Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  “Prisoners have the legal right to volunteer for risky scientific experiments,” Dumata said doggedly. “If they insist on doing so more than five times, the ACLU can complain to them about it.” He gestured toward the line of prisoners. “Go ahead—ask him if we twisted his arm.”

  Frowning, Sommer turned back to the line of prisoners. “Willie?”

  “I ’preciate what you’re tryin’ to say, Dr. Sommer,” Willie said. “But, really, I want t’ do this. I gotta”—he shrugged—“lotta stuff to make up for ’fore I die. I mean, die for real.”

  Sommer stared at him. He’d seen Willie when he first came to Soulminder. Remembered what he’d been like. “What sort of stuff is that, Willie?” he asked.

  Willie grinned, self-consciously. “Come on, Dr. Sommer—you know what I did. Shot down those four people for nothin’.” The smile disappeared. “I wish I could do somethin’ for ’em. Somethin’ t’ make up for it. But I can’t. So”—he gestured with his manacled hands—“I come here.”

  Sommer looked at Dumata, then back at Willie. “You’ve certainly changed, Willie,” was all he could think of to say.

  The dark eyes looked back at him steadily. “You don’t look at that Light in there without it makin’ some changes in how you see things.”

  A gentle chill ran up Sommer’s back. He remembered the Light, too. “No,” he agreed soberly. “You don’t.”

  “Dr. Sommer?” the lab’s receptionist called. “Security says your limo is here.”

  Sommer took a deep breath. “All right. But I’ll be having a talk with Dr. Sands about this, Tom.” He turned to Willie. “Good-bye, Willie. And … thanks.”

  Turning, he hurried out of the lab wing and down the hall toward the security entrance. As Sands had warned, the Congressmen wouldn’t be pleased if he were late, and with the rain outside the trip was likely to take longer than usual.

  He rather hoped it would. He had a lot to think about.

  The hearing went about the way Sommer had expected it to: powder-puff questions from most of the committee, hardball ones from Congressman Barnswell. No big surprises, no real substance, and most of it territory that they’d already gone over before.

  Until the very end.

  “Now, there’s just one more thing, Dr. Sommer,” Barnswell said, his almost lazy tone contrasting sharply with the glint in his eye. “You’ve stated several times before in front of this committee that your people have got safeguards all over your fancy Soulminder equipment—in fact, I believe you once said that there was no way at all that anyone could abuse or manipulate Soulminder for illegal purposes. You remember saying all that?”

  A quiet alarm bell went off in the back of Sommer’s mind. “Of course, no security system’s completely airtight, Congressman,” he said cautiously. “On the other hand, I think we can claim to have arguably the best arrangement anywhere in the country.”

  “Uh-huh,” Barnswell grunted, his voice abruptly turning icy. “Then maybe you’ll tell me, Dr. Sommer, how it is that less than twelve hours ago a man wanted by the FBI—wanted very badly, I might add—managed to die, get locked up in your Soulminder traps, and get put back into his body without your fancy security system blowing the whistle on him.

  “You want to tell me how that could happen, Dr. Sommer?”

  He reached the office, still seething, to find that Sands had a visitor.

  “Adrian—good, you’re back,” she said, relief evident in her voice. “This is Special Agent Peter Royce from the FBI.”

  Sommer nodded briefly to Royce. “I don’t suppose there are any prizes for guessing why you’re here.”

  “Not really.” Royce looked at least as annoyed as Sommer felt. “I gather you’ve heard all about Cavanaugh’s little sleight-of-hand trick last night?”

  “I had the high points thrown in my face, yes,” Sommer told him sourly. “None of the details. I wonder how the hell Barnswell found out. Operational details like that are supposed to be strictly confidential.”

  “In this case, it’s probably just as well someone leaked it,” Royce pointed out. “You know anything about Mario Cavanaugh?”

  “Barnswell said he was the head of one of the East Coast’s biggest independent mobs. Nothing more.”

  “Semi-retired head,” Royce corrected him. “Eighty-four years old, in poor health. And, at the moment, in deep hiding.”

  “From you or his own people?”

  “Possibly both. We’ve finally gotten something solid we can nail him to the wall with, but given the choice we’d rather peel the skin off his organization. He knows it, they know it; hence, the vanishing act.”

  “So how does Soulminder figure in?”

  “Cavanaugh was one of the first people to sign up when we got the office going,” Sands interjected. “When the indictments came through our flags picked up on his name, and the FBI directed us to set up a red light in the event the file was ever accessed.”

  “So why didn’t it trigger?”

  “For the simple reason,” Royce said heavily, “that Cavanaugh didn’t get reborn here. He did it out in Seattle.”

  Sommer stared at him. “In Seattle?” He looked at Sands. “He had two traces on file?”

  “You got it,” Sands sighed. “The Seattle one under a false ID. Somehow, the background profile check missed that.”

  Sommer shook his head, a shiver running up his back. “That was one hell of a risk for him to take,” he murmured.

  “What, that you wouldn’t spot the duplicate?” Royce asked, frowning.

  “That having two functioning traps trying to grab him at the same time wouldn’t do something terrible to his soul.”

  Royce’s lip twitched. “I never thought of that,” he admitted. “I assumed that the one nearest him would automatically do the grabbing.”

  “Obviously, it did,” Sommer said. “But we’ve never done that experiment ourselves with either of the last two generations of trap design. He could have wound up with his soul ripped in two.”

  Royce hissed between his teeth. “That sounds like Cavanaugh. He always was the type to take big gambles.”

  With an effort, Sommer shook the image of a bisected soul from his mind. “So what can we do?”

  Royce nodded at the computer terminal behind Sands. “It occurred to us that if Cavanaugh managed to get himself on file in two places, there’s no particular reason he can’t be on file in every one of your offices. Might be locking the door after the car’s been stolen, but then, it might not.”

  Sommer looked at Sands. “I hope you’re doing more than just checking names.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re doing it right this time,” she said grimly. “We’re comparing Cavanaugh’s Mullner trace with every single one we’ve got on file.”

  Sommer felt his eyes goggle. “You and whose nested supercomputer?”

  “The NSA’s,” she said, sounding distinctly unhappy about it. “They generously lent us some of their spare capacity.”

  Sommer swallowed. “I see.” The thought of a hundred thousand confidential soul-traces being sifted through a government computer …

  On the other hand, Sands was far more paranoid about the possibility of government encroachment than he was. The fact that she was going along with this meant either she’d decided there simply wasn’t enough worthwhile data to be gleaned from the traces—which was certainly true—or else she’d already argued the point with Royce and lost. Either way, probably a good topic to steer clear of. “We have anyone talking with the Seattle office directly?” he asked Sands instead.

  “Everly’s been burning up the line to them for the past half hour. He’s ready to go out there in person if it seems useful.”

  “Good. Well, then—”

  The phone beside Sands trilled. Snorting under her breath, she snatched up the handset. “This better be impor
tant,” she warned.

  And as Sommer watched, the lines around her eyes tightened. “Damn,” she breathed.

  “What?” Royce demanded.

  She shook her head briefly, shifting the phone to speaker. “How long since the trap was triggered?” she asked.

  “Almost twelve hours,” the monitor’s voice came from the speaker. Sommer could hear a slight tremor beneath the words. “His name’s Jonathan Pauley, twenty-six years old, from Bethesda. I’ve just finished checking with all the area hospitals and morgues—nothing.”

  “What is it?” Royce murmured.

  “One of our clients has triggered a trap,” Sommer told him grimly, “except we don’t know where his body is.”

  Royce swore gently under his breath. “And it happened twelve hours ago?”

  “It’s not necessarily that bad,” Sands told him. “A lot of hospitals keep terminal patients on life-support and neuropreservatives even if they’re not wearing Soulminder bracelets. Just in case. Have you alerted security, Hammond?”

  “Yes, Doctor. They’ve got some people doing a backtrack on him.”

  “All right. Keep us informed.”

  Sands keyed off the phone, and Sommer could see her brace herself as she looked up at Royce again. “There’s a good chance they’ll find him,” she said. “This has happened before.”

  “Ever lost one?” Royce asked bluntly. “Accident, or suicide?”

  Sands didn’t flinch. “Not because we lost the body. There’ve been a few accidents where there was too much damage for the doctors to do anything, but that doesn’t really count.”

  “At least, we weren’t blamed,” Sommer murmured.

  “Which is as it should be,” Sands said. “We’ve had a few close calls—accidents in out-of-the-way places. Luckily, we were able to get to all of them in time. As to suicides, right now the service is expensive enough that potential suicides don’t typically sign up.”

  “I’m sure we’ll lose someone eventually,” Sommer said. “The rate we’re growing, it’s pretty much inevitable.”

  “Well, you’d better hope it’s not today,” Royce said. “All you need is something like that on top of the Cavanaugh fiasco.”

  Sands drew herself up in her chair. “Pardon me, Special Agent Royce, but I hardly think we can claim full credit for the Cavanaugh mess. We set up our computer red light precisely the way your people told us to.”

  “The media may not notice the distinction,” Royce pointed out.

  “You’re going to release it?” Sommer asked him. “I’d think it would be to your advantage to let Cavanaugh think he’s still flying under everyone’s radar.”

  “I agree,” Royce said with a grunt. “But that decision’s pretty well out of both our courts. Even granted that Congressman Barnswell has excellent information sources, if he knows, the blogs can’t be far behind. Still”—he added, levering himself out of his chair—“the media does have a history of being gentle on you people. You’ve got my number, Dr. Sands—keep me informed.”

  He left, and for a moment Sommer and Sands just looked at each other. “They won’t be nearly so gentle,” Sommer said at last, “if it turns out we’ve lost a client.”

  “No,” Sands agreed soberly. “They won’t.”

  There was nothing about it on the midday news, not even a hint in the afternoon web updates, and by the time six o’clock rolled around Cavanaugh was starting to get more than a little edgy. Brilliant and gutsy though his plan might have been, it was pushing things way too far to think it had been so surreptitious as to sail totally past Soulminder’s notice.

  Unfortunately, the only other options were either that he’d become so important that the government had slapped a secrecy lid on the whole thing, or else that he’d become so unimportant that they didn’t even care anymore what he did. Neither alternative was especially pleasing.

  But then came the evening news … and life was back on a reasonable footing again.

  It was a short report, hardly more than a minute long, but in that brief time they managed to hit the high points. The notorious criminal Mario Cavanaugh had managed to escape death, thanks to Soulminder, and then disappear before anyone thought to notify the authorities. The FBI wouldn’t speculate as to his whereabouts, but there were suggestions that an old man who had gone through Soulminder once was highly likely to do so again, and the next time they would be waiting.

  The news turned to the start of the baseball season, and Cavanaugh clicked off the set with a grunt of satisfaction. He’d pulled it off, and the Feds were both furious and helpless. All in all, better than he’d dared to hope.

  And yet …

  Sipping at his beer, Cavanaugh frowned unseeingly at the blank TV screen. For just a minute, there, the satisfaction had been tinged with something else. Something he hadn’t felt in over fifty years. Something that had felt disturbingly like guilt.

  He scowled. It was the Light, he told himself firmly. The damn Light he’d seen while he was stuck in Soulminder. That was all it was, just some crazy hangover from that crazy ride. A few days, and it would be gone.

  It was nearly ten o’clock, and Sommer had just decided to give up for the night, when the long-awaited knock came on the door. “Come in,” he called, pushing the lock release.

  It was Everly. “Dr. Sommer,” he nodded in greeting, walking into the office with his usual easy grace. “The telltale board said you were still here, and I thought you might want to hear this.”

  “You’ve got some news about Jonathan Pauley?” Sommer asked hopefully.

  Everly’s lip twisted. “News, yes. Good news, no. We still haven’t had any luck locating his body. And I’d say chances are good we never will.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are still some leads we have to run down,” Everly said. “But at the moment it looks like Pauley disappeared nearly three days before he showed up in Soulminder.”

  Sommer felt his stomach tighten. “What do you mean? Disappeared how?”

  “All we know is that he didn’t come into his office on Friday and that they tried all day to get hold of him. His mail for Friday, Saturday, and Monday hadn’t been picked up, and his neighbors haven’t seen him since Thursday night. No Internet use, either. Could be he decided to go on a quick vacation and got in trouble.”

  “Or maybe he was kidnapped?” Sommer asked.

  “There’s been no ransom note. Besides, he wasn’t exactly the classic kidnap profile.” He pulled out a well-worn notebook, found the right page. “He’d been a realtor for the past five years—good one, too; got his picture in the paper about a month ago for racking up the highest sales numbers in the D.C. area. Not exactly rolling in money, though. He was a good solid Catholic—went to Mass at least twice a week, his priest told us, and was involved with a lot of their other activities.”

  “Hardly the type to be involved in shady activities,” Sommer commented.

  “Not even close,” Everly agreed. “Unmarried, parents living comfortably but without extra cash on hand; ditto for one brother and two sisters. And that’s about it for now.” He offered Sommer the notebook.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about him in the past tense,” Sommer growled, glancing over the notes. In his mind’s eye he saw Pauley’s battered body lying off the road in a ravine somewhere … “We have got to get that satellite system going,” he muttered. “Running the heartbeat screamer through the cell network still loses us too much territory.”

  “Oh, that’s the other thing,” Everly said with a grimace. “His officemates said he usually didn’t bother to wear his bracelet. Thought it looked too elite and upper-class-snobby. The only reason he was on Soulminder at all was that his company bought slots for all their top salespeople. Sort of a bonus.”

  Sommer tossed the notebook back onto the desk. “That probably finishes it, then
.”

  Everly nodded. “Yeah. Well … we’ll check his finances and all that—see if he might have had some reason to pick up and run. But I’m not expecting anything to turn up. He sounds like the original model citizen.” He slid the notebook back into his pocket. “A shame we can’t talk to people while they’re in the traps. We could ask him where his body is.”

  “Tom Dumata’s been working on that since about ten minutes after he joined us,” Sommer said. “So far he hasn’t made even a dent in it.” Thoughts of Dumata sparked a memory of the morning— “Incidentally, Frank, as long as I’ve got you here … have you noticed any changes in the death-row prisoners we’ve been using for our distance and timeline experiments?”

  Everly’s forehead creased slightly. “Afraid you’ll have to lead the witness, Doctor.”

  Sommer pursed his lips. “I talked to one of them this morning—Willie Kern—and I was struck by how much calmer and more polite he was than the first time he came through here. It started me wondering if the experience of going through Soulminder might have some overall rehabilitating effect.”

  “Um,” Everly grunted. “Cute idea. You’re talking about the tunnel-and-Light routine, I suppose?”

  Sommer shrugged, not entirely comfortably. “It’s not an experience you can just toss off.”

  “So I hear.” Everly pursed his lips. “I can’t say I’ve noticed any massive repentance going on, but then I don’t see as much of them as the line guards and test people do. I’ll have someone ask around, see if anyone else has noticed it.”

  “When you get around to it,” Sommer told him. “It’s not exactly top priority at the moment.”

  “Yeah.” Everly hesitated. “What are you going to do about Mr. Pauley?”

  Sommer sighed, their earlier conversation with Special Agent Royce flashing back to mind. Inevitable … “We’ll hold him as long as there’s even a chance of finding his body in usable state. If we don’t, we’ll have no choice but to release him.”

  “What about the media? You going to try and keep it quiet?”