She read it while Bose did his drive-around, and she was within a few pages of the end when he pulled back into the lot. He parked behind the restaurant’s Dumpster where the car would be hard to see from the street—an act of prudence or paranoia, she thought. “Find anything?” she asked when he came through the door.
“Nope.” He ordered another coffee and a sandwich and she heard him ask the woman behind the counter, “You mind if we sit here a while more?”
“Sit as long as you like,” she said. “We do most of our business at lunch. It’s mainly drive-through after three. Make yourselves comfortable. Long as you buy a little something now and then.”
“There’s a tip in it for you if you keep a fresh pot brewing.”
“We’re not allowed to accept tips for counter service.”
“I’ll never tell,” Bose said.
The woman smiled. “Looks like the rain’s starting. Good time to be indoors.”
Sandra saw the first fat drops strike the restaurant window. Moments later, water was washing down the glass in quavery sheets. Rain bounced from the steaming asphalt of the parking lot, and the scent of moist, tepid air seeped under the door.
Bose peeled a layer of plastic wrap off his sandwich. “You finished Orrin’s story?”
“Just about.”
“You understand why I think he’s headed here?”
She nodded tentatively. “Orrin—or whoever wrote this—obviously knows a few things about the Findley family. Whether they’re
“I’m more concerned with what’s going on in Orrin’s head than what’s true. Remember what he told Ariel? ‘Tonight’s the night.’”
“He has unfinished business. Or at least he thinks he does.”
“Right. What he doesn’t know is that Findley and his people are on high alert. There are private security cars parked all around the perimeter of the warehouse.”
“Private security? What, like Brinks?”
“No, not like Brinks. These guys aren’t bonded and they don’t advertise.”
Sandra shivered and told herself it was because of the sudden damp in the air.
Outside, in the flooding rain, a city bus pulled up. A puddle had formed around a blocked storm drain and the bus’s wheels splashed the three indifferent blue-collar guys who were waiting for it. They got on. Nobody got off. The bus pulled away.
“Orrin could get hurt,” she said.
“We see him, we take him back to Ariel and make sure they both get out of town. That’s the plan. If he gets past us there’s really nothing we can do.”
The wind picked up. There was one tree on the entire street—a spindly sapling on the lawn that hedged the sidewalk—and it bent before the storm like an arthritic pensioner. The restaurant’s plate-glass windows rattled.
Sandra found her thoughts returning to the scar on Bose’s body and the story of his father’s death in India. “Those thieves who broke into your father’s place in Madras,” she said.
He gave her a startled look. “What about them?”
“What were they after?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious.” I’m entitled to be, Sandra thought.
Silence. Then: “Maybe you guessed. They were after the drugs.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“The kind of drugs you seem to think they were after. Martian drugs.”
“Because your father wasn’t just an engineer, he was involved with Fourths.”
“He despised the people who were only interested in longevity. He hated the word. He used to say it wasn’t longevity that mattered, it was maturity.”
“Your mother knew about this?”
“My mother was the one who recruited him.”
“I see. So the scar…”
“What about it?”
“I didn’t get out of med school without a course in anatomy. Unless the knife that cut you had a blade under an inch long, it would have damaged major organs. Not usually a survivable wound, especially if you had to wait for help.”
She was so accustomed to Bose’s perpetual calm that she was startled when he wouldn’t meet her eyes. After a time he said, “It was my mother’s decision.”
Sandra had come to this surmise last night, but it was still slightly shocking to hear him admit it. “To give you the Martian treatment, you mean.”
“As a last resort. For the purpose of saving my life. It was a hugely controversial decision, among the people who knew about it. But I didn’t have a choice—I was comatose when it happened.”
Cellular technology engineered by the Martians from samples of Hypothetical debris, grown in bioreactors and injected into his damaged body, repairing it, working in him even now… She recalled something he’d said just a couple of mornings ago:
This body she had touched: not wholly human.
“That’s why you care so much about Findley’s import business.”
“Findley and the people he works for are corrupting and debasing something that might be vital to the future of all of us. They’re more than ordinary criminals. They’re the kind of people who’ll commit murder—not for the sake of a few extra years of life, which might be understandable, but for the privilege of retailing it.”
“Like the people who killed your father.”
“Exactly like.”
A fresh pulse of rain rattled the window. The streetlights had come on, serial halos of yellow light. Bose reached over the table to touch her hand, but she drew it away without thinking.
Chapter Twenty-four
Turk’s Story
1.
Isaac Dvali visited us once more before our planned escape. As before, he screened us from the Network’s embedded sensors, but I wondered whether there wasn’t one surveillance device still operational—namely, my own node. If the Coryphaeus wanted to know what was happening, couldn’t it just look through my eyes?
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the Coryphaeus as a personality,” Isaac said. “It isn’t. And it can’t do what you’re suggesting.”
“Still… it’s in my head.”
“Not to spy on you. Vigilance is a Network function. The Coryphaeus will try to influence your emotions and your unconscious beliefs, but it hasn’t established full connectivity yet. For now it can’t act except through the agency of other people. If it wants to speak to you, it will have to use someone else’s voice.”
“You think it might do that? Speak to me?”
“I think it will do anything in its power to keep you from leaving.”
