Sims (5 page)

“Two days ago.” She gave him a questioning look and he added, “Part of the backgrounding.”

She repressed a chill, knowing Zero most likely had had people on her trail, photographing her before he'd made contact.

“He's a ruthless negotiator, willing and able to go for the jugular, with no sign of regret afterward.”

“That's good, isn't it? I mean, as long as he brings that to the sim case.”

“So one would think. But what disturbs me is his apparent lack of any guiding principles. He'll represent a union this week, management next, and be an equally passionate advocate for both. His voter registration says he's an independent. A string of women have passed through his life with no lasting relationships. No pets. He subscribes to law journals, news magazines, and
Penthouse
. He has never given a dime to charity.”

“So Patrick Sullivan is a guy with no passions and no commitments. Doesn't sound like a man who takes up a cause.”

“Not unless it pays well.”

“Probably has the ethics of
E. coli
.” Romy could see why Zero was concerned. “What do we do?”

“We don't interfere—at least not yet. Just as great literature can be created by an author writing simply to pay his rent, great good can sometimes be accomplished by people with less than exalted motivations. This Patrick Sullivan may simply be trying to turn a buck or looking to garner some cheap publicity. If that's his goal, we'll follow the progress of the case and see if we can turn things to our advantage along the way.”

“And if he's an out-and-out crook?”

“We'll be keeping a close watch on him. At the first sign of any funny business, we move.”

“Move how?”

“I'm not sure . . .”

The remark disturbed her. This was the first time she'd ever detected uncertainty in Zero.

“Something else I wanted to tell you,” he said. “You'll be receiving notice soon that OPRR has succeeded in obtaining a court order allowing it to inspect the SimGen facility.”

Stunned, Romy could only sit and stare.

“Something wrong?”

“How . . . how did you manage
that
? We've been trying for
years
to get a look in there.”

“Vee haf vays,” he said in a bad German accent, and she could imagine a smile behind the protective layers.

“No, seriously. How—?”

“By employing the same tactics that SimGen has used to stall the inspection: bribery, cajoling, intimidation, the whole nine yards.”

Romy frowned. “Is that the way we want to be?”

“It's the way we have to be. And even then it was pure luck that the
petition came before a judge who was retiring and didn't give a damn about whatever pressure SimGen and its pet politicos were bringing to bear. He said to hell with it and signed the order.”

“This is wonderful.” Her admiration for Zero climbed to a new high.

“It's a start. The order allows a one-time inspection of the entire research facility.”

“No follow-up visits?”

Zero shook his head. “Sorry. But at least it's a foot in the door. We've pierced their armor—now we get a chance to look into the SimGen abyss.” He slid the briefcase on the table closer to her. “Take this with you. It contains various miniature spycams. Use them on your inspection tour, especially in the basic research facility. Be sure to ask for a full explanation of their security procedures—because you're interested in how well the sims are protected, of course.”

“Of course. And who knows? Maybe I'll get a face-to-face with the Sinclair brothers.”

“Don't count on it. But even if you do, prepare to be unimpressed.”

Another shock. “You've met them?”

“Yes. A number of times.”

“Then they
know
you?”

“Yes . . . and no.”

“I don't get it. What—?”

He raised his gloved hand, palm out: a stop sign. “We can't get into that now.”

“When?”

“Maybe never.” Zero rose and extended his hand across the table. “Good luck.”

Romy shook his hand, peering closely at him, thinking: He knows the Sinclair brothers. Who is he? I've
got
to find out.

SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
OCTOBER 3

“And I tell you, my brothers and sisters, that SinGen is doing the work of the devil his own self. Yes! The devil's work! As surely as I am standing here, Satan himself sits in those corporate offices, guiding the hand of the SinGen researchers, inspiring them to fashion beings that the Creator never intended to exist, creatures that are an abomination in the sight of God. It must be stopped or we all—and I do mean
all,
not just the SinGen sinners, but all of us who abide that company's evildoing—will be called to account on the day of Final Judgment!”

Mercer Sinclair, a tall, lean, youthful-looking fifty-two with dark eyes and dark hair that had yet to show a trace of gray, sighed in disgust as he turned away from the plasma TV screen hanging like an Old Master on his office wall. He jabbed the OFF button on his desktop and banished the Reverend Eckert's florid face.

Stepping to the tinted window that took up most of the western wall of his top-floor office, he gazed out at the green rolling hills, mist-layered and glistening with morning dew. All SimGen's, as far as the eye could see.

Using proxies and dummy corporations, buying up little parcels here and there, Mercer had accumulated this massive chunk of northwest New Jersey for damn near a song. He could have bought more land for less in the Sunbelt, but that would have placed him too far from the action. Yes, he was in the boonies here, but these boonies were only a twenty-minute helicopter ride from Wall Street, while the isolation afforded a form of natural protection from prying eyes.

Closer in, nestled in this tight little valley, stood the gleaming glass and steel offices, the labs and natal and nurturing centers that fed the world's ever-growing need for sims. Here they were bred and housed until ready to be shipped to training centers all over the globe. Here beat the heart of SimGen's—Mercer's—far-flung empire.

He opaqued the window and turned to the three other men in his office.

“ ‘
Sin
Gen'? I wonder who thought that up for him.”

His brother Ellis, two years older, taller, grayer, and almost gaunt, slouched on one of the black leather sofas to the left, far from the desk. Mercer expected no reply from Ellis, and received none.

Luca Portero, SimGen's chief of security, remained silent as well. Compact, muscular, in great shape for a man in his early forties, he stood with feet apart, arms behind his back; despite the blue blazer and tan slacks, he looked every inch a soldier.

Mercer hadn't picked Portero. He'd been
assigned
to SimGen as security chief. But he'd looked into the man's background. A self-made sort, starting off as a street urchin with an Italian first name in a mostly Mexican border town in Arizona, father unknown, mother of very dubious reputation—oh, hell, why not say it? The town whore. As soon as he was old enough he joined the Army and apparently found his métier.

And like a good soldier, he rarely spoke unless spoken to. That was the only thing Mercer liked about the man. Portero had always struck him as more snake than human. He didn't walk, he glided. On the rare occasions when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. And those cold dark eyes . . . always watching . . . like a snake. Mercer often wondered if Portero had indulged in a trans-species splice or two before joining SimGen . . . something reptilian. The heart, perhaps?

“Don't underestimate Eckert,” the third attendee said in a thick Alabama drawl.

Mercer glanced at Abel Voss, SimGen's general counsel. In his mid-fifties, with longish silver hair and twenty extra pounds packed around his waist, he filled the seat on the other side of the desk. Which didn't mean he was close—a string quartet could have set up and played on the vast gleaming ebony surface of Mercer's desktop. Only two colors here: furniture either black leather or ebony, carpet and curtains all a uniform light gray.

“You know him?”

“No, but a few years ago nobody'd even heard of that boy, and now he's a household name.”

Voss liked to come on as a slow-witted, somewhat bemused good ol' boy. He used it to lull opponents until he sprang and crushed them with one of the sharpest corporate law minds in the world. Mercer liked that. The crushing part.

Mercer grunted. “And he galloped there on
my
back.”

“
Your
back?” Ellis said. “How about my back as well? I wind up being
painted with the same brush as you, something I do
not
care for.”

Well, well, well, Mercer thought. Look who's speaking up.

He couldn't understand why his brother bothered with these meetings. He'd arrive, slump in a chair without saying a word to anyone, stare into space without participating, then leave.

Ellis had been in an emotional tailspin for years. Mercer had heard that only a complex antidepressant cocktail enabled him to get out of bed these days. Somehow he dragged himself to meetings, and managed to maintain a decent work schedule in his lab, but his productivity was zilch.

Today he'd actually offered a comment. Hallelujah. Maybe Ellis had finally found a combination of drugs that worked.

Mercer turned toward his brother. “That's what happens when you're the co-founder.”

“But
I'm
the co-founder who has kids. What's said about me reflects on them. They go to school and have to hear that their father's in league with the devil!”

Ellis's kids . . . Robbie and Julie. Good kids. But Ellis didn't get to see them much since the divorce. Truth was, they seemed to prefer their Uncle Mercer to their downer dad. Mercer liked playing uncle, but he lived alone; always had, always would. Robbie and Julie were the closest he ever intended to come to parenthood.

But the divorce hadn't caused Ellis's depression—no, it had been the other way around. Who could live with someone in Ellis's state of mind?

“Don't blame me, bro. Blame Eckert.”

“I know who to blame,” Ellis said with a glare.

“Gentlemen,” Voss said, “this can be saved for another time.”

Mercer turned toward the lawyer. “I didn't call you here about the Eckert matter, but we might as well address it. It seems every time I turn on the damn TV I see his face.”

“That's because the boy's syndicated. He does one show a day and it's farmed out to local stations all over the country. The local station managers plug it into a slot where they think they'll draw the most eyeballs.”

“I can't believe people watch him day after day. He's got one goddamn issue and he beats it to death.”

Voss shrugged. “Them Bible humpers've had it in for you two since sim one. Eckert is just more aggressive in grabbing the reins of that wagon.”

“And he's been riding it for all it's worth ever since.” Mercer rapped his knuckles on his desktop. “Can't we get anything on him?”

“Tried that. Took a look-see into his business affairs and personal life. Lives high but not too, too high. No bimbos, or if there are, he hides 'em well. On the surface he appears clean. No obvious belly-crawlin like Swaggart or Baker. Sockin away all those contributions until he's got enough to set up his own satellite network to—as he likes to put it—‘spread the word to the world about the sin of sims.' ”

“So let's probe a little deeper,” Mercer growled.

“Gotta be careful with that sort of thing. The Rev's got a bunch of real loyal eggs around him. You try to crack one of them, you could wind up with yolk on your face. I'm talkin a tar-and-feather overcoat in the PR department. I say give it time. These preacher boys, most of them got this sort of arc, y'see—they rise fast, then they fall back. And meantime, if he's like most other preacher boys I've seen, all that money he's pullin in will somehow find its way into his own pocket instead of being used to mess with us. You just be patient, son.”

Usually Mercer didn't mind when Voss called him “son”—just one of the man's Alabamisms—but today it irritated him. With his mother dead since his Yale days, and his father DOA with a cardiac arrest two years ago, he was now no one's son. His own man, answering to no one.

“Patient! Do you know he's scheduled to be on Ackenbury tomorrow night?
Ackenbury at Large
! Millions who've never even heard of the creep will see him do his anti-SimGen rant. What's Ackenbury thinking? Don't we buy enough time on his lousy show?”

“Hey, it's all show biz, you know that. That boy gets hold of the most controversial folks he can find. That's why he's rackin up better numbers than Leno and Letterman. I know we got a buncha cow flop flyin at us at once now, what with Eckert, the unionization thing, and havin to open our doors for an OPRR inspection, but I wouldn't let this rattle you.”

“I'm not rattled,” Mercer said.

But he wasn't particularly comfortable either. He didn't mention his growing uneasiness, a sense of malevolent convergence. If he believed in fate or astrology, he might have said he felt the stars aligning against him.

Utter nonsense, of course. You made your own destiny. You grabbed what you could and then did your damnedest to keep it. And if you lost it, that was because someone else outsmarted you. Flaming gasballs floating millions of light-years away had nothing to do with it.

But if the stars weren't aligning against him, then who?

“Good,” Voss said. “Glad to hear it. 'Cause there's nothin here to get
rattled about. Take this damn fool unionization thing, for instance. You have to be human to be in a damn union, so
res ipso loquitur
, the suit can't succeed. It's a sham, a PR stunt for this nobody shyster who—”