“Dr. Lash,” came Mauchly’s voice. “Keep moving, please.”
Just as Mauchly spoke, Lash made out the thick plates of steel that lay, accordion fashion, against the transverse walls of the baffle. They gleamed cruelly in the reflected light, like monstrous jaws. The security plates, he thought as he resumed his descent.
A minute later he was standing on the access pad atop the inner tower. Nearby was another open hatch, this one leading into the tower itself. He was safely below the security plates: from here, the underside of the penthouse was almost invisible in the thick air above. He felt Tara grasp his hand. For a moment, sheer relief washed away every other emotion.
And then he remembered: they were still short one person.
He turned to Mauchly, just now stepping off the ladder. “Where’s Silver?” he asked.
Mauchly raised his cell phone, dialed. “Dr. Silver? Where are you?”
“I’m almost there,” came the voice. Behind it, Lash could hear a terrible fugue of destruction: explosions, collapses, the groan of failing steel. And there was another noise, mechanical and regular, scarcely discernible: the sound of the tape reader, still chattering grimly on . . .
“Dr. Silver!” Mauchly said. “There’s no more time. The place could go up at any moment!”
“I’m almost there,” the voice repeated calmly.
And then—with a sudden, awful lucidity—Lash understood.
He understood why Silver abruptly acquiesced to Tara’s plan for erasing Liza’s memory, after resisting so fiercely. He understood the real reason Silver spent the time to get a memory dump onto tape. And he thought he understood why Silver remained behind. It wasn’t to buy time to see everybody out safely—at least, that wasn’t the only reason . . .
I’m almost there.
Silver didn’t mean he’d almost reached the exit. He meant he’d almost finished reloading Liza’s core memory. Keeping her terrible plan in motion.
Lash grasped the ladder. “I’m going back for him.”
He felt Mauchly grab hold. “Dr. Lash—”
Lash brushed the hand away and began to climb. But even as he did so there was a great clank of turning metal. Overhead, the security plates began to close again.
Lash took another step upward, felt Mauchly restrain him. And now Sheldrake and Dorfman came up, preventing him from climbing further. Lash whirled, grabbed Mauchly’s phone.
“Richard!” he cried. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” came the voice, faint and garbled amid the banshee howl. “I can hear you.”
“Richard!”
“I’m still here.”
“Why are you doing this?”
There was a squeal of interference. Then Silver’s voice became audible again. “Sorry, Christopher. But you said it yourself. Liza’s a child. And I can’t let a child die alone.”
“Wait!” Lash yelled into the phone. “Wait, wait—!”
But the security plates closed with a monstrous boom; the phone died in a shriek of static; and Lash, closing his eyes, slumped back against the ladder.
SIXTY-THREE
A lthough it is three in the morning, the bedroom is bathed in merciless light. The windows facing the deck of the pool house are rectangles of unrelieved black. The light seems so bright the entire room is reduced to a harsh geometry of right angles: the bed, the night table, the dresser . . .
Only this time, the bedroom isn’t that of a victim. It’s familiar. It belongs to Lash.
Now he moves around the room, flicking off switches. The brilliant light fades and the contours of the room soften. Slowly, the nocturnal landscape beyond the windows takes form, blue beneath a harvest moon. A manicured lawn; a pool, its surface faintly phosphorescent; a tall privet hedge beyond. For a minute he fears there are figures standing in the hedge—three women, three men, now all dead—but it is merely a trick of the moonlight and he turns away.
Beyond the bed, the bathroom door is ajar. He drifts toward it. Within, a woman stands before the mirror, brushing her hair with long languid strokes. Her back is to him but the set of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, is instantly recognizable. There is a faint crackle of static electricity as the brush glides through her hair.
He looks into the mirror and his ex-wife’s reflection stares back.
“Shirley. Why are you here?”
“I’m just back to collect a few things. I’m going on a journey.”
“A journey?”
“Of course.” She speaks with the authority of dreams. “Look at the clock. It’s past midnight, it’s a new day.”
The brushing sound has now morphed into something else: something slow, rhythmic, like regular pulses of static from a radio. “Where are you going?”
“Where do you think?” And she turns to face him. Only now it is Diana Mirren’s face looking into his. “Every day is a journey.”
“Every day is a journey,” he repeats.
She nods. “And the journey itself is home.”
As he stares, he realizes something else is wrong. The voice isn’t Diana’s. And it is no longer his ex-wife’s. With a shock that is not quite horror, he realizes it is the voice of Liza. Liza, speaking through Diana’s face.
“Silver!” he cries.
“Yes, Christopher. I can hear you.” The dream-figure smiles faintly.
The strange rhythmic sound is louder now. He hides his face. “Oh, no. No.”
“I’m still here,” Liza says.
But he will not look up, he will not look up, he will not look up . . .
“Christopher . . .”
Lash opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment, in the black night, he thought himself back in his own bed. He sat up, breathing slowly, letting the rhythmic rise and fall of the nearby surf wash away the tattered pieces of his dream.
But then the exotic midnight scent of hyacinth blossoms, mingled with eucalyptus, drifted through the open window, and he remembered where he was.
He slowly rose from the bed, drew aside the gauzy curtain. Beyond, the jungle canopy ran down to the tropic sea, a dark-emerald blanket surrounded by liquid topaz. Thin clouds drifted across a swollen moon. Sometimes, he reminded himself, dreams are just dreams, after all.
He returned to bed, gathered up the sheets. For a few minutes he lay awake, gazing at the bamboo ceiling and listening to the surf, his thoughts now in the past and half a world away. Then he turned over, shut his eyes once more, and passed into dreamless slumber.
SIXTY-FOUR
A lthough it was only four o’clock, an early winter twilight had already settled over Manhattan. Taxis jockeyed for position in the rain-washed streets; pedestrians milled about on the busy pavements, heads bent against the elements, umbrellas thrust forward, like jousting knights.
Christopher Lash stood among a throng of people at the corner of Madison and Fifty-sixth, waiting for the light to change. Rain, he thought. Christmas in New York isn’t complete without it.
He hopped from foot to foot in the chill, trying to keep the large bags he was carrying dry beneath the canopy of his umbrella. The light changed; the crowd streamed slowly forward; and now at last he allowed himself to peer upward, toward the skyline.
At first glance, the building seemed no different. The wall of obsidian rose, velvet beneath the overcast sky, enticing the eye toward the setback where the outer tower stopped and the inner continued. It was only then—as his eye crested the inner tower—that the change became clear. Before, the smooth rise of the inner tower had been interrupted by a band of decorative grillwork before continuing a few additional stories. Now those top floors, the ribbonlike line of grillwork, were missing, leaving empty sky in their place. The scorched remains—the ruined tangle of metal Lash had seen in newspaper photographs—had been whisked away with remarkable speed. Now it was gone, all gone as if it had never been there in the first place. And as he looked down again and let himself be borne ahead with the crowd, Lash ached for what had gone with it.
When the doors opened on the thirty-second floor, Mauchly was waiting. He shook Lash’s hand, wordlessly led the way to his office. Moving at his characteristic studied pace, he motioned Lash to take the same seat he’d occupied at their initial meeting. In fact, just about everything reminded Lash of that first day in early autumn. Mauchly was wearing a similar brown suit, generic yet extremely well tailored, and his dark eyes held Lash’s with the same Buddha-like inscrutability. Sitting here, it was almost as if—despite the changes he’d just witnessed, despite the whole appalling tragedy—nothing about this office, or its inhabitant, had or ever could change.
“Dr. Lash,” Mauchly said. “Nice to see you.”
Lash nodded.
“I trust you found the Seychelles pleasant this time of year?”
“Pleasant is an understatement.”
“The accommodations were to your liking?”
“Eden clearly spared no expense.”
“And the service?”
“A new grass skirt in my closet every morning.”
“I hope that was some compensation for having to be away so long. Even with our, ah, connections, it took a little longer than we expected to get your past history back to normal.”
“Must have been difficult, without Liza’s help.”
Mauchly gave him a wintry smile. “Dr. Lash, you have no idea.”
“And Edmund Wyre?”
“Back behind bars, once the discrepancies in his records were illuminated.” Mauchly passed a few sheets across the desk.
“What’s this?”
“Our certification of your credit history; reinstatement papers for your suspended loans; and official notification of errors made and corrected to your medical, employment, and educational records.”
Lash flipped through the documents. “What’s this last one?”
“An order of executive clemency, to be served retroactively.”
“A get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, whistling.
“Something like that. Be sure not to lose it—I don’t believe we missed anything, but there’s always a chance. Now, if you’ll just sign this.” And Mauchly pushed another sheet across the desk.
“Not another nondisclosure form.”
Another wintry smile. “No. This is a legal instrument in which you witness that your work for Eden is now complete.”
Lash grimaced. Time and again—as he’d sat on the porch of his little cottage on Desroches Island, reading haiku and staring out over the avocado plantations—he’d replayed the final scene in his head, wondering if there was something he could have done differently, something he should have seen coming—something, anything, that could have prevented what happened to Richard Silver and his doomed creation.
Sitting in this room, his work felt anything but complete.
He dug in his pocket, removed a pen.
“It also indemnifies us against any action you might take against Eden or its assignees in the future.”
Lash paused. “What?”
“Dr. Lash. Your credit, medical, employment, and academic histories were severely compromised. You were given a fraudulent criminal record. You were falsely apprehended, fired upon. You were forced to put your professional practice on hold and leave the country while the damage was repaired.”
“I told you. The Seychelles are lovely this time of year.”
“And I fear there have been other, more personal, repercussions we felt beyond our scope to address.”
“You mean Diana Mirren.”
“After what we’d done to ensure her safety, after what she’d been told, I didn’t see any way we could approach her again. Not without compromising Eden.”
“I see.”
Mauchly stirred in his chair. “We deeply regret these injuries, that perhaps most of all. Hence, this.” And he handed Lash an envelope.
Lash turned it over. “What’s inside?”
“A check for $100,000.”
“Another hundred thousand?”
Mauchly spread his hands.
Lash dropped the check on the table. “Keep the money. I’ll sign your form, don’t worry.” He scribbled his name across the signature line, placed it on top of the envelope. “In return, maybe you can answer three questions for me.”
Mauchly raised his eyebrows.
“All that sitting on the beach, you know. I had a lot of time to think.”
“I’ll answer what I can.”
“What happened to the third couple? The Connellys?”
“Our medical people managed a covert interdiction at Niagara Falls the day after . . . the following day. Lynn Connelly was already presenting signs of toxic drug interactions. We isolated her with a story about precautionary quarantine; stabilized her; released her. We’ve been monitoring her condition since. She seems fine.”
“And the other supercouples?”
“Liza had taken only preliminary steps toward the fourth, which we were able to roll back successfully. All data from our passive and active surveillance has been positive.”
Lash nodded.
“And your third question?”
“What comes next? For Eden Incorporated, I mean.”
“You mean, without Liza.”
“Without Liza. And Richard Silver.”
Mauchly looked at Lash. For the briefest of moments the mask of inscrutability dropped, and Lash read desolation in his expression. Then the mask returned.
“I wouldn’t write us off just yet, Dr. Lash,” Mauchly replied. “Richard Silver may be dead. And Liza may be gone. But we still have what they made possible: a way of bringing people together. Perfectly. It’s going to take us longer to do that now. Probably a lot longer. And I’d be lying if I said it’s going to be easy. But I’m betting most people will wait a little for complete happiness.”
And he stood up and offered his hand.
When Lash emerged from the building, the rain had stopped. He stood in the plaza for a moment, rolling his umbrella and glancing around. Then he struck off down Madison Avenue. At Fifty-fourth, he turned left.
The Rio was full of holiday diners, its gilt walls festooned with red bunting and garlands of green plastic fir. It took Lash a moment to locate the table. Then he made his way down the aisle and slid into the narrow banquette. Across the table, Tara put down her coffee cup and smiled hesitantly in greeting.
It was the first time he’d seen her since they’d shared an ambulance to St. Clare’s Hospital. The sight of her face—with its high cheekbones and earnest hazel eyes—brought back an almost overpowering flood of images and memories. She looked down quickly, and Lash knew immediately it must be the same for her.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, pulling the packages onto the seat beside him.
“Did Mauchly prolong the debriefing? It would be just like him.”
“Nope. My fault.” And Lash indicated the bags of gifts.
“Gotcha.” Tara stirred her tea while Lash asked a passing waitress to bring him a cup of coffee.
“You keeping busy?” Lash asked.
“Terribly.”
“What’s it been like for you? I mean, with . . .” Lash faltered. “With everything.”
“Almost unreal. I mean, nobody ever really knew Silver, hardly anybody ever met him in person.” She made a wry face. “People were shocked at the ‘acciden
t,’ they’re terribly upset about his death. But everybody’s so busy scrambling to retool the computer infrastructure, run damage control for our existing clients, bring the remaining systems back on line with new hardware, relaunch our service, I sometimes feel I’m the only one who’s really grieving. I know it isn’t true. But that’s how it feels.”
“I think about him, too,” Lash said. “When we first met, I felt a kind of kinship I still can’t explain.”
“You both wanted to help people. Look at your job. Look at the company he founded.”
Lash thought about this for a moment. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone. And I know it sounds strange, but sometimes it’s even harder to believe Liza’s gone. I mean, I know the physical plant’s been destroyed. But here’s a program that was conscious—at a machine level, anyway—for years. It’s hard to believe something so powerful, so prescient, could just be erased. Sometimes I wonder if a computer could have a soul.”
“Somebody thinks so. Or else there’s a really sick fuck out there.”
Lash looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Tara hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, there’s no reason not to tell you. We’ve been getting reports of somebody on the ’Net, haunting chat rooms and bulletin boards. He’s using the handle of ‘Liza’ and asking everybody where Richard Silver is.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was. We’re not sure if it’s somebody on the inside, or a competitor, or just a prankster. Whatever the case, it’s a major security issue and Mauchly’s taking it very seriously.”
The waitress returned, and Lash took the cup. “We were a lot alike, he and I.”
“I never thought that. You’re strong. He wasn’t. He was a gentle soul. All he—” But here she stopped.
As she composed herself, a silence stretched between them: the reflective silence of shared memories.
Death Match Page 36
