After a light dinner, they’d all turned in early. Romy was in the next bedroom down the hall, Meerm was on a cot in Betsy’s bedroom, Tome and Kek were with Zero at his home, wherever that was, God was in His heaven, and not one damn thing seemed right with the world.
He jumped as he heard the bedroom door open.
“It’s only me.” He recognized Romy’s whisper. “Didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Just startled me,” he said. Then she startled him even further him by slipping under the covers and huddling against him. “Hold me, Patrick.”
“Gladly.”
He wound his arms around her. She was wearing some sort of long T-shirt. He didn’t know what she had on under it, if anything.
“No, I mean, just hold me,” she said. “Nothing more. I don’t want to be alone tonight, Patrick. I need a friend.”
“That’s me,” he sighed. He was about to add, Friend to the friendless, but bit it back. She was trembling, as if chilled. So he said, “Tough day, huh.”
“Believe it.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
And then she said, “I feel lost, Patrick. I used to have some pretty hard and fast ideas about right and wrong, up and down, latitude and longitude, but now everything’s been twisted out of shape. Like one of those computer programs that let you distort a photo or a famous painting, you know, push it and pull it this way and that until it bears only a passing resemblance to the original. That’s how my world feels. That’s how my life feels. That’s howI feel. Like I don’t even know myself anymore.” A harsh little laugh. “Not that I ever did.”
“You loved him, didn’t you.”
He heard a soft sob and felt her head nod against his shoulder.
“Do you still?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I think I was in love with an image I’d concocted. But now that the mask is off…”
“Let me ask you something,” Patrick said. “If he’d taken off the mask and revealed a face horribly disfigured by birth defects or an accident, how would that have changed things?”
He marveled at the way his thoughts were running. He should have been searching for the best angle to wedge himself between Romy and Zero; instead he was looking for a way to ease her pain. As much as he wanted her—and right now, with her bare legs warm against his, that was very, very much—comforting her seemed even more important.
“Not at all. It wasn’t a physical attraction. I see where you’re going, but it’s not the same. A disfigured man would still be a man. Zero isn’t…”
“A man? What’s your definition of a man, Romy?”
“A maleHomo sapiens .”
Patrick sensed himself clicking into attorney mode, felt the well-oiled teeth of his rhetoric and advocacy gears meshing. He’d always prided himself on an ability to mount a convincing argument for either side of an issue, even one he didn’t particularly care for. Like this one.
“But before today, when you thought of both Zero and me as maleHomo saps , you gravitated more toward him than me. Why?”
“I didn’t know you, Patrick. And I didn’t trust you. At least not at first. But you’ve got to admit you’ve changed.”
“How?”
“Well…,” she said, drawing out the word, “you’ve gone from a man with no commitments to one who believes in something and is willing to put himself on the line for it.”
“Romy, Zero has been committed since day one, from the roots of his hair down to his toenails, and that was what you responded to. But it went beyond commitment, didn’t it. He demonstrated high intelligence, integrity, decency, courage, dignity, a reverence for life that matches, maybe even exceeds, your own. Those are traits you admire in humans. They’re what make you value a human, and until this morning you’d thought you could find them only in a human. But this is a new world, Romy, where the definition of ‘human’ is being revised—and let me tell you, when we take Meerm’s baby public, it’s going to undergo a total rewrite.”
Listen to me, Patrick thought. I’m making his case and killing my own.
But he was on a roll, high on his rhetorical momentum, and couldn’t stop himself.
“As for Zero, he says he’s a mutated sim. Well, it looks to me like he mutated in theHomo sapiens direction, big time. He’s more human than a lot ofHomo saps I know, and we both knowHomo saps who look more apelike than he does. Meerm’s baby is going to upgrade the sims from ‘product’ to ‘person,’ from the Pongidae family to Hominidae, but as far as I can see, Zero is already there. A new species of Hominidae—Homo zero. So what else do you want from the guy? What else does he have to do to deserve you?”
He felt her stiffen. “It’s not about deserving me. I’d never—”
“Then decide what makes a guy worthy of your love—his genome or his values.”
A long silence. Patrick had run out of steam, and Romy…he wished he knew what she was thinking.
Then she snuggled closer. “Thank you, Patrick. That doesn’t settle things, but it helps. Helps a lot. You’re a good friend.”
Good friend…he wished he were much more, but for now he’d settle for that. Didn’t have much choice. And who knew? Maybe things wouldn’t work out between Zero and her. They’d barely spoken today. Maybe Zero had other plans. But even if they both agreed on trying a relationship, they had a hell of a lot stacked against them.
He’d wait, because he knew of no other woman in the world like Romy Cadman. He’d hang around so he could be close by to catch her if she fell.
15
SHORT HILLS, NJ
The late-night wind cut at Luca Portero as he strode across the crowded mall parking lot toward Lister’s Mercedes. A perfect meeting place. The mall was staying open late for last-minute Christmas shoppers. Luca had taken advantage of that, arriving early and picking up a bracelet for Maria. He’d wait until after the holidays to dump her—no sense in spending New Year’s Eve alone.
He wondered why Lister had insisted on a face to face tonight. He guessed it wouldn’t be a happy meeting. When he opened the SUV’s door and saw the expression on his old CO’s fleshy face, he was sure of it.
“Cold out there,” Luca said as he slipped into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
“Cold everywhere,” Lister said. He sounded tired.
Not a good start. Better cut to the chase.
“What’s the word on the plan? How many men they giving us?”
Lister shook his head. “None.”
Luca felt as if he’d been slapped. “None? How are we going to—?”
“We’re not.” He unbuttoned his camel hair coat. “They think using Strickland’s body as bait is a waste of time. Why should anyone care about his body when his DNA fingerprint is on computer.”
“But it won’t be,” Luca said. “Not after we hack the NYPD system.”
“But it’s not on just the NYPD computer. If you remember, Strickland had a rap sheet that included a couple of sexual assaults—one in Nassau County and one in Rockland—and a rape in Queens that he pleaded down to simple assault. He got around. And so did his RFLP. Seems if you’re caught on a sexual assault in one area, the Special Victims Units in all the surrounding areas check your DNA for a match in the unsolved cases on their books. Craig Strickland’s DNA is in dozens and dozens of police computers all over the tri-state area. Even we can’t hack all those databases. It’s an easy bet that a sharpie lawyer like Sullivan will figure that out, and have a good laugh at us if we try to use Strickland as bait.”
Luca clenched his teeth. Damn. He should have thought of that.
“Dumb idea, Luca,” Lister said. “It had people questioning your suitability for leading a field operation. Fortunately I was able to defuse that talk with your other idea. That went over big. The Old Man sent two people from his own office to help me canvass the SimGen Natal Center staff. We’ve been at it all day.”