The surprise in Lundsdorf’s eyes was all too apparent; Xander’s expression, however, remained unmoved. “Put that away, Paolo,” ordered Lundsdorf as he adjusted himself in the chair.
“Why?” asked Xander, his voice quiet. “Why wait? You killed Tieg; you’re going to kill me. Why not be done with it?”
“I said, put it away.”
“You even have an audience,” he continued. “Doesn’t that excite your—”
“Enough,” said Lundsdorf, a pronounced anger in his tone.
“Paolo knows I’m right, don’t you, Paolo?”
The Italian looked at Lundsdorf. The old man spoke. “Put it down.”
Paolo hesitated. “He’ll never do what you ask of him.”
“Put it down, Paolo! You do not understand. I will not tolerate another Wolfenbüttel.” Lundsdorf looked at Xander. “Stop this foolishness at once.”
“What do you think, Paolo?” prodded Xander. “Do you understand?”
“Let me finish it,” insisted the Italian. “He’s not worth—”
“Has no one heard me!” roared Lundsdorf. “You think I do not know what you are doing, Dr. Jaspers? You think I cannot see through this little ruse? It is a very dangerous gamble you take.”
Xander stared into the Italian’s eyes. “Do it, Paolo. Save us all the time. Pull the trigger.”
The Italian looked again at Lundsdorf, then at Xander. His jaw tensed; a moment later, the sound of a single shot rang out inside the booth. For several seconds, nothing seemed to move. Then, very slowly, Paolo dropped to his knees, his eyes wide in disbelief. He fell, his head smacking against the floor. “He would have done what you asked,” said Lundsdorf, his voice once again controlled, a small pistol in his hands. “I could not permit that.”
Sarah and the others watched as the bizarre scene played out, Xander now moving to the desk, reaching over and taking the gun from the old man.
“But you knew that,” smiled Lundsdorf, his expression almost childlike. “And now, you will kill me. How well you have managed the situation.”
Xander remained strangely calm, the gun held between them. “No,” he answered, “you’re going to tell me how to stop all of this; somehow, I don’t believe it’s as irreversible as you say.”
“Trust me,” answered Lundsdorf, “there is nothing you can do.”
“Really?” Xander aimed the gun at his own chest. “What happens if I use this on myself?” He paused. “Where would that leave you and your destiny?”
The old man’s smile slowly fell from his face. “You would not do that.”
Xander stared into Lundsdorf’s eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
Neither moved for nearly half a minute. Then, very slowly, Lundsdorf leaned forward as if to say something. For an instant, Xander relaxed. The old man grabbed at the gun, pulled it to his own chest, and squeezed the trigger. A momentary tremor in his shoulders, and he slumped back in the chair. Lundsdorf stared up at Xander, a weak smile on his face.
“The question, it would appear,” he whispered, “is, What will you do?” He coughed once. “The generals or the manuscript? Violence or order? Chaos or permanence?” Blood appeared on his lip. “The owl of Minerva has taken wing. And now, there is no choice. There never was one.” Lundsdorf’s head fell to the side, the smile imprinted on his face.
Xander stared helplessly at the lifeless body, the gun still in his own hands. He spun toward the glass, threw the gun into the corner of the booth, and stared at Sarah. “Find me a choice. Get your damn computer expert in here and find me a choice!” He pressed a button on the desk and a door opened under the stairs.
Toby was the first through, eager to take a seat in front of one of the keyboards; within seconds, the sound of rapid-fire typing filled the space as O’Connell entered the booth. Xander had moved to the glass wall, his arms folded at his chest, his eyes fixed on the ground. There was nothing he could do now. The typing stopped and he looked up. O’Connell had moved to Toby’s side, both scanning the various screens for any hint of how to disarm the programming. It was then that Xander saw Sarah at the door. Their eyes met; neither said a word. The typing resumed and she moved toward him.
“They told me you were dead,” he said, his hands clenched even tighter at his chest. “I—”
“A few broken ribs. I’ll survive.”
He nodded just as Toby’s frustration took focus.
“Jesus, what the hell do they have in here?” He continued to stare at the screens as Xander and Sarah turned to him. “The old guy wasn’t lying. There’s no way to reverse what they’ve sent out. If I try to recall any of these command codes, the system’ll lock me out. The whole thing’ll shut down, and the computers will take over the tracking. I can’t even get inside the compiler to try to reroute it in binary.”
“So there’s nothing you can do?” asked Sarah, now at the desk.
“No.” He started to gnaw at his thumbnail. “It’s just that we might be here awhile.”
“What about names?” asked O’Connell. “There has to be a list of who’s out there. We get that, we can stop them before they get their relays.”
“Been there, done that,” answered Toby. “I almost got frozen out of the terminal. These guys weren’t fooling around. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
The booth became very quiet. “What about Pritchard?” The three at the desk looked up. It was Xander who spoke.
“Excuse me?” said Toby, unwilling to hide his irritation.
“Didn’t you say it looked like a … Pritchard matrix?” Xander continued, ignoring the computer expert. “Wouldn’t that give you some idea—”
“Pritchard.” O’Connell nodded. “Nice point, Professor. He’d have put something inside, wouldn’t he?”
“Hello.” Toby was beyond frustration. “What are you talking about?”
O’Connell ignored him and turned to Sarah. “Well?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes began to wander. “It could be any number of—”
“Would Stein know?”
Again, all three turned to Jaspers. O’Connell spoke. “Bob Stein?”
“He’s here. Could he help?”
O’Connell continued to stare at Jaspers. The Irishman nodded slowly. “If it’s computers and Arthur—”
Two minutes later, a slightly disoriented Stein sat in the chair next to Toby, Sarah and O’Connell speaking at him in quick bursts.
“Override relays,” Bob said softly. Both stopped and stared at him. No one answered. “Remember?” Sarah shook her head. “The delay commands in Amman?” He paused. “Arthur had a thing for override relays.”
Sarah’s eyes slowly went wide. “The delays came from Pritchard?”
“Yes.” Stein nodded.
The confirmation only seemed to add to her confusion. “Wait a second. So that would mean—”
“Yes,” he answered. “It’s why you couldn’t have saved her.” Stein was looking directly at Sarah. “I went back and checked. Pritchard created the delay because he needed the girl as bait. The longer he kept her as a target, the easier it would be for you to get at Safad. You never had a chance to save her. He gave you no choice.” Bob let the words settle, then turned to O’Connell. “Arthur had a thing for timing. He had to have complete control over each phase of an operation. That’s what he would have put into the system—the one thing that would circumvent the lockouts.”
“Would someone mind explaining to me what the hell you’re talking about?” Toby piped in. “Or does the computer guy not need to be in on this?”
“A delay command,” answered Stein. “It won’t allow you to establish new directives, but it will let you delay the ones that have been transmitted—indefinitely.”
“A delay command?” repeated Toby. “Meaning …”
“Arthur liked the timing to be perfect,” he answered. “If anything was off cue, he’d send out a delay until he could bring everything into line. He’d have buried some sort of
delay command deep in the programming.”
“So you’d just sit there,” asked Toby, turning to Sarah, “and wait for the next series of commands after the delay? What if nothing came?”
“Then nothing came,” she answered, more to herself, eyes still distant, the memory growing clearer.
“You’d wait for contact,” added Stein, “and, if and when it did come, it was always prompted by a different set of codes.”
“So we’re talking a delay pattern with altered sequencing.” Toby was back in his element.
Again he began to type, fingers and eyes working at breakneck speed as myriad screens appeared and disappeared, all filled with strange symbols.
For the first time in the last minute, Sarah looked up. She gazed at Xander. Neither said a word.
After a very long three minutes, Toby stopped and sat back.
“Nice pop.” He nodded at the screen. “You’re looking at your back door. A simple delay switch. Two problems, though. At this point, I can’t be sure that the command to delay would reach each team.”
“Meaning what?” It was O’Connell who spoke.
“Meaning you might not be able to stop the first few relays.”
“How many?” asked Sarah, once again fully focused.
“I don’t know.”
“Guess,” prodded O’Connell.
“Anything that would take place, say, within the next six hours.”
“That’s at most three more events,” he said. “I can live with that. And the second problem?”
“According to this, I send out the delay and everything gets erased.”
“Correct,” Bob agreed. “That was why the codes were different in Amman.”
“Where he’d be forced to reinitialize the system in order to send out the new relays.” Toby smiled, wrapped up in the banter. “An op reinterface: new relays, new codes.”
“The software lesson aside,” asked O’Connell, “what do you mean, ‘erased’?”
“I mean every last byte of info gets flushed, wiped clean. Zippo.”
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” nodded Stein.
“It means,” added Toby, “whoever set this thing up didn’t want anyone to send out the delay without a pretty good reason. It also means that it was designed so that if anybody were to find the back door—like us—they don’t get to look in the cupboard once they’ve broken in.”
“We lose everything?” asked Sarah.
“Am I not being clear here?” answered Toby. “Nada. Nothing. Not even a cursor. You won’t need any explosives because there won’t be anything worth blowing up.” No one spoke. “So what’s it going to be, folks? Delay or not?”
For several moments, no one said a word.
“There are going to be a lot of people sitting around waiting to hear from Eisenreich,” said Sarah, “and we won’t know who they are.” She looked at O’Connell. “We also won’t know how many schools are out there training a whole new generation of disciples.”
“And the other alternatives?” broke in Xander. “If we don’t send it out, we’ll know exactly who they are—they’ll be the ones turning this country upside down during the next eight days.”
“So we just let them disappear into the woodwork?” asked O’Connell.
“They’re already out there,” Xander explained. “Waiting. So we’ll tell them to wait a bit longer. Let’s not forget how Eisenreich set it up, what the manuscript stipulates: role playing. With Lundsdorf dead, where’s the source? Who’ll send out the new codes? Votapek? Sedgewick? I’m sure those are exactly the kinds of loose ends one of your national security agencies can eliminate.” Xander looked at O’Connell, then at Sarah. “The best we can do is let the boys and girls of Eisenreich wait for an order that never comes.”
“And when they grow up?” she asked.
“Without the manuscript, without someone spoon-feeding them ‘the word according to Eisenreich,’ they won’t do anything. They need to be told what to do, and there won’t be anybody around to do that.”
O’Connell took in a long breath. “You’re putting a lot of faith in a four-hundred-year-old theory, Professor.”
“No. I’m putting my faith in the men who followed that theory to the letter. They wanted to create disciples, not leaders. We just have to hope they were successful.” He turned to Toby. “Send the delay. Tell them … to remain patient.”
Toby looked at O’Connell, who looked at Sarah. She nodded. A moment later, every screen in the lab went blank.
Toby had been right, almost to the minute. For six hours, the nation lived through a series of near tragedies. First, the attempted assassination of Lung Tse Pao, senior member of the Chinese trade delegation. Luckily, the gunmen had been discovered only minutes before her televised speech, both killed, no names released. Questions, however, remained. Where had security been? Was this somehow connected to the ongoing incidents in Washington? New Orleans? The ambassador? Two hours later, computer malfunctions at LAX only fueled speculation. There, too, last-minute heroics prevented certain disaster; even so, a sense of disbelief, perhaps hints of panic, began to flood radio and television news programs. Were the police and other agencies helpless? Had the United States finally fallen prey to worldwide terrorism? Still other, equally jarring stories continued to trickle in—the worst, the near meltdown at Southwestern Bell—each uncovered in time to prevent catastrophe, yet each only adding to the already-high levels of anxiety. So many threats in so short a time. Were things spinning out of control?
News of real tragedy, however, came just as the evening news programs were airing. The body of Vice President Pembroke had been discovered in his office, the cause of death heart failure. In an address to the nation, President Wainwright spoke of the great sadness his friend’s sudden death had brought to the entire country. A man in perfect health only a few months before, the forty-five-year-old Pembroke had succumbed to an unknown virus evidently contracted during a recent trip to Malaysia. Doctors at the Hopkins Center for Viral Disease could offer little more by way of explanation.
The president then turned to the more disturbing matters of the day. He spoke with the easy familiarity that had long ago endeared him to his public.
“Over the last week, we have witnessed an unspeakable series of attacks, each meant to shake our spirit. And yet, at each turn, we have triumphed. At each turn, we have thwarted those who would seek to lay siege to our peace of mind, to a way of life we have come to cherish. And though—I have no doubt—there were moments of fear, perhaps panic, not once did we give in to those threats. No. We saw them for what they were—a banner by which to make clear to a watching world the resilience and courage of the American people. These attacks were mad, outlandish, but we must grant them no more than their due, and we must recognize how they most certainly pale when compared to the real loss of this day—the death of Walter Pembroke.
“We grieve at the tragedy, we accept its truth, and yet, we also learn from it. The death of the vice president must help us to put into perspective the bizarre events of the last week. They did not shake us. They did not undermine our trust. The country is strong, safe—safe to mourn the one real tragedy of the day. We must now look to ourselves and put our apprehensions to rest. It is, I know, what Walter Pembroke would have wanted.”
By week’s end, few questioned the president’s sage advice.
Sadly, tragedy did strike again two days later when Tieg Telecom announced the death of their inspiration, their shining light, Jonas Tieg. He, too, had fallen prey to heart failure, and though his adoring public mourned his loss—and Amy Chandler his ratings—they were all far too caught up in the aftermath of recent events to take more than passing notice. There were some questions about the strangely prophetic program aired on the night before his death, the tape on which Tieg seemed to anticipate several of the near tragedies that had occurred the following day. Amid all the confusion, however, discussion of the show quickly faded. Articles were written
, a retrospective on his life aired, but within a few weeks, a new, rising star appeared on another network—more abusive, more abrasive. And the Tieg phenomenon slipped easily into a forgotten past.
That same week, news of Laurence Sedgewick’s mysterious disappearance made it to the back pages of several national papers. His bank accounts untouched, files intact at his offices in New Orleans, it looked as though he had once again been caught with his hand in the till.
Not quite the same attention was given to the death of a rather esteemed, if obscure, political theorist, whose passing managed only a few lines in the New York Times. Herman Lundsdorf had died in his sleep, so they reported, at the age of eighty-six. A solitary man, his books remained his only legacy.
Few of the articles, however, elicited more than a moment’s perusal from the residents of a small farm in Maryland. They were too busy with other things. The owner, an Irishman somewhat famous among the locals for his reclusiveness, had begun to show real signs of life, chatting up customers at the town market, and even inviting one or two out to the house. Most of the gentry attributed the sudden change in O’Connell to the young woman who seemed to be always at his side. She, too, was flowering, more and more at ease with each passing week. Haiden Dalgliesh, the groundskeeper at the farm, had even started up a pool—how soon before the Irishman would make an honest woman of young Alison. Not usually a betting man, Gaelin had put a fiver on a date in late September.
Epilogue
PATCHES OF SNOW peppered the wide expanse of manicured grass. The augurs had promised it would be the last of the season; the clear sky seemed to be proving them right.
Xander and Sarah sat on a bench a good distance from the grave, neither much interested in the inscription, neither absolutely sure why they had made the trip. He had phoned and asked her to come, the first time they had spoken in several weeks. The time apart had been particularly hard on him, the strange good-bye, the sudden aimlessness, but he had known it was for the best. She had said she needed to spend time on her own, start again, find her way back. He should try to do the same. The week on Hydra, however, had done little to help. Only memories of Fiona. Still, it had been time away.
The Overseer Page 45