method that strikes me as appropriate. Do you understand?”
A second later, the tree in front of them erupted with a lightning hit. Lowery felt the charge in the air and went deaf for a few seconds after the crack. A tree branch the size of a Fiat came down a foot away and Volkov was in his face again.
“Yes, yessir, I understand,” Jerry stammered, trying with difficulty to make eye contact.
“Charge me with tonight’s suggestion,” Volkov ordered.
“What?”
“PLAY IT BACK. NOW! I want to see what you gave your charges tonight, what they sent out. Or shall I just extract it from your frontal lobe?”
“No, no, that-” It was not the easiest time to put himself into a meditative state but at least the lightning seemed to pause while he closed his eyes. Maybe Volkov was just gathering a big bolt to smite him if he didn’t like what he saw. Jerry tried to concentrate. When he opened his eyes momentarily, Volkov was standing, tapping his feet in exasperation.
Finally, Lowery was able to put himself back in the tasking room in the convention center, the place where they all received the images for their shifts. He felt himself in the chair and saw the ruby logo on the screen. He could see the flash of ruby on the next screen but only for a second, see, it’s just peripheral vision and my eyes go right back to my own screen and that’s it! And then, in the air around him, filling the space between him and Volkov, here was his image, his message-the grainy, jagged, useless image he’d given his team to send out. Flashes of close movement, the grunting noises of a struggle and cries for help, jerky shards of picture skimming across the air between them, the desperate movement in the pictures heightened by the frenzied shrieking of the orchestra in the background. And rain-he hadn’t noticed the rain when he learned the transmission but now it was everywhere and he realized it had come off the video image. Everything was just as he’d been given it, he was sure. All the control bytes showed in proper order, the color bars were correct, the control tone was accurate. He’d remembered it objectively, without coloring it with any of his own input. It was an successful tasking, he was sure of it.
Several seconds had passed since the image ended. He was still there. Volkov hadn’t said anything. Lowery convinced himself it was alright to open his eyes-at very least, his transmission couldn’t be held against him. When he did, Volkov had stepped a little further away. He seemed to be concentrating elsewhere. When he saw Lowery’s eyes were open, Volkov said, “Go about your business. Say nothing of this to anyone. We still have a leak. It wouldn’t do for them to know we’re looking for them, would it?” He took a few steps, then turned back just for a moment. “ You don’t know who to trust,” Volkov warned. Then he stepped into the swirling wind embracing the arches and was gone, disappeared, vanished.
Lowery touched his coat-it wasn’t even damp. No rain. He took off toward a street, anyplace with cars and other people. Anyplace he could find several-no, many-cognacs with breakfast.
Sixteen
“That was terrific,” Max told Kate as we watched Lowery sprint downhill away from the Palatine. “Except you dropped a plate.”
“Huh?”
“Volkov didn’t blink. He caught on it was an image. No harm done this time but, when you’re making an illusion, you’ve got to keep all the plates in the air.”
“You could do better?”
“Not a chance, but not the point.”
“Forget about next time, dammit!” Tauber burst. “ That was the message?”
“I know-not much, is it? It’s what was in his head-it’s the message they were sending out. We got it without probing and he won’t tell anyone. But I’m not sure what it’s worth.” We started back toward the villa. “Let’s get home and play it back,” Max said.
“Play it back?”
They had a very nice home theatre system on the second floor. Max went in behind the digital recorder, pulled out the input cables and placed his fingers over the inputs.
“It’s a hard drive,” he said. “Magnetic impulses on a platter. The same process, actually, as skewing instrument readings in the nuclear plant two or three miles away.”
He pushed ‘Record’ and stood over the inputs, eyes closed, humming a kind of odd, unmusical tone for a couple of minutes. I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I came real close to the machine-it was humming the same tone. When he finally pushed ‘Play,’ the scene Lowery had shown us appeared on the screen, tumult and frenzied movement but fuzzy images and indecipherable.
“Is it the assassination of her father?” Kate asked.
“Sounds kinda like it.”
“This can’t be right. How can they influence her when ya can’t tell what the picture is?”
Max replayed the thing to the end, where the control bits showed-color bars, audio tone and a slate. Emerald, 3 of 4.
“They’re a couple steps ahead of us. They’ve split up the signal. Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond-four teams, each sending out separate parts of an image. The recipient gets all four-”
“-we get static,” Kate said and Max nodded. “This is less than useless.”
“How come the music comes through while the rest is all broken up?” I asked and he shrugged.
The sun was coming up over the hills of Rome. Cars and trucks rumbled just outside, the beginnings of Sunday’s traffic. Church bells rang from every direction. Max was at the window, pulling a twenty-foot door open and shut, open and shut, all nervous energy.
“Today’s the day,” he said. “It’s going to happen today.” There was no excitement in his voice, only dread.
“We need another team leader,” Tauber said. “We need at least one more part o’ the puzzle.”
“That’s insane-finding the first guy took you hours.”
“It’s what we need, ‘less you got a better idea.”
Kate and I were dispatched to Tiber Island. “They’ve definitely got pictures of Mark and me,” Max said. “If anybody looks sideways at you-even once-cut your losses and get out.” It was pretty clear from the way he was talking that he didn’t expect much from the attempt.
Tauber looked even more wiped out-he really thought he’d found the missing link the night before; it tore into him to come up empty.
Getting onto the Island was insanity-five security checkpoints, passports and credentials and interrogation from scratch at each one. First day of the conference, everybody on full alert. With all that, I didn’t notice what was missing until we actually reached the conference center.
“Do you feel it?” I asked as soon as we crossed the threshold.
“What?”
“ Nothing. The air’s clear-no probing, no blocking, no nothing.”
The place was a dead zone, despite media geeks running around interviewing each other, security guards bulky at every entrance, world leaders behind closed doors, entourage busy looking important, caterers, drivers, runners, lots of pretty girls with clipboards and earpieces-but, once we got past the checkpoints, no L Corp.
We hustled the corridors of the conference center, the old cathedral, getting bolder with every minute, until we found their conference rooms-they were nervy enough to put decals on the door. Ornate, huge rooms-thirty-foot ceilings, fifteen-foot stained-glass windows, statues of long-forgotten saints, angels with wings folded standing across from angels with wings outstretched. Glorious rooms-glorious and empty, seats neatly stacked, whiteboards blank. We were actually giddy for a moment, triumphant at being inside their rooms, unchallenged-for just a moment. Then we realized how wrong it was, how bad it was for us.
“Nothing,” we had to report when we returned. “Not a sticky note. Dead empty.”
Tauber banged his hand on the kitchen table hard enough I thought he was going to break something. Max just sighed.
