The door to the sun porch stood open. Sarah set the clipboard down, on the table, and reached a hand under her jacket to touch the modified Beretta as she stepped through.
The inner back door was ajar. She studied the jamb for signs of forced entry, but found nothing. With a toe, she pushed the door open. The hinges complained briefly.
“Mr. Porter?” she called as she stepped into the kitchen area. The air smelled hot, acrid.
The coffeemaker ready light glowed, a pool of dark liquid less than an inch deep in the urn. On the stove a skillet was beginning to smolder. The smoke alarm had not gone off, assuming there was one. Sarah drew her weapon and edged to the stove. She grabbed a towel from the edge of the sink and turned the burner off, then moved the skillet. Whatever had been cooking was now blackened beyond recognition.
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Room by room, she went through the house. She found the body in the bathroom.
Jeri Porter had been a robust man, young, someone who had obviously worked out. His body had been propped on the toilet, pants down around his ankles, shirtless, arms dangling at his sides. His head lay back on the tank, eyes open to the ceiling.
A makeshift syringe hung from the vein in his left arm.
A compact metal box was open on the edge of the bathtub, containing the rest of the works—spoon, cotton, extra needles, and an open bag of white powder.
Sarah crouched to study the left arm. She saw two other punctures, but they looked recent. No other traces of needle use. She stepped back. It made no sense. The picture before her was incongruous to say the least. Jeri Porter had not been a drug user, not this kind at any rate. Not unless he had just taken it up in the last day or so.
Careful to touch nothing with her bare skin, she went through the rest of the house. In his bedroom she found his wallet. She used her pen to flip it open and go through the plastic windows holding his ID and credit cards. Full name, Jeremi D. Porter, age twenty-seven. She found an American Express Card. Gym membership. Credit union cash card.
This made less and less sense.
On the nightstand beside the wallet lay a check stub: Vanderlin Electric, Inc. Sarah was impressed at the size of the check.
This man had had a life. Sarah was disinclined to accept suicide—what, he started cooking dinner or breakfast, and suddenly had an urge to shoot up and die?—but the more she saw the more obvious it became that Jeremi “Jeri”
Porter had been murdered.
She left the towel in the kitchen. Pulling a handkerchief from her pocket, she left by the back door, retrieved her clipboard, and slipped out the alley gate. She marched the long block to the cross street, then back to her car. She sat there for a time, thinking. Then she returned to the front porch and, pretending to call again, used the handkerchief 112
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to wipe the bell button and the doorknob. She returned to her car and drove off.
One more Jeremiah on her list. She felt anxious, on edge, but she needed to follow up. If she found this one alive, somehow she would have to convince him to leave Los Angeles. She flipped open her cell phone and punched the single-digit code for Lash. “Hi, it’s me. I may need a removal. Fast. Living and probably unwilling.”
John wandered the warrens of Pioneer in company with a young intern named Sheila. Reinart had given him a security badge, an upgrade from the one issued at the front desk, and Sheila introduced him around as a new NSA liaison. Later he would go over the files Reinart had given him—organizational charts, personnel histories, physical plant, and so forth. Since the theft had already occurred, John was unsure exactly what he was supposed to do about it. Another incursion into Cyberdyne? Not likely. Not now.
Since Sarah and he had returned to this time/world/place they had been careful to stir as few dead ashes as possible.
They had become very good at fitting in—so good that sometimes it seemed to John as if they had a real life, with real possibilities. It would be easy to forget.
Reinart wanted him to find out who was responsible.
McMillin wanted to know how much of Destry-McMillin’s technology had been lifted along with whatever Pioneer had lost. After that, it would be John’s job—PPS Security, at least—to plug the holes. First he had to find them.
Data was one thing. It could be smuggled out on a disc or emailed off-site and downloaded to a separate machine.
But this, the optical array Reinart described, required a bit more ingenuity. Or a leak on the inside. John already had a feeling who to look at, but he wanted to at least go through the motions before jumping to a conclusion. If he was right, though, this would be a very tough job.
The place reminded him of all the other high-tech companies he had been through. Mazes of corridors, doors bearing obscure, cryptic nameplates, a mix of harsh fluor-113
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escent lighting and softer tungsten, clusters of people here and there talking animatedly interspersed by lone workers attending their jobs. Offices that looked like classrooms converted to labs, or labs conjoined with storage space.
Computers, cables, monitors, stacks of equipment in odd locations. There was a basic essence to such places and John imagined that even some great alchemist’s lair from the fifteenth century might share the same texture, a common frisson.
Sheila walked alongside him, pointing and describing in a voice that tried to sound more unaffected and disinterested than its years. She was an intern from Caltech, majoring in computer science, and worked here part time, full time in summer. John listened abstractedly, registering locations and descriptions, sifting the trivia she added in from time to time for anything that sounded useful.
She opened a door onto a catwalk and waved him through. They stood then above a large space covered by workbenches, machinery, and diagnostics equipment, interspersed with people intent on computers or the naked components of…
“Prototype maglev,” Sheila said matter-of-factly. “It’s a growing market. The new trains, and now talk about hover-craft that use the extant magnetic field. Anyway, resistance is still a problem, so we’re trying to combine superconduct-ivity with traditional maglev tech. If we pull it off, costs go down, efficiency goes up. For efficiency, read speed.”
“Sounds impressive.”
“Hm. You sound impressed.”
John glanced at her. He was only slightly older, but he felt decades her senior. “Sorry. Under other circumstances—”
“That could be interesting,” she said. “Other circumstances.”
She smiled, warming the briefly chill air between them.
“How long has Gant worked here?”
“He was here when I joined the company two years ago,”
she said. “I don’t have much to do with him.”
“Ever met him?”
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“Interviewed by him when I came on board. Security clearance.”
“What were your impressions?”
“None. The guy is utterly absorbed in his job. I doubt he has a life outside Pioneer.”
John said nothing and let Sheila guide him to the next sight in the tour.
When he finished it was early evening. Sheila took him back to the visitor’s office and collected his ID badges.
“If you need any other information,” she said, and let it hang.
“I might. Can I call you?”
She slipped her card into his jacket pocket. “Absolutely.”
John watched her leave the office, surprised at the pleasant sensation she caused. There had been too little time in the last three years for a private life; he had nearly forgotten that he missed one. He fished the card from his pocket. Her extension was listed next to the Pioneer phone number. He turned it over. At some point in the tour she had found time to write her home number on the back.
John grinned and tucked the card into his wallet.
Patterson met him outside.
“You haven’t been waiting all this time, have you?” John asked.
“No, I came back when I got off my shift. You need a lift?”
“As a matter of fact.”
As they crossed the street, John looked west. Besides the sodium vapors, few lights illuminated any of the other buildings. But in the distance he saw a glow from a concentration of industrial lights.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Patterson followed his gaze. “Oh, that’s the old Los Angeles Air Force Base. It closed down in ’05. It’s been acquired by someone in the last six months. They’ve been working on it for a while now.”
“Air Force base. But this is all commercial.”
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“This is, sure. And LAX is north of it. It’s all commercial now.”
“Pioneer didn’t get it?”
“Nah. They’re a little extended on everything else around here. I’m sure they’d have liked to get it.”
“Any idea who did?”
“No. Maybe Mr. McMillin knows.”
They reached the parking lot and approached Patterson’s car. Suddenly, a large man stood from behind it and came toward them. John reflexively reached for the pistol he had not brought.
“Gant,” Patterson said, hand inside his jacket.
Ari Gant stepped between them and the car. He seemed enormous in the fading light. He fixed John with a cold look.
“I want you to know,” Gant said, “you’re not welcome on my turf. Either of you. I suggest you don’t come back.”
“Or what?” Patterson said. “We have permission from your boss. You know, the guy who actually runs the place.”
“Irrelevant,” Gant said. “I don’t want to see either of you again. Clear?”
“So take a vacation,” Patterson said. “We’ll be done when you come back.”
“You heard what I said.”
With that, he walked between them, back toward the building across the street.
“Any idea what car he drives?” John asked.
Patterson shook his head. “Freaky son of a bitch. Car?
Why?”
“Curious, that’s all.” He sighed. “Let’s go. I’ve had enough excitement for one hour.”
Patterson chuckled and unlocked his car.
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John heard the argument before he stepped through the door.
A couple of Lash’s people sat on the sidewalk, back’s against the building, one smoking. They nodded silently to John as entered.
“—told you before, we don’t do that,” Lash said.
Ken Lash faced Sarah in the middle of the unfinished front office. Both stood, hands on hips, glaring. Sarah raised a hand, finger arrowing toward Lash.
“Whoa!” John barked. “What the hell—?”
Both of them looked at John and the tension broke. Lash stepped back from Sarah, eyes on the floor, while Sarah turned her back on Lash. John surveyed the room to see if anyone else was present. No one else.
“Not even the end of the third day and we’re fighting?”
he said sarcastically.
Lash glared at him. “We’ve been over this before,” he said, his voice low and controlled. “I do infrastructure. I do not do black bag.”
Sarah whirled. “Dammit, I don’t have anyone else here!
I need—”
“You take that up with Mr. Reed,” Lash said. “My people don’t do wetwork.”
“Wet work,” John said. “What’s this about?”
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Porter. I need one of them picked up and kept safe. I called him to take care of it and I get protocol!”
Lash drew himself up again, ready to snap back. John stepped between them.
“Enough,” he said. He looked at Lash. “Do we have a secure line to Reed yet?”
Lash took a few moments to cool down. “Yes, sir. We finished the T4 line right after she called me.”
“Then let’s get him on it,” John said. He looked at Sarah, who still seethed at Lash.
“John…” she started.
John put a hand on her shoulder. She blinked hard, focusing on him. “Maybe you better bring me up to speed,”
he said.
She nodded, once, and headed for the back room.
“You too, please,” John told Lash, following his mother.
Desks and covered monitors filled the larger workspace.
Toolboxes stood open on the floor amid tangles of cable, sawhorses, and the debris of ongoing construction. John uncovered one of the monitors and booted up the system; he heard the soft hum of computer fans.
“Okay,” John said, shrugging out of his jacket and tossing it over a chair. “Close the door.”
Lash complied, then leaned back against it, arms folded.
“There won’t be any more outbursts like this in front of others again,” John said. He looked from Sarah to Lash.
“Will there?”
Sarah gave Lash a final withering look, then shook her head. Lash shrugged.
“So what happened?” John asked Sarah.
“I started tracking those names,” Sarah said, sitting down.
“Porter. I found—well, hell, look what I found.” She handed him her yellow legal pad filled with the list of dead Porters.
“I found a short list of names still alive. At least, they were this morning when I started.”
John leafed through the pages. “Alive here in L.A. you mean?”
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“Yes. So I went looking for them. Most—the ‘J’ Porters—weren’t ‘Jeremiahs.’ ”
“Did you find any that were?”
“Two. One was already dead. He should be in the morning obituaries. The other…I don’t know. I found an abandoned house at the listed address.”
“So what’s between you and Ken? What this about ‘wetwork’?”
“I called him to arrange a pick up. I wanted this last Porter secured. He told me to refer it to Reed.”
“But you said you found an abandoned house.”
“So what? I didn’t know that when I made the request.
Someone with the misfortune to be named Jeremiah Porter could be dead now because he doesn’t do wetwork!”
“My people aren’t qualified for that,” Lash said, his voice barely controlled. “You want to get us killed?”
John dropped the pad on the desk behind him. “You went to this address alone then?”
“Of course.”
“What do you think is going on?”
“You can add.”
“You think a Terminator is taking these people out.”
“I knew you were smart,” Sarah said caustically.
“But you’re not. You went by yourself.”
“You were busy.”
“We have a list of locals to call.”
“Right. Unprepared, I walk them into something like this.”
John stopped himself. He knew his mother, knew she sometimes went off like this. He had seen it all his life, with the attempted sabotage that got her thrown in a psychiatric prison, with the night she tried to kill Miles Dyson, with a series of impulsive actions driven by anger and panic. She fixated on a program, drove herself and others toward it regardless of consequences, unless brought up short by events or—
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run on adrenaline to the exclusion of all else, though when she did John tended to forget her rational side. Sarah Connor demonstrated how to overcome fear—terror—and take the necessary action, make the required decision. She had taught him the true meaning of courage because he knew how frightened she was so much of the time, and she grappled with what scared her. The eff
ort to hold that fear at bay while she worked sometime blinded her to common sense.
Finally, he said, “They’re professionals, unprepared is what they do.” John looked at Lash. “How soon before everything is up and running?”
“Tomorrow, next day. We’ll be out of here by the end of the week.”
This was the fifth site Ken Lash had done for them. The longest job so far had been the main offices in Santa Fe—seventeen days. After completing a job, Lash would return over the next few weeks to see if anything needed to be redone or added. He never spoke about his personal life; John and Sarah knew no more about where he had come from now than when Reed had introduced them. But they knew he was good at his job and utterly reliable. He never promised more than he could deliver and he delivered on his promises. John admired him. So did Sarah, usually.
This was their first disagreement.
“Okay,” John said, “let’s get Reed on the line and straighten out this question of protocol.”
Sarah glanced at the time displayed on a large digital wall clock. “It’s almost eleven in Washington—”
“Jack never sleeps,” John said, gesturing to Lash.
Lash went to a desk, sat down, and began typing on a keyboard. Within seconds, the screen winked on displaying a federal seal. Lash stood up to let John take his place.
The seal faded and a face appeared.
“Jack…?” Sarah said quietly.
Neither of them had seen Reed in nearly fourteen months.
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deeply, his short hair graying noticeably. John was startled, but repressed it.
“Hope we didn’t wake you,” he said.
“And if you had?” Reed asked.
“Then I’d apologize and still tell you my troubles.”
Reed grunted, one side of his mouth rising in a half-hearted smile. “So talk to me.”
Sarah pulled a chair up alongside John and leaned toward the screen. “I think we’ve got a Terminator, Jack.”
The weak smile vanished from Reed’s face. “Definitely talk to me. Everything.”
When John and Sarah had returned from the war in the future and Jade’s world and hopping alternate dimensions chasing after Skynet—when they had stepped out of the vortex of the time vault one last time, alone and naked, exhausted and in pain—they had thought to bury themselves in the world, to disappear. Change names, live a life far from L.A. and Cyberdyne and Washington D.C. Pretend the past and all the fatal futures pertained to someone else. Not them. They were normal. They carried no secret knowledge of Armageddon or sentient computers or monster machines programmed to hunt and kill humans.
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