“Oh, well, you could do it anytime, it’s just a Catholic habit, my mother would get querents then because the farmers stay up late on Saturday, like a midnight Mass.”
“Okay.”
“And I do all my numbers then, investments, passwords, upcoming dates, all that. Of course, clients want lottery numbers.”
“Right.”
“But anyway, that just tells you when the last combination got set. It doesn’t have anything to do with the combination itself.”
“Right, okay, never mind, we’ll deal with it.”
I’ll bet you will, I thought. And I bet it’ll be with an oxyacetylene torch rather than with logic. I just hoped they wouldn’t ship the safe to Quantico or some other godforsaken place where it would attract the attention of politically motivated gangsters.
“You’re sure there’s no other strongbox around?” Ana asked. I said no.
“No other hides?”
I shook my head.
“What about all your safety deposit boxes?”
“I’m sure he would have changed those,” I said. Come on, five isn’t “all,” I thought. Five is still a nonparanoid amount. “Unless he didn’t get the time to go to Vegas and deal with the one at the Bank of Nevada.”
“Yeah, Bill’s already on his way to check on that one,” she said. I’d never heard of Bill, but I didn’t think he’d come up again anyway.
“Great,” I said. And be sure to put my underwear up on eBay, I thought.
“Hey, check this out,” another of the tech people said. I think his name was Chet Nguen. He called us over to my old desk, which had a new Samsung laptop on it. There weren’t any sensitive files on it, of course-those were all in the safe-but it did have the names of some recently modified files, and the last-touched file had automatically named itself after the first distinctive phrase in the contents, and, in the last five minutes, Chet had already deciphered the name out of EncryptX. It was a little on the ominous side: Why I Did It.
(86)
Marena got the Mission: Impossible — style team together again-herself, me, Taro, Ashley 2, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, Hernan, and Ana Vergara. Our main goal was, of course, to track down and capture Jed 1 and interrogate him about the Domino Cascade. We’d also be trying, concurrently, to identify the Cascade and divert it directly. So far, though, we hadn’t recognized even a single one of the “dominos.” Finally, the members other than me had a third directive that I suspected-to keep a close eye on me. That is, me, Jed 3. Marena was still worried that I might make the same decision as Jed 1 — even without an overdose of tsam lic-and then there would be two Game-savvy homicidal maniacs running around. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter how sentimental Marena might get about me, it wouldn’t matter to the Firm. As soon as I’d delivered the goods-the full deposition, the Game, and Jed 1, in increasing order of importance-Warren would slate me for cleansing. Still, I went along with it all for now.
Jed 1 could have been anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, Indiana, Peru, or even Peru, Indiana. There had been a hint, though. Jed 1 would be happy that the end of the world would kill the Mano Blanco guys and that damn nun. He’d want to let them know ahead of time and suffer. So I had feelers out watching them. And of course, I was watching all the nudibranch sites. He’d be happy to be in a place where he could take a last look at his favorite genus of animals, nudibranchs-but that could be at almost any of the reefs in the Caribbean, on the Pacific Coast, or even Southeast Asia or Australia. However, since Jed 1 and I shared versions of the same mind, I was at least able to compete with him on a high level, with almost a kind of virtual ESP.
I played four Games against the absent Jed 1. Unfortunately, somehow-despite my using the Human Game algorithms against his less powerful ones-he was able to anticipate my moves. And he kept eluding me.
Finally, on the Second Day of the Dead-that is, Friday-we got the certified decryption of Why I Did It. Marena and I read it without saying anything. There were sixty-two pages of Executive Solutions research attached, confirming that what Jed had identified as the first dominoes had, indeed, fallen.
Marena and I-the rest of the team were setting up a temporary office in the Holopaw compound-were alone on the sofa in her office, and we sat for two minutes without saying anything. I know because I was facing the clock collection on her big desk and this gaudy ormolu French Directoire thing had a big old second-counting annular ring that kept whirling around like a damn salad spinner. We sat for another two minutes without saying anything.
“Maybe nothing else is going to happen,” I said, finally. “Maybe he’s just blowing smoke at us.”
“Um… yeah, I hope so,” she said. “I don’t think so. Though.”
“No.”
We sat without saying anything, this time for two and a half minutes.
“Hey,” I asked, “are you sure Jed-Sub-One never told you how he thought the world would end?”
“No, I told you,” she said, “he said he didn’t know. I mean, before. And then when he was, you know, he didn’t say how.”
“I mean, did he ever just guess at it, or say anything about what it’d be like for, like, the People of Earth, or whoever?”
“I don’t know,” Marena said. “Painlessly, or whatever, I guess.”
“He said that?”
“Uh, something like that,” she said. “Or that people wouldn’t notice-”
“Damn it,” I yelled, “I knew it!”
“What?”
“Well, just that, that would be something that’ll disappear the whole planet in a second.”
“I thought it might be some sleeping-gas-type thing.”
“No, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t ever say-I mean, he wouldn’t put it that way, that, that’s-no, he, he means some collider event. Like a strangelet. You know, like, a black hole thingy. Or something. Something that just vanishes the whole place without anybody noticing.”
“Okay. Wow, you’re right.”
“That’s a huge clue. We can work backwards from that.” I started off toward my temporary server station on the kitchen table.
“Sorry,” she called after me.
After an hour I thought I had a pretty good list of facilities. It started with CERN, which was, of course, the world’s biggest collider, and then went down through a hundred and sixty-one others until it trailed off in labs whose particle accelerators probably weren’t functional enough for the job. There were two big problems with it, though. One was that one didn’t know exactly what procedure old J 1 was thinking of. The second was that the U.S., China, Europe, Israel, and the old USSR each probably had at least a handful of secret installations. And the third-okay, three problems-the third was just that even though he was still using the old version of the Game, the ol’ Jed-Sub-Onester was probably capable of doing the whole thing remotely. We had to start monitoring online traffic to each known lab, but there wouldn’t be much percentage in staking them out physically.
Or we could just convince every single one of them to shut down for a few months, I thought. Like, right, that’ll happen. Governments are so safety-minded.
Hell. I’d never thought I’d be sorry that I was intelligent.
By the next morning, Marena and Taro (on the phone) and I had talked it around another ten times. Lately she’d been thinking that instead of trying to track Jed 1 down, we needed to get him to get him to reveal himself.
“Yeah, but, the trouble is,” I said, for the unknownth time, “it’s hard to smoke out somebody who’s that paranoid.”
“I know,” she said, “you said that.”
“No, but-well, that’s it.”
“Look, he has to-it has to be very subtle. We have to let him suspect something.” And, she went on-not in so
