Jericho Iteration (25 page)

Off to one side, I saw a small isolated packet appear off to one side of the matrix, as if it was a displaced cream-colored electron. For a second, nothing happened …

And then something happened.

Almost quicker than the eye could follow, a bridge extended itself outward from the cube: a string of silver packets, following a weightless pattern that, during its zigzagging motion, vaguely resembled the L-shaped movement a knight takes upon a chessboard. Before I could take a breath, the bridge had connected with the isolated packet of information containing MarzBot. There was the briefest moment while the packet still remained off-white.

Then it turned silver.

Then it was sucked straight into the cube as the bridge collapsed in upon itself, reeling in the packet like a fisherman towing in a trout that had taken the bait. Within a second, the MarzBot packet was gone …

And the cube was slightly larger.

“Goddamn,” I said. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Jah said quietly. “The computer did it by itself. I haven’t touched the keyboard since I slipped MarzBot into the floppy port and hit the
ENTER
key. The virus reached out to the program, broke through its copy-protect subroutine, accessed its source code, and absorbed the game … all in the time it took for us to watch.”

I pulled off the HMD, shook off the aftereffects of VR decompression, and stared at the monitor. The image of the matrix cube on the computer screen was much flatter now, less lifelike than what I had seen in cyberspace … yet it was no less threatening.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Fuckin’ A, man.” Jah was staring at me, his eyes wide with fear. “This thing is the balls. I don’t know what you found, but it’s no ordinary virus. It can’t be detected, it can’t be fought off, but it takes over anything that even gets close to it.”

He pointed at the screen. “I’ve tried everything I could throw at it,” he said, his voice filled with both anger and awe. “Other antigens, Norton Tesseract, Lotus Opus … shit, even a shareware disk containing a virus that someone once gave me as a gag … and it swamps every program I’ve given it.”

Jah shook his head in wonderment. “Whatever it is, it’s one hungry son of a bitch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was—”

The antique Mickey Mouse phone on his desk buzzed, interrupting his train of thought. Jah swore under his breath as he bent backward to pick it up; he listened for a moment, then cupped a hand over the receiver.

“It’s Dad,” he said. “He wants you to come upstairs right away … says that he just got a call from someone who wants to talk to you.”

I was still staring at the monitor, watching as the last few packets in the matrix went from white to silver. “Is it important?” I murmured, not wanting to distract myself with a call from some yahoo. It’s not very often you get to look the devil straight in the eye. Jah asked his father if it was urgent, then he cupped the receiver again.

“He says it came from someone named Beryl Hinckley,” Jah said. “She wants to meet you an hour from now.”

T
HE MIDDAY LUNCH RUSH
in Clayton was just beginning as I climbed out of the rickshaw cab I had caught at MetroLink station and paid off the driver. The kid folded the money I gave him and shoved it into his fanny pack without so much as a word, then pulled out into the four-lane traffic of Central Avenue, playing a quick game of chicken with a streetcar as they rounded the corner of Forsyth together.

Long before St. Louis’s county and municipal governments had merged, Clayton had been a small metropolis in its own right, a prosperous “edge city” just west of Forest Park. Now it had become St. Louis’s uptown business district, its high-rise office buildings constituting a second skyline several miles from the riverfront. Compared to downtown, though, most of the damage suffered by Clayton during the quake had been cleaned up months ago, thanks in no small part to federal relief money. A few small offices had been condemned, a couple of side streets were still impassable, but otherwise it was now hard to tell whether this side of town had been affected at all by New Madrid.

No wonder. Clayton had always looked like a little piece of Los Angeles, disassembled from Beverly Hills and airlifted, brick by pink granite brick, to greater St. Louis. Yet I had never much cared for this part of the city. Despite its sleek postmodern veneer, Clayton was still a ghetto: ten square blocks of overpaid tax accountants, corporate lawyers, and executive vice presidents, an arrogant Disneyland for the aging yupsters and young MBAs who strutted down the sidewalks, each heading for his or her next opportunity to score big bucks. Although ERA troopers were invisible during the day, they were always out in force at night to keep Squat City refugees from taking up residence in the alleys and doorways of the social gentry who called Clayton home. Fall from grace, though, and you fall hard; some of those refugees probably used to live here, too.

The weather had turned bad; the blue skies of early morning had given way to pale gray clouds as a late April cold front began to move in from the west. Offices were letting out for lunch hour as I made my way down Central Avenue’s crowded sidewalk to Le Café François, about halfway down the block from the county courthouse.

It was your typical business-lunch bistro, already packed with salesmen and secretaries, and it took me a couple of moments before I spotted her. Beryl Hinckley was seated in a secluded booth at the back of the restaurant, nursing a cup of cappuccino as she furtively watched the door. Upon spotting me, she gave no overt sign of recognition other than to nod her head slightly; I cut my way through the dining room and slid into the booth across the table from her.

“Hi,” I said. “Long time, no see.”

“You’re late,” she said coldly. “If you’d been any longer getting here, I would have left.”

I shrugged. “If you wanted a reporter, you should have asked for one who owns a car.”

Or one who had changed his clothes or taken a shower within the past twenty-four hours,
I might have added; her nose wrinkled at my slovenly appearance. It wasn’t my fault; she had given me barely enough time to catch the Green Line train out here, let alone clean up a little.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said calmly. “This will have to be quick. When we’re through here, you’re going to walk me down the block to the courthouse, where I’m going to find a judge and request that he place me in protective custody.”

“What?” Had she told me instead that she planned to throw herself off the Martin Luther King Bridge, she couldn’t have caught me more by surprise.

“I’d prefer to surrender to a federal circuit judge,” she went on, “but the federal courthouse is only three blocks from the stadium. Since the whole point is to avoid being captured by ERA, I’ll have to settle for a state judge.”

“Whoa, wait a minute, lady … back up a second. Why are you—”

I was interrupted by a young waitress coming by to offer me a menu. I was hungry and could have done well with a burger and fries, but I shook my head and asked for coffee instead. The girl gave me a sweet smile and sashayed away.

“Did you bring your PT?” she asked when the waitress was out of earshot. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Joker. “Good. I picked a public place for this interview because it’s the safest option right now, but we still don’t have much time.”

I placed Joker on the table between us but didn’t switch it into audio-record mode just yet. “On the contrary,” I replied, “I think we’ve got all the time in the world. At least long enough for us to have coffee and get to know each other a little better—”

“Mr. Rosen …” she said impatiently.

“Y’know, the usual stuff. What high school did you go to? How did you like the Muny the other night? What did you say to my best friend that got him killed? That sort of thing.”

The muscles in Hinckley’s jaw tightened; she looked as if she were about to explode, but she was forced to remain calm while the waitress returned to place a mug of black coffee in front of me. “I’ve done a little checking on you since we met,” I went on after the girl had vanished again. “Found out a few interesting things, like the fact that you’re a research scientist at Tiptree, involved with the Ruby Fulcrum project for the company’s Sentinel program, and that your boss, Richard Payson-Smith, is currently being sought by the feds in connection with two murders.”

I picked up the cream pitcher and diluted the coffee with a dash of milk. “Also, you’ve been in hiding since last night,” I said as I stirred the coffee. “Given the neighborhood we’re in, you must have taken the Green Line out here, then checked into either the Radisson or the Holiday Inn … registering under an assumed name and paying for the room in cash, of course, since you were smart enough to take out all that money from your credit cards last night.”

Her eyes widened in outrage; for a moment there I thought steam would come whistling out of her ears. Except for the ATM transactions, the last bit was sky blue guesswork, but there was no sense in letting her know that. I was getting under her skin, which was exactly what I meant to do.

“Of course,” I continued before she could interrupt, “I could just get up from this table and leave. That’s mean sticking you with the bill, but I think paying the tab is the least of your worries right now.”

I picked up the mug and took a sip. “Good coffee. So what do you say we cut the crap, okay?”

I was bluffing. If I had a pair of brass handcuffs, I would have fastened her ankle to the table and threatened to flush the key down the men’s room toilet unless she spilled her guts. This woman had put me through hell in less than forty-eight hours after I had met her; besides getting a little cheap gratification from watching her squirm, I wasn’t about to let her waltz into some judge’s private chambers until she told me every nasty secret locked in her head.

Hinckley stared at me silently, her dark eyes smoldering with repressed anger. “One more thing,” I said, and this time I wasn’t bluffing. “I hold you responsible for John Tiernan’s death. If he hadn’t gone to Clancy’s to meet you last night, he’d still be alive now. But he took the bullet—or a laser beam, whatever—that was meant for you, and that really pisses me off, so don’t give me this ‘just a few minutes, then I gotta go’ routine. You owe me, sweetheart.”

She blinked hard a couple of times, then took a deep breath and slowly let it out again. “Mr. Rosen,” she said, her tone a little less imperious now, “the person who shot your friend—and it wasn’t Richard—didn’t miss. He’s looking for me now, but he meant to kill Tiernan. He was the intended target, not me.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit.” She shook her head. “There’s a conspiracy behind all this, and the last thing the people behind it want is public attention. Despite whatever you think you may know, trust me … you don’t know anything.”

I wasn’t about to argue the point. I didn’t know anything, and I was counting on her to give me the answers, but before I could ask she clasped her hands together above the table and pointed a finger straight at me.

“One more thing,” she said, “and this is why I’m in a hurry. There’s four people they want to see dead … and you’re one of them.”

I felt my heart skip just a little. “And the only way we’re going to get out of this alive,” she said, “is if you shut up and listen to what I have to tell you. Understand?”

I believed her. All of a sudden, this pretentious and socially correct little Le Café François was no longer as safe or secure as it seemed when I walked in through the door. In fact, it felt as if I were sitting in the center of a sniper’s crosshair, drinking great coffee and waiting for someone to squeeze the trigger.

I slowly nodded my head, and she gestured toward Joker. “Good. Now turn on your PT. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

Before she got started, though, I filled her in on much of what I already knew.

Although it was an abridged version of what I had related to Pearl a few hours earlier, it included the fact that Barris and McLaughlin had pressured me into stating that I would help them track her down, as well as Payson-Smith and Morgan. I was barely through telling her about being sworn to secrecy with regard to Ruby Fulcrum, though, when she began to shake her head.

“The name’s right,” Hinckley said, “but the details are all wrong. Ruby Fulcrum exists—I told you that when I first met you—but it’s not exactly what they claim it is.”

The four scientists who had been assigned to the Ruby Fulcrum project, she went on to explain, were all specialists in artificial intelligence—or perhaps, more specifically, a branch of AI research called “a-life,” or artificial life: computer programs that mimicked all activities of organic life-forms, including the ability to learn on their own.

As Cale McLaughlin had told me, the primary objective of Ruby Fulcrum had been to devise a c-cube system for
Sentinel 1.
This was to be an advanced program—since it was based partly on neural-net systems, even the word
program
itself was almost as archaic as calling a modern automobile a horseless carriage—which, once installed within the satellite’s onboard computer system, would learn on its own how to distinguish between ballistic missiles carrying real warheads and those launched as decoys. However, the long-range goal of the project had been the development of a self-replicating a-life-form. Although a-life R&D had been conducted, albeit on a smaller scale, by university and corporate labs since the 1980s, this was the first time a major DOD-funded research effort had been directed at this sort of cybernetic technology.

“The first part of the project was easy to come by, relatively speaking,” Hinckley said. “Richard and Po were principally responsible for coming up with an a-life system for Sentinel, and they managed to conclude most of their research about a year ago—”

“And Payson-Smith wasn’t opposed to it?” I asked. “I mean, he wasn’t against the military application?”

“Is that what they told you?” Hinckley looked at me askance, blowing out her cheeks in disgust. “Yeah, Dick’s such a dove, he has his father’s old RAF medals framed in his office just so he can swear at them.” She shook her head. “If anything, he was the most hawkish member of the team, even if he thought the whole concept of an orbital antimissile system was a little daft.”