Part 14 (1/2)
Desh frowned. ”When you put it that way, working with terrorists does sound pretty stupid.”
”Thank you,” she said emphatically. She paused as the waiter came over to check on them.
”Not that it matters,” she continued as soon as the waiter was out of earshot, ”but I made my fortune in the stock market.”
Desh raised his eyebrows. ”That wouldn't have been my first guess. How?”
”I a.n.a.lyzed the market while at an elevated level of intelligence,” she replied. ”When you're in the transformed state you have absolute access to your memory. All of your memory. The human brain stores every single input it ever receives: everything you think, read, see, touch or experience. In our normal, un-optimized mode, we're unable to access all but the tiniest tip of that iceberg. But in my enhanced state I can make correlations and logical connections between bits of information I didn't even know I had. Treacherously complex patterns become obvious. Market insights quickly present themselves.”
”Did you understand your a.n.a.lysis when you returned to normal?”
Kira smiled. ”Not even a little,” she admitted. ”All I know is that I was right about eighty percent of the time, more than enough to make me very rich, very fast. I underwent my treatment four different times with the sole purpose of a.n.a.lyzing the stock market. And I only placed the riskiest of bets. Currency fluctuations, options, futuresa”that sort of thing. Over a three-month period I increased my wealth a thousand-fold. The stock market is legalized gambling and I had transformed myself into the ultimate Rain Man.”
As usual, she made the most fantastic claims seem eminently plausible. ”So why the false ident.i.ties and Swiss bank accounts?”
”I started to get paranoid, so I began taking precautions.”
”Is paranoia another side effect of the enhanced intelligence?”
”No,” she replied solemnly. ”It's a side effect of getting robbed.”
Desh's eyes narrowed. ”Is this where the arch nemesis you wrote about in your E-mail comes in? Your Moriarty?”
”I like that,” said Kira, smiling. ”Gives me hope that you aren't still convinced that I'm Moriarty. If you had said, *Your arch nemesis, Sherlock Holmes,' I'd really be depressed right now.”
Desh couldn't help but return her smile.
”One of the things that popped out when I was studying you was how wonderfully well read you are,” said Kira earnestly.
”Moriarty isn't exactly an obscure reference. The majority of ten-year-olds know who he is.”
She smiled and her eyes sparkled playfully. ”That doesn't make what I said any less true. Besides, I wouldn't be too sure about that. I'm not convinced the majority of adults even know the name of our Speaker of the House.”
A slight smile played across Desh's face. ”So tell me about the robbery?”
Desh tensed as a fit man in this thirties with a serious look on his face approached the hostess station and began scanning the restaurant carefully, his eyes moving in an arc that would soon include their booth. ”Duck!” whispered Desh as he slipped the gun out from under his sweats.h.i.+rt and braced himself for action. Kira slid down in the booth as if she had dropped a coin on the floor.
Seconds later the man's eyes stopped s.h.i.+fting as his gaze settled on a booth two over from where they were seated. An attractive woman who was seated with two preschool children waved at him happily. He raised his hand in acknowledgment, his face becoming relaxed, and he hurriedly joined his family.
Desh let out the breath he had been holding. ”False alarm,” he whispered. ”Sorry.”
Kira returned to a fully upright position. ”Don't be,” she said, shaking her head. ”Better to err on the side of caution. Besides, I'm sure my pulse will return to normal in an hour or so,” she added with a grin.
”You were going to tell me about the robbery,” prompted Desh.
”Right,” said Kira. ”I came home from work one night and my place had been broken into. I had a bottle with twenty-three gellcaps and my lab notebook stored in the false bottom of a dresser drawer. Both were missing.”
”You had a dresser with a false-bottomed drawer?”
”I thought putting valuables in a safe would be too obvious. I measured the drawer and had someone at a hardware store cut a platform to my exact specifications. I wallpapered it to match the bottoms of the other drawers and stacked some sweaters on top.”
Desh raised his eyebrows, impressed. ”Did they take anything else?” he asked, chewing absently on the breadstick he had taken and continuing to watch the entrance.
”Nothing. They knew exactly what they were after.”
”Any ideas who it was?”
”Not when it happened, no. I was stunned. I had been careful not to leave a trail. I routinely disposed of the rodents I was using and I never let my lab notebook out of my sight. Until then, I wouldn't have believed it possible that anyone could have known what I was doing. On a hunch, the next day I hired someone at an executive protection agency, like yours, to look for listening devices.” She frowned deeply. ”He found several in both my office and home. That's the day I truly began to get paranoid.”
”That would do it,” muttered Desh.
”It was a disaster. Whoever he was, having twenty-three doses of my therapy instantly made him the most formidable man on the planet. I began to take elaborate precautions, learned everything I could about bugs and how to find them, and took some pains to spread my fortune across various accounts. The next time I was enhanced it became clear to me I needed to create a number of flawless false ident.i.ties as well as invent technologies that would help me stay hidden if I was forced to disappear.”
”Enhanced intuition also?”
She nodded. ”Intuition is just your subconscious putting together subtle clues and coming to a conclusion that your conscious mind hasn't quite reached. Since my rewiring gives me access to all the memories buried in my subconscious, it unleashes the full power of intuition.” Kira paused. ”As later events were to prove, this intuition was right on target.”
Desh said nothing as he finished the breadstick and drained the last of his soda. There was certainly no arguing this point.
”Three days later,” continued Kira, ”my boss, Tom Morgan, was killed in a car accident.”
Desh nodded, almost imperceptibly. Interesting, he thought. Another piece of the puzzle that was nowa”possiblya”explained.
”I was never able to find any evidence, but I suspect Morgan stumbled onto what I was doing and was responsible for having the bugs planted. My guess is he later approached someone powerful to sell what he knew and access to some of the gellcaps. My unknown enemy. Moriarty, as you called him.”
Desh frowned. ”And Moriarty had Morgan killed so he would have an exclusive on your treatment.”
”That's my guess.”
Desh opened his mouth to ask another question but closed it again as the waiter approached with their pizza. As he carefully placed it on the table in front of them, Desh reflected on everything Kira had told him. Her chronology of events explained any number of loose ends. And the central premise of his a.s.signment, that she was working with terrorists on a bioterror plot, had become laughably implausible. And she had warned them about Smith and had risked herself to extricate them.
And although he tried to resist, her looks and personality continued to cast a spell on him. As much as he needed to affix his gaze solely on the entrance and stay alert at all times, he found his eyes inexorably returning to hers as they spoke. He needed to keep the Greek myth of the Siren sea nymphs firmly in his mind. Was he really being as objective in considering her arguments as he needed to be? Were there holes that he was failing to consider?
However much she explained away, he kept returning to the same place: the deaths surrounding her childhood were indisputable. Griffin had verified as much when Desh had been asleep on the hacker's couch. And the evidence against her in the killing of Lusetti and her brother was airtight. As appealing as he found her and as artful as her explanations had been, it was still more likely than not that most of what she said was an elaborate fabrication.
27.
They both hungrily ate their first piece of pizza in silence, after which Desh announced his plan to use the restroom and scout the mall once again. He spent a few minutes in the restroom scrubbing his face with soap and cold water, feeling reinvigorated as he did so, and then exited the restaurant.
Throngs of brightly colored shoppers of every description paraded through the mall in all directions, creating a random, ever-changing mosaic of humanity. Some race-walked as if on an urgent mission while others strolled leisurely. Some were empty handed while others carried soft-pretzels, ice cream, elaborate purses, or plastic shopping bags filled to the brim with recent purchases. A young girl pointed excitedly to a pair of shoes though a window as her mother looked on with an amused expression on her face. Desh envied them their untroubled innocence.
He pretended to look in a few store windows and wander through the mall for the next five minutes, furtively scanning the crowd as he did so, but detected nothing out of place and no sign of pursuit.
He returned to the booth to find that Kira was almost finished with her last piece of pizza and the waiter had refilled his drink. Kira eyed him warily as he sat down. ”Any suspicious activity?”
Desh shook his head. ”I think we're probably in the clear,” he said. ”If they haven't found us by now, they'll have moved on. They'll never believe we'd do something as stupid as making sitting ducks of ourselvesa”literallya”in the middle of a busy restaurant.”