The Oracle Year(82)

Leigh Shore apparently agreed; she was staring at Will like he was completely out of his mind.

“Son,” Leuchten said, turning to address Hamza directly, “I was told about what that woman did to you and your wife. You have my sincerest apologies. She’s an independent agent. We had no control over her methods.”

“I—” Hamza began.

“But you did send her, right?” Dando interrupted. “Let’s be clear here. Whatever that woman did, she did it because you wanted her to.”

Leuchten frowned. He waited several long seconds before responding.

“The three of you can go together to a waiting room,” he said, indicating Hamza, Miko, and Leigh. “Anything you need, just ask one of the marines, and they’ll get it for you.” He pointed at Will. “You. Stay. Have a seat.”

A small group of soldiers stepped away from their posts against the wall to escort everyone but the Oracle out of the room. Dando took a few steps after them, but stopped when rifle barrels rose from resting positions to track his head. He held up his hands in surrender and called after his departing friends.

“Guys, it’s going to be all right. Really. We’ll be back together soon.”

Once the door had closed behind them, the Oracle sat down across the table from Leuchten and folded his hands.

“Why did you kidnap us?” Dando said.

Now it was Leuchten’s turn to snort skeptically.

“Mr. Dando—you have not been kidnapped. We are the United States government. We do not kidnap. You and your friends have simply been detained.”

The Oracle spread his hands, palms up.

“Is there a difference?”

“Absolutely,” Leuchten said. “When we do it, it’s legal.”

“Fine,” Dando said, frowning. “Why did you detain us?”

“Really, son, that’s not a game you want to play. You know who you are, I know who you are. You’re here because Will Dando is the Oracle.”

Dando shrugged.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not exactly,” Leuchten answered. “We just want to talk to you, to tell you something you need to know. We’ve been looking for you for a long time, so we could tell you this thing. But you made it so goddamn hard to track you down that we had to go through, well, quite a bit of effort.”

“Effort? You killed people, you caused those blackouts, you threatened me and my friends, you—”

“Shut up,” Leuchten cut him off. The kid was working up a head of steam, and maybe with good reason, but the Oracle needed to understand that he was not in control of this discussion.

“I talk, you listen. There are things you need to hear.”

Dando opened his mouth, clearly ready to start blatting again.

“Will,” Leuchten said quickly, before the Oracle could speak, “I can tell you where the predictions came from. I can explain everything that’s happened to you, if you shut the fuck up for two minutes.”

The Oracle’s mouth snapped closed, which Leuchten noted with no small satisfaction.

“Before I begin, do you want anything? Water? I know how getting hit with one of those Tasers can dry out your mouth.”

Dando hesitated, then nodded. A pitcher and a stack of paper cups sat on a tray in the middle of the table. One of the marines filled a cup and handed it to the Oracle, who drank half at a gulp.

Leuchten didn’t care at all about the relative parchedness of the Oracle. Not even a tiny bit. But he did want to take a moment to consider his next play.

This was the moment. Being in this room, on this day—every bit of power and access he’d amassed in his life had been about making sure it would happen. He hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t known the opportunity would fall into this particular configuration, but in the end, that hadn’t mattered. When the moment came, he’d been ready.

This was what he’d been searching for his entire life. He knew what the world of tomorrow should look like—he knew better than anyone else—and now he was sitting across a table from the man who could make it happen.

The future was within his grasp.

He just had to close his fist and squeeze.

“I’m listening,” the Oracle said and put the cup down.

“Here’s the situation, Will,” Leuchten said. “For more than ten years, the U.S. government has been working on a way to transmit information directly into the minds of people on the ground—by that I mean soldiers, agents, whoever, using signals sent from satellites. Whatever they send just appears in the brain of the receiver, like it’s a thought they generated themselves.”

Across the table, Leuchten saw the Oracle’s eyes narrow.

“The technology isn’t perfect. The biggest problem they’ve had, from what I understand, is the targeting—making sure the transmission ends up in the right skull. If you had ten people standing in a thirty-foot circle, you could be sure one of them would get the data. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t know which one.”

“What are you telling me?” Dando said. His voice had risen half an octave, which Leuchten thought was a promising sign.

He held up a hand for patience.

“During the tests, long strings of data were sent to test subjects,” Leuchten went on. “The receivers wrote down the information. If they got it all, fantastic. If there were gaps, well, then they knew where the problems were. You get the idea.”