Stones (Data) (57 page)

Matt flops down on a sofa. “So this is my holding cell?”

“You catch on fast,” Ryzaard says. “Make yourself comfortable and get some rest. You’ll need it in a few hours.”

“Can’t wait.”

Walking back to the door, Ryzaard is followed by Naganuma and the two guards. When they reach the door, it automatically opens. Ryzaard stops and turns back to Matt.

“You’re very lucky to be alive. Let’s hope you have the sense to cooperate.”

“What about Mr. Naganuma?” Matt stretches out on the sofa. “What’s his role in all of this?”

Ryzaard turns to walk out the door. “Be careful in your judgment of him. He’s the only reason you’re not with your mother right now.” They all walk out the door, and it seals shut behind them.

The shackles on Matt’s wrists and ankles fall off and rattle to the floor.

He looks around for a surveillance camera. After a few minutes of fruitless searching, he walks to the door. It has an air-tight seal that makes it flush with the wall when shut. He runs his fingernails across the hair-like seam, but they don’t catch. Taking a long walk around the perimeter of the room, he studies the wall for any sign of another opening, but it’s just one continuous glass bluescreen, like a millionaire’s idea of the perfect entertainment room.

Hunger draws him to the refrigerator.

Two multi-colored plates of thin-cut
sashimi
catch his eye. The raw fish looks and smells fresh. He grabs one of the plates, thinking he will save the other for later.

It’s first rate, maybe the best ever.

In five minutes, he’s worked through the whole plate. Tuna, salmon, squid, even some bright orange sea urchin. All of it delicious and fresh, as good as anything you could get at the
Tsukiji
fish markets. When the last piece goes into his mouth, his head falls back onto the sofa and eyes drop shut.

“I trust you find it to your liking?”

Matt’s eyes shoot open. A larger-than-life-size view of a woman’s face flashes on the bluescreen directly in front of him.

“So you’re watching me,” Matt says with a mouth full of blue fin. “I should have guessed.”

“Just checking,” the woman says. “My name is Alexa. I work with Dr. Ryzaard. It’s my job to make sure you are comfortable during your stay with us.”

Matt’s eyes narrowed. “I’m feeling a little cooped up in here. A walk outside in the fresh air would do me some good. Can you arrange that?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Alexa says. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

“How?”

“Just say it. Someone is listening and watching. All the time.”

The image of Alexa fades back into the Pacific island scene.

Matt relaxes his body, lets his head rest on the sofa, closes his eyes again, and starts counting breaths, forcing his fists to uncurl.

K
ent needs the architectural plans to the MX Global building. He spends a few hours lurking in the more seedy corridors of the Mesh, but comes up empty. If they ever existed, they’ve been scrubbed away.

And then he remembers.

Twenty years ago, when he was a young associate at Myers & Sullivan, one of the partners put him on a fast-track real estate deal, and he found himself doing mind-numbing due diligence at 3:00 in the morning on a hundred gigabytes of top-secret client files. There were pages and pages of architectural drawings for the buildings in the area of Manhattan around MX Global. Reaching the point of utter exhaustion, he ignored firm policy and copied the files to his jax to complete the work at home. Over the years, each subsequent jax was cloned to the prior one until he forgot about the data. On that day when he bolted from the firm and hit the road with Matt, he dumped the contents of his jax onto a secure Mesh-point before throwing the device away.

Accessing the same old Mesh-point, he finds the files intact and spends the rest of the evening blowing through them again, just like twenty years before. Among them is a set of old architectural drawings for the lower ten stories of MX Global corporate headquarters from a time when another company occupied the premises. They had been there all this time.

He studies the 3D layout on his slate, and it’s all there. Major structural design, mechanical systems, elevator shafts, plumbing, electrical. There’s no guarantee that it’s still the same after two or three decades. All of it may have changed over the years.

Hopefully, it’s close enough.

The building pulls electricity from an independent set of on-site power generators located a few floors above ground level. Staggered elevators run the length of the building, making it necessary to change at least three times on a trip from bottom to top.

After a couple of hours, Kent takes a break from studying the plans and pulls up a detailed layout of the 175th floor generated by a slate-based algorithm using the latest sound readings from the Turing Box. He can see the round space next to Ryzaard’s office. Soundings taken from just two days prior had shown this spot to contain random lines spread out evenly, like the static on antique televisions, the telltale sign of dead space. This time around, there are no such lines, nothing at all. Kent runs the algorithm again and gets the same result. The white space means there’s no sound, no vibrations of any kind traveling through that particular space.

In other words, it’s become a sound-proof room.

Kent checks internal conversations he captured from inside Ryzaard’s office again, and it becomes clear.

It’s the room where Ryzaard plans to hold his prisoner, the young man with the rare rock. Detailed instructions for its construction are neatly laid out in the voice transcripts. Heavy lines lead to the room, and then disappear into empty space. It’s hard to say what they are, but they have the look of power cables.

Why would Ryzaard need to feed so much power in a sound-proof room?

Kent checks the most recent voice transcripts, downloading them from the Turing Box and hunching over the bluescreen of the slate, looking for the voice of Ryzaard, who seems to have been gone for several hours.

Then he finds what he’s looking for. The voiceprint protocol identifies Ryzaard in his office. Kent backs up to the point where Ryzaard enters his office and plugs in the earphones and listens.

Sets of feet enter into the sound space.

“This is my office,” Ryzaard says.

The feet shuffle through the space. The sound analysis indicates a high probability that it’s five people walking. Another door opens, and the entire group enters into the round space. The door seals shut behind them with a sucking sound.

Then there’s nothing but silence.

Kent listens intently for several minutes. Just as he reaches his hand out to turn off the earphones, he hears the door unseal itself and open up.

“You’re very lucky to be alive. Let’s hope you have the sense to cooperate.”

It’s the voice of Ryzaard.

The door seals shut again, and footsteps move into the interior of Ryzaard’s office.

Kent pulls up the sound analysis. It says there are four people walking, one less than the number that entered the round room a minute ago. One stayed behind, or had been left behind, in the soundproof room. The one who Ryzaard said was
lucky to be alive
.

The young man with the rock.

Kent closes his eyes and listens to the conversation taking place in Ryzaard’s office.

T
he two guards walk out into the corridor, leaving Ryzaard in his office with Naganuma. There’s a long silence between them. Naganuma stands in place near the sofa, and Ryzaard moves close to the window, looking out on the city.

“I still have my doubts about this.” Ryzaard raises his chin in a subtle show of defiance as his arms drop to his side. “You had better be right.”

Naganuma leans close to the Chinese painting above the sofa, studying its exquisite details. “We have an agreement. I promised to bring the boy and his Stone to you. You promised not to kill him.” He speaks calmly, staring forward.

“Yes.” Ryzaard turns and drops down into the high back chair behind the desk. “We have an agreement. If the boy cooperates.”

Moving his hands along the painting, Naganuma looks as if he’s reading the impressions of the ink on the yellowed paper with the tips of his fingers. “I would advise you not to attempt to change the terms.”

“Let me make myself perfectly clear.” As he swivels in the chair, Ryzaard eyes the Zeus statue on the desk. “If the boy refuses to cooperate, I will torture him until he agrees. If he doesn’t agree, I
will
kill him. Simple as that.” He reaches into a drawer for a cigarette. “You are more of a fool than even I thought if you expected anything less of me.”

Naganuma’s eyes narrow to thin dark strips, and his fingers snap shut like a vise into a large fist, crumpling the ancient paper of the Chinese painting in his hand and ripping half of it from the wall. He turns, stares at Ryzaard and drops the torn fragment to the floor.

And then he vanishes.

Seconds later he reappears at the side of Ryzaard, staring down into his upturned face. “Fool!” Naganuma says. “Your answer to everything is always the same. Death and killing.” He towers over Ryzaard and speaks through gritted teeth, spittle flying out of his mouth. “You judge the boy too quickly. Push him too hard. Scare him off. No wonder he refuses you. Have you not seen the power he wields for one so young? Has there ever been another that learned so quickly, that was so prepared to take up a Stone?”

Ryzaard’s fingers curl until his nails bite into the palms of his hands. He slowly turns in the swivel chair, stares out the window and puts his back to Naganuma, letting silence fill the space between them. The next instant, his sitting form dissolves from the chair, and he’s suddenly standing face to face with Naganuma, holding the old Boker dagger in his hand under Naganuma’s chin, its point millimeters from drawing blood.

Naganuma is unflinching and looks through Ryzaard’s eyes as if there’s nothing there. “Try it.” he says. “You know you will fail.”

Gripping the handle of the knife, Ryzaard’s fingers are white against the black wood. “No one calls me a fool.” His voice is calm and steady. “And no one tells me what to do.” Lowering the dagger, a long exhale flows out like a valve releasing pressure. “I have kept my part of the bargain. I have kept all my bargains with you. Since you made contact with me, I have helped you build hundreds of Shinto shrines around the world. Your religion is finally beginning to break out of Japan. All thanks to MX Global funding.”

“And where would you be now if it were not for me and everything I have taught you?” Naganuma takes a step back and turns to look out the window over Ryzaard’s shoulder. “Still an unknown professor at some forgotten university in Europe, playing parlor tricks with the Stone. Without me, you would have never made it to Oxford or this company.”

A visible wave of relaxation moves over Ryzaard. He drops the knife and turns to stand, shoulder to shoulder with Naganuma, at the window. “Our partnership has been mutually beneficial for many years. For that I thank you. But you will not interfere with my plans for the boy. There is too much at stake. I will not allow anything or anyone to stop me from bringing Paradise to the earth. The future of the human race depends on it.”

Naganuma’s body tenses. “The boy has great strength. I have tested him and seen it myself.”

“I see. You took him to your little shack in the woods, showed him the wonders of the Stones, taught him many things, opened his eyes so that he can see as you do.”

“Just as I did for you many years ago.”

“You are a foolish old man, too generous with what you know, too willing to trust, to take risks.” Ryzaard’s lower lip shoots out, and the top one joins it in a snarl. “The higher knowledge of the Stones must remain ours, and ours alone. To do otherwise is suicidal.”

“You judge him too harshly.” Naganuma shakes his head. “Your desire to keep all things to yourself, your thirst for power, it has blinded you so that you no longer
see
.”

“You are wrong,” says Ryzaard. “I see only too clearly what must be done to save this world.”