Mount Dragon

less likely it seemed. But if he wasn’t leading the Hummers, then where the hell was he? Back at Mount Dragon, managing the crisis?

He realized, with a dull cold thrust of fear, that Nye would be out hunting them. Not in a loud, ungainly Hummer, but on that big paint horse of his.

Shit. He should have taken that horse himself, or, at the very least, driven a nail deep into his hoof.

Cursing his own lack of foresight, he looked at his watch. Three-forty- five.

Nye stopped and dismounted, examining the tracks as they headed north. In the strong yellow glow of his flashlight, he could see the individual grains of sand, almost microscopic in size, piled up at the edges of the tracks. They were fresh and precarious, and no breath of wind had disturbed them. The track could not be more than an hour old. Carson was moving ahead at a slow trot, making no further attempt to hide or confuse his trail. Nye figured the two were about five miles ahead. They would stop and hide at sunrise, someplace where they could rest the horses during the heat of the day.

That’s when he would take them.

He remounted Muerto and urged him into a fast trot. The best time to catch them would be just at dawn, before they even realized they were being followed. Hang back, wait for enough light for a clean shot. His own mount was doing fine, a little damp from the exertion but nothing more. He could maintain this pace for another fifty miles. And there were still ten gallons of water.

Suddenly he heard something. He quickly switched off his light and stopped. A gentle breeze blew out of the south, carrying the sound away from him. He stilled his horse, waiting. Five minutes passed, then ten. The breeze shifted a little, and he heard voices raised in argument, then the faint tinking of something that sounded like saddle rigging.

They had stopped already. The fools figured they had shaken their pursuers and could relax. He waited, hardly breathing. The voice—the other voice—said nothing.

Nye dismounted and led his horse back behind a gentle ridgeline, where he would be hidden and could graze unmolested. Then he crept back to the lip of the basin. He could hear the murmuring voices in the pool of darkness below.

He lay on his stomach at what he estimated was three hundred yards. The voices were clearer now; a few yards closer and he’d be able to make out what they were saying. Perhaps they were planning how to dispose of the gold. His gold. But he wasn’t going to let curiosity spoil everything.

But even if they saw him, where were they going to go? At some earlier time, he might actually have enjoyed alerting them to his presence. They would have to run off immediately, of course, with no chance to retrieve their horses. The chase would make good, if brief, sport. There was no better shooting than in an open desert like this. It was little different from hunting ibex in the Hejaz. Except that an ibex moved at forty-five miles an hour, and a human at twelve.

Hunting down that bastard Teece had proved to be excellent sport, much better than he could have anticipated. The dust storm had provided an interesting element of complication, and—when he’d left Muerto standing riderless in the path of the oncoming Hummer—made it easier for him to hide while enticing the investigator to leave his vehicle for a moment. And Teece himself had been an unexpected surprise. The scrawny- looking fellow proved much more resilient than Nye expected, taking cover in the storm, running, resisting to the end. Perhaps he’d been expecting an ambush. In any case, there had been no death-fear in his eyes to savor, no groveling pleas for mercy, there at the end. Now the nancy-boy was safely under several feet of sand, deeper than any vulture’s beak or coyote’s paw could ever probe. And his filthy sneaking secrets were entombed with him. They would never reach their intended destination.

But all that had taken place a lifetime ago. Before Carson had escaped with his forbidden knowledge. Nye’s unique brand of loyalty to GeneDyne, his blind dedication to Scopes, had been incinerated with the explosion. Now, no distractions remained for him.

He checked his watch. Three-forty-five. An hour to first light.

GeneDyne Boston, the headquarters of GeneDyne International, was a postmodern leviathan that towered over the waterfront. Although the Boston Aquarium complained bitterly about being in its shadow throughout most of the daylight hours, the sixty-story tower of black granite and Italian marble was considered one of the finest designs in the city. During the summer months, its atrium was crowded with tourists having their pictures taken beneath the Calder Mezzoforte, largest free-hanging mobile in the world. On all but the coldest days, people would line up in front of the building’s facade, cameras in hand, to watch five fountains trade arching jets of water in, a complex and computerized ballet.

But the biggest draw of all was the virtual-reality screens arranged along the walls of the public lobby. Standing twelve feet high and employing a proprietary high-definition imaging system, the panels displayed pictures of various GeneDyne sites throughout the world: London, Brussels, Nairobi, Budapest. When combined, the displays formed one massive landscape, breathtaking in its realism. Since the images were computer-controlled, they were not static: trees waved in the breeze in front of the Brussels research facility, and red double-decker buses rumbled in front of the London office. Clouds moved across skies that lightened and darkened with the passing of the day. The displays were the most public example of Scopes’s advocacy of emerging technologies. When the landscapes were changed, on the fifteenth of each month, the local news broadcasts never failed to run a story on the new images.

From his parking place in the access road along the rear of the tower, Levine craned his neck upward, gazing at the spot where the unbroken facade suddenly receded, in a maze of cubes, toward the building’s summit. Those upper floors of the building, he knew, were Scopes’s personal domain. No camera had penetrated them since a photo spread in Vanity Fair five years earlier. Somewhere, on the sixtieth floor, beyond the security stations and the computer-controlled locks, was Scopes’s famous octagonal room.

He continued to look speculatively upward. Then he ducked his head back inside the van and resumed reading a heavy paperbound manual titled Digital Telephony.

True to his word, Mime had spent the last two hours preparing Levine, turning to his connections within the byzantine hacker community, reaching out into remote information banks, threading mysterious datastreams. One by one, like some modern-day league of Baker Street Irregulars, strangers had arrived at Levine’s hotel-room door. Boys, mostly; urchins and orphans of the hacker underground. One had brought him an ID card, identifying him as one Joseph O’Roarke of the New England Telephone Company. Levine recognized the photo on the card as one of himself that had appeared in Business Week two years before. The card attached to a clip on the front pocket of the phone-company uniform that the valet had delivered earlier.

A kid with an impudent curl to his lip had delivered a small piece of electronic equipment that looked somewhat like a garage-door opener. Another had brought several technical manuals—forbidden bibles within the phone phreaking community. Lastly, a slightly older youth had brought him the keys to a telephone-company van waiting below in the lot of the Holiday Inn. Levine was to leave the keys under the dashboard. The youth had said he’d be needing the van around seven in the morning; for what, he had not said.

Mime had remained in frequent modem contact: downloading the building blueprints to Levine and walking him through such security arrangements as he’d been able to ascertain, providing background on the cover Levine would use to gain access to the building. Finally, he’d transmitted a lengthy program to Levine’s computer, with instructions on its use.

But now, Levine’s laptop was on the seat next to him, powered down, and Mime was in some remote unguessable location. Now, there was nobody but Levine himself.

He shut the manual and closed his eyes a moment, whispering a brief prayer to the close and silent darkness. Then he picked up his laptop, stepped out of the van, and shut its door loudly, walking away without glancing back. The brisk harbor air had a faint overlay of diesel. He tried to move at the ambling, unhurried pace of technicians everywhere. The weight of the orange line-testing telephone bounced awkwardly against his hip. In his head, he once again went over the various paths the upcoming conversation could take. Then he swallowed hard. There were so many possibilities, and he was prepared for so few.

Stepping up to an unmarked door in the building’s backside, he pressed a buzzer. There was a long silence in which Levine struggled to keep from walking away. Then came a squawk of static and a voice said, “Yes?”

“Phone company,” Levine said in what he hoped was a flat voice.