Perfect Dark: Initial Vector Page 12

  “You haven’t answered my question, Cass,” Carrington said gently.

  “Of course I want it, Daniel! You know me well enough to know that.” She sipped her wine, savoring the rich chocolate undertones. It was a 2005 Tignanello, from the famed Tuscan winery, Antinori—one of the most expensive of the so-called “Super Tuscan” wines. In the 1970s, the Italian Regulatory Council had snobbishly dismissed these wines, which incorporated non-indigenous grapes, as vino di tavola—mere table wines.

  Over the years, however, the Super Tuscan wines had outstripped their contemporaries, and now commanded, as was the case with this particular vintage, thousands of dollars per bottle. She and Daniel had always shared an appreciation for the distinctive wines, which she thought appealed as much to their mutual iconoclasm as to their palates.

  She set her glass down and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her folded hands, meeting his eyes. “Why are you asking? Why are you really asking?”

  “It’ll change our relationship.”

  “For the better, I’d think. No more slinking around, meeting in hotel rooms.”

  Carrington faked indignation. “I picked this place out myself, you know. Many consider this the finest hotel in all of Paris.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  He dropped the act, smiling at her, happy. “I ask because it’s one hell of an opportunity, for both of us. You could turn dataDyne off its course, guide it to a future that’s both profitable and productive.”

  “I am aware, believe me, Daniel.”

  “So I ask again, how badly do you want it?”

  “I still don’t know how to answer that. Will I fight for it? Absolutely. Will I go to the lengths of Sexton or Murray, for example? I don’t know. I’d like to think my standards are higher, that I still have a sense of decency. I’m not the CEOs they are, I’m the accidental Director, remember? The one who earned it on her merits alone, without politics.”

  “For which you should be duly proud.”

  “I am. I’ve earned what I’ve gotten, and I’ve managed to do it without selling my soul.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  She cocked her head, confused.

  “I’m pleased that you don’t think our relationship compromises you.”

  Cassandra shook her head. “Of course it compromises me. If anyone found out—”

  “They won’t, not from me,” Carrington assured her.

  She fell silent, straightening in her chair. After a second, she took up her wineglass, sipping. He stared at her with frank and intense interest, as if trying to read her mind.

  “You think we should stop seeing one another,” Carrington said, after a moment.

  Now that the moment was here, Cassandra DeVries found it even harder to say than she had thought it would be. “I think, given the circumstances, it would be wise, yes.”

  For a long time, neither of them spoke.

  She’d come to the decision before even leaving Hawaii, after the meeting with the Board but before her own departure. Waterberg and Sato had already departed for their offices in Tokyo and Los Angeles, and Velez was beginning to break down the massive security effort she’d put in place for the retreat. Cassandra had eaten a lonely dinner in one of the resort’s four restaurants, waited upon hand and foot to such an extent that the meal had been claustrophobic. After dining, she’d gone for a walk along the beach to gather her thoughts, to think about what the Board had said, trying to be honest about her chances.

  And honestly, her chances weren’t terribly good. She was the youngest of the candidates by far, and the one with the least general business experience. While Sato and Waterberg were each in their own way talented and successful, she knew she was a better bet to the Board. Sato’s skill, it was widely acknowledged, was in putting himself in the right place at the right time, and Waterberg was too fiscally oriented to ever see the big picture. It was Sexton and Murray she needed to beat, and while Cassandra DeVries had guided DataFlow from one successful quarter to another, she knew she didn’t have the business acumen of a Paul Sexton, nor the Nobel Prize of a Doctor Friedrich Murray.

  Walking along the beach, shoes in her hand, staring alternately at the stars above and the water beside her, she’d realized she could do one of two things. She could concede defeat, or she could fight.

  Since she’d never conceded defeat before, she wasn’t about to start now.

  It had been when Laurent Hayes, Doctor Murray’s sonslash-bodyguard, had passed her in the hallway as she’d returned to her room that she’d realized none of her competition was likely to, either. He’d passed her by briskly, ignoring her murmur of goodnight, and Cassandra had unlocked the door to her rooms wondering just what it was he’d been doing. Doctor Murray had taken a suite on the opposite side of the resort, and she knew that his son was staying there with him.

  There had been no reason for Hayes to be wandering the halls of what Velez herself had termed the “DataFlow Wing” of the hotel.

  Once back in her rooms, the lights on and the door locked, it had taken Cassandra almost half an hour to become certain of what she had suspected: Hayes had been in her rooms. Hayes had gone through her belongings. Hayes had tried to break into her laptop.

  He’d been digging, and it was only because Cassandra and Carrington had a mutual agreement that nothing about their relationship be committed to anything but memory that he’d come away empty-handed.

  Even so, it was too close a call, and before falling asleep that night, Cassandra DeVries had decided to end her affair with Daniel Carrington. It was a painful decision for her, and difficult to commit to, despite the obvious necessity of the action. She admired Carrington, respected the man, and more, his genius. She enjoyed the time she spent with him, the long conversations about science, about computers, about his work and hers, about the way the tiniest ideas could remake and rebuild the world. And when Daniel Carrington spoke to her of responsibility, of the need for progress that wasn’t simply financially beneficial, but morally and ethically upright as well, he was preaching to the choir.

  She was in love with him, and while he had never said as much, she believed he was in love with her.

  After almost a minute of silence, Carrington reached across the table for her hand, taking it gently in his own. She felt the warmth of his touch, the rough edges of his fingers as they wrapped around her own slender digits. She willed herself to look away from the candles burning on the table between them, to meet his eyes, afraid of what she’d see in them. In its own way, acceptance would be worse than refusal.

  “I agree,” he said.

  “Daniel, it’s not that—”

  “Shh, Cass … there’s nothing you have to say.”

  “Just right now,” Cassandra added, and it sounded lame to her ears, and she pulled her hand free from his grasp. “Just for right now.”

  “I understand.” He sat back slowly in his chair, folding his hands across his middle, and she thought she saw some sorrow in his expression before he managed to hide it away. “You’re facing some stiff competition.”

  “Yes.”

  “My guess is that it’s Murray and Sexton you need to be worrying about.”

  “Yes,” she said again, trying to warm to the conversation, finding it easier than talking about what they might have just lost. “That was my thinking, as well.”

  Carrington hesitated, scratching at the side of his beard with a finger, frowning.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m hesitant to broach the subject.”

  “We’ve known each other too long and too well to play games, Daniel. Say what you wish to say.”

  Carrington’s frown deepened a fraction. “Would you accept my help?”

  “Daniel …”

  “No, nothing like that, nothing covert. But you know me, you know how I feel about dataDyne. There’s a lot wrong that goes on in that corporation, a lot that’s not just
immoral or unethical, but outright illegal.”

  “Things that no one has ever been able to prove.”

  “Suppose I found proof? What then?”

  She looked at him closely. “Daniel, what are you getting at?”

  He waved a hand as if to soothe her. “I’m not withholding anything from you, Cass, we’ve long since passed that stage, I think you’ll agree. Once you’ve seen an old man naked, there’s very little sacred.”

  She grinned despite herself. “I saw nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “You’re very kind, and you’re very young, and it’s a wonder you haven’t given me a heart attack.” He toyed with his wineglass, turning the stem between two of his thick fingers. “If I discovered proof of wrongdoing, of corporate malfeasance, say, what then?”

  “You know what then. You’re morally and ethically obligated to bring that evidence to light.”

  “I’m not, per se. You could do it.”

  Again, she looked at him closely. “You’re hiding something.”

  “It’s just a suspicion, Cass, no proof yet.”

  “Of what?”

  “No, not yet. I don’t want to speculate. But suffice it to say, if it turns out to be true, if I find evidence confirming my suspicions, it could be devastating to dataDyne.”

  “Generally or specifically?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “And it’s definitely criminal?”

  “Again, I don’t know, not yet.” Carrington shrugged, smiling broadly, as if amused by himself. “Daft old man, that’s me. Just a suspicion, it may be nothing at all.”

  Cassandra considered, then said, carefully, “If you were to bring me proof—and I mean definitive, iron-clad proof—of dataDyne malfeasance, then yes, I would present that information to the public. I would do what is right, Daniel.”

  The lines around Carrington’s eyes deepened with his smile. “That’s my girl.”

  Cassandra shook her head once again, dismissing the conversation. She was used to him being oblique, to him making her work for the facts to catch up with his thinking. In the end she always got there, one way or another.

  She took the napkin from her lap, set it on her empty plate, then rose and moved around to his side of the table. He watched her as she moved, raising an eyebrow as she approached, then raising the other one with it when she took his face in her hands and leaned down to kiss him.

  “I thought we’d decided to end it,” he said when she broke the kiss.

  “Tomorrow,” Cassandra DeVries told him, and then took hold of his hand, and led him to the bedroom.

  CHAPTER 13

  Carrington Institute—Computer Lab III, London, England September 30th, 2020

  “Okay, you guys are going to love this, I mean you’re going to seriously love this,” Grimshaw said.

  Steinberg glanced at Carrington, seated beside him, then looked back to the Institute’s resident computer guru. In the past, when Grimshaw had told Steinberg that he would “love” something, it was either net porn, a techno-rap song, or an episode of Doctor Who, and Grim had been wrong in his assertion each and every time.

  “Show me,” Carrington said.

  Grimshaw beamed as if he were a puppy who’d just been rewarded for a particularly clever trick, made a show of cracking his knuckles, and then spun his chair around to face one of the three decks arrayed opposite him. His fingers positively flew across the keypads, and one by one, each of the monitors surrounding his workstation began lighting up.

  “All right, here we have the late Agent Able’s panic-burst transmission,” Grimshaw said, pausing his typing long enough to indicate one of the monitors. To Steinberg, the information on the screen was nothing but gibberish, a tangle of symbols and numbers that only the most dedicated programmer could make sense of. In the chair beside him, Carrington repositioned his walking stick in front of himself, then leaned forward, resting his weight on the cane.

  “Now most of this was just garbage, totally useless, and I mean totally frickin’ useless, right?” Grimshaw resumed typing. “To begin with, the information Able managed to steal was encrypted. Then it got compressed to fit on his ID card, and then he had to route it through a corporate kiosk, and then route it to his home deck before activating the panic burst. Add to that the fact that the card was presumably removed from the kiosk before he’d completed the transfer—you can see the mess. A lot of what we’re looking at here is just tracking information, machine language equivalent of white noise.”

  “Go on,” Carrington rumbled.

  Grimshaw picked up the pace, speaking faster, though not less. “Okay, so I cleaned it up, ran my best decryption software on it, and when that didn’t work, wrote a new program to attack the problem. Took three days of riding the caffeine-and-porno roller coaster, but it got me this.”

  A second monitor lit up, and Grimshaw swiveled around to look at them again, obviously pleased with himself and waiting for a general acknowledgment of his brilliance. To Steinberg’s eyes, the information displayed on the second monitor looked precisely the same as the information displayed upon the first.

  But apparently not to Carrington, who said, “Very interesting, Grim.”

  Grimshaw beamed, swinging back around to man his keypad once again. “Yeah, I thought so, but I didn’t have anything to go on, right? I mean ‘rose,’ what is ‘rose,’ right? I mean, maybe a flower, maybe a war, but neither of those things helped me rebuild the file, because I didn’t know what it was I was trying to rebuild, get it? And then sexbomb-killer-princess Miss Dark goes and gets the missing piece from the dearly departed Mister Able, and lo and behold, 2016, things begin clicking into place.”

  There was another flurry of tapping, and the third monitor sprang to life; this time, Steinberg could recognize what he was looking at, even if he couldn’t fully understand it. Financial data began to spill across the screen, hundreds of transactions flooding past so quickly that he had no hope of tracking what he was seeing. Steinberg felt a stab of acute annoyance, resisted the desire to whack Grimshaw upside the head and tell him to stop showing off.

  “So these are Doctor Murray’s financials, or a portion of them, at any rate. I managed to reconstruct about eighty, eighty-five percent of the file, and that’s pretty dandy, if I may say so myself, and I will. Mostly, these are the kinds of things you’d expect from a dataDyne CEO bastard type—some out-of-court settlements, some shady stock deals, some real-estate buys, things like that. But nested deep within all this effluvia—like that? ‘effluvia,’ great word, ‘effluvia’—nested deep within it, we come upon, finally, the mysterious Rose.”

  With that, Grimshaw assaulted his central keypad again, and the monitors flanking him went dark. The central screen redrew, and finally, clearly, discernibly, Steinberg was able to see the point of the exercise, a simple spreadsheet, listing dates and payment amounts to some person or persons unknown. The earliest date listed was August 23rd, 2016, the most recent barely three weeks ago, September 6th, 2020. The sums were impressive, starting with two million dollars in 2016 and rising to just below ten million as of this past month.

  “This is a spreadsheet I banged up using the recovered financials. All of these are wire transfers to banks in freesector Macao, Switzerland, and Australia, all locations—as you well know, I’m sure—where the banking laws are loose and the privacy laws are tight. We’re looking at a scheduled payoff, my friends, we’re looking at the trail of the blackmailee, so to speak. Someone has been tapping our Doctor Murray to the tune of almost eighty million dollars over the last four years.”

  Grimshaw’s chair creaked as he slowly swung back around to face them. “Whatever Rose is, whoever Rose is, whatever he’s got, Doctor Murray doesn’t want him telling.”

  “Eighty million,” Steinberg said. “Raises the question why Murray hasn’t just had him waxed.”

  “That assumes that Rose is a person, not a project, say, something along those lines.” Grimshaw reached behind him for t
he bowl of Smarties he kept on his desk, taking a handful. As he dropped them in his mouth one by one, he added, “Could be a pharmaDyne ultrablack project, maybe? Mindcontrol drugs or accelerated cloning or synthetic life?”

  Steinberg rolled his eyes. “Or something a little more, I don’t know, believable.”

  Grimshaw crunched noisily, leveling a finger at him. The nail, Steinberg noted, had been bitten down almost to the quick.

  “It’s totally believable, man! We live in an age of anti-gravity and flying cars! Effective cloning technology has existed for over forty years! Dude, we’re maybe ten years from faster-than-light travel! Anything is possible!”

  Carrington cleared his throat, cutting off Grimshaw’s tirade before it could gather further momentum. “It’s not an ultrablack, otherwise Doctor Murray would have funded it through pharmaDyne itself, or one of the other corporate fronts. This is something personal, something important enough to him that he’s willing to spend eighty million plus of his own money to keep it going, or to keep it silenced.”

  “You think it’s the latter?” Steinberg asked him.

  “I think both of you are overlooking the significance of the date,” Carrington said, and then, with a grunt, pushed himself upright with the help of his walking stick. He straightened his tie, using the moment to collect his thoughts, then began a slow circuit around the lab.

  “Twenty-sixteen, twenty-sixteen,” Grimshaw said. “Aston Villa won the FA cup. Jeanine Wacker became the new Doctor.”

  “The trade war in Central Asia went hot,” Steinberg offered.

  “You’re thinking along the wrong lines, lads.” Carrington stopped, peering at one of the smaller monitors nearby, frowning at what he saw on the screen.

  “The Flu,” Steinberg said.

  “Correct. The influenza A subtype H17N22 outbreak.” Carrington raised his gaze, settling it on Steinberg and Grimshaw. “Three things happened in 2016 that changed Doctor Friedrich Murray’s life. The first was the superflu pandemic. The second was his being named pharmaDyne’s new CEO. The third was his being awarded the Nobel Prize for his work leading to the discovery of an effective vaccine used to prevent the spread of influenza A subtype H17N22.”