Authors: Lincoln Child
He could not keep on climbing blind forever. There was a floor he was headed for, a specific floor. He needed to get his bearings, determine exactly where he was.
And that meant leaving the conduit.
He leaned against the tube wall, thinking. If he left the safety of the data conduit, the scanners would pick him up. Security would immediately know where he was and focus their search. There was no way he could fix his position without raising the alarm—was there?
Maybe most individual offices, labs, and storerooms
had
no scanners. Maybe most scanners were situated in the corridors and doors. If he was careful where he exited, and if he didn’t activate any sensors . . .
He had no choice but to try.
Lash climbed a few feet to the next junction, then clambered laboriously into the lateral tube. He crawled forward over the bunches of cables until he reached an access panel in the side wall. Here he waited a moment, listening. He could hear no noise from beyond. Holding his breath, he placed his fingertips against the inside of the latch and pushed carefully against it. The catch sprung free and the panel opened.
Instantly, light flooded in, bathing a thin angle of the conduit a brilliant white. Lash turned away and shut the panel. A brightly lit office—or worse, a corridor—lay beyond. No good: he’d have to try elsewhere.
He moved forward again, passing another panel, then another. At the fourth panel, he stopped. Once again, he pressed his fingers to the latch; once again, he eased it open. This time, the light beyond was dimmer. Perhaps it was a storage area, or the office of someone who’d left for the day. Either way, he wouldn’t get a better opportunity.
As stealthily as he could, Lash pushed the panel wider. The space beyond was silent.
He pulled himself forward on his elbows, peered out. In the dim light he could make out a darkened terminal, a shadowy desk. A deserted office: he was in luck.
Quietly, but as quickly as possible, he pulled himself out the accessway and into the office. As he rose to his feet, his shoulders, hunched so long in the cramped conduits, protested vigorously. He glanced around, hoping to find some memorandum or fire exit diagram that would give the floor—but except for the ubiquitous desk and monitor the office appeared unused, empty.
He cursed into the silence.
Wait
. Every door he’d passed inside Eden had always had a label fixed to its outside. There was no reason to think this door was any different. Doors were locked from the outside: if he was careful to keep his identity bracelet away from the scanner, he could simply open this one and peek at its label.
He moved to the door, put a hand on its knob. Putting an ear to the doorjamb, he paused. Silence beyond: no footsteps, no murmur of conversation.
Holding his breath again, he cracked the door and peered out. Light streamed in: there was the usual pale-violet hallway, apparently deserted. Keeping his identity bracelet carefully behind his back, he opened the door a little wider. Now, it was just a question of reading the label on the . . .
Shit
. There was no label on the door.
Lash closed the door again and let himself sink against the wall. Of all the offices to emerge into, he’d chosen one that was vacant.
He took a deep, steadying breath. Then, more quickly, he turned back to the door and cracked it open a second time.
There: across the hall was another door, this one with a label. A title beneath, a number above.
But Lash’s eyes, not yet accustomed to the light, couldn’t quite make out the number. He squinted, blinked, squinted again into the brilliance.
Come on.
Lash grasped the door frame and leaned into the corridor. Now he could make out the words: 2614. T
HORSSEN
, J. P
OST
-S
ELECTION
P
ROCESSING
.
Twenty six?
He thought in disbelief.
I’m only at the twenty-sixth floor?
“Hey, you!” a voice barked into the stillness. “Stop there!”
Lash turned. Perhaps fifty feet away, at an intersection, a guard in a jumpsuit stood, pointing at him.
“Don’t move!” the guard said, beginning to trot toward him.
For a moment, Lash remained frozen, a deer caught in headlights. As he watched, the guard’s hand slipped into his jumpsuit.
Lash ducked back into the office. As he did so, a sharp report sounded down the hall. Something whined past the door.
Jesus! They’re shooting at me!
He stumbled backward, almost falling in his haste. Then he sprinted for the rear of the office and almost dove into the data conduit portal, barking his shins cruelly as he scrambled inside. He did not bother closing the access panel—all his previous care had been rendered pointless—and moved forward as quickly as he could, taking forks at random, heedless now of the meticulous tapestry of cabling torn away by the passage of his elbows and feet, burrowing his way back into the mazelike safety of the digital river.
FORTY-SEVEN
T
ara Stapleton sat in her office, swiveling behind her desk, staring at the battered surfboard. The entire floor seemed deserted, the hallway beyond her door cloaked in a watchful silence. Although Tara was a key component of Eden’s security, she knew she should be gone, as well; Mauchly had said as much, outside the Rio coffee shop. “Go home,” he’d said, giving her shoulder an uncharacteristic squeeze. “You’ve had a rough afternoon, but it’s over now. Go on home, relax.”
She rose and began to pace. Going home, she knew, wouldn’t make her feel any better.
She’d been in shock ever since Mauchly called her up to Silver’s office just after noon. It had seemed impossible, what they told her: that Christopher Lash himself, the man they’d brought in to investigate the mysterious deaths, was himself the killer. She hadn’t wanted to believe it,
couldn’t
believe it. But Mauchly’s measured tones, the pain in Richard Silver’s face, left no room for disbelief. She herself had assisted Mauchly in polling the vast network of databases at their fingertips, collecting the information on Lash that damned him beyond any possibility of refutation.
And then, when Lash had called her—when she’d gone to meet with him, after first consulting Mauchly—her shock had deepened. He’d talked urgently, almost desperately. But she had barely heard. Instead, she’d been wondering how her instincts could have been so wrong. Here was a man who had murdered four people in cold blood, who’d been placed at the crime scenes in half a dozen ways. Here was a man who—according to all their data—had grown up in a highly dysfunctional family, spent most of his childhood in and out of institutions, successfully had his record as a sex offender suppressed. And yet she had grown to trust him, even like him, during the short time they had spent together. She had never been a trusting person. One of the reasons she’d had limited success in relationships, why she’d jumped at Eden’s pilot program, was because she
didn’t
allow herself to get close to anybody. So just what part of her elaborate self-defense mechanism had betrayed her so badly?
There was something else. Some of the things that Lash had said in the coffee shop were coming back. Talk about overdoses; about a brain chemical called Substance P; about the two of them being in danger because they knew too much. He was crazy, so the talk was crazy.
Right?
A sound: footsteps in the hall, approaching quickly. The knob to her office door squealed as it turned. Someone walked into her office, like some dread specter summoned by her own thoughts.
It was Christopher Lash.
Only it wasn’t Lash as she’d ever seen him before. Now, he truly looked like an escaped lunatic. His hair was matted and askew. An ugly bruise was coming up on his forehead. His suit, normally neat to a fault, was caked with dust, shredded at the elbows and knees. His hands were bleeding from countless nicks and cuts.
He closed the door and leaned against it, breathing heavily.
“Tara,” he gasped in a hoarse voice. “Thank God you’re still here.”
She stared at him, frozen with surprise. Then she grabbed for the phone.
“No!” he said, stepping forward.
Hand still on the phone, she dug into her purse, pulled out a can of pepper spray, pointed it at his face.
Lash stopped. “Please. Just do one thing for me. One thing. Then I’ll go.”
Tara tried to think. The guards would have tracked Lash to her office by his identity bracelet. It was only a matter of moments until they arrived. Should she try to humor him?
Stalling for time seemed preferable to a struggle.
She withdrew her hand from the phone, but kept the can of pepper spray raised. “What happened to your face?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm. “Were you beaten?”
“No.” The faintest ghost of a smile passed across his face. “It’s a casualty of my mode of transportation.” The smile vanished. “Tara,
they’re shooting at me
.”
Tara said nothing.
Paranoid. Delusional
.
Lash took another step forward, stopped when Tara aimed the can threateningly. “Listen. Do this one thing, if not for me, then for those couples who died. And the couples who are still under threat.” He gasped in a breath. “Search the Eden database for
the first client avatar ever recorded
.”
A minute had passed. The guards would be here soon.
“Tara,
please
.”
“Stand over there, by the far corner,” Tara said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Lash moved to the far side of her office.
Watching him carefully, she stepped toward her terminal, pepper spray at the ready. She did not sit down, but half turned toward the keyboard, leaning forward to type the query one-handed.
The first client avatar ever recorded . . .
Curiously, the search returned an avatar with no associated name. There was just the identity code. Yet it was a code that made no sense.
“Let me guess,” Lash said. “It isn’t even a rational number. It’s just a string of zeros.”
Now she turned to look at him more closely. He was still breathing hard, the blood dripping from his torn hands to the floor. But he was looking at her steadily, and—no matter how closely she looked back—she could detect no hint of madness in his eyes.
She glanced up at the wall clock. Two minutes.
“How did you know that?” she asked. “Lucky guess?”
“Who’d have guessed
that
? Nine zeros?”
Tara let the question hang in the air.
“Remember those queries I asked to run from your computer this morning? I’d just gotten an idea. A terrible idea, but the only one that fit. Those queries you followed up with all but confirmed it.”
Tara started to answer, then stopped.
“Why should I listen to any of this?” she asked instead, still stalling. “I saw the data on you. I saw your record, the things you’ve done. I saw why you left the FBI: you let two policemen and your own brother-in-law die. You led a murderer right to them, deliberately.”
Lash shook his head. “No. That’s not what happened. I tried to
save
them. I just figured it out too late. It was a case like this one. A killer’s profile that didn’t make sense. Edmund Wyre, didn’t you read about it in the papers? He was killing women as bait, writing phony confessions. Meanwhile, stalking his real target: the cops who were investigating. He got two. I’m the one he
missed
. That case wrecked my marriage, ruined my sleep for a year.”
Tara did not reply.
“Don’t you
understand
? I’ve been set up here. Framed. Somebody touched my records, distorted them. I know who that somebody is.”
He moved to the door, glanced back. “I have to go. But there’s something else you need to do. Go to the Tank. Run six other avatars—
the women from the six supercouples
—against avatar zero.”
In the distance, an elevator chimed. Tara heard raised voices, the sound of running feet.
Lash started visibly. He put his hand on the door frame, poised himself to flee. Then he gave her one final look, and his expression seemed to burn itself through her. “I know you want all this to end. Run that query. Discover for yourself just what’s going on. Save the others.”
Then, without another word, he was gone.
Slowly, Tara sank back into her chair. She glanced up at the clock: just under four minutes.
Seconds later, a team of security guards burst into her office, guns in hand. Their leader—a short, stockily built man Tara recognized as Whetstone—checked the corners quickly, then looked at her.
“You all right, Ms. Stapleton?” Beside Whetstone, one of the guards was peering into the room’s lone closet.
She nodded.
Whetstone turned back to his team. “He must have gone that way,” he said, pointing down the hallway. “Dreyfuss, McBain, secure the next intersection. Reynolds, stay with me. Let’s check the nearest access panels.” And he trotted out of the office, holstering his weapon and pulling out his radio as he did so.
For a moment, Tara listened to the retreating footsteps, the furtive sounds of conversation. Then they died away and the corridor fell back into silence.
She remained in her chair, motionless, while the wall clock ticked through five minutes. Then she rose and made her way across the carpet, avoiding the bloodstains. She hesitated in the doorway a second, then stepped into the corridor, heading for the elevator. The Tank was no more than a few minutes away.
But then she stopped and—reaching a new decision—turned and began walking, more quickly now, back in the direction she had come.
FORTY-EIGHT
T
he command center of Eden’s security division was a large, bunker-like space on the twentieth floor of the inner tower. Two dozen employees filled the room, transcribing passive sensor entries, controlling remote cameras.
Edwin Mauchly stood alone at the control station. On a dozen screens, he could bring up information from any of ten thousand live datastreams monitoring the building: camera feeds, sensor inputs, terminal keystrokes, scanner logs. Hands behind his back, he moved his gaze from screen to screen.