Twenty
Jennifer Sharifi, dressed in a flowing white abbaya, stood in the conference room of Sharifi Labs. The other members of the project team called this “the command center,” but Jennifer disliked that name. The team was a community, not an army. Through the clear bordered floor panel, stars shown beneath her feet.
However, Jennifer gazed not down but at a row of five holoscreens. The conference room had been transformed. Gone were the long curved table and eighteen chairs. Banks of computers and consoles filled the large space, with team members moving quietly among the machines. Jennifer herself remained motionless. Only her eyes moved, flickering from screen to screen, taking them all in, missing nothing.
Screen one: the “tribal” camp in Oregon, on hidden-frequency monitor. Livers walked on the rocky Pacific beach in mid-afternoon fog, because these particular Livers always walked on this particular beach in mid-afternoon. Today, however, the heavy ugly Liver faces were clearly upset and frightened. The Livers huddled together ten feet from the surging ocean. Surrounding them, donkey reporters shouted questions. Robocams recorded.
“The newsgrids have finally discovered one of the test sites?” Eric Hulden said, walking up beside her. “Slow enough, aren’t they?” Eric was one of the new ones, the few Sanctuary youngsters Jennifer and Will had added to the project in its later stages. Without stopping the back-and-forth flickering of her eyes, Jennifer smiled. Eric was tall, strong, perfect as all the Sleepless were perfect. More important, he was cold, with the coldness necessary to understand and control the world. Much colder than Will. Still, if Jennifer smiled directly at Eric, his eyes would deepen their genemod blue. He was ninety-six years her junior.
But all that could wait, until the project was over.
Screen two: newsgrids from Earth. The left side of the split screen ran the United Broadcast Network, the most reliable of the donkey channels. An announcer with the flashy genemod handsomeness of a Spanish grandee said, “In a major data-atoll coup on the Singapore Exchange, the stock of Brasilia-based Stanton Orbital Corporation rose to…” Nothing in the newscast mentioned a strange neuropharm altering Liver behavior. Nor did the flagging program on the right side of the screen, which constantly scanned the world’s major newsgrids in several languages. So far, the project’s luck was holding; Strukov’s virus had not mutated on its own.
“The neuropharm is still just a local story in Oregon, then,” Eric said. “Donkey fools.”
“Not completely local,” Jennifer said calmly. “Just underground.” She gestured toward the next two screens.
Screen three: Jennifer’s chief scientist, Chad Manning, gave his six-times daily summary of the progress at Kelvin-Castner on replicating Strukov’s neuropharm. Kelvin-Castner was thoroughly monitored, in ways the stupid Sleepers would never detect. Chad received streams of data, which he analyzed and reduced to terms intelligible to Sleepless who weren’t microbiologists. Kelvin-Castner was proceeding slowly—far too slowly to do them any good.
Screen four: the pirated monitoring of government progress. This was more problematic. The federal agencies were much better at security than corporations like Kelvin-Castner. Neither Jennifer nor her communications chief, Caroline Renleigh, was sure how complete their pirated information really was. But as far as Sanctuary could discover, the government labs at Bethesda, although they had “in protective custody” Livers infected by Strukov’s virus, hadn’t yet succeeded in replicating or countering it. And the FBI hadn’t succeeded in establishing any solid evidence about the La Solana bombing. As far as Sanctuary could discover.
Miranda would have found out for sure.
Immediately Jennifer destroyed the thought. The thought did not exist, and never had. Her eyes flickered among the five screens.
Eric Hulden put a hand on her shoulder. “I came to tell you that Strukov linked. He wants to strike Brookhaven in an hour. Is that all right with you?”
“Fine. Call in the entire team for the viewing.”
“All right, Jennifer.” A part of her mind noticed how he said her name. Firmly, coldly. She liked it. But all that could wait.
Screen five: empty. It was used for communications from Jennifer’s agents on Earth. They were Sleepers, informants against their own kind, highly paid and little trusted. Anything that Jennifer needed to know about came through here, instantly.
As Eric walked away, the fifth screen brightened into a formless glow. Audio only. The encryption integrity code appeared along the bottom of the screen. The transmission came from one of her agents in the United States. “Ms. Sharifi, this is Sondra Schneider. We’ve located Elizabeth Francy.”
“Go ahead,” Jennifer said composedly, but she felt her chest lift. That little Liver had been surprisingly hard to find. After Sanctuary had caught her electronic stumbling across Sanctuary’s data beam from the Liver camp in Pennsylvania, the Francy girl had disappeared. Hard as it was to believe, one of the most debased class of Sleepers had apparently realized what she’d found. She knew that Sanctuary was connected somehow to the neuropharm that had infected her pathetic “tribe.” Elizabeth Francy had apparently also realized that if she opened a comlink through any satellite relay or ground station, Sanctuary would locate her. She’d been off the Net, out of visible surveillance, hidden somewhere in the barbarous countryside. Jennifer had hoped she were dead.
“Elizabeth Francy is in custody of Manhattan East Enclave security,” Sondra Schneider said. “She apparently made her way to New York and through an enclave ground gate. A half hour before her arrest, the gate was opened by a donkey retina scan nowhere in our data banks. I can’t explain that. A ’bot from the enclave’s security franchise, Patterson Protect, classed her as suspicious, and moved to sedate and capture. Our Net-wide flagging program picked up the girl’s name from the routine police-net queries to other franchises.”
Jennifer said swiftly, “How long ago?”
“About ten minutes. They’ll give her a truth drug soon, if they haven’t already. But that’s off-Net, of course. We can’t access.”
“Do we have an agent inside Patterson Protect?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
Jennifer considered. Lizzie Francy must have gone to Manhattan East in search of either Victoria Turner, her quasi-adopted mentor, or of Jackson Aranow. But why? To tell them what she’d discovered about Sanctuary’s monitoring her infected tribe, of course. If the local police franchise thought her worth truthing—and they would, of course, they’d want to know how a Liver had penetrated Manhattan East—Lizzie would tell them. She’d tell them, too, about Sanctuary. But would they believe her? The drawback to truth drugs was that if the subject believed that lies were truth, lies were what the drug elicited. Would the Sleepers believe that Elizabeth Francy was deluded?
Perhaps not. Especially if Jackson Aranow supported the Liver girl’s assertions.
Damn it, it was less than an hour until Strukov’s most important test!
Jennifer stood very still, appalled at herself. She didn’t have such flashes of anger. They were unproductive, weakening. Jennifer Sharifi didn’t become angry. She became cold, and hence effective.
The moment of anger had never happened.
“Ms. Schneider,” she said calmly, “I’ll take care of this. Pull all of our agents out of Manhattan East, unobtrusively, during the next forty-five minutes. Make sure they understand that they must leave immediately. I’ll take care of the rest.” Strukov could go ahead with the Brookhaven test, but Jennifer would instruct him to change, the second target to Manhattan East. That would take care of the problem of Elizabeth Francy.