The Overseer (69 page)

“So there’s nothing you can do?” asked Sarah, now at the desk.

“No.” He started to gnaw at his thumbnail. “It’s just that we might be here awhile.”

“What about names?” asked O’Connell. “There has to be a list of who’s out there. We get that, we can stop them before they get their relays.”

“Been there, done that,” answered Toby. “I almost got frozen out of the terminal. These guys weren’t fooling around. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

The booth became very quiet. “What about Pritchard?” The three at the desk looked up. It was Xander who spoke.

“Excuse me?” said Toby, unwilling to hide his irritation.

“Didn’t you say it looked like a … Pritchard matrix?” Xander continued, ignoring the computer expert. “Wouldn’t that give you some idea—”

“Pritchard.” O’Connell nodded. “Nice point, Professor. He’d have put something inside, wouldn’t he?”

“
Hello.
” Toby was beyond frustration. “
What
are you talking about?”

O’Connell ignored him and turned to Sarah. “Well?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes began to wander. “It could be any number of—”

“Would Stein know?”

Again, all three turned to Jaspers. O’Connell spoke. “Bob Stein?”

“He’s here. Could he help?”

O’Connell continued to stare at Jaspers. The Irishman nodded slowly. “If it’s computers and Arthur—”

Two minutes later, a slightly disoriented Stein sat in the chair next to Toby, Sarah and O’Connell speaking at him in quick bursts.

“Override relays,” Bob said softly. Both stopped and stared at him. No one answered. “Remember?” Sarah shook her head. “The
delay
commands in Amman?” He paused. “Arthur had a thing for override relays.”

Sarah’s eyes slowly went wide. “The delays came from
Pritchard
?”

“Yes.” Stein nodded.

The confirmation only seemed to add to her confusion. “Wait a second. So that would mean—”

“Yes,” he answered. “It’s why you couldn’t have saved her.” Stein was looking directly at Sarah. “I went back and checked. Pritchard created the delay because he needed the girl as bait. The longer he kept her as a target, the easier it would be for you to get at Safad. You never had a chance to save her. He gave you no choice.” Bob let the words settle, then turned to O’Connell. “Arthur had a thing for timing. He had to have complete control over each phase of an operation. That’s what he would have put into the system—the one thing that would circumvent the lockouts.”

“Would someone mind explaining to
me
what the hell you’re talking about?” Toby piped in. “Or does the computer guy not need to be in on this?”

“A delay command,” answered Stein. “It won’t allow you to establish new directives, but it will let you delay the ones that have been
transmitted
—
indefinitely
.”

“A delay command?” repeated Toby. “Meaning …”

“Arthur liked the timing to be perfect,” he answered. “If anything was off cue, he’d send out a delay until he could bring everything into line. He’d have buried some sort of delay command deep in the programming.”

“So you’d just sit there,” asked Toby, turning to Sarah, “and wait for the next series of commands after the delay? What if nothing came?”

“Then nothing came,” she answered, more to herself, eyes still distant, the memory growing clearer.

“You’d wait for contact,” added Stein, “and, if and when it
did
come, it was always prompted by a different set of codes.”

“So we’re talking a delay pattern with altered sequencing.” Toby was back in his element.

Again he began to type, fingers and eyes working at breakneck speed as myriad screens appeared and disappeared, all filled with strange symbols.

For the first time in the last minute, Sarah looked up. She gazed at Xander. Neither said a word.

After a very long three minutes, Toby stopped and sat back.

“Nice pop.” He nodded at the screen. “You’re looking at your back door. A simple delay switch. Two problems, though. At this point, I can’t be sure that the command to delay would reach each team.”

“Meaning what?” It was O’Connell who spoke.

“Meaning you might not be able to stop the first few relays.”

“How many?” asked Sarah, once again fully focused.

“I don’t know.”

“
Guess
,” prodded O’Connell.

“Anything that would take place, say, within the next six hours.”

“That’s at most three more events,” he said. “I can live with that. And the second problem?”

“According to this, I send out the delay and everything gets erased.”

“Correct,” Bob agreed. “That was why the codes were different in Amman.”

“Where he’d be forced to reinitialize the system in order to send out the new relays.” Toby smiled, wrapped up in the banter. “An op reinterface: new relays, new codes.”

“The software lesson aside,” asked O’Connell, “what do you mean, ‘erased’?”

“I mean
every
last byte of info gets flushed, wiped clean. Zippo.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” nodded Stein.

“It means,” added Toby, “whoever set this thing up didn’t want anyone to send out the delay without a pretty good reason. It also means that it was designed so that if anybody were to find the back door—like us—they don’t get to look in the cupboard once they’ve broken in.”

“We lose everything?” asked Sarah.

“Am I not being clear here?” answered Toby. “Nada. Nothing. Not even a cursor. You won’t need any explosives because there won’t be anything worth blowing up.” No one spoke. “So what’s it going to be, folks? Delay or not?”

For several moments, no one said a word.

“There are going to be a lot of people sitting around waiting to hear from Eisenreich,” said Sarah, “and we won’t know who they are.” She looked at O’Connell. “We also won’t know how many schools are out there training a whole new generation of disciples.”

“And the
other
alternatives?” broke in Xander. “If we don’t send it out, we’ll know
exactly
who they are—they’ll be the ones turning this country upside down during the next eight days.”

“So we just let them disappear into the woodwork?” asked O’Connell.

“They’re already out there,” Xander explained. “Waiting. So we’ll tell them to wait a bit longer. Let’s not forget how Eisenreich set it up, what the manuscript stipulates: role playing. With Lundsdorf dead, where’s the source? Who’ll send out the new codes? Votapek? Sedgewick? I’m sure those are exactly the kinds of
loose ends
one of your national security agencies can eliminate.” Xander looked at O’Connell, then at Sarah. “The best we can do is let the boys and girls of Eisenreich wait for an order that never comes.”

“And when they grow up?” she asked.

“Without the manuscript, without someone spoon-feeding them ‘
the word according to Eisenreich,
’ they won’t do anything. They need to be told what to do, and there won’t be anybody around to do that.”

O’Connell took in a long breath. “You’re putting a lot of faith in a
four-hundred-
year-old theory, Professor.”

“No. I’m putting my faith in the men who followed that theory to the letter. They wanted to create disciples, not leaders. We just have to hope they were successful.” He turned to Toby. “Send the delay. Tell them … to remain patient.”

Toby looked at O’Connell, who looked at Sarah. She nodded. A moment later, every screen in the lab went blank.

 

Toby had been right, almost to the minute. For six hours, the nation lived through a series of near tragedies. First, the attempted assassination of Lung Tse Pao, senior member of the Chinese trade delegation. Luckily, the
gunmen
had been discovered only minutes before her televised speech, both killed, no names released. Questions, however, remained. Where had security been? Was this somehow connected to the ongoing incidents in Washington? New Orleans? The ambassador? Two hours later, computer malfunctions at LAX only fueled speculation. There, too, last-minute heroics prevented certain disaster; even so, a sense of disbelief, perhaps hints of panic, began to flood radio and television news programs. Were the police and other agencies helpless? Had the United States finally fallen prey to worldwide terrorism? Still other, equally jarring stories continued to trickle in—the worst, the near meltdown at Southwestern Bell—each uncovered in time to prevent catastrophe, yet each only adding to the already-high levels of anxiety. So many threats in so short a time. Were things spinning out of control?

News of real tragedy, however, came just as the evening news programs were airing. The body of Vice President Pembroke had been discovered in his office, the cause of death heart failure. In an address to the nation, President Wainwright spoke of the great sadness his friend’s sudden death had brought to the entire country. A man in perfect health only a few months before, the forty-five-year-old Pembroke had succumbed to an unknown virus evidently contracted during a recent trip to Malaysia. Doctors at the Hopkins Center for Viral Disease could offer little more by way of explanation.

The president then turned to the more disturbing matters of the day. He spoke with the easy familiarity that had long ago endeared him to his public.

“Over the last week, we have witnessed an unspeakable series of attacks, each meant to shake our spirit. And yet, at each turn, we have triumphed. At each turn, we have thwarted those who would seek to lay siege to our peace of mind, to a way of life we have come to cherish. And though—I have no doubt—there were moments of fear, perhaps panic, not once did we give in to those threats. No. We saw them for what they were—a banner by which to make clear to a watching world the resilience and courage of the American people. These attacks were mad, outlandish, but we must grant them no more than their due, and we must recognize how they most certainly pale when compared to the real loss of this day—the death of Walter Pembroke.

“We grieve at the tragedy, we accept its truth, and yet, we also learn from it. The death of the vice president must help us to put into perspective the bizarre events of the last week. They did
not
shake us. They did
not
undermine our trust. The country is strong, safe—safe to mourn the one
real
tragedy of the day. We must now look to ourselves and put our apprehensions to rest. It is, I know, what Walter Pembroke would have wanted.”

By week’s end, few questioned the president’s sage advice.

 

Sadly, tragedy did strike again two days later when Tieg Telecom announced the death of their inspiration, their shining light, Jonas Tieg. He, too, had fallen prey to heart failure, and though his adoring public mourned his loss—and Amy Chandler his ratings—they were all far too caught up in the aftermath of recent events to take more than passing notice. There were some questions about the strangely prophetic program aired on the night before his death, the tape on which Tieg seemed to anticipate several of the near tragedies that had occurred the following day. Amid all the confusion, however, discussion of the show quickly faded. Articles were written, a retrospective on his life aired, but within a few weeks, a new, rising star appeared on another network—more abusive, more abrasive. And the Tieg phenomenon slipped easily into a forgotten past.