Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  “Why wouldn’t it be through one of these other four rooms?” Marianna leaned across him to tap the paper. Her hair smelled faintly of lilacs.

  “Well . . .” Knox maneuvered his arm around to where it was just barely touching her thigh. “There might be some sort of exit into the main lab, maybe concealed behind that big GEI crest in Room A. I doubt they’d use it for anything but emergencies, though.”

  “Why not?” She inched in a little closer.

  Knox was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate. “Simple logistics: you wouldn’t want people constantly trooping in and out of your secret room, messing up the illusion. No, if it were me, I’d run an entrance shaft down through the decks above it.”

  “But that would make a visible bulge in the walls of all the rooms it passed through.”

  “Bring it right down through the point where four rooms come together and it shouldn’t amount to more than a bump-out on each inside corner. Where it passes through the corporate suites, you could pretty much stick it wherever you wanted—not a whole lot of public access up there. Down here on main deck you could, I don’t know, maybe hide it in a closet? After all, the whole shaft only has to be wide enough for a single person climbing a ladder.”

  “Shafts again,” Marianna said in a low voice. She was sitting close enough that he could feel her shudder. More loudly she asked, “Any chance it passes through one of our cabins? That would simplify things—just go in from the side.”

  “Sorry, no. They gave us outside staterooms—for the view, see?” Knox pointed to the star-filled sky beyond the porthole. “The shaft would have to be just about amidships. We’ll have to leave home base to get to the entrance.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Let me think.” Knox tried to visualize the design of Rusalka’s decks. “Somewhere on bridge deck, I’ll bet—probably the chartroom. We could check the schematics on the laptop.”

  But Marianna was already up off the bed, standing at the doorway.

  “Actually,” she said, “I had something a little more proactive in mind. C’mon, it’ll give you a chance to brush up on your Russian.”

  Marianna dialed her fool-the-eye leotard into high-refractivity mode and eased herself up the rear companionway to bridge deck. She emerged into a service corridor so dimly lit she had to wait a moment for her eyes to adjust. The lookouts must value their night vision; the wheelhouse down at the far end of the passage looked even darker.

  She glided down to the doorway and peeked in: sure enough, only a smudge of reddish illumination from an exit sign conspired with the phosphorescent glow of multiple status screens to hold back the night. If it weren’t for the low murmur of voices, she’d have been hard put to tell that Jon was in position, running interference with the bridge crew as he “brushed up on his Russian.”

  Rusalka’s bridge was fully computerized: standard watch-complement on the graveyard shift was only one junior officer and a seaman first class. And even they had very little to do between visual scans of the horizon every other minute or so. Jon’s arrival bearing a thermos of hot tea from the galley must have seemed a godsend to the bored crewmen. Not to mention he was happy to help them while away the empty hours between midnight and dawn with the rambling conversation Russians loved. Manna from heaven.

  Marianna retreated back down the corridor to the doorway she’d bypassed a moment ago. This was it: the chartroom where, if Jon’s guesses panned out—and guesses were all they were, really—she’d find the entrance to a secret lab.

  Whose existence itself was just a guess.

  Why was she going along with this fishing expedition of Jon’s, rather than following standard reconnaissance procedure? For that matter, what had she been thinking of on the bed, back there in his stateroom? Not that it hadn’t been nice, being close enough to a man to feel the warmth of his body without getting groped. Okay, maybe a little groped.

  Come on, Marianna—focus!

  Well, as fishing expeditions went, this one wasn’t going to take all that long. It wasn’t really feasible to scour the chartroom for hidden doors and secret passages anyway, not with crew on duty less than fifteen feet away. She’d just stake the place out with a spyeye and leave it at that.

  Her spyeye was a self-contained camcorder no bigger than a largish cufflink. At that size, it had no bits to spare for processing or storing high-definition images. Instead, its motion sensor simply triggered whenever a human-sized shadow crossed its light-sensitive laminates and then dumped a timestamped gray-scale to non-volatile memory. It couldn’t even televise these simple images to a receiver in the stateroom; like most of the monitoring devices Marianna had brought with her, it was a passive, nontransmitting collector. Not only did it have to be manually installed, but it would have to be manually retrieved again before they could access its captured data. Very low-tech, but it got the job done with no telltale signals for GEI’s counterintelligence to detect.

  She paused in the chartroom doorway, peering in. The visibility was marginally better in there, thanks to a single overhead lamp rheostated down almost into the infrared. By its murky light she could make out an antique-looking wooden chart table standing in the center of the room. The table’s twenty-first century equivalent—a flatscreen display plotting the vessel’s course in real time via a GPS feed—took up half the rear wall. The forward wall was blank save for a connecting passage to the wheelhouse. A curtain had been drawn across that doorway—night vision again—and through the heavy fabric she could hear muffled voices. She smiled: Jon continuing his diversionary chit-chat with the bridge crew.

  Marianna scanned the chartroom again. Not just eyes, instruments too this time, looking for cover for the spyeye. It had to be tucked away out of sight, yet positioned where it could take in as much of the alcove as possible.

  It was in the course of this second sweep that she discovered someone had beaten her to the punch.

  All but invisible behind a ventilator duct screen, though obvious to her EM detector, a videocam was panning back and forth, covering the room from its vantage above the wheelhouse door. Grishin’s Cl boys were keeping tabs on some thing, that’s for sure. Could it be that Jon’s whole precarious pyramid of assumptions had somehow been correct?

  Thank God she hadn’t just barged into the chartroom. One more step and she’d have been on candid camera. She slipped back out of the doorframe into the passageway. She needed to time out and rethink this.

  From its electromagnetic signature, Grishin’s videocam was a broadcaster rather than a wired device or a self-contained collector. Reaching down, Marianna withdrew a tunable video receiver from her toolbelt. Most of these commercial surveillance units transmitted in a narrow frequency band. Nothing. They must have jiggered it. Try a harmonic. Easy, now. There.

  On her receiver’s postage-stamp display there took shape an image of the chartroom as seen from the perspective of the ventilator duct. Wide angle coverage, all right, but centered on the map table. That put the doorway she’d been standing in just off camera. She couldn’t have been spotted from where she stood, thank God!

  There were ways to befuddle video surveillance, but it didn’t do to overuse them. She’d need such subterfuges when she actually entered the chartroom. And she was no longer planning on doing that tonight, not when there was an easier way to get what she was after. Readings of signal strength and orientation from several angles told her she could pick up the videocam’s transmissions from her stateroom. She’d only needed to know they were there.

  Thank you, Arkady Grigoriyevich! Rather than deploying her own spyeye, Marianna could piggyback off Grishin’s.

  She locked in the frequency and restashed her receiver. She was just turning toward the stairwell when she heard a new voice join the bull session on the bridge. Its grating timbre and curious accent hovered at the edge of recognition. She crept down to peer into the gloom of the wheelhouse again. One shadowy figure loomed over the rest. The mate and crewman had fallen
silent, but Jon was still talking, still trying his best to engage all comers and buy her more time.

  The stranger offered no reply to what Jon was saying, just grinned. The ruddy light from the exit sign glinted off two steel canines. And, with that, Marianna knew him.

  She felt her nostrils flaring, her lips skinning back to bare her teeth. It was the man who’d thrown her down the elevator shaft from the top of 17 State Street!

  As Knox entered the stateroom, Marianna looked up from her laptop. “Are you okay?”

  He was warmed by the look of concern on her face, though at a loss to explain it—she’d had the hard part. “Sure. Why, what’s up?”

  “Do you know who that was up on the bridge just now?”

  “The big guy? Said he’s a contractor from the Georgian Republic.”

  “You get a name?”

  “Yuri. He didn’t give a last name. Even getting that much was like pulling teeth. Hardest man I’ve ever tried talking to. I can’t say I’m looking forward to repeating the experience.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “In fact, if you see him coming, run the other way. He’s a contractor, all right—as in contract killer. You remember the guy I told you about, the one I tangled with back in New York?”

  “No shit . . . that’s him?” Knox’s stomach churned. He’d been close enough to reach out and touch the man. Or vice versa. “You sure?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve seen that winning smile before.”

  “The steel choppers? Used to be, back in the old Soviet Union, they were a pretty common dental appliance. I didn’t think porcelain was still in such short supply, though.”

  “Maybe with this Yuri guy it’s a fashion statement.” She twitched the corners of her mouth in imitation of a smile. “What was he doing up on the bridge?”

  “I got the impression he was looking for me—and you. Almost the only talking he did was to ask where you were. I told him I’d left you sleeping down in the stateroom. That I’d be down there myself if it wasn’t for a migraine so bad it made me want to die.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Nothing. That was when he grinned.”

  Marianna turned back to her laptop and finished linking the video receiver to dump its purloined signals to non-volatile memory. No coding required; CROM’s systems folks had installed half a gig of prefab software components on the little machine, and all she had to do was cookbook the right mods together. With a final flourish, she set up a simple motion-analysis routine to flag the frames where someone walked within range of Grishin’s chartroom videocam.

  She leaned back in her chair and stretched. “Now we wait,” she said, stifling a yawn. “If you’re right about the chartroom hiding an entrance to the lab, we’ll pick up shift change activity, at least.”

  “If I’m right?” Jon sat down on the edge of the bed just across from her, looking vaguely crestfallen. “The surveillance camera didn’t convince you?”

  “It’s pretty circumstantial,” she began, then relented. “Okay, okay, I’11 admit it looks like you’re onto something. It’s only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “Only I’d feel better if I knew how you did it. This inspired guess thing, I mean. Was it something you saw? Something you heard? Why didn’t I notice it? I was on the tour too.”

  “It . . . it’s not all that easy to explain.” He seemed at a loss for words, for once. “Things just didn’t . . . fit somehow.”

  “Things? What things?”

  “Sasha, for instance. He was trying too hard, too much indirection.” Jon’s expression evoked the disdain of the professional prestidigitator for the feeble effects of the rank amateur. “In particular, that whole business with Galina looked a little, um, staged. That, and the geometry of the firedoors being off, like I said.”

  “But that’s, like, nothing.” She stood and confronted him, hands on hips. “You’re saying you took a bunch of disconnected impressions and deduced the presence of a hidden room?”

  “It’s what I do.” He shrugged. “Not all the time, not reliably, but sometimes things just sort of, well, click for me. ‘Knox’s onboard pattern-matcher,’ they call it at the office.”

  “Okay.” Marianna sat down beside him on the bed, mulling it over. “Whatever you did, it worked. But sometime you’re going to have to tell me more about this pattern-matching business.”

  “Trade secret.” Jon grinned. “Incidentally, at times like this, it’s customary to turn to the consultant and, in a voice atremble with awe, exclaim ‘Wow, you must be a trained analyst!’ ”

  “Wow,” she mimicked, “you must be a trained analyst!”

  Then, without knowing quite why, she leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth.

  Quickly as the impulse had come, it was gone. She pulled back from him, her half-closed eyes flew wide open again, to see Jon looking as startled as she felt.

  Then she was up off the bed and standing on the opposite side of the room. From there, arms folded, she said, “So, what do we do next?”

  He said nothing, just stared at her. It occurred to her then that her last question might be subject to misinterpretation.

  “About your secret lab, I mean,” she said, so as to leave no doubt.

  16 | Idyll

  IN THE END, what they had done was table the matter and go to bed. In separate cabins, more’s the pity.

  Knox had drifted off to sleep that night thinking about her kiss. Even when they reconvened in Marianna’s room at eight-thirty the next morning, his lips were still tingling with the memory of it. All too brief, yes, but soft and warm as the one she’d hushed him with at the gala, and far less premeditated. Even now he could see the way the silken sheen of her lip gloss had been blurred by the momentary contact . . .

  “Earth to Jon.” Marianna raised her voice, jolting him back to reality. “Jon, do you read me?”

  “Hmm?” he managed.

  She sighed. “I was saying, if you’re not going to help out here,”—she jerked a thumb in the direction of the laptop sitting on her dressing table—“then how about you go rustle us up some coffee and O.J.?”

  Knox would have been more than pleased to help her review the hijacked surveillance video, if only they could’ve focused on the few potentially interesting sequences already earmarked by the motion-sensing routines. But no, Marianna was going strictly by the book, which meant slogging through all seven hours’ worth of image capture, ninety-five percent of it featuring an empty chartroom. Even with intermittent fast-forwarding, the exercise held all the fascination of watching paint dry. Knox didn’t even try to hide his relief at being assigned to the breakfast-procurement detail.

  They’d left the curtains drawn in their staterooms. Natural enough, given what they were up to, but it meant the brilliant sunlight out on deck took Knox by surprise. He shaded his eyes and walked to the rail.

  The sky was a bowl of crystalline blue deepening almost to violet at zenith, and unblemished save for a few small puffs of cloud gleaming far off on the horizon, so white they seemed lit from within. Out beyond the forward wind-baffles a stiff breeze was embroidering the ocean-top with lacy whitecaps. Knox took a deep breath of fresh, sea-scented morning air. Invigorating. He really should go back and drag Marianna out here.

  He was not alone in his enjoyment of the moment. At scattered intervals all along the rail, casually-dressed men and women stood in clusters of two and three, chatting, smoking, nursing cups of steaming liquids—tea, most likely—or just quietly contemplating the ensemble of sea and sky. Members of Rusalka’s headquarters and research staffs, no doubt, delighting in a spectacular Saturday morning.

  And, well apart from all the companionable little groupings, a solitary, black-garbed figure leaned against the rail. Looking, not out on the beauty of the morning, but down the length of the deck, directly at Knox. Noticing that Knox was looking at him, Yuri grinned back. Bright morning sun sparkled on his bared canines.

  Marianna a
nswered the door at Jon’s knock. “Perfect timing; I was just done with the scan.”

  “Oh, that looks good,” she added. Jon was balancing a tray laden with carafes of coffee and juice, a basketful of breakfast pastries, assorted miniature jam pots, and two table settings bearing the GEI crest.

  She cleared a space. “Here, set it down on the dresser.”

  “Thanks. I didn’t have anything this ambitious in mind, but the steward in that little outdoor dining nook wouldn’t take two lattes and an orange juice for an answer.” He poured coffees and handed her one. “Evidently word’s gotten around that we’re Mr. Bondarenko’s special guests. Everyone’s keeping an eye out for us, including your friend Yuri.”

  “I know. I was watching him watch you before.” She took a sip from her cup. “If he stays on us like this, it’s going to complicate things.”

  “What sorts of things? Did you find something?”

  “I’ll let you tell me.” Better he should draw his own conclusions. “Three of the flagged sequences are routine: mate comes in from the wheelhouse every couple hours to check position against the chart, stuff like that. The other two are, well, something else entirely. Here, take a look; see what you think.”

  She clicked on the hotlink for the third of the five motion-detection incidents. In response, the display filled with a freeze-frame of the chartroom, shot from the by-now familiar perspective of Grishin’s spycam. A timestamp in the lower righthand corner read 06:29:57 July 31.

  “Ready?” She tapped a key. “It’s showtime.”

  The digits of the timestamp came to life and began registering the passage of seconds and minutes once more. The camera resumed its slow circuit, left to right and back again. Then, with a quick blur of movement, someone entered the shot, stage left.

  “Notice he’s come in off the access corridor,” Marianna pointed out, “not from the bridge. Whoever he is, he’s not standing watch.”