Whether he meant baseball or something else was open to interpretation. He stood up and joined her in the kitchen as she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold bottle. Imported beer, the only kind she willingly drank. She popped the cap with an opener and handed it to him, opened a soft drink for herself, then clinked their bottles together. "To surviving another day," she said.
"Amen."
They tipped bottles and drank. McCarthy was still watching her, but his eyes closed when the taste of the beer hit his tongue. Sheer ecstasy, from the look on his face.
"Wow," he said, when he put the bottle down on the counter. "It really has been awhile. And obviously, you know beer."
"I try." She took down two plates. "You want to tell me anything?"
"Like?"
"Like your theory on why the evidence exonerating you showed up so conveniently when it did?"
He took another sip of beer. Stalling for time.
"Didn't seem very convenient to me," he said. "Considering I'd already had the crap beaten out of me."
"Maybe they decided you'd suffered enough."
"Let's just say that little things like compassion don't enter into the equation for the Cross Society. And I mean that literally, by the way."
She slid onto a bar stool and sipped from her bottle. She hadn't offered a glass; he hadn't seemed to mind. "I don't think I understand."
"What Simms does—you understand about him, right? That he's looking at alternate realities, not just telling the future?"
"Excuse me?"
McCarthy shook his head.
"Oh boy. You'll need a lot of beer, somebody smarter than me and some kind of consulting physicist." He shrugged. "Okay. There's this thing called string theory. Don't ask me how it works—I'm just a cop, okay? But the idea is that there are a whole bunch of realities all layered up against each other. Every decision everybody makes, there's a slightly different chain of events, right? Take six billion people times about a billion decisions—good, bad or indifferent—and you get how many potential realities we're dealing with here. The thing is, most of these decisions end up being meaningless, in the great scheme of things. They cancel each other out, and such. So instead of sixty fazillion realities, you get some manageable number, like a couple of million that simultaneously exist in the here and now."
Lucia listened, thinking hard. Mostly, she happened to be thinking that she'd never really believed the unlikely story of the Cross Society, or Max Simms, though Jazz seemed to have come closer to buying it, and Jazz was hardly the credulous type. "So, Simms supposedly can use all this theory to predict the future."
"No, Simms is the real deal, he's some kind of savant. He doesn't need theory to do what he does—he just sees it. Like some psychic in the circus."
"Then why the physics explanation?"
"That's what where the Cross Society comes in. They made what he does scientific."
"Uh-huh. And Eidolon…?"
Ben flipped a hand in assent. "Started out the same way, but Eidolon took it further. Has to do with predictive math, or something. Both the Cross Society and Eidolon can track decisions and look at the different outcomes. Only problem is, once playing god gets to be a multiplayer game, it gets nasty. Eidolon actually came first, by the way. It got a ton of defense department money, and Simms actually worked with a staff of high-level physicists to develop a computer system that could do what he did. That was his mistake. He created himself right out of a job. Then he founded the Cross Society to do the same thing, once he realized Eidolon was going to manipulate events to their own advantage. Counter of a countermove."
"And when Eidolon wanted him gone…"
"The new CEO made sure that he was taken out of the picture. I figure Simms should have been killed, but he managed to work the decision tree enough that he only got convicted and sent to prison. You'd better believe that Eidolon's been working hard to keep him there, or better yet, make sure he dies behind bars."
"How do you know all this?"
"I was in early." McCarthy shrugged and turned his beer bottle in neat, precise circles. "Simms wanted people in the Cross Society who could carry out orders, not just sit around and talk theory. I was…" He fell silent for a few seconds, eyes hooded. "I was supposed to help them make things better. But I figured out pretty fast that wasn't how it worked. You start out fighting the good fight, but pretty soon you're just fighting for your life."
"And you didn't agree."
He took a drink, then another. "I didn't say that. I'm no saint, Lucia."
"If you agreed, then why did the Cross Society put you in prison?"
"I told you. I refused to carry out an order."
"To stand by and let Jazz get killed."
His shrug was so small it could have been interpreted as fidgeting. "Hey, even a total bastard's got limits."
"So what's changed? Why let the evidence come to light to get you out?"
"Why the hell do they do anything? Their spreadsheets or Simms or whatever told them I could do something for them."
She nodded. Silence fell, broken by the clink of their bottles on the black marble counter. It seemed eerily quiet, here above the city, in this hermetically sealed building.
The buzz of the intercom made both of them jump, though McCarthy tried to look nonchalant about it.
"Pizza," she said.
She kept the gun handy anyway.
The sound McCarthy made at the first bite of pizza was like a man in the throes of—well, ecstasy. "Oh, God," he murmured. "That's just…unbelievable. Sorry, but you've got no idea how many nights I thought about—"
"Pizza?" She kept her voice cool and amused. "I'd imagine there were other things to think about."
He chewed and swallowed. Gave a Cheshire cat smile. "Pizza's the one I'm willing to talk about."
"Careful, Mr. McCarthy. I'm not on the menu."
"No question about that. Shit, I can't even afford the pizza." He blinked, and before she could feel even the first impulse to take offense, said, "And I didn't mean that the way it sounded."
She had to laugh, because his expression was priceless. "Don't worry. My dignity is hardly that fragile."
"I meant—"
"I know what you meant. Enjoy the food."
He did, wordlessly, letting out involuntary sounds now and then that strongly reminded her of other things he might have missed, during his time in Ellsworth. Which made her skin prickle and made her pulse thud faster. No. This is strictly dinner. Nothing more.
She was good at self-deception. It was why she had always been so damn good at undercover work.
He kept on watching her, as he made his way through his second beer and last slice of pizza, stealing glances when he thought she wasn't looking. She felt them like feathery touches on her skin. Her glass was dry; she debated opening another soft drink, then decided to have a beer herself. She went to the refrigerator to pull one free.
"No," he said flatly, and reached past her to close his hand around hers. She resisted the urge to drive her elbow back into his gut, mainly because the warmth of him, leaning against her, undid all her reflexes. "You're on antibiotics. No beer."
"What are you, my doctor?"
"Depends," he said. He was still pressed against her, his hand hot around hers. "Do you need examining?" His voice had dropped to a low, dark-velvet whisper, warm against the back of her neck.
She needed a whole lot of things, and it shocked her, the depth of that need. How long had it been? Nearly a year, she realized, since that business with Dallas that had turned out such a mess. Not a good memory, though the sex…no, even the sex hadn't been worth that. McCarthy made her body come alive in ways she wasn't prepared to deal with—nerves hot and tingling, skin tight and sensitive to every touch, every breath he took.