The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

But, as Shaw well knew, not until the raider was identified could the investigation begin. You couldn’t stop an attack beforehand. During the attack the Lattice could be used for defense, and afterwards it could reveal the entire life story of the raider and all his collaborators. But only afterwards.

There could be hundreds of people planning attacks on any given day—there probably were. But to find them, you still had to know where to look. There was no search option for thoughts that Shaw could query. No way to tell it: “Show me everyone who’s planning to attack the Lattice.”

Once a raider was identified, there was no hiding.

For crime other than attacks on the Lattice itself, the knowledge that there was a one hundred percent chance you would get caught was usually deterrent enough, as Shaw knew better than most.

When Shaw was six, he and his family were attacked while on vacation in West Rome. Their computer-driven car was taking them on a guided tour through the narrow streets near the high Vatican walls when eight Neo-Catholic terrorists descended on the car and cut power to its guidance system.

A man jumped on top of the car and slammed the butt of his laser into the glass dome over the car, shattering it into a million pieces over Byron and his family. He felt his mother’s grip on his arm, but it wasn’t enough to resist the pull of the man’s leathered glove on his other arm.

Byron and his younger brother Sagan were yanked out of the top and pulled away from their parents. Shaw’s memory of the rest descended into flashes. The thick black boots of the terrorist who had grabbed him. The wailing of his three-year-old brother screaming for his mother. And—for reasons he didn’t understand—a lingering smell of bread from a nearby cafe.

That was all he saw before he and Sagan were pulled into a steep stone staircase and deep into catacombs and sewers under the ancient city.

He spent the next four days there, doing his best to comfort his younger brother with games and stories, trying to quash his own fear. The man who had so easily grabbed Byron and stashed him under his arm introduced himself only as Dioli. He promised that Byron and Sagan would not be hurt, that as Catholics they would not take an innocent life. They needed the brothers to send a message to their father, and to the United States in general, that they should stay out of internal Catholic affairs.

Dioli told Byron the truth about Davis Shaw. Byron’s father was not merely in Italy for a vacation, as he’d told his family. And his job at the U.S. State Department was not as a low-level bureaucrat as he’d let on. He was in West Rome to offer military and financial support to the Italians after the disunification of the country the year before, and to pledge that the U.S. would ensure that the Papal States would have their membership to the United Nations revoked unless they renounced all claims of ownership to the southern half of the Italian boot and withdrew to the walls of the original Vatican City.

Unbeknownst to Shaw and his captors, a storm was rumbling on the other side of the world. A Japanese company called Kanjitech unveiled their discovery that the U.S. had been spying on the world with something codenamed the Lattice. This bombshell was followed by another revelation: Kanjitech had reverse-manufactured a device that could tap into the Lattice.

The secret exposed, the military tried to shut down Kanjitech’s ability to use the Lattice, but found it was impossible without affecting their own ability to use it. The Lattice was either on or it was off. So long as the U.S. wanted access to the Lattice’s incredible wealth of data, it would have to remain open to anyone who bought one of Kanjitech’s readers.

The President, his entire cabinet, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff met hastily and considered their options. Their final decision: leave it open. In a flurry of activity, the U.S. gave the Lattice specs to any American company that wanted to manufacture Lattice readers to compete against Kanjitech. In addition, they looked for something to show that the Lattice could do more than just spy on foreign nations. They found their story: two kidnapped boys.

Byron and Sagan were found and safely removed from their captors in the dead of the night, the Lattice guiding the soldiers step-by-step through the maze of tunnels and catacombs and directly to the sleeping boys. Their reunion with their parents was at the top of every news feed, and it was hailed as the first test case of what the Lattice could do to stop crime and improve the world.

As a boy of six, Shaw swore up and down that Dioli had pledged not to harm them and that he had believed his captor. Dioli had told the truth where his father had lied—he truly had been in West Rome to work with the Italians—and Shaw felt a certain sympathy with the man. Who was his father to dictate things to Dioli and his friends? They hadn’t done anything to him.

Dioli and the seven other terrorists were locked up for life, and Shaw’s testimony in defense of his captor was assumed to be Stockholm Syndrome. For the next three years he was excused from school early every Tuesday so he could go to therapy to treat his “misplaced” feelings toward Dioli.

Years later, when the Lattice was able to read thoughts, and Shaw was old enough to use a rented jump box without parental approval, Shaw jumped back to the four days of his capture and listened to Dioli’s thoughts.

Whatever compassion he’d felt toward the man was destroyed. Dioli was fully prepared to kill Byron to prove his resolve and to increase bargaining for the three-year-old Sagan. Just a few minutes in his mind, and Shaw was stunned by the calculations and the ruthlessness of the man he had previously defended.

One thing was brutally clear. One more day in captivity, and Dioli would have killed him. Shaw had the Lattice to thank for his life.

He never doubted that fact, and it was why he’d applied to work at Lattice security. It was why he had breezed through the background checks and been promoted so quickly. No one who jumped into him could question his resolve.

As the shuttle touched down in San Francisco, Shaw thought about that feeling of certainty he’d held when he’d signed up for Lattice security. It was still inside him somewhere, he felt … but hollowed, its nourishment from his childhood abduction and rescue depleted by the years. There was an uncomfortable feeling associated with it, a sense that he was holding onto a childhood blanket that he no longer needed for comfort. He was an adult now, and his questions about the Lattice were starting to outweigh his childhood story. In the back of his mind, he knew that he was truly starting to reassess everything.

Just what did he think of the Lattice?

Normally when he came home for long weekends he would arrive late at night, slipping into his side of the bed and trying not to wake his wife. This time it was a hero’s welcome, with Ellie waiting at Lambert Field, even though he hadn’t called ahead.

Seeing her there, Shaw couldn’t help but wonder why he’d signed up for a job that kept them apart for weeks at a time. Maybe it was time for someone else to defend the Lattice, he thought, as he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her cheek.

“You’ve had quite a day,” she whispered in his ear, their soft helmets pressed against each other.

“You weren’t following along, were you?” Shaw asked, surprised.

“No. I caught some highlights after I left work, that’s when I saw you were coming in. My day’s full enough without spending it jumping into yours too, By,” Ellie said. She was the only person in the world Byron Shaw wanted to call him “By.”

They kissed again.

“So do you want to talk about it now, or wait?” she asked.

“Wait. Definitely wait. Right now I want nothing more than to take you home, throw you on the bed, and get out of my own head.”

They were officially trying. Sure, they could have just used the Lattice to look inside Ellie’s fallopian tubes for an egg—and they had agreed that they would do just that if she weren’t pregnant by January—but until then, “trying” was way more fun.

Their lovemaking was not a frenzied passion built up after weeks apart but a slow and almost casual act with conversation and laughter.

They dressed afterward and left their Vandeventer apartment for a late dinner in the Central West End. They slid into a booth at a restaurant around the corner and ordered a St. Louis style pizza. Ellie smiled softly at him and he looked back at her, soaking in her dark brown hair and sharp green eyes. He loved her slightly hawkish nose. He loved watching the end of it dip when she spoke, pulled down by a one-size-too-small upper lip.

In his vainer moments, Shaw thought they made a good looking couple. Any man should be happy to be on Ellie’s arm, he thought. And as for himself, he only hoped he could keep up. His military trained and maintained physique was slim—but tight all over and wound like a coil. He might not be able to beat her in a marathon, but in short quick bursts of energy, he was faster than anyone he knew. Shaw’s sandy brown hair and light blue eyes softened him enough that he didn’t appear as threatening as his body might have suggested, a quality he was supremely thankful for, because without it he was certain Ellie wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

“The next time I’m mad at you I’ll try to remember to jump back here and see what you were thinking. Judging by your expression, it’s something rather sweet. Or rather dirty, I’m not sure which,” Ellie said, bringing him out of his thoughts.

“It’s what happens when I haven’t seen you in a month.”

“No, it’s not, Byron. It’s something different.”

“So what is it then?”

“Excitement?” She guessed. “Freedom?”

“Maybe. I’m looking forward to working from home for a couple days. Things can get … confining at the Installation.”

“You’re not going to be able to do this all in jumps, though, are you?”

Shaw shook his head. “Probably not. I’ll do as much as I can from home, though.”

“I heard from Sagan and Naila. He wants to organize a party for his big brother while you’re in town. Since you saved the world and all that.”

Shaw rolled his eyes. “Tomorrow night, then. Anything after that and I can’t promise I’ll still be here. Who knows where this search is going to take me.”

Ellie nodded. “It’s amazing to think—that someone could arrange an attack and not be traced by the Lattice, I mean.”

“It’s not that the Lattice missed them, it’s that the links between the raid today and whoever masterminded the whole thing are so tenuous they didn’t come up in the first jumps. I’m going to be hunting for those tiny little connections. Depending on how well-planned this raid was, those contacts might have occurred a long time ago.”

Their pizza arrived and Shaw and Ellie dug in. Scooping a slice onto her plate, Shaw asked, “How was the clinic?”

She took a fork and knife and began cutting her pizza slice into pieces. “Not bad. Actually good by the end of the day. We had a going-away party for that patient I’ve been telling you about. He’s been working a few hours a week and finally saved up enough to get his own place.”

“That’s great news.”

“He was a bad case when he came in. I wouldn’t have pegged him as a likely candidate for a full rehab. But he’s going to make it. Of course, on the same day he leaves, we get four new OJs off the street. Starving … all their money spent on rented jump boxes. So it’s hard to feel like we’re winning the war.”

Shaw cringed. How easily it could have been him walking through that clinic’s doors. He’d tried Orgasm Jumping only once. He’d since come to think of it as the most dangerous thing he’d ever done.

He was nineteen, and jumping into thoughts was still fairly new. There were reports of OJ addicts, but most people thought they must have been predisposed—sick lonely perverts. Despite his fear that he was one of those perverts for being interested, he was too cowardly to turn down Elvin when he suggested they go to the jump café. Too cowardly … and too intrigued. It was just too exciting for a nineteen-year-old guy to turn down.

Shaw and his friends repeated the already conventional wisdom: if you spent less than thirty minutes in an orgasm jump, you couldn’t get addicted. Later research showed how dangerous and damaging even a few minutes were, and how lucky Shaw had been.

He, Elvin, and Peter had found a jump café down the street from Peter’s parents’ apartment. The boys rented three jump boxes mounted in the wall next to each other. Shaw eyed his. It looked remarkably like a coffin, just one you entered from the end instead of the top.

Elvin was their natural leader and Shaw and Peter watched as he searched the touch screen for pre-set jump programs. “Here’s one,” he said. “Famous women, lesbians, and a couple orgies for good measure. Twenty-eight minutes. Too close to a half hour for you, By?” Elvin laughed and Shaw didn’t contradict, even though he bristled at being called “By”—Elvin knew it bugged him.

Together they slid into their jump boxes. Shaw closed the sliding door behind him and took a deep breath. He held up the rental slip he’d gotten at the café’s main desk and peeled the metallic mesh sticker off it. He attached it to his temple—it would be several more years before the implant that Shaw used now would be invented.

Once it was attached, Shaw only had a couple seconds before the first jump. He wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of images, jumping with no time for a breath.

With no warning he was suddenly mid-orgasm—the program had jumped him into the mind of a man coming inside of Cleopatra. Was he Antony? He didn’t care—it was too wonderful to think too long about that. He looked at her body underneath him, and just as the orgasm was fading, the program jumped him to a new mind, a new body, and a new orgasm. Above him was Marilyn Monroe, his hands on her breasts. Jump. He was in a woman’s mind and the jump lingered longer as she went through multiple orgasms, thanks to the tongue and hands of her beautiful lesbian partner. Jump. Another. Jump. Another. Jump. Another.

For twenty-eight minutes.

When Shaw emerged from the rented jump box he was torn between wanting to throw up and wanting to pay for another session. Peter slid out of his box looking sullen. He was trying to hide his crying, and Elvin made fun of him for it. Shaw was barely listening.