"So what's the story?" I asked. "It didn't take?"
"Nope." He grinned again. "What it didn't take was two weeks.'"
"What?"
"It doesn't "take two weeks," Marty said. "Benyo is humanized, and so are all the others."
"I don't get it."
"Your stabilizer, Candi, was in the loop. That's what did it! It only takes about two days, if you're jacked with somebody who's already humanized."
"But... then why did it take the whole two weeks with Jefferson?"
Marty laughed. "It didn't! He was one of them after a couple of days, but people didn't recognize it, since he was the first-and he was ninety percent there from the beginning. Everybody, Jefferson included, was concentrating on Ingram, not him."
"But then you take a guy like me," Benyo said, "who hates the idea from the very start-and wasn't exactly a sweetheart to begin with-hell, everybody could tell when I converted."
"And you are converted?" Amelia said. He got a serious look and nodded in jerks. "You don't feel resentful about... losing the man you used to be?"
"It's hard to explain. What I am now is the man I used to be. But more me than I used to be, get it?" He made a helpless gesture with both hands. "What I mean is I never in a million years could've found out who I really was, even though it was there all the time. I needed the others to show me."
She smiled and shook her head. "It sounds like a religious conversion."
"It is, sort of," I said. "It literally was, with Ellie." I shouldn't have said that; she started to cloud up. I put my hand on hers.
For a moment everyone was silent. "So," Amelia said. "What does this do to the timetable?"
"If we'd known before the thing started, it would've sped it up considerably-and of course it will do that in the long run, when we're out to change the world.
"Right now the limiting factor is the surgery schedule. We plan to finish the last set of implants on the thirty-first. So by the third of August, we should have a building-full of converts, general to private."
"What about the POWs?" I asked. "McLaughlin didn't convert them in two days, did he?"
"Again, if we'd only known. He was never jacked with them for more than a few hours at a time. It would be good to know whether it does work with thousands of people at once."
"How do you know it's one or the other?" Amelia said. "Two weeks if they're all just 'normal' people; two days if one of the elect is with them all the time. You don't know anything about intermediate states."
"That's right." He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. "And no time to experiment. There's some fascinating science to be done, but as we said up at St. Bart's, we're not doing science quite yet." His phone pinged. "Just a second."
He touched his earring and listened, staring. "Okay ... I'll get back to you. Yes." He shook his head.
"Trouble?" I asked.
"Could be nothing; could be disaster. We've lost our cook."
That took me a moment. "Thurman's gone AWOL?"
"Yep. He cruised right past the guard last night, right after you ... after Gavrila died."
"No idea where he went?"
"He could be anywhere in the world. Could be downtown living it up. You jacked with him, Benyo?"
"Huh-uh. But Monez did, and I'm with Monez all the time. So I got a little. Not much, you know, his headaches."
"Do you have any secondhand impression of him?"
"Just a guy." He rubbed his chin. "I guess he was a little more army than most. I mean he kind of liked the idea.".
"He didn't much like our idea, then."
"I don't know. I'd guess not."
Marty looked at his watch. "I'm due in surgery in twenty minutes. Be doing jacks until one. Julian, you want to track him down?"
"Do what I can."
"Benyo, you jack with Monez and whoever else was with Thurman. We have to know how much he knows."
"Sure." He stood up. "I think he's down by the game room."
We watched him go. "At least he couldn't have known who the general was."
"Not Roser," Marty said. "But he might have gotten the name of Gavrila's boss, Blaisdell, through one of the people in Guadalajara. That's what I want to find out." He checked his watch again. "Call Benyo about it in an hour or so. And check all the flights to Washington."
"Do what I can, Marty. Once he's out of Porto, hell, there must be ten thousand ways to get to Washington."
"Yeah, right. Maybe we should just wait and see whether we hear from Blaisdell."
We were about to.
BLAISDELL SPENT A FEW minutes talking to Carew – the actual "download" of information from the jack session would take several hours' patient interrogation under hypnosis, by machine, but he did learn that there were a couple of days unaccounted for, between the time Gavrila was jacked in Guadalajara and her death more than a thousand miles away. What did she learn that sent her to Portobello?
He stayed in the office until he got the coded message from his driver that matters had been disposed of, and then he drove himself home-an eccentricity that sometimes was useful.
He lived alone, with robot servants and soldierboy guards, in a mansion on the Potomac less than a half hour's drive from the Pentagon. An eighteenth-century home with original exposed timbers and a wooden floor buckled with age, it was consistent with his image of himself-a man destined from birth, privileged birth, to change the history of the world.
And now his destiny was to end it.
He poured his daily ounce of whiskey into a crystal snifter and sat down to the mail. When he turned on the console, before the index came up, a blinker told him he had paper mail waiting.
Odd. He asked the wheelie to fetch it, and it brought back a single letter, no return address, postmarked from Kansas City that morning. It was interesting, considering the intimacy of some aspects of their relationship, that he didn't recognize Gavrila's handwriting on the envelope.
He read the short message twice and then burned it. Stanton Roser the most dangerous man in America? How unlikely, and how convenient: they had a golf date Saturday morning at the Bethesda Country Club. Golf could be a dangerous game.
He bypassed his mail and opened up the line to his computer at work. "Good evening, general," it said in a carefully modulated sexless voice.
"List for me every project rated 'secret' or above that has been initiated in the past month-no, eight weeks-by the Office of Force Management and Personnel. Delete any that have no connection to General Stanton Roser."
There were only three projects on the list; he was surprised at how little of Roser's work was classified. But one of those "projects" was essentially a file of miscellaneous classified actions, with 248 entries. He tabled that one and looked at the other two, separated because they were Top Top Secret.
They were apparently unrelated, except that both projects had been initiated the same day, and-aha! – both were in Panama. One was a pacification experiment on the detainees in a POW camp; the other, a management evaluation scheme at Fort Howell in Portobello.
Why hadn't Gavrila given more details? Damn the woman's flair for the dramatic.
When had she gone to Panama? That was easy enough to check. "Show me all the DARPA travel voucher requests for the past two days."
Interesting. She had bought a ticket to Portobello under a female code name and one to the Canal Zone under a male code name. Which flight did she actually take? The note had been on Aeromexico stationery, but that was no help; both flights used that carrier.
Well, which identity had she used in Guadalajara? The computer said that neither code name had flown into the city in the past two weeks, but it was a good assumption that she wouldn't have gone through the inconvenience of masquerading as a male while she was tracking down that woman. Therefore it was likely that she did cross-dress to elude detection on the flight down.
Why Panama, why the Canal Zone, why the connection with mousy old Stanton? Why didn't she just come back to the States, after the damned woman's theory about the Jupiter Project was splashed all over the news?