Текст книги "Death Match"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Lincoln Child
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

FORTY-FIVE

Inside a forward security post on the third floor of the inner tower, Edwin Mauchly observed Checkpoint I through mirrored glass. It was a scene of controlled pandemonium. At least a hundred Eden employees were lined up waiting to pass through the exit portals, kept in line by a dozen guards.

Mauchly turned from the window to a nearby monitor. It displayed a bird’s-eye view of the main lobby. Another, larger, line of people was streaming back from a makeshift security checkpoint by the revolving doors. Uniformed guards were checking passes and identifications, letting people past in ones and twos, searching for Christopher Lash. Mauchly noted with satisfaction that plainclothes security personnel were mingling with the lines, subtly discouraging chatter, keeping clients apart from would-be applicants and vice versa. Even in this crisis, with a Condition Delta invoked for the first time in the tower’s history, Eden kept the safety and privacy of its clients a first priority.

Mauchly began to pace. It was a distasteful, messy situation, and one he found personally offensive. As liaison between Richard Silver and the rest of the company, Mauchly had placed, in his own quiet way, a very personal stamp on Eden. He himself had implemented all security arrangements save for the penthouse, which Silver insisted on handling personally. Mauchly had realized the acute need for secrecy, for absolute confidentiality, almost before there was a product to protect. And he had been the first to understand how the widest possible network of data-sharing – between communications conglomerates, financial companies, the federal government – could not only improve their product, but bring in revenue streams never before imagined.

Mauchly had no particular use for title or recognition, for the usual trappings of corporate glory. Nevertheless, he was fiercely proud and fiercely protective of the company. And that was why, as he paced slowly back and forth inside the forward post, he felt such an upswelling of rage.

He himself had suggested Lash. It was a studied move: there was a threat to the corporation, and Lash seemed the best person to identify that threat.

But instead of ushering a savior into Eden, Mauchly had admitted a serpent.

He was still amazed how well Lash had pulled it off. Mauchly knew little about psychology, but he did know that most people sick enough to be psychopathic murderers had difficulty concealing their true nature. But Lash had been almost perfect. True, he had failed his pseudo-application, but there was nothing to hint at the true gravity of the situation. Yet Mauchly had now seen the evidence with his own eyes. After Silver gave him the alarming news – after they knew where to look – the facts literally poured in from the computer. Records of institutionalization. A deviant medical history as long as one’s arm. For all his brilliance as a post-graduate student, Lash was also critically broken in some way, and it only got worse. He was clever – he’d been able to hide his sickness and his record from the FBI at first, just as he’d been able to hide it from Eden – but all the hiding was past now.

As Mauchly looked back through the privacy glass, the feeling of betrayal and violation increased. In hindsight, he should have heeded Dr. Alicto’s post-eval warnings. The cloud under which Lash left the FBI should have raised more red flags.

He could not go back and rectify past mistakes. But he could certainly atone for them. Now he knew exactly what the score was. And he would set things right.

There was a low beep, and a videophone on a nearby desk began flashing. Mauchly approached it, punched in a short code. “Mauchly here,” he said.

The small screen went blank for a moment, then Silver’s face appeared.

“Edwin,” he said. “What’s the current status?” Concern was evident in both his expression and his voice.

“The tower’s been placed in Condition Delta.”

“Was that really necessary?”

“It seemed the fastest, safest way to empty the building. Everyone is being evacuated except the security staff. We’ve got screeners at all exits and checkpoints, watching for Lash.”

“And our clients? Have steps been taken not to alarm them in any way?”

“They’ve been told it’s a routine evacuation drill, that we conduct them regularly to ensure our safety procedures are fully optimized. It’s not far from the truth. So far, everyone has taken it in stride.”

“Good. Very good.”

Mauchly waited for Silver to sign off, but the face remained on the screen. “Is there something else, Dr. Silver?” Mauchly said after a moment.

Silver shook his head slowly. “You don’t think there’s any chance we’ve made a mistake, do you?”

“A mistake, sir?”

“About Lash, I mean.”

“Impossible, sir. You gave me the report yourself. And you’ve seen the evidence we’ve turned up since. Besides, if the man was innocent, he wouldn’t have run the way he did.”

“I suppose not. Still… you’ll handle things gently, right? Make sure no harm comes to him?”

“Of course.”

Silver smiled wanly, and the screen went blank.

A moment later, the door to the security post opened and Sheldrake entered. He came forward, massive body poised, as if awaiting orders. You could take the man out of the military, but it appeared you could not take the military out of the man.

“How are we faring, Mr. Sheldrake?” Mauchly asked.

“Seventy-five percent of non-Eden personnel have left the building,” Sheldrake said. “From the checkpoint counts, about thirty-eight percent of workers inside the Wall have already passed through the security portals. We expect to have the evacuation complete within twenty minutes.”

“And Lash?”

Sheldrake held up a printout. “Scanners tracked him to a hardware support area. He went into half a dozen rooms there. No further reports or sightings since.”

“Let me see that, please.” Mauchly glanced over the printout. “Redundant Disk Silo Storage. Network Infrastructure. What would he be doing in places like that?”

“The same question we’ve been asking ourselves, sir.”

“There’s something wrong here.” Mauchly pointed at the listing. “According to these time logs, Lash went into six different rooms over the course of only fifteen seconds.” He handed the printout back to Sheldrake. “He couldn’t have visited that many rooms so quickly. What was he doing?”

“Playing with us.”

“My thoughts exactly. The last room he entered was a Web farm. That’s where your men should concentrate their search.”

“Very good, sir.”

“But continue to deploy roving patrols inside the Wall. We have to assume Lash is probing the perimeter, trying to find some way to exit the inner tower. I’ll head up to the command center; I can monitor the operation more efficiently from there.”

He watched as the man turned to leave. Then, in a quieter voice, he said: “Mr. Sheldrake?”

“Sir?”

Mauchly regarded him a moment. Sheldrake, of course, did not know everything – he did not know, for example, precisely why Lash had been in the building – but he knew enough to understand the man posed a grave threat.

“This man has already compromised Eden. The longer he’s at large, the more damage he can cause. Significantdamage.”

Sheldrake nodded.

“Containment is key here. This kind of situation is best dealt with inside the building. The sooner this whole thing goes away, the better for everyone at Eden.” Mauchly felt a fresh surge of anger. “Do you understand? The thing should go all the wayaway.”

Sheldrake nodded again, more slowly this time. “My feelings as well, sir.”

“Then get to it,” Mauchly said.

FORTY-SIX

Inside the data conduit, time seemed a stranger. The narrow tube forked, and forked again; a seemingly infinite lattice spreading itself horizontally and vertically throughout the inner tower. There were none of the usual benchmarks by which to gauge the passage of time: just a claustrophobic world of faint blue light, bounded by endless rivers of cabling. Now and then a larger conduit would cross his path – arteries amid the matrix of veins – but for the most part the tubes were horribly cramped, forcing Lash to crawl at full length, like a spelunker threading a narrow pipe.

Whenever possible, he climbed. Small metal projections protruded from the walls, meant for securing cable ties but also serviceable for footholds. Now and then, a rough edge would snag his shirt, score his skin. From time to time he passed an access panel, like the one he used to enter the conduit system, but they were never marked and it was impossible to gauge how far he’d ascended. Like time, distance was all but meaningless in this close and foreign world.

From time to time, Lash stopped to catch his breath and listen. Once he heard a distant boom break the silence, like the closing of some giant door in the deepest sub-basement of the tower. Another time, he thought he heard a ghostly cry pass along the narrow conduits, barely audible, like the whisper of a breeze. But then nothing would follow save the sound of his own heavy breathing. And he would move on again, cables rustling at his passage.

Although Lash was not claustrophobic by nature, the faint light, the watchful silence, the wires that pressed in on all sides unnerved him. He forced himself to take small careful steps, to keep his balance and prevent his feet from tangling in the cabling.

In time he found a vertical conduit, a little wider than most, that seemed to ascend uninterrupted, freeing him from the frequent lateral side-trips he’d been forced to take. He climbed for what seemed hours, pulling himself from projection to tiny projection, until his blood thrummed in his ears. At last he stopped again to rest, leaning against the uneven bunches of cabling, listening to the rasp of his breath. The muscles in his arms danced and jerked. Raising an arm, he held it close to the blue guidewire and peered at his watch.

Five-thirty. Was it possible he’d only been crawling through these conduits half an hour?

And how far had he climbed? He should have been able to estimate his rate of ascent: he’d done more than his share of time-trial wall climbs at Quantico. But not all his travel had been vertical in this maze. And cramped into these slender tubes, fettered by cabling, it was hard to gauge. Had he reached the thirtieth floor? The thirty-fifth?

As he balanced, gasping for breath, an image suddenly came into his mind: a tiny spider, no bigger than a speck, clinging precariously to the inside wall of a soda straw…

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 hadno 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. 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

Tara 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’tbelieve 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’tallow 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 savethem. 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.