“Is everyone here who’s coming?” Valerie asks.
“Yeah.” I close the door to our war room and take my seat. “Andrea still refuses to get involved, and Stan won’t let any of the Geologists leave their practice mine in the mountain west of here until they have their new techniques perfected, so it’s just us.”
“So what’s your big news that couldn’t wait?” Louise demands. “This better be worth leaving my lab for.”
“It is.” Evan stands and goes over to our “What We Know” board. He erases everything there and starts writing as he talks. “First, the illuminati group we’ve been chasing after has a name. It’s the Center for Progress and Peace. I’m just going to call them the CPP, because there are at least two lies in their full name. They’re a multinational non-governmental organization that pretends to be a business development charity to cover their real work of ensuring that a small group of uber-rich businesses and individuals don’t have to worry about extreme disruptions to the status quo.”
“Extreme disruptions to the status quo?” Louise repeats. “Isn’t that literally the title to a section of the old master plan whiteboard that Father had?”
“Still is,” I tell her. “That section hasn’t changed in so long that I think the ink on it is fused permanently to the board.”
“So, obviously they’re not fans of ours,” Evan continues. “But Father had so much clout with so many important people that the best they ever could do against him were some failed assassination attempts. He kept most of those quiet, but he let a few make it into the news to feed the legend of Tom Butler. The last one was when we were with him in Somalia. The CPP gave intel to those terrorists who came after us, let them know when and where we would be out in the open.”
Louise nods. “Obviously, that didn’t work either.”
“Nope. But they were apparently pretty happy when he died, figuring that they could do a hostile takeover and buy out SynTech and all its nanotech patents as soon as the Institute started selling off company stock. The only reason that didn’t happen was Noah.” He waves a congratulatory hand in my direction. “He managed to keep the place solvent enough that we didn’t have to sell any.”
“OK. Fine. Now we know who the bad guys are. Noah does office stuff real good. ” Louise seems really irritable tonight. “Can I get back to my work now?”
“Not until we talk about Jeff.”
“Whatever. Tell me about Jeff. I assume these CPP guys are the ones who got him out and helped him come here, rob us, and stab Mrs. Hastings?”
“You assume right,” Evan says, adding that to the board. “Once it became clear that a buyout was not going to be available, and that we were going to keep doing the kinds of disruptive things Father did, their first plan was to buy out General Liu and get him to attach that tech conference thing to our trip. The plan then was to reveal to the world the dirty secret that the Butler kids were weaponizing their father’s legacy. They’d have a whole bunch of very reputable witnesses knowledgeable in the field that would have seen us agree to use nanotech to take over the world, then they’d go to the press and tell them about the terrible dangers of nanotechnology and specifically the Butler Institute’s plans for it. Next thing you know there would be a new round of Butler Treaty restrictions and no one would let us or anyone else do anything of any significance.”
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Louise shakes her head and snorts derisively. “Idiots. You can’t put a genie back in the bottle once it’s been out.”
“Maybe. But they might have at least deferred the big changes for a few decades, which is all that most of the owners funding the CPP need to continue living out the rest of their lives as functional kings of the world.”
She rolls her eyes. “Fine. Maybe. Now you want to tell me about Jeff.”
“Right. Jeff was Plan C.”
“Did you skip Plan B?”
“Yes, ‘cause you obviously want to get out of here as fast as you can. Plan B was Dorothy, with the whole make us work for them and give them all the nanotech secrets thing that they tried when we were all too much of a goody two shoes crew to provide any ammunition for Plan A. If they couldn’t get nanotech banned entirely, they figured they could make sure it was the companies funding the CPP that controlled it.”
“Idiots again.”
“I’m not saying they're the smartest kids in town. Just the best funded and most ruthless.”
“So, Jeff?”
“Yes. They didn’t know exactly what happened at the end of the tech conference, but they knew that things had gone badly for them. So they scrubbed plans A and B and sent a military grade special ops team to get Jeff. He was dissociated from the Institute after all the publicity came out when he got locked away, so they couldn’t use him to discredit Father’s plans the same way they had wanted to use us. So they decided to make him into the bogeyman of the dangers of nanotech.”
“Trying to create another Gray Goo Event.” Louise deduces. “They gave him what he thought he needed to get revenge and a long leash. Then he would cause all the damage with nothing to tie it back to them and all the blame going to the Butler family.”
“But wouldn’t that destroy the whole world?” Lin asks, looking up from the tablet she’d been working on this whole meeting. “I thought they wanted everything to stay like it is now.”
“They do,” I answer. “But they’re willing to cause some collateral damage to make that happen. I think the plan was to have the wild bots on a timer. Let them run for a couple of days, maybe eat most of Colorado, then they’d turn themselves off. By then the military and whoever else thought they could solve it would have come in and whatever solution they happened to be working on would get the credit for solving it when the bots timed out.”
“So what was Smith doing there?” Louise asks, finally showing real interest. “Was he working for these CPP guys the whole time he worked for Father?”
“No, that was recent,” Evan says. “He got pulled in through Dorothy after Father died. He volunteered to work with Jeff on trying to kill Noah.”
Louse looks my way. “Guess he really, really hates you.”
“I have that effect on people sometimes.”
“Anyway,” Evan says, “I guess they kept that loose leash on Jeff a little too loose, because he slipped his CPP handlers after Colorado. The whole time we were tracking him in the midwest, he was flying solo.”
“Meaning that the nanotech bombs he left behind after that may or may not have had any safety mechanisms on them?”
“Right.”
Louise gets up. “Then I really have to get back to my lab. Thanks for the update. Try to keep the world from getting eaten for at least the next few weeks.”