Continuance (24 page)

“Please calm down.” A rasp
scraping ice, Neal’s voice filled the room from everywhere at once. The
photoscreen window darkened to transparency. He stood on the other side,
looking calmer than Lindsay would have liked, though Costilla and Wright looked
less relaxed. More agents poured into the room behind them. “You have nowhere
to go,” Neal said. “Step away from Agent Grieves.”

“Not until you give me what I
want.”

“And what would that be?”

“My children. I want their
biorecords uploaded to a private cloudspace. Something outside the country. Mine,
too.”

“You know we can’t do that,” Neal
said, a grown-up telling a child she couldn’t have a sweet before bed time.

“You can, and you will.” She spat
on the floor a few inches from Lindsay’s face. “They’re not
conscious,
he
says. They feel no
pain
, he says.” She pressed harder as she spared a
venomous glance down at him. He gasped as he struggled, but the chair felt like
it was stacked with lead bricks. “Neither does someone in a coma,” she said.
“But you don’t just toss them aside! You try to help them. Keeping us locked up
inside Arkive is the next thing to murder.”

“We aren’t murderers,” Neal said.
“But if you aren’t very careful…you will be.”

The words filled Lindsay with a
cold dread.
I could die here. Now.

“Maybe so.” Her voice grew deadly
quiet. “If you don’t give me what I want.”

She’d relaxed the pressure during
the exchange. It wasn’t much – the equivalent of replacing those lead bricks
with regular ones – but it might be the only chance Lindsay got. He twisted and
kicked, intending to knock her legs from beneath her. She must have sensed his
intentions, because she jumped – almost before his leg started to move –
letting it sail under her body through empty air. But she lost her leverage,
just for an instant. Lindsay slipped from beneath the chair leg, letting it
slam to the floor beside his head.

A single shot deafened his ears. He
tilted his head to see Accardi – Bishop? He didn’t know how to think of her now
– lean back against the wall, knees slightly bent, a bewildered expression on
her face. A ragged disc the size of a quarter marred the right breast of her
coat, a kind of grisly corsage. With a long sigh, she sank to the floor,
trailing a crimson smear on the stark whiteness of the wall behind. A glassy
fog clouded her eyes as she stared back at him, her breathing labored.

Agents poured through the door,
plowing into her like a suit-clad rugby squad. Seconds later, they pulled her limp
form to the door, one foot leaving a trail of blood as it dragged the floor.
Her wordless moans faded over long seconds as they carried her away.

“For the memory of Summer Bishop.”
Neal holstered his GLOCK, his raspy whisper barely audible as the door clicked
shut behind them.

Lindsay blinked blood from his
eyes, sucking air in convulsive gasps. A few feet from his face, his
smartglasses lay in two pieces on the floor, cracks radiating from the center
of one shattered lens like a spider web.

Neal offered a hand as Lindsay
wobbled to his feet.

“Like I told you before, Grieves,”
his voice scratched against the white walls of the empty room as he traced a
finger along his collar. “Gotta to watch out for those perks.”

With a wary glance in either
direction, Jason stepped through a gap in a hedge beside the parking lot
entrance. Next to it, SLIDe 3420-238477 controlled access to the east side of
the structure. Like Alex had said, the lot was faculty only – not a good sign
if you were trying to locate someone the age of an undergrad. But this was
where Michelle’s bioprint had come from. Alex was certain of it.

Jason chose a bench about thirty
yards away, sitting down with a textbook from his pack. A glance at the time in
his smartglasses told him it was still early, just after 6:30 a.m. He opened the
book on his lap, pretending to read while he tweaked a script on his AP. He
added a couple of lines, one to grab the SLIDe feed in real time, the other to
initialize the tiny camera he’d left mounted beneath it. With a few eyeclicks,
he keyed in the code to run the script –
MONARCH
.

Blinding static filled the
overlay in his smartglasses, bright even after he squeezed his eyes shut. Cursing
under his breath, he snapped the glasses off, killing the script. The computer
code of the day was close enough to what he’d known to pick it up without too
much effort, but there were still times he missed the right syntax or
overlooked a parameter. He waited a good half minute for the after images to
clear from his eyes, then looked at the script again, finding his mistake – a
missing encryption variable.

Traffic into the structure had
started to pick up. To save time, he hard-coded the SLIDe’s encryption key and
tried again. Trying the script with any other SLIDe would result in the same
static, but right now he only cared about access to this particular one. This
time the script ran smoothly, syncing the SLIDe feed and camera feed on the
display in his smartglasses. His matching routine would check it against
Michelle’s genome in real time, matching faces with bioprints. Now, all he had
to do was wait. With the feed working, he didn’t have to stick around to keep
tabs. Still, he watched car after car rolled into the structure, each time
wondering if the next one might be her.

Not for the first time, he
wondered,
Why here?
If she was student, did she ride in with one of the
staff that day? Or maybe she pulled into the wrong structure by mistake?
That
would explain the lack of further matches since that single hit. But if either
were true, chances of finding her here again weren’t good. But after all the
searching, all the work, this was the only lead he had. So here he sat.

Laughter drew his attention as a
group of students approached, strolling down the walk. With the distraction, he
noticed his surroundings for the first time. This was the same walk he and
Michelle had strolled along one chance afternoon, catching up on lost time,
lost years. It had seemed like fate at the time, running into her like that
after so long apart – a sign maybe things should have been different, an omen
they might still be.

They’d had kept in touch a lot after
that. Too much, if he was being honest. First, arranging that field trip to
Hermetica for Mandy and her class. Then emails and SocialNet exchanges, with
the occasional innocent get-together for lunch. But even though they both knew
there was more to it, that maybe those meetings weren’t entirely innocent after
all, they’d kept things above board. To her credit, that had been more her
doing than his. Until one day she’d called, asking to meet him
now
. His
stomach still churned at the memory – a sick feeling he’d carried with him ever
since.

Silence registered. The students
had passed by, taking their laughter with them. He looked over to see he’d
missed several cars entering the structure.

Damn.
But the feeling
was half-hearted. Watching the cars flowing in, one blurring into the next, the
reality of the situation set in, settling over him like a weight. He’d been so
focused on getting a hit on Michelle’s bioprint, he hadn’t thought through how
he might use it once he did. Only a single SLIDe read to go on, and that
already a week old. With the spiders shutting him out, soon there’d be no more bioprints
from Alex. All Jason could do was watch this parking lot, hoping she might show
up again. But what if she never came back?

And there was something else. He
eyeclicked to bring up the read, looking again at those few lines of data.

Matching Records
Found: 1

Target Match
Probability: 71%

Source SLIDe ID:
3420-238477

He hadn’t paid much attention
before, but now that he’d had time to mull it over, something bothered him.
71%.
A strong match, but not iron clad. And there’d been only the one hit. Could it have
just been an errant reading? Some bug in his matching algorithm?

No.
The algorithm
was solid. And SLIDes never misread DNA. He had to believe she was here
somewhere. Somewhere close. But the chances of finding her this way seemed slim
now, and short of checking the DNA of everyone on campus…

He froze, head tilted in thought.
Maybe not
everyone.

With a hasty last glance at the
security gate, Jason snapped the textbook shut and set off at a jog. He reached
the plaza in front of the Novella building at a full run, taking the wide
stairs two at a time. Inside, he didn’t stop, taking the curved stairway up to
the fifth floor.

As he hoped, he found Dr.
Fairchild’s classroom empty. The far wall was transparent at the moment,
showing the usual campus vista resting below clouds carrying a hint of rain.
Another check of the clock told him he still had forty minutes before class
started – maybe another fifteen before the first students started to trickle
in. Enough time to check the genomes everyone had sequenced that first day of
class.

This is crazy.
And yet, there
was the feeling he’d had last night. The tickling of memory, the sense of
something…
familiar
when he’d talked with Chaela.
Well, I’ll know
soon enough.

Closing the door behind him, he
activated the lock. A bank of secure cabinets lined the wall opposite the
windows, and he waved a hand across the SLIDe recessed above a particular one.
The lock opened with a metallic snap, and he grabbed the box of opdisks labeled
“NEUR 3010 – Genomes.” Setting it on the countertop, he ran his finger along
the rows of opdisks inside. He hesitated a moment when he found the one labeled
I. Accardi
before shaking his head and moving on. A few disks further
back, he found the one he sought –
C. Laurensen
. Heart pounding, he linked
up his AP and activated his matching script.

Contents Encrypted.
Private Key Required.

Jason gritted his teeth, biting
off a curse. Then, his heart surged. Encryption made perfect sense…
if
she had a reason to be careful with her genome. Like being continued.

Jason hadn’t encrypted his own
file, because he knew he didn’t need to. Alex has once explained it to him. The
genetic markers that might peg him as continued had all been modified enough to
mask his original bioprint. That was why he looked so different from Patrick
Dawes. But Chaela might not know that, especially if this Viceroy group didn’t
place the same emphasis on educating their charges.

He was still staring at the
encryption message when the slide of metal alerted him to the door opening. Dr.
Fairchild stepped in, arching an eyebrow. “Jason?”

But her surprise turned to
caution when she saw the opdisks spread across the counter. Without a word, she
turned and closed the door, then touched the control to lock it again. Her eyes
glinted as she opened her mouth to voice what would no doubt be a demand to
know what the hell he was doing, but he cut her off before she could speak.

“I think she may be in here.” He
heard the excitement in his own voice.

She tilted her head, studying him
before joining him at the counter. “The person you’ve been looking for? You
never told me it was a woman, but I suppose I assumed so.”

She looked at the array of
opdisks before continuing in a more guarded tone. “Jason, if I didn’t know
you’re far too intelligent – and experienced – to be chasing after red
herrings, I’d say you might be letting your imagination run away with you. You
realize the odds of this person just
happening
to be one of your classmates
would be…”

“Astronomical, right. I know it
sounds crazy, but bioprint data from one of the SLIDes on campus places her
here
,
at UCE. Within the last week.”

In Jason’s short experience with her,
he hadn’t seen much that could surprise the professor. But from the way her
eyebrows rose, this had. “Viceroy’s work? You’re certain? And you’ve got
evidence she’s a classmate?”

“Well…” Jason felt his face
redden. “My evidence on that point’s a little thinner. More of a feeling,
really.” He brightened. “But if it’s
not
her, why would she have
encrypted it?” He held up Chaela’s opdisk.

Dr. Fairchild took the disk from
him. When she read the label, her eyebrows climbed even higher, driving home the
skeptical look she gave him. But then her skepticism seemed to melt into
resignation, and she sighed. “Given the fact I’ve stolen thousands of genomes
over the last few weeks, I suppose it'd be hypocritical to turn my nose up at
unauthorized access to one more.”

She tapped a control on the
countertop, and a photoscreen displayed a login prompt. “My private key should
do the trick.” A few more taps, and she’d linked with the opdisk and decrypted
the file.

“Try it now.”

Jason re-ran the script. He
realized he was holding his breath, forced himself to relax. A few long seconds
passed.