Death Dream (51 page)

Besides, if Kyle blows up it'll take Jace with him. Jace has been helping him and once Dan finds out about that there'll be earthquakes and tidal waves.

So Smith is the best option. Go to Washington, get onto the power train. You've got to keep Chuck in line, though. Last night was a revelation. He's a macho creep under all that Beltway gloss. If I go to Washington with him I'll have to fight every inch of the way for my own self-respect.

Unless—there's still Peterson and whoever he's working for: Disney or Gulf and Western or one of the other corporate biggies. What if I offered to work for them? Vickie asked herself. What if I brought them ParaReality on a platter and showed them how they could use virtual reality in their own parks? I'd have to get past Peterson and talk to whoever he's working for.

She hesitated. Chuck said his people will scare Peterson off. But will the corporation behind him scare that easily?

If they contact me again, maybe I could get them to give me the kind of deal I'm looking for. That would be stabbing Kyle in the back. But if he destroys himself with this child porn thing, why shouldn't I try to land on my feet? It could even work out to my benefit.

Finished dressing, Vickie gave herself one last critical look in the mirror. Not bad for an old lady, she told herself. You'd look all right in Washington. Or in the corporate offices of Disney or MGM.

As she headed for the door she thought, it all depends on Kyle. If he actually gets Cyber World running on schedule we're golden. But if he cracks up before then, I've got to be able to get clear of the wreckage.

Quentin W. Smith III was trembling with eagerness. He had been angry, at first, because the phone call had come while he was in the VR simulation. He had been forced to terminate the session, to leave his gorgeous manipulation of the cabinet meeting, to come to the goddamned stupid phone.

But this call was important. This was the one that counted.

"So it really works?" Perry was asking.

"It works," Smith said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. "It works better than I thought it would. You've got to come down here and experience it for yourself."

"Do you think that's wise?"

"Why the hell not? Who's going to know? Take a couple days off and tell them you're going to Disney World, for Chrissakes."

Perry's tone was cautious. "Look, we're not playing games here. If word about this leaks out we could all end up in Leavenworth. Or worse."

"Jesus!" Smith snapped. "What kind of a pansy are you?"

"Hey, I don't like—"

"Never mind. Okay, I'm sorry. But you've got to get down here and try this for yourself. Then you'll see that it's exactly what we hoped it would be. Even better! In six months we'll have the whole cabinet eating out of our hand! In a year, the whole Congress!"

"It's that good?"

"Come and see for yourself."

"Maybe I should."

"You should."

"But what's this business about Army Intelligence? Why have you put them into the picture?"

"They're not in the picture. They don't know a damned thing about us."

"The hell they don't!" Perry's voice sounded tense, almost frightened.

"I needed some help to protect the security of our operation here," Smith explained. "They don't know what the operation is all about. I'm not that stupid."

"You had to get a pair of Army Intelligence goons down there to follow some private investigator?"

"It was necessary. For security."

"It was necessary to bring Army Intelligence into this? When McMasters finds out about this your name is going to be horse manure!"

That's not what Perry's worked up about
, Smith knew.
He was terrified that his name will be shit if things go wrong.

"Don't worry about it," Smith said.

"Don't worry? Have you gone nuts, Chuck? Do you realize—"

"Just haul your ass down here and take a look at what we've accomplished," Smith insisted, adding silently,
And stop acting like an old lady.

"This video thing of yours better be God-awful impressive," he warned. "McMasters won't be happy if it's just another fancy-dancey television gimmick. Neither will Ingram."

Smith grinned into the phone. "Don't worry. This is all we hoped it would be, and more. We'll be running the whole damned government inside of a year, you'll see."

Perry huffed. "Okay, I'll come down. I've got to see this for myself."

"Good. Do that."

"But I'm calling off those Army men you requisitioned. I don't see why you need the goddamned US Army to deal with one lousy private eye. I don't like having them involved."

Smith thought briefly of Vickie.
What the hell, I just did it to make her dependent on me.
"Okay," he said into the phone. "I think maybe they've already done the job I wanted them to do."

CHAPTER 39

It was Sunday morning when Luke Peterson realized he was no longer being followed. The big bronze Intrepid had gone away and he could not spot any replacement. He drove from his home in the trailer park south of the airport and spent the whole morning doodling around, looking for a tail. Nothing. Not at church, not at the shopping mall, not along the highway. Nobody was following him.

Which gave Luke Peterson reason to think hard. Maybe his contact actually did have friends in Washington high enough on the pecking order to get his tail removed.
Or maybe he just alerted whoever was tailing him so that they've gotten a whole lot smarter. Maybe they're watching me from the air, he thought. They could even do it from a satellite if they wanted to.

Peterson felt more worried without the obvious Intrepid behind him than when it had been there.

Sunday night. Dan sat wearily on the living room sofa, reading page after page of a report on brain physiology from a research group at Johns Hopkins University. It made little sense to him; the jargon was completely unfamiliar. But Jace had accessed this research paper from the Wright-Patterson library search system more than five years earlier.

The rest of the sofa was piled with papers. More report printouts lay scattered across the living room floor. The words were blurring in Dan's vision; he found himself struggling through the same paragraph for the third time. Or maybe it was the fourth.

Susan had spent the weekend alternating between her computer and the children. Her printer had chugged out a steady stream of reports on subjects as wildly divergent as computer chip manufacturing methods and sensory pathways in the human nervous system, optical data processors and the medical phenomenon called phantom limbs.

He had hardly seen Sue all weekend, except when she brought in more papers for him to read or handed him a tray of sandwiches and coffee. She kept the kids away from him entirely; they might have gone to Alaska for all he saw or heard of them.

Finally he let the paper drop from his fingers. Its unattached pages fluttered to the floor. Leaning his head back on the sofa Dan rubbed his aching eyes.

"Do you have a minute to kiss the kids good night?" Susan whispered.

He looked up, focused blearily on her at the doorway to the hall that led to the bedrooms.

"Yeah. Sure."

Philip was already blissfully asleep in his crib. Dan smiled down at his son and realized that the boy would soon be too big for the crib; he would have to convert it to a child's bed, if he could remember where he had put the instructions that had come with it.

Angela was tucked into her bed in her pink and white room, lit only by a Mickey Mouse lamp on the night table beside her.

"You want Amanda with you?" Dan asked her.

"Oh Daddy, I'm too big for that," she said, with no small disdain. "I haven't slept with Amanda in a long time."

He looked at his daughter. She was growing up, true enough. Soon she'll want to sleep with boys. But then he remembered that somebody was tampering with her VR games, invading her electronic fantasies.
I've got to put a stop to that before they hurt her.

Bending down, Dan kissed Angela on the forehead.

"Sleep well, Angel. Have happy dreams."

"You too Daddy."

He clicked off the lamp and left her bedroom, closing the door softly as if she were already asleep.

Susan was waiting for him in the hallway.

"Until we get this thing settled," Dan said to her, "I don't think we ought to let Angie play any more VR games at school."

"I've thought that for weeks," Susan replied.

"You'll tell her teacher?"

"First thing tomorrow."

"Good." He started for the living room.

"How's your reading going?"

He took a look at the paper blizzard and shook his head. "Jace seems to be interested in everything from computer architecture to phantom limbs."

Susan started to pick up the papers from the floor. "I only picked a small percentage of the papers he accessed over the years."

Dan knelt down to help her. "I guess if you tried to get all the papers he's looked at it would've filled the house."

"And then some." She stacked a pile on the coffee table. "I tried to give you as wide a sampling as possible. You know, picking as many different subjects as there were on the list."

"Yeah."

"I have the number of papers he accessed on each descriptor key word, so you can tell which subjects interested him most."

"What's the top subject?"

"Biofeedback."

"Biofeedback?"

" 'A method of controlling mental reactions and physical functions that are normally involuntary by the use of electronic monitoring devices,' " Susan recited. "I looked up the definition in the dictionary."

Squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by the scattered papers, Dan said, "Isn't that what people used to do back in the Sixties—change their pulse rate and stuff like that by listening to a tone in their ear-phones?"

"I think so," said Susan.

"But I didn't see any papers about biofeedback in the stuff I read."

"It's all in the oldest material. Seven, eight years ago. I didn't bother printing out material that old, but when the computer added up all the papers by subject, biofeedback was number one. Jace did a lot of reading on the subject back then."

"The library has records going back that far?"

She nodded. "I don't think the Air Force ever throws anything away."

Dan went back to picking the papers off the floor. The coffee table was starting to look like a library cart, but at least he could see the carpet again.

"Is the subject of phantom limbs what I think it is?" Susan asked.

He looked up at her. "An amputee still gets feelings from the limb that's been cut off. He feels as if the arm or leg is still there. It hurts him or itches or something."

"And he thinks he can move it? Like, reach out and grasp something with the amputated arm?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Jace accessed a lot of papers about phantom limbs. Duke University, MIT, the University of Milan, London School of Medicine, a lot from McGill and a couple of other Canadian schools."

Dan picked the last of the papers off the carpet and brought it to the coffee table. He sat on the cleared sofa; Susan sat down beside him.

"Apparently Jace got Joe Rucker his job," he said.

"Joe Rucker?"

"The security guard at the lab."

"The guy with one arm?"

"And one leg. He's got an artificial leg."

"You know," Susan said, "I thought I had seen him in Dayton."

"Yeah, you told me that. But he couldn't have been a security guard at the base."

"It wasn't on the base. I think it was at one of Doc's parties."

"Joe's never been to Dayton. I'm pretty sure of that."

"Then maybe it was somebody else who only had one arm."

"At a party at Doc's?"

Susan nodded.

"Was Jace at the party?"

"I'm not sure. I think maybe he was."

Dan felt his brows knitting into a frown. "I guess I could call Doc and ask him if he remembers. I sure as hell don't."

"You only remember numbers," Susan said.

"And dates. I've never missed a birthday or an anniversary, have I?"

"Because they're numbers," she teased.

"Still . . ."

Susan grew serious again. "There's another thing, now that I think of it. A lot of those papers were cross-referenced under pain control."

"Pain control?"

"Pain control. The subject seems to be linked to the work on phantom limbs."

Thinking out loud, Dan muttered, "Biofeedback, phantom limbs, pain control Jace has been studying all three."

"For years."

He glanced at his wristwatch. "Geez, it's not even nine o'clock yet. Feels like half-past midnight."

"You've had an exhausting weekend."

He pushed himself up from the sofa. "Doc should still be up."

"You're going to phone him now? On Sunday night?"

Heading for the wall phone in the kitchen, Dan replied over his shoulder, "I'll be seeing Jace first thing tomorrow morning—or at least as soon as he drags himself into the lab. I want to have all my ducks in a row before I face him."

Susan watched him through the pass-through, wondering if Dan really had the strength to face Jace down.

She had always felt that Jace depended on Dan, but her husband felt the other way: that he was nothing but a glorified technician; that if it weren't for Jace he would be a total nonentity. Now he's going to have to stand up to Jace, she told herself. I hope he can do it.

Dan heard the phone ring once, twice. In the middle of the third ring it was picked up. Doc's flat thin voice said, "Appleton residence."

"Hello Doc. It's me, Dan."

Immediately Appleton's voice took on a more tone. "Is something wrong with the access codes I gave you?"

"No, no. They worked fine. Sue dug up a lot of material."

"And?"

"I need to ask you a question."

"About Jace?"

"I think so. You remember a party you threw, oh, it must be more than five years ago, more like seven or eight, maybe—"

"Dan, I give parties every year at Christmas and the Fourth of July."