When he left the gym he struck lucky. A software glitch put half the local traffic signals out of action for a full five minutes—time enough to snarl up twenty thousand vehicles and create a jam which would require at least an hour to clear. The pavements jammed up almost as badly as the gridlocked vehicles, and tempers soared all along the line. Damon kept on ducking and dodging until he was certain that he was free and clear of all humanly possible pursuit, and then began the painstaking business of making his way across town without leaving a Webtrack.
“Is it about my tape?” Lenny Garon said, anxiously blinking his one good eye, as he let Damon into his squalid capsule. “Did something go wrong with the mesh?” Tamlin plainly hadn’t let him in on any secrets.
“Your tape’s fine,” Tamlin reassured him, once Damon was safely inside. “Just take a walk, will you? The two of us have something private to discuss. I’ll pay you a couple of hundred in rent, but you have to forget you ever saw us, OK?”
The kid was appropriately impressed. “Be my guest,” he said. As he disappeared into the corridor, he called back: “I hear you’re an enemy of mankind now. Good going.”
As the door slid shut behind the boy Damon looked around the room, wondering that people still had to live like this in a world whose population explosion had fizzled out long ago. While the greater part of L.A. slowly rotted down into dust its poorer people still huddled together in neighborhoods of high-rise blocks full of narrow rooms with fold-down beds, kitchens the size of cupboards and even smaller bathrooms. Perhaps people had grown over-accustomed to crowding during the years before the Crash, and now couldn’t live without it; that made more sense, in a way, than conventional explanations about buildings needing services and the proximity principles of supply and transport.
“What the hell is happening, Damon?” Tamlin asked, when the door was firmly closed and Lenny Garon’s footfalls had died into silence.
“You tell me.”
Tamlin shook his head again. “Damned if I know. How bad is the trouble I’m in?”
“Nothing much. They know Nahal was dead before you got there. All you did was find a body. They’d be grateful if it weren’t for the fact that somebody else had already tipped them off about it. They still want to talk to you, but they’ll be polite.”
Tamlin’s relief on hearing this news was very evident. “Who killed him?” he asked.
“Nobody. At the very worst, somebody flushed out his internal technology, the way Silas Arnett’s kidnappers did. Perhaps it’s suppose to look like justice. What did you find out, Madoc?”
“Not much,” Tamlin admitted. “The way the spiders are spinning, it looks as if this guy Nahal had some kind of grudge against your father and his cronies. Maybe he’d been nursing it for a hundred years, or maybe it’s just something that came back to haunt him in his old age. It looks as if Nahal had Arnett snatched, and that he put out the Operator 101 stuff himself—although the word is out that he isn’t the same guy who built up the Operator 101 name and reputation. He was difficult to trace, but not too difficult. I’m sorry about Diana—she wouldn’t stay home. You know how she is. I didn’t tell her anything.”
Damon had taken note of the emphases. “You said looks?” he queried.
“That’s right,” Tamlin confirmed. “I’ve no proof, but I have this itchy feeling that looks are all there is. Even before I found the door open and the guy lying dead... I think it was left all neat and tidy for someone to find—the cops, I guess. I get the impression that somebody’s busy clearing up their case for them. Whoever it is, they’re cleverer than any people I know, and have more money. That’s what I think, anyhow.”
“It’s what I think too,” Damon said. “You warned me when I asked you to help that all the best outlaw Webwalkers were in the pockets of the corps. I didn’t think it was relevant, but it is. All we could ever buy was a slice of the same pie they were feeding the authorities.”
Tamlin shook his head, wonderingly. “What’s it got to do with the corps?” he asked.
“Nothing, except insofar as the real owners and movers of the corps are hidden. The trouble with a world in which it’s difficult to keep secrets is that everyone tries so much harder. The Web is an open book to those who know how to turn its keys, and nanomachinery makes all kinds of unobtrusive eavesdropping as simple as falling off a log—and very, very cheap. There’s only one option for anyone who wants to move behind the scenes, and that’s to throw up multiple smokescreens. The only way to hide the truth is to dissolve it in an ocean of bluff and double-bluff. You and I wouldn’t even be clever enough to figure out who the players in this game might be, if it weren’t for the accident of biology that connected me to one of them—and even that would be irrelevant if it hadn’t been for the vanity which made my father instruct his trusty hirelings to do everything possible to turn me into a replica modeled on the same template.”
“Why did they say you were Conrad Helier? They couldn’t possibly expect people to believe that.”
“They didn’t. The third and fourth messages were calculatedly transparent lies, intended to discredit any truth that might have been lurking in the first two. My father’s team also wanted to give themselves an excuse for taking me out of the game—or dragging me further into it, on their side rather than the opposition’s. They didn’t approve of my sending you out digging for information—but they cocked up the abduction because they were in too much of a hurry.”
“Are you saying that your father really is alive, and that he really did cause the Crash?”
For a moment, Damon was tempted to tell his friend exactly what he did believe—but only for a moment. When the moment was past he knew that he’d made a crucial decision.
“No,” he said, after only the slightest pause. “He’s dead all right, and if the viruses which caused the Crash were manufactured, he didn’t do it. We just got caught in the crossfire of an old war which should have been laid to rest fifty years ago. It really doesn’t matter a damn who wins and who loses. Anyhow, Surinder Nahal has been cast in the role of guilty party, and now he’s dead the case will be closed.”
“You don’t think Nahal did it, do you?” Tamlin said, just to be sure.
“No,” Damon said, “I don’t think he did. I think my father’s friends want to keep the real guilty party out of sight, so that the only files that’ll be examined and picked apart will be Nahal’s—and those will be very carefully doctored. That way, they can shape the disclosures to suit themselves.” That much, he figured, was almost certainly true—but it was only a part of the truth. What the hidden movers wanted to keep hidden was something more significant than the possibility that Conrad Helier had designed and released the viruses which caused the Crash.
“Things could be worse,” Tamlin opined—still, apparently, buoyed up by the relief of knowing that Interpol had no particular grudge against him. “At least the bastards are still dying, one by one. Imagine how much worse it’d be if they really could live forever. No matter how far or how fast our generation went, we’d always be one step behind them. It’ll all be ours one day, though—we just have to be patient.”
Tamlin had always had an uncanny knack of putting his finger on the heart of a problem, although he was perversely prone to misinterpret the significance of what he saw. Damon was about to congratulate him on his cock-eyed perspicacity, with all due irony, but as he opened his mouth he saw Tamlin’s expression change to one of horror and alarm. He turned abruptly to see the apartment door sliding noiselessly into its bed.