Lethal Velocity

by Lincoln Child

  “Right again. Another small deception. It is awkward, I’m sorry. Say, is that jasmine tea you’re drinking? It smells marvelous.”

  Mr. Doe was still smiling easily at her. Then he did a very strange thing. He came forward, perched on the edge of her desk, picked up the cup and saucer, and took a sip. Then he closed his eyes appreciatively.

  “Ah. Very excellent.” He took another sip. “But it tastes like a spring harvest—first flush, you know. For this time of the day, a second flush would have been the more appropriate choice.”

  Sarah let her right hand drift casually back toward her keyboard. A short sequence, typed onto the numeric keypad, would bring Security to the office within ninety seconds. But then the man’s jacket fell open as he bent forward to replace the teacup. Inside, the butt of a handgun gleamed from a Mylar holster. Her hand dropped from the keyboard.

  “What is it you want?” she asked.

  The man looked hurt. “Why the rush, Sarah? Things are going to start happening very quickly, very soon. So let’s take a moment to get to know each other first. Like civilized people.”

  She pushed her chair back a little, watching him carefully. “Okay. Who are you?”

  Mr. Doe seemed to consider this, as if he had never heard the question before. “You mean, what do I do?” He paused. “I guess you could call me an expediter. I dislike the word—it has such a faddish, ephemeral sound—but I don’t know exactly how else to describe what it is I do. I get things that other people want. But ‘middleman’ sounds much too down-market. Perhaps it would be easiest for you to think of me simply as a man with a gift.”

  He slid a hand into a pocket of his jacket, and Sarah gathered herself to move quickly, if necessary. The man shook his head reprovingly, as if dismayed by her mistrust. Then he laid a small two-way radio on her desk with slender, elegant fingers. He leaned across the desk, as if to impart a secret.

  “Sarah, I have good news for you,” he said. “You have it in your power to make sure nobody in your Park dies this afternoon.”

  Sarah looked at the man, saying nothing.

  “I know how much this Park means to you.” As the man spoke, he held her eyes at all times. There was a look of empathy, of profound understanding, on his face. “I know you place the very highest value on its smooth operation, on the safety of your guests. Nothing need happen to compromise that; nothing at all. As long as you follow a few simple ground rules.” The sympathetic, understanding gaze continued to hold her. “You are not to alert local or federal law enforcement. And you are not to try to evacuate the Park. Business will go on as usual. Guests will come and go, just like they do every day of the year. Everybody has fun, nobody gets hurt. And when you come right down to it, isn’t that your job, anyway? Please don’t break the ground rules, Sarah.”

  “What is it you want?” she asked again.

  Mr. Doe leaned away. “I will be requiring several things of you. It is very important that you follow my instructions completely and precisely. We’ll keep in communication by means of this.” He pressed a button on the radio, and it made a quiet buzz. “But I wanted us to have this little chat first, in person. You know: to break the ice, put a human face on things, all that.”

  He adjusted his jacket. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, but now I’ve come to the unpleasant part of the conversation.”

  Sarah felt her jaw harden. “I don’t respond well to threats,” she said stonily.

  “Oh, it won’t take long. And these are such good threats, Sarah. Do exactly as I say, when I say it. Don’t try to stop me, or hamper me, or deceive me in any way. Or else. You’ll find I know more about you and your Park than you realize. There are others with me, all of them far more intimidating than myself. We’ve had lots of time to prepare. We’re watching both your entrances and your exits. If you cooperate, we’ll be gone before you know it. And you can get on with the job of pleasing the guests.”

  He slid off the desk. “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? I always think threatening someone should be like administering an injection. Do it quickly, and it won’t hurt as much.” He reached forward, and Sarah tensed again. But the man merely smiled, brushing his knuckles caressingly across her cheek. “I’ll be in touch shortly. Enjoy your tea, Sarah—it’s quite exquisite. But remember what I said about the second flush.”

  As he turned and walked away, Sarah’s hand moved once again toward the keyboard. But she thought about the gun, and the preternatural calm behind John Doe’s eyes, and she waited.

  Near the doorway, the man turned back. “One other thing. You may be inclined to doubt what I’ve told you. And you’re clearly a woman who doesn’t scare easily. You may, for example, be tempted to close down the Park to new arrivals. Or not comply with my requests. Either of which would be met by immediate reprisal. So in an effort to avoid any complications, I’ve arranged for a little show. I mean, you put on so many, shouldn’t you get to see one yourself once in a while? It should remove any lingering doubts from your mind.”

  He glanced at his watch. “It starts at 1:30 precisely. Enjoy.”

  And then, without another word, he was gone.

  “DO YOU THINK perhaps he was daft?” Fred Barksdale asked. “Like that fellow last week, thought he was Abraham and Utopia was Sodom?” He swerved the wheel of the electric cart to avoid a pedestrian. At ten miles per hour, their cart was moving at twice the speed allowed in the corridors of the Underground.

  Sarah shook her head. “He didn’t sound like the usual bomb crank or telephone jockey. He was too polite. Too solicitous, somehow…” She shook her head roughly, as if to clear it. “Remember he sought me out. He knew exactly what he wanted. And then there’s this.” She patted the pocket of her jacket.

  They rounded a corner, the rubber wheels of the cart squealing on the bare concrete. Sarah glanced over at Barksdale. The fine features of his face looked set, blond eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

  Barksdale glanced over, met her gaze. “You all right, luv?”

  Sarah nodded. “I’m fine.”

  They came to an abrupt stop outside a set of unmarked double doors. Leaving the cart parked diagonally across half the corridor, Barksdale trotted up to the doors, swiping a passcard through the scanner. When the lock clicked open, he pushed the doors inward, then stepped back to allow Sarah in ahead of him.

  The Center for Monitoring Operations, known to all Utopia cast and crew as the Hive, was a large circular space filled floor-to-ceiling with rack-mounted monitors. Here, the feeds for the Park’s mainline security cameras were channeled into a single command station. Not all video links in Utopia were viewable here: the infrared cameras inside the rides and attractions were closed systems, and the Eyes in the Sky at Utopia’s four casinos were controlled from separate locations. But views of more than six thousand locations throughout the Park—from restaurants to queuing stations to maintenance bays to monorail cars—could be independently controlled from within the Hive.

  As Sarah walked in, she thought—as on all her infrequent visits—just how appropriate the nickname was. The hundreds of monitors that surrounded her on all sides, glass faces slanting downward at achingly regular angles, were irresistibly reminiscent of the interior of some vast honeycomb.

  She was not concerned; at least, not overly so. There had been too many false alarms over the months, too many threatening phone calls and e-mails that never followed through. But none of the cranks or practical jokers had ever introduced themselves by name. None of them had given her a two-way radio. Most especially, none of them had carried a concealed weapon. And so she’d called Bob Allocco, head of Security, and ordered an interdiction. Just to be sure.

  Inside the Hive, the air was cold and dry, with the faint, almost sweetish smell of high purification. A dozen security specialists sat at the monitoring stations circling the room, panning across screens or speaking into headsets. Bob Allocco was standing beside the nearest specialist, his impatient fingers drumming on the black composite
of the table. He swiveled at their approach, then frowned, motioning them to follow.

  In the far wall, a door of smoked privacy glass had been set between two tiers of monitors. Allocco unlocked the door with his passcard and led the way in, closing the door behind them.

  The room beyond was small and dark. It contained several large monitors, three phones, a computer workstation, a couple of chairs, and little else. As the door lock engaged, a fan came on, providing a low, scratchy background hum: pink noise, ensuring they could not be overheard in the Center beyond.

  Allocco turned toward them. “How serious do you think this is?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid we shall have to treat it as serious, whether it is or not,” Barksdale replied.

  “We’ll know at 1:30,” Sarah said quietly.

  Allocco’s eyes darted toward her. “How’s that?”

  “He said he’d give us a demonstration. To show he meant business, prove it wasn’t a bluff.”

  “And he didn’t give you any idea of what he wants?”

  Sarah pulled the radio out of her pocket. “He said he’d contact us with this.”

  Allocco took it from her, turned it over in his hands. “Well, whatever else the guy may be, he isn’t hard up for money. Look at this: a military-grade scrambler. With a signal diffuser, I’ll bet. No way to get a lock on his position.”

  He handed it back. “Did he threaten you?”

  “He implied that if we didn’t do exactly what he wanted, people would die.”

  “Sounds bloody well like a threat to me,” Barksdale said.

  “He also told me not to contact law enforcement, not to evacuate the park. Keep things strictly business as usual. Or else.”

  There was a brief silence as this was digested.

  “And then he said something else. That there were several of them. And that they’d had plenty of time to prepare.”

  She turned, caught Barksdale’s eye. Even in the dim light, his face seemed to have gone a little gray.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “Terrorists? Zealots? Some lunatic fringe group?”

  “No time for speculating,” Allocco replied. “We have the gadgets. Let’s find this guy.” He picked up a telephone beside the workstation, dialed a number. “Ralph? Bob Allocco. I’m in the Hive. Can you join me, please?”

  He replaced the phone. “Ralph Peccam, my top video tech,” he explained. “Worked in Systems before, knows the whole infrastructure like the back of his hand.”

  “Discreet?” Sarah asked.

  Allocco nodded. “What time did this John Doe leave your office?”

  Sarah thought a moment. “About ten minutes after one.”

  “Okay.” Allocco turned to the workstation, moused through a series of menus. “Let’s pick up his scent.”

  There was a quiet rap on the door, and Sarah moved to open it. Standing outside, in the ethereal glow of the Hive’s countless monitors, was a short, skinny youth. He had a rooster’s crest of red hair, and freckles were splashed across his nose and cheekbones. He could not have been more than twenty. The gold pin on his retro-looking sports jacket identified him as an electronics specialist.

  “Ralph,” Allocco said. “Take a seat.”

  The youth glanced at Sarah, then sat down in front of the workstation, sniffing loudly.

  “We’ve got a little project for you. Something that stays inside this room, okay?”

  Peccam nodded silently, large eyes flickering once again toward Sarah. He was clearly unused to being in such close proximity to the Park chief.

  “Remember the interdiction drills we’ve run? Well, this isn’t a drill. A man left Ms. Boatwright’s office around eight minutes ago. Let’s follow his trail.” Allocco pointed at something on the screen. “I’ve brought up a list of the cameras in that corridor. Start with B-2023.”

  Peccam turned to the workstation and typed a series of commands. An image appeared on one of the monitors: the entrance to Sarah’s office, taken from a ceiling-mounted camera across the corridor. Displayed along the bottom of the screen was the time the film was taken. As the film ran in reverse, the hundredths of a second flew past, almost unreadable. Beside them was a long series of numbers.

  “It’s black-and-white?” Sarah asked in surprise.

  “All cameras in the staff areas are black-and-white. Only the public areas have color. We went over all this in one of the Pre-Game Shows last month, when the new system was fully installed. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Not closely enough, it seems. Get me up to speed.”

  Allocco waved his hand at the monitor. “The video is now entirely in the digital domain. No analog whatsoever. That means no signal degradation, infinite storage possibilities, theoretically infinite resolution. Everything’s striped to a uniform SMPTE time code running at—what is it, Ralph?”

  “Thirty drop,” Peccam said in a hoarse voice.

  “Thirty drop frames per second. We can synchronize precisely any two, three, whatever, feeds in the Park. And we can maintain a history indefinitely.”

  Sarah nodded. “So you journal everything?”

  “Up to a point, because the size of—Ralph, what’s the architecture again?”

  “Each monitor is linked to a fiber-channel RAID array, currently scalable to four terabytes.” Peccam sneezed explosively.

  “Sounds like you’ve got a lulu,” Allocco said.

  “I went down to Medical for some antihistamine two hours ago,” Peccam replied. “All it did was make me sleepy.”

  “Well, we need you awake right now.” Sarah turned back to Allocco. “If I’m understanding this, we can comb through old output, yes? See if John Doe made prior visits? Maybe see exactly what it was that he did?”

  Allocco scratched his chin. “Theoretically. But as I was about to say, real-time streaming video takes up bandwidth. A lot of bandwidth. You wouldn’t believe how fast those four terabytes fill up. That’s why we kept the Underground cameras black-and-white. Every night, video storage is handed off to the IT servers.” He nodded toward Barksdale. “And that, Buck Rogers, is where your guys come in.”

  Sarah looked over. “Fred?”

  Barksdale, who had been listening silently, cleared his throat. “We store the video feeds on our WAN for two weeks. Then they’re mothballed off-site.”

  “How fast can we get them back?”

  “Overnight.”

  “That’s not fast enough.”

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We haven’t even located the guy yet.” Allocco stepped up behind Peccam, glanced at the image on the central monitor. “Good. Ten minutes after one. Now go forward, two hundred frames a second.”

  On the central monitor, figures passed by Sarah’s office in blurs of gray. Then a shadow darted through her door.

  “Stop,” said Allocco. “Back one hundred frames.”

  Frozen on-screen was Fred Barksdale, stepping into Sarah’s office.

  “That’s too late,” Sarah said. “Fred came in maybe two minutes after John Doe left.”

  “Back at fifty,” Allocco said.

  Another blur of figures, slower this time, moving backward in silent pantomime. Then one of the figures slid into her office door in reverse; turned; disappeared within.

  “Stop,” Allocco repeated. “Forward, ten frames a second.”

  On the monitor, in slow motion, John Doe walked back into view. He glanced up and down the corridor, smoothed one hand across the front of his suit, then walked out of the doorway and disappeared out of camera view.

  “That’s the sonofabitch?” Allocco asked.

  Sarah nodded. Seeing him again—the small beard, the easy, narrow smile—sent a thrust of anger through her, mixed with some other emotion she couldn’t identify. Her cheek burned where his knuckles had brushed against it.

  “Back one hundred and freeze.”

  John Doe stood, motionless, in the doorway.

  “Bring up the face. Ten x.”

  The
face now filled the screen, striped in the shadow of an overhead light. Sarah saw that the left eye was a darker shade of gray than the right.

  “Can you clean that up?” Barksdale asked. “Sharpen it?”

  “Yes,” said Peccam. “It’ll take a little time.”

  “Then it can wait. Let’s find out where he went.” Allocco peered at a listing that ran down the edge of the command screen. “Bring up B-2027. Sync the time.”

  The central monitor went black for a moment. Then another view of the corridor, two doors down from Sarah’s office.

  “Forward, thirty,” murmured Allocco.

  For a second, the corridor was empty. Then a woman wearing a Victorian-era crinoline walked by. A moment later, she was followed by John Doe. He strode confidently, even casually, from the top of the screen to the bottom.

  “B-2051,” said Allocco. “Same sync.”

  Now the view was of two intersecting corridors. The woman in the crinoline appeared, turned left, and entered a stairwell. A maintenance cart passed laterally across the screen. Then John Doe emerged at the top. Stopping only to look for opposing traffic, he went left, following the direction the woman had taken.

  “He’s heading for A Level, maybe Gaslight,” said Allocco, glancing back at the screen listing. “Bring up A-1904.”

  “Remember,” Sarah said, “I don’t want a full-scale interdiction. Not yet. Let’s see where he’s going, if he’s really got something planned for 1:30. Get a security net around him, just in case he’s on the level. But don’t move in until I give the word.”

  The A Level corridor now displayed on the monitor was wider, more brightly lit. It was also busier. Knots of Utopia employees passed beneath the camera, talking together, heading to and from lunch at the A Café, the nearby employee cafeteria. The woman in the crinoline went by. She had apparently spotted her boyfriend, and the two of them were now walking arm in arm, at a much slower pace.

  “Tsk, tsk,” said Allocco. “PDA. Better write them up.” Public displays of affection between cast or crew members, while not exactly forbidden, were discouraged.

  Now John Doe came into the monitor’s range. He strolled forward, then stopped in the middle of traffic. People threaded their way past, ignoring him.