Science Fiction Stories

The Man Who Wasn't There

Written by Gregory Benford

Illustrated by Phil Renne

The security 'bots zoomed around the looming mosque like supersonic butterflies in the cold air. Jean watched them with his infrared eyes as their tiny plumes darted over the bare zone, blazing high tech fireflies. They patrolled silently over the wide plaza, watching for movement up and down the spectral bands.

Sentinels of Islam hovering in a suburb of Paris. Around the butterfly buzz hung a weekday midnight silence.

"Merde du jour," he muttered. The Islamic Front could afford the butterflies. They fed on endless money from the Saudis and Iranians. All part of the campaign to restore Islam to Europe after the regrettable Christian Era.

Not restored by the sword, of course—they were hopeless on a battlefield. But now, in softened consumerist Europe, their shopworn push-pull strategies of terror and political demand still worked. Islamic Front had plenty of followers in the immigrant masses. Their code of strict secrecy—talk and you die, unpleasantly—made them potent. Against them the French government deployed lawyers. Thinking of them, he spat on the floor of the apartment he had rented.

"Ready, Ajax?" He got a coded blip in answer—OK.

Time to move. Nobody knew where the Front would strike next with bombs, kidnappings, violent protests. Plus the usual rhetoric about being repressed. Very effective.

They had made such claims back in Lyon, after a street brawl on Montclair Boulevard. That was years ago, just as the Front started to use advanced technologies. All cameras, videos, and other recording systems near Montclair Boulevard had been blank, so the Front could claim that the fighting and the car bomb that followed were the work of others. So it had gone now for years, an arms race of technologies.

Unless, of course, the plans of the Islamic Front could be tapped. But that meant getting in fast, silent, deadly. Tonight.

Inside the shadowy compound ahead, the Head was at work. Under the shield of the looming mosque, he sent agents forth. He hid behind some holy name, but French Intelligence had pinpointed the Head's movements, and now was the time to strike. Remembering Montclair Boulevard.

Jean said softly, "Take out the microwaves."

Silently, the side teams did.

The details registered in his left eye, fed from his wearable computer. The Front was using the minarets at the square's corners to mount their detectors. Jean could see their snouts peeking out of the corbelled designs that wrapped around each artfully curved dome atop the minarets. The surveillance cameras were the usual IR motion sensing type. But they were all connected to a central security center—the usual control-freak arrangement. They could be defeated by intersecting their microwave links, saturating them, blowing the electronics down the line.

Jean ordered the teams to open up. Soundless beams lanced instantly into the broad square of the compound. They were aimed at receivers, jamming the link back to the security center that squatted down on the mosque's roof.

Simple, really—flood them with a high power noise spectrum signal. Their cameras looked in all directions, their sensors wide open in the winter dark—so they could be attacked from any direction, jammed from any angle. Thank God—whichever version you liked, Jean thought—the Front hadn't thought to use laser links—easier to find, but far harder to block or saturate.

"Their links are cut," came a whispered comm message from a nearby apartment, diagonally across the square.

"Now the security 'bots."

Microwave pulses transfixed each of the fireflies darting around the mosque square. Short bursts of microwaves flooded their diodes. The butterflies abruptly tumbled to the cobblestones.

He rasped in a short breath and beeped Ajax into action. "Send in the silver," Jean said. His buddy Ajax was in a silver suit, though why it got that name Jean never knew.

He switched to another spectrum, far beyond the visible, and searched for Ajax. Silver suits were layers of optical fibers and sensors, ever-watchful in all directions. There—

Ajax was a shifting blob of shimmering blue light in Jean's UV goggles, well beyond what ordinary cameras could capture. Each square centimeter of the silver suit took incoming light and routed it through chips, moving the image—say, of a wall—around the body, on its way to the directly opposite side of the suit. There another optical fiber emitted the same image in the same direction. It was as though the ray had passed through Ajax's body. Any guard looking toward the suit saw only the wall, as though nothing stood between them.

The silver suit gave Ajax invisibility. Jean watched as the blob flexed and moved across the Islamic Front's broad open plaza, toward the shadowy, looming mosque. He reached the first barrier, a cluster of concrete blocks, and just walked around them. Up in the minarets Jean could see shifting shadows. The guards had noticed that their gear was down.

"Here comes the glare," he sent on comm.

Searing light swept the compound. Spotlights on the minarets and the main mosque sent blaring beams into every corner.

Good coverage, Jean noted. Not that it would do them any good.

Because Ajax was inside by now. "I got it ," Ajax's voice whispered in his ears.

Meaning that he had used the tap-and-read gear strapped to his wrist. It sent an electric charge wave—what's this?—through a lock and used the rebound signal to figure out the lock's codes. The information was buried in the door, so it had to be user-reachable. Almost like a dog waiting for the right signal from its master to go fetch a ball.

Well, Jean thought, the ball was in play now. "Follow on," he sent, and two more silver suits started across the compound's square. They came in from the sides. He could see them moving fast, wrinkled UV ghosts.

The guards up in the minarets had their hands full, scanning the square and seeing nothing. Not even their motion sensing cameras could see anything through the smoky frequencies. What about visible?

Shouts echoed across the square. Getting the reserve house guard up from their beds.

Time to get serious. "Blow their electrical."

Microwave bursts curled through the chill air. They were vectored in on the mosque's power source, where their standard external current hookup met their in-house generator. Throw the diodes there into confusion, blowing most of them with thirty kilowatts of bursty microwaves, and kiss your amperes goodbye.

The spotlight glare vanished. The minor mosque lamps went too. Louder shouts.

Jean was already running out of the apartment building. His IR took in the sputtering of random gunfire from the minarets. They were shooting blind, chunking rounds into the cobblestones. It was easy to avoid their sweeps.

But that gave his side all the excuse they needed. Snipers in nearby buildings took out the men in the minarets within seconds.

Halfway to the mosque, all fell silent. He could hear his own whooshing breath, it was that still.

The main gate was still locked but the side door yawned. He went through into utter