“Please,” she muttered, “please—”
“Please what?” He twisted the sneaker in both hands. “To hurt or not to hurt—that is the only choice you have any more.” He made a show of glancing at a nonexistent watch. “And if you wouldn't mind hurrying, I'm on a tighter schedule than normal. We have a lot to share, you and I, before we finally part company.”
Her sobbing became more animated. He tapped her on the forehead with the toe of the sneaker to attract her attention, but she only flinched away. He hit her harder, frustrated by her unwillingness to communicate. Didn't she understand what he was trying to tell her? Did she really want to be hurt? Was she listening to him at all? Didn't she care what happened to her?
He tried talking to her again—one last time. “Look, there's a reason to all this. You won't have died in vain. In fact, you won't die at all in the long run. Not today. Just here. You're a copy. The real you keeps going.” Her stubborn introspection bothered him. He tried to appeal to her, rather than the victim: “Did you have a party to go to tonight, by the way, or was that just wishful thinking on my part?”
Still she didn't respond. His lips tightened. Gripping the sneaker more tightly, he struck her about the face until her cheeks began to bleed. She was screaming and thrashing by that point—more frightened animal than human. It was no use trying any more. She didn't give a damn. But he did. He did.
It made him angry.
The time for talk was past. He tossed the sneaker aside and tore away the rest of her clothes. He really was in a hurry—hadn't just said that to impress her—so he didn't waste time with pleasantries. Twenty-four hours was a long time for torture, but barely long enough to reduce a human being to the depths he had seen and wanted to see again. Prolonged pain was the key, and the absence of hope. He had offered her a pain-free death, and he might have given it to her, for simplicity's sake, but many was the time he had offered it, delivered for a while, then reduced the levels of narcotics in order to see the despair blossom when the pain returned.
He was a sculptor. His medium was flesh. His message was despair. His agenda was revenge.
The girl on the Rack was just a means to an end. A means he intended to enjoy to the fullest now that she had rejected his offer.
Not once did she attempt to reason with him again. She was weak, irrational, pathetic. Even her screams began to lose their strength after barely an hour had passed. She deserved everything he gave her.
Marylin Blaylock would have fought harder.
That was the thought he kept foremost in his mind as the tools came out and he began to work in earnest.
Marylin Blaylock would have fought harder. That would make her submission all the more sweet, when the time finally came.
Facts were much more reliable than memories, even if they alone did little to illuminate the situation Jonah McEwen found himself in.
Lindsay Carlaw had been killed by an explosion in the primary lab of SciCon's Advanced Research facility, often referred to as SCAR. The bomb had been placed within the housing of an otherwise unremarkable 3-by-Standard Human Equivalent processor Lindsay had had cause to examine during a random maintenance check prior to testing the latest configuration of the device known as QUIDDITY. Immediately upon opening the casing of the processor, the bomb had detonated. Shrapnel had cut Carlaw nearly in half and slightly injured his adopted son, who had been standing behind him. The 3-by-SHE processor itself had been completely ruined, along with much of the equipment in that corner of the room. QUIDDITY, and its creator, had been destroyed.
The opening paragraphs of the findings of the inquest into Lindsay's death graphically described the events that had taken place three years earlier. Jonah scanned through them, reliving the moment the bomb had exploded, and afterward, when he had been caught in a terrible loop of grief and guilt. His memories were clear up to that point.
The records indicated that he had attended the opening session of the inquest three days after Lindsay's death, but he had no recollection whatsoever of doing that. The inquest had concluded on the tenth day, two after Jonah had gone into hibernation and three after Lindsay's funeral. As he read past the bald statement of facts and reached the issues the inquest had struggled with, he became increasingly perplexed.
SciCon had reported receiving bomb threats leading up to the explosion. Jonah had been present that day to investigate them—not officially, and certainly not at Lindsay's request, or with SciCon's complete cooperation, but there nonetheless. WHOLE had been implicated, despite the fact that none of the threats had been traced and that Karoly Mancheff, head of WHOLE, had denied responsibility. Even the security administration of SciCon, at its lower, workaday levels, had taken them only half-seriously. Any company with such a high profile engaged in such sensitive work received threats; less than five percent turned out to be genuine. And this one, with its nebulous source and vague details, had rung no alarm bells.
But, according to the records, Jonah had noticed his father's atypical unease and had attributed the threats to be the cause. If WHOLE had indeed been behind it, Lindsay might have known more than he was admitting. Upon following up SciCon's evaluation procedure, however, he, too, had been reassured that the threats were idle. He had stopped looking, in other words. Perhaps if he had looked harder, he might have found the bomb in time.
Maybe.
In the end, the inquest found no clear evidence implicating WHOLE in the attack, but neither could it find another suspect to let WHOLE entirely off the hook. It failed to determine how the bomb had been placed inside the high-security SCAR facility. Nor could it decide how the explosion had been triggered: although the bomb had gone off when Lindsay had opened the processor, the detonator had not been linked to the casing. Instead, it had resembled a timed device. The only thing it seemed the inquest had concluded was that Lindsay's death had come about as the result of foul play, which had suprised no one. The lack of evidence made finding a suspect or pinning down the motive so difficult that the prospect of prosecuting a killer had been bleak.
A note appended to the file indicated that the subsequent EJC investigation had stalled within a few weeks. It had become one of the many unsolved crimes that, for one reason or another, were never adequately investigated. The reason in this case might have been a lack of family or social pressure applied at the time—a possibility that did little to ease Jonah's conscience. He had been interested, and he still was. The lead that had kept him from pursuing the case to its conclusion (if, indeed, he hadn't) must have been of overwhelming significance.
Whatever that was, he didn't know. All he could do was follow in his previous footsteps, hoping to avoid whatever pitfalls had led him here, three years later.
Reading over the scant physical evidence, Jonah thought the obvious conclusion was that the sabotage had been an inside job. The person behind it had had access to the SCAR facility at the very least. Possibly someone with an urgent desire to see the QUIDDITY project stalled, someone who wanted Lindsay out of the way so his patents could be exploited more fully, perhaps even someone with a personal grudge against Lindsay. That the bomb was aimed at Lindsay seemed impossible to refute. After all, the test run of the QUIDDITY project had been scheduled days in advance, and it would have been easy to ensure that Lindsay was the only one present. Rigging the bomb to the processor casing could have placed an innocent technician in danger and missed the actual target. Hence the bomb had been timed rather than manually triggered. Only bad luck and stubborn insistence had put Jonah in range as well.
They had been arguing. About what Jonah could no longer recall. Maybe about the bomb threats themselves; it didn't matter. Lindsay had been edgy all that week, and had no good explanation for it. He had turned away to open the processor casing, and—
Jonah remembered a sound so loud he had been deaf for minutes afterwards. He had felt pain in his chest. The ground had slapped him hard when he fell. The facility had been full of metal fragments and glass, and blood, when
he had staggered to his feet.
His mind shied away from the death of his father. That aspect of his past was still painful—for all that he had downplayed the bond between him and Lindsay to Marylin. They may not have been close in an emotional sense, but they were still father and son. The death of one would inevitably have an effect on the other.
He opened his eyes. He was lying on his father's bed while medical scanners hidden in the ceiling and walls, installed to assist Lindsay in his search for longevity, examined his body. The room and the rest of the unit was in gloomy half-darkness. He could hear Marylin moving nearby, although at first he couldn't see her. He craned his neck. She was in the hallway donning body-armour that must have arrived while he was reviewing the file. He looked away to respect her privacy.
Among the data she had given him was an overview of the d-med process that had brought him so rapidly to full health. He skimmed through part of it. The technical terms went over his head, but he understood enough to get a rough picture. He had been taken apart and put back together differently. Instead of operating on his living tissues by means of laser scalpels or nanos, the unnamed doctors had redesigned his body from the inside out while it was frozen between d-mat terminals.
He accepted that. It made sense. Despite the scaremongers, a lot of people would benefit from the development when it was released, among them the KTI shareholders, who would receive a royalty every time the process was employed. He was glad Marylin had taken the time to inform him of how he had been treated.
On the tail end of the data-packet was a brief description of something Jonah had come across before, prior to his hibernation. Turning matter into information was only half of the miracle that was d-mat. Reversing the process required sophisticated ways to create and manipulate matter in all its forms. Every receiving booth consumed large amounts of energy with every transfer, just as transmitting booths emitted surplus power due to the interchangeability of matter and energy. Across one transfer, the matter/energy reserves would rise near the transmitting booth and dip near the receiver, but the nett mass/energy budget of the KTI global system would remain constant. This nett mass/energy budget was measured in megaLuhrs, where each thousand Luhrs represented approximately one person. A percentage was lost every day due to inefficiencies in the system and the laws of thermodynamics, but that was easily made up in the long run as d-mat was increasingly used to dispose of dangerous waste.
According to the document Jonah was reading, the total mass/energy reserve was normally maintained at roughly 0.5 MLu. When the Twinmaker copied a victim, he reduced the m/e reserve by one thousand Luhrs. It was this discrepancy that alerted the MIU to the fact that another body was on its way, enabling it to warn EJC and security forces around the world. Word of a corpse that had appeared from nowhere in a d-mat booth usually came within hours, and when it did the MIU away team was ready to investigate. That explained how the MIU had known right from the beginning that this was no ordinary serial murder investigation, and how they could so accurately pinpoint when the Twinmaker had struck.
But there was something about the m/e shortfall that bothered Jonah. It took him a moment or two to figure it out.
“Marylin, are you there?”
“I hear you. You've had your half an hour. Are you done yet?”
“No. Tell me why there isn't a mass/energy shortfall when the Twinmaker kidnaps a victim. He had the last one for days before he dumped her, but only then did her existence register in the m/e budget. Why's that?”
“I don't know.” She came out of the kitchen, clipping black fabric sheaths tight across her abdomen. Active fibres in the weave pulled each sheath tighter still, perfectly matching the contours of her body. Flexible yet strong, the armour would stop a .44 bullet at close range or absorb large amounts of coherent electromagnetic radiation, yet remain undetectable beneath her uniform.
He levered himself into a sitting position. “You ‘don't know’?”
“I've never really thought about it before,” she said. “In the early days, he only kept his victims long enough to slit their throats; the difference between disposal and kidnap times wasn't really an issue. But now, he keeps them for days. You're absolutely right. The discrepancy should show up much earlier.”
“Who would know why it doesn't?”
“QUALIA, I guess. Schumacher and Verstegen for sure.”
He wondered if he should mention what he had remembered: that someone had been in his apartment during the week after Lindsay's death, someone who had threatened him and mentioned suicide. Herold Verstegen's name surfaced in that context, but he could not explain why while the identity of the mystery man remained an unknown. They might not have been one and the same; he might simply have been adding unrelated facts together in a vain, subconscious attempt to tie up loose ends. No doubt Marylin would explain it that way, and he wouldn't blame her for doing so.
Marylin had ducked back into the hall to finish sealing the armour.
“Now tell me how you can be so certain that none of KTI's top exec's are involved,” he called after her.
“We've been tracking the top twenty-five constantly for over a year,” she said.
“Through GLITCH?”
“With random spot-checks conducted in person.” Her head appeared briefly around the corner. “We know GLITCH isn't really infallible.”
“There's no way one of them could've been moonlighting?”
“No. They're watched twenty-four hours a day. Look.” She guided his overseer to an internal security site that listed the whereabouts of the twenty-five targets. Verstegen was there, along with Schumacher, Trevaskis, Whitesmith and others Jonah hadn't heard of. The present location of each was listed, along with a complete history of the last twenty-four hours. Previous records were archived but could be recalled at a simple request.
“The red marks next to specific times indicate verification in person,” Marylin explained. “And they couldn't have copied themselves as well, if you're about to suggest that. Their UGIs would have registered simultaneously at some point by now, alerting the system.”
“Unless—” He stopped, suddenly struggling to complete the thought that had struck him.
“Unless what?”
He shook his head. “I don't know. Have there been any hits on my UGI lately?”
“None more recent than a month ago.”
“Since I awoke?”
“Still none.”
He raised his eyebrows. “All that effort—”
“I know. Don't say it.”
He didn't. All that effort to obtain his UGI and in the end it had given them nothing. It would have been amusing under other circumstances, and if the same couldn't be said about the inquest file.
But…what had he been thinking? Something about how the killer could have avoided dangerous double-matches through GLITCH. There were ways to evade the network of detection points around the world, but they involved concealment across a number of different spectra and avoiding all legitimate forms of commerce and communication. That could be kept up for a few days, maybe even as long as a couple of weeks, if an accomplice could be relied upon to provide food and shelter—but for eighteen months, without a break? Jonah doubted it.
Wherever it was his mind had been leading him, he was lost now. The signpost would reappear later if it was important—he hoped.
Marylin stepped back into the room.
“Are you going to point the finger at Herold Verstegen next?”
He looked up. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you hinted at something to do with him before.”
“No other reason?”
“Like I might wonder about him myself? No. He's a spook and no one likes him much, but that doesn't make him a murderer.”
“He and Trevaskis make a nice couple,” he said.
“Their disagreements are common knowledge. Verstegen regards the MIU as a subordinate branch of his security force. Trevaskis wants the unit to become a fu
lly fledged subsidiary of the EJC. Neither aim is compatible, so there's constant friction. Your appearance seems to have brought it to some kind of head.”
“Not me,” he said. “The Twinmaker.”
“Games again?” She half-smiled. “I keep coming back to that too.”
“It is a theory,” he acknowledged. “I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's definitely suggestive.”
She moved around the room to a straight-backed chair nearby and sat down with a creak of armour. Her expression was wooden, as though she was hiding something more than just impatience at waiting for the latest body to turn up. In her hand was a folded piece of paper.
“What else is there you haven't told me?” he asked.
“Plenty, no doubt,” she said, too casually. “As you say, it's hard to bring you up to date immediately—”
“Anything specific?”
She looked at him for a long moment, then reached across to hand him the note.
Marylin watched him read with a feeling not unlike apprehension. Why, she didn't know, but the feeling was there. His eyes scanned the page once, then again, just as hers had the previous day. After the second time, he turned the page over and looked at the back. It was blank.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I didn't write it,” he said, looking up at her. “Where did it come from?”
“I left it in the JRM office six months ago for you to find if you showed up there. When I checked it yesterday, that line had been added.”
“It's been analysed?”
“Of course. It's clean. Very clean. The envelope it was in, the one I put it in myself, hadn't been opened. The note was somehow written onto the page while it was still inside.”
“That's—” He stopped. Impossible, he'd obviously been about to say.
“It can be done,” she said. “I can think of one way.”
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