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Biodigital

By John Sundman

Copyright © 2014 John Sundman

This is a work of fiction. All resemblances to real people and actual events are coincidental.

Rosalita Associates

Post Office Box 2641

Vineyard Haven, MA 02568

www.wetmachine.com

www.johnsundman.com

Cover design by Dan Lewis

Cover Credit: Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, Carlos Mena, Betty Lee, Moriah Thomason, David Shattuck, and Arthur Toga. www.humanconnectomeproject.org

Music and lyrics to “The Air” and “El Monte Legion Stadium” are from the album “Uncle Meat” by (Frank Zappa and) The Mothers of Invention.

Music and lyrics to “Pound” and “Andy Fell” are from the album “In a Roman Mood” by Human Sexual Response.

Music and lyrics to “Uh-oh” are from the album “Uh-oh” by Rosenshontz.

Citations from the work of Abraham Maslow, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vannevar Bush are as appear in the text.

ISBN 978-1-929753-43-0

Part I

March, 1990

Chapter 1

Todd Griffith was going to debug Kali or die trying.

Thirty-six strobe lines—an electroencephalogram of the Kali chip’s brain waves—danced in parallel from left to right across the four monochrome monitors in his cluttered office. The answer to the riddle lay hidden within them, and he knew that if he looked hard enough he would eventually find it. Unless, of course, he went mad first.

The chip was six months off schedule, and before Kali no chip of Todd’s had ever been late by so much as a millisecond. It was the curse of the new guy. It had to be. The original design team of Todd and Casey had met their milestones with monotonous regularity. Then management had stepped in with characteristic stupidity, reassigning Casey to some skunkworks kludge and replacing her with Pavel the Weirdo. For the last nine months, ever since Pavel had taken over as Todd’s junior partner, glitches had popped up with distressing frequency. Things that had worked before suddenly stopped working. And although it was tempting to blame Pavel for the bugs, they always turned out to have been there in Todd’s logic all along, lying dormant. Week by week Pavel added more capability to the Kali, and week by week this additional logic exposed the weaknesses in Todd’s original architecture, as a cantilever added to the tenth floor of a building might expose a flaw in the foundation. Todd, in his arrogance, had built very little debug time into the schedule. And, being a hardware guy, he resolutely eschewed Brooks’ famous dictum to “take no small slips.” Therefore every new bug meant a new small schedule slip, and every time the schedule slipped management became exponentially more pissed--and Todd’s life became exponentially more wretched.

If Casey were still on the project Todd wouldn’t be in this mess. If Casey were still on the project, the design would be done by now and some silicon foundry in Texas or Sunnyvale would be cranking out Kalies like jellybeans. Casey would have found work-arounds for the subtle flaws in Todd’s logic—she always did. If Todd’s specification called for a two-microsecond wait-state, Casey’s logic would have tolerated any value between one and three. Casey accommodated Todd, subordinated her design goals to his. She reacted instinctively to the feel of his design—as a junior surgeon might address herself to a wound in the scalp so that the senior surgeon could focus his attention on the bullet in the brain.

Pavel wasn’t like that. If two microseconds were specified, then Pavel’s circuitry demanded two microseconds. Not one, not three, nor even 1.9 or 2.1. Pavel claimed to be a purist when it came to Very Large Scale Integration. Todd thought that “anal retentive” was a better term.

But he had to give the devil his due. Pavel himself might be an unfriendly, humorless, compulsively orderly and geeky weirdo, but Pavel’s designs were magnificent. They were economical of power, heat, real estate, and cycles. They were, in a word, cool, and anybody who knew anything about the aesthetics of VLSI design could see that. Pavel’s logic demanded precision but it paid good dividends. Therefore it was no good bitching to management about Pavel. Management could clearly see that coolness came from Pavel and schedule slippage came from Todd. Besides, there was no way Todd could blame an interface bug on the junior designer when his own circuitry didn’t meet the spec. So whenever a new bug appeared, Todd owned it. He was not used to owning bugs, and he didn’t like it.

As irritating and embarrassing as these bugs had been, they had been relatively easy to diagnose and correct. They were nothing but timing glitches, the kind any smart college kid working on his first chip would be expected to handle. You could find a timing glitch with the silicon equivalent of a flashlight, and you could fix it with the silicon equivalent of string and bubble gum. In the nine months that Pavel had been working on the Kali project, Todd had found and fixed forty-seven such bugs, with an average elapsed time of just four days from the time a report was opened in the bug-track database to the time it was closed. Today, March 28, 1990, only one open bug remained.

But this one was no simple timing glitch, and there was no simple fix for it. It was different from any bug Todd had met in nine years of designing computers for a living. It was a phantom. Irreproducible. Subtle. And fundamentally impossible. Bugtrack number K666. The Beast.

The Kali would run successfully for hundreds of millions—hundreds of billions—of cycles, then inexplicably shit the bed, as if deciding that just this one time two plus two equaled seventeen, or that just this one time the letter ‘x’ fell between ‘q’ and ‘r’ in the alphabet. Then Kali would resume giving the right answer, failing only once until a power-down and reset, and never, ever repeating the same mistake. It was like that Charles Addams cartoon where a barber holds a mirror to the back of a customer’s head to produce an infinite regression of faces in the mirror in front of him, and the seventh face is a monster. The Beast was a monster. It was one true, hairy, son-of-a-bitchin’ bug.

Retrospective diagnostics proved that the floating-point section of Kali’s Arithmetic Logic Unit was unmistakably, and correctly, executing orders that it had not yet received and that the early arrival of results from the floating point messed up fifteen dependent steps elsewhere in the device. Clairvoyance in an ALU was an intriguing capability, but at this point in his life Todd was much more interested in the prosaic than in the paranormal. Since he didn’t really believe that Kali had supernatural powers, he had to wonder if something almost as unexpected was going on.

He was certain that the Beast was caused by a race condition, when electrons on separate paths towards a common logic gate wound up in a dead heat, and the gate could not determine who got there first. When that happened the output from the gate would be unpredictable. Debugging a race condition was usually the most satisfying part of chip design, but chasing the Beast had long ago ceased being fun. How could the decode be working correctly if the fetch had failed? Unless the laws of the universe had been suspended within the confines of his chip, it simply wasn’t possible. And yet it happened. How?

Todd had been hunting the Beast relentlessly for three months now. He hardly ever left the Mill. If he wasn’t in the lab huddled over prototype silicon with probes and oscilloscopes, he was in his cramped office running simulations and poring over schematics. Other than short exchanges with Pavel, he spoke to virtually nobody. He hadn’t answered his phone or e-mail in a month. His food came from Mill vending machines. He slept on the floor of his office. Every third day or so he showered in the locker room, and once a week he went home for a change of clothes, timing his arrival to hours when his house mates would be asleep or at work. Todd didn’t want to see anybody. Human companionship was a vague memory, and he wanted to keep it that way.

His office itself bore witness to the frenzy that possessed him: A white-board covered with saw-tooth and square-tooth timing diagrams in blue, black and red marker scribbled on top of each other. A sleeping bag rolled up under a table. Stacks of empty Jolt Cola cans. A wire-wrapped circuit board in the corner collecting dust. Piles of unread memos about schedules and coding practices. Reference catalogues from chip suppliers intermixed with random comic books—Cheech Wizard and The Eternals. CDs, headphones. An Alfred the Drinking Duck perpetual motion toy, given to him Casey the day their first co-designed chip went to tape. On his desk, propped against the window that overlooked the old mill pond, a needlepoint sampler, sewn for him by his sister in cross-stitch:

Running Round and Round

In Tiny Circles

At Very High Speed

And on the wall (its only adornment): a framed two-photo sequence of a Formula One racing car slamming into the wall at the Montreal Grand Prix. The little figure in the white track-safety volunteer garb slouching out of the path of a flying tire like Groucho Marx evading bullets in Duck Soup—that was Todd. There had been a time when those mementos had brought a smile, but that time was long gone. He was aware of one thing only: the deathmatch with his own brainchild, the Beast.

I am Kali, destroyer of worlds. I am become death.

Something like that, wasn’t it, that Bobby Oppenheimer supposedly said when he and his homeboys blew up that first atomic bomb somewhere outside Los Alamos in the summer of ‘45? Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, patron saint of the Manhattan Project—what a great code name for a chip that now seemed determined to destroy its creator by cold fusion of his brain cells.

Not that Todd had been thinking of Oppenheimer or atom bombs when he chose ‘Kali’ as the project name for this cache-controller. Actually, he had chosen the name because he thought that particular Hindu goddess had about six elegant arms (thirty delicate fingers) and two nice breasts, a combination that sort of appealed to him. If he had known this chip was going to turn out to be such a killer bitch he would have chosen another name. Leona maybe. Or Nancy.

I am Kali, destroyer of worlds. I am become death . . .

Todd stared at the pattern on the dusty screen of monitor 4 and took another sip from the can in his left hand. His right hand was tapping one, two, three, four, against his left foot’s one, two, three. Todd didn’t know how to think unless he was drumming, and the harder he was concentrating, the more complex the polyrhythms became. He absently placed the Jolt Cola on his desk. Now his left hand began tapping too, adding another level of texture: one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five.

He had been checking out the strobe lines (all one hundred and twenty-eight of them, in every permutation) for nearly fifty hours straight and he was prepared to go another fifty hours. It was a brute force tactic: Stress the chip; find the bug. Cool it with a hit of Freon. Heat it with a hair drier. One two three. Spike the voltage; dim the voltage. One two three four five. If Kali wouldn’t yield her secret voluntarily, he would damn well torture it out of her.

Hey, wait. What was that?

It almost looked like a simultaneous hiccough on two lines that didn’t touch each other.

The monitor he was studying was a beat-up old TeleVideo with an interlaced refresh. Mirages were common when you used that kind of prehistoric jack-leg equipment. You could get a hiccough interference pattern from the ceiling lights, for Pete’s sake. That was probably all it was, he told himself, an artifact from the ceiling lights. Todd usually subtracted that visual noise from the signal subconsciously, but maybe in this sleep-deprived buzz-state he had been fooled. His right foot began to tap, doubling the right hand:

. . two. . . . four. . . two. . . .four. . .

Hey. There it was again.

He typed a command on the keyboard to replay the log file. Yes. There it was again: a simultaneous hiccough, ever so tiny, of lines four and eighty-nine. Gotcha! He could feel tears welling up in his eyes. Then, as he realized the full meaning of the little hiccough, he shuddered.

“That sneaky worm,” Todd said. “I’ll kill the little scumpuppy.”

From the moment Todd met the Beast he had had an uneasy feeling about deliberate sabotage, but he had always tried to dismiss that feeling as paranoia. Now the hiccough proved his intuition had been right. Line four talking to line eighty-nine was about as innocent as CIA operative Aldrich Ames talking to the KGB section head. Pavel, Todd’s innocent-looking nerdy sidekick, was using one of these lines for double duty. It had taken Todd three months to find the trick, but now that he had it he could hardly believe it. Son of a bitch! He got up out of his chair, left his office, got a drink of water from the bubbler, went to the men’s room, took a leak, washed his face with ice-cold water and went back to his office to replay the sequence from the log file. The glitch was still there, no mistake. Lines four and eighty-nine. Who would have guessed?

He looked at the wall clock. Nine twelve PM here means six twelve in California. Monty would still be in his office, probably. Todd picked up the phone and dialed his boss’s number.

“Hey, it’s me. I found the bug. That little weasel you stuck me with has been yanking my chain. You better get your ass out to Massachusetts, Monty. You better call the police, too, or at least corporate security.”

Monty’s reaction was entirely predictable.

“Todd, Todd. Slow down, son,” he said, with the condescension fairly dripping from his voice. “When was the last time you had any sleep?”

Todd was in no mood for an interrogation.

“Listen, Monty. The BIST is dicking with the refresh. You don’t need to know anything else. His logic is reaching clear across an acre of silicon to tickle mine.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Why do you think? It’s a Trojan Horse.”

“You don’t know that. It might be accidental.”

“Accidental, like Rose Mary Woods accidentally wiping out Nixon’s White House tape by holding the erase button with her toe for eighteen minutes. Accident, my ass.”

Todd loathed Monty’s insipid, patronizing voice. Todd, Todd, slow down, son. In truth Todd found Monty only slightly less weasel-like than his co-worker Pavel. But weasel or no weasel, Monty was the boss, the big boss, so the problem now became his. Todd could imagine Monty sitting in his Menlo Park office, gazing at the Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay and frantically searching his mental files for a scapegoat for this fiasco. After all, Monty had been the one who insisted on assigning Pavel to work with Todd in the first place. Monty had removed Casey from the project. Clearly, as it now turned out, that had been a mistake. But Monty had never admitted a mistake in his life, and the only other logical scapegoat was Todd. Todd was suddenly very happy that he had gone to such lengths to cover his ass.

It didn’t matter that Monty was untouchable, that nobody in the entire corporation had the authority, or the balls, to question his judgment. The only thing that mattered was that Monty always required a blood sacrifice when somebody fucked up. That was why Todd was now glad that he had always made backup copies of his work and hidden them safely away. When you work with weasels, as St. Frank Zappa said, take care that your flesh does not get ripped.

After about ten seconds, Monty spoke.

“Okay, I’m coming out to Massachusetts. Don’t tell anybody about this until I’ve looked into it myself. Go home and get some sleep.”

“I’m going down to the lab to wring the little jerk’s neck first.”

“Todd, no. Go home. Please. You found the bug, let me handle Pavel. Go home, okay?”

“Okay,” Todd lied.

So, good: Monty was coming. When would he get here? He might catch the red-eye out of San Francisco tonight and be at the Mill by eight tomorrow morning. Monty might even take the corporate jet to get here sooner. A Trojan Horse in Kali was, after all, a bona fide emergency. Millions of dollars, and Monty’s prestige, were riding on the Roadrunner project, and Kali was at the heart of it.

Todd himself didn’t actually understand what the Roadrunner was all about. Yes, he knew that Roadrunner was going to be a portable computer with massive amounts of computational horsepower. According to hallway hype in the Mill and vague rumors from California, Roadrunner’s new architecture would vault Digital Microsystems leagues ahead of the competition. It would run much faster, and cooler, than anybody else’s machine and make possible things that had only been dreamed of before now, and blah blah blah.

In other words: so what. There was nothing too revolutionary about a faster, smarter, more efficient machine: companies leapfrogged each other all the time and the world was moving towards portable everything. The Roadrunner would be just one more incremental step in that direction.

But, Monty hinted, Roadrunner was to be something much more than the latest architecture, more than this year’s fastest box. It was going to be, he claimed, a true “intelligence amplifier”. It had something to do with haptic interfaces and genetic algorithms so exquisitely attuned to its users that it became one with them. To hear Monty talk, Roadrunner was to be a virtually self-aware being whose silicon-hosted mind would fuse with the carbon-based wetmachines inside its users’ skulls.

But to Todd, a hardware guy, this was all just talk, and Monty-talk at that, which meant that it was largely bullshit. For all Todd knew or cared, Roadrunner might be everything Monty hinted, and the Second Coming and the Mind of God. That was all software stuff, high magic to be performed by the Fellows in California. Todd’s job was simply to make sure the bits moved where they were supposed to move, very fast. He didn’t care two figs about software.

But his discovery of deliberate sabotage would surely throw a monkey wrench into the whole Roadrunner undertaking. What would happen to it now? Todd’s office was on the seventh floor of building eleven; the Kali lab was one building away—across an elevated walkway —and two floors down. Normally the distance between his office and the lab was a big irritation, but tonight it was just as well. By the time Todd reached the lab he felt less inclined to kill Pavel outright and more inclined to break an arm and a leg and let him die of sepsis. Todd pressed the seven-digit combination to the lock, heard the click and turned the handle. He waited before opening the door long enough for one last attempt at regaining some composure before going inside. As he stood there, his chest

heaving from the run, his eyes were drawn to the tenth-generation photocopy of the “hardware debug flowchart” taped to the door:

This bogus flowchart with the hopelessly garbled syntax had always made him smile before, but tonight it seemed a very stale joke. He ripped it down, crumpled it and threw it to the floor, imagining himself doing the same thing to pasty-face Pavel: yanking him off his stool and throwing him to the floor, his skin fading into the eggshell white of the linoleum as he gazed up at Todd in terror. Todd flung open the door.

The Kali lab had the feel of a morgue for robots: cold as hell, with dismembered computers on slab-like tables and outlet boxes dangling at the ends of fat black power lines that hung like microphones from the ceiling. At the far end of the room, before a massive electron microscope, was an empty stool. Pavel Isaacs was gone.

Todd was across the lab in five quick strides, looking left and right to make sure that the little creep wasn’t hiding someplace. No, the room was empty. Fine, let Monty handle Pavel. They deserved each other.

But wait. Was the room empty? Then why was the thermometer affixed to the electron microscope showing 6C instead of the baseline 4C it was supposed to show when the room was empty? There was a heat source someplace, a radiating body. Where? Todd turned slowly, listening intently. And then, in a flash he heard and saw him: Pavel, breaking for the door, pulling it open, an apparition in a white smock, gone, just like that. Where the hell had Pavel been hiding? On the floor behind a bench? In a cabinet? On the ceiling? He was like an octopus, oozing through the smallest crevice, creating his own camouflage. But what the hell, let him go.

“Gollum!” Todd hollered as the door slammed shut. Then added, quietly, “Fucking Sméagol.”

He turned and walked out of the lab, past the elevators to the stairs. He was ready to bolt down them when it occurred to him that given the situation, it might be prudent to go with a belt and suspenders. He already had the tapes for insurance, but it would probably be smart to confide in somebody, let them know what was going on, tell them where the tapes were, what was on them, just in case. In case what? Todd didn’t know. Just in case. The first person he thought of was Casey, but he decided it would be uncool to lay this problem on her. That would be like going to your wife and whining about your mistress. So whom would he tell? Aubrey, he decided. Nick Aubrey.

Nick was a software boy but he was no pansy. If anybody would watch Todd’s back it would be him. In another place and time Todd and Nick, together, had faced sandstorms, malaria, dysentery, and angry people with big knives. A decade and a half ago they had done famine relief work in West Africa. Ten years later coincidence, or Fate, had brought them both to Digital Microsystems’ vast Mill in Newcastle, Massachusetts. Nick Aubrey had balls. There was no way a little office intrigue would faze him. Todd ran back up to his office and dashed off a quick e-mail, using a code that Nick would recognize:

Ibu Yagg,

I fear these things.

Bachie M’Bodj

Yes, it was a code that Nick would understand, a reference to scary times they had gotten each other through long ago. “Bachie M’Bodj” had been the Pulaar nickname given to Todd by African friends, and Ibu Yagg was Nick’s. Nick would know that Todd needed to talk with him, soon, privately. Todd was glad he’d sent the note, knowing that he would have Nick for backup.

But his note was more than a signal that he wanted to talk with Nick, he realized. It was the truth. Something very wrong was going on, Todd could feel it. He was, he realized, afraid, with no idea of what he was afraid of. In any event, he had debugged Kali. And now it was time to go home.

A few minutes later he was walking out one of the Mill’s thirty-six exits into the crisp and snow-filled night air.

Chapter 2

Nick Aubrey stood atop a stepladder, his head nearly touching the pinewood-paneled ceiling. With his left hand he steadied himself against a wall; with his right he held a sixteen-ounce hammer. He was tired, it was past midnight, yet there was no question of his knocking off: he had to finish this work tonight. He and Bartlett had at least a six-hour drive ahead of them tomorrow, and those six hours would turn to sixteen or more hours if they didn’t get out of this wilderness before the snowstorm that was heading their way arrived. The work was grueling, sure, but he had a promise to keep, a promise he had put off for too long. Before daylight came, this architecturally charming but long-vacant old building on the far shore of a remote lake in the middle of the Adirondack Park would be properly closed, secured at last from the elements, raccoons, squirrels, bears and the occasional human. After he and Bartlett left here tomorrow, the chances were pretty good that the building would be swallowed by the forest before another person saw its insides again.

Strewn about the floor before him were piles of salvaged lumber, some saw-horses, a few boxes of nails, a pry-bar, a hand saw and an ancient push broom. Three kerosene lanterns provided the barely adequate light and what little heat there was. The fire in the fireplace had gone out.

The work was hard but he was enjoying it, imagining what it would be like to do physical labor for a living instead of herding cats as a Manager of Software Engineering at Digital Microsystems. He was in full reverie—having totally forgotten his “day job” life, imagining a real life, one without the Software Architecture Review Committee demanding the impossible, without prima donna programmers to placate—when Bartlett walked in, startling him out of his wits. He glanced at his watch. It was two in the morning. How long had she been gone? An hour or two? He had lost track.

She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that was covered with thick wet snow.

Snow already? Not good, Nick thought.

In her left hand was a large cloth drawstring bag; in her right was a thermos. On her back there was a small knapsack. She unscrewed the cup and cap from the thermos and poured. The aroma wafted to him. Coffee? Where the . . .? Neither of them had spoken. She crossed the room, climbed two rungs up a stepladder and placed the cup at Nick’s feet, then stepped down and walked back to the center of the room.

She put her bag and knapsack on the floor, then threw back the hood of her sweatshirt, revealing black hair pulled into an unruly bun. Some snow fell off the hood onto the floor. Bartlett sat cross-legged on the cold floor and withdrew a frosted glass bottle from the knapsack. Champagne?

They had arrived at the town side of the lake at noon, rented a small boat and loaded into it the barest essentials—a few tools, some food, sleeping bags. At no point had Bartlett mentioned coffee or champagne. It was a small boat. Hiding them had taken planning and skill.

“Now tell me what you are doing up there,” she said.

“Tell me how you made the coffee.”

“I took an old pot from the kitchen and made a fire down by the water.”

“In the snow. In the middle of the night.”

“It’s not snowing hard. A few flakes. Don’t you want it?”

“And champagne?”

“That’s for me,” she said.

“You’re full of surprises, you are.”

“So you say. Tell me what you’re doing.”

“You will remark this ugly window.” Nick touched the heavily leaded stained glass window that rose behind him. “It was built fifty years ago by a zealous but not very gifted parishioner named Tad Cushing, and whether this beast here is a lion or a lamb is a secret he took to his grave. It’s ugly, it serves no function, it doesn’t match the rest of the building, and my mother always hated it. I am going to board it up so that no light ever again passes through it into this hall.”

“It’s true that that window is ugly and out of place,” she replied. “But nobody sees the light that comes through it. Nothing in this building serves any function anymore. It’s abandoned.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is that my mother hated this window, and that I promised her I would make this building secure until the church needed it again.”

“But there is no church. It’s defunct. The Second Swedish Baptist Church of Oneonta, New York is the Norwegian Blue of churches. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.”

“Lovely plumage, the Norwegian Blue,” Nick said, acknowledging Bartlett’s geeky Monty Python reference. “You’re quite right. The Second Swedish Baptist Church of Oneonta, New York is no more. It’s dead, and so is my mother. She’s aware of neither fact. And furthermore, since the church has gone out of existence, it’s totally unclear who, if anyone, holds title to this land and building.”

“And yet here we are at the lake in the woods in the middle of the night, boarding it up and making it tidy. For no one.” Bartlett said.

“Your point?” Nick said, as he sipped the already-cooling coffee.

“Tell me again, then, why, at two in the morning we’re out here five miles from the nearest electrical outlet and twenty miles from the nearest human being, in a Wilderness Area for Pete’s sake, boarding up a window in a building that nobody has used for years and nobody, in fact, even owns?”

That was a perfectly legitimate question, Nick realized. And he further realized that his answer, I’m doing it because I promised my mother that I would do it wasn’t very good. But most importantly he realized how hopelessly, absolutely hopelessly, he was in love with the woman who so good-naturedly had not only asked this question, but come with him on his absurd mission.

“It wasn’t always like this,” Nick said. And suddenly he was nearly overcome by childhood memories: this place in summer, more than twenty years ago. “When I was a kid, the church was thriving. Of course I hated church; what kid doesn’t. But I loved coming to bible camp here at the lake. This camp is where I spent the summers of my youth. We had a lot of fun in this hall. My brother and I put on plays here, with swordfights and imaginary dragons. This place means a lot to me.”

“I understand all that, Nick, my love,” Bartlett said. “But we can’t go back in time. This place is nothing anymore. It’s a bunch of decrepit old buildings owned by a church that doesn’t exist. You can’t bring back your childhood, or your mother, or anything else by anything you’re doing tonight.”

“I know that, baby,” Nick said. “There’s nothing logical about this at all. But I’m a sentimental guy, and I made a promise to my mother before she died. I thought I had explained all this?”

“Yes,” Bartlett said, and smiled. “You have explained it. You’re a sentimental fool on a romantic mission to keep a promise in the middle of the wilderness. Why the hell do you think I’m here? Women are suckers for handsome romantic fools like you. I just wanted to hear you say it again.”

“Shall I go back to work, then?”

“Do you mind if I watch?”

“Not at all. But hand me those nails first, please.” He pointed toward a box of nails on the ground beside her, which picked up she passed up to him on the ladder. “Thanks,” he said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you made this pilgrimage with me. I thought you would stay in Cambridge for the weekend.”

He turned away from her briefly and with one hand lifted a piece of pine planking that was leaning against the wall, one of several he had cut to cover up Tad Cushing’s stained glass window. He placed the board across the opening and drove a nail through the board into the wall. Three more nails, done. Five more boards, twenty more nails and he’d have kept his promise.

“Well,” she said, as he finished nailing in place the third board and reached for the fourth. “Seems like with you at the Mill all the time and me in my lab we don’t hardly have time together anymore to take care of everything that needs taking care of.”

The woman could say the most provocative things.

“That may change,” Nick said.

“How so?”

“Digital Microsystems has just announced a collaborative research effort with MIT. They’ve endowed a couple of professorships and given, I don’t know, fifty million dollars or so to set up this whole new program. Monty Meekman himself will be heading up the effort. I even had a hint you would be tapped for a lead research position.”

“What the hell?”

Suddenly the room was felt as cold as it was. Bartlett’s voice was ice, when she spoke. “We drove six hours to get here the day before yesterday,” she said. “We took a boat across a lake, we spent seven hours in the same sleeping bag getting hardly any sleep, we worked all day, just the two of us, rehabilitating an abandoned building for sentimental reasons, and now, just now, at two in the morning, you find the first opportunity to share this information with me?”

“I guess you might say I was afraid of how you might react,” he offered weakly. God, he was an idiot. He should have told her yesterday.

She glowered at him for a full ten seconds. Then her features softened, slowly.

“So. Another coupling of industry and academe,” she said. “MIT selling out to yet another corporate sponsor. Probably something to do with the Media Lab. I can almost hear the porno music.”

“But this is not just any coupling,” Nick said. He had come off the ladder and was standing by the makeshift table, organizing nails into their proper boxes. It was busy-work, intended to give him the appearance of doing something productive while providing time for him to think. Bartlett’s reaction had been so strong, as he had deep down known it would be. Now that he had finally breached the subject he didn’t feel right talking about the Monty Meekman overture from the top of a ladder. In Nick’s imaginary world, he and Bartlett would benefit from the project. Nick would be able to leapfrog over whole rungs of the management ladder at the Mill, and Bartlett would have her own well-funded lab at MIT. She could stop chasing grant money and get back to doing science full time. Her research in molecular neurobiology was some of the most exciting stuff going on anywhere, and here was Monty Meekman offering to pay for it. Plus, Nick and Bartlett would be working together. The whole set-up was perfect, if only he could find some way to get Bartlett to go along with it. He just had to frame the idea properly, he thought. And he had already gotten off to a bad start. “I’m not talking about the Media Lab. I’m talking about your area. Neurochemistry, molecular biology.”

Bartlett seemed interested in this information but somehow bothered by it.

“Why’s a computer company funding a biology department at MIT?” she asked.

“It’s not a just a biology department. It’s a new department unto itself: Molecular Computation.”

“Go on,” she said. She was staring right through him. “What would this new department do?”

“Nanomachines, biological computers, self-modifying molecular computers made out of DNA that evolve without human intervention . . .”

A gust of wind suddenly shook the building, and a board that Nick had tacked over a broken window on the other side of the room gave out and rattled to the floor. The storm was coming on. Bartlett ignored it.

“Mixing computer science with life science at the molecular level,” she said. “So you weren’t kidding about getting me involved.”

“Their goal is to have a programmable machine to read and write DNA within a decade. And no, I wasn’t kidding. I did hear a rumor that your name was on the short list of people to head up the joint project.”

Bartlett drew in her breath, as if someone had just given her bad news about a close relative. Nick had spent countless hours in Bartlett’s laboratories, watching, fascinated, entranced, as she, wearing a white smock and with her hair in a fetching bun, inoculated Petri dishes with strains of E. coli. He watched as she irradiated the bacteria to form mutant strains, then grew the mutants in test tubes full of Luria broth, infected them with bacteria-eating viruses that hijacked their reproductive machinery and made more and more viruses until the bacteria literally burst open. He followed behind her like a puppy dog as she centrifuged test tubes full of bacterial remains in cold rooms kept at forty degrees Fahrenheit, next to Revco super-cold freezers in which you could deep-freeze a Snickers bar in ten seconds. Transfixed, he watched her perform dozens of other arcane operations—all to figure out the most basic mechanisms of DNA, secrets that Bartlett and others like her were prying free from DNA molecules with the molecular equivalent of twenty-pound pry bars. With that knowledge, she hoped to one day cure diseases of the brain. Working with viruses and bacteria, studying brains and disease, uniting vastly diverse reaches of modern biology, all of Bartlett’s work was at the cutting edge.

And yet Nick knew she had deep reservations about where all this research was taking humanity. Her ambivalence both perplexed and attracted him. She was a living, breathing contradiction, simultaneously in love with and terrified by the very science she was advancing. That made her interesting, but it also made it very hard for Nick to know how she would react to things. One thing he did know what she thought of Monty Meekman. She loathed him. Which was why he had been so reluctant to share the news with her that his employer Digital Microsystems, in the person of Monty Meekman, was making overtures to her employer MIT.

“Programmable DNA machines,” she said, “and my name on a short list of people to work with Monty Meekman on them.” He couldn’t read her face; she gave nothing away. She was a prosecutor, and Nick was on the witness stand. “How are you involved?” she asked. “Where does Nick Aubrey fit into the picture?”

“I got an e-mail from the man himself, Montaigne Meekman. He wants to meet with me to talk about having me be the liaison between the Mill and MIT. He said he was impressed by your work there. So, that’s what I meant about you and I having the chance to see more of each other. If you ran the MIT part and I ran the part at the Mill— ”

“What? No. You told him no, right? I hope you told him no.”

“Of course I didn’t. This is a chance of a lifetime. I said I’d be happy to meet with him.”

“Monty Meekman, the monomaniacal billionaire, is personally recruiting you? You don’t find hat odd? Don’t you think it odd that he knows you and I are dating?”

“No, I don’t find it odd that he wants to talk to me,” Nick said. “I’m good at what I do. And I don’t find it odd that he mentioned you. Your work is famous in some circles. And he didn’t imply that he was aware of any personal connection between me and you.”

“Oh come on, Nick. Open your eyes. My work’s got nothing to do with molecular computation. It’s got nothing to do with the Mill. And I sure as hell don’t want anything to do with Monty Meekman.” Bartlett was now visibly upset. But she continued, “You don’t know anything about molecular computation either, do you?”

“Not really.”

“Three thousand people work at the Mill. And thousands more work in your California offices. Surely one of them knows more about molecular computation than you do. Meekman could have picked an expert. Why does he want you?”

“I’m a good manager.”

“There are lots of good managers at Digital Microsystems.”

“I know software,” Nick said, feeling his own emotions rise. Why was she grilling him so much? “Some people think I’m pretty brilliant.”

“Sure, Nick, you know software. And I happen to think that you are pretty brilliant. I mean, aside from when you’re fixing unused buildings in the middle of the wilderness when a storm is coming. But the Mill is full of software geniuses. Why you?”

She may have softened her tone, he noticed, but she was no less vehement. This molecular computation thing could have been a big step up for at least one of them, maybe for both of them. Maybe it even could have worked out as he had said, both of them working together, with him leading an exciting new project at the Mill and Bartlett being the MIT project leader. Nick knew it was all just a daydream based on the sketchiest of hints, one email, one brief phone call, but it was a daydream he had enjoyed. Until about three minutes ago, that was.

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,” Nick said. “Why not me?”

Bartlett answered the question by changing the subject. She sat on the floor, crossing her legs.

“If you wind up working directly for Meekman you’ll spend all your time in California. Away from me. And California will eat your soul.”

This was not the response he had expected from her. Nick knew that like many people in Massachusetts, Bartlett had been upset when California’s Stanford Microsystems had acquired computer-maker Digital Data, a Massachusetts institution. The union of those two companies created Digital Microsystems, “Dijjy-Mike” for short, the second largest computer corporation in the world, with home offices in Silicon Valley, and satellite offices around the world including the Mill, in Newcastle, Massachusetts. Many people in Massachusetts resented these slick newcomers from Silicon Valley, bully-boys with too much money and too little respect, who absorbed one Massachusetts company after another and hollowed them out, then tossed aside the husks that remained. California seagulls, they called them: they flew in, squawked a lot, ate your lunch, shit all over everything and flew out. And Meekman was the worst seagull of them. Still, Nick was surprised by the vehemence of Bartlett’s reaction to the mention of Monty Meekman, the chairman of the Dijjy-Mike board and one of the most powerful men in computers. Many people who followed the computer industry feared or despised him, but Bartlett was a biologist with no interest in computer industry gossip. Her loathing seemed to come from somewhere else.

“I thought you would be amused by the idea of you and me working together,” Nick tried, feebly.

“You’re a terrible liar, Nick. That’s one of the things I like about you. If you thought I would find this story amusing you wouldn’t have waited until two in the morning when we were on the verge of being stranded in a blizzard before telling me.” Nick was glad to see that the Ice Queen was softening up a bit.

“So you’re not amused?” he dared.

“Amused, no.” She paused, looked down at her crossed legs, and pushed some sawdust around the floor with her finger, drawing a curling shape. “Not amused. Think about it.” She rubbed the shape she had drawn out with her palm, and then brushed her palm on her leg, absently. “Now that the human genome project is up and running,” she continued, “the structure and function of a new gene gets published to the Internet just about every other day. That in itself is enough to scare me. On top of that, along comes one of the richest and most powerful men on earth, Monty Meekman, creepy kagillionaire, accountable to nobody, who, with a measly fifty-million dollars—about one week’s pay, for him—buys the scientific might of MIT, not to mention a great cover story.”

“Like you said, there’s nothing new in a prestigious university whoring for a multinational corporation.”

“Yes, but there is something new in the human genome project, and there is something new in programmable machines that can read and write DNA. Not even God has such a machine. He still uses restriction enzymes.”

Nick looked down at Bartlett. God, she was wonderful. What a jackass he’d been to not tell her about the molecular computation thing until now.

She was no longer exactly glaring at him, but she was regarding him warily, which was a new and unpleasant experience for him. In the two years they had been dating he had come to know Bartlett as his true love and soul mate, yet there were parts of her psyche that he did not know how to reconcile. For all her scientific sophistication, she had an almost popish belief that some questions were best left unanswered. There was a line somewhere, but Nick didn’t know where it was.

“OK. So thumbs down on programmable nanomachines,” he said.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” she said.

“No? What is?”

“The worst of it is that that creepy Meekman guy is looking in our bedroom window. You really think it’s a coincidence that he’s picking me and you to work together? You really must be a romantic fool.”

Oh boy.

“Maybe this isn’t the time to talk about it,” he said. “Let’s drop it.”

“Good idea,” she said, and some of the concern seemed to lift from her face. “I’m going to try to steer my mind in the direction it was going before I walked in here.”

“Which was…?”

“Patience, dear,” she said. “Patience.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, and Nick could see her features softening, the calmness returning. She kept her eyes closed for a long time, as if she were praying. When at last she opened them, their eyes met for a long time as she sat nearly motionless.

She released her hair from its bun; it was black and reached the middle of her back, cascading around the hood. She took her sweatshirt off, then her bra, and threw them on the table saw. She stood to remove her boots and dungarees, and stood naked, save her woolen socks, in the frigid air. He could see the goose bumps all over her skin, but she appeared otherwise oblivious to the cold. And still no hint of a smile. Oh, my God in heaven, Nick thought.

She bent to pick up the sack that contained her sleeping bag, then stood erect and unfurled it and placed it back on the floor. Her breasts were large, he noted, perfectly so. For that matter, everything about her form was perfect—legs, arms, shoulders, tummy: everything. Absolutely perfect. He observed the line of her neck to her shoulders, then regarded her face. Her dark eyes were bright on either side of the nose that he always told her was too tiny for her face, but inexplicably right. The shape of her cheekbones hinted Cherokee blood, just as their coloring clearly showed Welsh. When she spoke a dimple appeared in her right cheek, and he glimpsed a gleaming hint of overbite of her top teeth and the nearly imperceptible squiggle in the alignment of her bottom teeth. He felt his entire body flush, and thought he might faint.

“Are you cold, Nick?” she asked, almost as if she had felt the heat pass through him.

She gracefully removed her socks, bending each exquisite leg in turn behind her, balancing on the other, like Katrina Witt holding her skate to her derriere. She was now completely naked in the forty-degree room.

“Marry me,” he said.

Finally, a smile. A small smile, but he would take it.

“About time you asked,” she said. “Now I can finally open that champagne. But remember. You don’t work for Montaigne Meekman.” The smile was gone. Her eyes were fixed on his. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

“From this moment on, you work for me. Now come here and keep me warm. You let the fire go out. It’s a fucking ice box in here.”

Chapter 3

After eight bottles of beer at home, one slice of cold pizza and three and a half hours of drumming, Todd Griffith had finally expelled six months of accrued tension. He was stripped down to his boxers (all his other clothes having been taken off an item at a time in syncopated frenzy) and still he perspired as he tapered down his long improvisation with a gentle glissando on the bells. Kali’s race condition was finally exorcized. The demon was no more. Todd stood, gloriously alone.

Upon leaving the Mill he had taken a long route home, making what was normally a fifteen minute stroll into a one-hour hike through deepening whiteness. He hadn’t noticed when the snow started, but by the time he started his walk home four inches were already on the ground. Along the way he had drummed on his legs a Zappa rhythm from Chunga’s Revenge and tried to guess what would happen next. But before arriving at an answer he had found himself here, home, at the massive Tudor house on Edgell Street. Without bothering to remove his boots or shake the snow from his jacket, he walked directly through the mud room at the back door and into the kitchen. There he found his housemates finishing the night’s dishes. He grunted hello, took a cold slice of pizza and two six-packs of Bass Ale from the refrigerator and headed for the basement. He sat on the stool behind his drum kit and started by picking up his sticks and kicking the bass pedal, twice.

As he reached over with the drumstick in his left hand to flick the switch to the Fender twin reverb, he invoked the holy spirit of percussion by quoting from sacred scripture, Zappa’s Uncle Meat album. Using the words FZ spoke before playing “Louie Louie” on the Royal Albert Hall pipe organ, Todd intoned, in mock solemnity, “They like it loud, you know,” and began to play . . .

But that had been hours ago; he had moved from Zappa to Metallica to Max Roach as snow filled the window wells and he drank eight beers without missing a beat. Well after midnight he flicked off the amp. He finished out his session with a Senegalese polyrhythm on just the tom and snare. Eventually, finally, he was drummed-out. He got up from behind his kit, strapped on a Stratocaster and noodled the Dog Breath in the Year of The Plague riff for a minute until he realized that he was, at last, sleepy. He was, in fact, utterly exhausted; he was three months’ worth of exhausted. He put the guitar down and staggered up the stairs to his first floor bedroom. The window was open and there was a pile of snow on the floor. He went over and lifted the sash another inch or two. A gust pushed the curtains up and snow blew into the room. Perfect, he thought. The only thing missing was a beautiful woman, but if one had been there he would have been too tired to notice her. He sat on the edge of his mattress and jotted a few notes in his work diary, then toppled over and pulled the rumpled quilt over his sweaty body.

Some time later, while it was still pitch dark outside and the snow was still coming down hard, the window was pulled up by two gloved hands reaching in from outside. Todd didn’t hear a thing. He never noticed the person stepping through the window into the small pile of snow on his bedroom floor, and he stayed oblivious even when the person switched on his bedroom light.

Todd was in REM sleep—dreaming of a little Ansley Dunbar riff from Zappa’s white Fillmore album (seven counts on the snare drum racing against four on the high-hat while the bass drum did something totally random) that was somehow associated, in his dream, with the sensation of reading a Weekly Reader with his back against the warm barn wall in the summer of 1959—when the bullet pierced his skull.

Part II

March, 1995

Chapter 4

At two in the afternoon, March 28, 1995, five years after Todd had been shot and Nick’s life had begun its long slow slide into hell, Nick Aubrey entered his room-with-no-personality at the Woodfin Suites motel-with-no-personality on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale—his home away from home. The message light on the bedside phone was on. Good news or bad? It was the last day of a five-day left-coast trip, and even though it was only the middle of the afternoon, he was off duty. Between now and the red-eye home to Massachusetts leaving SFO at 10:00PM, the only things on his schedule were one meeting with Carl Swirsing, a long-ago co-worker from marketing, followed by something with Monty Meekman.

At least, something with Meekman, in theory.

Meekman wouldn’t show, of course. He never did. But he never called to say he wasn’t coming, either. He just made and appointment with Nick and then stood him up. That meant that the message on Nick’s hotel room phone wouldn’t be from Meekman. So maybe that light meant Carl from marketing was canceling. Please, God, Nick thought, as he went to the fridge, took out an Anchor Steam, and opened it with his pocket knife. Two in the afternoon wasn’t too early to drink, was it? He was supposed to meet Carl half an hour from now and he hadn’t even packed yet. The last thing he felt like doing was shooting the shit with a coworker he had barely known and wasn’t sure he liked. Please let it be Carl cancelling, he whispered as he picked up the receiver.

Back in the good days, before Bartlett had left him, Nick always felt bad if he walked into his motel room and the message light wasn’t on. That meant there was no sexy message from his wife, and that he was condemned to another night of hotel-room loneliness for which the only remotely effective remedy was reading Balzac, whether in difficult French or some archaic English translation.

As his and Bartlett’s marriage grew more and more cold, those message lights had become less and less frequent. She had left him five months ago. They were still married, for whatever that was worth. His wedding ring was in his desk in the Mill back in Massachusetts. The message wouldn’t be from Bartlett.

Nowadays, whenever Nick walked into a motel room and found a blinking message light on the phone it meant only one thing: bad news. Usually the bad news was the front desk calling with a “delicate problem” with his credit card—over limit, how unusual—or, when that wasn’t the problem, it was some bullshit crisis from one of his offices—the office in Massachusetts he had left only a few days ago, or the one in Mountain View he had left only half an hour ago. Couldn’t those people whose boss he was do anything without consulting him?

Calls from the office were never about a real crisis, of course. Never about a child dying, a house on fire, somebody needing one of his kidneys, right now. No, just some corporate bullshit. Nothing but bullshit.

Nick took a swig of his beer, and pressed the “play message” button. This time the message wasn’t from the front desk about his credit card or from one of his offices about some non-problem, and it wasn’t Carl calling to cancel their rendezvous. It was from Jake Carelli, AKA Wiredog, the sys-tech guy in charge of keeping the machines and network running in Nick’s Byzantine corner of the Mill in Newcastle, Massachusetts.

“Call me,” Jake said. He left a number. Nick played the message again and wrote it down.

Jake and Nick were not close associates and not really friends, but they did understand each other. Jake was an eight-year Army veteran who had serious combat experience in Kuwait and Iraq. He had left the Army and come on board Dijjy-Mike a few years ago, after Desert Storm. His job was to keep the networks and machines in Nick’s part of the Mill running so the engineers in Nick’s group could design newer and better networks and machines. Jake was good at his job and didn’t freak out over inconsequential bullshit. As far as Nick could remember, this was the first time Jake had ever called him about anything. Jake was the kind of guy who figured out things for himself. If he was going to the trouble of tracking Nick down in his hotel in California, something was wrong. Nick dialed the number.

“Hey, Wiredog,” Nick said when Jake answered. “What’s up?”

“Thought I should let you know about some weird shit on our subnet.”

“What kind of weird shit?”

Nick walked to the window of his dreary hotel room, pulled open the curtains, and gazed on the unending, pointless traffic on El Camino. He drank deeply from his beer.

“I’m not certain about this, but it looks like somebody’s been doing some hosey doorknob black magic with the RARP protocol to dick around with one particular box.”

Goddamn script kiddies, Nick thought. Teenage joy-riders who stole your car from Main Street and drove it around spilling beer and smoking weed until they went chickenshit and ditched it in a field—stinking your car like a room in a freshman dorm. Punks. And speaking of stink, Nick thought as he opened a window, why did all hotel rooms stink with the exact same “April Fresh” smell? No April ever stank as bad as a hotel room filled with “April Fresh” air freshener. He forced his attention back to Jake and the script-kiddie penetration test.

But had it merely been joy-riding script kiddies? Jake wouldn’t have called Nick if he thought it was a routine pen-test. And script-kiddies looked for an open door, a key left in the ignition; they didn’t mess around with complex network protocols. Had Jake really said “RARP”?

“If it were a random hacker break in,” Nick said, “I don’t suppose you would have called me,”

“Roger that,” Jake said. “I think this might be a serious intrusion. Somebody who actually knows what they’re doing.”

“Have you blocked them?”

“Kinda.”

“So why are you calling me?” Nick said. “Don’t you have a boss who worries about such things? Or Corporate Security? Can they do some diagnostics? Forensics?”

“Corporate Security? Fuck those REMFs”

“Rem?”

“Rear-echelon motherfuckers. Rentacop leeches. Fuck them.”

Nick had never liked anybody from Corporate Security; they always struck him as humorless poseurs more concerned with looking like Secret Service agents than with doing anything useful. But ‘rear-echelon motherfuckers’? Leave it to a military guy to put it so succinctly. Indeed, Nick immediately concurred. Fuck those REMFs. That left unsolved the problem of what to do about the hacker who was cracking his net by toying with RARP, the reverse-address-resolution protocol. Jake had a challenging situation on his hands, but it really wasn’t Nick’s problem. This was Jake’s deal.

“I would love to help you, brother. But what the hell do I know about network security, Jake?” Nick asked.

“You now a fuck lot more about network security than most people, Nick. You know RARP. So don’t play dumb. But that’s not why I called you.”

“OK, why did you call me?”

“Because whoever it is poking around in our turf, assuming it’s a person and not a bogon or a ghost, they seem to have a particular interest in one machine.”

“Which machine?”

“Yours, ‘Mymosh’, the one in your office.”

Well, that does thicken the plot somewhat, Nick thought. But of course it might be random too. It wasn’t odd that hackers wouldn’t target an individual machine; it was only odd in that he, Nick Aubrey, was as close to being a corporate nobody as one could be. It was hard to imagine anybody going to the trouble of mounting a sophisticated attack on his machine. What the hell did they expect to find? All his projects were bullshit.

“You said you ‘kinda’ blocked the intruder,” Nick said. “What does that mean?”

“Well, I unplugged your machine. Unplugged every fucking wire going into it. Seemed the most expedient approach.”

“Bravo!” Nick laughed.

Yes, Nick thought. Jake is a guy I can work with. Todd would have liked him.

“What do you think they were trying to do?” Nick asked. “It’s not like I have any special secrets on my box.”

“Reprogram the microcode. At runtime.”

Runtime? Now Jake really had his attention.

“What?” he said. He was already through his first beer and reaching for a second. “That’s fucking nuts. Reprogram the microcode? Rearrange the firmware? Why would anybody want to do that at all, much less on my insignificant little box?”

“You’re the officer. I’m just the noncom. They don’t pay me to think, just to do.”

“You say he’s reprogramming the microcode without rebooting? At runtime? How the hell is that even possible? That’s rebuilding the ladder you’re standing on. That’s like swapping out your brain while you’re awake.”

“I haven’t got a fucking clue,” Jake said. “I’m not a computer scientist, I’m just a fucking wiredog. I watch the bits that go over the wire, and if I smell something fishy, I alert the brass. And Nick, you’re brass, and this smells of dead fish from ten miles away.”

“Well, did they succeed?” Nick said. “Am I hacked? Did they fuck my box before you unplugged it?”

“Can’t tell, sorry. Dunno. Out of my pay grade.”

Nick sighed. He felt a long, long way from Newcastle now, from home, from the Mill, from the man he used to be. “OK, Wiredog, thanks for the heads up,” he said.

“Just keeping an eye out,” Jake said.

They hung up and Nick finished off his second beer. He wasn’t late for his meeting with the guy from marketing, but he was about to be. He packed his bag in five minutes—the front section for his work clothes, the back for his sweaty gym clothes—threw the bag into the back seat of his rental car, and headed for downtown Sunnyvale.

Chapter 5

Nick Aubrey never would have figured Carl Swirsing for a Mad Antonio’s kind of guy. Carl was a California boy—a Porsche-driving, volleyball-playing, market-watching libertarian libertine, the kind of guy who filled the fern bars of Palo Alto. Mad Antonio’s Nut House, on the other hand, was no yuppie fern bar. It was a dark place of pool tables, tattoos, stale beer and TVs that played endless tape loops of Buster Douglas smashing Mike Tyson’s face. From the floor there emanated the smell of beer-soaked sawdust and lots of peanut shells. From a barstool deep within Mad Antonio’s there was no way to tell that just outside the door the California sun was shining with a soul-numbing cheerfulness. Nick liked it better here, inside. Maybe that’s why Carl had chosen this place. Maybe Carl knew Nick better than Nick realized.

Nick hardly recognized Carl when he walked through the door. He was wearing clean blue jeans and a faded Stanford sweatshirt—not one of the Armani suits that were Carl’s at-work uniform—and Nick was surprised to see how well he seemed to fit in here amid the grungy types. But why should it surprise him? In truth, Nick hardly knew anything about the man. They were from different worlds, engineering and marketing, and an unbridgeable gulf was axiomatic.

Nick and Carl had only worked on a few projects together—ad hoc teams to bring customers into the engineering universe: Beta-test focus groups in Stockholm and Toronto, usability walk-throughs in Austin and Hyderabad. On those trips the two men had seldom socialized in the off-hours. Carl was an astonishingly gifted Don Juan and usually had hooked up with an appropriately beautiful female companion before the second night in any city. Nick, on the other hand, preferred his own company. Sometimes he checked out a cathedral or wandered alone in some funky precinct. More often he found someplace to lift weights, or, failing that, simply went back to his hotel room and read Balzac. How long had it been since Nick had seen Carl? One year? Two?

“Hey there, stranger,” Carl said, approaching Nick with a big, straight smile and a hand stretched forward for a handshake. You can change the clothes, but you can’t change the man, Nick thought. Carl was and would always be in marketing.

Nick shook hands, and Carl settled into the stool next to his, instantly at ease.

“I haven’t seen you around much,” Nick said.

“I left Dijjy-Mike about a year ago. Started my own PR and market research firm.” Ah. Now Nick had an idea why Carl might have called him. “Market research.” Trade secrets, in other words.

“You know I’m not going to leak confidential information,” Nick said. “Not that I have any information you’d want. I’m kind of in the backwater these days.”

Carl raised two fingers to the bartender.

“What are you drinking?” he said to Nick.

“Beer.”

“Sierra Nevada for him. Calistoga Water for me,” Carl said to the bartender. He turned back to Nick. “I know you won’t leak confidential company information. You’re a very principled fellow. And you’re more than in the backwater. Siberia is more like it.”

An odd response. People like Carl trafficked in hot information, and Nick’s supply was indeed very cold.

“Do you know something I don’t know?” Nick said.

“Maybe.” Carl smiled 100 watts, pausing for effect. “I’ve got a strong hunch that you’re about to be called back from Siberia to Moscow and anointed.”

“Anointed?” Nick asked.

Around them pool-hall sounds clattered as serious-looking guys with beards and big arms covered with tattoos slammed balls violently against pool-table rails, as if cue sticks were weapons and balls were enemy targets.

The bartender dropped off Carl’s bottled water and Nick’s beer.

“Anointed by Meekman,” Carl said, lifting his glass and tilting it in a slight toast.

Was he trying to be funny?

“If you’re going to insult me, at least buy me a fancy beer. What makes you say that?”

Carl smiled tolerantly. “Who’s your boss now?” he said.

Nick cringed.

“Chuckie Johnson,” Carl said, answering for him. “A network administration project. Novell emulation? Am I right?”

“How art the mighty fallen,” Nick replied. How did Carl know who Nick’s boss was? Or what the project was, for that matter.

“I thought you didn’t want product information,” Nick said.

“I don’t,” Carl said. “Stick to non-confidential information. Don’t give me any code names or ship dates.”

“The project should be canceled,” Nick said. “By the time it’s ready nobody will want it.”

“You’re right about that,” Carl said. “Code name Docudisk. DOS binaries on a UNIX virtual PC. Ship date forty-three days from today, with an estimated gross margin of 78 percent. It’s a well-built crock of shit that’s two years too late. It’s like you spent the last 18 months of your life building the perfect Betamax machine when the world has long since moved on to VHS. Docudisk will be dead on arrival.”

Indeed, Nick thought, Carl was connected and he knew what was what.

“OK,” Nick said. “So you don’t need me to tell you about Docudisk.”

“No. How many people are in the group you manage?”

“Seven.”

“Six, actually,” Carl said. “Three on each coast. How many did you manage five years ago?”

“About fifty.”

“It was fifty-three. Tell me, how would you rate your software engineering skills?”

“Excellent.”

“I agree. And your management skills?”

“I’m a good manager. What’s your point?”

“Patience, my friend. I’m just remarking on the fact that your career’s been in a gradual tailspin for the last five years. How come every time you deliver the goods you get assigned to a crappier project and the group you manage gets smaller? Why are you working for a has-been non-entity like Chuckie Johnson? You’re good at seeing patterns, Nick. What’s the pattern here?”

“You tell me,” Nick said, feeling himself getting angry. Somebody opened the door and let daylight in. Why did they have to go and do that? Next thing you know there would be fresh air.

“Monty’s pulling strings behind the scenes,” Carl said.

“Monty? I don’t even work for Monty. I don’t know him; I’ve never even met him.”

“You’ve never met him face to face,” Carl said. “But you do know him. You’ve corresponded with him by e-mail, talked to him on the telephone, even by video conference—”

“—or whatever you call it when he can see me but I can’t see him—”

“You and Monty know each other, all right. Not only do you know him, Nick; in fact you’re sort of his unacknowledged protégé.”

Nick snorted. “Protégé, yeah.”

“Hear me out. He invites you out to dinner once or twice a year, but always stands you up. He calls you up when you’re not expecting it, he gives you career advice, picks your brain, flatters you, hints that he has a job for you that never quite materializes, one for you and one for your wife . . .”

“He doesn’t know my wife,” Nick said. “And anyway. We’re separated.”

“Oh, my bad,” Carl said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

If Carl knew so much, how come he didn’t know that? Carl had just given a pretty accurate description of Nick’s relationship with Montaigne Meekman, the inscrutable billionaire genius and Chairman of Digital Microsystems, Incorporated. The MIT gig hadn’t come through, not in the end, but that didn’t stop Nick and Bartlett from arguing about it. Even after she had left MIT for Tufts. And boy did they argue. Knock down, up till dawn arguments with her repeating the same things again and again: that she didn’t trust Monty, that she didn’t like what she had heard about him, that Nick should stay away from him, even if it meant Nick leaving Dijjy-Mike the way Bartlett had left MIT. And every time, Nick would put on a clean button-down shirt the next day and go to work, ready for a little more ass kissing to work his way up the ladder to the top. But he never got to Monty. He got emails, sure, and phone calls, and meetings that were canceled, and, once, a card with two kittens on the front for no apparent reason at all. Regardless, Monty seemed to have taken an interest in Nick, which was flattering. But sometimes, often when a few too many to the wind, Nick had wondered whether that simple ephemeral relationship between Nick and Monty had doomed his marriage. Bartlett had never said why she was leaving. She just left.

“This has been fun,” Nick said, standing. “But I’ve got to go.”

“Sit back down, Nick.”

“No, really. You call me up after, what, two, three years, sit me down, buy me a beer, and tell me about my sorry ass state of a life. I know about my life. I don’t need you to tell me how it looks to you from the outside.”

Carl took a deep breath. “When are you supposed to go back east?” he asked, his voice measured.

“You probably know I’m on the red-eye tonight.”

“Have you heard from Monty recently?”

Shit, Nick thought. He sat back down. Where the hell did Carl get his intel? Nick had spoken with Monty about once every other month, nearly always by phone—early morning or late night, Monty always calling when Nick was either asleep or waking up. The conversations were odd, lopsided: Monty did most of the talking, and most of it was about himself—his role in the computer industry, his role in the history of the computer industry, his thoughts on society, politics, art, music, history, the philosophy of science. . . He was a chirpy, squeaky-voiced, arrogant, self-satisfied pipsqueak of a man who had more IQ in his little finger than Nick had in his brain. Nick never enjoyed Monty’s conversations per se, but he continued to listen for the same reasons he always had: simple animal curiosity, and a vague hope that maybe something good for his career would come of it. Plus, vanity. Nobody got to talk to Meekman, nobody except the Corporate Fellows, yet here Monty was, calling Nick on the phone. It was flattering.

“Monty’s supposed to pick me up from Digital Microsystems in Mountain View in about two hours,” Nick said. “But let’s be honest. What are the odds that he’ll show up? Probably about as good as the odds that Lucy will let Charley Brown kick the football.”

Carl reached for his wallet. He took out a hundred dollar bill and put it on the bar in front of Nick. Then he reached into his pocket for a red felt-tipped pen and made some kind of mark.

“If Monty doesn’t show up and offer you a job today, you keep the hundred bucks. Otherwise mail it back to me.”

Nick glanced at the bill. It was crisp. “What’s the job going to be?”

“I don’t know. But it will come with a lot of cash and stock options. You know about Monty’s anointed ones: preposterously wealthy. Fiercely loyal. You’re about to join their ranks.”

Nick took a long pull from his beer. The bill sat where Carl had left it.

“You’re talking about the Corporate Fellows. The guys with Lab clearance?” Nick asked.

“Precisely. They’re the only ones who matter. Monty couldn’t care less what other people have to say about him, because they don’t have any idea what’s under development in the Labs.”

“Monty’s going to make me a Corporate Fellow?”

“I guarantee it.”

“Come on, Carl. You’re high. Those guys are the cream of the crop.”

On the screen above them, in a two minute loop that repeated endlessly, Buster Douglass again knocked Mike Tyson to the canvas.

“They are the cream of the crop now,” Carl said. “But let me tell you something. None of them, not a one, was considered a genius before being named a Fellow. They all were solid workers whose careers had inexplicably gone into the toilet for years before Monty rescued them. Then they were elected Corporate Fellows – by Monty, of course—and suddenly they became golden, brilliant. Smarter than smart—”

“Maybe Monty has an eye for latent talent.”

“—and their personalities changed too.”

This was ridiculous. Everybody knew that the Corporate Fellows were geeks and kept their mouths shut about Monty Meekman. Everybody knew that they were fabulously wealthy even by Silicon Valley standards. But everybody also knew that Corporate Research Fellows of Digital Microsystems, Incorporated, were the best computer engineers in the world. Although their offices were found in every Dijjy-Mike facility worldwide, they worked in a special, logically cordoned-off division of the company called Digital Microsystems Laboratories. In dozens of secure, mysterious facilities at the California headquarters, at the Mill, and around the globe, the Corporate Fellows of Dijjy-Mike labs designed the coolest products on earth. Virtual reality systems with photorealistic graphics, symphonic sound, and whole-body proprioceptive feedback. Neural nets that could predict stock market activity better than anybody on Wall Street. Holographic imaging systems used by neurosurgeons to perform the world’s most sophisticated brain surgery. Chess programs that no Grandmaster could hope to compete with. Language translation systems as accomplished as any linguist. The list was endless. Officially, the Corporate Fellows and the Labs were part of Dijjy-Mike. But the Fellows set themselves apart from it. They associated only with each other and even had their own dress code. No Corporate Fellow walking the halls of the Mill would ever be mistaken for a mere engineer.

“The Corporate Fellows are weird,” Nick said. “I’ll admit that much. But you’re saying that being made Fellows transformed them from nobodies into supermen? Come on. They’re geniuses. God made them that way, not Monty Meekman.”

Carl’s earnest response convinced Nick that Carl did not agree.

“When an engineer becomes a Fellow it’s like when an ordinary Mafia goon becomes a made man.” Carl said. “ Or when a squire becomes a knight. It’s like ordination in to the priesthood. After a long apprenticeship proves your mettle, you get elevated. Whereas before you could only receive the sacraments, now you can perform them. It changes you. Monty recruits these guys—guys like you: smart, decent—and somehow he transforms them into geniuses willing to die for him. There’s a connection between Monty and the Fellows that goes deeper than money. It’s more like the loyalty to Jim Jones that led six hundred people to drink cyanide at Jonestown, or the loyalty to that guy in Waco that made people fight to the death for his promised salvation.”

“Koresh,” Nick said, remembering the horrible shootout between government agents and the deranged followers of “messiah” Koresh that left seventy people dead, including many children. And now Carl was saying that Nick was about to become one of Meekman’s deranged yet insanely brilliant acolytes, ready to do for Monty Meekman what Koresh and Jones’s followers had done for them? Nick found it hard to believe that these words were coming from the man whose chief goal during their trip to India had been to experience the whole of the Kama Sutra in five nights.

“What are you saying? That Monty put me in Siberia to see how I’d bear up?”

“Basically, yes. He was sizing you up. And weakening your resistance.”

“What? How so?”

“Tell me, Nick. How’s your personal financial situation?”

Nick looked at him intently, but the look on Carl’s face didn’t change. There was more to Carl Swirsing than Nick had realized.

“I’m fucked,” he said. “I don’t know whether to file for bankruptcy or what. I can’t see any way out of the mess I’m in. But I guess you already knew that.”

“Yes,” Carl said. “I did know that. How does a guy with no dependents who makes your kind of income manage to go bust?”

“It’s a long story.”

“That’s okay. I already know it.”

Clearly Carl had set Nick up for this whole encounter. Nick was pissed off about being ambushed, but he was getting more curious than angry about the whole situation.

“What do you want from me, Carl? I’m getting tired of you telling me about myself. Especially the unpleasant parts, and things that you have no legal way of knowing. Don’t you think it’s time that you opened your kimono a little bit and told me what the heck your game is?”

Carl smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, it was hardly even a twitch, but it was enough to let Nick know he was enjoying this. Nick reached for his beer.

“Look, Nick,” Carl said, turning in his stool and focusing his entire attention on him. “I’m going to be blunt, because there’s big things at stake and there isn’t a lot of time for dancing around. Here’s the facts: Five years ago you were a hot shit. You were a fast rising star in a fast rising company in a fast rising industry. Your girlfriend was a beautiful babe who happened to be a superstar biologist at MIT. Then your best friend got shot and left in a coma and everything turned sour. You got married but after a few good years your wife moved out. So now your marriage is probably over and your job is pure crap. You’re doing scut work for a no-op loser who couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. You’re full of anger and doubt. You can’t find a better job outside of Dijjy-Mike. You have good interviews outside the company but you never get an offer. You take out your frustration in gyms and bars. You bench press three hundred pounds, and you drink way too much. You are ripe for the plucking, Nick. Ripe. This afternoon Monty is going to pluck you.”

Chapter 6

Dieter Steffen stared intently at the molecule floating in the air above his upturned palms. Like a magic fairy hovering over the cupped hands of a wonder-filled child, the molecule rose when Dieter raised his hands, sank when he lowered them. To Dieter Steffen, this molecule was a magic fairy, as wondrous as any mythical being that ever held a child enthralled.

The orthogonal Diels-Alder adduct: five benzene rings, some associated nitrogens, fluorines, and a solitary silicon. It was an exotic, and, Dieter thought, a profound molecule—profound in the way that a chessboard is profound before the first piece has been moved, as a piano is profound before the first note has been played. It was profound as DNA itself was profound: it embodied an infinitude of possibilities. Nitrogen, carbon, silicon, fluorine—red, black, white, green: a perfect T, two walls intersecting at a right angle. It looked like part of a building made of colorful plastic blocks. This molecule, barely a billionth of a meter across, was the one he had been seeking for six years. It was, he dared to hope, the last piece needed to complete his and Pavel’s machine. If Dieter’s calculations were correct, this simple molecule was the key that would unlock the tabernacle in which resided the Holy Grail itself.

Dieter was only vaguely aware that he was not looking at the molecule itself, but at an image of it on a computer screen. And it was not floating in the air in front of him; that was an illusion created by the visor through which he looked, just as the image of his hands was generated by the data gauntlets that he wore.

An illusion: but to Dieter Steffen this molecule was more real than the chair in which he sat. It was more real than the visor and the speakers in his headset, or the forty-five inch Digital Microsystems graphics workstation in front of him, more real than the data gauntlets on his hands or the cradle in which his right foot rested. This molecule was reality itself.

A billionth of a meter. Even after all these years of working on nanomachines, Dieter had trouble imagining something so small. Compared to the devices that he and Pavel designed, a virus would look like a jumbo jet beside a Wright Brothers’ flyer. And like the airplane, like the wheel, like the first tool used to create the first fire, Dieter and Pavel’s machine would forever change the relationship of humankind to the universe.

As soon as Pavel and Dieter perfected the design and refined the manufacturing process, their machine would be able to change any one DNA sequence into any other DNA sequence. With this capability the age of the new alchemy would truly begin. With this technology all things would become mutable: oil spill would become fish food, smog would become clear air, the cystic fibrosis gene would become sound. Imagine: the dying child lies on the hospital bed, a simple injection into his blood, and lo, behold the child arise and walk.

All they had to do was complete the design and take it from simulation into the world.

“All they had to do . . .” It was like saying all they had to do was walk on their hands from Tokyo to Ouagadougou. In computer simulation, it was possible to design simple nanomachines. It was even possible to build simple machines that worked in the protected, eutactic environment of the laboratory. Eutactic environments—such as perfect crystals, the interiors of protein molecules, or “machine-phase” systems—were characterized by precise molecular order. But Pavel and Dieter’s machine was designed to work on DNA, and DNA wasn’t generally found in eutactic environments. DNA was generally found in the disordered solution environment of biological structures on a cellular scale. To build a machine that could survive in that real, meat world—that was the challenge. The real world, where hungry hydrogens came swooping from everywhere like demonic flying raptors; where ultraviolet light shone down like deathrays from the heavens; where the rise in temperature from comfortable room to warm room would have the same effect as a visit to the surface of Venus. To make a programmable nanomachine for DNA repair that could survive in the real world was to cure cancer, prevent genetic diseases, and possibly to bring about an end to aging and bestow on mankind the gift or curse of immortality.

It was a dream that only the most ambitious and most gifted even dared to dream—to experience it required mastery of twentieth century physics, molecular genetics, and human physiology. Dieter Steffen and his partner Pavel Isaacs were two of the gifted. They had begun working on this project as students at MIT in America more than seven years ago, and continued working on it for the Hoff-Zeigy Pharmaceutical Corporation in Switzerland.

And now, today, Pavel had told Dieter that he had made not one, but two breakthroughs that would allow them, together, finally to complete the solution to the problem. This was Nobel Prize work, but much more than that. This was work that would make them gods.

The one small hitch was that Dieter did not really understand Pavel’s breakthroughs: a fractal compression algorithm for storing vast amounts of information, and a graphite laser evaporation technique for constructing a C60 buckminsterfullerene shell around a working computational element. Dieter had been in this situation before, when Pavel had explained something beyond his grasp. And invariably, after he had thought about it, zoned on it, he had come to understand. This had been true when they first met at MIT during the fall of 1987, and it remained true today, nearly eight years later. All Dieter had to do was think. So this would be his task for the day: to concentrate and wait for insight. He was sure it would come.

But something wasn’t right. What? It took him a minute to realize that it was the music coming through his headset that was out of place. It wasn’t right because he could hear it—a single violin doing the work of a quartet, making a choir from a single voice: the Bach partita in A minor. When the music was right Dieter couldn’t hear it at all: he could only hear the molecule speaking to him, like a lover. It was time to switch to a more invisible music. He touched his fingertips together and felt the pressure on his fingers release.

He glanced at his hands on the keyboard. The metallic-grey data gauntlets looked like electronic hockey gloves, and his pink fingers protruded beneath them—making his hands look like hermit crabs carrying their comically oversized shells above them. With a few quick keystrokes he changed the music coming through his headset from Bach to Eno. The A-minor partita was good for the transition to total concentration, from meat reality to virtual reality. But once his mind was in the zone even Bach seemed too bound to the leaden world, to tangible things. Eno was zone music. With a once-practiced, now habitual movement he raised his hands from the keyboard and slapped them outward, as if giving the back of his hand to two insolent cads at once. As the inertial digi-lock sensors swung around his fingers and the gloves engaged, he was vaguely aware of the music fading to invisibility.

He gave the molecule a flick with the index finger of his right hand and watched it spin in its virtual space. In the upper right hand corner of the screen a virtual clock showed 18:48 Basel Local Time. It was still early in the day; there was plenty of time. The hands he saw on the screen were his hands. The molecule was an extension of his thought. He was ready to go back to work.

Suddenly he was startled by the light flashing on the telephone in the right corner of his desk. With the exception of his colleague Pavel, virtually nobody ever called Dieter. And Pavel always sent e-mail first, to warn him that a call was coming. Since he received calls so seldom, usually wrong numbers, and since his calls invariably came when he was deepest in concentration, he had long since disconnected the ringer; yet even the faint orange light was a jarring invasion of his mental space. It took three flashes of the light until he had recovered sufficiently to remove his headset, and another flash or two before he could answer.

“Steffen,” he said. He pronounced Steffen with a long sibilant “sh,” his tongue back deep in his mouth: Schhhh-teffen.

“Hello, Doctor Steffen,” said an American-accented woman’s voice. “My name is Judith Knight. I am chief scientist at Human Potential, Incorporated, in Boulder, Colorado.”

Judith Knight? She was as close to a celebrity as scientists could get. He had known her, by reputation, for years.

“Dr. Knight,” Dieter said. “I am honored to receive your call. How can I help you?”

“Dr. Steffen, I wish to speak with you on a matter of some urgency. Could you make yourself available for an hour or so, in a few hours’ time—that is, this evening?”

Dieter tapped his finger against his cheek—a nervous habit. He was never best when he was on the phone, and he was particularly awkward when talking to women. And this wasn’t just any woman. It was Judith Knight. Her first paper had been presented at the 1973 Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids, where her comments prompted other scientists to voice their concern about the potentialities of recombinant DNA. At the time of the Gordon Conference she had been fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school.

“Certainly, Dr. Knight. I am at your disposal. We can speak now, if you wish.”

“No; I mean that we should meet in person. In fact, I have flown to Basel expressly to speak with you. I have only now arrived; I need only a little time to refresh. Can you suggest a place for us to meet?”

This was an extraordinary request. It took Dieter a moment to think what to say. And he was distracted by the noises coming over the line—conversations, music, the clinking of glass. Could it be that Dr. Knight was calling him from a public phone in a restaurant? A bar?

“There is a café near the art museum, in the old section of Basel that we call St. Albans,” Dieter said, trying to ignore the distracting sounds. “It is called the Kunsthalle Café; it is on an inside terrace, so it is pleasant to sit in the air, even so late in the year. Any cab driver can take you there.”

Dieter assumed that this was true; he had read about the place in a newspaper. He himself confined his meals to his apartment and the Hoff-Zeigy employee cafeteria.

“That sounds wonderful. Shall we say eight PM, or what do Europeans say, twenty o’clock?”

“Very well,” he said.

“Good. I am tall, I will be wearing a dress with a floral print, and a hat with a flower in the brim.”

“Can you tell me what we will be discussing, Dr. Knight?”

“We must talk; that is all I can tell you at this time. It is very important that you tell no one about this call, or that we plan to meet. Please, tell no one. And please forgive my rudeness. We should not stay long on the telephone, so I will say goodbye, until twenty hours.”

“Goodbye,” he said, as he heard the click at the other end.

He placed the receiver in its cradle, slowly. Then he placed the headset back on, trying to put this astonishing conversation out of his mind. What could it possibly be about? Well, he would find out soon enough; in the meantime he would concentrate on his machine and Pavel’s algorithm.

But it did not take him long to realize that the necessary concentration would not be forthcoming. It wasn’t like him to daydream, but that’s exactly what he was doing. In his mind’s eye he was already on his way to a chic café in Basel’s Old Town to keep an appointment with a woman he had never met. Scheiese. He might just as well log off. He took off the headset, removed his foot from the torsion cradle, and switched off the computer.

His thoughts turned back again to the curious phone call. She had said that she wanted to talk to him in person, that it was very important, that she would appreciate it if he would not mention her call to anybody. Under other circumstances he would have dismissed her as a crank. But Judith Knight?

The Gordon Conference had been her introduction to the public, but it was two years later at the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules that she first stepped into the spotlight. Asilomar had been the first conference where the ethical and practical problems of working with DNA were explicitly addressed by the scientific community. There had been one hundred and thirty-five participants in the Asilomar conference, including fifty-two scientists from outside the United States. Of these one hundred and thirty-five participants, one hundred and thirty were PhD-credentialed scientists. Of the remaining five, four were lawyers. The fifth was Judith Knight. She was seventeen years old. She was a prodigy, making breakthroughs in a high school laboratory that rivaled those of the leading universities. Five years later, in 1980, her essay “Thoughts about the Human Genome” had appeared in Science. She was twenty-two years old, and had written what was to become one of the touchstone documents of the entire Human Genome Project—a worldwide collaborative effort of universities, private companies and government laboratories, greatly assisted by the Internet, to identify the function of the approximately 80,000 genes in the human genome—to decode the human genetic blueprint, which was written in the universal language of DNA. The project was certainly the most ambitious undertaking in the history of science, and Judith Knight was one of its chief architects.

Her essay had not only outlined the science that would be required and the organization that would be needed to coordinate research activities, it had also anticipated the moral issues that the project would raise—from the ethics of research conducted on aborted human fetal tissue, to questions of resource allocation in a world where some people can live forever but some people must die. Since then Dieter had seen her name often; she had become one of the world’s preeminent scientists. Although they had never met, and in fact he had no idea what she looked like, she had been a professor at MIT when he was a graduate student there. No, Judith Knight was no crank. Dieter could only wonder what she could have to say to him that was so urgent that she had flown from Boulder to Basel to divulge it, so private that it could not be discussed by telephone, even a telephone in an unnoticed corner of a busy nightspot, where nobody would be able to overhear her.

Chapter 7

Nick was back in the men’s room at Mad Antonio’s Nut House. Too much beer, too much beer. He leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on his face, collecting himself to rejoin his old marketing acquaintance Carl Swirsing and hear more wild tales about his own imminent future. As he reached for a paper towel a bit of graffiti caught his eye.

Skinny little boy from Cleveland, Ohio, read the scribbled anonymous note to the ages on the wall above the sink, to the right of the mirror.

Here to chase your women and drink your beer

I just want to fuck, I don’t want no romance.

“I’d settle for the romance,” Nick said aloud as he reached for another sheet. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror before heading back to his inquisition; he couldn’t stand to see his own pathetic self. Besides, he was thinking.

Carl had said he was going to be blunt, and he had been. In fact, he had been blunt enough to risk getting punched in the mouth. Why, Nick asked himself. What did Carl want out of all of this? Let’s examine this phenomenon, as Todd used to say, echoing Zappa. What did men like Carl always want? He wanted a payday. If he found somebody inside Monty Meekman’s operation willing to report back to him, he could use the intel to place the right bets. Question answered. Nick dried his face and prepared for the round two.

He opened the door to the bathroom and started making his way back to the bar. The TV screen above where Carl sat played the endlessly repeating loop of Buster Douglas’s devastating punches to Mike Tyson, followed by the much-reviled champion’s collapse to the canvas, concluding with his pathetic attempts to replace his mouth guard as the referee declares the fight over.

Just beneath the screen sat Carl, and next to Carl was somebody new. He was a short, stocky, perspiring man with thinning hair leaning in toward Carl. Carl had half turned away from the man, but not totally. Friend or foe? Nick wondered. The man was wearing a light tan suit, rumpled. His garish red polyester tie was askew, and he was tapping what appeared to be a manila envelope, soiled, about an inch thick, tapping his finger on the envelop where he had placed it on the bar.

“New friend?” Nick said.

Carl smiled apologetically. “This is Peter Barlow. Peter was just leaving.”

Peter didn’t acknowledge Nick, but rather kept talking to Carl, his voice manic and high pitched. “You have to take this,” the man said, again tapping the envelope, pushing it closer to Carl’s hands. “The professor’s going to be on the flight tonight. I’ll have to figure out which passenger he is while we’re in the air. But I’m sure he’s on to me, and will probably try to take me out en route.”

He continued tapping on the bar.

“Everything’s in here. The diskette’s in here too. Unix. Do not try to copy it; it will blow up your system. And remember: nine three two three three. A million soldiers are counting on you. Farewell.”

He turned and quickly made his way through the crowd.

Carl regarded package on the bar with a look of disgust. He wiped his hands on his blue jeans as if to clean them from the crazy.

“Friends in high places, huh Carl?” Nick said. He gestured towards the envelope. “May I?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Nick picked it up, looked inside and gingerly removed the contents. It appeared to be a stapled, stained typed manuscript of about forty pages, overwritten with many handwritten notes in different colored inks, a product of a disturbed mind. Nick slid it back into the envelope.

“Peter,” Carl said. “Crazy Peter. He used to be a technician for CNN, he says. He was in Baghdad with Arnett right up to the eve of Desert Storm. But he got fired for putting himself on the air to explain his theory about the real reason for the war –computer chips and multinational corporations and biological warfare and Saddam Hussein and you name it. Kind of a poor man’s Ross Perot.”

The envelope was covered with illegible writing in different inks smeared with what appeared to be coffee and water stains, and the frayed edges were taped. One note Nick could read, however: the block letters were large and thick, gone over with a ballpoint a hundred times:

Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18

This just gets stranger and stranger, Nick thought. Twilight Zone. But Carl didn’t seem too fazed.

“How do you know him?” Nick asked.

If Carl heard the question, he didn’t answer. “Peter’s kind of a classic paranoid,” he said, “but he’s alright. Harmless. He has convinced himself that the CIA and Saddam Hussein are out to kill him but he thinks I’m one of the good guys, so he gave me a copy of his manifesto for safe keeping.”

Sheesh, Nick thought. Did I step into a wormhole this morning?

“How the hell did he find you here?”

“He lives just around the corner. Don’t worry about him.”

Nick tossed the envelope back on the bar. Carl picked it up then patted it on both sides, feeling its thickness. He opened it and peered inside. “No diskette,” he said. “Fuck me. Now he’ll have to track me down again to give me his precious diskette that answers every question in the world.” He pushed the package away from him, as if he would leave it for the bartender as a tip.

“Where were we?” Carl asked Nick.

“You were telling me that I’m one of the chosen few, about to be recalled from Siberia and ordained or anointed or whatever. You bet me a hundred dollars that the most powerful man in Silicon Valley is going to make me Pope, or something like that.”

“Right,” Carl said, looking at his watch. “You think I’m nuts. But wait until you hear what Monty has to say. If he offers you a position as a Corporate Fellow and you take the job, I want that hundred back. You won’t need it anyway at that point. But call me.” He took a card out of his wallet and passed it to Nick, using that cute two-finger technique Nick had seen all marketing guys use. “This has my cell number. You’ve got about an hour to kill until Monty comes to pick you up back at Dijjy-Mike. Get ready. He’s a mind-fucker of the first magnitude.” He pushed himself off his bar stool.

“You’re serious about all this aren’t you?” Nick said.

“Nick, I’m as serious as Tantric sex with a Hindu goddess.”

“Cheesus,” Nick said. “I’m going to be really disappointed if Monty just wants to say hello.”

The marketing veneer seemed to dissolve from Carl’s face and he became fiercely intent. It was a side of Carl that Nick had never seen before.

“Listen” he said, grabbing Nick’s shirt and pulling him half-off his stool with more strength than Nick would have guessed was in Carl’s marketing-drone body. “Two of my grandparents died in Buchenwald. I don’t like Meekman, I don’t like his Corporate Fellows, and I think they’re up to no good. They’re bad, maybe even Nazi-Buchenwald bad. Sure, I’ll be very happy if you give me information about Monty and the Corporate Fellows that will make me rich and you richer. But I’ll be happier if you help me send them all to the bottom of the sea.”

Nick was feeling more seasick than his few beers could account for. Buchenwald? A Nazi death factory for the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of people? Had Carl gone crazy too? Monty Meekman might be a Machiavellian corporate take-over artist and slimeball corporate politician, but that was a far cry from being a mass murderer. When he checked out of his hotel an hour ago, Nick had thought that he and Carl were going to be talking about industry rumors or maybe about old times with Carl chasing hot chicks in Hyderabad. Where had all this talk of Koresh cults and James Jones Kool-Aid drinkers and Siberia and ordination come from? Not to mention Saddam Hussein and the CIA and biological warfare. If Carl hadn’t lost his mind, had Nick lost his?

“OK, Carl. I got it,” Nick said, quietly. “Message received.”

“One more thing,” Carl said, releasing his grip. “Beware of icicles.”

“We’re in freeking Sunnyvale, Carl. What the hell do you mean by that?”

Carl was already walking away from him.

“No fingerprints. Watch your back, Nick.”

With that Carl was out the door. And, Nick noticed, he had taken Barlow’s stained manila envelope with him.

Nick considered ordering another beer, but decided a glass of water would be a wiser choice at this point. He needed to think. That Peter guy with his multi-colored manuscript and bible quotes? He was clearly crazy. But Carl hadn’t seemed deranged, even though the words that had come out of his mouth were nutzoid. It didn’t matter: within a few hours Monty either would or would not propose to Nick that he become a Corporate Fellow, and then Nick would know whether or not Carl had gone around the bend.

What if Carl were right, Nick daydreamed, and Monty did show up today? What if he showered Nick with dumpster-loads of cash?

Ironic, wasn’t it, to think Monty might be the one to rescue Nick from career oblivion and financial ruination? Bartlett had prophesied that Nick would never work for Monty. She also had pledged that she herself would remain faithful to Nick for life. She had left him. Monty had never really promised Nick a thing, he had only hinted. But he had remained faithful, in a manner of speaking, for five years.

“God, Bartlett,” Nick whispered to the empty stool beside him. “Has it really been five months since you left me? Five goddamned months and I can’t shake you for a minute; not even for a second.”

Nick walked out of Mad Antonio’s Nut House. The sunlight nearly blinded him.

Chapter 8

Bartlett Aubrey grabbed her coat, left her third-floor laboratory, walked to the elevator and got in, thinking of neurons and the various ways they decayed and regrew—how much of those processes were controlled by DNA, she wondered, and how much by environmental factors—plaque, proteins, parasites? The elevator had a quaint charm and a 1930’s look and it wobbled slightly as it descended. It was a wonder that it still worked at all. When the creaky conveyance’s doors opened at ground level, she stood lost in thought until they slid shut, snapping her out of her reverie. “Wake up, Bartlett,” she said, reaching for the Open Door button.

The doors opened again and she stepped into the tired Art Deco lobby. She pushed her way through the revolving door onto Washington Street, where her senses were immediately assaulted by the sights and sounds of Chinatown and the Big Dig: diesel fumes mixed with palpable essences of sesame oil, garlic, soy sauce, ginger and garbage. Horns were honking, people were walking by chatting in who knew how many languages—not a few of them speaking to nobody in particular—and beneath it all an endless clanging and pounding. Not far away, machines that looked like giant robot-monsters fighting with each shattered bedrock and shook the earth—just as they did twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, in the Big Dig’s endless, endless, endless construction—a boondoggle of many billions of dollars to remove an ancient elevated highway and replace it with a warren of tunnels under the heart of the city. This corner of Boston—where Tufts University’s most advanced biomedical research laboratories where hidden in unassuming buildings in the ugliest corner of Chinatown hard against the southern maw of the Big Dig—always seemed to Bartlett to be operating at about as close to pure chaos as a functioning city could handle.

She jaywalked across Kneeland Street, jostled through Asian crowds in front of jewelry shops filled with 18 carat gold chains behind inch-thick glass, and darted into the Peking Garden, a giant movie theatre that had been converted into a dim sum restaurant decades ago. Unprepossessing on the outside, the Peking Garden magically became as big as the Boston Garden once you walked through its front door. It was a fine place for lunch if you went in for “authentic” Chinese food and didn’t ask any questions about the menu that you didn’t want true answers to. But Bartlett wasn’t at the Peking Garden today for lunch.

She nodded to Madame Chen, the Garden’s ancient proprietor, pushed through an unmarked door on the right side of the grand foyer, jogged up two flights of stairs, and walked down a corridor. At the end of the hallway was a door with a fog-glassed window upon which were stenciled, in the style of Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, the words: The Neuro Group. She was early; the meeting wasn’t scheduled for another half an hour. She had come early because she needed to think—to think and maybe even to look into her heart. She took her key, opened the door, and walked in.

What a dump.

The corporate headquarters of the Neuro Group gave no indication of the ambitions harbored here. Twelve people—six biologists from Tufts and six computer scientists from MIT, a mix of professors and grad students—were attempting to model the workings of brains in silicon, using real-time data from living, breathing animals. Their goal was very simple: to come up with the technology—the hardware, the software, the chip-to-neuron interface—that would allow medical researchers to simulate the workings of brains. They were starting with mice of course, but inevitably, inexorably moving up the complexity ladder to humans. From there, they would directly interface computers to those brains. Their ambition was to not only feed information—thoughts?—from the brain into a computer chip, but also, conceivably, the other way around. Bartlett’s dream was that The Neuro Group’s technology, if they ever got it off the drawing board, ever got to actually, you know, work, would be widely shared in medical labs around the world; that maybe, someday, it would help researchers find cures for horrible degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, like ALS, and like Fitzgibbons Disease, that ghastly implacable illness which had claimed Bartlett’s brother Jerome at age 12 after putting him through a short lifetime of unmitigated hell. This was Bartlett’s prime passion now, her sole interest. Since she had left Nick five months ago, working at The Neuro Group seemed to be the only thing of value in her suddenly flat and empty life.

Other members of The Neuro Group, Bartlett was well aware, were more interested in becoming fantastically wealthy than in saving the world from neurodegenerative diseases—they dreamed of selling their technology to the military, to advertisers, to video-game makers. Or of selling it to people whose motives she didn’t want to, wouldn’t allow herself to, think about. People with names like Monty Meekman.

All the work The Neuro Group enterprise had so far done was legally legitimate. But there were university regulations, not to mention strict federal laws, that put limits on use of publicly-funded buildings and equipment for private gain—which was why The Neuro Group didn’t hold corporate meetings on either campus, why they had gone to the trouble of taking a lease on this “office,” more properly called a storeroom, that hadn’t been painted in thirty years and still reeked of onions and bok choi that had been kept there before The Neuro Group took up its intermittent residence. This “office”—more like a safe house, Bartlett thought—usually sat unused. It was only unlocked when something big had come up, something that required everybody in The Neuro Group to get together, like a meeting of the bosses in a movie about mobsters. And that’s what the whole project sometimes seemed like to her—a movie, a fantasy. The Neuro Group had come a long way since their decision to form a corporation, made over beers in an Inman Square pub two years ago, but they weren’t even within sight of the finish line. In fact they had hardly started. They had set up a small hardware lab and licensed technologies that they themselves had created from their respective universities; that was enough to eat through a significant pile of cash. They had sketched out a general research outline and determined what kind of facilities they would need—state of the art facilities—to do that research. This was all good and important preliminary work, but if their dream was ever to become reality, if The Neuro Group was to become a real world-changing corporation, the time had finally come to bite the bullet. It was time for them to take the leap, to quit their day jobs, to go at The Neuro Group as if it mattered. There was nothing holding them back. Nothing other than fear of failure, fear of losing tenure.

And lack of money.

Above the usual Big Dig pounding, Bartlett noticed a muffled cacophony that sounded like an off-key harmonium punctuated by somebody banging on a pot lid. The noise was coming up from the street. She walked to the room’s sole window and looked out. Twenty feet below her a Chinese funeral party led by a dissolute marching band with half a dozen players was making its way down a dumpster-lined alley. It was so depressing, she thought. There was no dignity in this funeral march, only rote behavior. They were just going through the motions. Why didn’t they just throw the body into the Big Dig and be done with it? She immediately felt bad for having even entertained such a sour thought. Something was happening to her, she realized, something she didn’t like. Nick would have found something charming, even joyous, in the sight. But ever since leaving Nick, Bartlett seemed to have forgotten how to feel joy.

Nowadays she tried to think of herself as a molecular biologist by calling and a neuroscientist by necessity. Also, she was a Red Sox fan. That was all there was to her, she tried to convince herself.

True, she sometimes still thought of herself as a woman, a daughter, a friend; once upon a time—and not so very long ago, only five months next week—she had thought of herself as Nick Aubrey’s wife. She had thought of herself as the woman who would be mother to Nick’s children. And that self-definition meant the world to her. But now that she was Nick’s “estranged” wife; his maybe, probably, someday ex-wife. Thoughts about who she was, at her essence, opened doors to all kinds of corridors that she refused to go down. She was a scientist who knew about DNA and brain structures and Red Sox batting averages. To hell with being a woman, a wife, a mother. To hell with joy. The funeral below might just have well been for the former Bartlett Aubrey. She was a new Bartlett now, a stripped-down model unencumbered by bullshit sentimentality.

She turned from the window and walked to the back room—it was no more than a closet, really—where there was a desk and a Dijjy-Mike terminal. She would log on, using her Neuro Group identity.

Assuming should could find the courage, that was, before her colleagues arrived.

She knew what would be waiting for her in her inbox, and it filled her heart with fear. “Go on, girl,” she said. “This why you came here early. Do it.”

She sat down in the beat up old chair, logged on, checked her email.

White letters on an ancient green phosphor screen, a blinking cursor at the first. Seven messages from Mountaintop@digitalmicrosystems.com. She knew what they would be before reading them. Monty Meekman was again reaching his tentacles out, trying to get into her company, into her head, just as, she realized, he had gotten into her marriage. There would be invitations to meet, hints of vast investments available for the asking. He had been sending her emails for months now, had called her house, had called her office, her lab. He had sent letters. He had even, once, shown up at her lab’s door. He wanted her to work for him, he said. He wanted her research, her ideas, her understanding of the human brain. He wanted her to join him. He wanted too much. Anything he wanted was too much.

Bartlett’s history with Meekman was long, reaching back to her high school years, when Meekman, a young Stanford professor, came out of nowhere and offered to train her. Somehow he had found out about her innovative science fair project in Oneonta, New York. He had invited her to be part of his Young Leadership Council of high school science whizzes, and, with stars in her eyes and dreams of changing the world, she had agreed. That was more than a decade ago, though, before she knew what his real motives where. As soon as she found out what Meekman was really all about, she got as far as she could from him, putting as much distance between her life and his. But every few years or so he’d reappear. He had contacted her when she was in graduate school, and again just after she published her paper on the Trojan Gene. Each time she told him to go away, forever. Finally she threatened to take out a restraining order, and it seemed that that got through to him. She thought she was done with him for good.

Until the night he showed up in her life, in Nick’s life, in a deserted church building in the Adirondack wilderness. The very night Nick proposed to her.

That had been five years ago, and Meekman hadn’t really gone away since. He hadn’t done anything that other people would consider out of line—just the occasional email about “areas of mutual interest.” But she knew better. She didn’t want anything to do with Monty Meekman. He was a lunatic, a mad man, a psychopath. He ruined everything he touched. He ruined her marriage. He had ruined her life.

Still, she was tempted to read what he had to say this time, because the Neuro Group needed the kind of help that only Monty Meekman could provide. She stared at the blinking cursor for what seemed an eternity.

“No,” she said, finally. She marked all seven messages as “read” and deleted them, unopened. She stood and turned the monitor off. If only getting rid of Meekman was as easy as nuking a few emails.

She considered fleeing right then. She could resign from The Neuro Group and who would even notice? She had a fine job at the Tufts lab. She liked her boss, Irwin Goldberg; she liked the people she worked with, she liked the research she was doing. Quitting The Neuro Group would mean an end to meetings in this smelly room, an end to the boiling friction between the MIT computer geeks and the Tufts biology geeks, an end to her foray into capitalism, the money hunt of which she had hated every minute.

But abandoning The Neuro Group would also mean, she knew, an end to any hope of her ever finding a cure for Fitzgibbons Disease, the rare and orphan condition that few other scientists had even heard of, much less understood, or, heaven knew, found any therapy for; the disease that had killed her brother after torturing him for twelve solid years. Not to mention that, of course, quitting The Neuro Group would pretty much rule out her ever paying back Nick all the money he had so enthusiastically given her to start it. Abandoning The Neuro Group would basically mean, in other words, that she would have no reason to go on living. She paced the meeting room waiting for the showdown to start.

The door opened and in walked Josh Simpson, The Neuro Group’s CEO, an MIT computer scientist chosen as the company’s chief executive more or less by lottery. Since he had been chosen, he’d developed a little bit of an attitude, an I’m-in-charge-here approach that didn’t sit well with Bartlett. He was one of the MIT guys, part of the group that wanted to and would sell out to money, regardless of who the bidder was. And that’s what they were gathering to talk about today: money. Within a few minutes a quorum was there, and then, for the first time in Bartlett’s memory, the Neuro Group’s full board of directors; everybody in the corporation—including Irwin Goldberg, who had sauntered over from their Tufts laboratory without bothering to put on a coat.

Chairs were assembled around the two folding tables, end-to-end, that made the former vegetable storeroom into a boardroom. And, as Bartlett sat thinking distractedly about nuked emails, Chinese funeral marches in dumpster alleys, and of her lovely brother slowly losing his strength, his eyesight, his coordination, his intelligence, his personality, his life, the meeting was getting going, quickly getting into technical areas she didn’t really follow.

“Listen” one of the MIT guys was saying, “what we have learned about using our graphics architecture to reconstruct neural connections in high-resolution brain-imaging data puts us miles ahead, years ahead, of anybody doing this kind of thing. We have solved non-trivial issues regarding the implementation of our system for semi-automatic segmentation and interactive visualization of terabytes of brain image data. Terabytes. Our simulations are already millions of times more sophisticated, and will be millions of times faster than anybody else’s.”

Bartlett was giving him about a third of her mindshare.

“When you combine what we’ve done with the work out of Bartlett’s lab . . . well, I think the potential for The Neuro Group is pretty much unlimited.”

Bartlett now felt like she was supposed to say something, although she really had nothing to say.

“Well then, what’s stopping us? Why don’t we—” she started.

“What’s stopping us is that we need money,” Simpson said. “Everybody knows that’s why were here today. Money. We need investors. Smart investors. And investors with very, very deep pockets.”

“Meekman,” somebody said. “Dijjy-Mike. It’s the only answer.”

Bartlett coughed involuntarily. The group looked at her.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Who else besides Meekman?” Irwin Goldberg asked. Good ol’ Irwin, Bartlett thought. He’s got my back.

“We haven’t even shopped ourselves,” one of the Tufts people said. “Pharmaceutical companies. The big giants in Basel . . .”

“You’re dreaming.”

The tension in the room had gone from zero to just under the boiling point in about three minutes.

“Listen,” Bartlett said, raising her voice above three ongoing conversations. “We don’t even have anything built. All we have is simulations. We’re supposed to be millions of times better—”

“Millions of millions of times” Simpson corrected her.

An MIT guy broke in, an enthusiastic grad student who evidently saw this project not only as his ticket to wealth, but as his pass-go ticket to a cushy tenure position at a respected university with an ever-refreshing supply of willing undergraduates to seduce. But whatever his motivations, he was smart. “Everybody else is using the wrong architecture and the wrong algorithms. They’re using CPUs and floating point boards. They’re simulating neural nets and stuff like that on plain old computers. Sure, they have fast computers, lots of horsepower. But they’re brute-forcing it, using a hammer where they should be using a screwdriver. The Neuro Group owns the goddamn screwdriver. Our patents are rock solid, and nobody else even understands them. We’re a perfect match for Meekman. He’s the only guy with both the money and the brains to understand what we’re doing.”

The room fell silent for a few seconds.

“Has anybody approached him?” Goldberg asked.

“Well, we think he wants in,” Simpson said. “We haven’t heard from him in a while. The last communication I got from him was about six weeks ago.”

And the last I got was twenty minutes ago, Bartlett thought. By not sharing that information she was not only betraying her partners in The Neuro Group, she was, in a sense, getting into bed with Monty, keeping a secret between them alone.

“From what we know of what Meekman’s doing,” Simpson said, “his techniques also suffer from fundamental shortcomings that limit his ability to rapidly produce physiologically relevant models of voltage-gated ion channels. It’s a computational bottleneck that he’ll never solve unless he stumbles upon our designs.”

“Or steals them,” Bartlett said. Nobody appeared to hear her.

“But we have solved that problem and proved it in simulations of voxel-based MRI morphometry in animal brains. Meekman might not know exactly what we’ve done, but he knows that he needs us.”

“If we let Meekman in, we’ll all be pushed out within six months,” Bartlett said. “You’ve seen how he operates. You know what he did to Digital Data and every other company he’s taken over. He’ll rob us blind and leave us wondering what happened when we wake up in one of those dumpsters down there.”

The room fell silent. And then from the back of the room, a strong woman’s voice.

“Dammit, are we going to do this company or not? Two years of this bullshit is enough.”

It was Marcy, a neurophysiologist whose own lab was just down the hall from Bartlett’s.

“Call up the devil,” she said. “Tell him to bring the contract and a pen. Let’s sign this deal.”

“Then I’m out,” Bartlett said. “I won’t do it.”

The group was silent again. The project wouldn’t fly without her and her lab, her research. And because they’d never properly incorporated—they were waiting for money to do that—she and Tufts University still owned all the intellectual property rights to her research. She owned the computers with the data and she owned the models and she owned the gels. From the other side, the MIT guys owned the software and circuitry. The Neuro Group project was a 50/50 bio-digital match, biology paired with computer science, a partnership, both halves necessary for the whole to succeed. Which meant that The Neuro Group needed her, needed her willing cooperation. No Bartlett, no neruo-genetic research. They’d have to start over from scratch.

“Well what then?” Simpson said. “What do you propose? That we just forget the whole thing and go downstairs for some crab rangoon?

“They don’t sell crab rangoon at the Peking,” someone said. “They sell real Chinese food here.”

“OK, cat rangoon. What do you propose, Bartlett? Where do you think we should look for money? Under a rock? Or should we just blow the whole thing up and forget about it?”

“I know somebody,” she said, hardly believing what she was saying. “He works for a pharmaceutical company in Basel. He directs corporate investments in startup companies.”

Simpson laughed gruffly. “How long have you been keeping this from us?”

Years, Bartlett thought. It seemed decades. “It didn’t seem relevant until now,” she said, lying. The man she knew was Nick’s brother Paul, and the situation was far from simple.

“Which company?” Simpson asked.

“Hoff-Zeigy.”

Irwin Goldberg whistled.

“Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a motion,” he said.

“Yes, Dr. Goldberg?”

“I move that we give Dr. Aubrey here two weeks to see if she can come up with a source of funding for our little enterprise that does not trigger her apparently strongly allergic reaction to joining forces with mister Meekman, of Digital Microsystems. And in the further interest of comity among us, might I request a voice vote.”

“Seconded,” someone said.

“In favor?” Most of the voices from Tufts, plus perhaps three from MIT, said “aye”

“Opposed?”

Two nays.

“Ayes have it,” Simpson said.

“Move to adjourn,” said an MIT guy, and the answer was twelve people pushing back their chairs.

Bartlett breathed a sigh of relief. She shot a grateful smile to Irwin Goldberg, who returned it with a wink. Now, she thought. All she had to do was get in touch with Paul, Nick’s brother, her brother-in-law that she hadn’t talked to since the night she met Nick, and a man who had once, and for a period of two weeks many years ago, been in her bed, whispering that he loved her.

Chapter 9

Twenty minutes before he was scheduled to meet Judith Knight, Dieter Steffen opened the seldom-used lower left-hand drawer of his desk and removed the lid from a sealed box of business cards. He withdrew one and examined it: Dieter Steffen, PhD, Senior Scientist, Hoff-Zeigy, AG. So that’s who I am, he thought. He put several cards in his shirt, closed the drawer, and left.

Ten minutes later he boarded the tram. The ride from Dreirosenbrücke to Barfüsserplatz took twelve minutes. He spent the time looking out the window at night-time Basel, occasionally catching glimpses of the river before crossing it on the Mittlere Brücke over into the Old City.

When the train went under an overpass he saw his reflection in the glass of the window. How jowly he had become! At one time, in his early teens, he had been a competition skier, an athlete. Now he was the very embodiment of unphysicality. He was embarrassed to find himself thinking this way: he never thought about his looks. It was only his going to meet a woman, an assignation in a café right out of a spy movie, that had gotten his mind going along this unfamiliar path. For two hours he had found himself wondering what she would look like—endless variations on the themes tall, floral-pattern dress and hat with a flower in the brim.

He got off the tram and headed towards Freie Strasse. The air was cooler than he had anticipated, and he was chilly. He walked close to the buildings on the right side of the street in a largely unsuccessful attempt to find warmth. At Freie Strasse he turned left. Five minutes later he was on the terrace, looking nervously about.

Then he saw her.

It had to be her. She was tall, she was the right age, she was wearing a floral print dress and a hat with a flower; a jacket was folded over her arm. But why, if she had wanted to make sure that she would be recognized, had she said only that she was tall, was dressed in such a fashion, would be wearing such and such a hat? Why had she not said, “I am a Nubian princess, the color of Swiss milk chocolate, possessor of such grace and beauty that men walk into walls when they first see me?” He knew for a fact that she was thirty-seven years old. It was hard to believe. Had she, in her work, perhaps solved the mystery of telomeres, the chromosomal timekeepers attached to each human cell’s DNA chain, and thereby drunk from the Fountain of Youth? He took a deep breath and approached her.

“Miss Knight? I am Dieter Steffen.”

“Hello,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course. Shall we sit?”

They took seats at an open table; a waiter approached.

“Miss Knight?” Dieter asked.

“Campari, please,” she said.

“Wartek, bitte.” Dieter said. Yes, by all means, a beer. Quickly.

“I am hoping you have found your way here without too much trouble?”

“No trouble at all, thank you. It is indeed a lovely city.” The drinks arrived; Dieter resisted the urge to consume his in one gulp, to help him to regain his composure. The circumstances, her fame, his shyness had made him nervous enough already. Her being an exotic beauty into the bargain was nearly more than he could handle. Her forehead was high and sloped back like a pharaoh’s. Her eyes were dark, her nose aquiline, her teeth a brilliant white. She had a dimple in her right cheek.

“Well now,” he said, “how is it that I can be helping you?”

“Perhaps you know me as a scientist with my company Human Potential,” she said. “But it is not in that capacity that I wish to speak with you today. Are you familiar with ARB, the Association for Responsible Biotechnology?”

“I believe that I have heard the name, but I must confess that I do not now recall anything about this organization.”

“Do you know a Paul Aubrey, from your company?”

“We may have met. In what capacity he may work I am not remembering.”

Dieter! he scolded himself. What is it with this accent? You speak English every day!

“Paul Aubrey is a matchmaker,” she said. “Like all the pharmaceutical companies, Hoff-Zeigy wants to know as much as it can about the Human Genome Project, and in particular how it can profit from it. Paul Aubrey is your company’s ambassador to the small biotechnology companies of the world, where much of this work is going on. Small companies like Human Potential—”

She paused, to make sure he was following her. Certainly he was following her. He would have followed her anywhere.

“Paul Aubrey met with the board of directors of our company last week. I sit on the board of directors.”

Dieter nodded.

“He came to us to propose a collaboration between Hoff-Zeigy and Human Potential. To be precise, Doktor Steffen, he proposed a collaboration between your nanotechnology laboratory, and my genetic research laboratory.”

Oh merde, he thought. Doktor Steffen. And I have been calling her Miss Knight. So ne duubel! What an oaf!

“I must admit to being at somewhat of a loss, Dr. Knight. This is the first I have heard of this proposed collaboration.”

“So I thought; that is no matter. My board has declined the offer. The reason that I have called upon you is that Paul Aubrey is still casting about for a corporate partner to provide research results on the human genome. His proposal to my company was rejected, but there are other companies. As a member of the board of directors of Human Potential, Incorporated, I can do nothing with this knowledge. It was divulged to me in strictest confidence; I cannot ethically share this information with anyone who wasn’t part of that discussion. Many people, including your corporation’s lawyers, I am sure, would consider that I have already broken my agreement by speaking with you. But you are not an uninterested party, Doktor Steffen. The whole reason for Paul Aubrey’s quest is your work.”

“Please go on, Dr. Knight,” he said. “Only, I would ask a favor. If it would not make you uncomfortable, I would prefer that you call me Dieter. I am Swiss, but I have spent much time in the States. I am more comfortable with the American form of address.”

“Very well. And you should call me Judith.”

“Thank you. Please continue—Judith.”

“As I was saying, as a member of the board of Human Potential I have nothing to say about Hoff-Zeigy’s corporate research strategy. But as a human being, as a founding member of the Association for Responsible Biotechnology, I am very concerned about the kind of partnership that Paul Aubrey is seeking to bring about. I don’t think such a partnership should take place now, perhaps not ever. Humankind has not yet developed the wisdom necessary to manage the offspring that might come about from such a union.

“I don’t know very much about your nanotechnology work, Dieter,” she continued. “I only know what Paul Aubrey told me. I am certain that he intended to divulge only enough information to see whether we would be interested in proceeding further. So I only know the general outlines of your approach.”

“Tell me then, please, what you understand of it,” Dieter said.

“You and your team are working on a nanomachine for DNA repair. This machine would be the size of a virus, yet capable of storing the information equivalent of the human genome, all forty-six human chromosomes, fractally condensed. This machine would be programmable, so that any portion of the stored genome could be used as a template for repair of a damaged chromosome in a target cell. Finally, this machine would be strong; strong enough to live outside of laboratory conditions, strong enough even to live in the air.”

“It seems that you know a lot about my work.”

“Dieter, this is very, very dangerous work. I am sure that you can see that.”

“If you mean that there exists the possibility for misuse of this technology, certainly you are right. But that is true of any science, of any technology. Steel can be used to make surgeons’ scalpels or, what do you call them, dumdum bullets. Fertilizer can be used to grow crops or to make terrorist bombs. Computers can be used to explore the ocean bottom or to manipulate the stock market. It is up to society to determine how technology is put to use, not up to the scientist.”

“That is certainly a common argument,” Judith Knight responded, “and a convenient one. But sometimes it begs important questions. It took the scientists of the Manhattan Project two years to invent an atom bomb, and yet fifty years later Iraq cannot do it; they must seek to buy their bombs elsewhere. What would the world be like if atom bombs were not so difficult to make, if you could make one as easily as you can buy a toothbrush? What moral burdens would rest on the shoulders of those first bomb-makers? Your work is perhaps as much in advance of the world. If you stopped working now, it might be fifty years until some other team reached the stage that you are now at. Fifty years is a long time. I would rather take fifty years to get ready, to think through what we are about, than to go ahead and make something dangerous now, just because we know how to make it.”

“So my work is like a Manhattan Project, an atom bomb? I was under the impression I was working on a universal medicine, a cure for Cystic Fibrosis and cancer,” he said.

“Of course it could be used for that, and I am sure that is your intent. But you cannot escape the fact that this technology could also be used for biological warfare of the most sophisticated, the most evil kind. Assume you succeed in making your device, your nanomachine. You could release these—” she hesitated, looking for a word—“these things in the air, and they could be programmed to seek out people who had a certain gene, say, a gene for blond hair. When they find that gene they change it to the ‘right’ gene. Or they launch another program to kill the ‘defective’ person who has that gene. These machines would be so small that they could pass through any gas mask. They would be virtually undetectable. And if they were enclosed in a sixty-carbon, flexible-diamond shell, they would be virtually indestructible. There would be no way to stop them.”

She was leaning over at him now, speaking very rapidly in a loud whisper.

“In theory what you say is correct,” he replied. “But how likely is it?”

“How likely does it have to be? How likely was it that the HIV virus would jump from monkey to man?” Dieter noticed her hands gripping the sides of the table; she almost looked ready to release it and slap him.

“How likely that HIV would be able to penetrate the immune system?” she said. “When you are talking about the most powerful weapon in history, the perfect terrorist weapon, the answer to Hitler’s prayers for a final solution—the likelihood doesn’t have to be very great before it becomes frightening. How would you feel if Saddam Hussein were loading warheads with these devices and pointing them at Israel to find and kill people with genes of Ashkenazi Jews? The structure of the Tay-Sachs gene was published last week. ”

Dieter was taken aback by her intensity, but in a moment he found a way to answer.

“Well, you can rest easy for a little while, Judith,” he said. “We have not figured out how to make these ‘things,’ as you call them. In computer simulation, it is possible to design simple nanomachines. But to build a machine that could survive in the real world? The real world, where a two-degree rise in temperature has the same effect as a nuclear explosion? No, you can rest easy, Dr. Knight. We are not there yet,” he said.

In truth, he had had inklings of some of these same concerns from time to time, but he had always put them out of his mind. Thoughts like Judith’s could drive you crazy. Start down this path and you might never get back on the right track, never regain your momentum. And once a scientist loses momentum, it’s all over, kaput.

“I am guessing that you have a colleague who is designing the computer,” she said, “someone experienced in chip design.” Her eyes remained level at him and she not break her gaze. “This computer will be as powerful as a supercomputer but one hundred thousand times smaller. And as you say, it will be very fragile. It could not survive outside of a vacuum chamber, much less in a human body.”

“As I said, you can rest easy.”

She blinked twice, measuring her words.

“But a fullerene shell, a hollow graphite sphere would be impregnable, wouldn’t it? A buckminsterfullerene sphere could protect the computer.”

“That is something we do not know,” he said, cautiously.

“The problem is, a graphite sphere is impregnable from the inside as well as from the outside. You would need to modify the sphere, to create an injector, a tunnel back and forth.”

“It seems there is little you have not guessed.”

“So we would have a sphere with a long tunnel coming out at one point. It would look a little like a water tower, or a blade of onion grass gone to seed, perhaps, shall we say, like a bacteriophage? The T4 strain would be a good model—”

“I must interrupt you, Dr. Knight,” Dieter said. “I can not discuss the matter of our design with you or with anybody else.”

The nature of Dieter’s collaboration with Pavel Isaacs was something intuitive; he had never discussed it with anybody. Nobody but Pavel had seen the fullerene-with-tube design, which was, indeed, based on the model of the bacteria-infecting virus known as T4. And yet Judith Knight had just sat there and told him all these things, as if she were reading from a cue card. This woman was more than smart; she was clairvoyant.

“Of course,” she replied, leaning away from the table. She picked up her glass as if to sip, but set it down again, untouched by her lips. “But based on what Aubrey told us I would have to conclude that you are getting close. Otherwise why would Hoff-Zeigy go shopping for a partner? I would add that when Aubrey met with our board he mentioned money available to the right partner. Very large amounts of money. Enough to make every person in the room a millionaire many times over, instantly. And that would only be the down payment if the collaboration succeeded. Not many boards of directors will be able to resist that lure. Especially a board of directors like mine, I might add, which holds title to remarkable technology, but hovers on the brink of bankruptcy.”

“I don’t suppose that many such boards of directors will be able to resist the lure. But it occurs to me, Judith, that perhaps you are talking to the wrong person. Why not talk to Aubrey himself?”

Judith Knight looked up from the table; her eyes fixed Dieter’s for a long time before she spoke.

“Paul Aubrey is only an agent of Hoff-Zeigy,” she said. “He is an ambassador, a salesman. Hoff-Zeigy must find a genome-research partner; the financial incentives are just too great to do otherwise. Paul Aubrey is the man they sent. But if Paul Aubrey did not want to pursue this work, the corporation would easily find somebody else to take his place. To be blunt, he is just a tool. He is smart and he is talented, but he can be replaced. But without you, without the science, Hoff-Zeigy is dead in the water. Paul Aubrey is replaceable. You are not.”

She stared at him so earnestly that he had to look down for a moment before he answered.

“You flatter me. But perhaps I am not as indispensable as you might think. I have a colleague, perhaps Mr. Aubrey mentioned his name. He must be the source of Aubrey’s knowledge about my work, since I have not spoken with Aubrey myself, and my reports go only to this other person, the research director of the NanoSection. He’s the computer designer whose existence you deduced. His name is Pavel Isaacs.”

She sighed, then appeared to bite her lower lip, however briefly.

“I think I would like to try a sip of some authentic Kirsch,” she said. “I have been told that the varieties available in the States pale in comparison to the real thing.”

A capital idea. Dieter could certainly stand a shot of brandy right about now.

“May I suggest, then, a local product, made here in Basel?”

He turned to the waiter. “Zweite Basler-Dybli, bitte.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll just need a few seconds to collect my thoughts.”

In the space of those few seconds the waiter reappeared, bearing a tray on which were two large shot glasses filled to the brim with clear liquid. “Brost,” Dieter said, raising his glass to his lips. They each took sips, and Dieter felt the sensation of the strong bitter drink, vaguely reminiscent of the taste of cherries, on his tongue.

“Well,” she resumed. “What I am about to say is going to place an imposition on your goodwill. I cannot talk with Pavel Isaacs, as you call him. This ‘Isaacs’ and I have, how shall I say this, a complicated history.”

“I do not mean to pry,” Dieter said, “but does it have to do with . . . how shall I say this . . . oh, never mind, I should say nothing. I apologize.”

Judith hesitated, and Dieter got the impression that she was debating with herself how much of Pavel’s story to share with him. Pavel was, indeed, a slippery fellow, Dieter thought. But harmless, surely.

After hesitating, Judith said with clear finality, “I cannot go into details. But I can tell you this. I fear this man. I fear him greatly. It was when I became certain of his identity that I knew I must come here to speak with you.”

Dieter was stunned. He took another sip of his cherry brandy. How could this be? He had known Pavel Isaacs for nearly ten years. It was true that in that time they had met outside of work perhaps only four times. It was true that Pavel’s complexion and features had changed in a way that were, frankly, bizarre. When Dieter asked about these changes, Pavel claimed he was sunbathing or avoiding the sun, going to the gym or on a diet. But the changes were more profound than those excuses would explain.

On the other hand, Dieter and Pavel were both extremely quiet and private people; each knew very little of the affairs of the other. People had plastic surgery—and, Dieter supposed, that included changes in skin tone—all the time. It was none of Dieter’s affair. So it was true that Pavel was a bit of an oddball, but if he were indeed such a dangerous man, wouldn’t Dieter have noticed something else, something in his behavior, not just his physiology?

“You astonish me, Dr. Knight,” Dieter said. His intrinsic formality had reasserted itself.

“Dieter,” she said. “Listen to me carefully. You must not let Pavel know that we have met. I apologize for putting you in such an awkward position, but I assure you that I am in earnest. Carry on with your work, if that is what you must do. I hope that I can convince you otherwise, but that is something that you will have to decide for yourself. But please, do not let him know that we have spoken. You may choose not to look at the potential for evil embodied in these machines you are trying to build, but Pavel is aware of this potential. That is his motivation.”

“Judith, I am speechless,” he said. “Are you telling me that my colleague, my collaborator at MIT and here in Basel, the most brilliant scientist I have ever known, is a terrorist?”

“Dieter, please. The more I tell you, the more I endanger you. Let us not talk about Pavel Isaacs. Why don’t you imagine that he was an old boyfriend of mine and that the wounds are too deep for me to bear to see him again. We can leave it at that. Please. But let us talk, as scientists, about your work, and about the collaboration that Aubrey is trying to bring about.”

“Very well,” Dieter said, hoping his voice sounded confident. He found himself tapping his cheek, nervously. He dropped his hand from his cheek, and then worried that this abrupt movement had been more noticeable than his cheek tapping. But Judith didn’t seem to notice.

“Judith,” he interrupted, “would you care to join me for another taste of kirsch?”

“Yes, I think I could use it. And I think I’ll take the opportunity to excuse myself for a moment.”

She left, leaving Dieter in a mild state of shock. His mind went oddly blank. He was still thoughtless when she returned, just as the second shots of Kirsch arrived.

“Well now,” Dieter said, recovering slightly. “If I am not to discuss our conversation with Pavel, and if Aubrey is, as you say, only a salesman, then what is it that you would have me do? Should I become suddenly stupid, and sabotage my own work? Should I run away from this research, and take up residence on a desert island? What are you asking of me?”

“There are several things that you can do,” she said. “As you say, you can abandon your research. Honestly, I think it might be better for everybody if you did that. But we both know that that is not going to happen. Another thing you can do is make sure that there is a way to disable the device you are building, and publicize it widely. Make the device vulnerable to salt water, or laundry soap, or weak radiation. Your machine could still be used for medicine, but would be less attractive as a weapon. I know that this makes the job more difficult, but you must consider what is at stake.”

“Why did you turn down the offer to work with Hoff-Zeigy? You could have built these safeguards in yourself.”

“Because we of the Association for Responsible Biotechnology do not believe that there are any safeguards strong enough for such devices. The only way to get rid of the threat is to never build them in the first place.”

Dieter paused a second to take this in.

“You say I cannot talk to Isaacs, that he is some kind of dangerous person. Can I raise these concerns with Paul Aubrey? Can I tell him that one day after he divulged Hoff-Zeigy secrets to Human Potential I received an urgent phone call from Human Potential’s chief scientist?”

“That is something that you will have to decide for yourself. I believe that Isaacs has collaborators, but I don’t think Aubrey is one of them. I think it is more likely that Aubrey is being used. Just as you are being used.”

“I hardly know what to say. I came here to meet a famous scientist, perhaps to talk over some recent scientific developments of mutual interest. Instead I find myself invited to intrigue.”

“I can imagine how crazy this must all sound. Take time to think over what I have said. I won’t intrude upon you again unless you e-mail me first. If you use two precautions, an anonymous e-mail account and simple encryption, our correspondence should be safe from prying eyes. Anybody poking around in your files is going to assume you’ve got a secret correspondent for some excitement in your life and probably not get suspicious of anything else. Have you got a card? I don’t want you to have anything with my name on it.”

He fumbled in several pockets before locating one. By the time he handed it to her the cap was off her gold-nibbed Mont Blanc pen.

“Here is an address, an anonymous address at a server in Sweden.”

She wrote:

anon7432@anon.tippi.se

“The server will assign you a new account number, so I’ll know how to get in touch. Now, we’ll need a password.”

“Basler-Dybli,” he said, smiling for the first time today. “It’s the brand name of the Kirsch we’ve been drinking.” He reached in his pocket for another card and wrote the words on the back.

“Thank you, Dieter. Please don’t call me; my phones may not be secure,” she said. “Well, that’s what I came here to say. Perhaps it would be better if I left now. It has been a pleasure speaking with you, Herr Doktor Steffen.”

She arose quickly and put on her jacket and hat. He stood as quickly as he could, nearly upsetting his chair. She offered her hand and he shook it. She smiled pleasantly, as if they had just agreed to a future date at the opera. Then she turned, and in an instant disappeared into the crowd.

Chapter 10

Once upon a time Nick Aubrey thought he knew what mattered to him. But, standing at the curb scanning the street for the phantom known as Monty Meekman, Nick had to admit that he now had no clue. He had grown up on a farm in upstate New York and studied agriculture in college, because agriculture seemed a predictable and honest subject. After graduation, he and his buddy Todd had gotten the idea of going into the Peace Corps, which took him to Senegal, and to a hut in the middle of the Sahel which, now that he looked back on it, seemed the apogee of happiness: no possessions, satisfying work, good friends, a tree full of bats and the sound of monkeys at night. He even fell in love with a woman there, his first love, his first true heartbreak, and his first lesson in how cruel and unpredictable the world could be. Eventually, graduate school called him back. During grad school, he stumbled somehow into a few programming classes. He went at first out of curiosity and to satisfy a course requirement, but the logic and beauty and pure fun of writing code seduced him. It took a while, but by degrees he set aside his dreams of going back to Africa and found himself becoming a hard-core computer geek, dreaming in code instead of Pulaar.

And then his brother, Paul, invited him to Boston for a weekend and introduced him to the director of his lab, a woman named Bartlett, who, Nick knew from the moment he saw her at the Thanksgiving party, would be his wife. The idea of leaving her for the hinterlands of the Sahel—or for any reason, including the feelings of his brother—soon became unthinkable. And so, at 28 years old, he had a full life—a career in computer science, and a girlfriend who was as brilliant, funny and fascinating as she was gorgeous.

It was inevitable that Nick would end up at Digital Data, the beating heart of the east coast computer industry. Like many a hacker he was largely self-taught, and there were big holes in his formal training. But he knew how to learn, and at Digital Data he discovered that he was very good at being a software pioneer, very good indeed. Africa became part of his past; what he left there got lost to the sands of time. Being with Bartlett and inventing the digital future became his present.

He would have said then that the meaning in his life came from taking part in the redefinition of human nature. After Monty Meekman engineered the corporate takeover of Digital Data by Stanford Microsystems—thereby creating Digital Microsystems, Dijjy-Mike—Nick’s horizons expanded from Newcastle’s Mill to Silicon Valley and the entire world. The technology that Nick and a few dozen engineers at the new Digital Microsystems designed would have a thousand-fold bigger impact on the human prospect than Aristotle, Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Henry Ford put together. The Information Revolution was bigger than the invention of agriculture, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution added and cubed—who wouldn’t leap at the chance to be at its forefront? Moreover, it was fun. The bozos leading this insurrection were a crazy fruit salad; oddballs, free-thinkers, and geniuses. And although Digital Microsystems was only one banana in the bunch, it was undoubtedly the Top Banana. The hottest box was always the Dijjy-Mike box; the coolest code was Dijjy-Mike code. Check out the Internet—developed on Dijjy-Mike machines—a distributed egalitarian thinking engine. Check out chips that helped the crippled to walk, the deaf to hear: if Jesus were alive today he’d be a VLSI designer at Digital Microsystems, just like Nick’s friend Todd. Power to the people, baby: technopotheosis. Nick’s business card said Director of Software Engineering, but it should have said Spiritual Alchemist.

He lived on the ramparts. With one office in Newcastle, Massachusetts, and another Mountain View, California, Nick Aubrey had traveled the Boston to San Francisco run so frequently that he knew the TWA flight crews better than he knew the people who lived in the house next door to him. For years he had spent twenty hours and more each month lashed to an uncomfortable seat inside a smelly contrivance ping-ponging between Logan Airport and SFO, assaulted by white noise as his feet swelled. He had spent endless hours swapping UNIX-wars gossip with the marketing dweeb from the Open Software Foundation whose cologne stuck to Nick’s clothes through three washings, or chatting with the stalking-horse delegates to the IEEE Floating Point Standards Committee about how underflow exception handling differed from straight divide-by-zero. This was the thing: even the boring parts were interesting.

There was a down side to his cyberlife: as it flourished, his meat life evanesced. He worried that Bartlett grew colder… He worried that his life was slipping away from him. But he never dreamed of stopping. He rather too much dug the buzz from the Juice.

The Juice, man. Residual perfume, fat feet and yuppie marriage angst were the price you paid to be plugged into it. The Juice was the adolescent Net, the nascent Web; it was intelligent agents, distributed objects, the Human Interface to cyberwhatever. You could pick it up by induction just walking down any street in Mountain View; it was so strong everywhere in Silicon Valley that it messed up radio signals from unhip stations. They even used it to heat burritos at the Dos Hermanos trailer in the Longs Drugs parking lot on Rengstorff Avenue and to recharge the leaf-blowers of the landscapers who ate there. It was intoxicating. The gizmos that would turn the world on its head in 1999 were dreamed up by Dijjy-Mike microkids in the eighties and prototyped by them in ‘90, ‘91, ‘92. To be a bi-coastal manager of software engineering for Digital Microsystems during those years was truly to have your finger in the socket.

So yes: present at the creation, check. Consequently today Nick’s finger was charred black all the way to his shoulder. He had sacrificed his life to his addiction to the Juice. And maybe his devotion would pay off, but Nick couldn’t imagine how, for if one time he knew what he wanted, now, today, standing at the curb waiting for Monty Meekman to show up, he hadn’t a clue. Sometime in the next hour or so Monty Meekman would either fulfill or belie Carl’s prediction, and either way Nick would know that he had wasted the last five years in pursuit of that buzz. For if Monty did do the utterly fantastic, if he did offer Nick ten million dollars to become a Corporate Fellow, that could only mean that Nick had been played like a marionette. But if, on the other hand, Monty did not offer Nick a fortune, if, indeed, he wanted nothing more from Nick today than he had wanted on other occasions—somebody to talk to, somebody to listen in awed silence to Monty’s self-absorbed explanations of Life, the Universe, and Everything—then what was the point of that? Was that all Nick had accomplished in his career? To have become an unpaid word-sink for a wealthy old crank?

Or, most likely, Monty wouldn’t show up at all.

That’s the most likely outcome of this little experiment, Nick thought, disgusted enough to spit.

Nick’s high-tech life was nothing but a high-tech grind. Juice? Nonsense. Let Wired keep all that technohip bullshit. Information technology was an economic centrifuge, a wealth-and-power concentrator. This was the reality of the Information Revolution: efficiency, productivity, and downsizing; NAFTA, and the Walmartification of once-beautiful downtowns like Newcastle’s; the strengthening of multinational conglomerates relative to poor people, human rights workers and small countries; the end of privacy, the eclipse of democracy, and realistic mayhem in video games.

Not to mention the probable end of his marriage and the loss of the most beautiful and wonderful woman on earth. Well done, Nicholas! Jolly good show, you fucking jackass.

And that’s where Nick’s thoughts were when the beat-up Mercedes driven by a middle-aged man with a paunch drove up beside him, rolled down the window, and said, in the pipsqueak voice Nick recognized from the phone, “Get in.”

Pay no attention to that nerd behind the curtain, Nick thought, as he leaned in close to the car. This was Monty Meekman, the great and terrible? This nonentity? Nick had seen him from a distance, never from up close. He had seen him on TV and in magazines. He had seen his image on computer screens. But this? Talk about anticlimax. Meekman looked about as threatening as Mickey Mouse. He was a fragile-looking fifty-something year old man in a rumpled, ill-fitting suit. He was slightly-built and un-athletic, the type of man who developed the small paunch typical of slightly-built un-athletic men at middle age. His uncombed hair had mostly gone to grey. He hadn’t shaved closely and his three-o’clock shadow was somewhere between Lieutenant Colombo’s and Fred Flintstone’s. A few errant hairs had escaped the razor entirely and were growing unchecked on his neck. His features were otherwise unremarkable, and as he hunched, smiling, over the steering wheel Nick thought he looked like the classic sidekick from an old Western movie, the guy who tagged along with the hero muttering wisecracks.

“Hi, Monty,” Nick said, getting over three waves of shock. The first wave: that Monty Meekman had shown up at all. The second wave: that Monty looked the way he did. And the third shock? Nick took in the mess he saw inside the car. Monty’s Mercedes was a ratty little rattletrap. A junkbox. How could this be? Nick was bending over to look at Meekman through the open passenger side window, but hadn’t moved to open the car door.

“Nicholas,” Monty said, in that high, weaselly voice. “Get in.”

Nick wrestled the stubborn passenger door open, then tossed books and papers from the front seat into the back. He was tipsy, but he hoped not too tipsy, from the beer he had consumed in his hotel room and then at Mad Antonio’s Nut House with Carl. Nick had never seriously considered the possibility that Monty would actually keep his appointment. Getting buzzed was unwise, Nick thought. If there’s one man he needed his wits for, it was Meekman.

Monty gunned it as soon as Nick closed his door. When they hit twenty, the car had started to shimmy. Now that they were approaching highway speed a mass of empty coffee cups jostled about Nick’s feet like a sea of writhing snakes.

Monty Meekman might be one of the richest people in the world, but clearly it wasn’t a passion for fine automobiles that had driven him to amass his wealth. For that matter, Nick couldn’t think of any material goods that attracted Monty’s interest, much less passion. Monty was not a person who wanted wealth for the usual reasons that people wanted wealth. Which raised the question: what did Monty want?

Monty hadn’t said another word after Nick got into the car, so Nick gazed out to the east over a sea of tall marsh grass that extended from the macadam all the way to the edge of San Francisco Bay. Amid square miles of vegetation he could see tiny figures jogging—distant people taking toy-scale exercise in the bright winter sun. It almost looked as if they were floating atop the cattails, but Nick knew they were walking on earthen levees that snaked through the estuary. The sound of an unmuffled down-shifting tractor trailer brought his attention around to the left side of the Mercedes, where, beyond a chain-link fence, four lanes of traffic on Highway 101 North paralleled the path of Monty’s car at twice its speed. At the traffic light where Frontage Road met Oregon Way, Monty pulled to a stop.

“Do you know what those buildings are over there, Nick?” he chirped.

Duh, Nick thought. Everybody knew that those perfectly anonymous two-story brick-and-glass office buildings in the little office park across the street had once housed the Mountain View Research Center, MVRC. During the late 1960’s, Duplicon—the giant photocopying company—had operated an R&D lab there. The free-thinkers of Duplicon MVRC, “Emverk”, most of whom had some prior association with Thomas Engleton and the Santa Clara Research Institute, developed the Duplicon DataStar, the precursor by two decades of the modern personal computer. Meanwhile, back in Syracuse, New York, Duplicon’s incredibly dim corporate management somehow didn’t notice that Emverk had just laid several golden eggs, and they shut the place down. It was criminal corporate vandalism of their own most valuable asset.

Emverk’s engineers scattered—to Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and of course, to Stanford Microsystems. Nick had heard this legend a hundred times before, ninety times from the lips of Monty Meekman, who, at the age of 25, had been Emverk’s precocious Director of Research.

“Was that the garage where Steve and Steve started Apple?” Nick deadpanned.

“No, actually, heh heh…” And so began the hundred-and-first telling of the Emverk legend. Monty put his car back in gear and headed over the freeway.

It was inescapable: like a captive altar boy to an ancient priest saying a Latin mass, Nick’s role would be to mutter responses at lulls in the sacred text as the liturgist and acolyte traversed Palo Alto. The Old Testament readings came first: Monty began with the chronicle of Alan Turing, who wrestled angels of improbability up and down a ladder-like virtual machine in his mind. Then came the story of John Von Neumann, who had led the chosen people from the captivity of analog to the heights above a land flowing with digital bits. This part of the oratory took them down Oregon Expressway to Alma Street, where they turned right, north, along the Cal Trans tracks.

Monty’s virtual tape droned on. Now it was at the ‘sh’-boys: Shannon of information theory, Shockley of the transistor. These two proto-hackers went together in Nick’s mind like prophets from the late-middle Bible: Ezekial and Ezekiah, or Zephaniah and Zechariah.

A quick left jog on University Avenue took them under the railroad tracks and across El Camino Real, as Nick mouthed random responses to Monty’s monologue. “Oh yes, entropy,” Nick said, or “the transmission of any message is necessarily accompanied by a certain diminution of the information it contains,” or “surprise equals the negative logarithm of probability.” If he had had a hand bell he would have rung it.

They cut through the Stanford campus, quarks and leptons drag-racing them underground in the Stanford Linear Accelerator, “SLAC,” as Monty picked up the pace of his recitation, getting to the early part of the New Testament—which was conventionally said to begin on the day that Thomas Engleton appeared at the Santa Clara Research Institute, SCRI, wearing sackcloth, eating locusts and wild honey, preaching Usability. From his earliest days at the Rengstorff creek he foretold the kingdom of Emverk, making smooth the way for Monty. Nick gazed at the familiar sights and did his best to tune out.

The rolling hills became the steep wooded hills of the Santa Cruz ridge, and still Monty chirped on, coming, inevitably, to the story of Engleton’s famous 1966 broadcast from SCRI to the Association for Computing Machinery assembled in San Francisco. Monty had been Engleton’s chief assistant at that epochal event; it had been his baptism. But Nick didn’t need to hear this part again, not now.

“Where are you taking us? I’m flying back east tonight,” Nick said, to make sure Monty understood the constraints on his liberty.

“Flights can be changed.”

Nick didn’t suppose he would ever get used to this billionaire’s presumption.

Until today Nick had never really thought about why he put up with Monty’s breaches of common etiquette, but with a sudden clarity born from the combination of alcohol, his conversation with Carl in Mad Antonio’s, and the disappointment seeing Meekman in the flesh, Nick knew the truth: he sucked up to Monty because Monty had money and power. Well, screw that. It was time to change the terms of their relationship by the simple expedient of acting like a man instead of a doormat.

“What’s wrong, Nick?” Meekman asked.

“You’re a presumptuous jerk,” Nick replied. “What if I don’t want to change my flights? What if I prefer to go home to my wife?”

“Oh come on. Don’t bore me. You have a better opening move than that.”

“Maybe I don’t feel like playing,” Nick replied.

“That so?” Meekman said, his weasel voice going high. “You said you were going home to your wife. Heard from her lately?”

“No,” Nick said. “Not lately.”

“Bartlett left you. Why was that?”

“That’s my personal business, Monty. How do you know her name?”

“Her company works with recombinant DNA to research the human genome. Is that her way of sublimating your refusal to have children with her?”

Nick didn’t know how to respond, but he knew that Monty was trying to get something out of him. Trying to get under his skin, into his head. Nick didn’t like this game. He didn’t like this billionaire. He wanted out.

“Bartlett’s company needs another infusion of cash,” Monty changed the subject. “A big one.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course you know that, Nick. You’ve given The Neuro Group every penny you had, which is why you’re so broke now. Bartlett wants to retain some control of the corporation, but control is the one thing capital never relinquishes. She doesn’t understand capitalists.”

Monty was right. Bartlett didn’t understand—nor did she care about—the way money worked. That was one of the qualities Nick loved most about her. It was like innocence, almost, not naivety but something infinitely more charming. Bartlett knew what she was about, and that was science and her lab and the man who was lucky enough to be next to her. The rest didn’t matter. Nick missed her then desperately, deeply. He hated that Monty had brought her memory to the surface.

Monty slid a cassette into the player, and presently piano, bass, drums and trumpet sounded, barely audible over the squeaks and rattles of his piece-of-shit car.

“The best way to understand Miles Davis’s music is as a pentatonic stochastic process, with each instrument a simple Markov chain . . .”

“You still haven’t said where we’re going.”

“People are generally stupid, Nick. That’s the important thing to remember if you want to have fun.”

“Baloney,” Nick said. The snakes at his feet were writhing again.

In Portola Valley Monty picked up Skyline Drive and headed south on the San Francisco peninsula along the ridge of the mountains that separate Silicon Valley from the Pacific coast. Although Nick had been down Skyline Drive several times before he had never gotten used to its drama. Up and up the road rose until eventually they were at almost three thousand feet, amid sequoias ten yards thick and a thousand years old, a forest primeval. There were places where he could see the San Andreas Fault, like a hiccough in the terrain; had he gotten out of the car he could have touched it. The Mercedes rounded a turn, the forest gave way, and a spectacular view opened up to them. There was a little parking area with a sign stating the obvious: scenic overlook. Monty left the road and pulled to a stop at the edge of the lot.

As they were getting out of the car Monty said, “Sometime in the next half hour.”

“What?”

“Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on,” Monty half-sang, in a very poor impersonation of Jerry Lee Lewis. “That’s why they call me the killer.”

“In your dreams,” Nick said.

They walked to a guardrail at the edge of a cliff. Silicon Valley lay beneath them, flush against the shallow waters of the South Bay: Sunnyvale. Cupertino. Palo Alto. Mountain View. Menlo Park. Santa Clara. Los Gatos. Los Altos. And at the south tip of the bay, to the right, San Jose.

There wasn’t much smog that day. Looking north Nick could see the Dumbarton Bridge over the bay, and seven miles north of that he could faintly make out the San Mateo Bridge. Across the water lay the towns of the East Bay and the hills behind them—Mission Peak, and way off in the distance, high on a mountaintop in the southeast, those two white domes of the Lick Observatory, with their two giant telescopes pointed up to the heavens: the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, the Milky Way, Castor, Pollux, the Horsehead Nebula; pulsars, quasars, galaxies upon galaxies, dark matter hiding the uncomputed mass of the unseen infinitude, neutron stars, black holes, the end of time. Somewhere to the east of the observatory lay Massachusetts.

“Knowledge is power, Nick,” Monty said.

Duh, Nick thought, increasingly annoyed.

“But you know this, of course. It’s why you’re no longer living in Fanaye, a mud-hut village on the edge of the desert, with Ousmane Diop and Amadou N’Diaye and Sediou Tall and Ama’sy N’Dongo. They may be nice people; I don’t know and I don’t care to know. You seem to believe that they are nice people. But you are a sentimentalist—a great failing. The point is that you left the powerless peasants behind. You found your way to Digital Microsystems, the forge of human destiny. Would you like to know why?”

Nick’s breath was taken away. How would Monty have learned the name of a small African village Nick and Todd had lived in nearly twenty years ago, much less the names of its inhabitants? That was a different lifetime, almost a different Nick who had been there. “Why?” Nick asked.

“You love knowledge, power. That’s why I’ve taken you here—to give you more of it.”

“I never told you about Fanaye,” Nick said. “I never told you anything about Africa.”

“I notice that you recently filed a bug report on the mail program,” Monty said. The conversation was back to normal—random comments apropos of nothing at all.

“I file bugs when I discover them,” Nick answered.

“You fixed the bug yourself and then you filed the report about the fix.”

“Nothing unusual in engineers fixing bugs, is there?”

“It wasn’t your code.”

“The guy who owned the code couldn’t see the problem. I fixed it for him.”

“The bugtrack protocol is that he who owns the code files the fix.”

Monty Meekman, primordial codeslinger, knew damn good and well that the bugtrack protocol was honored in the breach. The bugtrack protocol was about as sacrosanct as the admonition on a box of Q-Tips to use them to clean the outside of your ears only.

“I’m surprised that the Vice Chairman of the corporation is reading bug reports,” Nick said.

“Do you think it’s possible that someone might have sown bugs throughout the system, like bread crumbs in the forest, to see who would come to eat them?”

“You tell me,” Nick said.

Monty wouldn’t tell him, of course. Monty rarely answered a direct question. But there must have been a reason that he brought the subject up.

Chapter 11

Bartlett Aubrey skated down Lansdowne Street with Fenway’s left field wall, the Green Monster, on one side, and a row of silent nightclubs on the other. The streets were clear of ice but the air was cold. It was late March, but still felt like winter. Fenway Park was quiet in the fading sun of the late afternoon; the Red Sox were still in Florida for spring training, playing meaningless Grapefruit League games. The Neuro Group board meeting had caused her to get off to a late start today; she needed to hustle if she was going to get her exercise in before it got dark. Boston drivers lived up to their reputation, and rollerblading at dusk was a suicidal gambit.

It was just as well that there was no real baseball to distract her. Her work and her workouts were all she needed. She had no time or energy for anything else. Work and workout. Period, full stop. No entanglements, no distractions. She had no desire to become a well-rounded Cosmo Girl. She was a scientist, and science was all she needed in her life. If she didn’t need marriage she certainly didn’t need baseball.

It had been fifty-five minutes since she had left the small, smelly office above the Dim Sum restaurant, walked back to her lab, taken off her lab coat, blouse and blue jeans, and slipped into her skating outfit—baggy green shorts with a faded Kirkland College logo worn over orange and black Bruins sweatpants and topped with faded but still eye-catchingly purple “Purple Aces” sweatshirt from the University of Evansville. As usual, she had followed no pre-set route. Starting out from the exit on Kneeland Street she had skated through Chinatown to Downtown Crossing. Pedestrians had been thick on the mall in front of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s, and that had slowed her down.

From Downtown Crossing she improvised her own version of the Freedom Trail: she made her way along Tremont, cut down the hill at Government Center, skirted the crowds at Faneuil Hall and went by the back of Haymarket, under the tunnel that went beneath the one section of the Central Artery which the Big Dig had not yet consumed, to the North End, through narrow streets thick with the smells of bread, garlic and tomato sauce, back to Mass General, up Beacon Hill (for this she took off her skates, slipped on some black canvas Chinese shoes stored in her waist-belt pack and walked), down Beacon Hill past the State House and into the Common. From the Common she had taken a long detour out to Fenway, trying to force herself not to go by the Public Garden.

It hadn’t worked. Like the drunk making a U-turn to go to the road-house, she doubled back from Fenway to Kenmore Square and from there went down Commonwealth to the place she couldn’t avoid. Now she stood on the little suspension bridge in the Public Garden looking down to the little pond where, soon, the Swan Boats would again swim. She knew better than to come here, because “here” always brought up that memory of Nick, the one memory of Nick that still and probably forever would cause her pain.

The Swan Boats were still away for the winter, but she could imagine them here now just as they had been in the summer Nick and she were married: June, 1991.

She could feel her throat tensing, the sensation at the tip of her nostrils as if she were about to sneeze, the tears beginning to well up in her eyes as she remembered that day here with Nick on the little pedestrian suspension bridge, the day Nick had told her “you tell me the number. We’ll have as many children as you want.”

“Nineteen” she had said.

“Nineteen it is,” Nick said. “Do we make them all at once?”

She had thrown her arms around him and kissed him full right there in the most touristy spot in Boston, as if they were in some cheesy romantic comedy. It was the happiest day of her life.

But by the time they got home to Newcastle Nick was “different” again, the way he always got “different” when the subject of conception came up. He couldn’t do sex if it meant babies. What terrified him so? “What the heck is so unusual about a husband and a wife having children together?” she demanded. He never did give her a coherent answer, just some mumbled phrase in an African language. And at times when Nick got like that, the bleakest of times, Bartlett even caught herself wondering what would have happened if she had chosen a different man, a man more willing to grow up, a man who put his family ahead of his work, who loved her as much as he loved his code.

Oh hell, she thought. It didn’t matter. She was thirty-four years old, about to become single and likely to stay that way until she went to her grave. It was no good thinking about babies. Soon enough she wouldn’t even be able to have babies anymore. That train had left the station.

She resumed skating, heading back to the molecular genetics lab at Medical Center and the tiny shower in the ladies’ room. Night arrived before she got there. It was fully dark as she skated down Kneeland.

Yet knew she would be “here” again next week, at the bridge overlooking the Swan Boats. Oh, Nick, she thought, her mind traveling down a familiar path of loss and loneliness. She sprinted the last one hundred yards.

Out of the shower now, she ran a comb vaguely through her hair and thought about her work—as usual, she would be working late tonight. Her research team was attacking the problem of Fitzgibbons’ Disease from all sides. Under Bartlett’s direction, they were studying the molecular biology of mitochondria that went awry in affected children, physiological evidence of the disease in the human brain, the structure of suspect genes that might be the cause, models of the disease progression in genetically engineered mice, clinical approaches to brain-cell regeneration, histologic studies of human and mouse nerve cells, and more. Tomorrow Bartlett would be meeting with a pathologist to go over some results from stained slides of a recently deceased child’s brain to see how they correlated to PET results from before the patient died. Tonight she would study the patient’s history. What a delightful prospect.

It only reminded her that unless and until she had The Neuro Group’s planned technology, they might never find out how this baffling disease worked. The Neuro Group’s models would allow her to test ten thousand hypotheses for every one she could test using her current grab-bag of techniques. She would never find a cure for Fitzgibbons without it.

She walked down the hall past the open office door of the Molecular Biology Department chair, Dr. Irwin Goldberg. She and Irwin hadn’t had a chance to talk since the board meeting, but in any event there wasn’t much to say. Irwin and Bartlett agreed on almost everything. That was one reason she liked him. Another reason was that while Dr. Goldberg might be one of the most esteemed molecular biologists on the planet, he was the most unpretentious man Bartlett knew. He saw her standing at his door and motioned to her to come in. He was sitting at his cluttered desk, just finishing his nightly tuna salad sandwich. Papers, journals, notebooks were everywhere. There were even bench apparatus: flasks, beakers. Bartlett had to disguise her shudder. How could such a serious scientist be such a slob?

“Come on in, Bartlett,” he said, after swallowing. “Take the seat of honor.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said, sitting on a broken-backed swivel chair.

“Need to talk?” he asked.

“Why?”

“After the board meeting. This funder in you know in Basel, Mister Moneybags. Thought you might want to talk it out.”

“Nothing to talk about,” she lied.

He swiveled in his chair and smiled. It was easy to see that he didn’t believe her, but he was going to let it slide. “Good,” he said. “You know those board meetings give me a headache.” He fished through the mess on his desk and found the piece of paper he wanted, slipping it out from beneath a pile of papers. “An article in the New York Times today that I thought you would find interesting.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a couple of researchers over at MIT who’re doing work on that Gulf War stuff. Very bizarre. They say their funding was cut off and they were harassed and that their tenure was even threatened because they were investigating an unorthodox line of research that evidently somebody didn’t want them to investigate.”

“People with unorthodox ideas sometimes say things like that when they lose their funding,” she said.

“Sure. But here’s why I thought you might be interested. Number one, they’re investigating bacteriophage as the cause of the disease. And two, they used to work in your MIT lab. I thought you might know them.”

What the heck?

“How could they think bacteriophage caused Gulf War illness?” she said. “Trying to make a biological weapon from phage would be like trying to make a broadsword from a stick of butter. Who would think of such a thing? Some crackpot maybe. Not a real virologist.”

“I only know what I read. Did you know Chris and Janine Garbougian, husband and wife?”

She grabbed the paper out of his hand with more violence than she had meant to. Sure enough, there were Chris and Janine on page one of the science section, posing in a laboratory, looking very serious and much older than Bartlett remembered them. How long had it been? She had left MIT for Tufts before her wedding. . .

“I haven’t seen them in years, but I know them,” she said slowly. She skimmed the article and was stunned.

“Crackpots?” Irwin said, after a few minutes.

“No. They’re real scientists, not crackpots.”

Bartlett, Chris and Janine had met during grad school, students working on their PhDs. One of them—Janine, maybe? Bartlett couldn’t remember—needed for her research a protein that was only found in lobsters. So at the end of every semester the three of them would have a lobster party. “I suppose it’s kind of cruel to eat your research partners,” Chris used to say. And Janine would complete his thought, dipping a succulent bit of claw meat into drawn butter, “but it’s pretty hard to get emotionally attached to a crustacean.”

Those were the days when everything was new and intense, learning not just textbook science but real science: how to be a scientist. How to figure out for yourself what questions were important to ask instead of having a professor tell you. Designing your own experiments, and having them work for the first time. Chris, Janine and Bartlet worked hard and stretched their brains almost to the breaking point. And when they had a party, they had a party.

“They say they found markers from some industrial phage sold by a Swiss pharmaceutical company,” Irwin said as Bartlett continued scanning the newspaper. “But nobody’s been able to replicate their work, and all their remaining blood samples were ruined when a freezer failed. These two say it’s sabotage.”

Bartlett hated to admit it, but the more she learned of their story, the more paranoid it sounded.

“How very odd,” she said. “Very odd.”

“Give them a call.”

“I think I will.”

“Keep the newspaper. Are you ready to get back to work?”

“Sure,” she said, forgetting that she had not yet eaten her meager ‘vegetable delight’ dinner. She folded the paper and slipped it into her pocket. “Back to work.”

Irwin smiled.

“That’s what I like to hear.”

The next hours were typical, as far as research on incurable diseases went: first she read the medical history of the recently deceased child; it reconfirmed things she already knew. Then she read an article with a promising title that turned out to be far off the subject. And finally she helped a post-doctoral fellow tune her gel. Another quarter inch of progress on a million-mile journey.

As she left the Tufts building at quarter to midnight, she realized that soon she would have to make some uncomfortable phone calls. First, she would call her friends at MIT. What would she say? “Saw the story in the Times. I’m wondering – have you guys actually gone crazy?”

And, she knew, she would have to call her brother-in-law Paul Aubrey to see if he wanted to rescue The Neuro Group. It was a call she dreaded. But she would do it. She had to. Otherwise the board would sell out to Meekman, that was clear. Yes, she would call her former lover, the man whose heart she had broken in two. But first she was going to have to figure out what to say to him. She hadn’t even spoken with him since the night she met his brother. Not even to say goodbye.

Chapter 12

At a cliff above Silicon Valley, a Dark Angel hinted at untold powers and Nick Aubrey was beginning to regret that he had come along for this ride.

“You are familiar, of course, with the work of Abraham Maslow,” Meekman said. The whole valley spread beneath them, with only a skinny guardrail between solid ground and thin air. Beyond the guardrail the ground tapered steeply down one or two yards to a chiseled edge. Roll off that and it was fifty stories straight down.

“Keep up, Nick,” Monty said, snapping. “Maslow.”

Nick wanted to think more about the bread crumbs—Monty’s hint about bugs deliberately strewn in the system to see who would discover them—but evidently those lines of the conversation had evaporated. OK then; Nick would talk about Maslow. The name evoked memories of a college girlfriend, a tall psychology major with strawberry-blonde hair who was a fan of Maslow’s theories. She had had freckled breasts and sharp wit and a passionate sense of justice. Why had they ever broken up?

“Maslow’s the one with the theory about the hierarchy, right?” Nick said. “How did it go? Need food, need shelter, need achievement . . .”

Monty seemed pleased with Nick’s answer. He smiled, showing mismatched teeth.

“At the most basic level, people need food, shelter, sex. Once their biological needs have been met, more subtle social needs present themselves—for companionship, stability, love, a feeling of belonging. And once these needs have been met, people need achievement, a sense that they have accomplished something. Their sense of self is actualized by the regard of others.”

“Fascinating,” Nick said. He knew there was a reason he had broken up with that girlfriend. He hated this kind of Psychology Today baloney.

“At the highest level of human development are self-actualized people,” Meekman said, holding his hand above his head, his flat palm facing the ground. “Those who have attained a perfect indifference to the scorn or acclaim of the rest of the world. There are fewer and fewer people at each successive level of development,” he said, moving his hand down in stages, “so the whole of humanity makes a pyramid, with self-actualized people at the peak and everybody else below them.”

“Gotcha,” Nick said. “Like the TransAmerica Building.

Monty let his hand drop.

“How far up Maslow’s pyramid would you say you are, Nick?”

Nick thought. He didn’t care about cars, clothing, social standing, achievement—basically he didn’t care about anything. Outside of the acute but fading hope that he would someday reunite with Bartlett, the only things that interested him were drinking beer, lifting weights and writing code, getting plugged into the Juice. The Juice of pure logic and pure competition that only Silicon Valley could provide. But the Juice, more diluted every year, had lost almost all of its appeal now that Nick had been reduced to working for Chuckie Johnson and coding Novell emulators. That left beer and weightlifting.

“I guess I’m at the top,” Nick said. “Self-actualized.”

Monty looked at him with lowered, pitying eyes.

“Oh no no no no no,” he said, like a songbird instructing its young. “No no no no no. No, Nick you have a long way to go until you’re self-actualized. No no no.”

As Nick looked at Monty, puckered, frail-looking, smug, he imagined him as another stock character from some lame movie from the late 1930’s: the disapproving scold, the small-minded librarian or preacher mouthing platitudes. For all that Monty might tower over others intellectually, physically he was a puny weakling. Were the need to arise, Nick could crush him like a bug. He smiled inwardly at this thought.

“Well then maybe I misunderstood the concept,” Nick said. “Can we talk about getting me down from this mountain in time to get to the airport?”

“Let me give you an example of some self-actualized people. Albert Einstein. Abraham Lincoln. Bill Gates. Saddam Hussein. Alexander the Great. Adolf Hitler. Henry David Thoreau. George Soros. Mahatma Gandhi. Rupert Murdoch. Michael Eisner. Napoleon. The directors of the Cali cocaine cartels and the Russian mafias. Alan Greenspan. And myself.”

“Yes,” Nick said. “I can see how you might think that.”

It was pointless, of course, to use sarcasm on Monty. Once he got going there was no stopping him.

Monty said, “Understanding Maslow’s pyramid is the first step in understanding how the world works. Understand the pyramid and you’ll understand why oil, weapons, and cocaine are the three greatest commodities in international trade.”

“Do the guys at the top have a dating service and get together to play Scrabble like they do in Mensa?”

“We play, yes. But there’s only one game worth playing: Rule the Roost. The object is to make the other players cry ‘yield.’ And, of course, to do so stylishly.”

“So that’s your idea of fun,” Nick said. “Who’s winning?”

“Gates is winning on paper. Hussein has the most style points. Eisner is my biggest threat, especially if he hooks up with the cocaine cartels. But I’m winning.”

“Eisner? The chairman of the Walt Disney Corporation is your biggest threat to world domination? By selling drugs?”

“The Television Reform Act of 1984, by which Ronald Reagan gave America’s children over to the care of the Telescreen, was the most significant political act of the twentieth century, and I include Hiroshima and the decoding of DNA as political acts. Reagan blew the locks on the door that separated the nursery from the whorehouse, and Eisner rushed in first. Under Eisner, television has perfected the way it brainwashes children into the modern cult of sex, violence, fear and individual entitlement—which will make religion, family, and government moot within a generation. Disney’s children have grown up addicted to Little Mermaids, Michael Jordan, suburbia, MTV, and ABC news. All Disney needs now is a narcotic supply to complete its portfolio of dopamine enhancers and he’ll have an army of two hundred million of the best fed, best educated people in the world eating out of his hand. That’s why he’ll cut a deal for a narcotics supply. The Cali cartels also provide a more risk-free route to atomic weapons than the Russian Mafias do. Eisner and Disney have a very compelling game plan.”

Nick had to admit that as far as sociological theories went, this one explained a lot.

“What about you?” Nick said. “Where’s your bomb? Where’s your army? How can you expect to rule the world without an army?”

“Not rule the world. The game is Rule the Roost. To deny your opponent what he wants.”

Monty spread his arms wide. Beyond his reach, across the bay, Mount Diablo arose in the dry distance.

“Ah,” Nick said. “That explains Saddam’s style points. Because Bush didn’t get two terms, the only thing he wanted.”

“Some day Saddam may be acknowledged as the greatest military strategist of all time,” Monty said.

Nick thought that was a stretch.

“I’ll grant him political style points,” he said. “But military strategist? No way. Saddam’s boxed into a corner. His army is decimated.”

“Oh, Nick,” Monty said, shaking his head. “Nick, Nick, Nick. So much to learn.”

As he spoke, Monty clambered atop a guardrail post. There he stood, like an Olympic diver on the high platform, with his feet pointing ahead touching each other and his arms at his sides; it would only take a stiff breeze to start Monty a long fall to certain death below him.

“What would you do,” Monty said, while looking northeast from his perch to the Devil’s Mountain thirty miles away, “if you had a programmable biological weapon that could put millions of the world’s best soldiers under your command, but no way to deliver that weapon?”

Nick himself had no especial fear of heights. On the other hand he was no daredevil. Harold Lloyd movies with breathtaking stunts filmed atop unfinished skyscrapers literally made him shiver—as if someone had taken fingernails to a dusty chalkboard.

“Hmmmmm…” Nick said, refusing to acknowledge that Monty was one good gust of wind from death. “What would I do if had a programmable biological weapon that could put millions of the world’s best soldiers under my command, but no way to deliver that weapon? Let’s see. Would I attack Kuwait?”

Intellectually Nick knew the importance of maintaining sangfroid. But exactly how was he supposed to disregard this demonstration of ice water in Monty’s veins? However Nick did it, he had to act cool. To do otherwise would be tacky, like pointing out to the Titanic’s gallant orchestra that the barky, she was a-goin’ down. It would be tantamount to ceding the game on the opening play.

“Stylish, isn’t it?” Monty chirped from his aerie. “Even Gates was impressed.”

Maybe Nick hadn’t given Monty enough credit. Perhaps he was a syphilitic madman. Not only was he walking on a trapeze without a net, he apparently also believed that he was playing a real-life board game with Saddam Hussein, George Bush, and Bill Gates.

“How about you?” Nick asked. “How are you going to rule the roost?”

“That will be revealed to you if it becomes appropriate,” Monty said. With those words the spell broke. The sun was starting to slip behind the mountain ridge that rose behind them, and the air was getting chilly. Nick was about to force the issue when he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, something moving.

About fifteen or twenty yards to Nick’s right, at the far end of the parking lot, two bicyclists had stopped and dismounted. A man and a woman, both in spandex and clearly in great physical shape, took off their helmets and riding gloves. As if choreographed, both of them shook their heads, then ran hands through long shiny blond hair, his as long as hers. Venus and Adonis: for a moment Nick couldn’t take his eyes off them, and he had to force himself to remember his train of thought.

“You didn’t drive me all the way up here to give me this little Kissinger’s eye view of global power relations,” Nick said to Monty, taking his eyes off the New Gods. “You want something from me. I don’t know what it is, but you’re not going to get it without a little honesty. Tell me your strategy for winning Rule the Roost.”

“Stand beside me,” Monty said, and indicated the next post, six feet to the right of his own.

Backing out was impossible now: Nick had come here for information, and it was obvious that he wasn’t going to get it without passing this first test. Monty had issued a challenge, and dread or no dread, Nick was going to have to pick it up. He stepped forward and placed his hand on the thigh-high post.

“How nice of you to invite me up,” he said.

He focused his eyes on the spot where he was going to put his feet, and before he knew it he was crouching there. Quickly he stood erect, keeping his gaze straight ahead across miles of air to Mission Peak, from whence Europeans had first seen the mirror view and proclaimed God’s salvation to the indifferent bay.

“Chuckie Johnson was fired today,” Monty said. “Your project will be discontinued after the next stable build of the source tree.”

There it was. All this talk about a global conspiracy of self-actualizers had been a goof. Nick had been taken up to the mountains simply to be whacked, fired. But why was Monty doing the hit? Nick turned his head to the left and saw Monty slowly, silently, raise his arms from his sides until they were straight across, like Christ’s on Corcovado above Rio de Janeiro.

Nick turned his gaze once more to the front, but was distracted by something out of the right corner of his eye. He couldn’t believe it. The two perfect Aryans, as if playing Simon Says with Nick and Monty, had clambered atop guardrail posts at the far end of the lot and were raising their arms as well. Despite the spandex and the distance, Nick could see the size and symmetry of the man’s muscles, right down to his abs—and the woman’s form was, in its own way, even more remarkable.

“I am offering you the position of Corporate Fellow of Digital Microsystems,” Monty said, his eyes closed, his voice delivering the words in monotone. “You will be special assistant to me, to work on projects at Digital Microsystems Laboratories, Incorporated. The salary is two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars per annum.”

“Jesus,” Nick said. His thighs began to tremble. He imagined Harold Lloyd stepping off a girder into thin air fifty stories above Times Square, catching himself on a shoestring.

“Let’s jump, Nick,” Monty said. “Have faith. We can fly if you touch your finger to mine.”

The blood pounded in Nick’s temples as he found himself involuntarily lowering his head to look to where the earth met the sky at the cliff edge. Infinitely below was a pile of boulders. Nick imagined his own and Monty’s bodies lying atop the rubble, like tiny little Sistine dolls with arms outstretched, index finger to index finger, separated by a breath.

“You first,” Nick said.

“I have with me a bona fide offer, signed by Scott Beckwith, the Corporation’s Chief Operating Officer. If you accept, ten million dollars, net of taxes, will be deposited today in an account that has already been set up in your name. And you will receive bonuses at regular intervals.”

Nick’s legs weakened worse than before and for a moment his field of vision went completely black. Everything had happened just the way Carl had said it would: Johnson fired, Docudisc canceled, and Nick offered preposterous sums of money to accept a position for which he was probably not qualified—all wrapped in Monty’s thesis that the chairman of the Walt Disney Corporation was personally responsible for modern narcissism and the general shape of late twentieth century capitalism.

“That’s my job title,” Nick asked, weakly. “‘Special Assistant to Monty Meekman?’ At ten million down and two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why me?”

“Genius is innate; it cannot be taught, only shaped. You are not a genius, but you have a genius for certain kinds of fluid algorithms.”

“Bullshit,” Nick said.

“Don’t seek flattery Nick; it’s beneath you. If I went to the trouble to learn the names of the Fanayenabay don’t you think I’ve read your code? We both know what you’re good at, and we both know how good you are. Now, do you want the chance to really use your talent, or do you want to spend the rest of your life writing Novell emulators? That’s the choice before you: stay where you are, rot in obscurity, or come with me to design the most complex and beautiful objects in the history of human creation.”

“With no interference from the Software Architecture Review Committee, I assume?”

“You’ll have total freedom of design—and a lot of money.”

“And what will I be doing to merit such generous remuneration?”

“You must accept the offer before I can tell you that.”

Nick should never even have come along for the ride. He should have gone directly to the airport and caught the next flight out. He’d be nearly home by now, instead of getting a visceral lesson in the true meaning of the word “afraid.”

“And here’s your first opportunity for a bonus,” Monty said, nodding towards the spandex-clad mountain-bikers. “Push those vain imbeciles off their perches. They’ll never see you coming. I’ll give you two million dollars for each one.”

Nick said nothing. He could not remember how to speak.

“Well, son?”

Nick jumped backward, nearly losing his balance as he hit terra firma. Upon his perch, Monty turned to face Nick, his arms again at his side. Nick looked up at Monty like Dorothy looking up to Oz, the Great and Terrible—only not even Dorothy could have felt the terror that Nick now felt. But at least he had remembered how to speak.

“I knew you couldn’t do it, Nick,” Monty laughed. “You’re not self-actualized; not yet. But the offer still stands. How about it? How would you like to reside at the very frontier, the very apogee of human knowledge?”

“You just told me that you’re locked in mortal combat with cocaine cartels and Saddam Hussein,” Nick said. “You offer me ten million dollars for no good reason at all to do a job you won’t describe. Then you make a joke about killing people for hire. Do I have ‘idiot’ stamped on my forehead?”

“The offer is genuine. It is no joke and the Fellows are no joke. Accept my offer and you’ll be one of them. Corporate Fellows have interesting jobs and very much money. None of the Fellows are working on Novell emulation, and none of them are bouncing checks or hitting their credit card limits. You’ve noticed, surely.”

Yes, Nick had noticed. He had also noticed that the Corporate Fellows didn’t talk to anybody outside of their group, followed Monty’s orders like he was king, and occasionally dressed in matching uniforms, like a nerd’s baseball team. So far Carl had been absolutely right about Nick’s rehabilitation. He had been right about everything. Which meant, Nick was now quite sure, that Carl had been right about Monty’s role in the destruction of his career, his marriage—heck, his entire life. In compensation for which Nick was now being offered, what? The chance to run off with the Pied Piper of the nerdoids? The chance to invent the future while committing random homicide?

“Monty,” Nick said, the image of Bartlett coming into his mind unbidden. He should have followed her advice from years ago, should have listened to her that night during the snowstorm at the church’s camp hall at the lake. He should have listened to her every single time she warned him away from Monty Meekman. He should have treated her better. He should have had children with her. He should have loved her like she deserved to be loved. “Monty,” he said. “Shove it up your ass.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Well, that’s the way it is. Get down. Let’s go.”

“The instant you accept this offer I can begin to help you achieve the thing most dear to you. Decline this offer, and you’ll see what the world brings you.”

There was no mistaking the meaning of that remark. Nick had begun to recover from the tussle of wills on the guardrail posts. Monty wanted to play power games? Fine. Nick was ready to play.

“Are you threatening me?” Nick said. “I’ll smash your face, you pipsqueak. I’ll throw you off this cliff.”

“Bartlett is finding venture capital very hard to come by,” Monty said. “With ten million dollars you could provide a substantial lift to her and her colleagues.”

The bastard.

“I repeat: take me off this hill before I throw you off—and your shitbox car on top of you.”

“It’s a very short contract,” Monty said, as he reached into his jacket and withdrew an envelope. “It basically says that Digital Microsystems will give you enormous sums of money, and that you will work only for the Labs—no consulting on the side, no projects of your own at home. You are free to leave the employ of the laboratory after five years; if you resign before then you will have to pay the corporation back for all monies you may have received by that time. It obliges you to total confidentiality, for as long as you live, about the projects under development at the Labs.”

“Lifetime confidentiality? Even official government secrets have expiration dates.”

“Their contracts don’t pay tens of millions of dollars. And I’m afraid that this offer expires in two minutes. You have only to say, ‘I accept,’ and I will place the contract in your hands. Sign it and the money, the fellowship, are yours. So think about it, Nick. But don’t think too long.”

“You want me to take your money so that I can offer venture capital to Bartlett Aubrey, my own wife.”

“You can use the money however you like.”

“No strings?”

“There are none.”

“Capital never relinquishes control,” Nick said.

A tiny smile appeared on Monty’s face, and for an instant Nick thought he was going to be congratulated for spotting the contradiction, quoting the very words Monty had spoken a short while ago. Not a chance. With a grand gesture Monty swept his right hand out, indicating the panorama behind him.

“I made this,” he said.

Nick didn’t think he had heard him right.

“What?” he asked, still trying to comprehend the horror of his situation.

“I made this,” Monty said again. “I created the Silicon Valley.”

There was a look of rapture on Monty’s face as he began to recite the names of Silicon Valley companies: “Intel. Hewlett Packard. IBM. Advanced Micro Devices. Oracle. National Semiconductor. Silicon Graphics. Apple. Adobe. Next. All the others. All of them! Without me there would be nothing below us but a bunch of Mexicans picking fruit. All those companies, all that wealth, it all sprang from me, from my thought, from my inventions. Silicon is nothing but sand, and Silicon Valley is nothing but my sandbox. Without Monty Meekman there would be no Silicon Valley. And you, Nick, are the one I have chosen to help me design what it will look like a hundred years from now.”

Monty was smiling from ear to ear, like the Grinch, like Pat Robertson. Nick had no doubt now: Monty was a danger to Nick, to Bartlett, to the world. Nick wished he had listened to his wife. He wished he had never met this crazy billionaire. He should never have abandoned agriculture and Africa for the intellectual seduction of systems and algorithms. But past was past, and “should have” was shit. This was now, and Nick knew what he had to do. Anger was a useless emotion, a self-indulgent emotion. Carl Swirsing had been right: if anyone was going to get the better of Monty Meekman, it was going to have to be an inside job. No one but a Corporate Fellow would ever get the upper hand on this madman. If Nick was inside, he could help Carl get the brass ring he wanted, and he could bring Meekman down in the process.

“I accept your offer,” Nick said, even as he battled the impulse to vomit.

Monty glanced at his watch

“Right,” he said. Then he stepped off the post and placed the envelope in Nick’s hands.

Suddenly the ground beneath Nick’s feet melted away, and he had the sensation that he was falling out of the sky. At first he thought the insanity of everything Monty said had caused him to faint, but in a moment he realized that it was an earthquake.

Nick had been in earthquakes before, but he had never felt anything like this. It lasted about fifteen seconds, and the whole time he was quite certain that he was going to die. But he didn’t die, and eventually the terrible shaking ceased.

Nick looked up. Monty was standing above him, smiling.

“Whole lotta shakin’ going on,” Monty said, smiling.

Nick had managed to get only as far as his knees.

“The world is a very predictable place, Nick,” Monty said. “Events are predictable. People are predictable. Arise.”

Once again Nick asked himself if he had lost his mind.

“How?” Nick asked. He was not expecting an answer, but Monty gave one.

“With a little knowledge of stochastic processes and strange attractors you can pretty much tell when Saratoga earthquakes are going to happen just by looking at what the Calistoga geyser is doing, modulo the seismic data from the Heyward fault.”

Nick stood, uncertainly, like a toddler who has fallen after taking his first step.

“You can tell when an earthquake is going to happen to the precise minute?” he said.

“I can tell to the exact minute with a thirty percent degree of confidence. The degree of confidence goes to ninety-nine percent if I only specify the hour. That was four point six, by the way. It felt worse because you’re standing at the epicenter.”

Monty looked increasingly serene. “You’re not astonished by somebody who can predict a hurricane a week in advance or a lunar eclipse a hundred years in advance. Why should you be surprised that somebody can predict an earthquake a day in advance? Here’s a pen. Sign.”

Somehow the contract was still clutched in Nick’s left fist. The fist was trembling.

“Thirty percent degree of confidence?” Nick said, as the implication sank in. “Thirty percent? That earthquake could easily have come when I was standing up there. If you want to commit suicide, that’s your business. But when you play around with murdering me, well, I don’t like that.”

“The world is what it is, Nick,” Monty said. “People who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Only then did Nick remember the bicyclists. He looked to where they had been, but they were not there. Only their mountain bikes remained, one thrown atop the other.

“Sign the contract, Nick. You’ll be a multi-millionaire by the time we reach sea level.”

Behind him Nick heard a car approaching. He tore the envelope in half and dropped it, then turned and ran, with his arms waving in the air to flag down the rather battered Buick station-wagon that was rounding the curve.

Chapter 13

Dieter Steffen lay on his bed in the dark, staring at the glowing red numbers. It was 00:17, Basel local time. A new day had begun, a day with no prospect of rest. Scheiesse, he thought. Ich stand hüt nacht im bett. Tonight I am standing in my bed. There will be no sleep for me.

Three hours ago Judith Knight had spoken to Dieter over cherry brandy on the terrace of the Kunsthalle Café, and he had been in torment ever since, as the projector in his mind replayed, endlessly, the series of facts and conjectures that kept him in his current distressed state. What is known? he asked himself. What is known, and what is theorized, and how big is the gap between?

Known: Hoff-Zeigy, his employer, is days, weeks, months or years away from producing the world’s first true biodigital nanomachine—a programmable mechanical device the size of a small virus—that will be able to repair and rearrange DNA.

Known: If his machine ever moves from the drawing board to the real world (possible, but how likely? he thought) it will revolutionize medicine, providing an instant cure for cancer and hundreds of genetic conditions such as Cystic Fibrosis, Down Syndrome and Sickle-cell Anemia. It could also change skin color, hair color, eye color. Indeed, this machine can—no, it will—change the human condition, theoretically opening the door to personal immortality and the creation of whole new forms of life—designer plants, designer animals, designer people.

Dieter turned over in bed.

Known: a DNA pattern is programmed into a computer chip during the manufacturing process. The pattern is transferred from the chip to the nanomachine. The nanomachine is then injected into living organisms, where it rearranges DNA according to the instructions that have been programmed into it. The designs of the nanomachines and of the chip that program them are closely guarded corporate secrets, potentially worth billions of dollars.

Is it a secret worth killing over? Dieter asked himself.

Unknown.

Only a handful of people know about the nanomachine, and only one other scientist—another young loner, an American named Pavel Isaacs—works on it with Dieter. Pavel designed the chip that programs the nanomachines; he learned about chip design and manufacturing while an intern at Digital Microsystems, at their headquarters in Massachusetts.

Who is Pavel Isaacs? After eight years of working in the same labs at both MIT in the USA and Hoff-Zeigy in Switzerland, what really does Dieter really know about him?

He knows that Pavel is a polymath and genius who specializes in molecular computation—applying the principles of digital logic to submicroscipic biological and chemical systems. He knows that Pavel is a quiet, private person who shares with Dieter very little information about his activities outside of work. He knows that Pavel’s physical appearance has changed over the years in a most unusual way—his complexion has changed from African to European, and so have his facial features.

Where did Pavel grow up? Unknown. Who were his parents? Unknown. How or why did his appearance change? Unknown. Who are his friends? What does he do for fun? Does he have a girlfriend? Is he gay? What music does he like? What foods are in his kitchen? Unknown, unknown, unknown. Who the hell is Pavel Isaacs? Unknown.

Dieter tried to remember how he and Pavel had met. He knew it was at MIT; it must have been in one of their classes but Dieter wasn’t even sure about that. His earliest memory was of the two of them working in the NanoMechanical Technology Laboratory off the Infinite Corridor in MIT’s Building 8. He tried to remember their having socialized outside of work. He couldn’t. He kicked his leg out from the beneath the covers, which had begun to seem stiflingly heavy.

Enter Judith Knight with an improbable message: for the good of mankind, she says, Dieter should stop the work to which he has devoted his life. Pavel Isaacs, the only other person on earth who is capable of understanding this work, is a dangerous sociopath, she informs him. Dieter must not let Pavel know that he has spoken with Knight. Pavel cannot create the machine by himself; he needs Dieter’s help. Thus the fate of mankind rests with Dieter Steffen: a shy, slightly overweight, extremely introverted and nerdy Swiss scientist and proper citizen.

Is Judith Knight crazy? Unknown.

Schiesse, he thought.

Dieter must decide what he is going to do. Over and over, this endless series plays in his head, always ending up in the same place: Muss er sich eutschrade-jetzt. He must decide what he is going to do.

He needed to decide soon: over the last ten weeks he and Pavel had made remarkable progress on the two remaining design problems for their nanomachine: the compression algorithm, the fullerene sphere. And yesterday, only yesterday, Dieter completed the redesign of the tube. But he had not yet told his partner Pavel about his breakthrough. That is the question that is keeping him awake: will he share with Pavel his discovery about the orthogonal Diels-Alder adduct? For the chance of saving humanity from the ravages of disease and starvation will he risk unleashing the demons of hell?

Of one thing he is certain: once he shares this design with Pavel there will be no turning back. It will be time—after patient years of research, of regular failures and small incremental successes, years of computer simulation—time at last build the real device.

But first Dieter must decide about Pavel.

Is he what he seems to be: a brilliant scientist obsessed with discovery and invention? Or is he what Judith Knight had darkly hinted: an evil person working with evil people to devise a doomsday weapon? Was Judith Knight a guardian angel sent to warn him, or was she a delusional woman with an obscure score to settle?

Judith implied that Pavel had misled Dieter for as long as they had worked together. Now Dieter found himself wondering whether Pavel’s decision to collaborate with him had been based on an ulterior motive. There had been some odd aspects to Pavel’s decision to leave MIT for Basel. But on the whole the move made sense. Dieter had secured a position at Hoff-Zeigy, and had encouraged Pavel to apply for a job to work with him. Pavel and Dieter had worked well together in graduate school. Their two doctoral dissertations provided a roadmap to a brave new future; it was only natural that they would continue to travel that road together.

Pavel had seemed curiously anxious that spring five years ago, the last time they had been in America together. Pavel had had two jobs: in addition to his work as a graduate fellow in the department of Molecular Computation at MIT, he had also been working in chip design at a computer company under MIT’s co-op program. Dieter had expected that Pavel would move to Basel in the summer of 1991, but one day in early spring 1990 Pavel had announced that there was no further need for him to stick around: his dissertation was complete and his computer project had been canceled. He was moving to Europe immediately, he announced; he would be moving the very next day.

He was sick of the racism, he said; he wanted out of America right now, to give Europe a try. He didn’t care about graduation—they could mail him his diploma.

To Dieter it was astounding that Isaacs could complain of ill treatment at MIT. As far as he could tell, the MIT community had recognized in him another Feynman, a future Nobel Prize winner. They sucked up to him like groupies to a rock star. But Dieter had already grown used to Pavel’s idiosyncrasies. He simply accepted them.

Now it was years later and still Dieter knew nothing of Pavel’s private life. What Pavel did on his own time, where he went on those long absences, sometimes months at a time, were his own affair. Dieter turned away from the clock and shut his eyes in a last attempt to sleep. Five minutes later he admitted defeat. He was back at his Hoff-Zeigy lab before 1:30 a.m.

Chapter 14

Thirty minutes out of San Francisco Nick Aubrey had had enough. He liked to think of himself as a peaceable man, but if he didn’t change seats soon he was liable to kill somebody. The plane had reached cruising altitude and the cabin lights were out. The flight attendants had been up and down the aisles dispensing pillows and blankets like kindergarten teachers at nap time, and white noise from the enormous jet engines provided a familiar lullaby to the very important big boys and big girls resting before their next busy day. Conditions for sleep were nearly as good as they were going to get on a transcontinental flight, and if only the two loud business boys up in First Class would shut up, maybe Nick could get some rest.

Screw this, Nick thought. He grabbed his things and the TWA blanket and headed west.

Towards the back of the plane he found an unoccupied spot—a vacant aisle seat, with another empty seat next to it. Against the window, separated from him by the two empty seats, there was a balding man wearing a light business suit, perspiring. Nick had the feeling that he knew the man from somewhere, but couldn’t place him. In a minute it came to him: it was the funny little man from Mad Antonio’s, the one who had given Carl a package and left after a short, odd conversation. What was his name?

“Anybody sitting here?” Nick said.

“I’m not going to stop you,” the man answered. It wasn’t a red carpet, but so much the better. Nick was interested in rest, not chat. He quickly stowed his things, then slouched down into the aisle seat and tried to make himself ready for sleep. It was pointless, of course. For the first few hours after the quake he had been in shock, but now he was slipping into after-shock and guilt was already starting to gnaw at him. He had not told the police about the two bicyclists who fell from the cliff. He had not even gone over to the edge of the parking lot to make sure that they had not miraculously landed on a ledge or clung to a branch. He had hitched a ride down from the hills to Santa Clara, taken the train to Menlo Park, hired a cab to the Diggy-Mike campus in Mountain View, reclaimed his rental car from the lot there and driven it to the airport, arriving at the gate with only minutes to spare before his plane’s 10:00 PM departure. As soon as Nick landed in Boston, he decided, he was going to have to report the incident with Monty in the hills to the police.

Nick’s eyes had been closed for about half a minute when he heard the voice from his right.

“How are you going to do it? Lysergic acid in my Coca-Cola? Sodium Pentothal in an oxygen mask? Or were you planning to put some of your nanomachines into me and watch me turn into a robot?”

Nick opened his eyes and looked to his right. The man was huddled against the window, with his legs curled up. He looked pale but defiant, as if Nick had him cornered but could not make him surrender.

“Say what?” Nick said.

“Save it,” the man said. “You’re here to drug and kidnap me. So do it.”

It took Nick a few seconds to comprehend that the man was not joking and that he, Nick, was sitting next to a person, crazy or not, who was afraid for his life.

“My name is Nick Aubrey,” he began, cautiously. “I’m no kidnapper. I’m just a washed-up computer geek—”

“A computer geek who just happens to be an expert in nanotechnology,” the man sneered.

Clearly this conversation wasn’t going to be easy. Nick drew in his breath, paused a second to collect his thoughts, and tried again.

“OK,” Nick said. “Suppose you help me out. I’ve forgotten your name?”

“Sure you have. I’m Peter Barlow, remember? The guy you’re supposed to slip a mickey finn? But you can call me whatever you want, Mister Aubrey. Or should I say Herr Aubrey?”

Now Nick remembered: “Crazy Peter”, Carl had called him.

“Hey, Peter, no need to be alarmed,” Nick bluffed. “I forgot your name but I remember you. You’re Carl’s friend; I’m Carl’s friend. We’re friends. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“Carl’s friend? Bullshit. I know why you were with Carl today.”

“Why?”

“To see what I look like. How are you going to kidnap me if you don’t know what I look like?”

Oh, brother.

“Why do you think that I want to kidnap you?” Nick said.

“You want to kidnap me,” Barlow said, “because I know about your cabal. I know about the computer chips and Gulf War Syndrome. The CIA hand in hand with the Butcher of Baghdad. You need to find out how much I know. Do you really think I don’t know what ‘brain dump’ means? You want to wire me up!”

Play along, be careful, Nick told himself. Crazy people sometimes did crazy things.

“How do you know all this?”

“As if you didn’t know. I was stationed in Iraq, remember, with a CNN technician job as cover. Until you busted the play. You do fine work, too—it’s not easy to fool the people who invented disinformation, but you pulled it off. Now everybody thinks I’m crazy. Ollie North and Aldrich Ames and now you. Another sterling product of the Langley Home School for Traitors.”

Ollie North? Aldrich Ames? Langley?

“Do you think I’m in the CIA?” Nick said. Was there no end to the weirdness?

“I know a Company joke when I hear one,” Barlow said. “Herr Aubrey. Aubrey, Burgess, Carr, Delcourt. You think I never saw that film? I was with the Company! So I know about the Company and I know about the Corporate Fellows. I know about the Emverk Alumni Association.”

Emverk, the Mountain View Research Center, of which Monty Meekman had been Director of Research when he was twenty five years old. Emverk, where Monty had kicked off Nick’s guided tour of Silicon Valley earlier this afternoon.

Jesus Christ, Nick thought. Who put the LSD in my Coca-Cola? Was this coincidence or was it fate? Was Barlow an angel sent to enlighten him, or just a random nut?

“What do you know about the Corporate Fellows?” Nick asked, unsure whether he wanted to hear the answer. “What do they have to do with Emverk? What film are you talking about?”

Barlow ignored him, and his face took on a look of even greater venom and disdain as he spat out the next words:

“I know about the Overmind!”

“The Overmind? What the hell is that?”

“Shut up, asshole, and listen. I told everything I know to Iraqi intelligence. You probably never thought a loyal soldier would do that, did you? You can kill me, but they’re gonna get you.”

This was classic paranoia. Nothing that a shot of Thorazine couldn’t handle, but Nick didn’t happen to have any Thorazine on him. The best he could do would be to see if he could get the guy calmed down long enough to make a break for the flight attendants. He would tell them that they had a delusional person on board and let them handle it.

“Honest to God,” Nick said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But maybe I can help you. Maybe I can get the captain to land and let you off. You can escape whoever is hunting you.”

“Very funny,” Barlow said. “Escape. Hah. I know about your biometrics lab. You’ve got me scanned into your system. You’ve got my fingerprints, voiceprint, DNA, PET scan, brainwave patterns. You’ve got my credit card records, cable TV records, grocery store records. You know what I watch, what I eat, where I go, how much money I have. Cameras in ATM machines recognize the lines in my iris. My image is in the public domain. Escape! As if you wouldn’t scan for my voice on the telephone. As if every video camera in the country isn’t programmed to recognize my face. As if you couldn’t find me in ten seconds! You’ve got a simulation of me in your lab, predicting what I’ll buy next, say next, think next!”

“Calm down Peter,” Nick said. “I’m concerned about privacy too. You’re concerned about the government turning into Big Brother? I am too.”

“Privacy! Privacy? Privacy is a bogus concept. It’s more archaic than the Roman gods. Government is a bogus concept. Who has more power, the President or Bill Gates? Microsoft controls the CIA, everybody knows that. Gates bought it from Reagan.”

OK, forget the angel hypothesis. This here is a classic random nut.

“But I don’t work for Gates or Reagan. Here,” Nick said, withdrawing his wallet from his pocket and offering his laminated Massachusetts driver’s license for Barlow’s inspection. “This is who I am. A fellow traveler, just like yourself. Only I bet I’m deeper into MasterCard than you are.”

“MasterCard! MasterCard owns the National Security Agency! You think I don’t understand the 3D face scanner in every store? That I don’t know about mass suicide and the spaceship behind the comet? Government is not big brother; MasterCard is Big Brother! Disney Is Big Brother. Microsoft is Big Brother. Digital Microsystems is Big Brother. Overmind is over all. You are Big Brother.”

“Peter, I am not Big Brother.”

“Go ahead, tell me I’m lying. You have gesture analyzers that can tell whether I’m lying by the look on my face. Come on, tell me I’m lying. Tell me, you bastard. Then fucking kill me. I don’t want to live in a world without freedom. Escape? Fuck you. Escape to where? Your satellites encircle the globe. There are no degrees of freedom left.”

Nick looked up and saw a stewardess walking down the aisle towards him. If he could find a way to signal her . . .

“Another one of yours, coming for back-up?” he heard Barlow say.

“Listen,” Nick said, turning to face him. “I’m a good guy. I don’t know her, I am not going to hurt you, and the only Overmind I know is my wife. You’re frightening me. Please let me help you. Do you take any medication? Maybe you’ve forgotten a dose or two?”

“Save your breath,” the man said. “You’re no good guy, and I’m a dead man. Do you hear me? I’m a dead man. You can’t touch me. You can’t plug my brain into your system. I’m dead already.”

Then, before Nick realized what was happening, the man flashed his palm towards Nick, showing him something small.

“Here’s my medication,” he sneered. He put his hand to his mouth, bit hard, and swallowed. Then, with a sick but somehow serene smile Barlow turned and kneeled in his seat, looking beyond Nick towards the aisle of the jumbo jet. He took a deep and labored breath, then called out above the dull roar of the engines, “If I may have your attention please.”

As Nick looked at the man, amazed, he could see others turning to look at him as well.

“Give me your attention. Please, I do not have much time. Let me have your attention.”

Here and there a few lights went on. Nick noticed that the man’s hands were trembling.

“My name is Peter Barlow. I am going to die in one minute. This man sitting next to me has murdered me. He works for Hussein Kamel, of the Iraqi Defense Ministry. The Iraqi secret weapon is not nerve gas. It’s tiny robots to control our minds. Gulf War Syndrome is only the beginning. I have left proof and a plan for the cure on a diskette with a friend in California. Cincinnati Tuskeegee Bikini. LSD. MK-ULTRA. The radical uprising. Radicals. Free radicals at forum. Stop them. This man is a murderer.”

With a sudden jerk of his arms, as if impersonating Boris Karloff in The Mummy, Barlow reached across the empty seat that separated him from Nick. Nick flinched and tried to put his hands up to protect his neck—he was sure the man was going to throttle him. But instead Barlow’s hands now rose to his own throat, and he began to convulse, sending something small and flat flying from his shirt pocket onto the intervening seat. The convulsions momentarily ceased, and, with his hands still clutching at his own throat, Barlow toppled towards Nick, like a mast snapped in a gale. As passengers all around began to scream, Barlow lay across Nick’s lap, his head dangling in the aisle, with a ghastly grimace stretched across his blue-tinted face.

Shit, Nick thought. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

In the commotion that followed, he picked up the diskette that had flown from Barlow’s pocket before anybody noticed it was there.

Chapter 15

At 8:00AM sharp, Basel Local Time, Herr Paul Aubrey stood at his desk staring at the memo in his right hand, oblivious to the glorious views behind him from the floor-to-ceiling windows of his corner office on the fourth floor of the Hoff-Zeigy Executive Building.

It was a great office in a great location, and not only for the views it afforded. The back, western, wall of Paul’s office looked on the Rhine river, and the southern wall to Paul’s right looked down on the old city. The views in either direction were fascinating at any time of day and oftentimes were magnificent. The executive building itself was not tall by world standards, but it was grand; ostentatious only in its modesty: energy efficient, sharp-looking but with Old Basel lines, modern but not trendy. For purely aesthetic reasons—and Paul knew himself to be an aesthete—the office was nearly perfect.

Aesthetics aside, being given a proverbial corner office at Hoff-Zeigy Corporation Headquarters in Basel was tantamount to being beatified. Paul had not been anointed yet a corporate saint, but being given this corporate office was a signal that he was well on his way. Among other things, it was a signal to the business press that he was a potential candidate to one day head the corporation.

But today Paul was oblivious to the views, oblivious to boat traffic on the Rhine four floors below, oblivious to lovers strolling hand in hand through the narrow streets of the Old City. He was contemplating death.

Not literal death, but the death of his career. What would he do if the day ever came when he was given the boot from Hoff-Zeigy, the corporation to which he had devoted essentially everything in him for the last however many years? On the evidence in his hand, maybe today was the day. Maybe today was the day that everything turned to ashes, that his career as a high-tech, world-traveling, scientist-venture-capitalist came to an end. What would he do then? He had no idea. He had money in the bank; that was not an immediate worry. The worry was how he would keep himself busy. Maybe he’d become a mortician, he grinned morosely to himself, and help those whose loved ones had died, not merely their careers.

Paul held in his hand a memorandum written by his boss Herr Doktor Heinz Beer, in most formal German, directing him to meet, immediately, with Dr. Pascale Pacheco, newly appointed head of external scientific collaborations for Hoff-Zeigy, Incorporated.

Paul wondered if he would ever get used to the elaborately ritualized style of office intrigue here in this Swiss-French-German city. Until receiving this memorandum via his secretary, who had received it from his boss’s secretary two doors away, Paul had thought that he was director of external scientific collaboration for Hoff-Zeigy, Incorporated. Did this memorandum mean that Paul was being fired and Pascale, whoever she was, was getting his job? Or did it mean that Paul’s boss had been fired and Pascale was getting his boss’s job? Or did it mean that Paul had been promoted and Pascale now reported to him? Well, he would find out soon enough; Dr. Pacheco’s name had been placed on Paul’s calendar for a meeting five minutes from now.

Those five minutes would, of course, allow Paul enough time to go down to his boss’s office and ask him what was going on. Indeed, it would have been very simple for his boss to have come to Paul’s office and tell him straight out instead of sending a formal memorandum via two intermediaries from which the questions fairly spilled out onto the floor. If Paul were in America now, in the office of some Silicon Valley startup, he would walk down the hall, enter without knocking and say, “What the hell is this all about?”

But that wasn’t the way it was done here in Basel. Formalities were always observed, and you didn’t know if you had been befriended or betrayed until the deed was done. But Paul was used to that; indeed, he knew that it was his ability to function across cultures that accounted for his success at Hoff-Zeigy as much as it was his abilities as a scientist or business analyst. He knew how to be a chameleon, how to keep his mouth shut unless and until it was time to speak. He knew how to get the deal done, the American phrase used in every language he spoke.

But he had not been able to “get the deal done” with Judith Knight at Human Potential, Incorporated. That was an important “get,” and he had not gotten it. Was he about to be terminated for that failure?

“Well,” he said. He walked to the small mirror discretely mounted on one wall near his simple bookshelf, checked that his tie was crisply knotted, that there was nothing caught in his teeth. Nothing to do now but wait for Dr. Pacheco to show up. He walked to the window and gazed down.

“Not unlike ze view of the Charles River Basin from the Informatica building, is it?”

Her voice was friendly, the accent French.

He turned to face her. She was beautiful. Thirty-five, he guessed, but trying to be thirty. Blond, built, and dressed just a tad less formally than usual in this office. Clearly she had given careful consideration how to use her good looks to her advantage.

“Dr. Pacheco, I presume? I am Paul Aubrey.” He walked and extended his hand. And why did you mention the Informatica building?

“You and I will be working together, Mr. Aubrey. I thought it time we meet.”

Working together. So he had not been axed. Probably.

“Enchanté,” he said. “Please, sit. Would you like coffee?”

“No need,” she said. “This will be a brief visit; I have a plane to catch.”

Yes, he thought, the accent was French, but it was mild.

“Can you tell me the nature of our work together?”

“You phrase your inquiry discretely, Mr. Aubrey. I suppose you would like to know if I’m your new boss?”

Paul smiled slightly. “I do try to be discrete. It comes in handy in many lines of work.”

“Zecret agent work, you mean?” she said, and smiled with a slight turn of her head. She seemed to put on the accent at will. Was she flirting? Hard to say, even for Paul, who was generally very good at detecting signals from attractive women. But flirting at the office was dangerous.

“I was thinking more of maybe taking up funeral directing,” he said. He didn’t smile.

“Well, your Louis of Boston suits are a little too flashy for that line of work. You’ll have to switch to Brooks Brozzers.”

The suit Paul was wearing was double-breasted, modest grey, generally conservative but with a little bit of a Milano cut. Did she know for a fact that he had had it made for him at Louis of Boston, or did she recognize the tailoring? Or was it just a lucky guess?

She was not acting like a woman worried about catching a plane, he thought. She had already dropped two broad hints. Informatica Building. Louis of Boston. She had some kind of agenda. What?

“Well, then maybe I’ll just stay at Hoff-Zeigy. Assuming that’s still an option for me after Human Potential. I assume that my recent trip to Boulder has something to do with your being here in my office today?”

“You like to be discrete, but you do have a way of getting to the point. So let me get to the point. Don’t worry about Human Potential. We knew that Judith Knight would be, what do you say, a hard sell.”

We? Paul thought. Who is “we”?

“I have two other assignments for you.”

“These assignments come from you. So you are my boss.”

“Paul, Paul. No need to be so formal.”

And now she was calling him by his first name. And refusing to answer the question.

“As you prefer, Dr. Pacheco,” Paul said.

Two could play the formal/informal game.

“You are to travel to Boston. Well, actually, first to Cambridge, and then to Boston.”

“Presumably to speak with scientists at the Whitehead Center, or one of the local genomics startup companies,” Paul said. This was familiar territory for him.

“You’ll be meeting with the president of MIT.”

Whoa! Paul thought. He hoped his expression did not betray his surprise.

“What will we be discussing?” He asked.

“An endowed chair that Hoff-Zeigy wishes to establish at that great institution. A donation of a very large sum of money.”

“Begging your pardon, Dr. Pacheco, that doesn’t seem like an assignment for a mid-level dealmaker like myself.”

“We both know you’re higher than mid-level. And surely in your semester at the Sloan School you were taught to seize such opportunities, not shy away from them. Just as I was.”

Well, some progress. She was giving him a crumb of information. She too had attended MIT’s graduate school of management.

“I didn’t spend a semester at the Sloan School,” Paul said. “I only did a short summer course there. But you know that. And you know that while there I did a study of data mining at Informatica, whose building overlooks the Charles River as Hoff-Zeigy’s overlook the Rhine. But you, Dr. Pacheco, you didn’t just spend a summer at MIT. You spent two years there. You got an MBA.”

“Very good, Mr. Aubrey. Very good. How did you know?”

“Your American accent. You said ‘Bah-ston’, not ‘Baw-ston’. That’s an affectation that takes a fair amount of study, and a sense of humor too. Most Bostonians don’t even pronounce the name of the city that way. You wouldn’t pick it up over a summer.”

“Maybe I’m just a fan of Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. And Ricardo Montleban in Mystery Street,” she said. Her French accent was nearly imperceptible. If she worked on it, she could pass for American.

“You have an MBA from the Sloan School and you like gangster movies. I see,” Paul said.

“We just want you to open the door to MIT. Let them know Hoff-Zeigy is interested in negotiating.”

“Ah, of course.” Nick said. “Strings attached.”

“Control is the one thing capital never relinquishes. You know that. You invest Hoff-Zeigy’s money all the time. It’s your job.”

So, Paul thought. This is the secret agent stuff. He was going to have to find out how far MIT was willing to bend.

“What are the strings?” Paul asked. “What conditions does Hoff-Zeigy attach to this grant?”

“That’s a discussion for another time,” she said.

“OK then. Next question. You said two assignments. After I’ve finished in Cambridge, what do you want me to do across the river in Boston?”

“There is a company there called The Neuro Group. It’s small, it has received no publicity. And yet I think you may have heard of it.”

Oh, Paul thought. She’s good. She’s very good. He said nothing.

“It’s vitally important that Hoff-Zeigy gain access to The Neuro Group’s technology. We can license it. We can buy the company outright. We can acquire a controlling equity stake. But we must have that technology. How you get it is up to you, but you must get it for us. And by the way, we’ve already made several overtures through an intermediary. The Neuro Group is not interested.”

Intermediary? Paul thought. Since when did Hoff-Zeigy, the pre-eminent pharmaceutical company on Earth, approach tiny biotech startups through ‘intermediaries’? And since when did Paul, who until this moment had believed he was in charge of their overseas investments in small biotech startups, not known about overtures to an American company?

“So how do you propose that I succeed where you have failed?” Paul asked.

“Zat I leave to you, Mr. Louis of Boston secret agent man.” And this time she did wink: not merely a flirt but an exaggeration of a flirt.

“Alright then,” Paul said. “I’ll make arrangements to go to America. I expect I’ll be able to get there next week.”

“Paul, I was not clear. You are leaving now. Your meetings are today. A car is waiting downstairs to take you to the airport. You will have Hoff-Zeigy’s corporate jet at your disposal. I have taken the liberty of selecting a change of clothes for you; your bag is in the car. Also, you will find some briefing papers that you can read en route. As you know, Basel is six hours ahead of Boston, so you will have plenty of time. I trust that you have your passport with you?”

Paul felt air squeezed out of him as if he were in the coils of a giant boa constrictor. He tried to not show too much shock. What in the world was he getting into, he wondered.

“Yes, I have my passport,” he said.

She turned to leave.

“Dr. Pacheco.”

“Pascale,” She said, turning her head but not her torso.

“Dr. Pacheco.” He raised his voice as if addressing a willful child. His point had been made: she turned and faced him with a look of utter seriousness.

Be careful, Paul, he told himself. This is a dangerous one.

“Yes?” she said.

“You said that you and I will be working together. You’ve given me my assignments. What exactly will you be doing?”

“Oh,” she said. Her face relaxed, her tone was again friendly. “Assignments not unlike your own. But ones more suited to the skills I have.”

“Let me guess,” Paul said, unsure whether he was impressed, repulsed, or maybe even aroused. “Your skills in the coquette department.”

“Mais ouis, exactement, monsieur,” she said, tucking her chin down, grinning coyly and batting her eyelashes. Then she added, with her seductive French accent laid on thick as cement and her voice a half-tone higher and lilted with a schoolgirl giggle, “and I dare zay, zometimes in zee soubrette department as well.”

She turned, leaned almost imperceptibly forward, and then slowly moved what Paul was quite certain was, underneath her almost matronly suit, an anatomically perfect French derriere, to the left, then to the right. Then she quickly stood erect, turned to look at Paul over her left shoulder, made and exaggerated “O” with her mouth, and placed her right hand over it.

She lowered her hand, and stared at him with the intensity he had seen just a few moments ago.

“Tee-hee,” she said.

And with that she was gone.

Chapter 16

Having read Nick his rights, the two gentlemen from the Airport Police said that they would be back soon to hear his story, then left. As the door opened Nick heard the sounds of the airport: the rumble of jets, the announcements on the PA system, the cry of a disappointed child, the footfalls of someone running. Then the door pulled shut and the small dingy room became amazingly quiet. Nick glanced at his watch, which he always kept on east coast time. If it were 2:00AM in Boston, that made it what in Utah? Midnight? The math was too hard. He gave up.

Alone with his thoughts, Nick now found himself reliving the ordeal of Crazy Peter Barlow’s theatrical exit.

Nick had seen people die before; he had seen more than his share of bodies. During his time in Senegal he and Todd had spent their Peace Corps “vacation” time by answering a call for drivers for an emergency caravan bringing relief food to a refugee camp deep in the desert. The delivery took three weeks of hard driving over unpaved roads, where to stray from the pack was to die. They got there in time to save many people, but some were too far gone for help, including the little girl who died in Nick’s arms complaining of being cold. Cold, in the middle of a Saharan oven. Now, in Nick’s mind’s eye, Crazy Peter Barlow’s body became African, naked, another famine victim in the middle of nowhere . . .

Although he had seen death before, Nick had never witnessed a suicide, and he had never experienced anything like the power-assisted descent that the jet had made into Salt Lake City International. The seat belt lights had just come on and the first officer had been calmly telling the flight attendants and passengers to strap themselves into the nearest available seats when the plane pulled away from underneath him, like a roller coaster accelerating downwards, but harder. The aircraft was in no danger, the first officer had serenely continued; there was a passenger on board with a medical problem and they were making an unscheduled stop in Salt Lake City to let him off. Some “medical problem,” Nick remembered thinking. He’s dead.

Peter Barlow lay stretched out in the aisle with his mouth frozen in a grin and his eyes rolled back. It was a hideous discolored deathface, a Halloween mask. Yet somehow his tired suit and cheap tie made him look more pathetic than frightening.

And now Nick sat alone in this sparsely appointed interrogation room—four drab yellow walls, a black-and-white linoleum floor, a table, four old ‘futuristic’ plastic chairs, a telephone, and a wall clock that showed half past twelve—waiting to see whether he would be arrested for murder. He had Barlow’s diskette in his shirt pocket. Unless they searched him, they wouldn’t find it. And even if they found it, Barlow said it was password protected and would self-destruct. It was useless to them, he figured, but maybe helpful to him if he could figure out a way to crack it.

At first Nick hadn’t been nervous. The police had wanted to ask him some questions; that was only normal. They had advised him of his rights. Well, that was unnerving, but a dying man had accused Nick of murder, so of course the police had had to read him his rights. That in itself was nothing to worry about. But why this delay?

What were they doing outside? Was Meekman behind this, too? Nick couldn’t see how he would be. Barlow was connected to Carl, not Monty. But then again, Meekman knew things about Nick that he would have sworn were unknowable, as if he could truly see inside his mind. And besides, Barlow had mentioned Emverk, the very place where, decades ago, Monty Meekman had cemented his claim to being the smartest person in Silicon Valley. During its short life the Mountain View Research Center had been home to the greatest minds in the young field of computer science, and Monty, at 25, had been their boss. If he could predict an earthquake to the minute and allow two innocent people to be killed by it, he could certainly convince Peter Barlow that he should kill himself if he ever encountered Nick Aubrey and frame him for murder. Monty Meekman was capable of anything.

Nick took another look around the room, stretched his neck from side to side, tried to talk some sense into himself. How had he gotten here? If the police gave him one phone call, who should he call? Bartlett? Carl? Jake the wiredog? Who else was there? Todd was dead, or close enough to dead—as he had been for the last five years, in “a persistent vegetative state” — with a bullet to his brain and hooked to wires to make him breath.

Or maybe Nick should call his brother. How long had it been since he’d talked to Paul? Too long, that’s how long. If he called him now odds were better than good that Paul would hang up on him. How the hell had Nick gotten to this point in his life: jobless, broke, alone, surrounded by madmen and witness to three deaths in one single day, and now, evidently a murder suspect? What the hell was he going to do? If he got out of this jam, maybe he’d go back to Africa, he thought. Forget it all and leave. The village of Fanaye would still be there, the villagers would be the same. Life is simpler than this, Nick thought. It doesn’t have to be this hard. Or this insane.

Finally the door opened again and the two detectives came back in. The taller of the two—a heavy-set, grey-haired man with a silver moustache—had introduced himself as Lieutenant Ivan Marki. The other man was younger and slimmer, with bright red cheeks; he was carrying a small tape recorder. He had said his name was Detective Sergeant Blake. Both men were wearing sports coats and ties. They confirmed again that Nick didn’t wish to have a lawyer present, then one of them, the younger one, Blake, pulled up a chair to the table and began the interrogation. Lieutenant Marki remained standing, his arms crossed over his chest.

“OK,” the younger man said. “What happened?”

Nick told them everything he could remember, minus the fact that he had met Barlow in Mad Antonio’s, and that Barlow had remembered their encounter. He also neglected to tell the detectives that Barlow’s insane rant about Iraqi chemical weapons bore an uncanny resemblance to a theory advanced earlier that evening by Monty Meekman. What had Monty asked him? What would you do if you if you were Saddam Hussein and had a programmable biological weapon that could put millions of the world’s best soldiers under your command, but no way to deliver that weapon? And what had Barlow said as he was dying? The Iraqi secret weapon is not nerve gas. It’s tiny robots to control our minds.

Nick had a feeling that mentioning these coincidences would vastly complicate his situation, so he left them out.

And he also held back the pesky detail about the diskette in his pocket, the one that had fallen almost in his lap as Barlow convulsed on top of him. It was probably full of just more insane ranting, but after everything he had gone through today, Nick felt like he deserved at least something. The diskette was his, he decided.

Other than that, Nick told himself, he had pretty much told the police the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“OK,” Marki said, when Nick had finished. “Let’s back up.”

“Sure,” Nick said.

“That was the first time you ever met this guy, on the airplane, when you sat next to him?”

Nick tensed. “Yes,” he lied.

“Then why did he think you were an expert in these ‘nanomachine’ things?”

“I don’t know where he got that idea.” Nick said. “I know what the word means, that’s about it.”

“What does it mean?”

“Atomic scale machinery,” Nick said. Their faces remained blank. “Tiny devices. Smaller than specks of dust. Is this relevant? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Killing a man is wrong.”

The reality was starting to sink in.

“You think I murdered Barlow,” Nick said.

“You have been accused of that,” Lieutenant Marki said.

The man did not appear to be joking. This was turning out to be worse than Nick had anticipated. Should he stop now and ask for a lawyer? Not yet, he decided. For the time being he would count on logic and common sense to clear up this little misunderstanding.

“I didn’t even know Barlow,” he said.

“Why are you so antsy, Nick?” Sergeant Blake chimed in.

Blake hadn’t once let his face slip from its grim bad-cop mask. But beneath that grim look was a man, Nick thought, a normal guy, a guy who put his pants on one leg at a time, who loved or didn’t love his wife, who dreamed of golf or beer. The world isn’t full of Monty Meekmans, Nick told himself. Even hard-ass cops are people. This guy Blake was being a hard ass because somebody was dead and it was his job to find out why. But Nick had no idea why Barlow was dead. Surely he could make them understand that.

“Why am I antsy? See if you can guess,” Nick sighed.

The detectives glanced at each other, and there was a bit of a pause before Blake spoke again.

“We’ll be done with our questions in just another few minutes,” the younger detective said, “then you can go.”

“Thank God.”

“But we’re going to have to ask you not to leave the vicinity until the autopsy has been completed,” Marki added.

“What?” Nick said. “How long will that take?”

“It shouldn’t be longer than twenty-four hours.”

Oh, Christ, Nick thought.

“Officers,” Nick said. “Surely you don’t believe I murdered him? You must have a dozen witnesses who can tell you what he said. It’s clear that he was crazy, isn’t it? And anyway, you’ve got my name and address. I’ll be happy to leave my fingerprints. I’m a very findable person.”

“Sorry,” Blake said.

“God damn it,” Nick said. “You can’t keep me here.”

Blake got out of his chair and leaned close to Nick. He was visibly angry.

“We can’t keep you?” he said in a loud voice. “We can’t keep you? Let me tell you what we can do, Mr. Aubrey. We’re the Airport Police, and this is our turf. But we can always cede jurisdiction to Salt Lake City Homicide. Then you’ll see what police can and cannot do to a person fingered for murder.”

At that moment the door opened and a uniformed officer handed a piece of paper, obviously a fax, to Detective Marki, who looked at it, then passed it to his partner. Finally Blake nodded at the door.

“I’ll be back in a few,” Marki said, uncrossing his arms.

Marki left, and Nick heard the sound of the door being locked from the outside as Blake turned his chair back-to-front and straddled it.

“What do you know about Iraqi biological weapons, Nick?” he asked.

“Just what you hear on the news,” Nick said. “I haven’t followed it very much.”

“Your friend Hussein Kamel knows a lot about it. Only I thought he was dead.”

“Who’s he?”

“Your employer, Nick. The guy who hired you to hit Barlow. Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. He ran the Iraqi weapons program for Saddam, then defected to Jordan. Ring any bells?”

“I remember,” Nick said. “He went back to Iraq and got murdered by Saddam’s family.”

“Says who? Iraqi state television? Why should I believe them? Mr. Barlow seemed to think that Kamel was still alive, and that you were working for him. So now I’m thinking that maybe that whole defection-murder story was a scam.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” Nick said. “Barlow also said that I was in the CIA. So now I’m a double-agent, working for the CIA and the Iraqis? I must be damn good. Or here’s another possibility. Maybe the guy was just nuts, and maybe I was just unlucky enough to sit next to him.”

“You’re a smart-ass, aren’t you, Nick?”

It almost seemed like Blake wanted the answer to be Yes, I am. Stay calm Nick, he told himself; he’s trying to provoke you. Nick took a moment to summon his most even-tempered voice and said, “I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, Sergeant. But put yourself in my place. I’m sitting there in my airplane seat, minding my own business, when the guy next to me decides to kill himself—”

“But it wasn’t your seat. Your seat was up front.”

Maybe relying on common sense and logic had been a mistake. This guy needed yelling at.

“Jesus Christ, I changed my seat,” Nick said, raising his voice. “The guys sitting in front of me were talking loud and keeping me awake, so I moved. People do it all the time. That makes me a murderer? A terrorist? You might get a little testy if you were in my shoes.”

“I see your point,” the detective said, again rising out of his chair and leaning over the table. “Now you put yourself in my shoes. See these ruddy cheeks?”

Blake pointed to his face with both hands. ‘Ruddy’ was a fine word to describe his cheeks, Nick thought. ‘Scarlet’ or ‘crimson’ or ‘screaming red neon’ also would have been good.

“ … I never had them for the first twenty-seven years of my life. Then my reserve unit got called up for Desert Storm, and now I got a constant aching back, a ruby-red face and a two-year old son with only two fingers on his left hand. I’m a walking, talking poster boy for Gulf War Syndrome. And in front of me sits a man accused of murdering a CIA agent on orders from the man in charge of Iraq’s biological weapons program. So what do you think about my shoes? Well, Nick? How about my fucking shoes?”

“Jesus,” Nick said. His indignation, which had been rising just a few seconds ago, had disappeared. “I didn’t kill the guy,” he said, quietly. “He killed himself.”

“We’ll see about that,” Blake said.

The door opened and Marki came back in. He nodded at Sergeant Blake then spoke to Nick.

“OK, Mr. Aubrey, we’re going to let you go,” Marki said. “Your story checks out. And it appears that Mr. Barlow has a long history of dramatic exits. Apparently this was just his last shot to get himself on the news.”

Then he thanked Nick for his cooperation and opened the door. Nick was taken aback, unsure whether Marki was joking.

“Can I ask you something?” Nick said. He remained seated.

“Shoot.”

“Who was Barlow? Did he really work in Iraq?”

“CNN confirms that a man by his name and matching his description worked in Baghdad right until the eve of the war. Then he was let go.”

This wasn’t the answer Nick had wanted to hear.

“Mental health?” he asked.

“They wouldn’t put it in writing, but they hinted.”

Well, that was a plus, anyway.

“What about the CIA? Did you ask them if he had worked for them?”

“I asked,” Marki said. “They ain’t saying nothing.”

Nick stood, still unsure whether the interview was over. “Am I really free to go?”

“I’m making a judgment call,” Marki said. “But if something comes up and I need you back here for questioning, you’re going to come back under your own power. Agreed?”

“Sure.” What else was he going to say?

“And if you don’t come back when I call you, you become prime suspect in murder one.”

“It wasn’t murder, Lieutenant,” Nick said. “It was suicide.”

It was obvious that Blake didn’t want to let Nick leave.

“I’m taking a very personal interest in this case,” Blake said, jabbing Nick in the chest with his finger. “And if I ever find out you lied to me, about anything, I’ll track you down myself.”

Drenched in perspiration, Nick walked to the gate where the passengers of the interrupted Flight 44 to New York and Boston had been waiting. He arrived in time for the final boarding call. As he walked down the aisle of the now-less-crowded plane he was aware of hostile stares. Nick wondered what his greater offense was: murdering a man, or causing the red-eye to be almost three hours late. He took his originally assigned seat just behind the bulkhead separating first class from the main cabin and fastened his seat belt. A few minutes later he was looking down at the receding city lights as the plane left the city on the edge of the desert and headed up over the Wasatch mountains.

Chapter 17

At 8PM, wearing a lab smock, surgical mask, safety glasses and latex gloves, Bartlett Aubrey stood over a cage in the 9th floor animal lab contemplating her creation.

“Hello mouse,” she said. She reached in and gently grabbed the animal, then lifted it to her eye-level. It seemed to register nothing—neither fear nor curiosity nor any other emotion appeared on its tiny face.

Bartlett felt the base of the mouse’s neck with her right index finger. There was a small lump there, as expected. In a few days it would be ready for surgery. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit,” she whispered. “I’ll slip the chip in and you won’t even know it’s there.”

Bartlett had spent the last seven years of her life to get to this point. Seven years trying to understand the genetics of nervous systems—in worms, squids, lobsters, and now mice. She had grown nerve cells in cultures, spliced genes from one organism into another, doctored genetic material to create mutants with properties that she could turn on and off like a light switch. In fact, her cells had light switches, in the form of variants of genes for phosphorescence lifted from jellyfish DNA. She could genetically control axon length or dendrite density or any of a host of other characteristics of a nerve cell—or nervous system—or brain. And most recently she developed a strain of mice that had, in effect, a new kind of sensory organ, distinct from eyes or ears or nose or tongue or skin, that could easily be connected to external electrical connections. Basically her mice came equipped with sockets that, in theory, would allow them to be relatively easily plugged into a computer. A few days from now she would see if it worked. If it did work, the technology that her lab had developed could someday change the world. It could cure disease, retrain the brain. It could do so much good, save so many lives. That was the vision Bartlett had worked for, and that was the end she so desperately wanted.

What she didn’t tell the mouse was that although the surgery to insert the chip would in fact be painless, as far as Bartlett or anybody else knew, that wasn’t the end of the story. This mouse was facing a rotten fate—it was genetically engineered to die of a disease that mimicked Fitzgibbon’s Disease, the horrible affliction that had slowly killed Bartlett’s brother Jerome. Unlike Fitzgibbons in humans, the mouse version moved fast. Within a few days of having its chip implanted, this mouse would start to go blind and deaf. It would start to lose its decision-making ability and lose its way in mazes that it today knew by heart. Its muscles would weaken. All that before the really bad stuff started.

“I’m sorry, mouse,” she said. She could feel its heart beating in her hand. “I wouldn’t do it to you if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”

But just being necessary wouldn’t make it any easier to watch. At least she had a few days before she would have to deal with that. And if the poet Robert Burns was right, she tried to console herself, the mouse was spared dread of the future and regret of the past; those burdens were for humans only. She gently again felt the lump on the back of the neck, then placed the mouse in the cage and closed the lid. Just outside the lab door she discarded the gloves and mask, then took off her smock and hung it on a peg. A few minutes later she was in her tissue culture laboratory down the hall, looking at plastic plates full of nerve cells glowing green, yellow, and blue.

Bartlett awoke in the middle of the night when a truck sounded its horn—the kind of noise that city-born folks slept through. Bartlett wasn’t a city person and probably never would be. She lay on top of the sheets, as hot as if she were in the tropics—why couldn’t they get the heat right in this building?—thinking about what Irwin had told her about Chris and Janine and their bizarre story about Gulf War Syndrome being caused by bacteriophage and their conspiracy theory about their work being sabotaged. Bartlett knew she would have to get in touch with them soon—maybe even tomorrow. She wouldn’t be able to rest until she knew what was going on with her friends. Thought following thought, her mind cast back to the days when they were all in the lab together, before she had met Nick, in those heady days and nights of constant work and occasional parties fueled by lab-pure 200-proof alcohol punch, of nineteen-hour sprints rushing to set up new experiments, ignoring safety in the name of speed. She remembered the exhilaration of realizing that they had made a publishable discovery; then that they had made a discovery that would be published by Science; and finally that her article would be the top story, the cover article. Chris and Janine were some of the best lab scientists Bartlett knew. They wouldn’t fabricate results, she was sure of it.

“God damn it,” she said, sitting up, flipping on her bedside light. As if worrying about Chris and Janine weren’t enough, she was consumed with worry about The Neuro Group.

The Neuro Group. The very words were starting to give her hives. Despite the enthusiasm of her colleagues, Bartlett was far from convinced that they would ever produce anything useful. The Neuro Group’s idea was to take Bartlett’s new strain of mice, combine them with a whole new class of computer chips and advanced software for simulating what goes on inside brains. This revolutionary combination of new biological technology with new digital technology would make the mouse brain and computer simulation of it essentially redundant systems in real time. Only in this way, Bartlett felt certain, would researchers ever understand what was going on in a brain wracked by Parkinson’s or ALS or Alzheimer’s. Only in this way was there any hope of a cure for Fitzgibbon’s Disease within the next decade. Or two.

But there were at least a dozen assumptions that The Neuro Group hadn’t tested yet, and if they were wrong about any of them the whole enterprise would fail. There was no way to know if it would work unless they made the leap, took their respective technologies which they had licensed from MIT and Tufts, built the research facilities, did the damn work. True, the technologies that The Neuro Group’s 12 squabbling computer geniuses and biological scientists had devised, if they could be made to work together, would transform medical research, probably result in the cures of dozens of diseases, including Fitzgibbon’s, and be worth untold millions of dollars. First, however, those 12 squabbling scientists had to make their bio-digital system work. To do that, they needed facilities dedicated to that purpose. Designing, building, staffing, and running those facilities would take time, work, and money. Lots and lots and lots of money.

The Neuro Group needed funding, simple as that. They barely had money to pay the rent on their office above Peking Gardens, redolent of bok choi, much less build laboratories. If they didn’t find an investor with very deep pockets, soon, they were done, through, over. Bartlett would still have a career, of course, but it would mean the end of her dream of finding a cure for the disease that had tortured and killed her brother, that was still torturing and killing children all over the world at this very moment. And that was the whole reason she had gone into science in first place, the whole reason she had mastered two domains, molecular genetics and neurophysiology. Since her marriage was evidently over, that dream was the only thing that kept her going.

Monty Meekman had money, of course, but Meekman was one source of money she would never abide. She had lied to Nick about how much she knew about Meekman and how much interaction she’d had with him over the years. Why had she lied? Why did she continue to lie? She told herself she lied because she had to, because Nick would never understand, would try to use her connection to get closer to Meekman instead of further away from him. But in the deepest part of her, she sometimes wondered whether Meekman still had some kind of control over her, that it was his decision to not let Nick in on their secret, not hers.

Paul Aubrey might have money. Bartlett wouldn’t know until she spoke with him. And she hadn’t spoken with Paul since . . . well . . . since the night he introduced Bartlett to his brother Nick at that Thanksgiving party. There hadn’t even been a scene. Paul had been her lover for two short weeks at the end of his summer undergraduate research internship. It had been fun—a lot of fun, in fact—but that was all it had been. To Bartlett, at least. There was the age difference, for one. And the fact that he was an undergraduate still, at another school in another state. So she broke it off in September, when the internship ended. She sensed that it had been a much bigger affair of the heart to Paul, so young and new to love, than it had been for her.

And, of course, the fact that a few months later she had quickly, instantly, fallen for his brother complicated things. She knew she had caused a split between the brothers—Paul hadn’t come to the wedding—and she would forever feel guilty for that. But, as Nick said one night, love is love. We didn’t choose each other. Love chose us for each other.

What a romantic, Bartlett thought, remembering. What a hopeless child of a man, what a dreamer, my Nicholas. She had appreciated those qualities once. But then, when he resisted starting a family with her, resisted even talking about it, she saw the qualities for what they were—excuses to deflect responsibility, fear of mortality and of aging, weakness. Two Aubrey brothers, two love affairs, two fiascos. At least there was only one marriage. Oh, Jesus, this line of thinking would keep her up all night.

What she needed was sleep, not anxiety. She pushed herself to standing, tied on a robe, and booted up her computer. If she couldn’t sleep, she’d surf. Her favorite site was alt.science.genomics, which she checked first. Nothing interesting there, and nobody signed in to the chat rooms. She got up, made a cup of tea, then returned to her computer and called up the net browser. She clicked over to the newsgroup alt.conspiracy, a favorite guilty recreation. One topic predominated:

watch@1step_beyond.org RE: Flight 44 Assassination.

Skeptic@bozo.com RE: Flight 44 Assassination.

TOMA@Hamilton.edu RE: Flight 44 Assassination.

Nosy_parker@aol.com RE: Flight 44 Assassination.

Interesting, she thought. If there was one thing the Internet was even better at than anonymous pseudosex, it was rumor amplification. Bartlett, like most people she knew, loved a good rumor. Better than a novel, she thought. She clicked on a message at random:

FROM: skeptic@bozo.com

Summarizing what we know to date:

1) The person originally sitting next to Barlow moved from his seat as soon as the plane reached cruising altitude. The hit man, a tall white male with dark hair, then moved next to Barlow and completed the job within five minutes.

2) As Barlow died, a diskette fell out of his pocket. The hit man picked it up and placed in his own pocket. (See original post from Frightened@TIAC.net)

3) Police claim that the cause of death was acute cyanide poisoning from an orally ingested pill, but the observed symptoms (convulsions, etc,) are more consistent with injection of a curare-like agent.

4) After his “interrogation” by the police, the killer reboarded the plane for Boston. Obviously the ‘interrogation’ was a scam. This was a hit designed to send a message, and clearly was sanctioned at a high level: The killer got back on board the airplane in front of a hundred witnesses. It’s silly to scour the passenger list looking for the hit man. One thing we can be certain of: whatever name the killer was travelling under is fictitious. This guy left no tracks.

So, she thought. There’s an “assassin” on the loose. And headed for Boston, oh my! Poor guy. She rarely believed what she read online, but the newsgroups never failed to amuse her. Evidently there had been a death aboard an airplane just a few hours ago, and already the Internet had produced a half-dozen experts who could “prove” it was a murder, an assassination sanctioned at the highest level.

She checked the clock. Okay, sweetheart, she thought. Enough is enough. Go to sleep. She made her way to bed, then got up again, heading to the bathroom without bothering to put on her robe. She popped an over-the-counter sleeping pill into her mouth, filled her hands with water, and swallowed it down. She had been such an independent woman most of her life, it bothered her to recognize she now had trouble sleeping alone.

Standing over the sink, she looked at her reflection. Yes, she thought, she was older now. She turned and looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. She was wearing the satin nightgown that Nick had given her for Christmas years ago, the year she gave him the K-Mart briefcase doctored with a Coach tag. She hardly ever wore this nightgown—what had made her put it on tonight? Yes, she thought to her reflection, you’re older but you’re still in good shape. She was honest enough, objective enough to know that her body was still what the men called “hot.”

Oh, Nick, she thought. If you were to see me now, what would you think?

She knew just what he would think. Suddenly she was feeling it too.

It had been years since she had felt such an erotic thought. She went back into her room and lay back where she had been. Her left hand cupped her left breast, and she ran her thumb over the nipple. She was dispassionate, the scientist examining her own responses, taking her own case history. Oh if Nick could see me now, she thought. Poor horny Nick. Her right hand slipped along the inside of her thigh. With her left hand she found herself pinching her nipple. But when she closed her eyes she didn’t see Nick. She hadn’t seen Paul since he was an undergraduate. He was a grown man now, living abroad. She tried to imagine where he might be, what he might look like, tonight.

Chapter 18

Nick Aubrey pulled his dented Volvo out of the long-term parking lot onto the airport access road at 10:55 AM. He was unshaven, his hair was greasy, he felt scaly, his clothes stank, and he had a headache that throbbed just behind and above his left eye, about one inch back under his skull. But by some miracle there was hardly any traffic. The drive from Logan Airport to the Sumner Tunnel took only four minutes, and the trip under Boston Harbor only five. Before he knew it he was cruising toward Newcastle, his home, toward the Mill, his place of work, and toward the closest UNIX machine he could locate. He wanted to take a crack at Barlow’s diskette, and he wanted to do it now.

It was a beautiful morning: stark and overcast; dreary, the way he liked it. Leafless lilacs and dogwoods lined the roads and surrounded the white farmhouses that each had a little understated sign, white on black, somewhere near the front door: 1742. 1777. 1854. 1695. It was good to be back home in Massachusetts, where things were allowed to get old.

Little more than twenty minutes later, after stopping at a café to pick up some fresh coffee and a nice corn muffin, Nick Aubrey stood on the bridge that led to the Mill’s west entrance, hypnotized by the sound of rushing water and the sight of light snow swirling into the torrent. He alternated between nibbling on the muffin and sipping the hot coffee while gathering the courage to go inside. Had Monty actually fired him, he wondered, eating the last of the muffin. Maybe not. Probably, but maybe not.

He picked up the coffee cup, shook it to confirm that it was empty, then stuffed the muffin bag into the empty cup. He started walking over the bridge, with no idea what he’d find inside.

Bartlett had once said that the Mill was like Dracula’s castle, but she was only partly right: from this approach the Mill resembled a Saxon castle, not a Gothic Carpathian. It was massive, not airy—with its drawbridge extended over a turbulent moat. Architecturally, of course, the red-brick home of Digital Microsystems’ East Coast Division had little in common with the squat grey fortresses of pre-Norman Britain. But like the great houses of Arthurian legend, the Mill was massive, defiant, and permanent.

These falls were meant for mills. Flour mills and sawmills had come first, testing the smallest taste of the available force. The first cloth mill had appeared on this site in 1804, and it had grown like Topsy. By 1925 Newcastle Textiles had become the largest manufacturer of cloth in the world, and prosperity had reigned right through the Depression and the decades that followed. But then the modern mills of South Carolina and South Korea had appeared, whittling away at Newcastle Textiles, shuttering one wing after another until, in 1960, the last lonely light had gone out. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts took title to the building in lieu of back taxes. For years the Mill stood vacant. Then Ben Golson bought it, for one dollar, and created a legend. In 1952 Golson had founded Digital Data, Incorporated, and by 1958 his manufacturing plant in Kendall Square, Cambridge, was shipping so many computers that the surrounding streets could not handle the traffic. He moved the company to a much larger place in Waltham, but soon outgrew that facility too.

In 1963 Golson bought the Mill and began the never-ending process of turning the dark relic of a bypassed industry into the home of the most advanced computer makers on earth. There were jobs aplenty, for carpenters, painters, electricians, furniture movers—and for the world’s brightest computer engineers, who were drawn to Newcastle like moths to a candle. In 1983 there was even a job for Nick, whose resume included a smattering of college courses in programming languages that were no longer even in use and several years living and working in rural west Africa where there was no electricity for hundreds of miles, much less computers. In 1995 nobody with a background like Nick’s would get a toe in the front door at Dijjy-Mike. But in those days things were moving so fast and the need for workers was so great that anybody who was smart and willing to work hard could prosper. Nick was smart and willing to work hard. It didn’t matter that he was faking it, learning on the job, making it up as he went along. That’s what everybody was doing, including the people with fancy degrees in computer science from the fanciest schools. Digital Data was king of the hill, and the Mill was the computer capital of the world. All went well, until 1989.

Stanford Microsystems, a California start-up with incredible new technology and a brilliant, Machiavellian chairman named Montgomery Meekman was eating Digital Data’s lunch. Two rough quarters cut Digital Data’s stock price by 63%; the junk bond powerhouse Drexel, Burnham, Inc., put a hostile takeover deal together, and in the blink of an eye Stanford Microsystems—all six hundred and twelve smart-asses of it—became parent to Ben Golson’s twenty-thousand employee baby. The two companies merged, each giving half of its name to the new entity, and Digital Microsystems—almost immediately nicknamed Dijjy-Mike—was legally born. Golson’s resignation was “reluctantly” accepted by Monty Meekman. Champagne was poured on Wall Street, and the flood of pink slips began in Massachusetts as the horde of whiz kids arrived from California like a plague of goddamn locusts.

At first Nick’s luck had run contrary to the pattern. Meekman called him and offered the job that Bartlett had been so fervently set against. Nick took the job anyway, over her objection. He was promoted and given a second group to manage, this one in California. He began to think that maybe the merger wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Work was fun. He saw the world. He hired the hottest software engineers, and they made millions for the company. But Nick’s reward had been the slow dismantling of his career, endless nights spent alone in smelly hotel rooms, in rented cars, on damnable airplanes. The original position of liaison to the MIT Molecular Computation project never amounted to anything; as soon as Bartlett announced she was moving from MIT in Cambridge to Tufts in Boston, Monty gave that job to somebody else. Bartlett predicted it, that Meekman would ruin him, that California would eat Nick’s soul, but she didn’t stick around to see it to its conclusion. How had Nick missed the writing on the wall that she had seen so clearly? And why hadn’t he listened to her, not just about Meekman and the job, but about everything else? She said it was time for them to grow up, but Nick said, “why? It’s more fun being a kid.” She had wanted children, and he had never even talked seriously with her about it, never told her how the experience of having that young African girl die of starvation in his arms still haunted him whenever he thought of fathering a child.

And in truth he hadn’t wanted to give up the high that had come from being plugged into the action. He loved Bartlett, but play had always been the bond between them. For her, science was play. For him, play was inventing technology, otherwise known as hacking. For both of them, sex was play. Being married was just playing grownups. It was fun, dammit! But then she wanted to stop playing and things fell apart. She wanted to have nineteen children, she wanted Nick and Bartlett Aubrey to become Mr. & Mrs. Boring. Or at least, that was what he told himself at the time, although in his few moments of honesty, he knew that the faces of the starving children he had seen, and left behind, in Africa, had everything to do with his revulsion at the thought of becoming a father. Whatever his reasons, he had been wrong. He had been as wrong as it was possible for a man to be wrong about anything.

He threw the empty coffee cup into the trashcan and entered the house of Meekman, of Dijjy-Mike, of his liege lord.

A complex as large as the Mill could be confusing to anybody, and even after nearly twelve years, Nick was grateful for the street signs on the corridors. He followed “Shay’s Highway” the length of Building One. At Building Two he went up four flights of stairs, then down Publick Alley 4754 to Three. Once in Three he turned at Turners Falls and walked ten yards until he came to an unmarked firewall door on his right. The next door on the left was his office. The door was open. His office looked untouched. Good, he thought. Not fired yet. Maybe Meekman had been bluffing after all.

As the door shut behind him he tossed his briefcase in the corner, displaced the stack of memos, post-its, phone slips and code listings from his chair to his desk. Jake must have given the all-clear: his machine “Mymosh” plugged in, up and running. Nick sat in his chair and logged on. About nine million e-mails had arrived since yesterday—when he had logged on from the guest terminal in the Menlo Park office. He would read them tomorrow, maybe. But what was this new icon up in the corner? System administrators were forever cluttering up his screen with egregious clutter. Didn’t the word “trespass” mean anything in this electronic age?

He clicked on the icon, and almost immediately a pornographic film of a man and two young children began playing in the upper left corner of his monitor.

“What a sick bastard.” Nick instinctively started another window, found the links and nuked the vile program. His headache, which the coffee and corn muffin had partially subdued, was back, stronger than ever. Why was some freak harassing him with kiddie porn? All Nick had wanted to do was read the diskette, the one that had flown out of Crazy Peter’s pocket on to the seat next to Nick as Barlow was busy dying, and clear out. Was that too much to ask?

He was assuming that this diskette was the one Barlow had forgotten to put in Carl’s envelope, and he was hoping that it might shed some light on what had happened last night on the airplane. Normally Nick would have made several backup copies of such an important data source before trying to read the original. But Barlow had said that any attempt to copy it would hose his system. How? Maybe there was some kind of magnetically activated explosive on a track that wasn’t used for storing files, but would be accessed in a copying operation? Reading or executing files would be OK; copying would literally blow it up? Mission Impossible: Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Something like that?

He clicked over to a Bourne shell window, stuck the diskette in the drive and typed

ls -a /dev/rst0 | file

He heard the whirring of the disk drive, and in a few second the screen showed

>

overmind executable

data1ascii text (encrypted)

data2ascii text (encrypted)

Bingo. An executable file. With a very familiar name.

But should he run it? Common sense dictated that one should no more run an executable of unknown origin than one should have unprotected sex with an unknown partner. On the other hand . . . Did he really care, at this stage in his so-called career, whether he might blow up a little bit of Digital Microsystems’s physical plant?

Blowing up Mymosh would complicate Jake’s life, but what the hell, Jake had seen plenty of machinery blown up in his day. But now that Jake’s name entered his mind, it occurred to Nick that it might be wise to get a second opinion from him before trying to read this diskette. Not only did Jake know about computers and electronics, he also knew about booby traps and things that went “boom.” He really should call Jake right now.

But doing that, of course, would tie Jake to the whole Barlow situation, and if, God forbid, the Salt Lake City police found out that Nick had this diskette and that Jake had helped him read it, that would just drag Jake into Nick’s own world of shit, and Nick had no business doing that. He imagined the Salt Lake City cop Blake squaring off with Jake. Somehow Nick had the feeling that Jake would kick that macho cop’s ass.

He was reveling in the imagery when there was a knock on his office door. Not now, go away, he thought, as he swiveled to see who was there. It was Lynette Evans, from Human Resources, and some dweeby-looking guy Nick had never seen before.

Well that answered that question, anyway: he was toast.

He motioned for them to come in. As they opened the door and entered, Nick quickly ejected the diskette and slipped it back into his shirt pocket. The nervous-looking woman perched on the edge of a chair; the unknown man remained standing. Nick extended his hand; she shook it but the man studiously avoided it, with a Clint Eastwood stare.

“Lynette,” Nick said. “My favorite angel of death. Who’s your friend, a mortician in training?”

“Nick, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you . . .”

“Christ, Lynette, I know that. How much severance pay do I get? It used to be two weeks, plus an additional week for every year I’ve been here. That would make thirteen weeks’ pay.”

“That’s not a option,” the Eastwood wannabe said. “You have fifteen minutes to clear out your effects and leave the premises. And you are not to re-enter the premises for any reason, whether alone or accompanied by an employee.”

“Who is this guy?” Nick asked Lynette. “He’s got the personality of a quahog.”

“Corporate Security,” the wannabe said.

“I’m not talking to you, security. I’m talking to Lynette.”

“I’m talking to you. Start packing.”

“Lynette, would you tell him to go fly a kite for a minute or two, please?”

“Nick, as you know, Digital Microsystems competes in a very aggressive marketplace. But competition is not a bad thing; it’s the source of our product innovation…”

“Oh spare me, Lynette. We’ve known each other for seven years.”

“Fourteen and a half minutes,” Quahog said.

Through the window that ran floor-to-ceiling next to the door to his office Nick saw Jake peering in. Nick looked at him and slowly—discretely, he hoped—drew his forefinger across his throat to tell Jake he was a dead man. Jake nodded and walked away.

“In a global economy, companies, especially high-technology companies like Digital Microsystems, must maintain flexibility . . .” Lynette was saying.

“Enough already” Nick said. “Please just tell me, how many weeks pay do I get, and when do I get it?”

“You get nothing,” Quahog said. “Consider yourself lucky that you’re not walking out of here in handcuffs.”

“Shut up, clam-boy. Lynette, will you tell him to shut up, please?”

But Lynette had temporarily ceased to be a person. She was already in Human Resources mode.

“Experts predict that in our working lives, each of us will not only experience several jobs, but several careers. The old model of the employee who stayed in one job at one company for their entire career isn’t realistic in today’s economic environment—”

“What about my severance?”

“Fourteen minutes,” Quahog said.

Lynette was trying to finish singing her paean to downsizing, but seemed distracted by the cross-currents.

“—although losing a job can be traumatic, many people find the experience to be very beneficial in the long run. It provides an opportunity to take an inventory of your strengths and weakness, to update your resume, perhaps take some courses to augment your skill-set—”

Nick decided it would be better to ignore her for a moment and concentrate on Quahog.

“What did you mean about handcuffs?”

“Trafficking in child pornography is a serious offense. The authorities have been notified, but we have not told them that you were responsible. Yet.”

“What, that porn clip on my machine? I didn’t put that there.”

“On every machine in Digital Microsystems intranet.”

“Every machine in the company? Give me a break.”

“Thirteen and a half,” the clam said.

Nick needed some information from Lynette. He clapped his hands in front of her.

“Hello? You mean I’m getting fired, not Reduced in Force? Not riffed? No severance pay? No notice?”

“I would advise you to stop asking questions and start packing,” the serious man said.

This clam-boy meant business.

“Lynette, why is this guy making noises about child pornography?”

“It came from your machine,” Quahog said.

Evidently Lynette had entered the second Human Resources mode, the thousand mile stare.

“That clip was posted from an anonymous server,” Nick said. “I checked before I nuked it.”

“Corporate Security knows how to penetrate anonymous servers. I’ve been informed that you put it there, from this machine.”

“Then you also know that anybody could have made it look like it came from my machine.”

“It bore your digital signature, which can be generated only by the fingerprint reader on your keypad.”

“When? When I was in California?” Nick decided that talking to the security guy was a waste of time; clearly he knew this was a frame-up.

“Lynette,” Nick tried, but she continued to stare blankly, as if waiting for somebody to hit her reset button.

“I’m not adding any time to your fifteen minutes. Once they’re up, they’re up.”

“Lynette, hello? Lynette? Are you going to let him slander me like this?” That seemed to reset her.

“Nick, maybe you should consider relocating. Dataquest predicts that demand for computer professionals in the Sun Belt can only continue to go up between now and the end of the decade—”

“Lynette! Lynette!” Nick shouted. “For Pete’s sake! Would you please stop talking to me as if we’ve never met? We’ve known each other for seven years!”

The room fell silent for about ten seconds. Ten very long seconds. Through the glass next to his door Nick could see the curious slowing down their walk as they passed, glancing discretely at the scene playing out in Nick’s office, like motorists checking out the overturned car at the side of the road.

“I’m sorry Nick,” Lynette said. “We’ve prepared a press release saying that ‘Boojum’ has been canceled, and that you’ve been dismissed. It was the best compromise I could work out.”

“Thank you,” Nick said. “Now we’re starting to get somewhere. But as you know, Lynette, I didn’t work on the Boojum project. Not once, not ever. Why am I the fall guy in a press release?”

“It was the best I could do, Nick. I’m sorry.”

“Eleven minutes. It’s not too late to tell the police where those film clips originated.”

“There was a bug in the digital-signature software,” Nick said to the storm trooper/bivalve from Corporate Security. “I’m sure you know that.”

“Any security consultant will testify that our signature software is robust.”

“Robust? Bullshit. It required a very intimate familiarity with the reverse-address-resolution protocol, but anybody who knew RARP inside-out could have forged a signature.”

Monty Meekman knows that protocol inside out, Nick thought.

“Save it for the District Attorney.”

“Any applett compiled with the common-object request broker flag set to ‘false’ could use RARP to reset the microcode. I fixed that bug, but somebody could have stockpiled signatures before I did.”

Nick had fixed a compile-time vulnerability, but evidently it was possible to reprogram the microcode at runtime too. He had no idea at all how to do that, but evidently Monty Meekman had figured out a way.

“Tell that to the DA too,” the Corporate Security REMF said. Unless you’d rather take the option of a quiet dismissal.”

“The economy really isn’t as bad as it seems, Nick,” Lynette helpfully added. “There are jobs to be had out there. Chuckie Johnson …”

“The only job Chuckie Johnson is qualified for is professional hodad in the James and Carly fan club. Now you, mister,” Nick added to Quahog, “You know damn well I fixed that security hole. And you also know that I could never explain it to a jury. So I’m well framed, well and truly. But if you’re going to all the trouble of framing me, why am I being allowed an out? Couldn’t you find another fall-guy for Boojum?”

“What’s a hodad?” Lynette said.

“A hodad, Lynette, is a puffed-up jackass who drives a Cadillac and walks along the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard sucking farts out of dead seagulls. Lynette, why didn’t they just fire me? Is this just a charade to provide a scapegoat for Boojum?”

“I did the best I could, Nick.”

Monty did this; Nick was certain of it. First he murdered those two bicyclists, and now this. Murder is one thing, but framing me for child porn is altogether too much, Nick thought.

“Monty Meekman, by the way, designed the RARP architecture,” Nick said. “But I guess everybody knows that too.”

“I would be very careful before I started making public conjectures about Mr. Meekman’s knowledge of security bugs and pornography,” Quahog said. “The corporation will not allow malicious slander of its board chairman and chief technologist.”

“Maybe I’ll file suit for wrongful dismissal. Then you’ll hear all about Monty Meekman.”

“I would be very careful if I were you. You now have two minutes.”

“Where’d the other ten minutes go? Oh fuck it all. Never mind.”

He opened his desk drawer. Amid broken pencils, piles of post-its and some parking tickets he found a small photo of Bartlett, from their wedding day. He went to get his briefcase.

Quahog yanked it out of Nick’s hands.

“I’m going to have to search that,” he said.

Before Nick could say no, the man had grabbed it from his hands. There was nothing Nick could do about it now unless he felt like fighting him for it, which seemed a bit much. Folders, notebooks, and Nick’s work diary came out. What else was in there? Nick couldn’t remember.

“What’s this? Oh. Indeed,” the Clam from Corporate Security said, as he removed the High Society magazine from the back fold of the case, and thumbed through it, studying illustrated reviews of ten recent triple-X features. It seemed to Nick that the man was taking a lot longer than necessary to make sure there was no Digital Microsystems intellectual property hidden in the back pages among the phone sex advertisements. Everybody in the hallway, not to mention Lynette, now knew something about Nick’s taste in non-Balzac leisure reading.

“Here’s your magazine and your Human Sexual Response record,” the man said, with a snicker. “You can take your photo of your girlfriend—”

“My wife,” Nick corrected.

“Whatever. Let’s go.”

“Wait a second.”

Nick reached into the drawer and rustled until he found what he was looking for.

“Now let’s go,” Nick said.

He walked down the hallway with Lynette at one elbow and the Corporate Security goon at the other, like a prisoner being escorted to the electric chair between a sadistic executioner and a bewildered chaplain. People parted to let them pass, like a human Red Sea.

Jake Carelli was the only one to step forward. “Nick, need a hand? Can I carry something for you?”

Saying, “Mr. Aubrey is no longer in the employ of Digital Microsystems, please step back,” the corporate security guy placed his left hand on Jake’s chest, holding him back.

In a flash Jake responded by pushing Security so hard he stumbled back three steps into the wall.

“You touched me, fucko,” Jake said. “That’s assault.”

“Hey, Jake. It’s OK. I’m alright,” Nick said. As the security guard was straightening his uniform, Nick silently made the “call me” sign, right hand to right ear. Again Jake nodded and melted away, leaving only gawkers.

Lynette and Security left Nick at the front door, by the bridge. He walked to the middle of the bridge, then remembered something, and stopped.

Watchful eyes looked out from every window as he fumbled with the item he had grabbed from his desk drawer. In his awkwardness and self-consciousness, he dropped it while trying to place it on his finger. It fell, bounced off the bridge surface, and went through a hole in the fence. He watched in disbelief as his wedding ring glittered, then disappeared into the dark icy waters of the Mill stream.

Chapter 19

Judith Knight emerged from the Church of St. James the Greater on Harrison Street, Boston, with her soul nominally absolved of sin. But her heart didn’t much believe it and her head was full of doubt and worry. She was convinced she had recklessly endangered Dieter Steffen. The priest to whom she had made her confession seemed bored or confused by her explanation of little machines to rearrange DNA, but maybe it had just been a language problem, since English clearly wasn’t his first tongue. The signboard outside the church listed the Mass schedule: English, Sunday 8:00AM; Mandarin, 9:00; Cantonese, 10:00 and Fujenese, whatever that was, Saturdays at 5:30PM. She momentarily wondered which dialect of Chinese was the priest’s mother tongue, then drew her own attention, as if leading a puppy on a leash, to the task at hand. What would she say to Bartlett Aubrey?

What was her plan? She had none. But barely five minutes later she was on the elevator to the cellular neurology lab, trusting that she would be able to figure out how to speak with Bartlett once she saw her.

She fist caught a glimpse of her through the tiny window in the door to the laboratory opposite the elevator. It had been twenty years since she had seen Bartlett, but she recognized her immediately. Bartlett was wearing a white lab smock and her hair was in a bun with a pencil stuck through it. She was at a lab bench, concentrating intensely as she wrote in a notebook. Judith hated to break her concentration by ringing the buzzer to announce her presence, but better to interrupt her now than before Bartlett got involved in an experimental procedure. She pressed the button.

“May I help you?” Bartlett said, opening the door with a puzzled expression on her face. Judith supposed that Bartlett seldom got un-announced visitors here.

“Bartlett McGovern?” Judith said.

“Bartlett Aubrey,” she answered. “Or Dr. McGovern.” She smiled gracefully, then added, seemingly an afterthought, “Or, Bartlett McGovern. Whichever.”

What a beautiful woman she has become, Judith thought, regarding Bartlett steadily before speaking.

“I’m Judith Knight,” she began. “We met a long time ago.”

Bartlett’s face went blank as she took in this information.

“Oh,” she said. And then after a long pause, “oh”.

“We met when—”

“I remember where we met,” Bartlett cut her off.

“Well, may I come in?”

“Are you from him?”

“From whom?”

“From. . . from. . . Meekman?” The words seemed to burn her mouth.

“No!” Judith said, surprising herself with the vehemence of her answer. “No, I have nothing to do with him. God forbid.”

“Come in then,” Bartlett said, stepping aside and making room for Judith to pass.

The door closed behind them, and, as it closed, Judith breathed a little easier, surrounded by the things that were most familiar to her. It was a laboratory like any of the hundreds of such labs in which Judith had spent her life. Granite counters punctuated by sinks of various sizes ran around the perimeter of the room. There were bookshelves and shelves lined with rows of glass jars closed with glass stoppers, some of which had proper labels and others of which were identified by scrawled chemical formulae on masking tape. There were Erlenmeyer flasks and Bunsen burners and test tubes in a shaker racks; there were fire extinguishers and eyewash stations, and on one wall a giant poster of the grand mask of King Tutankhamun. There was a clear Plexiglass window attached to an aluminum exhaust duct over a work station, and there were white boards with colored markers neatly in their trays. Nobody else appeared to be in the lab that day. Judith and Bartlett were alone.

Bartlett offered a stool to sit on and placed herself on another, crossing her legs.

“I’ve followed your career,” Judith said. “You’ve done some brilliant work. The article on the Trojan Gene was particularly valuable.”

“Thank you,” Bartlett said. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

It wasn’t an unfriendly remark, merely a factual one.

“No, that’s not why I’m here.”

“Well then,” Bartlett said. “Why have you come to see me?”

Judith again remembered where and how she had first met Bartlett. It had been at a so-called “conference for child prodigies of science,” the First International Young Achievers’ Congress organized by one Montaigne Meekman, so long ago, when Meekman himself was still a young man—thirty-five at the oldest. Meekman had selected the youngest, brightest, most impressionable young child-scientists he could find, and brought them together for what they expected was going to be something like a summer camp for nerds. How had Monty even found these kids in the pre-internet age, Judith now wondered. It must have taken endless hours of searching, attending countless science fairs, scouring local newspapers for reports of young Einsteins.

But what they got at his “Congress” wasn’t a welcome into the adult scientific community, it was indoctrination into the weird but already growing cult of Monty Meekman. He trained his young charges—brainwashed them, more accurately—to believe the hallucinations he called science. After a few days, most of the kids were sufficiently freaked out to call their parents and ask to be rescued. But some of Judith and Bartlett’s fellow Young Acheivers, the most vulnerable ones, bought into his vision—crazy theories about all human intelligence uniting in one common hive mind—and became Monty’s disciples, or whatever he called them. Through the remainder of her high school years and when she was in college, she sometimes wondered what had become of those poor kids.

When Stanford Microsystems took over Digital Data and created Dijjy-Mike, it was as if Meekman had appeared again in her neighborhood. And when she learned of Digital Microsystems Laboratories, with its cadre of Corporate Fellows, she knew what had become of those kids.

“You would have been, what, fifteen years old at that time—” Judith began.

“It was just before my fourteenth birthday, and really, Dr. Knight, if that’s what you’ve come to talk with me about, I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to leave. Even though I am, like everybody else in the field, a great admirer of your work. I don’t talk about Meekman. With anybody.”

“I understand,” Judith said. “But please, hear me out, just for a few minutes.”

Bartlett turned her head a little to the side, saying neither yes nor no.

“I’ll be brief,” Judith said. Judith had been seventeen years old that summer, nearly a legal adult, but Bartlett was only thirteen, a child. How had her parents ever let her go? Judith supposed that the event must have been sanctioned by Stanford University, where Monty was a professor. Bartlett had gone expecting to participate in a science camp with kids her own age, with maybe some swimming or canoeing or archery for recreation. Instead she found herself among a crowd of creepy boys two or three years older than her, no science facilities, no science, no recreation—only a scary half-crazy professor lecturing them for hours on end about his vision of a ‘transhuman’ future. “Have you been in touch with Meekman since then?” Judith asked.

Bartlett grimaced. “I told you, I’m don’t talk about him. I’m not going to talk about him.”

“Please,” Judith said. “It’s very important that I know.” And then she added, quietly. “I’m on your side.”

Bartlett nodded. “He still tries to sink his claws into me. He never stops trying to sink his claws into me.”

“How?”

“He’s trying to invest in a company I’ve founded with some people from various labs here and at MIT. But we’ve rejected his overtures. And I don’t take phone calls from him or answer his mail.”

“You’re talking about The Neuro Group?” Judith asked.

“Yes.” Bartlett frowned. “How did you know that?”

“Molecular neurology is a pretty small world. I know several of your colleagues. But mainly, I make it my business to know what Meekman is doing, and why. Your brother-in-law, Paul Aubrey—does he want to invest also?”

Bartlett stood. “We can talk about my research, but let’s not talk about my family, if it’s okay with you. How do you even know Paul’s my brother-in-law? I feel like I’m being ambushed here. Who are you? What’s your agenda?”

“Please,” Judith said. “I didn’t mean to ambush you. I know Paul because he made an overture on behalf of Hoff-Zeigy to invest in my own company just ten days ago. I know your married name because I follow your work. It wasn’t hard to figure out that Paul is your husband’s brother.”

“I have lysate that has to come out of the cold room in fifteen minutes,” Bartlett said, still standing. “And then I really am going to have to kick you out. So again, why are you here?”

“I’m here because I’m scared of Monty Meekman, and I’m betting you are too. I could tell you why I’m scared of him, and what I think he might be up to, but the explanation would be long and potentially dangerous for you to know. I’m protected by who I am and who I know. I wouldn’t want to burden you with anything that might put you in jeopardy. So please, if you might give me ten minutes, I’d like you to be as open with me as possible. Believe me, we have the same interests at heart.”

Bartlett nodded and sat. “Thank you,” Judith said. “Did you know that Pavel Isaacs and Dieter Steffen were working together in Basel?”

“Who are they?”

“Pavel Isaacs was also at the Young Achievers’ Congress. And years later he worked at MIT. Steffen is Swiss; he and Isaacs worked together at MIT on molecular computation. The same years that you were there, not two buildings away from your lab.”

“I didn’t know them,” Bartlett said. “MIT isn’t exactly a tiny place.”

Judith ignored her sarcastic tone.

“They’re now both working for Hoff-Zeigy, the same company your brother in law works for.”

“I’m listening,” Bartlett said.

“Bartlett, I just returned from Basel, Switzerland. There I met with Dieter Steffen. He is working on nanomachines that can read and write arbitrary DNA sequences within living cells. And he nearly has them working.”

The irritation went out of Bartlett’s face, scientific curiosity replaced it.

“For real?”

“Yes. His machine is modeled on T4 bacteriophage. It’s not working yet, but it may work soon. Very soon. Dieter is working with Pavel Isaacs, and I believe that Pavel is working for Meekman. So you see, this is concerning to me. And it may concern you. Your research, if successful, presents a new way for machine-to-brain communication. I don’t need to tell you what Meekman might want to do with that technology if he got a hold of it.”

“I won’t ever give it to him,” Bartlett said.

“You might not know that’s what you’re doing,” Judith said. “Your brother in law, Paul Aubrey, is also working on this nanomachine project at Hoff-Zeigy.”

Bartlett gasped. She slowly raised her right hand to cover her mouth, as a young child might while watching a scary cartoon.

“What are you telling me?” she said when she regained control of herself. “That Paul Aubrey is a front man for Monty Meekman?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how deeply he’s involved. His role may be completely innocent. But I’m just saying, that if you do a deal with Hoff-Zeigy, you may wind up with Monty Meekman as a silent partner.”

“Or not so silent,” Bartlett said.

Her face clouded over, then set into a mask.

“What is it?” Judith said.

“I have to get that lysate from the cold room. It’s time for you to go now.” Her voice was shaking.

“You just thought of something. Tell me what it was.”

“Just go.”

“Please. Help me.”

Bartlett stood again.

“Dr. Knight, you come into my laboratory and you insist on talking about Monty Meekman, even after I’ve said I won’t talk about him. As far as I’m concerned, he might in fact be the devil. Then you tell me that one of the two men I’ve ever loved might be working for Meekman, that he might be a stalking horse Meekman is usging to get his hands on my company, The Neuro Group. I lost the other man in my life, my husband Nick, to Meekman too. What does that leave me? My company, Dr. Knight, which now that my husband is gone and Paul Aubrey is out of my life, is the only thing that I care about.” Bartlett looked at her watch. “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but in ten minutes, you’ve managed to call into question everything I know to be true about my life.”

Judith uncrossed her legs and stood.

“I’m sorry that I upset you. But I thought you needed to know.”

“Just go.”

“Alright. But for the love of everything holy, please get in touch with me if you need me. For anything.”

“Go,” Bartlett said. “I have nothing left to say to you.”

Chapter 20

Nick drove home from the Mill thinking about his briefcase. Why was it, actually, that he had left it behind? It was his own damn briefcase, after all. Bartlett had given it to him for Christmas years ago—a fake-leather Kmart deal which she, by the simple expedient of a bogus tag, had tricked him into thinking was a genuine Coach and thus five hundred dollars over their budget.

And while Nick was on the subject of things left behind, why hadn’t he taken his pictures off the wall, or the little bronze man from Dahomey, or the files of doodles and sketches from boring meetings? Why hadn’t he slugged that Corporate Security bastard in the mouth? Why, why. Who cared. It was over. Did he really want to work at a place where Monty Meekman was the guiding light? Fuckit. They could keep his doodles. They could keep his little bronze man from Dahomey. They could keep all of it: his career, his dreams, his money, his technoid life. They could keep it all so long as they left him the hell alone. He was going to go home, take a shower, put some clean sheets on his bed, and go to sleep for about a week. When he woke up from that nap, then—and only then—was he going to begin figuring out the next phase of his life, the post Dijjy-Mike phase.

It was a short drive to his house; he was there in 4 minutes. He pulled his beat-up Volvo wagon into the forlorn driveway over a quarter-inch dusting of snow and parked near the big spruce tree in his front yard. He grabbed his suitcase and briefcase and headed for the front door. It was open a crack. The name “Goldilocks” came to mind. Who’s been nosing around in my house? He kicked the door all the way open with his right foot.

Welcome home, Papa Bear. Tag, you have been touched. Burglarized, home-broken, violated, ransacked, visited, imposed upon, trespassed against, raped. It was a flipping fiasco, with furniture overturned, bookshelves emptied, cupboards spilled, dead plants smashed. It was teh perfect homecoming for his recent little excursion through hell. Mary, Mother of God, the Catholics said. He dropped his bags amid chaos in the front room and stepped over the scattered remnants of his material life.

He consulted his watch; it was ten-thirty-two in the morning. That meant it was seven-thirty-two in California, and he had been awake for twenty-five and a half hours. In that time he had put in a solid half-day of work in his California office, been told a fantastical tale, in a dive bar, by Carl Swirsing, about a quasi-religious cult centered on Monty Meekman; he had been briefly introduced to a frantic man with a fantastical manuscript; he had then taken a ride up Skyline Drive with a seriously deranged Monty Meekman and there been inducted into the aforementioned cult—whilst being subjected to mind-manipulation and an earthquake and witnessing the negligent manslaughter of two bicyclists; he had boarded an airplane, found himself by apparently pure chance seated next to the very same crazy man he had briefly met in Mad Antonio’s Nut House in Sunnyvale earlier that day; he had been subjected to said crazy man’s paranoid delusions and then watched as he flamboyantly committed suicide while announcing to all who could hear that Nick had just killed him on orders of Saddam Hussein; he had been held for questioning on suspicion of murder; he had been framed for distributing child pornography and summarily fired by a marine bivalve; he had dropped his wedding ring into an abyss and come home to a ransacked house. He had no wife, no job, hardly any money and an increasingly tenuous grasp on his sanity. And now, evidently, he had no home.

“Bite me,” Nick Aubrey said.

He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator: three Genesse Cream Ales and six Sierra Nevada. Thank God for small miracles.

As he cracked open a Genny he saw his UNIX box, the old junker, sitting on the dining room table.

He was sure that he had left it in a closet, but there it was, plugged in and humming amid debris left by thoughtful housebreakers. There were nine words typed on the otherwise blank screen: “Whole lotta shaking going on. Where’s the diskette, Nick?”

Jesus. Meekman. This was bad and was only going to get worse.

Why him? Why Nick Aubrey, of all the people in the whole god damn world for Meekman to fuck with, why was he messing with one mediocre wanna-be Juicer? Monty’s motives might be totally opaque, but thing was abundantly clear: it really was time to crack Barlow’s diskette. And right there on his dining room table was the machine he would use to do it. He sat down and typed a few commands, but nothing happened. The characters didn’t even echo on the screen. Locked keyboard? Hard reset, why not.

He turned the computer off, waited ten seconds, and turned it on again. There came up, in the place of the usual boot sequence, four words, you had your chance, taunting him. Meekman couldn’t have done this himself—and anyway, it was hard for Nick to imagine Meekman flying all the way out here just to ransack his house. So clearly Monty had some resources in Massachusetts. And they weren’t only house-trashers, they were hackers; whoever had done this was pretty hard-core. Nick had done a full security check before packing this machine into the closet. Nobody should have been able to get on without the root password, and it was unlikely that anybody had guessed E#j9uUi@b randomly. He tried typing this command and that, to no avail: he was locked out of his own computer. He drank another big gulp of beer, and something inside him snapped.

“ARRGH!” he screamed, throwing his head back like Chewbacka the Wookie as he stood, grabbed the chair he had been sitting on, and smashed it into his china cabinet. Then he destroyed, in a similar manner, every chair in his dining room.

“Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on,” he explained to the universe. Cracking the diskette had now become exponentially more personal. For the first time ever, he had something Meekman wanted. Well then, he thought. That changes things just a little, doesn’t it. He then went off in search of a Philips-head screwdriver and another beer. In the end he had to take off the skin off the old computer, and, kneeling on the seat of a busted chair, toggle in a new boot path to regain control of his own system. But by the third beer he had a bastard UNIX limping along in single-user mode.

Now he stood with the diskette in his teeth, unsure whether to put it in and try to read it. What’s the worst that could happen? he thought. The program on the disk might hose his system—this old warhorse prototype that pre-coma Todd had cobbled together from spare parts years ago. Maybe it would explode and set his house on fire. Big Fucking Deal. Even burning down the house would solve a certain class of problem.

He took the diskette out of his mouth and stared at it, as a gambler might look at his dice before rolling them, then stuck it in. He typed

cd /dev/rst1; overmind

and pressed the return key.

After about two seconds a message appeared:

THREE MINUTES TO TYPE PASSWORD (160 CHARS) OR SELF-DESTRUCT

COUNTING SPINS

TIME REMAINING 180

TIME REMAINING 179

TIME REMAINING 178

It took him a few seconds to read and interpret the message: the Overmind program was counting spins of the disk drive and was going to erase itself if he didn’t type in the password within three minutes. Hell’s bells. He needed to stop the thing from spinning. What command should he type? He couldn’t think. When finesse doesn’t work, there is always brute force. He reached over and pressed the button to eject the diskette. It peeped a slender edge out of the drive, like Hunca Munca the mouse cautiously checking Lucinda Doll’s house to see if the coast was clear.

Well, great, just great. There was no way he was going to read it until he had figured out the password. Now he was in a really bad mood. He felt like Daffy Duck taunted by Bugs Bunny. The right thing to do would be to walk away, but his sense of dignity compelled him to do otherwise. He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct exactly what had happened at Mad Antonio’s yesterday. If he could just remember exactly what the crazy nutter Barlow had said last night, perhaps he could figure out how to convert the number into a sequence that was exactly one hundred and sixty characters long.

Jesus, Nick thought. One hundred and sixty characters was a whole Hail Mary. It was an entire nursery rhyme. How was he supposed to guess a one hundred and sixty character string? And he would have to type it perfectly; he had only about one second per character.

Still, he tried, writing down possibilities on a piece of paper.

Our Father Who art in heaven hallowed be Thy Name… No, that’s not it, he thought, scratching it out and trying again.

Twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are…

I do not like them in a box. I do not like green eggs and ham. . .

This is bullshit, he thought. He got another beer and sat at his kitchen table, trying to force himself to think, but really thinking of nothing.

At around two PM the phone rang; it was almost a mercy.

“Hello, Mr. Aubrey? My name is Susan Carr; I’m with the New York Times. I was wondering if you would have a few moments to talk with me about what happened on Flight 44 last night? I have a copy of the flight manifest …”

“No thank you, Ms. Carr. Not today. Goodbye…”

“Have you seen the discussion on the alt dot conspiracy newsgroup, sir?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t read that paranoid crap,” he said, and hung up.

In a moment he wished he hadn’t been so curt. He didn’t want to talk with any news people, but a brush-off like that would only whet a reporter’s appetite. He reminded himself to be civil when she called back, as he was sure she would. And what had she meant about alt.conspiracy?

But before he could figure out how to get his UNIX box on the net the phone rang again.

“Mr. Aubrey, my name is Gene Burton; I’m with the Associated Press. We’re looking into the story of Flight 44, on which a man, Peter Barlow, either committed suicide or was murdered. Were you on that flight, Mr. Aubrey?”

Here we go again.

“Yes,” Nick said.

“Did you see the incident?”

“Not really. No.”

“Did you get a look at the man who was sitting next to Mr. Barlow?”

“No. I was at the front of the plane. It was all very disturbing. I would rather not talk about it. Thank you.”

He hung up. There, he told himself. That was a somewhat more polished performance.

Another ring. Already?

Yes?”

“Mr. Aubrey, this is Susan Carr of the New York Times. Earlier you and I were speaking of Flight 44.”

“We most certainly were not.”

Click.

Ring.

“Mr. Aubrey, this is Kathleen Gerbens of the New York Times. We’re covering the story of Flight 44, and our research seems to indicate that you are the so-called ‘Mystery Passenger,’ the one who was sitting next to Mr. Barlow and later questioned by the Salt Lake City police. Would you care to comment on this?”

“What research? Did the police give you my name?”

“Can I take that as a confirmation, Mr. Aubrey?”

“No. No you cannot. Ms. Gerbens, you are the third reporter to call me in the last two minutes. I am trying to get some work done. I don’t want to talk about that flight, but I’m sure that you can find fifty people who do. Please find one of them.”

“But none of them are the man who was sitting next to Mr. Barlow, are they?”

“I’ve got to get back to work.”

“What do you know about Hussein Kamel, Mr. Aubrey? What about Iraq’s biological weapons program?”

“Nothing. Not a God damned thing. See you later.”

He hung up. The phone rang again. He lifted the receiver, quickly put it down again, stood next to it for a minute or two, looking at it suspiciously. He lifted the receiver again, dialed the first few numbers of Jake’s office line, then thought better of it. Jake probably wouldn’t be able to help Nick. In fact, calling Jake might do worse than getting him in trouble with the Salt Lake City Airport Police. I might get him in trouble with Meekman. Heck, maybe Jake works for Meekman. There was no one to trust.

I’m going crazy, Nick thought. But who knew how far Meekman’s network went?

Nick called Carl instead. He got an answering machine, with Carl’s voice making itself casual and resonant. Did this guy ever stop the seduction routine? At the proverbial beep, Nick left his message.

“Hi, Carl. Nick here,” Nick started. “Thought I’d catch you up on a crazy 25 hours. You were right. That’s all I’ll say. Call me back.”

He left his home number, ran upstairs and found some clean clothes amid the wreckage of the second floor, ran downstairs, grabbed his coat, hat, suitcase and briefcase and headed for the door. He couldn’t stay here at his house, that much was clear. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Besides, whoever had wrecked the place might come back, and Nick didn’t think they would be gentle with him. Instead, he went to the faded elegance that was the Newcastle Hotel, a once-grand edifice across the street from the Mill’s main entrance, now a flophouse that rented rooms by the week. He parked his ratty Volvo three blocks away from his destination, hurriedly walked to the hotel, checked in, took the tiny elevator to the third floor, found his room, went in, dropped his bags and glanced around. What a dump. It was from another era; the floral wallpaper was fifty years old if it was a day, and the phone had rotary dial. At least there would be no message lights to worry about.

“West and wewaxation at wast,” he said. He’d like to talk to Bartlett, he realized. He should call her. If there was any excuse to call, this would be it. He needed help, and he needed it bad. But he didn’t call. He didn’t have the strength to dial a phone, much less talk to his one-time soul mate. Instead, dragged himself to the bed, collapsed on top of it, and fell deeply, profoundly asleep.

Chapter 21

Nick Aubrey awoke an unknown number of hours later to the sound of a freight train squealing at five miles an hour where it rounded a sharp bend behind the hotel, feeling like an animal had crawled into his mouth and died. It was dark outside, and quiet like it sometimes got before a snowfall. The clock on his bedside table read 9 p.m. Slowly, after showering in his 1930-era hotel bathroom, he felt closer to being alive than he had since he had sat with Carl at Mad Antonio’s bar in California. That seemed like a different lifetime. Had it only been yesterday?

Speaking of yesterday, he now realized that in his haste to get out of his house he had grabbed three sets of underwear and a few shirts, but no clean T-shirt or socks; nor did he have a razor. Well, he thought, at least his grooming matched his surroundings. With yesterday’s stubble on his face and yesterday’s shirt on his back and yesterday’s socks on his feet, he prepared to greet whatever was to come next.

He missed Bartlett with an intensity that he recognized from the first week after she left. She was the only person he wanted to talk to, the only one he wanted to see. But he couldn’t very well call her if Meekman’s thugs were out to kill him. The last thing he could do was bring a Meekman problem to her threshold; she was the person who had pleaded with him for years to avoid the son of a bitch. No, Nick couldn’t call his wife; not yet. He had things to figure out first.

Well now what, Nick?

Coffee, his brain answered. You need coffee, you dumb sod.

So, X number of hours after checking into the hotel, Nick was drinking his nth cup of coffee in a booth at the chrome castle called the Newcastle Diner, adjacent to the Hotel and just as ancient. The TV in the corner showed a reporter outside an airport—the Salt Lake City airport, as identified by the ticker at the bottom of the screen. Barlow’s death on Flight 44 was not going to be a story that would just blow over, after all. Nick’s phone was probably still ringing at the house. For all he knew, there was a TV news truck with a big antenna parked outside it right now. The key question, though, was whether these reporters actually had any evidence that Nick was the man who had been detained by the police, or if they were just taking an alphabetical walk down the passenger list. He could imagine the reporter Kathleen Gerbens using that same “our research seems to indicate . . .” line on every passenger with a male-sounding name, hoping to scare up the actual mystery passenger. On the other hand, maybe the police had leaked Nick’s name. Maybe he was due for six months of reporters calling every two minutes, camping out on his doorstep waiting for that big scoop. What should he do? He had no clue.

But something was bothering him: the names of the reporters who had called his house. Susan Carr. Gene Burton. Kathleen Gerbens. New York Times, AP, New York Times. No, that couldn’t be right. The Times wouldn’t assign two reporters to such a trivial story. One of them must have said the Globe, or USA Today. He consulted the clock above the counter. It was past working hours, but all good reporters would still be in the office putting their papers to bed.

Taking his coffee with him, he walked to the pull-shut phone booth. In a minute he had retrieved the 800 number for Times news desk, and faintly penciled it on the wall.

“Kathleen Gerbens, please. She’s a reporter.”

“Kathleen Gerbens? Just a moment; I’ll put you through to her voice mail.”

He waited until hearing her greeting before hanging up. He dialed the same number again.

“Susan Carr, please. She’s a reporter.”

“Just a moment.” There was a pause on the other end. “How are you spelling that?”

No luck. Nobody named Carr or Karr or Karp at the New York Times. Three more phone calls confirmed that there was no Susan Carr at the Globe or USA Today or the Associated Press. Something about that name, Carr, bugged him. What had Barlow said? Aubrey, Burgess, Carr, Delcourt. You think I never saw that film? I was with the Company, remember? According to Crazy Peter Barlow, at least, “Aubrey” and “Carr” were code names for CIA operatives. Could the CIA really be looking for Nick? Not bloody likely. Or was it? Everything was unknowable. But even if the CIA was looking for him, he was safe for now. Nobody knew he as staying at the Newcastle Hotel, or that he was having coffee at the Newcastle Diner right now, that he was in this particular antique phone booth.

But was he really safe, as in 100 percent safe? OK, he admitted to himself. Safe as in maybe 30 percent safe, with luck . . . Twenty percent? Ten?

Nick took out his wallet and found Carl’s number, then arrayed a few dollars worth of quarters to feed the phone. What time was it in California? Who cared. He needed to make this call no matter what time it was.

“Carl Swirsing,” the voice answered.

“It’s Nick.”

“Nick, Jesus. I’ve tried to call ten, twenty times.”

“I’m not at home.”

“So I gathered. Where are you now?”

Nick ignored the question. He didn’t want anybody but the front-desk guy at the Newcastle Hotel to know where he’d checked in. He’d rather hedge his bets. “Did you hear that Crazy Peter Barlow was killed?”

“Suicide,” Carl said. “I heard. But that has nothing to do with you.”

“Carl, listen. I was on that fucking flight.” Nick wanted to scream into the phone. Instead he spoke, quickly, in a hushed voice. “I am a murder suspect. They think I killed Barlow. And I’m a suspected child pornographer and my house has been burglarized and for the love of fuck, man, you need to come clean. You need to tell me every goddamn thing you know about the Corporate Fellows.”

“Did Monty make you that offer?”

“Yes, he did. And I told him to shove it up his ass. That man is insane. Insane and dangerous.”

Carl sighed.

“You screwed up,” he said. “You needed to be on the inside.”

“Well I was on the inside for about four fucking seconds and now I’m on the outside. I’m so far outside I might as well be on Pluto. And it’s pretty fucking cold on Pluto, and there ain’t a lot of oxygen here.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Come to Massachusetts and meet me. I need help, man.”

“Where are you now?”

“At a pay phone.”

“Which pay phone?”

The sound of the phone moving against fabric translated through the headset. Carl’s voice came as a murmur for a few seconds, as if he were talking to somebody else in the room with him.

“Where are you again?” he said.

“Massachusetts,” Nick replied.

“That’s a big state,” Carl said.

“Actually, it’s a pretty small one,” Nick replied. “And I’m scared shitless. So either you buy a ticket out here right now and give me some more information about what’s going on, or I’m hanging up.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t, Nick.”

“Bye Carl,” Nick said. “I’m keeping the hundred.”

So much for my partner in crime, Nick thought, replacing the phone in the cradle.

Through the glass doors of the phone booth, Nick saw there was somebody sitting at the table where he had been and where his jacket and a pot of coffee were clearly holding his spot. As Nick watched through the phone door, the waitress brought a cup for Nick’s guest, and the guest filled it with coffee from Nick’s pot.

Maybe his ‘ten percent safe’ estimate had been too high.

She was a slender woman, about thirty, with a narrow face, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. Her brown hair was long, and pulled into a simple braided ponytail that rested on a plaid shirt worn open over a white turtleneck. She seemed bemused as she reached for the little silver pitcher. As she finished putting cream in her coffee she looked up, and her eyes met his. She wore no make up. The bemused look on her face didn’t change at all as he stared at her; her little turned-down smile seemed to say, you wouldn’t remember me. I’m nobody.

He left the phone and walked to where she sat, neither of them averting their eyes.

He sat down opposite her.

“Hey stranger,” she said, and then her name came to him. Casey. Casey Montgomery.

No wonder it had taken him a few seconds to place her. He hadn’t seen Casey since sometime in the weeks right after Todd had been shot. That was what, five years ago? Todd and Casey were hardware hackers. Sometimes they designed chips together. Sometimes they slept together. Sometimes they went their own ways for months at a time. The parameters of their relationship were determined by them alone. It wasn’t the kind of thing that Todd and Nick would have talked about under any conceivable circumstance, but sometimes Casey had joined Nick in Todd’s basement to listen to him drum. It was no surprise, then, that it had taken Nick a moment to remember Casey’s name. Todd had similar relationships with two or three other unconventional women. Nick couldn’t remember their names either. For the last five years Todd had been in a coma, hooked up to machines at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Nick had heard that Casey still visited him. That was loyalty, loyalty bordering on obsession. Nick never visited Todd anymore. What was the point?

“So you’re not sailing on the Mother Ship anymore?” she said. Casey never had been one for beating around the bush.

Up until today, Nick and Casey had worked at the same address, for the same company, without running into each other for half a decade. But she was hardware and he was software, the Mill was vast, and their paths had no reason to cross in a complex maze of connected buildings that covered eleven acres. But still somehow the rumor of his firing had reached her.

“Good news travels fast,” Nick said.

Like Todd, Casey said what was on her mind or she said nothing. You asked a Todd or Casey a question; if they didn’t feel like answering it they ignored it, and sometimes they just walked away. It was as if their brain simply filtered out anything that their higher self would consider inane.

Was it really five years ago that Todd had been shot while Nick and Bartlett were pledging their lives to each other at Raquette Lake? Everything good turns to crap, Nick thought. He poured a refill into his cup. Casey had used all the cream.

“Did you jump or did you get pushed?” she asked. “I heard you got riffed, but maybe I caught the wrong rumor. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

It was her air of sympathy and concern that Nick found so touching.

“Partly wrong. I didn’t get riffed, I got fired.”

“Mazel Tov. I’ve been trying to pull that off for years.”

Then silence. Apparently it was his turn to speak.

“So how about you Casey,” Nick said. “What have you been up to?”

“Hardware, you know,” she said. “Just hardware. I’m working on a hyperscalar CPU. Sixty-four bits. Gallium Arsenide, remember that? G.A. The wave of the past. Me and Seymour Cray.”

Again that self-deprecation, that turned-down smile. Her upper right lateral incisor was turned about fifteen degrees, creating a very slight gap that gave her a pleasingly asymmetric smile.

“Have they figured out how to make that economically yet?” he asked. That had been the problem with gallium arsenide, right? The cost? Or was it the heat dissipation? Or susceptibility to EMF? He couldn’t remember. He basically knew nothing about chip substrates. GeeAy, EnMoss, CeeMoss, Nickel Oxide. When Todd had been alive he had explained to Nick the feel of each chip technology. To Todd they were as different from one another as a Formula One racer was from a Volvo station wagon. But to Nick they were all just hardware. He was a software boy.

“Ask me in a month,” she said. “Got any plans?”

“None. Maybe I’ll get my revenge on the guy who fired me.”

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Monty Meekman.”

The look on her face was awe.

“Monty? He slimed you too? I’m impressed.”

He didn’t think she was joking.

“It wasn’t a distinction I had actively sought out,” he said.

“At least you’re in good company. If you work with him and don’t get slimed, you’re pretty suspect, as far as I’m concerned.”

Outside a few snowflakes were falling. A Newcastle Public Works truck passed, periodically casting yellow light though the diner windows. Chains clinked loudly and the raised snowplow rumbled as if daring the sky to open up. How strange and wonderful that this little coffee shop stayed open into the late hours in a dying town when snow was coming. In late March. Maybe there were some good things left on Earth after all.

“You sound like you speak from experience,” Nick said.

“I got slimed a little on the Kali project.”

“That’s right. You worked on that with Todd. Until they replaced you with . . .” It was on the tip of Nick’s tongue. Todd had railed about this guy. What was his name? And what had Todd disliked about him?

“Pavel Isaacs. Shitbird and a half. We called him Michael Jackson, black the first year, and white the next.” She looked at Nick in such a way that Nick couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. “But fundamentally I didn’t have enough talent for Monty to even notice me. Also, I’m not a guy. Monty was always finding these guys with real talent and taking them under his wing, grooming them to be the next Dalai Lama or something. Then at some point he would either make them Corporate Fellows, or decide that they had let him down and set about to cut their balls off.”

“Sounds familiar,” Nick said. Had he been the only one not to notice this pattern?

Casey continued, “The way he scapegoated Todd really caught my eye. Here’s Todd lying in intensive care with half his head shot off, and Meekman’s making a speech to the team about how Kali is being canceled because Todd fucked up. Which was absolute bullshit, of course. Then the next day Monty’s at the hospital, the picture of piety, hovering over poor comatose Todd.”

“Whatever did happen to that Kali chip?” Nick asked.

“Want to buy me a beer?”

Nick’s memory was finally engaged now, the cobwebs having been dusted from a long-unused corner. He was remembering Casey, and the specifics of her connection to Todd. Women who preferred conventional relationships with men didn’t last long with Todd. They might spend an hour with him, or an evening. Then they would pronounce him “cold” or “weird” and that would be that. There were others, though, like Casey: Suzy Creamcheeses to Todd’s Frank Zappa. “No one could understand our bizarre relationship,” Suzy says on the Uncle Meat album. “I was his intellectual frigid housekeeper . . .” Nick couldn’t remember the rest of the way Suzy put it, but he could recall perfectly her blasé tone of voice, talking about her intimate life as if she were reading a shopping list. He imagined that she had a turned-down smile to go with it.

“Hey Casey,” Nick said, after getting another memory refresh from somewhere deep beyond the locus of his headache. “Whatever happened to the Shrine?”

Was that a smile? On a micron scale. Maybe.

“It still exists, although I had to move it. Now it’s kind of in the museum annex.”

“The Shrine’s in the museum annex? What museum?” he said.

“The Bonehead Computer Museum, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve never been to the Bonehead Computer Museum?”

“Perhaps you could enlighten me sometime.”

“Let’s go see it right now. It’s in the Mill.”

“I appreciate the offer, but not tonight. There’s the inconvenient fact that I no longer work there.”

“No, now,” Casey said. “Come on, you’re wallowing.”

She spoke with sudden authority, as if she were a cop rousting him from a nap on a park bench.

“Well, let me try another line of defense,” Nick said. He really was in no mood to go back in the Mill only hours after his disgrace. Not to mention the fact that he didn’t want to get arrested for posting child pornography on the intranet. “Corporate Security has enjoined me from re-entering the Mill. I’m persona non grata.”

“Corporate Security?” she said, incredulous. “All the more reason to go back right now. You’ve got to get back in the saddle, son. Jesus Christ on a Pogo stick, Corporate Security? Spit in their lemonade, Nick. Come on. Let’s go.”

She had a point.

They left a few dollars on the table and walked out onto the Main Street sidewalk. The night sky seemed close to the ground, full of what might become a full-on storm. Nick zipped his jacket shut, then headed left, towards the main entrance, but she pulled his sleeve.

“No, this way,” she said, and led him in the opposite direction, towards the upper mill pond. “The main entrance is probably the only place you have chance of getting nabbed.”

They crossed at an angle to the opposite sidewalk, which ran parallel to the series of falls that began at the upper pond and continued along the whole west face of the Mill to the lower pond. A low black iron fence separated the sidewalk from the highest and most powerful of the waterfalls that had once powered grain and textile mills here. By this route it would take them at least fifteen minutes, Nick figured, to get around the upper pond and the south parking lot. They had gone about twenty yards when she said, “Okay, Hercules, up and over,” and with surprising agility, did a one-handed vault over the fence.

Nick vaulted after her, awkwardly, and followed her as best he could down the steep, dark, slippery rocks along the falls. Eventually she stopped under the main bridge. Nick was breathing hard, as much from his fright at almost falling as from the exertion. Here, directly under the bridge, there was a relatively quiet pool that he had never noticed. Was this perhaps where his ring had come to rest?

“Take my hand,” she said. “This is a little tricky.”

“I’ll say.”

But he took her hand, and she led him over a path of rocks, some of them barely visible, to the other side. In the dark he never would have seen the door, but she obviously knew it quite well; in fact, she had a key for it. They entered into a dank sub-sub-basement illuminated by naked bulbs, but within a minute they had climbed three flights of stairs through increasingly less sinister surroundings, and soon they were in the hallway that began just behind the main reception desk.

They followed “Shay’s Highway” the length of Building One. At Building Two they went up four flights of stairs, then down Publick Alley 4754 to Three. Once in Three they turned at Turners Falls and walked ten yards until they came to the unmarked firewall door on the opposite wall just before Nick’s office. The door was open. All of Nick’s belongings had been removed already. The office was bare and, to Nick’s eyes, unbearably sad.

He followed her through the fire door into a dark room littered with old-style cubicles, long vacant. In Nick’s glory days as a manager this area had been part of his demesne. Then came the merger, the layoffs; before long this was just another void, one of numberless unoccupied sections that sprouted all over the Mill like spots of January mildew on a summer-house wall. Some cubes contained obsolete equipment—keyboards, mice, monitors, printed circuit boards—like rubble-strewn rooms beneath a pyramid before the archeologists have gone to work. Nobody cleaned them up. Who would have bothered? It would have been like sweeping out a dustbowl farmhouse before decamping to Salinas to pick lettuce.

“My Void and welcome to it,” she said, and her voice reverberated.

He followed her to a distant corner, where there was a door that he didn’t remember. Instead of a push-bar there was a two-foot long spatula-like device, and above it a printed sign had been pressed onto the door:

EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY

ALARM WILL SOUND

She pressed the door and it swung open, noiselessly.

“What did you do, disconnect the alarms?” he asked.

“Nothing so renegade,” she said as she led him up a flight of dusty stairs. “Somebody probably forgot to turn something back on when they shut down the Alpha Annex two years ago.”

“Does anybody else know about this?”

“I’ve never seen anybody near here,” she said. “There are whole sections of the Mill where nobody goes anymore.” She stopped at the next landing, the top. In front of them was a door, padlocked. To their left was a window that ran nearly floor to ceiling. “Here, this way,” she said, as she opened the window and stepped out into the freezing night air. It had begun to snow in earnest.

He stuck his head out and found her standing on a slightly sloping roof. Nervously, unsure of his footing, he stepped out to join her. What little light there was came from the upper stories of Nine, the tallest of all the Mill buildings about thirty yards away, but the falling snow blocked most of it. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he began to make out rooftops of the various Mill buildings all around him, like the spires of a castle. Casey led him to a three-foot parapet at the edge of the roof.

“Listen,” she said. He could hear the muffled sound of the half-frozen falls coming from below.

“I’m trying to make out where we are,” he said.

“We’re on the roof of Seven, right above the Klingon fab lab. Come here, I’ll show you something. They extended the clean room under the skylight; you can look down to see all the Klingons in their space suits.”

She set off at a trot and Nick loped after her. They stopped above a skylight. In a minute she had wiped a swath clear of snow and he was looking down through the glass at three or four people dressed in white smocks, hair nets, white gloves, and elastic slippers milling about in a blindingly lit room.

“What are they doing?” Nick asked.

“Making chips, silly,” she said. “This is a computer company, remember?”

“But I thought we shut down this operation when the equipment became obsolete. Don’t we outsource all our chips to Texas and California? I swear, I remember the layoffs.”

“We outsource all our new stuff. This is an old line. Makes chips according to 1990 specs, and older. Prehistoric. You’re looking at the computer equivalent of Henry Ford’s original assembly line.”

“Who could possibly want that ancient crap?” Nick asked.

“It’s milspec stuff, military specification. Chips for tanks and jets. They change slower than the glaciers. And they generate scads of cash. Dijjy-Mike just pulled its old machines out of mothballs and got into the business. The Gulf War was a godsend.”

Nick crossed his arms over his chest, which helped exactly zero against the cold. Casey seemed perfectly comfortable.

“What about the museum?” he said. “Or are we doing an experiment in hypothermia?”

“Follow me.”

A few moments later, by a path that he could never have retraced, he found himself back inside, walking next to her down a corridor that he eventually recognized as Charles Street, Building Nine. She excused herself to the ladies’ room. He stood in the hall, listening to the hum of the neon lights, until she returned.

“So you see where we are—Building Nine—here’s Todd’s old office. Some geek has it now.”

Nick glanced into an anonymous office: family photos, a college pennant.

“Here’s my office,” she said, tapping on an office door as they walked past. After six years of working in the same room, Nick wondered, had she suffused it with her personality, as Todd had done with his? Or had she left it sparse, undecorated?

“Recognize this?” she said, pressing a swinging door that opened to her right, off the well-lit corridor onto a darkened hallway.

“It’s the delicatessen, isn’t it?” he said.

“Used to be. Here, this way.”

She flicked a switch and a light came on at the far end of the thirty-foot passage that used to hold the lunchroom where he’d meet Todd, on those rare occasions when Todd was feeling sociable. He hadn’t thought this much about Todd in years. Misery on top of misery. Why not?

“Here we are,” Casey said. “Ta-da.”

On her right was a door that, as he now recalled, led to the delicatessen’s kitchen. He looked at the door, and saw, affixed to its center, a small neat etched plastic sign:

The Bonehead Computer Museum

Open Midnight to Midnight - Monday Thru Sunday

And By Appointment

Donations Welcome

“Please, I would be honored,” she said, and indicated for him to push the door open. He did, and entered a step or two, then planted his feet where they were. If he moved, he feared he would trip over something.

She turned on a light.

He looked around him. Affixed to the wall were mounted printed circuit boards, dog-eared manuals, reel-to-reel tape drives; on small tables he saw odd-looking personal computers. There was an industrial range and oven in burnished steel against one wall, and in the center of the room there was a large table with a butcher-block top. The room was in the shape of an “L”, with the long end to the right.

At his feet he saw a hunk of electrical equipment: metal cage, wires, circuit boards, and what appeared to be a stack of tan dishes connected by a spindle.

“Oh look,” she said, “another foundling left on the cathedral steps. This is a prize specimen. The curator has coveted one for years.”

“What is it?” he said, leaning over. “Looks like an old disk drive.”

“Correct,” she said. “Second generation, a DSU19. It’s probably nearly twenty-five years old.” She nudged it lightly with her toe, then bent to pick it up. “Now this, this is a truly bonehead piece of work,” she continued, turning it in her hands. “This is an exquisitely poorly-engineered kludge. These things never worked, you know. They were Digital Data’s first flop, their first Edsel. They broke, they caught on fire. But they were, at the time, the only option that Digital Data’s customers had for disk storage. I think they held, like, ten K or something. Just nothing. And they sold for, like, ten thousand dollars. Do you know what Ben Golson said about them?” She lowered her voice and dropped her chin to her chest, impersonating Digital Data’s legendary founder. “ ‘The good news is, you sold one, you sold two.’”

Nick laughed. “Where did it come from?”

“Who knows? Most of my donors are anonymous. People drop off bonehead crap they’re too embarrassed to be associated with. When I get heirloom pieces like this I suspect Golson himself is sneaking in here at night. Go ahead,” Casey said, sweeping her right arm before her as if this disused kitchen were the bridge of the Enterprise. “Captain, take the deck.”

He began to wander through the room. The first article he came to was a printed circuit board about sixteen inches square, which projected out perpendicularly from the wall. The board itself was hard laminated green plastic an eighth of an inch thick. Mounted on it were tens of brown chips and tan chips, each looking like a rectangular ant with eight or sixteen or however many little silver feet frozen to the board. Connecting the ants were sharply angled rivers of solder. Capacitors, resistors and heat dissipaters sat on the board like miniature railroad tank cars, tiny robots, and Christmas trees on the world’s smallest train set. On the front and back of the board there were scads of wires held in place with dollops of hardened green glue. The back of the device, in particular, looked like an electronic bird’s nest that some giant had sneezed upon. Even a software boy like Nick could see the boneheadedness of this design. All those parts must have cost a fortune, and the number of wires would have made it almost impossible to correctly manufacture.

The description mounted on the wall adjacent said:

Mosaic Technologies, Inc. CPU (1983-1984) - NS16016 CPU board for the Mosaic Graphics Workstation. One of the great marvels of boneheaded design, this module, despite its uncanny resemblance to a prototype, was actually the third pass board being produced by manufacturing. It is obvious from inspection why Mosaic failed after only two years of operation. “Never before have so many taken so long to produce so little.”

Gift of K. Thompson

“So you don’t just have Dijjy-Mike designs here?” he said.

“The museum started out with just one or two egregiously kludgey Digital Data designs. One of them was my own first board, a total crock. But people kept giving me all the great kludges of their own careers, from all over the place. So I decided to take a more ecumenical approach. Why should the museum be provincial? Bonehead design is a universal human right.” Next to the Mosaic board was a smaller printed circuit card, crammed with chips, about five by fifteen inches. Its card read:

S-100 Cassette Interface Card (?) - A beautiful period piece. Note the design such that chips were more expensive than sockets. This is a fine example of excessive engineering to the point that not even Digital Data could sell it.

Gift of C. Montgomery

“Ah, this is your crock. Nicely done. Really is a brick shit-house, isn’t it? Speaking of which, you can have my code from the Docudisk project for your software annex if you want it,” Nick said. “But you’ll have to grab the code yourself. If you can find it, now that Chuckie Johnson & I have been disappeared.”

“The curator is honored,” she said, with just a tiny hint of that turned-tooth, corners-down smile.

Arched over the two small cards was a heavy grey cable that appeared to be singed at one end, and at the other a card read:

ECD Bomber (1989) - Cable. This cable single-handedly flamed several peripherals in its short but hideous life.

Gift of Barry J. Folsom

Casey was standing back now, fastidiously avoiding further comment. In her turtleneck pullover, red flannel shirt, faded blue jeans and Topsider shoes she was the very vision of the rugged, outdoorsy New England woman, straight from the pages of L.L. Bean. And indeed, she was handsome. But her femaleness was entirely unlike Bartlett’s: she was taller, had fewer curves, stood with a more athletic posture. She should be hiking in the Adirondacks, he thought, or canoeing on Moosehead Lake. Why did she spend so much time within this monastery-like expanse of the Mill?

The next object Nick came to was a square of thick wire mesh, about five inches on each side, and on this there was a donut shape of heavy gray dust, grown up like coral. The caption read:

Filters (1986-1989) These were the non user-replaceable filters on the 386ie. It is not clear where dust this big comes from.

Gift of T. Griffith.

“Ah, Todd,” Nick said. “A gift of a ring of dust. Perfect.”

“Have you ever been back to visit him at Spaulding?” she asked.

“Not in years,” he said, feeling a twinge of guilt.

“Look behind you and say hello to Todd’s one and only, Kali, Hindu goddess of death, the bitch who got his final awake hours on earth.” Nick turned and nearly got spooked to death. It was a poster, mounted on a massive stainless steel door, which obviously led to the walk-in cooler dating from when this place had been a working delicatessen. The poster was full of garish hues, oranges and purples and greens, and featured a monster who had too many arms to count, some of which were holding bloody swords, scimitars, or severed heads. Kali herself was wearing a necklace made of skulls and standing on a mountain of skeletons. She was sticking out a blue tongue.

“I thought Kali was supposed to be beautiful,” Nick said, after his heart had resumed beating.

“That’s what Todd thought too. He was thinking of Innana. Kali’s a hag. Just look at those saggy tits. Innana’s tits are like Teri Hatcher’s: big and firm.”

“Casey, you frighten me.”

“Moi?” She looked at him quizzically, as if he were a bonehead kludge that she was considering adding to her collection. Then she opened the door to the cooler.

Chapter 22

From his seat in the front left passenger seat of the Hoff-Zeigy Gulfstream jet heading back to Basel after his whirlwind trip to Massachusetts, Paul Aubrey gazed out the window trying to make sense of the last two days as the few lights of Boston’s mostly uninhabited Harbor Islands twinkled through the lightly falling snow.

Just as Pascale had promised, there had been a satchel of briefing papers for him to read on the flight from Switzerland to America. Virtually all of them had been about the members of The Neuro Group’s board—their academic histories, research interests and published work, even, to Paul’s surprise and distaste, information on their personal lives, some of which would be embarrassing if made public. There was very little information pertaining to his first assignment, the one before The Neuro Group. Paul had been tempted to try to find a way to steam open the letter that he had been entrusted to give to the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but in the final analysis he accepted that he was nothing but a delivery boy. Two hours after landing at Logan Airport, Paul found himself seated in the leather-upholstered guest chair in the dignified Office of the President, which fairly reeked of history and power. As Paul sat, the man opened the letter, read it, whistled, and said, “Please convey to the Board of Directors of Hoff-Zeigy that the University is honored by this proposal, and that I will bring it to the attention of our trustees immediately.”

The entire meeting had taken less than ten minutes.

From the president’s office it was only a short walk to the Strata Student Center, where, over a cup of coffee with The Neuro Group’s president Dr. Simpson, Paul had laid out several alternative funding models by which Hoff-Zeigy might enter into a business relationship with the fledgling corporation. Before the meeting, he had wondered if Bartlett would show up to take part in the conversation. She hadn’t; Simpson had been alone, and Paul was almost relieved. He could play his part, the part he knew, and he could do it well. He had spent the last several years doing exactly this kind of thing—flying to meet with the presidents and chairmen and chief financial officers of biotech startups and finding ways to get deals done—sometimes to the benefit of the startup, and virtually always to the benefit of Hoff-Zeigy. He was good at his job. He had engineered a dozen mergers, buy-outs, and licensing agreements that had added tens of millions of dollars to Hoff-Zeigy’s bottom line. He had a very good idea of what he was worth to the corporation, and it was a lot.

But this trip’s deals were something different entirely. Yesterday, in the president’s office at MIT, he had the feeling that he had been cast in the role of Tom Hagen, the Corleone family’s consigliere, making an offer that MIT couldn’t refuse. He didn’t even know what the offer was, but he felt vaguely guilty about it.

He also knew exactly what the offers were to The Neuro Group, and they made him almost as uneasy, but for an altogether different reason. Normally a big part of his job was doing the due diligence necessary to ensure the company was as it appeared. He was used to visiting laboratories, checking on research, making sure that claims to intellectual property were legally valid, scoping the competition, checking out the bona fides of the principals. He was used to spending weeks, months, or even a year thoroughly investigating every aspect of the company on which he proposed to spend Hoff-Zeigy’s shareholders’ money.

Not so with The Neuro Group. Presumably the dossiers on The Neuro Group’s members that Pascale had provided were, in this case, considered sufficient. More than sufficient: the terms of the offer he made to Simpson were spelled out in the papers Pascale had left for him, and it was a generous offer indeed. More generous than anything he had ever seen. What the hell was going on, he wondered. Surely more than met the eye.

Yes, usually he would have met the other principals, if not all twelve, at least some of the leading researchers. As he knew well, Bartlett Aubrey was a principal of The Neuro Group, maybe its most valuable asset. She was responsible for the research that Hoff-Zeigy wanted, and without her buy-in, the deal wouldn’t go through. Still, he was glad she hadn’t been part of that first conversation. Meeting with her, given their complicated history, was likely to be awkward under the best of circumstances. He knew that at some point he would have to talk with her in the course of doing business. But this trip was hardly the best of circumstances. Everything about it was fishy. Paul wanted to know more about what was going on before adding Bartlett into the mix.

How many times he had talked with her in his mind over the last seven years! How many times he had felt her naked body against his when another naked woman was in his arms. How many times he had asked her if she knew how he felt, how smitten he had been, how in love, how betrayed. And he wanted to ask her if he would ever get over her.

The plane made a gentle turn; the last of the lights from America were far behind them. A “fasten seatbelt” light went dark, there was a gentle “ding”, and a pretty young woman in some kind of uniform asked him if he wanted anything to eat or drink. So this is what it feels like to be powerful, he thought. I have my own pilot and co-pilot; a flight attendant just for me. I have my own money, so much more than I need, and I have tens of millions of Hoff-Zeigy’s dollars to spend at my sole discretion. But I don’t have—I can’t have—the one thing I most want.

The pilot announced that they had reached their cruising altitude; in seven hours they would be in Basel. Paul reclined his seat, and as if reading his mind the flight attendant provided a pillow and blanket. Oh yes, I’m so powerful, he thought, the blackness of the Atlantic beneath the wings of the plane. So why do I feel like a puppet?

Chapter 23

A musty odor greeted Nick and Casey, mingled with a smell of jasmine incense and rose-petal potpourri. The empty walk-in cooler was the size of Nick’s bathroom at the Newcastle Hotel, with every square inch of wall and most of the floor covered. It was a shrine to Todd, complete with candles.

“Jesus, Casey,” Nick said, taking it all in.

In front of him, covering the wall from floor to ceiling, was a picture of a chip: thousands of impossibly thin blue, black, and red lines that looked chaotic but somehow gave rise to a marvelous order. On the floor in front of it: some candlesticks with melted candles in them, wands of incense in small buckets of sand, the Mothers of Invention’s Uncle Meat album on vinyl and CD, a paper-flower lei, two matchbox Formula One race cars, a pair of drumsticks, a pair of earplugs, a Cheech Wizard comic book, an unopened can of Jolt Cola, a whiteboard covered with saw-tooth and square-tooth timing diagrams scribbled on top of each other in blue, black and red marker, stacks of unread memos from management about uniform coding practices. On the left hand wall was the needlepoint sampler:

Running Round and Round

In Tiny Circles

At Very High Speed

Resting on the floor beneath that was Todd’s framed two-photo sequence of a Formula One racing car exploding into a wall, with tires flying like heat-seeking missiles.

Mounted on the right hand wall there was another small, pea-green printed circuit board, about five inches by ten. In the middle of the front face, dwarfing everything else, was a tiny, squat postmodern skyscraper: an inch-tall square stack of dull brown clay and shiny silver metal, about two inches on each side, that rose from the surface of the board like a colossal hotel in the desert. Thick wires of black, red, and copper were crudely soldered into the stack at various places, and capacitors and resistors joined them, all held in place by solder, black tape, transparent tape, and that snot-green glue. Atop this crude ceramic tower there was a little square well, and situated in that, connected by gold wires impossibly fine, there was a single silver iridescent chip.

A gold half-inch-square sliver was attached to the tower by a piece of tape. It bore the Digital Microsystems logo and the notations

8808V VM374

VC2964-0001 KALI 1.0

Proto USA

Nick turned his attention from the chip to the caption:

Kali - (1990- Canceled) Cache controller for the Roadrunner Workstation. A good idea one day too late. “From hush-hush to irrelevant in one incandescent whoosh.”

Donated by M. Meekman

Nick looked over his shoulder; a large photo mural of a beach covered the wall behind him at sunset. It was a remarkable illusion; even with the outline of the door clearly bounding the declining sun the mural conveyed a sense of calm, a journey’s end, a destination. He returned his gaze to the enormous reproduction of the chip that filled the wall in front of him. This shrine indeed performed spiritual work. Over the years Todd had become a memory to Nick; not even that—an abstraction, a notion. This place made him real again.

He closed his eyes against his will and tried to smile—which had the opposite effect.

“Goddamn,” Nick said. His eyes stung from the effort not to cry.

From his left he heard a single short sob. So: her irony could crack, after all.

“He’s been gone a long time, Casey,” Nick said. “You’re going to have to let him go.”

Her answer was one long exhalation. She bent down to the floor and lifted a single notebook from the top of a pile. It was one of Todd’s—Nick recognized the angular doodles that Todd had liked to draw when his mind was elsewhere. Relaxes me, Todd had said. He must have drawn hundreds of pages of doodles over his short life. Casey hugged the notebook to her chest.

“I know I know I know I know I know,” she said.

“His notebook?”

“Yeah. One of them. He kept meticulous work logs. Might was well be in Greek. I used to think there would be something in here, some clue to why he was shot. But I’ve been through them all and I couldn’t find anything.”

Nick pointed behind him, to the chip on the wall.

“That’s funny, ‘donated by M. Meekman.’ Does he know about this place?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t, the asshole. Right after he canceled that project, while Todd was still in intensive care, Monty was here collecting prototypes. He wanted all chips accounted for. I had to hide this one from him, like an innocent from Herod. If he knew it was here he would have come for it by now.”

“Why did Monty want the chips?” Nick asked. He walked closer to the circuit board, willing the Kali chip mounted on it to tell him something about what had happened to his friend, the one person on earth who had known Nick in three distinct universes: Oneonta, Africa, the Mill. In some ways, Nick realized with a doubly-sharp pain, Todd and Nick, even though they seldom saw each other and barely spoke when they did, had been every bit as close as Nick and Bartlett. But Nick’s marriage was in Limbo, Todd was in Limbo in Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital with a bullet still lodged in his brain, and Kali was saying nothing. Kali was just fucking computer chip, just an inscrutable bit of absolute geometric order etched into a fancy kind of glass mounted in a chaotic hunk of metal and cooked clay, connected to a plastic board by an ugly tangle of wires. The dawn of the information age, indeed. What information? It was all pure noise.

“Monty had some story about how we were going to buy the cache-controller from Intel”, Casey said, “and part of the deal was that we had to give them all our specs and chips for our own cache controller. He even wanted the plots,” she said and nodded at the wall. “That slimeball.”

“What’s a plot?”

“Like this here,” she said, touching the giant image of the chip on the wall in front of them and following the line of one of the etched circuits with her finger. “It’s just a picture of a chip, blown up a hundred times.” She let her hand fall. “What bullshit. Intel didn’t care about our plots. They had their own design. It’s not like they were going to reverse-engineer ours from a drawing.”

“What do you think his real reason was, then? Why did he want all the chips and plots and everything?”

“He was covering up for funny boy, you know, Michael Jackson. That co-op genius from MIT.”

“Pavel,” Nick said.

“Yeah, the shitbird. You have to understand, Pavel was hand-picked by Monty to replace me on the Kali project. So any Pavel fuckup was pretty clearly a Monty fuckup, by implication.”

“Do you really think Monty would go to all that trouble to hide one junior engineer’s mistakes? Monty was already a legend by then. He had been a legend for decades.”

“Listen,” Casey said, staring intently. “The first year Pavel was here, he was doing I-don’t-know-what. Just some stupid student intern from MIT jerking off on some logic gates or something. He was only here ten hours a week and who the hell cares what an intern does anyway? So, Todd and I started on Kali. When Todd and I were working on that chip, it was going pretty smooth. Todd used to get chips right on the first spin. They say a UNIX wizard is a guy who writes a compiler using the ‘cat’ command. That was Todd and silicon. He was the Bobby Fischer of chip design. He did the architecture on this thing, he did the geometry, he did the layout; divvied up the big chunks, figured out all the tricky timing and race conditions. Kali was going to be one cool chip. But it wasn’t revolutionary or anything. Basically it was going to make the CPU about five times more efficient by doing clever memory management. Straightforward. Then Pavel came on the project, I got kicked off, and the fucking thing goes to four spins. Four spins on a damn cache controller. And they still didn’t get it right. It looked like it was Todd’s logic that was fucked. He couldn’t figure it out. But the more I think about it, the more I think it must have been the other guy’s logic that was fucking up Todd’s. Todd never takes four spins for anything.”

“You mean ‘never took,’ not ‘never takes. He’s gone, Casey. He’s not coming back.”

“So you say.”

Nick nodded, then coughed. The air had gotten dense. Casey noticed it, too.

“Let’s scram,” she said. “The fan doesn’t work in here. They closed off the vent. No air in, no air out. If you get stuck in here, you might suffocate.”

They turned and left the cooler, Casey shutting the door behind her.

“Well anyway,” she continued. “Where was I?”

Nick was starting to feel the oppressive weight of the Mill around him. It was the Bonehead museum. It was Todd’s shrine. It was Casey’s grief. It was the marriage he had sacrificed to this stupid technology. It was all of it.

“Can we get out of here please?” Nick said. “It’s kind of creepy.”

“I don’t like to leave the Mill. It’s my fortress. But I’ll take you to happier places here. Trust me. And listen while I tell you.”

She led him down corridor after corridor illuminated by naked bulbs, over floors thick with dust, through places he felt certain had not been used since the age of water power, through cavernous rooms held up by vast timbers and rough bricks. He had completely lost his bearings and accepted the reality that he had to go where she went or be lost. So he walked beside her, and listened.

“The Kali project is on schedule, doing fine,” Casey said. “Then Monty takes me off the project, he puts Pavel on the project, and the chip slips six months and still isn’t right. We never saw Michael Jackson after Todd got shot. He never even came in to clean out his desk. Just whoosh, gonzo. And the next day here’s Monty canceling the project, looking for specs, prototypes, plots. We couldn’t even figure out how Monty got here so soon. You remember, there was a storm?

Yes, Nick remembered that storm. It covered all of New England and most of New York. It had nearly stranded Nick and his new fiancée on the wrong side of Raquette Lake, deep in the Adirondack wilderness.

“Logan was closed,” Casey went on. “They must have had planes delayed for hours. By looking at the time that Meekman showed up at the Mill, we figured he would have had to have been on the first plane that landed that morning and then raced like hell from the airport to the Mill. It was obscene. One would hope for a little more class from a Messiah.”

They’d been walking ever deeper through the forgotten parts of Mill while she talked, taking paths that Nick couldn’t retrace if he’d wanted to.

“OK, Casey. I’ll bite. Why do you call him a Messiah?”

“You never heard of the New Gospel?”

“No. What is it?” Nick was reliving the conversation with Carl Swirsing in Mad Antonio’s Nut House, when Carl had told him he was to be “anointed” and become one of Monty’s “apostles.” And now here was Casey was talking of ‘Messiahs’ and ‘New Gospels’. What the hell was going on?

“There used to be a giant loom in here,” she said, and pushed open another door into an echoing emptiness. There was no light, but she produced a small flashlight and cast it around the cathedral-like empty hall. “Built in Manchester, shipped from Liverpool, and reassembled here in 1848. A ten-ton loom. Can you imagine?”

“That’s great, Casey,” Nick said, anxious to hear the story about the New Gospel.

“And you know what else there is under one of those windows?” she said, pointing with the flashlight. “An antique bed with a feather mattress, also shipped from Manchester. Old as sin, but if you made it up with fresh clean sheets, it wasn’t a bad place to take an afternoon nap.”

“Do I understand you to say that you and Todd sometimes ‘napped’ there? Is that why you still come this way?”

He didn’t mean for his words to sound so harsh, but he knew they did. Casey took a deep breath and resumed.

“The New Gospel, right. Allegedly there was this famous computer scientist who was given a guest editorship of an issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery maybe twenty, maybe thirty years ago. He wrote a long article that had some kind of obscure title, but people quickly started calling it the New Gospel.”

“Yes dear,” Nick said with exaggerated patience. “But why did they call it that?”

“You know who Vannevar Bush was, right?”

“Vaguely.” Would she ever get to the point?

“Vannevar Bush was like Jules Verne and Leonardo, a universal genius and visionary. Twenty-five years before the first microprocessor was invented, when there were about two computers on the entire planet, Vannevar Bush predicted the Internet and the World Wide Web—he called them by different names, of course. But his descriptions were pretty right-on, fifty years ahead of his time. He looked beyond that too, to a future when people would communicate brain-to-brain, electronically.”

“Like a built-in Internet.”

“Precisely. And he predicted a digital science of thinking. Thoughts would be traceable through their evolution from one person to another. As you shared ideas they would become part of an electronic archive that he called ‘the record of the race,’ which would keep track not only of ideas, but who started them, who improved them. The best thinkers would be ‘Masters’ and the less gifted thinkers would be ‘Disciples.’ He wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly back in 1945. It’s called ‘As We May Think.’ It’s astounding. Careful here,” she said, taking his hand again.

In silence they crossed a darkened bridge that connected two unlit buildings, walked down a few flights of stairs, down a corridor or two, and then, just like that they had crossed a century and a half and were back in the modern offices of Digital Microsystems. She dropped his hand as if she were dropping an empty popcorn bag at a movie exit. They were walking through a corridor in hardware land now; the gizmos and gadgets were a dead give away. But it was eerily quiet, and Nick tried to imagine what time it was. It must be well past midnight if there were no engineers here.

“That’s the New Gospel?” Nick said, at last, picking up the thread. “The Vannevar Bush article?”

“Be patient. As We May Think is just a great piece of visionary writing. You also know who Thomas Engleton is, right? Inventor of the Engleton glove, and the brainwave parser, and the larynx sensor that knows what you’re going to say a millisecond before you say it, and about fifteen other inventions that marry people to computers?”

“Engleton wrote the New Gospel?”

“Patience, Nick. ‘Anonymous’ wrote the New Gospel. He took the ideas of Bush and Engleton to the next step: linking all the computers and people on earth into one giant organism. He called it the Overmind.”

“I’d like to read it,” Nick said, feebly, as the image of Crazy Peter Barlow turning blue crashed his senses. Overmind over us all. “Where can I get a copy?”

“You can’t. The ACM board of directors pulled the plug on the Overmind issue. Officially speaking, the New Gospel never existed. The Association for Computing Machinery went out of their way to destroy all traces of it.”

“Why? Sounds pretty fascinating.” Actually to Nick it sounded pretty terrifying, but he wanted to learn more. He needed to.

“This article talked about social policy as well as computer stuff,” She said.

“Lots of articles do that.”

“Not like the New Gospel. Apparently ‘anonymous’ embraced a very Nazi-like philosophy, a hierarchy in which some people were more valuable than others.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he was a Nazi. He might just have been a capitalist,” Nick said, trying to fill the conversational space, and quiet his memory of Monty Meekman talking about hierarchies in the minutes before the earthquake.

“No, Nazi. He proposed things like rounding up ‘unnecessary’ people to provide a supply of brains for neurophysiological research, and factories for growing fetuses to use in DNA research, and using genes from birds to grow magnets in people’s heads so that they could navigate and develop primitive radios. There were lots of other cool ideas straight from Auschwitz and de Sade, updated to reflect the latest technological developments. It’s said to be the foundational document of transhumanism.”

“And the ACM wouldn’t publish that? The cowards.”

“Legend says that copies of the original ‘anonymous’ article still exist, passed hand-to-hand like holy relics, pieces of the true cross.”

“You would think somebody would have posted it to the Internet by now.”

“According to the myth, only the initiated get to read it. Nobody else can be trusted. It will never be posted to the Net.”

Nick really disliked this legend. He had had enough of hierarchies of human worth, and of Masters and Disciples and things only the initiated get to know. He wished he had never met with Carl Swirsing yesterday. But there was no unknowing what he knew, so he asked the obvious question.

“You think that this ‘anonymous’ is Monty Meekman?”

“Genius boy,” she said. “One step ahead of me. Yes. I think Meekman wrote that article. Few people are brilliant and weird enough to have written such a thing. Monty was Engleton’s understudy for five years, and Monty’s literal godfather was, you guessed it, Vannevar Bush. So some people refer to Monty as ‘The Messiah’ and they call those drones of his—”

“The Corporate Fellows?”

“Yeah, them. They call them ‘The Apostles.’ They’re the keepers of the flame. Of course, it’s probably all bullshit, a story Monty made up and circulated about himself in order to add to his mystique. But the Vannevar Bush article is real enough. I’ve got a copy of it at my house. Why don’t you come on over and read it. I’ll make you a cup of coffee,” she said, putting her arm through his.

“Come on,” she said, giving his elbow a tug. “Live dangerously.”

He looked down at her. Was she saying what he thought she was saying?

“Can’t, Casey. Love to, but can’t.”

She shrugged and unhooked her arm. “Here, this way,” Casey said, and pushed open a door he hadn’t noticed. They emerged from the Mill out into the cold night air near the edge of the lower pool. She led him up a rocky path onto a lighted pavement, and after a few looks around he recognized First Street. Five minutes later Casey stopped walking, bringing them up just outside a big old house on the corner of Westford and Edgell Streets.

“Casey,” he said, trying to get a look at her face in the dark shadows. “Did you bring me to…?

He couldn’t even say the words.

“Nick,” she said, staring straight at him. “Let me tell you something else about Monty and the Kali project.”

“Tell me.”

“It was sabotaged. Or rather, it had a hidden function in it put there by Pavel on Meekman’s orders.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there is no other reason that Todd wouldn’t have been able to debug that race condition, the bug he called The Beast. Don’t forget that I worked with him on Kali. He knew that chip inside out, backwards and forwards. I saw it. He could debug a Kali race condition in ten seconds. Unless there was something very funky going on, wherefore we can conclude that something very funky was going on, Q.E.D. Kali was key to Roadrunner and Roadrunner was Monty’s baby and Pavel was brought onto the project expressly on Monty’s orders. Todd must have figured out what they were up to. The rest is obvious.”

“Not to me it isn’t. What is obvious?”

“Meekman shot Todd.”

Chapter 24

Christian and Janine Garbougian lived on Conwell Avenue, Somerville, near the Tufts campus in Medford. The afternoon shuttle-bus from the Medical Center to the Tufts campus left twice daily, at 4:00 and again at 6:00. Bartlett decided to take the later one.

It was 6:15 when the bus passed by the Boston Garden—the old Garden looking weary unto death in the pale light of all the construction kliegs, and the new Garden going up right alongside, its skeleton within inches of the bridge. When the bus was halfway across the Charles River the rain against its window turned to sleet; it was snowing by the time they reached Bunker Hill. They probably have five inches in Newcastle by now, Bartlett thought. Then she turned from the window and stared blankly ahead, thinking about bacteriophage.

Phage were tiny viruses that infected bacteria. Because they were such simple organisms, and harmless to humans, they had been studied in biology labs for decades—Watson and Crick had been studying bacteriophage DNA when they came to their epochal insight about how DNA molecules could carry genetic information. Bacteriophage viruses came in countless species, with names like T3, T4, and ϕχ174. These days they were produced industrially and you could order the variety that exactly fit your research needs from a commercial supplier. It would arrive via UPS the next day. Phage were as common as dirt, as exotic as skim milk. Because of their genetic simplicity, phage were the first and most-intensely studied genomes. Virtually everything learned anywhere in the first twenty-five years of research on the structure and function of DNA—from Watson and Crick until the Asilomar Conference—had come from studying bacteriophage. Bartlett’s own groundbreaking work on shifted reading frames and other clever information-encoding tricks in DNA had been done on phage. Phage attacked bacteria, period. How could Christian and Janine Garbougian possibly have thought bacteriophage were the key to the Gulf War mystery? People were not made of bacteria, after all.

The newspaper article had prompted Bartlett’s phone call, but she had lost touch with many of her old labmates after she got married and moved from MIT to Tufts, and she was glad for the excuse to go see her old friends. All this time Chris and Janine had been working just across the river, only a few miles away. If Bartlett had stayed at MIT instead of going to Irwin’s lab at the Tufts Medical Center, they might even have been her coworkers still.

Bartlett got off the bus at the Medford campus and it was an easy five-minute walk to Jay’s Deli. Chris and Janine had staked out a little booth and called to her as soon as she walked in the door. Bartlett felt a surge of joy and fairly flew to hug them, throwing back the hood of her sweatshirt as she went. In some ways it was as if she had seen them only yesterday. But oh, how they had aged. Christian’s blond hair, which he had once worn in a gorgeous ponytail, was nearly gone. Janine’s black hair had been cut short, and her face looked tired around the eyes. They were still an exceptionally good-looking couple—but they were definitely grownups, not the hot-shot kids that Bartlett had led to a stunning scientific breakthrough. Even Janine’s earrings looked like grownup earrings. Was Bartlett herself that much older?

They appeared glad to see her, but more clearly anxious to share their story.

“Do you mind talking about this?” Janine asked, flicking her eyes toward Chris. “It’s all we ever talk about, anyway. Not much else going on.”

“Not since our lab was sabotaged and our project lost its funding,” Chris added, putting his hand on top of Janine’s on the table.

“Tell me,” Bartlett said. She wasn’t in the mood for talking about herself, anyway—her failed marriage, her lonely apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. She ordered a cup of herbal tea from a very Greek looking waiter in a white apron, and Janine launched into her narrative before the tea arrived.

They had gotten into Gulf War research for an obvious reason, Janine began: it’s where the money was. Like all university scientists they spent half their lives filling out grant applications, and the NIH seemed primed for Gulf War grants. Besides, Janine’s sister Sarah had been in Tel Aviv when a SCUD fell almost on top of her, and now she was beset by skin rashes and backache that her doctor told her were caused by post-traumatic stress. If there were more to Sarah’s condition than that, Chris and Janine wanted to know what it was.

“But what made you think of looking for phage?” Bartlett said.

“We weren’t looking for phage,” husband and wife said in unison. They smiled at each other, obviously in synch. This is what marriage is supposed to be, Bartlett thought with envy. This is what I wanted to have with Nick. She took a sip of tea and focused herself again on the conversation.

“We were looking for a retrovirus,” Chris finished.

That made more sense. A doctored retrovirus—doctored to make it less dangerous for its handlers, not less noxious to its intended targets—would be a whole lot more likely than a phage for use in a biological weapon.

“We found evidence of phage by accident,” Chris said, leaning his elbows on the table. “And like the article in the Times said, almost immediately the ceiling came crashing down all around us.”

“What happened?” Bartlett asked.

“We thought we found phage in the blood of five different soldiers,” Janine said. “It seemed odd, and we were confused. So we posted a little note to the Internet asking if anybody else had found the same thing—”

Chris picked up her thought.

“The next day when we came into work the freezer was off, all our samples were melted—”

“The files on our computer were corrupted, and the box of backups had a magnet sitting next to it—”

“The head of the department asked for a review of our project, and the next day he announced that our methodology invalidated any results we might have had.”

“I can’t believe you would use poor methodology,” Bartlett said.

These had been two of the most methodical people on a very methodical team.

“It was our experimental design that they jumped on, not our lab technique. Our first approximation was seat-of-the-pants,” Christian said. “We figured that if we found anything interesting, we would bring a biostatistician on board to design a more rigorous approach. After all, if it looked like we had gotten a fix on Gulf War Syndrome, finding additional funding wouldn’t be a problem—”

“We knew, of course, that we had to work with numbered samples only, to prevent us from projecting what we expected to see. But we didn’t think that meant that we couldn’t meet any of the soldiers. There was no quicker or easier way to get the histories than to take them ourselves—”

“That sounds reasonable to me,” Bartlett said. Or did it? People designed experiments in many ways, making it more of an art than a science.

“It didn’t sound reasonable to our review board.” Janine said. “They raked us over the coals. Not only for the experimental design, but for the loss of our samples, not having backup copies of our files . . .” She trailed off, then started again. “Let me tell you the oddest thing. It just happened today. It’s really unbelievable and we have no idea what to make of it. The chairman of our department, the very guy who has been calling for our heads, took us aside and told us that Hoff-Zeigy Pharmaceutical Corporation—”

“The one in Basel?” Bartlett asked, thinking immediately of Paul, of the fantasy she’d had the night before. She felt herself flush, and a wave of guilt—of betrayal—washed over her.

“Yes, of course,” Chris said, taking over from Janine. “Hoff-Zeigy has endowed a chair at MIT, and our department chairman more or less said that we could share it.”

“Let me guess,” Bartlett said. “You could have the endowed chair, but only if you stopped your inquiry into Gulf War Syndrome?”

“Exactly!” Janine said. “So on the one hand, ‘We’re ready to fire you for incompetence,’ and on the other hand, ‘We nominate you for this high honor as long as you stop what you’re doing.’”

The story of the endowed chair was intriguing, but for the moment Bartlett was more interested in the science than the politics. She still had questions about the research her friends claimed to have been doing.

“Are you sure that you didn’t somehow contaminate the samples?” she asked.

She was having a hard time getting over the idea of phage protein in soldier blood. And she was wondering if the critics were right, that the experimental design was fundamentally flawed because the researchers had interviewed the subjects.

“That was our first thought,” Chris said, “that we had contaminated our samples. But that wasn’t possible because the phage protein we found was from a strain of bacteriophage that we’ve never used in our lab. It was a version from Hoff-Zeigy Laboratory Products Division. Each variant is well marked; you know that. This particular little guy has an extra carboxyl group right at the end of the alpha helix. It’s like a billboard, you can’t miss it. So we were sure it was phage protein, we knew where it came from, and we were certain that we hadn’t put it there.”

“So, however unlikely it sounded,” Janine picked up her husband’s thought, “we had to explore the possibility that maybe bacteriophage had caused Gulf War Syndrome. And maybe specifically a Hoff-Zeigy phage had caused it. After all, why couldn’t you build a biological agent based on a phage?”

“Good question,” Bartlett said. “And there are a couple of good answers. One: phage attack bacteria, they don’t attack human cells. Two: phage cannot survive in the human system. Three: there is no epidemiology that has ever associated outbreak of illness with exposure to phage. Four: every molecular biology laboratory in the world uses phage. Countless scientists have exposed themselves to phage infection. But we do not see an outbreak of Gulf War Syndrome in biology departments. Five: phage used in research have been engineered to die outside of the most extremely limiting test tube conditions—”

Chris interrupted. He seemed annoyed at Bartlett’s tone.

“Sure, we know it sound ridiculous, that bacteria-infecting viruses had somehow been modified to infect humans,” he said. “But nobody was having any luck with any other explanation for Gulf War Syndrome, unless you count that fertilizer-insecticide work, and that seemed dubious. People talk about nerve gas, mustard gas, anthrax—but there’s no physical evidence that soldiers were exposed to any of those things. And even if they were exposed, the symptoms that the veterans report don’t match with nerve gas or anthrax or any of that stuff.

“But why phage?” Bartlett said.

Chris tapped his hand on the tabletop, rapidly, three times. “Here’s a challenge,” he said. “If you were captured by a mad dictator and ordered to engineer a variant of bacteriophage that could work as a biological weapon, could you do it? I know you wouldn’t do it, but just play along. Could you do it? “

That was one way of looking at it, Bartlett thought. She considered the question. All around her the patrons and staff of Jay’s Deli went about their business, ordering, cooking, serving and eating pastrami and coffee and cheeseburgers and cheesecake and eggs without end, breakfast served all day. If anybody were eavesdropping, Bartlett wondered, what were the odds they could see the implications of the ideas she was being offered by her friends? If phage could be engineered to attack people, a whole new class of biological weapon existed—one for which there was no ready defense. If bacteriophage were the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, what did that mean? Could you catch it from a Gulf War vet? Was Gulf War Disease truly dangerous, or just a nuisance, like a cold? Would it become an epidemic? A million questions raced through Bartlett’s mind, none of them comforting.

“I suppose you could engineer phage to attack people,” she admitted. “You could also breed alligators thirty feet long in the sewers of Manhattan.” She paused. “I guess. Neither outcome seems very likely to me. Phage are so weak. Attack by bacteriophage would be like attack by wet noodle.”

“Precisely,” Chris said, with unusual intensity. “But that got us to thinking about it. If we wanted to devise a biological warfare agent that nobody could find, how would we do it? We would start with a very small agent, and a very weak one. It would be like invisible ink. It wouldn’t last very long in the body, just long enough to cause some symptoms in some of the affected population. The symptoms would be so weak that many people would deny they existed at all. This would be a great morale attacker. Soldiers would fear it, but the military brass would not be convinced that it even existed. You see? It’s as much a psychological weapon as a battlefield killing weapon. How would we build such a thing? With a tiny thing not associated with harm to people: bacteriophage.”

“That’s ingenious,” Bartlett said. “But I still suspect hammer-nail syndrome.”

An odd sensation crept over Bartlett as she realized where she was: she was home, where she belonged but had not been for years. The restaurant wasn’t home; the conversation was. This was like being back in the old days: in a coffee shop—surrounded by undergraduates earnestly talking about sex, music and sports—Chris, Janine and Bartlett were earnestly talking about phage.

“So where do things stand now?”

“We’re on administrative leave at half pay pending peer review of our work.”

“Oh, guys!” Bartlett said, and put her hands out to touch theirs. It was time to stop judging them and start showing some sympathy.

“The worst thing is not that we’re under a cloud,” Janine said. “The worst thing is that we don’t know whether we’re crazy.”

Chris was obviously agitated. “The instant we discover a Hoff-Zeigy strain of phage in Gulf vets, Hoff-Zeigy endows a chair for us—and at the same time our work runs into several coincidental accidents and we become subjects of an inquisition. So we start to wonder: is somebody trying to shut us up? Who, Hoff-Zeigy? But Hoff-Zeigy is the one Swiss pharmaceutical company that everybody agrees is squeaky clean—no deals with Iraq, no Nazi skeletons in the closet—”

“Paul works there now,” Bartlett interjected, without intending to.

Janine seemed to hear, but Chris didn’t.

“Paul?” she said.

“You remember, Nick’s brother. The lab.”

Janine smiled. “I remember. He works for Hoff-Zeigy now?”

“A big wig,” she said. “Business development something or other. I was supposed to call him about funding for The Neuro Group, but I haven’t yet. I’m glad I waited.”

“There’s more,” Chris said. “Hoff-Zeigy seems clean, but their vice-chairman was involved in the BCCI bank scandal, and so were the CIA, Noriega, and Saddam Hussein. So on the one hand we feel like we may have stumbled on something very sinister, a pharmaceutical giant developing a brand new kind of weapon, selling it to Iraq and then blackmailing a university to shut up the scientists who discover it, and on the other hand we can almost understand why the department would want to shut us down. With our discovery of phage they may think they have a ‘cold fusion’ situation on their hands, or an alien abductionist. They might really believe we’ve gone around the bend. Other places might put up with some borderline crackpot scientists, but not MIT. Plus, ever since that article appeared in the New York Times, every Gulf War fruitcake wants us for his poster children.”

Chris tapped the table again, and leaned back.

“We’re swamped with e-mail, Bartlett,” Janine said. “Half of it says, ‘You’re right! You’re right! It is phage, and it was developed by aliens that landed at Roswell.’ And the other half says ‘Do me a favor. Go buy a biology textbook, you dumb stupid cunt.’”

Bartlett had to laugh.

“What?” Chris said, frowning.

“Stop reading your email,” she said. “People don’t know anything. Listen, if you say you found phage, you found phage. You’re two of the most talented, most dedicated scientists I know. You’re not crazy. You’re doing science, and science is political. Just try to relax. I’m sure it will work out.”

They smiled simultaneously, and both a little sadly.

“Thanks Bartlett,” Janine said.

“We hope so,” Chris said, holding Janie’s hand.

Chapter 25

Snow enveloped the enormous Tudor edifice, softening its curves, smoothing its shadows, somehow dimming its grandeur, in the night, like a death shroud on a once-feared king. It blew off the slate eaves and gables in spectacular flares all the way to the intersection of Westford and Edgell Streets, where it entered the street lamp’s serenely illuminated cone and coasted gently down to rest. A Himalayan drift stretched from halfway up the mansion’s four-foot-wide oaken front door all the way to the white mountain that the snowplows had made at the corner of the yard. Another springtime blizzard was upon Newcastle. Nick Aubrey and Casey Montgomery stood looking at the place where their friend had been shot, oblivious to the storm.

“It’s still empty, isn’t it?” Nick asked. “It looks so desolate.”

“Yes,” Casey said. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a market for giant old drafty mansions where the last tenant took a bullet in the head.”

It had been during such a storm that Todd had been effectively murdered, at the burnt-out end of March, 1990, while, two hundred miles away in the middle of the Adirondack forest, Nick had kept a promise to his mother and Bartlett had agreed to be his wife. God, what a woman, Nick thought. She had brought champagne to toast their engagement before Nick had even been aware that he was going to propose. She knew him so much better than he knew himself. And she had loved him. She had walked through the door in the middle of the night and straight into his soul, showing him places within himself that he had never known were there. At dawn she had finally let him go to sleep. But only for an hour. Snow was falling and they were in a race condition, in real danger of being trapped and freezing or starving to death. It wasn’t only that driving through a blizzard would be nearly impossible. Nobody knew they were there at the old church campground. If the lake froze up before they got back to the other side, they would die trying to cross it.

When Nick and Bartlett finally made it back to Newcastle after 14 hours of hellacious winter driving there was a message on their machine to contact the Newcastle Police. The Police told Nick that Todd Griffith had been shot in the back of the head at about 5 a.m. with a silenced nine-millimeter handgun from a distance of three inches, a botched execution, and they wanted to ask Nick, said to be one of Todd’s closer friends, whether Todd had any enemies and if he did drugs. Two days later it had been seventy degrees out, and Nick had stood in a tee shirt outside the yellow crime-scene tape that surrounded Todd’s house—the Tudor building right in front of him now—as the police watched footprints and tire tracks melt into nothingness.

It had been years since Nick had given any thought to the mystery of who had shot his best friend. Now, with Todd’s lover’s face showing nothing in the shadows and with her arm through his, Nick looked at the window through which the would-be murderer had climbed, and he tried to decide if it really could have been the little billionaire pipsqueak Monty Meekman who had pulled the trigger.

Nick finally realized what had been going on for the last few days, ever since Carl had called him. He had been going insane. And now the process was complete.

“Meekman shot Todd?” he echoed Casey.

“Oh I can’t prove it, of course,” Casey said. “But dig it, OK? The police established that Todd’s last phone call was to Monty, at 9 p.m. Todd must have told him something that made Monty think he had to kill him. That’s the reason he arrived at the Mill so early on the day that Todd was found dead. He was already here.”

Todd’s last call had been to Meekman at 9 p.m., and he had sent Nick the cryptic e-mail, “I fear these things,” at nine-eleven. What had Todd been trying to tell him?

I fear these things.

Nick remembered when Todd had first uttered those words, during that trek with the famine relief convoy that they had made together through the Sahara all that infinite time ago. They took turns driving a truck full of emergency food rations—sorghum and dates and figs and corn-soya-milk, trying not to lose sight of the trucks ahead when the sand blasted up in sudden mini tornadoes. One night after sixteen hours of shared driving Todd found a scorpion in his sleeping mat as he unrolled it, exhausted, for another night under the impossibly bright stars of the desert sky: “I fear these things,” Todd said, before smashing it with his shoe.

What other things had Todd feared? At the time that Nick had read the note he hadn’t been able to think of anything Todd might have been afraid of, but now he was beginning to wonder if Todd had been referring to Meekman.

Meekman, like a scorpion in the bed.

Nick was in no mental condition to accept this line of thinking. Not now, maybe not ever. It had to be wrong, because if it were right the implications were unthinkable.

“It isn’t possible,” Nick said. “Todd was shot in the middle of the night. Logan Airport was closed for several hours. It was impossible for Meekman to get here from California. The first flights came in late, delayed because of the snowstorm. You already told me that.”

“The corporate jet, Nick. With a good tail wind that Gulfstream can cross the country in four and a half hours. Commercial flights were delayed, sure, but if Monty came on the Dijjy-Mike jet he could have gotten here before the airports shut down. He wouldn’t even have had to land at Logan. The jet could have landed at Hanscom, which is closer to Newcastle. That would have generated another hour.”

“So you’re saying that Meekman fired up the jet, raced out here, and murdered Todd? Why? And anyway, if Meekman wanted Todd dead, wouldn’t it have been easier to hire somebody to do the deed?”

“Easier, but Meekman’s insane. He might have actually enjoyed being the triggerman.”

“That’s sick,” Nick said.

“Tell me about it. What if Todd discovered something in the chip, a hidden function—you know, a Trojan horse, like that RARP trap door that you found in the mail daemon?”

Nick felt the hair on his arms stand up.

“How do you know about that?”

Was there anything she didn’t know about him? he wondered.

“Bugtrack, Nick. Any engineer can read bug reports. But that’s not the point. What if Monty instructed Pavel to insert a trap door in Kali, but Todd figured it out?”

Nick felt cold and not cold, sleepy and alert, calm and panicky. His stomach was a mess. He was a mess.

“Have you ever told the police this hypothesis?”

“Sure.” Casey said. “I told the police what I thought about Meekman. But neither Logan nor Hanscom had any record of the Dijjy-Mike jet landing. They checked all the airports that can handle that size jet. No record of it. Case closed.”

“You think Monty covered his tracks,” Nick said. “If he did it, that is.”

“Two things Monty Meekman is not: he is not stupid. And he is not careless.”

Nick looked back at the house. Even in the dark he could see that blinds were drawn on all the windows. He wondered if Todd’s housemates had moved out right away, after Todd was shot. Probably, he decided. Nobody wants to live in a house where somebody got shot in the head.

“Gulfstream jet?” Nick said.

“Four and a half hours from San Jose to the Gardner navigation beacon,” she said.

Nick remembered standing on the guardrail two days ago, the smile on Monty’s face after the earthquake. He knew Meekman could kill by keeping his mouth shut when he should have spoken. But that was a coward’s way of murder: murder by inaction, murder by abstraction. If Meekman was anything, Nick thought, he was an intellectual. Cold-blooded? Obviously. But a hit man? That was a stretch. Meekman was 100% pure geek. And geeks were, with a few notable exceptions, physically chickenshit. Chickenshits didn’t climb into people’s rooms and shoot them in the head. On the other hand, chickenshits didn’t stand atop guardrail posts overlooking a thousand-foot cliff when they know an earthquake might happen at any moment.

“Meekman might have ordered Todd’s death,” Nick said, trying to convince himself. “But pull the trigger? I doubt it.”

“No you don’t,” she said.

Nick thought he saw a light flickering in one of the rooms, a person moving. Now you’re seeing ghosts, he said to himself. Snow continued to fall. He needed to get away from here.

“Aren’t you cold, Casey?” he said.

“Freezing. Be a gentleman. Walk me home.” She put her arm through his.

They strode in silence down the streets that ringed the Mill. Nick’s mind had reached overload and he was focusing his full attention on the snow and the sound of their footsteps. There was no room for any thoughts of murder plots, or ghosts. Casey seemed as comfortable saying nothing as she did in conversation. They walked arm in arm for fifteen minutes without saying a thing.

She stopped at the entrance to the Newcastle Hotel.

“Here you are, esquire,” she said.

“How did you know?” he said. How did she know? He hadn’t told anybody he was moving here. Had she seen his ransacked house? Had she been stalking him? Could she have been the one who had done it? That was a paranoid thought, and he knew it. But still, it was there. And by the way, how had she just happened to show up in the Newcastle Diner after having not seen Nick in years?

“Pure chance,” she said. “I happened to be walking down the street when I saw you walk through the door hotel door. I had heard a rumor that your wife had moved out. It’s none of my business, but I thought that after losing your job and all, I should at least offer condolences.” She looked so innocent and earnest, so friendly, that he was suddenly nearly overcome with the idea of opening up to her, telling her everything that had happened today, yesterday, over the last few months since Bartlett had moved out, over the last six years. He was so lonely! Lonely and scared.

“Casey,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say next.

“Good to see you, Nick,” she said. “Don’t go do anything stupid tonight. I’m beginning to like you.”

She punched him on the shoulder, not hard but with purpose. Then she raised herself on tip-toe as if she wanted to whisper to him, but instead she kissed him on the cheek.

“I know you loved Todd,” she whispered in his ear. “It was good trip down memory lane, anyway.” She took a step away, smiled that downturned smile, then turned her back on Nick and walked up the street.

Chapter 26

At 13:30 in the afternoon, after being in the lab since 1:30 in the morning, Dieter still sat in front of the Dijjy-Mike graphics workstation. He hadn’t moved in the last three hours; his hands were still on his lap. Complete inertia.

He pushed back his chair, and forced himself out of his office, down one flight of stairs. As always, he took the route that cut across the molecular genetics laboratory on the third floor. Once upon a time Dieter had worked in labs like this, with colleagues like the white-smocked scientists who worked here, amid these pungent smells. These days Dieter worked mostly alone—just him and sometimes Pavel; the molecules Dieter worked with were odorless, virtual molecules made of virtual atoms, simulations on a computer screen. Maybe that was why he walked through this laboratory twice daily—to remind himself that a real world truly did exist, a world in which human beings used all the senses, sometimes even to communicate with each other.

The lab was the same as it always was, but today he was seeing it with new eyes. Technicians in white lab coats were tidying their already orderly lab benches, preparing ice baths or Luria broths amid the smells of ethers, mercaptans, and alcohols. Doodles—chemical equations, structures, formulae written in marker pen—filled the glass doors of the enclosed hoods used for work with dangerous evaporators. Ceiling ducts pulled away the fumes, and the enclosed hoods hummed. Dieter liked it here; his worries became lost in the noises of the laboratory: the whirr of a centrifuge down the hall, the rattle of a shake table, a faucet turned on, a fan humming. In a few minutes he was at the lab’s far side, running his feet past the Geiger counter at the door to check his feet for trace P34 before leaving.

But where would he go? All he knew was home, such as it was, and the laboratory. He had become an indoorsman, if there could be such a thing. The molecular biology lab comforted him more than rivers, birds, trees and clouds. He would go there and strike up a conversation with some junior scientist, find out what she or he was working on. By engaging his mind with somebody else’s puzzle perhaps he could free himself, if only briefly, from his own.

Then he realized, he had been putting off what he knew he had to do. He had to talk to this man Paul Aubrey.

He had no idea where Aubrey might be in the eighteen-building complex that was the central office of Hoff-Zeigy Pharmaceuticals. Quel drole de type que je suis, he thought. What a funny little man I am. I have worked here all these years and I know nothing about the place. How does one go about finding Herr Paul Aubrey among all these buildings, all these employees?

He walked across the parking lot to the guard station and asked for directions. Ten minutes later he was on the fourth floor of the Executive Building, standing before Fraulein Claire Mason, secretary to Herr Aubrey. She would see if he was available for an unscheduled visitor, she said, if Herr Doktor Steffen would care to be seated.

Two minutes later Paul Aubrey emerged from his office. He was wearing a double-breasted suit; his styled hair was black with some hints of gray, as was his closely-cropped beard. American, Dieter thought.

“Hello Doctor Steffen, Paul Aubrey. I was wondering when I might meet you,” he said, putting out his hand toward Dieter.

That American presumption of friendship, the clasp that squeezed his knuckles as if a handshake were a test of strength: so far Aubrey was true to form.

“I may as well get to the point, Mr. Aubrey,” Dieter said. “It comes to my attention that you are seeking a partner with whom Hoff-Zeigy can collaborate on nanomechanical systems; a partner that can provide a research capability on the human genome. Am I correct?”

“Doctor Steffen,” Paul said, neutrally. “Please come in. Sit down.”

Paul led him in to the office.

Dieter took in the surroundings: glass windows formed two of the four walls; one of them gave a view across the river, the other peered down on the Old City. A modernist desk sat squarely in the middle of the room, with a single high-backed leather swivel chair behind it. Along the wall that wasn’t glass there was a long cabinet made of dark wood, clearly custom-made and expensive, and to the right of that a single shelf with a few books and a few photos. Clean, spare, tasteful, and expensive. There were three guest chairs.

This Paul Aubrey was clearly a man with a sense of who he was, and a man used to power.

Dieter perched himself uncomfortably on the edge of a chair.

“You are correct,” Aubrey started. “On behalf of Hoff-Zeigy, I am looking for an appropriate partner with whom to share the work of the NanoSection. I have just returned from a trip to America to do just that, in fact.” He paused as if weighing his words. “To make something practical,” he continued, “we need a partner who is as far ahead in human genome work as you are in nanotechnology. Together, we can create a universal drug, something that will revolutionize medicine more than antibiotics, vaccines and anesthesia combined. It will be worth billions. And it will win for you the Nobel Prize in Medicine.”

“That is a long way off,” Dieter said.

“We’ll never know unless we try,” Aubrey said. His voice sounded formal and confident, but his face looked pained as he spoke. “The corporation has decided that the time has come to reach out.”

“And what of me, whose work you propose to sell. Were you planning to keep me in the dark indefinitely?”

“At some point Hoff-Zeigy must get something for all its expense, don’t you agree?”

No, I do not agree, Dieter thought. He was a scientist advancing human knowledge, not a financial instrument whose maturity date was approaching.

And now, on the threshold of a new world—a world of his own creation—he was experiencing what the Americans called ‘cold feet.’ But was Paul Aubrey, corporate venture capitalist, the person with whom to share his worries? All Aubrey seemed to care about was the return on investment, the billions to be made. Dieter thought about ending his visit right there. Conversation was hard for him, and confrontation was harder still. But he had come this far, he had to speak his mind.

“There are grave dangers here, Herr Aubrey. It is one thing to create ‘toys’ in simulation, and quite another to build them and release them into the world.”

There, he had said it. Sort of.

“Any new technology brings dangers with it,” Aubrey said. “When it was proposed to electrify New York City a hundred years ago, the anti-electricity people used to electrocute a dog every day in Central Park just to show how dangerous electricity was. And they were right. Electricity is very dangerous. Would you have been with the dog killers a hundred years ago?”

“Perhaps,” Dieter said, as he rose from his seat. “Thank you for your time, Herr Aubrey. I will ask that you keep confidential the fact that we have spoken.”

Paul Aubrey looked at him quizzically for a second.

“Well then,” he said. “It was a pleasure to finally meet you, Doctor Steffen.”

“Good day, Mr. Aubrey,” Dieter said.

Aubrey walked around the desk toward the door, but he didn’t open the door. Instead, he paused in front of it, searching Dieter’s eyes. His face registered some sort of internal struggle, but after a very brief moment he held out his hand again to shake.

“Let us continue this conversation at another time,” he said.

“Certainly,” Dieter said. But he was far from certain. He was unsure of everything—of his research, of the future, of the nature of this man standing in front of him. Friend or foe? Aubrey squeezed his knuckles again, smiled, and let go.

Dieter returned to the third floor laboratory to find the usual cadre of scientists gone, and a small army of technicians in white lab coats, rubber gloves, goggles and gas masks hurriedly packing the contents of the lab into boxes marked with warnings of chemical and biological hazards.

“Excuse me,” he said, interrupting one of the lab technicians. He used English, the lingua franca of the lab. The technician looked up at him, annoyed. “This morning you seemed to be working. Now you seem to be moving the lab?”

The technician nodded. “We do what they tell us to do,” he said in a thick accent.

“And what did they tell you to do?”

“They told me to pack this box,” the technician said. “And so I am packing this box. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

In dismay, Dieter walked through the commotion, unnoticed, as a scuba diver might pass through a school of hammerheads.

Hours later, still staring blankly at his screen, he could hear an incessant hammering and whining of motors coming up through the floor. Immediately below him the molecular biology laboratory was being demolished. Presumably, to make room for something.

What?

Chapter 27

Bartlett Aubrey put on her skates and headed out for her fifty-minute lunchtime exercise. The air was cool, but not cold. Thirty miles to the west, in Newcastle, there probably was lots of snow on the ground, but in Boston it had all melted already. The storm had been more rain than snow here, and spring was in the air. As soon as Bartlett started moving she felt warm enough to take off her outer layer and tie it around her waist. About halfway into the skate, her mind went blank, the way she liked it when she was working hard. But then, heading back in the general direction of the Medical Center, she began to think about the box that had arrived that day, and which Irwin had put in the freezer for her. Sarah’s blood. Sarah, Janine’s sister, who had been in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War when one of Saddam’s SCUD missiles exploded nearby. Sarah, who now appeared to have Gulf War Syndrome—whatever that was. Just before she went out for her exercise, Bartlett had made a gel to isolate the proteins in that blood. By the time she showered and got back to work, the gel would be finished. And then what . . .? Either Janine and Chris were right, or they weren’t the scientists Bartlett knew them to be.

Bartlett was trying to get back to that mellow empty-headed roller-blading Zen-state, but it was hopeless. The thought was there now, useless to fight it. She couldn’t make herself stop trying to understand how phage protein could appear in human blood. Maybe, it occurred to her, phage protein in the blood didn’t mean infection by phage after all. Maybe the phage protein was an artifact of something else.

What if there were some new little life-forms somewhere in these soldiers, she thought, not reproducing, not setting off the immune system, just living undetected and generating phage proteins? Little machines, microscopic little factories, producing phage proteins.

Yes. And what if there’s a teeeeeny-tiny little man in there with a leeetle-tiny radio transmitter sending messages to the president about the price of grapefruit? Do me a favor, go buy a biology textbook you dumb stupid cunt.

After her shower she went back to her lab bench. She pulled up a stool and half stood, half sat as she picked up the negative, a still-wet image on x-ray film stock the size of a sheet of typing paper. She held it up to the light from the window and looked at the image: little black bands a quarter of an inch across at irregular intervals in ten numbered columns across the sheet. She had made and studied a thousand such sheets as an undergraduate, grad student, post-doctoral fellow in Molecular Biology. She knew how to make a gel, and how to read an x-ray of one. She knew the patterns of the reference proteins better than she knew her own face. That’s why column seven bothered her. The spacing of its black bands had not changed during the hour she had been roller skating. Nor had the identity of the protein that it identified changed during that hour, any more than her own fingerprints had. Column seven was an old friend. Column seven was T4. Bacteriophage.

Dr. Irwin Goldberg, her ever-supportive boss, had said, “If you find phage, you had better double-check your results before showing them to me, because I am a skeptic.” So she double-checked, then checked again. She was sure.

Breathing hard, she stood at Dr. Goldberg’s door for just a moment, then walked in without knocking. He was reading the newspaper, and only glanced at her for a second before going back to his reading.

“Hello Bartlett,” he said.

“I know you’re skeptical, so I want you to do a gel on this sample yourself.”

Irwin put the paper down on his desk. He looked like he was thinking hard, searching for the exactly right words.

“Bartlett, tell me something,” he said, and thoughtfully took a bite out of a tuna sandwich.

“Yes?” she said.

Was he going to point out that he didn’t appreciate desperation ploys like having him do a gel for her when they weren’t even working on this project?

Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, he finished chewing and wiped his lips with a paper napkin.

“What the hell should the Red Sox do about Jose Canseco?” he said.

“Ask me after spring training,” she said quickly, as if answering a child’s insistent question while navigating the Fresh Pond rotary at rush hour. “Dr. Goldberg, will you run this gel for me, please?”

“Alright, Dr. McGovern. I will run your gel. Kindly allow me a few minutes to finish reading the box scores.”

“Here’s the blood,” she said, and stood the test tube of blood in an empty coffee cup, miraculously clean, that sat atop a pile of photocopied articles from Cell and Journal of Virology. “And remember: Grapefruit League games don’t mean anything. Reading box scores in spring training is a waste of time.”

She felt relieved yet anxious: relieved that Irwin had agreed to do the gel and confirm her finding; anxious that he would not find what she had found—that by some inexplicable mix-up she had contaminated her sample, and that Irwin would prove it. Because despite the evidence, she was having a hard time believing that she had actually found phage protein in Janine’s sister’s blood.

“Some interesting news, by the way,” Irwin said, picking up the sample.

“Oh?”

“An emissary from Hoff-Zeigy visited The Neuro Group’s president Dr. Simpson yesterday to deliver this letter expressing interest in exploring equity participation.” He said, waving a sheet at her. “Which I understand means they give us money in return for our firstborn children. You were going to get in touch with your contact there. Have you?”

“No,” Bartlett said, hesitantly. She had been meaning to call Paul, but she dragged her feet for a day or two, and then Judith Knight came to talk with her, and then Janine and Chris had told her about Hoff-Zeigy’s phage markers, and, well, she’d never made the call. “I’ll do it today,” she said.

“No need,” Irwin replied. “Their man in charge of joint ventures flew over expressly to introduce himself. Paul Aubrey. Evidently they are very interested and their pockets are very deep.” Irwin paused. “There’s a conference in California next week where the people with the money go to meet the scientists with the ideas. In my day we had the Catskills. That’s a joke. We were wondering, how would you like to go on behalf of The Neuro Group? You’re on the board of directors, after all. Mr. Aubrey plans to be there.”

Bartlett was on The Neuro Group’s board of directors, but so were eleven other people, including Irwin himself.

“Me? Why me?” she said.

“We think you need to get out more. But in truth it was the coincidence of name of the person who delivered the offer that put us in mind of it.”

Uh-oh.

“Paul Aubrey?” Dr. Goldberg asked, and looked at her meaningfully, as a parent might look at a young child trying to hide something.

“My brother in law,” she admitted.

“You’re not close, I take it?”

“Long story,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“The conference is next week. Paul Aubrey indicated that he has reserved a spot for a Neuro Group representative. So, I guess that means you have a week to decide.”

Bartlett nodded.

“You can say no, Bartlett,” Irwin said. He really is like a father to me, she thought. He’s always looking out for me.

“I just need to think about it first.”

She left his office, more confused and unsettled than when she had walked in, and made her way to her own lab.

At 1:15 she sat before the Digital Microsystems computer with her right hand on the mouse, poised and ready to click on bionet.protein.synthesis. What should she have said to Irwin? Yes, that’s my brother in law, with whom I made love? Or, Please send me to California to meet Paul, I’ve been thinking of him a lot lately?

She banished Paul Aubrey from her mind and spent the next several hours reading bionet newsgroups when she should have been working, nervously awaiting Irwin’s verdict. At four o’clock she stood and stretched. If he had forced the gel it might be ready by now. She went in search of him and found him coming down the hall with a film in his hands, dripping. He was not wearing gloves. Irwin and chemicals, she thought. He was ignoring 6 safety protocols and breaking 2 laws. Good thing he did so little teaching; he set a terrible example. But she was glad that he had rushed the job. Both because she wanted the result, and because it meant he took her seriously.

“I owe you a nickel,” he said, holding up the gel film. “Phage tail fibers.”

“That’s what I got too,” she said.

“So. T4 phage protein from human blood,” Irwin said. “Have you determined what strain of phage it is?”

“It has a Hoff-Zeigy marker,” Bartlett said. “You can precipitate it right out; it’s like they’re putting on a neon-colored shirt.”

Neither spoke for a half a minute. The developing chemicals dripped slowly off the film onto the linoleum floor.

“Well, this is certainly curious,” Irwin said. “But it hardly seems like it’s time to call up the CDC or quarantine the army. I suppose I should make an inquiry on the Internet.”

“No!” she said, then collected herself. “Those friends of mine at MIT made a simple internet post—and it may eventually wind up costing them their tenure. I have another idea.”

“Oh?” Irwin said, raising his eyebrows.

He waited for her to elaborate.

This was the point, she thought. The point she couldn’t go back from. She decided to take the leap, and she opened her mouth to speak. “About California,” she said. She cleared her throat. “I’d love to go to that conference. Maybe my brother in law can help us out.”

Chapter 28

Dieter Steffen lay on his bed in the dark, staring at the glowing red numbers. It was 4:02 Basel local time. Why did he even bother lying down? He had always found it hard to sleep, but even for an insomniac like himself this unyielding wakefulness was extreme. It had gone on for a week—over and over the same thoughts cycled: Judith Knight, Paul Aubrey, Pavel Isaacs. Night after night, just two hours of wretched writhing with his eyes closed in a Jacques Tati pantomime of sleep. His body had determined the absolute minimum of rest on which it could maintain homeostasis and a pulse, and that was all it was going to give him. Sheiese. He got up and got dressed.

Half an hour later Dieter was in his office. Why the hell had he ever gone to see Aubrey? It had only made things worse. Now Dieter only felt more exposed, and no closer to understanding what he needed to do. Maybe he should consult, one time, with Dr. Knight. Then he would make up his mind about continuing with the nanomachine project. He opened his center desk drawer and looked for the business card that Judith had written her email address on.

What had she said, that he should use the CIPHER command? Or was it DISGUISE? Such a bother. He knew how to use the Digital Microsystems workstation for molecular modeling: ensconced in data gloves, headphones, three-D visor, foot cradle, he became one with the machine. But it had been years since he had used the computer for anything else. So it was possible that he would find the right manuals, type the right incantations, and send a message to Judith Knight. But what would he say?

The torment continued all day. The sun rose. The sun set. He saw none of it.

At nine that evening, he could withstand it no more. He decided. He owed his loyalty to the company, and that was it.

At 21:00 Basel local time, Herr Doctor Dieter Steffen, Ph.D. walked into the office of Herr Doctor Pavel Isaacs, Ph.D.; Director of the NanoSection. Dieter was going to see Pavel, his friend. Pavel, with whom he had shared pizza at 4 AM in the Molecular Computation lab at MIT. Pavel, who had understood his ideas. Pavel, who had shared Dieter’s dream for more than six years. Pavel, the smartest person he had ever met. Pavel, his best and only friend.

He told Pavel the answer. He explained how he had modified the Orthogonal Diels-Alder adduct so that it could work as a non-immunogenic gate for a phage-like tube through the buckminsterfullerene shell. He gave him the last piece to the puzzle.

“Good,” Pavel said. “Good work.”

He had never seen Pavel smile that way before.

“Thank you,” Dieter said.

It was done. He went home, got in bed, and slept for twenty-seven hours.

Chapter 29

Nick woke up in his dreary Newcastle Hotel room far earlier than he wanted to, tired from a night spent dreaming about standing on a hilltop with Meekman and feeling the earth shake. Todd had been in the dream, too, but they were in Africa, and the dream didn’t make sense, and Nick didn’t want to be in the dream anymore.

“Shit,” he said, sitting up. What was he supposed to do from here? Solve Todd’s shooting, get Bartlett back, find a new job, rebuild his life. “And transmute lead to gold,” he said, aloud.

How about first things first, he asked himself. How about we shower and shave and put on some clean clothes. He’d been wearing the same outfit for what, four days now?

He went to his bag, took out everything in it, to make sure. Nope. No clean underwear, no razor, no clean socks. That’s what you get when you pack your bag in a ransacked house after a day filled with insanity, murder, suicide. He went to the bathroom and forced himself to look at his reflection in the mirror. Aging, not old yet but getting there. Sad, baggy eyes, and a bowery-bum’s four-day beard. He made a face, contorting his features like a gargoyle, then relaxed back. The four day growth didn’t help things. He couldn’t go around Newcastle looking like this. He still had his pride, goddammit. He put on the clothes he had worn yesterday and the two days before, grabbed a cup of coffee from the diner downstairs, and walked back to his house, liking the early hour and the feeling of snow crunching under his feet on unshoveled sidewalks. Lingering clouds blocked the sun, making it seem like dusk.

From the hotel to his house was a fifteen-minute walk. By the time he got there, the sun had come from under the clouds and the air had warmed by at least a degree. His breath preceded him up the street. His house, the one he had shared with Bartlett, was just a block or so away now. How many times had they walked these streets? Arm in arm, out late, talking. His house, their house. He would have to sell it now, he supposed. Unless she came back to him. Unless the impossible happened, and he somehow convinced her that he was worthy again, that their marriage was worth another try. And that Meekman was out of his life forever.

He turned the corner to their block but stopped short of the house itself. The snow on the front lawn was marked with footprints, and the front door was open. A light was on in the living room.

“Great,” he said. “Who’s it going to be this time? The abominable snowman?”

He wasn’t equipped for this stuff. He didn’t know how to throw a punch, let alone take a possibly armed invader sent to steal his spirit from his body. A hit man? Would he join Todd in the hospital, a host of wires hooked up to his head, neither dead nor alive, for eternity?

“Hey Nick,” he heard from the doorway of his house. “There you are.”

Jake Carelli stepped out where Nick could see him.

“Jake? What are you doing here?”

“Out for a run, door was open, looked inside. Do you normally leave it this messy?”

Indeed, Jake was dressed in winter running gear, complete with skin-tight leggings and a headband. Not something Nick would ever have chosen to see.

Nick walked through the snow toward the front door.

“You look like hell, Nick.”

“Thanks. I just came back for some clothes. You alone, Jake?”

“Alone? Buddy, I’m always alone.” Jake looked at him sideways. “Oh, you think . . . You think I work for them?” He laughed.

“Work for who, Jake?”

“How the fuck should I know? The people who did this to your place. God no, Cap. I work for good, not bad. And you’re good.” He paused again. “I’m freezing my balls off. Can we go inside?”

“You’re not going to kill me?”

Jake laughed again.

“If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.”

“Fair enough,” Nick said, appreciating the honesty but not exactly feeling comforted. “Let’s see if I can find the coffee maker.” Nick picked his way through the remains of his things on the floor, kicking the lighter bits of debris out of the way, bushwhacking through his burgled house. Had the intruders stolen anything, he wondered, or had they just wanted to scare him?

“The real reason I came,” Jake said, following him. “Want to know?”

“What do you think? Of course I do.” Nick reconsidered. “Or not.”

The coffee machine was on the kitchen counter, blessedly untouched. He took a bag of ground coffee from the fridge and got the maker ready to brew.

“Got a phone call last night,” Jake was saying. “Guy from Corporate Security asking me to do some quick work on the machine in your office. I said, ‘What for?’ He said you’d been canned, then told me about the kiddie porn.” Jake smiled and leaned against the far wall, next to the phone.

“It wasn’t my porn,” Nick said. The light on the answering machine behind Jake was blinking. Nick would get to that later. “Don’t tell me you believe that shit.”

“Of course not, Nick. I figure it had something to do with that RARP exploit I called you about when you were in California. Somebody’s seriously fucking with you. But I’m not one to argue with Corporate, even if they are a bunch of dicks, so I did what the man told me to do.”

“Which was?”

“I went to your office to reconfigure your machine. Removed a chip from a board & trashed it. Don’t ask me what kind of chip it was, ‘cause I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I felt like I was covering somebody’s tracks.”

“What did you do then?”

“Then I went home and went to sleep, dreamt of this girl I knew in high school, woke up, went for a run. But I decided I should check on you myself. And that’s when I found your house like this, and you nowhere in sight.”

The coffee was gurgling, and the smell was starting to make the kitchen feel like home again.

“I think you might be in some kind of trouble,” Jake said.

“Gee,” Nick said. “You think?”

“My outside opinion,” Jake said. “In case you’re wondering. Why don’t you tell me what’s up. Maybe I can help you.”

Nick only thought about this offer for about a second before deciding to level with him. He couldn’t go on alone, he’d die. He had to trust somebody. “Listen, Jake. I want to tell you, I do. But I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m in. And I don’t know for certain that anybody who’s associated with me won’t find themselves in the same kind of trouble.”

Jake nodded, with a hint of a world-weary smile.

“Roger that. I’ve never said no to trouble,” he said.

Nick believed him. He believed that Jake was as he seemed—an Army combat vet, a competent wiredog, a man of his word, of simple desires, of an ingrained sense of right and wrong, good and bad. A man who knew what loyalty tasted and felt like. If Nick were in a fight, he’d want Jake in his corner.

“Good,” Nick said. “Cause I wanted to call you yesterday. Let me listen to these messages first. Help yourself to the coffee.”

Nick pressed the button on the answering machine, quickly ran through five messages from reporters, and paused on a message from Jake.

“Delete that,” Jake said. “I tried calling last night after the man called me.”

He deleted a few more messages—two from reporters, and one from Carl, asking him to call back—then came to the last one. It was his brother. He would recognize that voice anywhere.

“Hi, Nick, it’s Paul,” he said. “Your brother.” There was a long pause. “I’m glad you’re still at this number. Call me back, or email me. Please. I would really like to talk to you. It’s important. It’s about . . . I’ll tell you when we talk. I don’t want to leave it on a machine. I’ll be coming back stateside tomorrow, and I’d love to see you. Please, call me back. Or email me.”

Paul repeated his phone number twice. The message ended with a click.

“No more messages,” the machine said. Nick stared at the machine, then replayed the message. Paul’s voice sounded strained, and Nick wondered what kind of trouble Paul was in, if it measured up to even half of Nick’s own troubles. Probably not.

“I can go,” Jake said.

“No,” he said. “I’ll call him later. It’s been seven years. What’s another hour?”

Jake held his hands in the air. “It’s your life, right? I’m just drinking your coffee.”

Nick righted a stool and sat down on it. He held his head in his hands and gathered his thoughts, completely and utterly exhausted, not just by the past few days, but by the last few years. After a few minutes, he lifted his head back up and looked at Jake. “Want to hear the whole story?”

“How much coffee you got?”

“Enough.”

“Let me hear it,” Jake said, and Nick started at the beginning, with Todd getting shot in the head.

Chapter 30

The newness of the room was palpable—from the smell of the paint to the gleaming counter tops to the stainless steel legs of bench stools reflected in the shining linoleum floor. Dieter could only marvel at his colleague’s ability to get things done. Despite the reputation of the Hoff-Zeigy bureaucracy for its glacial pace and miserly disbursements, Pavel had managed to have this lab constructed almost overnight. And it must have cost plenty.

It was 8:30 AM, half an hour before the meeting time. Now, as he walked slowly, incredulously, around the machinery-filled room, Dieter thought back on the preceding months. Just days ago he and Pavel had devised solutions to all remaining problems and had built the first working model of a DNA read-write nanomachine. In an uncharacteristic display of whimsy, Pavel had christened it the Feynman 1, after Richard Feynman, who had spelled out the principles of nanotechnology twenty-five years ago.

The Feynman machines were too small to be seen by any but the world’s most powerful electron microscopes. But Pavel and Dieter had never even bothered to directly observe one; they had only inferred its existence by its actions. They no more needed to see the device to know it was there than they needed to see oxygen molecules to know they were in the air. Strike a match; it burns. Ergo, oxygen: Q.E.D.

The first trial of the Feynman machines, on bacteria, demonstrated that the machines existed, and that they worked. Or at least that they worked after a fashion: the experiment used sixty nanomachines. If every machine had done its job, then each should have created at least one colony of bacteria, and there should have been at least sixty separate colonies. There were thirteen.

They repeated the experiment, this time using an isotope of P34 in making the machines, again repeating the process sixty times. This time they got twelve colonies instead of sixty, and by precipitating radioactive salts out of the growth broth it was easy to discern what had happened: once let out of the protective nothingness of the vacuum jar, the other forty-eight machines had disintegrated like paper lanterns in a hurricane. It was obvious to Dieter that their marvelous new machines were so fragile as to be nearly useless. The flaw had to be in the tube, and he had assumed that Pavel would ask him to go back to the Dijjy-Mike workstation for however long it took—a day, a week, a year—to devise a stronger one.

But Pavel had pronounced the experiment a resounding success and called for a new round of experiments: he wanted to try the Feynman machines on mammals. When Dieter had pointed out that the machines could barely withstand the benign environment of a Petri dish, much less a mammalian immune system, Pavel had merely laughed.

“Then we use more machines, that’s all. Like increasing the dose of a medicine. Once a machine changes one cell its work is done, like a little kamikaze. The fixed gene can replicate itself.”

Well, that was true. But it had never been their intent to create a medicine; they had set out to devise a machine, a reusable, long-lasting machine. If throw-away DNA repair engines were their objective, why go to all the trouble of inventing the world’s smallest computer, when a simple drug would do? Why bother with all the work on the T4 bacteriophage? It was as if the Americans had started using their space shuttles for only one trip each. If the device were not meant to last beyond one use, the repair of one cell’s DNA, then there were certainly cheaper—and safer—ways to get the job done.

“Come, Dieter,” Pavel had said, briefly resting his hand on Dieter’s shoulder with unusual—and to Dieter, uncomfortable—familiarity, “think of it as a disposable syringe.”

“But if the machine is to be disposable, our approach is all wrong,” Dieter had said. “With thousands or millions of half-broken Feynman machines floating around in a person’s bloodstream, there’s no telling what kind of havoc they might create. No, using many machines before we know how they work, how to fix them . . . it’s . . . it’s sloppy. It’s . . . dangerous. Let’s do it the right way. Let’s make one good machine, a machine that doesn’t break down. I . . . I must redesign the tube. It’s taken us six years to get this far, why not spend a little longer to get it right? We don’t even have a good mammalian genome to work with anyway. I do not understand the hurry.”

“One can learn a lot from prototypes, Dieter. Believe me when I say that I speak from experience.”

Dieter was taken aback.

“You confound me, Pavel. What prototypes? We have not made prototypes before these. What prototypes do you refer to?”

But Pavel had only answered that it was time to move on to animal experiments, and as Director of the NanoSection that’s what he was directing Dieter to do. He then announced that the Hoff-Zeigy Board of Directors had approved funding for the NanoSection Test Facility, and that it was already under construction on the third floor of Hoff-Zeigy Building Two.

Dieter’s familiar walk through the third floor biosynthesis lab was a thing of the past. The lab had been packed up wholesale and moved—where, he didn’t know—and the door walled up. When Dieter walked down the third floor corridor, from behind the walled door he could hear the sounds of construction, and at all hours, as he sat at the Dijjy-Mike workstation in his fourth-floor lab he could feel the floor beneath him vibrate. After only a few days the vibrations had ceased, and the heavy construction sounds had ceased filtering up from the floor below. A new door had appeared yesterday.

This morning Dieter saw for the first time what the workers had been building.

The room itself was smaller than the sitting room in his studio apartment. But he was astounded at the amount of electronics that had been packed into the place. Three of the walls were covered with switches, dials, patch wires, television monitors; and along the fourth wall was a counter top in front of a large window: the room beyond was dark and the glass showed only his own reflection. Stools were pulled up against the counter, waiting. It was like one of those American altars of technology—NASA’s “mission control room,” the “situation rooms” of thriller movies—reduced to a manageable Swiss scale.

Everything that had happened in recent weeks troubled Dieter, and nothing more so than this room. Pavel was changing, and this room proved it. The words of Judith Knight kept coming back to Dieter. I fear this man. I fear him greatly. It was when I became certain of his identity that I knew I must come here to speak with you. Her words now seemed to him prophetic: it was as if one identity of Pavel were giving way and another asserting itself. Maybe the new extroversion that Dieter saw in his friend was the glee of a villain on the verge of triumph. You may choose not to look at the potential for evil embodied in these machines you are trying to build, but Pavel is aware of this potential. That is his motivation.

There were, of course, other explanations for Pavel’s new behavior. Perhaps it was simple joy, even giddiness, in their recent breakthroughs. Was Pavel already imagining himself in Stockholm, giving his Nobel acceptance speech? Was he fantasizing about the millions of dollars (billions?) that could be his when the design was complete? Any of these explanations made more sense than thinking of Pavel as a terrorist.

And even if Pavel was a terrorist, Dieter thought, there was little danger. Their Feynman nanomachines couldn’t break out of a proverbial paper bag, much less attack the planet. Make the device vulnerable to salt water, or laundry soap, or weak radiation Judith Knight had said. So far, there had been no need to do that, no need to build in additional weaknesses when the machines were so fragile to begin with. But he was glad that he had done so anyway, and glad that he had written to Judith about it.

Because Judith Knight, somehow, without ever having seen a schematic of their machine, had devised a way to engineer a vulnerability to CO2 into the Feynman 9. He could control CO2 in the laboratory and so the machines could work there, but at least he knew that the devices would be harmless if released into the air.

It seemed like forever since Dieter’s ineffectual meeting with Paul Aubrey. Forever since he had given Pavel the design for the tube: an eternity of improving the design, atom by atom; an eternity of avoiding serious discussion with his partner about the things that most troubled him. The whole time he had waited, futilely, for Pavel to mention Paul Aubrey or the search for a partner on the Human Genome Project. But it was time for this evasion to cease. The issue had to be addressed head on, and today he would talk with this ‘new’ Pavel. As soon as the mammalian experiment was over, Dieter would do it.

The door to the lab swung open and Pavel Isaacs walked in, looking vibrant. There was a smile on his olive face, and his curly black hair seemed to have more life than ever. Even his clothes were different; he looked like a hip artist from the Kunsthalle, not like the earnest nerd that Dieter had met so long ago in the lab at MIT.

“Good morning Dieter, ready for our big day?” he said.

Ready for our big day? Where is my old taciturn friend, Dieter thought, the one who would never talk to me as if I were a four-year old about to go to the circus?

“Hello Pavel,” Dieter said. “How are you?”

“I’m great, Dieter,” he said. “This is going to be some show today. Wait until you see what I have programmed our little machine to do. You are not going to believe your eyes.”

“Let’s hope it works,” Dieter said.

“Oh, it’s going to work alright,” Pavel said. “In fact, I’ve invited one of our corporate guardian angels to see the show. I expect him at any moment.”

“And what, my friend, is a guardian angel?” Dieter asked, trying to keep his inflection as neutral as possible.

“Why, the provider of our money, of course. The man who sees to it that we never want for wherewithal. His name is Paul Aubrey. He’s an American who lives here in Basel and works for Hoff-Zeigy. Perhaps you know him?”

Was there irony in that suddenly serious look on Pavel’s face?

“No, I do not know a Paul Aubrey,” Dieter said, hoping his mannerisms did not give away his lie.

He wished more than anything that he could disappear before Aubrey arrived. His entire life he had been comfortable with chemistry, mathematics—never with people. The only time he had felt genuinely comfortable on the streets of Basel was during the three days of Fasnacht, when, safe in the anonymity of an oversized and garishly painted mask he could walk among the thousands of other nightmarish apparitions and enjoy the city’s sights. Interpersonal relations, even ones that other people considered as natural as breathing, filled him with apprehension. And yet here he was in the middle of intrigue, with secret messages to anonymous addresses, hidden flaws kept secret from his partner, meetings that must not be divulged, deceptions, lies, evasions. He had to leave before Aubrey arrived, he suddenly decided. He would say that he had taken ill.

There was a knock on the door. He tensed in anticipation of Aubrey’s entry.

“Come!” Pavel said.

The door opened, and a blond man of about twenty-five walked in.

Dieter felt his heart palpitate; he strained to maintain an equivocal expression. This was not Aubrey! What hoax was this?

“Dieter,” Pavel was saying, “say hello to Herr Kurt Alder. He is the designer of this studio. He will show us how to operate the equipment; soon we will handle it ourselves.”

“Gut morgen, Herr Alder,” Dieter said.

“Gut morgen, Doktor Steffen,” the other answered.

Get hold of yourself, Dieter, he said to himself. You’re panicking. Calm down.

Before he could listen to his own advice the door opened again and Paul Aubrey entered the room. He was wearing a grey double-breasted suit, deep red tie. His beard seemed more grey than Dieter remembered, and he looked older, or perhaps simply more worn down.

“Hello Paul,” Pavel was saying. “This is my colleague Doktor Dieter Steffen.”

“How do you do,” they both said, shaking hands. There was a moment or two of silence as each regarded the other. Dieter felt himself relax a tiny bit as it became apparent that Aubrey was acting as though they had never met.

“Gentlemen,” Pavel began, “let me explain today’s experiment. As you know the Feynman Machine—I think we’re up to version nine, aren’t we?—the Feynman Nine is a device for finding a DNA sequence and converting it into another sequence. What gene it looks for and what action it takes are determined by me when I program it. To program it, I first obtain the structure of a genome and load it into the controller chip. Then I make the Feynman devices by laser evaporation, downloading the pattern from the chip into the new devices.”

He looked at Aubrey as if searching for approval. Aubrey nodded. Then Pavel gestured to Kurt, who pressed a button on a control panel. The light came on in the adjoining room behind the glass, revealing a table on which there were three glass boxes, each containing a mouse. Three glass tubes fed the boxes, one to each.

The mouse in the box on the left was brown, and appeared abnormally large for a laboratory mouse, almost the size of a rat. The mouse in the center box was white, and appeared normal. The mouse in the box on the right was small and oddly-shaped, brown and white.

“You notice that these three mice differ in color and in stature. For this experiment we don’t care about color, only about body size. The mouse in the middle, the white one, is a normal-sized mouse. The other two have been genetically engineered. The one on the right, the brown and white one, is a dwarf. Its size and body shape have been proven to be caused by a defect of a single gene. The mouse on the left has giganticism. Its abnormally large size is caused by a different defect of the same gene.

“We are now going to change the giant into a dwarf and the dwarf into a giant. To do this I have created two different versions of the Feynman Nine. The first one finds the giganticism gene and converts it into a dwarfism gene; the second finds the dwarf gene and converts it into a giganticism gene.”

Aubrey was looking ahead, politely. It was impossible to read him.

“There are billions of cells in an organism of this size,” Pavel continued, “so here is what we will do. Into the left and right mouse chambers we will introduce about a hundred thousand of the appropriately programmed Feynman machines. If each machine changes ten cells per minute, then a hundred thousand machines should change a million cells per minute, sixty million in an hour. So within a couple of hours we should start to be able to see some real changes in these mice.”

“A hundred thousand machines?” Aubrey said. “I had no idea.”

“We make about one per second with the new laser process. But we get about 15 percent duds,” he said, and smiled. “So that means that we create about three thousand Feynman machines an hour, seventy thousand machines a day. They’re not very stable, even under the best conditions. They just break.” Again that new, irritating laugh. “When you amortize in the cost of the labs, it probably costs about fifty dollars per nanomachine to make them. But that will change.”

Fifty dollars per machine times one hundred thousand Feynman Nines?

This one experiment was costing five million dollars, at least. Dieter’s nervousness was getting worse by the minute.

“OK,” Pavel was saying, “here’s what we’ll do to start the process. Kurt, are you ready?”

“Shall I begin recording now?” he said.

“Yes, please. I suppose I should mention,” Pavel said to Dieter and Paul, “that much of the equipment you see around you is for recording experiments. There are video cameras mounted on the ceiling and wall of the next room. There is a Geiger counter attached to each tube so we can count how many Feynman machines are introduced into each chamber; that information and much more is all recorded in an electronic log that is mixed in with the video signals.”

The younger man pressed a few buttons at the bank of equipment on the wall.

“Recording,” Alder said.

“Would you open the tubes please,” Pavel said.

Alder walked two steps to the left and typed a few characters on a keyboard that rested on the counter in front of the glass.

“Open,” he said.

“Gentlemen,” Pavel said, “It would be tedious to stay here waiting for the pot to boil. I thought we might go for a cafe. By noon we might expect to see something.”

A waiter set their café au laits before them, with a basket of croissants. “Dieter,” Pavel began. “I want to introduce Paul as more than a guardian angel. I want you to consider him a partner with us, part of our research team.” He went on to explain the rationale for seeking a research partner that was active in the Human Genome Project, the need for forming a joint venture, the importance of a properly structured corporate agreement, and the importance of having somebody with Paul Aubrey’s experience and skill on the team.

No mention was made of specific companies. No mention of Human Potential or the Association for Responsible Biotechnology. Or Judith Knight. It was now or never.

“You know,” Dieter began. His throat was dry, his voice cracked. He began again. “You know, I have been thinking a lot about this work, and how the Feynman machines might be used on human beings. I think that they are potentially very dangerous things. I don’t think we should even begin work on the human genome yet. We cannot do this alone; we need to publish our work and bring others into the discussion. For all these years I have put off thinking about these things because it seemed hard to believe that we would ever actually succeed. But now we are almost there. There are larger things at stake here than making profits for Hoff-Zeigy. In the wrong hands Feynman machines could be very dangerous indeed. I am not sure that I can continue to work on this project if we begin to program human gene patterns into the devices.”

He had not intended to make such a speech, but in any event he had done it. He had stated his concern and raised the possibility of quitting the project. He felt relief, which was immediately followed by a new sense of dread.

Pavel smiled a little. Was it a grimace, or something else? A threat? He spoke. “I’ve been having these concerns myself. But we can’t stop work while we sort out the larger issues. Who knows how far along others might be in making their own nanomachines? You have read about Bill Gates, the wealthiest man in the world, underwriting the University of Washington to develop just what we have built? You know about the programs in Germany, Wisconsin, France, Tokyo? They are trying to go exactly where we are going, only we will get there first. We cannot simply stick our heads in the sand; that would not solve any problems. But let us continue this discussion. Why don’t you and Herr Aubrey join me tonight, at my apartment, for dinner? I have already invited two other people who might like to discuss a little philosophy with us, and it will go a lot better after a couple of glasses of wine.”

“I am sorry,” Aubrey said. “I will not be able to attend the dinner tonight.”

Pavel grimaced slightly, then cleared his face of expression. “Oh?”

“I have a flight scheduled.”

“For tonight? Surely you can postpone your trip?”

“For tonight. I’m leaving directly from the office.”

“Pity. Dieter? Will you come to dinner?”

“And who would these people be?” Dieter said. “I thought our work was secret.”

“Yes, it is very secret. But one person is already part of the project. An old professor of mine, he currently is director of Digital Microsystems Laboratories, and he has developed the method that we use to collapse genetic information into so small a space.” Dieter tried to absorb this new fact. Certainly he had known that Pavel had some kind of special arrangement with Digital Microsystems, the very company where he had worked on a co-op project while a PhD student at MIT. Pavel had made no secret about the source of the compression algorithm, and he knew that Pavel sometimes went to the Basel facility of Digital Microsystems Laboratories, and that he sometimes even traveled to California. But he had never met the person, and certainly did not, until now, consider him a part of their research team. That was a shocking assertion.

“And who is the second person?” Dieter asked. “Another unknown co-designer of the machine?”

“Pascale Pacheco. A scientist, author and rising star in Hoff-Zeigy’s management. You’ll be very happy to meet her,” Pavel said. “She’s quite a feast for the eyes.”

Dieter had never even considered what might happen to the mice once the Feynman machines began to change their cells. He must have been so worried about seeing Aubrey at the new laboratory that he had somehow disengaged that part of his brain. He had simply never even thought about what it might mean to change a dwarf into a giant, a giant into a dwarf. But nothing he could have imagined would have prepared him for the sights awaiting him back on the third floor of Hoff-Zeigy Building Two.

In the right box, the brown and white dwarf had clearly changed. But it wasn’t simply larger; it was distorted, grotesque. One side of its cranium was larger than the other, and the skin looked to be stretched over it, leaving one eye tilted up at an angle. Its legs were misshaped and unsymmetrical: on the left front leg, the foreleg had grown more than the thigh; on the right front leg the thigh had grown faster. The animal was lying on its side, its miss-matched eyes open in anguish. Its little heart could be seen to beat furiously within its chest. If a mouse can wish, Dieter thought, this mouse is hoping it will die very soon.

If the mouse in the left box had wished the same thing, its wish had already been granted. But its agony before dying must have been extreme. This one had been the giant. Dieter tried to remember what color it had been. Brown, he thought. He could still see patches of brown fur beneath the blood. Deformed like the other, this one had suffered more, as the skin had shrunk while the bones could not, and eventually the bones broke and punctured through the skin. Dieter had seen squirrels after they had been run over by a truck that looked healthier than this mouse did after exposure to the Feynman Nine. Kurt Alder was visibly distraught.

“Herr Doktor Isaacs,” he said, as soon as the three men had entered the observation room and seen the carnage on the other side of the window, “can we not kill this miserable creature now? I could not find a syringe or already I would have let it out of its agony.”

“Have you gotten everything on tape?” Pavel said. His tone was perfectly neutral.

“Yes. The blue tape cartridges are the final mixes. There is no point in allowing this creature to suffer any more. With the tapes you can witness the entire process frame by frame.”

“But the process is not complete, Herr Alder. The experiment must continue. I appreciate your concern for the animal, but we must see this through. Who knows, perhaps it will live.”

“Herr Doktor Isaacs, this is cruelty,” Alder said.

“This is science,” Pavel said, intently, looking at Alder but glancing at Dieter as he spoke. “This animal is not suffering in vain, nor will it die in vain. You have only to imagine a child cured of leukemia in the time it takes to drive to the country for a cup of coffee. Think on that, Herr Alder, and you will not be so distressed by the deaths of these animals. The experiment must continue.”

“Well then you will excuse me if I leave the room for the next thirty minutes. The tapes are set; everything will run by itself without me here.”

“Very well,” Pavel said.

Once the door had closed after Alder, Pavel turned to the remaining two men with an entirely new expression on his face. It was joy, pure radiant joy.

“Gentlemen!” he exclaimed. “What great success we have achieved today. Let us adjourn until eight tonight. I will bring the champagne.”

Paul Aubrey returned Pavel’s smile, but tightly, as if he were wearing a mask.

“Sorry, Gentlemen. Good work. But I have a plane to catch.”

Chapter 31

Bartlett slinked into the black body suit and the black jeans, put her hair up with a black Thai comb, and clasped the necklace—a gift from Nick, a long time ago—around her neck. She felt good—nervous, but more free than she had felt in years, ready to be a woman again, not just a scientist. If Paul were the first man to notice, so be it.

Paul was be flying in from Basel, via London. After a four-hour layover he would be continuing on to California to a swanky hotel resort in Saratoga, between San Jose and Los Gatos, where the Biodigital Forum was to be held over the weekend. Bartlett would be going too, or at least that was the plan. The Biodigital Forum was where the computer big wigs met and made deals with the geneticists and biologists. It was where partnerships were formed that would change the world—a mating ritual of cold cash and hot technology. Paul was going out early so that his body would be adjusted to the time change before the meeting started, he said. He never worked jetlagged.

She herself would be flying west in a few days, arriving on the day before the conference was to start. That was the plan, at least, and it was what The Neuro Group wanted her to do. But she wasn’t all that certain she would actually follow through with the plan. Partially, her attendance depended on what Paul said to her during this four-hour layover.

Bartlett re-did her hair, fastening it more tightly with the comb. What the hell, as Nick used to say. In for a dime, in for a dollar. She put in the earrings, the monkeys with the sapphires. Then she threw on her Mr. Anonymous down coat and Mr. Anonymous knit hat and headed for the door.

It was Bartlett’s idea that she come to the airport to meet Paul and talk before the conference. After getting her courage up, she had finally placed the call and had, miraculously, got him on the phone the first try. He had been less surprised to hear from her than she’d imagined he would be. Yes, he said, he would be delighted to meet in Boston during the layover.

The Swissair monitor showed that the flight from London was on time, arriving in twenty minutes. Bartlett had a Boston Herald but was too nervous to read it. So she stood contemplating the glassed-in kinetic sculpture in the main terminal. Little colored balls rode up a conveyor, then fell, bounced and rolled along paths dictated by gravity and chance, hitting wood blocks, wind chimes, bells and drum skins all the way down to the collector at the bottom, where the ride began again. A playful concerto of bings, bangs and boings percolated out to the cavernous airport.

She strode away to find someplace else to pass the time.

Ten minutes of browsing in the bookstore found her in the science section. She stopped and stared at a photographic image, fascinating and perverse, on the cover of a book face out on the shelf. Under the title Convergence, by Pascale Pacheco, it showed a computer chip with a nerve cell grafted onto it. Monster cell, she thought. This was exactly what The Neuro Group was doing, but today it seemed all wrong. It was Frankenstein on a minuscule scale—carbon brain and silicon brain in bestial communion. Is this what I’m doing with my life, she wondered, creating monsters? She turned and left the bookstore.

The Swissair monitor informed her that Paul’s plane had landed. Paul would be in customs now, and any second she would see him. And she was in a state of panic, wishing she were anywhere but here. With all her heart she regretted having agreed to go to the conference, which was what set this meeting in motion in the first place. But she needed to be here, she reminded herself, for two reasons.

In the first place, she needed to go to the Biodigital Conference find out more about Hoff-Zeigy’s intentions for The Neuro Group. She wanted to find out if the Hoff-Zeigy was going to leave them any control of their company, or whether it was merely going to steal their ideas and then proceed to dismantle and discard the team. Contracts were very opaque things; it was hard to tell what the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company had in mind from reading the Josh Simpson’s summary of the offer Paul Aubrey had tendered. Bartlett was counting on her ability to read Paul, to see if the decent young undergraduate was still there in him, or if he had completely gone over to the dark side. If Paul was still Paul, she would probably go along with the deal to let The Neuro Group to Hoff-Zeigy.

Years ago she would have called this whoring, the selling out of virgin academe to a multinational John. Her idols were Johannes Keppler, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin. Not Jay Gatsby. Not Bill Gates. She cared about science, not money. Time had softened her views—there was no such thing as pure research anymore, if there had ever been. Unless and until she resigned, she was part of The Neuro Group, and The Neuro Group needed money if it was going to survive. She accepted the reality. But she still felt like a whore.

The second reason she needed to go to the Biodigital Conference had to do with the inexplicable discovery of protein from Hoff-Zeigy bacteriophage in Sarah’s blood. Irwin’s test had confirmed the presence of phage, which came as both a relief and a burden—a relief because Bartlett knew that she and her friends Janine and Chris weren’t crazy, and a burden because now she’d have to do something about what she knew. Bartlett had entertained hopes that Paul would help her—or help Chris and Janine Garbougian—to figure out how that protein had gotten into the blood. The idea had seemed good yesterday, but now she doubted herself. Why in the world would Hoff-Zeigy as a corporation, or any of its employees as individuals, tell her how their genetically-altered bacteriophage had been used for biological warfare? For that matter, how would they know? It was like asking US Steel to solve a homicide because the fatal gun had been made from their metal.

But it was a third, un-admitted, reason that made her suddenly want to flee. How on Earth had she decided to dress provocatively for a meeting with her brother-in-law, a former lover whose heart she had broken? A brother-in-law who, incidentally, worked for a company that might or might not invest big dollars in The Neuro Group, maybe even invest money as a cat’s paw for Monty Meekman. Would Bartlett’s outfit help or hurt her company’s prospects? What if she slept with Paul? What if she didn’t? And what if Hoff-Zeigy were somehow wrapped up in biological weapons used by Saddam Hussein against American troops during Desert Storm? What if Paul was indeed working with Monty Meekman? What kind of man had Paul become? She had no idea. Two hours ago, in her apartment, she had been full of confidence. Here at the airport as she waited for Paul to arrive, her confidence had totally evaporated. Furthermore she didn’t trust Paul and she didn’t trust herself. God, she was a mess.

It was too late to change her clothes now. But at least, at the very least, she could get rid of the pendant that was drawing attention to her breasts. She was reaching behind her neck to unfasten the clasp when Paul walked out of the customs area. He was impossibly handsome. Nick didn’t even own a suit, and Paul wore his suit like Cary Grant. He approached her with a small smile, and kissed her on the cheek. She felt trouble in every cell of her body.

“Hello Bartlett,” he said, smiling. His face looked a little like Nick’s more than she had remembered. “This is the most pleasant welcome I’ve had in a long time.”

He exuded an unadorned masculinity that she found—contrary to her wishes, if not her expectation—to be almost overpoweringly sexually attractive.

Oh. Well. Now what would she say?

She didn’t need to say anything. She simply followed his lead. He walked across the floor to the first class passenger’s club and held the door open for her. He checked in with the receptionist, and he guided Bartlett to a table by the window.

“So,” he said, once they were seated. “You have some questions you’d like to ask?”

He smiled, and he looked so much like Nick—the same shape of the eyes, the same slope of the forehead. She felt a pressure behind her eyes and a tightness in her throat that she recognized as the precursor of tears. No, Bartlett, no, she warned herself, but she couldn’t stop what had already started. All the tension she’d been feeling finally found an outlet—all of it, from The Neuro Group’s money concerns to Judith Knight’s visit to the discovery of phage and Monty Meekman’s return. And, of course, the loneliness and fear she felt, daily, since she had left Nick. “I’m sorry,” she said to Paul as her vision blurred. “Everything’s just gone to hell.”

Chapter 32

At 19:01, Basel time, Dieter was quite drunk. After much cursing, first at his phone book for the poor instructions, and then at the international operator, he finally managed to place a call to the States. Dr. Knight was not in her office, Judith’s recorded voice informed him, but if he left a message after the tone she would get back to him as soon as she could. Well, too bad. He had hoped that he could talk with her before leaving for the celebration at Pavel’s apartment, but that clearly was not going to happen. He told the machine what he planned to say to Pavel, hoping that the combination of his slightly slurred speech, accent, increasingly awkward choice of English phrases, and less-than-perfect telephone connection would not make his message unintelligible. Then he stripped, leaving a pile of his clothes on the floor, and stepped into the shower. The warm water felt good.

At 19:32 the taxi arrived in front of his apartment. During the ride he drank the pint of Guinness Stout that had been in his refrigerator for three years. At 19:48 he got out, one block away from Pavel’s apartment.

The door opened and Dieter found himself staring blankly at a stunning blond beauty, about thirty years old.

“Bonsoir,” she said. “Je m’appelle Pascale. Et vous êtes le Docteur Steffen, n’est-ce pas? Soyez le bienvenu. Pavel arrive a l’instant.”

This must be the feast for the eyes, Dieter thought. Yes, indeed.

“Good evening.” Dieter said. “How nice to meet you too.” Where was his French?

Dieter stepped into the room. It was not as he remembered it, but it had been a while, he told himself. It seemed more, what, studied. There were bookcases, pictures arranged just so on the walls. There were oriental carpets on the floor, and leather couches. This was not the apartment of the single-minded, obsessive graduate-student-turned-laboratory-director. How is it that Pavel has had time to acquire a personality while I have not?

“Dieter! There you are!” he heard Pavel’s voice calling to him. “Good of you to come. You know, Aubrey had a flight. Well, screw him. We have had enough of bureaucrats for one day. This can be an evening for the scientists.”

“Scientists,” Dieter said.

“Yes, let this be an evening for us, the three creators of the Feynman machines,” Pavel continued. “And give me a drink, I want to make a toast.”

Dieter noticed a middle-aged man in a poorly-fitting suit approaching from a back room.

Pavel smiled broadly. “A toast. But first say hello to my mentor. This is Dr. Meekman. He is the professor I mentioned earlier today, from Stanford University in Palo Alto.”

“Your mentor?” Dieter slurred. The blonde bombshell handed him a Champaign flute, cool and delicate in his hand.

“A toast!” Pavel said, lifting his glass.

“A toast,” the three answered.

Pavel raised his glass.

“To us. And to the future of the world.”

They drank, everybody but Dieter sipping from their flutes. Dieter downed his in two long gulps, his throat burning with the Champaign bubbles.

“My turn,” he said, holding his glass out to be filled. “My turn. To toast.”

The group raised their glasses politely. Did they know he was drunk already? Surely they must.

“To three blind mice,” Dieter said. “To the million dollar rodents of the third floor lab, God save their putrid bones.” He drank. He drank until his glass was empty. The others smiled as if embarrassed. He did not notice if they drank or not.

By the time they got to the dinner table, Dieter’s stomach was full of bubbly, but he ate a bite or two of something not Swiss. Seated opposite him was the Stanford professor, Meek-what’s his name, a pompous ass if ever there was one, so full of condescending answers about every known thing.

“Dieter,” he was saying. “You’re drunk; that’s understandable. It’s been a very disturbing day for you. Tomorrow I can guarantee you that you won’t recall a thing about our conversation tonight. But you have been saying some very interesting things. In vino veritas est, they say, in wine lies truth. So, let me suggest something. Here is a pad of paper and a pen.” He passed them to Dieter. “Now put down the date, then write down the things you are concerned about, and sign it. This can be a letter to yourself. After your hangover has cleared up you can look at it, to help remember the passion you feel tonight.”

“Who are you, Zeegmund Fooking Vroid?” he heard himself saying. But Meekman simply passed him the paper and pen, with a knowing smile.

“OK here goes. 3 April. Basel,” Dieter said, writing.

“I believe that my work as a scientist poses a grave threat to the human race. I believe that my partners are madmen. Our tiny machines will change man into woman, woman into man, health into disease. There is no control over us. There should be an international commission to supervise us, and it should be headed by…”

Meekman reached over and put his hand on Dieter’s. He smiled, showing little weasel teeth.

“No need to get too specific,” he said. “You only need to capture the emotion, the feeling.”

“Tonight I am with an asshole,” Dieter said, writing. “An asshole who thinks he knows everything. With little teeth like a rat.” That was clever. He smiled and looked up across the table. Pavel was smiling like a fool. Dr. Meekman’s expression seemed solicitous, but fake. The blonde kept her face calm, friendly but impenetrable, like plastic.

“I need to start my life over again, away from these monsters,” Dieter wrote.

He signed the paper with a flourish. “There,” he said, passing the pad and pen to the professor with a dismissive shove.

Dr. Meekman picked it up and read.

“Very good,” he said. “This will answer a lot of questions.” He folded the paper and slid it down the table, out of Dieter’s reach.

“Let me ask you a few more questions,” he said. “Here, good American bourbon is the best after-dinner cordial.” Dieter took the proffered glass, sipped. Scheissvasser. What the hell, drink up.

“Now, tell me. You have been sending emails to Judith Knight in America, haven’t you?”

“Nosey aren’t we? What business is that of yours? I think I will go to sleep.” He put his head down on the table. He was more drunk than he thought he should be. His head didn’t feel right. “Leave me alone.”

“I need to know more about your messages to Dr. Knight, Dieter. We have been copying your messages, but the encryption algorithm is too good. We simply cannot unscramble the messages until you give us the password. So come, what is it?”

“I don’t think so. Drinking and driving.”

He felt a sharp blow to the back of his head. “The password, Dieter,” somebody said.

“Ouch,” he said, rubbing the back of his head and feeling like a five year old. When he drank too much, he wanted to cry. He had forgotten that, it had been so long since he’d been this drunk. The tears came to his eyes and his voice got very thin and quiet. “That hurt.”

“Ce n’est pas la peine. Forget about it,” he heard the woman say. “We gave him too much. I’ll get the password from the other side.”

“Well Pavel,” Meekman said. “It’s up to you. Can you take it the rest of the way from here?”

Dieter laid his head back on the table. Was he drunk, or was it something more? His vision blurred. He wanted to sleep.

“Yes,” he heard Pavel say.

“You are sure you don’t need him any more?”

“I am sure,” he heard Pavel say.

“And Paul Aubrey?” he heard the woman’s voice say.

“I need him for the genome deal. Another month or two.”

“We’re agreed to take care of this tonight?” the woman said. “You don’t think Aubrey will connect the two?”

“A coincidence.”

“Alright,” the woman said. “I’m off for California. See you in a few days.”

Somebody placed their hands under Dieter’s armpits and lifted him up.

“Come on, Dieter,” Pavel said, as Dieter let his full weight fall on his . . . what . . . not his friend. What was Pavel, anyway? He was not what Dieter knew him to be, after all these years.

“God damn you, Pavel,” Dieter said, feeling the sadness come again. “Mouse killer.”

Pavel placed his hand on the side of Dieter’s face.

“Goodbye, Dieter. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

They stood him on his feet. Somehow he was walking down the stairs with the American professor. He was in the taxi, he was in his house, in his bedroom. Tell the stupid American to go home.

These Americans and their Hollywood fixations. Now the black gloves. What, a pistol? Don’t scientists types hate guns? What? A silencer? I saw one of those in the movies.

Chapter 33

Somewhere over the Midwest, Nick realized that he wasn’t going to sleep. In two more hours to Salt Lake, then, if everything went right, another hour’s flight would bring him to San Francisco. He’d get a rental car as he’d done a thousand times before, then on to the Biodigital Forum, where he was to meet Carl. “Get there early, Nick,” Carl had said on the phone. “So we can figure out our strategy before things get cooking.”

Nick couldn’t believe he was voluntarily returning to California, but then again, he didn’t see what other choice he had. He wanted to talk to Carl face to face, to probe for more information on Meekman and the events that had exploded his life. That was the initial reason he accepted Carl’s offer to come. But then, Carl mentioned in an offhand way that a representative of The Neuro Group would be there, and Nick’s gut turned. When Carl said the name—Dr. Bartlett McGovern—Nick felt a combination of longing and dread that nearly knocked the wind out of him.

“Oh, and, a Paul Aubrey, too,” Carl said. “Your brother?”

“Yes, Paul Aubrey is my brother,” Nick said. He assumed that Carl was playing dumb, given how much he knew about Nick’s life. But if Carl wanted to play dumb, Nick could play dumb too. He kind of excelled at it, actually. “He’s some kind of hotshot deal maker for a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. I talked to him last week. He’s been bugging me to come almost as much as you have.”

So Nick really had no choice. He would go to talk to Carl, but he would also go to find out what was Paul thought was so urgent. And, perhaps most importantly of all, he would see what, if anything, was going on between Paul and Bartlett.

As for Bartlett herself, well… All he wanted to do was see her. To see her in the flesh. Across the room. Across the bar. Anything. His eyes were hungry for her. He just wanted to see her again.

He opened his eyes, reached in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him for Casey’s bon voyage gift: a stapled photo-copy of the pages of a 50-year-old Atlantic magazine with Vannevar Bush’s article, along with Casey’s scribbles all over it.

He was glad to have the article to distract him. The language was convoluted, but the ideas were astonishing, especially considering that the piece had been written in 1946. It was damn enervating, was what it was. Astounding. Metaphysical. Creepy:

“The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

“Okaaaay…” Nick said.

“Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race […] All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses […] Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?”

Well Vannevar, if we had chips planted in our brains, and Ethernet drops or radio transmitters too… Until then we’re kind of stuck.

“In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?”

So Vannevar was talking about direct brain-to-brain electrical communication. That was enough for Nick. He tried again to close his eyes, and somewhere over the Rockies he succeeded in coaxing himself to sleep. He didn’t wake until somebody nudged him when the plane was at the gate. When he got to the car rental desk at SFO he found that Carl had reserved a Lincoln Town Car for him. Whether that was because he wanted Nick to look presentable or was merely a tacit recognition that Nick was tall—or more likely, mere habit—was a question that didn’t much concern him.

Chapter 34

It was April in California and the weather was glorious, as it always was. There was traffic but it didn’t bother Nick; it forced him to go slow; to observe, to daydream. Traveling south stoplight after stoplight down El Camino he listened to an Afropop-Tejano music show on KFJC, thinking about time and change. Traditional Fulani kora songs—but played with a Cuban beat—alternated with mariachi tunes distorted by polka. Why were Africans playing rumbas? Why were Mexicans playing polkas? And what had inspired this deejay to mix these two styles in one radio show? Oh, the oddness of everything.

He drove past drugstores, furniture stores, liquor stores, food stores, hardware stores, hotels, software stores, pornography stores, flower stores, clothing stores, restaurants, video stores, office equipment stores. El Camino, once a thoroughfare between San Jose and San Francisco, was no longer a highway to anywhere. It had become a thirty-mile long shopping mall of national chain franchises, the human interface to the global economy. Before the invention of the first integrated circuit this region had been all orchards—as open as the farmland on the outskirts of Oneonta where he had spent his boyhood. And before that it had been grassland, as open as the African Sahel where he had spent his early manhood. Soon, he supposed, it would become a wasteland, as shoppers forsook the quasi-human interaction of Blockbuster Video and The Gap for the onanistic delight of Internet shopping. It was hard to imagine a time when there were no cars or buildings here. And yet, long before the first English speakers had arrived here, El Camino Real, the royal road, had connected forlorn isolated missions from Baja to San Francisco. He wished it were still forlorn and empty. Nick wished there was no such thing as Silicon Valley. Everything was getting worse.

He drove his rental car through the crush of the Valley until, in Saratoga, the city relented before the memory of its more rustic past. Around a corner from a school or church there would be a hidden steep valley covered with evergreens, or an old barn or orchard.

Following the directions Carl had included with his ticket, Nick came, at around six, to a driveway at the apparent end of a short valley. A small sign said “The Acres.” He turned the car off and looked down as far as he could see, to where the roadway went around a wooded bend, out of sight. There were few sounds other than birds chirping and wind rustling branches of eucalyptus trees. The sun was already getting low in the sky. “Yeah, well,” he sighed to himself. “Father if it is your will that I drink this cup . . . oh, fuck it.” He followed the driveway around to the left underneath drooping branches until he came to a gate across the road next to a little building under a streetlamp. The modest sign on the guardhouse told him he had found the right place, and the uniformed, side-armed attendant—after checking Nick’s identification—indicated where to park amid the Jaguars, Rolls Royces, Porches, and Lotuses in the darkening lot.

There were footpaths illuminated with knee-high lamps, and here and there amid the trees he noticed little white cabins. The one thing he hadn’t noticed was an obvious place to check in. He parked, opened his door and got out. Before he could get to the trunk to retrieve his luggage, a golf cart silently arrived and a uniformed attendant hopped out.

“I’ll get your bags, Mr. Aubrey,” the attendant said, attempting to take the keys from Nick’s hand.

“I’ll keep the goddamn keys,” Nick said, and opened the trunk. How the hell did this punk know his name?

The attendant was more assertive when it came to getting to registration. With little choice in the matter, Nick got into the cart’s passenger seat. Soon they were on their way, with Nick’s bags on the back. In about two minutes they came to a low white California Rustic building not visible from the lot. The style, and probably the building itself, dated from around the time of the Gold Rush. The house had been perfectly maintained, and everything about the place bespoke wealth and taste.

“Register inside, please,” the man said. “I’ll wait to give you a ride to your cabin.”

Nick walked though the lobby doors and instantly felt the presence of something beautiful. Actually, he heard the presence before he felt it. The woman was talking to someone at the front desk, with her head turned sideways.

“Pascale Pacheco. Yes, thank you, I’ll be staying for the conference entire,” she said, in the astonishingly sexual cadences of Catherine Deneuve. The sound of the doors opening caused her to look around, and Nick found himself gazing into the eyes of a textbook French bombshell, right out of central casting, perhaps thirty or thirty-five years old: pouty Bridget Bardot lips glossed in pink, a slender nose, impossibly deep eyes under eyebrows furrowed in Gallic concentration, blonde hair pulled back in a very loose braid with casual ringlets framing her face. She wore gold hoop earrings, and there was even a sweater draped over her shoulders, with the sleeves loosely knotted around her neck.

She noticed his grin and looked at him quizzically, as if to say, “should I know you?”

“Bonsoir, Mademoiselle,” he said.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” she answered.

He took out his credit card and placed it on the counter, then remembered that Carl had paid for everything, and put it back into his wallet and the wallet into his pants. He felt suddenly awkward. The switchboard rang again, and two more calls came in while the clerk was handling the first one.

“Je m’excuse, Monsieur. Vous êtes francais? Est-ce que je vous connais?”

“No, I’m American, and you don’t know me. My name’s Aubrey, Nick Aubrey.”

He extended his hand, and she shook it.

“Pascale,” she said. She smiled at him, then repeated his name. “I have a colleague named Aubrey,” she said. She looked up at him, with a friendly but somehow intense look on her face, as if waiting for him to continue the conversation.

The clerk behind the counter was waiting for him.

“That’s my brother,” he said.

“Oh? Yes, I see the resemblance.” The woman—Pascale—looked at him deeply, then bowed her head. “Good night, Nick Aubrey,” she said.

“Goodnight,” he replied, awkwardly, realizing he didn’t know her last name.

He watched her walk away—specifically interested in the shape of her legs as they moved inside her skirt—then turned his attention back to the clerk.

“I have your cabin key here, Mr. Aubrey,” the clerk said. She handed him a plastic card in one hand. “And here’s a package for you, left by another guest earlier in the day.”

He took the manila envelope—it was bulky but not heavy—and thanked the woman.

“One more question,” he asked. “Well, two. I’m wondering if Paul Aubrey or Bartlett Aubrey—I mean, Bartlett McGovern, have checked in yet?”

The clerk typed a few quick commands on the keyboard in front of her.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “They have both registered already.”

“Did they check in together?” Nick asked.

The clerk looked at him blankly. “We don’t provide that kind of information,” she said.

Successive waves of fear, anger, relief and doubt rushed over him. He wanted to ask if they had the same room, and if that room had one bed or two, but asking questions like that was crazy, nutzoid, jealous husband territory. Soon to be ex-husband, probably, he reminded himself. “Can you tell me where I might find them?” Nick finally asked.

“It is not our policy to give out cabin numbers,” the clerk said politely. “But there is a bar in the central courtyard where many of our guests choose to congregate at night.”

“Thank you,” Nick said.

“Have a nice stay with us,” the clerk replied. “And enjoy the conference.”

Yeah, right, Nick thought. And fuck you too.

Nick’s golf cart dropped him off at a little whitewashed two-room cabin with a little kitchenette. He threw his suitcase and gym bag on the bed and took a tour of the digs. The walls were wainscoted, painted white. Ceiling beams were white too. There were original paintings on the walls, and large milled soaps in the bathroom. On a table in the sitting area there was fruit, French bread in clear bag, and some bottles of what he assumed were very pricey California red wine. He went to the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator: cheese, juice, champagne, and white wine. He walked back to the bed. Opposite it there was a giant television easily concealable in a tasteful cabinet. Everything about the place was modest, and yet it reeked of money. “It’ll do,” he said.

He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the envelope the desk clerk had given him. It was from Carl, a cell phone and a short note. The cell phone said, “Hello Nick,” on the message screen, and the note said: “I’ll need a way to find you. – Carl.”

“Bite me,” Nick said, and tossed the phone on the bed.

At that instant the room phone rang, and he felt a fear grip his heart. Would it be Bartlett? No, he told himself, it would be Carl. Or Paul. Or the Dali Lama. Or Jesus Christ himself.

He picked it up on the fifth ring.

It was Paul.

“Hello, brother,” Paul said.

“Hey Paul,” Nick replied.

“I’m in the bar, if you’d like to come to join me for a drink,” Paul said, as if getting Nick on the phone and inviting him for a drink were the most common thing in the world.

“Do they serve beer?” he asked.

“Yes,” Paul replied. “Only about thirty kinds.”

“Choose one for me. Let me get changed,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

He turned on the TV, which came up with a blue screen on which was displayed a personalized message: “Welcome, Mr. Aubrey. We hope you enjoy your stay.”

“Bite me,” he said again, flipping up to the regular programming and quickly finding the scrolling guide. He began to unpack his small supply of clothes, which he was sure would mark him as a K-Mart shopper among the billionaires and geniuses in the light of day. What does a fella wear to a meeting with his estranged brother? Nick asked himself, surveying the options. Nothing seemed right, so he just put on his clean pair of jeans and a checked button-down collar shirt, his uniform. He looked at himself quickly in the mirror, smoothing out his hair. On a whim, he dropped to the floor and performed ten slow pushups. The effort got his blood moving, and made his arms bigger. He absent-mindedly flexed a succession of muscles in turn as would in the gym: pecs, lats, triceps, trapezius, obliques, deltoids. . . Great, you’re a muscle-man, he thought. Fat lot of good that’s done you. Not only that, but he had flexed his right bicep too hard and it took ten seconds for the resulting painful cramp to subside. “Idiot,” he muttered. He pocketed his room key, left the TV on—the sound would comfort him when he came back to the room, later—and set out into the mild Californian air, feeling like an imposter, a fake, and a fraud.

His brother, however, looked like he fit right in. He was sitting in a large leather arm chair in the middle of the room with a small table in front of him, his legs crossed at the thigh. The table held three drinks—a beer poured into a tall glass, which was his; a tumbler, which was Paul’s, Nick guessed, and a martini glass filled with a pink liquid. A woman’s drink. Bartlett’s drink?

Paul stood up when he saw Nick enter the room and smiled. He looked healthy—older, but more possessed. He looked privileged, too, as if the last seven years had been filled with fine wine, good diners, comfortable mattresses, and beautiful women, while Nick’s had been filled with airport hotels, red-eye flights, a declining marriage, no job, and, finally, divorce waiting to jump out from around the corner any minute.

Nick extended his hand for a shake, and Paul returned it. “Sit, sit,” Paul said, indicated one of the three chairs. As if I need your permission to sit, Nick thought.

“How long have you been here?”

“I arrived three days ago,” Paul said. “I never work jet-lagged.”

Jesus, Nick thought. He didn’t even know what it felt like to be not jet-lagged.

“How was your flight?” Paul asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

Paul smiled. “No, not really. I’m making small talk.” Paul paused. “Nick, I know that it’s been awkward, but I hope it doesn’t have to stay awkward between us.”

“Good,” Nick said. He looked at that pink drink in the martini glass on the table. “Me too.” He indicated the glass. “That Bartlett’s?” he asked.

Paul nodded. “She ran back to her room for a sweater,” he said.

“I see,” Nick said. “Her room, or yours?”

“Relax,” Paul said. “She wants to see you. That’s one of the reason’s she’s here.”

Was his brother playing marriage counselor now? Nick thought.

“How is she?”

“She’s good,” Paul said. “I’ll let you ask her yourself. But I’m worried about her, too. And I’m worried about you. Which is why I wanted you to come here. Thank you for coming, Nick. I mean that.”

Nick’s brain was chewing on the fact that Paul and Bartlett had been here, at this hotel, for an indeterminate period of time together, and that they had, apparently, gotten intimate enough to talk about Bartlett’s relationship to Nick. Did that surprise Nick? Bartlett was an intensely private person. It had taken him years to really know her. He knew she had had a two-week fling with Paul, but she always said it had been ‘nothing’. But two weeks wasn’t nothing. She didn’t open up easily, and if she had opened up to Paul, again, that meant something. What, Nick didn’t know. He asked the obvious question. “Why are you worried about us?”

Paul paused, as if trying to figure out how to begin. He leaned back in his seat and put the palm of his left hand on his face. Older, yes, Nick thought. More gray, more wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. But he looked young and fit and sophisticated. He looked, in fact, like a Silicon Valley power type, someone from the mold of Carl Swirsing, someone who knew how to wear a fancy suit, order a fine wine. He was probably a triathlete, and no doubt a fine skier. Nick was certainly much stronger than his brother, but that was only because he spent so much time in sweaty gyms lifting weights. Paul looked liked a man willing to accept the world on the world’s terms, while Nick had spent so much time hiding from it. Maybe Bartlett would have been better off with Paul, Nick thought. Maybe Nick should have tried harder to make her happy, Nick thought. Maybe Nick should have not gone and ruined his life.

Paul leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and started right in. “Have you ever heard of a group called the Association for Responsible Biotechnology?”

Nick shook his head, no.

“A woman named Judith Knight?”

“No. Should I have heard of her?”

“She runs a biotech company in Boulder, Colorado, and a do-gooder association on the side. A few weeks ago I tried to negotiate a deal to buy her company. She wasn’t interested, but I didn’t expect her to be. It was a long shot.”

“Fascinating,” Nick said.

Paul smiled. “Still a smart ass.”

“Well I don’t feel very smart. Feeling pretty stupid, actually.” Nick wasn’t interested in small talk, and he didn’t feel like smiling. Paul could see this, and his expression became serious. Pleasantries were over. Good.

“Ever heard of nanomachines?”

“Of course,” Nick said, as Peter Barlow’s words resonated in his memory: The Iraqi secret weapon is not nerve gas. It’s tiny robots to control our minds. Gulf War Syndrome is only the beginning. Nick took a rapid, deep drink of his beer, trying to not look too spooked.

“Judith Knight called me a few days ago. She was pretty agitated about work going on at my company, Hoff-Zeigy Pharmaceuticals. She wanted to warn me about the implications of some of our research, specifically about our research into nanomachines. I brushed her concerns to the side. Now, I’m not sure she was that far off the mark. I only knew the general outlines of the work our scientists were doing. I didn’t even know that a new, secret nanomachine lab was being built for them. But I was in that lab four days ago. I left there and directly flew here.”

“And?”

Now Paul took a drink, as deeply and rapidly as Nick had. The power look had disappeared. Now Paul looked scared.

“There were four of us in that laboratory that day. A scientist named Pavel, a scientist named Dieter, a technician named Kurt, and me.”

“Pavel,” Nick said. “I know that name.”

“He worked with your friend Todd,” Paul said. “I didn’t know that until Bartlett told me last time I saw her in Boston. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not, maybe it is. What I’m pretty sure is no coincidence is that Pavel works with Monty Meekman. He’s a Digital Microsystems Corporate Fellow, or whatever they call themselves.”

“I thought you said he worked for your company, whatchmacallit pharmaceuticals.”

“Yeah, well, evidently he’s been in violation of his employment contract, working for Digital Microsystems at the same time. Came as a bit of a shock to me, I gotta tell you.”

It shocked Nick too, a little. On the other hand, it was getting to the point where nothing shocked him. He wouldn’t be all that surprised if Paul right now turned into a talking banana.

“How did you find that out?” Nick said. “Those Corporate Fellow guys are pretty damn secretive.”

“Bartlett told me.”

“I need another drink,” Nick replied. Pavel, Todd’s partner on the Kali project, Michael Jackson, now worked on a nanomachine project for Hoff-Zeigy? And Bartlett had seen Paul last time he was in Boston? And Bartlett knew secrets closely held by the Dijjy-Mike Corporate Fellows, the apostles of Monty Meekman? This was going from very, very bad to much, much worse.

“No, let me finish first. These nanomachines, they play with DNA in living animals. They alter cells in real time, from the DNA up. They can practically change a mouse into rabbit while you’re watching. They don’t really work right. Not yet. But they will. We have some of the best scientists in the world working for us. And this is where I get spooked. My company wants to buy The Neuro Group, Bartlett’s company. And…” Paul paused, and downed the rest of his drink. “And, here’s the really scary part. Two of the people in the Hoff-Zeigy nanomachine lab with me four days ago —the scientist Dieter Steffen and a guy named Kurt Alder, a lab tech—those two thought the experiments were unethical and should be stopped. Both of them are dead. Both were dead within twelve hours of the first successful experiment on the mice.”

Nick felt shivers pass through him. There had been entirely too much death lately.

“What happened to them?” Nick asked.

“One a bullet in the brain, and the other cut in half by a trolley in downtown Basel. Rush hour. No witnesses. Both deaths were ruled suicides within thirty-six hours and the bodies were cremated. This all happened, like, hours ago. This is going on right now. The only reason I’m not in Basel right now is because I’m here. I think I might be in line, too. If I were in Basel I think I might be dead.”

“Jesus.”

“I can’t pull it together; I’m missing pieces of the puzzle. But I don’t think either one of them, Dieter or Kurt, killed themselves. They were murdered. Meanwhile, my company wants to buy The Neuro Group, and I’m the guy who negotiates that kind of deal. They want me to buy it, bad. My arm is being twisted halfway off my shoulder to acquire it at any price. I’ve been asking myself why.”

“You guys buy up all kinds of biotech companies. I thought that’s what you did.”

“Yeah, but they told me to find a partner working on the Human Genome Project. The Neuro Group’s work is only distantly related to that. The rationale Hoff-Zeigy gave me is bullshit.”

“Well, why do they want it then? What do you think?”

“It must be Bartlett’s research into machine-to-brain communication. I think my company needs what she’s done in order to complete their nanomachines. But they need her, not just her research. They need her 100 percent to come on board.”

“So, she’ll just say no. She’s good at doing what she wants.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“No?”

“Somehow, I get the feeling that they have ways to get people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise want to do. I might be in line because I was in the lab that day, and besides my connection to Bartlett and the Neuro Group, I don’t have any obvious use to them. They could kill me, like that.” Paul pretended to snap. He was talking in a quiet voice, leaning in to Nick.

“How much of this does Bartlett know?” Nick asked.

“Everything. And she’s terrified of Meekman, who is supposed to be speaking at this conference tomorrow.”

“Then why is she even here?”

“We didn’t think she shouldn’t come. That might set off some alarms somewhere.”

We didn’t think? What the hell did that mean?

Nick leaned back and finished his beer. He motioned for another one, and weighed what he wanted to say to his brother now, how much he should tell him. Finally, he said, “If there is a hit list, I’m on it too.”

Paul didn’t seem surprised, but he asked why, and for the second time in a week, Nick found himself starting from the beginning—Todd’s shooting, Monty Meekman, the crazy man on the airplane, the kiddie porn, the house break-in, all the way up to this piece of bad news. When he was finished, Paul leaned back in his chair and said, “Jesus, Nick, I had no idea.”

Chapter 35

It had been cold in the bar, but that was only part of the reason Bartlett had left to go get her sweater from her room. The real reason was that her stomach was in her throat and her hand shook as she raised her glass to her lips. She had spilled a bit of the vodka on her pants once already. Paul was gentleman enough not to notice, or, if he did notice, not to remark on it. Bartlett was too nervous to see Nick. Every cell of her both wanted to see him and didn’t want to see him. And so she was stuck, half pulled toward him, half pulled away.

So she had come back to the room to get her sweater, and had sat on the edge of the bed taking deep breaths until she felt like herself again. Once that was accomplished, she checked her reflection, smiled at herself to make sure she didn’t have anything in her teeth, and took a deep breath, about to make her way back to the bar. That’s what she would have done, if the phone hadn’t rung.

She picked it up. It was Irwin Goldberg, calling at an hour that was, for Irwin, at least, very late East Coast time.

“Irwin, what is it?” she asked.

“Are you in California?” he asked. “At the conference?”

“You know I am.”

“With the Hoff-Zeigy man?”

“Yes. Irwin, what’s going on?”

“Your friends that found the phage protein . . .”

“Janine and Chris,” Bartlett said. “What’s wrong, Irwin?”

“I’m sorry, Bartlett. They’re dead.”

Bartlett sat heavily in the chair next to the phone. This was impossible. She had just seen them not five days ago.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here,” she replied.

“I’m sorry.”

“How did they die?”

“Car accident,” he said. “Vermont. I saw it on the news.”

“I’m coming back,” she said. “Right now, as soon as I can.”

“What good could you do here? The funeral won’t be for a few days. Why not stay at the conference. It will keep your mind off things. And I will keep you informed about arrangements, I promise.”

Bartlett pulled her hair with her left hand, squeezed the phone with her right. Irwin was right—staying at the Biodigital Forum was the logical thing to do. But she also knew it was impossible. Not with both Paul and Nick here. Not with her friends lying cold and dead just days after they had told her how afraid they were. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” She said, and then added, “I need to see their lab with my own eyes.”

“I wanted to call you to tell you myself,” Irwin said.

“Thank you.”

She was silent a long time.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, and hung up the phone. She sat still for a few minutes, fearing that any sudden move would cause more tragedy, more death. Then she picked up the phone, dialed the hotel desk, and asked to be connected to the bar. She asked for Paul, and eventually he came to the phone. She told him what happened, and that she was going to leave, and that she was sorry.

“Bartlett, where are you going?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Home. Boston. I’ll take a cab to the San Francisco airport.”

“I’ll give you a ride. San Jose is closer.”

“Is Nick there?” Bartlett asked.

“He’s ten feet away, at the table. I’m at the bar.” Paul paused. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Tell him I’m sorry,” she said. “Goodbye Paul.” She clicked off, packed up her recently unpacked bags, and headed towards the front desk. She’d take a cab to the airport, and she’d get the first flight she could into Boston. It was something, at least. It was a plan.

Chapter 36

Paul came back to the table after the short phone conversation at the bar looking even more intense than he had when telling Nick about the apparent murders in.

“I’ve got to take off for a bit,” Paul said. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

Nick felt every muscle in his body tense again, only this time he wasn’t flexing voluntarily.

“Who was on the phone?”

“Listen, Nick, she’s leaving. She doesn’t want to see you now.”

Nick stood, feeling his right fist clenching. “Who the hell are you to tell me whether I can or cannot see my own wife?” He seethed the words as much as spoke them.

“For Christ’s sake Nick, will you knock off the jealous husband bit? Two of her friends got killed in a car wreck. Do you want to make a scene and have security and cops crawling all over you? Is that what you want? I’m taking her to the airport. San Jose. I’ll give you the details when I get back.”

Nick felt like putting Paul’s teeth down his throat, but if Bartlett didn’t want to see him she didn’t want to see him. She had gone five months without calling him, after all. It was time for him to take the hint.

“Which friends? Her friends are my friends too, you know,” Nick said. But even as he said the words he wondered if they were true. What did he really know of Bartlett’s personal life? With him spending half his life on the road, maybe she had acquired a whole new circle—one that didn’t include him.

“When I get back I’ll fill you in on everything,” Paul said.

“You do that,” Nick said, sitting.

“You’re going to have to trust me, Nick.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t.”

Paul leaned over and whispered at him ferociously, his face an inch from Nick’s. “Will you please take the cotton out of your ears and listen to me? People are getting murdered left and right. I’m afraid for me, I’m afraid for you, I’m afraid for Bartlett. You and I are going to have to work together to figure this out. Do you think I’m stupid enough to go poaching your wife when I need your help to stay alive?”

“Whatever, just go,” Nick said. He didn’t know if he was more angry with Paul or disgusted with himself, and he had no idea how he felt about Bartlett at all. Everything that had once been so certain was now completely foreign. Was she giving him the brush-off, or was she really racing back to Massachusetts because two friends had been killed? If so, who? Should Nick be heading east too? He decided to give himself the time it would take to have one more pint of strong ale before deciding what to do.

He ordered the ale, drank it deliberately, pausing between sips, resisting the urge to down it in one gulp. Yet it only took seven minutes, according to the clock above the bar, for him to make it gone. He wanted another. But, dammit, he and Bartlett were not divorced yet. She was still his wife, he was still her husband, and if she had just lost two close friends maybe he had also, but in any event it was his duty to see if there was anything he could do to help her. He stood and got his bearings, headed towards the exit that would take him to the parking lot.

It was there that he saw them. He stood on a little terrace outside the hotel’s front entrance. Down a graceful flight of stairs and twenty yards away, Paul and Bartlett were standing next to the open passenger side door of a Mercedes sedan; Paul’s hand was on the handle. Suave bastard, Nick thought. He tried to remember if he had ever opened a car door for his wife. They didn’t have that kind of relationship; for Nick to hold the passenger door for her would have been at least as unnatural, and unnecessary as it would be for her to open the driver’s door for him. Had he missed the boat? Under her feminist, we’re-all-equals-here exterior, did Bartlett have an inner girlie girl who wanted to be pandered to like some 60’s dame? As Nick was wondering if he had really misunderstood her that much, Bartlett suddenly threw her arms around Paul. Paul, surprised, glanced in the direction of Nick’s bungalow, and awkwardly hugged her, briefly, then swiftly guided her to her seat and closed the door, looking nervously around him as he did. Do you think I’m stupid enough to go poaching your wife when I need your help to stay alive? Well, that answered that question. Nick quickly stepped back inside the building, out of sight. Paul got into the car and it moved rapidly away.

Chapter 37

Nick had come all this way to see Bartlett again, and seen her he had. For three seconds, in the arms of his brother. Careful what you wish for. Now she was gone again, and he was, again, alone in a bar with a drink in front of him, three drinks behind him, and more to come. He caught the bartender’s eye, and pointed to a tap. Nick had discovered in recent years that it was better to be lonely drunk than it was to be lonely sober. Getting drunk might also help with the fact that he was terrified. In any event, he was well on his way.

“Ah-lo,” said a French-accented woman’s voice, behind him. “Monsieur Aubrey, no?”

Nick turned. The gorgeous woman he had seen at the desk. She was wearing slacks and a beige sweater that clung just enough.

“Nick Aubrey, n’est-ce pas?” she said. She smiled. “May I join you?”

The seat to his left was open, as was the seat to his right. A woman like her could sit anywhere she wanted, at any time. Maybe she was joking with him.

“Je vous en prie,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

She was drinking Chardonnay. He ordered her one and put it on his tab. Carl’s tab, actually. Which, by the way, where was Carl? Nick had come to this damnable conference expressly to meet with Carl, who was nowhere to be found. Well, never mind that for now.

“It was nice of you to remember my name,” he said. “I’m flattered.”

“I will tell you a secret. I was looking for your brother, Paul Aubrey. So of course, when I hear you say your name. . .”

“You said you worked together?”

She nodded.

“At Hoff-Zeigy,” she said. “Pharmaceuticals?”

“What’s your position there?” Nick asked, trying his best to hold up his end of the conversation while not getting too distracted by her breasts, or the curve of her neck, or her huge, almond shaped eyes.

She pouted her lips. “A little of this, a little of that. Whatever they need me to do.”

“I wish I had a job like that.”

“You can have whatever you want,” she replied, and laughed. “Usually, all you have to do is ask, no?”

She was assertive, maybe even flirting with him, but that was OK with Nick. Anything was better than worrying about Bartlett and her two dead friends, or why she had asked Paul to drive her to the airport and not him.

“What brings you to the Forum?” Nick said.

“I came to meet people like you,” she replied. “And some other things to take care of.”

He asked if she had been to Silicon Valley before and she said no; he gave her a capsule history of the area and asked where she was from, and before he realized it they were talking like old friends. She shouldn’t drink any more, she said. But she didn’t care, she was going to have another glass of wine. Nick drank beer, and for the first time in what seemed an eternity, he actually felt himself beginning to relax.

Their conversation rambled; he could hardly keep up with its twists and turns. Pascale, it seemed, was a person who got bored when a conversation stayed on one topic for more than five minutes. They talked about California, pinball, bocce ball, Kansas, Hegel, the Beatles, Johnny Holiday, Socrates, pederasty, structural anthropology, and what the world was like before computers. Which brought Nick to talking about the Bonehead Computer Museum. Pascale seemed fascinated.

“Et quesque il y a dans cette musé?” she asked.

“Everything, from the first Digital Microsystems kludges all the way up to the Kali chip.”

“I am death, I destroy the world,” she laughed.

“I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” he corrected her.

“Le show-off”, she said. She ordered two more drinks, then excused herself. On her way to the lady’s room Nick noticed her take a cell phone from her purse and dial it. Maybe I should get one of those things, Nick thought, then remembered that Carl had already provided one for him. He modified his thought: maybe I should learn how to use it. She looked over and saw Nick looking at her, waved a little wave. Her call was short, and in five minutes she had rejoined him and was talking again, jumping from subject to subject. She really was the most entrancing thing. Smart, funny, beautiful, and perhaps above all, like Bartlett, she was an attentive listener. Talking with her was fun. Before Nick knew it, it was closing time. Closing time, and no sign of Paul. Had he really taken Bartlett to the airport, or had that just been a lame excuse for them to scram?

“It’s four AM in Boston,” Nick said, wondering if the sudden dread that passed through him showed on his face. “I must be crazy to stay up so late.”

Pascale looked at him quizzically.

“Really, Nick, es-tu fou?”

“Am I crazy? That’s a good question, actually”. He pondered a moment, reflecting on everything that had happened over the last few weeks, all the reasons why this was the last place on earth he should be right now.

“I think the answer is yes, I am crazy,” he said.

She took his hand and put it on top of her own. “Let’s go,” she said.

She stood up, a bit woozily. Oh my God, Nick thought. The sweater was a masterpiece of the sweater maker’s art. No sweater ever better fit a woman’s body.

“I’ll walk you to your cabin,” he said. “Do you know how to get there?”

“Quelle idiote! J’ai trop bu,” She replied, ignoring him.

They walked arm in arm to her cabin. She retrieved her card key and slid it through the slot. “Come on,” she said. “Tu viens?”

How did he explain that he was married, and even though his wife had in fact left him a lifetime ago, he was still carrying a pathetic torch? That his wife Bartlett had gone off this very evening with his brother, Paul? That even though Bartlett hadn’t had sex with him in about nine million six hundred thousand four hundred and twenty-two years three months nineteen days six hours and five seconds that he, Nick, didn’t want to ravish the living daylights out of this most provocative creature who was practically throwing herself at him?

“Viens, fais-moi l’amour,” she said.

“Pascale,” he said. “It’s been fun.”

Five months since he’d been with Bartlett, and the final two months of their shared life had been cold, frigid. That made seven months, total, since he’d been with a woman.

Pascale pressed her body into his. “Make love to me,” she said. “Make love to me.”

She licked his neck, bit his ear lobe. Standing halfway inside her room and halfway in the breezeway, she raised her right thigh between his legs and rubbed. With her arms still around his neck, she said, “you make love to me right now or I scream ‘rape.’”

She put her head back and screamed “RAPE!” in her irresistible accent, and laughed.

Nick tried to say, “I am too old for this.”

He tried to say “If I have an affair with you, Pascale, my sanity, which is more fragile than the cigarette paper upon which the bumble-bees have urinated, will never survive.”

He tried to say, “I’m tangled up in an intrigue of murder, industrial espionage, biological warfare, who-knows-what, and if you hang with me, mignone, you won’t see your next birthday.”

What he said was “OK.”

She pulled his head down to her own and kissed him, walking back into the room and seating him in a plush arm chair. She insisted, first, on feeding him, as if they were newlyweds, helping herself to the gourmet fare in the tiny pantry and fridge. She put the Brie on the bread, the bread in his mouth—from behind, standing while he sat, kissing his neck, hugging him, both arms in his shirt, pinching his nipples.

“Pascale, you are going to drive me out of my mind,” he said.

“Oh shut up. Macho man. You need to rebuild your strength. Drink. Idiot.”

He drank a swig of champagne from the bottle.

“I swear to God,” he said. “You are the sexiest woman in the world.”

“Ah non,” she said, walking to stand in front of him. “Look at me. No teets. No azz.”

That did it; the force was beyond his control. He exploded out of the chair like a saber tooth tiger in a cartoon show. The first time was in the living room, with most of their clothes still on. There were breadcrumbs, cheese and some spilled champagne to be cleaned up, but that was why one tipped housekeeping. The second time was in the bed, like normal people, naked. The third time was on the chair, with her facing away from him.

Then somehow they crawled to the bed and fell asleep.

He didn’t know how long he slept for. It could have been ten minutes, it could have been ten hours. He woke up suddenly, itching his nose, and Pascale was above him, lying on his left arm, her perfect bare breasts pressed to his chest, her hair falling over her face, holding what looked like a small pen in her hands. The pen had a foil cap on one end and a push button on the other. A sprayer. And indeed, that’s what it felt like in his nose—a nasal sprayer. Whatever was in his nose smelled like licorice and ran down the back of his throat, making him cough.

“Wake up, sleepy,” she said, smiling. “Special, imported from France. Energy in a bottle.” She raised it to her own nose, sprayed and inhaled. “The taste is not great, but just wait for what it will do.”

“Pascale, you’re the crazy one, not me,” he said.

He tried to push himself up; his arms were not strong enough. He touched his right hand to his left ear. It was still bleeding, just a little, where she had bit him. The clock by the bed told him that the conference started in less than an hour. And who the hell knew what she had just put up his nose? Ecstasy? Cocaine? Viagra? Was he going to be tripping soon, or sporting some kind of monster boner on top of everything else?

“Shit,” he said. “I’ve got to get ready.” Carl was going to love this, Nick thought. He started to raise himself up; she pulled him back.

“Non, reste là.” Stay here. “Je te ferrai des tendresses.” I’ll do sweet things to you.

“I’m sorry, I have to . . . I have to get ready.” With superhuman strength, he stood up. The sprayer, mister, whatever it was, it had apparently done its job well. He had a hard-on the size of Texas.

Pascale called after him half-heartedly as he made his way to the bathroom.

“Make love to me again. Encore! Sauvage!”

He stumbled through the door, checked himself out in the mirror. What a mess. There was a hickey on his neck the size of a golf ball, a very clearly visible set of teeth marks on his ear, bags under his rheumy eyes. Good Christ.

He stayed in the shower for fifteen minutes, hoping for a miracle of rejuvenation. If anybody asked, he would figure out some story about the band-aid on his ear. Visine would take care of the eyes. Five good strong cups of coffee would tighten up his facial muscles and moderate the bags. Only one thing was going to get rid of the hard-on, and he didn’t know if the rest of his body was up to doing it again.

He came out of the shower, his mind on business. He had one goal: get dressed and get out before she seduced him again.

The fourth time was back on the living room floor, missionary. This early in the day, after this kind of evening, at his age, nothing fancier was called for. Or possible. Oh God, he shuddered. He had never felt so completely sated in his life.

Chapter 38

At 2:00 AM, Casey Montgomery, intent on testing a hypothesis that had just come to her in a dream about some thermal properties of gallium arsenide, walked down the hall, opened the door to her office, and knew immediately that she was hosed.

Oh fuck it’s him! she thought. Sméagol. She turned to run but it was too late—there was someone else behind her, a woman, ugly, not smiling. They must have staked out her office: Pavel had been waiting inside the office while the other waited around the corner at the little coffee station. Pavel had a black gun in his hand. The barrel looked very long. Oh, a silencer, she realized. Tacky. Where the hell was Corporate Security?

“I need the Kali chip,” he said. “I understand that you have one in the Boneheaded Computer Museum. Kindly take us there. Don’t try to give me a substitute; I know what a real Kali looks like.”

“Sorry. Museum’s closed,” Casey said. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Don’t fuck with me. Take me to your so-called museum.”

“Why would I fuck with you?” she said. “You ugly. And furthermore you fucked up my chip.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder at the woman behind her. Woman? Upon closer inspection it appeared to be a female alien from the cast of Star Trek: she was wearing not a mask, but crudely applied heavy makeup that completely distorted every feature of her face. There was no telling what she—or he—looked like underneath all that.

“Hey, Pavel,” she said. “There’s a question I want to ask you. Why are you always doing his dirty work?”

He looked bored, expressionless. “I could kill you right now,” he said.

“Yes, and water is wet. Some things are obvious,” she replied. “Answer the question if you want me to take you to the chip.”

“Monty is the single most advanced being the world has ever known.”

Casey started laughing, then stopped when she realized Pavel’s expression hadn’t changed. “Oh,” she said. “You’re serious. Come on, I’ll take you to the damn museum.”

She made a motion towards her desk, but Pavel pointed the pistol at her head and said, “Stop, what are you doing?”

“‘Stop, what am I doing,’” she mimicked. “I’m coming to give you a blow job. Unzip! No, you moron, I’m getting the key. The key to the museum, OK?”

He nodded OK.

She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a knotted loop of pink ribbon, about ten inches long, with a key on it. She picked it up and held it toward them, holding the knot; the key swung back and forth.

“The key? OK? The key?” she said. Then she started towards the hallway, pushing the alien aside.

She could feel them both following her. She heard a rustle of clothing but she didn’t look behind. “OK,” she said, “museum this way. I’m really flattered by all the attention, really I am. When I started the museum I had no idea that anybody would want to see my humble work, especially not any minions for the single most advanced being the world has ever known. Minions. May I call you that?” She started walking with no clear idea of where she was heading, and as she walked she talked, keeping up a long, steady stream of chatter. She wasn’t particularly thinking about what she was saying, but she didn’t want them thinking about where she was leading them, or not leading them. One thing for certain: she wasn’t going anywhere near Todd’s shrine in the Bonehead Computer Museum until she had ditched these two heavies. So now the problem was, how to ditch them without getting a bullet in the head, like Todd had done.

She had no plan, but the Mill was one very large place, which meant that she could lead them around for a while before they would realize they were being taken on a wild goose chase. Thirteen interconnected buildings sitting on eleven acres. Nobody knew the Mill better than Casey did, and if you had told her to find a Kali chip hidden in it she would have needed two thousand years to do it. And if Casey couldn’t find a hidden chip, she who knew the Mill better than any living person, if she couldn’t find it, nobody could. Without her as a guide, these two goons wouldn’t have a chance. And she was not going to be their guide.

“In here,” she said at last, pushing a door open. Bingo. The gigantic room was nearly dark, with only the safety light over the door pushing back the black. She took off running, leaving the two behind her.

Two guns discharged simultaneously. The bullets danced around her. Cripes, she thought.

As another bullet whizzed past; she ducked behind a large wooden bench. She raised her head above it, not knowing where they were, and called out, “Bet you can’t tell I’m not wearing any underpants.”

Two bullets answered. OK, that’s where they were. She ran out an exit and down a half flight of stairs, where, by an act of God, she found a shovel, relic from who-knew-what activity a century before. Footsteps were close behind her. She picked up the shovel and swung, never looking, only trusting somebody would be there. The shovel hit something soft. There was a muffled shriek—female?—and she heard a something drop, presumably a gun. She ran back up the short flight and across the vast room and left through the door by which she had entered, reasonably confident that the uninjured one would leave his companion and continue chasing Casey alone. She was also reasonably confident that she would not be shot in a main hallway. There was after all some security in the Mill. The Mill was never truly empty.

The trick was going to be to get her pursuer to follow her to the Void without letting him catch her, and then to lose him. She clutched the key tightly. She didn’t hear anybody following, so she turned around. It was Michael Jackson, Pavel, Sméagol. He was at least fifteen yards behind. The other one—the ‘she ugly’—came up behind Pavel, her face and right hand bleeding. Casey stopped, turned, held up the key and said, “nyah-nyan-na-boo-boo” and took off at a trot.

Down Daniel Shays to Two, up the stairs, four flights. They were still behind her. Down Publick Alley 4754 to Building three, then right at Turners Falls. There was the door; she had made it as far as the Void. So far, so good.

She turned to make sure that they were still with her, and pushed the door to the Void. Now it was time to see if she could really run. Come on, she said to herself, Come on, Rosie Ruiz. You can do it. She ran harder than she had ever run in her life. Past the empty rows of cubicles, past the cubicles filled with cables, monitors, chairs, circuit boards, testers, boxes; a city of the dead and forgotten. Through the door that said, “DO NOT ENTER, ALARM WILL SOUND.” Up, up. Would she have time? Only one intact one was following her, right? The other was wounded by the shovel? But was that two sets of footsteps following behind? Up. Up. Up. The key, the key, the key, up, up. The key fit. She opened the lock, pushed open the door, just half an inch. Then stepped back and stepped onto the roof through the window miraculously open, slamming it behind her. Into the cold night air.

She heard the door swing open.

She heard it clang against the wall. She heard a scream as he, Pavel, fell.

She heard the sound of his body hitting the bridge five stories below. His skull, when it split, sounded remarkably like a cantaloupe. She thought she heard the sound of his gun falling in the upper pond, but she couldn’t be sure.

Then she heard silence, and the muffled roar of the falls.

Good riddance, she thought.

One down, one to go.

Casey waited. The other footsteps had been right behind the first pair, but they had stopped at the top of the stairs. Now she had a decision to make. She could continue to wait there outside the window and try to jump the alien woman when she climbed out onto the roof. Or, she could run. Let’s see, hmmm…Which will it be? Run for my life? Or stay here and engage Lady Terminator in hand-to-hand combat? She ran. Her legs were much heavier than they had been ten seconds ago. She ran past the skylight above the fab-lab where the Klingons in bunny suits were making chips to decades-old specifications, oblivious to the chase taking place on the roof over their heads.

If she could make it to the parapet, maybe she could time her jump just right. Maybe. And maybe she could get whoever was following her to fall for the same trick, to jump where there was no ledge, to fall to her death. She could hear footsteps getting closer. Closer.

Now!

She jumped. But she was more tired than she had thought. She wasn’t going to clear the distance. In the split second in the air, with the nothingness beneath her, a single thought went through her head.

No.

That was the thought. No.

You took my job.

You took my lover.

You took five years of my life. You don’t get me.

No.

She stretched her arms as far as they would go. She hit, she grabbed, and she pulled. She had made it. Blessed Jesus and Mary, she had made it. And the Lady Terminator, the she-devil with the bloody nose, was readying to jump the distance and take from her what was hers. Casey scrambled in a window, down a hall. Her pursuer was only ten yards behind. There was no time for fancy strategy. Change of plan: go to the Shrine in the Bonehead Computer Museum and retrieve the chip before Meekman’s thug could get her hands on it. Casey was never going to set foot in this dark satanic Mill again. She was going to have to go to the museum for the Kali. Now. She would figure out what to do about Powerbitch when she got there.

Most of the Mill’s corridors were lit up like a Kmart, but if she could make it to the museum maybe she could lose her adversary in the dark. Down the hall, through the swinging doors. It was pitch black, thank God. Casey knew the way by heart; her attacker didn’t. If Casey could just make it into the cooler, grab the Kali, put it in her shirt pocket, then dash back out… Maybe later she could get a friend to bring the etch plot to her when things had settled down, in a day or two. For now the only important thing was the chip. She had to have that chip. Why? She didn’t know. But Sméagol had come all the way here to get it. It must be important.

She blinked in the darkness. Breathing hard, quietly, with her lungs screaming for more air, she used her toes to slip off her shoes. The linoleum felt cold on her bare feet as she inched her way down the hall. Was there somebody else breathing there, behind her? She couldn’t tell, the sound of her own heart was too loud. Foot by careful foot she made her way through the empty kitchen. Was she alone?

She put her hand on the handle of the cooler. She could see, in her mind’s eye, six-armed impassive Kali floating above her. Kali, Goddess of death, destroyer of worlds. Hope you’re enjoying this, she thought. The door made a loud click as it opened. Shit! But no response. Maybe somehow she had done it, gotten away.

The pain to the back of her head was excruciating, and her cheek didn’t feel too good either. So this is what it feels like to be pistol whipped, she thought as she crumpled to the floor. A real education she was getting tonight, for sure. The she-bitch turned on the light switch and gazed down at Casey. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” the she-bitch said. God she was ugly—face bloodied, scowling. Casey knew she should get up, but her legs and arms had been replaced with silly string.

Casey couldn’t move. Had she been tied up? No. Her body just wouldn’t work. Then she saw the gun come out. With a silencer, just like the one Pavel had pointed at her in her office. So this was going to be it, after all. ‘Chip designer found shot.’ Just like Todd. Deja vu all over again, Todd.

“We’re part of something much larger than any of you can imagine,” the she-bitch said. “Pavel might be dead, but he lives on in all of us.” Her voice was distorted. Was that a man or a woman? Ah, no matter. It was just one more question to which Casey would never no the answer, now that she had come to the end of the road.

The alien aimed, fired. But not at Casey. At Kali.

The last remaining Kali chip was no more. A million bits of glass dust were floating in the air; Casey couldn’t see them: a tiny invisible silent crashing. With this Kali went all hope of figuring out the mystery, all hope of solving Todd’s murder, all hope of rectifying injustice. She might as well have taken the bullet in her head. Her life was over. Then the woman, the wraith, took a lighter out of her pocket and apply a flame to the edge of the etch plot, the map of Kali. Casey looked up and saw the block-printed words, If you can read this you’re too damn close, the three-micron tall bumper sticker Todd had designed onto the side of his chip, a joke for Casey’s eyes only, before Pavel took her place. The flames devoured it, then the rest of the plot—multicolored lines writhing in the flames like a map of hell.

She heard the door slam shut, a lock sliding into place.

That’s precisely my problem, Todd. I got too damn close.

Famous last words.

Chapter 39

Nick Aubrey—freshly fucked and feeling both gloriously satiated and guilty beyond measure—finally left Pascale, went to his own bungalow, took another shower, shaved, and put on a clean button-down Tattersall shirt and some dorky “casual Friday” trousers from Sears. A wave of panic momentarily ran through him as he realized that anybody could have gone through his things while he was with Pascale. But a quick check of the bottom of his ratty bag revealed that Barlow’s diskette, the only material possession that still mattered to him, was still there. He put on his socks and shoes, grabbed the cell phone, slipped it into his left front pants pocket and walked out into the early morning sun.

Following unobtrusive signs that indicated the way, he strolled through fastidiously tended rose bowers to a terrace that led to a large field surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. From where he was, Nick could look out at the cliffs or down at a patio a few feet below him, which was defined on its edges by coffee stands and buffet tables stacked high with pastries. He had an impulse to just run, get the hell out while he could, take off into the hills. But there was no way out. In front of him the canyon walls were too steep. And behind him lay the hotel, the parking lot, and beyond them the whole goddamn modern world, in which all his efforts to disappear himself had proved futile. To his right, near a manicured croquet lawn, there was a stone-fenced gathering spot outlined and divided by exquisite gardens that were almost wild but restrained from chaos by a landscaper with a refined sensibility and a big budget. Not a tree or branch or even blade of grass was out of place. The upper terrace and lower patio were full of beautiful people, chatting amiably, each one radiating confidence at ten thousand watts

Got to hand it to these A-list types, Nick thought. Whatever else they are, at least they’re punctual. Most of ’em, anyway. There was no sign of Pascale or Carl. Or of Paul, for that matter.

There looked to be about 100 people already gathered around the coffee and food tables on the near side of the lower terrace. Nick descended some gentle stairs, aiming for food. Near one of the buffet tables, he saw a man he recognized from the cover of Time magazine, although he couldn’t remember who he was. All around there were small groups of people dressed in the studied casualness of an Eddie Bauer catalog, wearing sweaters over khaki pants or two-hundred-dollar blue jeans, talking in low voices. Nick was surprised at the number of women; they were about forty percent of the total. He scanned them carefully. Still no sign of Carl.

He grabbed a cup of coffee and a pastry. In the absence of anybody he knew, he decided it would be silly to just stand around by himself, that would only draw attention to himself, the last thing he wanted. He approached a man of about his own age, a confident looking guy who was wearing tan pants, boating moccasins, a checked shirt and a cable-knit sweater.

“Nick Aubrey,” he said extending his hand.

“Troy Maciel,” the man said. “Biodigital Venture Fund.”

“I’ve never been to one of these events,” Nick said. “When does the action start?”

“At Rachel’s Forums there is action in non-action, like the dog that didn’t bark in the night.”

“Oh?” Nick said. “What dog isn’t barking?”

“Bill Gates isn’t here. He’s boycotting. Very offended that Rachel would give over her event for a partisan deed like the unveiling of Dijjy-Mike’s espresso. Gates loathes Meekman.”

Well, two points for Bill Gates, Nick thought.

The Venture Fund guy was looking over Nick’s shoulder, and excused himself a moment later. Nick stood around, lamely, waiting for action in non-action, or non-action in action, or whatever he was supposed to be waiting for. No Paul, still. Everybody who should have been here wasn’t—Paul, Bartlett, Carl, Pascale. The one person who really shouldn’t be here—Nick—was the only one who actually was here.

So where were they all? Paul and Bartlett might have gone off with each other; Carl might be doing some back-room intelligence-gathering. But why wasn’t Pascale here? Nick knew better than to think he had worn her out; it was the opposite, if anything. Maybe she was simply being discrete, taking care to not arrive when he did. Or maybe she had been a plant—sent by the CIA, or by Meekman—and was already long gone. But this was paranoid thinking he told himself; she was merely skipping breakfast.

Who knew why any of them weren’t there? But actually, who cared? If Bartlett were gone, who the hell cared about anything else.

Nick was anything but relaxed, and he didn’t feel like pretending otherwise. But it was taking all his concentration to keep up his calm facade. All he could think of was how and where to call Bartlett. That was the only thing he wanted now; to just hear her voice again. But at the back of his mind he kept hearing Casey saying what she had said weeks ago: Let her go, man. Let her go.

Nick looked up, and as if on cue several golf carts whizzed by, each carrying two young men wearing purple tunics with the logo of Digital Microsystems Laboratories emblazoned on them. Meekman’s Corporate Fellows were out in force, and nobody had bothered to tell them about the preppy dress code. Eddie Bauer? Hell, they looked like they had made a wrong turn on the way to the Star Trek convention. Christ, to think I signed a contract to become of them. Nick shivered at the memory. It might have been above one of the very cliffs before which he now stood that he had told Monty Meekman “I accept your offer,” moments before the earth had quaked. Nick followed the cart with his eyes to the far end of the field, where a large mass of the purple-tunic men appeared to be building something, a stage, perhaps.

“There you are,” Carl said, coming up behind him, startling him badly.

“Carl,” Nick said, when he recovered momentary equilibrium. “You’re late.”

Carl appeared not to hear him, or if he heard, not to care.

“You got the phone?”

Nick patted his pocket. “You never write, you never call.”

Everybody was walking across the terrace towards the base of the far cliff. He and Carl started walking, too.

“Just keep it with you. I may need to get ahold of you in a hurry.”

There was a giant rock pile at the base of the cliff where, over the eons, pieces of mountain had fallen to the earth. The cliff itself was concave; its chord length was about thirty yards. Within this hollow the rocks made a natural amphitheater, and scores of people were quickly filling it—scrambling over the stones, angling for a good vantage to see and hear Rachel Tryson—like disciples on the banks of the Galilee.

Nick’s eyes, like everyone’s, naturally fixed on the focus of the arc. There Tryson sat on a small stage, cross-legged like a swami, waiting for her audience to ready itself. Rachel was a standard-issue white woman, neither pretty nor not pretty. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut and shining; she appeared to be wearing conservative makeup and some kind of modest earrings. She was dressed in Levi’s and a Gap sweatshirt; her watch had a cloth band. She might have been a soccer mom on her way to pick the kids up from practice. Nick got the feeling that Rachel, unlike everyone around her who seemed to be affecting relaxation, was actually relaxed. And no wonder. She was part of the infotocracy, the top of the top. It was under her watchful gaze that the best and richest of the technology world met and congregated and made deals. She brought people together. Her will facilitated the development of technologies that would—that already had—changed the earth.

Nick found a spot and sat. The rocks might have seemed disordered, but now, once he was among them, he saw that they were arranged roughly in rows, with an aisle down the center. Must have cost somebody a pretty penny to do this, he thought. These people swim in money.

To either side of her, two groups of Corporate Fellows were assembling some kind of stage and a speaker system.

Nick saw no microphone, but when Rachel spoke her voice was conversational, yet perfectly audible. Nobody clapped. Nobody introduced her. She just began.

“Computation is the future of biology; biology is the future of computation.”

She allowed this profundity to sink in for a full minute, it seemed, before she continued.

“At the atomic and molecular scale, viruses and human-built molecular machinery perform similar functions, act on similar scales. A virus is a simple machine for manipulating strings of information; within the virus this information is encoded in the four nucleotides of DNA. Over the last decade we have made enormous strides in DNA-based technology. Genetic engineering, in the true sense of engineering, is commonplace. At the same time silicon and other types of computer chips have become ever smaller and faster, approaching biological scale. Computers manipulate strings of digitally encoded information. The difference between life and computers is that life works on a quaternary code and computers operate on a binary code. That is not a very significant difference. The union of these two technologies is imminent, as when two sides tunnel towards each other under a river. In laboratories, in fact, the two sides of the tunnel have met. It is only a matter of time before the tunnel is open to commercial traffic.

“On a macroscopic scale too, computation and biology converge. To the extent that people wear data gloves, or virtual reality visors, or electrodes in their skin to stimulate nerves in paralyzed legs or arms; to that extent the human information-processing system, which basically means the brain and nervous system, becomes part of the electronically mediated environment, which, at a first approximation, is the Internet. This integration will continue to accelerate.

“There is a third sense in which computation and biology will converge, and that is in the understanding of how the human perception of ‘mind’ arises from the brain. This understanding will be formalized in neural network models operating on traditional hardware. Thus in the near future, intelligences entirely akin to humans will reside in the Internet. These intelligences, not being physically limited, will merge and transform themselves in ways we cannot imagine. The idea of the discrete intelligence, such that I stop here, and you begin there, will disappear.

“These developments are profound and irreversible.”

Rachel paused, looking out at her audience. They, all of them, sat stark still, watching and listening, absorbing. Nick could not think when, if ever, he had seen such a large group of people behave so quietly. It was as if Rachel Tryson’s words were a soothing balm to their souls.

“You know what I’m going to say, because you’ve heard me say it before,” Rachel said, wrapping up. “The future belongs to those who are unafraid to look the developments in the eye, and who have the wisdom to think through their implications. The future belongs to us.”

She finished speaking and sat quietly on one of the rocks in the front. There was a light applause as she left, but it died out quickly.

Chapter 40

Paul Aubrey had driven Bartlett Aubrey, the woman he loved, to the airport, knowing at a deep level that he would probably never see her again. He then drove back to the hotel, got into bed and willed himself to sleep, a process that took almost until dawn. He woke up feeling hung-over although he had gone to bed sober, and late for the start of the conference. For the first time in his professional, adult life, he decided not to care. All he could think of was Bartlett throwing her arms around him, saying, “Oh Paul, I’m so scared, and I don’t know what to do,” and his lame reply, “It will be alright,” as he practically wrestled himself out of her embrace and shoved her into the car’s front seat. Had he ever made a more feeble response to a cry for help in his life? He thought not. But it was not too late to act now.

He glanced at the clock. It was 7:00 AM in California, which meant that it was mid-afternoon in Basel. The banks would be open.

The information he needed was in his locked briefcase; he retrieved it and placed a call. God bless the Swiss and their banking secrecy laws, he thought. As long as you know the right numbers, no questions are asked. Then he wrote a short note on hotel stationery and addressed it to Judith Knight, Human Potential, Inc., Boulder, CO. He would drop it off at the font desk on his way to find Nick.

Then there was a knock on the door, and he called out, “just a minute,” taking a second in the bathroom to splash water on his face and tie on his robe.

He opened the door to Pascale, whom he had last seen in Basel. He should have been surprised to see her, but he wasn’t.

“Good morning,” he said.

She peered inside his room.

“May I come in?”

“I’m feeling a little ill today,” he volunteered. “If you’re here to see why I’m not at the Forum.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she replied. “Je peux entrer?”

He moved his arms aside. She was wearing a pair of slim fitting black pants and a yellow blouse. She looked around his room with an appraising eye, taking in the small bottles, the rumpled bed.

“Trouble sleeping? Ich stand hüt nacht im bett?”

“Indeed,” he replied in English.

“Sit down, Paul,” she said, and, taking a seat herself, patted the mattress beside her. He sat. “I’m sure you understand that we had to see if you were the kind of person we could rely on.”

“I did everything you asked.”

“Do you know who I am, really?” she asked.

“I don’t know your real name if it isn’t Pascale,” Paul said. “But I have a pretty good idea who you are.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “But all you need to know about me is that you lived and breathed according to our will, because we thought you had a purpose. Maybe you do have a purpose, to somebody. To your sister-in-law, for instance. To your brother. To Judith Knight. But not to us. Not anymore.”

“Who’s us?”

“All of us. Can’t you feel us? Can’t you feel him? Don’t you know that together we’re better than you?

“What do you want?”

“We wanted you to do what we told you to do. But you didn’t do that very well.” He noticed that she had hardly any trace of an accent. She modulated that too, as finely as she controlled her looks. “So you have a choice. Join us, now.” She held up what looked like a small pen with a foil cap at one end.

“Let me guess,” he said, as the truth became apparent to him. “That contains your fullerene shell riding on the back of phage proteins. If I take it, I’m your new lab mouse.”

“Imprecise, but not inaccurate,” she said. “Though no, not a mouse. A man. Better than a man. Outside right now, a hundred men and women are lining up for this privilege.”

“Good for them,” Paul said.

“So you’re telling me no?”

“Go to hell,” he said.

She put one hand on his leg and leaned in close to him, her lips very close to his ear.

“I am sorry, Paul,” she said. “You had so much potential.”

Paul smiled, and said, “Even when you tell the truth you lie.”

He felt a sharp prick on his thigh, followed instantly by tightness in his chest. His breathing came with more difficulty.

Pascale withdrew the syringe and placed it in her purse.

“Not painless,” she said. “But not too painful, either. Pavel wanted you shot.” She smiled, “but I don’t like to shoot. I’m sure you understand.”

His head felt heavy. He thought of Bartlett, and of Nick. No way to warn them now. Nothing to do. Nothing to do but relax. She laid him down on the bed behind him. She petted his hair once or twice as tenderly as if she actually meant it, then turned and walked out of the hotel room, through the lobby, and to her waiting car at the valet. She drove away with a slight, very slight, smile on her face—another pretty lady taking her leisure in the springtime Californian air.

Chapter 41

Nick wanted to get another cup of coffee. He wanted a doughnut, something fatty and sugary, anything to help the horrible hunger that was coming on as a result of his athletics in the bedroom the night before. Every few minutes he scanned the crowd around him—discretely, he hoped—for some sign of his brother, or his wife, or the gorgeous woman with whom he had betrayed his wife, the woman who had sprayed God knew what up his nose as he lay in a stupor. No sign of any of them. But there was Carl, in the back of the crowd, glad-handing a man in a pink shirt and white pants, who obviously hadn’t gotten the memo that the 80’s ended nearly a decade ago.

After Rachel Tryson got down from her speaking perch, the next speaker, Jim Boerr, a legendary venture capitalist who looked like a young Michael J. Fox, jumped up on the table in an astonishingly athletic move. He talked much more quickly and energetically than Tryson had, but Nick still saw no evidence of amplification. As Boerr took the stage, the purple-shirted Corporate Fellows continued building whatever it was they were building.

“I think we can draw some very important conclusions from what Rachel has just told us,” he said. He was obviously used to speaking to large groups. He was poised, he enunciated clearly, and he moved as gracefully as a tiger. “The most important conclusion, I think we’ll all agree, is that there’s a lot of money to be made when the two ends of the biodigital tunnel are opened up for traffic. Imagine the value of a complete simulation of the human brain! It would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, for drug companies alone. New therapies could be tried out without the time and expense of experiments on human subjects. I’m sure you can think of a million other uses. A working model of the human brain is going to make somebody, or some group of somebodies, very, very wealthy.”

An appreciative chuckle went up from the crowd. Glancing over his shoulder, Nick saw that the Corporate Fellows had finished setting up speaker columns and the flat of a platform that ran between them. They were lining objects up on that platform in rows. Nick couldn’t tell what the objects were, but there were a lot of them. One for every member of the audience, it seemed.

“Think for a minute about what Rachel said about the irrelevance of governments,” Jim Boerr was saying. “Imagine the pace of progress in brain research in the absence of legal restrictions once the United States has been privatized. China is already a lucrative source of kidneys and other organs; imagine the money to be made in brains once the market opens! No wonder Bill wanted so badly to get into China!”

Another chuckle went up from the crowd.

“In the absence of national governments, two things happen. First, so-called privacy rights cease to be a problem. Second, the need for private security service increases exponentially. How can we capitalize on this situation? Imagine a biometric database for every person in North America. Fingerprints, DNA genotype, iris scan, one or two other markers. That would enhance security, wouldn’t it? Who would be foolish enough to attempt a crime when their apprehension was certain and justice was administered according to market prices? With today’s technology it would not be difficult to compile such a database, and it’s about to become much easier.

“Don’t think this market window will stay open very long. Somebody in this audience is going to tap this opportunity, and the rest of you are going to be going ‘d’oh!’. Biometrics will make it possible to know, at any time, the whereabouts of every single person who participates in the modern world. Homes will be wired to know who is in what room of the house doing what activities, and cars likewise will track the location of drivers and passengers. In public, people will be tracked by cameras; in stores their biometrics will be recorded—and soon satellites will be able to detect DNA trails as easily as they now detect heat trails of ballistic missiles. Building such a database and tracking system will take a lot of capital. But once it’s in place, we’re talking a return, a major return for this kind of information… ”

The Corporate Fellows had finished with their set up. Now, three of them stood behind the table, which was lined with a multitude of small white objects, and two more were standing to either side of the table.

“And now, the exciting news. Are you ready for it?”

The audience clapped.

“With Espresso Tone the day of ubiquitous computing is truly here. Your challenge, your opportunity, is to imagine ways to combine the power of espresso with the breakthroughs in biocomputation that Rachel spoke of. To my right, notice that the kind people from Dijjy-Mike have set up an Espresso beta for you to see and enjoy. It’s true biometric computation, delivered through a proprietary inhaler. We’ll break for lunch now, but I urge you to take a look at what they have to offer.”

As he was talking, the audience turned their heads as one toward the Fellow’s stage. The two standing next to the table indicated to the first few people that they should form a line. The audience members did, but impatiently, everybody wanting to be the first to see what Dijjy-Mike had made.

With a shiver, the words of Vannevar Bush’s article came back to him.

“In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?”

Nick felt the heebies run all through him. The objects on the table looked remarkably similar to the object Pascale had held to his nose. He smelled the licorice again. “Energy in a bottle,” she had said, and he was naïve enough to believe that she had given him ecstasy or something to help with his erection. The first person came to Corporate Fellow’s table. The Fellow picked up one of the pen-sized objects and held it to the man’s nose. The man tilted his head back and laughed nervously. A moment passed. The Fellow moved his hand down. The man, rubbing his nose, smiling, walked away, and the next one—the man in the pink shirt and the white pants—stepped to the front. There were a hundred more people behind him.

My God, Nick thought. Panicked, he walked quickly away from the line that was forming around the Corporate Fellows. Before he could make it all the way out, though, a hand grabbed his arm.

“Hey hey,” Carl said. “What’s the rush?”

“I’ve got to go, Carl,” Nick said. “Do you know what they’re doing there?”

“Yeah. Well, no. Not really. That’s why I wanted you on the inside. There have been a few rumors, but nobody ever knows what Monty’s apostles are up to until they do it.”

Nick twisted his arm out of Carl’s grasp.

“Let me go,” he said.

“Whoa, calm down,” Carl replied.

Nick took a step back and then turned, realizing that not just one purple-shirted Fellow was beside him, but that they all seemed to be looking at him. No, they didn’t seem to be looking. They were looking. And then, as if they were one being, they all, at the same moment, looked away.

“Nick,” Carl said. “We’ve got to find out what they’re up to. That’s why we’re here, remember?”

“Maybe that’s why you’re here,” Nick said. “But I’m outta here.”

He took two steps backward away from Carl, then turned and ran. He ran up the stairs to the terrace, taking them two at a time, and then down the breezeway, under the rose arbors, over the manicured flagstone path by the perfect croquet lawn towards his bungalow. Maybe he would go back to Boston. Maybe he’d find Paul. And Bartlett. Maybe they’d all go upstate, buy a farm, tend some goats and chickens, grow corn. Or maybe he’d go to Las Vegas and become a used car dealer. He’d figure out his long range plans later. For now he had only one goal: get to his room for Barlow’s diskette and the keys to his rental car, and scram the fuck out of Dodge.

As he rounded a corner he came upon a group of the Star Trekians crowded around the entrance to a bungalow near his, intent upon some task, carrying something awkward and heavy. Good, maybe they wouldn’t notice him. But they did notice him, and turned their attention to him in unison, like a flock of ugly purple starlings turning, and Nick saw what they were carrying. For a second he thought his brother was sleeping, his robe open halfway up his thigh, his arms limp at his side. But the look on Paul’s face—the mouth frozen open, the eyes rolled back, the blue-tinted lips—told Nick that Paul was no more alive than Peter Barlow was. Crazy Peter Barlow. Crazy my ass. Peter hadn’t been crazy and Nick’s brother was dead.

But he had to be sure. He pushed a few of the apostles aside and confirmed what he thought he saw by touching his brother’s cold hand. But when he touched it he felt something odd, and realized that Paul was clutching something in his fist. Nick prized apart Paul’s fingers and grabbed the envelope they held in a death grip. At which the Corporate Fellows who had been mutely staring at Nick now unceremoniously dropped Paul and reached for Nick.

Nick ran. They ran after. They might be a thousand times smarter than he was, but it was he and not they who spent half his life in smelly gyms, and if he wasn’t a thousand times stronger and faster than they were, he was faster enough. He ran hard back to his little cottage, slid the card through the front door, closed it behind him, grabbed his bag and keys at a run, slid open the back door and ran hard to the parking lot, looking for the place where the creepy kid in the golf cart had met him yesterday. In a field of Jaguars, Porches, Lotuses, Mercedes and the occasional ostentatious Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, Nick’s relatively modest Town Car was easy enough to find. He ran to it and fumbled with the key, not daring to look to see how close behind the apostles might be, feeling each moment as it passed and each heartbeat as it rocked through his body.

He managed to get the car door opened; he got inside, tossing his bag and the letter that had been in Paul’s hand onto the seat beside him. Two thoughts filled his mind: first, that his brother was dead; second, that the last time he had seen Bartlett she had had her arms around him.

Nick sped towards the exit, not sure where he was going, knowing only that he would find her if he had to scour the whole earth to do it.

Chapter 42

Casey sat up slowly. What time was it? How long had she been out? If only she wore a digital watch as befit the nerd she was, she might have been able to tell. If only she wore any watch. She felt the swelling on the back of her head. This bruise will look great when they lay me out, she thought. I’ll make a beautiful corpse. Unless, of course, they don’t discover me until I’ve bloated three times my size. The air was already pretty stuffy. How long until the oxygen ran out? Or was it the CO2 that would kill her? Not that it made any difference.

She reached for the overhead light and pulled the string: nothing, switched off from outside. Of course. She was in the dark.

OK, Casey. Mission: Impossible. Let’s think. You’ve been in this room a million times. Let’s remember what’s in here, what we might use to effectuate an escape.

She stood. She could really use a screwdriver, she thought. Or a hammer. Of course, nothing like that was in the shrine. What did she have? Let’s see. Some incense, some candles, some matches. Good. What else? Some candlesticks, the Uncle Meat album and CD. What else? Sand. Cheech Wizard comics. What else? Drumsticks. Think! Toy cars. Jolt Cola.

Then it came to her: she could light a candle to see; and maybe, if she was lucky, there was a sprinkler system that she could set off; that would bring somebody. Maybe. She felt around on the floor in front of the etch plot where she had placed candles in little bowls of sand, found a match, struck it, lit a candle, looked around. She tried the door, knowing it would be locked. The ceiling showed that there was no sprinkler, of course. Why would there be a sprinkler inside a refrigerator? Think, girl! But instead of thinking, she tripped and as she reached over to steady herself she managed to place the flame of the candle against the edge of the what remained of the etch plot. The flames shot up remarkably quickly. She dropped the candle and it went out and it only took her a few second to pat-out the fire of the small portion of paper map of Kali that remained affixed to the wall. But now the shrine was filled with acrid smoke, and of course the fire had used up a bunch of her limited supply of oxygen. Not to mention that she seemed to have burned her left hand nicely. Einstein. She needed to rest, to conserve her breath. She would think of something later. Realistically, of course, she knew she was a goner. But she decided to issue one last SOS to the universe. Concentrating in prayer, she focused on the words:

Hey Todd!

Yeah, you, ghost-boy!

Get your ectoplasmic ass over here and open the door.

But the universe wasn’t listening. Sometimes, Casey, she scolded herself, your tendency to make a joke of everything can really get on my nerves. Dying in an unplugged refrigerator is bad. Dying without undoing Meekman is very, very bad; it means your life has been meaningless. But dying with the theme from Mission: Impossible playing through your head is too much, too goddamn much.

It was clear to Casey that she was going to die. She was really pissed at herself for never having removed the tough vinyl seal around the door. That’s what was keeping the air out. Well, next time she would do it differently. She stood and went to the wall, feeling where the etch plot had been. She could at least die with a piece of Kali next to her, which was as close as she could get to dying alongside Todd. She found a piece about a foot square, charcoaled around an irregular edge, taped to the wall. She folded it into a little wad and put it in her brassiere.

She was sweating heavily. She had a headache. Her neck was wrenched. Her eyes smarted. She was very weak. The back of her head hurt. Her ribs were bruised. Her cheek was sore. She had to pee. Her left hand was burned. Her period was going to start any minute. Why the hell were her knees killing her? Oh yeah, she probably had banged them when she was hanging from the ledge. She slumped against the wall and knocked something; she heard the sound of breaking glass as it hit the floor; it startled her, she fell, her left hand hit the floor and she felt, vaguely, dully, the glass piercing her skin. What was that glass from, she wondered? The needlepoint sampler? One of the Grand Prix photos? If only she had thought to break the glass and use it to cut the vinyl seal, she could have gotten air to breathe. But it was too late now, she was too tired. She lay back on the floor. She cupped her bleeding hand to her breast, where the Kali map was.

“Look, Todd,” she whispered, “falsies.”

His answer was so gentle, so loving, she hardly would have known it was him: Cold Todd; Silent Todd, Unsentimental Todd. But the voice was his, unmistakably. And then she saw him.

“You don’t need falsies, Casey,” he said “Your breasts are perfect. Joan of Arc had breasts like yours.”

She passed out, sort of, and woke back up again. Three or four times this happened, each rise into consciousness more difficult than the last. It was her brain. Her brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen to sustain her. She took one last deep breath, and passed out.

The light was blinding, and the rush of cold air was like pure Antarctica released in Newcastle. Todd was standing at the open door to the cooler. Todd, my love! You did hear my prayer!

No, wait. Wait a minute. You’re not Todd.

“Thank cripes,” Casey said.

The Corporate Security guard was standing in the doorway. He had already called for help.

“We followed a trail of blood and we cut the lock to see if anybody was inside. Who are you?” the cop said.

“O.J. Simpson,” Casey said, before everything went black again.

She awoke in the back of the ambulance with a tube of oxygen running into her nose and a paramedic taking her pulse. Funny thing about oxygen: it smells bad. Or maybe that was just a kinesthetic response, the sensation of something unpleasant on her face translated into perception of foul smell. Whatever it was, she tore the mask off her face, which startled the hell out of the paramedic and the cop who were riding in the back with her.

They took her to the hospital, where she had to convince first one doctor, then two more that she wasn’t going to die. A policeman took her statement. A trauma doctor shot her full of wonderful dope, removed glass from, then bandaged up her burnt and bleeding hand.

“Good as new,” he said, smiling.

The cops weren’t smiling. They told her that her story contradicted the known facts in about a half a dozen places, and, they informed her, she was a material witness in an investigation involving at least one dead body. She should not leave town, they said. If she decided to skip they would find her, they would convict her of obstruction of justice, and she would be a very unhappy camper.

The Newcastle Police drove her home, and she didn’t relax until she was inside, with the doors locked and the curtains drawn, until three strong shots of chilled Vodka were swimming with the dilaudid in her blood.

And then she thought of Nick.

Thank God for modems. She had to get a message to Nick, real quick. She didn’t trust her phone, of course. She was convinced that she was dealing with big-time trouble: not just slimy Meekman but a conspiracy of at least three people, more likely a conspiracy of Meekman’s entire cult. She assumed that her files had all been read, that her phone was tapped, that her mail would be watched. “Security through obscurity” didn’t work when you were up against world-class computer designers. She could hope, at least, that they didn’t know about her account on the Internet Access Company server. She used it for her private life only, and it was under an assumed name.

Of course the chance of her maintaining any of her old private life now was about as great as the chance of her sitting down at a piano and playing Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand. She was going to have to get a message to Nick. She would use her one more-or-less intact hand to log on and send him a message Then she was going to have to do some serious thinking about what to do next. Leave her old life behind? Cut and run? No problem. She had never really liked her old life that much, anyway. The problem was, how?

Chapter 43

It was noon. After leaving the Biodigital Conference and making his way to Sunnyvale Nick had driven aimlessly for more than an hour pondering what to do next. Certainly he had to get in touch with Judith Knight; but when, and how, he had not yet determined. So far he had resisted the temptation to open the letter Paul had addressed to her, the letter he had removed from Paul’s cold fist. Should he read it? Mail it to her? Deliver it himself? But even questions as simple as these were too difficult for him; he was still shaking, and couldn’t keep a thought in his head for more than five seconds. Then he saw, on El Camino, between a porn shop and a liquor store, what appeared to be an Internet Café. When he walked inside, he was the only one there, besides the tired, glazed clerk and the three teenagers in the back, all of them gathered around one machine. The clerk—skinny, pierced, looked like he was twelve but was probably twenty-four—told him it was a twenty minute minimum to use the machines. “Ten dollars,” the clerk said.

“Robbery,” Nick said.

“Do I look like I own the place? Save it for the owner. Meanwhile if you don’t like the price, go someplace else. I don’t care.”

“I could hack in for free,” Nick said, realizing as he said it what a poseur he must sound like.

“Hot shit, old man,” the kid said. “You must be really leet.”

Nick received a piece of paper the size of a cookie fortune with a password printed on it in exchange for his ten-dollar bill. He sat at a table away from the windows, placed Paul’s crumpled letter to Judith on the table, and logged in to his webmail account, feeling dirty from just touching the well-used and never-cleaned keypad. There was only one message in his mailbox. It was from an4444@anon.tippi.se Might that be Bartlett?

Subject: decrypt what you fear

He pulled up the message. It read

kj09un09uve073,vj8äÆffHw!!BBB*;#fcsaÒ_[[Jhy5yeCGyu6e@

and on for thirty more lines, each one just as readable as the first one. He needed a password to decrypt it. What password? He didn’t know who an4444 was, so they didn’t have a shared password. He looked again: what you fear. That must be a clue to the password.

But what did Nick fear? What a ridiculous question. What didn’t he fear? That would be a better clue. Let’s see. He feared the Corporate Fellows. He feared the Salt Lake City Airport Police. He feared the end of his marriage. He feared bankruptcy. He feared—taking in his surroundings—alcoholism. He feared that Carl Swirsing or Pascale or both of them had sold him out. He feared whatever Pascale had put up his nose. He feared whoever had killed his brother. In fact he feared every goddamn soul he had met at the Biodigital Forum, from the Jim Boerr the uber-wealthy venture capitalist down to the smarmy punk who drove the golf cart. He feared that his wife was in great danger. He feared she was dead. And more than anything, he feared Monty Meekman.

And then it came to him. Todd Griffith’s final message: “I fear these things.”

He typed in ‘thesethings’, into the password field and the message came up:

they’re on to us last night they tried to kill me. Killed kali. trust nobody. some good news I killed michael jacskon. run fast they mean business. kisses, casey. PS RESCUE ME!!! POLICE WATCHING! YOU HAVE 4 days.

All right Nick, he said to himself, let’s parse this one info-unit at a time: they’re on to us. Self-explanatory enough. Next point. They had tried to kill Casey. Casey was given to understatement, not overstatement. If she said that somebody had tried to kill her, then he was absolutely certain that somebody had tried to kill her.

Killed kali. So, they didn’t kill Casey, but they did kill Kali. Presumably she meant the chip in the Bonehead Computer Museum. Whose existence he had cleverly made known to Pascale twelve hours ago. Well, that was fine, Nick supposed. It wasn’t like Kali would do anybody any good, anyway.

Next: some good news, last night I killed Michael Jackson. He had to take this statement at face value. ‘Michael Jackson.’ That was her name for Pavel Isaacs. She had said that Pavel and Meekman together were responsible for the failure of Kali. If Meekman was responsible for Todd’s death, then Isaacs was implicated. And now he was dead.

Next: Run fast they mean business. No shit.

Next: Kisses, Casey. He would have to think about that later.

Rescue me, police watching, you have four days.

He typed in a quick reply, and pressed ‘send’.

He needed to clear out, fast. Sunnyvale was only half an hour from Saratoga, and Monty’s minions were sure to be out in force looking for him. But where would he go? Then he glanced at Paul’s letter, and he knew where he had to go. But first he needed some advice—advice and help from somebody used to dealing with people trying to kill you.

Noon here meant 3:00 PM in Massachusetts. He took the cell phone Carl had given him and dialed the Mill’s main number, then asked to be transferred to Mr. Carelli.

“Yeah?” Jake answered.

“It’s Nick. Holy fuck, Jake. People are getting killed left and right, and they’re after me.” Nick’s voice was shaking; his hands were shaking. He couldn’t find any words. “I need to ask you a favor,” Nick said. “A big favor.”

“Where are you now?” Jake asked, calmly. How the hell could Jake sound so calm after what Nick had just told him? Then he thought, a combat vet. He’s seen worse than this before.

“Sunnyvale. A fucking Internet Café. Paul’s dead. My brother’s dead.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, man. Just freaked.”

“Are you using a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Take out the battery and call me from a pay phone.” The line went dead.

Nick figured how to remove the battery, grabbed Paul’s letter and walked quickly to the kid at the front counter, who was reading a skateboarder magazine and didn’t look up.

“I need five dollars in quarters,” Nick said, putting a five-spot in front of him.

“Not my problem,” the punk said.

Nick thought again of his brother slumped dead in the arms of those awful nerds in their asinine matching Star Trek outfits. He leaned over the counter until he was practically on the other side and grabbed the magazine, slammed it on the counter.

“It’s not your problem, yet,” he said.

“OK, old man, OK.” Quarters were produced. Nick gathered them up and ran to the open-air phone booth near the liquor store entrance. He had Jake on the line again in a minute.

“They’re using that cell phone to track you. Get rid of it. Do you have a car?”

“Carl Swirsing rented it for me.”

“They’re tracking it. Ditch it as soon as you can.”

“Okay, but…” Nick started.

“But what? You know the Mill is crawling with cops, right? And with Corporate Fellows? One of theirs got dead here last night and they’re not too happy about it. Police found Casey Montgomery locked in a cooler, nearly dead, and they’re asking me where you are. You better stay low, think smart and move fast.”

There was the confirmation, if any was needed, that Casey had told the truth. Which still left the mystery of how she knew what Nick feared when she chose the password she did, but he wasn’t going to worry about that now.

“I need you to find Bartlett. Bartlett Aubrey. Or Bartlett McGovern. My wife. You’ve met her before. She lives in Boston.” He gave Jake the address, and the location of her lab in Chinatown just in case.

“Roger that, Captain.”

“Make sure she’s safe,” Nick said.

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Nick said.

“Copy that. Ditch the car. And the phone.”

The line went dead.

It annoyed Nick to pay a dollar just to get the number of Human Potential, Incorporated, but once he called and gave his name to Judith Knight’s secretary, he was put right through to her.

“Hello Dr. Knight. My name is Nicholas Aubrey. I believe you know my brother Paul.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“Dr. Knight?”

“Yes, I’m here,” she said. “Mr. Aubrey, my telephone may not be secure. Please give me a number where you are—”

“No. Listen to me. I am coming to Boulder, and I am going to take you with me until I get answers to some questions. I will be there within thirty-six hours. Tell me where to meet you.”

He had expected indignation, refusal, and perhaps a threat to call the police.

“Call me when you get to Boulder, day or night, and I will tell you where to pick me up,” she said. “I will be ready for you. Be very careful. I will be at this same number.”

Nick trotted to the car, with the cell phone still in his pants pocket. Think smart, Nick, he reminded himself. Move fast. A short time later he was on 101 North, heading for the Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay.

Chapter 44

Casey Montgomery stood at her living room window. She looked, she paced, she looked again. This hanging around doing nothing was going to kill her. But what else was she going to do? Anything that required concentration was impossible: not only was she too agitated, but she had taken three Percocets and washed them down with a shot of tequila at eight this morning, ten minutes ago. The throbbing was still there, if duller than before, but her ability to concentrate was considerably diminished. So, what to do? Sometime within the next day or two she was going to have to visit the bathroom, but that was not a pleasant prospect, so she was putting it off as long as possible. In the meantime she would keep pacing back and forth like a puppy whimpering after a squirrel on the other side of a picture window.

She had been informed that Detectives Susan Roy and Jim Myers of the Newcastle police would be there to question her at one PM. She should plan on spending the afternoon with them, she was told, from one until whenever, and she might want to have her lawyer handy.

But detectives Roy and Myers of the Newcastle Police were the least of her worries. I’m a sitting duck, she thought. If I stay here, I’m already dead. The killers had come to her at work—they’d come to her home, too. Todd had been shot in his bed. She might be shot in hers. And for what? For figuring out that the Kali chip had a Trojan horse? Big deal. She still didn’t know what the Trojan horse did or why Pavel put it there to begin with. But they were still willing to kill her.

Pavel. Michael Jackson. “Sméagol,” Casey shivered just thinking about him.

She looked at what was left of the media stake-out, on First Street. It had considerably diminished since yesterday. There was one news truck, its antenna sticking 30 feet in the air. There were several cars with people sitting in them drinking coffee and doing crossword puzzles. She walked around to her kitchen, from which she could see her back yard. Yesterday, on the other side of a fence and through in an ill-maintained playground, more news crews waited. Now, there was nobody.

“Short attention spans,” she muttered. “Sometimes I like Americans.”

And the news crews weren’t the only ones with short attention spans. She took a seat in front of her computer, checking her mail for the thirtieth time that hour.

Wait for it, Casey, she thought, impatiently watching her connection spin. Finally, her mailbox refreshed. There was one message, encrypted, and the subject line “what choo fraid of?”

Nick. Finally.

She decrypted it, and the message came up:

Find Wiredog. Go to the town with the animal that screwed calley. Leave message at house of calley so I can find you. Bring all your green stuff.

That was clever, Nick, Casey thought. The animal that screwed calley: that would be a Trojan horse. Where do Trojan horses live? In Troy, of course. Calley equals Kali was easy enough, and the house of Kali would be a shrine. Two minutes with the yellow pages was all it took to start the thread; five minutes and two calls later she was on the phone with Shriners International headquarters, in Fort Lauderdale. They were more than happy to give her the address of the Shrine in Troy, New York. She got a light bag together, quickly, then ducked out her back door and walked unmolested through the playground all the way to the shuttered train station, leaving behind her the media, the police, and the killers who would no doubt return soon.

Chapter 45

Getting rid of the phone would be easy, but how should Nick ditch the car? If Wiredog knew that Nick hadn’t gotten rid of them yet he would tearing him a new asshole. Maybe, of course, Jake was wrong and neither phone nor car were bugged. That wasn’t a chance Nick felt like taking. But the thing wasn’t just to ditch the car and phone. It was to do so smartly, in a way that would allow him to stay low and move fast.

To his left he saw a little strip mall with a Lucky’s supermarket, a coffee shop, a pizza place. Outside of the pizza place, a throng of teenagers, most of whom were tattooed, nose-ringed, purple- or orange-haired and chain smoking, were leaning against the hoods of a variety of beat-up cars, speaking the universal teenager tongue. He pulled into the lot and parked five spaces away from the gaggle of kids. He walked toward them, and at first they didn’t notice—just another old guy going about his business—but then he was right among them.

“Hey,” Nick said, trying to decide whether he should be a nice guy or a hard-ass. “See that car?” he asked.

“Which car?” one of the kids, the one Nick hoped was the leader, making no move to get off the hood.

“The tan one. Over there. Town Car.”

“Does it run?” His friends laughed.

“Yes, it runs,” Nick replied.

“Then I like it.”

“How about I give it to you?”

“How about you go screw my mom,” the kid said, laughing.

“I’m serious,” Nick said. “I rented it. It’s due back in a week. It won’t be missing for a week. Cost about thirty grand. If somebody stole it they would have a week to make it real lost. You can sell it for five grand, easy, fifteen or twenty if you’re smart. And I’ll give you some cash too. All you gotta do is get somebody to permanently lend me some piece of shit car that they legally own.”

“This one’s a beauty,” the kid said, tapping the hood of the car he had been leaning on. “Chevy Eurosport with a hundred and forty thousand miles. Transmission leaks. Bad tires. Worth about fifty bucks.”

“Deal,” Nick said.

The kid said, “Are you serious?”

“Serious as all hell. Come with me to the bank machine and I’ll give you some money.”

In a minute Nick had withdrawn $450, his bank card limit. He gave fifty of it to the kid and put the rest in his pocket. “Here’s some bucks, and my bank card,” Nick said. “And my PIN.” He wrote the number on the kid’s hand. “And here, take this cell phone,” he said, putting it back together. “Make as many calls as you want. Drive to Portland, Oregon, and stop to check your balance every three hours on the way. A day or two after you get to Portland there will be a couple hundred dollars in the account. It’s yours.”

The other kids were watching warily, from a distance. The one with Nick looked over at them, then back at Nick, and eyed him suspiciously.

“I don’t get it. Why are you doing this?”

“Look,” Nick said. “I’m offering you a lot of money to make that car disappear and to keep your mouth shut. Do you want it or not?”

“But why do I have to stop at an ATM every three hours?”

“So I can check to make sure you’re doing what I said, duh. Are you in or out?”

It didn’t take him long to make up his mind.

“I’m in.”

Nick handed over the rental car keys and pocketed the keys that were handed to him.

“Tell me something,” Nick said, as he transferred his worldly goods into his new car. “Where do you get that shit you use to make your hair green?”

The kid cocked his head to the side.

“Lucky’s, man,” the kid said. “Lucky’s Supermarket, right there behind you. Fucking lime Jello. Lime Jello, man. Mix it in, let it sit for fifteen minutes. You can even eat the shit right out of your hair.”

“Yummy,” Nick said. “Drive safely.”

Nick got to Boulder shortly after 4:30 PM the next day after twenty-seven hours of virtually nonstop driving and called Judith from the first phone booth inside Boulder city limits, outside a gas station. “Listen to me carefully,” she said, cutting him off. “Assume that they’re listening to this conversation. Do not tell me where you are. Head right now to Boulder airport. I’ll meet you there. I’ve got a friend who can fly us. You can ask anybody for directions. Hurry. If they get there before you do, we’re dead.” She hung up before he could say a word.

The kid at the Texaco station pointed the way to the airport. It was only five miles away, and within seconds Nick was peeling out of the station, squealing tires and spraying gravel behind him.

He never noticed the flashing lights: it was the siren that got his attention. For a few seconds he even considered trying to outrun the cop to the airport, and gunned it a little. Perhaps that gambit accounted for the extremely sour look that was now on the cop’s dark face as she approached. There was no way she could know that she had just pulled over the guy some Salt Lake City airport cops thought had killed somebody on an airliner, was there? And by the way, what was a plain-clothes cop doing in a cruiser? How the hell was he going to get out of this one? Nick had no idea where his license was, much less the registration to his new car.

“Hello Nick, I’m Judith Knight,” the cop said. “I’m going to get in the front seat, and you are going to turn your car around and get us out of here in a big hurry.”

“Are you a police officer?”

“No.”

“But—”

“I’ve got a friend. It’s a long story.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You are married to Dr. Bartlett Aubrey, whose lab is in possession of the single most dangerous biological breakthrough in the history of mankind. Her life is in danger. Your brother Paul was being used to get to her. His company is in possession of the single most dangerous digital technology breakthrough on earth. If the two come together… If the two come together. . .”

“My brother is dead.”

The woman looked over her shoulder.

I fear these things, Nick thought.

“The last thing he did before he died was write to you.”

“Do you want to stay there talking with me and die too, or do you want to let me in, and live?”

“Get in,” Nick said.

She did, pulling the door shut as Nick accelerated into a U-turn. “Buckle up,” he said.

He fishtailed from the shoulder onto the pavement, sending gravel flying.

Chapter 46

Nick and Judith drove from Colorado, through the plains of Nebraska and the rolling hills of Iowa planted to winter wheat, through corn and soybean farms of Illinois and Ohio, past truck stops, chain hotels, McDonalds’ by the hundreds, through dreary towns and the occasional glistening city, until they reached Troy, New York. There, they met Casey and Jake, following instructions Jake had nailed to Shriner’s International clubhouse door. Bartlett wouldn’t come with him, Jake told him. Instead, she had gone to hide out at her professor’s house. Nick didn’t like the sound of that, but at least, for now, she was a tad safer than she would be at her own place. At Troy, Nick and Judith loaded their few possessions, and some supplies Nick had bought en route, into the car Jake had driven—a burgundy coup smelling of fake potpourri. The car wasn’t Jake’s, wasn’t a rental, and might have been stolen; Jake wouldn’t tell them, either way. The four people climbed in and Nick drove to Raquette Lake, deep in the Adirondack Preserve. The park was the largest nature preserve in the lower 48, and, not-incidentally, the far side Raquette Lake was home to the little cluster of buildings that Nick visited every summer of his youth for Bible camp, the largest building of which, the Camp Lodge, he and Bartlett had sealed up against the elements, the fireplaced building that had, since then, lain empty, waiting for his return. They “borrowed” canoes to get out to the place. It was nearly four AM before they had unloaded, by moonlight and flashlight, the last canoe’s worth of supplies at the cove beyond Marcy Point, five miles up the lake. The stars were impossibly bright; the air was impossibly clear. It was about thirty-five degrees out.

When Nick had closed this building five years ago his mission had been to make it as secure as possible against time, the elements, and any backwoods explorers who might have been tempted to take a look inside. He had done a good job. The doors and windows were still boarded shut and the building looked sound. But brute force and intelligent use of the fulcrum principle soon undid his handiwork, and they were in.

The roof was still good too: the inside of the hall smelled like dust, but not like mold. Nick stood at the threshold to the space, pointing his flashlight around, taking it all in. His gaze fell naturally on the line of windows he had boarded up last. He remembered standing on the ladder above it while telling Bartlett that Monty Meekman wanted to promote him to some new fancy job at the Mill. He remembered, too, that she had said that he would be sucked to California, and that California would eat his soul. That was five years ago, here and a world away from here. A different lifetime. A different life. Since that night Nick had not only traveled to California, he had spent a million years on transcontinental airplane flights and a billion years in every single lonely hotel room in all of Silicon Valley. And the question most on his mind right now was, did he still have any soul left, or had California already eaten all of it?

“You alright?” Casey asked coming up beside him.

“Memories,” Nick said. “This is where I more or less proposed to Bartlett.” He tried to smile but was sure he grimaced. Not that it mattered. Casey couldn’t see him anyway. “Actually, she more or less proposed to me. Right there.” He swung his flashlight to the place where Bartlett had sat, to the spot where she had unrolled her sleeping bag before stripping to her socks for him. He missed her so much it hurt in a place he didn’t know he could hurt, somewhere deep in his chest, above his stomach, the place that felt as if it housed his soul. He missed Paul in the same place, too. His death kept returning to Nick’s mind. Paul’s face, waxen and relaxed, his hand clenched, his skin cold. Nick swung the flashlight away.

“Well ain’t that a bitch,” Casey replied.

Nick found and lit an old hurricane lamp still filled with kerosene. A broom had materialized from somewhere, and somebody—maybe it was everybody—organized sweeping out the front half of the meeting room near the fireplace, leaving untouched the forlorn debris pile near the back. Jake brought in the supplies from the canoes and stacked them in a corner while Judith stretched out the sleeping bags. At the fieldstone fireplace Casey had opened the flu and now kneeled over a small fire, which she tended with her one good hand until it began to draft on its own. She added more wood from a tall stack made decades ago, miraculously not rotted. Then the rag-tag group gathered around the fire’s flickering yellow light. Each of them sat on a sleeping bag, the K-Mart price tags still affixed.

“What now, chief?” Jake asked, looking toward Nick.

When had Nick become the one in charge? The one responsible for saving not only his own life, but these three others’ too? And Bartlett’s? Hell, for all he knew, Nick was now officially in charge of saving the world. When had he signed up for that?

“We’re all tired,” he said. “Two possibilities. We can go to sleep now and wait till tomorrow to try to figure out what the hell is going on and what to do about it, or we can start now. Dr. Knight told me some of what she knows during the drive here. But you two weren’t with us,” he said to Jake and Casey, “and you have some of the puzzle pieces too.”

“Now,” Casey said. “What’s another hour?”

“It might take longer than an hour,” Judith said, wrapping her sleeping bag around her shoulders.

“I’m awake,” Jake said.

“Yeah,” Casey said. “Tell us what you know.”

Chapter 47

Illuminated by flickering firelight and the steady but faint glow of the kerosene lantern, Judith’s face blended into the darkness. Nick remembered so many nights he had spent in Africa, a trillion years ago, sitting with African friends telling stories by lantern light, their faces blending into the night even as his own face, he was certain, glared like the moon.

“Perfect weather for a ghost story, isn’t it?” Judith began.

It would be nicer, Nick thought, if there weren’t so much real death, so many real ghosts, involved.

Judith took a long look at each of them and said, “I’m assuming you’ve heard of what some people call the Singularity, and other people call Overmind. Or at least you’re familiar with Star Trek, where aliens communicate telepathically and sort of share the same mind.”

“If you say I’m an electric sheep in some robot’s dream I’m going to smack you,” Casey said.

Judith forced a smile. “Just listen.” Casey calmed down and settled in. “In 1975, when I was a teenager, I met Monty Meekman before he had changed his name to Monty Meekman.”

“I knew that wasn’t his real name,” Casey interjected. “Dumb name.”

Judith ignored her.

“It was before the internet. Before gene splicing. DNA research was still basically in its infancy; Bartlett Aubrey hadn’t yet published her work on overlapping gene products. In fact, she was still a child.”

At the mention of Bartlett’s name, the pressure around Nick increased by five atmospheres, but he pretended not to notice. Judith went on.

“The molecular genetics community was just starting to grasp the importance of computers—many biology labs didn’t even use them. People were just starting to understand the implications of manipulating DNA, wondering what might happen if you changed the DNA inside a living, breathing person. But Monty Meekman was thinking about exactly these things. Monty was way ahead of everybody.”

“That murdering scumbag,” Casey said, and Nick reached out to put his hand on her arm. He had never seen her as agitated as she was tonight.

“I met Monty when I was young,” Judith continued, “and I didn’t really understand much what he was talking about. He said that ways would be invented for machine-to-machine communication, and then for direct brain-to-machine communication. But he went further. After machine-to-machine and machine-to-brain communication, we’d invent ways for direct brain-to-brain communication. Everybody and everything on Earth would be connected. At that point, when we had all networked into each other, the people and the computer network would become one thing. He called it the Overmind.”

“I think he read too much science fiction as a kid,” Casey said.

“Maybe,” Judith said, humoring her. “He’s not the first person to have these kinds of thoughts. There was a French Jesuit theologian called Teilhard de Chardin wrote similar things in the 1930’s and 40’s, before computers even existed.”

“Not to mention Vannevar Bush,” Nick said.

“Precisely. Anyway, the point isn’t that we’re getting more and more knitted into each other. That’s obvious. The point is Monty Meekman,” Judith said. “There are probably an infinite number of ways that you can imagine something like an Overmind evolving. But Monty said that he wasn’t going to just sit back and watch it happen. He was going to direct this new, evolving, mind. He was going to shape it, nurture it, tame it, and make it his own. As this new mind evolved, he said, he would be at its center. He described what he called a distributed architecture that would allow this to happen, to put him at the center of everything. Every computer and every person on earth would become just an extension of his brain, his mind, and he would experience a rapidly growing consciousness, like when a child grows into adulthood. Computer designers talk about master-slave designs. Monty did too. He said he would be the master, and everything and everybody else would be his willing slave.”

“Willing? Who the hell would sign up for that?” Casey asked. “Monty’s an asshole.”

“Perhaps,” Judith said. “But many people find him charismatic, and in any event he already has dozens, or perhaps hundreds of disciples fanatically devoted to him. His ‘apostles.’”

“The Corporate Fellows,” Nick said.

“Yes, the Digital Microsystems Corporate Fellows are Monty’s so-called apostles. And they’re not only ‘on board’ with his vision, their whole purpose in life is to become extensions of Monty, to link their minds to his, link their brains to his.”

“They want to become part of Monty?” Jake muttered, as if it were the most nonsensical thing he had ever heard. “They want to link their minds to Monty Meekman. That pipsqueak?”

“Yes,” Judith said. “And I believe that they’ve been modifying their own bodies for years now—”

“’Michael Jackson’ changing his skin color,” Casey stage-whispered to nobody, as if Judith were a grade schoolteacher and Casey were the smart-aleck student. “Sméagol.”

“—even hacking their own brains. They think of themselves as a ‘transhuman’ vanguard, pioneers.”

“Gah,” Casey said. “And they all read Ayn Rand novels too, I bet.”

Judith didn’t say anything, but Nick could tell that she was getting frustrated with Casey’s interruptions.

“Casey this is serious,” Nick said.

“Nick, I know it’s serious,” Casey replied, sarcastically. “I had two people come after me with guns just six days ago. You may have noticed this giant bandage on my hand? You don’t have to tell me how serious it is. I just want Dr. Knight to get to the fucking point.”

From the fireplace there was a popping noise and burst of light as a sap-rich knot ignited, followed by more quiet and the gentle hiss of the fire.

“The point, Casey,” Judith began again, her voice controlled, “is that the Overmind is not theoretical anymore. For fifteen years Monty Meekman and his gang have been working on it in secret, developing their theories in secret, operating only on each other. But through years of trial and error and some very sophisticated research they’ve come up with new technologies that they now believe are good enough to conquer the world. They’re not afraid. They’re ready to spread out, to suck everybody into them. They’ve been in waiting for the time to come when they could come out of hiding and go out to convert the world, and now that time has come.”

“Apostles,” Nick said. “Bringing the Good News to the gentiles.”

“Yes,” Judith said. “Only, they’re not going to bother trying to convince us to convert, like the Apostles of Jesus did. They’re going to literally change our minds. By changing our brains.”

“Okaaaaay,” Jake said. “The people of the world responding to this guy Monty’s whim? What are we going to do, walk around like zombies with our arms outstretched in front of us? How could anyone believe it’s the next stage in human evolution? Monty’s a douchebag. I’d kill myself first.”

“Not if they had re-arranged your brain to make you want to join them,” Judith said. “When you think of the Overmind, don’t think of zombies. Think of a swarm of bees, instantly communicating, sharing the same thought. Think of the best performance of a string quartet, when four musicians magically become one. Think of the person who knows what you’re thinking without asking, whose thoughts you share. In other words, think of love. From the dawn of time, holy people have sought Holy Union. And the Overmind is union—real, physical, chemical, electrical union. Once they get inside you, you will want to join them. All it will cost you is your soul.”

“Soul schmoll,” Casey said, her lips downturned at the corners. “It’s just a bunch of nerds in a cult.”

“I know it sounds crazy,” Judith said. “But it’s real, and both you and Jake are already involved, like Nick is. You’re more involved that you know.”

“Bullshit,” Jake said.

“Jake, you’re a veteran, right?” Judith said. “Gulf War? And you have symptoms of the Gulf War Syndrome? The headaches, the flushed cheeks?”

Jake nodded.

“And Casey, your boyfriend Todd, he was working on the Kali chip when he was shot.”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend. He was my friend.”

Yeah, right, Nick thought.

“You may be part of Monty’s plan already. He may be using you in ways you don’t know.”

Jake made a deep, guttural sound, part aggressive, part disbelieving.

“I’ll be god-damned if he’s using me,” he said.

Judith sighed. Nick could feel her exhaustion, if only because it matched his own. Driving across the entire USA in four days in a quasi-legal car with hell-hounds on your trail, then stealing canoes and paddling across a cold, dark lake in the middle of the night did tend to tire one out.

“To understand what I’m saying, you need a little more background,” Judith said.

“You’ve been giving us background for the last twenty minutes” Jake said, “Just tell me who you want me to shoot, for fuck’s sake.”

Judith took one more deep breath.

“I have to back up a bit,” she said. “Bear with me, please. Where is that water? I would like a little drink of it.”

As Casey fetched four water bottles from a case in the corner, cradling them in the crook of her left arm, Nick got up and added wood to the fire. He poked at it with a stick until the old logs broke into a pile of blazing coals and the new logs burst into flames all at once. Then he threw the stick into the fire and returned to his sleeping bag. Casey’s face showed a deepening grimace, and Nick realized that she was probably out of painkillers. Her sleeping bag seemed to swallow her whole. Judith, having consumed half a bottle of water, resumed her tale.

“I met Monty in 1975, at a scientific conference, when I was 17. Five years later, in 1980, I encountered Monty again when I was part of a group of young people that he had personally recruited to train as his apostles. His cover story was that he was running a summer science camp in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a place for the truly gifted kids from across the country to meet and have fun and do science for a few weeks under the guidance of a gifted professor from Stanford. There were about twenty or thirty kids there, all precocious young people with a scientific bent. We went there for science, but what we got was something different. We all listened to Monty’s strange talk of how he was going to take over the world, how he was going to become God, how he had selected us help us on his divine mission. Only two of us were disgusted enough that we said no to the supposed honor. Only two of us tried to put as much distance as possible between Monty and ourselves. Two girls. I was one. Bartlett McGovern, who was only 13 at the time, was the other.”

“Bartlett?” Casey said, her voice cracking, looking at Nick in the flickering light. “Your wife?”

Inside the camp building there was a long silence, but outside the wind was beginning to pick up. Gusts shook a nearby tree against a boarded window and it screeched, seeming almost to cry.

“I just found this out, too,” Nick said, softly. He hoped nobody could see his face clearly. Judith had told him most of this story in the car, during their drive. She had told him about the conference in the mountains where she and Bartlett had met, she had told him about Bartlett’s refusal to work with Monty, her hatred of the man. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, Nick had thought then, in the car, and was thinking now, again. Why didn’t I listen to Bartlett? Why didn’t I trust my own wife?

Judith continued, as if every word were causing her pain. “Bartlett and I found Monty totally weird and creepy. But the other young people there were totally taken by Monty’s vision. One of these people was a young black kid named Jamal Jackson. He changed his name to Pavel Isaacs.”

“Hole. Ee. Shit.” Casey said. “He went back that far with Monty? Fifteen years?”

“You worked with Pavel,” Judith said.

“No, not me. Todd worked with him. I was replaced by him. Pavel took my spot on the Kali project. And, newsflash, he’s dead.”

“Thank the Lord,” Judith said. “That man…” She paused, closed her eyes, and collected her thoughts. “I didn’t hate him,” she said softly. “I feared him. He was a very smart, very ambitious teenager in 1980. But with Monty teaching him, by the 1990’s he had become a brilliant scientist with absolutely no moral compass. To give you an idea how smart that guy was, he was working on a PhD with Dieter Steffen in the MIT nanomaterials laboratory and working on the Kali chip with Todd Griffiths at the Mill in Newcastle at the same time. He was absolutely brilliant, he was tireless, and he was willing to do absolutely anything in order to further Monty’s Overmind goal. Anything. Including murder. I lost track of him in the late 80’s, early 90’s, but he surfaced in Basel, Switzerland, working Dieter Steffen. Dieter was originally from Basel. I knew him, briefly.” Judith paused again. “He’s dead, too.”

A gust came under the front door, as if, Nick thought, an evil spirit had snuck in and settled itself around them.

Judith broke the silence after a moment. “Anyway, I believe it is the goal of Monty Meekman and his followers to use their nanomachines to reprogram genes—DNA sequences—that control the construction and function of human brains. Hoff-Zeigy, where Dr. Steffen and Pavel worked, is developing a microscopic machine that can change our DNA from the inside out, to literally reshape our brains. Monty and his cult will use those machines to infect and reprogram people by literally changing their minds.”

“That’s like swapping out your brain while you’re awake,” Jake said, glancing at Nick.

“Reprogramming the microcode at runtime,” Nick answered, and both laughed nervously, like schoolboys, avoiding each other’s eyes, as Judith continued instructing like a stern teacher.

“And they want to use Bartlett’s genetic engineering breakthroughs too. The goal would be to change our brains into receptors for Monty’s Overmind communication,” Judith said. “To grow special new brain portals where chips could be inserted—”

“The RARP back door trick! Hosey doorknob black magic!” Jake said, and out of pure nerves, Nick felt himself on the verge of developing a fit of uncontrollable giggles. He forced himself to concentrate on what Judith was saying

“—this is exactly the kind of thing Bartlett’s company was working on. Brains simulated on computer chips, brains connected to chips, mice genetically engineered to make it easier for chips to control them. Monty’s machines could change genes that affect human volition—free will. Put all these technologies together and you’ve got a skeleton key to give Monty access to your mind, to every mind on earth. That’s what Pavel was working on with Todd, although Todd didn’t know it. Todd thought he was designing a chip to do one thing, just an ordinary chip to make computers run faster. But his partner Pavel was secretly adding a whole special function to the Kali chip. He was making a chip that could load nanomachines with DNA information.”

Casey sighed. “And that’s why Todd was shot. Because he discovered the Trojan Horse in the Kali chip.”

Judith nodded. Casey looked oddly relieved, as if she had managed to finally scratch an itch that had been bugging her for five years.

The fire hadn’t really died down much, but Casey got out of her sleeping bag and threw another log on it. Then she stretched, shivered, hugged herself with one naked hand and one hand wrapped in a giant bandage, and crawled back into the bag.

“Let me see if I can keep up with you college kids,” Jake said. “The Kali chip contains DNA information; that information is transferred from the chip into Dieter’s nanomachines; the nanomachines rearrange DNA in our brains, which mutate until we’re all linked into Monty’s Overmind. And we communicate magically, sharing thoughts, maybe using radio chips that we’re also somehow infected with.”

“That’s the plan,” Judith said. “You’ve got it. And there’s another thing. Bartlett Aubrey’s research, and her new company, all have to do with improving the interface between computer chips and brains. It’s what they call BCI, brain-computer interface. Her company, The Neuro Group, deals with simulating brains, even transmitting thoughts electronically—that’s their plan, anyway. Bartlett does her work on animals, not humans. But once Monty gets his hands on that technology he’ll quickly adapt it for use on people. After all, he already has a crudely working prototype Overmind of him and his ‘apostles.’”

“I’ve seen it,” Nick said. “It’s real. They’re one organism.”

Nick thought back to just a few days ago, the eeriness of the Corporate Fellows moving as one being, all of looking at him as if they shared one mind. He felt a shiver go up his spine. He thought, too, of Pascale leaning over him with that pen-sized inhaler, and of all the people lined up to get their own dose of whatever was in that thing.

“And that’s just the beginning, the baby steps,” Judith said. “Everything they’ve done, they’ve done with the crudest technology, like building an airplane with wood and canvas and bicycle parts. Imagine what they’ll be able to do once those nanomachines have been perfected, after Monty has adapted Bartlett’s techniques for marrying brains to chips, after the entire human genome has been published and the Overmind learns exactly which genes control which parts of brain development. Everything the Overmind has learned until then will be put to use and the Overmind itself will be sped up a thousandfold. There will be no stopping it.”

Judith paused, and looked at Nick. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?” she asked.

“Tell us what?” Casey said.

Nick looked at his lap tugged at the fabric of his sleeping bag, momentarily considered lifting it to see if there were any scorpions lurking underneath. Ever since Judith had informed him what, exactly, had been in Pascale’s inhaler, he had been mentally scanning his systems to see if he felt any different than normal—was he thinking differently, were his emotions different, was the tingling in his feet and fingers a result of the cold or of the dose Pascale had given him. The thought of what she had injected into him made him feel tainted, sick.

“You tell them,” he said.

Judith looked away from Nick and back toward Casey and Jake.

“Just spit it out already,” Casey said.

“Nick is infected with Monty’s nanomachines,” she said. “They need to get to Bartlett, and Nick is the way in. This is the ghost story I promised you. The Nick Aubrey you know is evaporating; soon there will be nothing of him left. But it’s worse than that. Nick isn’t the only one infected. There might be a hundred, or a thousand more. We know that one way to get the nanomachines inside a person is through a nasal inhaler. Nick was given a dose—squirted up his nose while he slept. Nick didn’t want it, but others did. A hundred or more people lined up voluntarily in California. Even as we sit here talking, Nick, along with everybody else who was at the Biodigital Forum, the most powerful people in the biotech and computer industries, is being sucked into the Overmind. Right now. And if all of these people turn their hearts and minds to Monty’s program, devote the vast resources they control to realizing Monty’s dream, there will be no escape for any of us. We’re as good as ghosts ourselves.”

Chapter 48

Bartlett Aubrey was aware that she had probably committed some kind of offense by bringing a pint of Jack Daniels into Irwin Goldberg’s kosher house in Brookline, but she forgave herself on the grounds of medical necessity. Tonight, she thought, I’ll need all the help I can get. But at least she had brought her own plastic cup with her, so the contamination would be localized.

She poured one shot in, drank it quickly, and listened for footsteps in the rooms above her. As far as she could tell, Irwin and his wife were sound asleep. Bartlett was truly alone. She poured more whiskey into her cup. Her goal was to make the pain go away. The pain of knowing that Paul Aubrey was dead. The pain of Nick’s absence. The pain of her lab and her research—her entire life’s work—being at the center of Monty Meekman’s plans. She had done everything she could to distance herself from that man. And still he found her, had never let her out of his sight. How long before he figured out where she was hiding now? A day? An hour? Or did he already know?

The whiskey wasn’t working. She drank, then poured herself another. The whiskey was only making her drunk, a condition she had never liked and consequently grown unused to. But how else could she make the pain go away, the anguish, the confusion of her own motives, the loneliness, the fear? She poured again and drank again. This is stupid, Bartlett, she told herself. This is really stupid. You should drink some water, she told herself. As quietly as she could, she opened the guest-room door and tip-toed, in her bare feet, to the kitchen, dimly lit by a nightlight. Opening the tap just a crack, she slowly filled her cup with water.

Remorse was a useless emotion, but the only one her heart now knew. She looked around the kitchen, and had a sudden vision of kitchen in her parent’s house Caldwell, Maine, the kitchen her mother used to spend most of her waking hours when she was still alive, before her child, Bartlett’s brother, developed Fitzgibbons Disease. The kitchen where her brother sat, strapped into his wheelchair, during his long decline. She remembered the kitchen table where she had started studying biology. And it had been in that room where she made a pact with herself that she would solve the riddle of what caused her brother’s terrible disease. And she would find a cure for it. It was at a table, not unlike this table at Irwin’s house a quarter mile from Coolidge Corner, Brookline, that her life as a scientist had begun. And so it was appropriate that it would be at this house, in this scientist’s kitchen, where that same scientific life would end. She couldn’t have known that Monty would use her research in the way he planned. Only a sick mind could conceptualize, let alone orchestrate, direct brain-to-brain communication as a way to control every being on earth. Certainly some potential applications of the work The Neuro Group planned had worried her. She knew that many of her colleagues joyfully anticipated selling their technology to the military, and that troubled her. It didn’t take much imagination to imagine all kinds of dark scenarios. She had put them out of her mind, telling herself that that was the price she had to pay to defeat Fitzgibbons.

But to infect and control the entire world using techniques she had developed in her transgenic mice? It was ludicrous. It was insane. Yet if anybody could do it, Meekman could, and would.

Bartlett herself had certainly never thought of anything remotely that sinister. Not until Judith Knight had alerted her to the possibility, not until Paul had told her about the phage proteins, not until Chris and Janine had died—had been murdered—not until Jake, claiming he was a friend of Nick’s, told her that Paul had been killed, murdered only hours after she had last seen him, and warned her to either come with him or to go into hiding. She had chosen to come here, to the house of her friend, boss, and mentor. Any half-decent assassin would find her here, she was certain. But she couldn’t run; she didn’t have the strength.

She went back to the guest room, sad on the bed for a minute, tried to convince herself to pull back the covers and go to sleep. But it was useless. She took another drink. She had left Nick because he refused to grow up. That was the story she told herself. But no, she thought now. She had left him out of pride. He had refused to listen to her about Monty. And she couldn’t stand the thought of how little her opinion mattered to him, in the end. So she had left him, and he didn’t deserve it, not when she had withheld the most crucial information, her own long association with Meekman. She missed Nick now with a strength she hadn’t ever felt. She thought of the first time she saw him. She was torturing herself, she knew, but she thought of it anyway. She willed herself to go back there, to that party at Thanksgiving, 1988. It was forever ago. It was yesterday. Her Trojan Gene article in Science had come out, the article that launched her career. She had passed her “prelim” exams and had just about completed writing her dissertation. The research was complete, and she was well on her way to being awarded her doctorate. Bartlett McGovern, PhD. Nick was tall, handsome, deep-voiced, and confident like Gary Cooper in High Noon. He knew virtually nothing about molecular biology. He had studied farming and computers, and had fascinating tales of adventures in Africa. He and she danced: he told her stories, she told him stories, he recited Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail;’ she recited the atomic weights and valences of sixty-seven elements. He loved children and hated injustice. She loved Red Sox and hated Mets. And within three short hours she lost her heart. It as true as it was incredible: she had met the perfect man. She tumbled like a brick falling into a well.

Atomic weights and valences… Funny, she hadn’t done much organic synthesis since leaving grad school. At one time she could have taught organic chemistry in her sleep. She wondered if she could still remember how to synthesize cyanide without looking at a textbook.

She poured one more bit of whiskey and drank it. She took a look around the room. She couldn’t stay here. There was no rest for her here, and every moment she stayed only repaid Irwin’s generosity with insult and maybe even endangered him and his family as well.

She grabbed her coat and hat, slipped on socks and boots, slung her bag over her shoulder and left by the back kitchen door, walking out into the cold, spring air, suddenly a degree or two more sober than before. The windows of the houses next door were black. Everybody was asleep. The big city was like a small town. She thought of Caldwell, wondered if it was how she remembered it from childhood—quiet, dead, depressed, a long way from anything important. Maybe she’d go back there, she thought, to take care of her ageing father, to nurse her broken heart. Maybe, if she lived through whatever was going to happen next, she’d start over again here, walking in her parent’s footsteps, something she had sworn to herself that she’d never do.

It was fate that Nick and Bartlett would wind up in Boston, then Newcastle. Sure, MIT was a great place to start a career. But there had been other offers. Everybody wanted her after her Trojan Gene article came out. She could have worked at NIH or CDC, or Stanford, or Chicago. Something about Boston and New England had drawn them to it. Nick had been drawn to the Mill. She had been drawn to MIT. Why New England? Because they were both Puritans at heart, she now realized. And she wanted nothing more right now in all the world than to be with Nick. What a fool I was, she thought, not to go with Jake. She had made a mistake and moved out on Nick, but the past be damned. Nick Aubrey was still her husband. Why hadn’t she gone to him? It was the only thing her heart wanted. And now there was no way on earth to find him.

The face of God in messenger RNA? No man sees the face of God and still lives. That was in the bible. And I’m drunk.

She was drunk, and, suddenly, everything was clear. She would destroy her lab, all of her research, everything. She wouldn’t let Monty get a hold of the technology he wanted, not now, not ever. He had tried to make her one of his apostles. He had had her kneel in front of him and he had placed his hands on her shoulders and he had said, “I will come for you when I need you.” She hadn’t understood what she saw and heard there, but it disturbed her, gave her nightmares for years. And he had come, years later. He came to her laboratory at MIT. He had been following her career, reading her papers. When she had seen him through the eyes of a child he was intimidating, mysterious, powerful. But when she saw him as a young woman with a PhD, she saw only an oily, ugly snake. She slammed the door in his face and she thought she was done with him.

But she had made a fatal mistake. She had bargained with the devil. It was Monty’s idea that she had used to start her Fitzgibbon’s research, his insight that lead her to the Trojan Gene. She hadn’t admitted that fact to anybody, not to Paul, not to Nick, not to anybody. She had barely acknowledged it to herself. And so she had kept her history with Monty secret, buried it deep inside her mind and her memory. She had promised herself she would never tell Nick about Monty. And she had lost her marriage because of that promise.

What did she have now? A lab that would be ruined by tomorrow, years of research down the drain. That stupid Neuro Group. “Thought made tangible”. Thought in software! Thought in a mutilated brain of a mouse! Monstrosity! She sat down on the curb of the quiet, sleeping neighborhood and let her tears flow. My poor Nicholas! she thought, not sure who she felt more sorry for, herself or for him.

Chapter 49

Judith Knight sat inside her sleeping bag, her hands gripping the cloth tight over her shoulders. She looked at each of her companions individually—Nick, whose unshaven and exhausted face framed with dirty green hair seemed to show every minute of a week of hell, and a hell of a five years before the week even began; Casey, whose face looked like it was caught half in the past and half in the current nightmare of a reality; and Jake, the wiredog, who appeared to be struggling with some strong emotions. If those emotions broke, she didn’t know what would happen. Jake looked like the kind of man who was capable of beating another man into a pulp. Indeed, he looked like the kind of man who would enjoy such a physical release. She looked at each of them and she wished with all her heart that she had done things differently in her life. She should have reported Monty to the authorities twenty years ago, when he was still vulnerable. She should have come forward with her concerns. She wished she had taken one or two more vacations in her life, that she had had one or two love affairs. She had worked, and worked hard, for all of her life, chasing the dream of science. But it was a cold dream, and, ultimately, an empty one. Life, ever mysterious, was where she should have spent her time, and though she had convinced herself that life existed inside the human genome, she knew now that life exists where she least expected it—among other humans, flawed, frail, and afraid though they all were. All of us, she thought with something like resignation. Even me.

“I’m sorry, Nick,” she said. “I can’t think of any way to save you. Or any of us.”

“Oh no no no no no,” Jake said, his face animated with anger. “No you don’t. You don’t give up that easily.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Judith said.

“There’s always something we can do,” Jake replied. “And hell, I’m not the smart one here. You guys, you’re the big brains. You’ve got to think.”

Nick stood up.

“I’ve got to get some air,” he said. He walked outside, letting in the freezing wind behind him before shutting the door.

“Should somebody go after him?” Judith asked.

“Leave him be,” Casey replied. “He’s just coming to terms with the fact that his brain is being Monty-fied. He might want some time alone.”

The three of them were quiet for a few minutes. Finally, Judith turned to Jake and said, “Do you want to know why your cheeks get red?”

“I’m not sure that I do,” Jake replied. “But tell me anyway.”

“Gulf War Syndrome is caused by tiny viruses called T4 bacteriophage. Monty had a pact with Saddam Hussein; he gave Saddam weapons that made Saddam think he could defeat America. You, and every other person with Gulf War Syndrome, are Monty’s lab rats. They were experimenting with ways to get DNA information from a chip into a microscopic machine, and then from the machine into a person. They wanted to see how biological weapons worked, how many people they could infect with one device. If you were to inspect an Iraqi missile warhead, I’ll bet you would find that it contained a Kali-chip and a ‘monster-cell’ full of T4 somehow reprogrammed with snippets of the human genome, probably Monty’s genotype. They don’t expect the whole world to voluntarily infect themselves with nasal spay, after all. So they’re trying to develop the ultimate biological weapon, one that can infect hundreds of millions, even billions of people. A dictator like Saddam who was willing to use biological weapons would be a very handy asset for them. He did their research for free.”

“So I’m infected, too?” Jake asked.

“No. Not with nanomachines. Your DNA isn’t being reprogrammed. The syndrome is caused by nerve damage from the imperfect machines, but it’s not life threatening. It wouldn’t be the first time that American soldiers were used as guinea pigs for the benefit of a third party.”

“I supposed I should be thankful.” He stood up and paced to the back of the hall where it was nearly completely dark. After a few moments, he leaned his head against the wall and said, “fuck.”

Nick stood just outside the church lodge. The wind was strong, but the building itself blocked some of it, and though it was cold, the bodily sensation gave him some comfort. At least he could still feel his body. When the change happened, if the change happened, not only could he not do anything about it, and he wouldn’t even know it had happened, when it happened. That was the rub; that was the bite in the ass. He wouldn’t know. He would just melt into Monty, melt into the apostolic Overmind, and not even feel it happening.

Everything Carl had said that afternoon in Mad Antonio’s Nut House was true: Monty had ruined Nick’s career. He had destroyed his marriage. He had stolen his brother from him. But Nick wasn’t done fighting. Not yet. Not until the last cell of the old Nick was gone would he stop. Not until he had given everything he had, not until hell arrived on earth and Monty sat in the throne.

Nick opened the door to the lodge and walked back inside, into the building where he had know the greatest joys of his life as a boy, and as a man. He would find some kind of redemption, right here, tonight.

“We’re deep in the Adirondack Forest,” Nick said as the re-stoked fire cackled. “In front of us is three miles of open water, and behind us it’s thirty miles of roadless wilderness. Monty can’t find us here. We can put our minds together and come up with a plan of action.”

Jake turned to him. “Nick, buddy, I’m not sure you were listening, but let me give you a little recap. You are infected with tiny little machines that want to rearrange your brain to turn you into a Monty slave. Judith just told me that I’m infected with T4 bacteriophage, whatever that is. We’re both part of a multinational conspiracy to create an Overmind. Monty Meekman is the devil. And we’re all screwed.”

“Sounds about right,” Casey said.

Nick took that in. What was it Peter Barlow had announced to the startled passengers on Flight 44?

The Iraqi secret weapon is not nerve gas. It’s tiny robots to control our minds. Gulf War Syndrome is only the beginning. I have left proof and a plan for the cure on a diskette with a friend in California.

And that diskette was still in Nick’s pocket, as silent and unreachable as Barlow himself now was. He would probably never be able to crack it. But at the very least it gave him reason to believe that a cure was possible.

“Listen,” Nick said. “There are billions of cells in the brain, and no easy pathway for machines to get to them all. No gene therapy has ever worked—and people have tried hundreds of them. I think Meekman’s plan is bullshit. So I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to concede the game to Monty. Not yet. He’s done me some major harm, and I have some revenge to get in return.” They were looking at him, their faces registering various degrees of disgust and fear.

“But you just said that the Overmind is real. You saw it,” Casey said.

“I was thinking about this outside,” Nick said. “The Corporate Fellows, they were volunteers. I’ve only had one exposure, but they might have had hundreds of exposures. They probably have chips implanted in their brains, radio transmitters under their skin. They probably breathe that shit every day and every night. They’re not me and I’m not them. Not yet. We can counterattack. We must counterattack. Monty killed my brother. He shot my best friend Todd in the head. And he did his best to ruin my marriage and my life. But guess what? I’m alive and I’m still in love with my wife. I can’t risk not seeing her again. I won’t risk what Monty will do to her if I’m not around. I am not out of this game yet. Not by a long shot. And you guys are going to help me, whether you want to or not.”

“A counterattack,” Casey said, quietly. “We have to fight the machines in your brain.” After a few seconds she said, “We can do that.”

“Right. Thank you Casey,” Nick said. “Explain how, please.”

They looked at Casey, and waited. She chewed at her lip for a moment. “I can’t think when you’re all god damn staring at me,” she said. Nick looked away, his eye traveling to the window he had boarded up, his mind traveling to the step ladder and the woman he had asked to marry him that night, eons ago. “Got it,” Casey said. She was smiling her snaggletooth smile. “Got something. Not sure it’s going to work, but it’s an idea. It’s what we call an S M E,” she said. “A Simple Matter of Engineering. We’ve got to make our own machines to repair the damage that Monty’s machines are doing. We need our own version of the Kali chip. Now, it’s too complicated for me to make a whole Kali, but I can fake it with a PROM.”

“PROM?” Judith asked. “I’m sorry. I have no training in software.”

“Hardware,” Casey said. “A simple kind of chip, a Programmable Read-Only Memory, about a thousand times less complicated than Kali was. You program information into it when you build the chip, then read it out when you need it. It’s cookbook stuff. I could probably design one in a few days.”

“Great,” Nick said.

“But we also need a Kali,” Casey added.

“Not so great,” Nick sighed. “There are none left. Why do you need one?”

“Kali was a cache controller,” she said, “designed to hold large amounts of regular information that it flushed very quickly. It’s the perfect chip to hide DNA patterns in. Todd’s goal was to load, unload, and rearrange patterns as quickly as possible, like one of those puzzles that you slide the letters around. He didn’t care what the patterns were; only that he could move them fast. So now I think I know what Pavel was doing, and why Todd couldn’t debug it for so long.”

“Why?” Jake said.

“Whenever the Kali was done doing its real job, Pavel designed it to reset itself to the pattern Monty wanted. The only problem was, Pavel’s reset logic kept messing up Todd’s shuffle logic. That’s how Todd discovered the trick.” And she added, after what sounded to Nick like a poorly suppressed sob, “Poor Todd.”

“Casey,” Nick said. “We need you to focus.”

“If Pavel had the chip reset to the pattern Monty wanted, that pattern would still be in the chip. We don’t need the pattern, but we need the packing sequence.”

“Keep going,” Nick said.

“DNA has four nucleotides: cytosine, adenine, somethingelseiforgetanine, guanine. CATG. Let’s say you’re tiling the floor of your house with DNA. C is a red tile, A is blue, T is green, G is white. When you know the sequence, it’s like you have a stack of tiles in the exact right order. A Kali chip is like a house already tiled. If I can figure out how your stack of tiles was laid out to create the pattern in your house, then I know the packing algorithm. Once I know that, I can substitute any stack for the original one, and make a new chip to lay the tiles in my house. In other words, with that new chip I program new nanomachines with any pattern I like, and the pattern I like is good old Nick, before he got infected. So I sequence Nick’s DNA to get the pattern I want; I program that into my PROM, I use that PROM to create new nanomachines and I infect Nick with new nanomachines that undo the changes made by Monty’s machines. Nick goes right back to how he was before the attack. Voila, antidote.”

“So, what do we need again?” Nick asked. “Spell it out slow, like you’re talking to an idiot. Which I am.”

Casey held up the fingers of her good hand as she talked. “One, we need a Kali chip to get to the packing algorithm. Two, we need your DNA from before you were infected, that will give us the pattern for the right DNA. Three, we need some of those nanomachines, unprogrammed, so we can program them to re-infect you with the good stuff. And finally, four, we need to program those machines with the new information, which means you have to go to Basel.”

“Why Basel?” Nick asked.

“Because Judith said that that’s where the machines are made and programmed,” Casey said.

“If you don’t have a job after this,” Judith said to Casey, “you can come work for me.”

“Thanks. But let’s get through this first. DNA, I don’t know the first thing about it, we need to get a sample of Nick’s pre-infection DNA, and then sequence all of it, which is, practically speaking, impossible. Next, we need a Kali chip. Well, we’re screwed on that one too. The chip that was destroyed in the Bonehead Museum was the last Kali we’ll ever see. There are no more. Monty has them all. And we’re screwed on the nanomachines too, because we’ll never get into that lab in Basel. Hello again, square one. We’re fucked.”

“I can take care of the DNA,” Judith said. “All I need is some of Nick’s old clothes from before he got infected, and a decent lab.”

“I’ve got my smelly gym clothes in the car,” Nick said. “Haven’t used them since before I got sprayed.”

“You’re going to sequence Nick’s entire genomic sequence?” Casey said. “That’s never been done, if Time Magazine isn’t lying to me. That’s what the whole Human Genome Project is about, and they say it won’t be done for ten more years.”

“I don’t need to sequence his genome. I know exactly what segments I’m looking for, even what chromosomes they’re on.”

“But how can you possibly know that?” Casey asked.

The fire was ebbing and the room was suddenly much darker. Judith’s face was barely visible.

“Because Monty himself has explained, on his website, how he sequenced the relevant parts of his own genome; he even published a chromosomal map. He claims that he will be able to sequence his entire genome before the Human Genome Project has completed theirs. In any event, he’s found the genes that control formation of certain structures in the brain, and he’s quite proud of himself. He published the relevant sequences and chromosome maps on the day of the Biodigital Forum.

The room again fell silent as each person tried to fathom what Judith had just told them.

“I know somebody who has a lab,” Nick said, finally. “Bartlett. But Monty’s surely watching her, if he hasn’t killed her already.”

“I have an idea about that,” Judith said. “Just assume I can get the DNA sequenced. Then what?”

“We’re still fucked,” Casey said, sighing. “We don’t have a Kali chip. And without that I can’t figure out the packing sequence, the stack of tiles, how the DNA info is coded.”

“So all we lack, then, is a Kali chip?” Jake said. “That’s the only problem?”

“Yeah,” Casey said, irritated. “That’s the only problem. But it’s a very big problem.”

“I’ll have a chip for you in seven days,” Jake said. “April fifteenth.”

“How you going to do that, cowboy?” Casey said.

“There’s Kali chips on Iraqi SCUDs, right?” Jake said. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“That’s my hypothesis,” Judith said.

“I know a secret,” Jake said.

“We’re like Ross Perot,” Nick said. “All ears.”

“The CIA has a SCUD, and I know where it is.”

“Keep talking.”

“Fort Devens, Massachusetts. “

Damn! So close, so tantalizingly close! And yet infinitely far away.

“There might useta been a SCUD at Fort Devens, Wiredog,” Nick said. “But you haven’t been keeping up on current events. They closed that place down after the Gulf War, after you mustered out of the Army. There is no more Fort Devens.”

Jake laughed.

“You’re going to tell me about the Army? Why don’t you make yourself useful and put some wood on the fire? Listen, it’s at Devens, Captain, and I’ll tell you how I know. Over in Saudi, Technical Intelligence had a warhead. It was a dud; fell unexploded. So Tech Int scooped it up. That’s their job—to capture and analyze enemy equipment. But before Tech Int could do their magic, the Devon’s contingent of USAID came and scooped that warhead up. I know about the SCUD because I have a good buddy who was in Tech Int during Desert Storm. Now, what he told me is all super secret, court marshal stuff if it ever gets out that he told me, okay?”

Standing in the near-total darkness, with rain thundering on the roof, standing next to a dying fire and with a sleeping bag gathered around him, five miles into the Adirondack wilderness on the edge of a lake that might freeze tonight and thus strand and kill him and his companions, in a campground meeting hall owned (if ownership by a nonexistent entity were possible) by the long-defunct Second Swedish Baptist Church of Oneonta, New York, Nick, mere feet from the window his mother had hated and below which he had uttered the two smartest and most significant words of his entire life, “marry me”, he thought he saw Jake, the Wiredog, smile. Nick hadn’t had a drink since leaving California; his brain was full of nanomachines that had either disintegrated by now or were re-arranging his mind; his brother was dead, and his wife, whom he adored with all his soul, was as unreachable as any star visible to the twin telescopes of the Lick Observatory. He hadn’t slept in two days nor bathed in five. Yet Wiredog’s smile gave Nick, for the first time in months that seemed like centuries, a feeling that remotely, ever so faintly, resembled happiness. Or if not happiness, at least a temporary cessation of bone-crushing dread and remorse. Wiredog was still talking.

“Devens is ninety-nine percent shut down. But there’s still a spook crew at the old school, USAISD. Not completely kosher, if you know what I mean. You can see their cars in the parking lot. How do I know that? Let’s just say that I have sources. But those guys still at Devens are not with the Army, I guaran-damn-tee it. Nobody knows who these spooks really are or what they really do. Nobody goes near them. You gotta be afraid of that kind of people.”

“I am afraid of them,” Nick said.

“Well buck yourself up, Nick, because those assholes, whoever they are, have a SCUD warhead with a Kali chip in it, and you and me, we’re going to go take it away from them.”

“Well then,” Nick said. “It seems that the outlines of our counterattack are already in place. So I don’t know about you, but I’m going bed. We roll tomorrow.”

Five seconds later he was soundly asleep.

Chapter 50

Casey Montgomery, herself, didn’t care one rat’s ass about God or religion. She didn’t care about Holy Water or the Torah or the Sabbath or eating fish on Friday or the yarmulkes or the no shoes in the mosque or the veil or fasting or crossing fingers when she drove by a graveyard. She didn’t care about genuflecting in front of the altar, keeping kosher, honoring the Prophet, sacred mountains, the Dalai Lama, Toni Morrison, extreme unction, spiritual awakening, ritual cleansing, Hopi dancing, or touching a teammate’s hands between foul shots. The next bumper sticker she put on her car would be the one that said

GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE

RELIGIONS KILL PEOPLE

She didn’t care about any of that stuff. But she had spent a lot of time lately wondering if there was anyway to get back in touch with Todd, short of hiring somebody to lock her in a freezer and stab her with shards of glass.

Her longing for him was of two well-defined natures. The first nature was her longing for him to come as he had come to her in the shrine in the Mill, to unify his soul with hers; to make her whole, hale, complete. Her sure knowledge that that experience would never be repeated was not enough to make her stop wanting it. The second nature of her longing was in the aspect of Deus Ex Machina. Get your ectoplasmic ass over here and open the door, she had commanded. And he had obeyed. Ever since then she had been commanding him to reappear and explain his Kali work notebooks, but so far he was keeping mum.

For a Mill rat such as herself, sneaking back into the Mill hadn’t been such a big deal, even with one sore hand that ruled out some of the more “tactical” approaches. The fact that there was a five-state manhunt out for her, however, had put a little excitement into the proposition. But she had made it in; she was safe. Her left hand was still far from healed, but it was in much better condition than it had been a week ago and somewhat usable. She had equipped a tiny hardware-lab-slash-living quarters, replete with sleeping bag, chamber pot, potable water, and hardware test bed. She had jury-rigged a motion sensor that would alert her if anybody happened to come her way. But this particular neck of the Mill, she knew from years of prowling, was lucky if it saw more than five people a year. As a consequence of which, well, yes, it was filthy. But Mission Impossible heroes and heroines get used to that. They can shower up after they have once again made the world safe.

Her goal was to have the test suite written by the time the Nick showed up with the Kali chip. If everything went according to plan, that would be about three days from now. Three days wasn’t a lot of time in which to rig up a hardware lab and engineer a test suite. On the other hand, what else was she going to do with her time? Between now and whenever Nick arrived with the Kali—if he arrived with the Kali—her sole purpose in life was to write code furiously and solder circuit boards.

Casey thought of Kali as a padlock. Her test suite would try keys against the lock, where each key was a different rearrangement of the genomic information that Monty had sent to Judith. If the program found a key that worked, that would mean that she had found the packing algorithm—and that would allow her to create a new PROM chip packed with Nick’s genotype instead of Monty’s. To do that, of course, she would need Nick’s DNA sequence. But that was Judith’s worry, and Casey had a feeling that she would handle her part of the assault. Casey’s program would test about one key per millisecond, a thousand keys per second. That would make sixty thousand a minute, a couple of million an hour. In other words, nothing. There were countless billions of ways that information could have been mapped. It would be like looking for the Titanic one bucket of water at a time. She tried to not think about how impossibly the odds were stacked against her.

In fact, she knew that the odds in her favor were actually worse than that. For even if she somehow came up with the right packing plan, the whole idea of using a PROM in the place of a Kali chip was a stretch. There was no guarantee that her chip would be compatible with the machines in Basel. No, even a perfect PROM was unlikely to rescue Nick. The only way to be sure would be to make an actual new Kali chip, one packed with Nick’s genotype. And to make such a chip she would need a tape out, a magnetic encoding of the actual instructions used to etch the wafers on a chip. And to get her hands on such a tape, she would have to go back in time and ask Todd to make one for her. But she didn’t have a time machine. Her situation was beyond hopeless. It was nuts.

She had taped the charred bit of the Kali plot to the wall of her tiny lab; otherwise the walls were bare.

She had hoped that somehow that bit of charred paper would prove to be her Rosetta Stone, the fragment that would lead to the deciphering of the entire chip. She had traced every line on the paper until it either met a pin-out or disappeared into carbon on a burned edge. The Kali had thirty-two pin-outs per side, a hundred and twenty-eight total. The portion of paper that she had salvaged contained a single chip edge; there were seven pin-outs on it and she could only follow them a tiny portion of the way into the chip. Some Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Pebble was more like it.

But still she kept at her work, hoping for that second miracle.

Realistically, of course, she knew she was hosed. Which meant that Nick was hosed. And that meant that many, many other people were hosed as well.

Perhaps everybody.

Chapter 51

Bartlett caught the first Green Line train through Coolidge Corner to her apartment on Commonwealth to pick up a clean pair of jeans and a fresh pair of underwear. As she changed her clothes she considered, briefly, aborting her mission before what she was about to do could not be undone. She reminded herself that she was probably still legally drunk, perhaps not the ideal conditions under which to destroy her life’s work. But what the hell, as Nick always said. In for a dime, in for dollar. She walked out and to the street and hailed a cab. The sun had not yet come up

She told the driver the location of the Tufts building on Harrison Avenue in Chinatown where her laboratories were located. Within fifteen minutes she was standing on the sidewalk outside the entrance as the glimmers of dawn appeared over the non-stop Big Dig machines pounding the bedrock.

She had loved this building. She had loved the work she did inside it. She was a scientist, through and through, and it was not in her nature to destroy her work. But she had to destroy it, she knew, if she was ever going to free herself from Monty.

She glanced up one more time, taking it in, and saw that the light was on in Irwin’s office. Had he noticed that she was gone? Had he guessed, maybe, what she had in mind? Or, perhaps, was somebody other than Irwin in Irwin’s office?

It didn’t matter. Irwin’s office was on the sixth floor and that’s where their shared virology lab was. She could skip that one. The crown jewels were the eighth and ninth floors. That’s where she did the work that Monty wanted; that’s where her records were, her tissue samples, her protocols, her mice.

She walked into the lobby, got into the sixty year old elevator and punched “8”. Half a minute later the lift rattled to a stop and the doors opened. Moving swiftly to not allow time for any second thoughts to assert themselves, Bartlett pressed the combination sequence to unlock her lab door and walked in. Into the cold room she went first, grabbing gloves from the hook near the door on the way. With a well-practiced tap of her toe she caused the lid of the Revco freezer to swing open, and she felt the relative warmth of the room being sucked into the Revco’s -89C depths. We a deliberateness that was nearly vengeance, she removed a meticulously labeled tray of frozen tissue samples—a hundred slivers of frozen mouse brain stained to show its structure under a microscope—and carried it to the large “biological hazard” sink. She placed the sample tray at the bottom of the sink and opened the hot water tap. “There,” she said, and went back for another tray.

The freezer was large; its contents could fill the sink a dozen times or more. But she didn’t need to cook the samples to ruin them; a minute or two in the bath and they were useless. The process was simple: fill the sink while the hot water was flowing; once the sink was full, let it drain and move the trays into a double-strength biohazard bag. She would toss the bags down the chute to the incinerator on her way out. Within twenty minutes the freezer was empty, its contents turned to mush—melting brains whose morphology not even Monty Meekman could divine.

With that done, the next task was unpleasant but emotionally easier than it would otherwise have been. With the tissue archives destroyed the living animals could only be of use to one person, Meekman. She took the stairs to the 9th floor and entered to code that let admitted her to the animal room. She grabbed a large rubbish bin lined with a plastic bag, then, moving quickly from cage to cage, dragging the bin behind her, she picked in turn up each of the 120 mice she had carefully bred for ten generations and dropped it into the bin. After harvesting the last of them, she tied a knot in the bag, sensing but not looking at the writhing white mass that halfway filled it. She dragged the bin into the hall, rolled it on an edge into the elevator, rode one floor down, punched in her code, again, and dragged the bin into the cold room, where, with great effort, she wrangled the bag filled with seventy-odd pounds of frantic mice to the lip of the freezer and dropped it in and shut the lid. At -83 Celsius, -123 degrees Fahrenheit, it would take but a minute or two before the last of her beloved genetically engineered rodents were frozen solid, dead as doornails.

While that was going on, she used scissors, an X-ACTO knife, and her tired fingers to shred, slice, tear and pulverized every last piece of paper in her office, everything from her bench logs to work journals to meeting minutes and budget requests for more test tubes. Everything. She put the resulting confetti in biohazard bags too.

By the time Bartlett was done with all of this work the sun was shining bright above Boston Harbor, South Boston, the Boston Channel and the unendurable never-ending Big Dig and into her east-facing laboratory windows. She looked out those windows one last time, then, with much effort dragged, one after the other, fifteen or so large biohazard bags of tissue samples, shredded notes, and frozen-solid transgenic mice to the chute that led directly to a bin eight floors below. A few hours from now some poor soul whose job it was would fire up the biohazard incinerator and feed the bin’s contents into it. One by one she tossed the bags down the chute, feeling a little bit of her life go with each one. After she had destroyed, to the best of her ability—and without doing much damage to the lab facilities owned by Tufts University and operated under the aegis of Irwin Goldberg, PhD, without taking a further glance, she left the door and heard it slam shut and lock behind her.

That was it. She had done it. Twenty years, uncountable hours, a life’s worth of work, gone. But she didn’t feel what she was expecting to feel. No more sadness, now. Just relief.

She pushed out of the building for the last time. A figure walked toward her, separating from the crowd.

“Hello Bartlett,” the woman said.

“Hello Judith,” Bartlett replied.

“Your life is in danger, and so is Nick’s. If you come with me, I can help you. Will you come?”

“Let’s go,” Bartlett said, more free than she had felt in years.

Chapter 52

Nick Aubrey stood at the window of his room at the Henry Hudson Hotel in Albany, New York, and looked down on O’Heany Street four floors below him where some of the less prosperous citizens of the area stood huddled in an alleyway evidently doing some kind of commerce. Compared to the Henry Hudson, the Newcastle Hotel was the Plaza. Nick had spent five days in this dump and he was going a bit stir-crazy. But stir crazy was better than the alternative.

Jake had rented this room, paying a week in advance, cash, while Nick sat outside in the “borrowed” pickup truck with the stolen New York plates. Then Jake had opened a side door, let Nick in (with his bag of groceries), and, after asking Nick what size shoe he wore, left to park the truck in an even worse section of town.

Nick was a very wanted man. In addition to being wanted by Monty Meekman and his apostles, he also now had every law enforcement agent in America looking for him, as the North Country Times newspaper purchased in Raquette Lake had told them. The Salt Lake City Police had reclassified Peter Barlow’s death a homicide and named Nick the main suspect. They had also announced that Barlow had indeed been a covert CIA operative in Iraq, and that Nick Aubrey was possibly an agent of Saddam Hussein: a terrorist, Islamist assassin. And, just to add some icing on the cake, Nick’s rental car had been found in Portland, Oregon, with a terrified nineteen-year-old green-haired car thief behind the wheel who had been very willing to talk.

So now there was a nationwide APB out for Nick Aubrey, on top of the manhunt presumably underway by Monty’s apostles, the Corporate Fellows.

Even after Nick’s hair had been dyed from green to black, it was too dangerous for him to accompany Jake as he assembled the supplies. So Nick had stayed in this fleabag until they were ready to move. TV was unwatchable. He was too jumpy to read anything. He had already done two hundred and fifty pushups. If he ate another baloney sandwich he would hurl. So what was he to do now?

He knew, of course. He would follow the only course of action consistent with prudence and common sense. He would wait. If all went well, the real fun at Fort Devens would begin later today.

Nick nearly jumped out of his skin when the phone rang. Only three people knew he was here, so the news was either very bad, or very good.

“Hello,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Hello.”

“Nick, it’s me.” It was Bartlett’s voice. Clear. Alive. On the other end of the miles and miles of telephone wire that stretched between them. But Nick could feel her, could almost smell her. The emotions practically floored him.

“Bartlett, thank God,” Nick said. “You’re safe? You’re with Judith?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can’t talk. We’re boarding a plane. But I wanted to call and let you know myself. I’m safe. Thank you for sending Judith to get me. I destroyed my lab, everything is gone.”

Nick couldn’t find a single word to say. Her lab? Gone? Her research, her decades of work? He wanted to say so much, and now, with the chance in front of him, he couldn’t say a single word.

“Nick, I have to go,” Bartlett replied. “We’ll talk more later, okay?” She paused. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Be safe,” Bartlett replied. “We can talk about the rest of it later.” The line went dead.

Nick replaced the phone gingerly. Five minutes passed, then ten. After maybe a half an hour, Jake let himself into the room.

“It’s time, Captain,” he said, and they were on their way.

Chapter 53

From the opposite side of the laboratory bench, Bartlett Aubrey considered her new friend Judith. Bartlett was a laboratory adept herself, but Judith, performing procedures, had a natural grace unlike any Bartlett had ever seen. Her slender fingers seemed to caress the glassware, as a violinist’s might caress a fingerboard. She had a graceful way of speaking, too: they had only begun working together four days ago, but already Bartlett felt that Judith was someone who could help her sort out the confusion in her addled noggin.

Before coming to find Bartlett as she left her laboratory, Judith had made a 5:00 AM visit to Irwin Goldberg’s house. She had awakened him, and in the course of a few minutes convinced him that the bacteriophage protein that he had found in Janine’s sister’s blood was from a biological weapon launched by Saddam against Israel during the Gulf War. She further proved to him that what Bartlett had told him when she asked if she could spend a few days hiding at his house was true: bad people were after Bartlett’s research, were after her. And her life was definitely in danger. That was all it had taken to get Irwin Goldberg into high gear. High enough gear to somehow smuggle Judith and Bartlett out of Boston and into Israel, without passports, within 24 hours.

So now here were Bartlett and Judith, with full access to the most advanced genetics laboratory in Tel Aviv, purifying and refining DNA samples from one of Nick Aubrey’s dirty socks.

Their conversation had just taken a natural turn from orphan diseases to nineteenth century literature. A natural turn for Judith, anyway. Bartlett wasn’t too deep into the American Renaissance, but Judith clearly knew her Emerson and Melville. Bartlett had told her of her work on Fitzgibbon’s Disease, coming more quickly in the telling to the loss of her young brother than she usually did. Judith had tactfully steered the conversation to her own firm’s particular adopted modern plague.

Human Potential, Inc., had identified the mechanism of action of Ousman’s anemia, another new disease like AIDS. Like sickle-cell anemia, Ousman’s was hundreds of times more prevalent in African people than in Caucasian.

“It’s actually related to genetic factors that cause skin coloration,” she said. “Those genes are pretty well understood. The sickness is not an off-or-on thing. There’s a degree of anemia that’s directly proportional to the amount of melanin in a person’s skin. So if you took a person who had the anemia and altered their genes to make them white, as each new layer of skin grew, in the natural process of replacing shedding cells, they would become stronger.”

“Like adjusting a rheostat,” Bartlett said. “Up a little darker, down a little lighter.”

“Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story about a scientist whose beautiful wife had a single blemish—a tiny birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a hand. He worked for years to find the potion that would eradicate the birthmark. At last he succeeded. She consumed the potion, the birthmark faded to invisibility, and she died. I sometimes wonder if Pavel Isaacs had Ousman’s anemia. I have wondered whether his first human experiments were on himself.”

“The operation was a success but the patient died.”

“If you’re white, you’re alright,” Judith said. “Unless you fall out a fifth floor door.”

“I suppose that it’s an occupational hazard for those in our field. Self experimentation.”

Judith put down the pipette she had been using and took off her gloves.

“I used to think I knew how I felt about human genetics,” she said. “I had a carefully reasoned, well-buttressed argument that allowed for exactly this, but not for that. I had it all worked out.”

“I take it you don’t feel that way any more,” Bartlett said.

“I know less now than I did when I was seventeen. I say that I didn’t believe in adjusting people’s genetic endowments, yet here I am determining a sequence for us to insert into Nick, whoever he has become. I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“I never thought I’d be doing genetic experiments on my own husband,” Bartlett said. “I guess this is my final gift to him.”

“Your final gift?”

“There’s no guarantee that any of us will make it out of this alive,” Bartlett said.

“Have faith,” Judith said, bending to her work. “It’s the only thing any of us have, in the end.”

Chapter 54

At midnight, Casey Montgomery was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her office, a stack of Todd’s notebooks on one side of her, the burnt edge of the Kali plot on one knee, an open notebook in her hands. She had notebook number 3 open, which Todd had written in the early fall. This was her favorite of his notebooks. Todd’s writing was a comfort to her-—practically illegible, but with a certain flowing design that was visually appealing. Most of his notebooks were sketches of timing diagrams, chip geometries, programmable logic, gate arrays—jottings that might be intelligible only to another chip designer—but some of it held insights and observations, and once, on page 46, a reference to her. At least, she thought it was to her. “Case mental,” it said, with an exclamation point. Could have been a reference to anything, really, but she chose to believe it was a reference to her.

Except, maybe it wasn’t, and maybe Todd’s notebooks didn’t actually contain a little bit of Todd’s soul, and maybe he had never loved her, which was why he went and got himself shot over some Hindu or Buddhist or whatthefuck Goddess who wasn’t even pretty.

“We’re hosed,” she said, closing number 3 and picking up number 4. Disgusted, she let her head hang and shut her eyes tight, thinking.

Todd was working on Kali. He found a Trojan Horse. Then he was shot and left for dead. By Meekman. And how could they get to Meekman? She opened her eyes again. By unpacking Kali.

The test bed was ready. It was waiting for a Kali chip like a bassinet waiting for the baby. Now, while waiting for Jake and Nick to arrive, she could mope. Once Jake and Nick got back to the Mill with the chip, if they got back with the chip, she would plug it in and start the test. But it would be a shot in the dark. Unless she found a way to constrain the search, it would be an absolute shot in the dark.

“Damn you, Todd,” she said. “Why won’t you tell me what these notebooks mean?”

She read, for the thousandth time, the snowmelt-smudged page 99 of Todd’s Kali notebook number 4:

“I’ve got a timing bogon on chevy39, I think it is the master reset bogon. That would give me the off-by-one. It should go clear to the air, then dog breath, but vectors off at king kong one. Funny boy’s bist is toying with carucha. No reason to.”

A “bogon” was obviously a bogus entity, something that was there but shouldn’t be. So, Todd had detected a timing glitch that gave rise to an off-by-one error. The bist was the built-in-system-test, part of the logic that Pavel had taken over from Casey. So Pavel’s system test was disturbing Todd’s logic somehow. That much was easy to understand. But what about Chevy39, the air, king kong one, dog breath, carucha? It was nonsense.

By two o’clock in the morning, Casey had abandoned the floor and taken up her position at the computer, reading Internet newsgroups. Nothing new in that. But the appearance of a care package of pure information just for her was kind of exciting. Prissy net fetishists took great offense when binary nonsense clogged up space on a discussion group, but on the Internet nobody knows if you’re a dog and you can post binaries anywhere you want.

It was the sequence, from Judith. Everything had evidently gone according to plan, because already Casey had snarfed and decrypted the binaries from alt.comix.pogo, nucleotide by nucleotide, megabyte upon megabyte listing the Monty blueprint and the Nick blueprint for their anterior cingulate sulcuses, or whatever the hell it was.

So, she had both stacks of tiles. All she needed now was the tiled house, the Kali.

That was to say, all she needed now was a Kali chip and a miracle. Built into the Kali, hidden among its nearly three hundred thousand AND gates, OR gates, NANDs and NORs, was the secret recipe for making the chip upon which Nick’s soul and life depended. There were hundreds of billions of possible ways to distribute the tiles throughout the house. She would never be able to do it by chance; she needed Todd’s recipe. But to read the recipe Casey needed to decode Todd’s notebooks.

She picked up notebook number four again and began to read.

Chapter 55

Nick turned off his headlights and drove the road that lead to Fort Devens by the light of the rising three-quarter moon. All along the right side of the Devens road there were bulldozers, mounds of earth, pickup trucks, trailers, stacks of girders. But within three minutes they had driven through the site, and a golf course appeared on either side of the road. The road continued down a long gentle hill and eventually reached a T. There was a large open field on the right and a baseball field on the left. They turned left.

They saw no other cars as they drove through a ghost village of vacant old and tired buildings amid acres of lawns leaf-covered and brown under majestic bare trees. Nick tried to imagine what this place must have looked like in the summer of 1990 when it had been a major staging point for Desert Storm. For months Route 2 East and West had funneled convoy after convoy of forest-camouflaged trucks, jeeps and artillery into the base. There they were repainted, and desert-camouflaged convoys funneled out, heading for Westover Air Force Base, where giant cargo planes picked them up to take them to Saudi Arabia. This empty base today was the emblem of a passing era. How long before Monty’s way of cyberwarfare became the norm, and tanks, planes, rifles and bullets became as obsolete as bows and arrows?

“Park here,” Jake said. Nick cautiously pulled the car behind a mound of earth next to a bulldozer. Jake had paid cash for the car, and it wasn’t a beauty, but it had gotten them here. Now all it needed to do was get them out. “What’s all this?” Nick said. “I thought the base was shut down.”

“That must be the new federal prison. I didn’t know that they had started construction yet.”

Nobody would see the car here unless they were looking for it. By moonlight, he could make out the profile of Jake Carelli in the passenger seat. As Jake applied the black grease paint to his face, he seemed to melt into the night.

“Now listen,” Jake said. He handed Nick the grease paint. Nick applied the goo to his face as Jake rechecked his weapons. “This base is a couple thousand acres, but most of that is woods that they used to use for training. The actual base, where there’s buildings and stuff, is a couple hundred acres. You can see the buildings over there. The cops from the town of Ayer patrol it but they won’t bother you unless you’re dealing dope or vandalizing the place. There’s no official security ‘til ten PM. Then there’s a private company that checks for IDs. Tonight we’ll be breaking into the USAISD buildings. There’s four of them on a quadrangle about thirty meters by two hundred meters, and they’re all connected by tunnels underground.”

“Okay,” Nick said.

“There might be a whole army of spooks in there or some kind of secret laboratory, like James Bond or something, but my bet is that there’s just a bunch of low-level losers with not much to do. There’s a bunker room down there off one of the corridors; that’s where the SCUD will be.”

“How do you know?” Nick said.

“It has to be there, because that’s where all the electronics warfare labs are, so that’s where they would study it. And if it isn’t we’ll have to kidnap somebody and get him to tell us where it is. Once we find where it is, I’ll go in first, put the boys to sleep, blow the locks; you go in and get the chip out of the warhead, then we get in our car and drive away. “

“Good plan,” Nick said. “I hope we don’t have to kill anybody.”

“Tranquilizers first. Then plastic bullets. The grenades are a last resort. And let me tell you something. In the Army they’ve got this book, see, FM 34-54 Battlefield Technical Intelligence Procedures. It spells out in more detail than you ever want to know what to do when you capture enemy materiel, and who does what to whom once the shit comes Stateside. There’s no CIA or NSA listed anywhere in FM 34-54. So if anybody other than the Army is holding onto captured weapons that have been used against the Army . . . Let’s say I’ve got a problem with that. That SCUD properly belongs to the Army. I’m Army. The CIA can’t legally operate on a military base on US soil; these guys are running open loop. In other words they’re fucking criminals. That pisses me off. Three quarters of a million soldiers might be helped by understanding that warhead. But these Gordon Liddies are holding out on us. And why are they holding out on us? Who knows? Because they’re embarrassed that they fucked up yet again? Because they want to clone the technology and sell it to the highest bidder? Because Hussein Kamel never really died? Because they want to take over? Who knows? Fuck ’em. You ever shoot a gun?”

“I’m a farm boy. All farm boys are shooters.”

“OK. Worse comes to worst, we’ll shoot ’em with real ammo. Only if we are totally screwed—”

“In Massachusetts we say ‘scrod.’”

“—Only if we are totally scrod will I think about using the hand grenades. Main thing is, you get the chip and board, and you get your ass the hell out. You’re a damn Peace Corps Volunteer and I’m a damn commando. So you let me worry about this stuff, OK?”

“I am not just a Peace Corps Volunteer. I worked for UNICEF too. Todd and I drove in a famine relief convoy through the desert. I’m a very macho Peace Corps Volunteer.”

“I’ll grant you that, but on the other hand you’ve never shot anybody.”

“And you’re no commando, neither,” Nick said, refusing to yield the point as he continued to blacken his face. “You’re a wiredog and jeep driver.”

“I’m a damn site closer to being a commando than you are. Here, put this stuff on the back of your hands too.”

“I will agree that you’re the lead commando. But only if you agree that I am a very macho famine relief worker. I want that in the record.”

“I’ve already granted you that much. You are a very macho famine relief worker. Do you know how to work the safety?”

“We’ve been over this, Jake.”

“We’ve been over it in the Army too, and we still manage to fuck it up from time to time.”

“I know how to work the safety. Like this.”

“Good. You know the plan?”

“Across the golf course and parade ground, past the infirmary to the USAISD quadrangle. You gain access through a balcony door. I wait there while you find and tranquilize anybody who’s around. Then you open the ground floor door for me, we go to the basement, blow the lock to the throne room. The warhead will be in there. I cut open the skin with the bone-saw. I remove the Kali and, what did Judith call it? The ‘monster cell’ full of bacteriophage. Assuming that they’re in there.”

“They will be.”

“Then we get the fuck out of Dodge.”

“Sounds like you got it. Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Good. Me too.”

“Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we going to pull this off?”

“Nick, these spooks are nerds. If the day ever comes when a US Army jeep driver and a Peace Corps Volunteer can’t handle a dozen of them, you better sell all your stock short.”

“What the hell do you know about selling stock short?”

“I saw it on television. Let’s go.”

“Let’s go.”

They set off at a loping gait across the fields and Jake’s military training was very apparent. It was amazing how quickly Nick could lose him in the darkness. They quickly crossed the fields and skirted the vacant infirmary, arriving, winded, at the USAID quadrangle. “Stay where you can see the door. Don’t stand too close in case I need to blow up the hinges. I’ll be back after I’ve put the children to bed,” Jake said, vanishing around a corner. He opened the door within five minutes.

“Hurry before they wake up. You’ve got a baby to deliver, doctor.”

They ran down the hall, down a set of stairs to a hallway marked “Electronic Warfare Research, Top Secret.”

“Top secret my ass, you fucking REMFs,” Jake muttered as he trotted down the hall. There were a dozen doors along the corridor, but only one of them had a card-reading lock. “This must be the place,” Jake said, and quickly took off his knapsack and removed what looked to Nick like a little ball of beeswax. He worked fast.

“Stand back, don’t look, and put your hands in your ears.”

The SCUD was right where Jake said it would be. With the smell of the explosive they had used to blow the door still in his nose, Nick began to work. Cutting through the skin of the warhead proved easy: the bone-saw went right through it. He cut a small square, removed it, and peered into the nose of the SCUD. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

It was a Kali, as sure as he was born, sitting right there on a circuit board at the very tip of the rocket. On a conventionally-mounted Kali he would have expected to find on each of its four sides, thirty-two little gold wires—nearly microscopic, like the finest gossamer—connecting the chip to the surrounding ceramic mount. The SCUD Kali was different. Three of the four sides were normally mounted: the gold gossamer joined the surrounding ceramic, as he would have expected. But the thirty-two leads out of the fourth side were fused not into the ceramic, but into a glass tube that was mounted on the board. It looked like a small test tube that had been melted shut at either end. There was a green liquid in it that reminded Nick of a plastic tube of frozen fruit punch.

“Jesus God in heaven, Judith was right,” Nick said. “Saddam’s revenge. It’s a Kali chip, with a goddamned monster cell full of T4 bacteriophage. Holy shit.”

“Can you get it out?” Jake said, scanning the room.

“Hope so,” Nick said. “I’m going to try to take the whole board instead of just the chip.”

He removed the board and held it above his head like a trophy, feeling flushed and giddy. Success! But suddenly he felt Jake’s hand in an iron grip around his left wrist.

“Company,” Jake said. Nick could hear the agitated voices coming down the stairwell. Two voices, maybe three. The nature of the echo made it hard for Nick to tell how far away they were.

“Is there another way out?”

“It’s a maze; I’d get us lost. We’ll go out this way; wait till I call you.”

Before Nick could say a word, Jake was running up the stairs. Nick switched the board from his right hand to his left, and with his right withdrew the pistol and ran after Jake.

An eruption of sound and smell: gunfire, explosions.

“Nick,” he heard Jake calling, after the noise stopped, “Come on. Come

on.”

He ran up the stairs and darted his head through the doorway, looking left. No one.

“Nick, here.”

He turned to his right and saw Jake. He was leaning against the wall, bleeding heavily from his right shoulder and obviously in pain, fussing with the two hand grenades on his belt. “Right through that door,” Jake said. “Take the car. Good luck.”

“Oh Christ, Jake. Oh Christ,” he said. “Come on, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

There were shouts coming down the hallway. “I’m done, Nick. Get going.”

“Jake, come on.”

“Nick,” Jake said.

“What?”

“You told me to back you up. Which is what I’m doing. Now go. Get your ass out of here. If that chip doesn’t make it, I’m dying for nothing.”

Nick could see a pair of headlights rapidly approaching. Already?

“Go!” Jake said.

Oh good Christ, Nick thought. But he knew what he had to do.

“Thanks, brother,” Nick said.

“Get Meekman,” Jake said, as he pulled the pin from a grenade and threw it past Nick, down the hall.

Nick pushed at the door and it swung open. He took two steps out into the night. Suddenly there was noise and bright light all around. He was in the air, doing a flip off the high dive at Oneonta Swim Club.

Nick must not have been out long; when he awoke the lights were still approaching. He found the board almost immediately, and miraculously the Kali chip was intact. The cell, however, was gone. It must have slipped off when the concussion catapulted him out of the building. He didn’t need the cell; all he needed was the chip—and he wasn’t about to take the time to go on a scavenger hunt. He glanced towards the street lamp and saw the light glinting off the metal of the gun he had dropped; he picked it up at a run. There was no time for a fancy evasion strategy: he would sprint for the car, straight across the open field and golf course.

He had only gone a hundred yards or so when his chest began to ache from the cold air. Why hadn’t he built more aerobic exercise into his weight training? Breathing heavily through his open mouth, he ran past the parade ground cannon under some evergreen trees that appeared as negative shapes against the stars and onto the golf course. He knew that if he stopped to rest he would never be able to start up again. It seemed like an eternity before he came upon the edge of the construction site. His car had to be about two hundred yards away. But what would he do if he got there? Already more headlights were rapidly coming down the entrance road from Route 2. One set, now another. More would come, certainly. And they would notice a car speeding in the other direction. There was hardly any point at all in reaching the car. But he couldn’t think, he could only run, his lungs on fire, his legs made of lead. Now he was among the piles of construction supplies; a trailer on his left; beyond that three port-o-lets and a large new bulldozer, shiny in the moonlight.

He tripped and found himself flying again, but this time he was conscious of himself in the air. He dropped the gun mid-flight to have a hand free to break his fall, as with his right hand he cradled the board to his chest.

His landing was soft—soft and muddy. Nick’s heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest. Just as he was about to stand he saw headlights sweeping the golf course behind him. Somebody was driving right over the fairways.

Oh hell.

The headlights momentarily rose up in the sky as the car went up an incline. Now, Nick! He grabbed the gun, jumped up and ran to the nearest port-o-let, tore the door open, entered and pulled the door shut. Less than two seconds later the headlights leveled, and they stayed fixed as the car drew closer. Finally the car stopped and he heard a door slam. The headlights stayed on. Their light, entering the outhouse through ventilation slits, reflected off the back plastic wall and glinted off the pistol in Nick’s trembling fist.

And then there wasn’t just one pair of lights, but many, and not two or three men, but a dozen. The response from the State Police had been amazingly rapid, Nick thought. They had come from everywhere. Then he realized: he had seen no blue lights. Heard no sirens. There had been no cackle of car radio or walkie-talkie. It had been a stealth response. These weren’t cops, they were hardcore spooks. He had no doubt now, if he had any before, that he was dealing with the CIA, NSA, or something worse. If they found him, he wouldn’t be facing arrest. He’d be facing a bullet in the head.

The next three hours were absolutely the most wretched of his life. Trying to remain motionless, holding his breath, expecting any instant to hear the call to come out with his hands up, he listened as the men inspected his car. The smell from the open shit-tank was not nearly as bad as the fright he felt every time someone walked close by. But eventually, to Nick’s utter amazed relief, the cars all left. He guessed that it must be about three in the morning now. He waited for what he felt had to be half an hour, counting the seconds out in his head. Then he slowly opened the door and stepped out into the frigid moonlight on legs so cramped that he could barely stand. When he was sure there was nobody about, he tossed the pistol into the toilet. It took him half an hour to walk the quarter of a mile or so though the woods, swamp, and bracken towards the sound of the cars that passed at a rate of one every five minutes or so down Route 2. With the Kali board uncomfortably tucked under his shirt, he scaled the twelve-foot tall chain link fence at the highway. Then, after wiping the black greasepaint off his face with the little packet of cold cream and handkerchief Jake had given him, he walked six dark miles to the Searstown Mall—certain, every time a car approached behind him, that he would be run down. He spent two hours drinking a pot of coffee at Denny’s before catching a bus to Fitchburg center and walking up the hill to the Fitchburg State College library. Half an hour after the library opened he walked in as if he belonged there and, from a public Internet account, he made a simple posting to alt.comix.pogo: Albert requests a guide through the swamp. 2 AM. Then he climbed the stairs to the stacks, where he retrieved the counterfeit driver’s license and passport that Jake had placed in between pages of the 1967 Journal of Forensic Pathology. Good old Jake. Add another check mark to the dead list. Nick leaned against the cool metal shelves of the library, hung his head, and waited for the grief to pass. He said a silent prayer of gratitude for his dead friend. For Paul. For Todd. And then he left. The plan had been for him to drive Jake’s car the fifteen miles from Fitchburg to Newcastle, but that was impossible now. There was no bus, hitchhiking was out of the question. He would have find someplace to make himself invisible until after dark. And then he would have to fake it.

Chapter 56

At one forty-five in the morning the freight train slowed to five miles an hour, as it did this time every morning, where it rounded the hairpin turn behind the Newcastle Hotel. Nick clambered down the ladder from the boxcar roof and jumped off. At two AM Casey met him at a door at the bottom of a leaf-strewn stairwell by the lower pond. Fifteen minutes after that they were in the Annex, carefully installing the Kali chip in the waiting test bed. She didn’t mention the obvious fact that Jake wasn’t with him.

Now he watched as Casey wrapped a crude anti-static bracelet of naked copper wire around her left wrist and wrapped the other end around an exposed pipe near the floor. Then quickly, deliberately, she detached each lead from the Kali chip to the SCUD board, and with an amazing deftness she instantly inserted the chip into her homemade pattern-tester. If the bleeding wound in her left hand hurt, and he was sure it did, she wasn’t showing it.

“Let’s kick this pig,” she said, and touched a switch.

A tiny light on the test board lit. Messages began to scroll on monitors.

“And?” Nick said.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“We wait until we find a packing pattern that fits,” she said, testily. “You don’t have anywhere to go do you?”

“How long? How long until you find it?”

“How do I know? My program will test about one key per millisecond. There are about ten-to-the-thirtieth ways to pack that genotype in here. There hasn’t been enough time since the big goddamn bang to try them all. If we get lucky we’ll find it. If we’re not lucky, we won’t. So climb off my back, why don’t you? I haven’t slept ten hours in the five days since I started making this test bed. You ought be saying ‘thank you.’”

“I haven’t exactly been on a vacation myself,” Nick said, thinking of Wiredog’s last words as he unpinned his hand grenades.

Nick sat on the dusty floor and leaned against the wall. His mind was completely empty.

He liked it better that way.

“Here, amuse yourself,” she said, and threw a notebook in his lap.

He thumbed the pages slowly, looking at the logic diagrams, the margin notes, the dated entries. Half an hour later he was still silently reading, and she was silently staring at the hypnotic messages scrolling off the screens: reports of one lock attempt after another, a blur, a thousand failed tries each second.

He was on his sixth notebook when one entry seemed to prevent him from turning the page.

“I’ve got a timing bogon on chevy39, I think it is the master reset bogon. That would give me the off-by-one. It should go clear to the air ,then dog breath, but vectors off at king kong one. Funny boy’s bist is toying with carucha. No reason to.”

It was tantalizing. Something was nearly there, on the tip of Nick’s tongue. An off-by-one error, the kind of mistake that arose when you counted iterations starting with “1” as the mundanes did, instead of with zero, as was proper and correct for any true geek. Nick felt so close! It was almost painful, as if he had a violent itch in the middle of his back. God damn it, Todd! Nick felt like going to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and slapping some sense into his five-year-comatose friend. What the fuck was he talking about?

“Casey,” Nick said. “This ‘carucha, chevy thirty-nine, King Kong, dog breath’ stuff. ‘I made a special tape recording. I put it with Mommy and Daddy.’” It’s familiar. Where’s it from? What the hell is he trying to tell us?”

“I don’t know. It’s familiar to me too,” she said. “But I can’t think where I know it from.”

“It must be some kind of private language of his. But it’s not totally private; it’s something you and I know vaguely, but something Todd knew intimately. What did Todd know that you and I know? Some movie? A Dr. Seuss book? An episode of Star Trek? Cheech Wizard? Forumla One racing? What?”

“I don’t know Nick, I told you that. I’ve been thinking about these notebooks for years.”

“I don’t care if you’ve been thinking about these notebooks since the big goddamn bang,” Nick said, forcing himself to keep from shouting, feeling himself evaporate with every second they wasted and his anger and fear mounting with every moment lost. “Think harder. What did Todd know intimately that you and I know, but less intimately?”

She thought for only a few seconds,

“Music,” she said. “Rock ‘n roll.”

“Good,” She was right. “What kind of rock ‘n roll?”

“Loud rock ‘n roll.” Her ironic smile had come back. “Very loud.”

“Good, good.” Tired as he was, Nick could feel his pulse quickening. “What else? Drumming. He was a drummer. He loved drumming.”

“Not just drumming,” Casey said. “Percussion. All kinds of percussion.”

“Percussion . . . Percussion. . . . Zappa!” Nick was on his feet now.

“Zappa!” she fairly screamed. “Zappa! Uncle Meat! There’s a copy in the shrine, unless the cops took it.”

She was already running down the hall.

“Wait up.” He jumped up and began to sprint after her.

“You’ll get us caught,” she called without slowing down. “You don’t know the route and you won’t fit through some of the places I have to fit through. Stay here.”

It was the longest ten minutes of his life. She came back silently, flush-faced and drenched in perspiration. In her right hand was the Uncle Meat CD, with eight sets of teeth in bad need of orthodontia on the cover.

“I’ve got it,” she said. “The chip structure.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. Kali is Uncle Meat. It’s all through the notebooks; I don’t know how I missed it. Cruddy teeth. Suzy Creamcheese. Louie Louie on the pipe organ at the Royal Albert Hall. Todd listened to it all the time. It’s the album where Frank says, ‘They like it loud, you know.’ That’s what Todd always said when he put in his earplugs and turned up the mikes on his drum kit.”

“I remember,” Nick said. “Todd revered Zappa.” Zappa indeed. How many times had Nick and Todd listened to Todd’s cassette copy of Hot Rats as they drove through the roadless desert with their cargo of emergency rations, terrified of getting lost and dying in the Sahara, racing against time, and for at least one child who died in Nick’s arms, arriving too late, failing?

“But how is Uncle Meat the Kali chip?” he said.

As she took the small disk out of its case and inserted it into the computer’s CD drive, Casey cleared her throat and began to sing along with the sound coming out the tiny speakers, the Mothers singing in falsetto:

Prima mi carucha Chevy-Thirty-Nine

Going to El Monte Legion Stadium

Pick up on my Weesa, she is so divine

Helps me stealing hubcaps, wasted all the time

“Oh good God,” Nick said. “You’re right. But what the hell does it mean?”

“There are one hundred and twenty-eight leads going into the chip,” she said. “Every one has a name. The first one, of course, is Prima. Starting with Prima, all the leads are named according to the words on the record. Mi is the second lead, carucha is the third, and so forth.”

“There’s more,” she said, as she sat down and began to type at the keyboard. “Every major logic section of the chip is named after a song on the album. Like, King Kong is one area, The Air is another, Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague is another. And see this line here ‘it was a special tape recording. I put it with Mommy and Daddy.’ That’s from the line ‘it was a special tape recording, and they nabbed me while I was boarding.’ It’s all on Uncle Meat”

“A little cryptic,” Nick said, weakly. He didn’t know how he could have missed it either. Simply by virtue of being Todd’s friend, Nick must have heard this album thirty times.

Casey’s eyes filled with tears. Which made Nick’s eyes start filling with tears too.

“Is this right?” Nick asked her. “Did we figure it out?”

“Yes,” she said, wiping her eyes with a corner of her shirt sleeve. And then she added quietly. “But we’re still fucked. I now have a Kali, and I know the structure of Kali, but hell, that doesn’t mean I can just conjure the packing algorithm out of thin air. Not even Todd knew how that was done; Pavel did it. Todd just figured out that Pavel was messing with his logic, doing something secret. He didn’t live long enough to figure out any more than that.”

“So what do we need?”

“We need a tape out. That’s how you transfer a chip design from a computer to the machine that manufactures the chip. I’ve been trying to convince myself that I could figure out a way to do this with a PROM using some hosey doorknob black magic, but it’s a lie, Nick. I can’t, and having a chip doesn’t change that, even if Jake died to get it. I don’t need a Kali chip, I need the plans for a Kali chip. If I had them, I could just swap out Pavel’s data set and stick in Judith’s data. It’s child’s play. Literally. It’s like playing Legos: take out this data block, stick in that one. But I need that tape out. And Meekman took all of those.”

“But couldn’t Todd have made a backup, a spare? Do you think that’s what he meant, ‘it was a special tape recording’?”

“Oh my God,” Casey said, getting to her feet. She looked woozy, as if she might fall over. She reached out her left, bandaged hand to brace herself against a wall Her right hand went reflexively over her heart. “Oh my God. He did make a backup tape. And I know where it is.”

“Where?”

“It’s in some kind of large jar under that old bed I showed you in the room with the old loom in it, where Todd and I used to make love.”

“And how do you know that?” Nick said. She had lost him completely.

“Listen,” she said, and knelt to select a song on the CD, skipping to the part she was looking for:

It’s the middle of the night, and your mommy and your daddy are sleeping.

Sleeping.

Sleeping in a jar.

The jar is under the bed.

She whispered, “I love you, Todd,” and took off at a run. It was the first time Nick had ever seen her really smile.

Chapter 57

Casey Montgomery was tired, tired to death. It had been three hard days since she and Nick had broken the skylight lock and rappelled into the secure ‘Klingon’ fabrication line that Digital Microsystems had taken out of mothballs in order to make ancient chips according to military specifications. The relatively low-level workers who made chips there were unionized, which implied that they were sane instead of slavishly devoted to the company, so Nick and Casey assumed that they would have uninterrupted access to the equipment from Friday evening until Monday morning. Enough time, barely, if they were very clever and very lucky.

After descending by ropes they headed immediately to the prep room. There they had shaved, showered, and put on the bunny suits—hoping that the dirt they had already cascaded into the far end of the line hadn’t hopelessly contaminated the near end, where the particular steppers that they needed for their new version of the Kali chip were located.

Casey remembered being naked before Nick, who was naked too, as they raced to get the stupid clean-room garb on. As she bent to adjust her pants leg, she had let her left nipple brush, ever so lightly, the hair of his right forearm, and she had been gratified to notice the response. But, she knew, that was only reflex. If she had been fully clothed, ugly, weighed four hundred pounds and brushed his forearm with a tire iron instead of her breast, she probably would have seen his penis flinch in exactly the same way it had flinched when her nipple touched his arm. It was clear as day that he felt absolutely no attraction to her.

And what had she been thinking, anyway? Sex? Good Christ. There was no time for any silliness like that. They had had to get in and start making the chip immediately, before the wafer-steppers had cooled down. Casey and Nick were going to try to do the nearly impossible: force an eleven-layer chip while the lab was empty over the weekend: less than three days to do what the laws of physics said should take four or five days. It would have been only marginally impossible if Nick had known anything about the process, so that he could help her think things through—but he was a software guy he didn’t know Jack Shit about making chips. All she could expect him to do was try to stay alert, and when she told him to do something, do it. The chip was entirely up to her. And time was short. Very, very short.

“Basically we’re making a glass trinket; you understand that,” she had said. “We can fool around with the layout, but once we commit to it we’ve got to be perfect. We can’t fuck up the radicals. We only get one chance. The radicals are everything.”

“Radical?” Nick had asked, with, it seemed to her, a suddenly chilly tone.

“Radical; you know,” she said. “Each glass layer of the chip is called a radical.”

It was amazing what these software boys did not know.

“It’s really kindergarten stuff, Nick, like when you make those paintings by scratching away one layer to show something underneath. It’s really no more complicated than making layer cakes in a bakery. It’s not rocket science; we feed in the file and the machines make the chips on these glass wafers. Then we take the wafers to another machine that cuts the chips out off the wafers and another machine that packages them up & puts little gold wires on the places that need them. You don’t have to understand what you’re doing; you just have to do it. That’s why the people who run these machines generally don’t have degrees, they just have good eyes and steady hands and patience.”

“I’ve never made a cake in my life.”

“Steady now,” Casey said. “Anybody can do it. Even us.”

And she was right. Barely four days after Jake and Nick had broken into the secret facility hidden at Fort Devens, Casey and Nick had four good chips made from a single wafer, using the data Judith had sent them on the alt.pogo list. They made four more, for insurance. One dataset was labeled “Barlett.” Nick had no idea what that might mean, but didn’t have time to worry about it. They just made the chip and labeled it. Then they said goodbye in the rigged up lab she had made to unpack Kali.

“This is it,” he said. Was it really possible he would never see her again?

“Guess so,” she replied.

“You did good, Casey. Todd would be proud.”

“Todd shmawd,” she said, “He hasn’t done a fucking thing in five years. Not even wipe his own ass.” But her smile showed that she was pleased.

“He was a lucky man,” Nick said. Her smile was gone. “Hey,” he said. “There might be another one out there. But if there is, you’ll never find him in the abandoned wings of the Mill. Just like you told me, Casey, you’ve got to let him go.” Nick turned toward the door, the box with the chips in his hand. “This is your last chance to stop me from saving the world,” he said.

“Don’t look at me,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’m just a drone. I don’t think; I just do what I’m told.”

“Okay then,” he said. “I’ll be off on a few errands now, dear. Call me if you need a ride.” She thought again of when they had been naked together, when he had flinched and then looked the other way. Casey hadn’t had sex with a man since the morning Todd was shot. Five years ago. Christ, you’re hopeless, she told herself.

And then Nick was gone.

Call you if I need a ride? Casey thought, alone again. Nick, my precious, if you only knew.

As soon as he left, Casey signed on and made the prearranged anonymous posting to the Pogo newsgroup, her signal to the void, and to Judith and Bartlett (and Jake, in the unlikely event that he was alive) that Nick was on the way: I’m leaving, on a jet-plane . .

And now she was going home. Alone. More alone than she had ever been in her life, more alone, if that was possible, than she had been after Todd took a bullet to the head.

She was walking across her porch with her key in her hand when she heard the voice—she hadn’t even reached the door yet. Didn’t the Newcastle police have anything better to do than stake out her apartment?

“Casey Montgomery?”

“Yes?”

“Please stay where you are and put your hands up. I am placing you under arrest for obstruction of justice and interstate flight. You have the right . . .”

“Let’s not fuck around with each other, officer,” Casey said, turning, without raising her hands. “You don’t want me. You want Nick Aubrey. I know where he is. But I haven’t slept in three days and I’m in a very bad mood. Let me have a nap and get me a lawyer. Then I’ll give you your Nick Aubrey.”

PART XX

Chapter 59

Streaking over the Atlantic at five hundred miles an hour, still struck with wonder that the false passport Jake had come up with in Albany had gotten him out of America, Nick tried to understand what it meant for one person to become transformed into another. He tried to think of the transformations that might be taking place inside himself as a series of organ transplants, one cell transplanted at a time. At what point would he stop being himself? After 50 percent of the cells had been transformed? 51 percent? After all the transplants were done, would he still be Nick?

Of course he would still be Nick, he reassured himself. For that’s what life was: transformation. The infant becomes the child, the child becomes the adult—each instant bringing infinitesimal changes that somehow add up but don’t change the integrity, the essentialness, of the person. After all, what did it mean to say that the man having these thoughts was the same Nick Aubrey who had done flips off the high-dive at the Oneonta Swim Club? It didn’t mean much, he concluded. The only thing that this Nick Aubrey had in common with some of those earlier versions of Nick Aubrey was the name—and the DNA, of course. But this Nick didn’t really even have his name any more: there was a manhunt on, so he had relinquished the rights to it and was traveling on the passport of one imaginary Daniel Quinn. So all Nick had in common with his earlier selves was the DNA. And his DNA would pretty soon not even be his own, Monty’s machines were rewriting it one cell at a time. Who would he be then?

What if, tomorrow, he woke up thinking that Monty was kind of an intriguing fellow after all? What if he woke up thinking that maybe this Overmind idea was pretty cool? Who would be having those thoughts? Would it be Nick? Would it be Monty?

Under the seat in front of him, in a cheap nylon carry-on bag, there was a little Styrofoam case that contained a plastic pillbox with five compartments. Four of those five compartments each contained a dip-mounted chip that had been cut from the single wafer he and Casey had made. His own DNA, coded in silver. Identity, mind, matter. Electric impulses. Energy. Sparks and pulses and binary gates. Yes or no. Did Bartlett love him still, or did she not? Could he be the man she needed him to be, or could he not? Would he live or would he die? Would he ever see Africa again? He ordered a whiskey from the passing flight attendant, determined to steer his thought down a different channel.

And what if he didn’t die; what if his half-baked James Bond plan miraculously worked, and Nick successfully eliminated Monty? What would that accomplish? Hundreds of Corporate Fellows, apostles of the New Christ, stood ready to build Monty’s cybertopia. Monty’s death would no more slow them than the death of the original Christ had slowed down the first Christians.

He would stay at Paul’s apartment, sleeping in Paul’s bed, on his pillow, among Paul’s things, the belongings acquired during his life. Nick had never visited Paul in Basel, and now he felt guilty for not doing so. He had failed as a brother, deeply. And he was sorry, but he didn’t have anybody to apologize to.

He closed his eyes. He slept, and he awoke as the plane circled above Basel, its river muddy from the spring-time rains.

He quickly cleared customs, and took a taxi directly to the address he had for his brother’s apartment. There, he found the building manager and fed him a story in slow English, which he hoped the man could understand. The man nodded. He understood. Paul Aubrey was dead. Nick Aubrey, Paul’s brother, had come to clear his apartment. The small man graciously let Nick inside, murmured his condolences, and left him alone. Old world manners, Nick thought, closing the door behind him. He turned into the apartment, and whistled as the view. “Good god, Paul,” he said. “You lived like a king.” Everything was in perfect taste—the art, the furniture, the glass tables, the lightening. Even the mask hanging on the wall, a Fasnacht mask of the joker Pierrot, was extraordinarily well done. Nick picked it up and placed it over his face, finding a mirror to see himself in. His face, his new face, was distinguished by an enormous leering smile, very poor oral hygiene, a bulbous red nose the size of a grapefruit with black hair protruding from the nostrils, and orange hair that erupted sideways, like Bozo’s. He looked like a farmer from Ken Kesey’s Kommune, where the main crop is LSD.

Maybe this is the new me, Nick thought.

He took the mask away and returned it to its hook on the wall.

Now that he was here, he could think about rest. He was tired beyond exhaustion.

Overwhelmed with sleepiness, he sat on his brother’s bed, trying to decide whether it was worth the effort of taking off his clothes. He could have slept for forty-eight hours, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to sleep only until the next morning, when he would get up, shower, shave, and go have his rendezvous with fate. He grabbed the alarm clock and set it for five in the morning. Eight hours from now he would embark on the final leg of his mission to find a cure for Monty’s inoculation.

A cure, what a dream. He reached into his shirt pocket for the diskette he had been keeping with him as a talisman every since that horrible day when he had met Crazy—or not so crazy—Peter Barlow. He held it up before him like a priest holding up a communion wafer about to be consecrated.

“What the fuck is your secret?” he asked, but the diskette, as usual, was silent. He opened the drawer in the bedside table, and there he saw, to his surprise, a bible. Odd that Paul would have such a thing; he had never been any more religious than Nick, as far as Nick recalled, which was not religious at all. On a whim Nick picked up the bible, opened to the first page.

He recognized his mother’s handwriting, with a sharp pang:

Darling Paul,

If you look, you’ll find the answers to all your questions within.

Love, Mother

Don’t I wish it were that easy, Mother, Nick thought, placing the book in the drawer, and the diskette on top of it.

Fuck it, Nick thought. He kicked off his shoes and lay down, facing the ceiling. That’s enough for now, he told himself, as words from somewhere deep in his memory lulled him to oblivion.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John Bless the bed that I lay on If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.

He drifted off to those words cycling through his head, and sometime hours later, he woke with a start. “Nine three two three three,” he said aloud. “Chapter nine, verses thirty-two and thirty-three. . . ” Nick sat up, gasping, drenched in sweat, and looked around him.

How could a so-called software expert like Nick have missed it for so long? Barlow’s number was not a code; it was just a pointer to an address in an address space. Which address space? The bible’s address space. Which version of the bible? King James, of course, the one Barlow quoted on the envelope he had given Carl. The version used by the resolutely old-school Second Swedish Baptist Church of Oneonta, New York (defunct). The version in his brother’s drawer. Nick switched on the light, opened the drawer, turned to the Book of Matthew, and found the verses:

As they went out behold they brought to him a dumb man possessed with a devil. And when the devil was cast out, the dumb spake: and the multitudes marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel.

Nick knew without counting that there would be one hundred and sixty characters, exactly, and that meant he could now read whatever was on Mr. Barlow’s diskette. The only question was, where was he going to find a Unix machine to read it?

Chapter 60

It was just past midnight in Basel when Nick found his way to the hacker-filled nightclub. Funny how the hardcore underground geeks of Switzerland looked just like their counterparts in Sunnyvale and Newcastle. But on the other hand, it wasn’t that unusual, since underground hackers were all part of the same subculture that didn’t recognize national boundaries; they hung out on the same boards and Usenet groups, went to the same kinds of meetups. That was how Nick had found this place, after all – by asking a question on a black-hat board, using his brother’s clunky Windoze machine, the password to which Paul had thoughtfully left on a sticky note under the desk drawer. The club was only three blocks away.

Nick asked a question of the goth at the door, passed a few twenty-dollar bills to the guy who was evidently in charge, followed his direction to a back corner where he found five or six Dijjy-Mike boxes with some kids gathered around them, programming, Or more likely, not “programming” per se, but trying to hack into someplace they didn’t belong. Nick asked, in English, if he could use one of the machines and got a grunt in answer, which he took to mean yes.

He sat and took Barlow’s diskette out of his pocket, looked at it one last time. What if he miss-typed the password? Would the machine blow up, as Barlow said it would? Would the password work? And most importantly, what if the diskette disclosed that Barlow knew a whole lot more of Meekman’s plans than Nick’s little Scooby Doo gang did? What if the plan that Nick and Judith and Casey had come with was all wrong? What would he do then?

The nightclub light was dim, but bright enough for Nick to read the verse he had copied in large letters onto a clean white sheet of paper, which he placed on the table in front of him.

“Here goes nuthin’” Nick said, and slid the diskette into the drive.

The password prompt came up. The spin counter counted. As quickly as he could without racing and risking a typo, Nick entered the 160-letter password from the Book of Matthew. When he was done, he had fifteen seconds to spare. He took a deep breath, braced himself for an explosion, closed his eyes, and firmly pressed the ‘return’ key.

The screen lit up and soon resolved itself into a document of some kind, in six or eight colors and fifteen different typefaces:

“It all started with Tuskeegee syphilis EXPERIMENTS on black (“negro”) americans of course who had not given informed consent. I don’t mean meekman yet this was just the precursor beginings it is all secret government CIA. In the 1960’s of course there were MK-ULTRA and bikini experiments on MIND CONTROL in Russia. Saddam was not part of this. KEEP in MIND that RARP is the method “Dr.” “Meekman” will use as explained in ‘New Gospel’ but the substrate is cosmic frequency overload harmonics N.B. Dalai Lama. . .”

And on and on for at least forty incoherent pages, run-on sentences with no apparent structure but all having to do, somehow or other, with vast conspiracies to conduct experiments in mind control, culminating in Meekman’s Overmind plot. As far as Nick was able to determine, Barlow had made some truly significant investigations, and many, if not most of his basic facts were right. But it was also clear that Crazy Peter Barlow was, just as Carl Swirsing had said, crazy, and his document was, basically, gibberish. He had come so close to figuring out what Meekman and the apostles were all about, but in the final analysis he had fallen short. Barlow’s “cure” for Gulf War Syndrome, as far as nick could tell, was to stare at a moving pattern that he had programmed while reciting bible verses. Nick could see all the truth and anguish in this document, but anybody who had not been through what Nick had been through would dismiss it as the ravings of a madman. Whether Barlow had always been that way, or whether what he discovered had driven him around the bend, or whether Monty Meekman had fried his brain with a gallon of LSD was impossible for Nick to judge. All he knew was that Barlow’s manifesto was useless to him. Now he knew for absolute certain that he was on his own.

He left the diskette in the drive and Barlow’s dissertation on the screen for the edification of whoever next used the machine, stood up quickly and left. With any luck he’d get back to Paul’s place in time for at least three hour’s sleep. He stepped out into the night air and began to jog. Within fifteen minutes he was in Paul’s kitchen, drinking a glass of water, looking out through darkened windows over the city below him, older by centuries than anything on the North American continent. He turned to head to the bedroom.

That was when he noticed something else on the table, a piece of paper: a note. He walked to the window, where there was more light. Block letters, in heavy ballpoint:

Nick. Go away. You cannot win. Run while you can. Look under your pillow. Leave right now.

He read the note again. Look under your pillow. He ran into the bedroom and reached under the pillow; there were papers there and some kind of booklet. He took them back into the kitchen where the light was better. Outside, dawn was breaking over the city. By its rosy-fingered light he inspected a United States passport, with an airline ticket inserted between the last pages. He opened the cover and read the name Isaac Angevine next to the photo of himself. It took a while to make out the writing on the ticket, but soon it was clear: one-way, by way of London and Miami, from Basel to Mexico City.

“Fuck you,” Nick said, softly. “Fuck you.” He tore the tickets easily. The passport required a little more strength. “Here I come,” he said.

Chapter 61

Nick was as ready as he would ever be. He had the map of Basel seared into his mind, with his first few moves planned out. Step one: go to Digital Microsystems lab, get into the Feynman lab, use the chips he and Casey had made to program Feynman machines with good DNA in order to replace Monty DNA. Step two: Go to the Hoff-Zeigy lab, figure out how to get the Feynman machines into me once I’ve got them programmed. The two labs were on the same block, in the scientific heart of the business district. If Judith was right—and she’d been right about everything up till now—the labs were connected underneath the street by a tunnel—just like the biodigital tunnel Rachel Tryson had described sitting cross-legged in Saratoga. Infrastructure like that—vast laboratories that were connected by tunnels under city streets—didn’t happen overnight, Nick thought, but took years to build. How long had Monty been planning this move? Step three: go find Monty and kill him while he sleeps. Just like he killed Todd.

First, though, was step zero. The step that preceded all steps, and from which all steps arose. Get coffee.

He walked out of Paul’s apartment and onto the street.

The light, the smells, the movement of the traffic, the clothes, all of it had the delicious snap of foreignness that Nick, in his previous life, had loved. He should have traveled more, he thought, or at least more consistently. He had spent too much time in California, and Bartlett had been right. It did in fact eat his soul. If he ever got out of this, he’d take Bartlett to Africa, so they could lay under the stars and she could see them for herself.

It was only then that he realized he had awakened into a very bad dream. All around him, in the streets and alleyways, all of Basel seemed to be inhabited by ghostly armies of nightmarish apparitions. Fasnacht, Nick remembered. Basel’s answer to Brazil’s Carnival and New Orleans’s Mardi Gras. But if those cities’ celebrations were about the pleasures of the flesh on the eve of a pretend period of penance, Fasnacht was the real thing. Columns of peoples wearing paper maché masks walked by in silence, each more creepy than the nest: obscene jesters, grotesque burghers, women with watering cans for hats; clowns, waifs, stupid country bumpkins and horned devils. All the masks in the informal dawn parade were creepy, but the Pierrot masks were the creepiest of all.

Nick ducked into the closest café, ordered an espresso, and drank it standing at the bar. That was when he saw the Pierrot again, or rather, the man wearing what looked like the Pierrot mask. Many of the Fasnacht masks looked alike; many of them were in fact identical, obviously made from the same mold. The costumes were identical too. There was no way to tell one Pierrot from another.

But this was the one that had been hanging on Nick’s brother’s wall. He knew it.

He left, trying not to run.

Two blocks later he looked over his shoulder. The Pierrot was still there. Behind him, silent parades of masked and creepy archetypes walked on.

Nick needed to stay calm. But he couldn’t do that with this Pierrot tailing him. It was time for evasive maneuvers. Down this street, then over one. He could lose the tail by cutting through the Theatre tram stop. The street he was on would be Ausgrabben. When he looked around this corner to the left he should see the Basel Civic Opera, and across from that a large tram stop. He got to the corner, turned left. There was no Opera House, no tram stop. Instead he found some kind of school or something. He looked up; there were no signs. How had he managed to get lost so quickly?

Don’t panic, Nick.

But he was panicking. He saw the Pierrot again, running towards him. There was something in its right hand.

He started to run. He glanced over his shoulder. He was not imagining things: the Pierrot was there, running towards him. Nick sprinted, turned right down a narrow street. It was a cobble-stoned cul-de-sac. Damn my luck. He stopped, trapped. Then he saw a narrow passageway leading to another street. It was wide enough for two people to pass abreast. Nick would have to turn on the afterburners now, outrace this masked assassin. How fast could somebody run while wearing a two-foot high mask, for Pete’s sake? Then he heard his name called, and even though he knew he should keep running, he stopped. He knew that voice. Who was it? He turned. Pierrot was gone.

“Carl?” Nick said. His pulse was pounding; he was so full of fright that he could barely stand.

“Jesus Christ, Carl,” Nick said. “You scared the living fuck out of me. What are you doing here?”

“Just a little business,” Carl replied. “I’m considering moving here. A genomics startup offered me a job, somebody I met at the Forum. Said they would pay to relocate me here. Hey, who wouldn’t like to live in Europe? Where the hell have you been? You ran out of the Forum. I looked for you all day. The cell I gave you went right to voicemail. Come on, Nick. Is this how you treat your friends? Next thing I know you’re running down a Basel street as if Beelzebub was on your ass . . .”

Nick was hardly listening. He was still catching his breath when he noticed the Pierrot approaching Carl’s back.

“Get ready to run, Carl, when I tell you,” Nick said. “Don’t turn around.”

But Carl did turn, just in time to see the Pierrot leveling a gun at his chest. Before Nick realized what was happening three loud shots had been fired in the alleyway. Two had hit Carl; one had hit a wall, sending fragments of masonry into Nick’s hair.

At first Nick thought he had been shot, but in a moment he realized that he was untouched. He turned his gaze to the costumed figure. With a visibly trembling hand it was pointing the gun towards the ground, where Carl was lying on his back, looking up at Nick. Nick could see that Carl was still breathing, barely.

What a way to go, Nick thought. Damnation.

Slowly, the Pierrot put down the pistol and removed its mask.

“Holy sweet Mary,” Nick said. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

Chapter 62

Jake Carelli dropped the Pierrot mask on the ground.

“Look,” he said, and kicked Carl’s hand. A black gun with a silencer fell out of Carl’s loosening grip. “He was going to shoot you down, Nick. He’s been following you all morning. And look.”

On a lanyard around Carl’s neck, a photo ID card to Digital Microsystems, Incorporated.

Jake’s speech was halting. He was out of breath.

“Carl,” Nick said. “What’s up man, what’s up?”

“You should have left, Nick. I got you the ticket. They would have left you alone.”

“You were in Paul’s apartment? Oh God, Carl. Why?”

“At first I wanted in for the money,” Carl said. “But then I discovered how beautiful it all is once you surrender. You could have come with us, Nick. Cybertopia. No more suffering. No more injustice. Level above human, behind the next comet.”

“Carl you crazy motherfucker,” Nick said, as tears welled up in his eyes.

“Overmind.” That was all Carl could say, and Nick could tell he was dead without taking a pulse. He crawled backwards and sat against the wall.

He looked up to see Jake sliding down the opposite wall, a dazed look on his face.

“I thought I lost you at Devens,” Nick said.

“That was nothing,” Jake said, softly. “But this is bad.” He weakly touched his hand to his belly where, for the first time, Nick noticed blood seeping through the costume. Then Jake seemed to hiccup, and blood poured from his mouth.

Nick jumped up and ran to him.

“Mercy. Hell. Hell.” He had no idea what to do. He was frozen.

“Nick,” Jake whispered through red foam. “You go ahead. I’ve got your back.”

Then he shook once more, and his eyes sprang wide open.

Nick felt as if a spell had been broken, as if he were Merlin stepping out of thralldom in solid rock. Monty Meekman had taken every friend Nick had ever had; here, in this alley, he had taken two at once. Now, at last, Nick knew what Monty had been talking about on that hilltop above Los Altos. He understood what Abraham Maslow had meant by that ability of self-actualized people to bring all their passion and talents to bear on a single goal. Nick was finally, ruthlessly, self-actualized. He was finally really ready to play Rule the Roost. From this moment on, until he saw Monty dead, anything and anybody that got in his way was in for a whole lot of trouble.

He stepped over to Carl’s body and removed the lanyard with Digital Microsystems employee badge bearing Carl’s photo on the front and a magnetic stripe on the reverse. Bingo.

He took the pistol from Jake’s hand, and then reached over for the gun that lay in the alley near Carl. Nick took that, too. At the far end of the alley, before walking out into the street, he stopped to tuck the guns into his pants. He turned left and ran. Within minutes he had ended up at the bank of the river, no longer lost. He knew exactly where he was; he knew exactly where he was going. And why.

Chapter 63

Nick slid Carl’s card through the card reader and heard the click of the lock opening. As simple as that, he was in. Now to find the Feynman machinery. He turned left down a hallway that exited off the lobby, with no idea where he was going. It was all ad-lib from here on.

The first person he saw could have been right out of the Mill or the California offices. It was a man of about forty, a little overweight and very pale, with a greying beard and black hair in a long ponytail.

Nick approached him.

“Hi, how ya doin’,” he said.

The fellow nodded, didn’t say anything.

“Don’t tell me,” Nick said. “You’re one of those Corporate Fellows!”

“No,” he said. “But I know Monty very well. I have reason to expect—”

Nick didn’t have time for this loser’s bullshit.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m just in from the States, never been here, I’ve got to find Monty’s lab. Can you tell me where it is?”

“Which lab?” he said, in a dry, superior tone. “He works in several.”

“Oh you know,” Nick said “The nanolab.”

“You won’t get in,” he said. “You’re not on the project. I don’t know you.”

“Oh, are you on that project?” Nick said.

A nearly imperceptible nod.

“Great! You can let me in.”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” he said.

“Really, you have to,” Nick said. “It’s a matter of some urgency. Monty won’t object, and if he does you can say I made you do it.”

“You should leave your pressure tactics in the States,” Mr. Ponytail said. “Here they’re considered in very poor taste.”

Nick grabbed his shirt.

“You haven’t seen a pressure tactic yet and you don’t want to. Get me in the lab, or I am going to take my gun and shoot off your left big toe.”

“Where do you work, the Mill?” the guy said. “I bet you’re a Miller, one of those hardcore Digital Data guys.”

“Oh godamnit,” Nick said.

He took Carl’s gun from the waistband of his pants, placed it against the man’s shoe where the big toe would be and pulled the trigger. He felt the kick but heard no sound except a shout of pain. A pink mist settled to the floor.

“Now listen, Stock Option,” Nick said. “You get me into the nanolab before you leave too much blood around here, or I’m going to show you a real pressure tactic.”

It was two doors down. The pony-tailed man pressed some numbers on a keypad and the door swung open.

“Give me your shirt,” Nick said. While pointing the gun at the man’s chest, he ran back and cleaned what he could of the blood trail, leaving it barely visible.

“OK,” Nick said. “Now then. I am going to take off your shoe and bandage your foot with your shirt while I ask a few questions. You will answer them, or I promise you on my brother’s grave that I will put a bullet through your head. OK?”

“OK,” he said. Nick could see the fear on the man’s face, which was rapidly blanching. It would be too bad if the guy died from shock or blood loss, but Nick couldn’t worry about that now.

“Simple answers. Is this where they program the Feynman nanomachines?”

“Yes,” he panted, clearly in pain.

“How many programming machines are there here?”

“Ten.”

“My lucky day. I have four chips that I want you to substitute for the Kali chip. Do you know how to do that?”

“Yes.”

“How long will it take?”

“Five minutes.”

“How long will it take to make one million Feynman machines with the four new chips?”

“Half an hour.”

“What do you put them in?”

“A pressurized tank. I really don’t feel very well,” he said.

“I’m not feeling so hot myself,” Nick said. “Work with me, quickly, and I’ll make sure you don’t bleed to death. Here,” Nick said, reaching into his shirt pocket for the plastic case that contained the chips.

Nick kept the gun trained on the man’s chest as he stood up and began to work on the gleaming metal devices.

Nick hardly noticed what the man was doing. His mind was racing but covering no ground. Throughout the lab there were machines, lasers, glass tubes; it was a blur. He should have tried to watch and understand what Stock Option was doing, but his mind could not handle any more data. It only processed one thought: “Hurry.”

After an eternity the man handed him a canister the size of a can of shaving cream. His face was white, his hands were shaking. Nick looked to the man’s foot. There was a lot of blood, but not as much as there might have been. He would make it.

“Tell me something,” Nick said. “What do you do with all these things?”

“I don’t know what the Fellows do with them. I’m only a technician.”

“Do they use them on human beings?”

“Not here,” he said.

“At Hoff-Zeigy do they?”

A shrug.

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

Nick thought about shooting off his other big toe but decided against it.

“You’re going to give me one hour, Stock Option, before you call for help. One hour, or you are going to experience pressure tactics that Amnesty International never even heard of. Lie down and put your foot in the air, you’ll be fine. One hour. Got it?”

The man nodded.

“Tell me where the Hoff-Zeigy building is,” he said. “Their R&D lab.”

“They have dozens,” the technician said, grimacing.

“The one with the most security.”

“Down the hall, left, left, right, down the stairs, left, straight, first right. Up stairs.”

“If you’re lying to me, I’m coming back. Tell me again what you just said. If anything’s different, I’ll shoot you again.”

The man was trembling.

“Down the hall, left, left, right, down the stairs, left, straight, first right, up stairs. Can’t miss it.”

“One hour,” Nick said.

Nick ran out the lab door, and followed the man’s directions, which were perfect. He jogged, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum, his hand stretched in front of him trying to hold the canister as level and still as possible. It was Nick inside that canister, after all. Nick, distilled. Nick, in a can.

Chapter 64

The ponytailed technician’s directions took him right to the door. And the guy had been correct. Nick couldn’t have missed this door if he had tried.

It was solid, with a keypad to the right of the door, and a large yellow BioHazard sign above it. There were signs all over the door, in fact—Caution, Authorized Personnel Only, Dangerous Materials. Nick stood in front of the keypad, trying to decide which numbers he should punch in. Barlow’s diskette popped into his mind. It had taken him a month in hell and a very bad dream to figure that one out, and he didn’t have a month to spare. He took Carl’s card and swiped it through the reader, praying for a miracle.

The door clicked open. Miracle delivered, just on time.

The door closed and sealed behind him, and the one in front of him beeped once, indicating that the lock had opened. He walked through. A large window reflected his image back to him; beneath the window there was a control panel. There was a single four-legged stool with shiny metal legs pulled up to what appeared to be an operating table. The table had straps and stays that looked strong enough to hold an ox. Next to the table was a large translucent box, big enough for him to walk inside and long enough to hold the table. A vacuum pump and tube were connected to one side of the box, with a separate pump, one he didn’t recognize, connected to the other. In and out, Nick guessed. Gas in, gas out. The other three walls were packed with electrical equipment—VCRs, patch cords, dials, sliders, indicator lights and meters—and a whole lot of stuff he didn’t recognize. All of the recording instruments were trained on that box. There was a shelf along one wall that appeared to contain a row of canisters like the one in his pocket. He also saw what appeared to be an operating table. In the wall on the left, amid the equipment, there was a door.

“Bravo!” Nick heard the tinny voice of Monty Meekman say. It took him an instant to realize that Meekman was not in the room with him, that the voice was coming through a speaker. “Put down your popgun. This isn’t cops and robbers we’re playing, it’s chess.”

Suddenly the lights dimmed in the room he was standing in and came on in the room behind the mirror. The mirror transformed from reflective to translucent, showing Monty standing in what appeared to be a control room, leaning forward to speak into a microphone. Nick’s knees started to buckle. His palms were sweaty, his vision was blurring. Was it fear? Hatred? Or was it Monty, projecting thoughts and feelings into him?

Jake’s gun was in Nick’s right hand. He raised it to point at the glass, and, on the other side of the glass, at Meekman.

“I’m no good at chess. I’m more of a barroom pool guy,” Nick said, and pulled the trigger.

His arm felt like it had been torn off; his entire body was pushed back and twisted to the right; the ringing in his ears was painful. The window was still there. He shot five more times until he heard the click of the empty barrel. Like an afterthought, a piece of something dislodged by the ricochet landed on his foot. I’ll be lucky if I don’t kill myself, he thought. The glass was still there, but he could see hairline cracks feathering out from eight or ten places. Maybe another few bullets would do the trick.

Monty was laughing. “I think this is going to be more fun than our test of wills on the mountaintop. I’ve been waiting for you, Nick.”

“I’ll bet you’ve been waiting for me,” Nick said. He put down Jake’s gun and picked up Carl’s. “Thank you for your patience. I had a few things to take care of. But I’m here now.”

“And I admire the great pluck you displayed in getting here. It’s been very entertaining. But now your journey is nearly at an end, and you will find the inner peace you’ve been looking for, for so long.” Monty reached forward and touched his control panel. “Any minute now, Nick,” Monty said. “Just wait. Calmly. You’ll see.”

“Shut up,” Nick said. He fired through the rounds in Carl’s gun, and though the cracks were more apparent, still the glass held. The room was filled with acrid smoke. Ricocheting bullets had destroyed equipment on two side walls and on the wall behind him. The floor was littered with debris, and there was a fizzling sound of an electrical fire coming from someplace. The window was still there, and beyond it, Monty. But the glass was weakened; it had to be. He looked around the room. What the hell would break that glass?

The stool.

“Death isn’t peace, you moron,” Nick said to Monty. “Death is just death.”

“Let’s have no talk of death,” Monty replied, kindly. “Just relax, Nick. I’m here that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.” Monty paused. “Do you feel it yet? Can you feel the connection more directly?” Nick’s whole body felt weak. He put the stool down, and sat. “That’s good,” Monty said. “Good. We’ll have a little chat, and then you can take the next step, one simple, easy step, and you’ll join with me, and Todd, and Bartlett and with all the great minds of those you love. Come, Nick. Relax. Relax into me.”

Chapter 65

So which one was it? Nick thought. Fifty percent? Or fifty-one? How much of his DNA was still his and how much was Monty’s? He heard Monty talking, but he couldn’t be sure that what he heard wasn’t in his head. If, and when, he was fully transformed, would he still be alive, even? Or would he be dead?

“I’m not going to kill you, Nick. Don’t you think that if I wanted you dead you would be dead? No, I want you alive. It will be good to have you with us. You have a certain kind of primitive charm, and even a certain kind of intelligence. And this is life,” Monty said, raising his arms wide. “This is life.”

“If you didn’t want me dead, why did you send Carl to kill me today?” Nick said. The stool seemed to gently wrap itself around him, as if it could feel his weariness and had decided to ease it.

“A little challenge that you passed nicely. I knew you would make it here. Look, Nick” Monty said, pointing to a TV monitor hanging from the ceiling. It showed the outside laboratory door. “Don’t you think I watched you coming in? If the lock hadn’t opened, I would have opened it for you. I wanted you here, my son. I willed you to be here. I called you here. And here you are. Bartlett will be here soon too. When I call my children, they come.”

Sitting on the stool, glancing up at the little TV monitor Monty had pointed to, Nick flashed back to the day in Mad Antonio’s, sitting on a barstool next to Carl Swirsing, where Carl had prophesized everything that had since come to pass. How long had Carl been working for Monty? Had he been with him even then? The more Nick thought about it, the more sense it made. What, at essence, motivated Monty Meekman? What gave him pleasure? It was fucking with people, messing with their minds. Nothing more exalted than that. And so he had sent Carl to mess with Nick’s head before their meeting on the mountaintop. Carl had been slavishly devoted to Meekman, willing to die for him, just like Koresh’s followers were willing to die for him. And Monty let Carl die in an alleyway without a second thought. Monty’s words on the mountaintop came back to him: People are generally stupid, Nick. That’s the important thing to remember if you want to have fun. Carl had been stupid enough to trust Monty. And Nick had been stupid enough to trust Carl—at least at first, in Mad Antonio’s. Nick had been played like a chump. He was a chump.

But there was something else about that day in Mad Antonio’s that Nick was trying to remember. He had seen something important there. Not Barlow, not Carl, not the stupid drunks playing pool. What was it?

“Why?” Nick asked, trying to buy time for the fog in his brain to clear. “Why do you fuck with people? Why do you kill people? Why did you torment my wife for twenty years?”

“Nick, Nick,” Monty said. “Don’t be silly. You can no more understand my thoughts and reasons than a cow can understand your thoughts and reasons. So why ask? Rather, simply try to imagine what it is liked to be blessed as I, Montaigne Meekman am blessed; to see as I see, to know as I know. If you were I, what would you do for amusement? Nick, when you take the final step and join me, all will be revealed. For now you see as through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. I want you to come to this chamber on the other side of the room. You know what it is for: it’s a tabernacle. Within it you will bathe in the Holy Spirit.”

All around Nick everything was becoming less substantial. He couldn’t tell if he was even on the stool anymore. He might have been walking across the floor, following Monty. He seemed to be floating.

“You came between me and my wife. You killed my best friend.”

“No,” said Todd, from somewhere. “I’m here, Nick. Come join us.”

“I fear these things,” Nick said.

Todd answered, “I like it loud, you know.”

Was it possible that Monty was not bluffing about Bartlett? That she too was coming to this very room in Basel, to this place where Nick could feel every last bit of his own true self evaporating? He could feel himself disappearing from his every cell, surrendering. It felt almost like . . . joy. He had come so far and overcome so many obstacles to get exactly where he was now, and he had failed. But with that failure came a certain contentment. He had no more energy, no more volition. What if Monty were right; what if Nick could unify himself not merely with Todd, but with Bartlett? Wasn’t that the one and only thing his true self wanted? Why not give it a try? What was there to lose? For if he didn’t Monty would kill him just as he had killed so many others. Why not choose life over death?

“It’s important to you that I walk into the device of my own free will, isn’t it?” Nick said. “That’s why you waited here for me alone, unarmed. It’s no good if you force me to do it. I must choose it for myself.”

“What are people?” Monty said. “They are patterns that arise and dissipate, memory processes that run and can be stopped. Do you feel remorse when you terminate a process? Of course not. Especially when you can restart it with just a thought. It’s time now, Nick.”

Nick stood again. But only for a few seconds. He was too tired. He sat again.

“Just walk into that box and I’ll take care of the rest. Good, Nick. Good. No need to break that window; I’ll open the door for you now.”

No, Nick thought. People weren’t just patterns that arose and dissipated. Those two bicyclists that fell to their deaths weren’t just patterns. And neither was Jake Carelli, dead in a Basel alleyway. They were people, not software processes. They could not be restarted, and it despite the silly parlor trick of Todd’s synthesized voice, Todd could not be restarted either.

“It’s Overmind, Nicholas,” Monty said. “And after you awake from your communion, you can read the scripture in which I explain how it all will come to pass.”

There it was again, that echo of the very words Carl had used in Mad Antonio’s, tickling Nick’s memory. Then it came to him. The image of the unknown, unheralded, fifty-to-one underdog Buster Douglas, the loser, the nobody, the chump, who with one punch from out of nowhere knocked the living shit out of the undefeated Mike Tyson, the most ferocious fighter to ever enter a boxing ring. Nick could clearly see, in his mind’s eye, Tyson’s mouth guard flying out; then the champ, on his knees, dazed, pathetically trying to pick it up with his boxing gloves, uncomprehending, defeated for the first time in his life, as the referee declared the fight over. If Buster could do it . . .

Nick stood, bent low, and grabbed the stool by the bottom of two legs.

“I’m just a skinny little boy, from Cleveland, Ohio,” Nick said, to drown out the thoughts Monty was trying to make him think.

“Put that down, Nick.”

“Here to chase your women and drink your beer.”

“Put it down, son.”

“I just want to fuck, I don’t want no romance.”

He raised the stool above his head and stepped backwards about five steps. He stopped there, with the stool held high, for the space of three deep breaths. Then he ran three steps towards the glass and swung the stool with all the effort he had in him. The window shattered; the stool carried into the next room and clanged to the floor. Immediately, without realizing what he was doing, he found himself hurtling after it like a fullback jumping over the goal line from three yards out. He landed on the floor in a pile of glass—no sound; no pain from the fall. “No,” Monty said. “It’s impossible. It’s not in my model.”

Nick stood to his full height. When he hit Monty it was like hitting a scarecrow; there was no resistance to slow them down as they both flew straight back, nearly to the empty chamber.

Nick picked Monty up—he was as light as a doll—and opened the door, dragging him back into the room with the operating table and box. He kicked the lever on the side of the box with his right foot and the door sprang open; then he threw Meekman in with his full force, causing the back of Monty’s head to smack against the back wall. As the door slammed shut he heard the lock and vacuum seal automatically engaging.

A remarkable calm descended upon Nick. He looked around and saw on a shelf dozens of canisters like the one that he had brought with him from the Feynman lab. He checked his pocket to make sure that his own canister was still there, then limped over and picked up one from the shelf. It was labeled. “Rev 01 Mouse Dwarfism.” Nick walked back to the chamber where Monty was locked, and Nick saw, to his amazement, that Monty was afraid. “Let’s play cat and mouse,” Nick said. “Meow.”

There was a valve built into the chamber wall that clearly matched the nozzle on the canister, and a small lever next to it in the ‘up’ position, marked “closed.” Within seconds Nick had mated the nanomachine container to its dock.

“If you’re God,” Nick said, “then I must be Nietzsche . . .”

He pulled the lever down, ‘open’.

“Because you’re dead.”

Almost immediately there was a short, barely perceptible pneumatic sound, fvt, like the sound of an air hose being applied to a tire. A colorlessness, an essence of pure whiteness, more invisible than nothingness itself, filled the chamber. It was the white soul of the universe.

Monty was straining at the door, trying to find a handle where there was none. He was breathing hard, gasping through his mouth. He now half-stood in a contorted posture. His left arm began to writhe as if it were a snake shedding its skin, and suddenly a bloody bone broke through the skin above his wrist. His face was only inches from Nick’s, and Nick could see sharp little teeth growing right in the middle his forehead, where a second mouth was forming. Meekman’s human lips twitched and Nick strained to listen, but Monty’s voice was weak and muffled by the glass, and Nick could not make out the words.

Blood began to weep from Monty’s left eye; a little splotch of brown hair appeared on his chin. He was breathing shallow breaths with his mouth open and his tongue protruding like a rodent’s. Nick turned away, resting his back against the wall of the chamber. He felt the chamber vibrate once, then again. And then nothing, only silence.

It took Nick a while to work up the strength to turn around. When he did, he nearly vomited. Monty, or rather the man that used to be Monty, was clearly, unmistakably dead. Now it was Nick’s turn.

He vacated the gas from the box. He then replaced the canister that had transformed Monty with the canister that would transform him, Nick, back to himself. He engaged that canister, opened the door with his foot, and stepped inside the box. He extended his right foot, touched the floor lever and quickly pulled his foot back into the chamber. The door closed and sealed. This was the point of no return. There was no handle he could use to let himself out. Standing on the bones, blood skin and brains that used to be Monty Meekman, Nick vomited. He could smell Monty’s putrid guts in the air around him, the final union. There was no joy. The gas filled the box. Like licorice, the same smell that had been in Pascale’s pen merged and replaced the disgusting smells that had just been there.

Nick had done many things wrong in his life. He had let himself get too far from the man he knew himself to be. But maybe, with Monty’s help, he could get back. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He was going home.

Epilogue

Nick Aubrey sat on the edge of a low, firm bed, watching his feet as he moved them into the sun and out of the sun coming through an open balcony doorway. A fan spun above him, and from the street came the sounds that, over the last two weeks, he had first found irritating and then had grown to love. He had been told that he was supposed to avoid the sun, a commandment which he obeyed. His feet were all he allowed himself. Most of his body was covered by an intricately embroidered gown, which he fanned in and out to let a holy breeze pass over his torso. It was hot here, hotter than he remembered from his Peace Corps days. But all in all, he had been surprised at how much of his memory held true these the many long years.

Last week Nick had received a letter from Judith—it was slid to him under the door of the small room in which he was convalescing—saying she would be arriving today. If her schedule still held, her plane would have arrived at Dakar six hours ago, and by now she would be somewhere north of Thies, scrunched into a Peugeot taxi brousse. She would be arriving in St. Louis, N’Darr, in about an hour. Nick had a lot of questions for her when she got here.

He was curious, for example, about how he had gotten out of Switzerland and safely to Senegal. Never mind Switzerland: Nick was curious about how he had escaped from that box. Who had found him? How long had he been in there, with Monty, or what was left of Monty? What kind of state was he in when he was found? After taking his last, long breath, the next thing Nick remembered was waking up in his African apartment.

It was a simple room: A table, a chair, an armoire, a bed; tiled floor, cement walls painted a pale yellow. One day he was just there, poof! on the bed, under a white muslin mosquito tent. He awoke under the gaze of ebony masks—the spiritual inverse of his brother’s Pierrot, which continued to make appearances in his dreams—mounted on the wall above him. That first day, he got out of bed unsteadily and went to the window. He pushed open the weathered green wooden shutters and stepped out onto a narrow balcony. The drumming, the smell of chebbu jenn cooked over charcoal, the snippets of spoken Wolof rising up to his nose and ears gave him to know—even before he had seen anybody in the sandy street four stories below—that he was in Senegal.

Some children noticed him looking down from the balcony, but now no one called toubab, white man, the way they used to do twenty years ago. He confirmed in the mirror what he could see by holding out his hand—the cure that he had taken had also changed the pigment of his skin. He was black, and he was in Africa, but how both had happened, he hadn’t a clue. After inspecting every inch of his body, a process that took nearly two hours, he stayed away from the mirror altogether, no longer recognizing the man that he saw.

The first few weeks were incredibly disorienting—the first period of time was strange in any new place, but now that Nick was a whole new person, he didn’t quite know how to behave. When he came out on his balcony, people in the street just kept on about their business. Some sat in doorways, not staring; some walked by, not stopping. Some were dressed in flowing robes, some wore skin-tight pants and shirts that threatened to pop five buttons at once. Color was everywhere. There were blue turbans, red fezzes and black Chicago Bulls baseball caps. There were Mercedes sedans and donkey carts. In one direction a man walked by with ten open cardboard trays of eggs stacked on his head, three-dozen eggs to the tray. In the other direction two young girls ran playing tag, one balancing a quart of cooking oil on her head, the other balancing a bag of flour.

Gradually during those first few days, Nick became aware of other scents and other sounds: sea salt and waves breaking. He knew then that he was near the ocean; it could be no more than a few blocks away. Then he raised his eyes up, looked over the rooftops and across the river and he knew. He understood: he was home.

He soon discovered that he was also a prisoner.

Djennaba, the landlady’s shy teenage daughter, brought him his meals. She explained to him in French—her mother had no ‘Frasay’, and Nick’s Wolof was too rusty—that he was convalescing, forbidden to leave this top floor, under orders of the black Americaine, until he was well. The sunlight would hurt les machines. Uncles and brothers on floors below were prepared to enforce this injunction if Nick were silly enough to try to leave. But Nick had no inclination to test their resolve: walking to the balcony and back was all the exertion he could stand.

Now, however, he was a free man. Or rather, he would be once Judith arrived. He was feeling much stronger, but still weak: healing comes slowly, he figured, when your brain—not to mention your body and soul—is being mechanically reassembled from piece-parts.

He now also had the answer to some of his questions. Would he see Bartlett again? No. Would he ever hold her in his arms? No. His life now was one of permanent exile. It wasn’t only that he was still wanted by the Utah police for the murder of Peter Barlow. He was probably also wanted by the Basel police for the murders of Montaigne Meekman, Carl Swirsing and Jake Carelli. The obsessive paranoiacs of the alt.conspiracy newsgroup were certainly still on his trail. The military-industrial-pharmaceutical-entertainment complex, for that matter—yea, the Overmind itself—was probably scanning the infosphere at this very instant for any trace of his phosphorescent data tracks. And, Nick had left an unpaid bill at the Newcastle Hotel. No, he could never go back. Africa, now and forever, was home.

He heard Judith’s taxi pull up outside the building. He went to his balcony and watched her step out of the car, and he watched as his hosts greeted her in the street. So, he thought, sensing a change. Now this stage is done, and the next is going to begin.

“Let’s go on a picnic,” she said to Nick, after their hellos. “I’ve hired a canoe.”

“Can I go out in the sun?” he asked, skeptically.

She laughed.

“Everything that could be done, has been done by now. Your transformation, Nick, is complete.”

“Thank God,” he said. “In that case, let’s go on your canoe.”

The city of N’Darr was built around an island in the Senegal River several miles upstream from where its waters entered the Atlantic. Between the island and the sea there was a narrow sandy barrier, a pristine ten-mile white sand beach.

“The peninsula?” Nick asked.

“No,” she said. “Up river. Hurry while the tide is still going our way.” They walked to the quay; it was near. There Judith handed bags to a young man in a lateen-sailed dugout. She had prepared a modest feast: bread and jams, butter, cheeses, apples, mangoes, oranges, bananas, bottles of water and jars of fruit juice. They clambered in after the provisions and headed upstream. With the tide mounting they hardly needed the sail, but they set it anyway, for the effect. Judith sat in the back, trailing her hands in the water. Nick sat facing her, with his back resting against the mast and his bare feet stretched out before him, touching hers. The only sounds came from the water, wind, birds, and ever-present drums. Time passed. They passed through the Makanna Djamma wildlife preserve, they sailed past villages along the river further inland, up the river, home, into a vast, loving, heart of darkness.

The tide had slackened and the wind had died. The boat’s movement on the river had slowed to a standstill; soon the tide would flow downstream. The boatman took up his paddle and began to stroke.

Judith selected an orange. As she peeled it, she began to speak.

“Rolf Steffen, the Vice-chairman and chief stockholder of Hoff-Zeigy Pharmaceuticals, died in an alpine crash of a small jet,” she said. “His niece Pascale Pacheco inherited a majority share of Hoff-Zeigy shares. She was elected Chairman and CEO by the Board of Directors, and almost immediately she and Scott Beckwith, the Chairman of Dijjy-Mike, announced plans to combine Digital Microsystems and Hoff-Zeigy. The Security and Exchange Commission is expected to approve the merger this week. The Neuro Group was already acquired by Hoff-Zeigy in a separate transaction.”

She paused to let Nick absorb the information. Then she started again.

“Together, Digital Microsystems and Hoff-Zeigy are working around the clock to decode and patent the human genome; they’ve already contracted with several prison corporations to use The Neuro Group’s model to predict inmate behavior—in return for which the Labs have obtained rights to the brains of all prisoners killed by lethal injection—a major coup. Phenotypes for strong, beautiful and hyper-intelligent babies will be on the market by the end of the decade. The Department of the Army and Department of the Navy have signed contracts for the development of brain-implant weapons systems. Wall Street has bid Dijjy-Mike and Hoff-Zeigy stocks through the roof.”

“I wonder if shareholders would care that their CEO is a murderer?” Nick interjected, thinking of Pascale.

“Nick, be serious. With her track record? In the short time since she took over for her Uncle Rolf, Hoff-Zeigy’s market capitalization has nearly doubled. Forbes and Fortune love her; the Wall Street Journal is arguing for her canonization. So no, I don’t think anybody cares. But I wrote up the whole story anyway, of course,” Judith said. “I wrote practically a whole dissertation that spelled out everything I had learned about Meekman, doctored bacteriophage, monster cells, nanomachines, Corporate Fellows, souls in thralldom.”

“What happened to it?”

“I sent it to the Centers for Disease Control, to the Pentagon, to my Senators and to the New York Times.”

“What was the response?”

“Nothing from the CDC. The Times and my Senators thanked me with polite notes.” She smiled, but the smile looked a little like a grimace.

“And the Defense Department?”

“There was no official response. But soon the Pentagon began ‘admitting’ that soldiers had been exposed to Sarin nerve gas at Kasimiyah, and also changed its story on the PB anthrax vaccination. A version of my memorandum, rewritten to make it sound even more crazy—if that’s possible—showed up on conspiracy news groups. Photos of me began to appear on the cover of Weekly World News, with headlines like ‘Top Scientist says ‘Monster Viruses’ Cause Phantom Illness.’”

“You’re famous,” Nick said.

“I’m a laughing stock,” she answered. “It’s just as well I’ve retired from science.”

“Judith,” Nick said. “I’m very sorry to hear that. Science has lost one of its brightest lights.”

“That’s sweet of you to say, Nick,” Judith said. “But based on what I’ve seen recently, I don’t think I want to be a scientist anymore. Or at least, not one in this imperfect world. I don’t want to help them anymore, and I’ve learned that I can’t stop them.”

“What about those men who lined up for the nasal inhaler?” Nick asked. He’d been thinking about these men for the last few weeks, wondering what they had experienced once they took their injections and what had happened to them when Monty had died. “Do they now resonate on espresso’s frequency? Have they lost their souls?”

“That depends on how you interpret the evidence,” she said. “Even though the Forum was only a few months ago already you can see evidence, if you’re inclined to see it, that Monty triumphed, that he won his game of Rule the Roost—even if he didn’t live to see it. In fact, I tend to wonder whether the infection hasn’t spread much further. There’s pretty strong evidence that the first crop of Overmind converts has already turned around and infected most, if not all, of the developed world. Europe, all of North and most of South America, vast regions of Asia. They may all be infected.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“Television commercials are the most obvious signs. Everywhere you look the Overmind is celebrated; the Internet itself is worshiped as a Deity, and all other notions of God or spirituality are mocked and ridiculed. I don’t think you can even say that people are responsible anymore; the technology itself produces, schedules, broadcasts the message, the Overmind enlists people in its cause instead of the other way around. School teachers do ads for software monopolies. School boards sell access rights to children’s minds. Rock stars prostrate themselves before the new God. Some have become Corporate Fellows of Digital Microsystems; others work for Microsoft or Apple or any of a million Dijjy-Mike wannabes. Corporations and governments trample on privacy in ways that once would have sparked riots, sparked revolutions. In America, few people care. Some anachronistic dreamers, like me, try to make the case for going slowly. We say that our moral, ethical, legal, cultural systems are unprepared, not up to the assault. We suggest taking the time to think through our options, taking care that we don’t destroy what may be our last chance to remain human. It’s a losing cause. America—and the rest of the world under American cultural hegemony—has truly come to love Big Brother. To question the wisdom of surrendering our autonomy to the Telescreen is literally enough to get you declared insane and locked up for life without due process, without a trial. You can get away with just about anything in America, except challenging the hegemony of technology.”

“But are all these developments proof of contagion by nanomachines, or are they just signs of the times?”

“I don’t know,” Judith said. “But you are living proof that Pavel and Dieter’s nanomachines do, in fact, work.”

“There’s no denying that,” Nick said, glancing at his coal-black skin. “But what happened? I’m assuming you found me in that box? With Monty?”

“Yes,” she said. “We arrived just after you did. We had been in Israel, but Bartlett refused to let you face Monty alone. And yes, to answer your question, Bartlett and I did put the additional information necessary for your cure into the genome that we sent to Casey. We had to decide for you and we wanted to give you an escape outlet, a way for you to disappear if you chose to. There was no way that we could consult you.”

“You made the right choice,” Nick said.

“That’s a relief,” she said. “Because there’s really no going back.”

“But I don’t remember any of it. I was in Monty’s lab, and then I woke up and I was here.” Nick held up his hands, as if to illustrate the point.

“I hired a jet to fly us to Dakar, and an ambulance from Dakar to here. And that’s the end of my cloak-and-dagger days. I’m retired.”

“You hired a jet? When did you become a millionaire?”

“I’ll explain in a minute.”

“If you’re retired, am I to understand that there’s no more Association for Responsible Biotechnology?”

“A guy named Lazarus Gilmore has taken over as executive director. He’s this fellow with a ponytail and a limp from the Basel Dijjy-Mike labs who recently had a life-changing experience. He’s one of the few people on earth with the know-how to create an antidote program. I’m a client. Casey too.”

“I’m glad I decided not to shoot his other toe off.”

Nick looked at his bare feet touching Judith’s.

“So, there it is: proof that nanotechnology works. Pavel and Dieter were an extraordinary team.”

“Unknown giants. Fausts,” she said.

“I guess it was early versions of the machines, prototypes, that Pavel used to change himself from black to white?”

Judith frowned. “I’d thought of that,” she said, “but I don’t see how that’s possible. No early prototype had the capability to do that. I don’t know how Pavel changed his pigmentation from black to white, or why. Perhaps it was surgery, or illness, or some kind of bleach that so dramatically changed his appearance. But we’ll never know; he remains a cipher. I don’t expect to ever learn where he came from—who his parents were, or how he came to be Monty’s special altar boy. Sometimes I wonder if Pavel was Monty’s literal creation, not just his figurative one. What motivated Pavel Isaacs? Maybe science had inflamed his passion, as it once inflamed mine. Maybe he set out to win a Nobel Prize and became corrupted along the way. Or maybe he was already corrupt by the time I met him. Maybe it was just his fate. Maybe he was doomed from the day he was born.”

“Speaking of life-changing experience, what news of Casey?”

“State’s evidence. She’s in Sao Paulo, helping Interpol track Nick Aubrey.”

“Why Sao Paulo?”

“I guess because she’s always wanted to go Brazil. You can read all about her adventures on her website ‘gothic high-tech favella chic.’”

“She’s leading them on a wild goose chase?”

“The wildest. Judith smiled and continued, “Casey has teamed up with

‘Frightened@TIAC.net’ the guy who claims he saw you murder Barlow. Together they have confirmed several sightings of you consorting with the moneyed German community of Brazil, the Nazi next generation. She’s leading them around in circles, having a blast.”

The only sad part of the story, Nick thought, was that the few people who could appreciate the irony in Casey’s turned-down smile would never see that smile again.

“I hope some day she’ll get over Todd.”

“Don’t worry about her. She’s having fun. When she’s not actively derailing the manhunt for you, she’s off exploring the sensual extremes of Rio.”

“And what of Judith Knight?” Nick asked. “What adventures lie in store for her?”

“Judith Knight has not been seen for a while. Sister Marie Grace, a young woman who once resembled Judith, has taken her first vows in a contemplative order. She is traveling in Africa now, on personal business, before taking her final vows and completely retreating from the world to become a bride of Christ.”

He was afraid to ask the next question, but he had to. “Any news of Bartlett?” he said.

“One more bit of information first,” Judith said. “Your brother loved you; he gave his life for you. I tried to dissuade him from returning to Basel. But he knew that trouble lay in store for you. He didn’t know what trouble, exactly—none of us could have foreseen it. But he knew you would need money, and he knew where to get it: from Pascale Pacheco. When Paul finally unraveled all the dummy corporations that Monty and Pascale had used, he redirected the funds to Swiss bank accounts established in your name, and he named me a trustee. He loved you, he just didn’t know how to deal with his emotions after you and Bartlett got together.”

“So there was nothing between . . .”

“No,” she said. “Does that surprise you?” It shouldn’t have Nick, but it did.

Something else now surprised both of them: the wind had picked up, cresting little wavelets on the river’s surface, and a gust nearly capsized them.

“As a trustee of your account, by the way, Nick, and I have spent some of your fortune.”

“For my… convalescent care. For my transformation into what I am.”

“Yes. And for your farm.”

Not an answer he had expected.

“My farm? We sold the place in Oneonta years ago.”

“Not Oneonta. Here. I bribed some people, Nick. Don’t feel guilty. Your circumstances are unique. You now have legal claim to two acres in this wildlife area, this national park. Your house is nearly complete: you can see it there, by those neem trees.”

Nick looked where she was pointing. Not far from the edge of the river, several workmen were lowering a skylight into the roof of an adobe house. It was no more than a doublewide trailer made out of mud block, but by the standards of villages along the Senegal River, it was quite grand.

“Skylights,” Judith said. “You’ll be able to see the stars at night.”

“Ah.”

“As well as the three hundred satellites that Microsoft will be launching for their network, and the four hundred that Dijjy-Mike have announced for theirs.”

“Surveillance satellites?”

“They’ll never admit it.”

“How long before they find me, do you suppose?”

“They may never. They may not be looking. I expect they won’t waste their batteries on Africa. Or maybe they will, who knows? Their plans will never be divulged; no government is strong enough to make them even answer a question. But even if you escape them, Nick, your idyll here is likely to be short-lived. Famine, drought, pestilence… they’re all just over the horizon.”

“I saw them all when I was here before.”

“That was a trickle. I’m talking about a flood. Your house is stocked with a year’s food, and you have millions of dollars in a Swiss account. But if it goes to hell around here, and it may, there will be no protection for you.”

“In the meantime I’ll enjoy myself,” Nick said. “I always liked it here.”

“Your house of course has no electricity.”

“I don’t want any.”

“You have gravity-fed running water from your own well. There’s some marsh, some dunes, an irrigated plot for rice and wheat. There’s an orchard too. This used to be a mini agricultural experiment station.”

“I remember,” Nick said, with a numbing, overwhelming sensation of nostalgia. “A French guy from Catholic Relief Services lived here.”

“Yes,” she said. “You now own his Peugeot pickup truck; it’s been locked away for fifteen years. From your house to the paved road is four kilometers, and from there to N’Darr is only twenty minutes.”

“They must have been working very fast,” Nick said, trying, for some vestigial macho reason, to keep his emotions under control. He could see that improvements to the old experiment station had been made everywhere, and he wanted to cry, but couldn’t.

“There is a very competent foreman in charge, even if she doesn’t know the language.”

“You,” Nick said, as his heart swelled with gratitude.

“No. Not me. There she is, look. Do you recognize her?”

He looked where Judith was pointing. And yes, he recognized her. Good God, his heart recognized her before his eyes did. Bartlett was wearing a long African indigo dress, and her hair was braided close to her head, but yes, he recognized her.

“She’s taken a nanomachine regime, just like me?”

“She wanted to be with you. There was no other way.”

The canoe nestled the shore, and as Nick and Judith stepped out the breeze stiffened, and a cloud of sand assaulted their eyes. The wind had been getting worse for some while, and as Nick looked towards the horizon he saw a large dust devil nearing. It might pass, or it might turn into a monster sandstorm. Bartlett had seen them approaching shore, and was waiting for them.

“Hello, Nicholas.” She raised her ebony-black hand to touch his face.

THE END