Crime Zero (33 page)

Its eyes, however, followed the two entrants, watching their every move.

Chapter 30.

ViroVector Campus, Palo Alto. Friday, November 7, 8:00 P.M.

"Please place your palm against the sensor," said the voice at the main gate of ViroVector. Decker did what he was told, but he was disconcerted by the fact that the gate wasn't manned. Not by a human anyway.

The tall guard in the gatehouse was a lifelike hologram, his face a composite of leading male film stars. It was standing above a KREE8 Version 6 holopad, according to the sticker on the window. "Is he meant to scare off people or welcome them?" Decker whispered to Kathy.

Kathy shrugged and removed her palm from the sensor where his was now being read. She looked nervous, and he didn't blame her. "Don't worry about it. He's just there to impress you with how technologically advanced ViroVector is."

"It's working," he said, feeling a slight heat under his palm as the sensor peeled a microscopic layer off his skin, scanning his DNA. Suddenly a rush of irrational panic hit him, wondering if the scanner would somehow be able to identify Axelman's genes in his DNA and bar him access.

"Welcome, Dr. Kerr," said the hologram after Decker's palm had been read. "Please state your guest's full name."

"Luke Decker." She spoke into a small microphone on the wall of the guardhouse.

"Thank you, Dr. Kerr."

Suddenly the large gates slid silently open, and they were in.

He briefly turned around and saw the lights of Frankie Danza's van a hundred yards farther up the road. It had brought Decker and Kathy here an hour ago. In that time they had sat in the van, watching the last stragglers leave for home, and waited the final half hour while no ViroVector employees had left. The parking lot was empty, and the whole place appeared deserted. At eight precisely they had approached the gates, trusting Kathy's clearance was still live. It was a gamble, and now they were inside. But as Frankie had said, that was the easy part.

As Decker followed Kathy toward the large dome, which glowed in the evening gloom like some implacable spaceship, he felt the sting of hundreds of invisible eyes watching him.

"There shouldn't be anyone here," said Kathy as they neared the steps that led up to the entrance. "But if there is, just smile." Ahead he could see a pair of thick glass double doors. The name ViroVector was etched into both of them. Looking in, Decker was relieved to see that apart from two people talking intensely by the rest rooms the reception lobby was empty.

"To open the door, put your hands on the sensor again," said Kathy.

"Does every door have these damn sensors?"

"Yup. TITANIA likes to know where everyone is."

"Great," said Decker as he placed his hand on the steel pad.

He turned as they were both in the foyer to see a set of car headlights pierce the darkness of the parking lot. A limousine drove past the dome. It could have been his nervousness, but he was sure he saw the white hair of Director Naylor in the passenger seat.

"Shit," he said.

Kathy had seen her too. "Don't think about it. Let's go," she said, clutching her bag. She led him through a door at the end of the foyer, which opened out on to a long corridor.

At the end was a yellow door with a black biohazard symbol. "Be quiet," she whispered as they walked past a steel silver door with "TITANIA Smart Suite" written on it in black. A dull hum could be heard from within.

When they reached the yellow biohazard doors, their palms were read once more. As the door opened, Decker could see before him a white sterile environment, totally devoid of warmth or color. And just as the door closed behind him, sealing in the air, he was sure he heard the door to the Smart Suite opening.

But it wasn't the door to the Smart Suite Decker had heard. It was the sound of TITANIA thinking.

The Smart Suite was humming with activity. The main display media, the fifteen-by-ten-foot screen wall and the KREE8 hologram floor pad at the head of the conference table, were in use. At the rear of the room, four small monitors were showing quickly shifting views of the ViroVector complex as seen through TITANIA's sixty closed-circuit security cameras dotted around the campus.

The hologram being displayed on the pad was a five-foot-in-diameter, three-dimensional globe rotating slowly a yard off the ground. The definition of the hologram was so precise that the silver globe looked solid, as though made of real metal. Each country, its border demarcated by thin black tracing, was layered with three colored strata forming population mountains like a topographical three-dimensional map--red, green, and blue--graphically demonstrating the demographic breakdown of each country. Unlike the static colors in the rest of the world, the red in Iraq pulsed with light as if alive.

When a country was simply touched by a fingertip, the layers of color separated to display a percentage figure and an absolute number, showing the importance and size of that demographic group in the particular country. The absolute numbers were constantly changing, reflecting births and deaths collated from the numerous data sources on the World Wide Web. As did the rising total world population number shown on the screen wall. The last number stood at 6,567,987,601.

There beneath the population counter was a cryptic legend, indicating what each color represented. Red was labeled "target," green, "carrier," and blue, "corrected." Beside each color was a number counter giving a total for that segment.

As she stood alone in the room, Alice Prince's eyes were sparkling with excitement while she watched the globe, its iridescent colors reflected in the thick glass of her spectacles. After witnessing the Iraqi turnabout last night, she felt born again. World War III had been averted, and the doubts she may have had had ceased to trouble her. Crime Zero was a just project, and it was going to work. Phase 2 was performing so well it looked certain that they would be able to launch Phase 3 within days. And the vision was so much cleaner and clearer when seen in its clinical entirety, far from the confusion of face-to-face human realities.

TITANIA began to run its Global Predictive Sequence for Phase 3.

At the top of the screen wall a time line appeared, showing today as time zero and then counting off the months and years as they elapsed in the simulated sequence.

The colored layers started pulsing in each chosen index country for Phase 3. But no sooner had the epicenters been illuminated than black parabolic arcs, simulating air, sea, and land travel, spread across the globe like the legs of a malevolent spider. Within days on the time line all the color segments in most of the so-called first world were pulsing. Only the remoter regions of the Amazon and Patagonia in South America, Antarctica, and central Africa as well as the more distant islands north of New Zealand remained unaffected.

Within ten days in the major countries the red band of color representing the "target" stopped pulsing and began to glow. The other countries soon followed, and within weeks 90 percent of the red sections on the globe were aglow and therefore in decline. In one month every single country had been touched in one way or another. On the main screen wall the rising number in the counter beside the red legend slowed to 2,408,876,654 and then began to fall. Within two and a half months the figure had dropped by almost 300,000,000, within six months the decline had doubled, and within a year the figure had dropped by more than 1,250,000,000. After thirty-six months and three days all traces of red in the world had disappeared.

There were only two color strata left on the depleted population mountains: green and blue, "carrier" and "corrected."

The total number on the population counter had reduced by almost 2,500,000,000 humans in three years, fifty times that of the great influenza pandemic of 1918.

The time line moved forward another twenty years, and the counter gradually began to climb once more with new strata of differing shades of blue adding to the rising population mountains in each country.

The silver globe was now dominated by calming blues and green. The angry rash of red was effectively extinct.

As TITANIA laid out their vision like the onslaught of the inevitable, Alice felt she was seeing something sacred, a purging flood she had played her part in unleashing.

So transfixed was she by the globe that she hadn't even registered Madeline Naylor entering the room.

"It's beautiful, isn't it, Ali?" said Madeline.

"Unstoppable," said Alice with a sigh.

"There's just one small thing we need to make this perfect," said Madeline.

"What now?"

"Decker and Kerr still aren't out of the way. Jackson's working on it but--"

"It doesn't matter now, does it?" said Alice, staring at the shimmering globe and the New Eden it represented.

"I suppose not," said Madeline. "I just wish I knew where they were."

Ironically she only had to have asked TITANIA and the biocomputer would have told her exactly Luke Decker and Kathy Kerr's location. Or had she looked behind her at the four screens continually monitoring the entire campus, she might have even snatched a hurried glimpse of a figure in a blue Chemturion biological space suit entering the Womb.

Chapter 31.

The Womb, Biosafety Level 5 Laboratory, ViroVectorSolutions, Palo Alto.Friday, November 7, 8:32 P.M.

As the glass doors of the Womb hissed closed behind her, the first beads of sweat prickled on Kathy Kerr's skin within the rubberized suit. Entering the campus, she had felt nervous but in control. And even seeing Director Naylor had spurred her on rather than paralyzed her. But now, here in the Womb, she could feel herself tensing, only the sound of her breathing for company. This time was different from the many previous visits.

The clock above the door indicated 2032. TITANIA was to close down the Womb at 2130. Including the essential half hour to undergo the decontamination procedures, Kathy had to make her exit before the computer closed down the whole compound at 2200 hours: Fifty-eight minutes to use the pulse box, open the safe, find what she was looking for, and capture the data on the computer and printer upstairs, where Decker should be waiting. It didn't seem enough. The prospect of another scientist's entering the biolab complex in the meantime was beyond contemplation. If anyone did, she would be helpless.

Taking a deep breath, she walked past the first bank of refrigerators to the corner where the waist-high black safe sat. On the front was a flap about the size of a paperback book covering the electronic keypad. It was as she remembered it and looked reassuringly like the Lenica 101 she had practiced on, but she couldn't be sure.

On the workstation beside Alice Prince's safe was a computer VDU. Kathy powered it up and opened the link with the terminal on the ground floor above, where Decker waited with a new box of blank discs ready to copy whatever data she found.

The keyboard was twice the normal size with large flat keys covered in a sterile plastic sleeve. With her unwieldy gloved fingers she jabbed out a message:

I'm in and have found the safe. Are you set up with discs and the printer?

There was a heart-stopping pause.

Everything looking good up here. Good luck.

She looked down at the slim chrome slab the size of a checkbook resting on her left palm: the pulse box--and the key to the whole operation. Exploiting nuclear magnetic resonance and liquid molecules, the quantum code breaker used qubits, which, unlike classical binary bits, could exist simultaneously in multiple states, allowing it to decipher each element of a code in parallel time rather than sequentially. It was fast and efficient, but was it enough? Studying its liquid crystal display and the two silk-thin wires trailing out one end like wispy antennae, she recalled the procedure. Using the magnetic pad on the back of the quantum pulse box, she anchored it above the safe's electronic keypad. Once she was satisfied it was secure, and with Frankie's words in mind--"If you drop this thing, it's history"--she carefully taped the spring-hinged plastic keypad cover back on itself, revealing the keys. Then she took the two trailing wires in her fingers and searched for the two tiny holes in the top edge of the keypad. "After a bit of practice it should be easy," she'd been told.

But it hadn't been easy in practice, and it wasn't easy now. At first she couldn't even find the holes, and when she did, she almost gave up in frustration. The protective gloves she wore were even thicker than the ones she'd been using before. They had been designed to give as much movement as possible, but inserting the two silk-thin wires into minute holes obviously hadn't been on the usage spec.

"Relax and take your time," she told herself. But time was the one thing she couldn't afford. Maintaining composure, she straightened out the inch-long wires with one hand, aligning them with the two holes. If they met any resistance at all, they began to bend and she had to ease them in at a painstaking pace. It was vital that they connect with the inner electronics. Frankie's guys had taught her how to "jiggle" them, as they put it, gently vibrating the wires until they found a way into the opening. But jiggling required sensitive fingers, and her gloves didn't allow her that luxury.