Thirst No. 5 (3 page)

“But this is insane,” Seymour protests. “Can’t these agencies tell fake information from the real thing?”

“Yes and no,” Brutran says. “To understand the no part, you have to understand the fierce competition that exists between the various agencies. The disputes between the police and the FBI are legendary. There have been hundreds if not thousands of TV shows and movies that have talked about that. The local police are working on a case and an FBI agent shows up and all hell breaks loose. That’s old news. But when Homeland Security was created, the discord was taken to a new level. Homeland feels they are the boss, that all the other agencies should bow to them. While the CIA has been around for ages, and they feel they are the final authority. My point is that these agencies don’t cooperate with each other, not easily. They are loath to share information, and when they do, they seldom trust that the information they’re getting from another agency is accurate.”

“We have nothing to do with their internal disputes,” Seymour says.

“That’s true,” Brutran says. “But the Cradle’s program is clever. It knows how to take advantage of this blind spot. By flooding the various agencies with false information about us, it has created a hysterical wave of paranoia that no single agency—and no single person—can stand up and dispute. Remember Hitler’s famous line, ‘The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.’ It’s only been twenty-four
hours since the explosion and already this lie has tremendous momentum.”

“What you’re describing is all smoke and mirrors,” Seymour says.

“Yes. But it’s rooted in the hard cold fact that hundreds of kids have been murdered. You keep forgetting that. Someone has to pay for that evil deed, and, once again, the authorities are under tremendous pressure to produce suspects. Imagine how pleased they must be that, seemingly out of nowhere, they are receiving all kinds of intel on us.”

“Receiving it from whom?” Seymour demands. “It makes no sense they should believe a torrent of information being fed to them by some wild program.”

“You haven’t been listening,” Brutran says. “The FBI doesn’t think this information is coming from a computer program. To them, it appears to be coming from local police. In the same way, Homeland doesn’t think it’s getting this intel from a foreign source. They probably believe it’s coming from the CIA or the NSA. That’s why I stressed the problem with these agencies not talking to each other.”

“You’re saying the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” Matt interjects.

“Exactly,” Brutran says.

“But eventually the truth has to come out,” Seymour insists.

“Probably,” Brutran says. “But that will take time. The
Cradle’s program has its tentacles wrapped around every computer in practically every government agency. From what I can tell, even the White House is being fed a stream of false updates. If we’re lucky, and the president eventually realizes that his people have been duped, then he will still be left with the fact that these children died and we were seen leaving the area of the crime.”

“This is ridiculous,” Seymour says. “What are we supposed to do? Sit here and rot and wait until the storm blows over?”

“Funny you should say that,” Brutran says. “That was going to be my final piece of advice—”

“We cannot sit here and do nothing,” I interrupt.

“Why not?” Brutran asks.

Matt holds up his hand. “We’ll get to that in a minute. For now I want to finish discussing this program. Cindy, exactly when did it become active?”

I have never heard Matt call Brutran by her first name before. The woman appears to respond well to his questions, to his command. With me, she has always been a little snide.

“Yesterday morning. The instant we blew up IIC’s headquarters and wiped out the Cradle,” Brutran says. “That act immediately triggered the program’s attack on us.”

“So there must be someone left alive who is controlling the program,” Matt says.

Brutran shakes her head. “It may be on automatic.”

“That’s a freaky thought,” Seymour says.

Brutran disagrees. “In a way it doesn’t matter if there’s still a living hand at the helm. The program is awake and it’s intelligent. The instant we leave this motel, we’ll be exposed and it will begin searching for us again. Think of the resources at its command. It just has to give the word and hundreds of thousands of police and government agents will try to converge on us. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if the program goes so far as to use the military’s satellites to hunt us down. With power like that, it won’t be long before we’re caught.”

“What if we continue to live off the grid?” Seymour asks.

“It will help,” Brutran says. “But it won’t save us.”

“I disagree,” I say.

“With which part?” Brutran asks.

“The last part. I’m not as fatalistic as you.” I say.

“I’m being pragmatic,” Brutran relies.

“You’re giving up. I believe if we’re smart and careful we can avoid being caught. Plus I think it’s vital that we discover if there’s a living hand behind this program. If there is, we kill it. And then, and only then, do we try to erase the program.”

“Why wait?” Seymour asks.

I shrug. “If we manage to erase it, but haven’t taken down whoever’s behind it, they’ll just reload it on the Internet and we’ll be back to square one.”

Brutran stares at me. “Long before you moved into IIC’s headquarters, I assigned our best minds to study this program. They got nowhere and we’re talking about some of the keenest
computer people of our time. They told me they couldn’t get within a light year of figuring out how to disable it.”

“Why?” Seymour asks.

Brutran leans toward us as she answers. “Because the intelligence that created the program had an IQ of at least a thousand.”

“You’re suggesting it’s being controlled by subtle beings,” Matt says. “Nonphysical beings.”

“There’s a strong possibility that’s true, I can’t be sure. However, I do believe it was created by something nonhuman.”

“We can’t kill it if it ain’t alive,” Seymour mutters, expressing my lingering fear. “What are our choices?”

“Wait it out,” Brutran says. “Wait until the government realizes it’s chasing a ghost. Eventually they’ll see that the bulk of the data they’re being fed is false. Plus they can’t keep their agents running all over the country looking for us. There are a thousand other threats they have to worry about every day. If we’re patient, they’ll get weary of the chase. At the same time they’ll probably discover the program on their own. Then it will be their problem to figure out how to pull its plug.”

Matt glances at me and I nod. “I wish waiting and doing nothing were an option,” he says.

Brutran notices our exchange. “Is there somewhere else we have to be?” she asks.

“Yes,” Matt says, and proceeds to describe the photograph I found hidden in Shanti’s suitcase. Brutran and Seymour
listen closely. Indeed, Jolie lowers the volume on the TV and cocks her head in our direction, and I remind myself to keep an eye on her. Even though she looks innocent, she was part of the Cradle, which specialized in remote assassinations.

When Matt is finished, Seymour turns to me. “Why would the people behind Shanti be interested in a religious artifact?” he asks, and I can’t help but notice his use of the word “people.” Seymour refuses to accept that Shanti was possessed.

“She may have just been interested in those who are taking care of it,” I reply. But I have chosen the wrong person to lie to. Seymour looks as if he wants to snicker.

“Gimme a break. They want the veil,” he says.

I shrug. “You might be right.”

“You really fought the Nazis during the war?” he asks.

“Didn’t you say so in one of those books you wrote about me?”

“I’d have to go back and check. But why bother? I have the real deal sitting beside me. How did you get involved in the war?”

“I was living in France when it was overrun in 1940. I could have gotten out but I loved Paris. I decided to stay and see which way the wind blew. But after a while I got tired of watching the Gestapo’s brutality and decided to help out the French Resistance.” I shrug. “My involvement blossomed from there.”

“We had a record of your work with the Resistance in our
files,” Brutran says. “But you seem to have vanished after the Allies invaded on D-day.”

Matt has brought up the fact that Harrah and Ralph Levine were friends of mine during the war, and that they possessed the Veil of Veronica, but he has not revealed how rough a time I had in Auschwitz, for which I’m grateful. I’m not in the mood to talk about those days. I wonder if I ever will be.

“It’s a long story,” I say, repeating what I told Matt.

Seymour reaches out and touches my hand. “We have the time to listen,” he says.

Matt notices my discomfort and interrupts. “Not now, Seymour. We have more pressing matters to take care of this morning.”

Seymour continues to study me, as do Brutran and Jolie. I feel like I’m sitting under a hard white light. The Nazis used to grill me under such lights, for days at a time.

“Like what?” Seymour says to Matt. “You know as well as I do that Sita’s already decided we have to go after these people—or I should say their grandchildren—and see if they still have the veil.” He stops and turns back to me. “True?”

“I’ll go after them on my own,” I say.

“Like we’d let you,” Seymour says.

“Do you have Shanti’s cell phone with you?” Brutran asks me.

I hand it over. “I’ve already checked for stored numbers. She had none. Not even a copy of her last call.”

Brutran accepts the phone and reaches into her bag and pulls out a small electronic device I don’t recognize. “The phone might show no obvious record,” she says. “But I should be able to read her SIM card.”

Brutran opens the back of the cell as she speaks and removes the battery. She clearly knows her business. Beneath the battery is a small transparent plastic card coated with lines of copper and silicon. Without a pause, Brutran slips the card into her mysterious device and plugs the latter into her laptop. She scans the screen, appearing to flip through numerous files. She frowns.

“Shanti was cautious,” she says. “This card has been wiped clean. Even my recovery programs can’t find anything, and they’re capable of reconstructing files that have been ground with sandpaper.”

“The phone might have been new,” Seymour says.

“No. Shanti used it to make numerous calls. I can detect that much. But she erased all the numbers before she put it back in her suitcase.”

“Hand me the phone, please,” I say.

Brutran tosses it to me, not worried that my reflexes won’t be up to the task of the catch. The woman knows more about me than I would like. Her comment about my activities during the war did nothing to diminish my suspicions about her. Okay, so she helped me destroy the Cradle—IIC’s headquarters, even. The company continues to exist, continues to
print money like a paperback press rolling out the latest bestseller. She is staying close to us for a reason, I know, besides protection from those who pursue us. She still has an agenda independent of ours.

“I tell you, it’s empty,” Brutran says. “It’s a dead end.”

“Maybe not,” I say softly as I close my eyes and let my fingers play over the numbers. My hearing is my most powerful sense, but all my senses are more acute than a human being’s. The tips of my fingers, in particular, can detect things mortals couldn’t imagine. For example, I can tell if something is poisonous just by touching it. My skin cells react, they immediately send a message to my brain—
Don’t eat it!
They can also detect disease with the lightest of brushes. That was how I knew Seymour was infected with HIV the moment I met him. But lucky him, while he slept one night, I put a drop of my blood inside his wrist vein and killed the virus.

Now, though, I feel something unrelated to disease or poison. I can tell which numbers Shanti used most often. Five numbers—1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9. They’re obvious to me from the amount of resistance they offer, which is less than the other numbers on the cell’s pad. These five numbers are more worn. Deepening my focus on the digits, I even get a sense of the rhythm Shanti used when she struck the keys, which tells me the order in which she dialed the numbers.

1-212-555-7819.

A New York number.

But not the same number on the lawyer’s card.

I gesture for the others to be silent while I dial.

Someone answers immediately, before the first ring is complete, as if they have been waiting to hear from me. It’s a voice I’ve not heard before, yet I recognize it. Not from the vocal cords it’s using—those are new—but from the evil I hear behind it.

It sounds like a young woman. Intelligent, resourceful.

But I know it’s really Tarana.

Ancient Egyptian for “the Light Bearer.”

Lucifer.

My blood turns cold, while my hand that holds the phone drips with sweat from the heat that suddenly seems to radiate from it. The pain in the center of my head, from last night, returns with a vengeance, and I feel I’m going to be sick. Worst of all, I, Sita, last of the vampires, am afraid.