Sims (43 page)

“Well?” he said as he took her arm and began walking her uptown. The cold snap had broken and the day was clear and mild. “Did he react?”

“Did he ever,” Romy said. “He just about lost it. Looked as if he'd just been stripped naked and hosed with ice water.”

Patrick grinned and jabbed the air with a fist. “Knew it!”

She had to hand it to Patrick. He had an acute ear for nuances and he'd heard something in that one syllable from David Palmer. He'd been sure it was significant, and he'd been right.

He threw an arm around her shoulders. “Damn, I wish I could have been there.” He waved his free hand in the air. “But forget about that. The question now is, how do we capitalize on this?”

“For one thing,” Romy said, “we know the word itself has meaning. It's not just part of another word or a phrase.”

“If I'd known that last night I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. I went through an online dictionary and plugged in every spelling of ‘surge' I could think of to see if it might be the first syllable of another word. Got nowhere. Didn't do any better when I tried every possible homonym. ‘Surge' is not a common syllable.”

“For which we should be thankful, I guess. Imagine if he'd said ‘con'?”

“Then we'd be cooked. But ‘surge' itself doesn't appear to mean anything.”

“It might if it's an acronym.”

He stopped walking as if he'd hit an invisible wall. His arm dropped from her shoulder and she missed it.

“An acronym! Of course! And acronyms usually mean government.” He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “Do you know how many Washington agencies, departments, subdepartments, and bureaus are designated by acronyms? It's staggering.”

She looked away, glancing around to see if anyone was watching them. “What makes you so sure you'll find it in Washington? You've already traced the chain of subsidiaries leading to Manassas Ventures offshore. Who knows how far offshore the chain goes? Maybe it ends in Moscow. Or Beijing.”

“You wouldn't be trying to discourage me, would you?”

“Not at all, but we're still a long way from home.”

“At least we've got the Internet.”

“Right.” He glanced around. “I think I'll head downtown for a little point-and-click session on my office computer. Want to come along?”

“I've got to get back to OPRR, but we can share a cab.”

He looked into her eyes. “What almost happened the other night at your place?”

“We almost got dosed with Totuus.”

“No. I mean, what was in the cards before we opened the door and found the two uninvited guests?”

Romy held his gaze. She'd grown to like Patrick, even admire him in some ways, but she didn't love him. She enjoyed his company and, even though she knew injecting sex into their relationship might complicate matters, she'd wanted him that night. But that wasn't the same as wanting him every night.

“We'll never know, will we,” she said, giving him a warm smile. “It was a moment, one that might come again.”

“Or might not.” His expression soured, leaving him looking needy.

Well, I have needs too, she thought. Sometimes sex is front and center, but lots of times something else pushes it down the line.

She knew all too well how she'd let the war on SimGen take over her life, but the time to press the fight was now. Every day of delay meant another day of slavery for the sims. Plenty of time later to play catch up.

“It's the Masked Marvel, isn't it,” he said.

“Who?”

“Zero. You've got a thing for him.”

“Don't be silly. I've never even seen his face.”

“That doesn't mean you haven't imagined it, or that you can't be infatuated with him.”

She tensed. Patrick had hit a bit too close to home. Yes, she had times when she fantasized about Zero. His inner strength and resolve spoke to her, reaching out through his layers of protective insulation to touch her like no one else she had ever known. And his air of remove that proclaimed him beyond her reach only heightened the attraction.

Fearing her expression might give something away, she stepped off the curb and waved at an approaching taxi.

“You're talking crazy.”

You've got to love modern technology, Luca Portero thought, smiling as he spotted Ellis Sinclair's silver Lexus SUV half a dozen car lengths ahead on the George Washington Bridge.

Luca had equipped the Lexus with a transponder that let him know its location no matter where it went. He glanced at the locator screen, glowing in the dark on the passenger seat. Luca's car was a fixed dot in the center of the green LCD monitor; the Lexus was a blip floating directly above it. A GPS program laid out a map of the city around them, showing both cars crossing the Hudson River toward the city.

All was well.

Well?
he thought. Who am I kidding?

He shook his head. He'd almost forgotten what
well
meant. Nothing was anywhere near
well
.

Darryl Lister had become a raw, twitching nerve after he learned of the fateful question at the stockholders' meeting, a nonstop question box:
Who asked it? How could he know?

Well, Luca had soon found out that it wasn't a ‘he' at all. The meeting had been recorded—a matter of routine—and who did he spot while reviewing the video files: Cadman. Romy fucking Cadman.

Initially Lister had been sure that Palmer had talked under his own Totuus, but then they'd tracked the operative to some Long Island hospital where he was spending his days sitting around babbling gibberish. Obviously the MTW had worked.

Luca shuddered at the thought of such a fate, even if the effect only lasted for ninety days. Ninety days of hell. If you weren't loony before, you damn sure might be after.

But the success of the MTW had sent Luca back to the leak problem.

He already knew it was Ellis Sinclair. But who was he was leaking to? That was what mattered. Tonight Luca would find out. Once he learned Sinclair's contact, the rest would fall into place. Then he'd make his move. And take no prisoners.

He followed Sinclair down the West Side Highway to Fifty-fourth Street,
crawled across Midtown—traffic in the city would be murder until after Christmas—to a parking garage across the street from the Warwick Hotel. Shit! He couldn't very well pull in right behind him. He should have brought backup.

He left the car double-parked and running while he trotted to the ramp that led down to the parking area. Crouching, he spotted Sinclair accepting a ticket from the attendant. But instead of walking back this way, he started up the ramp on the other side.

Fuck! He was heading out to Fifty-third!

Luca ducked back into his car. He folded up the locator unit and grabbed the keys. As he slammed and locked the door he heard a voice behind him.

“Can't leave that here.”

He turned to see an NYPD uniform. Black, big face, big gut stretching his blue shirt, big black belt laden with police paraphernalia.

“Officer, this is an emergency.”

“I don't care if your hair is on fire, you can't leave that car here. There's a garage right there. Pull it in and—”

“I don't have time. I'll be right back.”

“You leave that car there, I promise you, it'll be long gone and far away when you come back.”

“Fine,” Luca said, moving off. He tossed the keys to the cop. “Take it. Merry Christmas.”

The cop opened his mouth, then closed it. Luca doubted he'd ever had anyone tell him to go ahead and tow his car.

Luca dashed straight through the garage—down, across, and up onto Fifty-third. He stopped when he reached the sidewalk, frantically peering east and west through the lights, the shadows, the people hurrying to escape the chill.

Which way, damn it?

He glanced longingly at the locator unit, dangling from his hand like a small valise. If only there had been some way to affix a transponder to Sinclair himself.

Never mind the wishing. What now?

He couldn't see Sinclair on Fifty-third. Maybe he'd headed downtown on Sixth Avenue. Luca's instincts urged him in that direction. He started off at a run but the crowds on the avenue slowed him to a crawl. The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Show was in full swing, jamming the Sixth Avenue sidewalks with parents and their screaming kiddies. But that meant Sinclair couldn't move fast either.

Luca bullied and bulled his way through the throng as fast as he could, earning angry looks and comments. Yeah, merry Christmas to you too, fuckers. He kept rising on tiptoes to check the other side of the street—he saw oversized Venus de Milos framing the Credit Lyonnaise Building, and a line of fifteen-foot nutcrackers standing guard against the columns of the Paine-Webber, but no Ellis Sinclair.

An Art Deco marquee directly ahead now,
Radio City
blazing in red neon, and the damned charter busses vomiting tourists onto the sidewalk blocked his view of the opposite side. No sign of Sinclair here, so he stepped between two buses to check the other side—just in time to spot Sinclair starting down a subway entrance by the Time & Life Building.

Luca congratulated his instincts. And his luck. But it occurred to him that Sinclair was moving pretty quick for a guy who was supposedly dosed to the eyeballs on antidepressants.

No time to wonder about that now.

He sprang forward to follow but a horn blared him back. The light was against him and traffic was moving just fast enough to make crossing impossible. Cursing, he edged to the corner. As soon as the light changed Luca lunged forward, damn near knocking down a few slow movers on his way to the subway. He flew down the steps and raced along the longest, fanciest goddamn subway ramp he'd ever seen—marble tile, brass trim, all part of the Rockefeller Center complex.

When he reached the token booth, Sinclair was nowhere in sight.

Uptown or down?

He saw the ALL TRAINS sign and ducked under the turnstile—no time for a token—and followed the sound of a train pulling in. He reached the platform just in time to see the doors of an F train pincer closed behind Sinclair.

Luca pelted after the train as it began to move, intending to grab a handle and jump onto the landing between the cars, but it picked up speed too quickly and he was left standing on the platform.

The lighted sign on the rear car said its last stop was 179th Street in Jamaica. That meant Sinclair could be going across town or to the far side of Queens, or anywhere between.

He let out a roar and kicked the nearest tiled pillar.

“Hey, don't worry, buddy,” said a shabby guy a few feet away. “There'll be another along soon.”

Luca wanted to kill him.

SUFFOLK COUNTY, NY

Zero stepped into the small, two-story farmhouse in the middle of a fallow potato field, one of many that dotted eastern Long Island.

Good to be home, even if he had no one to share the place.

He unwrapped the scarf from his lower face and removed the hat with the pulled-down brim. Masking his features was relatively easy in the colder weather, especially at night. Summer was a problem, forcing him into a wig, a fake beard and nose, oversized sunglasses, and a floppy boonie cap.

He shrugged out of his coat and turned on the three computers arranged around the sparsely furnished living room. A couch, a recliner, a TV, three folding chairs before the card tables holding the computers. Not exactly the lap of luxury, but it served his purposes.

As the computers booted up he stepped to the mantle of the cold fire-place where an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Romy Cadman leaned against the wall. He loved this close-up, taken with a telefoto lens shortly after a letter to the editor of the
Times
had brought her to his attention. He felt a familiar ache as he stared at her face.

Romy . . . were there other women in the world like her? If so, he'd never met one. But then, really, how many women had he met? Nowhere near enough for a fair comparison.

He ran a fingertip along her cheek, wishing he could do so in the flesh.

And what did others matter, anyway? Romy was Romy, his Romy. He knew he shouldn't think of her as his, for she never would be, never could be. That would require removing his mask for her, letting her see his face. And then she'd reject him, turn away in loathing.

Well . . . he didn't actually
know
that, but he couldn't risk it. Better this way. At least he could see her often, be near her, talk to her, hear her voice. But once she rejected him, all that would be lost. And even if by some miracle
she, superior woman though she might be, didn't reject him, the whole relationship would change, and not for the better.

Tonight's Romy ritual ended with a knock on the front door. Even though he was expecting it, Zero jumped at the sound. A visitor here was an occasion. Only one person knew where he lived, and his visits were rare.

He laid the photo face down on the mantle and went to the door. When he opened it he embraced his oldest and dearest friend, the man who was like a father to him.

“How are you?”

“Good, Ellis. Very good. How are you?”

“Getting better every day, thanks to what you and your group have been doing.”

Ellis Sinclair did look better. Maybe a little grayer, but less gaunt. Perhaps he was eating better.

“Come in,” Zero said, shutting the door and taking Ellis's coat.

He felt a little awkward. He was unpracticed at being a host.

Ellis did a slow turn, taking in the small living room. “Are you comfortable here?”

“Yes, thanks to you.”

He pulled a bottle of Scotch from the cabinet under the TV. He'd never developed a taste for liquor himself, but he knew his guest was something of a hard drinker. But Ellis surprised him by waving it off.

“Thanks, but I'm taking a breather from the booze.”