle internal security.
His main concern, however, was that Cyrus wasn’t ready for the upload.
