Aftermath (49 page)

"A man better not, unless he wants a woman to ignore him." Dana sat up straighter and stared ahead. "
Now
what's going on?"

The Jeep had been on Maine Avenue, ready to follow the traffic north onto Fifteenth Street. There were signs of major clear-up efforts, but the streets still held scattered heaps of trash and rubble. Instead of steering a way around them, Yasmin made an unexpected right turn at a narrow ramp and rolled down below street level.

"Avoiding bottlenecks in the middle of town," she shouted back to them. She sounded pleased with herself over the engine's rattle. "We'll go the rest of the way underground. Save half an hour."

Art thought again how tough she must be, under the sexy and decorative exterior. She had to be thinking about and grieving for her brother, but she held it under tight control. He was admiring Yasmin for that when Dana glanced at him in the sudden gloom and said, "An underground road system in Washington? That's a new one on me."

"Me, too. And I thought I knew the city pretty well. If it's going to be like this all the way, I don't think we'll save much time."

The Jeep had stopped at the bottom of the ramp. The automatic gate designed to accept an ID card was not working. It stood wide open, but a man in Army uniform stood by the gate. He took the pass that Yasmin held out and examined it closely before he waved them on. A couple of hundred yards farther along, the whole process was repeated.

"The Pentagon?" Dana asked, after the third halt and inspection.

"But then we'd have to cross the river. Maybe Capitol Hill?"

Yasmin must have heard their questions, but she pointedly did not answer them. All she said was, "It's a lot quicker when the automatic ID checks are working."

She made a final left turn and the Jeep emerged into a vast parking garage. The floor was blacktop, the whitewashed ceiling lit by fluorescent bulbs and no more than seven feet high. Yasmin drove all the way to the far end. The spaces there were tiny, designed for electric urban runabouts. Each had a sign: RESERVED, SPECIAL STAFF. PARK IN DESIGNATED SPOTS ONLY. AS A COURTESY TO THE NEXT USER, MAKE SURE THAT YOUR VEHICLE IS PLUGGED IN FOR RECHARGE.
DO NOT OCCUPY MORE THAN ONE SPACE.

Yasmin parked the Jeep neatly, but it was so wide it sprawled across two spaces. She shrugged. "So they'll probably sue me. Come on."

They climbed down. Art took three steps and paused, puzzled. After a moment he realized what the problem was. It was like the gene-spliced fruit and vegetables, something noticeable by its absence. His right knee was guaranteed to stiffen up after hours in one position. This morning he felt not a twinge. It must be the telomod treatment, it could be nothing else. The urgency hit him again. He and Dana needed to get out of here and learn what was happening with Seth and Oliver Guest. Without the genome scanners, everything going on inside their cells was guesswork.

He hurried after Yasmin and Dana, in through yet another checkpoint complete with armed guard. Then it was an elevator, rising steadily for four floors. And, at last, they were inside a structure designed for people rather than vehicles.

Yasmin picked up a telcom by the elevator door, made a connection, and said, "Yasmin. I'm back."

Art sensed an odd tension in her voice, but she went on, "How's his schedule? Yes, ten minutes should be enough."

She led them along a short corridor, saying good morning to the handful of people they passed. Clearly, she was a regular. And clearly, this was the house of someone very rich. Everything—pictures, carpets, drapes—was either an antique or a superb fake.

At the end of the corridor Yasmin paused. "I hope this goes all right, but it may not. A couple of days ago I had a horrible screaming fight with the man inside this room. We said some pretty awful things to each other. I want to patch things up, but if I can't, please remember that it's nothing to do with you."

They entered a smallish room, whose only occupant sat at a cluttered desk before a thick-paneled door of dark wood. He stood up as they came in, an unusually handsome young man whose face was a picture of uncertainty. He and Yasmin stared at each other for a few seconds.

"Want to go on working here?" she said at last.

He grimaced. "Is that what he said to you? It's exactly what he said to me."

"Me, too. What did you tell him?"

"I said, yes, I want to work here. More than anything I can think of."

Yasmin nodded. "That's pretty much what I said, too. He made me feel about two inches tall."

"I know. The worst thing is, he was absolutely right. Can we have lunch today?"

"I'd like that. We'll compare wounds." Yasmin turned to Art and Dana. "This is Auden Travis. Auden, this is Art Ferrand and Dana Berlitz. They were at the syncope facility, too."

Travis nodded, but he hardly glanced at the two visitors. He was looking appalled at Yasmin. "I heard," he said. "I should have mentioned it before, instead of talking about our jobs. I'm really sorry about Raymond. It must have been awful."

"It was. Worse than I thought. But it's over." Yasmin swallowed and looked toward the paneled door. "Anyone with him?"

"Not at the moment. They found another big store of RAM chips, way underground at Cheyenne Mountain. Giga capacity, not tera, so they're all pretty much out-of-date. But we had a few million flown in yesterday. A technician slapped a bunch of them together in parallel, and was in here earlier trying to get the holo projection unit up and running. He left about fifteen minutes ago. He said he'd be back soon. So it's a good time." He glanced back to Art and Dana. "They were checked?"

"Back at Indian Head. All we could with the deep scanners out of action. They're clean."

That meant little to Art, but Auden Travis nodded and said, "It's what we have to settle for at the moment. Go ahead."

Yasmin moved to the door, knocked, and opened it. She ushered Art and Dana in ahead of her.

Art found himself in a big, airy office with a high ceiling. That's all he had time for, because once his eyes reached the man standing by the window he could look at nothing else.

Saul Steinmetz. Not quite as tall as he seemed on media releases, thinner, and with the stoop of a scholar. As he turned, penetrating eyes of pale gray skipped rapidly from one person to the next.

"Very sorry to hear about your brother," he said to Yasmin. And, to Art and Dana, "And you lost a relative, too. Terrible business. I wish I could think of something better to say."

He did not go through the charade of pretending that they might not know who he was. And he obviously knew who they were and where they had been. Art immediately wondered what else Steinmetz might find out. That they were not related in any way to the dead Desmond Lota? That they had no valid personal reason for a visit to the Q-5 Syncope Facility? He glanced at Dana, and saw that she was having the same worries. Her eyes were wide, fixed on Saul Steinmetz.

Very deliberately, Art forced himself to turn his head and look over to the corner of the office. Something odd was there, something he had caught from the corner of his eye as they entered. It was a ghostly projection, an insubstantial hologram of a man with the wall showing through his head and body. The head and mouth and eyes moved in stop-action jerks, like an old-fashioned clockwork figure.

The tick-tock man,
Art thought.

"That monstrosity is supposed to be Benjamin Disraeli," Steinmetz said. He had caught and followed Art's look, and he spoke in the friendly and informal tone that came across so well at public meetings and press conferences. "Not quite what he was before Supernova Alpha. But maybe none of us is. I'm promised something better before the day's out."

He gestured to an oval coffee table surrounded by chairs at the other side of the office. "The more I hear about Pearl Lazenby and the Eye of God and the Legion of Argos, the less I like the sound of them. Look at this."

He held out a black-and-white photograph. "Taken with a long focus camera from a high-flying military aircraft over North Carolina. See the lines of dots, like columns of ants? Those are people, coming out of one of the Legion of Argos strongholds. So far as we can tell, they're moving north. Did you know that her followers have been saying for years that she prophesied her own return from judicial sleep? She was sentenced to six hundred and fifty years. All logic said that she would die of natural causes, centuries before her time was served. But she was right, and logic was wrong."

He turned to Art and Dana as they all sat down. "Yasmin tells me that you were the first people to come across Pearl Lazenby's empty body drawer. I'd like you to tell me exactly what you saw in and around the syncope facility. What direction you approached from, what condition the ground was in, tell everything. Take as much time as you want, and try to forget that you are in the White House. Yasmin asked for only a few minutes, but you have as long as you want."

Steinmetz had noticed Art's and Dana's discomfort, and read it as nervousness in the presence of the President. But that idea wouldn't last. Art knew Steinmetz's reputation, as someone with an uncanny gift for reading people far below the level of words. Now he and Dana were proposing to lie to the man—and hope-to get away with it. It would never work, not in this world. Those pale gray eyes were frighteningly luminous and knowing.

Dana was staring at him, expecting him to take the lead. Well, he would—in a direction she might not like at all.

"I'm going to do what you ask," Art said slowly. "Even though at first you may not think I am. And this will take a little while." He looked again at Dana, and was encouraged by her nod. She understood, and she approved. "My name really is Art Ferrand, and this is Dana Berlitz. But we are not related to each other. And we didn't have a relative at the Q-5 facility. We went there for a quite different reason."

Tell everything.

Art began to describe telomod therapy, and was surprised by Saul Steinmetz's quick, "I know about that. Experimental, right? Go on."

Art started over, this time with his call to Dana from Joe's house in Catoctin Mountain Park. Then it was the journey to the Treasure Inn, the ruined Institute, the decision to look for Oliver Guest ("Guest and telomeres? I thought he was the clone man." "Telomeres, too, Mr. President."), the trip through the echoing storm drains, and the scow and tobacco runners' boat down the Potomac, all the way to Maryland Point. The story sounded unreal, as much as the events themselves now
felt
unreal.

Steinmetz said hardly a word. A couple of times he nodded, and once when a buzzer sounded he told Yasmin, "Tell 'em not now, no matter who it is."

Art described the river landing at Maryland Point, the discovery of the trails from that side of the fenced facility around to the front, the broken gate. He told how they had found at first only corpses, but at the higher level at least some of the sleepers were alive.

He looked Saul Steinmetz straight in the eye. "We didn't try to save them. We kept moving."

The President nodded. "We're on to that. Don't worry. What next?"

It was the finding of Pearl Lazenby's body drawer, empty. Then the resuscitation of Oliver Guest, interrupted by noises from below.

"We didn't want to be discovered, doing what we were doing."

"Of course not." Steinmetz spoke as though that were obvious. "For one thing, it might have been Pearl Lazenby's followers again. Then you'd have been in real trouble."

"So we left Seth with Oliver Guest, back in the body drawer."

"You weren't worried about him? Left behind with Grisly Guest?"

"You don't know Seth. Anyway, that's the last that Dana and I saw of them. We came down, and we met Yasmin. And she brought us here."

"She did, indeed." Steinmetz stood up and walked across to the window. "You're telling me the truth. Why?"

Why? Art and Dana stared at each other. "We'd never have convinced you with a lie," she said at last.

"You might have, if you kept it simple and agreed to your story ahead of time. I'm pretty good, but I'm not infallible. Ask my mother, she'll tell you. But you told the truth. I'd like to know the reason."

"I didn't decide to tell the truth," Dana said. "But I'll tell you why I agreed with Art when I realized where he was going."

"That will do fine." Steinmetz came back, sat down, and speared her with that luminous gaze that made her feel pinned in her chair. "Why?"

"You said that telomod therapy is experimental, and you are quite right. Nobody knows the possible side effects, or what will happen to the patients in the long term. But the hell with the long term. Who cares about that if you're dead?"

" 'In the long run, we are all dead.' Not the words of our quantized friend over there"—Steinmetz glanced across at the spectral shade of Disraeli—"but of the economist, John Maynard Keynes. I agree with him completely. We have to worry about now, today, and worry about later if and when we have time."

"Well, without telomod therapy I would be dead today. So would Art, and so would Seth Parsigian. Every doctor I went to before I found the Institute for Probatory Therapies said the same thing: try to put your mind at ease and prepare for death. I wouldn't do it, and I won't do it. We may not seem to be dying to you, but we have no idea what might happen next. The Institute is gone, the genome-scanning equipment is useless, and our doctors are dead. The only person we know who has a prayer of telling us anything is Oliver Guest. But suppose we can't find him? Suppose he gets away from Seth, or kills him, and disappears?"

"Given his past history, that's not at all improbable. People have said many things about Dr. Oliver Guest, but no one ever said he was less than brilliant. Now I think I see it, but let me make sure. You are telling me all this, so that if you are unable to find Guest, the government might help you?"

"Yes." Dana glanced to Art for confirmation. "That's exactly it. We agreed to try to rendezvous with Seth north of here, and at the moment we don't even know a way to get there."

"We could certainly help with that." Steinmetz's voice was gentle and understanding. "But don't you see that what you are asking is both illegal and impossible? You want me to sanction the continued liberty of a convicted criminal. Not just a minor felon, one who did not deserve his sentence"—Steinmetz bound Yasmin to silence with a strange glance—"but one of the most demented and horrifying murderers in history. How am I supposed to justify that? What will my political enemies say when they find out?"