Death Match

FIFTY-FIVE

Mauchly looked down at his cell phone a moment, as if doubting it was working properly. Then he returned it to his lips. “Could you repeat that, Dr. Silver?”

“I said, hold your position. Do not attempt to enter the penthouse.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Yes, Edwin, just fine. I’ll get back to you soon.” And with a chirrup, the phone went silent.

Mauchly gave it another long stare.

Even through the distortion, there’d been no doubt the voice was Silver’s. There was an unusual undercurrent to it Mauchly did not recall hearing before, and he wondered if Lash was threatening him, if he was being held hostage in his own penthouse. Yet the voice hadn’t sounded frightened. If Mauchly detected anything, he detected great weariness.

“That was Silver?” Sheldrake shouted from below.

“Yes.”

“And his orders?”

“Not to enter the penthouse. Hold our position.”

“You kidding?”

“No.”

There was a brief silence. “Well, if we’re to hold our position, could we hold it somewhere more comfortable? I’m feeling like a circus gymnast here.”

Mauchly glanced down. It seemed a reasonable request.

For the last fifteen minutes, they had been waiting at the top of a long metal ladder that climbed the inside wall of Eden’s inner tower, just below the roof. Waiting while a security tech — a sleepy-eyed, tousle-headed youth named Dorfman — tried to outsmart the access mechanism of the barrier to Silver’s penthouse. It had been a long fifteen minutes, made longer by the hard metal rungs of the ladder and the constant noise of the huge power plant arrayed across the cavernous space below them: the generators and transformers that supplied electricity to the hungry tower. Despite the full resources of the security staff, Dorfman had had a difficult time.

Perhaps Stapleton could have made a quicker job of it. Had she wanted to…

But Mauchly would not allow himself to ponder the problem of Tara Stapleton any further. Instead, he made a mental note to reevaluate penthouse security at the earliest possible opportunity.

Clearly, he’d allowed Silver’s passion for privacy to be carried beyond reasonable extremes. The last fifteen minutes had been proof of that. It was an indulgence, a dangerous indulgence. The battering ram had failed — as expected — but high-tech methods had also proven alarmingly slow. What if Silver should fall suddenly ill and be unable to help himself? If the elevator were to malfunction, precious minutes would be lost reaching him. Silver was simply too valuable an asset of the company to be put at risk, and Mauchly himself would tell him so. Silver was a reasonable man; he would understand.

Now, Mauchly looked up the ladder. It disappeared into a hatch in the roof of the inner tower and ascended into the terminal baffle: the open space between the inner tower and the floor of Silver’s penthouse. Looking up still farther, Mauchly could see Dorfman, standing just within the newly opened security hatchway leading into the penthouse. He was looking quizzically down at Mauchly, one hand gripping a ladder rung, the other holding a logic analyzer. Continuity testers, electronic sensors, and other gear hung on cords from his belt.

“Proceed,” Mauchly called up.

Dorfman raised a hand to one ear.

“Proceed! Wait just inside for us.”

Dorfman nodded, then turned to grasp the narrow ladder with both hands. Another moment and he had climbed out of sight, disappearing into the blackness of the penthouse.

Mauchly glanced down at Sheldrake, motioned for him and his men to follow. It had been a hard-fought battle, gaining access to the penthouse: if they were going to wait, they might as well wait inside.

He began climbing the rest of the way up the ladder. Four steps took him to the porthole in the tower’s roof; another four steps brought him up into the baffle. He had never been in this space before, and despite himself he stopped to look around.

Mauchly was not a particularly imaginative man, but — as he slowly swivelled through an axis of one hundred and eighty degrees — he found he had to fight back vertigo. A dark metal landscape — the roof of the inner tower — ran away from him on all sides. It was studded with cabling, and its flow was interrupted by countless small equipment housings. Some ten feet above, like a titanic lowering sky, hung the steel underbelly of the penthouse structure. It was fixed to the tower’s roof by a carapace of vertical I-beams. Two metal-sheathed data trunks ran from fairings in the upper structure to the roof of the inner tower. In the distance he could make out a third, much larger boxlike structure: the shaft of Silver’s private elevator. Around the periphery ran a lattice of horizontal slats, through which the rich hues of the setting sun could be glimpsed. An observer, staring up at this decorative latticework from street level, would never know it was concealing the jointure of two physically separate structures, the inner tower and the penthouse above it. But to Mauchly, sixty floors above Manhattan, it felt like being between the layers of a huge metal sandwich.

And there was something else: something more unsettling. Set into the walls of the long axis, midway between the two structures, were the telescoping sections of the huge security plates. Mauchly could make out three indentations in their steel flanks: two fitted to the data trunks, the other to the private elevator. The plates were fully retracted now, but if an emergency was ever declared they would slide forward and lock together, sealing the penthouse from the tower below. From his vantage point, the massive hydraulic pistons that powered the plates looked like the springs of a colossal mouse trap.

“Mr. Mauchly?” Sheldrake called up from below.

Mauchly roused himself, took a fresh grip on the ladder, and — turning his eyes from the baffle — climbed up through the security hatchway and into the vestibule of the penthouse.

His first impression was the simple relief of setting foot on solid ground again. The second impression, following immediately, was of unrelieved dark.

“Dorfman!”

There was a rustling in the dark beside him. “Here, Mr. Mauchly.”

“Why haven’t you turned on the lights?”

“I’ve been looking for a switch, sir.”

Mauchly rose, feeling his way forward until he touched metal. He felt along the wall until he reached a door — closed — then continued along the walls until he returned once again to the security hatchway. His circuit of the small compartment yielded no light switch.

There was a clatter, and a dark shape suddenly thrust its way into the hatchway, obscuring the dim light filtering up from below.

“Sheldrake?”

“Affirmative.”

“Call down to some of your men. Get some torches up here.”

The shape descended again out of view.

Mauchly paused, thinking. The penthouse compartment was six stories high. Silver’s quarters occupied the top two stories. This huge space below housed the machines that made up Liza.

Silver had always been easygoing about Eden’s business matters, leaving day-to-day operations to the board of directors. The one thing he was extremely possessive about was Liza’s physical plant. He’d been up here every day during construction, overseeing the installation himself, sometimes even physically moving equipment in from the cranes through the unfinished walls. Throughout, Mauchly remembered, Liza had been kept running on a large suite of rather old computers with a portable power supply; inserting the various components into place, with electricity flowing and computers online, had been a harrowing process. But Silver had insisted. “She can’t lose consciousness,” he’d told Mauchly. “She never has, and I can’t allow her to do so now. Liza’s not some personal computer you can just reboot. She’s had all this time of self-awareness — who’s to say what would be lost or altered if she lost power?”

A similar anxiousness lay behind the precautions Silver took to guard Liza from the outside world. Mauchly knew that, for whatever reason, Liza’s intelligence had never been transferred from one computer to another: instead, newer and larger computers had simply been linked to the older ones, creating an expanding sprawl of “big iron” hardware of several vintages and makes. The powerful cluster of supercomputers that did Eden’s outboard processing — data gathering, the client monitoring, all the rest — were housed in the inner tower below, monitored by countless technical specialists. But the central core of Liza, the controlling intelligence, lay here, cared for by Silver alone.

Mauchly had never set foot within Liza’s physical plant since earliest construction, and now he cursed himself for the oversight. In retrospect, his lack of knowledge was a severe breach of security. He thought back on what he knew about the four-story space beyond. He realized he knew very little; Silver had protected it jealously, even from him.

Mauchly edged back to the door he’d noticed before. For a moment, he feared Silver might have locked it from the inside. But the simple knob turned beneath his grasp. As the door slid open, light at last returned: not lamplight, but a vast thicket of diodes and LEDs, winking red and green and amber in the velvet darkness, stretching ahead into what seemed limitless distance. There was sound here, too: not the banshee-like howl of the building’s power plant below, but a steady hum of backup generators and the subtler, measured cadence of electromechanical devices.

Instructing Dorfman to wait for Sheldrake, Mauchly stepped forward into the gloom.