Splicer (26 page)

The man they called the team leader was born in a dusty bleached-white little village in Angola, the son of a bricklayer. South African forces constantly foraying into his country, looking for Namibian insurgents crossed a squad of Cuban-backed Popular Liberation Movement rebels one night in 1989. His parents were killed in the crossfire. An uncle, tired of the misery, the baked squalor and the constant civil war took the boy and fled to Great Britain. Later he attended University in the States as part of a United Nations student exchange program. During his final year at Cornell in New York, he attended a series of voluntary programs on sensory deprivation, hoping to accrue some much-needed curricular points. This brought him to the attention of the Special Services Branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Never a dull moment since then
he thought dimly.

His crew, two former FBI agents, had a simple task confronting them. Find Malcolm Grieves and bring him, alive, to the team captain. The team captain had an even simpler instruction. Get the password. One word and the job was complete. This single password was the key to making the program that ran the
Splicer
functional. The team captain might have asked his superiors why they couldn't just decode the password using a wealth of cryptology equipment and a staff that spilled over two floors of a downtown Washington office building. But he wouldn't ask because he didn't care. He loved his job. 

Damn the technocrats - sometimes a little muscle, a little guts, a lifetime of instinct could get the job done faster.

What the team captain didn't know was that the password was indecipherable in any case. The author of the software had used current research on prime number encoding to scramble the code. It would take the world’s fastest supercomputer, a Cray IV buried deep in Cheyenne Mountain at the Air Defense Command Center, running full time over a 1000 years to decode the one word that would make Grieves' creation come to life.

With Grieves in hand, a fine piece of surgical wire and a little will-power, the code would be forthcoming in a matter of hours or perhaps minutes if everyone concerned was in a hurry.
Business before pleasure
the team leader thought.

That thought stirred up an image in his head of the woman in the apartment block they had killed. What was her name? Shay? A strange name for a woman. He would never forget the spray of her blood across the light colored carpet. To him it was like a work of art.

The team captain was wishing now that they hadn't come to Toronto equipped so lightly. They had left behind the heavier firepower, thinking it was hardly necessary. The decision to ignore the personal communications equipment, he now regretted as well.

Grieves was a chunky little figure and he expected little in the way of resistance. But things can happen. Victims get lucky or they act unpredictably. He looked at his watch again. His two agents would have to bide their time until the break at 9:00. They would bundle Grieves off to their rented van and do the job right there. A programmer was waiting in Lansing, Michigan who would feed the password in to the system once the team captain called it in to him by cell phone from the back of the truck. When the software worked, and only then, would they put Grieves out of his misery.

Pierce fired his gun in the small space of the landing, wincing as a ricocheting bit of cement glanced off his forehead. He fired once more at the lock mechanism and then kicked at the handle, which fell to the floor with a dull thunk.

He maneuvered his right hand into the small jagged hole and pulled the door back.
Who the hell was the woman
he thought angrily.
Nobody mentioned a woman.
They had seen pictures of Grieves’ wife and this didn't match. She was too tall for one thing. Too good looking for another.

Pierce cradled his swollen left hand against his stomach feeling it throb with every heartbeat. 
Without her, the fat programmer would never have made it out of the stairwell. He was such a short ass he couldn't reach the handle through the broken safety window.
Above him, he heard his partner try to yell then gurgle something incoherent, the way a man would if he was strangled or knifed in the throat. His concern over being shot by Grieves in the basement alleyway was overshadowed now by his partner's dilemma a story above him.

He crouched, took a deep breath, then jumped through the door and twisted to the left. In order to hold his gun he had to wrap his broken right arm under his left and squeeze it against his chest. Through slitted eyes he scanned the tunnel that stretched out ahead of him. It was empty, but in the distance, down the maze of underground walkways, he heard angry yelling.  He decided then that he would cut Grieves down the instant he saw him; not by killing him but with a clean shot to the upper thigh. When the man went down, he would explain very clearly that unless he revealed the code words, Pierce would open his femoral artery. Grieves would deflate like an untied balloon. Then Pierce slipped over sideways and went down. He was light-headed from loss of blood and the shock of too many broken bones. Before he could continue he would have to tie off the wound on his right forearm. But that would be nearly impossible without help.

He lifted himself up with his shoulders and stumbled towards the direction of the voices. Every step was agony. The arm had swollen, filling the sleeve of a jacket that he was unequipped to remove. His left hand was bloody and covered in bruises, twisted claw-like at his side. His eyes were filled with madness.

Rusty felt his way back along the hallway to the steel door that led back to the student lounge. As the door opened and the hinges squealed, he heard the person he had struck struggling to get up.

He ran down the stairs two steps at a time and dove through the exit door into the lounge, his head pounding, feeling like a man on a stroll who had stirred up an angry wasps nest. He had a dedicated enemy now, and to be honest, he could only guess that it was someone linked with Grieves and Jayne's disappearance from the lecture hall. He slid around the random chairs and tables and headed down the west tunnel to the core of the campus.

:

The team captain heard more than he saw. Then he spotted someone in his thirties, red hair, his light jacket flapping behind him, running as if pursued by the devil. Someone late for class? At 8:30 at night? He jogged towards the triple set of glass door that led to the Hub. The team captain didn't like this, didn't feel comfortable with this simple piece of unexplained phenomena. The man with the red hair had disappeared. The team leader strode back to the doors to Donner Hall and looked in. A dozen faces turned in his direction but not the face he was looking for. He scanned the assembled club members, then the room. Where were the other exits?  He frowned for the first time that evening, then closed the door behind him and jogged for the Hub.

As a student
Jayne had worked for one summer on campus on a project called "Space Inventory". The job sounded high-tech to her friends but was actually the result of the administration's need to understand how much square footage the University encompassed. The most sophisticated tool she used that year was a tape measure. Her team had delved into every cubbyhole, residence, closet and underground lab that existed. As a result she knew the campus better than Grieves and better than her pursuers but she wasn't prepared to let anyone know that yet.  She also began to realize that Grieves was in far more danger than even he realized. She kept him moving.

"So we've got one more after us."

"As far as we know," she offered.

"The other one is probably garroting your client as we speak."

Jayne glowered. "Grieves, I'm trying to save your worthless ass. At least try to be civil."

"Save my life? I was doing perfectly well until you came along to play Angela Lansbury."

"You'd be dead, Grieves. Whose keys did you use to break through that door?"

"I'm no good to them dead."

"Excuse me?  You're right.  They'll buy you a coffee and a double chocolate donut and have a little heart to heart. Then they'll string you up by your testicles, apply the 220 and wait for you to sing." Grieves turned from a ruddy pink to a pale white. "Passwords are fine, Grieves, as long as you understand how far someone is willing to go to get them out of you. Judging by what happened to Shay, I'd say they were prepared to go as far as it takes."

"Going after Shay was a waste of time," was all that Grieves could answer, the gun growing heavy in his hand. "I don't understand why they would think that she knew something."

An awareness was beginning to grow in Grieves. A sense of futility. Here they were, skulking amongst boilers and asbestos coated steam pipes while a team of hired killers waited for them on the surface. And Shay? Why in Gods name Shay? Because he had seen her, gone to her condominium complex to confront her after she had seen him in the street? To tell her what?  Don't talk? Don't say you've seen me? She never even answered the door. And that incomplete little visit had caused her death? It didn't make sense. If they were tracking him to her block, there is no doubt they would have picked him up as well.  So the connection had to be Shay.  Who had she told about seeing him?  Rusty?

The key to the proper control of heating and cooling in a large complex of buildings like the campus center, is air pressure. Any large building has a myriad of leaks, open doors and gaps to deal with that would make heating it nearly impossible without the simple expedient of positive pressure. Large fans force heated air into the building. Any air leak then becomes a problem of escaping air as opposed to one of cold air leaking in. To create this positive pressure a series of large high-volume fans and plenums are required. In a building the size of the campus hub complex, the air ducts were large enough to walk through, much like sheet-metal hallways.

When Jayne heard the sound of distant running from within the basement hallway, she made a desperate decision. They would flee into the plenums; an idea that made her heart race. As a student, the dim gray interior - the omnipresent feeling of suffocation and the dull subconscious roar of the monster fans made her feel as if she had stepped into one of her nightmares. But they had no real choice. She guessed that the two assailants were closing in from two directions and there was no side escape. They were trapped. The doors into the plenums looked like the man-hatches on submarines - thick, rounded corners and a rotating locking wheel device. The doors would not open with the huge room-filling fans on. The pressure they created prevented the airtight doors from opening inward. Jayne ran back several yards to a large multicolored panel and hit a large red backlit switch. The walls rumbled, then a deep bass-like moan wound down through several octaves, the sound more felt than heard.

Jayne and Grieves looked around in the new awkward silence. She hadn't heard the sound before; the deep throated vibrating of the fans. Now in their absence she felt naked and confused.

"What the hell was that?" said Grieves.

"Come on, Grieves.  It's your turn to follow orders."

The interior of the ducting, to Jayne’s surprise, was lit. Sixty-watt bulbs covered in sealed glass envelopes were mounted ten yards apart. The entire hallway was sheet metal, each section a panel about eight feet long and separated by further strips of steel. Jayne closed the door behind her and dropped the small steel handle into its latch.

"Can they follow us?"

"Sure."

"Can't we lock it?"

"By turning on the fans."

"Well, why don't we?"

"Because we'd never get out. The air pressure would make it impossible to open the doors."

Grieves pushed the latch open on the door and peered out into the hallway. Then he stepped through, leaving the door slightly ajar. She heard the soft click of copper contacts in the panel off to the left and the hair on the back of Jayne’s neck stood up straight. Grieves had activated the main fans again. Already she could feel the air pressure building in the closed space, the slow climbing whine of the rotors filling the air around them. He pushed the door back awkwardly and stepped back inside.

"I can feel it already - the pressure on the door.  In a few seconds a crowd of them couldn't get through."

Jayne was thinking hard, visualizing the maze of plenums and ducts, the huge unguarded fans.

"They told us never to go into the system with the fans on," she said, yelling above the roar of air, her hair whipping around her face.

"Don't be such a chicken-shit. Which way?" He waved the gun at her, then toward the direction of the steady pull of air in the chamber. She pointed west, downstream. He nodded. She went first, Grieves behind her, his hands on the sleek metal sides to keep his balance. This was like a bad dream realized, she thought, and worse than that, she couldn't remember if the fans pushed or pulled the air.  But she knew the answer was going to be important eventually.