Death Match

Lash shook his head. “Amazing.”

Diana’s smile returned. “That’s what I mean about opening doors.”

There was another, briefer silence as an under-waiter crept up and refilled Lash’s glass. “You know, it’s fu

“What’s fu

“Here we’ve been talking about French wine and Greek mythology and Japanese poetry, and you still haven’t asked what I do.”

“I know I haven’t.”

Once again, he was surprised by her directness. “Well, isn’t that usually the first topic that comes up? On first dates, I mean.”

Diana leaned forward. “Exactly. And that’s what makes this so special.”

Lash hesitated, considering. Then, suddenly, he understood. There was no need to ask the usual questions. Eden had taken care of all that. The tiresome introductory baggage, the blind date checks-and-balances, weren’t important here. Instead, a journey of discovery lay ahead.

This hadn’t occurred to him before. It was a tremendously liberating thought.

The waiter returned, noticed the menus remained untouched, bowed yet again, and turned away.

“Poor guy,” Diana said. “He’s hoping for a second seating.”

“You know what?” Lash replied. “I think this table’s booked for the rest of the evening.”

Smiling, Diana raised her empty hand in imitation of a toast. “In that case, here’s to the rest of the evening.”

Lash nodded. Then he did something unexpected, even to himself: he took Diana’s fingers in his own and raised them gently to his lips. Over the curve of her knuckles, he saw her eyes widen slightly; her smile deepen.

As he released her hand, he became aware of the faintest of scents. It wasn’t soap or perfume, but something of Diana herself: a hint of ci

Diana said nothing, merely raising her eyebrows in question.

In response, Lash lifted his own hand, filled this time with his wine glass. “And here’s to a universe of diversity,” he said.

THIRTY-FOUR

Sunday dawned raw and cold, and as the sun rose in the sky it seemed to chill rather than warm the land. By afternoon, the whitecaps of Long Island Sound had a leaden cast to them, and the unsettled waters looked black: harbingers of approaching winter.

Lash sat before the computer in his home office, nursing a cup of herbal tea. Miraculously — given the charged atmosphere of his di

There was the usual Web ephemera: a scammer that claimed to have unlocked the secrets of Eden and offered to share them on a $19.95 video; conspiracy-theory sites that spoke darkly of evil alliances the company had made with intelligence agencies. But among all the dross there were also occasional bits of gold. Lash sent half a dozen articles at random to his printer, then carried the printouts to the living room sofa.

Feet propped on the table, the mournful cry of gulls sounding in the distance, he leafed slowly through them. There was an exceedingly complex white paper on artificial personality and swarm intelligence, written by Silver almost a decade earlier and no doubt released on the Internet without permission. A financial website provided a sober-sided analysis of the Eden business model, or at least the portion of it that was public knowledge, and a brief history of how it had been bankrolled by pharmaceutical giant PharmGen before being spun off on its own. And from another site came a flattering corporate biography of Richard Silver, who had risen from obscurity to become a world-class entrepreneur. Lash read this more carefully than the first two, marveling at the way Silver had developed his dream so faithfully and resolutely; how he hadn’t let the vaguely reported misfortunes of early youth stand in his way. He was that rarest of people, the genius who seemed to know, from a very young age, the gift he’d been born to give the world.

There were other articles, too, not quite so flattering: an obnoxious tabloid article that promised to expose the “shocking, bizarre” details of the “crackpot genius” Silver. The opening paragraph read: Question: What do you do if you can’t find a girlfriend? Answer: You program one. But the article itself had nothing to say, and Lash put it aside, stood up, and walked to the window.

It was true there were few other tasks Silver could have set Liza to that would have earned him more money, or so ensured the future health of his research. Yet on one level it was a little odd. Here was a man — by all accounts a shy, retiring man — who had made his fortune with that most social of games, the game of love. It seemed a shame, a bitter irony, that game could not extend to Silver as well.

As he stared out the window, the haiku Diana Mirren quoted the night before came back to him with sudden clarity.

He smiled as he recalled their di

What had she said? Haiku were the opposite of puzzles. Don’t search for answers. Think of opening doors.

Opening doors. So how to interpret the one she quoted?

It had only eight words. In his mind, Lash saw a green willow branch, twisting in a lazy current, heading toward a distant waterfall. Still singing. Were the insects still singing out of ignorance of what lay ahead — or because of it?

The Wilners and the Thorpes were like the insects of the poem, singing on that floating branch. Blissfully, unrelievedly happy… right up until that last unfathomable moment.

The silence was shattered by the ring of a telephone.

Lash pushed himself to his feet and headed for the kitchen. Perhaps it was Diana; he’d have to dig up his recipe for salmon en croute.

He lifted the phone. “Lash here.”

“Chris?” came the voice. “It’s John.”

“John?”

“John Coven.”

Lash recognized the voice of the FBI agent who’d run the surveillance on Handerling. His heart sank. No doubt Coven was following up on his personal interest in Eden. Maybe he thought Lash could get him a discount or something.

“How are you, John?” he said.

“I’m okay, I’m fine. But listen, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Go ahead.”

“Wyre’s made parole.”

Lash felt himself go numb. “Say again?”

“Edmund Wyre’s made parole. Happened late Friday afternoon.”