Lash waited, heart hammering in his chest, for something to happen.
Nothing.
He felt his skin scorching in the heat. He closed his eyes; felt the earth begin to tilt dangerously; opened them quickly again.
Sheldrake picked up his radio. “Gilmore!”
There was a crackle of static. “Yes, sir!”
“Anything happening?”
“No sir. Status quo here.”
Sheldrake slowly lowered the radio. Nobody spoke, or even dared look at one another.
Then the radio chirped back into life. “Mr. Sheldrake!”
Sheldrake instantly raised it. “What is it?”
“The security doors — they’re opening!”
And now Lash could feel a faint vibration beneath his feet: nearly lost amid the death throes of the machinery, but discernible nevertheless.
“Power?” Sheldrake almost yelled into the radio. “Is there power down there?”
“No, sir, I don’t see anything yet — just the lights of the city, shining through the baffle. Jesus, they look good—”
“Hold your position. We’re on our way.” He turned toward the group. “Standing down from Condition Gamma. Looks like we did it.”
“Tara did it,” Mauchly said.
Tara leaned wearily against the panel.
“Come on,” Mauchly said. “No time to lose.”
He began leading the way out through the heavy palls of smoke. Lash took Tara gently by the arm and fell into step behind Sheldrake. Glancing back, he was surprised to see Silver was not following. Instead, the man was threading his paper tape back into the teletype.
“Dr. Silver!” he shouted. “Richard! Come on!”
“In a minute.” The teletype came to life, and the paper tape began threading through the reader.
“What the hell are you doing?” Tara cried. “We have to get out!”
“I’m buying us some time. Don’t know how long your scheme’s going to work — Liza’s bound to notice an irregularity soon. So I’m restoring the original programming to cover our tracks.”
“You’re wasting time — come on!”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
“Let’s go.” And as Lash ducked between viscous curtains of black, he caught one more glimpse of Silver: bending intently over the teletype, guiding the tape back through the reader.
The walk was a nightmare of fire and smoke. What on their way in had been a digital city in overdrive was now a silicon inferno. Cascades of sparks spat, tongues of flame arced overhead; steel behemoths tore themselves apart as their internals expired in jets of burning machine oil. The shriek of failing metal, the bolts exploding under enormous heat, turned the huge chamber into a war zone. The pall grew even thicker as they moved outward through the rings of support equipment. Once, Lash and Tara grew disoriented and strayed from the group, only to be tracked down by Lawson. Later, when Tara became separated in a particularly fiery passage, Lash somehow managed to find her after a frantic ninety-second search.
They stumbled on. A dark mist gathered before Lash’s eyes: a mist that had nothing to do with the smoke.
Then — just as he felt he would succumb to the heat and fumes — he found himself in a small, cramped passage with the others. A metal ladder was anchored to a hatch in the floor. Sheldrake was already descending, flashlight in hand, shouting out to an invisible Gilmore below. Mauchly helped Tara onto the ladder next, then Dorfman — who carried another light — and then Lash.
“Watch your step,” Mauchly said, guiding Lash’s hand onto the railing. “And move quickly.”
Lash began descending the ladder as quickly as he could. He climbed through a vertical steel cylinder — the structural undercarriage of the penthouse — and emerged into a strange, twilight world. Despite everything, he paused for a moment. He’d heard mention of the “baffle,” the open area between the inner tower and the penthouse. Faint lights of the city filtered in from the surrounding latticework. Here, the metallic shrieking of the computing chamber was faintly muffled. Below, flashlights lanced their way through the gloom.
“Dr. Lash,” came Mauchly’s voice. “Keep moving, please.”
Just as Mauchly spoke, Lash made out the thick plates of steel that lay, accordion fashion, against the transverse walls of the baffle. They gleamed cruelly in the reflected light, like monstrous jaws. The security plates, he thought as he resumed his descent.
A minute later he was standing on the access pad atop the inner tower. Nearby was another open hatch, this one leading into the tower itself. He was safely below the security plates: from here, the underside of the penthouse was almost invisible in the thick air above. He felt Tara grasp his hand. For a moment, sheer relief washed away every other emotion.
And then he remembered: they were still short one person.
He turned to Mauchly, just now stepping off the ladder. “Where’s Silver?” he asked.
Mauchly raised his cell phone, dialed. “Dr. Silver? Where are you?”
“I’m almost there,” came the voice. Behind it, Lash could hear a terrible fugue of destruction: explosions, collapses, the groan of failing steel. And there was another noise, mechanical and regular, scarcely discernible: the sound of the tape reader, still chattering grimly on…
“Dr. Silver!” Mauchly said. “There’s no more time. The place could go up at any moment!”
“I’m almost there,” the voice repeated calmly.
And then — with a sudden, awful lucidity — Lash understood.
He understood why Silver abruptly acquiesced to Tara’s plan for erasing Liza’s memory, after resisting so fiercely. He understood the real reason Silver spent the time to get a memory dump onto tape. And he thought he understood why Silver remained behind. It wasn’t to buy time to see everybody out safely — at least, that wasn’t the only reason…
I’m almost there.
Silver didn’t mean he’d almost reached the exit. He meant he’d almost finished reloading Liza’s core memory. Keeping her terrible plan in motion.
Lash grasped the ladder. “I’m going back for him.”
He felt Mauchly grab hold. “Dr. Lash—”
Lash brushed the hand away and began to climb. But even as he did so there was a great clank of turning metal. Overhead, the security plates began to close again.
Lash took another step upward, felt Mauchly restrain him. And now Sheldrake and Dorfman came up, preventing him from climbing further. Lash whirled, grabbed Mauchly’s phone.
“Richard!” he cried. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” came the voice, faint and garbled amid the banshee howl. “I can hear you.”
“Richard!”
“I’m still here.”
“Why are you doing this?”
There was a squeal of interference. Then Silver’s voice became audible again. “Sorry, Christopher. But you said it yourself. Liza’s a child. And I can’t let a child die alone.”
“Wait!” Lash yelled into the phone. “Wait, wait—!”
But the security plates closed with a monstrous boom; the phone died in a shriek of static; and Lash, closing his eyes, slumped back against the ladder.
SIXTY-THREE
Although it is three in the morning, the bedroom is bathed in merciless light. The windows facing the deck of the pool house are rectangles of unrelieved black. The light seems so bright the entire room is reduced to a harsh geometry of right angles: the bed, the night table, the dresser…
Only this time, the bedroom isn’t that of a victim. It’s familiar. It belongs to Lash.
Now he moves around the room, flicking off switches. The brilliant light fades and the contours of the room soften. Slowly, the nocturnal landscape beyond the windows takes form, blue beneath a harvest moon. A manicured lawn; a pool, its surface faintly phosphorescent; a tall privet hedge beyond. For a minute he fears there are figures standing in the hedge — three women, three men, now all dead — but it is merely a trick of the moonlight and he turns away.