Death Match (28 page)

“Go on.”

“Hera didn’t like what Tiresias had to say. So she blinded him.”

“Typical.”

“Zeus felt bad, so he gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy.”

“Big of him. But there’s something you left out.”

“What’s that?”

“What Tiresias said to make Hera so mad.”

“He said women enjoy sex more than men.”

“Really?”

“Really. Nine times more.”

We’ll get back to that later
, Lash thought to himself. He lifted his glass. “By all means, let’s drink a toast. But shouldn’t we be drinking to hermaphrodites?”

Diana considered this. “Right you are. To hermaphrodites, then.” And she raised her glass to his.

Lash took a deep sip, found it excellent. He decided he was glad Diana didn’t have the looks of Claudette Colbert. If she had, he’d have been intimidated. “Where did you find this particular nugget of information?” he asked.

“Actually, I knew it already.”

“Let me guess. You read
Bulfinch’s Mythology
on your trip across France.”

“Nice try, but wrong. You could say it’s part of my job.”

“Really? And what job is that?”

“I teach English literature at Columbia.”

Lash nodded, impressed. “Great school.”

“I’m still just an instructor, but it’s a position with a tenure track.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“The Romantics, I guess. Lyric poetry.”

Lash felt a strange tremor, as if something deep inside had just slid home. He’d enjoyed Romantic poetry in college, until psychology and the demands of graduate school pushed it to one side. “That’s interesting. As it happens, I’ve been reading Bash–o recently. Not exactly Romantic, of course.”

“In his own way, very much so. The greatest haiku poet of Japan.”

“I don’t know about that. But his poems have stuck in my mind.”

“Haiku’s like that. It’s nefarious. It seems so simple. But then it sneaks up on you from a hundred different directions.”

Lash thought of Lewis Thorpe. He took another sip of wine, then quoted:

Speechless before
these budding green spring leaves
in blazing sunlight

As he spoke, Diana’s smile faded and the look on her face grew intent. “Again, please,” she said quietly.

Lash obliged. When he finished, a silence fell over the table. But it was not an awkward silence. They merely sat, enjoying a moment of contemplation. Lash glanced at the surrounding tables, at the rich evening colors that lay over the park beyond. Without his realizing it, the nervousness he’d felt entering the restaurant had faded away.

“It’s beautiful,” Diana said at last. “I’ve had moments like that.” She paused a moment. “It reminds me of another haiku, written by Kobayashi Issa more than a century later.” And she quoted in turn:

    Insects on a bough

floating downriver,

    still singing.

Their waiter reappeared. “Have you decided what you’d like this evening?”

“We haven’t even cracked the menu,” Lash said.

“Very good.” The man bowed again and walked away.

Lash turned back to Diana. “The thing is, beautiful as they are, I don’t really understand them.”

“No?”

“Oh, I guess I do on a superficial level. But they’re like riddles, with some deeper meaning that escapes me.”

“That’s the problem right there. I hear it all the time from my students.”

“Enlighten me.”

“You’re thinking of them like epigrams. But haiku aren’t little puzzles that need to be solved. To my mind, they’re just the opposite. They hint at things; they leave a lot to the imagination; they imply more than they say. Don’t search for an answer. Think, instead, of opening doors.”

“Opening doors,” Lash echoed.

“You mentioned Bash–o. Did you know he wrote the most famous haiku of all? ‘One Hundred Frogs.’ It consists of only seventeen sounds—all traditional haiku does. But guess what? It’s been translated into English more than
fifty different ways
. Each translation utterly different from the rest.”

Lash shook his head. “Amazing.”

Diana’s smile returned. “That’s what I mean about opening doors.”

There was another, briefer silence as an under-waiter crept up and refilled Lash’s glass. “You know, it’s funny,” Lash said as the man left.

“What’s funny?”

“Here we’ve been talking about French wine and Greek mythology and Japanese poetry, and you still haven’t asked what I do.”

“I know I haven’t.”

Once again, he was surprised by her directness. “Well, isn’t that usually the first topic that comes up? On first dates, I mean.”

Diana leaned forward. “Exactly. And that’s what makes this so special.”

Lash hesitated, considering. Then, suddenly, he understood. There was
no need
to ask the usual questions. Eden had taken care of all that. The tiresome introductory baggage, the blind date checks-and-balances, weren’t important here. Instead, a journey of discovery lay ahead.

This hadn’t occurred to him before. It was a tremendously liberating thought.

The waiter returned, noticed the menus remained untouched, bowed yet again, and turned away.

“Poor guy,” Diana said. “He’s hoping for a second seating.”

“You know what?” Lash replied. “I think this table’s booked for the rest of the evening.”

Smiling, Diana raised her empty hand in imitation of a toast. “In that case, here’s to the rest of the evening.”

Lash nodded. Then he did something unexpected, even to himself: he took Diana’s fingers in his own and raised them gently to his lips. Over the curve of her knuckles, he saw her eyes widen slightly; her smile deepen.

As he released her hand, he became aware of the faintest of scents. It wasn’t soap or perfume, but something of Diana herself: a hint of cinnamon, of copper, of something else that resisted identification. It was subtly intoxicating. Lash thought back to what Mauchly had said in Eden’s genetics lab: about mice and their unusual method for sniffing out the most radically different gene pool for potential mates. Abruptly, he laughed aloud.

Diana said nothing, merely raising her eyebrows in question.

In response, Lash lifted his own hand, filled this time with his wine glass. “And here’s to a universe of diversity,” he said.

THIRTY-FOUR

S
unday dawned raw and cold, and as the sun rose in the sky it seemed to chill rather than warm the land. By afternoon, the whitecaps of Long Island Sound had a leaden cast to them, and the unsettled waters looked black: harbingers of approaching winter.

Lash sat before the computer in his home office, nursing a cup of herbal tea. Miraculously—given the charged atmosphere of his dinner and the late hour at which he parted from Diana—he’d managed a good six hours of sleep and had risen without overwhelmingly weariness. What he did feel was restlessness: barred from removing any data from Eden, and without access to files or records, he had no way to advance his investigation. Yet instinct told him he was close, perhaps very close, to a revelation. And so he’d paced the house, ruminating, until at last in frustration he turned to the Internet and anything he could find about the company.

There was the usual Web ephemera: a scammer that claimed to have unlocked the secrets of Eden and offered to share them on a $19.95 video; conspiracy-theory sites that spoke darkly of evil alliances the company had made with intelligence agencies. But among all the dross there were also occasional bits of gold. Lash sent half a dozen articles at random to his printer, then carried the printouts to the living room sofa.

Feet propped on the table, the mournful cry of gulls sounding in the distance, he leafed slowly through them. There was an exceedingly complex white paper on artificial personality and swarm intelligence, written by Silver almost a decade earlier and no doubt released on the Internet without permission. A financial website provided a sober-sided analysis of the Eden business model, or at least the portion of it that was public knowledge, and a brief history of how it had been bankrolled by pharmaceutical giant PharmGen before being spun off on its own. And from another site came a flattering corporate biography of Richard Silver, who had risen from obscurity to become a world-class entrepreneur. Lash read this more carefully than the first two, marveling at the way Silver had developed his dream so faithfully and resolutely; how he hadn’t let the vaguely reported misfortunes of early youth stand in his way. He was that rarest of people, the genius who seemed to know, from a very young age, the gift he’d been born to give the world.

There were other articles, too, not quite so flattering: an obnoxious tabloid article that promised to expose the “shocking, bizarre” details of the “crackpot genius” Silver. The opening paragraph read:
Question: What do you do if you can’t find a girlfriend? Answer: You program one
. But the article itself had nothing to say, and Lash put it aside, stood up, and walked to the window.

It was true there were few other tasks Silver could have set Liza to that would have earned him more money, or so ensured the future health of his research. Yet on one level it was a little odd. Here was a man—by all accounts a shy, retiring man—who had made his fortune with that most social of games, the game of love. It seemed a shame, a bitter irony, that game could not extend to Silver as well.

As he stared out the window, the haiku Diana Mirren quoted the night before came back to him with sudden clarity.

    Insects on a bough

floating downriver,

    still singing.

He smiled as he recalled their dinner. By the time they’d finally gotten around to ordering, the conversation had grown as easy and comfortable as any he could remember. His habitual distance crumbled without even a protest. She began to finish his sentences, and he hers, as if they’d known each other since childhood. And yet it was a strange kind of familiarity, filled with countless little surprises. It was close to one when they parted on Central Park West. They had exchanged numbers before going their separate ways. There had been no agreement to meet again; but then, there’d been no need of one. Lash knew he’d be seeing her again, and soon. In fact, he was half tempted to call now and offer to cook dinner.

What had she said? Haiku were the opposite of puzzles. Don’t search for answers. Think of opening doors.

Opening doors
. So how to interpret the one she quoted?

It had only eight words. In his mind, Lash saw a green willow branch, twisting in a lazy current, heading toward a distant waterfall.
Still
singing. Were the insects still singing out of ignorance of what lay ahead—or
because
of it?

The Wilners and the Thorpes were like the insects of the poem, singing on that floating branch. Blissfully, unrelievedly happy . . . right up until that last unfathomable moment.

The silence was shattered by the ring of a telephone.

Lash pushed himself to his feet and headed for the kitchen. Perhaps it was Diana; he’d have to dig up his recipe for salmon
en croute
.

He lifted the phone. “Lash here.”

“Chris?” came the voice. “It’s John.”

“John?”

“John Coven.”

Lash recognized the voice of the FBI agent who’d run the surveillance on Handerling. His heart sank. No doubt Coven was following up on his personal interest in Eden. Maybe he thought Lash could get him a discount or something.

“How are you, John?” he said.

“I’m okay, I’m fine. But listen, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Go ahead.”

“Wyre’s made parole.”

Lash felt himself go numb. “Say again?”

“Edmund Wyre’s made parole. Happened late Friday afternoon.”

Lash swallowed. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”

“Nobody has. I just found out ten minutes ago. Saw it on the wire.”

“Not possible. The guy killed six people.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There must be some kind of mistake.”

“No mistake. He got the full board vote and the written report from DCJ.”

“Any release conditions?”

“The usual, under the circumstances. Special field supervision. Which means precisely diddley-squat with a guy like Wyre.”

Lash felt a sharp pain in his right hand, realized he was squeezing the phone. “What’s the time frame? Weeks? Months?”

“Not even. Apparently they’re all in a lather, setting Wyre up as some poster boy for rehabilitation. Screening’s completed. They’re already performing a residence investigation and preparing the release certificate. He’ll be on the streets in a day or two.”

“Jesus.” Lash fell silent, struggling with disbelief.

“Christopher?”

Lash did not reply.

“Chris? You still with me?”

“Yes,” Lash said distantly.

“Listen. Still got your service piece?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame. Because no matter what that parole board thinks, you and I both know this fucker wants to finish what he started. If I was you, I’d arm myself. And keep in mind what they taught us back at the Academy. You don’t shoot to kill. You shoot to live.”

Again, Lash did not respond.

“You need anything, let me know. Meanwhile, watch your six.”

And the line went dead.

THIRTY-FIVE

H
e was driving home. That’s how it began: driving home from Poughkeepsie yet again, in brilliant sunlight on a Friday afternoon. The last several times he’d made the sixty-mile journey back to Westport, he’d been so tired he feared falling asleep at the wheel. This afternoon, however, he was wide awake.

I’ve got what I need now,
the murderer had written in blood on the picture window
. Thank you.

He reached down for the car phone, dialed.

“Lash residence,” came the voice of Karl Broden, his wife’s brother.

“Karl.”

“Hi, Chris. Where are you?”