Death Match

by Lincoln Child

  As he reached for the phone, it rang again.

  He picked it up. “Hello?”

  This time, there was a listening silence on the line.

  “Hello?”

  Another click as the line went dead.

  Lash slowly replaced the phone, then stared at it, thinking. He’d been so wrapped up in the events at Eden he hadn’t noticed all the little annoyances that were once again creeping back into his life. Or perhaps he had noticed them, but simply hadn’t wanted to address them. His newspaper, missing three days out of four. The mail, missing from his mailbox. The repeated hang-ups, eight today alone.

  He knew exactly what this meant, and he knew what had to be done to stop it.

  The prospect filled him with gloom.

  The drive to East Norwalk took less than ten minutes. Lash had made it only once before, but he knew Norwalk well, and the landmarks were familiar. The area he found himself in was what civic leaders euphemistically called a neighborhood in transition: close by the new Maritime Center, but also near enough to the poorest sections to require bars on the doors and windows.

  Lash pulled over to the curb and double-checked the address: 9148 Jefferson. The house looked like all those that surrounded it: Craftsman-style; small, just two rooms over two; stucco front with a detached garage in the rear. This particular lawn might be less tended than those around it, but all the houses shared a certain shabbiness under the pitiless glare of the streetlight.

  He stared at the house. This could be handled in one of two ways: with compassion, or with firmness. Mary English had not responded well to compassion. He’d been compassionate with her last year, during the marital therapy sessions with her husband. Mary had seized upon that compassion, fixated upon him. She had developed an infatuation, an obsession, that ironically led to her divorce: the very thing Lash had been trying to forestall. It had also led to a protracted stalking—telephone hang-ups, mail missing or thumbed through, tearful late-night ambushes outside his office—that had taken a restraining order to stop.

  Lash sat a moment longer, preparing himself. Then he opened the door, came around the car, and walked toward the house.

  The sound of the doorbell echoed hollowly through the rooms beyond. As the chimes died away, silence briefly returned. Then, the tread of feet descending stairs. The outside light came on, and the eyehole cover was scraped away. A moment later, the thud of the deadbolt; the barred door pulled back; and there was Mary English, blinking out into the glow of the streetlight.

  She was still wearing her work clothes, but she had clearly been interrupted in washing up: her lipstick was gone, but the mascara remained. Although it had been only a year since the last therapy session with her husband, she now looked far older than her forty years—there were hollows beneath her eyes the makeup couldn’t hide, and a tracery of fine lines ran away from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes went wide with recognition, and in them Lash read a complex mix of emotions: surprise, pleasure, hope, fear.

  “Dr. Lash!” she said a little breathlessly. “I—I can’t believe you’re here. What is it?”

  Lash took a deep breath. “I think you know what it is, Mary.”

  “No, I don’t know. What’s happened? Do you want to come in? Have a cup of coffee?” And she held the door open for him.

  Lash remained in the doorway, trying to keep his voice cool, his face expressionless. “Mary, please. This will only make it worse.”

  She looked at him, uncomprehending.

  For a moment, Lash hesitated. Then he remembered how it had been the first time he’d confronted her, on this same stoop, and he forced himself on.

  “Denial won’t help, Mary. You’ve been harassing me again—phoning my house, tampering with my mail. I want you to stop it, please, and stop it now.”

  Mary did not speak. But as she looked at him, she seemed to age even more. Her eyes slowly fell away from his, and her shoulders slumped.

  “I can’t deal with this again, Mary. Not right now. So I want you to agree to stop this before it escalates again. I want you to say you’ll stop this, say it to my face. Please, don’t force my hand.”

  At this, she looked up again, her eyes glittering with sudden anger.

  “Is this some kind of cruel joke?” she spat at him. “Look at me. Look at my house. There’s barely a stick of furniture in it. I’ve lost custody of my child. It’s a struggle just to see him alternate weekends. Oh, God . . .”

  As quickly as it had come, the anger receded. Tears traced muddy lines of mascara. “I’ve complied with the judge. I’ve done everything you asked.”

  “Then why is my mail missing again, Mary? Why all the hang-up calls?”

  “You think that’s me? Do you think I could bring myself to do that, after all that’s happened . . . after what your judge did to my life, to my—” Further words were choked off by a sob.

  Lash hesitated, not quite sure what to say. The anger, the sadness, seemed genuine. But then again, borderlines like Mary English did feel anger, misery, depression. It was just misdirected. And they were very good at dissembling, at twisting things back on you, making you, not them, the guilty party . . .

  “How could you come here like this, hurt me this way?” she sobbed. “You’re a psychologist, you’re supposed to help people . . .”

  Lash stood in the doorway, silent and increasingly uncertain, waiting for the emotions to play themselves out.

  The sobs ceased. And a moment later, her shoulders straightened.

  “How could I possibly have ever been attracted to you?” she asked in a quiet voice. “Back then, you struck me as a man who cared, who had it all together. A man with a little sense of mystery.” She brusquely wiped away a tear. “But you know what I decided, lying here awake at night, alone, in my empty house? Your mystery is the mystery of a man who’s got nothing inside. A man who’s got nothing of himself to give.”

  She reached behind her, fumbled with a box of tissues on the hall table, cursed when she found it empty. “Get out of here,” she said quietly, without meeting his gaze. “Get out of here, please. Leave me be.”

  Lash stared at her. By old habit, half a dozen clinical replies came to mind. But sorting through them, none seemed appropriate. So he simply nodded and turned away.

  He started the car, did a U-turn, retraced his route down the street. But before he got to the corner, he pulled over to the curb and stopped. In the rearview mirror, he could see that the front light of 9148 Jefferson had already been extinguished.

  What had Richard Silver said, in that vast room floating sixty stories above Manhattan? It’s reassuring, knowing you’re assisting us. Here, staring out into the dark, Lash felt no such reassurance.

  NINETEEN

  T he following morning, as he walked from a Manhattan parking garage, Lash stopped outside a magazine shop, set into the base of a vast apartment house and drowned in the shade of the facing buildings. He stepped inside, his eye quickly scanning the headlines of local and national newspapers: the Kansas City Star, the Dallas Morning News, the Providence Journal, the Washington Post. He breathed a small sigh of relief on finding no stories detailing double suicides among happily married couples. Leaving the shop, he turned right on Madison Avenue, heading for the Eden building. Now I know how Louis XVI must have felt, he thought; getting up each morning under the shadow of the axe, never knowing if this was to be the day of ultimate revelation.

  Though he remained tired, he felt a little better about the night before. Borderlines like Mary English were excellent liars, actors in their own way. He’d done the right thing. He’d have to keep a close eye for future signs of stalking, just in case.

  He arrived in the lobby a little early but Tara Stapleton was already there waiting for him. She was wearing a dark skirt and sweater, without jewelry of any kind. She smiled briefly, and they exchanged a few pleasantries about the weather, but she seemed as remote as she had the day before.

  Leading him past the security perimeter
and down a wide unmarked corridor, Tara instructed him in crisp sentences on the finer points of getting in and out of the inner tower. Although there were two entrance portals at Checkpoint I, the morning crush of employees meant a five-minute wait. Tara spoke very little, so Lash listened discreetly to the conversations going on around him. There was excited chatter about a memo that had circulated recently, reporting client applications were up thirty percent. There was remarkably little talk about last night’s ball game or how the morning commute had gone. It was as Mauchly said: these people genuinely loved what they did.

  Once past the checkpoint, Tara showed Lash to an office reserved for him on the sixteenth floor. The door had no key, but was opened by a bracelet scanner. The office was windowless, but pleasantly bright and large, with a desk and table, a large empty bookcase, and a computer, also sporting a scanner. The only other feature was a small panel, set low in one wall, allowing access to the inner tower’s omnipresent data conduit.

  “I’ve arranged to have all the results for the Thorpes and Wilners brought to you,” she said. “We’ll have the data terminal online for you this morning, and I’ll show you how to access records as needed. You’ll need to scan your bracelet before you can log on. Here’s my extension and cell number if you need to reach me.” She placed a card on the table. “I’ll come back for you at lunch.”

  Lash pocketed the card. “Thanks. Where can I find coffee around here?”

  “There’s a staff cafeteria down the hall. The bathroom’s that way, too. Is there anything else?”

  Lash dropped his leather satchel on one of the chairs. “Could I have a whiteboard, please?”

  “I’ll have one sent in.” With a nod, she turned gracefully and left the room.

  For a moment, Lash stared thoughtfully at the space where she’d stood. Then he stowed his satchel inside one of the desk drawers and made his way to the cafeteria, where a Junoesque woman behind the counter cheerfully brought him a large espresso. He took it gratefully, sipped, found it excellent.

  No sooner had he returned to his office and made himself comfortable than a technician knocked on the open door. “Dr. Lash?”

  “Yes?”

  The man wheeled in what looked like a black evidence locker, set on a steel cart. “Here are the documents you requested. When you’ve finished your examination, call the number stamped on the cartons and someone will pick them up.”

  Lash lifted the heavy locker and placed it on the table. It was sealed with white tape that read HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY—NOT TO LEAVE EDEN INTERNAL.

  He closed the door to the office. Then he slit the tape and snapped open the lid. Inside were four large accordion files, each bearing a name and a number:

  Each was sealed with white tape and bore an identical label:

  EDEN CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL

  INTERNAL USE ONLY

  L-3 AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED

  NOTE: HARDCOPY WITHIN. DIGITAL MEDIA ALSO AVAILABLE.

  USE REQUISITION AT-4849

  Lash reached for Lewis Thorpe’s file. Then he hesitated: no, he’d leave Lewis Thorpe for last. Instead, he opened Lindsay Thorpe’s file and upended it onto the table. A flood of paper streamed out, much of it testing sheets and result forms, but also a thick spiral-bound packet that made little sense:

  CODING SHEET FOLLOWS

  Note: Summarization only

  header

  =====

  telephony metrics—quantization

  assembly period: 27 Aug 02/09 Sep 02

  datastream: nominal

  homogenization: optimal—

  data location (hard): 2342400494234

  first access sector 3024-a

  compartmentalization algorithm set

  chief operator: Pawar, Gupta

  scrub chief: Korngold, Sterling

  data gathering supervisor: Rose, Lawrence

  hexadecimal source follows

  It appeared to be some kind of machine-code summary of Lindsay’s telephone habits during her surveillance period. Readable or unreadable, it wasn’t the data he was interested in. Lash put this aside and picked up the test forms. They looked precisely like the tests he had taken just days before; the sight sent a fresh surge of mortification through him. He sipped his espresso, riffled through the pages, glancing at the little black circles Lindsay Thorpe had filled in so industriously. Her answers seemed to fall within normal ranges, and a quick glance at the scoring sheets confirmed this. His eye fell at last on the senior evaluator’s report.

  Lindsay Torvald shows all signs of being well-adjusted socially, with a normative personality profile. Appearance, demeanor, behavior during and between the tests was within normal limits. Attention span, speech articulation, comprehension, and verbal skills were all within the top 10th percentile. Tests showed little abnormal scatter or skew, and validity scales were high across the board: the applicant seemed exceptionally candid and forthright. The projective inkblot test indicated creativity and a vivid imagination with only slight morbidity factors. The personality profile showed slight tendencies toward introversion but well within acceptable levels, especially given the strong indicators for self-confidence. The intelligence battery was also strong, particularly in the areas of verbal comprehension and memory; computation skills were weaker, but still the overall score gives the applicant a Full Scale IQ of 138 (modified WAIS-III).

  In short, all quantifiable metrics suggest Ms. Torvald would make an excellent candidate for Eden.

  R. J. Steadman, Ph.D.

  August 21, 2002

  There was movement in the corridor outside his door; a technician wheeled a whiteboard into his office. Lash thanked him, watched him leave. Then he put the report aside and reached for the testing forms once again.

  By noon, he had studied the test results for three of the applicants. No smoking guns, no signs of incipient pathology. Across the board, the signs of depression, the suicide indexes, were extremely low. Lash replaced the stacks of paper into their respective folders; stood; stretched; then went down to the cafeteria for another espresso.

  He walked back to his temporary office more slowly than he had left it. There was only one folder left: Lewis Thorpe’s. Thorpe, who specialized in invertebrate biology and enjoyed translating the poetry of Bash–o. Lash had spent several nights rereading Narrow Road to the Interior, putting himself in Lewis’s shoes, trying to feel what he’d felt in the testing suite, in that sun-filled Flagstaff living room where he had died under the gaze of his own infant child.

  Eagerly—yet a little warily—Lash broke open the seal on the fourth folder.

  It took less than half an hour to realize that what he most feared was, in fact, true. Lewis Thorpe’s test results showed him to be as normal and well adjusted as the rest. They showed an intelligent, imaginative, ambitious man with a healthy self-regard. No indicators for depression or suicide.

  Lash slumped back in his chair and let the senior evaluator’s report fall from his hands. The tests he’d fought so hard to get brought him no closer to an answer.

  There was a knock at his door, and he looked up to see Tara Stapleton leaning in, her long, intent face framed by thick auburn hair.

  “Lunch?” she asked.

  Lash gathered Lewis Thorpe’s papers together and stuffed them back into the folder. “Sure.”

  Already, the cafeteria down the hall felt like an old friend. It was bright and almost festive, and more crowded now than it had been on his two earlier visits. He fell in line at the buffet rail, helped himself to another espresso and a sandwich, then followed Tara to an empty table near the rear wall. She’d taken only a cup of soup and some tea, and as Lash watched she tore open a packet of artificial sweetener and poured it into the cup. Her reserved, preoccupied silence remained. But right now, that seemed all right: he wasn’t eager to field a lot of questions about how his investigation was going.

  “How long have you worked at Eden?” he asked after a moment.

  “Three
years. Since just after its founding.”

  “And it’s as great a place to work as Mauchly says?”

  “It always has been.”

  Lash waited as she stirred her soup, a little uncertain what she meant by this. “Tell me about Silver.”

  “How do you mean.”

  “Well, what’s he like? He wasn’t at all what I expected.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “I take it this was the first time you’ve met him face to face.”

  “I saw him once before, at the first anniversary celebration. He’s a very private person. Never leaves his penthouse, as far as anybody knows. Communicates by cell or videophone. It’s just him up there. Him and Liza.”

  Liza. Silver had mentioned that name, too. At the time, Lash had thought it a slip of the tongue. “Liza?”

  “The computer. His life’s work. What makes Eden possible. Liza’s his one true love. Kind of ironic, really, given the nature of our business. He does most of his communicating to the board and the staff through Mauchly.”

  Lash was surprised. “Really?”

  “Mauchly’s his right-hand man.”

  Lash noticed that somebody was looking at him from across the cafeteria. The youthful face, the bright thatch of hair, seemed familiar. Then he realized who it was: Peter Hapwood, the evaluation engineer Mauchly had introduced him to the day of the class reunions. Hapwood smiled, waved. Lash waved back.

  He returned his attention to Tara, who was once again stirring her soup. “Tell me more about Liza,” he said.

  “It’s a hybrid supercomputer. Nothing else like it in the world.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the only large computer built entirely around a core of artificial intelligence.”

  “And how did Silver come to build it?”

  Tara took a sip of tea. “You hear rumors. Stories, really. I don’t know exactly how true any of them are. Some people say Silver had a lonely, traumatic childhood. Others say he was coddled, doing differential equations at the age of eight. He’s never talked about it on record. All anybody knows for sure is, by the time he got to college, he was doing pioneering work in AI. Brilliant, genius-level stuff. His graduate work centered around a computer that could learn for itself. He gave it a personality, made its problem-solving algorithms more and more sophisticated. Eventually, he proved a computer that can teach itself could solve problems far more difficult than any hand-coded computer. Later, to finance further research, he farmed out Liza’s processing cycles to places like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Human Genome Project.”