Death Match

For a moment, Lash remained frozen, a deer caught in headlights. As he watched, the guard’s hand slipped into his jumpsuit.

Lash ducked back into the office. As he did so, a sharp report sounded down the hall. Something whined past the door.

Jesus! They’re shooting at me!

He stumbled backward, almost falling in his haste. Then he sprinted for the rear of the office and almost dove into the data conduit portal, barking his shins cruelly as he scrambled inside. He did not bother closing the access panel — all his previous care had been rendered pointless — and moved forward as quickly as he could, taking forks at random, heedless now of the meticulous tapestry of cabling torn away by the passage of his elbows and feet, burrowing his way back into the mazelike safety of the digital river.

FORTY-SEVEN

Tara Stapleton sat in her office, swiveling behind her desk, staring at the battered surfboard. The entire floor seemed deserted, the hallway beyond her door cloaked in a watchful silence. Although Tara was a key component of Eden’s security, she knew she should be gone, as well; Mauchly had said as much, outside the Rio coffee shop. “Go home,” he’d said, giving her shoulder an uncharacteristic squeeze. “You’ve had a rough afternoon, but it’s over now. Go on home, relax.”

She rose and began to pace. Going home, she knew, wouldn’t make her feel any better.

She’d been in shock ever since Mauchly called her up to Silver’s office just after noon. It had seemed impossible, what they told her: that Christopher Lash himself, the man they’d brought in to investigate the mysterious deaths, was himself the killer. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, couldn’t believe it. But Mauchly’s measured tones, the pain in Richard Silver’s face, left no room for disbelief. She herself had assisted Mauchly in polling the vast network of databases at their fingertips, collecting the information on Lash that damned him beyond any possibility of refutation.

And then, when Lash had called her — when she’d gone to meet with him, after first consulting Mauchly — her shock had deepened. He’d talked urgently, almost desperately. But she had barely heard. Instead, she’d been wondering how her instincts could have been so wrong. Here was a man who had murdered four people in cold blood, who’d been placed at the crime scenes in half a dozen ways. Here was a man who — according to all their data — had grown up in a highly dysfunctional family, spent most of his childhood in and out of institutions, successfully had his record as a sex offender suppressed. And yet she had grown to trust him, even like him, during the short time they had spent together. She had never been a trusting person. One of the reasons she’d had limited success in relationships, why she’d jumped at Eden’s pilot program, was because she didn’t allow herself to get close to anybody. So just what part of her elaborate self-defense mechanism had betrayed her so badly?

There was something else. Some of the things that Lash had said in the coffee shop were coming back. Talk about overdoses; about a brain chemical called Substance P; about the two of them being in danger because they knew too much. He was crazy, so the talk was crazy.

Right?

A sound: footsteps in the hall, approaching quickly. The knob to her office door squealed as it turned. Someone walked into her office, like some dread specter summoned by her own thoughts.

It was Christopher Lash.

Only it wasn’t Lash as she’d ever seen him before. Now, he truly looked like an escaped lunatic. His hair was matted and askew. An ugly bruise was coming up on his forehead. His suit, normally neat to a fault, was caked with dust, shredded at the elbows and knees. His hands were bleeding from countless nicks and cuts.

He closed the door and leaned against it, breathing heavily.

“Tara,” he gasped in a hoarse voice. “Thank God you’re still here.”

She stared at him, frozen with surprise. Then she grabbed for the phone.

“No!” he said, stepping forward.

Hand still on the phone, she dug into her purse, pulled out a can of pepper spray, pointed it at his face.

Lash stopped. “Please. Just do one thing for me. One thing. Then I’ll go.”

Tara tried to think. The guards would have tracked Lash to her office by his identity bracelet. It was only a matter of moments until they arrived. Should she try to humor him?

Stalling for time seemed preferable to a struggle.

She withdrew her hand from the phone, but kept the can of pepper spray raised. “What happened to your face?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm. “Were you beaten?”

“No.” The faintest ghost of a smile passed across his face. “It’s a casualty of my mode of transportation.” The smile vanished. “Tara, they’re shooting at me.”

Tara said nothing. Paranoid. Delusional.

Lash took another step forward, stopped when Tara aimed the can threateningly. “Listen. Do this one thing, if not for me, then for those couples who died. And the couples who are still under threat.” He gasped in a breath. “Search the Eden database for the first client avatar ever recorded.”

A minute had passed. The guards would be here soon.

“Tara, please.”

“Stand over there, by the far corner,” Tara said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Lash moved to the far side of her office.

Watching him carefully, she stepped toward her terminal, pepper spray at the ready. She did not sit down, but half turned toward the keyboard, leaning forward to type the query one-handed.

The first client avatar ever recorded…

Curiously, the search returned an avatar with no associated name. There was just the identity code. Yet it was a code that made no sense.

“Let me guess,” Lash said. “It isn’t even a rational number. It’s just a string of zeros.”

Now she turned to look at him more closely. He was still breathing hard, the blood dripping from his torn hands to the floor. But he was looking at her steadily, and — no matter how closely she looked back — she could detect no hint of madness in his eyes.

She glanced up at the wall clock. Two minutes.

“How did you know that?” she asked. “Lucky guess?”

“Who’d have guessed that? Nine zeros?”

Tara let the question hang in the air.

“Remember those queries I asked to run from your computer this morning? I’d just gotten an idea. A terrible idea, but the only one that fit. Those queries you followed up with all but confirmed it.”

Tara started to answer, then stopped.

“Why should I listen to any of this?” she asked instead, still stalling. “I saw the data on you. I saw your record, the things you’ve done. I saw why you left the FBI: you let two policemen and your own brother-in-law die. You led a murderer right to them, deliberately.”

Lash shook his head. “No. That’s not what happened. I tried to save them. I just figured it out too late. It was a case like this one. A killer’s profile that didn’t make sense. Edmund Wyre, didn’t you read about it in the papers? He was killing women as bait, writing phony confessions. Meanwhile, stalking his real target: the cops who were investigating. He got two. I’m the one he missed. That case wrecked my marriage, ruined my sleep for a year.”

Tara did not reply.

“Don’t you understand? I’ve been set up here. Framed. Somebody touched my records, distorted them. I know who that somebody is.”

He moved to the door, glanced back. “I have to go. But there’s something else you need to do. Go to the Tank. Run six other avatars—the women from the six supercouples—against avatar zero.”

In the distance, an elevator chimed. Tara heard raised voices, the sound of ru

Lash started visibly. He put his hand on the door frame, poised himself to flee. Then he gave her one final look, and his expression seemed to burn itself through her. “I know you want all this to end. Run that query. Discover for yourself just what’s going on. Save the others.”