All the Rage rj-4

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Such a fastidious bird I've got."

  "You kidding?" Jack said. "You plopped that stuff down on George Veczy's column, and now he can't read the end."

  Abe fixed him with a silent, over-the-reading-glasses stare.

  Jack sighed. "All right then, hand me the Post, will you—unless you've messed up its sports section too."

  Abe's hand started toward it then stopped. "Well, well, well. Here's something that might interest you."

  "Something about the Mets, I hope," Jack said.

  "A different kind of sportsman—your preppy rioter friends are in the news again."

  "Sent to Sing-Sing, I hope."

  "Quite the contrary. They're walking—all of them."

  Jack's mood suddenly darkened. "Let me see that."

  Abe gave the Metro Section a one-eighty spin and jabbed his finger at a tiny article next to the lottery numbers box. Jack scanned it once, then, not quite believing his eyes, read it again.

  "None of them booked! Not one! No charges against any of them!"

  "Due to 'a new development' in the case, it says. Hmmm… what do you think that could mean?"

  Jack knew what Abe was getting at: Well-to-do guys, some of them undoubtedly with a connection or two in City Hall or Police Plaza, get a few strings pulled and sail home as if nothing had happened.

  And one of them was Robert B. "Porky" Butler. The bastard who'd damn near killed Vicky hadn't spent a single night in jail—wasn't even being charged with anything.

  "I've got to make a call."

  Abe didn't offer his phone and Jack wouldn't have used it if he had. Not with so many people using caller ID these days.

  Jack had retrieved Butler's phone number from his wallet by the time he reached the pay phone on the corner. He plunked in a few coins and was soon connected to the home of Robert B. Butler, alumnus of St. Barnabas Prep and attacker of little girls on museum steps.

  When the maid or whoever it was answered the phone and asked in West African-accented English who was calling, he made up a name—Jack Gavin.

  "I'm an attorney for the St. Barnabas Prep Alumni Association. I'd like to talk to Mr. Butler about the unfortunate incident Wednesday night and his injury. How is he doing, by the way?"

  "Very well," the woman said.

  "Is he in a lot of pain?"

  "Hardly any."

  Damn. He felt his jaw muscles tense. Have to fix that.

  "May I speak to him a minute?"

  "He's with a physical therapist right now. Let me check."

  A minute later she was back. "Mr. Butler can't come to the phone right now, but he'll be glad to see you anytime this afternoon."

  Keeping his voice even and professionally pleasant, Jack said he'd be over around one.

  Scaring Vicky, endangering her life, and then skating on any charges…

  He and Mr. Butler were going to have a little heart-to-heart.

  4

  Nadia sat in the sealed, dimly lit room and stared at the 3-D image floating in the air before her. The first thing she'd done upon reaching the GEM Basic lab was light up the imager and call up the Loki structure from memory: the Loki molecule—or rather its degraded form, which she'd begun thinking of as Loki-2—had appeared.

  Changed, just like her printout.

  OK. That could be explained by someone tampering with the imager's memory. But she had an ace up her sleeve. Before leaving yesterday she had scraped a few particles of the original Loki sample from the imager.

  She removed the stoppered test tube from her pocket and dumped the grains into the sample receptacle. Something about the color… she couldn't say exactly what, but it wasn't right. She sat back and waited, then punched up the image. Her mouth went dry as the same damn molecule took shape before her.

  The dry lab lightened, then darkened again as the door behind her opened and closed.

  "Are you a believer yet?"

  She turned at Dr. Monnet's voice. He stood behind her, looking as if he hadn't slept last night.

  She swallowed. "Tell me this is a trick. Please?"

  "I wish it were." He sighed. "You have no idea how much I wish this were some sort of hoax. But it is not."

  "It has to be. If you were simply asking me to believe that this molecule alters its structure during the course of some 'celestial event,' I could buy that. I'd want to know how the 'event' effected the change, but I could imagine gravitational influence or something equally subtle acting as a catalyst, and I could handle that. But what we've got here—if we haven't been flim-flammed—is a molecule that not only mutates from one form to another but substitutes its new structure for all records of its original structure. In effect, it's editing reality. And we both know that's impossible."

  "Knew," Dr. Monnet said. "That was what we assumed was true. Now we know different."

  "Speak for yourself."

  He smiled wanly. "I know how you feel. You are utterly confused, you are frightened and suspicious, yet you are also exhilarated and challenged. And the tug-of-war between all these conflicting emotions leaves you on the brink of tears. Am I right?"

  Nadia felt her eyes begin to brim as a sob built in her throat. She wiped them and nodded, unable to speak.

  "But it's true, Nadia," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Trust me. We are not being tricked. There's something here that challenges our most fundamental beliefs about the nature of the physical world, about reality itself."

  And that was what was so upsetting, making her crazy. What if the ability to reorder reality, along with the very memory of reality, were not confined to this one molecule? What if it were happening every day? How many times had she typed or written a word and then stopped and stared at it, thinking it looked wrong, that it was spelled some other way? She'd look it up and find most times that her original spelling had been correct, so she'd move on despite the feeling that it still looked wrong.

  "We must know how it works," Dr. Monnet said. "And the first step toward an answer is to stabilize the molecule."

  "How can you do that if you can't even remember what it looked like originally?"

  He pulled a vial from his pocket and held it out to her. "Because we have a new supply."

  Nadia stared at the tube for a heartbeat, then snatched it from him and with trembling hands began preparing a sample of the pale blue powder for the imager. When it was ready she fed it to the machine and waited.

  Finally the molecule appeared and she wanted to cheer when she recognized it. This was what had been erased from her brain. Now the memory was back and, disturbing though its shape might be, she felt whole again.

  "How… where did you find the unaltered Loki?"

  "From the source. It doesn't change within the source, only after it's been removed from it."

  She turned to face Dr. Monnet. "And are you still keeping the source a secret?"

  "For now, yes."

  Nadia wanted to scream at him to tell her. It had to be organic—a plant? An animal? What?

  "And the mysterious celestial event? Does that remain a secret too?"

  "I only held back on that until you'd seen for yourself the changes wrought by the event. The event itself is common, occurring a dozen, sometimes thirteen times per year: the new moon."

  Nadia wet her lips. "The new moon? When was that?"

  "Exactly eight-forty-two last night."

  The cycle of the moon, one of the primal rhythms of the planet. And the new moon… a time when Earth's celestial night-light was out, blind to what was going on below on the darkest night of the cycle.

  A chill ran over her skin.

  "I'd like you to get started right away," Dr. Monnet was saying. "We have no time to lose. The Loki source may be… unavailable after this, and then we will have lost forever our chance to unlock its secrets."

  "Don't you think we should get some outside help? I mean, if we've only got twenty-nine days…"

  Dr. Monnet shook his head vigorously. "No. Absolutely not. Loki does
not leave GEM. I thought I made that clear."

  "You did, but—"

  "No buts about it." His face paled, but Nadia wasn't sure whether from anger or fear. "Absolutely no outside consultation on this."

  Nadia wanted to wail that he couldn't—shouldn't—put all this responsibility on a beginner like her.

  "You are going to help me, I hope," she said.

  "Of course. To save you time, I'll show you all the dead ends I've already explored. After that, I'm counting on you to come up with a new perspective."

  Uncertainty tickled her gut. "I don't know if you should count too heavily—"

  He held up a hand. "I never told you this, but before I hired you I put in a call to Dr. Petrillo."

  She stiffened. Her research mentor during her fellowship—the Grand Old Man of anabolic steroids. "What did he say?"

  "What didn't he say! I couldn't get him to stop talking about you. He was overjoyed you were staying in research instead of 'wasting' your talents in clinical practice. So you shouldn't underestimate your abilities, Nadia. I'm certainly not. But as an extra incentive: if you stabilize the Loki molecule within the next four weeks, I am authorized to offer you a bonus."

  "Really, that's not necessary."

  He smiled. "You shouldn't say that until you hear the amount. How does one million dollars sound?"

  Nadia was struck dumb. She opened her mouth but it took a few seconds before she was capable of coherent speech. "Did… did you say—T

  "Yes. A lump sum of one million. You can—"

  Pat, a middle-aged tech with salt-and-pepper hair, knocked on the dry lab door before pushing it open. Fluorescent light streamed in from the hall.

  "Excuse me, Dr. Monnet," she said, "but Mr. Garrison's on the phone."

  Dr. Monnet looked irritated. "Tell him I'll call him back."

  "He say's it's urgent. 'An emergency' was how he put it."

  "Oh, very well." He turned to Nadia. "I'll be right back. Nothing is more important right now than this project."

  I guess not, she thought. A million dollars… a million dollars!

  The words kept echoing through her head as she waited, fantasizing what she could do with that amount of cash. She and Doug could get married right away, put a down payment on a house, get his software company up and running, jump out of limbo, and start living.

  When a good ten minutes had passed and Dr. Monnet didn't return, Nadia stepped outside and signaled to Pat.

  "Where's Dr. Monnet?"

  She pointed toward the door. "He got off the phone with Mr. Garrison and hurried upstairs."

  Nothing more important right now than this project, hmmm? she thought as she returned to the dry lab. Obviously something was. She hoped Mr. Garrison's emergency wasn't too serious or personal.

  She stepped up to the imager and began rotating the 3-D Loki image back and forth, hoping the more she saw of it, the less discomfiting it would seem.

  I'm going to beat you, she thought, staring at the molecule. Not for the bonus… this is the challenge of a lifetime, and I'm going to show I can do it.

  But she wouldn't turn down that bonus. No way.

  5

  "We've been hacked!" Kent Garrison said as soon as the soundproof door was pulled shut and latcned.

  Kent, flushed, suit coat off, crescents of perspiration darkening the armpits of his bulging blue shirt, stood at the end of the table.

  "Not true," Brad Edwards said. Dressed in a perfectly tailored blue blazer, he sat hunched forward in his chair across from Luc, twisting his delicate hands over the mahogany surface. "They said they think someone got past the fire wall, but they're not sure."

  Stunned, Luc sank into a chair. "What? How? I thought we were supposed to have the best security available."

  "Well, apparently we don't." Kent directed a venomous stare at Brad who was responsible for the computer system. Kent tended to be full of bluster except when Dragovic was around.

  "I was assured we had a state-of-the-art fire wall," Brad said. His usually perfect hair was in disarray, as if he'd been pulling at it. "But that was last year. Hackers learn new tricks too."

  "Why aren't they sure?" Luc asked.

  "They found evidence of temporary alterations in codes that could have innocent causes." Brad ran a hand across his mouth. "I don't pretend to understand it all."

  Kent couldn't seem to stand still. He paced in an arc at the end of the table. "If it was some fourteen-year-old with too much time on his hands, I don't give a shit. He might have screwed up some data, but he'd never be able to make any sense of what he found."

  "What if it wasn't a kid?" Luc said. "What if it was someone looking for something on us?"

  "Like who, for instance?"

  "One of our competitors. We're playing with the big boys now. Or maybe Dragovic hired someone. Or worse yet, a corporate raider looking for inside information before making a move on us."

  Finally Kent sat down. He rubbed his eyes. "Oh, God."

  Luc turned to Brad. "What countermeasures are we taking?"

  Brad perked up at this. "The software people are going to link up to our system and monitor it. If anyone breaks in, they'll know, and they'll trace him."

  "And then what?"

  "We throw the fucking book at him," Kent said. "Unless of course it's our friend Milos, in which case we'll say pretty please don't do that anymore because it makes us very nervous."

  Luc said, "But what if the hacker learns what we're doing with the money that's supposedly going to R & D?"

  Silence around the table. An expose would lead to an audit, an audit would eventually lead to Loki, and that would put them all behind bars for a long, long time.

  Brad Edwards let out a long, tortured groan as he shook his head. "I don't know how much more of this I can take. I did not enter into this venture to become a criminal. We started with a straight honest business—"

  "That was going down the tubes!" Kent said.

  "And so we got in bed with the devil to save it."

  "I don't see you hopping out of bed."

  Brad stared at his hands. "Sometimes I wish the shit would hit the fan. Then this whole ordeal would be over. Maybe then I could sleep at night. When was the last time either of you had a decent night's sleep?"

  Good question, Luc thought. If not for a few glasses of his best wine before retiring, he doubted he'd sleep at all.

  "Cut the crap, will you?" Kent said, his face now nearly as red as his hair. "If you go up, don't think you'll be doing your time in some federal country club! We're talking drugs, here, and worse. With what they'll have on us, you'll spend the rest of your life in Rikers or Attica, where they'll pass you around as an after-dinner treat."

  "Me?" Brad said, his lower lip quivering. "Just me? What about you?"

  Kent shook his head. "I'll blow a big hole through my brain before it ever gets that far."

  Luc wanted to scream. He'd heard all this before. "Can we return to the matter at hand? What do we do if this hacker breaks in and learns enough to bring us down?"

  Kent did not miss a beat. "He gets the Macintosh treatment." He looked around, daring anyone to challenge him.

  Luc had a flash of Macintosh's face as he died… the bulging eyes, the startled O of his open mouth…

  Not again… please, not again…

  "Let us hope we won't be faced with that choice," he said. "If it was indeed an intrusion, perhaps it was just a capricious stunt by an otherwise disinterested hacker who will target another system tonight."

  "But if he doesn't," Brad said. "If he chooses to come back, we'll track him and find him."

  They fell into silence. The meeting was over, but no one moved to leave. Luc didn't know how the others felt, but the world beyond their insulated, isolated, soundproof, bug-proof boardroom seemed full of danger and menace, a giant trap waiting to snap shut on him. He wanted to delay venturing outside this sheltering cocoon as long as possible.

  6

  Jack spent mu
ch of the late morning on his computer, designing an attorney business card. He'd used the program only twice before and still hadn't got the hang of it. He botched the first couple of attempts, then came up with a design that looked like the real thing. Running off a single sheet yielded a dozen cards. Plenty.

  At one o'clock exactly, showered, shaved, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and striped tie, John Gavin, attorney-at-law, presented himself and his brand-new card to the doorman at the Millennium Towers on West Sixty-seventh Street. A call upstairs confirmed tbat he was expected, and he was pointed toward the elevator.

  The Butler condo was on the twenty-first floor. On his way up Jack reviewed his options. He hadn't yet worked out just how he was going to handle Butler—hang him out the window for a while or maybe break his other leg—a lot would depend on how Jack felt when he saw him again. Right now he was in a pretty good mood. A shame to spoil it like this, but some things you could let slide; other things you couldn't.

  A private nurse, her black skin seeming even darker against her white uniform, greeted him at the door. Jack recognized her accent from his phone call. She led him to the study and left him with Mr. Butler.

  Jack felt the old fury scald his insides again as he stared at the bastard. Butler wore a Princeton sweatshirt and matching sweatpants with one leg cut off at mid-thigh to accommodate his cast. And he still looked like Porky Pig.

  "Gavin, right?" he said, thrusting out a hand. "Bob Butler. Thanks for coming over." When Jack didn't shake hands, Butler said, "Something wrong?"

  "Don't I look familiar?" Jack said.

  "Not really." He smiled apologetically. "I assume you're a Barny if you're working for the alumni association, but I can't recognize some of the guys in my own class, let alone—"

  "Last night," Jack said through his teeth.

  Butler's smile faded. He averted his eyes. "Yeah. Last night. I suppose you want to know about that."

  "I know all about it," Jack said. "I was there, remember?"

  Butler looked up at him again. "You were?"

  Jack leaned closer, pointing to his face. "Remember?"

  "No," Butler said. "Everything's kind of a blur."