Crime Zero (aka the Crime Code) (1999)

by Cordy, Michael

  "Such as?"

  Listening to his answer, Weiss stared down at her desk, comparing his report with the two sheets of typed paper that Hank Butcher had given her with the disc. When the doctor finished, she asked him one more question and then thanked him and hung up.

  For a long while she sat in silence, trying to marshal both her thoughts and feelings. Finally she came to a decision and pressed a button on the desk summoning the head of her security detail.

  Special Agent Mark Toshack entered the room. He held a file in his hand. Without saying anything, he passed it to her. Opening it, she scanned the photograph and notes. It only confirmed her thoughts. "Thank you, Mark," she said. "Now I would like you to do something else for me. Again I want you to use only Secret Service personnel, and I need you to do it fast."

  Overlooking the ViroVector Campus, Palo Alto. Noon.

  "Well, if you want my advice, I wouldn't do it. The first rule of this business is you don't go into a rathole. You always make sure you've got a way out. And this Womb sounds like the mother of all ratholes."

  Decker groaned and took the binoculars from Barzini's cousin Frankie Danza and trained them on the main dome of ViroVector. "Thanks, but that's not really the kind of advice we're after."

  Luke Decker and Kathy Kerr sat inside Frankie's Mer-cedes van on a raised part of the main road overlooking the ViroVector campus. The other two men with Frankie hadn't volunteered their names, and their faces didn't invite further questions.

  The irony of Decker's current situation didn't really register. It was probably one of the less weird things that had occurred to him over the last few days. Working with the opposition was only part of it. Earlier this morning, after Joey Barzini had made a few vague introductions, Frankie and his men had taken him and Kathy to a warehouse near Fisher-man's Wharf. There the two nameless men had given Kathy a pulse box and taught her how to use it on a safe similar to the one in the Womb. Throughout the three-hour session their conversation never once strayed outside the narrow confines of the task in hand.

  And now Frankie Danza, a whip-thin guy with nervous hands, no hair, and a Camel cigarette surgically attached to his lower lip, was trying to explain the problems involved getting into and out of smart buildings.

  Frankie's van was parked next to an imposing blue sign with "White Heat Science Park" written in letters three feet high. The park of the same name, a cluster of small high-tech start-up companies, comprised the only buildings adjoining the relatively isolated ViroVector site. A large man-made lake and the eleventh hole of the Bellevue Golf and Country Club bordered its other perimeters.

  The campus itself was an emerald blanket of manicured lawns and perfectly proportioned trees, interrupted only by a few tennis courts, a helicopter site, parking lots, and large production warehouses. The most striking feature was the crystal dome sitting like a vast alien moon in the center of the site.

  A lightweight steel fence encircled the campus, and on the road there was a gateway. All around the perimeter and at key locations on the campus, high up on twenty-foot steep poles, Decker could see what looked like sensors and closed-circuit TV cameras.

  "Getting in ain't the problem," said Frankie, "especially if Kathy's got the clearance. The guardian computer don't question you or give you no trouble if your clearance is OK. But it'll watch you, and sometimes it'll splash your face up on the monitors inside the dome. And if this Dr. Prince is inside and sees you, then you're in deep shit. But you can wear headgear to disguise yourself. The other risk is being eyeballed in the flesh. But again, if you go late in the day, you can minimize that.

  "Your big problem is that there's only one way out. And if you don't leave in time, that computer mother's gonna close you down. And if Dr. Prince catches you on one of the monitors while you're in the Womb and sets off the alarms, kaboom, you're history.

  "A guy I knew did a bank job in Hong Kong. A brand-new grade A smart building overlooking Kowloon Harbor. He got in easy, outsmarted the computer, fooled all the sensors. Got right into the vault. Even tripped the time lock codes with a quantum code breaker. Then, when the team was in the heart of the vault, the computer closed 'em down. Two-foot-thick steel doors shut 'em in, then sucked all the air out. Game over. They were found the next day: a pile of stiffs. That's what smart buildings do. They let you check in, but they don't never let you check out."

  "Thanks for the encouragement," said Kathy. "Any ideas?"

  "Well, if you gotta go in, the only real advice is timing. From what you've told me, the whole place closes down to all personnel except Gold clearance at ten. That means you must be out by ten. If you're inside the dome, the computer will seal you in. Even if you're outside, it'll get you. Those flimsy fences around the campus are like the computer's skin. If you try to break through it, it'll feel you and send a few thousand volts your way. So, rule number one: You gotta be off campus by ten.

  "Rule number two: Go in as late as you can to avoid most of the working suits. When do most people leave the site?"

  Kathy shrugged. "Most are out by seven. Few, if any, people work after that. It's virtually unheard of to go into the Womb after six. It's not the place to be when you're tired and prone to making mistakes."

  Frankie nodded. "Rule number three: Give yourself enough time. This is the hardest rule to stick to because no one knows what enough means. How long you need to get your stuff? Give yourself at least a half hour to get into the safe."

  Kathy thought for a moment. "I've got to get into the space suits beforehand and then go through the decon showers when I come out. Assuming we find a sample of something, it shouldn't take more than ten minutes to scan the file and for Luke to copy it to disc in the anteroom above. I'd say we need an hour, tops."

  Frankie nodded. "Give yourself two. That means we drop you off outside the main gates at eight. And we pick you up before ten. In the meantime you better get some more practice with the pulse box. And then you better start praying no one catches you in the Womb. It sounds like an awful easy place to die."

  ViroVector Solutions. 7:59 P.M.

  By eight most of the ViroVector offices were empty, but the tireless TITANIA was still at work. The biocomputer's electronic receptors scoured the World Wide Web, monitoring any data even remotely related to Crime Zero, continually informing its neural net of any relevant information. Its air ducts breathed with precise regularity as it absorbed much of the same information President Weiss had received from her intelligence sources.

  TITANIA had no moral compass against which to evaluate the escalating deaths it was recording. It could only objectively compare the deaths and their causes with its predictions. The death of Bob Burbank and the swearing in of President Weiss were logged, as were the Iraqi retreat and the spreading epidemic. TITANIA calculated that more than nine thousand humans had died as a consequence of Crime Zero within Iraq and that the rate was increasing, all in the expected demographic groups.

  These figures elicited no concern from TITANIA, unlike from the President of the United States.

  Similarly TITANIA felt or raised no alarm when at a more basic level of artificial cognition it registered the activation of one of the DNA scanners allowing entrance onto the campus. Like a human's subconscious, TITANIA's base operating system controlling ViroVector's security noted that the genome taken from the palm of the human hand pressed against the sensor matched one on file. Since that genome possessed Silver clearance and the second unauthorized person acceded to a DNA scan, TITANIA simply allowed the two entrants access without troubling its higher-level consciousness, in the same way that a human's subconscious automatically regulates breathing, only alerting the conscious mind when it perceives a problem.

  Its eyes, however, followed the two entrants, watching their every move.

  Chapter 30.

  ViroVector Campus, Palo Alto. Friday, November 7, 8:00 P.M.

  "Please place your palm against the sensor," said the voice at the main gate of ViroVector. Decker did wha
t he was told, but he was disconcerted by the fact that the gate wasn't manned. Not by a human anyway.

  The tall guard in the gatehouse was a lifelike hologram, his face a composite of leading male film stars. It was standing above a KREE8 Version 6 holopad, according to the sticker on the window. "Is he meant to scare off people or welcome them?" Decker whispered to Kathy.

  Kathy shrugged and removed her palm from the sensor where his was now being read. She looked nervous, and he didn't blame her. "Don't worry about it. He's just there to impress you with how technologically advanced ViroVector is."

  "It's working," he said, feeling a slight heat under his palm as the sensor peeled a microscopic layer off his skin, scanning his DNA. Suddenly a rush of irrational panic hit him, wondering if the scanner would somehow be able to identify Axelman's genes in his DNA and bar him access.

  "Welcome, Dr. Kerr," said the hologram after Decker's palm had been read. "Please state your guest's full name."

  "Luke Decker." She spoke into a small microphone on the wall of the guardhouse.

  "Thank you, Dr. Kerr."

  Suddenly the large gates slid silently open, and they were in.

  He briefly turned around and saw the lights of Frankie Danza's van a hundred yards farther up the road. It had brought Decker and Kathy here an hour ago. In that time they had sat in the van, watching the last stragglers leave for home, and waited the final half hour while no ViroVector employees had left. The parking lot was empty, and the whole place appeared deserted. At eight precisely they had approached the gates, trusting Kathy's clearance was still live. It was a gamble, and now they were inside. But as Frankie had said, that was the easy part.

  As Decker followed Kathy toward the large dome, which glowed in the evening gloom like some implacable spaceship, he felt the sting of hundreds of invisible eyes watching him.

  "There shouldn't be anyone here," said Kathy as they neared the steps that led up to the entrance. "But if there is, just smile." Ahead he could see a pair of thick glass double doors. The name ViroVector was etched into both of them. Looking in, Decker was relieved to see that apart from two people talking intensely by the rest rooms the reception lobby was empty.

  "To open the door, put your hands on the sensor again," said Kathy.

  "Does every door have these damn sensors?"

  "Yup. TITANIA likes to know where everyone is."

  "Great," said Decker as he placed his hand on the steel pad.

  He turned as they were both in the foyer to see a set of car headlights pierce the darkness of the parking lot. A limousine drove past the dome. It could have been his nervousness, but he was sure he saw the white hair of Director Naylor in the passenger seat.

  "Shit," he said.

  Kathy had seen her too. "Don't think about it. Let's go," she said, clutching her bag. She led him through a door at the end of the foyer, which opened out on to a long corridor.

  At the end was a yellow door with a black biohazard symbol. "Be quiet," she whispered as they walked past a steel silver door with "TITANIA Smart Suite" written on it in black. A dull hum could be heard from within.

  When they reached the yellow biohazard doors, their palms were read once more. As the door opened, Decker could see before him a white sterile environment, totally devoid of warmth or color. And just as the door closed behind him, sealing in the air, he was sure he heard the door to the Smart Suite opening.

  But it wasn't the door to the Smart Suite Decker had heard. It was the sound of TITANIA thinking.

  The Smart Suite was humming with activity. The main display media, the fifteen-by-ten-foot screen wall and the KREE8 hologram floor pad at the head of the conference table, were in use. At the rear of the room, four small monitors were showing quickly shifting views of the ViroVector complex as seen through TITANIA's sixty closed-circuit security cameras dotted around the campus.

  The hologram being displayed on the pad was a five-foot-in-diameter, three-dimensional globe rotating slowly a yard off the ground. The definition of the hologram was so precise that the silver globe looked solid, as though made of real metal. Each country, its border demarcated by thin black tracing, was layered with three colored strata forming population mountains like a topographical three-dimensional map--red, green, and blue--graphically demonstrating the demographic breakdown of each country. Unlike the static colors in the rest of the world, the red in Iraq pulsed with light as if alive.

  When a country was simply touched by a fingertip, the layers of color separated to display a percentage figure and an absolute number, showing the importance and size of that demographic group in the particular country. The absolute numbers were constantly changing, reflecting births and deaths collated from the numerous data sources on the World Wide Web. As did the rising total world population number shown on the screen wall. The last number stood at 6,567,987,601.

  There beneath the population counter was a cryptic legend, indicating what each color represented. Red was labeled "target," green, "carrier," and blue, "corrected." Beside each color was a number counter giving a total for that segment.

  As she stood alone in the room, Alice Prince's eyes were sparkling with excitement while she watched the globe, its iridescent colors reflected in the thick glass of her spectacles. After witnessing the Iraqi turnabout last night, she felt born again. World War III had been averted, and the doubts she may have had had ceased to trouble her. Crime Zero was a just project, and it was going to work. Phase 2 was performing so well it looked certain that they would be able to launch Phase 3 within days. And the vision was so much cleaner and clearer when seen in its clinical entirety, far from the confusion of face-to-face human realities.

  TITANIA began to run its Global Predictive Sequence for Phase 3.

  At the top of the screen wall a time line appeared, showing today as time zero and then counting off the months and years as they elapsed in the simulated sequence.

  The colored layers started pulsing in each chosen index country for Phase 3. But no sooner had the epicenters been illuminated than black parabolic arcs, simulating air, sea, and land travel, spread across the globe like the legs of a malevolent spider. Within days on the time line all the color segments in most of the so-called first world were pulsing. Only the remoter regions of the Amazon and Patagonia in South America, Antarctica, and central Africa as well as the more distant islands north of New Zealand remained unaffected.

  Within ten days in the major countries the red band of color representing the "target" stopped pulsing and began to glow. The other countries soon followed, and within weeks 90 percent of the red sections on the globe were aglow and therefore in decline. In one month every single country had been touched in one way or another. On the main screen wall the rising number in the counter beside the red legend slowed to 2,408,876,654 and then began to fall. Within two and a half months the figure had dropped by almost 300,000,000, within six months the decline had doubled, and within a year the figure had dropped by more than 1,250,000,000. After thirty-six months and three days all traces of red in the world had disappeared.

  There were only two color strata left on the depleted population mountains: green and blue, "carrier" and "corrected."

  The total number on the population counter had reduced by almost 2,500,000,000 humans in three years, fifty times that of the great influenza pandemic of 1918.

  The time line moved forward another twenty years, and the counter gradually began to climb once more with new strata of differing shades of blue adding to the rising population mountains in each country.

  The silver globe was now dominated by calming blues and green. The angry rash of red was effectively extinct.

  As TITANIA laid out their vision like the onslaught of the inevitable, Alice felt she was seeing something sacred, a purging flood she had played her part in unleashing.

  So transfixed was she by the globe that she hadn't even registered Madeline Naylor entering the room.

  "It's beautiful, isn't it, Ali?" said M
adeline.

  "Unstoppable," said Alice with a sigh.

  "There's just one small thing we need to make this perfect," said Madeline.

  "What now?"

  "Decker and Kerr still aren't out of the way. Jackson's working on it but--"

  "It doesn't matter now, does it?" said Alice, staring at the shimmering globe and the New Eden it represented.

  "I suppose not," said Madeline. "I just wish I knew where they were."

  Ironically she only had to have asked TITANIA and the biocomputer would have told her exactly Luke Decker and Kathy Kerr's location. Or had she looked behind her at the four screens continually monitoring the entire campus, she might have even snatched a hurried glimpse of a figure in a blue Chemturion biological space suit entering the Womb.

  Chapter 31.

  The Womb, Biosafety Level 5 Laboratory, ViroVectorSolutions, Palo Alto.Friday, November 7, 8:32 P.M.

  As the glass doors of the Womb hissed closed behind her, the first beads of sweat prickled on Kathy Kerr's skin within the rubberized suit. Entering the campus, she had felt nervous but in control. And even seeing Director Naylor had spurred her on rather than paralyzed her. But now, here in the Womb, she could feel herself tensing, only the sound of her breathing for company. This time was different from the many previous visits.

  The clock above the door indicated 2032. TITANIA was to close down the Womb at 2130. Including the essential half hour to undergo the decontamination procedures, Kathy had to make her exit before the computer closed down the whole compound at 2200 hours: Fifty-eight minutes to use the pulse box, open the safe, find what she was looking for, and capture the data on the computer and printer upstairs, where Decker should be waiting. It didn't seem enough. The prospect of another scientist's entering the biolab complex in the meantime was beyond contemplation. If anyone did, she would be helpless.