Death Dream (44 page)

"How do I get up to it?" she asked, craning her neck as she stood near the base of the huge old tree.

"Use the elevator," said Georgie.

And Angela saw that amidst the vines hanging from the tree's upper branches there was a wooden platform with a railing all around it. She heard the powerful trumpeting of an elephant, and sure enough a big gray elephant stepped out of the jungle foliage as daintily as a ballerina, spread its huge ears and lifted its trunk in greeting.

Laughing, Angela skipped onto the elevator platform and gripped its railing. The elephant grasped a particular liana in its trunk and started backing away. The platform rose swiftly into the air and in no time at all Angela was stepping onto the front porch of her very own tree house.

"What about you?" she called down to Georgie. "Won't you come up?"

"I'm not allowed to," the jaguar called back. "Don't worry, I'll be down here waiting for you. You won't be lonely up there, I promise you."

"Hello, Angela darling."

She whirled and saw a handsome young prince standing in the doorway smiling at her. He was tall and slim and wore a soft white shirt and skin-tight pants with a wide leather belt, highly polished leather boots and a long velvet cape so deeply violet that it seemed to glow. He looked a little like the young patriot she had met at Lexington. Yet when he smiled he almost looked like her father did when he wasn't too busy to pay attention to her, gentle and strong and loving. His eyes were like Daddy's too, she thought: deep, warm brown.

Angela felt her heart beating fast.

"I've been waiting for you for a long time," the prince said. But his voice was not a young man's voice, she realized. It was a voice she had heard before: Uncle Kyle's.

"Are you Uncle Kyle?" she asked, her own voice trembling.

"Is that who you want me to be?"

"No!"

"I'm whoever you want, Angela darling. I'm your dream prince. The only reason I'm here is to make you happy."

Angela realized she felt a little afraid of all this. "Could—could you change your voice?" she asked.

The prince looked very sad. "Is that what you truly want, Angela?"

"Yes. Please."

For a long moment the prince simply stood there before her, smiling sadly. Then at last he spoke again. "All right. This is your world, Angela, and whatever you ask for in it you shall have." His voice was young now, rich and soft and matching his appearance perfectly.

"Oh, thank you," said Angela, feeling truly grateful. Yet she still had the feeling that somewhere in this delicate green world she was being watched by eyes as coldly glittering as the alligator's, by someone whose teeth were waiting to sink into her flesh.

Muncrief yanked the helmet off his head and mopped his face with a handful of tissues.
You came on too strong, you damned idiot!
he raged at himself.
You scared her again.

He tugged off the data groves, turned off the electronics box, stored everything back where it belonged, shut the cabinet and drawer, locked them both and then collapsed into a tearful blubbering mess, arms on his desktop, head in his arms, sobbing softly to himself.

She doesn't love me. She's afraid of me. All I've done for her and she doesn't care about me at all. The little bitch. But she will
, he vowed to himself.
She will love me. I'll make her love me.

CHAPTER 33

Susan was sitting in the computer center with Philip on her lap. The desktop machine at her side was still searching for the sports medicine reports that Dan had asked for. The search had slowed down considerably. She had gone through NREN and had the computer double check the Library of Congress files. Now the program was seeking out smaller data banks, oddball medical journals and popular magazine articles. Even newspaper items.

There's enough material here to keep Dan reading for a year
, Susan thought as she tickled her baby's tummy. Philip giggled and hiccupped happily.
He'll have to set up a program to scan the whole file by key words, once he figures out which key words he's really interested in.

Dan stuck his head through the open doorway.

"Working hard, I see."

She gave him a mock frown. "The computer's working. I'm keeping an eye on it. And doing some mothering at the same time."

He made a tight grin. "Angie's in the VR booth up the hall. Give me a call when she's finished the game she's playing."

"How will I know—"

Dan pointed to one of the minis, a few desks up the line from where Susan was sitting. "That's the machine running the program. when it beeps and its lights go out, the program's over."

She nodded.

"Pretty easy, having the computer do all the work for you," he teased.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"About how to track down all the files Jace has accessed. How far back do you want me to go?"

"To the year one."

"AD or BC?"

With a shrug, "Take your pick. I don't want to make it too hard on you."

"The hell you don't."

Dan's grin turned sheepish. "Okay, okay. I've got to get back to my own work. Give me a call when Angie's program is over."

"In your office?"

"Or down at Jace's lab."

He left and Susan could hear his footsteps echoing down the hallway. But as she sat in the curved little typist's chair holding her baby in her arms, Susan wondered how she could possibly track down Jace's requests for data from all the information services in the country.

Then one of the minis beeped. The noise made her look up. No, it wasn't the machine Angie was using for her VR game; that one was still humming softly to itself. But the one next to it had beeped to life.

Curious, Susan carried Philip on one hip as she walked to the blinking, chugging computer.

She bent over the keyboard of Angie's machine and tapped out a query in yellow letters against the display screen's pale blue background: PGM RNG?

GRN MAN 1.0, answered the display screen. The "Green Mansions" game, version 1.0.

Okay. Susan shifted Phil's weight slightly and turned to the next machine.

PGM RNG?

ACCESS RESTRICTED. ENTER ACCESS CODE.

She felt her teeth clenching. Susan walked back to the playpen and deposited Philip in it. He started to squawk but she handed him a squeeze toy that honked like a duck. That seemed to satisfy him for the moment. Rushing back to Angie's machine, she sat in its chair and typed: LIST ALL PGMS RNG

GRN MAN 1.0

"So you won't talk, eh?" Susan muttered. Computers are like very obedient children, she knew. They will do exactly what you tell them to. But not a jot more than you tell them.

LIST ALL GRN MAN PGMS

The list was very short: GRN MAN 1.0

GRN MAN 1.5

There's another version of the game Angela is playing! Susan felt neither triumph nor vindication; only the sudden shock of realization that all her fears were true.

She typed, CD\GRN MAN 1.5

ACCESS RESTRICTED. ENTER ACCESS CODE

She typed, GRN MAN 1.5 IN USE? Y/N

Y

Susan felt a constriction in her chest. The other version of "Green Mansions" was in use. Angie was playing with 1.0 but somebody else was using 1.5. Breathing heavily, she typed, LIST ALL NEPTUNES KINGDOM PGMS

NOT FOUND

Damn! The program's listed under some abbreviation, she realized. It took her four tries before she hit it:

LIST ALL NPT KGM PGMS

NPT KGM 1.0

NPT KGM 1.5

There's another version of the game! Despite what Vickie said, there is another version of the "Neptune's Kingdom" game, god damn it! There must be alternate version of all the games. And somebody's using the second version of "Green Mansions" right now, while Angie's playing the regular version. That's how Angie keeps seeing people she knows in the games; somebody's injecting himself into her games!

She scooped up Philip again and went racing down the hallway toward the VR booth. peering through the darkened glass of its door, she saw Angela sitting back in the chair, visor over her face. Susan could just make out her daughter's lips below the edge of the mirror, smiling faintly. Her hands twitched now and then inside the data gloves.

Susan turned and made her way toward Victoria Bessel's office like an old-west sheriff heading toward a shootout at high noon.
The lying bitch told me there were no other versions of the school games.

But Vickie's office was empty, its door wide open, its computer cold and quiet.

Then who? Susan asked herself. Who else is here beside Dan and Jace?

She went out to the lobby and saw Muncrief's green convertible in the parking lot. And a black BMW sedan.

Kyle? Could it be Kyle?

Philip was squirming in her arms. He wanted to get down m the floor and be free of his mother.

"Not yet, baby," she whispered, heading up the corridor, looking for Muncrief's office.

There it was. The nameplate on the door said KYLE MUNCRIEF, nothing more. It was closed. Susan tried the doorknob. Locked. She tapped at the door. No reply. She knocked harder. No answer.

He's in there, she knew.
He's in there injecting himself into my daughter's game!

Wait, she said to herself. Wait. Calm down. Don't go off half-cocked. Who else is in the building? Closing her eyes briefly, she recalled that when Dan drove into the parking lot out back earlier in the morning the only other car had belonged to the guard, Joe Rucker. And Jace's bicycle had been there.

Again Susan hurried down the hallway, Philip starting to squall unhappily. She checked Angela once more. Still looking relaxed, no apparent trouble. Then she went back toward Jace's lab in the rear of the building. On a hunch she went to the loading dock and checked the back lot: still nothing but Dan's dark blue Honda and the guard's battered Thunderbird. There was a stranger in the lab with Jace when she popped in. Jace looked surprised to see her.

"Hi!" Susan said, her voice too loud with tension. "I thought Dan might be back here."

Jace was sitting at a desktop, looking slightly annoyed at her interruption. The other man, square-jawed and clean-cut as a movie version of an FBI agent, was watching football on television.

"He's in his office," Jace said, not bothering to introduce the man with him. Nor did the man do more than flick a glance at Susan before returning his attention to the TV screen. She assumed he was the man from Washington that Dan had spoken of.

"Oh. Sure. I should have looked there first."

Philip was putting up a real struggle as she hurried back up the hallway, yowling loudly enough to echo off the bare painted walls.

Dan was halfway around his desk when she burst into his office.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "I could hear Phil halfway across the building."

Susan bent down and let the baby crawl across the office's thin carpeting. His yowling stopped immediately once he had the freedom to explore.

"Kyle's messing into Angie's game," Susan blurted.

"What?"

Breathlessly, she said, "He's got alternate versions of the school games. 'Green Mansions,' and 'Neptune's Kingdom,' at least. I didn't have time to check them all out. Kyle's in his office with his door locked. Didn't answer when I knocked. He's putting himself in Angie's game, Dan!"

"Angie's still in there?"

"She's all right. I looked in on her. Twice."

"Then what—"

"It's Kyle," Susan insisted. "He's been interfering in the games Angie plays. Right from the start!"

Dan sagged back on the edge of his desk. "But that's not possible."

"The hell it's not!" Susan snapped. "There are alternate versions of the games, Dan. I found them in the files."

"That doesn't mean he's injecting himself into the games Angie plays, for God's sake!"

"He's running the alternate version now!" Susan fairly screamed. "While Angie's in the booth!"

"Why would anybody. . ." Dan's voice trailed off. He looked at his wife. Her blue eyes were fiery but she wasn't hysterical. Never had been, no matter how mad she got. Always had a level head, even when things were at their worst.

"Let's get Angie out of that game," he said, heading for the door.

Susan scooped up the baby and headed after him, saying, "Let's break in on Kyle first and catch him red-handed."

They raced to Muncrief's office, Dan holding Philip in one arm as he followed Susan's frenzied dash up the hallway. Muncrief's door was still closed and locked. With his free hand Dan knocked on the door. No response. He glanced at Susan, then pounded on it harder. Almost immediately Muncrief opened it, looking half-startled, half-angry. Maybe there was guilt in his expression, too, Dan could not tell.

"What are you trying to do," Muncrief demanded, "break my blasted door down?"

Dan eyed the frowning man, wondering,
How do you accuse the boss of messing with your daughter, electronically? While holding a squirming ten-month-old baby in your arms?
Muncrief looked flustered, all right, but there was no helmet, no data gloves, nothing of a VR system in sight. Muncrief's shirt was rumpled a little and his hair slightly out of place but otherwise he seemed perfectly normal.

"Someone's interfering with Angela's VR game," Susan snapped, from behind Dan's shoulder.

"What?"

"There are alternate versions of the school games," Susan insisted, pushing past Dan, past Muncrief himself and into his office.

"What on earth do you mean?"

"Alternate versions of the games the children play at school," Susan said impatiently her eyes scanning the office like a detective looking for evidence. "Versions that allow somebody to get into the game with the child and interact with her."

Muncrief followed her into his own office, his face white as if in shock. Dan followed him in and let Philip down on the thickly carpeted floor. Phil immediately crawled toward the window, where the blinds had been drawn against the afternoon sun.

"That's ridiculous, Susan," Muncrief was saying. He turned to Dan. "Tell her how absolutely idiotic that is, Dan."

"She saw the alternate versions listed in the files," Dan said.