"Your father will die tonight." Victor held up the black metal attaché case. "And he's already turned over everything to me—including the access code for Zap-Star."
She gasped. "I don't believe it! He's lied to you."
"There is that possibility. Which is why you and I are going to check things out before my big production number goes any further."
He took her arm again and guided her up a wide flight of carpeted stairs to the main lobby. They might have been colleagues chatting familiarly after a long separation.
"Did Gerry know you were coming here?"
"Of course not," she said. "He knows better than to question me about my affairs."
"What's he doing these days—househusbanding? Baby-sitting, perhaps?"
"Pulling his head together before going to work for a Boston branch of Cams, Elsasser, Lehmann, if you must know. He took it hard when Griffith kicked him out of Roggenfeld Acquisitions."
Victor chuckled. "Too timid to swim with the sharks, I heard. How are you two getting along these days?"
"Gerry is civil, and he's afraid of me, and there are times when I'm certain he's hiding some ghastly secret—but my redaction is no good against a trained operant like him, and I've never been able to pry it out. You'll have to. Afterward."
"How does Gerry get along with your baby, Laura? The kid's about nine months old, isn't she? And big-brained?"
Shannon said coldly, "Aside from his little character defects deriving from overweening ambition, Gerry is a decent sort of man. He knows Laura isn't his, but he doesn't hold it against her. He's kind. He's certainly more interested in her than you seem to be—"
They had passed out of the lobby into the executive offices of the hotel and now paused before an unmarked door. Indicating mentally that Shannon should keep silence, he opened it and stepped inside. It was a suite of rooms that obviously housed the computer functions. A young man in shirtsleeves working on a sheaf of print-outs looked up in surprise and opened his mouth—then froze as Victor's coercion took control of him. Without saying a word, the young man got up and led Victor into an inner room where the equipment was kept. Victor said:
Your work for the day is finished. Go home now without speaking to anyone. You will not remember having seen us.
The young man turned on his heel and marched out, closing the door behind him.
Shannon said, "What are you going to do?"
Victor had seated himself at the manual console and began to rap expertly on the key-pads. The display said: CHASE MANHATTAN BANK DATACEN. GOOD AFTERNOON MR REMILLARD. PLEASE BEGIN UPLOAD.
Victor took the thick plastic gigadisk out of the attaché case and slotted it. Then he waited.
Shannon's eyes were glued to the display screen, which now said: WORKING. She whispered, "He couldn't have. I don't believe it." And then the screen said: TRANSACTION VLNX2234-9-21-2013 PRE-LOGGED AND READY FOR FINAL EXECUTION 1600 HRS. DO YOU HAVE INSTRUCTIONS?
Victor typed: PRECIS.
And the computer obliged.
Shannon gave a strangled little joyous shriek. "It's true! He's done it! My God, it's totally unbelievable!" She would have thrown her arms around Victor, but his coercion flicked her back as casually as an insect. "Wait. We have to confirm the other."
Thanking and dismissing the bank, Victor retrieved his disk and replaced it in the case. Then he typed out a certain telephone number with a northern Illinois area code. The screen said: YOU HAVE REACHED A PRIVATE NUMBER. PLEASE INSERT ACCESS CODE.
Victor typed: FOR BEHOLD HENCEFORTH ALL GENERATIONS SHALL CALL ME BLESSED.
The computer said: ENTER.
Victor typed: DIR.
The computer said: ZAP-STAR OVERRIDE iMARY.KOC. THIS COMMAND FILE IS VALID BUT NOT OPERATIONAL UNTIL 12-25-2013 AT WHICH TIME THE ZAP-STAR SYSTEM COMES ON-LINE. DO YOU HAVE INSTRUCTIONS?
Victor typed: NO. GOODBYE. And then he erased all record of both the calls, using an old hacker's trick, and turned in the seat to face Shannon.
She said, "It's true. He's capitulated completely ... unless he plans to cheat you some way at the last minute—"
"I don't believe that he does."
"Then," she said, "all that's left to do is finish him off."
"And the Metapsychic Congress."
"Oh, there's no need for that! Only a paranoid like Daddy would believe that the mass murder of a couple of thousand leading operants would leave people like us with a clear field. What about all the rest of the heads in the world? If we kill this lot, others will eventually take their places. No ... Daddy's famous 'edge' is obsolete, and so is yours, Victor. You should have seen the apparatus that Professor MacGregor demonstrated at his lecture! It was the first aura detector. All it does is shine a beam of something-or-other at a person and analyze the reflection—and it can tell whether or not that person is hopelessly latent, or suboperant, or operant. And it even quantizes the degree of operancy! One of the subjects MacGregor used in his lecture was the ten-year-old son of Denis Remillard. Would you believe the boy sent the analyzer right off the scale?...So you see, with a gadget like this available, it just won't be possible for people to keep their operancy secret. Even casinos will install these things—"
"There are other edges," Victor said.
Shannon looked at him mutely, her mind incredulous. Finally she said, "You can't mean it!"
"I'd call Zap-Star the ultimate edge. Of course, it wouldn't be used in the clumsy death-ray scenario your father dreamed up. Its use would be very selective."
"But it's not necessary, Victor! Any more than killing these operants is necessary. Once Daddy is dead you'll have all the power and wealth that any man could want—"
He shook his head. Slowly, he rose from the chair and came to her. "He said you disappointed him. You've disappointed me, too."
She didn't try to flee. Proudly, she said, "I see. You don't need people the way Daddy did. You're self-sufficient. You don't need—or love—anyone but yourself, do you, Victor? Not me. And certainly not our child."
"Laura is not my child. We've never had physical intercourse. You were quite right to call me self-sufficient."
"Good God. Not yours..." Her eyes were fixed on him as the truth of it slowly broke through. "Yes, I see. You're impotent."
Victor laughed at her. "Not in any way that really matters. Not the way your father is now, powerless because he still loves you. He asked me to tell you that you were never really free of him. He was always able to penetrate your double screen. I suppose he let you keep the illusion in hopes that it would shore up your ego. Keep you from sui-ciding."
"And it suited his plans when I came to you." Her eyes had gone dull. "Of course. He had to manipulate both of us. He must have known he could never bond you..." She straightened, proud again for a moment. "Neither of you will use Zap-Star, you know. The government knows the system is penetrated."
"All they know is what you—and my brother Denis—have told them. I'm willing to gamble that the President won't be able to stop the system's activation on schedule. Not on the word of two dead heads."
His farsight roamed the area, then lit on a small storeroom that opened off the computer room. He compelled her to follow him to it, opened the door, and flicked on the light.
"This will do. No one will come in here so late on Saturday afternoon. It won't matter tomorrow."
She said, "You aren't going to do it quickly."
"I have some time to kill," he said, laughing, and took off her black wig so that the long flaming hair tumbled out. Her face and mind were calm. Eventually he would give her what she wanted.
He asked her to kneel, and she sank down without protest. Then he cupped her head in both hands and pressed her against him, and stopped her heart for the first time.
30
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
FOR MORE THAN a year, since Denis's interrogation of Gerry Tremblay, government investigators had sought in vain for hard evidence that would connect Kieran O'Con
nor to the sort of grandiose conspiracy that his daughter had accused him of perpetrating. It was easy enough for EE adepts to search his offices and his residence—and the presence of the elaborate satellite uplink equipment was duly noted, but conceded to be quite legal. The heavily guarded data bank beneath the O'Connor mansion undoubtedly held the key to the mystery; but EE adepts could scrutinize its library of disks until doomsday without knowing what they contained. No search warrant could be served because no probable cause of felonious action could be demonstrated, and U.S. law forbade "fishing expeditions" as unwarranted invasions of privacy.
One of the Zap-Star battle-mirrors was plucked from orbit and taken to the ON-1 habitat for examination. A problematic chip was indeed found, one that was unauthorized in the original specifications. However, engineers of the O'Connor satellite consortium maintained that the component was entirely innocuous, designed to improve guidance system response to groundside commands. If the chip did contain an override, the thing had been hidden with surpassing cleverness and would probably display its true colors only when activated by a coded signal.
One could, of course, haul in each and every one of the 130 non-Chinese battle-mirrors and—using exquisite care—remove the dubious chip. The fix would take approximately four years and cost $7.2 billion, and in the meantime the independently operated Chinese units would remain fully operational.
The allegation of conspiracy was based thus far only upon the unsupported word of Shannon O'Connor Tremblay. Denis's mind-ream of her husband had yielded only tenuous confirmation—and that legally inadmissible. Subsequent investigations of the O'Connor empire had turned up no evidence whatsoever of any Zap-Star conspiracy—and precious little else that was even remotely actionable. The only taint was a distant one: back in the 1980s certain O'Connor subsidiaries had been strongly suspected of laundering Mafia funds. But this had never been proved and the Mob was dead and gone, while these days the O'Connor organization seemed guilty only of the immoderate gobbling of smaller corporate fry ...
At least that had been the status of the government's investigation up until 20 September 2013.
On that day, an alert bureaucrat in the Securities and Exchange Commission took note of a routine notification of a transfer of assets from an American conglomerate to an obscure Canadian holding company. The SEC woman was struck by the enormous size of the transaction, and even more interested when she recognized the conglomerate to be a key-stone of the intricate O'Connor organization. A fast check with Montréal (Canada having less of a penchant for financial confidentiality than the U.S. at that time) yielded up the name of the man behind the dummy corporation. The SEC woman informed the Attorney General and he informed the President of the United States—who in turn called up Denis to inquire why his younger brother Victor was being handed control of virtually everything that Kieran O'Connor owned.
***
"I told him I was just as flabbergasted as he was," Denis told me. We had met at the conclusion of MacGregor's lecture, and now he and I and Lucille stood in the back of the nearly deserted hall talking the thing over. Naturally the President had asked his people to brief him on Victor; and he had been dismayed to discover that the Nobel laureate's family harbored a sheep who, if not exactly black, looked decidedly grubby around the edges.
And was a familiar of Kieran O'Connor's daughter.
"I'll give Baumgartner credit," Denis said. "He called me himself and he was straightforward about Victor. He told me that the government had a file on him dating way back to when Vic and Dad first started Remco. Tax fiddling, and later on some quashed indictments for interstate transportation of stolen property. The feds have never been able to get the goods on Vic, primarily because no one would testify against him. Lately, he's seemed to be clean—but the feds looked him up again after Shannon sprang her blockbuster. Naturally she was investigated with her father, and her relationship with Vic muddied the waters considerably. I was approached last spring and asked to mind-ream both Victor and Shannon. Of course I refused."
Lucille and I said nothing and kept our thoughts to ourselves.
"Now the President has personally appealed to me to interrogate them mentally—especially Shannon—to find out whether the threat to Zap-Star is real. If I can get confirmation from Victor, it will preclude the possibility that Shannon is suffering some delusion."
"But why do the feds think Vic would know anything about it?" I asked.
Denis said, "Because Kieran O'Connor has terminal testicular cancer. If he's passing his empire to Vic, as the Canadian connection seems to prove, he's probably passing the clout along with the assets."
"Christ!" I said. "Vic with a handle on Zap-Star?"
Denis said, "O'Connor evaded both EE and normal government surveillance and has disappeared. As far as the feds can tell, Vic is innocently at home in Berlin. Shannon Tremblay was traced to this Congress. The agents are certain she's here in the hotel."
"And the President wants you to find her," Lucille said, "and turn her inside out?"
"That's about it," said Denis.
"It's monstrous!" she exclaimed indignantly. "The whole thing is incredible! That wretched woman corrupted Gerry for some squalid motive of her own, and then when he was caught in the Coercer Flap she invented this other thing—"
Denis silenced her. "All I know is what was in Gerry's mind. He doesn't believe she's deluded. His impression—the impression of a trained psychiatrist—is that she is eminently sane in spite of a neurotic love-hate relationship with her father. Deep in his mental core, Gerry recognized that Kieran O'Connor was a paramount metapsychic manipulator, a man who had used his powers for self-aggrandizement all his life. The Zap-Star net wasn't Gerry's province. He knew O'Connor's consortium built the guidance systems for the net and he had a kind of instinct that it figured in some scheme that the old man was cooking up. That was the only verification I could give the President after my ream of Gerry. It was sufficient to launch the full-scale investigation, which yielded nothing ... up until now."
"So where do you go from here?" I asked.
"I did a quick farscan of the place," Denis said. "I have Shannon's mental signature—in a rough approximation, I'm afraid—from my mind-ream of Gerry. I swept the hotel from top to bottom and found no trace of her. For what it's worth, I found no trace of Vic either! But that doesn't mean they're not here. Vic's a devil of a screener and Shannon's probably no slouch either. I'm going to go very quietly to the top scanners attending the Congress and ask their help in watching out for both Shannon and Vic. They may let their guard down."
"You're not thinking of confronting your brother—!" Lucille was aghast.
"I'd rather not," Denis replied dryly, "but there seems to be little choice. If he shows up, I'll play it by ear. But I don't think he will show." He looked at his watch. "By now, he's the new owner of O'Connor's billions, with more profitable ways to occupy his time."
"And Shannon Tremblay," I said archly, "is probably helping him get in the mood to romp through the money-bin."
Lucille said, "If the government agents tracked Shannon today, they can track her another day and take her into custody for your interrogation. Denis, you will have fulfilled your promise to the President when you notify the other scanners to watch out for her."
I could see that my conscientious nephew was mulling this over, trying to decide whether to remain in the hotel on farscan alert rather than join his colleagues at the banquet, where he was certain to be distracted by his own speechmaking—to say nothing of the emotion-charged atmosphere.
Impetuously, I said, "Look. My farscan hasn't much range, but I know every nook and cranny of this old place. Pass me Shannon Tremblay's mental signature and I'll spend the rest of the afternoon and the evening combing the hotel from cellar to rafters. Hell—I'll get a passkey from Jasper Delacourt and search the place physically when the delegates are out. I'd rather do that than go to the banquet anyhow. Farewell speeches depress me and thunderstorms rattli
ng around mountain peaks make me nervous. Any old backpacker will tell you the same."
Denis eyed me doubtfully. "Uncle Rogi, if you should find Shannon—or, God forbid, Vic!—you are to do nothing except notify me telepathically."
"I swear!" said I, rooting in my hip pocket. I dangled the talisman and clapped my right hand over my heart. "I swear by the Great Carbuncle."
***
All day long the Sons of Earth pickets, a couple of hundred strong, marched up and down Highway 302 in front of the resort entrance. They chanted and flourished their placards and banners, and now and then numbers of the more dedicated lay down on the driveway when shuttle buses brought in delegates who were lodged at other hotels in the area. The police didn't bother to arrest the lie-ins; they just toted them out of the way and deposited them very gently in a handy culvert flowing with storm run-off. Along about dusk, when the big X-wing transports came in from their base at Berlin, a band of more determined activists tried to infiltrate the resort grounds by moving through the forest that lay between the hotel and the cog's Base Station Road. Police detection equipment sniffed the invaders out before they had penetrated two hundred meters. A SWAT team of State Police rounded up the antioperant commandos, who were armed with nothing more lethal than paint-pistols, and removed them to the hospitality of the county jail over at Lancaster.
By the time the delegates were ready to depart for the Summit Chalet, the heavy rain had discouraged all but a handful of diehard demonstrators out on the highway. I had completed my search of the hotel's lower reaches and was just coming up to the main floor when Denis transmitted a mental hail:
INTERVENTION Page 68
