Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (40 page)

Tauber shook his head and, with a
mighty effort of will, fought off a spreading sadness that
threatened to engulf him.

Keith Daniels
wasn’t
Derek
Marsden, Tauber reminded himself sternly, but Daniels was becoming
a big question mark. He was doing a good enough job with the
lawsuits, but Tauber suspected the lawyer still wasn’t sold on
Operation Strong Man, despite the fact that he mouthed all the
right slogans.
Maybe it’s that girlfriend of his,
thought
Tauber,
the one who saved Althea Milgrom’s life back in
November.

Tauber put the papers in a neat pile
on his computer desk, then turned the machine off and went to the
terminal with the CDN hookup. He attached a small, gray box to the
keyboard, entered a series of numbers and then flipped a scrambler
switch on the box. A moment later, the face of the bearded giant
appeared on the screen.

“Kronis here,” the giant said
grumpily. “What is it?”

“I’ve got a job for you.”

Kronis looked bored.

“Of course you do,” he said.
“Otherwise you wouldn’t have called.”

Tauber was irritated by the remark,
but he resolved to say nothing about it.

“Yes. Well, you know the lawyer who’s
been handling all the merchanter lawsuits?  Keith
Daniels?”

Kronis bent his big head forward. “I
know him.”

    “
I want you and
your men to keep a close watch on him. Keep track of every move he
makes, every communicator call he places or accepts.”

“What’re we looking for here,
Lieutenant?”

“We’re looking for any indication that
he’s trying to give information to the enemies of Operation Strong
Man. And don’t call me ‘lieutenant.’  You were never even in
the Merchant Fleet.”

The strong lines of Kronis’s face
hardened. “It’s not my fault I was too big.”

Tauber nodded impatiently. He had no
desire to go into the story of frustration and anger that brought
Kronis to Operation Strong Man’s attention. He just wanted the man
to do a job.

“Yeah, Kronis, I know. Point is, I
want you to watch Daniels. If he tries to contact any officials
except in line with the lawsuits he’s working on—anyone like Althea
Milgrom, for example—you and your boys grab him and take him to 435
Nottingham St., Apartment 12. Got that?”

“Sure, Tauber—435 Nottingham St.,
Apartment 12. What’s that—some kind of safe house?”

“In a way, Kronis, in a way. At least
it’s a safe house for us. If Daniels makes any suspicious move, I
want him kept under guard at the Nottingham address until further
notice. Got it?”

Kronis nodded.

“Good,” said Tauber. “Then set the
surveillance in motion right away. Oh, and Kronis....”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want him contacting his
girlfriend, either.”

Kronis nodded again. “If he does, we
cut him short and take him to Nottingham.”

“Right.”

“It’ll be taken care of,” Kronis said
simply. “Anything else?”

Tauber shook his head. “That’s it.
I’ll be in touch when I need you again.”  With that, Tauber
cut the connection and disengaged the scrambler.

Now then,
Tauber said to
himself as he returned to his off-line computer,
I’ve got some
messages to send to a certain zapper.

Children were romping on the
playground and running across the grass. Couples out for a
leisurely walk on a lovely spring morning were strolling along
tree-bordered paths. A light breeze gave a delicious zest to the
very air. At the open-speech area in the center of the park, three
men and one woman were making the necessary arrangements for this
afternoon’s presentation. It all seemed quite idyllic.

Keith felt out of place in this
picture as he glanced nervously over his shoulder. No sign of them.
Perhaps he had managed to elude them after all. Although they must
have known where he was headed. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Tauber
didn’t want to give them any hint of what he was planning.
Maybe
he doesn’t trust them any more than he trusts me.

It was only hours after he left
Tauber’s apartment four days ago that he began to sense he was
being watched. At first, he was inclined to attribute it all to
paranoia—a condition that had become somewhat familiar to him since
his association with Tauber. He was confused, too. He wasn’t quite
sure how he felt about Tauber or Operation Strong Man. The man had
a powerful personality—no question about it. Keith was
simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the Strong Man philosophy.
He had been mulling all this, considering whether to feed his
latest information on Tauber’s plans to Rayna, when the feeling of
being watched first hit him. It wasn’t until several hours later
that his vague suspicions were confirmed:  The same large,
bearded man he’d seen several miles away on leaving Jared
Clarkson’s place had also shown up at Maybo’s Cafe, a lawyer’s
hangout that Keith frequented.

When he arrived home, he found a
message from Rayna inviting him to join her Saturday afternoon at
John Martin Roberts park for a scheduled HV broadcast of an Althea
Milgrom speech. Keith had felt sick then. He might be able to talk
himself into doing nothing about Tauber’s plans as long as they
affected only some anonymous park-goers, but he couldn’t stand by
and let Rayna get hurt—maybe killed.

So he’d placed the call. Or rather,
he’d tried. There had been no answer. With a growing sense of
urgency, he’d rushed out of his apartment and taken the Trans-Mat
to Rayna’s building. It never occurred to him that his pursuers
might simply use the booth’s “repeat” option to follow
him.

They’d kept him locked up in a small,
poorly lit room at the north end of town. It wasn’t until three
o’clock this morning that he had managed to escape, defeating the
electronic door lock while his guards slept. His efforts to contact
Rayna had been unsuccessful so far. She didn’t answer her
communicator, and he didn’t want to lead his former captors to her
door. His efforts to get the police or the park authority to cancel
Milgrom’s speech had merely resulted in frustration and loss of
precious time as he was challenged over and over to produce
evidence of an imminent zapper threat—evidence he didn’t have.
 

And so here he was at the park, eight
hours after his escape, hoping desperately to find Rayna and get
her away from this place before it was too late.

She’s probably not even here
yet,
Keith thought. When was Tauber planning his attack? 
Would he trigger the zappers before the speech, or would he wait,
hoping to catch Milgrom herself in the line of fire?  He
massaged his temples.
Put yourself in Tauber’s place,
Keith
told himself desperately.
Think it through the way he
would.

“Mommy!  Mommy!” a small boy’s
voice called out, breaking Keith’s line of thought—which seemed to
be going nowhere in any event. “Lookit my balloon!”

Without thinking, Keith glanced in the
direction the boy was pointing. A bright red, helium-filled balloon
was climbing skyward, to the mixed excitement and consternation of
its former owner.

“Oh, Stevie!” the mother said sternly.
“I told you to hold onto the string!”

Suddenly, and for no apparent reason,
the balloon seemed to burst. Stevie exploded into tears as his
mother tried to comfort him.

“It was just a balloon, Stevie,” she
told him. But the boy cried all the louder. “
My
balloon!” he
said. “Want my balloon!”

The rest of their words were lost in
the distance as mother guided son off to see the other sights of
the park. Keith was about to turn and resume his search for Rayna
when he caught sight of a tall, bearded  man coming up the
walk from the Trans-Mat center. Quickly, he ducked behind a nearby
tree, his heart pounding madly. He licked his lips, suddenly
conscious that his mouth had gone dry, and he struggled to keep his
shallow breathing even. He felt keenly on edge, like an athlete
measuring, watching, waiting for just the right moment to make the
crucial leap that would take him over the hurdle.  

***

Tauber’s 11th-floor hotel room
afforded him a perfect view of John Martin Roberts Park—close
enough to watch the fun but far enough away to be safe. Now if
these zappers had been the earlier models, it might be a different
story. The targeting mechanisms in those things were so unreliable
that a number of life domes had been badly damaged by strikes
intended for targets several kilometers away. The Z-48 model,
though, had proved itself over and over. It was accurate to within
30 centimeters from standard Earth orbit.

The simulation Tauber had run on his
off-line computer at home verified the result:  He would be
safe here, and he would be able to observe the carnage personally.
He took a deep breath, but it wasn’t air he was inhaling. It was
the intoxicating scent of power.

There had been a chance that Daniels’
suspicions might be right:  Wraggon
could
have had his
robots mess up the zappers’ basic programming, either by directing
the zappers to hit unauthorized targets or else by locking out new
instructions from Earth. That’s why, after using his off-line
computer to encode the signal in a way that would appear
meaningless to anyone monitoring CDN transmissions, Tauber had sent
override instructions through his CDN-linked communicator. If the
new instructions were locked out, there would be some sort of error
message. But no such message appeared on his terminal. So now all
he had to do was use the hotel communicator to send the trigger
code to a zap miner drifting far above him in synchronous orbit
over Los Angeles.

Tauber smiled and looked at his watch.
Almost noon. Only two more hours until the big moment. The moment
that would put an end to the political aspirations of Althea
Milgrom and put Operation Strong Man in charge for good. For an
instant, he forgot his earlier musings on the advantages of being
the power behind the scenes, and he saw himself standing before a
wildly cheering throng.
Maybe I won’t let Rensselaer have all
the glory after all,
he thought.

Rensselaer was at the United Nations
today. He was scheduled to report to the General Assembly on the
latest developments in dealing with the colonies. That would fit in
well, too. Just as Rensselaer was telling them how serious the
situation is, Milgrom would be trying to say the communications
with the colonies have been fakes. But no one will be able to claim
that this zapper attack is a fake.
The park will look like an
abandoned rock quarry by time this is over,
Tauber chuckled to
himself.
Milgrom won’t have a prayer of convincing anyone that
the colonies weren’t behind this—especially since she’ll probably
be dead.

Tauber went to the window overlooking
the park, opened the sash and leaned forward over the ledge.
Look at them all,
he mused, surveying the tiny figures
below.
A colony of ants. No. Not ants. Ants work together
collectively. Ants have a common purpose. No, they’re not ants.
They’re just grains of sand. And this is
my
beach!

***

Rayna stood at the window in the
park’s recreation building and heaved a sigh.

“What is it, Rayna?” Althea Milgrom
asked, a half-finished cup of coffee on the table before her. “You
seem particularly on edge today.”

Rayna turned to face Milgrom and
lifted her hands in a gesture of confusion. “I really don’t know
what it is, Althea. I should be feeling great. For most of the past
year, I’ve felt like a helpless captive on a doomed, runaway train.
Thanks to you and Derek, I’m beginning to have some real hope
again. But....”  She shook her head, unable to complete the
sentence.

“Are you worried about that friend of
yours?”

Rayna’s heart did jumping jacks in her
chest as she joined Milgrom at the table.

“That’s it, isn’t it,
dear?”

Rayna smiled half-heartedly. “Maybe
you’re right. Things have been—well, let’s say things have been
strained between Keith and me since I first came to you back in
December. I kept hoping he’d come around—that he’d realize we had
to work with you to stop Tauber.”

“Tauber can have a pretty powerful
effect on people. Take it from me.”  Derek Marsden’s face was
creased into an unusually thoughtful expression. Rayna looked at
him with frank curiosity. Marsden had said little about his
relationship with Tauber, but what he had revealed suggested that
the two men had once been quite close.

“Hank always had a way getting other
people to do what he wanted them to do,” Marsden said.

If Marsden was trying to reassure her,
it wasn’t working, thought Rayna. Was Keith now one of those doing
what Tauber wanted them to do?  The thought—one she’d been
struggling mightily
not
to think—depressed her
thoroughly.

It wasn’t the first time she’d
considered the possibility that she was losing Keith to Tauber’s
sinister influence. She’d tried to reason with him, cajole him,
even seduce him away from what she now saw as Tauber’s insidious
clutches. There were moments when she thought she was winning, when
the old Keith seemed to be back. But then he’d see Tauber again,
and once again the strength that was part of his character was
distorted into a cruel parody of itself—twisted into a cold,
indifferent sharpness that chilled Rayna even as she thought about
it.