Wired - Douglas E. Richards [87]
Sam nodded at Smith’s glassy-eyed corpse on the floor and then his gaze settled back on Kira Miller. “Although, admittedly, there used to be two of us. But now that I have you, Dr. Miller, I won’t be needing him anymore,” he explained, and then frowning, added, “and to be frank about it, he wasn’t all that useful. I had you dead to rights at that motel and he fucked it up.”
Desh’s last reservations about the veracity of Kira’s story had now vanished. Everything she had told him was true. This was the man Connelly had been looking for.
“How will you explain Smith’s murder to your men upstairs?” asked Desh.
Sam grinned. “No need for explanations among friends. The men upstairs were handpicked and are all completely loyal to me. I pay them extremely well, but I’ve always believed in wielding a stick to go along with the carrot. None of them are big believers in the Ten Commandments and have unfortunately committed some major, ah … indiscretions … in their lives. I have enough dirt on each of them to put them away forever. And if I die, this dirt becomes public automatically.” A self-satisfied look settled over his features. “These men would do anything for me. And since they have absolutely no idea what’s going on, unlike our dead friend here, they don’t have to worry about, ah … early termination, so to speak.”
Desh knew that Kira had been badly shaken by the ruthlessness of Smith’s execution, but she appeared to have composed herself once again. “What’s the game here, Sam?” she said, spitting out his name hatefully. “You know you can’t get the secret of longevity out of me through torture or with drugs. And you’d better believe I’m not going to tell a psychopath like you anything of my own free will. So what am I doing here?”
“We’ve already established you won’t tell me the coordinates.” He raised his eyebrows and an amused expression came over his face. “Not even to save your brother’s life. But there are sacrifices that are far greater even than this. I’ve been working ever since that moron Lusetti lost you—paying with his worthless life—to find the proper leverage to get you to, ah … voluntarily … tell me what I want. And I found it. So here is the question: will you tell me what I want to know to save the future of humanity?”
Kira remained silent, not taking the bait.
“After Lusetti used truth drugs on you, he told me he had learned why you felt it was so important to keep your discovery secret. Overpopulation. Fear of societal upheaval. Well, you’re in luck. I can help you out. What if there were no longer any births in the world?” Sam smiled cruelly, quite pleased with himself. “That would solve this problem, wouldn’t it? Give you no excuse for not sharing.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Sterilization of every woman on the planet,” he said simply.
Desh heard Sam but didn’t react in any way. His mind had begun to feel strange. It had been painful at first, like a sharp headache, but now the feeling was electric, like the pins-and-needles feeling of a limb falling asleep, only in his head, a place in which he knew there were no sensory receptors of any kind.
Kira looked at Sam as though he were mad. This wild, over-the-top threat could have easily come out of the mouth of a villain on a Saturday morning cartoon. But sadistic and deranged though Sam was, he was clearly formidable, and she sensed that this threat was not entirely an idle one.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
“Am I? My enhanced molecular biologist doesn’t think so. He thinks mass sterilization is child’s play. Well, child’s play for a child trained in molecular biology with an immeasurable IQ,” he said in amusement. “A woman is born with all the egg cells she’ll ever have. Take them out and it’s game over.”
“How?”
“I’m not the expert, but I’m told that it’s pretty simple if you really make the effort. Lots of ways to target just egg cells. Hell, there are venereal diseases that lead to infertility all by themselves. All you need are determination and