Ground Zero

by F. Paul Wilson

  “The more we learn about his condition,” she said, shaking her head, “the more mysterious it becomes. He has a form of aphasia that’s both expressive and receptive.”

  “Sorry?” Patrick said.

  “He can’t understand what’s said to him, or even written out for him, and can only jabber word salad when he wants to speak.”

  Patrick shivered inside. “Sounds like an inner circle of lawyer hell.”

  “Syndromes like it can occur with strokes or sometimes with tumors that affect the Broca speech area of the brain, but an MR scan showed a perfectly normal brain. We shipped him out to NYU Medical Center this morning where they did a PET scan—that’s positron emission tomography. It gives us a functional as opposed to structural view of the brain, and Mr. Palmer’s Broca area has been damaged.”

  “Damaged how?” Romy said.

  Betsy shrugged. “Neurology is not my field but I’ve been asking a lot of questions under the guise of being interested because I found him in the parking lot. The experts’ best guess is a toxin.”

  “Totuus?” Romy said. “You mean I did that to him?”

  “No. Totuus was found in his system, but the NYU neurologists believe he had another compound in his bloodstream that combined with the Totuus to form a neurotoxin specific to the Broca area.”

  “Pretty damn sophisticated,” Zero said.

  Betsy nodded. “Amazingly sophisticated, according to the experts. All just theory, of course, one they have no way of testing at the moment, but it goes a long way toward explaining his syndrome.”

  “And it fits with his behavior last night,” Romy said. “Remember how he broke down and cried when he found out we’d injected him with the Totuus? He must have known he had the other compound floating through his bloodstream, and knew what was coming.”

  Zero said, “A failsafe to prevent anyone from using Palmer’s own Totuus against him.”

  “Is it permanent?” Romy asked.

  Betsy shrugged. “Who can say? No one I’ve spoken to has ever dealt with anything like this.”

  “My guess is it’s temporary,” Zero said. “I can’t see anyone willingly taking something that could cause irreversible brain damage. But temporary can be a long time.”

  “Talk about covering your tracks,” Romy said, shaking her head. “How are we ever going to nail these monsters?”

  Betsy smiled and tightened her scarf around her neck. “That I will leave to you. As for me, as long as I’m in the city I believe I’ll do some Christmas shopping. Good luck. And you know I’m available anytime day or night if you find that pregnant sim.”

  Patrick showed her out, then returned to where Zero and Romy were standing.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “What if it wasn’t just the mixture of the two drugs in his bloodstream? What if saying a vital word was what triggered the—what was it?”

  “Aphasia,” Zero said, then shook his head. “That sounds even more farfetched.”

  “Maybe. But what was he saying at the very instant something tripped the circuit breaker in his brain?”

  “I don’t remember,” Romy said, “but it’s easy enough to find out.”

  She went to a shelf on the wall and retrieved the recorder. She reversed it for a second, then hit PLAY . Romy’s voice burst from the tiny speaker.

  “—op stalling! Tell me now: Who do you work for?” was followed by Parker’s hoarse rasp: “SIRG—” and then strangled noises and cries of alarm.

  Romy switched off the player. She looked pale. “Want to hear it again?”

  “That’s okay. You heard the word: ‘Surge,’ right?”

  Zero shrugged. “I doubt he was talking about a fabric or an electric current. I believe he got out the first syllable of the answer—‘s-u-r’ or ‘s-e-r’ or ‘c-e-r’ or maybe even ‘c-i-r’ for circle—and then the seizure hit and the rest of the word or words were crushed into a guttural mess.”

  “But this was in direct response to ‘Who do you work for?’ so it’s got to have some relevance, don’t you think? I mean, at least it’s a start. Question is, how to find out if it means anything?”

  “Why don’t we simply ask?” Romy said.

  “Oh, sure. I’ll just call up Mercer Sinclair and say, ‘What does the word “surge” mean to you?’ That’ll work.”

  A smile played about Romy’s lips, the first since last night. “Why call when you can ask in person?”

  8

  NEWARK, NJ

  Meerm feel ver bad today. So fat belly. Legs swoll. Hard move. Many move inside, like thing kicking. Kick-kick-kick. And dizz. Ver dizz.

  Oop. Meerm trip, fall against bunk. Make noise. Loud. Must hide. Benny come.

  Climb top closet. So hard climb. More hard squeeze into hole. But Meerm push hard. Push back board and wait in dark. Soon Benny come. Talk self. Always talk self.

  “Who’s up here? Goddamn it, I heard you. I been hearing you all week! Now come out!”

  Benny come closet. Pull door. Meerm not breathe. Hear Benny voice through wall. Shout-shout-shout.

  “Where are you, dammit! You gotta be somewhere! Or maybe I just gone loco! No! I know what I heard, dammit!”

  Benny leave closet. Many loud noise in room—dresser move, bunk move, door slam-slam-slam. Then noise stop.

  “All right so maybe I am hearing things. Next I’ll be seeing things. That’s it. I’m losing it. I been babysitting these monkeys so long I’m going bugfuck nuts! But I coulda sworn…”

  Benny go way but Meerm stay. Too tired. Too scare to move. And hurt. Kick and hurt all time. Poor Meerm. When hurt stop?

  9

  MANHATTAN

  DECEMBER 19

  Romy was late for the meeting. On purpose.

  For the past few years she’d made a point of keeping a few shares of SimGen stock in her 401(k) for the sole purpose of being invited to shareholders’ meetings. She’d been to a number of these and knew how they went—blather and hype from beginning to end. The only interesting part was the finale when Mercer Sinclair took questions from the audience.

  By the time she reached the upper floors of the Waldorf Astoria she already knew from the ecstatic talk in the lobby that SimGen—or “simgee,” as the stockholders liked to call it, phoneticizing its SIMG stock symbol—had come in with earnings of $1.37 per share, beating not only the analysts’ predictions of $1.26, but the whisper number of $1.31 as well.

  She walked into the magnificent four-story Art Deco grand ballroom just in time to fill out an index card with her question for the CEO. Instead of passing her card down to the center aisle, she walked it to the rear of the ballroom and personally handed it to the elderly gent who would be reading them.

  “I’d really like to know the answer to this,” she whispered, laying a hand on his arm and flashing her warmest smile.

  He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses and smiled. “I’ll see what I can do, miss.”

  Then she found an empty seat along the side and waited. Mercer Sinclair, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and impeccable in a charcoal gray silk Armani suit, stood behind a podium on the dais and breezed through the usual run of inane questions from the audience about future earnings projections and new product outlooks—all of which were explained in detail in the annual report—and deftly fielded inquiries about the Reverend Eckert’s assertions that the lost sim was pregnant, laughing them off as a crude and transparent ratings ploy.

  And then the reader-man got to Romy’s question.

  “Mr. Sinclair, a stockholder wants to know, ‘How big a part does surge play in your day-to-day operations?’”

  Romy leaned forward, studying Mercer Sinclair’s face as it floated in the glow from the podium. She saw him stiffen as if touched by a cattle prod, watched his eyes widen, then narrow. Even if she were blind she’d have detected his shock from his stammering reply.

  “Wh-what? I-I don’t understand the question. What does it mean? Could the person who asked it please identify himsel
f and clarify the question?”

  Romy didn’t move.

  “Please,” Sinclair said. “I…I’m quite willing to answer any question, but I have to understand it first. Who asked it? If you’ll be kind enough to clarify…”

  Romy sat and watched him stumble and fumble, peering into the great dark lake of faces before him.

  Finally he fluttered a hand at the reader and said, “Very well…I guess he left…next question.”

  He went on responding but Romy could tell his heart was no longer in it. His answers were terse, his manner distracted, as if he couldn’t wait to be done with this.

  Before the lights came up, Romy wandered back to where the elderly question reader was winding up the Q and A session, and grabbed the discard pile of cards he’d already read. No sense in leaving any unnecessary traces behind.

  She had a bad moment when two men in suits followed her into the elevator down to the lobby, but they spent the ride talking about hockey and got off on the twenty-second floor. She used a side exit and stepped out onto East Forty-ninth. She waited to see if anyone followed, then hurried downhill to sunny Lexington Avenue where Patrick waited. His face was too well known to SimGen stockholders to risk his presence at the meeting, but he hadn’t been able to stay completely away.

  “Well?” he said as he took her arm and began walking her uptown. The cold snap had broken and the day was clear and mild. “Did he react?”

  “Did he ever,” Romy said. “He just about lost it. Looked as if he’d just been stripped naked and hosed with ice water.”

  Patrick grinned and jabbed the air with a fist. “Knew it!”

  She had to hand it to Patrick. He had an acute ear for nuances and he’d heard something in that one syllable from David Palmer. He’d been sure it was significant, and he’d been right.

  He threw an arm around her shoulders. “Damn, I wish I could have been there.” He waved his free hand in the air. “But forget about that. The question now is, how do we capitalize on this?”

  “For one thing,” Romy said, “we know the word itself has meaning. It’s not just part of another word or a phrase.”

  “If I’d known that last night I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. I went through an online dictionary and plugged in every spelling of ‘surge’ I could think of to see if it might be the first syllable of another word. Got nowhere. Didn’t do any better when I tried every possible homonym. ‘Surge’ is not a common syllable.”

  “For which we should be thankful, I guess. Imagine if he’d said ‘con’?”

  “Then we’d be cooked. But ‘surge’ itself doesn’t appear to mean anything.”

  “It might if it’s an acronym.”

  He stopped walking as if he’d hit an invisible wall. His arm dropped from her shoulder and she missed it.

  “An acronym! Of course! And acronyms usually mean government.” He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “Do you know how many Washington agencies, departments, sub departments, and bureaus are designated by acronyms? It’s staggering.”

  She looked away, glancing around to see if anyone was watching them. “What makes you so sure you’ll find it in Washington? You’ve already traced the chain of subsidiaries leading to Manassas Ventures offshore. Who knows how far offshore the chain goes? Maybe it ends in Moscow. Or Beijing.”

  “You wouldn’t be trying to discourage me, would you?”

  “Not at all, but we’re still a long way from home.”

  “At least we’ve got the Internet.”

  “Right.” He glanced around. “I think I’ll head downtown for a little point-and-click session on my office computer. Want to come along?”

  “I’ve got to get back to OPRR, but we can share a cab.”

  He looked into her eyes. “What almost happened the other night at your place?”

  “We almost got dosed with Totuus.”

  “No. I mean, what was in the cards before we opened the door and found the two uninvited guests?”

  Romy held his gaze. She’d grown to like Patrick, even admire him in some ways, but she didn’t love him. She enjoyed his company and, even though she knew injecting sex into their relationship might complicate matters, she’d wanted him that night. But that wasn’t the same as wanting him every night.

  “We’ll never know, will we,” she said, giving him a warm smile. “It was a moment, one that might come again.”

  “Or might not.” His expression soured, leaving him looking needy.

  Well, I have needs too, she thought. Sometimes sex is front and center, but lots of times something else pushes it down the line.

  She knew all too well how she’d let the war on SimGen take over her life, but the time to press the fight was now. Every day of delay meant another day of slavery for the sims. Plenty of time later to play catch up.

  “It’s the Masked Marvel, isn’t it,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Zero. You’ve got a thing for him.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve never even seen his face.”

  “That doesn’t mean you haven’t imagined it, or that you can’t be infatuated with him.”

  She tensed. Patrick had hit a bit too close to home. Yes, she had times when she fantasized about Zero. His inner strength and resolve spoke to her, reaching out through his layers of protective insulation to touch her like no one else she had ever known. And his air of remove that proclaimed him beyond her reach only heightened the attraction.

  Fearing her expression might give something away, she stepped off the curb and waved at an approaching taxi.

  “You’re talking crazy.”

  10

  You’ve got to love modern technology, Luca Portero thought, smiling as he spotted Ellis Sinclair’s silver Lexus SUV half a dozen car lengths ahead on the George Washington Bridge.

  Luca had equipped the Lexus with a transponder that let him know its location no matter where it went. He glanced at the locator screen, glowing in the dark on the passenger seat. Luca’s car was a fixed dot in the center of the green LCD monitor; the Lexus was a blip floating directly above it. A GPS program laid out a map of the city around them, showing both cars crossing the Hudson River toward the city.

  All was well.

  Well? he thought. Who am I kidding?

  He shook his head. He’d almost forgotten what well meant. Nothing was anywhere near well .

  Darryl Lister had become a raw, twitching nerve after he learned of the fateful question at the stockholders’ meeting, a nonstop question box: Who asked it? How could he know?

  Well, Luca had soon found out that it wasn’t a ‘he’ at all. The meeting had been recorded—a matter of routine—and who did he spot while reviewing the video files: Cadman. Romy fucking Cadman.

  Initially Lister had been sure that Palmer had talked under his own Totuus, but then they’d tracked the operative to some Long Island hospital where he was spending his days sitting around babbling gibberish. Obviously the MTW had worked.

  Luca shuddered at the thought of such a fate, even if the effect only lasted for ninety days. Ninety days of hell. If you weren’t loony before, you damn sure might be after.

  But the success of the MTW had sent Luca back to the leak problem.

  He already knew it was Ellis Sinclair. But who was he was leaking to? That was what mattered. Tonight Luca would find out. Once he learned Sinclair’s contact, the rest would fall into place. Then he’d make his move. And take no prisoners.

  He followed Sinclair down the West Side Highway to Fifty-fourth Street, crawled across Midtown—traffic in the city would be murder until after Christmas—to a parking garage across the street from the Warwick Hotel. Shit! He couldn’t very well pull in right behind him. He should have brought backup.

  He left the car double-parked and running while he trotted to the ramp that led down to the parking area. Crouching, he spotted Sinclair accepting a ticket from the attendant. But instead of walking back this way, he started up the ramp o
n the other side.

  Fuck! He was heading out to Fifty-third!

  Luca ducked back into his car. He folded up the locator unit and grabbed the keys. As he slammed and locked the door he heard a voice behind him.

  “Can’t leave that here.”

  He turned to see an NYPD uniform. Black, big face, big gut stretching his blue shirt, big black belt laden with police paraphernalia.

  “Officer, this is an emergency.”

  “I don’t care if your hair is on fire, you can’t leave that car here. There’s a garage right there. Pull it in and—”

  “I don’t have time. I’ll be right back.”

  “You leave that car there, I promise you, it’ll be long gone and far away when you come back.”

  “Fine,” Luca said, moving off. He tossed the keys to the cop. “Take it. Merry Christmas.”

  The cop opened his mouth, then closed it. Luca doubted he’d ever had anyone tell him to go ahead and tow his car.

  Luca dashed straight through the garage—down, across, and up onto Fifty-third. He stopped when he reached the sidewalk, frantically peering east and west through the lights, the shadows, the people hurrying to escape the chill.

  Which way, damn it?

  He glanced longingly at the locator unit, dangling from his hand like a small valise. If only there had been some way to affix a transponder to Sinclair himself.

  Never mind the wishing. What now?

  He couldn’t see Sinclair on Fifty-third. Maybe he’d headed downtown on Sixth Avenue. Luca’s instincts urged him in that direction. He started off at a run but the crowds on the avenue slowed him to a crawl. The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Show was in full swing, jamming the Sixth Avenue sidewalks with parents and their screaming kiddies. But that meant Sinclair couldn’t move fast either.

  Luca bullied and bulled his way through the throng as fast as he could, earning angry looks and comments. Yeah, merry Christmas to you too, fuckers. He kept rising on tiptoes to check the other side of the street—he saw oversized Venus de Milos framing the Credit Lyonnaise Building, and a line of fifteen-foot nutcrackers standing guard against the columns of the Paine-Webber, but no Ellis Sinclair.