Stalling for time seemed preferable to a struggle.
She withdrew her hand from the phone, but kept the can of pepper spray raised. “What happened to your face?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm. “Were you beaten?”
“No.” The faintest ghost of a smile passed across his face. “It’s a casualty of my mode of transportation.” The smile vanished. “Tara, they’re shooting at me.”
Tara said nothing. Paranoid. Delusional.
Lash took another step forward, stopped when Tara aimed the can threateningly. “Listen. Do this one thing, if not for me, then for those couples who died. And the couples who are still under threat.” He gasped in a breath. “Search the Eden database for the first client avatar ever recorded.”
A minute had passed. The guards would be here soon.
“Tara, please.”
“Stand over there, by the far corner,” Tara said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Lash moved to the far side of her office.
Watching him carefully, she stepped toward her terminal, pepper spray at the ready. She did not sit down, but half turned toward the keyboard, leaning forward to type the query one-handed.
The first client avatar ever recorded…
Curiously, the search returned an avatar with no associated name. There was just the identity code. Yet it was a code that made no sense.
“Let me guess,” Lash said. “It isn’t even a rational number. It’s just a string of zeros.”
Now she turned to look at him more closely. He was still breathing hard, the blood dripping from his torn hands to the floor. But he was looking at her steadily, and — no matter how closely she looked back — she could detect no hint of madness in his eyes.
She glanced up at the wall clock. Two minutes.
“How did you know that?” she asked. “Lucky guess?”
“Who’d have guessed that? Nine zeros?”
Tara let the question hang in the air.
“Remember those queries I asked to run from your computer this morning? I’d just gotten an idea. A terrible idea, but the only one that fit. Those queries you followed up with all but confirmed it.”
Tara started to answer, then stopped.
“Why should I listen to any of this?” she asked instead, still stalling. “I saw the data on you. I saw your record, the things you’ve done. I saw why you left the FBI: you let two policemen and your own brother-in-law die. You led a murderer right to them, deliberately.”
Lash shook his head. “No. That’s not what happened. I tried to save them. I just figured it out too late. It was a case like this one. A killer’s profile that didn’t make sense. Edmund Wyre, didn’t you read about it in the papers? He was killing women as bait, writing phony confessions. Meanwhile, stalking his real target: the cops who were investigating. He got two. I’m the one he missed. That case wrecked my marriage, ruined my sleep for a year.”
Tara did not reply.
“Don’t you understand? I’ve been set up here. Framed. Somebody touched my records, distorted them. I know who that somebody is.”
He moved to the door, glanced back. “I have to go. But there’s something else you need to do. Go to the Tank. Run six other avatars—the women from the six supercouples—against avatar zero.”
In the distance, an elevator chimed. Tara heard raised voices, the sound of running feet.
Lash started visibly. He put his hand on the door frame, poised himself to flee. Then he gave her one final look, and his expression seemed to burn itself through her. “I know you want all this to end. Run that query. Discover for yourself just what’s going on. Save the others.”
Then, without another word, he was gone.
Slowly, Tara sank back into her chair. She glanced up at the clock: just under four minutes.
Seconds later, a team of security guards burst into her office, guns in hand. Their leader — a short, stockily built man Tara recognized as Whetstone — checked the corners quickly, then looked at her.
“You all right, Ms. Stapleton?” Beside Whetstone, one of the guards was peering into the room’s lone closet.
She nodded.
Whetstone turned back to his team. “He must have gone that way,” he said, pointing down the hallway. “Dreyfuss, McBain, secure the next intersection. Reynolds, stay with me. Let’s check the nearest access panels.” And he trotted out of the office, holstering his weapon and pulling out his radio as he did so.
For a moment, Tara listened to the retreating footsteps, the furtive sounds of conversation. Then they died away and the corridor fell back into silence.
She remained in her chair, motionless, while the wall clock ticked through five minutes. Then she rose and made her way across the carpet, avoiding the bloodstains. She hesitated in the doorway a second, then stepped into the corridor, heading for the elevator. The Tank was no more than a few minutes away.
But then she stopped and — reaching a new decision — turned and began walking, more quickly now, back in the direction she had come.
FORTY-EIGHT
The command center of Eden’s security division was a large, bunker-like space on the twentieth floor of the inner tower. Two dozen employees filled the room, transcribing passive sensor entries, controlling remote cameras.
Edwin Mauchly stood alone at the control station. On a dozen screens, he could bring up information from any of ten thousand live datastreams monitoring the building: camera feeds, sensor inputs, terminal keystrokes, scanner logs. Hands behind his back, he moved his gaze from screen to screen.
Somewhere, in that vast storm of data, Christopher Lash was dodging all the raindrops.
Behind him, a door opened. Mauchly did not turn: he did not need to. The heavy, clipped tread, the brief silence, told him Sheldrake had just entered.
“They missed him by five, maybe ten seconds,” Sheldrake said, approaching the control station.
Mauchly reached for a keyboard. “He spent four minutes in Tara Stapleton’s office. Four minutes, when he knew every second put him at greater risk. Why did he do that?” He typed again. “He left her office heading southbound. As he ran, he passed his identity bracelet beneath a dozen additional door scanners along the corridor. Which of those doors he entered — if any — remains unknown.”
“I’ve got men checking them out now.”
“It’s important to be thorough, Mr. Sheldrake. But I have the strong feeling he’s no longer on the thirty-fifth floor.”
“It’s still hard to believe he’s using data conduits to get around,” Sheldrake said. “They’re meant for maintenance access, not travel. He must feel like a pipe cleaner squeezing his way through those things.”
Mauchly stroked his chin. “He should be trying to find a way out, flee the building. Instead, he’s climbing. First, to the twenty-sixth floor. Now, the thirty-fifth.”
“Could he be after someone, or something? A suicide plot? Sabotage?”
“I considered that. If he’s desperate enough, it’s possible. On the other hand, he didn’t harm Tara Stapleton just now — who, after all, is the person who turned him in. The fact is, we simply don’t have a sufficient bead on his pathology to know for sure.” Mauchly scanned the screens. “I don’t want to draw too many of your men away from the search. But you should place small details on the most critical installations. And have another guard the emergency penthouse access.”
“Shouldn’t we also post teams outside access panels? Now that we know how he’s getting around, we can arrange an ambush.”