Part 33 (1/2)

Do you have any secondhand impression of him?

Just a guy. He rubbed his chin. I guess he was a little more army than most. I mean he kind of liked the idea. .

He didn't much like our idea, then.

I don't know. I'd guess not.

Marty looked at his watch. I'm due in surgery in twenty minutes. Be doing jacks until one. Julian, you want to track him down?

Do what I can.

Benyo, you jack with Monez and whoever else was with Thurman. We have to know how much he knows.

Sure. He stood up. I think he's down by the game room.

We watched him go. At least he couldn't have known who the general was.

Not Roser, Marty said. But he might have gotten the name of Gavrila's boss, Blaisdell, through one of the people in Guadalajara. That's what I want to find out. He checked his watch again. Call Benyo about it in an hour or so. And check all the flights to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Do what I can, Marty. Once he's out of Porto, h.e.l.l, there must be ten thousand ways to get to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Yeah, right. Maybe we should just wait and see whether we hear from Blaisdell.

We were about to.

BLAISDELL SPENT A FEW minutes talking to Carew- the actual download of information from the jack session would take several hours' patient interrogation under hypnosis, by machine, but he did learn that there were a couple of days unaccounted for, between the time Gavrila was jacked in Guadalajara and her death more than a thousand miles away. What did she learn that sent her to Portobello?

He stayed in the office until he got the coded message from his driver that matters had been disposed of, and then he drove himself home-an eccentricity that sometimes was useful.

He lived alone, with robot servants and soldierboy guards, in a mansion on the Potomac less than a half hour's drive from the Pentagon. An eighteenth-century home with original exposed timbers and a wooden floor buckled with age, it was consistent with his image of himself-a man destined from birth, privileged birth, to change the history of the world.

And now his destiny was to end it.

He poured his daily ounce of whiskey into a crystal snifter and sat down to the mail. When he turned on the console, before the index came up, a blinker told him he had paper mail waiting.

Odd. He asked the wheelie to fetch it, and it brought back a single letter, no return address, postmarked from Kansas City that morning. It was interesting, considering the intimacy of some aspects of their relations.h.i.+p, that he didn't recognize Gavrila's handwriting on the envelope.

He read the short message twice and then burned it. Stanton Roser the most dangerous man in America? How unlikely, and how convenient: they had a golf date Sat.u.r.day morning at the Bethesda Country Club. Golf could be a dangerous game.

He bypa.s.sed his mail and opened up the line to his computer at work. Good evening, general, it said in a carefully modulated s.e.xless voice.

List for me every project rated 'secret' or above that has been initiated in the past month-no, eight weeks-by the Office of Force Management and Personnel. Delete any that have no connection to General Stanton Roser.

There were only three projects on the list; he was surprised at how little of Roser's work was cla.s.sified. But one of those projects was essentially a file of miscellaneous cla.s.sified actions, with 248 entries. He tabled that one and looked at the other two, separated because they were Top Top Secret.

They were apparently unrelated, except that both projects had been initiated the same day, and-aha!-both were in Panama. One was a pacification experiment on the detainees in a POW camp; the other, a management evaluation scheme at Fort Howell in Portobello.

Why hadn't Gavrila given more details? d.a.m.n the woman's flair for the dramatic.

When had she gone to Panama? That was easy enough to check. Show me all the DARPA travel voucher requests for the past two days.

Interesting. She had bought a ticket to Portobello under a female code name and one to the Ca.n.a.l Zone under a male code name. Which flight did she actually take? The note had been on Aeromexico stationery, but that was no help; both flights used that carrier.

Well, which ident.i.ty had she used in Guadalajara? The computer said that neither code name had flown into the city in the past two weeks, but it was a good a.s.sumption that she wouldn't have gone through the inconvenience of masquerading as a male while she was tracking down that woman. Therefore it was likely that she did cross-dress to elude detection on the flight down.

Why Panama, why the Ca.n.a.l Zone, why the connection with mousy old Stanton? Why didn't she just come back to the States, after the d.a.m.ned woman's theory about the Jupiter Project was splashed all over the news?

Well, he knew the answer to the last one. Gavrila watched the news so seldom she probably didn't even know who was president. As if the country had an actual president nowadays.

Of course, the Ca.n.a.l Zone could have been a feint. She could get to Portobello from there in minutes. But why would she want to go to either place?

Roser was the key. Roser was protecting the scientist by hiding her in one of those two bases. Give me a list of noncombat deaths of Americans in Panama over the past twenty-four hours.

All right: there were two at Fort Howell, a male private who was KILODNC -killed in the line of duty, noncombat-and an unidentified female, homicide. Details available, no surprise, on a need-to-know basis from the Office of Force Management and Personnel.

He touched the KILODNC, which was not restricted, and found that the man had been murdered while standing guard at the central administration building. That must have been Gavrila's work.

A soft chime and a picture of the interrogator, Carew, appeared in the corner of the screen. He touched it and a hundred-thousand-word hypertext report appeared. He sighed and decided to have a second ounce of whiskey, in coffee.

WE WERE GOING TO be a little crowded in Building 31. The people in Guadalajara were too vulnerable; there was no telling how many nutcases like Gavrila might be available to Blaisdell. So our administrative experiment suddenly needed a couple of dozen civilian consultants, the Sat.u.r.day Night Special crowd and the Twenty. Alvarez stayed behind with the nanoforge, but everybody else got away within twenty-four hours.

I wasn't sure it was a good idea-after all, Gavrila had killed almost as many people here as she had in Guadalajara. But the guards were really on guard now; three soldierboys patrolling instead of one.

It did simplify the humanization schedule. We had been set up to use the Twenty one at a time, by way of the secure phone line at the Guadalajara clinic. Once they were physically inside Building 31, we could use them four at a time, in rotation.

I wasn't looking forward to the Twenty arriving so much as I was the others-my old friends who now shared with me an inability to read minds. Everybody who was jacked was completely caught up in this huge project, in which Amelia and I were reduced to the status of r.e.t.a.r.ded helpers. It was good to be around people with a few ordinary, noncosmic problems. People who had time for my own ordinary problems. Like becoming a murderer for a second time. No matter how much she deserved it, and had brought it on herself, it was still my finger on the trigger, my head full of the indelible image of her last horrifying moments.

I didn't want to bring it up with Amelia, not now, maybe not for a long time.

Reza and I were sitting out on the lawn at night, trying to pick out a few stars hidden in the glare and haze from the city.

It couldn't possibly have bothered you as much as the boy, he said. If anybody ever had it coming to them, she did.

Oh, h.e.l.l, I said, and opened a second beer. At a visceral level, it doesn't make any difference who they were or what they did. The kid just got a red spot on his chest and fell over dead. Gavrila, I sprayed her guts and brains and f.u.c.king arms all over the corridor.

And you keep thinking about it.

Can't help it. The beer was still cool. Every time my stomach growls or I get a little pain down there, I can see her bursting open. Knowing I have the same stuff inside.

But it's not as if you've never seen it before.

Never caused seeing it before. Big difference.

There was an awkward silence. Reza ran a fingertip around the rim of his winegla.s.s, but it just hissed. So are you going to try it again?

I almost said Try what again? but Reza knew me better than that. I don't think so. Who ever knows? Until you die of something else, you can always kill yourself.

Hey, I never thought of it quite that way. Thanks.

Thought you needed cheering up.