The Sacrifice Game (55 page)

( 83 )

I
motioned him inside and made a feeble gesture at the coatrack. I don’t know what I was thinking because of course, like me, he’d want to keep his coat in this icebox.

“I’m in the orifice,” Marena’s voice called. I was pretty sure she was watching us—it seemed like she had cameras in every other Robie sconce—but she sounded casual, not at all worried that I was out here with her gentleman caller. Impotently, I followed protocol and pointed Jed
₁
toward the door to the living room, and watched as Marena swept across the room and planted—is that the right word?—her lips on his. Max Sleeked through the hall and vaulted over the desk. Marena gave me a funny look, held up a wait-one-minute finger, and closed the door in my face. I guess I hadn’t changed that much, after all. Big tough Jed, back from Mayaland.

I tiptoed back to the guest bedroom. Maybe if they couldn’t hear me slink away, they’d forget about me.

I could hear Marena chattering away and could tell by the thunk of stone on thick wood that they’d started up a Go game. Hmmm.

Time trickled past. Every once in a while I sort of tiptoed back over to the door. I didn’t put my ear on it, though, since I figured everything you did in this house was on video.

“Are you and he having a thing?” Jed
₁
asked.

“No.”

They must have moved into a different part of the room, because their voices got too muffled to hear, and I started feeling stupid standing there. I went into the sort of living zone and flopped on the sofa. Huh. Damn. It’s me in there and he doesn’t know it. This is odding me out. And I’m jealous, sort of. Except I suppose they couldn’t be involved if he was asking insecure questions about me. Then again, she’d just said we weren’t having a thing. Weren’t we? I went back to the guest bedroom again, turned off the main light, and started one of my pacing rituals. I was on my one hundred and fifty-fourth circuit when voices started coming out of the phone. I was about to pick it up and then realized they weren’t talking to me, and that Marena must have turned on the intercom so that I could hear her conversation with Jed
₁
.

“Don’t even tell me, you
fuck,
you, you, you
 . . .
you think you’re going to make that decision—you can’t make that decision, you’re not some like, wise being, you’re just, you’re a loser.” Geez, I thought. Take it easy, that’s me you’re talking to. “You’re a boring windbaggy geek loser, you don’t know anybody worth knowing, nobody’s heard of you, you’ve never done anything remotely important, you’re—”

I heard a little grunt. Had someone just gotten punched? And her voice had sounded so guttural. Like, desperate. I picked up the receiver, turned the speaker thing off, and walked out into the hall.

“You
shit,
” Marena’s voice went. “I was, I was, I was practically falling in
love
with you and you were
shit
. You were worse than shit. You’re what shit would shit if it could shit.”

I skidded a little bit in Tony Sic’s athletic socks as I rounded the corner of the hallway.

“How do I stop it?”

I opened the door and saw Other Jed, Jed
₁
, looming over a very small-looking Marena.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked like an idiot.

Jed
₁
looked over his shoulder at me. “Hi, Tony, nothing.” I felt something large and rocklike push me to the side. It was Grgur.

I looked back just in time to see Marena give a brutal low kick to Jed
₁
’s knee. I winced and jumped forward. I don’t know if I was planning to protect Jed
₁
or help her finish the job. Neither thing happened, though. Jed
₁
was backing away through the room, throwing whatever was handy at the three of us.

“Jed’s gone psycho,” Marena shrieked. Her voice wailed feeedbackily through every speaker in the house

“GRAB HIM RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW . . .”

( 84 )

A
nd at that, I knew they were going to kill him.

Another thing I knew, though, was that Marena’s earlobe-mounted phone, and the whole house’s phone and Internet systems, weren’t running off the increasingly sketchy post–Disney World Horror local towers. Instead, there was a pair of direct-uplink dishes on the roof. And they ran on the house’s electricity.

I toe-mushed my latex sandals off my feet and padded out, into the kitchen, and through a little pantry. It was Florida around here, so there wasn’t any basement, and the house’s gut brains were all in a little room behind a commercial water cooler. I’d already identified both the regular main circuit breaker and the big isolator switch that cut the line to a natural gas-powered backup generator that lurked in a shed in the backyard. Just to make a cleaner break, I cut the generator first and then the house main. There was a second of real dark and then a few battery-powered night-lights came on. Well offstage, Marena’s voice shouted something.

That ought to give him a few extra minutes, I thought. I’ll try some of his cold e-mail accounts later. My cold e-mail accounts. Our. I opened the kitchen door, jogged across the backyard—which wasn’t the yard with the pool and the pepper hedges and everything, but just a swath of centipede grass surrounded by dready yew bushes—and vaulted—well,
vaulted
sounds a little too graceful—over a steel fence post into the neighbors’ yard. I lost footing and rolled over. If they catch me, they’re going to ice me pretty fast after this, I thought. A few days of interrogation, tops. Still, I was less terrified than I would have expected I’d be. Maybe Tony’s brain—the less conscious part of it that was still there the way he’d left it—was less cowardly than the Jed mind it had appropriated. Or maybe it felt like I didn’t need to worry because I wasn’t really me. I got up again and ran around the neighbors’ big faux-Spanish-Colonial pile toward Oshkechabi Street. I’m doing great, I thought. Got to ditch the phone, though. And check again for implanted chips—oh, hell. I only got the vaguest impression of something behind me before there was something around me, crushing my chest, and as I realized that one of the guards had tackled me the grass tilted up and mashed me in the face.

Too late.

( 85 )

“W
ell,” I said, “if you’d let me meet with him, like I’d been begging to do, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Or else it would have still happened,” Marena said. “Or something even worse.”

We were checking out Jed
₁
’s house, or rather aquarium. There were wads of Kleenex and drilled-and-smashed hard drives lying all over. What a fucking slob, I thought. Marena and I had come out onto the sort of porch because I couldn’t bear to watch Ana’s team tear up the place.

“Okay,” I said, “but—look, what was I supposed to think? It sounded like you were going to kill him, in fact I bet you were going to kill him, and I didn’t know why, so, so, so—”

“Okay, okay,” she said, “let’s not just keep going over and over this. We’ll find him, and you’re going to help us find him, and we won’t kill him, and everything’ll be fine.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

It was me, I thought again. I am such a fuckup. I’m
evil
, I’m vile, I’m evillive vileeliv, I’m—

No
. No, it’s not me. That me is a different me. The me I am is
not
that person any more. Better. Anyway, don’t dwell on it. Fix it. Find him and neutralize him. And don’t get sentimental.

Someone I know of but whom I’ve never seen face-to-face, I thought. Idiot. Who else could it have been? Obviously mirrors don’t count.
Idiota, tonto, pendejo
—

Cancel, cancel. Not helpful.

Come on, work with Marena. Make sure
she’s
okay. Because she’s not okay right now, that’s for sure. She doesn’t realize how much trouble she’s in. Warren’s paranoid. I mean, both the individual and the company are paranoid. No matter how much I doth protest, they’re going to think I’m going to make the same decision as Jed
₁
. Especially after my little world-destroying misunderstanding the other day. They’ll keep me on a short leash, short like choking, and when I don’t have any more goodies for them, they’ll kill me. And Marena—I mean, they’ll do her, too, no matter how sophisticated she seems she’s still a little too trusting, she still thinks they’re her friends, she doesn’t realize they’ll do anybody, oh, Jesus we are so screwed—

Cancel that, my interlocutor self said again. Don’t sell yourself short like one of your corn contracts. You’ve still got a few arrows in your bow or strings to your quiver or whatever the hell it is. Go along with it, stay close to Marena, win her over to your way of thinking, put in protection for both of you . . . I mean, you know all this, Jed, Jed slash Tony, Jed-Sub-Three, whoever you are now, just do it.

I guess you’re right, I thought back.

“. . . how to stop it,” Marena was saying. “Right?”

“Sorry?”

“What?”

“Sorry, I tuned out,” I said.

“I said, Jed-Sub-One thought the Cascade wouldn’t be stoppable because you couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Right?”

“Well, yes,” I said, “if you mean that just doing random things and hoping one of them’ll work is too much of a shot in the dark. Presumably it’s a robust autocatalytic event chain with a variable
n
of—”

“Okayokayokay, hang on.”

“I tried to access his finances, but I couldn’t get much of it.”

“The thing is he didn’t know about the Human Game, right? So it may be figure-outable with that, I mean, it might identify a whateveryouguyscallit, there may be, you know.”

“A stopping mechanism.”

“Right. And with the LEON version of that, the, I guess we’re calling it the Human Game, that should do it, right?”

“I hope so. I mean,
we
hope—”

“So, so let’s just put everything into finding Jed-Sub-One, and then, we’ll get out of him what, you know, whatever’s going on, and then we’ll bring in LEON and work from there.”

“Get out of him, like, sweat him.”

“Right. Why, do you mind?”

“Oh, uh, no, no, definitely—”

“Hang on.” Ana and one of her tech people were calling for us to come back in. We did. They’d really torn up the place, but so far, it looked like they hadn’t disconnected any of the fish tanks. They’d pulled up the rubbery jigsaw matting and were prying the old half-ton Chubb safe out of the concrete. Needless to say, Jed
₁
had reset the combination.

“Any erasing or explosive triggers on this?” Ana asked.

“Not that I know of. Unless I got even more paranoid after the Guate trip.”

“No radioactive materials or anthrax powder or whatever?”

“No, no, are you kidding? I wouldn’t—”

“Anything that’s going to erase the hard drive on opening?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’ll erase without the password, though.”

“Right. Any ideas on the password? Any favorite pet names, TV characters—”

“No, I don’t do it that way, it’s like with the safe combination, every Sunday when I do my Grandessa Game I just grab a new sixteen digits off a randomizer and reset it to that.”

“What’s a Grandessa Game?”

“Well, a Grandessa . . .” Hell, I thought. It felt violating, getting interrogated. But I’d screwed up. Pretty regally, in fact. You deserve it, Jed. Just co-fucking-operate. I started again. “A Grandessa’s just a word for a sort of pouch of like, seeds and stones that all Maya sun-adders have. And we use it to tell the suns, you know, like divination. So it’s kind of an abbreviated version of the Sacrifice Game. But I use it with a full Game board. And I do it at midnight on Sunday and that kind of maps out the next week.”

“Why on Sunday, aren’t you on a Mayan calendar or something?”

“Oh, well, you could do it anytime, it’s just a Catholic habit, my mother would get querents then because the farmers stay up late on Saturday, like a midnight Mass.”

“Okay.”

“And I do all my numbers then, investments, passwords, upcoming dates, all that. Of course, clients want lottery numbers.”

“Right.”

“But anyway, that just tells you when the last combination got set. It doesn’t have anything to do with the combination itself.”

“Right, okay, never mind, we’ll deal with it.”

I’ll bet you will, I thought. And I bet it’ll be with an oxyacetylene torch rather than with logic. I just hoped they wouldn’t ship the safe to Quantico or some other godforsaken place where it would attract the attention of politically motivated gangsters.

“You’re sure there’s no other strongbox around?” Ana asked. I said no.

“No other hides?”

I shook my head.

“What about all your safety deposit boxes?”

“I’m sure he would have changed those,” I said. Come on, five isn’t “all,” I thought. Five is still a nonparanoid amount. “Unless he didn’t get the time to go to Vegas and deal with the one at the Bank of Nevada.”

“Yeah, Bill’s already on his way to check on that one,” she said. I’d never heard of Bill, but I didn’t think he’d come up again anyway.

“Great,” I said. And be sure to put my underwear up on eBay, I thought.

“Hey, check this out,” another of the tech people said. I think his name was Chet Nguen. He called us over to my old desk, which had a new Samsung laptop on it. There weren’t any sensitive files on it, of course—those were all in the safe—but it did have the names of some recently modified files, and the last-touched file had automatically named itself after the first distinctive phrase in the contents, and, in the last five minutes, Chet had already deciphered the name out of EncryptX. It was a little on the ominous side:
Why I Did It.