Yet, despite all their precautions, the inevitable accident happened. This occurred on May 17, 2012-the same day an inevitable accident happened throughout the rest of St. Louis County.
“The earthquake hit the company pretty hard,” Hinckley said. “You can’t tell it now, but four people were killed when the cryonics lab collapsed. That was bad enough, but a lot of other people got injured because of ceilings and shelves falling in. None of my team were hurt, though, thank God … we were in the commissary having a late lunch, and the worst thing that happened was that I got a sprained shoulder when a light fixture nailed me … but our lab was almost totaled.”
She paused, looking nervously again toward the restaurant’s front door. I glanced over my shoulder; the lunchtime crowd was beginning to filter out, and our waitress looked as if she was wondering whether she would get a decent tip from two people who had taken up a booth but ordered nothing more than coffee. Other than that, though, nothing seemed unusual; no ERA troopers, no police cars, no mysterious men in trench coats lurking near the cash register.
“Go on,” I prompted. “The lab …”
Her gaze returned to me. “The lab was busted up pretty badly,” she continued, “and the company didn’t want any valuable employees going back inside until it had cleaned things up … hot wires, unstable walls, things like that. So we were sent home for the next several days while Tiptree brought in a general contractor from Chicago to restore everything-Science Services, some firm that specializes in laboratory restorations, that’s what we we’re told. Don’t worry about it, they said. Come back Monday and everything will be fine … and, you know, that was all right with us, because we had our own messes at home to clean up. Po lost his house, Dick’s cats had been killed, my car had been crushed by a tree …”
She sighed as she settled back against her seat, rubbing her eyelids with her fingertips. “Well, to make a long story short, some college kid was responsible for straightening up the a-life lab. I can’t really blame him, because things were scattered all over the place and no one had kept any reliable charts as to what went where … but when he uprighted the Ruby Fulcrum computer and found the loose telephone prong leading from the modem, he figured it was another loose wire and slipped it into the jack.”
“Oh, shit …”
Hinckley’s face expressed a wan smile. “Yes, well, that’s one way of putting it. After he did that and he was assured that the phone lines were operational again, he switched on the computer to give it a quick test … and, of course, being a conscientious Science Services employee, he tested the modem by dialing into a local BBS to see if the patch was solid.”
And, without anyone’s realizing what had happened, Ruby was allowed to crawl through the bars of its playpen. Frankenstein’s monster had been let loose to roam the streets of the global village.
“We didn’t know what had happened until we came back to the lab on Monday,” Hinckley went on. “Dick flipped out, of course, and the first thing he did was to try and figure out where and how Ruby had slipped through our fingers. To do this, he had to access the company’s mainframe and backtrack all its incoming and outgoing phone calls, including e-mail and fax records.”
She stared at me directly, meeting my gaze over the tabletop. “When he did this,” she said, very quietly, “he managed to penetrate company files none of us had ever seen and discovered something none of us were ever meant to know-”
At that moment, the door slammed loudly. We both glanced up; no one but a pair of salesmen, swaggering in for a late lunch as if they owned the place. One of them yelled for our waitress to seat them; the other tried to stroke her ass as she flitted by. A couple of slimers, nothing more, but their rude entrance made her more aware of our surroundings.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t like this place.”
“C’mon,” I said. “Just some yups cruising for burgers.”
She continued to stare uncertainly toward the door. “There might be ERA people out there,” she said. “They don’t always wear uniforms or carry guns, you know.”
She was scared and had every right to be, but that didn’t matter right now. I wanted to get the rest of the story out of her before she went down the street to the courthouse. “Don’t worry about the feds grabbing us,” I said quickly. “Remember what I told you about Barris, the local ERA honcho? He gave me a card I could use to get us past checkpoints.”
“Card?” Her gaze wavered back toward me, only slightly distracted. “What sort of card?”
“Umm … this one.” I reached into my jacket for the laminated card the colonel had given me the night before. I hadn’t looked at the card since Barris had handed it to me; in fact, this was the first time all day I had thought of it.
“See?” I said as I produced the plastic card and showed it to her. “It’ll solve any problems with-”
“Oh, hell,” she whispered. “Let me see that.”
Before I could object, Hinckley whisked the card from my fingertips and examined it closely. She bent it slightly, held it up to the light … then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife, unfolded its miniature scissors, and made a deep cut into the center of the card.
“Hey!” I snapped. “Don’t do …”
Then I stopped as she pulled open the card a little more and revealed it to me. Within its plastic and cardboard lining lay wires as fine as cat whiskers, leading to tiny wafer-thin microchips and miniature solenoids.
“It’s a smartcard,” she breathed. “Like the smartbadges we’ve got at the company … only this one can emit a signal that can be traced through cellular bands.”
“Aw, shit …” I couldn’t believe I had been such an idiot. The bastards had set me up and I had fallen for it. “Can it … could it listen to us?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said quietly. “It’d have to be larger than this … but it can signal our location to anyone who’s paying attention. That’s bad enough.”
A frigid current ran down my spine. “Does this mean-”
“I don’t know what it means,” she shot back at me. “You brought it here, so you tell me.” Hinckley gently lay the card on the table and slid it against the wall, placing a napkin dispenser on top of it for good measure. “One thing’s for sure, and that’s the fact we’ve been here too long.”
“Hey, I didn’t know-”
“I know you didn’t know,” she murmured as she slid out from her side of the booth. “If you’d been working for them, you wouldn’t have been so stupid as to show it to me. That’s not the point.”
She dug a few dollars out of her pocket and put them on the table. “When we get to the courthouse and I find a judge, you’ll get the rest of the story … but we’ve got to get out of here.”
I was just starting to clamber out from my side of the booth. “But I swear I didn’t-”
17
I caught up with Beryl Hinckley just outside the restaurant. The crowds were beginning to thin out on the sidewalk as office workers hurried back to their desks and cubicles, clutching half-read newspapers and foam cups of coffee. There was still plenty of traffic on the street, however, and the metered slots along Central Avenue were filled with parked cars.
“Walk fast,” I murmured as I took her right arm and began marching down the sidewalk. “Whatever you do, keep an eye on the cars. If you see anything-”
“I know,” she whispered back. “Run for it.”
I glanced at her; she nodded her head, her face grim. She knew the score: both John and Kim Po had been shot from a vehicle, and although a van had been spotted leaving Clancy’s, no one was certain if this was the automobile the killer was driving. The only thing we had going for us was that it was a blustery afternoon, and most
