Circuit Of Heaven (42 page)

As he watched Justine sleeping, he never wanted to see that other Nemo again, the one who’d broken her heart. He got out of bed and put on his clothes, still watching her. He ordered coffee from the room service pad, and sat on the side of the bed, waiting for the coffee smell to wake her. He had to be going soon.

She rolled over and stretched. “Mmm. You made coffee,” she murmured. “Aren’t you sweet.” Her eyes fluttered open. “I had another dream.”

“Who were you this time?”

“Oh, I was me. I dreamed we made mad, passionate love all night long.”

He laughed. “That wasn’t a dream.”

“Yes, it was.” She took him by the shirt and brought his mouth to hers, kissing him. She tugged at his shirt. “Take this off. You don’t need it this morning.”

He took her hands. “I have a few good-byes—before I come in. I mentioned it last night.” He tried to give her a cheerful smile.

She touched his mouth with her fingertips. “I’m sorry, Nemo. I forgot. I just wasn’t thinking. It must be terrible for you to leave your friends.”

“It won’t be so bad. They’ll visit. I think Jonathan halfway wants me to come in.”

She gave him a quick kiss. “Well, get going then, so you can hurry home to me.”

“I like the sound of that. I’ll be home by eleven at the latest. I’ll meet you right here.” He patted the bed beside her. “Shirtless.”

NEMO’S
MIND
WAS
A
MILLION
MILES
AWAY
AS HE
TOOK
THE
Metro to Pentagon Station and stepped into a
VIM
, thinking about Justine and their new life together. He’d taken a few steps out of his coffin before he realized he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He was standing in a clearing in front of a rustic cabin, a stream running alongside it, the blue shadows of mountains in the distance.

An old man sat on the deck overlooking the stream. Nemo walked down to him and took the seat beside him. “Mr. Rogers,” Nemo said. “We meet at last.”

The old man smiled. “Yes, I wish we had more time. I’d rather you didn’t call me
Mr. Rogers
. If you were as old as I am, you’d know why. Call me Newman, or Grandpa.”

“I think I’ll go with Newman.”

“Wise choice. The other has to be earned, doesn’t it? Like Daddy. I met Wade Donley once, crossed his path, quite on purpose. He had his little girl with him, your mother. She was no taller than this cane, clinging to her daddy’s leg as we talked.” He paused, remembering. Nemo had seen photographs like that. “I liked him a great deal. He was a good man. We talked about medical imaging techniques, I think. If he knew it was me that’d fathered the girl beside him, he didn’t let it show. But he certainly knew she wasn’t really his daughter and he never let that show either.

“Elizabeth adored her father, and rightly so. What good would it have done anyone for me to announce I was her father? By the time you were born, I was in here. I sent Lawrence to look after you.”

“Did he know that?”

“Of course. I’m afraid I have to ask the Constructs to keep entirely too many secrets.”

“You communicate with all of them, don’t you? They’re your spies.”

The old man regarded him with his wrinkled eyes, nodding slightly. “I guess you could put it that way. That certainly wasn’t my intention. They’ve become my friends, shared their world with me. They’ve kept me sane, I think. Completely devoted to me for reasons I can’t begin to understand. They’ve taught me a great deal about love and humility, though I’ve often wondered why they don’t hate me for creating them. It’s not an easy life.”

Nemo remembered history class—where he’d learned everything he knew about his grandfather. “But you didn’t create them. You were opposed to the whole idea from the beginning.”

He smiled. “That’s true. But I created them, just the same.” He waved his cane a few inches off the deck. “Oh, I didn’t finish the work, but what was left undone, a fairly talented graduate student could’ve completed. Einstein was opposed to the atom bomb, too, but without him, there wouldn’t have been one. That must’ve weighed on him from time to time. But unlike the atomic bomb, the Constructs have made the world a better place.”

“Lawrence has been awfully good to me,” Nemo said, staring at the rushing water, thinking about their years together. He looked up the stream to the woods beyond, the mountains at the horizon. “Where are we?”

“Foothills of the Blue Ridge. In my youth I preferred the Rockies. Now that I’m older I’ve come to appreciate older mountains. This is my retreat. I haven’t spent near enough time here lately.”

“How did you bring me here so fast?”

“As you’ve observed many times, the usual limits needn’t apply in here. Place means nothing. I had to write it in. Some people go crazy without it. Time, on the other hand, is a different matter, so I must get to the point. I’ve brought you here to ask you a favor. You have an appointment with Gabriel at ten o’clock. I want you to keep it. I’m rather counting on it, actually.”

Nemo felt a tingling at the base of his scalp. “You
want
me to convey this virus into the Bin?”

“Exactly.”

Nemo was still basking in the relief he’d felt deciding he wasn’t going to do it. The whole thing seemed like temporary insanity to him now. “I can’t do it. It’s just not right. Why would you, of all people, want to cut off the Bin?”

The old man sighed heavily. “Because it’s time. You were right, you know. Gabriel
will
just find someone else. Or someone else as clever as Gabriel will find a pawn of his own. But when that happens, I won’t know exactly when, and it won’t be a pawn I can trust.” His cane swept the horizon. “As we speak, there are thirty-four sects, cults, religions, and political organizations whose raison d‘être is to destroy the Bin and everyone in it. I’m a clever fellow, Nemo, but I don’t trust the odds. My most optimistic simulation says we’ve got seven years. Or it could be seven days. The only way to stop them is to convince them they’ve accomplished their glorious mission.”

Nemo remembered Gabriel atop the pyramid, spewing his righteous venom. “Maybe the two worlds should be severed.”

“Severed—I quite agree. But it’s not just a matter of cutting the connection. The virus you’re being asked to bring in isn’t designed just to cut off the Bin, but to wipe it clean. Twelve billion lives in an instant. Gabriel has told you what you wanted to hear, and if things had gone according to his plan, you would’ve had no way of knowing that you’d been lied to.”

Nemo felt as if he were falling as he imagined the horror of what he had almost done. “You’re sure of this?”

“Of course I’m sure. I fed them the virus, most of it anyway. They were getting
very
close on their own. They’re good, Nemo. Gabriel’s a religious fanatic, but he’s also brilliant. It had to be the real thing. He’d spot a fake. But what he doesn’t know is that I’ve written a sister program to disarm the virus, and sever the Bin, at the precise moment you enter. The door will be closed, to be sure. That’s absolutely essential, so that we may deceive them. But everyone inside won’t be murdered in the process.”

Nemo’s mind was racing, trying to take all this in. But there was one thing that still made no sense to him. “How did they come to pick me as their messenger boy? I’m not even a Christian.”

“I’m afraid that’s my doing. At my request, Winston was deliberately careless arranging for the plot to lure you into the Bin. There was even an exchange of memos to the effect that you might pose a security risk, if the plan backfired. Gabriel hacked your file and thought he could make sure it did. Peter’s visions were just a gift from God. Gabriel puts a great deal of stock in them.”

Nemo could hardly believe what he was hearing. “So you handed them your own grandson, nudged me over the edge with Justine, thinking I’d charge in with the virus. It almost worked. But you hadn’t bargained on her downloading herself, had you?”

“You’ve both surprised me, I’m proud to say.”

“You had Lawrence introduce me to Elaine so that I’d stop Justine and come inside.”

“Yes, I did. You didn’t
want
to know what Justine was about to do?”

“Of course I did.”

“Then what, exactly, are you accusing me of?”

“Of arranging this whole business, of using us, so that I would carry in this virus. Your own grandson—and a woman you supposedly loved.”

He rested his chin on his cane, watching the stream cascade over the rocks. “Do you have any idea how many conflicting desires there are in the world at any given moment? Sometimes I have to kill twenty or thirty birds with a single stone, metaphorically of course. I haven’t killed anyone yet. I don’t have the luxury of pure, simple motives. Sometimes I wonder whether I used all this intrigue as an excuse to resurrect Angelina, or whether it’s the other way around, and I’ve used her. I trust God knows. My motives are mixed, Nemo, but they’re not evil, and you do have a choice, your own motives to consider.

“Before you give me your answer, I have to warn you that you could be in danger. I have to put the sister program into place before you come in. If they suspect what I’m doing, they’ll want to keep you out—by any means necessary. Without access to the Bin, they can’t destroy it.”

“And the End of Days never comes.”

Newman snorted his contempt. “As if God would wait on them to tell Him what to do!”

“You believe in God?”

“Oh yes, Nemo, most definitely. Will you do it?”

“I need to think about it.”

“You have approximately five minutes. You still have to catch a train to Richmond. I can’t zap you around in the real world.”

Nemo didn’t know why he should trust this man. He’d hated him all his life without ever knowing him. What he was saying made perfect sense. Sooner or later, the Gabriels of the world would have their way, if something wasn’t done to stop them. But the sense of it wasn’t enough. Nemo’d have to trust him as irrationally as he’d hated him before. “I have to tell Justine. She’s expecting me by eleven.”

Newman Rogers smiled, the proud grandfather. “I’ll tell Justine you’ll be coming in at noon. And don’t be late, by the way. If they’re onto us, they’ll take countermeasures to disable the sister program. But it will take them some time. Don’t give it to them.”

“So if I’m twenty minutes late, I could end up murdering everyone in the Bin just by uploading myself?”

“I’d say it’d be more like eighteen minutes, maybe nineteen. I must tell you, Nemo, that, according to my simulations, our chances for success are not very good. It’s not a question of
if
something goes wrong. It almost certainly will. But Lawrence tells me you’re quite resourceful.”

“He taught me everything I know.”

HOLLYWOOD
CEMETERY
LOOKED
A
LOT
DIFFERENT
in the daylight. The morning sun was burning off last night’s rain, and a mist hung over everything. The birds were singing in the trees, pecking on the graves for worms. The rain had strewn the walkways with flower petals.

Nemo strolled past the iron dog, obviously harmless in the light of day. He turned slowly around in a circle, looking for any sign of human life. He hadn’t seen a soul since he got on the train in D.C. but the whole time he had the feeling he was being watched.

He walked up to Monroe’s black iron monument. It looked like an ornate cage. There was still no one around. He tried the gate, and it came open. At the foot of the sarcophagus, a grass-covered trapdoor stood open, and narrow steps led into the earth. He looked down the stairs and saw a light some thirty feet down. He couldn’t tell how far the steps continued beyond that.

He passed three lights on the way down—bare bulbs, hanging from a conduit that ran along the ceiling of the concrete shaft. Someone had been very busy. Nemo’s estimation of Gabriel went up several notches. He wondered what their power source was, especially when he got to the bottom. He was in a concrete room, at least thirty by thirty, with a twelve-foot ceiling, covered with banks of fluorescent lights shining down on a computer that took up most of the floor. He’d never seen anything like it.

Gabriel walked out from behind it, still in his robes. No. Clean, fresh ones. All dressed up for Judgment Day.

“Good morning, Nemo.” He beckoned with his hand. “This way.”

On the other side of the computer was a console and a chair atop a low pedestal. “Have a seat,” he said. “This won’t take long.”

Nemo climbed into the chair, looking around at the array of electronics, the likes of which the world hadn’t seen for twenty years at least. “Where did you get all this stuff?”

“We made it,” he said. “Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Faith can move mountains. I learned about computers at my father’s knee. He was the man who fired Newman Rogers. He died humiliated and broken.”

“Now you have the last laugh.”

Gabriel grinned. “Something like that. Are you ready, or has your night in bed with your whore changed your mind?”

Nemo hung his head. He wanted to come up out of this chair and strangle Gabriel on the spot. But he couldn’t just think about what he wanted to do. Besides, he’d spotted four lasers pointed at him. There were probably more. He remembered his shame, tried to feel it all over again. “That’s why I’m doing this. I have to rid myself of her. As long as she’s there, I’m not strong enough to stay away. But I have to. She’s—” He looked Gabriel in the eye. “Never mind what she is. Let’s just get this over with. I have to catch a train, remember?” He heard a slight ringing in his ears. This jumping in and out of the Bin apparently had him completely exhausted.

Gabriel smiled. “Sin is a bit too delicious, isn’t it? You’re doing the right thing, Nemo. While you’re here, I can implant more than the virus.” He gestured to the sprawling computer. “Anything you like. Isn’t there something you’d like to know? A foreign language, or a dozen? A musical instrument perhaps? I believe you’ve heard Rick and Ian play. They couldn’t play a note before they came to me. But you’re an intelligent young man—how about the combined knowledge of all the civilizations that ever existed?”