Revolution (Replica) (30 page)

“I’ve been on conference calls with my advisers most of the afternoon,” he said. “We’re all finding your story about Dorothy very hard to swallow.”

The anger that Nate had been suppressing ever since he’d heard the news about Nadia’s mother made his fists clench, and he opened his mouth to let all that anger spew out. But all it took was a significant look from Nadia to shut his mouth again.

“So you’ve decided you don’t believe us?” she inquired, way calmer than Nate could hope to be.

“I didn’t say that,” Belinski answered. “I said it’s hard to swallow. And the problem is if it’s hard for
me
to swallow, it’s going to be hard for anyone else to swallow, too.”

“Where are you going with this?” Nadia asked.

“We need proof of what Dorothy is before we can act.”

Nate shook his head in disgust. “You know perfectly well Nadia and I can’t provide proof. No one can, except Dorothy.”

“Then that’s who we’ll have to get it from.”

Nate blinked in surprise. “Come again?”

Belinski’s lip twitched in the faintest of smiles. “You said that Thea communicates with Dorothy through some kind of receptor in Dorothy’s brain. And that Dorothy is nonfunctional without Thea’s input.”

“That’s what Dorothy told us,” Nadia agreed. “I don’t suppose she had any reason to lie at the time. I doubt she ever imagined we’d stay alive this long.”

Belinski nodded. “Probably not. So we’ll take it as a given that she was telling the truth. In which case we can prove she is not what she says she is by cutting off communication between Dorothy and Thea. We cut that communication, and Dorothy stops functioning. I suspect that would be very convincing evidence. Especially if it happens in front of witnesses.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Nadia asked.

“By use of a jamming device. Obviously we can’t be sure exactly how Thea is communicating with Dorothy, but it’s something wireless, which means it uses radio frequencies, which can be disrupted.”

“And you have some kind of technology that will let us do that,” Nate said.

“We’ll have to improvise,” Belinski said. “Most of our jamming devices target a limited range of frequencies, so that our own forces can use the free ones to communicate with each other. But we have no idea which frequencies Thea uses, so we’ll have to jam them all. I have an engineer modifying one of our portable jammers as we speak.”

“And is this going to knock out communications for the whole city?” Nate asked.

The Chairman shook his head. “There’s no need for something so drastic. I’ve been invited to address the board of directors tomorrow afternoon. The new Chairman Hayes and I have been going over the existing trade agreements between Synchrony and Paxco, and we’re planning to announce what we’ve come up with during the meeting. It’s the perfect opportunity to tear the mask off Dorothy—in front of the board of directors, and captured on video, because all board meetings are recorded, even if the recordings are top secret. We can use a very localized signal jammer—one that’s small enough to be carried in a pocket.”

Nate imagined it would make quite a sensation if Dorothy suddenly collapsed in the middle of a board meeting, and once the board of directors found out what she was, she would not be Chairman anymore.

“Discrediting Dorothy isn’t enough,” Nate said. “The real enemy is Thea, and losing her puppet won’t do her a whole lot of harm.”

“True. But Thea is just a computer—an extraordinary one, to be sure, but a computer nonetheless. Without human beings to carry out her wishes, there’s nothing to stop us from shutting her down—and this time we’ll know enough to shut down the Replication tanks, too.”

Nate shuddered, remembering what it was like when he and Nadia had faced Thea in the flesh. She was more than just a computer. She also had flesh and blood mixed in with her machinery, and shutting her down was not as simple as just flipping a switch. It would take guns, though no doubt Chairman Belinski had plenty of access to those as well.

“We’ll be in the Fortress for the board meeting anyway,” Belinski continued.

“In the Fortress?” Nate interrupted, surprised. “The board usually meets at Headquarters. I’ve never heard of them meeting in the Fortress.”

“They’ve been meeting there ever since Dorothy took over,” Belinski said. “According to her, it’s a more secure location.”

You couldn’t get much more secure than the Fortress. It was in the Fortress’s subbasement that Thea resided. But Paxco Headquarters was almost its equal, and it wasn’t like Paxco was at war—except with the trapped denizens of the Basement. So why would Dorothy feel the need to have the board meet in a more secure location? Nate wondered if Thea’s control of her puppet was better when Dorothy was nearby. Certainly she had better control of the building itself. Her original had been ensconced in that subbasement for years and had made unauthorized changes to some of its electronics. For instance, Nate’s father claimed Thea had added listening devices where none had existed before by modifying whatever software she could connect to. Which no doubt made it easy for her to listen in on private conversations in rooms that were supposedly free of bugs—and thereby increase her power over the board members.

“Once we’ve proven that Dorothy isn’t a real person,” Belinski continued, “we can go down to the subbasement and take care of Thea right away, before she comes up with some other way to protect herself. With the entire board of directors as witnesses, I don’t imagine we’ll have too much trouble getting to her.”

“You’re assuming no one but Thea is going to resist,” Nadia said. “Cutting Dorothy off from Thea might make the board acknowledge Nate is the true Chairman, but they won’t necessarily all agree that Thea has to be destroyed. After all, Nate’s father didn’t see Thea for the monster that she was until way too late.”

“That’s why you and Nathaniel will be coming with me to the board meeting,” Belinski said. “You’re eyewitnesses to the things that Thea has done, and once we’ve shown them that you’re telling the truth about Dorothy, the rest of the crazy story sounds a lot more plausible. I would be stunned if your board didn’t agree Thea has to be put down after hearing everything.”

Nate wondered if Belinski was giving the board too much credit, or whether he himself wasn’t giving them enough. The last couple of months had turned him into a cynic, but the fact that the board had approved cutting off food and medical aid to the Basement and then bombing it didn’t do much for his faith. Even if Dorothy had fabricated evidence that the Basement was in full revolt.

Apparently, Nadia was feeling equally cynical.

“You’ll be asking them to give up the revenue from making backups and Replicas,” she said. “They might be harder to convince than you think.”

Belinski’s eyes turned shrewd and cold. “If they won’t listen to reason, then I’ll have to resort to more drastic measures. If everything you’ve told me about Thea is true, then she has to be stopped. No matter what.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When
Nadia returned to her comfortable little room after a brief visit with Agnes, she saw that someone had left a bottle of sleeping pills on her bedside table. She was so exhausted—both from a lack of sleep and from an excess of grief—that she didn’t imagine she’d need any chemical aid, but almost as soon as she’d closed the bedroom door behind her, her mind turned on itself and the litany of recriminations began.

She took a pill, and was asleep within fifteen minutes.

She felt like she could sleep for a week, but a woman on Belinski’s security team woke her up before the sun had risen. The board meeting was scheduled to begin at nine
A.M
., and there was a lot to do—plus an hour-long drive—before it began. Nadia soon found herself sitting in a chair surrounded by lights bright enough to make her head ache, while two other members of Belinski’s household studied her with a focus and intensity that made her squirm.

“We’ll need to change her hair, obviously,” the female member of the duo said. They hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves.

“Do that first,” the man said, opening up a large black case and sifting through its contents.

The woman came at Nadia with a pair of scissors, and she jumped out of the chair. “Wait a minute!” she said, glaring at the scissors. “What are you doing?”

The woman looked at her like she thought Nadia was a little slow in the head. “Disguising you, of course.”

Nadia had known a disguise was part of the plan—it wasn’t like she or Nate could just walk into the Fortress without anyone noticing—but she’d been envisioning wigs and makeup. Not having some stranger hacking at her hair with a pair of scissors.

“What’s wrong with a wig?” Nadia asked, grabbing the end of her long braid protectively.

The woman crossed her arms and gave Nadia a stern look. “Wigs can come off, no matter how firmly you anchor them in place. And you’ll be wearing this disguise for many hours. It’s going to be uncomfortable enough without adding a wig into the mix. Your hair will grow back.”

After everything she’d gone through, it seemed ridiculous for Nadia to be upset over getting her hair cut, but to her utter humiliation, there were tears gathering in her eyes.

The look on the woman’s face softened with sympathy. “I’m sorry, Miss Lake. I’m being completely insensitive. My name is Andrea, and this is my partner, Roger.” She indicated the man, who was still taking things out of his case. “I’m going to cut and color your hair, and Roger is going to do your face. When we’re finished with you, you won’t even be able to recognize yourself in the mirror.”

Nadia swallowed hard and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry for making such a big deal over my hair. It’s so stupid, I know.”

“I don’t think it’s your hair you’re crying about,” Andrea said gently, and Nadia practically lost it.

Of course, Andrea was right. Nadia still had a lot of crying left to do, but somehow she was going to have to shove it all down and put off her grief for later, after everything was over. She took a deep breath, then another. After the third, the grief receded to the back of her mind—still hovering, but not as overwhelming.

Nadia had had long hair all her life, but Andrea cut most of it off and dyed the remainder a deep chestnut brown, leaving her with a short, punky hairdo that required copious amounts of mousse and hair spray to hold in place. Already, she barely recognized herself, but then she sat in Roger’s chair and the true transformation began.

Nadia had imagined Roger would disguise her by putting makeup on her with a trowel, but this disguise was more thorough than that. He wouldn’t let her look in the mirror while he was working, but the stuff he was putting on her face looked more like putty than makeup, and she could feel it building up in places, especially around her nose and chin. Whatever the stuff was, it would be hell on her pores.

“Hold still,” Roger snapped at her when she almost laughed at the absurdity of her thoughts.

After he’d finished with the putty, Roger went to work with a series of paintbrushes and mysterious metallic instruments that Nadia thought would fit in perfectly in a dentist’s office. She was especially careful to hold still when he wielded those.

Eventually, he finished. Nadia’s face felt strange and tight. Roger finally let her look in the mirror, and she couldn’t suppress a gasp.

She looked nothing like Nadia Lake. Her nose was thicker and more sharply flared, her chin was pointier, her cheekbones were higher, her eyebrows had less of an arch, and somehow—Nadia had no clue how he’d done it—Roger had made her look older. With her new face, she could easily pass for twenty-five.

“Avoid touching it as much as you can for the next thirty minutes,” Roger advised. “It’s not entirely dry yet, but when it is, the adhesive will be strong enough to keep it in place even if you do, and nothing but the external makeup can get wiped off. I’ll give you some towelettes with solvent on them. When you’re ready to take the mask off, moisten the edge of it with the towelette, and then pull the rest off. It’ll feel like peeling off a bandage, but I’m afraid that can’t be helped.”

Nadia blinked at herself in the mirror, hardly able to believe that it was her under that face. “Who are you?” she asked Roger, shaking her head in disbelief. “Do you work in the movies or something?”

He met her eyes in the mirror and smiled. “I do real life, not movies. Draw your own conclusions from that.”

The fact that Synchrony had a safe house here within Paxco suggested that they had a pretty healthy and active spy network. Nadia supposed it wasn’t surprising that someone in that network was good at creating disguises. She was anxious to see what Nate would look like when they were through with him.

“Thank you,” she said to both Roger and Andrea. “You did amazing work.”

“Good luck today,” Roger said as Nadia slipped out of the chair and headed for the door.

Her disguise got its first test when she reached the stairs to the second floor. Nate was just coming down for his own transformation, and he passed her on the stairs, nodding an impersonal greeting. Nadia couldn’t help laughing, and Nate paused on the stairs below her, looking at her with a puzzled frown. Which made her laugh harder. She hoped her watering eyes weren’t damaging the mask.

“Nadia?” Nate asked wonderingly. “Is that you?”

“Took you long enough to recognize me,” she teased, fighting off more laughter.

He shook his head. “I
still
don’t recognize you. I would never have guessed if I hadn’t recognized your laugh.”

She nodded in satisfaction. “Then I very much doubt Dorothy or any of the board members will recognize us. At least not until we want them to.”

“As long as we keep our mouths shut.”

That, Nadia believed, they could do. It was everything else she had doubts about.

*   *   *

Belinski’s
team had turned Nate into a freckled redhead with pudgy cheeks and broad shoulders. There was no way anyone at the Fortress could recognize him or Nadia, but that didn’t stop his heart from beating double time or his palms from sweating. Too many awful things had happened at the Fortress, too many images of the place haunted his nightmares.