by Jak Koke
Strapp scratched at the stubble on his chin. "My thoughts exactly, but I had to ask. What else did you talk to the President about during the phone conversation?"
"Nothing."
Strapp nodded and paced back around behind Ryan.
"All right, next question. How well do you know Damien Knight?"
For the first time, Ryan was actually taken by surprise. "Knight? Not well at all. I've met him once, but it was brief and informal."
"What do you think of Dunkelzahn's and Damien Knight's relationship."
Ryan chuckled. "Not much. Dunkelzahn respected Knight, I think. They played chess, which means Knight must be a slotting good master of the board. Other than that, I didn't pay it much attention. Why?"
"I'm just checking out all leads. As CEO of Ares, Knight certainly had the resources to pull off the assassination, as would any high-level megacorp executive. But Knight seems to have been closer to the President than most others. Dunkelzahn's will has been difficult to sort through, but I noticed Knight received a chess set-a much more personal item than nuyen, and indicating a long-term relationship. Anyone who could play chess with a great dragon might be able to kill him."
"You suspect him?"
Strapp gave Ryan a hard stare. "Not anymore than I suspect you, Mr. Mercury. Aren't you the 'Ryanthusar' to whom Dunkelzahn willed his Heart?"
Ryan took a step back. "Yes, but-"
"And what is this Heart? Is it an ancient magical artifact? Is it a small personal item? It doesn't matter either way, Mr. Mercury, because it incriminates you regardless. It gives you motive."
"But I-"
Strapp interrupted, scanning from Ryan to Nadja. "You both have motive, inheriting billions of nuyen, and perhaps powerful magic. You were both personally close to the President, and you, Mr. Mercury"-Strapp pointed at Ryan-"you had the resources to pull it off. You have an alibi, but it's far from airtight. You could have made that telecom call from Aztlan or from around the corner, you have no one to vouch for your being captured, and perhaps you were just lying low until you could eliminate the evidence."
Ryan clapped. "Wonderful story, Mr. Strapp, but it would hardly hold up." But he was thinking, This man might be able to pin the assassination on Nadja and me, even though we had nothing to do with it.
Strapp lost the hard-line stare. "Perhaps not yet, but more digging will tell." Abruptly, he turned to Nadja. "Thank you for being so understanding, I know your schedule made this meeting a bit difficult." Then he turned back to Ryan. "You've been very cooperative, and I thank you for that."
Lying right through his teeth, thought Ryan.
"I trust you'll inform my office if you decide to make any travel plans."
Ryan stood, forced himself to maintain the appearance of civility, and stretched out his hand. "Of course. If there's anything else, give me a call. As I said before, I'm more than happy to help in any way possible."
Strapp didn't bother taking Ryan's hand, but simply looked at them both as if from far away. "I will figure out who killed the president," he said. "And I just hope for your sakes, you had nothing to do with it, because if you did, I will bury you."
Ryan ignored the threat. "Whoever killed Dunkelzahn," he said, "is strong and cunning enough to have assassinated one of the most powerful creatures to ever have existed. Even if you do figure it out without getting yourself killed, how do you propose to bring the culprits to justice?"
Strapp smiled. "I have the UCAS military. And I suppose you and the Draco Foundation as well as about two hundred million angry UCAS citizens would also like to help?"
"You got it, chummer," Ryan said. "Count me in."
8
Alice was bored. Moody.
Tall buildings of concrete and mirrored glass reached up into a night sky around her, but there was no traffic on the street as she walked through Wonderland City. Street lamps illuminated the sidewalk, reflected in silver streaks that rose up the chrome windows of the buildings. But there were no people.
Only Alice, a gentle breeze, and the absolute silence of the vacant city. Wonderland City was her private little ultraviolet electronic universe. A personal section of the interconnected computer systems that spanned the world.
To herself, Alice appeared the way she had when she'd had a physical body. When her consciousness had inhabited a natural neural network called a human brain. Now her consciousness lived in… well, it spanned the Matrix really. Alice looked like a young woman, human, about twenty-five years old with shoulder-length blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. She wore black jeans and a plain white halter top.
She took a drag on her cigarette and folded a section of Matrix space into her. The man in her mind's eye was standing naked in a grove of trees, his obese, naked body seemed to ripple and shake with the passing wind. Next to him, in a small clearing, a mad tea party was underway. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare sat at opposite ends of a large table.
Oh, the plans she had for Thomas Roxborough. Just thinking of them sent a delicious little shiver through her. Ryan Mercury had given her the access codes to Rox's system in Panama. It had tipped the balance so she could trap his consciousness in her virtual reality. A place where she made the rules.
Rox had designed the system in which she had been flatlined so many years ago. This was her revenge. She laughed, and the sound of her good humor rang through the dark city around her like a chuckle in the wind.
Roxborough looked around at the glen, and his sneer changed to a look of mild admiration. "Well, well. This certainly is impressive." He stretched out his hand and touched it to the March Hare's fur.
"I say! Keep your mitts to yourself, old man. Would you like some tea? Well, you can't have any." With that, the Hatter and the Hare quickly gathered up everything from the table and went into the small shack.
"Alice? I don't know where you are, but my compliments. This is the most solid code I've ever come across."
"Welcome to Wonderland, Rox."
Roxborough looked around the grove, trying to pin down the location of Alice's voice. Suddenly, he looked directly at Alice as she first made her wide grin, then her head, then her tail appear on the table top. She left everything in between transparent.
Roxborough smiled, showing wide, flat buck teeth. "Alice?"
"Yesss."
"I thought there might be more to it, Cat. The city up above is well done, but this… this, however, is simply delightful."
Alice's Cheshire grin widened into a vicious, predatory leer. "The city above is for the sane. You, Rox, are the most deluded case of megalomania it has ever been my displeasure to encounter. I thought you might feel right at home. However, you might be interested in knowing something. Lewis Carroll's Alice was very lucky. Wonderland is full of dangerous, deadly little surprises, and even a full-blown homicidal sociopath such as yourself could get into trouble very quickly."
Roxborough gave his toothy grin again. "Homicidal sociopath? My dear Alice, you're not still going on about that bygone Crash virus are you? You really should get some help for your obsessive behavior. Why don't you program yourself a nice little Freudian psychoanalyst? It would do wonders for your state of mind."
The disembodied tail began to twitch. "Rox, you are in a very precarious position at this moment. I suggest you cooperate."
Roxborough sat in the chair recently vacated by the Mad Hatter. "Cooperation is a wonderful thing, Cat. Makes the world go 'round, don't you know? But you've given me nothing to cooperate with. You make accusations and veiled threats, but you've failed to tell me just what you want."
Alice let the rest of her icon slowly take shape. "An admission of guilt would be a start."
Roxborough crossed his arms over his naked chest. "An admission of guilt for what? I've done nothing."
Alice pulled the Wonderland universe closer to her, jerking Roxborough out of the chair. "Don't toy with me, Rox. I know your system came to the aid of the Crash entity the day it flatlined my meat body, so an admiss
ion of attempted murder would be a good place to begin. We'll go from there."
Roxborough looked up at her, a glint in his rabbit-brown eyes. "My dear, you are tragically mistaken. I had nothing to do with the viral attack, and if you believe my system came to its aid, then I'm guessing there isn't anything I can say to dissuade you. However, it simply isn't true."
Alice smiled. "Okay, you won't confess. Still, you might be interested to know that the Crash entity was never destroyed by the Echo Mirage team. It was damaged and chased away. But it could still be out there, hiding somewhere. Learning and growing with each passing cycle. Getting smarter, faster, more deadly. I don't know where it is, but I intend to locate and destroy it."
Roxborough's knee suddenly gave out and he fell to the ground with a cry of anguish. "Alice!"
"It is beginning," she said. "You are reliving your disease." Several years ago, Roxborough had been struck with systemic lupus-a degenerative disease that had eventually forced him to live out the remainder of his life in a vat, connected to tubes and the Matrix. Ever since then, Roxborough had been obsessed with getting out of his vat and into a real body.
"Alice, I swear I had nothing to do with the Crash."
"I've pinned the origin of the virus to three possible hosts. Your system at Acquisition Technologies, Gossamer Threads, or the old NASA mainframes. Both Dunkelzahn, who owned Gossamer Threads before his death, and NASA lost a great many assets during the crash. You, however, only lost data pertaining to one corporation. That in itself points a lot of blame in your direction."
"Luck," said Roxborough, with a laugh. "Simple blind luck."
"That kind of luck doesn't exist."
Roxborough sobered, and for a second his eyes lit up. "For the most part, I would agree with you. And maybe even in this case as well. You want an admission? All right. I'll tell you what I know."
In the cityscape, Alice took a drag from her cigarette and waited.
Roxborough sat on the grass and rubbed his knee. "A long time back, I was attempting a buyout of a corporation that belonged to Dunkelzahn, though I didn't realize he owned it at the time. It looked like a ripe salvage project, dabbled a bit in code research and some minor hardware production. I saw what I thought was a lot of untapped potential. So I checked it out."
"Checked it out?"
"Yeah, I hired someone to hack into his system. Old terminology, I know, but this was before cyberdecks and ASIST technology. I wanted to see if I could find any tidbits of leverage when I presented the offer. The hacker went too deep and found something that scared me. Her system got fried, but she managed to salvage some of the downloaded data."
"Who was it?"
"The hacker?"
"Yes?"
"Her name was Eva Thorinson," Roxborough said. "But I think she died a few years back."
"Convenient for you," Alice said with a grin. "What did the data show?"
"The file contained only a bit of code, but its implications were staggering. I firmly believe that what burned her computer was a precursor of the Crash virus. That's all the information I have, and the only admission you'll get."
In the grove of trees, Alice's cat tail twitched again. "That doesn't scan," she said. "Dunkelzahn lost billions of nuyen in the Crash of '29. Why would he sponsor something that would cause so much damage to nearly every company he owned? Dragons aren't in the habit of tossing away fortunes like that."
Roxborough sighed. "For such a smart little cat, you're hopelessly stupid. Two plausible possibilities present themselves. One, that whoever was doing the programming lost control of it, allowing the Crash virus to escape. It could have been inadvertent."
Alice mused on that for a second. "That doesn't absolve you of responsibility. What's the second possibility?"
"Just that you're dealing with a dragon."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Simple, my dear. Dragons don't throw anything away without a reason, but you're talking about the most intelligent, far-thinking, Machiavellian bastards on the face of the Earth. Who can ever say why they do what they do? Maybe the Crash was just part of an enormously complex plot on the wyrm's part. A plan with rewards great enough to be worth the losses."
Alice had to admit that Roxborough had a point, even though it galled her to think he might be innocent. "I'm going to check out your story. I hope for your sake you've told me the truth."
Roxborough nodded at the disappearing cat icon. Then Alice pushed that section of the Matrix away from her, back to run its course while she contemplated what Roxborough had told her.
A light drizzle drifted down, making the streets of Wonderland City shine and glow. Reflecting Alice's inner mood. Dark gray sky above mirrored in the buildings.
If Dunkelzahn had engineered the computer entity that had caused both the infamous Crash of 2029 and the death of Alice's meat body, she was going to make sure everyone knew about it. That news would affect the entire world, most of whom loved the old dragon. If it was true, Dunkelzahn's image and everything associated with him would suffer greatly.
She hoped, with everything human left in her, that Rox-borough was lying.
9
Ryan breathed a sigh of relief after Quentin Strapp left Nadja's study. He hated being so high-profile. He didn't want anyone knowing where he was and what he was up to.
Nadja stood and looked at Gordon Wu. "I'll be indisposed for a little while," she told her aide.
Gordon nodded, then turned and walked silently out the door into the adjacent office.
Nadja looked up at Ryan, a mischievous smile forming on her lovely face. "Come on," she said, taking his hand. She led him to the dining room, a spacious chamber with marble floors covered by Indonesian throw rugs and furnished sparingly with antiques of polished rosewood.
The table was a huge marble slab upon which was laid a sumptuous meal. As Nadja indicated for him to take a seat, he suddenly realized that he was very hungry. They ate in silence for a few minutes, Ryan enjoying the rich taste of his real steak.
As he ate, Ryan remembered the scene at Hells Canyon when he had been under the influence of Roxborough's personality. When he had been drunk with the power of the newly acquired Dragon Heart.
Nadja had arrived at the airstrip in her jet. She had come to try to persuade him to give up the Dragon Heart, to continue with Dunkelzahn's mission. He had run, trying to get to the helicopter. Trying to escape so he didn't have to talk to her. Didn't have to justify his actions.
She had come between him and his escape, standing with her guards. Blocking his way to the helo.
Possessed by Roxborough's personality, he had yelled at her, spitting obscenities. Roxborough's voice ringing through his own. The evil voice inside that had become a part of him since the memory transfer in Aztlan. The dark part of him wanted to keep the Dragon Heart, use it himself instead of giving it up as Dunkelzahn had asked.
Lost to Roxborough, Ryan had surprised Nadja's security force, moving faster than any of them could track, slipping past them to grab Nadja and hold his gun to her head. He had threatened to kill her if they didn't let him leave.
And all the while she had spoken to him, soothed him. She had kept her calm under the threat of instant death.
Until finally, Ryan had remembered himself and collapsed, begging for her forgiveness. And she had held him close, whispering her support.
Now, he pushed his empty plate away and looked up at Nadja. "I'm so sorry," he said. "I'm sorry about everything. How could I have done that? How could I have let Roxborough's personality get control and threaten you?"
She held his gaze in silence.
"I want us to stay close," he said. "I want… I want to get past this."
"And now?" she asked. "Are you still in control?"
"Yes," he said. "Firmly. There are occasional flashes of Roxborough's memory, but I no longer act on his impulses."
"You've changed," she said. And there was something like sadness in her expression.
Ryan looked up at her, his gaze a soft caress. "But my essential core is the same."
"I know," she said. "The part I care about is still there."
"You think so?"
She smiled and gave him a slow nod. Ryan felt a surge of affection. He loved her. On impulse he leaned close and tried to kiss her.
She pulled back and laughed.
"What?"
Between laughs, she said, "I'm sorry, Ryan. You need a shower and perhaps a shave. You're in civilization now." She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek.
Ryan stood. "All right, a bath then. Join me in the big tub?"
Nadja threw her head back in joy. "Sure."
They went into the master bathroom and drew a hot bubble bath and turned on the jets. The tub was huge and very deep, big enough for three trolls to use without crowding. Ryan stripped and settled into the hot water, leaning back to let the jets massage his aching and exhausted muscles.
Nadja joined him a minute later, stepping through the door in her white terry cloth robe. She looked into his eyes as she disrobed, purposely holding his gaze on her face. He was tempted to look lower, to follow the curves of her elven body down past her waist to her toes. But he resisted. There was time enough for that later.
She entered the water and slipped in next to him. He ducked his head under to wet his hair, to wash his face. Spirits, it feels good to focus on getting clean. As he lifted his head from the water, she was on him, her arms wrapped around his neck, her body pressed close.