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“This isn’t the way to the main entrance,” Riley said.
“Nope. We’re going in through a side entrance.” He glanced at her. “Less fuss.”
“You don’t think the Sommers Group might have drones using facial recognition?”
“I expect he has blanketed the city with drones and has hacked into security cameras, but not over the Pentagon. I don’t think he’d dare. And this is an area that official Washington more or less agrees is off-limits to law enforcement. So you’re okay.”
“How tech savvy do you think the people we’re going to talk to are? It’s important, otherwise it’ll just feel like I’m feeding them a line in gobbledygook.”
Pierce sighed. “I don’t know. I think Jacob chose the audience because of their pull, not their tech savvy. But there will be adjuncts in the room who should be able to follow you.” Though secretly, he doubted many people in the military were as proficient as Riley. Or Felicity, Hope and Emma, for that matter. But they had to convince those with war-making powers, whether they could follow the tech or not.
Pierce was following the lead car to a small car park. He pulled up beside the lead car and killed the engine. The trailing car pulled in beside him. He put his weapon in the console between the seats, checked with the other drivers and they all got out at the same time.
He circled his vehicle and opened the door for Riley. He needed to keep his hands free, so he didn’t help her down, but she definitely didn’t need help, jumping down nimbly, backpack already in place. Each vehicle had two operators, the driver and the one riding shotgun. They immediately surrounded Riley in a diamond formation and moved off. Riley didn’t need instructions to stay right in the middle, she did it instinctively.
They moved in formation to a small building adjacent to the River Terrace Entrance, entering a lobby. The guy at the desk wasn’t some supermall time-server retired cop. He was young, fit, alert, behind a bulletproof screen.
Pierce was prepared. He held out his ASI ID and nodded to the other four, who pulled out their Black Inc. IDs. Riley showed her NSA badge. The security guy studied each one carefully, not smiling, checked it against a list he had, then nodded toward the elevator behind him, and buzzed them through the gate. First they walked through a metal detector then went to the elevator.
The elevator took them four stories underground. Guidebooks all said that the Pentagon only had two underground stories, but that was bullshit. Riley again was in the center of a phalanx of operators, quietly waiting to reach their destination.
Down a corridor, to the right, and there was another unsmiling security guard who scrutinized their IDs, checked his list, and opened a heavy steel door for them. They walked in in twos, Pierce and Riley in the middle.
It was a war room, though not big. An oval, shiny, mahogany conference table, a wall-sized flat screen, laptops at each seat. General MacBride sat at the head of the table, Colonel Perry to his left side. Pierce didn’t recognize the other officers, though by their uniforms they were another two colonels and a captain. Several young men and women sat in chairs against the walls. They didn’t look hard and tough like the military officers. They looked dewy and soft. But they also looked like they would understand Riley more than the officers.
Jacob Black sat at the right hand of General MacBride.
There were name plates and Riley’s was in the middle of the table, facing the huge wall screen. She sat, set up her laptop. Pierce and his teammates stood in the back of the room against a wall. They weren’t needed for this. Everyone waited until Riley was done, and then General MacBride cleared his throat and bent toward the microphone in front of him. It was a directional mike and he didn’t need to bend toward it, but old habits die hard.
“Good morning,” the General said. “I have called you all in to listen to Dr. Riley Robinson, who has, I am told, pertinent information on the ongoing crisis with the People’s Republic of China. I have done so upon the insistence of Jacob Black, who has been … persuasive.” He shot a sour glance at Black, who didn’t change expression. “So, Dr. Robinson, I understand you have a presentation for us. These are busy days for us all, as you can imagine, so I’ll turn the floor over to you right away.”
He capped off his little speech by shooting his cuffs and ostentatiously checking his watch, when the time was shown not only on the huge wall monitor but also on an enormous clock on another wall.
He was trying to intimidate Riley. Luckily, Riley didn’t even notice. She looked around the table at each participant. Pierce knew she was nervous, he’d felt her trembling as he put a hand to her back to usher her into the room. He didn’t think she was scared of making the presentation, but rather scared that the presentation wouldn’t work.
They were in the Pentagon, a huge institution that had started a slow but inexorable push toward war. War was the business of the Pentagon, and there were a lot of people happy at the idea of a war with China. They were sure that they could contain it, and anyway the people planning it sure weren’t the ones who would fight it. A lot of careers were going to be made, and here was Riley, a lone woman, sayingno. Don’t do it.
It was sort of working against her that she was so good-looking. That wasn’t the way Pierce thought—the women at ASI were drop-dead gorgeous, every single one, while being serious professionals at the top of their game. He and his teammates respected them. But a lot of men instinctively didn’t take a beautiful woman seriously. As if their looks counted against them. And Riley was amazingly beautiful. Serious in demeanor but also seriously beautiful.
However, Pierce was the only one there to know how incredibly gorgeous she was all over. How silky soft her skin was, over strong, slim muscles. How perfect her breasts were, how her breathing speeded up when he kissed those breasts, how she arched when he touched her between her legs, how wet she got…
His groin just lit up.
Fuck.
He shifted uneasily, cursing himself. Goddamn. In a room at the Pentagon with war on the horizon was no place to get a woodie.
“Good morning, everyone.” Riley’s cool voice made him stand up straight. She had an effect on not just him, but on everyone. The room came to attention. “My name is Riley Robinson, and just to give you an idea of my credentials, I have a Masters in Computer Science and a double PhD in Statistics and Data Science and Computer Science. I worked for the NSA and I currently work for the NSO. My specific remit at the NSO is analysis of People’s Liberation Army footage. I have reviewed perhaps three thousand hours of satellite footage of the People’s Liberation Army on maneuvers. Three days ago, some footage from the Democratic Republic of Congo came to my attention. Though to the naked eye it seemed like a video of an attack by PLA soldiers on a group of American scientists, it was clearly corrupted as you can see here, and here and here.”
She pressed a button and the wall monitor came to life. It was what he’d seen back at the safe house, only blown up to wall size and 8K. Riley used her laser pointer to show the anomalies she’d shown them back at the safe house. It was all much clearer than it had been before.
Riley waited a second for everyone to absorb the images. “To a trained eye, this video is a deepfake, but it’s good enough to create a stir. Deepfakes are an iterative process. You work at it back and forth and it improves. And a few hours later, this is what that video looked like.”
On the monitor, the video was crystal clear, sharp in its details. Chinese soldiers attacking Americans. The faces were clear, their uniforms crisp, insignia sharp and visible.
“But,” Riley continued, “in real life, this is what that video is, when stripped of the manipulation.”
The wall monitor, paused at a dramatic moment in the massacre, rippled as layers were stripped, new layers added on and then the image came into very sharp focus. Only it was completely different.
