In the Courts of the Sun (76 page)

Also, I wasn’t sure about my legal status. At least six different agencies were still investigating the Hippogriff Incident—hmm, good title for a new posthumous Robert Ludlum novel—and they’d finally made the connection to Executive Solutions, which meant that the rest of us might eventually get linked to it. And to top it all off, they’d let Sic and a few of the other trainees try the Game drugs, and on them they were working well. Sic had been studying Jed
₂
’s notes, and he’d taken to the new Game layout, and then, with the blood lightning, he’d gotten quite a bit ahead of me. Normally I would have been insane with jealousy, doomster or no doomster. Now, I just kept slogging.
My second bout with the drugs went better. I played two games on the stuff, and I cooked. By the fifth dose I was as good with four stones as I had been with two. I asked about upping the dosage. Lisuarte said no. Nine days ago I’d completed a game using five stones. Now I was making progress with six, and yesterday I’d even glimpsed the bewildering world of seven. But like I think I said, seven stones isn’t just twice as hard as six, or seven times as hard, or forty-nine times as hard. It’s about 7!, that is, 5,040 times as hard. So, realistically, I couldn’t imagine that at this rate I’d ever get to eight stones, let alone nine, even in a lifetime, let alone in a couple of months. Some of the time, when I read in Jed
₂
’s letters about what that Lady Koh person could do, not just playing with nine stones but using live animals for the runners, and then doing whatever that business was with the spiderweb—I almost thought he might have been exaggerating. Except, why would he? Or why would I?
On the twenty-second, Laurence said he, and that meant Lindsay, wanted me to work on the Disney World Horror. I said I’d been planning to go directly to the Doomster and appealed to Taro and Marena. We decided I’d put in two days looking for Dr. X. If we delivered him, they said, we could write our own ticket with the DHS. After that, anything we said about 4 Ahau would immediately get taken seriously, no matter how odd it might seem. It sounded plausible, although I was sure there was more going on. Still, I’d already gone over Jed
₂
’s notes about Dr. X from his game with Lady Koh, and they were definitely provoking some associational flashes. Although, reading them over again, I found myself getting pretty annoyed with him. They were only about forty thousand words long, for one thing, which isn’t a lot when you’re trying to remember every little detail because it could possibly turn out to be important later. And then there was the style. There was a smirking slacker pomposity about the prose that set my teeth on edge. Although I realize that he/I was working under difficult conditions, but still—well, one gets annoyed with oneself a lot, even when one hasn’t split in two. Anyway, I kept going over and over the Disney World Horror game, about how he, or let’s just say I, had gotten a strong feeling that Dr. X would be someone whose name I knew well but whom I hadn’t met in person, someone who was still alive, someone who’d been everywhere and back twice, maybe someone we’d already discounted, or maybe somebody I wasn’t considering because it seemed too obvious. And as Jed
₂
had said, he was someone “who was once half in the light but is now again in darkness.”
Huh.
That day I got to my cubicle a bit late and scattered the first batch of seeds at noon. I tried to integrate the Game with LEON’s search engines. Secret contracts, I thought. Cayman banks stuff. Functionaries living beyond their means. Jets, yachts, and Bugattis turning up in the wrong backyards. Gambling winnings. Wives suddenly inheriting a hundred times more than anyone thought they would. Antiques, artwork, old jewelry with new stones. Anything. Come on.
Quid bonum?
Follow the bucks—
Damn. Blocked.
I ran through it again, sifting one cyclopean block of data through another and then chasing down the points where they crossed. Hopping down the money trail. Come on. Forward. Into the Value of Cash. Mammon to the right of them. Wondering, wondering. Forward. It’s definitely one person in charge, I thought. The whole thing was too coherent for groupthink. And as far as who benefited goes, well, that was easy, in a way. Every military contractor in the world benefited. Say it’s one of them. Which one is it? Whose shares went up the most? Or second-most, say. Come on. Say it’s Corporation A. Except Corporation B owns most of Corporation A. But maybe it’s Corporation C that’s really going to benefit, because they’re going to get bought out by Corporation B. Or maybe it’s Corporation D, which is going to make a deal to buy all of them. This way. That way. That way. This way. Hippity, hoppity. Chains of causes. Chains of effects. Russian nesting dolls within nesting dolls. Russian nesting-doll factories full of Siamese nesting dolls. Within Triamese and Tetranese nesting dolls. Come on. Every chain has a crummy link—
Hmm.
There was definitely cash there, and it was swirling around something, an outline of a shape—a head, maybe . . . and I could almost see it emotionally, that is, there wasn’t really a visual, but I got a sense of hatred around it, maybe not even so much from the shape itself, but . . .
Yeah. Other people’s hatred.
He’s an outcast.
Come on. Think.
Someone wealthy and powerful whom nobody likes. Someone loathed even by the people on his own side. Someone who was beaten up on the playground. Someone with a twisted face. Someone who’d confirm my worst suspicions. Someone who’s already considered truly evil. By most people, anyway. Some exiled imam? That guy from Myanmar? No, that’s not it. Damn it, am I just getting stupid in my middle age?
Maybe I couldn’t see it because it was too much what I’d expected. Maybe I’d already discounted it, like the way you might be looking for your car keys all over because you’d checked all your pockets, and then after turning the house inside out you find them in your pocket because in the first ten seconds of looking for them you’d misidentified them as, say, your house keys and not your car keys, and that was enough . . . well, you know what I mean. Okay, come on. Forward. LEON goes, I go. Chain of events. Chain, chain, chain, chain of food. LEON goes, I go. LEON goes—
Whoa. There it is.
Eighteen billion euros. And, really, it was just one transaction. Details clicked reluctantly into place like the tumblers of some big rusty old antique lock. The door groaned open—
Not Richard. The company.
Gotcha.

[67]

I
’ d kind of expected that the DHS and all the other agencies would have been pretty well paid off and that nothing would happen after we fingered the culprit besides, maybe, them trying to bump us off. But apparently the government still wasn’t quite so monolithic because, amazingly, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the FBI conducted simultaneous raids on Halliburton offices in Houston and Bakersfield, on the KBR building in Harris County, and on twelve offices and a hundred and ten servers owned by either Dyn-Corp or by shell firms controlled by the Carlisle group. 243 people were arrested. And according to Laurence, who’d gotten it from Lindsay, who’d undoubtedly gotten it either from someone very much on the inside or from God, they’d found files relating to aerosolized polonium in four of the raids, and there was a memo in one of the servers that talked about how the centralization of the military was “our number-one rainmaking priority.” I guess the money trail was pretty damning when you had all the details. The short version was that they used a hawala system, which basically just means that everybody’s a member of some big Islamic clan that all trust each other and don’t write anything down. No actual money actually got shipped anywhere. Years before—in 2006, in fact—a couple of hotel owners in Dubai had hired some Moscow-based contractors to build some private highways and airstrips, and they’d let them overcharge a little. The contractors used the money to pay off debts to another firm—probably one of the firms that had merged into Lukoil—which had inherited the undocumented polonium 210 from the original manufacturer. And then the Carlisle people had undercharged the hotel chain a little for construction work on developments in Jordan and Lebanon. And this was spread out over dozens of handshake deals. So you’d think with all that, they could have kept everything under the Isfahan rug. But the fact is that eighteen billion is still a lot, even these days, and most of it will eventually be represented in some deposits somewhere. And with new banking laws and improving search engines, it’s getting easier and easier to search for deposited amounts that match estimates of missing amounts. Once LEON and his counterparts at the DHS knew what they were looking for, they just kept crunching data until eventually they had two patterns—kind of like two thumbprints—that matched enough to convince the judge.
Even so, though, they hadn’t come up with a warrant for Cheney himself—he was still just a “person of interest”—and, as might be expected, he’d apparently been tipped off and was not to be found.
And he’s not likely to be, I thought. The cat has more undisclosed locations than the Atlas Missile Program. Even if we worked on him full time, they’d just keep moving him around and we’d probably always be a step behind. Well, I did my job. It was unsatisfying, but things are unsatisfying. Anyway, there’d probably be more coming out about it all later. And that’d bring a lot of other people into the picture and maybe somebody’d drop the dime on him. So far most of the media response to the raids was just speculation, but supposedly there was going to be a big leak later in the week.
Or I’ll blow the whistle myself, I thought. Just as soon as I get a break from some more immediate problems.
Things in the wide world had gotten flaky and flakier. Bangladesh was almost completely without electricity, food, water, or law. The Sword of Allah was attacking American bases in Pakistan. FEMA said it had underestimated the number of terminal cases in Florida and that they were now projecting sixty thousand fatalities within the next few years, which would bring the total death toll from the Disney World Horror to a little over a hundred thousand. Or probably about 124,030 people, I thought, give or take. There weren’t enough facilities to take care of them all in the U.S., so the more advanced cases were being shipped overseas, although the State of Florida was already building the world’s largest and most advanced hospice park. So far there’d been fourteen copycat alarms in major cities mimicking the Orlando attack. All of them had turned out to be dry, that is, without any real polonium, but the evacuations had cost billions. Conventional explosives, though, were enjoying a resurgence. Two days ago, eighty people had been killed in a second suicide bombing in DeKalb, Illinois. Like a lot of the new bombings, the DeKalb incident had been in two parts—that is, there’d been one large bomb that had taken out a whole dorm building and that the perpetrator had watched through binoculars, and then when that was done, he’d blown himself up with something about the size of a hand grenade. Investigators were pretty sure it was what they were calling “unaffiliated,” that is, it wasn’t ideological but part of a rising trend of suicide bombings by regular folks, people who were just fed up and wanted to take as many classmates, local officials, or coworkers as possible along with them and who, a few years ago, would have to have been satisfied with the handful of people they’d be able to shoot. And worst of all, there was evidence from the Sacrifice Game that the Doomster was on the move.
By the last day of March LEON’s probability engines were indicating that the world—very roughly speaking—had reached a permanent critical state. That is, human history was at a point where any small disturbance might trigger an avalanche that would flatten the whole sand pile. In terms of the Doomster progression, the implication was that even if we identified and stopped the first (and still hypothetical) lone Doomster, pretty soon there’d be another like him. And there would be more, and at an increasing rate, maybe one every two or three years, say, for a while, and then one every month, and then one every day, and so on into inevitability. And for that matter, even if the first doomster’s actions weren’t a total success—even if it only affected one continent, say—a “casualty event” on that scale was “liable to reduce the functioning of all societies to the point that they will be severely vulnerable to further stresses.” Or as Ashley
₂
put it, the world’s immune system was drastically compromised, and a cold could be fatal.
I kept saying we needed to get more serious about the dosage. Lisuarte kept holding back. Around April 4 I started to get the feeling that we might already be too late. Or we would be very shortly. It was just a feeling, but I didn’t like that date LEON had flagged, April 20. This wasn’t the first time the date had come up. And each time it felt to me like it had a gray halo around it. And it wasn’t just because it was Columbine Day. It had the sense of a point of no return. Maybe the Doomster was going to use another timed virus, set to go symptomatic on 4 Ahau, and was going to release it into the population on the twenty-eighth. Or maybe it was a conventional bomb or some other chain reaction that got triggered that day. Whatever it was, it felt like our zero hour might be right now. It might even have been yesterday. It was time for the
D
word.
Drastic.
It’s easy to steal from someone who trusts you. Fooling Dr. Lisuarte would have been hard. But Taro had access to the dope fridge, too, and his lab wasn’t exactly the world’s tightest ship. And now Ashley
₂
and I were, well, we had a little thing going on, what with Marena’s absence and A
₂
’s husband being stranded in Beijing Province and the world going all
Dawn of the Dead
on us and everything. It was kind of a boffery of convenience. A
₂
wasn’t the sort of person one would notice or anything, but actually if you got her glasses and lab coat off and put her in a dim room, she could pass for Ziyi Zhang’s chunkier twin. She was trying to learn the Game—she was about the worst player in the place—and I was giving her special lessons with benefits. It wasn’t a big deal, except I got her saving me fractions of the Game drugs out of her own doses. As of today, I had about 480 extra mgs—the topolytic component had to be in liquid form, so the stuff was in tiny 40 mg scintillation vials—and I’d loaded 300, ten of my standard doses, into an AirJet helium tube. There weren’t any cameras in the isolation room—not that I could find, anyway, and anyway things still weren’t quite that uptight around here. Yet. I detaped the little steel cylinder from my underarm, slid it down under my elastic waist-thing to my right, nontobaccoed inner thigh, and squoze the button. There was a sound like slowly unscrewing a cold Shasta bottle and a feeling like a shard of ice materializing in my great saphenous vein and then melting away.
If I’d dosed it right, in twenty minutes it would bring me up to roughly one-fifth of the amount that we’d calculated Lady Koh had taken during her last game with Jed
₂
. Of course, she’d had a lifetime to build up her tolerance. The Lotoslanders had said this much could be fatal or that it might blow out my hippocampus. But they were worryworts. Anyway, if I start having a seizure, Lisuarte’s staff ’ll rush in and sedate me and nurse me back to normal. They can do anything these days. Right? Anyway, we’ve got bigger problems. Focus.
I moved the first of my nine skulls to April 28 and displaced LEON’s seed. Take that, glassbrain. THINKING, his File window said. I looked around from my new location. Or rather, “looked” is a bit of a misleading word because now that I was feeling the blood lightning sizzling through my arteries I was really seeing, if you could call it that, with all those little shivers and flutterings, feeling that every atom of my body had a paired particle on the game board. Maybe it’s like the way blind people with those implanted cameras and glossopharyngeal electrodes see with their tongues—
BEEP.
LEON moved two forward, toward the center.
Hmm.
I moved my skull forward. There was that feeling of climbing stairs, of both expansion and contraction. It’s hard to describe, but emotionally it’s like what it would feel like if you’d spent, say, your whole life in a single small city, and you knew your way around but you’d never looked at a map of the place, and now you were climbing, say, a high radio tower that they’d just put up in the center of town, and for the first time you looked down at your hometown from high overhead. In a few seconds you’d understand things you never realized were even there to understand. You’d see that places that had seemed far away from each other were close together, streets that you’d assumed were perpendicular were actually disturbingly off-angle, parks that you thought were squares were actually irregular trapezoids, familiar buildings that had seemed huge were smaller than less familiar ones that had seemed small, and it would all be a new, different order of understanding, not something you could ever get from just living in the place even if you lived there another hundred lifetimes.
The trouble with this picture, though, is that it sounds as though it might be exhilarating, or even fun. But it’s not, it’s just scary. It was especially scary this time, of course. But it’s always scary. Your apprehension increases with your perception. And in fact it has to.
When I’d read about Lady Koh’s animals, it didn’t surprise me as much as it seemed to have surprised Jed
₂
. Really, I’d been using myself as a monkey all this time. That is, to really play the runner, that is, the skulls, you have to have some fear there. Even if you’re playing for a client you don’t much care about, you have to scare yourself. You need to look around you the way a prey animal does, seeing a predator in every shadow. And as your field of understanding widens, instead of feeling more powerful, your fear increases. It becomes fear not just for yourself but for your fellow prey animals, the members of your herd that you now see are all around you and too numerous to count. Instead of spotting escape routes you realize how many prey animals surround you and how far it is to any safe haven. You start comprehending how unlikely and contingent your consciousness is, and the farther you get up that staircase, that sense of tenuousness just keeps increasing. You start seeing more of the present, and more of the past, and then even some of the future, and then more possible futures and possible pasts—all the trillions of times you weren’t born, for instance—and then even counterfactual presents and nonexistent futures and impossible worlds, universes where light is slow and local and gravity is fast and far-reaching, where two plus two equals one, or even where two plus two equals, say, grapefruit. And it’s not intriguing. It’s terrifying.
But if you can get past the vertigo of all that, you do start to notice a few patterns. I minimized the game board window on the video wall and took a squint at the scrolling swarms of raw information. Right now LEON was sifting through data relating to people with the same names and making sure they were assigned to the right individual. And by data, I mean all data—occupations, genealogies, online and RL webs of acquaintance, credit reports, purchases, school records, birthdays, photos, hobbies acknowledged and inferred, browser histories, haplotype estimates, cross-references, medical data, an Iguazu of facts, near facts, and falsities in every language on earth, human and machine. I was seeing the closest available thing to what God would see, even closer than what Google sees, since what Google looks at is determined by whatever all these not-too-bright human beings are looking for. Any really purposeful data mining has to be a lot more selective. You need to focus. And I don’t mean focus on some little detail, like in a word search. It’s more like those Magic Eye pictures, where you need to focus a couple of feet below the surface of the paper, and if you can keep from getting distracted by all the little squiggles, you start seeing a shape—or rather, it’s more accurate to call it a space than a shape, since you’re really seeing only the space, that is, if you only use one eye you can’t see it at all—and if you can keep focusing on that shape, it coalesces out of the noise, it gets rounder and deeper and smoother, and at some point you start to realize what it is. As the Steersman’s dust soaked into my nervous system, it was as though I was slowly opening my second eye; I was beginning to make out an outline of something in the east, and now the muscles of my iris were slowly focusing out beyond the cataract of names and dates and amounts and all the other quintillions of grains of garbage that constitute the monstrous world, and I was almost beginning to see what it was, something made up of all those things but not really of them at all, something direful looming up ahead.