That made sense. All too much sense.
It would do as a working assumption, then-he'd been imprinted with the training to be a spy, a secret agent. And maybe his brain hadn't been ready for it-maybe that was why he'd had such a bad reaction to the imprint. He wasn't meant to be able to kill people.
But on the other hand, he was certainly good at it now. Wouldn't those two men have had the same sort of imprinting?
Maybe he'd gotten something special. Maybe that was why whoever was responsible was after him.
Spies, assassins-it all sounded like something out of an old video.
“So where are we going?” Mirim asked, as the sound of an approaching train reached them.
“Your place,” Casper replied.
Mirim nodded.
By the time they actually boarded the subway car, however, Casper was having second thoughts. If the government was trying to kill him-and of course it was the government; who else but the Party would have the arrogance to set assassins loose on the streets of Philadelphia?-then they'd probably already done their research. They'd probably know he was dating Cecelia. They might know that Mirim had left the Data Tracers offices with him.
And Mirim and Cecelia shared that apartment.
If they had any brains at all, the people who were after him would be watching the apartment. They might be holding Cecelia hostage, as bait for him.
He shook his head. No, he thought, Cecelia wouldn't be home at this time of day, she'd be at her office. He glanced at his watch-she'd be going to lunch soon, he judged.
Maybe they could arrange a rendezvous; somehow, he didn't think anyone should be going into that apartment.
Instead, he got off at City Hall, pulling Mirim after him.
“Where are we going?” she asked for the third time.
“We're going to meet Cecelia,” Casper told her. “Your apartment's probably being watched.”
The man called Smith was not happy with what he heard when one of the back-up men checked in.
The agent who'd been waiting out front had eventually realized that something was wrong, that the pick-up wasn't going as planned; if Beech had been there he should have been taken care of quickly, and if he wasn't, either Lambert or Finch should have come out and said so, so the man in the car would know it was a stake-out.
He'd heard gunfire and breaking glass, he was pretty sure, and that should have been the end of it, but he waited and waited and Lambert and Finch did not emerge.
So he'd gone in, and he'd found Finch with bullet holes in his chest and Lambert with a chunk of wood rammed through his eye, and he'd gone back out, quickly, with his pistol ready, to warn Eberhart out back, and then he'd returned to his car and called in.
Smith was not happy at all.
This should have been easy. Beech shouldn't be ready for them yet-the file should still be fragmented, working in fits and starts. Lambert and Finch should have polished him off in seconds.
Maybe it hadn't been Beech at all, maybe Lambert and Finch had stumbled into a drug deal or some other illicit activity and been mistaken for cops-the neighborhood was bad enough, certainly.
But in that case, where the hell was Beech?
He wasn't at his apartment. He wasn't at the woman's apartment. He wasn't at Data Tracers. Where else would he go? Smith accessed the file on Beech and skimmed through it.
He saw three more possibilities.
First, Beech might have figured out what had happened and gone to NeuroTalents to complain.
Second, he might have headed to his girlfriend's law firm-either to see her, or to discuss filing suit against NeuroTalents or Data Tracers.
Third, he might have decided to take shelter with friends or relatives-only his records didn't show any living relatives, and the only friend mentioned was Cecelia Grand.
Those would all want attention. It meant calling in more manpower, but that was better than letting Beech stay alive and loose with the Spartacus File gradually integrating itself in his brain.
And that brought up the question of just how good, how dangerous, Beech already was. It would take a neurophysicist and an imprint programmer with a complete scan of Beech's brain to predict that with any accuracy; the theory was that he would need weeks or months to absorb everything, but Polnovick had begun his rampage within twenty-four hours. The theory might well be wrong.
Beech might be a rank beginner who got lucky, or he might already be the equivalent of an experienced rebel leader, or he might be anywhere in between, and Smith didn't know which it was. Could Beech spot Covert agents reliably, or had Lambert and Finch just been sloppy? Was Beech wary now, alerted by the attempt on his life? Would it be possible to get near him?
A sniper didn't need to be near him, of course, but the sniper that morning hadn't managed to dispose of Beech. Had that been merely coincidence, or had Beech somehow already been alerted?
Or was the Spartacus File simply making him very, very cautious?
If Beech was on the lookout, for whatever reason, how could Smith get at him? Smith kept half his mind on that question as he issued orders to cover Grand's office.
Chapter Nine
Mirim followed along, watching in puzzlement as Casper zigged and zagged through the city streets. He paused now and then to stare up at certain buildings or vehicles, though Mirim could never see anything special about them.
They went past the entrance to Cecelia's law firm four times without going in.
At last Casper stopped, a block away from Cecelia's office, and ushered Mirim into a coffee shop.
“I'm pretty sure they're here, but they're still setting up,” he said, leading her toward an ancient landline pay phone at the back. “They won't have had time to monitor all the phones-I hope not, anyway. They'll have your cell covered, and of course mine, not that it works, but they probably don't have Celia's phones yet, so I want you to call her, arrange to meet somewhere for lunch.”
Mirim nodded, and started to pull her calling card from her purse. Casper's hand on her wrist stopped her.
“Use cash,” he said.
She glanced at him, then fished out a dollar coin instead. As she punched in Cecelia's office number and waited for an answer, Mirim looked uneasily at Casper.
This was all so strange and horrible. She had always liked Casper, thought he was sort of cute-she'd often thought that if he'd had any backbone and hadn't been dating her roommate, she'd have been seriously interested in him.
She hadn't known then that he lived in a slum, or that he was capable of killing two armed men in a matter of seconds.
Of course, maybe he hadn't been capable of it-but didn't they say that imprinting couldn't teach you anything you wouldn't have been able to learn? It was just faster -if you weren't able to handle something, imprinting wouldn't change that.
Could an ordinary man learn to fight like that? Or was Casper something special?
That speech he'd given at Data Tracers had been wonderful, and he was still charming, but he'd been so ruthless. And all this cloak-and-dagger rigmarole-was he being paranoid?
But they really were after him, whoever they were.
What was going on? Casper said he didn't know, either, but he still seemed to know what to do-could an imprinting do that?
Then Cecelia's voice said, “Grand speaking,” and Mirim concentrated on sounding normal, as if she were still at her office, as if she hadn't seen two men killed about an hour before, as if Casper weren't standing behind her with a loaded handgun in his pants.
It would have to be lawyers, Smith thought. With most people he could have bullied the manager into letting them monitor the landline phones in a matter of minutes, just as he'd bullied that oaf Quinones at Data Tracers. The cells had all been tagged already, not just Grand's but everyone in the office, but Beech might expect that-or he might just use a landline anyway. Smith needed access to the office phones, and the easiest way to get it was courtesy of someone who already had it.