But the gist of the investigations was this: the warehouse mentioned in the e-mail was the same one recently disclosed by Theia Labs in the mountain of evidence they had released. The same one videoed several times by Kelvin Gray. And it had been the site of a devastating fire very soon after Hall’s e-mail had been sent. They had also learned that several people had been questioned about the warehouse by members of a mysterious government agency.
The e-mail message could still be a hoax, but given it had correctly disclosed the nature of Hall’s implants, and the location of the warehouse, days before Fyfe’s revelations, it looked for all the world to be legitimate.
So could it be that Hall’s implants also gave him ESP? The ability not only to surf the web, but to surf the thoughts of other people?
Hall hadn’t lied about anything else in his desperation e-mail message, the reporter pointed out, so why lie about this? And how else could he have escaped from Kelvin Gray?
The story ended by suggesting that if the message was completely accurate, Cameron Fyfe had quite a bit more explaining to do, and finally, that the expanded report would be available the next morning for anyone who purchased the print or online version of the newspaper. There was little doubt that for one day, the Iowa Gazette would have more readers than the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal combined.
“Wow, Nick,” said Heather. “You don’t remember writing any of that, do you?”
Hall shook his head no.
“You sure kept yourself busy in that warehouse,” said Altschuler. “I’ll bet it took some major effort for you to find the e-mail addresses of that many journalists.”
Heather turned toward Hall. “How big of a problem is this?” she asked. “I mean, you can’t read minds anymore. You could for a while and now you can’t. End of story.”
“I wish it were that easy,” said Altschuler.
“It’ll be okay,” said Hall, but Altschuler wondered if he was trying to convince himself of this as much as he was trying to convince his companions. “We can walk this back,” he continued. “It adds to our headaches, but it isn’t the end of the world. I’ll just say my mind had undergone repeated traumas, and I must have hallucinated the ESP thing. That this part wasn’t true. And that when others get the implants, they’ll see that they don’t magically get any voodoo ESP.”
“Voodoo ESP?” said Heather, raising her eyebrows.
“Well, you know, I’m just trying to make it sound ridiculous. Anyway, there will always be those who believe the ESP I mentioned in the e-mail is real. But when people start getting implants and see they can’t read minds, this report will become an unimportant and discredited footnote of the history of this era.”
They continued to discuss this and other topics, and to monitor the never-ending barrage of coverage generated by the press conference. It would all be wild enough if they weren’t involved, but since they were at the very epicenter of the quake, it was crazy. The word surreal didn’t even begin to do it justice. Especially for Nick Hall, whose photo was prominently displayed in the corner of every major television channel, and who was being talked about, and dissected, on each one.
Fifteen minutes after they had read the Iowa Gazette story, Hall was responding to a question Heather had posed to him, when her eyes fell shut. Alex Altschuler noticed this unusual turn of events even before Hall. “Heather?” he said in alarm. “Are you okay?”
But even as he said this, Heather Zambrana toppled over to become an inert lump on the couch.
“What the hell!” said Hall, reaching for her to check for a pulse.
But before he could find it, his eyes fell shut as well, and a second later he toppled to the floor.
The video footage Fyfe had shown of the unconscious bodies on the Scripps Explorer flashed into Altschuler’s mind, but only for an instant, before he, too, slipped to the floor, and into the waiting arms of absolute darkness.
53
Altschuler realized his internal Internet connection was down the moment he began regaining consciousness. Hall had mentioned Girdler had used an electronic device to suppress the WiFi in Hall’s vicinity, and no doubt this tactic was being repeated. Like Hall before him, he was struck by how dependent he had become, already, on a capability he had had for less than two days.
He still felt groggy, and his thoughts were swimming in molasses, but he gradually became aware that he was sitting on the beige carpeted floor of the panic room they had toured earlier, against the wall, his hands behind him and handcuffed together. Heather was beside him, to his right, and Hall was situated on the other side of her, all three handcuffed in the same manner.
Altschuler tried to resituate his hands behind him and realized he was also somehow attached to Heather, who was no doubt attached to Hall in turn, a paper chain of unwieldy humanity. Cameron Fyfe had just finished injecting Hall at the end of the short line with an unknown drug, and since Heather and Hall were both now stirring, it must have been a reviving agent.
Cameron Fyfe seated himself on the steel workbench against one side wall, several yards to the left and several feet above the row of prisoners sitting on the floor against the wall. His legs dangled down, not quite reaching the floor, as he set the semi-automatic and dart gun he had confiscated from Hall beside him. Weapons that had recently been the property of Colonel Justin Girdler.
A sense of dread came over Altschuler more palpable than any he had ever experienced. He couldn’t die now! Not on the eve of being an integral part of an unparalleled technological revolution. And not when he had just found comfort and happiness in Heather Zambrana’s arms.
It wasn’t fair.
And yet he knew in his heart that the cosmos could be cruelly ironic, and that his pending death was a certainty.
“How long have we been out?” whispered Altschuler, his tongue still thick. He noticed the time posted on the sleek bank of silver-edged monitors affixed to the opposite wall even as he asked this. It hadn’t been long. An hour at most.
He looked around the room. “Where’s Ed Cowan?” he added, his mind finally beginning to clear.
Fyfe ignored him.
“Cowan was here already,” answered Hall, sounding a little drunk as his faculties gradually returned. “He helped drag us in here. They killed Trout and Tienda, who were also knocked out. Cowan is disposing of the bodies. He’ll be back in an hour or two.”
Fyfe raised his eyebrows. “Very good, Nick,” he said. “I was wondering if you were going to continue pretending you couldn’t read minds.”
“What’s the point? You know I can.”
“You can still read minds?” mumbled Heather drunkenly.
When no one answered, she turned to Fyfe, “You killed our bodyguards?” Her words were still slurred but getting better. “Why?”
“Tell her, Nick,” said Fyfe.
“Because now that I’m a celebrity, they know too much. They know who I am, that I was here, and that Fyfe was well aware I was here.”
“Exactly,” said Fyfe, turning back to Heather. “When I burn this place to the ground, and all of your remains are identified by dental records and your skeletons, I can’t have any loose ends. Trout and Tienda were loose ends.”
“Why are we in this room?” asked Altschuler.
Fyfe shrugged. “I always feel safer in here. And having your remains found in a panic room adds something to the worldwide story this will become. Don’t you think?”
Heather’s full faculties had finally returned and she stared at Fyfe in horror. “What’s all this about? Have you lost your mind?”
Fyfe shook his head in amusement. “You two really didn’t tell her, did you?” he said, and then with a shrug added, “I guess it makes sense. No sense staking your futures on her acting abilities.”
Heather turned to the two men beside her on the floor. “What’s this all about?” she demanded, panic growing.
Once again, everyone ignored her, which her flushed face made abundantly c
lear was infuriating to her.
“Why haven’t you killed us already?” asked Altschuler.
“Tell him, Nick,” said Fyfe.
Hall shook his head. “I’m not going to be your mind reading puppet so you can spare your own vocal cords. I can read minds, but not intent. So for the most part, it’s better if you formulate your own answers. I wouldn’t want any of your psychotic thinking lost in translation.”
Fyfe shot Hall an icy glare that was so intense, Hall couldn’t help but blink several times. “I’m willing to keep this civilized,” said Fyfe calmly. “But if it becomes uncivilized, consider who is in a dominant position here and who isn’t. Have I made myself clear?”
Hall nodded reluctantly.
Fyfe turned back to Altschuler. “Why haven’t I killed you yet, Alex?” he repeated. “Because I’ve obviously made some mistakes. Or else you wouldn’t have suspected I was John Delamater.”
Even though their suspicions had now been confirmed, Altschuler had been so certain Fyfe and Delamater were different men—and on wildly different ends of the criminal spectrum—that even knowing the man in front of him was John Delamater, he still couldn’t help seeing him as Cameron Fyfe.
“So before I send you to the afterlife,” continued Fyfe, “I wanted to understand where I went wrong.” He paused. “Do any of you know of a man named Jose Capablanca?”
Fyfe’s question was met with blank stares all around.
“He was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927, and widely thought to be the most naturally talented chess player in history. He believed you could learn more by studying your defeats than studying your victories. I’m a grandmaster level player in my own right, and I happen to agree. And while I did win in the end, I stumbled a bit in the middle-game.”
He leaned closer to Hall. “So tell me, Nick. Where did I go wrong? How did you know to suspect me?”
“Okay,” said Hall. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know. In as much detail as you’d like. But I want a quid pro quo. You have to answer our questions as well.”
“Oh? And why should I do that?”
“Because you have all the time in the world, so who cares if it takes an extra hour or two to humor us? Because you know this is the easiest way to get total cooperation. And because you love chess. And we’ve been worthy opponents. Far more worthy than you ever expected. And you have a measure of respect for what we’ve been able to do. In that same vein, this is your chance to share your brilliant moves with an audience who can appreciate them. One of the only chances you’ll ever have. And if a brilliant game is played in the forest, and no one is there to admire it, was it really played at all?”
Fyfe smiled, but it was more crocodilian than amused. “Very Zen, Nick. You can read my mind, so you know what arguments will be effective. But that doesn’t diminish their effectiveness. You are correct. In life, as in chess, you can admire an opponent’s play, even as you prepare to topple his king. Okay. You have a deal. But why don’t you and Alex go first. Tell me where I went wrong?” He gestured toward Hall. “I assume it was you who first suspected.”
Heather caught Altschuler’s eye, curled up her lip, and glared at him angrily. He couldn’t blame her. He and Nick had deduced a danger existed, and had decided to take certain risks, without consulting a woman whose life was also endangered by their decisions. Hopefully she would come to understand why they had decided not to confide in her in the short time they had left. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but the thought of her going to her death thinking he had betrayed her trust was too much for him to bear.
“It wasn’t a single thing that made me suspicious,” replied Hall, “but a combination. And it started with Ed Cowan. Alex trusted you and Cowan implicitly. You had been the one to bring Gray’s crimes to light. And Cowan had saved Alex’s life. But when you’ve lost your memory and everyone is trying to kill you, you learn to be very paranoid. So I vowed not to fully trust anyone whose mind I hadn’t read. You were a fair distance away,” continued Hall, nodding at Fyfe, “but Cowan was based in Northern California, and even rented the suite at the Homestead Inn for us. So it was curious that he never got within mind reading range of me. I read all of the mercs he hired, of course. None of them knew anything about his past or present, which I found odd. And which made me wonder how legitimate he really was. And several of his hires wondered themselves why he maintained the distance he did from the civilians he was so eager to protect.”
“But what would cause you to think he knew about your ESP in the first place?”
“Actually, I didn’t guess this until later. But I’ll get to that. It was just strange that I never had the chance to read him. But the most suspicious behavior of all came very early on. Ed Cowan was the least paranoid bodyguard in history. I read from Alex’s mind that Alex had been the one to push for extra precautions at the Homestead Inn. Cowan wouldn’t have even posted guards next door. And even when he did, he told them he didn’t expect trouble. Why? How could he be so sure the fabled John Delamater, who had shown himself to be incredibly resourceful, wouldn’t pick up our trail again?”
Fyfe nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. And you realized one possibility was that he knew Delamater wasn’t going to trouble you, because he was working with Delamater.” He sighed. “A small but telling oversight we shouldn’t have made. He still needed to act as though Delamater was a huge threat, to better keep up the facade. I see it now.”
“So this line of reasoning led me to suspect the man he was working with was potentially John Delamater. Which meant you. You had hired Cowan and brought him into the picture in the first place. I used my implants to research you and Cowan but found almost nothing. Neither of you left even the faintest footprint. You both had a single web page with your cover identities, and that was it. A big dead end.”
Hall paused. “Even more suspicious, the night the military raided our suite at the Homestead, when we conferenced with you in Heather’s car, you never once asked how Heather came to be involved in the proceedings. Or what Alex and Heather were doing at the Madera facility that night. These should have been the first questions you asked. You swore us all to absolute secrecy, but you didn’t seem too troubled by this development.”
“I did realize this mistake afterward,” admitted Fyfe.
“Right,” said Altschuler. “Which I assume is why you grilled me about Heather the next day.”
“Correct.”
“I reasoned that you failed to bring it up when we were in Heather’s car,” continued Hall, “because you knew very well what they were doing. Which meant you probably had bugs in our suite at the Homestead Inn. Just speculation, but that would be my guess.”
“Good guess,” said Fyfe. “Go on.”
“Since you knew about our planned experiment,” said Altschuler, “and didn’t intervene, I assume that you approved of it.”
“Yes. I was just as eager as you were to confirm the success with Hall could be duplicated. And that ESP wasn’t an unwanted side effect. My compliments to you and Heather.”
Altschuler’s jaw tightened. Even though he and Hall had guessed he had been bugged, this confirmation of it still made his skin crawl. Fyfe had been three steps ahead of them from the beginning. And even when they thought they were doing something off script, it had ended up serving his interests.
“After the call in Heather’s car,” said Hall, “I decided to share my suspicions with Alex. It was the perfect time, because now that he also had working implants, I didn’t have to worry about any eavesdropping. We could communicate in perfect silence, and perfect secrecy, using our Internet connections. Alex even set up a PDA that mimicked each of our respective voices to read IMs we sent each other. Half the time it seemed we were having actual conversations, only ones that no ears or bugs could ever pick up.”
Fyfe frowned deeply, clearly annoyed at himself for not having considered this obvious possibility for evading his surveillance.
“Once Hall had shared his
concerns,” said Altschuler, “ I set out to find you in SEC filings. Even the most silent of investors have to be on file with the SEC, as you know, even if the filing isn’t in the public domain. So you didn’t have any footprint online, but if you truly were invested in a number of companies as you claim on your web page, in addition to Theia, you’d have to leave a footprint at the SEC. I was able to hack into their private files with my implants.”
“And I had no footprint there either,” said Fyfe, shaking his head. “I must say, I am truly impressed. I almost regret the need to kill you.” Then, with his upper lip curling into a sneer, he added, “Almost.”
Altschuler glared at Fyfe with an inhuman intensity. Recent events had toughened him up, hardened his spine, and he was no longer the sniveling geek, nervously cleaning his glasses, that he had been when he had first confronted Gray. As small and relatively unathletic as Altschuler was, had he not been chained to two other people, he would have found a way to break the neck of this smug bastard, no matter how many bullets were pumped into him on the way.
But chained as he was, and dealing with an unpredictable psychopath, he decided to continue to cooperate. Like Hall, he was curious to learn the exact nature of Fyfe’s plan, and he didn’t want to enrage the beast, which might boomerang back on Heather.
Altschuler took a deep breath and found a way to stay calm. “I had also hacked all of Gray’s files,” he continued. “As you also know. I searched them all for mentions of Cameron Fyfe. But I didn’t find a single one. Which was impossible. Gray recorded his every impression for posterity. Hell, he had notes about me and every other employee at Theia. His thoughts. Were they bright, were they pricks, how to deal with them. Their worth to him—because everything revolved around him and how he could use people. He even had extensive notes on suppliers he dealt with. No one got a pass. Except Cameron Fyfe.”
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