Death Match

Then, without another word, he was gone.

Slowly, Tara sank back into her chair. She glanced up at the clock: just under four minutes.

Seconds later, a team of security guards burst into her office, guns in hand. Their leader — a short, stockily built man Tara recognized as Whetstone — checked the corners quickly, then looked at her.

“You all right, Ms. Stapleton?” Beside Whetstone, one of the guards was peering into the room’s lone closet.

She nodded.

Whetstone turned back to his team. “He must have gone that way,” he said, pointing down the hallway. “Dreyfuss, McBain, secure the next intersection. Reynolds, stay with me. Let’s check the nearest access panels.” And he trotted out of the office, holstering his weapon and pulling out his radio as he did so.

For a moment, Tara listened to the retreating footsteps, the furtive sounds of conversation. Then they died away and the corridor fell back into silence.

She remained in her chair, motionless, while the wall clock ticked through five minutes. Then she rose and made her way across the carpet, avoiding the bloodstains. She hesitated in the doorway a second, then stepped into the corridor, heading for the elevator. The Tank was no more than a few minutes away.

But then she stopped and — reaching a new decision — turned and began walking, more quickly now, back in the direction she had come.

FORTY-EIGHT

The command center of Eden’s security division was a large, bunker-like space on the twentieth floor of the i

Edwin Mauchly stood alone at the control station. On a dozen screens, he could bring up information from any of ten thousand live datastreams monitoring the building: camera feeds, sensor inputs, terminal keystrokes, sca

Somewhere, in that vast storm of data, Christopher Lash was dodging all the raindrops.

Behind him, a door opened. Mauchly did not turn: he did not need to. The heavy, clipped tread, the brief silence, told him Sheldrake had just entered.

“They missed him by five, maybe ten seconds,” Sheldrake said, approaching the control station.

Mauchly reached for a keyboard. “He spent four minutes in Tara Stapleton’s office. Four minutes, when he knew every second put him at greater risk. Why did he do that?” He typed again. “He left her office heading southbound. As he ran, he passed his identity bracelet beneath a dozen additional door sca

“I’ve got men checking them out now.”

“It’s important to be thorough, Mr. Sheldrake. But I have the strong feeling he’s no longer on the thirty-fifth floor.”

“It’s still hard to believe he’s using data conduits to get around,” Sheldrake said. “They’re meant for maintenance access, not travel. He must feel like a pipe cleaner squeezing his way through those things.”

Mauchly stroked his chin. “He should be trying to find a way out, flee the building. Instead, he’s climbing. First, to the twenty-sixth floor. Now, the thirty-fifth.”

“Could he be after someone, or something? A suicide plot? Sabotage?”

“I considered that. If he’s desperate enough, it’s possible. On the other hand, he didn’t harm Tara Stapleton just now — who, after all, is the person who turned him in. The fact is, we simply don’t have a sufficient bead on his pathology to know for sure.” Mauchly sca

“Shouldn’t we also post teams outside access panels? Now that we know how he’s getting around, we can arrange an ambush.”

“The question is where? There are probably a hundred miles of data conduits, they honeycomb the entire i

He stepped back from the monitors. “He has a plan,” he said, more to himself than to Sheldrake. “If we learn what that is, we’ll learn where to trap him.”

Then he turned. “Come,” he said. “I think we need to have a little talk with Tara Stapleton.”

FORTY-NINE

In the room known as the Tank, the wall clocks read 18:20. Normally, the space would have been full of Eden technicians: monitoring throughput, scribbling notes on palmtop computers, ensuring the matching process that was the heart and soul of Eden proceeded in a fully optimized fashion.

This evening, however, the room was empty. The dials and monitors displayed their data for no one. There was no sound but the whisper of forced air, no movement but the blinking of diagnostic LEDs. The Tank, like the rest of Eden, had been evacuated.

As the clocks rolled over to 18:21, a soft click sounded in the hallway outside. The double doors parted. A lone figure peered cautiously within. Then it came forward, closed the doors, and moved quietly across the room.

As she’d moved through the corridors of the i

She came forward, toward the face of the Tank. She stretched out a hand to the cool, smooth surface. The sensation of great depth, of velvety darkness, remained. And yet how strange to see it depopulated. Though she knew the avatars were just electrical phantoms — binary constructs that had no existence outside the computer — it seemed wrong somehow, against nature, to drain them from the Tank, leaving it lifeless.

Her eyes drifted away, stopping when they reached the wall clock. 18:22. Twenty-two minutes past six.

She walked to a nearby console. Typing a series of commands, she brought herself into the Tank’s dataspace and accessed the central client archives.

Then she paused. As chief security tech, her authorization was more than high enough to carry out what Lash had suggested. But there would be a record of her access, a log of her keystrokes. Questions would be asked, probably sooner than later.

She shook her head. It didn’t matter. If Lash was lying — if this whole business was some part of his madness, some imaginary conspiracy or persecution complex — she’d know it pretty damn quick. On the other hand, if he was telling the truth…

She flexed her fingers briefly, returned them to the keyboard. She didn’t yet know what it meant if Lash was telling the truth. But one way or the other, she had to learn.

She typed another command. The screen went black briefly, then refreshed.

PROP. EDEN INC.

CLIENT COMPATIBILITY

VIRTUAL PROVING CHAMBER

REV.27.4.1.1

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY

L-4, EXEC-D OR HIGHER CLEARANCE REQUIRED

MANUAL POPULATION MODE ENABLED

SIMULATED ONLY

TOTAL POPULATION COUNT?

As she stared at the screen, Tara felt a sudden urge to place her own avatar in the Tank: to see her own digital representation glide through that velvet darkness. Had it taken long to find Matt Bolan’s avatar? She was standing at a command console. She knew his identity code by heart; she could—