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. THORSSEN, J. POST-SELECTION PROCESSING.
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?”
&nbs
p; “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.
Somewhere, in that vast storm of data, Christopher Lash was dodging all the raindrops.
Behind him, a door opened. Mauchly did not turn: he did not need to. The heavy, clipped tread, the brief silence, told him Sheldrake had just entered.
“They missed him by five, maybe ten seconds,” Sheldrake said, approaching the control station.
Mauchly reached for a keyboard. “He spent four minutes in Tara Stapleton’s office. Four minutes, when he knew every second put him at greater risk. Why did he do that?” He typed again. “He left her office heading southbound. As he ran, he passed his identity bracelet beneath a dozen additional door scanners along the corridor. Which of those doors he entered—if any—remains unknown.”
“I’ve got men checking them out now.”
“It’s important to be thorough, Mr. Sheldrake. But I have the strong feeling he’s no longer on the thirty-fifth floor.”
“It’s still hard to believe he’s using data conduits to get around,” Sheldrake said. “They’re meant for maintenance access, not travel. He must feel like a pipe cleaner squeezing his way through those things.”
Mauchly stroked his chin. “He should be trying to find a way out, flee the building. Instead, he’s climbing. First, to the twenty-sixth floor. Now, the thirty-fifth.”
“Could he be after someone, or something? A suicide plot? Sabotage?”
“I considered that. If he’s desperate enough, it’s possible. On the other hand, he didn’t harm Tara Stapleton just now—who, after all, is the person who turned him in. The fact is, we simply don’t have a sufficient bead on his pathology to know for sure.” Mauchly scanned the screens. “I don’t want to draw too many of your men away from the search. But you should place small details on the most critical installations. And have another guard the emergency penthouse access.”
“Shouldn’t we also post teams outside access panels? Now that we know how he’s getting around, we can arrange an ambush.”
“The question is where? There are probably a hundred miles of data conduits, they honeycomb the entire inner tower. There’s five times that many access panels. We can’t watch them all.”
He stepped back from the monitors. “He has a plan,” he said, more to himself than to Sheldrake. “If we learn what that is, we’ll learn where to trap him.”
Then he turned. “Come,” he said. “I think we need to have a little talk with Tara Stapleton.”
FORTY-NINE
I n the room known as the Tank, the wall clocks read 18:20. Normally, the space would have been full of Eden technicians: monitoring throughput, scribbling notes on palmtop computers, ensuring the matching process that was the heart and soul of Eden proceeded in a fully optimized fashion.
This evening, however, the room was empty. The dials and monitors displayed their data for no one. There was no sound but the whisper of forced air, no movement but the blinking of diagnostic LEDs. The Tank, like the rest of Eden, had been evacuated.
As the clocks rolled over to 18:21, a soft click sounded in the hallway outside. The double doors parted. A lone figure peered cautiously within. Then it came forward, closed the doors, and moved quietly across the room.
As she’d moved through the corridors of the inner tower, Tara Stapleton had been struck by the emptiness, the atmosphere of watchful silence. Yet she was totally unprepared for what now lay before her. She had been in this room hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Every time, it had been humming with activity. Every time, people had been standing before the Tank, mesmerized by the avatars gliding restlessly within their digital universe. But there were no spectators now, and the Tank was dark and empty. Client processing had been halted when the tower was placed under Condition Delta, and would not resume until the next shift began work the following morning.
She came forward, toward the face of the Tank. She stretched out a hand to the cool, smooth surface. The sensation of great depth, of velvety darkness, remained. And yet how strange to see it depopulated. Though she knew the avatars were just electrical phantoms—binary constructs that had no existence outside the computer—it seemed wrong somehow, against nature, to drain them from the Tank, leaving it lifeless.
Her eyes drifted away, stopping when they reached the wall clock. 18:22. Twenty-two minutes past six.
She walked t
o a nearby console. Typing a series of commands, she brought herself into the Tank’s dataspace and accessed the central client archives.
Then she paused. As chief security tech, her authorization was more than high enough to carry out what Lash had suggested. But there would be a record of her access, a log of her keystrokes. Questions would be asked, probably sooner than later.
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. If Lash was lying—if this whole business was some part of his madness, some imaginary conspiracy or persecution complex—she’d know it pretty damn quick. On the other hand, if he was telling the truth . . .
She flexed her fingers briefly, returned them to the keyboard. She didn’t yet know what it meant if Lash was telling the truth. But one way or the other, she had to learn.
She typed another command. The screen went black briefly, then refreshed.
PROP. EDEN INC.
CLIENT COMPATIBILITY
VIRTUAL PROVING CHAMBER
REV.27.4.1.1
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY
L-4, EXEC-D OR HIGHER CLEARANCE REQUIRED
MANUAL POPULATION MODE ENABLED
SIMULATED ONLY
TOTAL POPULATION COUNT?
As she stared at the screen, Tara felt a sudden urge to place her own avatar in the Tank: to see her own digital representation glide through that velvet darkness. Had it taken long to find Matt Bolan’s avatar? She was standing at a command console. She knew his identity code by heart; she could—
She reminded herself this was no time for wistful nostalgia. Besides, she wasn’t doing this for Lash, or even for the Wilners or Thorpes. She was doing this for herself. If she could help unravel this mystery, set things right . . . maybe it wasn’t too late for her own avatar, after all.
She took a deep breath. Then she typed a single number: 2.
The screen refreshed:
ENTER AVATAR IDENTITY CODES