Death Match (9 page)

“They could have met in the lobby, the day they both applied. Or one of the couples could have bragged about their experience at Eden to the wrong person.”

Lelyveld shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so. Our security and confidentiality procedures begin the moment somebody steps into the building. They’re transparent for the most part, but they would forestall the kind of casual interaction you describe. As for the other, we caution our couples against any boastfulness. It’s one of the things we monitor at the class reunions. And both the Thorpes and the Wilners were discreet about how they met.”

Lash drained his coffee. “All right, then. Back to suicide. Maybe there’s something inherently wrong with the makeup of a supercouple. Some psychopathology in the relationship, but very deep and subtle, something that wouldn’t show up in the usual screenings at your—what do you call them?—class reunions.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Minor.

“Nonsense?” Lash raised his eyebrows. “Nature abhors perfection, Mr. Minor. Show me a rose without at least a minor blemish. Pure gold is so soft as to be unworkable, useless. Only fractals are perfect, and even they are fundamentally asymmetrical.”

“I think what Greg means is that, even if such a thing were possible, we would have learned about it,” Lelyveld said. “Our psychological assets run extremely deep. Such a phenomenon would have been picked up in our evaluations.”

“It’s just a theory. In any case, homicide or suicide, Eden is the key. It’s the one thing, the
only
thing, these couples have in common. So I need to understand the process better. I want to see what the Thorpes saw, what the Wilners saw, as your clients. I want to know just how they were selected as perfect couples. And I’ll need access—
unrestricted
access—to their files.”

This time, Gregory Minor rose to his feet. “That’s out of the question!” He turned to Lelyveld. “You know I’ve had reservations from the first, John. Bringing in somebody from the outside is dangerous, destabilizing. It was one thing when we were dealing with an isolated incident, something that affected us tangentially. But with what happened last night—well, the security risk is too great.”

“It’s too late,” Caroline Long replied. “The risk goes beyond company secrets now. You of all people, Gregory, should understand that.”

“Then forget security for the moment. It just doesn’t make sense bringing somebody like Lash inside the Wall. You read his jacket, that messy business just before he left the FBI. We have a hundred psychologists on staff already, all with impeccable credentials. Think of the time and effort it would take to get him up to speed. And for what? Nobody knows why these people died. Who’s to say there’s reason to think it will happen again?”

“You want to take that chance?” Lash retorted angrily. “Because there’s one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty. You’ve caught a huge break. These two double suicides happened
on different coasts
. And in the case of the Wilners particularly, so close to home, you’ve managed to keep things low key, out of the press. So nobody’s picked up on the coincidence. But if a
third
couple decides to go out the same way, there won’t be a chance in hell of keeping your precious company out of the news.”

He sat back, breathing heavily. He raised his coffee cup, remembered it was empty, set it back down again.

“I fear Dr. Lash is right,” Lelyveld said, his voice soft. “We must understand what’s going on and put a stop to it, one way or another—not just for the sake of the Thorpes and the Wilners, but for Eden as well.” He glanced at Minor. “Greg, I think Dr. Lash’s objectivity here is an asset rather than a liability. He may not yet understand the process, but he comes to it with a fresh eye. Of the dozen candidates we considered, he has the best qualifications. We already have his confidentiality agreement on file. I say we put bringing him inside to a vote.” He took a sip from a glass of water by his elbow, then raised his hand into the silence.

Slowly, another hand went up; then another, and another. Soon, all hands had been raised except those of Gregory Minor and another man in a dark suit beside him.

“The motion is passed,” Lelyveld said. “Dr. Lash, Edwin here will get the process started for you.”

Lash stood up.

But Lelyveld wasn’t through. “You’re being given unprecedented access to Eden’s inner workings. You’ve requested—and been granted—a chance to do what nobody with your knowledge has done before: experience the process as an actual applicant. You’d do well to remember the old saying Be careful what you wish for.”

Lash nodded, turned away.

“And Dr. Lash?” Lelyveld’s voice came again.

Lash turned back to face the chairman.

“Work quickly. Quickly.”

As Mauchly opened the door, Lash heard Lelyveld say, “You may resume transcribing the minutes of the meeting, Ms. French.”

ELEVEN

K
evin Connelly walked across the broad blacktop lot of the Stoneham Corporate Center, making for his car. It was a Mercedes S-class, low-slung and silver, and Connelly was careful to park it far from other vehicles: it was worth the extra walk to avoid dings and scratches.

He unlocked the door, opened it, and slid onto the black leather. Connelly loved fine cars, and everything about the Mercedes—the solid thunk of the door, the cradling sensation of the seat, the low throb of the engine—gave him pleasure. The AMG performance package had been worth every penny of the twenty grand it added to the sticker price. There had been a time, not so long ago, when the drive home itself would have been the highlight of his evening.

That time was gone.

Connelly eased across the lot and slid onto the feeder road for Route 128, mentally plotting his route home. He’d stop by Burlington Wine Merchants for a bottle of Perrier-Jouet, then visit the adjoining florist for a bouquet. Fuchsias this week, he decided; she wouldn’t be expecting fuchsias. Flowers and champagne had become a staple of his Saturday evenings with Lynn: the only mystery, she liked to joke, was the color of roses he’d bring home.

If someone had told him, just a few years before, what a difference Lynn would make in his life, he would have scoffed. He had an exciting and challenging job as CIO for a software development company; he had plenty of friends and more than enough interests to occupy his free time; he made a lot of money and never had problems meeting women. And yet, on some almost subconscious level, he must have known something was missing. Otherwise he would never have visited Eden in the first place. But even after enduring the grueling evaluation, even after shelling out the $25,000 fee, he’d had no inkling of how Lynn would make his life complete. It was as if he’d been blind all his life, never understanding what he’d been missing until the gift of sight was suddenly granted.

He pulled onto the freeway and merged with the weekend traffic, enjoying the effortless acceleration of the big engine. The strange thing, he remembered, was how he’d felt that night of their first meeting. For the first fifteen minutes, maybe even more, he’d thought it was a huge mistake; that somehow Eden had blundered, maybe mixed up his name with somebody else’s. He’d been warned in his exit interview this was a common initial reaction, but that made no difference: he’d spent the first part of the date looking across the restaurant table at a woman who looked nothing like what he expected, wondering how quickly he could get back the twenty-five grand he’d dropped on the crazy scheme.

But then, something had happened. Even now, no matter how many times he and Lynn had joked about it in the months that followed, he couldn’t articulate just what it was. It had crept up on him. Over the course of the dinner he’d discovered—often in ways he could never have expected—interests, tastes, likes and dislikes they shared. Even more intriguing were areas where they differed. It was as if, somehow, each filled gaps in the other. He’d always been weak in foreign languages; she was fluent in French as well as Spanish, and explained to him why language immersion was more natural than memorizing a textbook. She’d spent the second half of the dinner speaking only in French, and by the time his crème brûlée arrived he marveled at how much he was managing to understand. On their second date, he learned Lynn was afraid to fly; as a private pilot, he explained how to cope with fear of flying and offered to take her up for desensitization flights in the Cessna he co-owned.

He shifted lanes, smiling to himself. These were crude examples, and he knew it. Truth was, the way their personalities complemented each other’s was probably too subtle and multifaceted to detail. He could only compare it to the other women he’d known. The real difference, the
fundamental
difference, was that he’d known her close to two years—and yet he was as excited now at the prospect of seeing her as he’d been in the first flush of new love.

He wasn’t perfect; far from it. Eden’s psychological screening had made his own faults all too clear. He tended to be impatient. He was rather arrogant. And so on. But somehow, Lynn canceled these things out. He’d learned from her quiet self-assurance, her patience. And she had learned from him, as well. When they’d first met, she was quiet, a little reserved. But she’d loosened up a lot. She was still quiet at times—the last couple of days, for example—but it had grown so subtle that nobody but he would have noticed.

Although he’d never have admitted it to anybody, the thing he’d been most worried about, going into Eden, was the sex. He was old enough, and he’d had enough relationships, for bedroom marathons to be less important to him than they once were. He was by no means a Viagra candidate, but he found he now had to feel deeply about a woman before he could really respond. This had been an issue in his prior relationship: the woman had been fifteen years his junior, and her sexual hunger, which as a young stud he would have found desirable, had been a little intimidating.

It proved a non-issue with Lynn. She’d been so patient and so loving—and her body was so wonderfully sensitive to his touch—that the sex was the best of his life. And, like everything else about the marriage, it only seemed to get better with time. He felt an electric tickle of lust as he thought about their upcoming anniversary. They were going to spend it at Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Canada, where their honeymoon had been.
Just a few more days
, Connelly thought as he slowed for his exit. If there was anything on Lynn’s mind, the spray of the Maid of the Mist would soon drive it far, far away.

TWELVE

A
t 8:55 Sunday morning, Christopher Lash pushed through a revolving door and entered the lobby of Eden Incorporated, surrounded by dozens of other hopeful clients. It was a crisp, sunny autumn day, and the pink granite walls blazed with light. Today he’d left the satchel at home. In fact, other than his wallet and his car keys, the only thing in Lash’s pockets was a card Mauchly had given him at their last meeting reading simply:
Candidate Processing, 9 a.m. Sunday
.

As he walked toward the escalator, Lash mentally reviewed the test preparations he’d been coached on at the Academy, over a decade ago. Get a good night’s sleep. Eat a breakfast high in carbs and low in sugar. No alcohol or drugs. Don’t panic.

Three out of four
, he thought. He was tired, and despite the mammoth Starbucks espresso he’d had on the drive in, he found himself craving another. And though he was far from panicked, he was aware of feeling uncharacteristically nervous.
That’s okay
, he reminded himself: a little tension kept you alert. But he kept recalling what the man said at the class reunion he’d observed:
If I’d known just what was in store for me, I don’t know if I’d have had the
cojones
to take that evaluation. It was a brutal day
.

He put this aside as he approached the escalator. Amazing to think that demand for Eden’s services was so great it had to process its applicants seven days a week. He stepped on, looking curiously at the people ascending the twin escalator to his left. What had been going through Lewis Thorpe’s head when he rode this same escalator? Or John Wilner’s? Were they excited? Nervous? Scared?

As he watched, he saw two people on the adjoining escalator—a middle-aged man and a young woman, a few riders apart—exchange a brief glance. The man nodded almost imperceptibly at the woman, then looked away. Lash thought of what the chairman had said: security was subtle but ever-present. Were some of these would-be applicants really Eden operatives?

Reaching the top of the escalator, Lash passed beneath the wide archway and entered a passage decorated with cheery promotional posters. Faint parallel lines had been etched into the floor, creating a series of wide lanes leading down the passage. They had the effect of making the applicants—of their own accord, or through subtle orchestration—spread apart and walk side by side. Ahead, each lane terminated in a door. A technician in a white coat stood before each. Lash could see the person at the end of his lane was a tall, slender man of about thirty.

As Lash approached, the man nodded and opened the door behind him. “Step inside, please,” he said. Lash glanced around and noticed attendants at the other doors doing the same. He stepped through his doorway.

Ahead lay another hallway, very narrow, unrelievedly white. The man closed the door, then led the way down the featureless hall. After the airy lobby and the wide approach corridor, this space felt claustrophobic. Lash followed the man down the passage until it opened into a small, square room. It was as white as the hallway. Its only features were six identical doors set into the surrounding walls. Instead of a handle, each door had a small white card reader bolted to its face. One door in the far wall had a placard designating it a unisex bathroom.

The man turned toward him. “Dr. Lash,” he said. “I’m Robert Vogel. Welcome to your Eden evaluation.”

“Thanks,” said Lash, shaking the proffered hand.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, thanks.”