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Hinton gave a long sigh. “He was a brilliant guy, could have been bigger than me, but his focus changed, and we parted ways. I don’t blame him. He was Israeli and he felt the call to develop LAWs to help his nation.”
“LAWs?”
“Lethal autonomous weapons.”
“Killer robots?”
Hinton chuckled a little. “That’s right, mate. In layman’s terms, anyway. He wanted to use his expertise to help protect his little nation from everyone out in the region trying to destroy it. That was his decision. I respect it. I disagree with it, but I respect it.”
“You went into cars instead.”
“Self-driving electric cars, to be specific. Both Tomer and I were successful, as were others doing what we do,” Hinton said. “A lot of my story is hype. I’m not better than Tomer, I’m not better than Kotana Ishikawa or Ju-ah Park or Bogdan Kantor or Lars Halverson or any of the others. I’m just the flamboyant one who got lucky with my businesses, dated the pop stars, and got myself up on TV a lot.”
“Halverson? Who is that?”
“Another old partner of mine. You haven’t heard of him because he’s still alive. He’s in Boston, and I talked to him this afternoon. His street’s lined with cops and corporate security. Like me…it looks like they won’t be able to get to him.”
Zack continued his questioning. “So…you sold your car company?”
“Is that what you read in the news, or is that what Gareth told you?”
“I read in the news that you sold. Wren said the Chinese basically stole it out from under you.”
Anton shrugged. “They cut me in so I wouldn’t make a fuss about it, and so I’d still buy chips and other equipment made in China.” With a chuckle he said, “They stole ten billion in capital assets, God knows how much in intellectual property value. But it is what it is.”
He smiled; the man smiled a lot for someone on the edge of tears, Zack noticed, but this time it was a sad smile. “The thing that hurts the most, though, is the brain drain. Some of my best programmers were Chinese. They all work for Ningbo Automotive Group now, and none of them work for me.
“So.” Anton switched gears, asking a question himself now. “You know Gareth from the Army?”
Zack didn’t correct his boss and mention he’d been in the Navy. Instead he said, “We ran together in Afghanistan, Pakistan, places where we and the Brits did joint ops. I was an O, he wasn’t, but we got along—”
“What’s an O?”
“An officer. Sorry, sir. I was a commander, he was a Warrant Officer 1, enlisted, but every time he spoke up, me and the other Os, SEALs or SAS, would listen.”
“He does have an imposing presence.”
“Anyway, I left the military and went into intelligence, and we ran into one another then, too. And now, as luck would have it, when you needed a new security chief, he remembered this old American FAG and gave me a call.”
Hinton’s eyes went wide. “Beg your pardon?”
“Former action guy. Sorry again, it’s just something we call any long-in-the-tooth operator who hangs around the periphery of the game looking for work. Never thought that would be me.”
“You thought you’d find some other line of work?”
“I thought I’d be dead by forty. Then by fifty. Now…I’ve stopped making predictions.”
Hinton said, “Predicting the future is my line of work, essentially. Leveraging the knowledge of the present to make a better tomorrow.” He shrugged. “You might have heard that I am a strange man.”
Again, Hightower wasn’t sure what to say. After a moment, he replied with honesty. “I don’t think I’d be able to convince you I haven’t, so I’ll just go ahead and tell you they say other stuff, too. I’ve read good things.”
“Can you work with strange?”
“My job is to keep you alive; my job isn’t to psychoanalyze you.”
“Right,” Hinton said. He seemed like he was about to wrap up the conversation. But instead he said, “How can I help you do your job?”
“Here’s the sixty-four-dollar question. Do you have any idea who might be killing your colleagues and trying to kill you?”
