Smith shook his head. “I know she can be a pain in the ass, Fred. Probably better than anyone. But if she says that’s what happened, that’s what happened.”

“I appreciate your loyalty, Jon. And let me be clear that I have a lot of admiration for Randi Russell or I wouldn’t have sent her out there in the first place. This isn’t specifically aimed at her. I wouldn’t take this kind of intel on faith if God himself sent it down on stone tablets. Trust but verify, right?”

Smith nodded hesitantly. He wasn’t accustomed to questioning Klein, but in this case it seemed justified. “So you didn’t send her out there for this—the behavior of the people in Sarabat, the heads…”

Klein didn’t respond immediately, obviously considering how much he wanted to reveal. “There seems to be some money bleeding out of the Pentagon. I’ve been after it for more than a year and still only have a few vague scraps. Whoever’s behind it is incredibly thorough at covering his tracks. But we recently found something—a small and very indirect payment to mercenaries who were reported to be operating in that region.”

“So this didn’t have anything to do with the Merge.”

“Not at first. But now I’m concerned. Have you had a chance to examine the head she brought back?”

“I took it to my lab and spent the night looking it over. Exact time of death is hard to determine at this point but the three months that Randi’s telling us is completely plausible.”

“What about the studs?”

“They weren’t added postmortem, if that’s what you’re getting at. There’s new bone growth around them. I’d say they were installed about a month before death.”

Klein set his pipe down. “And the bodies? Can I assume there were no actual Merge units in evidence?”

“Randi said she didn’t check all of them, but the few she did—and the one she brought back for autopsy—didn’t have units. Someone would have had to remove them. Maybe when they were sawing off their heads.”

Klein just nodded, probably thinking the same thing Smith was—that this stank to high heaven of some kind of covert U.S. test. But if it was, who the hell authorized it?

“The way I see it, Fred, is that if we aren’t responsible for this, we need to find out who is. I’ve been working with the Merge for a few months now and my opinion of it has gone nowhere but up. This is going to be a transformational technology, and exclusivity is an important part of that. If someone had access to this thing before us, we have to find out who and what exactly they’re doing with it.”

“How plausible is it that someone has gotten access to the military version of the operating system?”