by Allen Steele
“They found her through me,” I said. “I hate to say it, but I led ’em to her.”
Morgan paused again, this time shining the flashlight on me; I glanced away before he could blind me again. “Barris’s men busted me in my apartment last night,” I said before he could ask. “They took me down to the stadium and gave me the story about Payson-Smith being the killer—”
“And you believed them?”
I shook my head. “Not for a second, but that wasn’t the point. The whole thing was a pretense for Barris to give me a smartcard that could track my movements. I guess they figured I would eventually make contact with one of you guys, and they were right. When I met up with Beryl at the cafe, they must have figured things out and sent in their hit man.”
“You didn’t know you were carrying a smartcard?”
“Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head. “Beryl figured it out and destroyed the thing, but by then it was too late.”
Morgan slowly let out his breath. “Goddamn.” he whispered. “I told her it was a bad idea to contact the local press. I knew you couldn’t be trusted to—”
“Look, bud,” I snapped, “don’t gimme this never-trust-the-press shit. My best friend’s dead because of your team, and if I hadn’t taken out their hitter we’d still be up shit creek.”
“For your information, Mr. Rosen,” he replied coldly, “we’re up shit creek anyway. We’ve got the whole goddamn city looking for us—”
“And we’re both screwed,” I shot back, “unless you’ve got some scheme for getting us out of this jam. Okay? So stop blaming me for your troubles.”
Morgan didn’t respond. He turned back around and began climbing the stairs again. I could now see a dim light from somewhere above us, but it was difficult to gauge how far up the tower we were. The pipe thrummed in the darkness, its cold metal shaft slippery with condensation.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a few minutes, not breaking stride this time. “I’m not blaming you for anything. Beryl knew the risks when she decided to seek out a reporter. She was gambling and she lost the bet, but it probably would have happened even if she hadn’t run into you.”
He let out his breath. “But she’s dead,” he went on, “and there’s nothing we can do about it except resort to a backup plan.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. C’mon …”
The light above us was much larger and sharper by now; it took the form of an open horizontal hatch in the floor. Morgan climbed the final few steps and disappeared through the doorway; I followed him, pulling myself upward by the guardrail until I found myself in the tower’s observation deck.
The cupola was circular, its walls and floor built of old brick mortared into place before my grandfather’s time. Although fluorescent fixtures were suspended from the low ceiling, they were switched off; dim light came from a couple of battery-powered camp lanterns hung from ancient oak rafters. Three sleeping bags were laid out on one side of the room next to a propane hiker’s stove and a sack of canned food; a few newspapers and the last issue of the Big Muddy Inquirer rested next to an untidy stack of computer printouts and a couple of rolls of toilet paper.
It looked like nothing less than the inside of a kid’s treehouse during a weekend campout; all that was missing was a sign reading “Sekret Hedquarters—No Girls Aloud.” Unfortunately, the only girl who had been let up here was gone now …
No treehouse ever had a view like this. Through the twelve square, recessed windows that ringed the room’s circular walls could be seen the entire cityscape of St. Louis, from the weblike streetlights of the western suburbs, to the long dark patch of Forest Park in the center of the northern plain, to the lighted skyscrapers of the downtown area, with the Gateway Arch rising in the distance as a giant silver staple against the eastern horizon. Even if the camper lamps had been switched off, the observation deck would have been bright with the city’s nocturnal shine.
Yet there were other lights inside the observation deck as well. Two portable computers arranged next to each other on the floor beneath the eastern windows emitted a frail blue glow that silhouetted a figure seated before them.
The man turned around to look at us as we entered the cupola, then he grunted as he pushed himself off the floor and walked into the lamplight.
“Mr. Rosen—” he began.
“Dr. Frankenstein, I presume.”
The man whom I had first seen a couple of days earlier at the reception didn’t seem to be insulted. “My friends usually call me Dick,” Richard Payson-Smith said sotto voce as he proffered his hand. “I trust you’ve met my loyal assistant Igor.”
“We’ve talked.” I reached out and grasped his hand. Oxford accent and all, Richard Payson-Smith wasn’t quite what I had expected. I had anticipated meeting a priggish, humorless academician, the stereotypical British scientist. Payson-Smith, firm of handshake and gawky of build, resembled a weird cross between King Charles and Doctor Who.
“Sorry to have put you out so much,” he went on, releasing my hand and stepping back a little, “but it’s important that you see what’s going on right now.”
“And that is …?”
He idly scratched at his bearded chin as he turned toward the two computers on the floor. “Well,” he said in a thoughtful drawl, staring at their screens, “if we can get our friend Ruby to cooperate, we’re trying to plumb the eidetic memory of the world’s first fully functional artificial life-form, ruin my former employer, bring down a powerful conspiracy within the United States government, and save our arses.”
“That’s all?”
“Hmm. Yes, quite.”
Morgan and I chuckled as Dick shrugged beneath his dirty fisherman’s sweater and glanced back at me. “Not necessarily in that order, of course,” he added, “but who’s counting? Want some coffee?”
“Thanks, but I brought my own.” I pulled the still-unopened can of beer Chevy Dick had given me out of my jacket pocket. Morgan watched with frank envy as I popped the top and took a swig.
“Suit yourself.” Payson-Smith walked across the room, knelt beside the propane stove, and picked up an aluminum pot from the grill. “I’ll settle for this bitter swill … as if I haven’t had enough already.”
I watched as Tiptree’s former chief cyberneticist poured overheated coffee into two paper cups. Dr. Frankenstein or not, the man looked skinny and vulnerable in the dim lamplight. He was clearly uncomfortable, locked away in a cold, dark castle that vaguely resembled the Bloody Tower. “So,” I said after a moment, “what’s with the setup here?”
“Hmm? The computers?”
“Uh-huh.” I walked over to the two laptops on the floor. The one on the left was a new Apple, the other an old, heavy-duty Compaq; they were hardwired together through their serial ports. An external hard drive and a small HP Deskjet printer were tucked between them. “I take it you’re interfaced with Ruby.”
“We are.” Payson-Smith stood up, handed one coffee to Morgan, then walked over to join me. “We’re linked with Ruby Fulcrum through cellular modem … and, by the way, we’ve got them running off the tower’s electrical current, in case you’re wondering … and we’ve been running two programs since we moved in here.”
He lowered himself to the floor in front of the two laptops; I squatted on my haunches next to him. “This one,” he said, pointing to the Apple on the left, “is running a search-and-retrieve program through all the government databases it can access … ERA, other federal and state agencies, municipal government files, subcontractors to Tiptree, whatever it’s been able to burrow into.”
I looked closer; page after page of computer files flashed rapidly across the screen, pausing only long enough for a black cursor to skim through the lines. Every so often, the cursor would pause and enclose a particular word or phrase within a blue box before moving on again. “We’re using a hypertext feature,” Richard went on. “Ruby has been taught to look for certain key words and names. When she finds occurr
ences of these words or names, she copies the file containing them in a subdirectory elsewhere in her network and adds a coded prefix next to it. Later on, Jeff and I sort through those documents and find the ones pertinent to our interests.”
“Which are …?”
Richard took another sip from his coffee and scowled. “Damned stuff tastes like ink,” he muttered and put the cup aside before looking at me again. “We’re collecting evidence of the conspiracy, including tracking down as many participants as we can find. When we’ve compiled enough documentation, we’ll edit the whole thing and have Ruby e-mail it to as many news agencies and public interest groups as we can.”
“Such as newspapers, TV networks?”
He nodded quickly. “All that, yes. We’re also sending copies to the ACLU, Public Citizen, the Rainbow Coalition, the three major political parties, various other nongovernment watchdog organizations, and so forth.”
“And the Big Muddy, I hope.”
Payson-Smith smiled. “And your own paper, of course. In fact …”
He pointed to the stack of printout I had noticed earlier. “In fact, you’re going to get the scoop on this before anyone else. That’s the first batch from our search. Everything we’ve found about ERA’s involvement in St. Louis, including the development of Ruby Fulcrum itself and the Sentinel program … it’s all in there, or at least as much as we’ve printed so far.”
He frowned as he glanced at the printer. “Just as well, I suppose. The blamed ink cartridges are beginning to run out on us …”
Who cared? I would have settled for dry impressions on paper. I started to stand up, but Payson-Smith grabbed my arm, stopping me from diving into the stack. “Look at it later,” he said. “That’s only the tip of the iceberg.”
I wrenched my eyes away from the printouts, gazing again at the Apple laptop. More documents flashed across its screen; I caught a glimpse of the ERA logo at the top of one page. “ERA doesn’t know what you’re doing?”
Payson-Smith shook his head regretfully. “Unfortunately,” he said, “since they’re aware of Ruby’s very existence, they must know what we’re up to. She’s already informed us of a number of virus hunter/killers that have been introduced in the net during the last twenty-four hours. Ruby has no trouble tracking them down and deciphering their source codes, but we’re still afraid that the opposition may get wise and develop a program she can’t defeat.”
“ERA shut down a few nodes within the last few hours,” Jeff Morgan said.
He stood at a window behind us, peering down at Grand through the eyepiece of a Russian-made night-vision scope; no wonder he had been able to see me coming through the park. Morgan was probably the serious camper who had outfitted this hideout, considering all the outdoors supplies they had up here.
“They’ve also gone dark on several frequencies,” Morgan went on, watching the street intently. “They figured out that Ruby can scan cellular channels, so they’ve been using some other means of communication we can’t intercept.” He shrugged. “Semaphore, sign language, I dunno what, but they’ve got to be getting desperate by now.”
“Sure sounds like it.” I thought for a moment before the obvious question occurred to me. “If you’re using cellular modem, can’t they trace the signal?”
Payson-Smith sighed and scratched the back of his neck. “Unfortunately,” he said, “they can indeed. Ruby’s jumping channels every few minutes and blocking their remote tracking systems, but all they really need to do is conduct a block-by-block search through RF scanners. Any car passing on the street could be someone trying to lock on to us—”
“Or chopper.”
“Or by helicopter, yes, but that’s not our only concern.” He pointed to the Compaq laptop on the right. Its screen depicted a Mercator projection of the North American hemisphere; thin red lines curved across the map, weaving parabolic traces across the United States.
“That’s the orbital footprint of Sentinel 1,” Richard said. “As you can see, it regularly passes above almost every point in this country. Right now it’s …”
He studied the celestial coordinates in a bar at the bottom of the screen. “Somewhere over the Pacific, not far from the southern California coastline,” he continued. “It’s off screen right now, but in about a minute or so it’ll be over the United States again, and in another fifteen minutes it’ll be over Missouri … and here is why that matters.”
He pointed behind the two computers. For the first time, I noticed a flat gray coaxial cable running from the back of the computer to a window; the window was cracked open slightly, allowing the cable to pass over the narrow sill.
“We’ve got a portable satellite transceiver dish rigged on the ledge,” Richard said. “It’s oriented to precisely the right azimuth that Sentinel will follow when it passes over St. Louis. When this occurs, Ruby will uplink with Sentinel and order it to disengage itself from the Air Force space center in Colorado.”
I stared at the wire. Beside the fact of its technological complexity, there was also the human factor; it must have taken some nerve to hang out a window over a sheer drop to put the portable dish in place. “You can do this?” I asked.
“Certainly.” Payson-Smith was almost smug now. “After all, Ruby’s primary function was to act as the c-cube system for Sentinel. Her node is already in place aboard the satellite … it’ll be no more problem for her to communicate with Sentinel than for one of us to call up a long-lost brother. But the main trick will be establishing a direct uplink with the bird.”
On the Compaq’s screen a tiny red dot had suddenly appeared over the California coast. As I watched, it began to edge closer toward San Diego. “Why can’t you tell Ruby to access Sentinel now?” I asked. “If it—she—can run through the system and crack any source code it wants to, then why can’t it override Colorado?”
Payson-Smith folded his arms together. “Ruby isn’t a simple worm or virus,” he said. “Her architecture is much more complex than that. It takes her a while to infiltrate the nets, since she has to hide herself at the same time she’s installing a memory-resident. To make it short, she hasn’t been able to crack the Colorado computers quite yet.” He shrugged his shoulders. “In another few days, yes, but …”
“So why can’t you just wait?”
“Look here.” He pointed at a line in Sentinel’s footprint that passed over the Pacific northwest. “In about eighteen hours, the satellite will pass directly over the border between Oregon and California … the southern border of Cascadia. When that occurs, it’ll be able to open fire upon Cascadian defense forces. Now, what do you think that means?”
I stared at the screen. I considered all that I learned. I reached a basic conclusion …
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
Now it all clicked together. Sentinel 1 could wipe out the renegade National Guard forces that had been established in southern Oregon, thereby leaving Cascadia open to attack from the U.S. Army units mobilized to northern California.
Yet, even worse than that, it would give the conspirators their window of opportunity. If everything Ruby Fulcrum had discovered was correct, then an outbreak of civil war in the Northwest would allow the fanatics to call for a declaration of martial law throughout the rest of the country, to “protect” against civil insurrections by Cascadian sympathizers.
Martial law enforced by ERA troops and a high-energy laser that passed over the continent once every few hours. In short, it would be the beginning of the end for free society in the United States.
“And if you can’t …?” I began.
Then I heard something and I stopped talking.
Out in the predawn darkness beyond the observation deck windows, from somewhere not far away, there was a faint yet nonetheless familiar mechanical whine … then a dense, atmospheric chopping noise, like cutlasses carving through thick air.
Richard heard it, too. He raised his head, listening intently to the sound as it came closer.
“Not now
,” he said softly, almost as if in supplication. “Oh, dear Christ, not now …”
Helicopter rotors, closing in on the water tower.
21
(Saturday, 4:02 A.M.)
“UH-OH,” MORGAN SAID from the window behind us. “We’ve got—”
The rest was drowned out in the dense roar of helicopter rotors. Standing up to look out through the eastern windows, I caught a glimpse of a dark airborne shape as it hurtled toward the cupola. I instinctively ducked as the helicopter growled over the roof; the entire tower seemed to shudder. When it was gone, I uncovered my ears and raced to the opposite side of the observation deck.
Morgan was crouched next to a western window, peering at the street through his nightscope. As I knelt on the other side of the window, he passed the scope to me and pointed downward. I cautiously raised my head to the windowsill and pressed my right eye against the scope.
Through the green-tinted artificial twilight, I could see two Piranhas coming off the I-44 ramp and rolling down Grand Avenue. Just in front of them was a trio of faster-moving Hummers, their headlights casting foggy-looking halos until they were simultaneously extinguished just before they passed in front of the reservoir. The last Piranha in the column swerved to the left and halted in the center of the street, blocking Grand Avenue; the other armored car trundled to a stop directly in front of the park, while the three Hummers jumped the curb, barreled across the sidewalk, and disappeared under the trees left and right of the tower.
“Oh Jesus, oh Christ,” Morgan was muttering. “We’re really screwed now …”
I got up from the window and ran over to the south side of the deck. Peering through the nightscope, I could see the helicopter that had just passed over the tower: an OH-6A Cayuse, a tiny gunship painted with the ERA logo, an IR scanner fixed to the front of its bubble canopy. It had established a low orbit directly above the reservoir, apparently performing recon for the mission.
