Perfect Dark: Second Front Page 3

  They called her “Future.”

  “All posts, Future on walkabout.”

  “Future, second floor, south two.”

  “Future, third floor, north three.”

  “Future, third floor, west one.”

  Finally, DeVries would reach the very old study of her very old new house, and two new Shock Troopers—or perhaps the same two, she honestly couldn’t tell—would already be in position there. One would open the door for her solicitously, closing it softly behind her as she passed within, but not before she heard the final transmission.

  “Future, third floor, west two, study. In for the night.”

  They were her ghosts, dedicated to her safety and survival, each of them handpicked to work her private home security detail by Anita Velez, the director of corporate security. Selected by Anita Velez, kingmaker, who had stood beside Cassandra DeVries and nodded the barest approval when Cassandra had shot Friedrich Murray. Anita Velez, who had believed that Cassandra DeVries was the only possible future dataDyne could have. Anita Velez, who had, strangely enough, become the new CEO of dataDyne’s only friend.

  Once in the study, Cassandra would open her laptop, typing in her password, offering it her left eye for retina confirmation, making certain the friend-or-foe chip she had implanted in herself at her wrist was read properly. She would log into her office, and begin working, or, more correctly, she would resume working, because she had discovered that she was never, ever, going to be finished.

  In this, perhaps, the insomnia was a blessing in disguise, because it gave Cassandra hours back in her day. Hours when she didn’t need to be in the office, surrounded by her half-dozen personal assistants and secretaries and handlers; hours when she didn’t need to be constantly jumping from one video conference to another, from one meeting to another, from one event to another.

  Even before she’d joined dataDyne as a junior programmer in its subsidiary, DataFlow, Cassandra had known the corporation was enormous. She had known it the same way she had known that the Atlantic was enormous. She had known it as an intellectual truth, but without the emotional understanding that comes when you’re floating alone in the middle of it.

  DataDyne was her Atlantic Ocean, and it was Cassandra DeVries’s job not only to know its depths and currents, but also the doings of all the fish in this particular sea. Upon her appointment as CEO, DeVries had spent six days in what she herself referred to as “boot camp,” but which Anita Velez had called “holding court.” The directors of all of dataDyne’s subsidiaries had made the pilgrimage to Paris to meet with her, each of them in turn offering their congratulations, their loyalty, their gifts, and then the latest in spreadsheets, prospectuses, prototypes, and multimedia presentations. R-C/Bowman and Runyon-Adams and Patmos Casualty and Freis Construction and Dun-Chow Manufacturing and ServAuto Robotics and Ellison Electronic Security and at least twenty-seven more divisions that, until she found herself face-to-face with their respective directors, Cassandra DeVries had thought owned by other hypercorps, by CMO or Beck-Yama or Zentek.

  Cassandra DeVries knew she was a very smart woman. She knew there were some people who believed she was a genius, but she had met genius, and she knew the difference. Genius was named Daniel Carrington, and she had been his lover for a time. But that had ended, because Daniel Carrington was also a zealot, and where Cassandra DeVries believed in the good dataDyne could do, he believed only that dataDyne must be destroyed. She wasn’t a genius, and having seen the lengths Daniel Carrington would go to achieve his aims, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be.

  But she was smart, and even so, she was still being bombarded with more information than she could possibly begin to digest. As the CEO of DataFlow, her particular fiefdom of the dataDyne empire, she had been able to track all of its activities, its projects, even the majority of its personnel. She had prided herself on this ability, in fact.

  DataDyne was DataFlow to the nth degree. She couldn’t keep up. How Master Zhang Li had managed the corporation, let alone controlled it, she honestly had no idea. She was beginning to suspect that he never truly had.

  Learning to tame dataDyne was a struggle, but it was her intention to prevail. She had killed Friedrich Murray to protect the corporation, to keep Murray’s own division of pharmaDyne from bringing down all of the others with it; the fact that, in so doing, she had guaranteed her appointment as the next CEO had been incidental, at least at the moment of action.

  While what she had done remained defensible to herself, and certainly to Anita Velez, it didn’t change the reality that she had killed a man. The stain of it weighed heavily on her still; she wanted—needed—to make it right.

  The way to do that, Cassandra DeVries had resolved, was to become the best CEO dataDyne had ever seen. The fact that only Zhang Li had come before, that she was measuring herself against dataDyne’s founder and creator, did not deter her.

  While Cassandra DeVries had tried to settle into her new job at the office, other people were making further alterations to her life. When Velez, who acted as her personal bodyguard during the day, escorted her from the office after the end of that first week as CEO, it wasn’t until they were crossing the Seine that Cassandra realized they were heading the wrong way.

  “Where are we going?” she asked Velez, glancing with some concern at the driver in the front seat, separated from them by a privacy screen of carefully crafted ballistic glass, as clear as crystal. “We’re going the wrong way.”

  “You’re going home, Madame Director,” Velez said, the mirth in her voice almost hidden behind her peculiar accent, part American English, part German.

  “My home’s the other direction, Anita. I don’t have time for this, I have a lot to do.”

  “Your new home, Madame Director,” Velez said, and then she had smiled, something so uncharacteristic that Cassandra could only stare. “You are the CEO of dataDyne. A town house in Le Marais, lovely though it was, is hardly befitting a woman of your stature and power.”

  DeVries had begun to respond, then had fallen silent, because that was when the null-g limousine and the motorcade of outriding protection vehicles turned off the Avenue Anatole France and began slowing. Looking from her window, Cassandra DeVries had been forced to make a determined effort to keep her jaw from dropping into her lap.

  The house—her house—wasn’t a house at all. From the looks of it, it was a bloody palace.

  Velez laughed with positive delight at the expression on Cassandra’s face.

  “Oh, no,” DeVries said. “Oh, no, Anita, no. It’s too much, it’s … it’s far too much.”

  The motorcade had come to a halt, and Velez exited the vehicle first, coming around to meet Cassandra as the driver opened her door. Once out of the vehicle, the circle of protection collapsing tighter around Cassandra for the twenty-meter walk from driveway to front door, Velez went silent. The protection, along with everything else, was something Cassandra was growing more and more accustomed to, and she now knew that Velez’s abrupt silences at moments like these weren’t due to inattention but rather the exact opposite.

  They entered the house through an enormous foyer with a roof reaching almost ten meters above them. A grand staircase dominated the center of the room, then split itself and reversed for passage to the second floor. Tapestries and statues and at least five pieces of art that Cassandra was certain she had seen hanging in the Louvre made up the décor. At the foot of the stairs, standing in a perfect line, the household staff waited for introductions.

  “Built in 1679,” Velez told her. “Obviously, there’s been some refurbishment since then. We’ve had teams working around the clock since your appointment to ready the location, since you have made it abundantly clear that you will not be relocating yourself to Master Li’s residence in China.”

  “I told you,” Cassandra said, her eyes still wide as she took in the foyer, her voice low. “DataFlow is here. This is my home.”

  “Your home is the world, Madame Director, be
cause that is dataDyne’s home. But if you insist on sleeping in Paris more often than sleeping elsewhere, you deserve a home worthy of your position. Would you like me to show you around?”

  And despite herself, and feeling very much like a princess in a fairy tale, Cassandra DeVries said, “Yes, please. Very much.”

  They had, quite literally, taken care of everything, right down to filling her new closets with a new wardrobe, everything hand-tailored and perfectly fitted. Her personal belongings had been packed with care, moved from across town, and unpacked with the same attention to detail. There were household attendants available for her every need, at every hour of the day. Two chefs, three maids, one butler, two under-butlers, a groundskeeper, and, of course, security. Lots and lots of security.

  She was the CEO of dataDyne; anything she needed, all she had to do was ask.

  But what she needed most was sleep, and the thing that no one understood, because Cassandra DeVries wasn’t telling them, was that she was suffering her insomnia by choice.

  When she slept, she dreamt.

  And she didn’t much care for the dreams she’d been having.

  Velez, being Velez, knew something was wrong almost immediately.

  “You look tired, Madame Director,” she said to her one morning after escorting her into her office.

  “I am tired,” Cassandra admitted, already standing behind the desk she once had thought was far too big and that now seemed to be eternally covered in papers. As she spoke, her first assistant secretary stepped in and began projecting the daily schedule for her review from his d-PAL. The holograph shimmered and began scrolling, forming a makeshift divider between the two women as they spoke.

  “New appointment for R-C/Bowman CEO at nine-fifteen,” the secretary murmured.

  “It’s not good,” Velez said. “You need your health. You cannot afford to become ill, certainly not so soon after being named CEO.”

  “Review candidate listing to replace Dr. Murray at pharmaDyne, nine-seventeen.”

  “We’re closing it down,” Cassandra told the secretary. “I thought I made that clear. I want pharmaDyne dismantled and folded into Patmos. R and D will reform under a new division.”

  “I’ll schedule a call with Miss Waterberg for the same slot.”

  “Madame Director,” Velez said.

  Cassandra shook her head. “I’m sorry, Anita, I don’t have time for this right now.”

  “Conference call with dataDyne Los Angeles in three minutes,” the secretary murmured, as if to prove the point.

  Velez hesitated, then nodded. “We will speak further about this when I take you home, then.”

  Cassandra nodded, barely hearing her, already sinking into the day’s work.

  “There are some sleeping aids, quite safe. I can have your physician in to see you this evening.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You said you are not sleeping, Madame Director. That cannot possibly be ‘all right.’ ”

  “I’m not going to take pills.”

  “There are other methods of delivery. A dermal patch, if you would—”

  “No, Anita,” Cassandra said, and she tried to say it gently, and with a smile. “I’m not going to take anything. I’m fine. Please, just let it alone.”

  Velez furrowed her brow, and it put her severe features into relief, had the effect of softening them in a way that DeVries found unexpected. Velez was several years her senior, and Cassandra found the obvious concern in her expression surprisingly touching.

  “Very well, Madame Director,” Velez said. “If you need anything, you know where I am.”

  She wasn’t sleeping, but there was only so much of that she could do without, and so, in the end, the bed won.

  The bed always won.

  Sun. Hot day. South of England, the drive from London to Bristol, the stop at Bath.

  “To see the baths of Bath.”

  Eight years old. Backseat. Father driving. Mother beside him. Talking about the news of the world, football, what was on the telly last night.

  Beside her, Arthur, he’s six. He’s her brother. Her baby brother.

  Some siblings, they fight. They are close, but they do not know how to be close.

  Not Cassandra and Arthur. The best of friends, those two. He’s the quiet one, and she does the talking for them both, but they’re always there for each other. Brother and sister, the best of friends.

  Sitting in the backseat, twisting around in their seatbelts to face one another, laughing as they play snap.

  “Snap!”

  “Snap!”

  “Snap!”

  The world freezes, and Cassandra feels herself thrown back against her door, and there’s something in the periphery, shiny metal and sunlight off glass and there’s another car, a green car, the color of a meadow. She has no idea where it has come from. She has no idea where it is heading.

  She hears her mother screaming just a fraction of a second before she hears the sound of metal ripping metal, of glass exploding from its frame. Playing cards spray in every direction. Then there’s no noise at all, and she’s looking at her brother, she doesn’t blink, she doesn’t look away, but suddenly Arthur is not there anymore.

  At least, no Arthur that Cassandra DeVries, eight years old, can recognize as her best friend and her brother.

  Time explodes back into motion, sound crashes back into perception, and she is upside down, right-side up, on her side, tumbling, no, she’s not tumbling, the car is tumbling, the car is rolling and bouncing over and over again. More screams of metal and mothers, more cries of terror and fear, and some of them are now Cassandra’s. Glass that has survived this long finally fails, and then, once again, silence.

  She’s on her side, still held by her seatbelt, the car finally at rest. Lying more on the rear door than in her seat. Playing cards have covered her like leaves from an autumn tree, and when she looks up, she can see the trees they could have come from, white clouds and blue sky beyond.

  When she looks to her right, she can see her brother, what remains of him. He doesn’t know he’s dead, yet.

  But she knows.

  His eyes are still open, and he blinks at her, and he tries to speak.

  The blood that fountains from his mouth makes Cassandra scream again.

  It’s the scream that wakes her up.

  It was an old dream, an old nightmare, and Cassandra DeVries had thought she laid it to rest long ago. She thought she had nailed its coffin shut with the creation of AirFlow.Net, the near-bulletproof software control system she invented to guarantee the safe coordination of all null-g transport, anywhere in the world, at any given time. AirFlow.Net had brought her to the attention of Zhang Li, and that in turn made her the head of DataFlow.

  That was the old dream.

  Now there’s a new one. It’s exactly the same as the old one, but with one crucial difference. In the new dream, lying beside her isn’t Arthur.

  Lying beside her is Dr. Friedrich Murray, with three holes in his chest that Cassandra DeVries put there.

  He meets her eight-year-old eyes, calls her a bitch, and damns her to hell.

  “Wake up! Please, Madame Director!”

  Friedrich Murray vanished, replaced by Anita Velez, and Cassandra realized that she was awake, that the older woman was standing beside her bed.

  “Up!” Velez grabbed her by the upper arm, pulling Cassandra free from the bed and to her feet. “Hands up, hold your hands up, over your head.”

  The lights snapped on in the bedroom, and Cassandra winced at their sudden ferocity, still groggy. There were Shock Troopers everywhere, standing at the door, coming toward her, one of them with a bundle in his hands.

  “Can you stand?” Velez demanded. “Are you awake?”

  “Anita—”

  “Get your arms up, over your head. Please, Madame Director! There isn’t time to waste!”

  I’m still bloody dreaming, Cassandra thought, and blearily brought her arms up. The Shock
Trooper lifted the bundle over her head, pulled it down, and suddenly two more Troopers were at her sides, tightening straps and pulling them so hard it crushed the breath from her chest. Cassandra was dimly aware that she was being encased in some manner of heavy body armor not unlike the suits the Shock Troopers wore.

  “What do you need?” Velez was asking her insistently. “Is there anything here you need?”

  Shaken, confused, Cassandra tried to speak and found she had no air for the task. She gestured with her right hand, waving toward the briefcase resting unopened on the chair in front of her dressing table. In the case was her customized laptop and the latest progress reports on AirFlow.Net 2.0 that Dr. Ventura had delivered to her office at her request. Velez turned, marking the direction, then barked an order to the first Shock Trooper.

  “The briefcase,” she snapped, then released her hold on Cassandra just long enough to touch the skin behind her left ear, activating her subcutaneous radio. “We have Future. Thirty seconds.”

  “Anita, what’s going—”

  Velez moved her hand from her radio to the small of Cassandra’s back, and Cassandra felt the pressure rather than the warmth of the touch. She was pushed forward, not quite gently, and Velez moved with her, staying close to her right side, her customized MagSec still held in her right hand.

  “Quickly. Do not stop until you’re in the limo.”

  “My bag—”

  “Will be brought, let’s go.”

  Shock Troopers closed around them as soon as they passed the door, all of them with their weapons in hand, and then Cassandra was being hustled down the stairs, through the great hall and foyer. Velez stayed in position at her side, her hand still on Cassandra’s back, guiding her, and they went through the front door and into the Parisian predawn without breaking stride. The cold hit Cassandra like a club, the winter wind slicing through the her pajamas effortlessly, the pavement stones turning her bare feet almost immediately numb.