Maelstrom (13 page)

 

Back on the subway platform, wilting in the heat, packed for the transatlantic supersonic jitney, on her way to London . . .

 

She wanted to see Blake. But she didn’t want to see Blake. She liked Blake. She was afraid of Blake. Maybe she was in love with Blake.

She hated herself like this, when her brain went nothing but blah, blah, blah. She was hung on a cusp. She wanted to find out what had become of her parents, and Blake could have learned something. She wanted revenge for what had been done to her–or did she? She also wanted to survive. A few months on Port Hesperus, just being a cop, and her conviction had begun to dissolve.

Maybe the commander was right. Maybe she really needed a rest.

The antique subway train clattered into the station, glistening with bright yellow paint. She stepped onto the squeaky-clean car. It was empty except for a stylishly dressed young couple–on their way home from classes at NYU, to judge by the shiny black datapads they balanced on their knees.

Or they could be a tail.

Sparta sat by herself, beside the doors at the far end of the car. She pulled her jacket closer about her shoulders and brooded. The commander had boxed her in. She hardly had a choice but to go to Blake, to find out what Blake had to tell her. To be with him.

VIII

Sparta cuatiously climbed the narrow, smelly stairs to Blake Redfield’s flat in the City of London. In her trip from Manhattan she had taken every precaution to evade pursuit that was consistent with her pose of innocence. She had not tried to call Blake, either by personal commlink or public phonelink. She had made her travel arrangements as discreetly as she could, then changed them at the last minute, spending two days on a trip that could have been completed in an afternoon. All this would be child’s play for the commander’s people if they were tailing her, but she didn’t dare try any fancy stuff.
London in the late summer was hardly better than Manhattan. Today the air was so saturated with humidity it had begun to rain. Drenched from within and without, she rapped on Blake’s door.

There was no answer. She listened, then ran her hand lightly over the jambs. Her palm hovered above the alphanumeric keypad of his outdated magnetic lock, parsing its field patterns. In moments, guided by intuition, she had decoded its lengthy combination, CH3C6H2N023246. Which was very like Blake, thus predictable, and therefore rather stupid of him: minus subscripts, parentheses, and commas, it was the chemical formula of TNT.

Sparta’s fingers danced on the keypad. Before she pushed the door open she hesitated. Blake wasn’t stupid, of course. Blake was the sort to warn unexpected guests and, should they ignore his warning, leave them a little greeting card. A grain or two of TNT, or more likely nitroglycerin, that sort of thing. She bent her nose close to the strike plate and sniffed.

There was no sign of any chemical more unusual than light machine oil. There was no sign that the door had been used recently; in the infrared, it was cooler than the ambient air.

 

But the last person who had touched this doorknob was not Blake. Blake’s unmistakably spicy aroma was overlaid by that of someone Sparta didn’t recognize. A female.

Perhaps it was his landlady. Whoever she was, she was not inside now. Her prints were stone cold–more than a week old, Sparta guessed–and the lingering odor of perfume that came through the crack where the heavy door badly fitted its ancient frame was stale and so faint only someone with Sparta’s sensitivity could have detected it. Nevertheless Sparta slipped her hands into her pockets and withdrew a pair of transparently thin polymer gloves. Someone had been in Blake’s flat since he’d been there, and she could come back. Sparta had no intention of leaving traces of her own visit.

She pushed gently on the door and stepped back as it sprang open. There were no fireworks.

She peered cautiously into Blake’s sitting room. She had never been here before. Her eager curiosity threatened to overwhelm her caution. But she sensed the current of the pressure-sensor wires under the kilim on the varnished oak floor, and she noted, mounted in the corners of the ceiling moldings, the movement detectors, invisibly small to anyone else.

She raised her arms, feeling for their wave patterns. Her belly burned for an instant, and three quick bursts disarmed Blake’s alarms. Leaving her duffel bag in the hall, she stepped tentatively into the room.

There was a mullioned bay window to her left, shadowed by a big elm outside. Heavy rain continually rustled the elm leaves. The pallid green light of late afternoon filtered through the rain-streaked panes and gave the interior of the flat the watery feel of an aquarium.

The walls of the room were lined with bookshelves; the books were stacked on their shelves like vertical irregular bricks, their spines a faded spectrum from ruddy brown to slate-blue. There were albums of recent book chips and older books recorded on disk and tape, and an impressive number of real books made of paper and cloth and leather, many crumbling inside their clear plastic envelopes, others in pristine condition.

Where the walls were not obscured by bookshelves they were painted with creamy enamel and hung with framed manuscript pages and early 20th-century European oils.

Sparta retrieved her duffel and left it inside the door, which she closed carefully behind her. She moved through the quiet rooms. Blake lived well on his consulting fees, not to mention the income from a sizable trust fund; these gave ample play to his collector’s passion and his taste in Chinese furniture and Oriental weavings.

Her eye zoomed in on surfaces and textures, probing shadowed crevices. Her ears listened beyond the human frequency range, below the human threshold of audibility. Her nose sniffed for chemical hints. If there were booby traps or hidden transmitters or receivers in the room, she would home in on them.

Blake had left his apartment at least two weeks ago, perhaps much longer. There was no sign that the circumstances of his leaving were unusual. But everywhere the prints of his woman visitor were more recent, if only by a few days; nowhere did his prints overlay hers.

Sparta looked into the bedroom. His bed was made with fresh sheets, and his closet was full of suits and shirts and shoes, everything from black leather pumps to red high-top moon boots. Blake was quite a dandy, but if anything was missing from this extensive wardrobe, Sparta would not know. She noted that the woman had pawed through his things.

His bathroom cabinet was fully stocked: Blake’s cordless toothbrush was there, and a chemosonic shaver, and shelves full of deodorants and aftershaves and other nostrums. The woman had been here too, since Blake had left.

The refrigerator in the kitchen alcove held a six-pack of Czechoslovakian lager–his taste for cold beer confirmed that Blake was, after all, American–but it held no eggs or milk or vegetables or other perishables, only a few hard cheeses and a jar of mustard. The stove was spotless. There were no dirty dishes in the sink. The recycling chute hadn’t been used for a week. Either Blake had planned his departure, or someone had cleaned up after him.

His back porch–a tiny enclosed landing, really–had been converted to a workshop; through its single window she could make out a row of brick-walled back gardens, trim and middle class. Rows of neatly labeled bottles of chemicals lined the wall above a table that was anything but neat; its surface was crowded with scraps of microlectronic substrate. There were traces of numerous nitrogen-based compounds and splashes of solified metal on the carbon-fiber work surface. All of the debris was cold.

The copper pipes of the kitchen plumbing to Blake’s flat and the ones above and below his were exposed in one corner of the little workroom, next to a small laundry sink. But Blake didn’t do his laundry here. The round metal gadget stuck on the end of the faucet was a mainframe computer, a micro-super smaller than the water filter it was packaged in. The computer worked through complexification and decomplexification of artificial enzymes; the thing got so hot when it was working at capacity that it needed a steady flow of coolant.

Blake’s woman visitor had twisted the faucet handle, and she’d played with the remote keyboard on Blake’s desk. Sparta wondered if she’d gained access to its memory.

Sparta turned on the cold water. She slipped the glove off her right hand and thrust her spines into the ports on the back of the keyboard. She got past the computer’s quite competent security in a split second, and its informational guts started to spill faster than the steaming water that was already pouring into the sink. From one sprung booby trap in Blake’s security–and several yet unsprung–Sparta knew that no snoopers had gained entry.

The flatscreen glowed. Anyone watching Sparta would have seen a woman staring as if hypnotized at a meaningless jumble of alphanumerics and scrambled graphics spilling across the flatscreen, but she was not seeing it; the data was flowing directly into her neural structures.

The little computer was so capacious that it took Sparta several seconds just to read the directory of its stored programs and files. There were knowledge based programs for chemical analysis, some having to do with explosives, corrosives, incendiaries, poison gases, and other such pleasantries, others having to do with the analysis of papers and inks. There were powerful programs for modeling the complex interactions of shockwaves, programs so intricate they showed that Blake’s interest in making things go boom was more than a mischievous hobby.

Of the files, the biggest were bibliographies. Sparta would not have been surprised if every edition of every book known to have been printed in English for the past three hundred years was listed here.

 

But one miniscule file called attention to itself. Its name was README.

She smiled. Blake knew Sparta as few others did. One thing he knew about her was that she could crack any computer almost effortlessly, although he didn’t know
how
she did it, and she had no intention of telling him. She had no doubt that README was meant for her.

README, however, turned out to be unreadable. Not that it was inaccessible, but it contained nothing except an apparently meaningless list of numbers. The numbers were arranged in groups: 311, 314, 3222, 3325, 3447, 3519 . . . a total of 102 such groups in all, none with less than three numbers or more than six, and none repeated. The first few groups began with the numeral 3, the next few began with 4, and so on, in increasing numerical order. The last groups all began with 10.

Sparta smiled. She recognized the list for what it was and instantly committed it to memory.

So Blake wanted to play hide-and-seek, did he? She replaced her glove, turned off his computer, and left his workshop precisely as she had found it. She slipped quickly and quietly into the main room of the flat, moving like a shadow in the deepening shadows, grinning a cat’s satisfied smile.

Outside, the rain still drummed on the elm leaves. The light was greener. By pushing her nostrils close to the books on their shelves, she could inhale the residual odor of the hands that had touched them, the amino acids and other chemicals that were as distinctive to individuals as their fingerprints. Only Blake had handled the plastic sleeves in which they were protected–Blake and, in a few cases, the mysterious woman.

The woman had handled only a few books. She’d pulled books from the shelves here and there, apparently at random–unlike Sparta, she had evidently had no idea what she was looking for.

Sparta was looking for a specific book. Blake had left Sparta a message hidden in a book, a book he knew Sparta would recognize as unique in a way that one else could. The list of numbers in README was a book cipher.

A book had drawn them both to Port Hesperus and had served to reintroduce them, a copy of the fabulously valuable privately printed first edition of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, by T. E. Lawrence. There were no copies of any version of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
on Blake’s shelves, but they had shared many other books in the past, when both of them had been children in SPARTA. Among Blake’s collection of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, memoirs, travel journals, essays, and other literary letters, one book was an anomaly, an anomaly only someone who knew Blake’s collection intimately–or someone who had been part of SPARTA– would recognize.

She pulled it from the shelf and looked at it. The eye printed on the jacket stared back at her. In the more than one hundred years since it had been published, the bright red of its dust jacket had faded to pale pink, but its bold title was clearly visible through the plastic:
Frames of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
, by Howard Gardner. It was a gifted psychologist’s exposition of what he called “a new theory of intellectual competences,” and it had been a major influence on Sparta’s parents when they conceived the SPARTA project.

Sparta removed the book from its plastic sleeve, studied its cover a moment, then carefully opened it. She smiled at the dedication, “For Ellen.” That was a different Ellen in a different century–a real Ellen, unlike the fictitious Ellen Troy–but she had no doubt that Blake meant her to take it personally.

Yes, she was now “in the mood”–the right frame of mind.

She turned to the first chapter, “The Idea of Multiple Intelligences.” It began, “A young girl spends an hour with an examiner. . . .” Sparta knew the passage well, a brief parable of a youngster whose diverse gifts are summed up in a single round number, an I.Q. The thrust of Gardner’s argument, and of the program Sparta’s parents had created, was to lift the dead hand of I.Q.

The first page of this chapter was numbered 3 in the book. And the first letter of the first line was A. It was the letter to which README had directed her. The first group of numbers in README was 311, indicating page 3, line 1, letter 1. The next group of numbers in README was 314; it directed her to the fourth letter in the same line, which was u.
README’s next group was 3222, which could be read as page 3, line 2, letter 22, but could also be read as page 3, line 22, letter 2, or even as page 32, line 2, letter 2. The steady increase of the initial digits told Sparta that Blake had used the simplest form of the cipher, taking each letter serially. Thus the first digit or two would always be the page number, from page 3 to page 10. The second one or two digits would count down the lines of the page, and the remaining digit or two would indicate the placement of the letter on the line.