It was still there, a little silver disk about the size of an antique fifty-cent piece. I looked down the street, but the detective was nowhere in sight among the blue leather jackets still clustered around the front of Clancy’s. I shoved the disk back in my pocket and ducked around the corner of the building, heading for the fire escape ladder.
There would be plenty of time for mourning later. Right now, all I wanted to do was find a killer.
10
(Thursday, 10:52 P.M.)
As soon as I crawled through my apartment window, I switched on my computer and booted up the mini-disk I had taken from John’s PT, and the first thing I did was make a backup copy.
Call it paranoia, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the cops discovered that the evidence bag had been unsealed; even though I had fooled Farrentino once, I wasn’t going to count on his remaining stupid. The police could be here by morning with a search warrant. When the copy was made, I slipped it into a plastic case and took it into the bathroom, where I hid it beneath the toilet tank with a strip of electrical tape.
Back at my desk again, I rebooted the original disk and copied it onto the hard drive; once it was loaded into my system, I tried to punch up the root directory, only to find that I needed a password to get in. No problem there; not long ago, shortly after I had gone to work at the Big Muddy, John and I had agreed to share our passwords with each other, in case I ever needed to hack into his PT or vice versa. Being a faithful University of Missouri alumnus, his password was “Mizzou”; mine was “chickenlegs,” for no other reason than I happened to be dining upon an Extra Crispy Recipe snack box from the Colonel at the time. I typed in “Mizzou,” the system cleared me through, and I got my first peek at whatever had been contained in Dingbat’s memory.
I let out a low whistle as the screen was immediately filled by a directory as long as a small-town phone book. A bar at the top of the screen told me that almost 100 megabytes of information had been copied into my system, leaving less than 50 kilobytes free on the disk. As I ran the cursor down the screen, a seemingly endless list of filenames scrolled upward, many of them suffixed as BAT or EXEC commands, none of them immediately recognizable.
An extremely complex program of some sort had been loaded into Dingbat’s floptical drive shortly before John’s death. Tiernan had no business carrying around something like this unless Beryl Hinckley had downloaded it into his PT during their encounter at the bar … but exactly what it was, I hadn’t the foggiest idea. Cyberpunk, I am not; my hacking skills were only those of the average computer-literate college grad, and I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to understand a program of this complexity.
One thing for damn sure: my best friend had been shot through the head with a laser beam shortly after receiving this program. And despite what Farrentino had said about his murder resembling the “Dark Jedi” killings, I had the gut feeling that John’s death had not been a random shooting.
What if John had been assassinated?
And, to take this supposition one step further: what if John had been assassinated because of the contents of this very disk?
I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. Don’t get panicky. I leaned forward again and began to run further down the directory, trying to find something that looked like a main menu or even a README file. I was like a blind man thrown into a large and unfamiliar room, but if I could just get hold of something I could use as a white cane, I might be able to …
The phone buzzed.
The answering machine was switched on, but without thinking I snatched the receiver off the cradle and lifted it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.
No voice from the other end of the line; the phonescreen remained blank. Figuring it for a wrong-number call, I was about to hang up when I heard, as if in the background, a brief, swift sequence of electronic snaps, chirps, and beeps.
“Hello?” I repeated. “Who’s there?”
As soon as I spoke again, the electronic noise ceased. There was a moment of silence, and I had almost hung up when I suddenly heard a toneless voice speak from the other end:
“Hello … hello … who’s there … hello …”
“Who is this?” I said, losing patience.
The screen flickered, then random fractals appeared, casting undulating images like electronic finger paintings. A couple more chirps and beeps, then there came a sound like an audiotape being replayed at high speed-high-pitched voices, as if Alvin and the Chipmunks were bleating nursery rhymes from an old NASA space probe lost out beyond Jupiter-as the fractals congealed and began to assume a vaguely human shape. Then:
“Hey, who is this? … hello … who’s there? … hello …”
It was my own voice.
Now the head and shoulders of a person appeared on the screen, but his/her features were in constant flux: eyes, nose, lips, brow, chin, cheekbones, hairline, all changing more rapidly than my eye could follow. Sometimes the face looked like my own, and then it would be me as a woman, then as a bearded woman, then as a black man with a beard, then as a new face entirely.
“Who is this?” I demanded. “Who … hey, Jah, if this is you fucking around, I’m going to unscrew your head and shit down your-”
Throughout all the changes, the face’s lips moved, yet my voice coming from the speaker no longer sounded quite like my own. It had a scrambled, surreal quality: “Jah … if you’re fucking around … hey, Jah, I’m going to shit down your head and unscrew your … who is this? … Jah, I’m going to unscrew your shit and fuck down your …”
The face’s permutations began to slow down, becoming distinctly male, getting younger. Again there were beeps, chirps, and a sound like a tape being fast-forwarded, and then:
“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … Can I talk to you, Daddy?”
A new face appeared on the screen.
I slammed down the receiver.
The face stared at me for another instant, then vanished entirely, leaving behind only a blank screen.
For a long time I simply stared at the phone. A soft nocturnal wind whispered outside the window like a ghost asking to come in. I felt my heart pound against the inside of my rib cage, smelled the acrid tang of my sweat. After five minutes my computer’s screensaver switched itself on; bright, multicolored fractals began to undulate across the screen, Mandelbrot equations casting impermanent algorithmic sandpaintings, the black magic of higher mathematics.
And still I stared at the phone, unwilling to accept the face and voice I had just seen and heard.
God help me, it had been Jamie.
A sharp knock at the apartment door brought me back to the present.
“Who’s there?” I called out. No reply; I thought I had been hearing things when there came another knock, a little harder this time.
Probably Chevy Dick, coming over to see if I wanted a beer or something. He had a keycard and knew the codes to disable the front door alarms. I wasn’t in any mood for drinking, but I needed some company right now, so I stood up from the chair and headed for the door. “Okay, hold on,” I muttered. “I’ll be there in a-”
The door slammed open, its lock broken by the force of a violent kick, and four soldiers in riot gear swarmed into the loft.
“Freeze, asshole!” one of them yelled, crouching next to the door, his Heckler amp; Koch G-11 leveled straight at me. “ERA!”
A second later the fire-escape window was shattered by the impact of a rifle butt; I whipped around to see two more ERA troopers coming in through the window.
“Hey, what the fuck are-”
I didn’t get the chance to complete this line of inquiry, as one of the grunts who had charged the front door tackled me from behind. The air was punched out of my lungs as I hit the wood floor face-first; I gasped, fighting for breath, and tried to raise myself on my elbows, only to be forced down when a heavy boot landed against my back.