Eileen Reed - Ground Zero Part 28

"I'll get the children," Ilina whispered.

"We have maybe ten minutes," Anna said, closing her eyes for an instant and visualizing bullets, grenade, careful negotiation of the eight flights of stairs, and another grenade or two. "Ten minutes."

"I will send out the warning," Boriska said stiffly. "It is my duty."

"Come to your wife, Boriska," Anna said. "Don't be a hero."

"I will come if I can, Anna," Boriska said. His face was ashen white, but he was not trembling. "Take care of my babies."

"I will, Boris," Anna said, and turned away. She did not look back.

27.

Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia.

"I'd like to speak to Lieutenant Jefferson, please," Lucy said. Her fingers clenched the phone. Sweat beaded her hairline yet again.

"He's not at his desk right now. Would you like to leave a voice mail?" the voice said cheerfully.

"No, this is very important. Can you page the Lieutenant and tell him Lucy Giometti from the CIA would like to speak to him?"

"Well, all right," the voice said, not as cheerfully. "But you'll have to wait."

"I'll wait," Lucy said. She ma.s.saged her temple with her finger, switched the phone, and ma.s.saged the other one. She'd never felt so angry in all her life. She was sure Mills was feeling just grand.

Mills had refused to take her report to higher levels. It was too much of a leap, he said. The potential attack on a missile silo was not confirmed by any other source except an Iranian fuel clerk's gossip, he said. The idea that Muallah was going to attack an American city using nuclear weapons because of a poem written in 922 was ridiculous, he said.

Lucy had watched the smile bloom into a grin on Mills's face as her frustration became apparent. Her logic was infallible. The report from Mashhad fit in perfectly with everything she'd learned. But Mills was not going to take her a.n.a.lysis and use it.

Finally she realized why Steven Mills was grinning. He had her, finally, and he knew it. She could quit, she certainly could, at any time. Steven Mills had never been able to have power over her, the way he longed for power over his subordinates. Now Lucy had handed him a collar and leash. She desperately wanted to complete her case, and only Mills could do that for her. He finally had power over her, and he loved it.

"The report is interesting," he said, and pushed her report to one side of his desk. "We'll see if it's confirmed by additional sources."

"But-" Lucy bit off the words she was about to say. She stood for a moment, looking at Mills, and nodded slightly. "I see. Well, then, you have my report, Mr. Mills. I'll be getting back to my other work, then."

Mills looked at her suspiciously for a moment, then nodded. His grin was still there, though. Mills was having a great day. Lucy left to find the bathroom and throw up.

"Lieutenant Jefferson here," a voice spoke suddenly in her ear. Lucy started, lost for a moment in her musings over the horrible scene in Mills's office.

"This is Lucy Giometti, Lieutenant Jefferson," she said.

"Ah yes, Lucy," Jefferson said warmly. "What can I do for you?'

"I'd like to send you a small a.n.a.lysis I've done," Lucy said calmly. This might be the end of her career at the CIA. Lucy understood the risk of going around the chain of command. "Do you have a computer at your desk with on-line capability?"

"Of course," Jefferson said warily. "This will be encrypted, of course?"

"Of course. The key is-" Here Lucy thought for a moment. "The key is the word you said your wife was when she was pregnant. Remember?"

"I remember," Jefferson said.

"Are you at your desk?"

"I'm at my desk, Miss Lucy. This sounds important."

"It is important," Lucy said. "Desperately important."

"Then why isn't this going through channels?" Jefferson said sharply.

"Because channels are closed to me right now," Lucy said grimly. "My companion at our little dinner party is not interested in furthering my reputation, shall we say?"

"In the military world, this is a very dangerous thing to do, my dear," Jefferson said.

"This is my world," Lucy said, then winced at the arrogance of her remark. "Well, I mean-" Jefferson laughed in her ear, but it was a kindly laugh.

"You are very young," he said. "But I do like your style. So does my friend."

"Give me your e-mail address," Lucy said, typing in "Peckish" as the encryption code to her report. She typed in Jefferson's address rapidly and punched the Send b.u.t.ton before she could change her mind.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Jefferson said in her ear.

"Whatever you think you should, Lieutenant," Lucy said grimly. "Whatever you think you can."

University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Sharon was waiting when Eileen found her way into the Student Union. The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs sat along the slope of a bluff. The buildings were the usual college mixture of old and new. The union was new, all gla.s.s and concrete, and was empty except for a few solitary students studying at the tables. Sharon was studying as well, but she put her papers neatly together and put her books and papers in her knapsack as she saw Eileen approaching.

"Would you like some coffee?" Eileen asked. "I was going to get a cup."

"Nothing, thank you," Sharon said. She was dressed in old black jeans and a long sweater, and she wore old squashy loafers on her plump feet. Sharon Johnson looked puffy and tired. A woman who was mourning. Eileen got a cup of deep black student coffee and poured half a cup of milk into the Styrofoam cup before the liquid turned a muddy brown. She sat down across from Sharon and took a cautious sip.

"I'm sorry about Art," Eileen said finally. Sharon blinked and nodded and looked down at her folded hands.

"Art's in G.o.d's hands now," she said. "I'm sorry you didn't find the murderer before, but I hope you still will. Arthur was a good man."

"I talked to Joe Tanner about Sully," Eileen said. "I found out about your mysterious coder, as well."

Sharon looked up in surprise and with the faint beginnings of a question on her lips. Eileen shook her head, and Sharon nodded immediately.

"I understand," she said. "I don't want to know. I hoped that would help you find-whoever it was. But it didn't, did it?"

"No, I'm afraid not," Eileen said. "I'm fresh out of ideas."

"You're not supposed to tell me that, Detective," Sharon said wryly. '-'I'm one of your suspects still, I suppose."

"Yeah, you are," Eileen said, and sipped her coffee. "I want to know something from you, and it's probably not going to be easy for you. So I'll start off by saying I don't think you killed Art."

Sharon nodded gravely and moved the loafered feet in a slight whispery sound on the tile of the floor. That was the only sound she made, although Eileen thought she saw a slight relaxation around the tired brown eyes.

"So you're off the hook, maybe."

"Thank you, Miss Reed," she whispered.

"Now I want to know what Terry had on you."

"Pardon?"

"I think I knew Terry. Perhaps better than any of you did. Better than Lowell did, even. She had to have something on everybody. I'll be talking to Lowell tomorrow; perhaps the only thing she had over him was his love for her. I'll find that out tomorrow. But every other Gamer had a reason to hate her. Tell me what she tried to do to you."

There was a period of silence. Eileen tried to keep her expression open and friendly and slightly pleading. She wouldn't threaten this woman.

Sharon Johnson sighed.

"Well, I'll tell you," she said. "I don't know what Terry did to the other Gamers. But she hated me. She hated me and she knew just where I was the most vulnerable, the little b.i.t.c.h." Sharon spoke the word with a total lack of pa.s.sion that came off as somehow deadly.

"Where was that?"

"My children, of course," Sharon said. She looked at Eileen with black eyes that suddenly seemed even blacker. "She was trying to get me fired. Because of my work. I told you that the first day."

"I remember," Eileen said. "What did she do?"

"She knew I couldn't afford the Colorado Springs school. Not without this job. She knew I couldn't afford this school unless the government was paying for my cla.s.ses. I have three children. I have to pay for my neighbor to look after them while I'm in cla.s.s, so there's that money too."

"Why did she think she could get you fired?"

"Because I'm not that good, or I wasn't. I struggled a lot that first year. Sully, I thought she hated me. I didn't know how to think my way through the whole problem. I kept missing things."

Sharon looked down at her fingers, twined together, then spread her hand out and looked at it.

"I didn't know what a parameter was. It was a complete mystery. I didn't dare ask. I worked so hard, but I didn't know how to write a good program. Even Terry was better than me at first. They hired me because I talked Paul Wiessman into it. And my race helped, too," she said, and her mouth twisted bitterly. "I wanted to prove to everyone that I could pull my own weight."

"What is a parameter?" Eileen asked, smiling.

"A list of things you pa.s.s to a program," Sharon said promptly, and her grave look lifted for a moment. She smiled back at Eileen. "Like your program is going to sort fruit, so you run the program and you pa.s.s along an apple, an orange, and a banana. Those are the parameters to the program."

"I see," Eileen said. "You make it sound simple."

"Those are Art's words," Sharon said, and she blinked rapidly. "I finally asked, late at night. He came by and I was in tears. I don't cry easily. I knew I was beat. He sat down and flat out told me he was going to help me, and for me not to get my d.a.m.n southern back up about it."

Eileen could see the vision Sharon presented to her. She could see the half-darkness of the empty office s.p.a.ce and the weeping woman in the front of the blank face of the computer terminal. She could see Art's friendly expression and the simple explanation of apple, banana, orange.

"He tutored me for months," she said, and reached down to her purse. She blew her nose briskly on a tissue. "I started to get it. Before then, Terry didn't hate me. I wasn't worthy. People have to be beneath her, that's her kink. When I was the worst programmer on Gaming, she didn't notice me. Then I started understanding. Then the computer started to become a machine to me, not this living creature that hated me.

"Then Terry started making remarks about my work. My code. We'd run a test and she'd find some flaw with my work-that was easy at first-and she'd throw up her hands and declare she couldn't do her tests unless the product was stable, unless she had good code to work with. She'd be just loud enough. Lowell had a talk with me."

"Lowell talked to you?"

"He'd do anything she wanted, poor man. He loved her so. I can't imagine sleeping next to that woman. It would be like sleeping next to a nest of cottonmouth snakes. She'd talked to him about me, I imagine at home, and so he wanted to ask me about my work."

"What about Nelson?" Eileen asked, although she already had a pretty good idea about that.

"I didn't talk to Nelson," Sharon said after a moment. "He didn't concern himself much with this sort of thing."

Eileen nodded solemnly. Sharon had a tender heart. Nelson Atkins was a worthless manager, but he was a sweet and caring man. She wouldn't reveal Nelson's inadequacies to Detective Reed.

"What did Lowell say?"

"He wanted to know how I felt I was doing. Perhaps Terry thought I would be an easy pushover, that I would cry and beg to be kept on. It was so odd to see his face and hear his voice saying words that I knew had been spoken by her.

" 'Do you think this job is going to be too much for you?' he asked, and I took my courage and I fixed him with my eye and I said, 'I don't think it is. I'm doing well and I'm getting better every day. I've done code counts and problem counts, and I could print you out a chart if you'd like. Sully helped me with a program that shows my improvement over time.'

"Terry didn't know I was making friends, you see. She thought of everyone as a separate island, vulnerable. Sully put a sword in my hand. Sully knew I was supposed to go talk to Lowell. I don't know how she knew. But there she was, with her hair all sticking up every which way, and she showed me this program that she'd put together. She showed me how my code and the quality of my code was shooting up every week. She showed me her code, all flat line and basically perfect, and she winked at me and showed me Terry's code, flat line and at the bottom. Then she put my code up against Terry's and she turned and just walked away."

"She helped you," Eileen said. She was choked with admiration and jealousy over a woman two years dead.

"She knew what I was going up against. If I had shown any weakness, maybe Lowell would have tried to get Nelson to set my rating back to technician instead of engineer. That would have been a big cut in pay. She wanted to punish me through my children. I would have had to pull them out of the private school. She wanted me beaten."

She almost did it, Eileen thought, and remembered the dead-ness of Joe's eyes when he spoke of Sully, the tortured penance of 'Berto, and the exhaustion and guilt of Doug Procell.

"She didn't know I'd have my friends. She took Sully away, but there was Joe, and 'Berto, and Doug. She didn't beat me. But she never gave up, either." Sharon looked at Eileen, and her eyes were implacable.

"Whoever killed that woman did us all a favor," Sharon said. "I'm ashamed of myself for thinking that. Then G.o.d took Art away from us. He was the best of us, Art was. Now he's gone. Perhaps that's our punishment."

Turtkul, Uzbekistan.

Muallah toed the body of the Russian soldier. He was a young one, perhaps no more than twenty or so. He'd gotten some sort of message out over the communications set before Rashad shot him carefully in the back. There was no sign of anyone else, although Muallah was sure that there were more people here. Women, probably, and perhaps children. The curtains at the window. The vegetable garden.

"Ali," he said softly. "There are more here. Find them."

Ali touched his lips with his right hand and ghosted out of the room alone. Ali needed no help.