couldn’t have caught me more by surprise.
“I’d prefer to surrender to a federal circuit judge,” she went on, “but the federal courthouse is only three blocks from the stadium. Since the whole point is to avoid being captured by ERA, I’ll have to settle for a state judge.”
“Whoa, wait a minute, lady … back up a second. Why are you-”
I was interrupted by a young waitress coming by to offer me a menu. I was hungry and could have done well with a burger and fries, but I shook my head and asked for coffee instead. The girl gave me a sweet smile and sashayed away.
“Did you bring your PT?” she asked when the waitress was out of earshot. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Joker. “Good. I picked a public place for this interview because it’s the safest option right now, but we still don’t have much time.”
I placed Joker on the table between us but didn’t switch it into audio-record mode just yet. “On the contrary,” I replied, “I think we’ve got all the time in the world. At least long enough for us to have coffee and get to know each other a little better-”
“Mr. Rosen …” she said impatiently.
“Y’know, the usual stuff. What high school did you go to? How did you like the Muny the other night? What did you say to my best friend that got him killed? That sort of thing.”
The muscles in Hinckley’s jaw tightened; she looked as if she were about to explode, but she was forced to remain calm while the waitress returned to place a mug of black coffee in front of me. “I’ve done a little checking on you since we met,” I went on after the girl had vanished again. “Found out a few interesting things, like the fact that you’re a research scientist at Tiptree, involved with the Ruby Fulcrum project for the company’s Sentinel program, and that your boss, Richard Payson-Smith, is currently being sought by the feds in connection with two murders.”
I picked up the cream pitcher and diluted the coffee with a dash of milk. “Also, you’ve been in hiding since last night,” I said as I stirred the coffee. “Given the neighborhood we’re in, you must have taken the Green Line out here, then checked into either the Radisson or the Holiday Inn … registering under an assumed name and paying for the room in cash, of course, since you were smart enough to take out all that money from your credit cards last night.”
Her eyes widened in outrage; for a moment there I thought steam would come whistling out of her ears. Except for the ATM transactions, the last bit was sky blue guesswork, but there was no sense in letting her know that. I was getting under her skin, which was exactly what I meant to do.
“Of course,” I continued before she could interrupt, “I could just get up from this table and leave. That’s mean sticking you with the bill, but I think paying the tab is the least of your worries right now.”
I picked up the mug and took a sip. “Good coffee. So what do you say we cut the crap, okay?”
I was bluffing. If I had a pair of brass handcuffs, I would have fastened her ankle to the table and threatened to flush the key down the men’s room toilet unless she spilled her guts. This woman had put me through hell in less than forty-eight hours after I had met her; besides getting a little cheap gratification from watching her squirm, I wasn’t about to let her waltz into some judge’s private chambers until she told me every nasty secret locked in her head.
Hinckley stared at me silently, her dark eyes smoldering with repressed anger. “One more thing,” I said, and this time I wasn’t bluffing. “I hold you responsible for John Tiernan’s death. If he hadn’t gone to Clancy’s to meet you last night, he’d still be alive now. But he took the bullet-or a laser beam, whatever-that was meant for you, and that really pisses me off, so don’t give me this ‘just a few minutes, then I gotta go’ routine. You owe me, sweetheart.”
She blinked hard a couple of times, then took a deep breath and slowly let it out again. “Mr. Rosen,” she said, her tone a little less imperious now, “the person who shot your friend-and it wasn’t Richard-didn’t miss. He’s looking for me now, but he meant to kill Tiernan. He was the intended target, not me.”
“Bullshit.”
“No bullshit.” She shook her head. “There’s a conspiracy behind all this, and the last thing the people behind it want is public attention. Despite whatever you think you may know, trust me … you don’t know anything.”
I wasn’t about to argue the point. I didn’t know anything, and I was counting on her to give me the answers, but before I could ask she clasped her hands together above the table and pointed a finger straight at me.
“One more thing,” she said, “and this is why I’m in a hurry. There’s four people they want to see dead … and you’re one of them.”
I felt my heart skip just a little. “And the only way we’re going to get out of this alive,” she said, “is if you shut up and listen to what I have to tell you. Understand?”
I believed her. All of a sudden, this pretentious and socially correct little Le Café François was no longer as safe or secure as it seemed when I walked in through the door. In fact, it felt as if I were sitting in the center of a sniper’s crosshair, drinking great coffee and waiting for someone to squeeze the trigger.
I slowly nodded my head, and she gestured toward Joker. “Good. Now turn on your PT. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
Before she got started, though, I filled her in on much of what I already knew.
Although it was an abridged version of what I had related to Pearl a few hours earlier, it included the fact that Barris and McLaughlin had pressured me into stating that I would help them track her down, as well as Payson-Smith and Morgan. I was barely through telling her about being sworn to secrecy with regard to Ruby Fulcrum, though, when she began to shake her head.
“The name’s right,” Hinckley said, “but the details are all wrong. Ruby Fulcrum exists-I told you that when I first met you-but it’s not exactly what they claim it is.”
The four scientists who had been assigned to the Ruby Fulcrum project, she went on to explain, were all specialists in artificial intelligence-or perhaps, more specifically, a branch of AI research called “a-life,” or artificial life: computer programs that mimicked all activities of organic life-forms, including the ability to learn on their own.
As Cale McLaughlin had told me, the primary objective of Ruby Fulcrum had been to devise a c-cube system for
“The first part of the project was easy to come by, relatively speaking,” Hinckley said. “Richard and Po were principally responsible for coming up with an a-life system for Sentinel, and they managed to conclude most of their research about a year ago-”
“And Payson-Smith wasn’t opposed to it?” I asked. “I mean, he wasn’t against the military application?”
“Is that what they told you?” Hinckley looked at me askance, blowing out her cheeks in disgust. “Yeah, Dick’s such a dove, he has his father’s old RAF medals framed in his office just so he can swear at them.” She shook her head. “If anything, he was the most hawkish member of the team, even if he thought the whole concept of an orbital antimissile system was a little daft.”
“How’s that?”
She paused to take a sip from her cappuccino, licking the cream from her lips. “Maybe this sort of thing might have made a little sense twenty years ago, when the U.S.S.R. was still around and was stockpiling weapons, but nowadays the only country that still has a large nuclear arsenal is the U.S. itself. Any third-world country that wanted to nuke us wouldn’t fire a secondhand Russian missile … they’d simply put it on a freighter and sail it into a harbor city … and most arms-control people would tell you that accidentally launching a missile is much harder than it’s made out in movies. So Sentinel was obsolete almost before it got off the drawing board.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ve heard that said before. So why were you going along with it?”
“Because it’s our job, that’s why.” She shrugged offhandedly. “Look, that may sound irresponsible, but we aren’t the congressmen who voted to appropriate money for this thing. We’re just some guys hired to do one small part of the program. We all knew that it was a fluke, but if this was something Uncle Sam wanted, and since Tiptree
