The SONG of SHIVA (18 page)

“Bet if you dug down far enough at the foundation here,” again he pointed, this time directly between his knees, “before you hit bedrock there’d be evidence of Neolithic habitation.”

“Pandavas might know,” Nora suggested. “Bet he’s been
down
to the bedrock. Even farther. The research labs under the mansion go down at least four stories.”

Lyköan was about to ask about this when he noticed a shadow fall across the pinpoint of reflected moonlight in the distance. He strained into the blackness with eye and ear and was rewarded shortly when a fluttering sound, fainter than the background whir of insects, arrived upon the bare breeze.
Not the original sound
, he thought,
an echo
. Half a dozen deep-throated beats and it was gone. Lyköan looked up into the cloudless sky.

“How far away is that RAF base? You know?” he asked.

“Boscombe Down, you mean? Maybe fifteen miles. Why?”

“Thought I heard something. Probably one of theirs, coming or going.” But he had seen no running lights. Only the beacon on the hilltop miles away grow dark for an instant.

“‘Hearken! It hums,’ she said,”
Lyköan announced in an affected baritone.
“He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.’”

“What’s that?” Nora asked. It had struck a chord.

“It’s Hardy’s description of Stonehenge from
Tess of the d’Ubervilles.
A feeling I had just now dredged it up
.”

“That’s so strange.” Nora said. “I’ve never read
Tess
― maybe I’ve seen a BBC adaptation or something ― but I had exactly the same feeling when we were at the dolmen today. That it was playing some kind of single note, but not one meant for human ears.”

“Aliens you mean?”

“No,” she answered sharply. “That maybe it played for some other sense. One that modern humans no longer use. It’s just so odd, you know? That someone else ― you... might have been harboring the same suspicion. Was that quote something you looked up after we got back?”

“No, I read it sophomore year in college,” Lyköan answered pointedly. He was a little offended. What did she take him for, some uneducated slob?

“And you still remember it verbatim? I’m impressed. Honestly.” Nora could see she had struck a nerve.

“You should be,” he said, but this time, through a pleasant, kidding smile. “I was experiencing the same damned thing. Especially that indefinable one note ― whatever it was.”

“My God, Egan, you’re really a well of knowledge aren’t you? Any other secrets – hidden info you want to tell me?”

“Maybe one. It was George Fanju, the French director.”

“What was? I mean,
who
was?”

“Who said ‘the source of beauty is a wound.’” Then he added, “I had a wonderful time today, Nora. Even if I had to lose a horserace to experience it. For some time now I’ve been convinced I used up all my fun when I was young. Today totally changed my mind.”

“When you were young? Jeez, Lyköan, you sound like you’re preparing for assisted living or something. How old
are
you?”

“Old enough to believe in second chances, I guess.”

“You in need of second chances, boy?” she asked, her own smile beaming.

“Desperately.”

Her expression changed suddenly. “Did you feel that?” she asked.

“What?”

“That rumble. The same sensation I had at the monument today. A low-pitched hum? Best I can describe it. It’s gone now – only lasted a second or two.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“A vibration ― the ground or something. Not there anymore.”

“The earth moving?”

“I had a great time today too, Egan. Maybe we should leave it there for now.”

“Or we could kiss passionately in the English moonlight and see where that leads.”

“A lovely offer, Mr. Lyköan. Right now, though, earth moving or not, I’m going inside. It’s freezing out here. But you are sweet...” Turning her head, she kissed him full on the mouth. A taste of futures, pasts, could and might have beens, even desires already recognized, all wrapped in one note of unmeasured anticipation.

“Let’s walk in together,” Lyköan suggested.

He stood and helped her up. She was warm and lithe in his hands, the summer night delicious in his eyes and ears, its odor both earthy and sublime. Lights still glowed from a few of the manor house windows, stretching the couple’s tangled shadow as they went back inside together.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sherlock Holmes :
A Scandal in Bohemia

Once inside, the dizzying emotional gears inexplicably downshifted. While a few lights still burned, Cairncrest was silent. Their hushed voices echoed in the empty corridors like sandpaper scudding across stone. Nothing else stirred.

Returning to their earlier agreement to observe every possible detail of the night’s proceedings Nora had to admit that she hadn’t noticed anything suspicious all evening. Not even a hint of the nefarious. Lyköan was forced to agree. Keeping an eye on their quarry had been about as interesting as watching grass grow. The laird of Cairncrest had been nothing but a gracious and forthcoming host. He hadn’t committed a single indiscretion, not so much as a minor breach of etiquette.

But they were both in total agreement that the evening
had
accomplished everything the sly rascal probably intended. He had effortlessly distributed credit for the vaccine’s success to people and agencies around the globe and, at the same time, announced to the worldwide scientific and political communities that Innovac was ever vigilant, had supported the effort at every turn, and was their staunchest ally in the eternal struggle against the microbial world. A perfect delivery. Who could argue with the underlying business strategy? There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all.  But that appeared to be the full extent of any ulterior motive.

While walking the hall towards Nora’s room, the conversation turned full circle, both of them now expressing their guilt for ever being suspicious. Pandavas probably
was
using everyone to further Innovac’s business agenda, but they were all being duly compensated ― one way and another. No one was in any way being coerced.

The conversation had drifted towards a sputtering conclusion when they reached Nora’s door. An awkward, almost painful pause descended, holding them in the hallway. Nora stared unfocused at the carpet. Lyköan felt frozen in the conversational pallor.

Nora broke the silence first. “So much for our amateur sleuthing.”

“I’m deferring judgment,” Lyköan replied. “There’s still the rest of the weekend. Maybe in a more relaxed setting...” he trailed off without completing the sentence, overcome by its senselessness. Their little investigative cabal was disintegrating. Another sad self-deception ― his laughably futile attempt to draw closer to this woman ― to anyone. Not too much longer now, he knew, and it would all be over. 

“The CDC figures I’ve completed my assignment,” Nora mentioned, which only reinforced his anxiety. “They’re right, of course. They’ll expect me back soon.” The observation exposed the basic folly lurking in her own nascent emotions. How had she allowed this to happen? Where could it possibly lead?

“We’ve still got another day or two, right?” Lyköan sought desperately with a wan grin, trying to put a positive spin on the same unspoken difficulty, what they had started and where they seemed to be heading. “There are plenty of ways we can keep in touch. We both travel. We could make plans. I’d at least like to try.”

“Me too,” Nora agreed. But what were the odds?
Too bad, it’s really too bad
, she thought and, avoiding his eyes, looked past him down the hall. Life was just too damned complicated. Never act on a whim.

Mutual desperation sparked a last passionate embrace at the open threshold, enwrapped arms and mouths, bodies pressed just close enough to express unspoken yearnings. But in the end Nora knew she would be bunking alone. Lyköan didn’t argue or attempt to press.

With a final, “Until tomorrow then?” he left her at the doorway and headed for his own room. By the time he reached it, only a trace of second-guessed reflection remained.

Why argue with progress
? It had still been an eye-opening day in so many ways. Although he knew he was rationalizing, it didn’t take much to convince himself a cooling off period at this point made sense, that he
needed
time to assimilate everything. Intellectually, he was perfectly content letting the current of this unanticipated river of events determine the speed with which life should proceed downstream. No need digging in his paddle, meddling with the timing of an unknowable future. “Let the pace of existence dance to its own rhythm,” as Sun Shi might say.

While that might have been the method his conscious mind employed attempting to reconcile the here and now, his emotions were an entirely different matter. Maybe an alarm should have sounded when three in the morning found him still awake, stripped down to his boxers and sitting cross-legged on the bed, the yíb open and warm in his lap. But none did. Instead of an alarm, the high-ceilinged room was abuzz with the incessant string of chords announcing app-functions shuttling on and offline, a monotonous medley of repetitious notes. He was hardly paying attention to the tune. After an agitated hour at the butterfly keyboard he had become its integrated extension and the yíb was acknowledging this by responding nicely to his rapid four finger parry and lunge. No longer requiring precise instruction, the cyber-song had taken on a life of its own.

Utilizing the yíb’s seek-n-lok search function, his first attempt at accessing the password-protected Innovac LAN, running somewhere in the vicinity, probably the research labs below ground, had been rebuffed. But Sun Shi’s reverse-encryption hack had made short work of that hurdle. After a few simple access-configuration adjustments, he had slipped inside the server backbone and now had access to the pharma company’s entire database, augmenting the yíb’s already substantial capabilities.

Bodhisattva Shi, if nothing else, was versatile. Those years spent on the computer engineering faculty at Kundu University in Madras had served the
chao awat
well. As he had confessed, his decision to pursue the monastic life had always presented serious conflicts with his passion for programming, though the word “passion” itself offended him. More than once he had admitted the irrational hold Number Theory had on him, like the Apostle Paul’s insistent thorn. And he possessed a truly amazing gift for cryptographic programming. Had he pursued this gift, he could have landed any governmental or industrial position he might ever have desired. If he
had
desired. He was that good.

But he had chosen a different path. Even so, Lyköan never tired of deriding him about the apparent hypocrisy; that the saffron-robed aesthete’s monastic pose might be nothing more than a grand disguise, the best hiding place imaginable for the consummate closet hacker. There was certainly no denying that the guy was a programming genius. Whoever had stolen Lyköan’s old Ōkii might have ripped off an operational unit, but only if the thieves were willing to completely reformat the hard drive and give up every last byte of binary it contained. No team of experts alive could have ever accessed the data itself.

The
Zen-encryption
key, techies liked to call it ICE, that Sun Shi had created and which served as the basis for that lock, operated on a completely different wavelength, a plane of spiritual programming architecture totally removed from any other earthly set of numerical algorithms. With its help, the yíb had been able to slip undetected inside Innovac’s protected network without creating so much as a traceable wake. How Sun Shi’s program avoided detection was a complete mystery to Lyköan. The old man had explained the thing in a Zen-Socratic construct, by posing a question: “How does a duck’s quack, of all the sounds in nature, escape its echo?” The obvious answer was that no one knew. Lyköan was even a little doubtful it was true. The monk had insisted, however, that such knowledge could be directed with useful purpose. As ludicrous as it may have sounded, this reverse-encryption crack-app was the programming equivalent of the duck’s quack, capable of slipping through even the most elegantly protected ICE shield without stirring so much as a whisper of the equivalent cyber-echo. All that was required was proximity to a protected system’s wireless signal.

Initially, Lyköan had used the ICE-breaker innocuously, scanning for recent business messages sent to Lyköan IE, to which he had responded in kind. He followed that by transmitting to Whitehall the brief summary he had promised before leaving Bangkok, tactfully omitting any reference to his interlude with the fetching Doctor Carmichael. Maybe Whitehall had discovered something in the days since, where Lyköan had come up empty-handed.

But open access to such dauntingly enormous unexplored terrain soon proved irresistible. He itched for a clearer picture of the hand that was feeding him. He was already trespassing upon Innovac intellectual property anyway. Why not see what a modern industrial empire looked like from the inside? His initial incursions returned little more than virtual wrong turns and blind alleys.

On more than one occasion, after crashing into the great tangle that was the Innovac cyber-hierarchy, he was forced to dust off and reconstruct his virtual craft and then approach the target from a different direction. With each failed attempt, however, he was able to dig a little deeper into the mountainside. Once he had identified the vast Innovac Pharma Biologics R&D database, his flying improved immeasurably. Eventually, the innumerable mundane levels of commonplace business functions fell by the wayside. His target within sight, he drew a heading for a destination with which he thought he had some familiarity.

The first organizational signpost that caught his attention was a subdirectory under the broad heading: TAIV CHRONO. Following the thread of the recent TAI antibody development, he pursued a string of data points back to the very beginning of the Bangkok outbreak. The complex information tree would often veer off in wild directions: intergovernmental communiqués, WHO field work analyses, wild and domesticated avian population studies ― and then something quite unexpected. Drilling down to a time before the very first case had turned up at Samphan Thawong Hospital, he discovered a lengthy trail of files, mostly scientific notation and formulaic gibberish, stretching back years.

Entirely by chance, in racing through a group of files dated around the end of the previous year, he stumbled across another subdirectory simply named: i-maps. Inside this folder were dozens of detailed Bangkok subway and Skytrain system schematics that he recognized immediately. There were other renderings that looked like skyscraper architectural plans ― blueprints of buildings with elevator shafts highlighted in red. Only one explanation came immediately to mind and it certainly wasn’t comforting.

Christ, maybe I was right all along
―
suspecting these shitheads of something!
I just didn’t know what it was.
But what he suspected right now didn’t make complete sense. Why would Innovac have purposely released a virus that, from everything Nora had told him, was programmed to self destruct? What would that accomplish?

Think man, think!
He was speeding through one unintelligible jargon-filled file after another: Anti-Telomerasic Protein AgI Outcomes, Dendritic Cell and Plasmid-Based Vaccine Studies, Phoenix Phenotypical Recombinance, Altered RNA Arrays, Neurominidase Separators, Plasminogen Binders, Plenconaril-Resistant Variants,
locum tenes ventorium
. What the hell did it mean?

One thing was certain: If the crew that had developed this shit discovered he was poking around inside... what was one more body added to the heap the TAI virus had already produced? He wasn’t thinking straight. Once you’ve dug yourself a hole so deep you can’t climb out, the first thing you’re supposed to do is stop digging. But he couldn’t stop. Careening into a tangential directory ― Hell, he might have exited the TAIV CHRONO directory entirely ― he encountered an unfamiliar file subset: ATYPICAL GENOMES.

Just winging it now, he opened another subset folder, just riffling through its contents now, hoping he’d come across something he really understood. But this one was no different than the last ― cryptic scientific notation, formulae, DNA strings running volumes: The R-17 Genome, the TA-1 Genome, the S-7 Genome... There were dozens of them.

Opening each in succession, the descriptors came, one-by-one, frighteningly into focus. R-17 appeared to be the genomic fingerprint and some sort of experimental history for somebody named “Rodgers, William M. ― Deceased.” TA-1 turned out to be “Tan Ang, Chen ― Deceased.” S-7: Sterronovich, Sestavonia V ― Deceased. R-2: Ruminski ― Deceased. R-11: Deceased. M-15: Deceased. BN-3: Deceased. S-6: Deceased. The dates of death moved closer to the present as he moved down the list. The earlier names went back years. It wasn’t possible that all of them had been victims of the Bangkok TAI outbreak.

Lyköan scanned madly through the rest of the files. Deceased, deceased, deceased.
Who
were
these people?
Within minutes he had brought up more than fifty records. The last file in the sub-directory,
L-9 Genome
flashed on the screen.

With a lightheaded dizziness, fingers tingling, he read the record. “
L-9: Lyköan, Egan M.”

“Ho-ly Shit,” he gasped aloud.
What the fuck does
this
mean? Jesus. What are gigabytes of
my
fucking DNA doing buried in the vaults along with this list of obituaries? Am I their next target? Or their current?