Chrysalis

10

Logan followed Asperton down the concourse. The lawyer was silent, seemingly lost in thought.

“So Bridger was on medication for a knee injury,” Logan said after a moment.

Asperton nodded. “But he’d been on it for over two years. As it happens, I’m familiar with the clinical history of Ambutrexine, both during trials and after it was approved for general use. One of our more popular new medications, with very few contraindications.” She paused. “I feel bad about the deception, but if Purchase learned about Bridger’s death, he might be… well, less forthcoming.”

“He’s down one Mark III customer.”

“I used to think, cynically, high-end medical upgrades were just a new status symbol for aging people of means: having the latest-generation pacemaker, with all the cellular bells and whistles. Until I got one myself.”

Logan was surprised. “You?” The lawyer was trim, apparently in good health, and well under fifty.

“BioCertain’s finest. My SA node was damaged by myocarditis three years ago — a lasting gift from a vacation I took, paddling down the Amazon. They’re amazing things, really — this latest generation of medical implants. Frank wasn’t just being a pitchman back there. They have come a long way from the old nickel-cadmium or metallic plutonium batteries. We’ve got the miniaturization process nailed; tethering, too. Button cells as small as five millimeters that provide cardiac stimulation for twenty years. Telemetry alarm systems so if anything goes wrong, a monitoring station is immediately alerted.”

“Do any other board members have medical implants?”

“I know Miles Johnson has the same BioCertain pacemaker I do; we talked about it when I saw him at the board meeting.”

“Any others?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Isn’t that relevant?” Logan asked. “I mean, this implant wasn’t mentioned in Bridger’s medical dossier.”

“Probably too minor a procedure to include. It’s not our job to monitor every medication our board members take, far less elective or cosmetic surgeries. If Spearman had decided to have yet another face-lift, for example, I doubt we’d be the wiser.”

“Think you can dig a little deeper for me? And speaking of Bridger, I wasn’t aware of his Ambutrexine use. I know you say it’s a safe drug, but—”

“The ME said there were no traces of unusual drugs: that includes corticosteroids, which would have shown up if Bridger had taken Ambutrexine before or during the flight.”

Logan cursed under his breath. The fact the Chrysalis board had met here just two weeks before had seemed such a promising lead. And the fact one of them — one only — had made a detour to a classified research division seemed even more promising. But it was a dead end.

“What next?” Asperton asked, as if reading his mind.

Logan sighed. “I start playing board member. Follow their footsteps of two weeks ago.”

Asperton frowned. “If every board member was involved, what could you possibly discover?”

“I won’t know until I discover it.”

There was a brief pause.

“Well, at least it won’t be difficult to do,” Asperton said. “After lunch, the board members only visited three divisions. And we’re coming up on one of them now.”

A visit to Agrinox did nothing but acquaint Logan with several new kinds of fertilizer, and then another five-minute walk through the pleasantly humid air of the Torus brought them to the Arc that housed New Eden. A brisk, businesslike woman met them inside the D security barrier, then led them into a small conference room similar to BioCertain’s. New Eden, Logan learned, was a complex AI system that functioned, essentially, as a dating service on steroids: finding perfect matches for candidates and guaranteeing lifetime compatibility. Several years earlier, the original Eden building had suffered a crippling fire — Logan vaguely recalled reading about it — and afterward was purchased and rebuilt, essentially from the ashes, by Chrysalis. It was scheduled to go back on line early next year, and as a result the board members had convened here for an explanation of the updated technology. Logan asked several questions, but when he learned that client interactivity at New Eden was limited to personality inventories, he lost interest. As they thanked the woman and returned once again to the concourse, he began to wonder if perhaps the unspoken thought behind Asperton’s frown was correct: this line of inquiry was a waste of time.

“Damn,” Asperton said. “Who the hell could this be?”

She was looking down at the tablet in her hand.

“What is it?” Logan asked.

“A call coming in. But nobody in the Torus would route a message through my tablet, because…”

Suddenly she went absolutely still. As Logan dropped his own gaze to her tablet, he saw a series of words — white against black — slowly form.

“Christ!” he said. “Claire, you need to alert someone — immediately.”

His sharp voice snapped the lawyer out of her shock, and suddenly she was in frantic motion. “Dispatch?” she said, now pressing a hand against the Omega device circling her ear. “This is Claire Asperton. I need an emergency link to Marceline Williams. Williams of the Halcyon Publishing Group. She’s in London, staying at the Connaught. No, I don’t know the goddamned number! You need to get her now, right now, because…”

Asperton’s voice receded in Logan’s mind as he reread the words on her tablet — and their implication burned into him: