Death Match

THIRTY-FOUR

Sunday dawned raw and cold, and as the sun rose in the sky it seemed to chill rather than warm the land. By afternoon, the whitecaps of Long Island Sound had a leaden cast to them, and the unsettled waters looked black: harbingers of approaching winter.

Lash sat before the computer in his home office, nursing a cup of herbal tea. Miraculously — given the charged atmosphere of his dinner and the late hour at which he parted from Diana — he’d managed a good six hours of sleep and had risen without overwhelmingly weariness. What he did feel was restlessness: barred from removing any data from Eden, and without access to files or records, he had no way to advance his investigation. Yet instinct told him he was close, perhaps very close, to a revelation. And so he’d paced the house, ruminating, until at last in frustration he turned to the Internet and anything he could find about the company.

There was the usual Web ephemera: a scammer that claimed to have unlocked the secrets of Eden and offered to share them on a $19.95 video; conspiracy-theory sites that spoke darkly of evil alliances the company had made with intelligence agencies. But among all the dross there were also occasional bits of gold. Lash sent half a dozen articles at random to his printer, then carried the printouts to the living room sofa.

Feet propped on the table, the mournful cry of gulls sounding in the distance, he leafed slowly through them. There was an exceedingly complex white paper on artificial personality and swarm intelligence, written by Silver almost a decade earlier and no doubt released on the Internet without permission. A financial website provided a sober-sided analysis of the Eden business model, or at least the portion of it that was public knowledge, and a brief history of how it had been bankrolled by pharmaceutical giant PharmGen before being spun off on its own. And from another site came a flattering corporate biography of Richard Silver, who had risen from obscurity to become a world-class entrepreneur. Lash read this more carefully than the first two, marveling at the way Silver had developed his dream so faithfully and resolutely; how he hadn’t let the vaguely reported misfortunes of early youth stand in his way. He was that rarest of people, the genius who seemed to know, from a very young age, the gift he’d been born to give the world.

There were other articles, too, not quite so flattering: an obnoxious tabloid article that promised to expose the “shocking, bizarre” details of the “crackpot genius” Silver. The opening paragraph read: Question: What do you do if you can’t find a girlfriend? Answer: You program one. But the article itself had nothing to say, and Lash put it aside, stood up, and walked to the window.

It was true there were few other tasks Silver could have set Liza to that would have earned him more money, or so ensured the future health of his research. Yet on one level it was a little odd. Here was a man — by all accounts a shy, retiring man — who had made his fortune with that most social of games, the game of love. It seemed a shame, a bitter irony, that game could not extend to Silver as well.

As he stared out the window, the haiku Diana Mirren quoted the night before came back to him with sudden clarity.

He smiled as he recalled their dinner. By the time they’d finally gotten around to ordering, the conversation had grown as easy and comfortable as any he could remember. His habitual distance crumbled without even a protest. She began to finish his sentences, and he hers, as if they’d known each other since childhood. And yet it was a strange kind of familiarity, filled with countless little surprises. It was close to one when they parted on Central Park West. They had exchanged numbers before going their separate ways. There had been no agreement to meet again; but then, there’d been no need of one. Lash knew he’d be seeing her again, and soon. In fact, he was half tempted to call now and offer to cook dinner.

What had she said? Haiku were the opposite of puzzles. Don’t search for answers. Think of opening doors.

Opening doors. So how to interpret the one she quoted?

It had only eight words. In his mind, Lash saw a green willow branch, twisting in a lazy current, heading toward a distant waterfall. Still singing. Were the insects still singing out of ignorance of what lay ahead — or because of it?

The Wilners and the Thorpes were like the insects of the poem, singing on that floating branch. Blissfully, unrelievedly happy… right up until that last unfathomable moment.

The silence was shattered by the ring of a telephone.

Lash pushed himself to his feet and headed for the kitchen. Perhaps it was Diana; he’d have to dig up his recipe for salmon en croute.

He lifted the phone. “Lash here.”

“Chris?” came the voice. “It’s John.”

“John?”

“John Coven.”

Lash recognized the voice of the FBI agent who’d run the surveillance on Handerling. His heart sank. No doubt Coven was following up on his personal interest in Eden. Maybe he thought Lash could get him a discount or something.

“How are you, John?” he said.

“I’m okay, I’m fine. But listen, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Go ahead.”

“Wyre’s made parole.”

Lash felt himself go numb. “Say again?”

“Edmund Wyre’s made parole. Happened late Friday afternoon.”

Lash swallowed. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”

“Nobody has. I just found out ten minutes ago. Saw it on the wire.”

“Not possible. The guy killed six people.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There must be some kind of mistake.”

“No mistake. He got the full board vote and the written report from DCJ.”

“Any release conditions?”

“The usual, under the circumstances. Special field supervision. Which means precisely diddley-squat with a guy like Wyre.”

Lash felt a sharp pain in his right hand, realized he was squeezing the phone. “What’s the time frame? Weeks? Months?”

“Not even. Apparently they’re all in a lather, setting Wyre up as some poster boy for rehabilitation. Screening’s completed. They’re already performing a residence investigation and preparing the release certificate. He’ll be on the streets in a day or two.”

“Jesus.” Lash fell silent, struggling with disbelief.

“Christopher?”

Lash did not reply.

“Chris? You still with me?”

“Yes,” Lash said distantly.

“Listen. Still got your service piece?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame. Because no matter what that parole board thinks, you and I both know this fucker wants to finish what he started. If I was you, I’d arm myself. And keep in mind what they taught us back at the Academy. You don’t shoot to kill. You shoot to live.”

Again, Lash did not respond.

“You need anything, let me know. Meanwhile, watch your six.”

And the line went dead.