Crime Zero (10 page)

Alice smiled back. "No, I suppose not. It's just that as we come closer to Crime Zero, I worry about all the things that can go wrong, and it's becoming so--so... real. It frightens me, Madeline, and makes me think that perhaps--"

Naylor smiled. She knew how Alice hated getting too close to the practicalities of what they were doing. She gestured to the man being strapped into the chair in the airtight capsule. "Look, we're on schedule, aren't we?"

Alice nodded. "Yes. TITANIA was out by a few hours, but no more than with the younger convicts. It was obviously an accelerated test, but it verifies the principles of the Phase Three Crime Zero vector. And I've just heard that the orphanage scare was nothing."

"Excellent. Well then, once this unpleasantness is over, you can forget about Crime Zero and let TITANIA handle the phasing issues. Just concentrate on Project Conscience for now. I've blocked out most of today to deal with this. The immediate concern is to ensure that Pamela is happy with everything. Her campaign manager has given us only an hour today to brief her for Friday's announcement. So after we leave here, we'll go back to ViroVector and make sure everything's buttoned down before she arrives. How is Kathy Kerr? Will she keep quiet about the FDA compromise when she finds out about it?"

"Yes, I'm sure she won't be a problem."

Madeline Naylor nodded, but she felt less sure. "Have you isolated her as we agreed?"

"Yes, yes. Her two closest colleagues are on a field trip to Africa, and all relevant files have been moved to a different directory in TITANIA."

"How about hard copies?"

"I imagine she'll have those at Stanford."

"OK, Jackson's people should have already removed those."

William Jackson was an associate director based at FBI headquarters who reported directly to Naylor. A powerful African-American with high cheekbones, fierce eyes, and a distinctive nasal voice, Jackson ran a team of four special agents who helped her tie up loose ends and keep her abreast of any developments in the bureau she should be aware of. She regarded them as her law within the law.

"But, Madeline, is this really necessary? Kathy'll be fine. It's in her interests to cooperate."

"Perhaps." Naylor understood Alice's loyalty. It had been Kathy Kerr's thesis that had inspired Alice to get through her breakdown nine years ago after her daughter, Libby, had been abducted and Alice's spineless husband had deserted her "to rebuild my life" with his younger secretary. "Anyway, we're seeing Kathy before Pamela," Naylor said. "I can find out then how cooperative she's going to be. We can't afford any dissenting voices now."

Saying nothing, Alice gave an acquiescent nod and nervously fingered the unusual pendant on the silver chain around her neck. The size of a thumbnail, the glass teardrop mounted in platinum contained liquid, which moved as she touched it. Naylor shifted her attention back to the prisoner. The guards remained expressionless as they went about their routine task. Alice Prince looked away, her face pained by the spectacle.

But Naylor didn't turn away. She knew all about Karl Axelman; she had studied his files, both criminal and medical. He had no family, which is why he and the other five death row convicts had been selected for the Phase 1 Crime Zero trial. Most of Axelman's victims had been about sixteen, little older than Alice's daughter, Libby, when she'd disappeared ten years ago. Naylor was Libby's godmother, and she had taken it personally when the FBI--her FBI-- couldn't find the child's abductor. They still didn't know who he was. For a time they'd thought it might be Axelman, but the absence of Libby's effects among his trophies made that unlikely.

Still, if a person deserved to die, then Karl Axelman did. Naylor was sure of it. But she wanted more than justice for men like him. She wanted punishment. Revenge. So she felt cheated when the door to the execution chamber was sealed and the warden in the other viewing room nodded twice, authorizing the release of the lethal gas pellet. Unlike his victims, the man being executed in front of her could feel no fear or pain.

Karl Axelman was already dead. He had died almost eleven hours ago.

Naylor gleaned some satisfaction from the way he had killed himself. Last night he had stuffed a sheet into his mouth to stifle his cries, and despite terrible self-inflicted injuries, the prison doctor estimated that Axelman had taken at least three hours to die from loss of blood. It was gratifying to know that far from being the error Tarrant thought it was, the manner and timing of Axelman's death had vindicated their plans.

Her only small concern was that a senior FBI agent had interviewed Axelman yesterday. She had asked Deputy Director McCloud to keep her informed of what Axelman might have revealed but on past evidence thought it was unlikely to be anything significant.

As Director Naylor watched the gas fill the chamber, she wished she could have witnessed Axelman's agony. Only what they had learned from his death, and what they still had planned, tempered her frustration. He was beyond their justice now. After all, only God could punish a dead man.

But there would be others, she consoled herself. There would be many others.

Chapter 8.

The Cold Room, ViroVector Solutions, Palo Alto. Thursday, October 30, 9:11 A.M.

If TITANIA could have expressed an emotion, it would undoubtedly have been satisfaction as it updated the status on both Project Conscience and Project Crime Zero.

TITANIA was housed in the Cold Room, a sterile room at the heart of the ViroVector dome in Palo Alto. Embodied in a twelve-foot steel and glass cube, it was protected in an air-cooled jacket of white Kevlar. Air ducts blowing sterilized eight-degree centigrade air emitted a slow rhythmic sound as if TITANIA were breathing. Any service engineer entering this domain had to pass through an antistatic air shower to remove dust, before donning white overalls, overshoes, hair net, and face mask.

The supercomputer was born of the genetics age, when the need to sequence the three-thousand-million-letter sentence of the human genome had spurred computer programmers and hardware designers on to greater heights. The breakthrough came with the invention of the Genescope by the Genius Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, just months before the last millennium ended. That revolutionary gene sequencer eschewed the use of electronic logic gates in its processor, using the primitive photo-responsive protein bacteriorhodopsin instead. This instantly multiplied processing speeds a thousandfold within an industry that until then had prided itself on doubling speeds every year. Of the ensuing new generation of "living" biosupercomputers, TITANIA was one of the most powerful.

TITANIA controlled a myriad of projects within ViroVector. Its programs included payroll, inventory control, smart building security and maintenance, the ordering of raw materials, production planning, and distribution. It also controlled the data flow of the company's ten Genescope gene sequencers. In its database were the DNA records of every ViroVector employee or associate plus the gene sequences of every known virus in existence and every genetically engineered viral vector ever worked on or produced by the company.

Both Conscience and Crime Zero were controlled by a program located in its Project Management suite of applications. These applications controlled the schedules and status reports on every project managed by the company. They were updated automatically with suggestions submitted to the human managers based on TITANIA's constant roaming of the information superhighway. Although physically based at ViroVector, TITANIA could be omnipresent in cyberspace. It drove a variety of search engines to probe and, if necessary, steal relevant data, and its mission was to learn everything and convert what it learned into usable information. It used this omniscience to maximize the success of each project's outcome, whether launching a new product, coping with imminent new legislation, or choosing a new menu for the staff cafeteria.

Currently a small section of its powerful neural net was focusing on the Crime Zero program, the most complex and secure system under its control.

First it noted the related Project Conscience inputs and data, although that project was almost complete. Conscience had always had two objectives as far as TITANIA was concerned. One was to act as a learning process to develop viral vectors for the infinitely more complex Crime Zero. The other was to help Pamela Weiss win the presidency--again vital for Crime Zero. Checking back over time, TITANIA noted the key dates for Project Conscience.

.

SUMMARY: 0900 hr

10/30/2008

.

V.I Criminal efficacy trial 02/10/2001

[non-FDA approved] to present

V. 9 Vector optimization complete 10/12/2004

V.9 FDA human safety trials commence 01/06/2005

V.9 FDA safety approval 10/29/2008

Democratic Crime Policy Statement 10/31/2008

Pamela Weiss elected Democratic president 11/04/2008

Democratic Crime Policy Statement 10/31/2008

Pamela Weiss elected Democratic president 11/04/2008

.

There was nothing more TITAN [A could do. The Version 9 FDA approval lag had been suboptimal, but with the forthcoming policy Statement this Friday and next Tuesday's election, Project Conscience bad almost fulfilled it's purpose. It could do no more to effect the outcome, merely record when it would happen. Next TITAN IA checked Crime Zero:

.

PROJECT CRIME ZERO: MANAGEMENT

SUMMARY: 0900 hr.

10/30/2008

Phase I: Telomere Trials

San Quentin patient trial commenced 09/02/2008

Final patient # SQ6 term mated 10/29/2008

Cartamena patient trial commenced 02/11/2005

Patient # C78 confirmed as post-pubesccnt10/30/2008

Phase 2: Controlled Trial

BioShield Batch # VV233456H dispatched 10/10/2008

Microchip confirmation of batch activation 10/23/2008

The Phase 1 telomere trials had been a complete success with the suicide of the sixth and final San Quentin patient.

.

Less than twenty-four hours ago and the Cartamena incident proving to be an isolated false alarm. But the escalating crisis in Iraq had necessitated pulling forward the Phase 2 controlled trial before Phase 3 could confidently be launched. Interrogating its search engines, TITANIA scoured the Internet for feedback on what might be happening in Iraq. Knowing what it was looking for made its quest efficient.

One definition of intelligence is the ability to see patterns in apparently random data. If this was true, then TITANIA was a genius. Logging into hospital databases in Baghdad and Iraqi military systems, while at the same time piecing together apparently unrelated snippets of information from Reuters, CNN, the BBC, and the other syndicated news agencies on the World Wide Web, TITANIA continuously searched for the pattern to emerge. But it was still too early. The reports TITANIA was looking for would surface only in the next few days. Still, for the moment Phase 2 appeared to be active and on schedule.

Only now did TITANIA look at Phase 3, the most complex stage of all. This was much harder to predict.

Given that Phase 3 hadn't yet begun and Phase 2 was on track, the computer could only check the delivery and replacement schedules of the modified bacteriophage air purifiers at Heathrow Airport. Once it had confirmed these were in place, it kept its original forecast unchanged, putting the final outcome of Crime Zero still some three years away. That is, if nothing altered in the meantime.

As TITANIA compiled its Project Conscience and Project Crime Zero status reports for the two humans with Gold level clearance, the biocomputer's air-cooling ducts seemed to exhale more loudly for an instant. As if breathing a sigh of satisfaction.

Chapter 9.

San Quentin Penitentiary. Thursday, October 30, 9:25 A.M.

Life was looking less than satisfactory for Luke Decker as he drove toward San Quentin for the second time in two days, with Axelman's letter on his mind.

This morning he had woken late in his old bedroom at Matty's house. Cracking open his eyes the way he used to as a kid, he'd watched the morning light reach impossibly long fingers beneath the curtains and stretch across the polished wooden floor toward his bed. For a brief moment he had felt like a child again. Only when he rolled over did the dull throb in his head remind him that he was a stupid adult who had drunk one too many bottles of Budweiser with Hank Butcher last night.

Butcher wrote mainly for magazines like Vanity Fair and had a gift for tapping into the zeitgeist. He had made a name for his witty pieces commenting on the main issues and personalities of the day. As always he'd been excellent company, knowing all the trivial gossip that rarely touched Decker's life. He had managed to push thoughts of Axelman from his mind.