Page 13 of Maverick

“Fucking right, she is.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Once Katelyn was sound asleep, Mav moved her to the back, where she lay comfortably on the bed. He covered her up and frowned, realizing how very tiny she was in the relatively small bed. Walking back to the front, his friends read the look on his face.

“She’s a full-grown woman, brother. It will all be okay,” smirked Saint.

“What the hell just happened to me?” he asked, pushing his hand through his thick brown hair.

“You fell, dude. Like seriously fell off a cliff, face planting at that beautiful girl’s feet. Melissa was a distraction, a little side entertainment until the real thing showed up, and the real thing just showed up.” Pax just laughed at him, shaking his head. The ping of the video call had them all turning to the screens on their individual tablets.

“Hey, Doug, what’s up?”

“Is she safe?” he asked.

“She’s sleeping, but yes, she’s safe. Is there something wrong? I mean, beyond the obvious is there something wrong,” said Pax.

“The CIA is claiming she is an enemy of the state. They want her for questioning.”

“Fuck,” muttered Saint. “Do they know it was us that took her?”

“We don’t think so. There weren’t any cameras in the area, and it was dark. Your faces weren’t easily seen. The only thing that might tip them off is that the four of you all left the Teams on the same day. Now, we can write that off as coincidence, but they probably won’t buy it. They know she was working for us.”

“Why were we letting her work remotely when she was working on something so important?” asked Mav.

“She doesn’t like to travel much. One of the things she disclosed in the interview process was that the only thing that brings her peace is being near the water. We tried to tell her there’s all kinds of water here, but she didn’t buy it. I think she’s about to get a first-hand account of how much water we truly have,” he said.

“Doug, this shit she’s working on sounds like something we wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Why are we backing this?” asked Mav.

Ryan, Montana, and Hiro’s faces appeared on the screen, and they waved.

“We might be able to better answer that,” said Hiro. “Ryan and Montana came to me asking about the primitive versions of AI that we already use. Some of them are facial recognition software. I can take someone’s face from any camera we operate, or don’t operate, and overlay that image on anybody I want, making others believe it’s someone different.”

“Why does that not make me feel good?” frowned Saint.

“It shouldn’t. I mean, it should because it’s us, but if it were someone else, it shouldn’t. The other forms of AI we use are the voice-altering software systems that we have. We’ve used them recently taking pieces of someone’s voice and creating new messages. Hell, as far back as Tony, we were using these initial versions.”

“So, it’s not new to us at all,” said Brax. “What makes what she’s doing different?”

“It’s on an entirely different level,” said another voice. Thomas’s face appeared, and he waved. “The sound deflection systems I used years ago are still operable and useful today. Katelyn’s technologies are surpassing that. Stay with me while I lay this out.

“Let’s say that we want war to break out between Mexico and Spain. I could take the sounds from a nuclear submarine that belongs to us and is currently in the Atlantic. I can take those sounds, transfer them to an inferior diesel submarine used by Mexico, making Spain think they have a nuclear sub. I could even take the sounds of ballistic missile silos opening and firing and infer it to the Mexican submarine.”

“Fuck me,” whispered Mav. “It would instigate all-out war.”

“It would. We think that’s why the agency wants it. If they could use this to do just that, they could play puppet master over the world,” said Thomas. “If we go even further, we could use AI images and voices in advertising, news stories, transferring the original voice into any nationality’s language and broadcasting on their news networks anything we wanted.”

“Fucking hell,” muttered Saint. “She said nothing is on paper, Thomas. She said it’s all in her head. What was their plan with this?”

Thomas stared at the screen, then looked at Doug, Montana, and Hiro. Doug turned the screen toward him again.

“Their plan was to either force her by torture to create what they want or keep her so drugged she’d have to talk about it for the next twenty years for someone to figure out.”

“Shit,” muttered Brax. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to hide her. Keep her on our property, away from the crowds, for as long as we can. Then, we’re going to arrange for her death.”

The gasp behind them told everyone that Katelyn had arrived at the last moment. Her face was pale, shaking her head at them.

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