She laughed. It wasn't a sound he liked. Then she picked up a cigarette, lit it in front of the camera, blew smoke into the lens.
'The same thing I want everyone to do, Michael. Prepare. Everything comes around in its own good time. Life. Death. The cycle of nature. Sometimes you have to burn the corn to the ground to make sure the crop that follows prospers. Think of it that way.'
Charley Pascal did that laugh again, the one that made Michael Lieberman feel cold, then said, 'Oh, really, Irwin. You never give up. You have any luck?'
Schulz went red.
'Charley?'
'With all that low-grade snooping you're doing. Oh hell.. '
She reached forward, her face disappeared, and they heard the sound of a keyboard getting hit. Then she came back on screen and said, 'Irwin, you ever hear of the ping of death?'
He nodded. 'Surely. They had that when I was at college. That stuff is old. You could ping someone, anyone, out on the Net, provided you had their IP address.'
'That's right, Irwin. And what happened when you got pinged?'
'Well' — he couldn't understand where this was leading — 'someone took your system down. But all that's impossible now, 'cause we don't let any executables past the firewall, and even if we did — '
'Irwin?'
'Yeah?'
Lieberman watched Schulz's face. He was puzzled. Something was coming through on the monitor he didn't understand.
'Welcome to the new world,' Charley Pascal said, and then the screen went blank, her face dwindling into a fast-vanishing dot, there was a popping sound, and, one by one, every terminal in the room died, slowly, mechanically, on the hot, fetid air.
'Fuck,' Schulz muttered, in a way that made Lieberman think this was a word that didn't pass through his lips that often. 'Holy fucking fuck.'
And then, from a far corner, a sound. One of the terminals came back to life, lines of zeros and ones scrawling across its screen, and from the speaker the tinny sound of a guitar and a female voice. It was Sheryl Crow, and the mysterious way Charley had sent this thing unbidden to them, from God knows where out on the Net, meant that only the first line came through, just looped around itself continuously.
Singing, 'Every day is a winding road…'
Bevan came over to him, stood so close that Lieberman could smell the sweat on his body.
'We need your expertise. We need your insight. You knew the Pascal woman. Pretty well, huh? And now she wants to screw the world. Who knows? Maybe these two things are connected.'
'Bullshit,' Lieberman said, and went back to the briefing room, picked up a bottle of red wine.
'Bullshit,' he said again, then headed for the door, left them there, staring at his back for all he cared, thinking about how he'd get out in the morning. Walk if need be.
Outside it was a glorious Mediterranean night, the air hot and aromatic with the scent of wild herbs. The sun was dying out to the west, a gorgeous sphere of gold and red embedded in the velvet sky. The stars were out, so clear in the sky, alive, sparkling. The evening hummed with the skittering of insects on the hot, dry breeze. It would be another airless, sweat-filled night.
He half-walked, half-stumbled over to the clifftop, sat on the wall, drank from the neck of the bottle.
'Don't want company,' he said out to the sea when he heard her footsteps.
Mo Sinclair sat down next to him on the wall, looked at him with that accusing feminine expression he felt had probably accompanied his birth.
'We can't go, Michael. You heard what they said.'
'Watch me.'
'You don't have to like them. They need us.'
'Really?' he grumbled, wheeling round to face her. 'Now they do. But not when they were setting up this stupid piece of shit. Who do these people think they are, putting their fingers into a pile of stuff like this? Perry goddamn Como singing "Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket"? Jesus, they set out to do this kind of thing and they show no respect. And when it all goes wrong, they turn around to the likes of you and me and say, hey, this is your responsibility, you're the one to blame.'
'I heard what Bevan said. That was a stupid and thoughtless thing. I told you he was an unpleasant man.'
'Hell, I didn't mean that.'
'Then what did you mean?'
'Doesn't matter. Will you leave me alone? Can't a man even get drunk around here if he wants?'
She glared at him.
'Hey,' Lieberman said, 'I don't get it. We only met today. And there you are giving me that contempt thing just like we've known each other for years.'
'I thought you were different,' Mo Sinclair said, and turned on her heels, headed back to the mansion.
'To hell with "different"!' Lieberman yelled at her disappearing back. 'You know what they do to different people in this world?'
She didn't answer. Pretty soon she was gone, inside the mansion.
'Turn them into Charley Pascal,' he said quietly to no one, watching some distant lights bob up and down on the sea, now glittering under the brilliance of a nearly full moon. 'That's what.'
Then slowly poured the remains of the bottle of wine over the rocky wall.
CHAPTER 16
Colourpoint Shorthair
'What the fuck do you call that?'
Pete Jimenez stared at the picture in the cheap plastic frame with chilli peppers and sombreros on it, the sort of mass-produced item you picked up in the tourist stores at the airport. There was a growing sneer of distaste wrinkling his pockmarks. It was too hot in the room. The freeway leading out through Silicon Valley to San Jose was packed with slow-moving cars full of angry people. The world felt ugly just then, felt at the end of its tether, writhing underneath the relentless burning brightness of the sun.
'Looks like ET with fur on,' Vernon Sixsmith said, and wiped his brow. The air was stuffy and thin, as if there weren't enough oxygen in the atmosphere.
'Yeah. And not much fur, at that. Not much of anything here I can see. 1 guess we should stand down the SWAT team. These guys bill heavy by the hour and I don't think we got much for them to do here.'
'Yeah,' Sixsmith said. 'In a minute. No hurry.'
They hadn't expected much of the apartment. Barnside had had men crawl over Charley Pascal's place before. The address wasn't hard to find. The Pascal woman had quit the Sundog research team in Sunnyvale a year ago, after a long bout of absenteeism and a string of arguments with the management. By that stage, they guessed, she'd picked up all the information she needed.
At some stage too, she'd quit the apartment, continuing to pay the rent but, as far as they could work out, living somewhere else, probably with the rest of the Gaia crew, probably in the Bay Area, but no one could be sure. The woman was just plain elusive.
The apartment was in a block of buildings put up to cater to the growing single population of the Valley, the army of bright young computer things who were flocking in from all over the world to feed the digital industries that ran from close by San Francisco airport all the way out to San Jose. Charlotte Pascal was long gone, every item of clothing with her, that much was obvious on their first visit. Jimenez and Sixsmith fine-combed the apartment, opened the drawers one by one, looked under the cushions, talked to the solitary neighbour who was still around — a dopey-looking German girl with close-cropped blonde hair dyed partly pink — and found out nothing they didn't know the moment they came through the door. Charlotte Pascal had walked out of this apartment three weeks or more earlier, with the rent paid up until the end of the year, and she hadn't told a soul where she was going.
All this was a week before. Then Barnside sent them back again. Jimenez watched Sixsmith taking the call from Langley, and the look on his face said it alclass="underline" My, what a persistent man.