Stones (Data) (62 page)

“Deal with it. I don’t want to hear about it,” Ryzaard waves a hand in front of his face. “I’m in the middle of a breakthrough here.”

“OK, but—”

“I said
deal
with it.” Ryzaard slips the gold card out of his pocket and touches it.

“But Dr. Ryzaard—” Jing-wei says.

The bluescreen goes white and silent as she and Diego vanish.

Pacing back and forth with nervous energy, Ryzaard stops squarely in front of Matt. “Now then, there is a little experiment I’ve been wanting to try for some time. It could change everything, and I think it might work.” He shifts his gaze to Jessica, who is breathing normally with her eyes still closed. “I assume that I will have your full cooperation.”

Matt feels a shift around him, and the room goes silent. He glances at Jessica. Her chest is no longer rising and falling with the rhythm of breath. For an instant, he fears she has died, but then he notices that Alexa is also standing still. Ryzaard has stopped time. He and Matt are the only things moving in the room.

“Ever heard of Marcus Tullius Cicero?” Ryzaard says.

“Cicero? Of course.”

“They say he was one of the greatest orators in the history of the Roman Empire, perhaps the world.” Ryzaard puts his hand in his pockets, steps back off the rug and walks back and forth between Matt and the bluescreen. “Ever read any of his speeches?”

Matt wonders why Ryzaard is talking about Cicero, of all people. But he thinks it best to play along and wait for an opening, a way to escape.

“I must have studied him back in my freshman Western Civilization class,” Matt says.

“Can you remember any of the speeches or tell me anything about even one of them?”

“Is this a test?”

“No.” Ryzaard stops and turns. “The point is that his speeches are a complete bore. I’ve read them all. Historians like to talk about his meteoric rise from humble origins to consul of the Roman Empire, holding each position along the way at the youngest age allowed. Of course, they all give the credit to his phenomenal speaking ability. But I don’t buy it.”

Ryzaard’s voice becomes background noise. Matt relaxes into his breath. In his mind, he sees the hilltop where the Allehonen came to him. Gripping Jessica’s cold hand tightly, he wills himself to jump there, just as he jumped from the sea to the little house on Naganuma’s world. He can feel the Stone, almost like it’s
alive
.

But nothing happens.

It’s like reaching a hand into a river and trying to grab it. He can feel the wetness of the current rushing through his fingers, but can’t get a grip on it.

A hand strikes him across the face. “Stop trying to leave. It won’t work.” Ryzaard towers over him.

Matt raises his eyebrows in feigned innocence. “So how did Cicero do it?” he says.

“Let me show you. I’ll need your help.”

Matt notices that Ryzaard steps on the dark blue area of the rug and then immediately draws back. “What do you want me to do?”

“An ancient Egyptian manuscript speaks of a man who rose to become Pharaoh over all the land, whose words had such an overpowering effect on listeners, that it was
impossible
for them to disagree with him.”

Matt nods his head. “He had a Stone?”

“No, he had two of them. Or rather, I suspect he had one and his son had one.”

Now Matt understands what Ryzaard is driving at. “So you want to try it out?”

“Precisely.”

“How?”

Ryzaard walks around the outer edge of the room to the side of Jessica and Matt. After a moment’s hesitation, he steps quickly onto the blue part of the rug. The sounds in the room come back for a few seconds, like someone is turning the volume back up. Ryzaard goes to the front of the refrigerator and peeks inside. He quickly shuts the door and steps off the rug.

The room is silent again.

Ryzaard glances at Alexa, standing near the door. “She hates anything raw. Especially fish. Always orders her steaks well done. Won’t even eat an apple or carrot unless it’s cooked.” He laughs. “She told me that she once bit into some rotten Albacore tuna as a child and has not been able to stomach the stuff ever since.”

“What are you going to do? Make her eat the sushi?”

“Better than that.” Ryzaard starts walking to her. “I am going to make her like it.”

“How?”

“Easy. You concentrate on her eating the sushi and loving it. See it in your mind. Create it in your mind. According to Naganuma, you are especially good at that. I will do the same. You won’t have to say a thing. Just concentrate and watch.”

Jessica begins to stir in the chair next to him. He turns his head to the opposite end of the room to look at Alexa. She has her back to them and is fidgeting with her hair.

Matt closes his eyes and images Alexa craving raw fish. He sees her shoving great handfuls into her mouth, ravenous for more.

“Alexa,” Ryzaard says. “Are you hungry?”

She turns around. “No thanks, I had a snack before I came.”

“Eat too many protein bars and you will get nothing but gas.” Ryzaard raises an eyebrow. “Why don’t you have something fresh from the fridge over there? It should be well-stocked.”

Matt cracks his eyes open to sneak a look at Alexa and quickly shuts them. He goes back to the image in his mind of her devouring the sushi.

“Maybe I
will
have something. I suddenly feel hungry.” She walks across the rug to the refrigerator a few steps from Matt’s chair. The door comes open. “This raw fish looks great.” She grabs the plate and sits down on the sofa. Without hesitation, she picks up a large pink piece of yellow tail, immerses it in soy sauce, and pops the whole thing in her mouth. “Delicious,” she says with her mouth full.

After one minute of listening to her eat, Ryzaard clears his throat. Matt opens his eyes to see Ryzaard draw a hand quickly across his throat.

It’s his signal for Matt to stop. The image of Alexa fades from his mind.

The next instant, a gagging noise comes from the sofa. Alexa drops the plate and its contents on the rug and runs from the room, holding her mouth.

A look of triumph flashes across Ryzaard’s face.

“Jing-wei,” he says.

Her image materializes on the wall screen. “Yes, Dr. Ryzaard.”

“Get the President of the United States on the line. I’d like to have a chat with him.”

P
lease don’t let him die.

Kent pulls hard on the knob, and the door swings open on screaming hinges. Taking a step forward, he stops in the utter darkness of a long corridor and leans against a dusty wall to catch his breath. With no ventilation, the air has the taste of an old crypt. Seeing only by the light of the diode on his forehead and the IR goggles, he moves through murky green space, like an astronaut on some alien world. It’s all in sharp focus out to a distance of two or three meters, but beyond that, everything fades into an oblivion of mist. A rat the size of a cat runs through the corridor and bursts out of the haze to brush against his leg. He nearly falls back and hits the ground, catching his breath and thinking about the MEPP explosives in his backpack.

They’ll become very angry if there are any jarring movements.

If his calculations are correct, the chaos in the lobby is now consuming all available security personnel. It won’t last long. In time, a guard with a scanner will locate the source of the disturbance in the concrete outside the front door. And it will all be shut down.

At the end of the hall, the corridor turns left and runs for a short distance before it terminates in a dead end. He gently places his backpack on the ground and takes out two ultrasound sensors, each the color and shape of hockey pucks. Both of them go on the wall two feet apart. Then he pulls a slate out of the backpack, activates the interface and stares at the screen, hoping against hope that the building plans were correct.

There it is on the slate, a view of what’s hiding behind the wall. The entrance to the original elevator shaft.

The only open space in the building running in an unbroken line from bottom to top.

Back in ‘35, Tibetan monks placed tanks of liquid hydrogen in the elevator shafts of hi-rise buildings in every major capitol, flooding them with ultra flammable gas. At the same instant, as they silently meditated on skyscraper roofs around the world and ignited the explosions, the buildings emptied their guts from the inside out.

The massacre triggered a massive response. New laws, new government regulations. New architecture. Elevator design changed. Shafts no longer ran in straight lines through building cores, but were disconnected, staggered. Old elevators were dismantled, the shafts filled in.

MX Global’s lawyers quietly lobbied and obtained exemptions to avoid the enormous cost of removing the old shaft in its corporate headquarters. Kent had heard the story before.

And the shaft is still there, behind the wall.

Kent repositions the hockey pucks and engages the resonance protocol on the slate. A deep rumble moves out from the pucks and penetrates the wall. He steps back with eyes focused ahead. An oblong area of cinder blocks peels away and crumbles to the floor. When the dust clears, it reveals a decades old elevator door with a seam running down the middle.

With winch separators from his backpack, Kent inserts their tips into the seam and watches as the doors slowly move apart. Stepping through, he balances on the massive steel coils at the bottom of the shaft and gingerly inhales. The air is even more stale and dead than in the corridor. There’s a distinct smell of oil mixed with the odor of decaying rats and ancient dust. He stares up into the stretch of darkness above him and runs his hand along the steel wall of the shaft. It’s surprisingly warm.

Just a foot above his head, he touches the end of a horizontal steel bar, the bottom rung of the access ladder that runs the entire length of the shaft.

He presses a soft motion sensor the size of a marble on the inside wall of the shaft at ankle level. A dot pulses green on its tiny surface. If someone tries to follow him, it will trigger an alarm in his ear.

Then he pulls himself up past the first rung, grabs the second and begins to climb.

“I
’ll have the order prepared and sign it immediately. Good to speak with you, Dr. Ryzaard.” The President of the United States leans back in the chair behind his desk.

“The pleasure is all mine. I hope to drop by the next time I’m in Washington,” Ryzaard says.

“I look forward to it.”

The image fades from the wall screen, and Ryzaard walks back to Matt from the other end of the room. “Very good,” he says, patting Matt on the shoulder. “We can accomplish much when we work together.”

Matt can hardly believe it. Ryzaard just convinced the President of the United States to allow MX Global and its affiliates to have Level 5 access to the NSA’s secure Mesh-point.

“Kalani,” Ryzaard says.

A young man with a Polynesian face appears on the bluescreen with his bare feet propped up on the desk. “I’m here. Heard everything. Level 5 access. Don’t know how you did it, but I think we just hit the jackpot.”

“It’s just the first of many jackpots, Kalani,” Ryzaard says. “I want to exploit this to its full potential. Spend some time on the Mesh-point, dig around. Find out how this expands our reach.”

Kalani’s face breaks into a wide smile. With the slate in hand, his fingers fly over it like a concert pianist. “Just got on the Mesh-point. Let’s see, we have confidential dossiers on every member of Congress. Classified access to foreign government surveillance operations. Spy satellite database. Even something on Area 51.”

“See what you can find on the current status of talks between Japan and China. Let’s see if the government knows more than I do.” Ryzaard rubs his hands together and puts fingertips to his lips, closing his eyes in contemplation. “There’s so much to do,” he says. “So much that
can
be done. It’s difficult to decide where to start.”

“Looks like you already have,” Matt says.

At the sound of his voice, Jessica opens her eyes. She’s breathing easy again.

Ryzaard walks back to Matt with his back to the wall screen and looks down, unable to suppress the excitement and exuberance in his face. “I’d like to give you one more chance, to join me. Voluntarily. Let us forget about all these unnecessary restrictions.” He points at Matt’s wrists and the cube in the middle of the room. “You can become part of the inner team. The most important member of the team.”