Tom Hyman (38 page)

He greeted Anne with elaborate continental politeness, obtained a visitor’s pass for her, and ushered her down the empty corridors to his office on the second floor, a cramped, windowless space in a state of disarray so chaotic that Anne’s first impression was that it had just been burglarized.

Guttmann removed a teetering stack of paper and books from a chair and invited her to sit. He plunked himself down in his own chair, in front of a glowing computer screen. Only the screen was visible. All adjacent surfaces, except for a detached keyboard, were totally buried under paper. Anne wasn’t even certain that Guttmann had a desk at all.

“I apologize for the grossly untidy state of affairs,” he said, with a self-deprecating grin. “The management threatens to fire me regularly.

Of course they won’t, because I’m the only living human who knows where everything is in here. And for that same reason, I dare never clean it up, lest I render myself dispensable in the process.”

Guttmann’s eyes, which had been focused lingeringly on Anne’s breasts, finally noticed the thick manila envelope she was carrying. “I see that you’re treating the package in your right hand with extreme care.

I can only guess that it contains the program you’re so eager to have me examine.”

Anne handed Guttmann the envelope. “I very much appreciate you taking the trouble.”

Guttmann busied himself pushing aside boxes and stacks of manuals to locate a bay for the RCD in the computer tower hidden somewhere under his desk. He found one, finally, and sat back with a sigh of contentment. “This may take a minute,” he warned, settling the keyboard comfortably in his lap.

Anne sat silently while Guttmann explored the contents of the Jupiter disk. His fingers flew over the keyboard in a blur of clicks, interspersed with an occasional grunt of impatience.

“It’s Goth’s baby, all right,” he said, not pausing in his keystrokes.

Screen after screen of data flickered by.

Suddenly Guttmann banged both fists against his head and uttered a booming shout that made Anne jump. “And it’s vintage Axel Guttmann, too!” he exclaimed proudly. “I know my algorithms when I see them.”

He swiveled around in his chair. “I wrote it. Most of it, anyway. It took a few months out of my life, I can tell you. I never finished it, though. Goth just disappeared one day. I never saw him again, never heard a word from him. I learned later that Stanford had fired him.

And by that time he could probably write program code as well as I could. He was a fast study, that Goth.

It’s incredibly complicated stuff—so many evaluations to make, so many kinds of criteria. And so much data to crunch. I almost went out of my mind trying to make my humble computer languages perform the kinds of four-dimensional acrobatics that Goth expected. But I did it.

I forgot how good I was. But Goth himself—he was crazy, I think. A genius, of course, but obsessed.

He must have finished this himself.”

Anne explained the genetic trials she had run with Jupiter. “I could never get a match. The program seems to function fine, but the results I get are consistently wrong.”

Guttmann laughed. It was a barroom guffaw, as if he had just been told a great dirty joke. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “Goth was a maniac about secrecy. I don’t know much about genetics, you understand, but it was clear to me that Harold thought he was on to something big with these new procedures he was developing. He was very arrogant about it.

He even made me sign a piece of paper swearing I’d never divulge anything about the nature of the work I’d done for him.” Guttmann paused, then continued in a quieter tone. “I never did, either. But now that he’s dead, I guess it no longer matters.”

Anne was completely puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Access codes,” Guttmann explained. “He always used codes.

He drove me up the wall with his goddamned codes.”

“But I was able to operate the program. And so were you.”

Guttmann patted Anne gently on the knee. The gesture startled her, and she tensed. “Of course . . . of course,” he said. “And you got terrible results!”

“Yes, but—” “Goth used a silent code. It doesn’t prohibit access. It does something better. It lets you go right ahead and use the program, in complete ignorance of the fact that your failure to initiate with the correct code renders all your results useless—completely useless!”

Guttmann moved his head closer and stared right into her eyes. “A silent code is the best protection,” he continued, in a soft voice.

“It encourages the would-be intruder into believing he’s broken into the program, when in fact he’s being hoodwinked.

It’s as if you cracked a combination safe on the first try, took out

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the valuables, and found out later they were all fake and sprayed with a lethal poison to boot.”

“Then how do you access the program properly?”

Guttmann flashed his gold inlays. “You have to know the access code, of course.”

Anne felt the now familiar sense of impending frustration and despair.

“But that could be anything, couldn’t it?”

Guttmann nodded. “There are millions of possibilities.”

“But just now, you searched all through the program, didn’t you . .

.

?”

“Hah. Yes. Of course. I was studying the program code—the lines of instruction written in computer language. In this case, Language C.

Very powerful. It’s used in a lot of scientific applications.”

Anne bit her lip. Guttmann was making her nervous. Despite absolutely no encouragement, he insisted on trying to flirt with her. “I don’t know anything about the architecture of computer programs,” she replied. “But how could you have looked at all those lines of program without knowing the access code?”

Guttmann produced a self-satisfied little chuckle. “Oh, I do know it.

I typed it in at the sign-on. You can hit the Return key at that point, as you’ve obviously been doing, and get your bogus results, or you can enter the correct code. That’s what I did.”

Anne laughed. She felt a rush of triumph. Her effort was finally beginning to pay off. “Are you sure it’s right?”

Guttmann chuckled again. “Oh yes. Goth always used the same word as his access code. I used to kid him about it, telling him he was defeating his own purpose by being so unimaginative. But it had some special significance to him, it seemed. And I suppose he figured that since I was the only other living human being that knew what the code word was, that it would remain perfectly safe.”

Guttmann removed the RCD from his computer and handed it back to Anne.

He closed her fingers around it with his other hand.

Anne slipped it back in the envelope.

“Well . . . what is it?” she asked.

Guttmann showed his gold teeth again. “First, I have a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“How do you come to have this program?”

Anne had thought out in advance what she should say. She hated to lie to anybody; but in this situation, extreme caution was obviously called for. Guttmann didn’t seem at all aware of the controversial nature of the program; neither did he appear to know that it had led to Goth’s death. So the complete truth was out of the question. “Goth sold it to a company that my husband owns. That was just before he died. Now my husband’s trying to figure out exactly what he owns. Since he can’t go back to Goth, he’s asked me to look into it.”

“What does your husband intend to do with it?”

Anne smiled brightly. “Nothing at the moment. He just wants me to help him determine whether or not it has any value.”

“Does it?”

“Well, we’re not sure, yet.”

Axel Guttmann poured on more questions, and Anne had trouble trying to fabricate persuasive answers. His sudden curiosity alarmed her. She couldn’t tell if he was genuinely suspicious of her or just trying to keep her there.

He finally ran out of questions. It was Sunday, the place was empty, and Guttmann just sat there, staring at her, his eyes appraising her body with a rude frankness.

“So will you tell me the code word?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he replied.

“Oh? Why?”

“I think I might need a little persuasion.”

Oh God, Anne thought. “If you’re thinking of some financial consideration,” she said, “I’m sure we could arrange something—’ “I’m not,” Guttmann interrupted. He wet his lips with his tongue.

“No ? Then what . . . ? ” “I was thinking of a more personal consideration. A little exchange, you might say. I give you what you want, and you give me what I want….” He let his sentence trail off suggestively.

; You creepy bastard, she thought. It was clearly time to leave.

Anne got quickly to her feet and held out her hand. “Well, thank you for your time,” she said in a cold voice. “If you change your mind about money . . .”

Guttmann remained in his chair. He grabbed her hand and grinned at her. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

She tried to pull her hand back, but his grip tightened. He yanked her toward him. She lost her balance and fell forward onto his lap. He locked his arms around her waist and neck and pressed his mouth against her lips. His tongue slithered against her teeth, trying to pry them apart. A hand squeezed her breasts, and she felt his penis bulging against her thigh.

Guttmann was strong and determined. Screaming out in a deserted office building would be a waste of breath. She opened her mouth to allow Guttmann’s probing tongue partway in, then bit down hard. He fell back—shocked, astonished. He groaned, then clapped a hand over his mouth. Blood oozed between his fingers.

She pulled free of his lap and started to run. He caught her and spun her around. She brought one foot up swiftly. The toe of her sneaker met the middle of his groin with a solid thud. He gasped, staggered, and doubled over.

e didn’t seem inclined to pursue his attack, but Anne didn’t wait around to find out. She tucked the envelope with the RCD under her arm and fled from the building. She ran to her car in the parking lot, got in, slammed and locked the door, and sat there, trembling violently from the fear and anger boiling in her blood.

When she felt calm enough to drive, she started the car and headed slowly back for Manhattan.

She was happy she had fended him off so decisively. But the encounter depressed her.

Giving into Guttmann’s demands was out of the question. But how else was she ever going to get the access code from him?

It was an exclusive gathering. The baroness had chosen the twenty couples from an initial list of two hundred. Each couple was being charged the equivalent in German marks of half a million dollars to be the first to participate in the program. They had all been interviewed several times, and their medical, social, and financial histories taken down in detail.

They were all rich and well connected. Five couples were from Germany, five from France, four from England, two from Italy, and one each from Spain, Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland. The youngest woman in the group was twenty-four; the oldest, thirty-five. Three of the husbands were titled nobility; two of them were billionaires.

Dalton Stewart had played no part in their selection. Nor had he sought any. He was content to let the baroness stick her neck out for this first round of customers. If Jupiter worked as advertised, he expected to initiate the second round with a group of Americans.

The baroness had been careful to understate Jupiter’s promise.

The couples had been told that they could expect mentally and physically superior offspring, and that was all. They were at Schloss Vogel for a series of informal talks on the procedures they were to undergo the following week at the clinic in Romania.

As the guests arrived, they were shown to their bedrooms-large, spacious suites on the upper floors of the castle. Later, the baroness conducted them on a tour through the 250-year-old 314

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building’s seemingly endless spaces: the huge Hall of Knights, with its display of medieval armor and weaponry; the baroque chapel, with its enormous stone arches; the grand salons; the two story-high dining hall with its tapestries and balconies; the tower rooms; the ramparts; the arsenal; the keep.

The dungeon, located at the bottom of a long circular stone staircase several levels below ground, was especially popular. The guests inspected the various medieval instruments of torture with J.” avid curlosity.

The center of attention was something called the “little maiden,” a modified version of the infamous iron maiden. The iron maiden was a giant iron box about the dimensions of a large coffin stood on end, with a hinged door on the front. The insides of the back and the door were studded with hundreds of long, sharp iron spikes, so that when a victim was put inside and the lidlike door screwed closed, the spikes would pierce his flesh from head to toe in hundreds of places. The little maiden differed in that her spikes were considerably shorter.

It was possible, unless one was very fat, to stand up in it with the door closed without a single point touching one’s skin. The little maiden was considered a more effective torture because of the exquisite mental duress it inflicted on its victim. Some were able to hold out for hours before finally collapsing against the spikes. Amid a great deal of giggling and laughter, several of the guests got inside and had the door closed on them.

But Schloss Vogel’s biggest attraction was its ingenious network of secret passageways. The baroness passed out flashlights and took the guests through the main one—a three-level passage twenty inches wide inside the interior walls of the main section of the castle. One entered the passage through a hidden doorway in a basement closet, climbed a long flight of extremely narrow steps to the second floor, then walked along a kind of gallery past a row of small wooden doors that gave access to a row of bedroom suites on the castle’s south side.