The story was a phenomenal success from his very first attempt. Everyone was thrilled that the agency was paying attention to the problem, which they had suspected anyway. Furthermore, he learned a great deal from some of the more technically minded workers about how implant communications really worked. Signal distortion was a common and regularly occurring problem with everyone, whether they worked in an area with lots of electronics or not, but whether the machinery was really causing more glitches than would be expected in another environment or whether the workers simply paid more attention to the glitches at the office, Jeremy never found out. All that mattered to him was that everyone was happy to see him and report their latest problems and pet theories.
The other advantage of his imaginary assignment was that he had free rein of the entire facility. He also took the opportunity to make friends with the support staff.
While he was in the administrative wing, questioning some of Lenzke's administrative assistants, the AIC himself came into the room and listened as Jeremy questioned a Mr. Edwards.
"Is there something you need, sir?" Edwards asked Lenzke as he came in the room.
"No," Lenzke said. "I'm just waiting for a reply from Peter, and I thought I'd watch Mr. Mitchell at work. Have you found anything out yet, Jeremy?" he asked.
He's quick, Jeremy thought. He hadn't told Lenzke what he was doing.
"It's too early to say, but it seems that the biggest problems are concentrated near the central computer area," Jeremy said. It was a bald lie, but he had to make up something for the sake of the people listening in. Lenzke came closer and spoke to Edwards. Jeremy picked up that distinctive smell again. It was very faint, but he was sure he had smelled it before; he just couldn't figure out what it was.
"What do you think of Mr. Mitchell's study, Edwards?" he asked.
"It's about time somebody did it," he said. "I think we've all been wondering about this for a long time."
Lenzke nodded and went back to his office. Jeremy looked at Edwards with a smile and sniffed, visibly and obviously. Edwards smiled back, then looked to be sure Lenzke was gone.
"So you've smelled her, eh?" he said. "We keep telling him to run his clothes through the launderer after he sees her, but he doesn't listen."
Jeremy smiled, but his heart almost stopped. He realized where he had smelled that perfume before -- on Dr. Berry.
* * *
Duncan, Hanna and MacKenzie were moving along at an incredible speed over a virtual image of the streets and buildings of Washington, D.C. Duncan would have liked to go faster, but it was making Hanna dizzy. He decided to use the time for a lecture on the mission of his organization.
"After the riots, you see, everyone was desperate for some peaceful resolution to the crisis," he said in a quick, but deliberate tone. "So when the government offered to hand over the encryption technology for the net, nobody doubted that they had. The fools! They thought that the government had learned its lesson and was going to play nice. To be fair, most of the government did. But several agencies -- or at least people in the agencies -- kept the key to the encryption routines, and they've been monitoring the hole for decades."
"Why?" Hanna asked. "What have they done with all that information?"
"A lot. More than I know, I'm sure, although we've figured out some of it. Do you remember when Miller disappeared?"
Oh no, not another Miller story, Hanna thought. Clayton Miller had run an eccentric campaign for president in 2036, claiming that the hole had been compromised, that the government was stealing from people, that innocent citizens had been arrested and all records of their existence erased -- every good conspiracy theory had to involve Clayton Miller. He had gathered a small but devoted following and threatened to renew violence against the government, but then he suddenly disappeared.
"Well, the truth of the matter is that Miller was on to something. He was a nut, don't get me wrong," Duncan clarified -- nobody with any sense allowed himself to be associated with Miller, "but he was also a computer genius, and he'd been developing a pretty strong case for some of his anti-government theories."
As Hanna wondered how all this fit into her developing perception of Duncan and his work, she watched the Potomac River slip underneath them. Far ahead she could just make out the edges of the Appalachian mountains. MacKenzie also enjoyed the view, but she decided to break into the conversation.
"How do you know all this about Miller?" she asked. She hated conspiracy theories, and she didn't want to have anything to do with Duncan if he was a Millerite.
Duncan didn't answer for a moment, and Hanna and MacKenzie wondered what else was going to come out of all this.
"I hate to tell you this, and I wish it weren't so, but our organization has some of Miller's former operatives. They're nuts, and they're hard to control, but they're useful nuts, and I need them." He paused and shook his head. "They're useful most of the time, anyway. Sometimes their methods are too severe for my tastes." He glanced quickly at Hanna, and MacKenzie noticed.
"So it was your group that had Hanna kidnapped?" she asked. Hanna looked over quickly, starting to put the pieces together. She took the news of Duncan's involvement in her capture dispassionately, which surprised her. Perhaps the affairs of the world had less of a hold on the mind while the body soared ten thousand feet above the earth.
Duncan pointed down and started to descend toward a series of office buildings. As they got closer to the ground they began to intersect hovercar traffic, which was quite unnerving for Hanna, even though she realized that she was still "transolid" -- the virtual hovercars would go right through her.
"Yes," Duncan said to MacKenzie, "in a way it was my group, and I'm sorry about that. We have to use scoundrels from time to time, and we can't always keep them on a leash. I didn't authorize the kidnapping, but the people who did it were connected with us."
MacKenzie stopped right where she was, about 300 feet off the ground, above something that looked like an old-fashioned power station, and refused to budge. She waited until Duncan and Hanna circled, and nodded with her head back towards Washington.
Hanna clumsily maneuvered herself next to MacKenzie, set a hand on her shoulder and smiled.
"King David had the same problem," she said. "Let's hear the whole story before we make a decision, okay?" Duncan nodded appreciatively, but MacKenzie glared at her with a look of incomprehension. After a minute, Hanna prevailed on her and she gestured to Duncan to lead on.
They continued to descend in silence. Duncan pointed to a narrow alley between two of the high rises and they all went in, leveling out at ground level.
* * *
After a particularly long session with an engineer in one of the labs, Jeremy had found it particularly hard not to yawn. He hadn't slept well for the last two nights and wanted to take a nap. At first his work ethic resisted the idea, but then he realized that he was going to be on 24-hour call for the foreseeable future. Besides, the building had no windows and was fully staffed around the clock, so sleeping at night was a convention he didn't feel any need to follow. Added to everything else, the couch in his office doubled as a bed.
On his walk back to his office he tried to make sense of the perfume. What did Lenzke have to do with Dr. Berry? Was it just a coincidence -- did Lenzke's girlfriend use the same perfume? No, that was too much to believe. "Don't trust coincidences," he had learned in his training. The perfume was probably Dr. Berry's.
On a wild hunch he checked the agency roster to make sure she didn't work for Peter. It seemed ridiculous -- Peter had identified her as a target of some of his investigations -- but he had to be sure. She wasn't there.
Feints within feints, he remembered from one of his favorite books. The real question was who was using whom. Was Dr. Berry infiltrating the agency through Lenzke, or was Lenzke keeping an eye on Dr. Berry? Then he remembered that it was Lenzke who had sent him to Berry in the first place. Why would he do that?
He tried to work it through,
but his eyes were getting heavy. Maybe I'll work it out in my dreams, he thought, and was sound asleep moments after his head hit the pillow.
* * *
"Here's where the program gets a little tricky," Duncan explained to Hanna and MacKenzie as they stood in front of an alley door. "This is a real office building and there are people walking around in it. Our computers are monitoring what they see, which means that what we're seeing in this simulation is what's actually happening, in real time, in Virginia. If we go around opening doors or moving things, it uses up processor resources, because we're forcing the virtual representation of the building out of sync with reality -- that is, with the data the system is getting from all those people's implants." He pointed inside. "It slows down the system, and we don't want to do that. So, the easiest way to reconnoiter this building is to reconfigure the program to make some structures solid and others transolid. So you can walk through walls and doors -- and the people -- but the floors will hold you up. It'll take some getting used to, but you'll catch on."
He looked at Hanna and MacKenzie to make sure they understood. "This is important. The government has its own intruders." Hanna hadn't heard that term before, but she assumed that was what Duncan's group called the net spies. "If we see any, we abort, immediately. All you have to do is hit the power button twice -- it's on the side of your goggles, Hanna -- and you'll be back floating in the tank at the warehouse."
That's where I really am anyway, Hanna told herself, but she understood that there had to be some ambiguity in language when switching back and forth between reality and virtual reality.
"How can we tell another ... intruder, from a regular person?" Hanna asked. "You both look real to me."
"And how could we see them anyway?" MacKenzie asked. "They'd have to be in a different set of tanks connected to a different virtual reality program. Where would your computers get the data to make them visible to us?"
Duncan shook his head. "We're not exactly sure how, MacKenzie, but for some reason we can see each other sometimes. It's just one aspect of this business that we haven't figured out yet. But to answer Hanna's question, intruders aren't as clear and well-defined as everybody else. You'll know what I mean if you see one."
From MacKenzie. At least his confidence includes us.
To MacKenzie. I wish I was so sure.
Duncan motioned them forward and they walked through the security door into the well-lit hallway of the office building.
* * *
Jeremy just couldn't bring himself to sleep during regular work hours. He awoke again after only a half-hour nap, surprisingly refreshed, ran his clothes through the launderer, ordered a cup of coffee from the concierge and started another jaunt around the facility.
He hadn't figured out what was going on with Lenzke and Dr. Berry, but he decided he'd better talk to Peter about it. Procedures required all agents to report any incident that might involve a breach of security.
* * *
After entering through the back door, Hanna felt as if she was burgling the place. The first time she saw someone, she felt an urge to dart behind a door and hide. It took a minute to get used to the idea that no one could see her except MacKenzie and Duncan.
Hanna and MacKenzie walked around obstacles and tried to avoid touching anyone, but Duncan went where he wanted to go, heedless of people or things. Sometimes he walked right through a plant, a desk, a wall, or even a person, and one time he actually stood with his feet on the feet of a security guard and read his implant desktop.
"This way," he said after he had found what he wanted, and started walking. He headed off, through walls, furniture and people, paying no attention to the layout of the office, but when he saw that Hanna and MacKenzie weren't used to being so reckless, he decided to take a more conventional route.
"I brought you here for two reasons," Duncan said. Hanna tried to imagine what his real mouth, back in the VR tank, was really doing, while this virtual image of his mouth spoke. The head gear for the VR suit fit the face as well as the body. Where did the air go? Did he blow bubbles in the solution in the tank? And then she remembered that she was in a suit, in a tank, just a few yards away from him, several miles from where she thought she was. She tried blowing out to see how it felt. Duncan saw her, and his disapproving look brought snapped her back to attention.
"First, I wanted to show you how the intruder technology works," he said. "Second, and more importantly, I want to show you that the government has been using this technology to spy on everyone. We're heading to the central computer station. I'm confident you'll see enough to persuade you to join up with me."
Hanna and MacKenzie looked at each other in stunned surprise and apprehension. They knew that Duncan wasn't showing them all of these things out of the goodness of his heart, or merely to satisfy their curiosity. He wanted something out of them, and now, for the first time, that something was explicit. He was going to try to recruit them into his organization.
In a few minutes they were standing in the middle of a large, wedge-shaped room with more than 50 manned workstations. Most of them had flat, 2-dimensional screens, but a few had the more expensive, holoprojector bubble screens. At the apex of the room sat an elevated chair manned by a supervisor who watched all the workers. Hanna stood near the apex, behind one man's chair, and looked over his shoulder at the display on his workstation. The image on the display was eerily reminiscent of what she had just been doing. It seemed to be a 2D view from a camera that was moving through a building, passing through walls, stopping from time to time to look at someone's implant desktop, but it was clear to Hanna that what she was seeing was an image generated from something or someone -- another intruder, probably -- on an intelligence gathering mission in another office complex. The image wasn't very good, and she instantly saw the advantage of doing such work in the VR tanks. Even the holoscreens didn't allow you to get inside the image, like she could.
The man at the station seemed to be monitoring the work of one of the government's intruders in the field.
She still worried that the people in the room could see or hear her. Her mind told her that she was miles away, but the reality of the simulation was compelling -- except for sound. The VR programs tried to mimic the sounds of the office, but they were inexact. She could ask the computer to simulate voices, based on the movement of a person's mouth, but that was iffy. The programs only received up-to-date data if someone with an implant was watching the speaker, thereby feeding real-time information on the movement of his lips back over the hole and into the VR routines.
She knew they couldn't hear her, but it was with some initial trepidation that she called aloud to Duncan, across the crowded room. "So, is someone back at your warehouse monitoring what we see?"
"No," Duncan said, turning to look at her. "We don't have this technology yet. They have a head start on us." He turned back and scanned four or five workstations, looking for something interesting.
Hanna continued to watch the monitor, wondering why a net spy -- or intruder, or ghost, or whatever the right word was -- was sent on this particular assignment. Then she recognized a face in a crowd on the monitor's screen. Hanna couldn't remember where she had seen that face before, but she knew he was an important man. Maybe he was the president of some company, or a legislator.
But then she turned and caught a glimpse of a familiar face, not on a workstation, and her adrenaline pumped.
"Abort," she yelled. "Duncan, abort now."
Chapter 15
Jeremy had finished surveying the first floor staff except for the technicians stationed in the central computer area. He feared this group, suspecting some of them might see through his concocted cover story about interference from the electronic equipment.
The computer area constituted the heart of the Agency's operations. Fifty workstations hummed round the clock as hotshot programmers put them through the paces. He didn't know exactly what they all were doing, but he'd gleaned from stray comments her
e and there that this was Peter's pride and joy.
The room itself reminded Jeremy of old movies of NASA's mission control center in Houston, except that the workstations were arranged in arcs rather than in rows, and some of them had 3-D displays. The supervisor sat in a raised swivel chair, overlooking every station. His chair was equipped with a magnifying screen that allowed him to read the fine print on a monitor 20 yards away.
The etiquette of the room prohibited Jeremy from simply talking to one of the workers, as he did everywhere else. He had to get permission from the supervisor first. Jeremy stood next to his chair, waiting to attract the man's attention and talk with him. He didn't seem to be busy, but he didn't show any sign of attending to Jeremy, either. Jeremy wondered if this was an act -- a kind of passive assertion of dominance -- but he didn't get much of a chance to think about it.
While he was waiting on the supervisor, he had nothing to do but survey the room. Just beyond the first arc of workstations he saw a man who seemed to be standing in the middle of the second arc. Jeremy assumed there was a gap in the workstations, hidden from his view, but then he noticed something odd. He closed his left eye to be sure.
When Jeremy opened his eye again the man turned enough for Jeremy to see his face. It was the same man Hanna and MacKenzie had met at the Chocolate Bar that night; the man he had spied on for MacKenzie.
Almost as soon as Jeremy recognized him he looked up -- not at Jeremy, but in another direction. He appeared to be startled. Jeremy turned to see what he was looking at and thought he caught a glimpse of another net spy, a woman, but she vanished before he could be sure. His peripheral vision told him that the man was gone as well.
"Shut down these terminals and clear this room immediately," he said to the supervisor in a commanding voice. The supervisor looked at him in angry surprise. Jeremy didn't have time to get into a contest of wills.
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