Death Match (47 page)

“Christopher . . .”

Lash opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment, in the black night, he thought himself back in his own bed. He sat up, breathing slowly, letting the rhythmic rise and fall of the nearby surf wash away the tattered pieces of his dream.

But then the exotic midnight scent of hyacinth blossoms, mingled with eucalyptus, drifted through the open window, and he remembered where he was.

He slowly rose from the bed, drew aside the gauzy curtain. Beyond, the jungle canopy ran down to the tropic sea, a dark-emerald blanket surrounded by liquid topaz. Thin clouds drifted across a swollen moon.
Sometimes
, he reminded himself,
dreams are just dreams, after all.

He returned to bed, gathered up the sheets. For a few minutes he lay awake, gazing at the bamboo ceiling and listening to the surf, his thoughts now in the past and half a world away. Then he turned over, shut his eyes once more, and passed into dreamless slumber.

SIXTY-FOUR

A
lthough it was only four o’clock, an early winter twilight had already settled over Manhattan. Taxis jockeyed for position in the rain-washed streets; pedestrians milled about on the busy pavements, heads bent against the elements, umbrellas thrust forward, like jousting knights.

Christopher Lash stood among a throng of people at the corner of Madison and Fifty-sixth, waiting for the light to change.
Rain
, he thought.
Christmas in New York isn’t complete without it
.

He hopped from foot to foot in the chill, trying to keep the large bags he was carrying dry beneath the canopy of his umbrella. The light changed; the crowd streamed slowly forward; and now at last he allowed himself to peer upward, toward the skyline.

At first glance, the building seemed no different. The wall of obsidian rose, velvet beneath the overcast sky, enticing the eye toward the setback where the outer tower stopped and the inner continued. It was only then—as his eye crested the inner tower—that the change became clear. Before, the smooth rise of the inner tower had been interrupted by a band of decorative grillwork before continuing a few additional stories. Now those top floors, the ribbonlike line of grillwork, were missing, leaving empty sky in their place. The scorched remains—the ruined tangle of metal Lash had seen in newspaper photographs—had been whisked away with remarkable speed. Now it was gone, all gone as if it had never been there in the first place. And as he looked down again and let himself be borne ahead with the crowd, Lash ached for what had gone with it.

The large plaza before the entrance was very quiet. There were no tourists snapping pictures of family members beneath the stylized logo; no would-be clients loitering around the oversize fountain and its figure of Tiresias the seer. The lobby beyond was equally quiet; it seemed the fall of Lash’s shoes was the only sound echoing off the pink marble. The wall of flat-panel displays was dark and silent. The lines of applicants were gone, replaced by small knots of maintenance workers and engineers in lab coats, poring over diagrams. The only thing that had not changed was the security: Lash’s bags of gift-wrapped presents were subjected to two separate scans before he was cleared to ascend the elevator.

When the doors opened on the thirty-second floor, Mauchly was waiting. He shook Lash’s hand, wordlessly led the way to his office. Moving at his characteristic studied pace, he motioned Lash to take the same seat he’d occupied at their initial meeting. In fact, just about everything reminded Lash of that first day in early autumn. Mauchly was wearing a similar brown suit, generic yet extremely well tailored, and his dark eyes held Lash’s with the same Buddha-like inscrutability. Sitting here, it was almost as if—despite the changes he’d just witnessed, despite the whole appalling tragedy—nothing about this office, or its inhabitant, had or ever could change.

“Dr. Lash,” Mauchly said. “Nice to see you.”

Lash nodded.

“I trust you found the Seychelles pleasant this time of year?”

“Pleasant is an understatement.”

“The accommodations were to your liking?”

“Eden clearly spared no expense.”

“And the service?”

“A new grass skirt in my closet every morning.”

“I hope that was some compensation for having to be away so long. Even with our, ah, connections, it took a little longer than we expected to get your past history back to normal.”

“Must have been difficult, without Liza’s help.”

Mauchly gave him a wintry smile. “Dr. Lash, you have no idea.”

“And Edmund Wyre?”

“Back behind bars, once the discrepancies in his records were illuminated.” Mauchly passed a few sheets across the desk.

“What’s this?”

“Our certification of your credit history; reinstatement papers for your suspended loans; and official notification of errors made and corrected to your medical, employment, and educational records.”

Lash flipped through the documents. “What’s this last one?”

“An order of executive clemency, to be served retroactively.”

“A get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, whistling.

“Something like that. Be sure not to lose it—I don’t believe we missed anything, but there’s always a chance. Now, if you’ll just sign this.” And Mauchly pushed another sheet across the desk.

“Not another nondisclosure form.”

Another wintry smile. “No. This is a legal instrument in which you witness that your work for Eden is now complete.”

Lash grimaced. Time and again—as he’d sat on the porch of his little cottage on Desroches Island, reading haiku and staring out over the avocado plantations—he’d replayed the final scene in his head, wondering if there was something he could have done differently, something he should have seen coming—something,
anything
, that could have prevented what happened to Richard Silver and his doomed creation.

Sitting in this room, his work felt anything but complete.

He dug in his pocket, removed a pen.

“It also indemnifies us against any action you might take against Eden or its assignees in the future.”

Lash paused. “What?”

“Dr. Lash. Your credit, medical, employment, and academic histories were severely compromised. You were given a fraudulent criminal record. You were falsely apprehended, fired upon. You were forced to put your professional practice on hold and leave the country while the damage was repaired.”

“I told you. The Seychelles are lovely this time of year.”

“And I fear there have been other, more personal, repercussions we felt beyond our scope to address.”

“You mean Diana Mirren.”

“After what we’d done to ensure her safety, after what she’d been told, I didn’t see any way we could approach her again. Not without compromising Eden.”

“I see.”

Mauchly stirred in his chair. “We deeply regret these injuries, that perhaps most of all. Hence, this.” And he handed Lash an envelope.

Lash turned it over. “What’s inside?”

“A check for $100,000.”

“
Another
hundred thousand?”

Mauchly spread his hands.

Lash dropped the check on the table. “Keep the money. I’ll sign your form, don’t worry.” He scribbled his name across the signature line, placed it on top of the envelope. “In return, maybe you can answer three questions for me.”

Mauchly raised his eyebrows.

“All that sitting on the beach, you know. I had a lot of time to think.”

“I’ll answer what I can.”

“What happened to the third couple? The Connellys?”

“Our medical people managed a covert interdiction at Niagara Falls the day after . . . the following day. Lynn Connelly was already presenting signs of toxic drug interactions. We isolated her with a story about precautionary quarantine; stabilized her; released her. We’ve been monitoring her condition since. She seems fine.”

“And the other supercouples?”

“Liza had taken only preliminary steps toward the fourth, which we were able to roll back successfully. All data from our passive and active surveillance has been positive.”

Lash nodded.

“And your third question?”

“What comes next? For Eden Incorporated, I mean.”

“You mean, without Liza.”

“Without Liza. And Richard Silver.”

Mauchly looked at Lash. For the briefest of moments the mask of inscrutability dropped, and Lash read desolation in his expression. Then the mask returned.

“I wouldn’t write us off just yet, Dr. Lash,” Mauchly replied. “Richard Silver may be dead. And Liza may be gone. But we still have what they made possible: a way of bringing people together. Perfectly. It’s going to take us longer to do that now. Probably a lot longer. And I’d be lying if I said it’s going to be easy. But I’m betting most people will wait a little for complete happiness.”

And he stood up and offered his hand.

When Lash emerged from the building, the rain had stopped. He stood in the plaza for a moment, rolling his umbrella and glancing around. Then he struck off down Madison Avenue. At Fifty-fourth, he turned left.

The Rio was full of holiday diners, its gilt walls festooned with red bunting and garlands of green plastic fir. It took Lash a moment to locate the table. Then he made his way down the aisle and slid into the narrow banquette. Across the table, Tara put down her coffee cup and smiled hesitantly in greeting.

It was the first time he’d seen her since they’d shared an ambulance to St. Clare’s Hospital. The sight of her face—with its high cheekbones and earnest hazel eyes—brought back an almost overpowering flood of images and memories. She looked down quickly, and Lash knew immediately it must be the same for her.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, pulling the packages onto the seat beside him.

“Did Mauchly prolong the debriefing? It would be just like him.”

“Nope. My fault.” And Lash indicated the bags of gifts.

“Gotcha.” Tara stirred her tea while Lash asked a passing waitress to bring him a cup of coffee.

“You keeping busy?” Lash asked.

“Terribly.”

“What’s it been like for you? I mean, with . . .” Lash faltered. “With everything.”

“Almost unreal. I mean, nobody ever really knew Silver, hardly anybody ever met him in person.” She made a wry face. “People were shocked at the ‘accident,’ they’re terribly upset about his death. But everybody’s so busy scrambling to retool the computer infrastructure, run damage control for our existing clients, bring the remaining systems back on line with new hardware, relaunch our service, I sometimes feel I’m the only one who’s really grieving. I know it isn’t true. But that’s how it feels.”

“I think about him, too,” Lash said. “When we first met, I felt a kind of kinship I still can’t explain.”

“You both wanted to help people. Look at your job. Look at the company he founded.”

Lash thought about this for a moment. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone. And I know it sounds strange, but sometimes it’s even harder to believe
Liza’s
gone. I mean, I know the physical plant’s been destroyed. But here’s a program that was conscious—at a machine level, anyway—for years. It’s hard to believe something so powerful, so prescient, could just be erased. Sometimes I wonder if a computer could have a soul.”

“Somebody thinks so. Or else there’s a really sick fuck out there.”

Lash looked at her. “What do you mean?”

Tara hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, there’s no reason not to tell you. We’ve been getting reports of somebody on the ’Net, haunting chat rooms and bulletin boards. He’s using the handle of ‘Liza’ and asking everybody where Richard Silver is.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was. We’re not sure if it’s somebody on the inside, or a competitor, or just a prankster. Whatever the case, it’s a major security issue and Mauchly’s taking it very seriously.”

The waitress returned, and Lash took the cup. “We were a lot alike, he and I.”

“I never thought that. You’re strong. He wasn’t. He was a gentle soul. All he—” But here she stopped.

As she composed herself, a silence stretched between them: the reflective silence of shared memories.

“I should have mentioned before,” Lash said at last. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“I felt kind of strange, actually, calling you out of the blue like that. But when Mauchly said he’d be seeing you, I wanted—” And she again stopped.

“You wanted what?”

“To tell you I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Lash asked incredulously. “For what?”

“For not believing you. Last time we were here.”

“With the rap sheet they showed you? Liza had the kind of reach that could make the Pope look like public enemy number one.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I should have trusted you.”

“You
did
trust me. Later on. When it mattered, you trusted me.”

“I put your life in danger.”

“My life’s been in danger before.”

She shook her head again.
She keeps shaking her head
, Lash thought,
and yet she keeps talking, as if she needs to hear answers, be reassured.

“It’s not just that,” she said. “I ruined everything for you.”

Lash raised his coffee, took a sip. Replaced it in its saucer. “Diana Mirren.”

Tara didn’t answer.

“You know, Mauchly made the same reference just now, in his office. Funny how everybody around here is so interested in my love life.”

“It’s our business,” she said quietly.

“Well, I didn’t say anything to Mauchly. But I don’t mind telling you.” And he lowered his voice. “Four words:
don’t worry about it
.”

When Tara looked perplexed, Lash pointed at the shopping bags.

Her eyes widened. “You mean
you
called Diana?”

“Why not?”

“After what happened? After what Mauchly must have done to keep her away—”

“I’m a pretty convincing talker, remember? Besides, I walked away from that dinner at Tavern on the Green feeling,
knowing
, I wanted this woman in my life. I believed she felt the same about me. That kind of thing isn’t easily broken. Anyway, I had the perfect explanation.”