Текст книги "Lock in"

Автор книги: John Scalzi

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

On that, she was, for the moment, silent. This was not helping her in the media. Still, possibly better to be silent than to say something stupid.

On reflection, it seemed strange that I had never met Cassandra Bell. We were two of the most notable young Hadens in existence. But then the majority of her notoriety began to accrue around the same time I was trying to step away from the limelight and to have something like a private life.

Also, be honest, I said to myself. You’re the establishment. She’s the radical.

And that was true enough. Through my father and his activities, I was in the physical world more than most young Hadens. Cassandra Bell, on the other hand, was never in it, other than by reputation.

I set aside Cassandra Bell for a moment and went back to Jay Kearney, who had blown himself up on Karl Baer’s behalf. A scroll through his client list confirmed, as Vann had said, that Baer was indeed a client of Kearney’s, with three appointments in twenty-one months. The last of these was eleven months ago. According to Kearney’s appointment notes, they went parasailing.

But aside from brief notes on the nature of their appointments, there was nothing apparently connecting the two that I could see. Three appointments in two years was evidence of a prior relationship, but it wasn’t much of a relationship.

The FBI had gotten warrants for every scrap of Baer’s and Kearney’s lives the instant it was clear they had done the bombing. I reached into that data trove to pull out messages and payment records. I wanted to see how much cross talk there was between them, either in personal correspondence or in a financial trail of crumbs that suggested that the two of them interacted in any significant way.

There was very little. The messages clustered around integration appointments and discussed things like potential activities, how much Kearney would charge for his time, and other pedestrian affairs. Likewise, their financial records coincided at integration appointments only, when Baer would pay Kearney for the appointment.

This lack of a trail didn’t mean that the two of them didn’t meet or plan the bombing. It only suggested that if they did, they weren’t idiots about it. But it didn’t seem a lot to go on.

I stopped and looked up, and stepped back from the wall of images and searches I had constructed, looking for the structure in it, and in the connections. I imagine to a lot of people it would look like complete chaos, a mess of pictures and scraps of news.

I found it calming. Here was everything I knew so far. It was all connected in one way or another. I could see the connections out here in a way I couldn’t see them when they were jumbled in my brain.

Next steps, I heard Vann say in my head. I smiled at it.

One. There were two nexuses of interaction that I saw. One was Lucas Hubbard, to whom Nicholas Bell, Sam Schwartz, and my father connected, and with whom Jim Buchold argued on a matter related to their mutual business.

The other was Cassandra Bell, to whom Nicolas Bell, Baer, and Kearney were connected, whom Buchold was antagonistic toward, and Hubbard, possibly, based on his argument with Buchold, was sympathetic toward.

So: Dive into both, particularly Cassandra Bell. She was the only person in all of this whom I had not physically met. Arrange an interview if at all possible.

Two. Baer and Kearney: Still unconvinced about the connection here. Dig deeper.

Three. Johnny Sani. Find out what he was doing in Duarte and if anyone knew him there. Learn if there was a connection between him and the City of Hope.

Four. Two outliers in this tangle: My dad and Brenda Rees. I was pretty certain my dad was not up to no good, running for senator notwithstanding. In any event I had a massive conflict of interest if I wanted to investigate him.

As for Brenda Rees, might as well get an interview with her and see if she had anything useful to say.

Five. Nicholas Bell. Who said he was working when he met with Sani, but also appeared to have been there to integrate with Sani, even though it was impossible, because they were both Integrators and because the headset was fake.

So what the hell was really going on in there?

And why did Johnny Sani commit suicide?

Those were the two things that taking all these data points out of my brain and spreading them out into space didn’t make any clearer.

Chapter Thirteen

A LIGHT PING ECHOED through my cave. I recognized the tone as a noninvasive hail, a call that would be delivered if the recipient was conscious, but not if not. Hadens, like anyone else, hated to be woken up by random calls in the middle of the night. I pulled up a window to see who it was. It was Tony.

I cleared the call, audio only. “You’re up late,” I said.

“Deadline on a gig,” Tony replied. “I had a hunch you might have been lying when you said you wanted to sleep.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

“What are you doing instead?”

“Trying to figure out a whole bunch of shit that unfortunately I can’t tell you much about. And you?”

“At the moment, compiling code. Which I can tell you about but which I don’t imagine you care about,” Tony said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “I am endlessly fascinated.”

“I’ll take that as a challenge,” Tony said, and then the data panel popped up a button. “That’s a door code. Come on over.”

Tony was offering me an invite to his liminal space, or at very least a public area of it.

I hesitated for a second. Most Hadens were protective of their personal spaces. Tony was offering me an intimacy of sorts. I hadn’t known him that long.

But then I decided I was overthinking it and touched the button. It expanded into a doorframe and I stepped through.

Tony’s workspace looked like a high-walled retro video game cube, all black space with the walls defined by neon blue lines, off of which branched geometric patterns.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Tron fan.”

“Got it in one,” Tony said. He was at a standing desk, above which a neon-lined keyboard hovered. Beside that was a floating screen with code, with a toolbar slowly pulsing, marking the amount of time until Tony’s code compiled. Above him, rotating slowly, was a swirl of lines, apparently haphazardly connected.

I recognized them immediately.

“A neural network,” I said.

“Also got that in one,” Tony said. His self-image was, like most people’s, a version of his physical self, fitter, more toned, and stylishly clothed. “If you really want to impress me, you’ll tell me the make and model.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I admitted.

“Amateur,” Tony said, lightly. “It’s a Santa Ana Systems DaVinci, Model Seven. It’s their latest-released iteration. I’m coding a software patch to it.”

“Should I be seeing any of this?” I asked, pointing at the code in the display. “I would guess this is all supposed to be confidential.”

“It is,” Tony said. “But you don’t look like much of a coder to me—no offense—and I’m willing to guess that the DaVinci up there looks mostly like artfully arranged spaghetti to you.”

“That it does.”

“Then we’re fine,” Tony said. “And anyway it’s not like you can record anything in here.” Which was true. In personal liminal spaces, visitor recording was turned off by default.

I looked up at the model of the neural network hovering over Tony’s head. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” I said.

“Neural networks in general, or the DaVinci Seven in particular?” Tony asked. “Because confidentially speaking the D7s are a pain in the ass. Their architecture is kind of screwy.”

“I meant in general,” I said, and looked up again. “The fact we’ve got one of these sitting in our skulls.”

“Not just in our skulls,” Tony said. “In our brains. Actually in them, sampling neural activity a couple thousand times a second. Once they’re in, you can’t get them out. Your brain ends up adapting to them, you know. If you tried to remove it, you’d end up crippling yourself. More than we already are.”

“That’s a cheerful thought.”

“If you want really cheerful thoughts, you should worry about the software,” Tony said. “It governs how the networks run, and it’s all really just one kludge after another.” He pointed at his code. “The last software update Santa Ana put out accidentally caused the gallbladder to get overstimulated in about a half a percent of the operators.”

“How does that happen?”

“Unexpected interference between the D7 and the brain’s neural signals,” Tony said. “Which happens more often than it should. They run all the software through brain simulators before they upload it into customers, but real brains are unique, and Haden brains are even more so because of how the disease messes with the structure. So there’s always something unexpected going on. This patch should fix the problem before it causes gallstones. Or at least if gallstones happen, they won’t be traced back to the neural network.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “You’re making me glad it’s not a Santa Ana network in my head.”

“Well, to be fair, it’s not just Santa Ana,” Tony said. He nodded at me. “What do you have in there?”

“It’s a Raytheon,” I said.

“Wow,” Tony said. “Old school. They got out of the neural network business a decade ago.”

“I didn’t need to hear that,” I said.

Tony waved it off. “Their maintenance is handled by Hubbard,” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said. I was momentarily shocked.

“Hubbard Technologies,” Tony said. “Lucas Hubbard’s first company, before he formed Accelerant. Hubbard doesn’t build networks—another Accelerant company does that—but Hubbard makes a lot of money off of maintaining the systems of companies who left the field after the first gold rush. He did a lot of the early coding and patching himself, if you believe his corporate PR.”

“Okay,” I said. The sudden intrusion of Hubbard into my head, literally as well as figuratively, had thrown me off.

“I’ve done work for Hubbard, too,” Tony said. “Just a couple of months ago, as a matter of fact. Trust me, they have their issues.”

“Do I want to know?” I asked.

“Suffered any colon spasms recently?”

“Uh,” I said. “No.”

“Then nothing you need to worry about.”

“Lovely.”

“I’ve worked with them all,” Tony said. “All the networks. The biggest issue isn’t neural interference, actually. It’s basic security.”

“Like people hacking into the neural networks,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never heard of that happening.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Tony said. “First, the architecture of the neural networks is designed to be complex to make them hard to program on, and hard to access from outside. The D7 being a pain in the ass to deal with is a feature, not a bug. Every other network since the first iteration is designed that way too.

“Second, they hire people like me to make sure it doesn’t happen. Half my contracts are for white-hat incursions, trying to get into the networks.”

“And what do you do when you get in?” I asked.

“Me? I file a report,” Tony said. “With the first iteration of networks the hackers would run blackmail schemes. Fire up a series of gory pictures or put ‘It’s a Small World’ on a repeating loop until the victim paid to make it stop.”

“That sucks,” I said.

Tony shrugged. “They were dumb,” he said. “Honestly. A computer inside your brain? What the hell did they think was going to happen with that? They got serious about patching when some hacker from Ukraine started giving people arrhythmia just for kicks. That shit’s actual attempted first-degree murder.”

“I’m glad they fixed that,” I said.

“Well, for now,” Tony said. His code had compiled and he waved his hand to execute it. From above, the network pulsed. It wasn’t just a pretty image. It was an actual simulation of the network.

“What do you mean ‘for now’?” I asked.

“Think about it, Chris,” Tony said. He pointed at my head. “You’ve got what’s effectively a legacy system in your head. Its upkeep is currently being paid for out of the budget of the National Institutes of Health. When Abrams-Kettering goes into effect next Monday, the NIH will stop paying for upkeep once its current batch of contracts expires. Santa Ana and Hubbard aren’t updating and patching out of the goodness of their corporate hearts, you know. They get paid to do it. When that stops, either someone else is going to have to pay for it, or the updates stop coming.”

“And then we’re all screwed,” I said.

“Some people will be screwed,” Tony said. “I’ll be fine because this shit is my job and I can hack my own network. You’ll be fine because you can afford to hire someone like me to maintain your network. Our roommates will be fine because I like them and don’t want them to have spam piped into their brains against their will. And the middle-class Hadens will probably be able to pay for a monthly subscription of updates, which is something I know Santa Ana, at least, is already planning for.

“Poor Hadens, on the other hand, are kind of fucked. They’ll either get no updates, which will leave them vulnerable to software rot or hacking, or they’ll have to deal with some sort of update model that features, I don’t know, ads. So every morning, before they can do anything else with their day, they’ll have to sit through six goddamn advertisements for new threeps or nutritional powder or bags for their crap.”

“So, spam,” I said.

“It’s not spam if you agree to it,” Tony said. “They just won’t have much of a choice.”

“Swell.”

“It’s not just updates,” Tony said. “Think about the Agora. Most of us think of it as a magical free-floating space somewhere out there.” He gestured with his hands. “In fact it’s run out of an NIH server farm outside of Gaithersburg.”

“But it’s not on the chopping block,” I said. “There’d be a panic if it was.”

“It’s not being cut, no,” Tony said. “But I know the NIH is talking to potential buyers.” He pointed up at the neural network. “Santa Ana’s putting in a bid, Accelerant’s making one, GM’s in, and so is just about every Silicon Valley holding company.”

He shrugged. “Whoever eventually buys the farm will probably have to promise to leave the character of the Agora unchanged for a decade or so, but we’ll see how much that’ll be worth. It’s going to be monthly access fees from there for sure. I don’t know how you’d do billboards in the Agora, but I’m pretty sure they’ll figure it out sooner than later.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” I said, after a minute.

Tony smiled, looked away, and made a dismissive wave. “Sorry. It’s a hobbyhorse of mine, I know. I’m not this humorless about most things.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “And it’s fine that you’re thinking about it.”

“Well, there’s also the side effect that once all these government contracts go kerplooey, my line of work is going to get tougher,” Tony said. “So this is not me being socially active out of the goodness of my own heart. I like to eat. Well, be fed nutritionally balanced liquids, anyway. The Hadens who are walking out this week are making the point that our world is about to be wildly disrupted, and the rest of America doesn’t really seem to give a shit.”

“You’re not part of the walkout, though,” I said.

“I’m inconsistent,” Tony said. “Or maybe I’m a coward. Or just someone who wants to bank as much money as he can now because he expects things to dry up. I see the wisdom of the walkout. I don’t see it as something I can do right now.”

“What about the march on the Mall?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ll definitely be going to that,” Tony said, and grinned. “I think we’ll all be going. Are you planning on it?”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll be working it,” I said.

“Right,” Tony said. “I guess this is a busy week for you.”

“Just a little.”

“Got thrown into the deep end, it looks like,” Tony said, looking back to his code. “You picked a hell of a week to start your gig.”

I smiled at that and looked up again at the pulsing neural network, thinking. “Hey, Tony,” I said.

“Yes?”

“You said a hacker gave people heart attacks.”

“Well, arrhythmia, actually, but close enough for government work,” Tony said. “Why?”

“Is it possible for a hacker to implant suicidal thoughts?” I asked.

Tony frowned at this for a minute, considering. “Are we talking general feelings of depression, leading to suicidal thoughts, or specific thoughts, like ‘Today I should eat a bullet’?”

“Either,” I said. “Both.”

“You could probably cause depression through a neural network, yeah,” Tony said. “That’s a matter of manipulating brain chemistry, which is something networks do already”—he pointed up at his network simulator—“although usually accidentally. The patch I’m doing now is designed to stop just that sort of chemistry manipulation.”

“What about specific thoughts?”

“Probably not,” Tony said. “If we’re talking about thoughts that feel like they’re originating from a person’s own brain. Generating images and noises that come from the outside is trivial—we’re both doing it right now. This room is a mutually agreed-upon illusion. But directly manipulating consciousness so that you make someone think they’re thinking a thought you give them—and then making them act on it—is difficult.”

“Difficult or impossible?” I asked.

“I never say ‘impossible,’” Tony said. “But when I say ‘difficult’ here I mean that as far as I’ve heard no one’s ever done it. And I don’t know how to do it, even if I wanted to, which I wouldn’t.”

“Because it’s unethical,” I prompted.

“Hell yes,” Tony said. “And also because I know if I’ve figured it out, someone else has too, because there’s always someone else smarter out there, who may not have ethics. And that would really mess with shit. It’s hard enough to believe in free will as it is.”

“So,” I said. “Really difficult but not actually impossible.”

“Really really really difficult,” Tony allowed. “But theoretically possible because, hey, it’s a quantum physics universe. Why do you ask, Chris? I sense this is not an entirely idle question.”

“What’s your work schedule look like?” I asked.

Tony nodded upward. “It looks like my patch is doing what it’s supposed to. Once I clean it up a bit, which should take less than an hour, I’ll send it off and then I’m free.”

“Have you ever done work for the federal government?”

“I live in Washington, D.C., Chris,” Tony said. “Of course I’ve done work for the government. I have a vendor ID and everything.”

“Do you have a security clearance?”

“I’ve done confidential work before, yes,” Tony said. “Whether on the level you seem to be thinking about is something I guess we’d have to find out.”

“I may have a job for you, then,” I said.

“Involving neural networks?”

“Yes,” I said. “Hardware and software.”

“When would you want me to start?”

“Probably tomorrow,” I said. “Probably, like, nine A.M.”

Tony smiled. “Well, then,” he said. “I should probably finish up what I’m doing so I can at least attempt to get some sleep.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No,” Tony said. “Thank you. It’s not every day that a new housemate comes bearing work. That makes you officially my favorite housemate.”

“I won’t tell,” I said.

“No, go ahead and tell,” Tony said. “Maybe it will inspire a competition. That’ll work out for me. I could use the work.”

Chapter Fourteen

“DON’T TELL TRINH I said this to you,” Captain Davidson said, pointing to the five Hadens he had in his holding cell, “but I would be delighted if the FBI took these idiots off our hands.”

The five Hadens, or more accurately their threeps, glared at me, Vann, and Davidson from the other side of the holding cell. We could tell they were glaring because their threep models came with customized heads that displayed faces and expressions. The faces these threeps carried were not their owners’ actual faces, unless their owners were the spitting images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Hamilton. The threeps were also wearing colonial-era uniforms, which may or may not have been historically accurate. It was like an elementary school diorama of the Continental Congress come to life.

The threeps were just threeps, of course. The Hadens driving them were somewhere else in the country. But when you’re a Haden and you’re arrested in your threep, if you disconnect, that’s considered resisting arrest and fleeing the scene. This fact was courtesy of a young, rich Haden who in the early years of threeps carelessly knocked down an old lady, disconnected from her threep in a panic, and then spent three years and a couple hundred thousand dollars of Mommy’s money trying to get out of what would have been a standard-issue moving violation. She eventually also ended up adding perjury and bribery to her docket. She should have just done the community service.

Thus our colonials, cooling their heels and glaring through their pixels.

“What you in for, George?” I asked Washington. Davidson had called us in to deal with several different Hadens in his holding cells. This was the first bunch.

“For exercising our constitutional Second Amendment rights,” Washington said. His real name was Wade Swope, from Milltown, Montana. His information was popped up in my view. “Here in the dictatorship of the District of Columbia, a man is apparently stripped of his right to bear arms.”

Vann turned to Davidson. “Shocked, shocked I am to find men with guns somehow landing in jail.”

“Yes, well,” Davidson said. “Our founding father here is correct that he has the right to bear arms, which in this case were long rifles for each of them. The part he’s skipping over is where his little group of colonial fighters went into a coffee shop—private property—and started to make a scene, and when they were told to take a hike, commenced to wave their rifles around. We have it on the store video, not to mention the phone of every single person in the store.”

“We’re here to be the security detail for the march,” said Thomas Jefferson, aka Gary Height, of Arlington, Virginia. “We’re a militia, consistent with the Constitution. We’re here to defend our people.”

“You might be a militia,” I said. “But I don’t think waving your firearms around in a coffee shop accurately describes ‘well-regulated.’”

“Who cares what you think?” said Patrick Henry, aka Albert Box of Ukiah, California. “You’re standing with them. Those who oppress us.” He pointed to me. “You are a traitor and a sellout.”

It occurred to me that Henry/Box actually had no idea who I was, although I don’t know if that would have changed his opinion any. I glanced over at Vann and Davidson. “Oppressing us, as in we Hadens, or oppressing you, dudes waving around firearms in a coffee shop?” I asked. “I want to be clear on the depth of my traitorness.”

“You know what confuses me, Shane,” Davidson said, before any of them could answer.

“Tell me,” I said.

Davidson motioned at the colonial Hadens. “On one hand these guys seem like your basic crazy conservative types, with the Second Amendment and their Yankee Doodle hats. But on the other hand they’re saying they’re security for a march protesting reductions in government benefits. Which seems pretty liberal to me.”

“It’s a puzzler,” I agreed.

“I don’t know,” Davidson said. “Maybe it’s not about politics. Maybe these guys are just assholes.”

“Seems the simplest explanation,” I said.

“We have a right to assemble—” Washington/Swope began, clearly winding himself up.

“Oh, Jesus, don’t,” Vann said. “It’s too early in the fucking A.M. for your brand of pathetic patriotic bullshit.”

Washington/Swope clammed up, surprised.

“Better,” Vann said, and leaned in toward the lot. “Now. Your threeps are here, but each of your physical bodies are in a different state. That makes you the FBI’s problem. Which means you are my problem. And I say five jackasses dressed up like the back of a two-dollar bill, claiming to be a militia and waving around rifles in a goddamn Georgetown coffee shop violates Title Eighteen of the U.S. Criminal Code, chapters twenty-six, forty-three, and one hundred two.”

I quickly pulled up the relevant chapters of Title Eighteen and noted that chapter 43 was for “False Personation.” I didn’t suspect that anyone would confuse Swope with the real George Washington. I also knew to stay quiet.

“So, here’s the deal,” Vann continued. “You have two options. The first is I decide not to make a federal case of it, and you idiots walk your threeps over to the precinct storage room, where you power them down and then we yank out the batteries. You’ll have three days to arrange to have your threeps and your precious rifles shipped back to you, or we’ll assume you’re donating them to the Metro police.

“The second option is I do make a federal case out of it. In which case we confiscate your threeps and rifles, and a law enforcement official comes to all of your houses to wheel you off to the nearest Haden-capable federal detention center, which is probably not actually anywhere close to you. Then you get the joy of spending all the money every single member of your entire family will ever earn on lawyers, because in addition to those three chapters of Title Eighteen I covered with you, I’m going to throw every other single thing I can think of into the indictment.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Thomas Paine, aka Norm Montgomery of York, Pennsylvania.

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” Vann said. “But whatever it is, I will absolutely fucking bury you in it. And I will enjoy it, because you chose to waste my time making me deal with you. So, decision time. Door number one or door number two. Choose wisely. And if you don’t choose in ten seconds, we’re going with door number two. Choose.”

Seven seconds later our founding fathers chose door number one and Davidson was yelling for an escort to walk them down, one at a time, to evidence and storage.

Then we moved on to the next Haden in the pen, this one in for punching some woman who had called her a “clank.”

*   *   *

“Welcome to the next four days,” Vann said to me as we exited the second district headquarters. “We’ve got a bunch of incarcerated threeps in the first, third, and sixth district to get at, too. Then when we’re done with those we can come back here to the second and start all over. And then over and over again until the march is done and all the Hadens go home. You should probably tell your caregiver to put you on a caffeine drip.”

“What about Johnny Sani and Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“Terrorism’s got Loudoun Pharma,” Vann said. “We’re only on the edges of that one. Sani’s in our morgue and not going anywhere. Both of them can probably wait until Monday. Unless you think you’ve got something.”

“I think I have something,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Vann said. “We don’t have time for ‘maybe’ at the moment. We’ve got a whole line of threeps that we have to decide what to do with.”

“I want someone to look at Sani’s neural network.”

“We’ve already got our forensics people looking at it.”

“I want someone looking at it who knows their way around one,” I said. “Someone who works on them every day.”

“You have someone in mind?” Vann asked.

“My new housemate,” I said.

Vann reached into her jacket pocket for her e-cigarette. “You’re getting an early start on your cronyism,” she said.

“It’s not that,” I said, annoyed. “Johnny Sani had an IQ of eighty. He had no business having an Integrator’s neural network in his head. Someone installed it in him and someone used him, and then when they were done with him, they made him slit his own throat somehow. I think there’s something going on in the software of that network.”

“Something that forced him to slit his own throat?” Vann said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“There’s that ‘maybe’ again,” Vann said. She sucked on her cigarette.

“Tony does neural network software all the time,” I said. “And he contracts with the companies who make them to test their security and troubleshoot issues. He would know what to look for. Or at the very least, he would be able to see if something was wildly off.”

“And ‘Tony’ in this case is your new housemate.”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s done confidential work for the government before. Has a vendor ID and everything.”

“Is he expensive?” Vann asked.

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters,” Vann said, and it was her turn to look annoyed with me. “One of us is going to have to make the case for any expenditures we make outside ourselves. And if they don’t like it, they’re going to yell at me to yell at you.”

“I think it’s going to be worth it,” I said.

Vann took another suck on her cigarette. Then: “Fine, let’s get him in. I’ll tell them it’s related to the Loudoun Pharma thing if they bitch about it.”

“And they’ll buy that,” I said.

“Maybe,” Vann said.

“Because I really do think there’s something going on there,” I said. I recounted to Vann my brainstorming session of the night before.

“Do you do that a lot?” Vann asked, after I finished. “That tossing things into space and drawing lines between them thing.”

“When I can’t sleep? Yes.”

“You need to find some other evening activities,” Vann said.

“I’m not even going to touch that one,” I said.

Vann smiled wryly at that, took one more suck on her cigarette, and then started to put it away. “Well, I don’t want to take a run at Lucas Hubbard if we don’t have anything to take a run at him with. If we come after him I want him off guard. We can ask after Cassandra Bell, but I guarantee you the terrorism people already have a microscope shoved up her colon after the Loudoun Pharma thing, so she may not want to speak to us, and terrorism might not want us stepping on their dicks even if she does. What was the name of that woman Integrator that Schwartz was using?”

“Brenda Rees.”

“I’ll knock on her door today,” Vann said. “See if anything shakes loose there.”

“Am I not going with you?” I asked.

“No,” Vann said. “Since you seem to think all this is on some sort of timetable, you need to go out to California to follow up on that money order and then head over to that City of Hope place to see if anything comes of that. That should keep you busy.”

“What about Tony?” I asked.

“Give me his information and I’ll get him set up and over to the morgue today,” Vann said. “If he’s a flake, I’m going to take it out on you.”

“He’s not a flake, I promise.”

“He better not be. I’d hate to have to kill him and frame you for it.”