Olga had thought she had no more tears left to cry. She had been wrong.
The intruder was still talking to someone—someone Jongleur couldn't see. Immersed in protective fluids, he writhed in impotent fury. He tried to bring up the room audio but again he discovered himself blocked, the commands disabled. He knew it must be his ex-employee who had done all this, but why should that street animal go to such ridiculous lengths just to confuse him?
Jongleur stared at the screen with the intensity of a mad thing, an old falcon who lived only to strike at anything that moved. The woman's lips were moving—what was she saying? Damn her, is she talking to Dread?
He watched the woman begin to cry again, shuddering, pulling at her face with her hands, and his distant heart was again chilled. She knew. Somehow, she had found out. Which meant that his enemies knew as well, for who else would tell her?
Why bring this woman into it? What does he think she can possibly accomplish?
She was standing over his pod now—his pod, only a few short meters from the rags and tatters of his living body. He switched cameras so he could see her face, which was grotesque with rage and misery. She made a fist and struck the pod—a tiny, meaningless blow on the hardened plasteel, but Felix Jongleur suddenly felt himself suffocating, his fear twisting ever tighter. There were strangers in his home—he was violated. Pursued. Caught.
No! I won't let it happen. A dozen possible reprisals flashed through his mind, all thwarted by the evacuations and the meddling in his system. Even his last-ditch defenses had been rendered inoperative. He could not flood the room with immobilizing gas or crippling sonics.
I won't let it happen!
It came to him suddenly, but he could not at first decide if it was genius or complete madness. Months—they had been immobilized for almost twenty-four months. Would it work? It would—it had to. He triggered a massive dose of adrenaline to be administered to both of them. It would work. He knew it would. He was excited now, his pulse suddenly racing with feverish glee instead of terror. What was the release sequence? If that much adrenaline hit them and they couldn't get out, they would thrash themselves to death—damage the breathing masks and drown in the suspension fluid.
There. He selected the commands. In the window in his mind, the system brought up the life signs, the graphs already spiking as they rose toward something like normal function, then moved on beyond, fueled by the adrenal surge. He brought up the view of the room again, the heedless woman sitting obliviously on the floor of his sanctum sanctorum between his own helpless body and the last remnants of Ushabti, the terrible mistake that had destroyed his beautiful Avialle.
Violated. She has. . . .
"There is an intruder just steps away from you," he told his servants, making the words thunder in their ears so they would retain them even in the confusion of waking to their real bodies for the first time in two years. "Take her and hurt her and find out what she knows. Do this and afterward you may remain free."
The indicator lights blinked, then blinked again as the lids of the two black pods slowly began to rise.
CHAPTER 45
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NETFEED/OBITUARY: Robert Wells, Founder of TMX
(visuaclass="underline" Wells at Telemorphix "torchlight rally" company meeting)
VO: Robert Wells, techology pioneer and one of the world's richest men, died of a heart attack yesterday. Wells, the founder of the Telemorphix Corporation, was one hundred and eleven years old.
(visuaclass="underline" Owen Tanabe, Wells' executive assistant)
TANABE: "He went out the way he would have wanted—at the office, plugged into the net, working right up until the last moment on ways to improve human life. Even though he's gone, all of us will be feeling the impact of Bob Wells' personal vision for years to come. . . ."
He was laughing, laughing out loud. He couldn't help it. His heart was aflame with exhilaration, his thoughts swirling like smoke and sparks. He was as alive as he had ever been—it was like the last moment of the hunt, drawn out by some hallucinatory distortion of time into an hours-long orgasm.
The chorus in his head had reached a crescendo. Camera in close. Face flushed but coldly handsome. The winner. Unstoppable.
All his enemies inside the network were at his fingertips now, hopelessly trapped—the blind woman, Jongleur, the Sulaweyo bitch, even the operating system itself. They cowered before him. He was the destroyer, the beast, the devil-devil man. He was a god.
And outside the network. . . ?
Pull back to reveal his enemies at his feet. Long shot. Only one standing.
Dread looked down at the two bodies on the floor of the loft. Dulcie lay silent in a tangle of arms and legs like a puppet with its strings slashed, blood pooling around her. The policewoman was still moving, but only a little, her head twitching in time with her swift, jerky breathing, bright red arterial blood frothing on her lips. He frowned. Even in the flaring majesty of the moment he remembered his mantra against overconfidence.
Dread muted his inner music, then bent and rolled the policewoman onto her side. She gave a little whistling grunt but otherwise did not respond, even when he wiggled the handle of the knife in her back. A shame to leave her unattended in the last moments, but he had bigger game afoot. She wasn't his type, anyway—he didn't like them stocky. He reached down into her overcoat, found the holstered Glock, and pulled it out. He put the barrel against the policewoman's head, then remembered that even after he returned to the network her final moments would be recorded on the loft's surveillance cameras.
Why waste a slow death? he thought. Dulcie's end had turned out to be a bit disappointingly swift, after all.
He considered briefly, then ejected the bullets from the policewoman's gun and Dulcie's snapped-together pistol and tucked both weapons into the pockets of his robe. He reached back into the woman's breast pocket and found her police pad. Sorry, sweetness, no calls. He ground it under his heel until he heard components shatter, then kicked it across the room.
No sense in putting temptation in the way of a dying woman, he thought cheerfully. Women just couldn't resist temptation—pretty things, bright colors, false hopes. They were like animals that way.
He climbed back onto the coma bed and frowned at the blood he was smearing on the purity of the white surfaces. Can't be helped. Fix it in editing. Then again, maybe it would be a nice effect. . . ? He ran a quick check to make sure the cameras would pick up everything that happened in the loft, and that he himself would have a view of it even when he was back on the network. Confident, cocky, lazy, dead, right? Not this boy.
Dread brought his music back up, a swell of triumphant strings and kettledrums. The chorus came in again, hundreds of voices singing in the bones of his skull as he dropped back into the universe he had conquered.
Paul could only stare at the spot where Felix Jongleur had stood a moment before. One second the ancient man had been there, then he had simply vanished—pop, like a soap bubble.