Bug Park

by James P. Hogan

  He nodded. "We've always got an emergency crew on call."

  "Get them over to Phil's office and comb the area for a dark gray Dodge van, registration 437 ECH, with antennas on the roof. It should be within a few blocks. Whoever's doing this will be right there."

  Finnion gave a curt nod. "Okay. Kyle, rustle 'em out. Let's move it."

  Garsten was still looking incredulously at the screen. "How in hell did they get in? Look at that. . . . Goddamn beer can walking down my hall!"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Corfe made his way to the rear of the house and found the place where the capped-off pipe that looked like a piece of old dryer vent entered from the outside. The inside end was covered by a painted aluminum plate held by four screws, which the mec removed without difficulty. Peering in, he saw that the way to the outside cap, about eighteen inches away, was unobstructed. There was no more to be done here for the moment. The mec would be best left where it was for the time being, to help carry the additional equipment away when it was brought through. "Okay, I'm done for now, and exiting," he announced.

  "Did you find a way in?" Kevin's voice asked.

  "I think so. It's time to tackle it from the outside. How's it going with you guys?"

  "Oh, we're getting there. Talk to you soon."

  Corfe called down the Control menu, exited, and was promptly back in the van beside Michelle. He removed the headset and collar, yawned, and rubbed his eyes with his fingers.

  "Taking a break?" Michelle said.

  "There's just a cap to take off from the outside, which shouldn't be a problem." He looked up at the screen monitoring Kevin's video output, which was showing columns of names and numbers. "What do we have there?"

  "We're going through the file indexes. The system's starting to make sense."

  "Will you be okay on your own here for a while?"

  "Sure."

  "I might as well take the extra stuff over now. It shouldn't take more than thirty minutes at the most. You're sure you'll be okay?"

  "Doug, stop fussing."

  "You're right. It's nerves, I guess." Corfe indicated the canvas tool bag containing the additional mecs and other items to be sent in from outside, which he had placed inside the rear door. "Can you hand me that?" Michelle tried to reach, but couldn't turn her seat far enough. "It's okay," Corfe said. "I'll come around outside." He slid out of the coupler seat and opened the partitioning curtain to the front. Just as he was about to leave, Michelle said:

  "Will I need to do anything with this?" She gestured to indicate the panels and controls.

  Corfe thought for a moment. Then he took one of the van's complement of smaller mecs from a storage rack and put it down on the console in front of her. "Here," he said. "If you need to change anything, get Kevin to couple through into this. He can be the guide."

  "Great. Thanks," Michelle said.

  "Back soon."

  "Good luck. Be careful."

  Corfe squeezed between the front seats and climbed out via the driver's door. The street alongside the parking lot was quiet, the air cool and fresh after the mugginess inside. He drew in a long breath, stretched, and exhaled gratefully. Then he went around to the back of the van, retrieved the canvas bag from inside, closed the rear door, and walked away along the street.

  The vent was at the back of the house, which meant going inside the fence and around. If that looked suspicious, it was a risk that just had to be taken. After a bit of searching, Corfe located the outlet and found that it was partly shielded by the shrubbery, which made him not quite so conspicuous, at least. He squatted down, and working quickly, removed the cap and transferred the mecs and other things from his bag into the opening of the pipe. Then he straightened up, and for the benefit of anyone curious who might be watching, made a show of inspecting the junction box where a power cable from a nearby distribution pole entered the house, and then scribbling in a notebook. Casting a final look around as if he had every right to be there, he returned the notebook to his pocket, picked up the tool bag, and departed back for the van.

  Eric sat finishing his breakfast, listening to two men in the next booth arguing politics. The bearded man in the green sweater had decided that socialism was morally degenerate. The belief structure came first, determining what was acceptable as fact. Whatever accorded with it became a self-evident truth; anything in conflict was rejected as propaganda or typical of uninformed media. Finally, the white-haired man with him said, "I can't talk to you. You won't entertain any possibility that you might be mistaken. If it's not even conceivable, then there isn't anything to discuss."

  After a few seconds of silence the other conceded grudgingly, "Well, theoretically I could be, I guess. . . ." Then rallied quickly. "But that still doesn't alter the fact that . . ."

  But the one who'd asked the question had created a chink. Now he could start probing it with wedges.

  He faced the same problem, Eric thought to himself. It was a lonely business, waiting for one of Kuhn's paradigms to shift. The collective of the physics orthodoxy were literally incapable of seeing a fact that went against what in their minds had taken on the quality of self-evident truth. Hence, the very notion of questioning it was unthinkable. Eric had been through the routine many times, heard all the objections. Here, however, was an approach that he hadn't tried before.

  "Is it possible that you might be wrong?" So disarmingly simple. Perhaps this time he would preface his talk with an appeal along those lines. Who could refuse to grant a modicum of open-mindedness in response to something like that?

  He finished his meal, paid the check, and left, mentally composing various opening lines as he walked back to where he had parked the Jaguar.

  They had found an index under Heber's name that contained references to various files and records. This looked more like it. Michelle studied the entries on the latest page that Kevin had routed through to her screen. "Now I need to check something back in the index," she told him. Just then, the display lost synchronism and broke up into streaky bands scrolling vertically. "Wait a minute, I've lost the picture here," she said. "What do I do now?"

  "Hang on. I'll be there in a moment."

  A few seconds later, the mec that Corfe had left on the console with Michelle moved a couple of inches and looked up at the controls beneath the screen. "Third knob from the left," Kevin's voice said in her headset. Michelle turned it. The scrolling slowed, then reversed. She turned the knob back a fraction, and the screen stabilized. There was still some residual judder. "Now try turning one next to it to the right a little," Kevin said.

  A clack sounded from the rear door as the catch was released from the outside. Michelle turned her head as the door opened, expecting to see Corfe. But the man standing there in the dark raincoat was somebody she had never seen before: lean and muscular, dark hair slicked back above a sallow, unsmiling face. Two others were with him, one of them pocketing what looked like a phone. The one at the door jerked his head curtly. "Okay, it's over. Get out."

  Michelle summoned as much semblance of outrage as she was capable of, given her surprise and the sudden shock. "What the hell? . . . Who are you? What do you think you're doing? Get out of here!"

  The man sighed and produced a gun. Michelle stared at it disbelievingly. It took her several seconds to accept that this was really happening. "No, I don't think you understand," he said. "Either you come out the sensible way, or get pulled out with a hole in your leg. It's your choice. Don't touch anything in there." The tone and look on his face said that he meant it.

  Michelle experienced a confused numbness. She got up and climbed shakily out of the van. The two men who had been standing back moved in on either side and seized her arms. A black Lincoln was blocking the back of the van. Another two men, she saw, had been positioned outside the doors at the front. Before anyone could say any more, a beige Cadillac came into the parking lot and pulled up behind the Lincoln. A short man with a mustache, wearing a camel-hair overcoat and black Tyrol
ean hat, climbed out and came forward.

  The man in the dark raincoat closed the van door and turned, slipping the gun back into his pocket. "There's just her," he informed the newcomer. "The gear inside is switched on. I've left it all as it was."

  "Who else was with you?" the man in the hat demanded. "You weren't running this on your own?" Michelle glared at him and said nothing. He turned to the one wearing the raincoat. "We need to get her off the street. Take her back to Andy for now. I need to check out the office."

  "Okay, put her in the car," the man in the raincoat told the two who were holding Michelle, then threw some keys to one of the other two by the van, who caught them. "Ollie, bring the van and follow us. Royal, you go with Phil to check out the office. We'll see you back at the firm."

  The mustached man in the camel-hair coat began walking back to the Cadillac with Royal. Phil? Michelle forced the two who were steering her toward the Lincoln to halt. "Garsten?" she fired at the mustached man. He stopped and looked back. "You're Phillip Garsten. Just what in hell do you people think you're doing? Don't you realize you're going to have a lot of explaining to do?"

  He didn't seem unduly perturbed. "Ms. Lang, I assume, is it? No, you're the one who's going to be doing some explaining." He turned and walked away.

  One of the men holding her opened the door of the Lincoln, and then went around to the far side while the other followed her in. The man in the dark raincoat got in up front. Doors slammed in quick succession. The car moved forward a few yards to make room, and then waited for the van to back out behind.

  Michelle, wedged between two sets of broad shoulders in the rear seat, wondered how the driver had come to be in possession of keys to the van. As the Lincoln pulled away again, the thought came to her suddenly that Vanessa had to be involved. Guns? Abductions in broad daylight? Just exactly what was going on? A sinking premonition gripped her that she had gotten herself into something that could have consequences a lot more serious than breaking into offices. She shivered, drew her coat closer around herself and slid her hands into the pockets.

  Inside one of them was something irregularly shaped and hard. It felt like a little metal bug. And as her fingertip traced over it, it moved. A mec! It could only be from the van—the one that Kevin had been operating. In the few moments while she was turning in the seat, before she got out, he must have seen what was happening and scrambled off the console and into her pocket. Michelle wasn't sure how much use that might be. She was still scared. But at least, she no longer felt totally on her own.

  As Corfe came around the corner onto the street leading back to the parking lot, the first thing he saw was that the van wasn't in the slot where he had left it. A moment later he spotted it moving behind a black Lincoln that was coming out through the gate. The Lincoln turned away in the opposite direction, and the van followed it. Corfe came to a halt on the sidewalk, stunned. Then he realized that a beige Cadillac that had come out behind the van was turning the other way and coming in his direction. Something told him that he had seen that car before, causing him to retreat back around the corner and stand out of sight against the wall. Moments later the car passed, and he recognized Phillip Garsten at the wheel, accompanied by another man. Then he remembered: He had seen that car yesterday, parked in one of the "Private" slots outside Garsten's office. From the direction it was going, that could well be where it was heading for now.

  He stood for what seemed a stupidly long time, unable to fathom what it meant, utterly without a clue of what to do next. What was there to do? He didn't even know which direction to head. There was no point in going on the way he had been, since Michelle and the van were gone. And there was nothing to accomplish by going back to Garsten's office except to get apprehended himself too. Now he didn't even have a way of getting back, or anywhere else—even if he knew where he wanted to go.

  It was all over, he realized sickeningly. What other conclusion was there? Michelle was very likely in danger. There was no time for any more games of pretend heroics. He had stuck a toe into waters that he didn't understand, and promptly gone in over his head. He stood on the corner of the street with his bag, looking first one way, then the other. He wasn't even sure which direction the nearest police station was in.

  Wearily, he pulled his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and first tried calling Neurodyne to let Kevin know what was happening, but there was no reply. He pressed the Reset button and called Emergency.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Phillip Garsten stood looking around his office in bewilderment. The screens were turned on, and a bug thing with a wire coming out of it was plugged into the computer. Another bug and a beer-can robot were up on the desk; there was a piece of cord hanging down over the edge from the lamp; and there was a carpenter's tape and other junk all over the floor. . . . What in the name of God was going on?

  He looked at the screen facing him, and his face darkened. It was showing entries from the Heber files. This was serious. He touched the smaller bug on the desk warily. It fell over. He nudged the larger one; it was just as inert. Of course, he told himself—they'd been controlled from the van, and the van was gone. All the same, he felt relieved.

  What to do? His eyes darted around uncertainly while his mind worked. They had expected to find Heber's technical chief, Corfe, because Vanessa said Corfe was using the van. Without a doubt, Lang hadn't been working alone. Therefore, Corfe was still out there somewhere. Would he go to the police? Garsten didn't know. But one sure thing was that if they came here and found all this going on, a lot of inconvenient questions would get asked. And with one thing leading to another, all kinds of complications were likely to develop that everyone could do without. Get rid of the evidence and deny everything, he decided. First leave everything clean; then consult with Martin and Vanessa.

  He went through to his own office—there was no sign of anything amiss there—and returned with a large leather briefcase that he used for carrying legal files. Still handling them cautiously, he put the micromecs inside, added the other things from the floor and the cord that had been tied to the lamp, plugged the keyboard back into the computer, and shut down the system. Then he stood back to survey the room one last time.

  "Son-of-a-gun," he breathed. There were two more of them. One was wedged in the bracket of a wall lamp; the other was in the plant up on the file cabinet behind Susanne's desk. How long had they been there, for God's sake? Now he was getting really worried. He scooped them down and put them in the bag just as Royal came in from checking the outside of the building.

  "There was a cover off a pipe at the back," Royal announced. "I found these in it." He opened his hand to show several more bug-size robots and a small plastic package. Garsten shook his head bemusedly and held open the bag. Royal's eyebrows raised. "Was all this stuff in here?"

  "We had a mechanical zoo loose."

  "Jeez!"

  "Did you put the cover back on out there?"

  Royal nodded. "Uh-huh. We'd better take a look at the inside as well." He led the way back to where he thought the place was, but Garsten had guessed where he meant before they got there. The inside cover plate was off, and there was another beer-can standing motionless to add to the collection.

  While Royal resecured the inside cover plate, Garsten called Vanessa at Microbotics to let her know the situation and to say he was on his way. He and Royal gave the place a final inspection but found nothing more. They turned out the lights, reset the alarms, and left.

  "You shouldn't have had them take her back to the firm, Vanessa. Now we're all implicated. It's a mess." Payne was talking over the phone from the yacht on Lake Union. He sounded agitated. Typical, Vanessa thought, controlling herself with difficulty. The minute the going started getting rough. Welcome to the real world, Martin.

  She was back on the top floor of the laboratory block with Finnion. Eric was getting close to the target stretch now, where the road wound up a valleyside of sheer cliffs and gorges. Vanessa had changed
into the VR body suit and had plugged in the helmet in readiness.

  "Where else was there to take her?" she snapped. "Obviously she was working with Corfe, since he borrowed the van yesterday. We had to get her out of sight, off the streets."

  "It means the whole thing's off," Payne began. "We're going to—"

  "No, it does not. We're all set to go here. It's literally a matter of a few minutes now, and it'll be all over. We can't let it pass by now, Martin. There's no knowing when there might be another chance like this. Everyone's keyed up. We have to see it through."

  "But she's there at the firm," Payne protested. "She knows I'm involved—Phil, all of us. Are you going to get rid of her too? This has got to stop. And in any case, Corfe's still loose over here in the city somewhere."

  Vanessa sighed. "Martin, calm down and think about it. If Eric has an accident up in the mountains, there's absolutely nothing to connect us with it. That was precisely why we decided on doing it this way. Whatever Corfe and this woman are involved in has to do with something else."

  "But what?"

  "How can I know yet? Probably they're just meddling. But it puts them more in the wrong than us. She was involved in breaking into premises that this company has a perfectly legitimate contract to protect. So at worst, Andy stands to be reprimanded for letting his security people act over-zealously, that's all." Finnion nodded silently from across the room. "And I'm sure that with his connections he's well able to take care of something like that." There was a knock on the door. Finnion moved to open it. A man in a gray overjacket stuck his head in and murmured something.

  "Well, I just hope you're right, Vanessa," Payne went on. Finnion caught Vanessa's eye. "I can't afford to risk any—"

  "Just a moment, Martin."

  "She's here—over in Security," Finnion murmured.