The Intruder (21 page)

"Are you looking for
Duncan
?" she asked. They nodded, and she pointed them to one of the rooms. "Go in there. He'll be with you shortly."

They opened the door to the study room and saw three people sitting around the central desk. A chalk board on the wall had a series of equations and a few drawings scribbled all over it. They looked up at Hanna and MacKenzie, who suddenly had an awkward feeling. Each of them had the same odd left eye, just like the woman. When they saw Hanna and MacKenzie, they immediately wrapped up their conversation and left. One of them intentionally left a large paper envelope on the desk. It seemed that
Duncan
had arranged for someone to reserve this room to ensure that it would be available at the proper time. MacKenzie thought the secrecy was a little overdone, but considering what she suspected was going on, she couldn't complain.

Hanna opened the envelope, which contained two black eye patches and a note that instructed them to put them on their left eyes. Hanna looked quizzically at MacKenzie, but nodded knowingly and immediately put the patch on. Hanna followed her example. They sat in silence until
Duncan
showed up.
Duncan
's left pupil had the same, eerie look.

"I take it you understand what this is about," he said, pointing to his left eye. MacKenzie nodded, but Hanna didn't respond, so he explained.

"As your friend here has discovered, our implants feed what we see onto the net," he said. "They're not supposed to -- or, at least it's not supposed to be known that they do. But they do. If we wear these," he said, and Hanna realized the enlarged pupils were just dark contact lenses, "it blocks the transmission -- what we see doesn't get onto the net, so nobody can spy on us."

"Unless they bugged the room," Hanna suggested.

"I had it scanned,"
Duncan
said nonchalantly, "and I have people stationed around us watching for any kind of surveillance. We are completely secure. Getting out might be a problem," he said with a wry grin.

Duncan
sat quietly for a moment, allowing the seriousness of the situation to impress itself upon Hanna and MacKenzie. This wasn't a college prank, or a neat computer project, but they already knew that. Hanna's kidnapping had already raised the stakes beyond the mundane, and as she considered the danger and seriousness of the situation, she wondered why she was here at all. MacKenzie was the computer genius. Hanna's only involvement was that she knew Jeremy and MacKenzie. It was somewhat unsettling that that was enough.

"So what did you want to talk about?"
Duncan
asked.

"The conspiracy," MacKenzie said, intentionally using the word from the anonymous message.
Duncan
just stared at her for a moment, trying to read her face.

"And what do you want to know about the conspiracy?" he asked, nodding his head slightly as if to say "yes, it was me."

"First, which side are you on?"

Duncan
laughed. "What's the point of the question? Do you expect me to say I'm a bad guy? But I suppose you have to ask," he conceded. "First, however, I want you to know how fortunate you have been. You've fallen into the middle of the crime of century, and, so far, you've stayed alive. That's something. This game gets rough from time to time," his eye strayed ever-so-slightly toward Hanna, "but we're the good guys." MacKenzie wondered if he was responsible for kidnapping Hanna. "If the conspiracy had any idea how close you are to figuring them out, your life wouldn't be worth a cat's whisker. The only thing that has saved you so far is that we managed to distract Dr.
Berry
while you were working in your lab."

MacKenzie tried to think it through. If
Duncan
had sent her the message, then he had to have information from the net spies. That was the only way he could have known what she had been doing. So does that mean the net spies are working against the conspiracy? If so, what worse thing is the conspiracy doing?
Duncan
began to smile. He seemed to guess what she was thinking.

"It's far more complicated than you imagine," he said.

Hanna and MacKenzie each had several competing theories that tried to tie together the isolated pieces. They peppered
Duncan
with questions, trying to make sense of it all. After an hour of conversation that seemed to stray from one topic to another, never bringing them any nearer to a conclusion, Duncan convinced Hanna and MacKenzie that the best way for him to explain what he was up to, and why, was to take them to his central office.

When they agreed,
Duncan
gave an order and several of the students who were waiting outside began to move.
Duncan
poked his head out of the study room and gestured for Hanna and MacKenzie to follow. Each step of the way -- from the room to the elevator, from the elevator through a back hallway, and out the freight entrance to a waiting hovercar -- black-eyed students were guarding the way, motioning for them to continue, or keeping them back if anyone ventured too near.

Just as Hanna began to wonder if, after all this secrecy,
Duncan
was going to let them know where his office was, he flipped the privacy switch in the hovercar and the windows went dark. The on-board computer system had been pre-programmed for their destination, so
Duncan
merely told the car to go and they took off. 

When the doors opened ten minutes later they found themselves inside a small garage. The outside door had already closed behind them and
Duncan
led them through another door -- a security door, MacKenzie noted -- into a large warehouse. It was only half full, and the collection of machines, offices and computer stations gave the place a disorganized, eclectic feel.

Hanna noticed five large virtual reality tanks against the side wall. She had never actually seen one because she had no interest in what they were typically used for. In fact, it made her uncomfortable to see them here. She knew what they were from the unavoidable and somewhat garish advertisements that hyped all the fun things you could do in a virtual reality tank. She didn't care for that sort of thing. Real life seemed more interesting to her than fantasy adventures in a computer simulation.

But she knew how they operated. The tanks were about 10 feet high and were filled with a solution that could be adjusted to make a human body neutrally buoyant. The person in the tank, called a "rider," wore an elastic, waterproof, skin-tight suit that monitored every bodily movement and fed that information into the tank's program, which provided real-time responses. The suit not only monitored what the body did, but provided appropriate stimulation to the skin, depending on the program. Someone in a virtual reality suit could go skiing, practice karate,
climb
Mt.
Everest or swim in a coral reef -- all without leaving the VR tank. The suit would provide the appropriate visual, tactile, auditory and olfactory stimulation. They were still working on a virtual sense of taste.

MacKenzie didn't notice the tanks. She only had eyes for the computer hardware. Because of the nature of the communications links between the hole and the implants, computer functions done through an implant interface were limited, despite the fact that the implants were connected to the most powerful computers in the world. Normal implant use didn't even approach the limits of implant computing, but for the serious computer user, like MacKenzie, it was necessary to work at a terminal where high speed interfaces allowed the user to pull out all the stops and run elaborate computations.

One wall of the warehouse was packed with terminals and state-of-the-art processors. Holographic bubble displays floated in front of the programmers, displaying complicated mathematical processes in three dimensions. To Hanna they just looked like computer-generated art, but MacKenzie saw several familiar patterns.
Duncan
's
lab was at least three times the size of the lab at the university, which was a good-sized computer lab in its own right. MacKenzie was mesmerized.

Duncan
removed his black contact lens and told his guests they could remove their patches. "We've managed to protect this area," he said, and then noticed that MacKenzie wasn't hearing him. "You're never going to figure out what's going on until you look over there," he told her, pointing to the tanks, "and notice this," he said, indicating the high-speed connection between the tanks and the wall of computer hardware.

MacKenzie looked, but she was too impressed with the hardware to see the big picture. Hanna picked it up first.

"That's how you spy on people," she said, pointing to the tanks. "You monitor everybody's visual information from the hole with those things," she pointed to the processors, "and they generate a virtual reality simulation of the world, which gets fed into the tanks. So somebody in one of those tanks can 'go' anywhere -- inside a virtual image of the world -- without really going anywhere. They're there, but they're not there, just like the net spies."

Duncan
smiled and MacKenzie looked at Hanna in surprise, then she went into hard-core genius mode, as Hanna would call it, dropping her mouth half open and getting that characteristic look on her face; the one that looked to Hanna like someone who was recovering from a stroke. She was taking Hanna's layman's explanation and putting it through all the changes.

"Of course," she said after a minute of near paralysis. "The best way to interpret all that visual information from everybody's implant is to render it in 3-D, and the best way to do that is in a tank. That's why you need all that hardware," she said, looking again at the bank of processors. "At first I thought it was overkill on the computing power, but now I have a hard time believing it's enough. Processing all that data should take twice what you've got here."

Duncan
smirked. "We've come up with a few short-cuts, but we really need someone like you to help us find new ones."

Chapter 14

Jeremy had no doubt of it, now. The only reason he was being paraded around the office several times a day was to keep an eye out for net spies. He resented that they didn't have the decency to tell him this -- as if he couldn't figure it out on his own -- so he decided to see the boss about it.

What is it with these people?
he wondered as he walked down the main corridor to the corner office. Jeremy imagined a disturbing trend in agency actions: they had a habit of using people and not caring how they felt about it.

He paused in the hall, realizing that he didn't know who the agent-in-charge of this particular office was. That was easy to solve, he realized, and called up the roster, which was updated continuously as Peter deployed his resources into new positions. He noted with satisfaction that he was assigned to this office as a "special agent." 

"Oh, that's just great," he said aloud when he noticed who the AIC was.

"What's just great, Mr. Mitchell?" a familiar voice said from just ahead of him in the hall. The AIC himself had come out of his office.

"I just found out that you're in charge here," Jeremy said, realizing he was now right outside the man's office.

"And do you have a problem with that?" Lenzke asked. The question could have been the prelude to a fight coming from another man's lips. Lenzke said it more like someone performing a psychological diagnosis of a patient.

"Nothing I can't manage," he wanted to say, but his better judgment prevailed.

"I have a question about my assignment here," Jeremy said. "Can I have a minute of your time?"

"Certainly," Lenzke said, walking past Jeremy back into his office. As he passed, Jeremy smelled something very faintly. He remembered it from somewhere -- something very recent -- but he couldn't place it. Jeremy followed Lenzke into the office, and, remembering his procedures, waited until the door was shut to speak.

"It's fairly obvious why I've been assigned to this facility. Why hasn't anyone explained my mission? Why all this nonsense about meeting people on the other side of the building?"

Lenzke looked confused, and then laughed. "You're right, it's obvious why you're here. You're supposed to be smart enough to figure out obvious things, Mr. Mitchell. Do you think all the training we've been giving you is so we can hand-hold you through every assignment?"

Jeremy hadn't thought of it that way, and he felt stupid. He couldn't have expected them to tell the hired hands to take him around the office so he could look for invisible spies. That was need-to-know information, and the work staff didn't need to know. He also realized that he had been thinking of his work with the agency as a kind of master-slave relationship. But he wasn't merely a hired hand. He was supposed to think for himself and take initiative, provided he kept within the lines.

"You're right," he admitted.

"Then you know what to do," Lenzke said. "But there is one thing I want to clarify. You are not to leave the facility, and you're on-call until further notice."

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