Splicer (24 page)

The Metro Power Users group, one of the cities biggest computer clubs, met on the first Wednesday of every month on campus at the University of Toronto. Members came by bus and rapid transit, or parked far to the north on the visitor’s parking lot, then negotiated a series of tunnels, stairs and junctures to make their way to Donner Hall.

Donner Hell
, as it was known to the students, was a newly constructed lecture hall boasting comfortable upholstered seating, a fresh air and heating system that worked, and surprisingly good acoustics. It also had the solid ambiance of a bank vault, buried as it was three stories underground, and thus the name. The room was dark and cavernous, only a dimly lit stage greeting Jayne as she entered from the double doors to the right of the podium. She was early. Two young men, one with a ponytail and ripped blue jeans, were maneuvering what looked like a jerry-rigged computer into place on a desk near the front. No more than a dozen people were seated in the first few rows playing with tablets or pointing animatedly towards the dais. Jayne poked her head in at first, surveying the audience, all of whom looked under the age of 20, all male. The nerd-look she had expected was nowhere in evidence.

The idea to come here tonight was Rusty’s. His plan was simple - call five or six computer clubs. Give them a $100.00 for their membership list, tell them you want to mail out a product announcement. They eventually found Malcolm Grieves on one list. MTPUG.  He used to be the treasurer for God's sake. One meeting a month. How could Grieves resist attending the meetings? It was the only family he had left.

Jayne felt confident that she hadn't been followed. Rusty, driving her Lexus out of concern that his car would be recognized, took a number of detours, dodging suddenly down back alleys and once drove against the traffic again on a one-way street. There was rarely a vehicle in sight on some of the smaller side streets. At one point they stopped on a tree-shaded residential cul-de-sac; wartime homes row on row lined up off into the shadows. They waited quietly. No lights followed them down the street. When they arrived at the university they opted for the distant north-end parking lot, seeing faces everywhere in the shadows but none that materialized into a living, breathing, homicidal maniac. Yet.

Rusty was beginning to feel that they needed another scare. He was finding it more difficult by the minute to stay vigilant and alert. The whole idea of being tracked by professional killers seemed more preposterous with each false alarm. If these faceless agents wanted the codes, would he be prepared to hand them over? Almost certainly. If Shay's life was the consequence, he would have handed them over without thinking. But he never got the chance to make that decision. Sitting there, waiting, he looked over at his nervous passenger. His lawyer. Now lover. She was impressive from both perspectives.

"I want you to understand that everything you told me last night, stays with me," he said. She looked at him, uncertain. "Client attorney privilege," he added. Jayne still said nothing. It was bothering her. For years she had carried the burden alone. Knowing that her father died in prison for a crime he didn't commit - that her mother had run off to the States and had planned the whole incident to make it look like her father was a murderer. She learned later that her mother even smeared her own blood on the upholstery of the family sedan. Her need to escape from him, her fear of reprisal so great, that she traded freedom for never seeing her sons again. But she had risked it with her daughter. Every year they met secretly for a week, their only contact. To notify the authorities now would lead to extradition and the likely imprisonment of Jayne's only remaining parent. A terrible secret. Why had she told Rusty? Was it just time to let go? Or something else? He let it pass and pulled out into the street.

:

The pathways that led to the campus center were constructed of long round over-lit concrete tunnels. The buzz of the overhead fluorescents seemed to echo down the passageways like the background music from an early Ken Carpenter horror flick. Their voices and their footsteps were amplified horribly. As they turned through each bend in the passage, the tunnel behind them would cant out of view as if each section was designed with its own unique angle of deflection. Side tunnels jumped into view unpredictably, bearing cryptic signs that read
OPT lab
,
McMann
and
Husbandry
. Jayne expected at every turn to confront the twisted face of Malcolm Grieves, his skin painted the color of gangrene by the overhead lighting.

Eventually they came to a turn marked by a dark blue plastic panel that indicated DONNER HALL with an arrow to the right.

"Listen," said Rusty carefully. Jayne looked about, standing warily at the junction of four white tunnels. "If we were being followed, with this echo, we'd be hearing something. The place seems deserted. I think most of these hackers must come by bus because the parking lot was literally empty."

Jayne nodded and leaned back against the glossy tunnel wall.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, looking in the direction of Donner Hall.

"I'll stay behind you, see if anyone looks suspicious." He was also going to be watching her. If you're going to be running for your life, you might as well do it with a beautiful young woman, he thought. "Just ignore me. Act like you've come alone. I'm not going into the Hall. I'll stay outside. If Grieves doesn't show up, then just leave."

"And what if he does?" she asked quietly, her eyes wider than usual.

"Talk to him? I don't know! Use your feminine wiles to lure him away?"

"You think I have feminine wiles?" she asked distracted.

"Some of the best I've seen," Rusty whispered.

"Why are we whispering?" Jayne replied, smiling.

"Because I think they can hear us downtown. This is like talking inside a giant megaphone?"

"Let me see what I can do,” she said, turning to leave, then hesitating. She turned back to him and touched his arm lightly with her hand. "And be careful."

:

Rusty watched as Jayne clicked softly away on the shiny cement flooring. With her shoulders back, her head high and her long slender legs moving quickly down the hall, she looked like anything but a victim. But his senses told him there was some quality of frailty about her that his eyes couldn't detect, something bravely child-like in the way she forced herself erect and covered up her fear.

Jayne climbed the aisle way to the rear of the lecture hall and sat near the middle of the row, her eyes constantly on the door. She opened her nylon jacket and put on a pair of dark rimmed glasses; the ones she wore in court to add seriousness to her appearance. She crossed her arms and sat back as the room slowly filled. After a moment a voice came from behind her.

"I only came because I was impressed."

Jayne felt the warm breath of Malcolm Grieves on her ear, but fought the urge to turn. She stiffened slightly, instantly angry with herself for reacting.

"Impressed that you could find me this easily. In fact, I'm flattered that a woman of your obvious talents and wit would be even the slightest bit interested in my, let's call it,
plight
." He had moved closer, his lips only inches from her cheek. This was the first thing she noticed when she began practicing criminal law - the repeat offenders, the cocky auto thieves, the purse snatchers and muggers - they had virtually no regard for her personal space. They would press their noses right up against hers and scream obscenities. Spit dotting her face, she would reel against a breath full of alcohol, tobacco and hate. Their reactions no longer surprised her, only puzzled her.

"You were followed," he added, moving away from her.

"By whom?"

"By whom?" he mimicked her. "How correct. You didn't see? Amateur. It was me."

"Then of course you know I'm not alone," Jayne removed her glasses and turned.

Grieves studied her bright emerald eyes and for a moment was fixed by them, impaled, like those moths in museum cases marked with tiny labels covered in achingly precise handwriting. He turned from them finally and slouched over the back of the next chair, his arms folded.

"Brought your boyfriend? Little excitement for the middle of the week? They call it hump day don't they?" Jayne turned from him and replaced the glasses.

"Well? You going to throw a net over me? Cuff me?"

"Grieves, you need to testify." He almost laughed, his eyes on the front door, people straggling in.

"Look at those morons," he chuckled. "Go to school, work hard, get a degree, find a job if you can. And the only place that's hiring is
Doomed 'R'Us Incorporated.
Jerk yourself off with your computer at night. Commit a felony, meet a sexy attorney and make babies who can do the same damn thing all over again."

"If you don't testify, nothing will change. It will be just like the last trial."

"You mean a farce?"

"Exactly."

"And when did
you
see the light?"

"I knew Ludd was lying. Hell, the
prosecutor
knew he was lying. But why stop him, he was lying on his side."

Grieves thought about that for a moment. "And how will it be different this time?"

"The media. This trial will get coverage - it's going to be a big event. You can tell your story."

"How I spent my summer vacation by little Malcolm Grieves?"

"Tell whatever you want. You testify, they'll listen."

"And Redfield?"

Jayne stopped to collect herself. She would only have one chance to build some kind of trust with Grieves. She needed to say the right things. "I doubt that Redfield did it." Grieves raised an eyebrow. “But that's irrelevant. It's my job to protect his rights and keep him out of jail. Without you though, the real culprits, the real story, won't get told."

"I can't believe this. The real story? You sound like the lead-in to a TV mini-series."

"You still think that the military murdered Shay?" asked Jayne. Grieves said nothing, his eyes momentarily on his carefully manicured hands. The last residue of his former self.

"You don't think that there's someone else, something else, orchestrating this whole
GeneFab
business and screwing up your life, and Ludd's, and Shay's and who knows who else? Wake up, Grieves."

Grieves looked at her again, his mouth set. "I've never been more awake, counselor. In fact, I've been wide-eyed through this waking nightmare since ..."

Jayne turned to follow his glance. Below, to the right of the stage, two men entered. They were tall, muscular, expensively dressed. They looked instantly out of place. Both separated, one hanging back by the entrance, the other making his way to the other side of the hall.

"Do they look like hackers to you?" he asked coolly.
Yes! They did
she thought.
But not the way he meant it.

Jayne and Grieves both recognized the problem at the same time. If Grieves sat quietly, blended in with the crowd, he might get a short-term respite. But all these intruders had to do was watch the exits and wait. As soon as Grieves made a move to leave, he would be instantly tagged, any hope of protecting his new appearance gone.  Grieves guessed that there would be no more than two, but that was a dangerous assumption. How valuable was he anyway? There might be a small army stalking him outside.

Jayne had a choice as well. If she let him go, it may be the last time she would ever see him again. If she made a move to help him, she could be risking her life. She knew nothing of value and that made her an expendable nuisance. Had they found Rusty? If not, did he even know what was happening? She looked at Grieves whose eyes had narrowed, his body tense.

"There's a back exit they probably don't know about," he whispered, his eyes never leaving the entrance.

"How do you know?"

"They're not from here. They're ... foreigners. My wife recorded a phone call from one of them last week. One sounded 'Bostonian' - a New England type. The other, mid-eastern. They just got here. Must have followed you."

"That's not possible."

"Yeah? Is Redfield down there?"

She nodded.

"Maybe he led them here."

Suddenly the hall went dark. Only the lights on the stage remained. Grieves pulled on Jayne's arm and they slipped back over their seats, feeling their way as their eyes slowly grew accustomed to the pool of blackness around them. She felt Grieves push her forward. She turned toward the brightness of the stage but was unable to see the man with the black tie, the deeply tanned forehead. They reached the aisle, which Jayne stumbled into, letting out an explosion of air between her teeth. Grieves raced around her, grabbed her arm and pulled her up into the flat blackness at the back of the room. 

Jayne heard the speaker’s voice, his sibilant "sss" as sharp as a guns retort. She waited for footsteps to overtake them. She was pulled sharply to the right then felt a blast of warm air, then the thump of a safety door closing quietly on its hinges behind her. Grieves pushed her back against the concrete and froze, his fleshy arm around her.

"Where are we?" she gulped.

"The back stairs. If they know about this, they'll be expecting us to go up, into the main corridors. Let's disappoint them."

They headed down. As they descended, the darkness only grew murkier which unnerved Jayne.
An exit stairway without lights?

"Where are the lights?"

"I disabled them," he grunted, sliding down the steps, his voice rough, angry.

You disabled them?
She thought. Not turned off, not broken, but
disabled.
  His choice of words concerned her. But she was beginning to feel better - they had gone down three flights, the door above them had not yet swung open with the sounds of pursuit. Maybe they had escaped the room without being seen.

Then they turned into the dark and came to a flat cement wall. They had gone as far as they could. A large steel door confronted them with a single narrow glass panel in its center. Just beyond the window a yellow light glowed from some distant light bulb exposing a cinder block wall covered with stacked pipes running the length of the corridor. Steam pipes wrapped with thick white insulation. They had finally reached the bottom. Grieves turned the knob with a sweaty right hand. He swore.

"It's locked!"