Caliphate

OSI Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 19 June, 2112

"My local contact is a what?"

Caruthers sighed. "She's a slave girl, a prostitute. More specifically, she's an implanted agent. She has a chip in her head. The Chinese have been doing this kind of thing for thirty years. It's the major reason we stopped allowing immigration from China."

"That's abominable."

Caruthers gave a characteristic shrug. "We do the same things with convicted criminals. So they don't bother with convictions? Not our problem."

"But we're at war with them."

Caruthers put out one hand, palm down and fingers spread. He wagged it, saying, "Not by declaration. Almost everybody is at war with almost everybody, these days, and all the time, too. What that means in practice though is that nobody's at war—not emotionally, anyway—unless bullets are actually flying. So, yeah, we're at war with them but, also yeah, we can cooperate."

"Do we know anything else about this woman?"

"We have a picture, sort of," Caruthers answered, then produced a hologram of that. The hologram was . . . decidedly odd, out of focus, as if taken through a bad lens.

"Awfully white, for a Chinese. Unusually large breasts, too. Why is the picture so fuzzy?"

"She's also relatively tall. The chinks were coy. We think she was specially bred, maybe even genengineered, for exoticism. As for the picture . . . our best guess is that the camera was her own eye, tapped by the chip in her head."

Hamilton had a sudden thought and as suddenly looked ill. "Jesus, that's vile. This poor girl was chipped, then sold as a hooker, and everything she does is recorded for anyone to see. And she knows this? Knows she's performing for a camera?"

"Look, I didn't make the world," Caruthers said testily. "I don't even approve. I just observe and report. They sell us—we buy from them— redundant human organs and we should balk over a little incidental voyeurism?"

Rocking his head from side to side, Hamilton grudgingly agreed. "Okay. Sure. Go on. What's her name, by the way?"

"Zheng Ling."