Greenhouse Summer (38 page)

“But we’re representing the interests of a client we believe your client may be running a scam on, and you’re representing the scammer in question. . . .”

Posner frowned. “Let’s get one thing straight between us, Esterhazy,” he said quite vehemently. “For the duration of this inspection at least, I represent
my syndic
and not any cabal of capitalist bastards who would play Frankenstein games with human brains merely for profit!”

Both Posner’s angry intensity and his frankness had startled Eric, but he believed he had managed to cover his surprise. “Guilty until proven innocent?”

“Come off it, Esterhazy! You know as well as I do that neither Bad Boys nor Mossad would honor a contract with creatures like that. Man to man, either of us would eagerly enough accept a contract to terminate the decision makers, would we not . . . ?”

Posner had grimaced. “In the unlikely event that any individual responsibility could be sorted out of the corporate dung heap,” he had added sourly.

At which point, Monique Calhoun had arrived, they had paid the check, and walked over to the Grand Palais, where Monique, as Bread & Circuses’ VIP services chief, had VIP passed them inside.

And now here they were, at least for the duration with a united purpose—Monique, himself, and Posner; Bread & Circuses, Bad Boys, and Mossad.

And in deadly earnest though that purpose was, Eric could not help amusing himself with the thought that someone should have composed a syndical anthem and a big brass band should be playing it behind them now as they strode together righteously through the massed climatech displays of the Big Blue Machine toward the dark secret that the capitalist miscreants held under guard.

Eric’s first sight of their objective, however, was something of an anticlimax, being a simple enclosure of green canvas screening, the gap in which was presided over by two slightly overweight guards, discreetly armed with ordinary pistols, and wearing the rumpled and ill-fitting gray uniforms of Keystone Kops, a syndic not noted for providing anything more sophisticated than routine physical security.

The guards did not seem to have the thespian talent to fake the blank looks they gave Posner as he approached them, meaning that the chances that they were actually Mossad operatives in drag were minimal.

Instead of speaking, Posner palmed a small photo ID card, and passed it quickly under their noses.

“Right,” grunted one guard. “Horst, the peeper . . .”

Horst went through the gap and emerged a few moments later with a device that looked something like a pair of antique opera glasses on a thick stalk, which Eric recognized as a retina reader.

The other guard, who seemed to be in charge, took it and held it up to Posner’s eyes briefly, regarded a readout on the stalk.

“Right, you’re Avi Posner,” he said. “Orders are you and your party have a maximum of twenty minutes inside, no weapons, no cameras, no recording devices. Right?”

“Right,” Posner mimicked humorlessly, and the guard led them inside the enclosure to a small antechamber, just more canvas screening and two open gateways leading into the main area, one after the other, that resembled standard metal and explosive detection equipment.

“No weapons, cameras, explosives, electronic equipment, medical implants, phones, metallic objects bigger than belt buckles,” the guard
droned mechanically. “If you got ’em, drop ’em. The first gate detects ’em, the second will fry any and all circuitry.”

He glanced at Eric’s wrist, then Monique’s. “Including those watches.” They removed them and laid them on the floor. Posner, who seemed to know this drill, hadn’t been wearing one.

With an “after you” gesture, the guard ushered them one by one through the double security gates and into the main enclosure, following close behind.

The interior was illumined by harsh overhead halogens strung on temporary wiring. There was a computer console with an assortment of standard keyboards, microphones, and speakers, and a single screen; a rig which impressed Eric as not only ordinary-looking, but, considering Ignatz and its multiscreen setup, even cheesy.

There were two ordinary swivel chairs in front of the computer, plus a third seat which reminded Eric of Eduardo’s antique dentist’s chair, or, fitted as it was with a clunky virtuality hood on a flexible stalk, more of an equally antique lounger from an old-fashioned public cyber arcade.

Beyond the computer console was a large rack of sat-link equipment and assorted electronic bric-a-brac. An untidy spaghetti bowl of wiring and cables taped to the floor linked everything to everything.

“This is it?” Monique muttered in a tone of disappointment.

And Eric fully sympathized with her.

He didn’t know quite what he had expected—a naked human brain in a jar of bubbling green goo? towering electrodes sparking away madly? Dr. Frankenstein and Igor?—but this wasn’t it.

This installation didn’t even seem to be up to what he had in
La Reine
. On the other hand, Eric knew that he was hardly an expert.

“Can you explain what this gear is?” he asked the guard.

The guard looked at him as if he had just arrived via transporter beam from the planet Mongo.

Avi Posner, though, was already poring over the equipment. He examined the keyboards, the front panel of the computer console. He stepped behind it, peered through a series of ventilation grilles at the interior, while Eric stood there like a display window mannequin wondering what to do.

Monique Calhoun seemed to be in the same quandary. She locked
eyes with him. She raised her eyebrows. She shrugged.

Eric shrugged back, and went over to the front of the computer console, doing a disney of Posner’s inspection routine just to keep from looking stupid.

Monique went over to the virtuality lounger, apparently doing likewise, poking at the cushioning, peering up the hood, as if she were a customer in an antique shop contemplating buying the thing. Eric joined her for a bit, giving it the jaundiced and uncomprehending once-over of the twentieth-century husband likely to be stuck footing the bill.

Posner, meanwhile, had moved over to the rack of electronic equipment, peering closely at this and that, frowning, muttering to himself, all but scratching his head.

Eric moved behind the computer console, looked through the ventilation grilles as Posner had done. All solid-state circuitry and a couple of fans as near as his unschooled eye could tell. Certainly no object in there remotely large enough to contain a human brain, polymerized or otherwise.

Posner paced the floor following wiring. Eric and Monique pretended to do the same. On and on, seemingly to no purpose, as the guard stood athwart the entrance with his arms folded across his paunch, looking as bored, if not as puzzled, as Eric felt.

Finally, after a good deal less than their allotted twenty minutes, Avi Posner walked up to Eric, grimacing in puzzlement, shaking his head. Monique joined them.

“Well?” she said softly enough not to be overheard by the guard.

“Well nothing,” said Posner. It was hard to tell whether he was angry, puzzled, or relieved, and Eric suspected that he didn’t know either.

“A CJC 756 computer with no organic elements that I could detect, and certainly no human meatware central processing unit. Ordinary sat-link equipment. The whole thing seems designed to merely run software and broadcast the output. And maybe slave the display screen in the auditorium to it.”

He cocked an inquisitive, even imploring look at Eric. “Anything to add, Esterhazy?”

Eric shrugged.

“If there’s a human brain anywhere in here, it’s been sliced into tasty bite-size pieces,” he said. “It’s the Night Before Christmas, and all through this house, not a creature’s been circuited, not even a mouse.”

“MEET ME ON THE PONT DES ARTS AT ELEVEN,” was all that Avi Posner had said over the phone but the agitated tone of his voice and the fact that he was setting up another outdoor rendezvous away from possible bugging told Monique that the absence of a human brain in the Davinda climate model computer had not entirely restored his trust in the client.

The Pont des Arts was an old footbridge over the Seine between the upscale end of the Latin Quarter and the Louvre; wooden planking on a metal framework, the only bridge over the river that was pedestrian only.

It commanded a magisterial view of the Louvre, the stone-bound prow of the Ile de la Cité, the tropical gardens of the Tuileries, the Eiffel Tower beyond, and it had therefore been turned into a linear sidewalk café with tiny tables along both railings, the better to milk the considerable tourist traffic.

So it was crowded and noisy, ideal for secure conversation, and Posner had already taken a table and ordered two frosty mint juleps by the time Monique had arrived.

Though yesterday’s humidity was in the process of being burned off by the sun—or an orbital mirror adjustment—it was still turning
into a scorcher of a day and there was no room on the narrow bridge for table umbrellas.

Nevertheless, to judge by his demeanor, something more than the heat and the fact that he had gone through half of his drink already was causing Posner to sweat profusely.

“It makes no sense, Monique,” were his first words to her as she sat down.

“Life, the universe, and everything?”

“That too, I’m beginning to believe,” Posner said morosely.

Monique took a sip of her julep. The sun was nowhere near its zenith and she too was starting to sweat.

“So my fears about human meatware in the computer were mistaken, paranoid perhaps, even,” Posner babbled as if this were already the middle of a conversation. “So ersatz white tornadoes seemed what the Catholics would term merely a venal sin under the circumstances, the contract with the client was still valid, and as a matter of course I passed along your information that I had withheld—”

“That Lao was the code designation of some Siberian operation against Davinda?”

Avi Posner didn’t even bother to nod. He just went on as if he were talking to himself. Perhaps in effect he was.

“And it was like poking a stick in a wasps’ nest! Screams! Howls! Find out what it is! Put a stop to it! By whatever means necessary! Do it yesterday!”

“I don’t get it, Avi,” Monique said calmly. “Why the agitation? Isn’t that the sort of thing they hired Mossad for in the first place?”

“Think, Monique,
think!
”

“About what?”

Posner took a long sip of his julep, then a slow deep breath, and seemed to have succeeded in calming himself.

“That Bad Boys is in possession of recordings that can prove they’ve faked the white tornadoes, they take too calmly,” he said. “As if they know they are holding a card which can trump it. I am led to believe, or perhaps I lead myself to believe, that the trump is a human brain in the computer. But that turns out not to be so. So it can only be—”

“Davinda’s climate model itself.”

Posner nodded, and his expression, if it did not relax, at least expressed a reassurance at the acknowledgment that she was now following his logic.

“So you
do
see?” he said.

“Uh . . . look Avi, I appreciate the compliment, but I really
am
an amateur at this stuff. . . .”

“
What are they afraid of?
” Posner exclaimed in exasperation.

Monique squinted at him uncomprehendingly.

Posner made a visible effort to truly calm himself, to get professional, and didn’t speak again until he had succeeded.

“What do they
have
to be afraid of?” he said evenly. “Davinda’s climate model has already been loaded into the computer, and the computer is under guard.”

“So . . . ?”

“So what harm can the Siberians do by eliminating Davinda now, or even turning him?”

“Nothing,” said Monique. “Unless . . .”

“
Unless
?” Posner said eagerly. He leaned forward and peered across the table at Monique intently, hopefully, or so she thought. “You have an
unless
?”

“Unless they got to Davinda a long time ago,” Monique told him.

“My god!” Posner exclaimed. He looked as if he had been bonged on the head with a mallet. “He’s a
mole
! And Lao isn’t just a designation, it’s an
activation signal
!”