by Hammond, Ray
He had checked and rechecked the room, too: there was no internal magnetic field. He had demagnetized and degaussed the culture units, the work surfaces and the three electron microscopes in the lab. Viewed separately under each of the three in turn, the result had been the same.
Morton looked at the microscope’s display screen again and then reached for his VideoMate to call Fred Zimmer. He knew Thomas Tye had been exaggerating when he had talked about an invitation to Stockholm for the pseudo-nocturnal crops – but this! It was certainly worth waking up his partner. They would have a chance to decide how best to start further replication trials before the day shift returned to the lab.
*
Thomas Tye had used the island’s natural hot springs to feed his indoor swimming pool. Whether this had been his idea or the architects’ was not known, but balneologists had been brought in to supervise its design and those who had swum in the mineral-rich water reported enthusiastically on the invigorating benefits of this natural spa. One of the many underground springs had been diverted to feed the large pool and, with a tunnel bored to provide an exit to the sea, the trillionaire had eliminated at a stroke the energy requirements and costs of both heating and recycling filtration.
Jack clipped himself to the grille below the pool while he deployed his micro-saw again. The cut-away section of the grating, and the filter mesh, sailed away in the rapidly increasing current and Jack forced himself up into the pool against the flow.
He swam away from the now swirling drain and sat at the bottom of the pool, looking up for human silhouettes. His air supply was not now the invisible mixed-gas rebreathers he had used as a SEAL. He knew that bubbles were escaping to the surface, but it was unlikely that any of the house staff were in the pool room at three a.m.
He then finned towards the surface and gently broke through into fresh air. Pulling off his mask, he savoured a deep breath and slipped back the hood of his wetsuit. The ornate pool room was empty, as expected. Moonlight penetrating the huge windows was reflected off the water’s surface and bathed the ceiling and walls in gentle undulations of light.
Jack swam to the edge of the pool, pulled off his fins while still in the water and climbed out onto the marble surround. He thought it unlikely there would be any security cameras here or in the changing rooms. Considerations of modesty often over-ride security – a sensibility that professional intruders frequently exploit. Inside the male locker room he peeled off his wetsuit. He was wearing black shorts and T-shirt beneath his wetsuit but he kept his reef shoes on to provide grip. Then he removed a plastic bag from his tool kit. The 9mm SigSauer was perfectly dry. Even though the gun’s microprocessor-controlled firing system was not activated and he had left the empty seventeen-round magazine back in his apartment, he checked once again that it did not have a round in the breech. He tucked the gun in the waistband of his shorts, ensuring that it was displayed prominently. Next he took a black waterproof envelope from his swimming bag and clasped it under his arm.
Back in the main pool room he summoned the elevator. From now on he knew his presence would be recorded, but that was part of his plan. Once the elevator arrived he stepped quickly into its bright interior, hoping that this small momentary illumination in the pool room would go unnoticed by his own patrols out in the grounds. Jack studied the row of buttons and the camera lenses set into the control panel at shoulder height.
He pressed for the fourth floor, where he knew Tommy’s room was located. He had not visited that level before, but he had inspected the lower three floors of the great house and realized that Tommy’s room and the live-in staff quarters were situated on the fourth. Tye’s private quarters, inaccessible to all others but his Mexican domestic staff, lay on the fifth and topmost level. The elevator began to climb.
Eventually the doors hissed open onto a dimly lit corridor running to either side. From here on, Jack was working on luck. He pulled a sheet of ultra-thin, clear, optically conducting plastic from the envelope, knelt down and depressed the ‘open door’ button. Slowly he extended his arm and the plastic into the hallway. He determined the house’s alarm system did not include movement-detection beams at floor level. Tye had never asked Jack or any of his predecessors to cover the interior of his house in their security plans, so the island’s security force held no details of its internal protection arrangements. It was this anomaly that had given Jack an excuse to mount this exercise. If he triggered an alarm by breaking a movement-detection beam now, his dual-purpose mission would be over instantly and he had no alternative plan.
He slowly worked the transparent sheet up to head height, then higher again. There were no beams, so he stepped out of the elevator. As the doors closed behind him he carefully repeated the process, crouching and straightening to full height again and again as he worked his way across the width of the corridor. They had either chosen not to install detectors in the hallways or they were not switched on. Perhaps there was too much casual movement through these corridors for them to be practical, Jack supposed – it wasn’t as if this house was ever going to be left empty of staff. He returned the plastic tell-tale to its envelope and looked towards each end of the hall, spotting cameras at ceiling height. He pulled the gun from his waistband and waved it theatrically at each camera in turn. He knew of no all-night surveillance team that might be monitoring the camera feeds right now, but he wanted to create an impact when the inevitable, exhaustive post-mortem started.
He had already estimated that there might still be three or four people inside the house at this time of night. Apart from Tommy there would be his night nanny – a woman called Angela, whom he had only met once, Emily Pettigrew the head nurse, the night butler and then possibly a cook. But with Tom away in Moscow it was likely that most of the domestic staff would have chosen to return to their own homes in Hope Town or its outlying developments rather than sleep unnecessarily in the almost empty mansion.
Jack made an arbitrary choice, turned right and moved silently along the corridor. It was 3.20 am., the nightly low spot for human activity when all the staff would be most likely sound asleep. He paused at the first door he came to, bending to listen. Then he opened the door quietly and poked his head into the room. The bedroom was empty, with moonlight streaming through its large window. He closed the door and set off again. When he opened the next door, he sensed the room was occupied, even before he heard gentle snoring. Emily Pettigrew slept naked, Jack noticed. He closed her door silently. He was now nearly at the end of the corridor. Looking up at the camera he shrugged, and he pointed at the last door, miming the question ‘In there?’
Suddenly he heard a sound he recognized. It was a HydraChair in full motion. He pushed the door open and stood watching in the dimly-lit room as Tommy’s chair inverted the boy completely, then put him on his side as the game simulated an aircraft or a spaceship executing a sharp turn. He could hear Tommy laugh as he fought to keep the virtual craft within whatever performance envelope the game’s designers had specified.
Jack closed the door behind him, returned the gun to his waistband, pulling his T-shirt down to cover it, and turned up the main room lights. He didn’t expect the illumination to penetrate the boy’s helmet so he crossed the room and rapped playfully on its decorative wing decals.
The HydraChair flipped upright to its resting position and Tommy’s helmet visor hissed upwards.
‘Hiya, Tommy,’ said Jack.
‘Hi,’ replied Tommy doubtfully.
‘You’re up late,’ observed Jack.
‘Hello, Jack. Was that a gun?’ asked Jed from the bed. The Furry’s vision extended into infra-red wavelengths.
‘You are clever, Jed,’ said Jack, keeping the irritation out of his voice. ‘But it’s not loaded.’
He lifted the front of his T-shirt, pulled out the gun and handed it, butt first, to Tommy.
‘I’m testing security in the house,’ Jack told the seven-year-old. ‘I heard your HydraChair. Why are you still up?’
&
nbsp; Tommy turned the heavy gun over in his hands. ‘I don’t have to go to sleep – as long as I stay in my room,’ he explained. ‘Who are you going to shoot?’
Jack smiled and retrieved the weapon. ‘Nobody,’ he said, stowing it in his waistband again. ‘We’re just practising drill – to make sure everybody’s safe. Do you want to help us?’
Tommy banged the quick-release lever on his safety harness. He was wearing blue pyjamas and a pair of large blue rabbit-eared slippers that, Jack recalled, had been a gift from Calypso. As Tommy rose out of the chair he staggered slightly.
Jack stepped forward and caught the boy’s arms to steady him. He eased his grip as he noticed the bandages underneath the boy’s pyjama sleeves. Calypso had told him about the incident with the knife.
‘Whoa – it gets like that when you’ve been flying.’
‘I’m OK,’ insisted Tommy, pulling free. He stepped to the bed and picked up his Furry companion.
‘What are you going to do now?’ Tommy asked Jack. ‘Your face is all black.’
Jack took the package from under his arm and extracted a smaller, white envelope. ‘I’ve crept into the house secretly to surprise everybody. It’s your father’s birthday tomorrow and I’ve brought a birthday card for you to give him. You can sign it. Have you got a pen?’
Tommy ran to his drawing chest. Jack followed and laid the card on its flat surface. He watched as Tommy read the text.
‘It says “Happy Birthday, Dad”,’ exclaimed Tommy excitedly. ‘I didn’t know it was his birthday.’
Jack smiled. The card was a generic anniversary greeting, mentioning no particular age.
Tommy took up a green marker pen and carefully wrote his name.
‘I’m going to sneak this into your father’s office,’ said Jack, tucking the card back in its envelope. ‘It will be a nice surprise for when he gets home. Want to come along?’
‘I’m not allowed out of my room,’ responded Tommy, dutifully.
‘You’re with me now,’ replied Jack firmly. ‘Come on.’
‘May I come too?’ asked Jed in the very proper English that Tom had specified for his son’s personal Furry. ‘I’ll just disconnect from the networks. Hang on a mo.’
Tommy scooped up the caterpillar as Jack picked up the small chair from in front of the boy’s drawing desk.
‘I think we’ll need this,’ he explained.
He opened the door and glanced along the long corridor. Seeing that it was still empty, he stepped out, followed by Tommy with Jed tucked under his left arm. Jack led the way to the elevator.
Inside the lift Jack pressed the button for the fifth floor. As he had expected nothing happened.
‘We’re not moving,’ observed Jed.
‘Just a moment,’ said Jack. ‘We need a special pass.’
He opened the larger envelope and carefully pulled out a gleaming mirror that immediately iridized, shooting rainbows of prismatic light around the lift. He positioned the low chair underneath the control panel.
‘I want you to stand on this, Tommy,’ Jack said. ‘I’ll show you a trick.’
‘Will my father be angry?’ asked Tommy, suddenly afraid.
Jack laughed.
‘No. He’ll be really pleased. He’ll come back to a great surprise.’
Tommy stepped up onto the chair, Jed still clenched firmly under one arm.
Jack positioned the mirror carefully and Tommy’s eyes widened as he stared at the reflection. The intelligent mirror recreated the boy’s face as a perfect, slightly enlarged three-dimensional hologram. It was as though his whole head was captured inside a strangely deep mirror. He turned his head to the left and the right, watching the disembodied head move, exactly as Jack had hoped.
In their lab the UNISA technical officers had scaled up the identification parameters of a facial-recognition system, requisitioning the experimental holo-optics from the physics department at the University of Indiana. They had added an imaging microprocessor to the system with over 120,000 algorithms intended to morph a juvenile face into a convincing adult version. The system could generate all these in less than a second before starting over again. In the lab the catoptricologists had managed to fool a facial-recognition system by using the enhanced 3D-mirror and coloured images of approved faces, but there was no guarantee that Tommy’s young face would be sufficiently similar to his father’s for the reflector’s enantiomorphing and ageing techniques to work. Jack knew the recognition system was dividing the boy’s reflected face into forty elements, such as the outer corners of the eyes, the tip of the nose and the ends of the eyebrows and measuring the distances between them to compare to its database of approved faces. He also knew that each measurement was programmed to be imprecise to some degree because the system had to allow for variations in lighting and distance.
As Tommy gazed into his reflection, Jack slowly moved the mirror closer to the stereoscopic camera lenses, then back towards Tommy’s face, angling it slightly as he did so.
‘It doesn’t seem to be working,’ observed Jed.
‘Thank you,’ said Jack, who knew that the Furry would be recording all his actions. Instinctively, he stuck his tongue out at the caterpillar – a gesture he knew Jed couldn’t return.
Tommy laughed at this and then Jack saw a small green LED illuminate above the button for the fifth floor. Jack nodded to himself in satisfaction. He should have guessed that Thomas Tye would always smile for a camera.
‘Press the button again,’ he said to Tommy.
As the boy did so, the lift started to rise.
‘Well done,’ said Jed.
The lights were off in the fifth-floor corridor but Jack doubted whether movement beams would have been installed there in addition to the elevator’s security system. A rapid traverse of the hall space with his conducting tell-tale sheet confirmed it. He stepped out and touched the illumination control on the wall. The accommodation on the top of the building was set back considerably from the floors below, so was practically invisible from the ground. Jack wondered if any of his patrols had been sufficiently energetic to climb the mountain tonight. If they had, they might spot the lights and he would only have a minute or two before someone arrived to check.
Jack noticed three doors along the corridor. Two were on the side where the rooms would have sea views. The room on the other side would face the mountain. Jack opted for the land-facing room. As expected, there was a full range of security barriers protecting this door.
‘Touch that pad with your finger,’ Jack said to Tommy. He pointed to the long middle finger of Tommy’s right hand.
He had already lifted the boy’s fingerprints from the cup of hot chocolate Tommy had left unfinished at Calypso’s house. Back at UNISA’s HQ, Deakin had received them as uncaptioned electronic images, with a separate, coded fax detailing the request. Within an hour the dermatoglyphologists in UNISA Forensics had compared the prints to a set of impressions Thomas Tye had left in the White House in Washington DC eight years before. At that time the US Secret Service had harvested the prints as part of their routine observation of all the President’s guests and, as part of a wide-scale reciprocal agreement, copies had been lodged with UNISA. Jack had received a four-word message back: ‘100 per cent match.’ He had read somewhere that a third of identical twins have matching fingerprints, but he doubted whether anyone had data on artificial clones.
As Tommy touched the fingerprint pad, a green LED illuminated. Jack then positioned the low chair again and repeated the procedure he had followed in the lift. It took longer this time, although the system would be employing precisely the same facial-pattern recognition system used in the lift. He moved the mirror closer to and then further away from the twin lenses.
‘Smile,’ prompted Jack again.
As the green LED lit up, Jack helped Tommy step down from the chair.
‘Now the system’s got to sniff your wrist,’ said Jack. ‘Put your arm up against that grille, like this.’
Jack showed Tommy how to put the inside of his wrist to the olfactory sensor. This would be the hardest part and Al Lynch had bet him a case of Jack Daniels that his mission would fail here. Jack took a small aerosol spray from his belt bag as he watched the display panel.
The iatrochemists and the osphresiologists of the World Health Organization’s research labs had also been doubtful. Though they understood that the boy was a clone of his father, they argued the degree to which the body’s chemistry was altered during puberty. They therefore thought it very unlikely that the young son’s chemical signature would match his father’s so – as one put it, ‘rather more in desperation than in hope’ – they had prepared a supplementary concoction of testosterone and related hormones for Jack to spray on during the sampling.
He just was about to use the spray when another green LED lit up, indicating the system had been fooled.
‘Just one to go,’ said Jed.
Despite the preoccupations of the moment, Jack felt his skin crawl at hearing the little companion. This was uncanny. He turned and stared at the caterpillar under Tommy’s arm. To his discomfort, Jed turned his own head slightly and blinked the lashes of his huge eyes, raising his eyebrows as he returned Jack’s gaze. The caterpillar was mugging back at him! Jack thought he might have a word with Professor Keane. Her achievements with artificial intelligence were astonishing but also quite disconcerting.
‘Now we need one more thing,’ he told Tommy. ‘This won’t really hurt.’
‘Oow,’ complained Tommy jokingly as Jack pulled a single hair from his head.
‘Watch this,’ said Jack. He carefully placed the hair in the scanning capsule of the DNA-verification system and they watched as it was bathed in UV light. Within four seconds the third green LED illuminated.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Jack. He pushed open the door and they were inside Thomas Tye’s private office.
‘It’s very dark,’ observed Jed, who could see perfectly well. Jack switched the lights on.