Repairman Jack [04]-All the Rage (15 page)

Somewhere in Jack's dreams Sal Vituolo became the Sayer of the Law, crying over and over, "Are we not men?… Are we not men?…"

FRIDAY

1

"Jesus H. Christ!"

It had changed.

Nadia sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the printout in her vibrating hands.

The diagram of the Loki molecule's structure—it looked different,
was
different. She couldn't say how, exactly, but she knew that some of the side chains present yesterday afternoon were missing this morning. For the life of her, though, she couldn't remember what they were.

She'd meant to check the printout last night when she came home but forgot. Probably because she hadn't thought it worth the effort, or maybe she'd subconsciously believed that Dr. Monnet had been kidding her. In Nadia's world, diagrams did not alter themselves.

Until now.

No-no-no. Don't go there. This is impossible.

Wait. She'd also printed out the empirical formula and memorized it. She pulled the sheet from her shoulder bag and unfolded it. It read "€24113404." But that was wrong. She was sure it had been C
₂₇
H
₄₀
O
₃
. Or had there been six oxygen atoms? Damn! She couldn't be sure. And that wasn't like her.

She checked the empirical formula against the molecular structure—they tallied perfectly.

She closed her eyes against the queasy, dizzy feeling stealing over her. This can't be happening. It's some sort of trick. Has to be.

Somehow someone had got into her shoulder bag and switched the printouts. But who? And when? She'd made the printouts just before she'd left GEM yesterday, and her bag hadn't been out of her sight since. And why the hell would someone go to all that trouble?

But a switch didn't explain her memory lapse. Even on a bad day she'd be able to remember at least one of the missing side chains, but this morning she was drawing a complete blank.

A strange mixture of unease and excitement started buzzing through her. Something very strange was going on here. That molecule—Loki—was some sort of singularity. It had properties she could not explain but not unfathomable properties; over at GEM she had tools that could help her unravel its mysteries. This would be ground breaking work. She thought of all the papers she could publish about Loki, all the lectures she would give. Barely thirty and she'd be world famous.

Well, famous among molecular biologists.

And best of all, she was getting paid to do what she'd be willing to do for free.

Nadia started pulling on her clothes. She wanted to be in the dry lab right now, but she had to stop by the diabetes clinic first. She'd do a fly-through there, then run straight over to GEM.

As she hurried down the hall toward the front door, passing various portraits of Pope John Paul and loops of dried palm fronds tacked to the walls, she heard her mother's voice call out from the other side of her bedroom door.

"I heard you, Nadj!"

"Heard me what, Mom?" she said, still moving.

"Take the Lord's name in vain. You shouldn't do that. It's a sin."

When did I do that? she wondered. But she had no time and less inclination to discuss it right now.

"Sorry, Mom."

Doug's right, she thought as she swung into the hallway. Got to move out. And soon.

2

Doug's eyes burned from staring at the monitor. He leaned back and rubbed them. He'd spent the whole night chipping away at the defenses in the GEM mainframe. Some he'd overcome—the partners' expense account records, for instance. He'd tooled through those and wasted a lot of time without finding anything unusual or even interesting.

But the defenses around the finances of GEM Basic were giving him fits. He could follow the money trail to the R & D division, but there it stopped. Details of where, when, and how that money was spent were locked in a cyber safe, and he didn't have the combination.

Not yet, anyway. He was making headway, but at a glacial pace.

"Need a break," he muttered as he rose and rotated his aching back.

He walked around the study, stretching, punching at the air to loosen up. He felt tired but wired. He was getting the hang of the GEM security codes. Whoever had set them up was good, but Doug was pretty good too. He'd pulled his share of all-nighters with the computer nerds back in college, hacking into various corporate and academic systems and leaving prank messages in the sysops' mailboxes. Nothing vicious, more like the cyber equivalent of water paint graffiti.

He glanced at the clock. Damn—almost eight and he had a couple of calls scheduled for late morning, plus he was delivering lunch to the staff of a group practice in Bay Shore.

He hated quitting now, but if he didn't get a little shut-eye he'd be useless the rest of the day. But then, why should he worry about sales calls and feeding nurses and receptionists if sales had no relationship to his commissions?

Good question, but it wasn't his style to blow off appointments. And besides, he had tonight and a three-day weekend ahead to complete the hack.

Reluctantly he shut off his laptop and staggered to the bedroom. He set the alarm for nine-thirty, then toppled onto the bed like a falling tree. The sheets still smelled vaguely of Nadj. He dozed off with a smile on his face.

3

"See!" said Abe, jabbing a juice-coated finger at the
Daily News
spread out on the counter before him. "See!"

"See what?" Jack said.

Breakfast with Abe again, back in their customary positions on either side of the counter. Jack had brought a couple of papayas this time. Sipping coffee, he watched as Abe quickly and expertly began quartering and seeding them, amazed that his chubby, stubby fingers could be so agile.

"Right here. More congested spleen being vented. It says some high school teacher in Jackson Heights tossed two unruly students out a second-story window."

"Probably a physics lab and they were having trouble with the concept of gravity."

"One's got a broken arm, the other a broken leg. Four cops it took to arrest the teach. Know what he said when they finally subdued him? 'They were talking while I was talking! Nobody talks when I'm talking! Next time they'll listen!'"

"Somehow I doubt there'll be a next—hey, what are you doing?"

Abe had just dumped a mass of black papaya seeds and their gooey matrix on the sports section of the
Times
.

"What? I should dump them on my nice clean counter?"

Jack wasn't going to get into that—the counter was anything but clean. "What if I wanted to read that?"

"Suddenly you're Mr. Yankee Fan? A jock you're not."

"I used to be a star hitter in Little League. And what if I wanted to know who won the Knicks game?"

"They didn't play."

"All right. The Nets, then."

"They lost to the Jazz, one-oh-nine to one-oh-one."

Jack stared at Abe. He believed him. Abe listened exclusively to talk radio. He'd probably heard the scores a dozen times already this morning. But Jack wasn't giving up. He rarely read a sports section outside of World Series time or Super Bowl season, but a principle was at stake here. He wasn't sure which one, but he'd come up with something.

"But sometimes I like to
read
about a game."

Abe had freed up the orange papaya fruit but left the crescents lounging in their rinds. Now he was cross-slicing the crescents into bite-size pieces.

"You know the score already. You need more? For why? You're going to read some self-styled mavin's postulations on why they won or why they lost? Who cares unless you're the coach. Team A won; Team B lost; end of story; when's the next game?" He gestured at the papaya with his knife. "Eat."

Jack popped a piece into his mouth. Delicious. As he reached for another piece, Abe gestured to where Parabellum was eyeing the gloppy mass on the sports section. The parakeet cocked his head left and right with suspicion, hungry for the seeds but not sure what to make of the goo.

"Such a fastidious bird I've got."

"You kidding?" Jack said. "You plopped that stuff down on George Veczy's column, and now he can't read the end."

Abe fixed him with a silent, over-the-reading-glasses stare.

Jack sighed. "All right then, hand me the
Post,
will you—unless you've messed up
its
sports section too."

Abe's hand started toward it then stopped. "Well, well, well. Here's something that might interest you."

"Something about the Mets, I hope," Jack said.

"A different kind of sportsman—your preppy rioter friends are in the news again."

"Sent to Sing-Sing, I hope."

"Quite the contrary. They're walking—all of them."

Jack's mood suddenly darkened. "Let me see that."

Abe gave the Metro Section a one-eighty spin and jabbed his finger at a tiny article next to the lottery numbers box. Jack scanned it once, then, not quite believing his eyes, read it again.

"None of them booked! Not one! No charges against any of them!"

"Due to 'a new development' in the case, it says. Hmmm… what do you think that could mean?"

Jack knew what Abe was getting at: Well-to-do guys, some of them undoubtedly with a connection or two in City Hall or Police Plaza, get a few strings pulled and sail home as if nothing had happened.

And one of them was Robert B. "Porky" Butler. The bastard who'd damn near killed Vicky hadn't spent a single night in jail—wasn't even being
charged
with anything.

"I've got to make a call."

Abe didn't offer his phone and Jack wouldn't have used it if he had. Not with so many people using caller ID these days.

Jack had retrieved Butler's phone number from his wallet by the time he reached the pay phone on the corner. He plunked in a few coins and was soon connected to the home of Robert B. Butler, alumnus of St. Barnabas Prep and attacker of little girls on museum steps.

When the maid or whoever it was answered the phone and asked in West African-accented English who was calling, he made up a name—Jack Gavin.

"I'm an attorney for the St. Barnabas Prep Alumni Association. I'd like to talk to Mr. Butler about the unfortunate incident Wednesday night and his injury. How is he doing, by the way?"

"Very well," the woman said.

"Is he in a lot of pain?"

"Hardly any."

Damn. He felt his jaw muscles tense. Have to fix that.

"May I speak to him a minute?"

"He's with a physical therapist right now. Let me check."

A minute later she was back. "Mr. Butler can't come to the phone right now, but he'll be glad to see you anytime this afternoon."

Keeping his voice even and professionally pleasant, Jack said he'd be over around one.

Scaring Vicky, endangering her life, and then skating on any charges…

He and Mr. Butler were going to have a little heart-to-heart.

4

Nadia sat in the sealed, dimly lit room and stared at the 3-D image floating in the air before her. The first thing she'd done upon reaching the GEM Basic lab was light up the imager and call up the Loki structure from memory: the Loki molecule—or rather its degraded form, which she'd begun thinking of as Loki-2—had appeared.

Changed, just like her printout.

OK. That could be explained by someone tampering with the imager's memory. But she had an ace up her sleeve. Before leaving yesterday she had scraped a few particles of the original Loki sample from the imager.

She removed the stoppered test tube from her pocket and dumped the grains into the sample receptacle. Something about the color… she couldn't say exactly what, but it wasn't right. She sat back and waited, then punched up the image. Her mouth went dry as the same damn molecule took shape before her.

The dry lab lightened, then darkened again as the door behind her opened and closed.

"Are you a believer yet?"

She turned at Dr. Monnet's voice. He stood behind her, looking as if he hadn't slept last night.

She swallowed. "Tell me this is a trick. Please?"

"I wish it were." He sighed. "You have no idea how much I wish this were some sort of hoax. But it is not."

"It
has
to be. If you were simply asking me to believe that this molecule alters its structure during the course of some 'celestial event,' I could buy that. I'd want to know how the 'event' effected the change, but I could imagine gravitational influence or something equally subtle acting as a catalyst, and I could handle that. But what we've got here—if we haven't been flim-flammed—is a molecule that not only mutates from one form to another but substitutes its new structure for all records of its original structure. In effect, it's editing reality. And we both know that's impossible."

"Knew," Dr. Monnet said. "That was what we assumed was true. Now we know different."

"Speak for yourself."

He smiled wanly. "I know how you feel. You are utterly confused, you are frightened and suspicious, yet you are also exhilarated and challenged. And the tug-of-war between all these conflicting emotions leaves you on the brink of tears. Am I right?"

Nadia felt her eyes begin to brim as a sob built in her throat. She wiped them and nodded, unable to speak.

"But it's
true,
Nadia," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Trust me. We are not being tricked. There's something here that challenges our most fundamental beliefs about the nature of the physical world, about reality itself."

And that was what was so upsetting, making her crazy. What if the ability to reorder reality, along with the very memory of reality, were not confined to this one molecule? What if it were happening every day? How many times had she typed or written a word and then stopped and stared at it, thinking it looked wrong, that it was spelled some other way? She'd look it up and find most times that her original spelling had been correct, so she'd move on despite the feeling that it still looked wrong.