Dresner shut down the Afghan video and brought up a set of graphs depicting Merge adoption. Ninety thousand new units were being sold every day and, because of his targeted marketing strategies, a large percentage of those sales were to people LayerCake deemed dangerous to society.

He refocused on a small icon in his peripheral vision. The gray-and-black human outline appeared only on his unit and had been inspired by the images of civilians vaporized in Hiroshima. A reminder of the seriousness of his undertaking.

It accessed a simple subsystem that he’d built into every unit disguised as battery management hardware and unused upgrade paths. The Merge didn’t have enough power to directly harm anyone, even if fully discharged over a short period of time. What it could do, though, was create a feedback loop in the area of the brain that controlled heart function. He’d learned early in development that if he mimicked the signal the heart sent to the brain to indicate that it was beating, the brain would stop sending the commands for it to continue doing so. With less power than it took to run a simple gaming app, the user’s heart would simply stop.

A phone icon began to pulse at the edge of his vision and Dresner’s brow furrowed. It was a private number only a select few had and unscheduled calls never came in on it. Perhaps it was Craig Bailer’s wife taking him up on his offer to help?

He activated it but discovered that it wasn’t a grieving widow looking for closure. It was the director of the North Korean facility.

“Hello?” he said hesitantly.

“Dr. Dresner. This is Dr. Nang. We are dismantling the facility per your instructions. Do you have concerns?”

“Should I? Why are you calling me about this?”

“Dr. Eichmann and his two assistants are due to arrive in a few hours for their review of our progress. We never talked about that kind of oversight and I can assure you that it isn’t necessary. We’re attending to this in the same way we’ve attended to all your requests over the years.”

Dresner felt his breath catch in his chest. Two assistants?

“Do you want me to give them access to Division D? In the past, Dr. Eichmann—”

“No!” Dresner said immediately, trying to work through what he was hearing. The only plausible explanation was that Smith and Russell had discovered the connection between himself and Eichmann and had somehow coerced the man into talking. How much did they know? What had they discovered?