Mappa Mundi (33 page)

But it was a hell of a weapon. Nell must have felt like she was witnessing the first-ever nuclear fission test when she set eyes on it. More so. Potentially it had the finesse of a scalpel, compared to the hammer blows of conventional bombs and guns. The idea of genetic recognition, multiple payloads—Jude's head didn't feel big enough to handle it. He sat and stared at the people passing, watched the grass, thought nothing, then got up and walked in to work, the vial in his pocket so light he couldn't feel it.

Mikhail Guskov looked around him at the interior of the Sealed Environment where Mary and her associates in the military had prepared his centre of operations. Its small dimensions, tightly stacked efficiency, and walls painted with technical symbols and instructions resembled nothing so much as a series of Egyptian tombs. He well realized that this could be the last place on Earth he would see, and it was ugly.

His own office was the largest of all, but still a rat-trap of a place, the ergonomic chair and state-of-the-art computer systems consuming all the available space. In an attempt at humanizing the place a guest seat, barely functional in size, had been left in one corner and a wispy-looking plant with variegated leaves that seemed to enjoy artificial light squatted on the desk. He had one of the soldiers remove both.

Mary had sent him a note to let him know that the standard issue of Deliverance was going to be showcased to the National Command Authority this week at Dugway, and later to those agencies the DoD decided should know. That would leave precious little to the imagination of those who discovered it, inevitably, postleak.

Some lab in Asia could knock up a serviceable version within months, maybe even extend its capacity to the private version he'd created secretly, using his alternative laboratory contacts, in a few more.
Then everything would fall apart like a house of cards and his decades of work and effort would go for nothing in the storm that followed. The Mappaware technology would no doubt become nothing more than a tool for manipulating people, either singly or in vast populations, ideology doled out with the drinking water and social obedience to any dictat determined by the nearest passing breath of wind. It was exactly what he wanted to prevent.

As he sat down in the control seat and looked around him, again the vague doubt assailed him that what he had made was as much the cause as the effect of the particular drive to create technologies of mass control or destruction. In quieter moments he allowed himself to consider it in the cold light of his own intellect.

Guskov didn't feel responsible for their situation. That was a power well beyond his control. History held the reins that drove him. If a technology existed, someone would use it. If their need demanded, they'd do what they thought they had to. Everyone was a damaged article and power accelerated their decline, so anyone with access to a power like Mappa Mundi would be sure to employ it to further the replication of their own version of the truth. He'd known that from the outset. Understanding it was part and parcel of accepting the burden this knowledge put over him, why he'd risked everything to be here, in this tiny airless room, locked down with his team under the scrutiny of the Americans. Because he understood his own human nature and the relationship it had with technology itself, he considered he was worthy of taking on the role of world-maker. Of course, the logic determined that the fact he'd come to this very conclusion ruled him out as a worthy candidate.

A worn smile crossed his face and he began to activate his systems, bringing them online for first testing. It was far too late for the philosophical high ground. The first to succeed in engineering the Meme-cube was the one who had the best chance to forestall misuses of the same ability later, and that was the truth. He knew he was only a
person, like every other. He knew he was going to fail to some greater or smaller degree. Only time could reveal the extent of it.

The AI subsystems began running their start-up procedures. He watched them interface with the automated, insensible circuitry and slide quickly into command. The first of their language systems painted him a message on the wall opposite, which acted as his screen.

READY.

Most of what worried him right now concerned Dr. Armstrong. He guessed that the Americans wouldn't want her to be on the team and would attempt to take control of her. He himself wasn't sure that she was fit to come here—she hadn't allowed anyone to treat her condition, and the initial readings were inconclusive without a lengthy series of tests and interviews to back them up. He needed to maintain an upper hand. He needed to be sure nothing happened to her. She might even know the truth of what had happened to Patient X.

His thinking was disrupted when the major in charge of the Environment showed him how he would communicate with the outside world: everything went through official channels. There were no external lines. This left him with the final problem that he needed Natalie Armstrong or her Selfware system to solve, if it were solvable.

It was too late to carry on with his air of mystery as far as she was concerned. As he had with her father, he was going to have to let her in on the game while he still had his networks outside this wretched bunker to help him. Thanks to the Deer Ridge test all his better plans had been thrown on the junk heap. Now it was going to be the fastest mover and the smartest manoeuvre that won the day.

Once the presentation was over he took the opportunity of his few remaining hours of freedom to take a car back into the one-dog town that passed for the closest civilization. Parking up out front of the single row of stores he made a few Pad calls, using an encryption and transmission sequence he'd been saving for this moment. As he imagined how much it would annoy Mary Delaney to know he was calling,
but not whom, nor what he had to say, he found himself sighing through his smile. He wasn't a fool. He knew that the Americans would get him in the end.

Natalie had packed her small bag of personal items and was waiting for the airport car to arrive and take her away when she received an urgent signal vibration from her Pad. Thinking that it was Dan at last, she whipped it out of her jacket and flicked it on, walking away from her minders and into the relative privacy of the old wood-panelled living room. The boards creaked under her feet as she realized it wasn't from him at all, but that Guskov had got hold of her personal codes and was sending a ream of stuff she most likely didn't want to know about. Still, it was furled with urgency banners, so she glanced over it as her disappointment waned.

What he'd sent her was a series of alternative joining instructions. They included intricate plans for shrugging off her plainclothes police guard and allowing agents of another organization entirely, which she suspected must be essentially criminal, to shepherd her onto a set of private planes and automobiles to the final destination—an address in Virginia she didn't know anything about except that it sounded like the middle of nowhere in the Appalachians. She asked Erewhon to run a source-verification check to get confirmation that this was indeed from Guskov and as she waited she turned to read an attached document that he said would explain everything about this “hasty action.”

“Are you ready?” one of the policemen asked, poking his head around the door.

Her father had departed two hours earlier. Such was the secrecy of their plans that confirmations of travel weren't issued to the staff on the ground until it was time to move. When Calum's joining instructions came they'd discovered that they were to be shipped separately. Natalie made an equivocal movement of her head, “In a minute.”

She sat down in the deep velvet of an ancient armchair and began
to read. Watching her quickly bored the detective, who looked very annoyed, but withdrew, tortoiselike, into the bustling efficiency that had taken over the hall as they checked and rechecked the contents of her luggage. Vaguely, Natalie thought this was what it would have been like in the old days when grand families had staff. A right pain.

When Natalie understood the scale, the ambition, and the sheer bloody arrogance of Guskov's plans she sucked in air through her teeth with a regular carpenter's whistle and shook her head.

“You'll never get away with that, mate,” she whispered to herself in her best builder's voice. “You'll need more than a few two-be-fours and a nail gun.”

The plan, for all its complex detail, was simple. Guskov was going to use the military superpowers to fund his personal crusade against the incursion of regulation into ordinary lives and the spread of global politics with its increasing trend towards dictator-like legal and social measures. Mappa Mundi was the culmination of years of his hard labour, a tool that he intended to use to empower individuals to choose their own destinies, their own personalities, and their own minds in the face of what he saw as an inevitable development of centralized control methods.

Natalie didn't get the whole picture in a single pass but she realized what it meant for her in the short term: either she was about to be recruited into the private army he was building to finish the dream, or she was going to be the lab rat who served the governments and she would also, potentially, be his victim. Her choice, and there was no third way. Unspoken laws of
omertà
permeated every suggestion in the document. Now she was in the game whether she liked it or not.

She put the Pad away and wondered instantly if Guskov had had a hand in Bobby's experiment—to such a person nothing was too extreme. And if he had, was his interest in her only as a subject for test? But there were too many questions and no answers: even if he succeeded and Mappa worked as he hoped, how would he disperse it?
How would he get his hands on enough NervePath? How would he get it past the authorities? How, how, how?

She decided Jude could forget his guilt for having involved her in this. She'd been involved a long time before. And there were others also implicated—her father, of course, who'd never bothered to inform her if he knew of the greater goals of the project, for one. And Dan, for another.

Where
was
Dan?

Natalie stepped out into the hall and marched between two dark-clothed armed officers, to their waiting car. She'd had enough of playing their tunes. If she was going to join Guskov, she was going to do it on her terms.

“Take me to the Clinic,” she said. “I forgot something.”

They began to protest but she was adamant that her oversight was vital—a data source file she'd forgotten to copy—and so they took her into her offices. As the officer with her looked around in a bored, frustrated fashion, she made a show of copying something off the Clinic system and meanwhile began to search her desk. Fooling him was child's play. He wasn't really paying her any attention.

She was looking for her second Pad, which she found easily. She wiped dust off it, checked its power, and then put it down opposite the new Pad, leaning on the transmit button as she moved to use the desk system, copying what she could of the new one onto it, omitting all her personal identification documents and auto-registrars. This Pad contained older codes that she was betting the Ministry wouldn't be monitoring, and instead of the Erewhon service it was programmed to auto-direct enquiries and calls through a different ‘pilot.

Closing her clinic account took a few seconds. She held up her usual Pad in her right hand, waved it, grinning, and said, “Got it. Sorry.” At the same time she slid the old Pad into her pocket, and added, “I'll just go to the loo and then we're off, okay?”

The toilet escape had to be the oldest trick in the book, but she knew it was the best chance she had. They thought she was a willing participant
in this job, after all, and the man set to stand guard over her wasn't really thinking that he should be watching her for signs of deception.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging. “But be quick. We're late already.”

“Sure.” She went directly to the Ladies' and had cause to be glad she worked on the ground floor.

The frosted glass of the toilet windows opened into the inner courtyard where the waste bins for everything that wasn't to be incinerated on site were managed. It was sealed to the outside world but there was a door leading to the furnace room that she could get through. As soon as the door had closed Natalie walked across, undid the window catches, got a hygiene bin out of one of the cubicles and upended it, so that she could step up easily onto the ledge. It was a narrow window, one that would have stopped most people, and the drop on the other side was a good five or six feet, but she could see immediately how to get through.

She put her head out first, ears scraped back and eyes bulging for a second, then wriggled her small, flexible frame until her chest and hips had cleared the gap. There she hung for a moment, stuck fast by her legs as they wedged tight, giving her time to stretch out her arms and walk them slowly down the wall in support of her weight, watching the brickwork closely as she tipped further and further upside down…With a few contortions she managed to hang by her feet until she was able to touch the gritty surface of the yard and then easily plucked one foot free after the other and up into a comfortable balance. She walked a few steps on her hands and then dropped back to her feet once more.

Never in her life had she done a thing like that. It was as easy as breathing.

She marvelled at it, even as she remained alert, passing into the shadow of the heavy rubbish skips and the service laundry's plastic containers where the furnace door stood open to allow a straight gangway into the yard itself for the orderlies' carts. The furnace itself was in constant use. Its gas supply made a low hissing noise that
masked voices and the sound of shoes in the big room until you were within a few feet of someone. She was able to walk behind the caretaker without being noticed and let herself out into the corridor of an entirely different wing. Bargaining on the fact that none of the staff knew she shouldn't be here as usual, she walked out of the side door and along the staff entryway onto Huntington Road where the security system had no trouble opening the gate for her.