“Must have had a hell of a time getting that in here,” Lash said, nodding at the surfboard.
Tara flashed one of her rare smiles. “I spent my first couple of months outside the Wall, auditing security procedures. I brought in my old board to remind me there was a world out there beyond New York City. So I wouldn’t forget what I’d rather be doing. Audit finished, I got promoted, transferred inside. They wouldn’t let me take the board. I was ripshit.” She shook her head at the memory. “Then it appeared in my office doorway one day. Happy first anniversary, courtesy of Edwin Mauchly and Eden.”
“Knowing Mauchly, after having been scanned, probed, and analyzed six ways from Sunday.”
“Probably.”
Lash glanced at the clutch of emerald-green postcards. A question had formed in his mind—a question Tara could probably answer better than anybody.
He leaned toward the desk. “Tara, listen. Remember that drink we had at Sebastian’s? What you told me about your getting the nod?”
Immediately, he felt her grow more reserved.
“I need to know something. Is there any chance that an Eden candidate who gets turned down after testing might end up getting processed anyway? Go through data-gathering, surveillance—the works—and ultimately end up in the Tank? Getting matched?”
“You mean, like a mistake? Obsoletes somehow making their way through? Impossible.”
“Why?”
“There are redundant checks. It’s like everything else with the system. We don’t take any chance that a client, even a would-be client, could suffer embarrassment from sloppy data handling.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s never happened.”
“It happened yesterday.” And in response to Tara’s disbelieving look, he handed her the letter he’d found waiting outside his front door.
She read it, paling visibly. “Tavern on the Green.”
“I was rejected as an applicant. And pretty definitively. So how could this have happened?”
“I have no idea.”
“Could somebody within Eden have doctored my forms, guiding them through instead of shunting them toward the discard pile?”
“Nobody here does anything without half a dozen others seeing it.”
“Nobody?”
Hearing the tone of his voice, Tara looked at him closely. “It would have to be somebody very highly placed, somebody with world-class access. Me, for example. Or a grunt like Handerling who’d somehow hacked the system.” She paused. “But why would anybody do such a thing?”
“That was my next question.”
There was a silence. Tara folded the letter and handed it back across the table.
“I don’t know how this happened. But I’m very, very sorry, Dr. Lash. We’ll investigate immediately, of course.”
“You’re sorry. Silver’s sorry. Why is everybody so sorry?”
Tara looked astonished. “You mean—?”
“That’s right. Tomorrow night, I’m stepping out.”
“But I don’t understand—” The flow of words stopped.
I know you don’t, Lash thought.
He didn’t exactly understand himself. If he’d worked at Eden, like Tara—if he’d been influenced by what insiders called the “Oz effect”—he might have torn up the letter.
But he had not torn up the letter. The peek behind the scenes, the rabid testimonials of Eden clients, had piqued his interest almost without his realizing it. And now he’d been told a perfect mate had been found for him—Christopher Lash, so expert at analyzing other relationships yet so unsuccessful in his own. It was simply too powerful a lure to resist. Even the knowledge of why he was here in the first place was no match for the curiosity of meeting—just perhaps—an ideal partner.
But that meeting would come tomorrow. Today, there was something else on his mind.
“It’s not a coincidence,” he said.
“Huh?”
“My application getting processed. It might be a mistake, but it’s no coincidence. Any more than the deaths of the two supercouples are coincidence.”
Tara frowned. “What are you saying, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. But there’s a pattern here somewhere. We’re just not seeing it.” Mentally, he returned to last night’s drive home, when he’d refused to listen to the voice in the back of his head. Now he tried to recall the voice.
You murdered the first two supercouples, in order, Mauchly had said to Handerling during the interrogation. Now you’ve been planning to stalk, and kill, a third.
In order . . .
“Mind if I borrow this?” he asked, taking a notepad from the desk. Pulling out a pen, he wrote two dates on the pad: 9/17/04. 9/24/04. The dates the Thorpes and the Wilners had died.
“Tara,” he said. “Can you pull up the dates that the Thorpes and the Wilners first submitted their applications?”
“Sure.” She turned toward one of the terminals, typed briefly. Almost immediately, the printer spat out a sheet:
Nothing.
“Could you widen the search, please? I want a printout of all relevant dates for the two couples. When they were tested, when they first met, when they were married, everything.”
Tara looked at him speculatively for a moment. Then she returned to the keyboard and resumed typing.
The second list ran to almost a dozen pages. Lash turned them over, one after another, running his eyes wearily down the columns. Then he froze.
“Jesus,” he murmured.
“What is it?”
“These columns labeled ‘Nominal avatar removal.’ What do they stand for?”
“When the avatars were removed from the tank.”
“In other words, when the couples were matched.”
“Right.”
Lash handed her the sheet. “Look at the removal dates for the Thorpes and the Wilners.”
Tara glanced at the report. “My God. September 17, 2002. September 24, 2002.”
“That’s right. Not only were the Thorpes and the Wilners the first two supercouples to be matched. They also died precisely two years after they were matched. Two years to the day.”
Tara dropped the report on the desk. “What do you think it means?”
“That this dog’s been sniffing around the wrong fire hydrant. Here I’ve been digging into the psych tests and evaluations, assuming there might be some human flaw your examinations missed. Maybe instead of examining the people, I should have examined the process.”
“The process? What about the suspect match? Liza’s search?”
“That won’t be done until Monday. I don’t plan to spend the next seventy-odd hours sitting on my hands.” He stood up and turned toward the door. “Thanks for the help.”
As he opened the door, he heard Tara’s chair roll back. “Just a minute,” she said.
He turned.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my office. I’ve got a lot of evidence lockers to search.”
When Tara came around the desk, there was no hesitation. “I’m coming along,” she said.
THIRTY
S een my traveling kit, babe?” Kevin Connelly called out.
“Beneath the vanity, second shelf. On the left.”
Connelly padded past the sleigh bed, past the bars of yellow light that slanted in through the windows, and knelt before the vanity sink. Sure enough: second shelf, tucked carefully against the wall. Back in the day he’d have spent half an hour tearing up the bedroom in search of it. But Lynn seemed to possess a photographic memory for the whereabouts of everything in the house: not just her stuff, but his as well. It wasn’t anything conscious, it was just there all the time, sticking to everything it touched, like flypaper. Perhaps that’s part of what made her so good with languages.
“You’re a treasure,” he said.
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
He paused, crouching before the vanity, to look over at her. She was standin
g just within the closet, staring at a long rack of dresses. As he watched, she took down one, turned it around on its hanger, replaced it in favor of another. There was something in the way her limbs moved—lissome, unself-conscious—that even now quickened his pulse. He’d been deeply offended when, the other week, his mother had labeled her “cute.” Cute? She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
She left the closet and walked the newly selected dress over to the bed, where a large canvas suitcase lay open. With the same economy of motion, she folded the dress in half and placed it within the suitcase.
He’d taken the afternoon off to help his wife pack for Niagara Falls. It was a kind of guilty pleasure that, for some reason, he’d be embarrassed to confess to anybody. They always packed days in advance of a trip; somehow, it seemed to extend the vacation. He’d always been a premature packer, for the same reason he always liked to get to the airport early—yet as a bachelor it had been a hurried, slovenly affair. Lynn had shown him packing was an art, never to be rushed. And now, the process had grown into one of those intimate little rituals that made up the fabric of their marriage.
He stood, came up behind her, put his arms around her waist. “Just think,” he said, nuzzling her ear. “Another couple of days and we’ll be in front of a roaring fire at the Pillar and Post Inn.”
“Mmm.”
“We’ll have breakfast in bed. Maybe lunch in bed, too. How does that sound? And if you play your cards right, you just might get dessert, as well.”
In response, she leaned her head a little wearily against his shoulder.
Kevin Connelly knew his wife’s moods almost as well as his own, and he drew back. “What is it, babe?” he asked quickly. “Migraine?”
“Maybe the beginnings of one,” she said. “Hope not.”
He turned her toward him, kissed her gently on one temple, then the other.
“Some perfect wife, huh?” she said, raising her lips to his.
“You are the perfect wife. My perfect wife.”
She smiled, laid her head against his shoulder again.
The doorbell rang.
Kevin gently detached himself, then trotted out into the hall and down the stairs. Behind, he heard Lynn’s quiet footsteps, moving more slowly.
A man with an enormous wrapped parcel waited at the front door. “Mr. Connelly?” he said. “Sign here, please.”
Connelly signed on the indicated line, then gathered the package in his arms.
“What is it?” Lynn said as he thanked the man and pushed the door closed behind him.
“Don’t know. Want to open it?” Connelly handed the package to her, then watched, smiling, as she tore off the wrapping paper. Clear cellophane came into view; then a broad red ribbon; then the pale yellow of woven straw.
“What is it?” he asked. “A basket of fruit?”
“Not just fruit,” Lynn said breathlessly. “Look at the label. It’s red blush pears from Ecuador! You have any idea how expensive these are?”
Connelly smiled at the look that came over his wife’s face. Lynn was passionate about exotic fruit.
“Who could have sent this?” she asked. “I don’t see a card.”
“There’s a small one tucked in the back, over here.” Connelly plucked it from between threads of twisted straw, read the engraved words aloud. “Congratulations and warm best wishes on your upcoming anniversary.”
Lynn crowded close, headache forgotten. “Who’s it from?”
Connelly handed it to her. There was no name, but the card was embossed with the sleek infinity symbol of Eden.
Her eyes widened. “Red blush pears. How could they have known?”
“They know everything. Remember?”
Lynn shook her head, then began tearing the cellophane from the basket.
“Not so fast,” Connelly said in mock admonishment. “We’ve got some unfinished business upstairs. Remember?”
Now a smile brightened on her face, as well. And putting the basket aside, she skipped up the stairs after him.
THIRTY-ONE
L ash glanced up at the clock: a quick, disinterested look. Then he glanced again in disbelief. Quarter to six. It seemed only minutes since Tara, pleading a doctor’s appointment, had excused herself from his office around four.
He leaned back in his chair, surveyed the flood of paperwork covering the table. Had he really complained bitterly, once upon a time, about a lack of information? Now he had information, all right: enough to drown an army.
Discovering the deaths of the Thorpes and the Wilners were precisely timed to their matches was a critical piece of the puzzle—he just had to learn how it fit in. But with this embarrassment of data, he wasn’t likely to learn this afternoon.
His eye returned to the table, falling on a folder labeled Thorpe, Lewis—Process Inventory. He’d already flipped through it briefly: it appeared to be a system-generated list of all Eden systems Thorpe had interacted with. Lash sifted through the other flotsam until he found an identical folder for Lindsay. Then, walking to the far wall of the office, he rummaged through the evidence lockers until he’d located similar inventories for the Wilners, as well.
Maybe Silver was right—nothing would happen that weekend. If there was a murderer out there, maybe Eden’s surveillance teams would catch him before he could kill again. But that didn’t mean Lash was going to twiddle his thumbs. Comparing the data in the folders might turn up more pieces of the puzzle.
He slipped the folders into his leather satchel, stretched wearily. Then he made his way down the hall to the cafeteria. Marguerite had left for the day, but the counter person on duty was more than happy to make him a double espresso. Despite the late hour, the room was bustling, and Lash chose a corner table, grateful Eden maintained a three-shift operation.
Draining his cup, he returned to his office, retrieved his coat and satchel, then headed to the nearest elevator bank. Though most of the building remained a mystery to him, he’d at least learned to navigate his way to the lobby.
As Lash took up position in the queue for Checkpoint III, his thoughts returned to the couples. Before she’d left, Tara Stapleton had pointed out the third supercouple—the Connellys—had been matched on October 6, 2002. If the pattern he’d discovered held true to form, that meant the Connellys would experience their own tragedy—suicide, homicide—this coming Wednesday. That took a little pressure off, gave them some breathing room. But it also meant they had an ironclad deadline.
Wednesday. Any missing pieces of the puzzle had to be found before then.
He reached the front of the queue, waited while the glass doors slid open, then stepped into the circular chamber. Even this had become almost routine. It was an amazing thing, conditioning. You could get used to almost anything, no matter how remarkable. In the lab, he’d seen the effect in dogs, mice, chimps. He used it himself in biofeedback therapy. And here he was, a walking, talking example of its use in a corporate . . .
He became aware of a distant ringing sound. The light in the chamber, already bright, grew brighter. Ahead, beyond the second set of doors, he could see people running. What was happening—a fire alarm? Some sort of drill?
Suddenly, two guards appeared ahead on the far side of the glass. They planted themselves in his path, feet apart, arms at their sides.
He turned back the way he’d come, not comprehending. Two more guards now stood there. As he watched, more ran up behind them.
There was a brief series of tones, then the doors he’d passed through opened again. Guards advanced in two rows. One of the guards in the rear row, he noticed, held a stun device in one hand.
“What—” he began.
Quickly, and very firmly, the two lead guards hustled him back through the glass doors. The rest formed a security cordon around them. Lash registered a fleeting set of images—the queue falling back, wide-eyed; the walls of a corridor; a quick turn around a corner—and then he found himself inside a stark, windowless room.
&nbs
p; He was guided to a wooden chair. For a moment, it seemed nobody paid any further attention to him. There was the sound of radios chattering, a phone being dialed. “Get Sheldrake in here,” somebody said. The door to the room closed. And then one of the guards turned to him.
“Where were you going with these?” he asked. In one hand he held up the four folders from the satchel.
In his confusion, Lash was unaware the satchel had been taken from him. “I was taking them home,” he said. “To read over the weekend.” Christ, how could he have forgotten Mauchly’s warnings? Nothing from inside the Wall ever went out. But how had they . . .
“You know the rules, Mr.—?” the guard said, placing the binders inside what looked uncomfortably like an evidence bag.
“Dr. Lash. Christopher Lash.”
Hearing this, one of the security officers walked over to a data terminal and began to type.
“You know the rules, Dr. Lash?”
Lash nodded.
“So you realize the seriousness of this offense.”
Lash nodded again, embarrassed. Tara, stickler for protocol, would never let him live this down. He hoped she wouldn’t get in trouble; after all, Mauchly had put her in charge of—
“We’re going to have to keep you here until we’ve pulled your security history. If you already have a warning on your record, I’m afraid you’ll be brought before the termination review board.”
The security officer at the workstation looked up. “There’s no Christopher Lash in the Human Resources files.”