T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures (11 page)

"I'm just keeping you informed. I've got Oscar here, as you know—and Samantha Jones. I'll talk with them again soon. I'm totally satisfied with the system at this point."

"Good. That's very good. There's nothing you need to do, Jack. You can rule out sabotage at our end—everyone is totally loyal, even if Miles does get nervous. And you know how tight the security checks were."

"There's no criticism of your people, Charles. Nonetheless, I'm monitoring the situation closely. I'll let you know if anything comes up."

"Understood,"
Layton
said again, in the same tone of voice. "I'm available if you need to speak with me."

"Thanks, Charles."

"Thank you for calling, Jack."
Layton
hung up. One call down.

Much as
Layton
was cold, formal, and sometimes prickly, he had no real authority. The important thing was to keep the military hierarchy informed. If Skynet ever detected a Russian attack and decided to launch the American ICBMs, there was a clear line of command to confirm its decision, beginning with
NORAD's
Command Director, going through its Commander-in-Chief at Peterson Air Base, then the defense chiefs in Washington and
Ottawa
. In the end, the U.S. President would have to make the call, consulting with the Prime Minister of Canada and whomever else he saw fit.

Soon they would give Skynet sole responsibility for aerospace surveillance, decommissioning the NORAD site at
Cheyenne
Mountain
. Once that happened, shutting down Skynet would require the same line of authority as firing the missiles. For the moment, there was redundancy in the surveillance system, and Jack could still take Skynet off-line on his own authority, though he'd have to answer for it all the way up.

He called the NORAD Command Director. "Jack Reed here."

"Everything okay?"

"The system's working fine. Miles Dyson thinks it's working too well, which is pretty funny from the guy who designed it. Anyway, that's the only complaint anyone's got so far."

"All right."

"I'll be meeting with Cruz, the Cyberdyne President, and Sam Jones as the night goes on. If there's any glitch at all, I want to take the system down, just in case—put the issue beyond any doubt. I can't see it happening, but I'll need your support if it does."

"Everything is nominal here, Jack," the Command Director said, sounding only slightly puzzled. "We can get by without Skynet for a few hours if we must. We've done it before for long enough."

"Of course you have."

"It's your call, pal. Don't worry, I'll back you up if I can. Just make sure you've got a damn good reason."

"Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. I don't want to give you the wrong impression—we're not panicking over here. It's just if there is some glitch..."

"Yeah, yeah, I understand—you're just keeping me in the loop. Don't worry, that's fine. I'll have another word with the Commander-in-Chief."

Jack put down the receiver, feeling relieved to have that out of the way. The whole thing was ridiculous, but it still gave him the creeps. Well, he'd been given responsibility to deal with the problem and he damn sure would, one way or other. Next, he'd give Cruz and Jones a quick call.

What he couldn't get over was the fact that someone had such good information. Jack had played it down with Miles, but Miles was right: There was more behind all this. Some kind of sabotage could not be ruled out, not absolutely. Despite
Layton
's obvious impatience with the idea, some whacko might be trying to give them a twisted sort of warning.

The alternative, of course, was out of the question: Perhaps Sarah Connor really
had
received information from the future.

No, that didn't bear taking seriously.

CHAPTER FIVE

JOHN'S WORLD

LOS
ANGELES
,
CALIFORNIA

MAY 1994

Oscar Cruz ate half his sandwich and gulped down most of his coffee. He left the diner, handing across enough cash to cover the check easily, then waved down a taxi. He jumped in the back seat and gave Rosanna Monk's address. At this time of morning, it would take half an hour to reach her apartment.

On the way, he made some phone calls. First, he checked in with Cyberdyne's attorney, Fiona Black, from Black Jessup Nash. She had a complicated story about the insurance and the difficulty with getting any cooperation from Tarissa Dyson. "A lot of this doesn't add up," she said. "The insurers are going to be difficult about it I've already spoken to their attorneys and it's pretty obvious they don't want to grant indemnity. They almost seem to be blaming the
Dysons
."

Oscar cursed silently, but he wasn't really surprised. It was still unclear why Miles had gone to the site with the Connors and their accomplice. At first glance, it looked like he'd been forced to accompany them, but that didn't add up. The Connors had let Tarissa and the kid, Danny,

go free-so why hadn't she called the police straightaway, instead of waiting for a guard at the site to do it? Perhaps she'd been intimidated by threats of reprisals, but an early intervention might have saved her husband's life. If the
Dysons
weren't actually in league with the Connors, they'd sure behaved foolishly.

"Tarissa won't even talk to me," Black said. "She won't talk to the insurer or its lawyers, either. Everything has to go formally through her own lawyer. You'd think she was the subject of a criminal investigation."

"Maybe she will be," Oscar said, glancing at the taxi driver and just making sure that his end of the conversation didn't make sense to the driver. He guessed not.

Black said, "Maybe so, though I gather she's been prepared to talk to the police, as long as her attorney's present."

"Okay. So it's turning into a quagmire at your end?"

"Well, it's what you pay me for. You just need to understand that it's getting complicated."

Oscar had been around long enough to know that this was lawyer code for expect a huge bill He didn't like paying avoidable legal expenses, but it seemed that Black was doing a good job in absurdly difficult circumstances. It wasn't just the
Dysons
who'd screwed up badly. You'd think that the LA.P.D. could have stopped two adults and one nine- or ten-year-old child from demolishing a city office block. An entire SWAT team had failed to stop them, for God's sake.

If Black and her firm were going to get a windfall out of this, that might be a small price to pay. They had to sort out the big questions-not just the insurance money, but also the company's defense contracts. They'd have to convince the government that Cyberdyne was not at fault and that it still had the capacity to deliver. It didn't matter much what it took in legal expenses, or any other short-term pain, if they got a good result.

"Okay," he said. "That's all fine. I understand what you're up against Do what you have to do."

He left a message for Jack Reed in
Washington
, just saying he'd call back later. Then he called Charles Layton, just to say to whom he'd been talking.

"Very good,"
Layton
said, sounding slightly patronizing. "Keep me informed, Oscar."

Rosanna answered the door of her apartment, dressed in a plain white T-shirt, faded pink jeans, and a pair of flexible plastic sandals. She led him to a paved terrace out back, with cane furniture and an open sun umbrella.

"Thanks for making the time, Rosanna."

"Well, it's not like I had to go to work today."

She was probably the smartest of all Cyberdyne's team of young research employees, a pretty blonde in her late twenties, with very pale skin and a genius for neural net design work. She'd become involved in the nanochip project since joining the company two years before, with a doctorate and a raft of other degrees from UCLA. Next to Miles Dyson, she knew more about the project's details than anyone, even Oscar himself. But that was not necessarily saying so much. Miles had been the real expert. The project was his baby.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Rosanna said.

"Just water, please. Chilled, if that's not a problem. Nothing with bubbles."

She went inside, and Oscar called Reed again, getting his secretary, who put him through. They lined up a time for Oscar to visit him at the Pentagon, bringing
Layton
along.
Layton
had said he'd make any day available.

"I'm going to bring Rosanna Monk, as well," Oscar said. "With Miles gone, she's our best researcher. I'm sure she'll impress you."

"Okay," Reed said. "I've entered you in my diary." Rosanna returned with a clear plastic tray containing a jug of water and a couple of plastic tumblers. She put it down on the cane table, and pulled up a chair in the shade of the umbrella. With her pale complexion and large eyes, she looked like some nocturnal mammal.

Oscar got to the point. "I just spoke to Jack Reed in
Washington
. He wants to meet you. I told him that you're our top researcher on the nanochip device.
 
After Miles, of course.

"Maybe." Her skinny hand shook slightly as she poured water for them both.

"I don't think there's much doubt," he said. "Look, I won't stay long-this must be tough on you. I guess you think it could have been you last night."

"Am I that easy to read?" She looked at him in an odd way, as if they'd only just met, and she was sizing him up

"No, I'm sorry.
 
But I've been having similar thoughts."

Her expression softened a bit, and she nodded. "Okay.

"Those maniacs could have picked me to call on, just as easily as Miles. It makes you think."

"That's an understatement."

"I'm sure we're not the only ones in the company who are shaken up, but you and I must have been next in line."

"Yeah. Cheery thought, eh?" She gestured for him to eat some of the grapes. "Maybe it's not safe anymore, doing this kind of research."

Was she getting cold feet? He couldn't afford to lose her. "Well," he said, changing his voice a little, trying to tone things down and get some rapport, "one of the mysteries is how Sarah Connor even knew about it. There must be stuff the police haven't uncovered yet You know her background, I take it?"

"Not much, only what I've heard this morning-that she tried to blow up an AI lab in
San Diego
a year or two back. They caught her that time."

"Yeah, and they should have last night, too. Our guards got a message to the police-there was nothing wrong with our security arrangements. But somehow Connor and the others fought off a whole SWAT team and God knows how many other cops. How they did that is beyond my reckoning." He drank some of the water.

"Well, what next?" Rosanna said.

"I've got to go to
Washington
with Charles, the day after tomorrow. I want you to come with us."

"So I can meet Reed?"

"Yeah, I think that's pretty important. He really does want to meet you, and I want you to meet him. we've got to rebuild the team, and the relationships." He chewed one of the fat white grapes, then finished his water. "You said before-on the phone-that the project is still viable."

"Yes. I've been thinking about it some more, while I was waiting for you. I'm sure it could be done. It's just a question of how long we'd need."

"All right, that was my next question. Answer it frankly-this is no time for false optimism. I need your best assessment of how close Miles was, and how long it would take us to reconstruct his work."

"How close? You mean when he might have licked all the problems?"

"Yes,
 
how
 
close
 
he was
 
to
 
making
 
a
 
workable nanochip. You can assume that I've read all his reports and that I have a pretty good technical understanding."

She smiled thinly. "Yeah, boss, I know you're an old tech at heart."

"The point is, I need to take stock of where the project sits right now. It's crucial to our future."

"Miles was in a good mood about it last week," she said thoughtfully. "I didn't talk to him about it yesterday, but I know he worked on it over the weekend."

"When did you last discuss it?"

"On Friday. At that stage, he thought he was within an inch of solving the problem. My guess is he would have wrapped it up in a month or three."

"All right, now we need to be realistic. Regardless what Miles thought or anything else, how far away are we now?"

"Now that he's dead?"

"Exactly."

"That depends."

"Realistically, Rosanna."