Death Match

FIFTY-ONE

Edwin Mauchly stood in the hush of Tara Stapleton’s empty office, scanning the room slowly. To an observer, the scan might have appeared desultory. Yet he missed nothing: the posters, potted plants, spotless desk with three monitors arrayed behind it, battered surfboard leaning against the wall.

Though he had personally championed her rise through the ranks — though he had implicit trust in her talents — Tara remained a cipher to him. She always dressed professionally, rarely joked, even more rarely smiled. She was not given to small talk or gossip. All business, all the time.

His eye returned to the surfboard. Though he’d arranged for its presence here, it had always puzzled him. It didn’t jibe with her almost fanatic desire for privacy, with the wall she’d erected around her private life. Clearly, she wasn’t just showing off: if she wanted to do that, she would have brought in the championship trophies he knew from background checks that she’d won. No — the surfboard was there, one way or another, for her own benefit.

His eye fell to the carpeting, to the droplets of blood that were visible near the doorway. Elsewhere, Lash had left little or no trail. Not here. Why? Had he been gesturing? Threatening?

That led back to the main question. Why had Lash come here at all? Why had he taken the risk?

There were too many questions. Mauchly plucked the radio from his pocket, pressed the transmit button.

“Reading you, sir,” came the voice from the command center.

“Who is this? Gilmore?”

“Yes, Mr. Mauchly.”

“Go over with me again Ms. Stapleton’s movements after Lash left her office.”

“One moment, sir.” The clack of keystrokes sounded over the radio. “The advance team came through at 18:06. At 18:12 she left her office and was tracked to the radiology lab, down the hall. She was there for three minutes. At 18:15 she left the lab and proceeded to the elevator bank. She took elevator 104 up four stories, to the thirty-ninth floor. Sensors tracked her to the Proving Chamber.”

“The Tank.”

“Yes, sir. She opened the doors with her identity bracelet at 18:21.”

“Go on.”

“Passive sensors in the Tank confirm her presence there for the next nine minutes. After that, nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“Just that, sir. It’s like she vanished.”

“And the team we dispatched to the Tank?”

“Arrived there just now. The place is deserted.”

“Can you check the terminal logs, see if she accessed any systems?”

“We’re checking that now.”

“What about Lash? Any updates?”

“There was a sensor hit on the thirty-seventh floor ten minutes ago. Then several on the thirty-ninth floor a few minutes later.”

“Thirty-ninth,” Mauchly repeated. “In the vicinity of the Tank?”

“The last one was, sir.”

“And when was that?”

“Eighteen thirty-one.”

Mauchly lowered the radio. One minute after they lost contact with Tara. And on the same floor, the same spot.

Mauchly glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes without a sensor hit on either Lash or Tara. That made no sense — no sense at all.

He considered the situation. Except for the checkpoints and the elevators, there were no video cameras installed in the inner tower. There had seemed no need: under Eden’s draconian security policy, the inner tower was riddled with so many movement sensors that any person wearing an identity bracelet could be traced to a twenty-foot area. And the limited number of entrances, the rigidly patrolled checkpoints, ensured only authorized personnel went inside the Wall. The infrastructure was designed to guard against corporate espionage: there were no contingency plans for chasing an escaped murderer.

Still, the security protocols should have worked. There was only one way to defeat the identity bracelets, and that was a highly sensitive secret Lash could not be aware of…

Could he?

He raised the radio again. “Gilmore, I want you to divert the roving patrols. Send them all to thirty-eight and above. I want spotters in the stairwells and major intersections. If anything moves that isn’t a security guard, I want to know about it.”

“Very well, sir.”

Mauchly returned the radio to his pocket. Then he exited the office and walked thoughtfully down the hall.

The radiology lab was almost sepulchral in its emptiness. He gazed around at the idle equipment, the gleaming stainless-steel instruments.

Why had Tara come here?

Christopher Lash, psychopathic murderer, had just burst into her office. Had she then been seized by a sudden craving for extracurricular research? Again, it all made no sense.

Was it possible she was aiding Lash? Hardly likely. She’d seen the evidence; she knew how dangerous he was, not only to the supercouples, but to Eden itself. She’d alerted Mauchly to the meeting in the coffee shop. She’d turned Lash in.

Could he be threatening her in some other way? That seemed equally unlikely. Tara was eminently capable of defending herself. And Lash was unarmed: Mauchly had made sure of that himself.

He tried to put himself in her shoes, tried to follow her train of thought. But one could only make assumptions about a person one understood. And Mauchly was not convinced he really understood Tara. He’d been surprised, almost shocked, when she’d barged into his office two months before, asked him to use his clout to get her in the pilot program for employee matching. And he’d been just as surprised when she reappeared in his office after her match was found, asking to be removed from the program. It was Monday, he recalled; the day Christopher Lash first came inside the Wall.

Lash. This was all his doing. He was insane, a mad dog. He’d done great harm to the corporation. It was imperative he be stopped before he did any more harm — something truly irreversible.

Mauchly reached into his pocket, drew out a Glock 9mm. The weapon glinted faintly in the dim, off-hours light of the lab. He turned it in his hands, made sure there was a round in the chamber, returned it to his pocket.

This was one mad dog that had no place to run. And Mauchly would treat Lash just as one should a mad dog. Corner it, then kill it.

His radio squawked.

“Mauchly here.”

“Mr. Mauchly, it’s Gilmore. You asked me to report in if we spotted any movement in the tower.”

“Very true, Mr. Gilmore. Go ahead.”

“Sir, the penthouse elevator’s been activated. It’s moving as we speak.”

“What?” Mauchly felt mild annoyance. “I’ll have to speak to Richard Silver. He can’t leave the penthouse now, not while Lash is on the loose. It isn’t safe.”

“You don’t understand, sir. The elevator isn’t descending. It’s rising.”