Mount Dragon (47 page)

Levine started blankly at the words. Then he realized what Mime meant.

He looked up from the laptop. The view out of the elevator was breathtaking. But there was something odd that, in his haste, he hadn't noticed when he first entered. The stars in the eastern sky hung over the quiet scene. He could see the harbor spread out below him, a million tiny pinpoints of light in the warm Massachusetts darkness.

Yet he was only on the seventh floor. The view he was seeing should be from a much higher vantage point.

It was no wall of glass he was staring out of. It was a wall-sized flat-panel display, currently showing a virtual image of an imaginary view outside the GeneDyne building.

The screen winked to black. There was no time now to decipher Mime's parting acronym. Taking a deep breath, Levine typed another brief command:

“What is it?” de Vaca asked as Carson sat up abruptly.

“I just smelled something,” he whispered. “I think it's a horse.” He licked his finger and held it up in the drifting air.

“One of ours?”

“No. The wind's from the wrong direction. I swear to God, I just smelled a sweaty horse. From behind us.”

There was a silence. Carson felt a sudden cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was Nye. There was no other explanation. And the man was very close.

“Are you sure—?”

Quickly, Carson covered her mouth with one hand, and with the other drew her ear close to his lips.

“Listen to me. Nye is waiting out there somewhere. He didn't go with the Hummers. Once dawn breaks, we're dead. We've got to get out of here, and we've got to do it in utter silence. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” came the strained reply.

“We'll move toward the sound of our horses. But we'll have to walk by feel. Don't just plant one foot in front of the other; let it rest an inch above the ground until you're sure you have a clear step. If we step on some dry grass or a piece of brush, he'll hear it. We'll have to untie the hobbles without making a sound. Don't get on your horse at first—lead it away. We'd better go east, back toward the lava fields. It's our only hope of losing him. Head ninety degrees to the right of the North Star.”

He felt, more than saw, de Vaca's head rise and fall in a vigorous nod.

“I'll be going the same way, but don't try to follow me. It's too dark for that. Just try to maintain as straight a course as possible. Keep low, because he might glimpse you moving against the stars. We'll be able to see each other at first light.”

“But what if he hears—?”

“If he comes after us, run like hell for the lava. When you get there, ditch your horse, whack him on the ass, and hide as best you can. Like as not he'll follow your horse.” He paused. “That's the best I can do. Sorry.”

There was a brief silence. Carson realized that de Vaca was trembling slightly, and he released her. His hand groped for hers, found it, squeezed.

They moved slowly toward the tinking sound of the horses. Carson knew that their chances of survival, never good, were now minute. It had been bad enough without Nye. But the security director had found them. And he'd found them very quickly—he hadn't been fooled for a moment by their detour on the lava. He had the better horse. And that damned wicked rifle.

Carson realized he had grossly underestimated Nye.

As he crept across the sand, a sudden image of Charley, his half-Ute great-uncle, came back into his mind. He wondered what synaptic trick had brought Charley to mind, now of all times.

Most of the old man's stories had been about a Ute ancestor named Gato who had undertaken numerous livestock raids against the Navajos and U.S. cavalry. Charley had loved to recount those raids. There were other stories about Gato's tracking exploits, his skill with a horse. And the various tricks he'd used to throw off pursuers, usually of the official variety. Charley had recounted all these stories with quiet relish, there in the rocking chair before the fire.

Carson found Roscoe in the dark and began untying his hobbles, whispering soothing words to forestall any inquiring whinnies. The horse stopped grazing and pricked up his ears. Carson gently stroked the horse's neck, slipped off the lead rope, and carefully removed the cinch from the halter. Then, with infinite care, he clipped the bullsnap on the halter and looped the lead rope around the saddle horn. He stopped to listen: the silence of the night was absolute.

Guiding the horse by the halter strap, Carson led him westward.

One of his legs had gone to sleep, and Nye carefully shifted position, cradling the rifle between his arms as he did so. The faintest glow was appearing in the east, over the Fra Cristóbal Mountains. Another ten minutes, maybe less. He glanced around into the darkness, satisfying himself once again that he was well hidden. He looked back behind the rise and saw the dim outlines of his horse, still standing at attention, awaiting his next command. He smiled to himself. Only the English really knew how to train their horses. This American cowboy mystique was bollocks. They knew next to nothing about horses.

He turned his attention back to the broad, shallow hollow. In a few minutes the ambient light would show him what he needed to see.

With infinite care he slid back the safety on the Holland & Holland. A stationary, perhaps sleeping, target at three hundred yards. He smiled at the thought.

The light grew behind the Fra Cristóbals, and Nye scanned the basin for dark shapes that would indicate horses or people. There was a scattering of soapweed yucca, looking damnably like people in the half light. But he could see nothing large enough to be a horse.

He waited, hearing the slow strong beat of his heart. He was pleased at the steadiness of his breathing, at the dryness of his palm against the rifle's buttstock.

It slowly began to dawn on him that the basin was empty.

And the voice came again: a low, cynical snicker. He turned, and there was a shadow in the half light.

“Who the hell are you?” Nye murmured.

The chuckle built in intensity, until the laughter echoed across the landscape. And Nye recognized the laugh as being remarkably like his own.

In an instant, Boston faded to black.

The breathtaking view from the elevator was gone. The landscape had seemed so real that, for a horrible instant, Levine wondered if he had suddenly been struck blind. Then he realized the subdued lights of the elevator were still on, and it was merely the wall-sized display in front of him that had gone dark. He stretched his hand forward to touch the surface. It was hard and opaque, similar to the panels he had seen in the GeneDyne corridor but much larger.

Then, suddenly, the elevator was twice as large as it had been. Several businessmen in suits, briefcases in hand, stared down at him. Levine almost knocked the computer from his lap and jumped to his feet before he realized that, again, this was simply an image projected on the display: an image that made the elevator deeper, and populated it with imaginary GeneDyne staffers. Levine marveled at the video resolution necessary to create such a lifelike image.

Then the image changed again, and the blackness of space yawned before him. Below, the gray surface of the moon spun lazily in the clear ether, revealing its pocked surface without shame. Behind it, Levine could see the faint curve of the Earth, a blue marble hanging in the distant black. The sensation of depth was profound; Levine had to close his eyes for a minute to allow the vertigo to pass.

He realized what was happening. As Mime's lancet program drilled into Scopes's private server, it must have interrupted the normal routine of the software bindery controlling the elevator images. Temporarily without control, the various available images were being displayed one by one, like a fantastically expensive slide show. Levine wondered what other vistas Scopes had programmed into the display for the amusement or consternation of the elevator passengers.

The image changed again, and Levine found himself staring at a bizarre landscape: a three-dimensional construction of walkways and buildings, rising from a vast, apparently bottomless space. He appeared to be gazing at this landscape from a terrazzo platform, tiled in muted browns, reds, and yellows. From the end of the platform, a series of bridges and walkways led in many directions: some up, some down, and some continuing horizontally, falling away in various directions to spaces inconceivably vast. Rising among the walkways were dozens of enormous structures, dark with countless tiny illuminated windows. Running between the buildings were great streams of colored light that forked and flickered into the distance, like lightning.

The landscape was beautiful, even awe-inspiring in its complexity, but in a few minutes Levine grew impatient, wondering what was taking Mime's program so long to access GeneDyne cyberspace. He shifted his position on the floor of the elevator.

The landscape moved.

Levine looked down. He realized that he had inadvertently moved the rolling trackball that was built into the keyboard of his laptop. Placing his hand on the trackball, he rolled it forward.

Immediately, the terrazzo surface in front of him fell backward, and he found himself balanced on the very edge of space, a slender walkway ahead of him, floating like gossamer in the black void. The smoothness of the video response on the huge display made the sense of forward motion almost unbearably real.

Levine took a deep breath. He wasn't simply looking at a video image this time: he was inside Scopes's cyberspace.

Levine removed his hands from the laptop for a minute, steadying himself. Then, carefully, he placed one hand on the trackball and the other on the cursor keys of his laptop. Painstakingly, he began the task of learning how to control his own movement within the bizarre landscape. The immensity of the elevator screen—and the remarkably lifelike resolution of the image itself—made comprehension difficult. Always, he was troubled by vertigo. Though he knew he was only in cyberspace, the fear of falling off the terrazzo platform into the depths below kept his movements excessively slow and deliberate.