Death Match

“Dr. Silver!” Mauchly said. “There’s no more time. The place could go up at any moment!”

“I’m almost there,” the voice repeated calmly.

And then — with a sudden, awful lucidity — Lash understood.

He understood why Silver abruptly acquiesced to Tara’s plan for erasing Liza’s memory, after resisting so fiercely. He understood the real reason Silver spent the time to get a memory dump onto tape. And he thought he understood why Silver remained behind. It wasn’t to buy time to see everybody out safely — at least, that wasn’t the only reason…

I’m almost there.

Silver didn’t mean he’d almost reached the exit. He meant he’d almost finished reloading Liza’s core memory. Keeping her terrible plan in motion.

Lash grasped the ladder. “I’m going back for him.”

He felt Mauchly grab hold. “Dr. Lash—”

Lash brushed the hand away and began to climb. But even as he did so there was a great clank of turning metal. Overhead, the security plates began to close again.

Lash took another step upward, felt Mauchly restrain him. And now Sheldrake and Dorfman came up, preventing him from climbing further. Lash whirled, grabbed Mauchly’s phone.

“Richard!” he cried. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” came the voice, faint and garbled amid the banshee howl. “I can hear you.”

“Richard!”

“I’m still here.”

“Why are you doing this?”

There was a squeal of interference. Then Silver’s voice became audible again. “Sorry, Christopher. But you said it yourself. Liza’s a child. And I can’t let a child die alone.”

“Wait!” Lash yelled into the phone. “Wait, wait—!”

But the security plates closed with a monstrous boom; the phone died in a shriek of static; and Lash, closing his eyes, slumped back against the ladder.

SIXTY-THREE

Although it is three in the morning, the bedroom is bathed in merciless light. The windows facing the deck of the pool house are rectangles of unrelieved black. The light seems so bright the entire room is reduced to a harsh geometry of right angles: the bed, the night table, the dresser…

Only this time, the bedroom isn’t that of a victim. It’s familiar. It belongs to Lash.

Now he moves around the room, flicking off switches. The brilliant light fades and the contours of the room soften. Slowly, the nocturnal landscape beyond the windows takes form, blue beneath a harvest moon. A manicured lawn; a pool, its surface faintly phosphorescent; a tall privet hedge beyond. For a minute he fears there are figures standing in the hedge — three women, three men, now all dead — but it is merely a trick of the moonlight and he turns away.

Beyond the bed, the bathroom door is ajar. He drifts toward it. Within, a woman stands before the mirror, brushing her hair with long languid strokes. Her back is to him but the set of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, is instantly recognizable. There is a faint crackle of static electricity as the brush glides through her hair.

He looks into the mirror and his ex-wife’s reflection stares back.

“Shirley. Why are you here?”

“I’m just back to collect a few things. I’m going on a journey.”

“A journey?”

“Of course.” She speaks with the authority of dreams. “Look at the clock. It’s past midnight, it’s a new day.”

The brushing sound has now morphed into something else: something slow, rhythmic, like regular pulses of static from a radio. “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?” And she turns to face him. Only now it is Diana Mirren’s face looking into his. “Every day is a journey.”

“Every day is a journey,” he repeats.

She nods. “And the journey itself is home.”

As he stares, he realizes something else is wrong. The voice isn’t Diana’s. And it is no longer his ex-wife’s. With a shock that is not quite horror, he realizes it is the voice of Liza. Liza, speaking through Diana’s face.

“Silver!” he cries.

“Yes, Christopher. I can hear you.” The dream-figure smiles faintly.

The strange rhythmic sound is louder now. He hides his face. “Oh, no. No.”

“I’m still here,” Liza says.

But he will not look up, he will not look up, he will not look up…

“Christopher…”

Lash opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment, in the black night, he thought himself back in his own bed. He sat up, breathing slowly, letting the rhythmic rise and fall of the nearby surf wash away the tattered pieces of his dream.

But then the exotic midnight scent of hyacinth blossoms, mingled with eucalyptus, drifted through the open window, and he remembered where he was.

He slowly rose from the bed, drew aside the gauzy curtain. Beyond, the jungle canopy ran down to the tropic sea, a dark-emerald blanket surrounded by liquid topaz. Thin clouds drifted across a swollen moon. Sometimes, he reminded himself, dreams are just dreams, after all.

He returned to bed, gathered up the sheets. For a few minutes he lay awake, gazing at the bamboo ceiling and listening to the surf, his thoughts now in the past and half a world away. Then he turned over, shut his eyes once more, and passed into dreamless slumber.

SIXTY-FOUR

Although it was only four o’clock, an early winter twilight had already settled over Manhattan. Taxis jockeyed for position in the rain-washed streets; pedestrians milled about on the busy pavements, heads bent against the elements, umbrellas thrust forward, like jousting knights.

Christopher Lash stood among a throng of people at the corner of Madison and Fifty-sixth, waiting for the light to change. Rain, he thought. Christmas in New York isn’t complete without it.

He hopped from foot to foot in the chill, trying to keep the large bags he was carrying dry beneath the canopy of his umbrella. The light changed; the crowd streamed slowly forward; and now at last he allowed himself to peer upward, toward the skyline.

At first glance, the building seemed no different. The wall of obsidian rose, velvet beneath the overcast sky, enticing the eye toward the setback where the outer tower stopped and the i

The large plaza before the entrance was very quiet. There were no tourists snapping pictures of family members beneath the stylized logo; no would-be clients loitering around the oversize fountain and its figure of Tiresias the seer. The lobby beyond was equally quiet; it seemed the fall of Lash’s shoes was the only sound echoing off the pink marble. The wall of flat-panel displays was dark and silent. The lines of applicants were gone, replaced by small knots of maintenance workers and engineers in lab coats, poring over diagrams. The only thing that had not changed was the security: Lash’s bags of gift-wrapped presents were subjected to two separate scans before he was cleared to ascend the elevator.

When the doors opened on the thirty-second floor, Mauchly was waiting. He shook Lash’s hand, wordlessly led the way to his office. Moving at his characteristic studied pace, he motioned Lash to take the same seat he’d occupied at their initial meeting. In fact, just about everything reminded Lash of that first day in early autumn. Mauchly was wearing a similar brown suit, generic yet extremely well tailored, and his dark eyes held Lash’s with the same Buddha-like inscrutability. Sitting here, it was almost as if — despite the changes he’d just witnessed, despite the whole appalling tragedy — nothing about this office, or its inhabitant, had or ever could change.