Springboard (29 page)

In this case, Bretton had created a huge army of robots. Each one was over a mile long, with thousands of magnetic millipedelike legs. Each was loaded with full spectrum sensors that could read every kind of radiation, chemical, sound, and texture that mankind had ever encountered. Millions and millions of these snakelike creations crawled across the sphere, sampling, testing, looking.

Bretton had made them, but the robots were under
Jay’s
control.

Jay’s normal VR sensors had been rerouted through the robots, each machine giving him data, millions of points of information combining into his senses.

He hung in space, an immense figure, the sphere appearing to him about the size of a large beach ball. He reached out and rotated it, running his hands over its surface, feeling for imperfections, looking for the place that wasn’t like the other places, the spot that was weaker.

As he did so, huge arrays of robots fanned out on the sphere covering every spot that his fingers touched, using their sensitive legs to send information to his tactile sensors. He felt a uniform pattern on the sphere, a pattern that fit with the geodesic nature of the construct.

Every location that his fingers passed changed color after it had been scanned, a bright red that seemed to seep from his nails like blood. The marker helped track his progress and would let him know when he’d completed this stage of the search.

He closed his eyes to focus on the tactile sensors—and for a moment he saw Mark in the hospital bed. He remembered standing there with Saji after the doctor had finally come. Mark had been asleep by this point, far more relaxed than his parents.

Oh, my God, Jay, I was so scared,
he remembered Saji saying, and the squeeze of her hand.

He opened his eyes and saw that he had covered most of the globe in red. He carefully brushed his fingers over the rest.

He pulled his hands back, and traced a sign in the air.

The stars blanked out, leaving the sphere darker than before. The scene was almost black now, only a faint metallic gleam on the sphere, barely enough to still see it. His eyes shifted slightly, and the globe became blacker as the radiation sensors in the robots came on-line.

He reached for the sphere again, this time checking it for any light leaks. Such a leak would indicate the data hole he was searching for, whether it was in any part of the emittable spectrum or not.

It was larger now, about the size of a hot-air balloon, representing the scale change necessary for this test. He worked slowly, feeling the massiveness of the sphere as he turned it, carefully staring at each piece on the macro level while legions of robotic sensors scanned it at the micro.

His eyes had adjusted to the darker light, and now the segment of the sphere he looked at appeared brighter, almost silver. . . .

Jay blinked twice to shake the image, and continued to turn the globe. He had to be sure to hold it in each position for three seconds so that he could see all of the surface within the three-second window that the sphere represented. A tiny turquoise bar-graph at the edge of his vision constantly counted off the time, filling up with gold and then reverting to blue at the end of each interval.

A wire-frame model below the bar showed his progress. Two segments left.

Jay completed the search.

He started his next check, a chemical examination of the sphere, using his olfactory sensors. The globe had shrunk now, to a basketball. He pulled it close to his face and started to sniff.

As he did this, the robot armies, now germ-sized on his scale, deployed spectral analyzers, checking the atomic makeup of the sphere, looking for variations that could not be explained. There was a slightly pinelike smell, almost antiseptic.

This wouldn’t do.

Jay activated a control and the smell shifted to a more pleasant cedar, taking him away from thoughts of Mark.

He turned the ball, sniffing, a bloodhound looking for something that didn’t smell right.

A bell chimed, and he realized that he’d completed the search.

He hadn’t found anything. But he should have. The interface had been tested, the robots’ AI performed flawlessly, and the metaphor was good. There was the tiniest chance that they’d gotten the time frame wrong for the sphere, but it seemed unlikely.

Which left
him
as the weak link.

Jay let out a long breath. He’d been distracted, thinking about Mark. He must have missed something, some factor.

He was going to have to try something else.

After they alighted from the cab, Thorn said, “See that lot over there?”

Marissa nodded.

“Holds two hundred cars, and it’s full. That’s the parking for Tials. See all those people at those outdoor tables, under those ratty umbrellas? That’s the dinner crowd.”

It looked like a busy evening at a country fair’s food plaza. Maybe three hundred people in the warm summer night, at long rows of wooden picnic tables set end to end. The diners were laughing, talking, eating.

“Come on.”

She followed him around the corner. There were three lines of people queued up in front of what looked like a market stall, a pole barn with counters and a dozen men and women inside it, no walls, just a roof. Fragrant smoke rose from the place in a thick cloud.

Behind it was a stubby, rectangular building the size of a small two-bedroom house—that held a refrigerator, freezer, and a lot of storage space.

“Looks like the waiting line for a ride at Disneyworld,” she said.

He nodded. “The long line is for new customers, the medium-long line for regulars. The short line is for cops and firefighters only.”

“And this is enforced how?”

“If you are in the regulars or cops line and somebody doesn’t recognize you when you get to the counter? You don’t get served—you have to go to the back of the new-customer line.”

“And these dedicated people are lined up to eat what?”

“Chiliburgers.”

Marissa shook her head. “This is it? Lord, Tommy. I was guessing maybe you were taking me someplace where they served fugu or some weird Tasmanian snail or something. You flew us all the way to New York—to Queens, of all places—to have
chiliburgers
?”

“Best in the country, maybe best in the world,” he said. “So how come a crack CIA operative like you doesn’t know about Tials?”

“I don’t even know what kind of
name
that is,” she said.

“Acronym, actually,” he said, heading toward the cop/firefighter line.

“How do you rate the short line?”

“Well, I was a regular, but Bruce decided that becoming Commander of Net Force made me a cop. Best perk I’ve gotten from the job so far, present company excluded.”

“Uh huh. You were explaining the name of this place?”

“ ‘There is always a Larry somewhere.’ The first letter of each word—T-I-A-L-S.”

They reached the end of the line. The man in front of them turned and saw them. “Hey, Thorn,” he said.

“Hey, Mickey. Marissa, this is Mickey Reilly, Detective Third, NYPD. Mickey, Marissa Lowe. Marissa is an operative for one of those, ah, federal agencies usually known only by their initials.”

“Pleased to meetcha,” Reilly said.

“Likewise.”

She looked back at Thorn. “Explain the name, please.”

“What? Mickey?”

“I
will
hit you, Tommy.”

He smiled. So did Mickey. “Well, Bruce used to work in Hollywood. He was an up-and-rising screenwriter, wrote a couple movies for guys like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, like that. But it got to him after a while, all the Hollywood crap, so he took his money and quit. He bought a secret family chili recipe from some Greek guy back in the old country, then set up shop here.”

“And?” she asked.

“The story Bruce tells, he would go into meetings with studio executives to pitch a script. And they’d go back and forth, but nobody ever wanted to make a decision right there and then. They always had to check it with somebody first. Only a handful of folks in La-La-Land can actually greenlight a movie. So they’d tell him, ‘Baby,
I
love it, it’s great, a fantastic idea, but before we can go ahead, I have to run it past Larry, you know.’ ”

“Ah.”>

Thorn nodded, grinned. “Bruce said there was always a ‘Larry’ somewhere—down the hall, up the stairs, on vacation in Mexico. It was one of the ways studio guys avoided having to ever say ‘No.’ They could look like they were on the side of the angels, because
they
never rejected anything, never had an unkind word for anybody. It was always
Larry’s
fault.”

She shook her head.

“All they serve is chiliburgers and soda. You get to the counter, you say how many of each you want, that’s it. Nine dollars for the burger, a buck for the soft drink. They don’t take checks, Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, cash only. They also don’t make change—you give ’em a ten, you break even. A twenty, you either want two burgers and drinks, or you tip them ten dollars.”

He paused, but she didn’t say anything, just waited for him to continue.

“On an average night,” he said, “there will be ten or fifteen thousand dollars in small bills in the cash drawer. And, in case you are wondering, no, nobody has ever robbed them. If anybody ever tried, most of the cops in this line would happily shoot them and step over the body to get their order.”

Mickey nodded at that, and threw in a wink.

“You want it your way,” Thorn went on, “you go to Burger King—you don’t alter anything here. What you get is half a pound of ground sirloin on an oversize burger bun, slathered in the special Greek chili, wrapped in a piece of aluminum foil, and a wad of napkins, which you’ll need, and whatever soft drink they got the best deal on this week. You don’t want to know how many calories and fat and cholesterol is in Bruce’s burger.”

“Right,” Marissa said.

“Forty years ago, there used to be a place in L.A. with a similar setup, it’s where Bruce got the idea, but they franchised it, and it wasn’t the same after that. Tials is one of a kind. Open twenty-four/seven. Come by here at two A.M. on a weekday, it’s this crowded. People bring their families here for Christmas dinner. Tials never closes. I think Bruce must live in the refrigerator—which occupies a good section of that building behind the stand.”

“Wow. It’s that good?”

“It’s better than that. Just wait. After Tials, you’ll never be able to eat a burger anywhere else without frowning at it.”

“Two surprises in one evening. What else have you got up your sleeve, Mr. Thorn?”

He smiled and winked at her, but didn’t say anything else.

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting at a stained picnic table, each with a chiliburger and a Coke. Thorn watched her take her first bite, and smiled at the look on her face as she chewed and swallowed it.

“Lord. This is
great
!” she managed.

“You’re a cheap date,” he said, waving his burger. “Well, except for the ride.”

“Shut up and eat,” she said.

They did, chili dripping. Thorn watched her as he ate, and at that moment, figured this might be as good as dinner ever got, in which case, he’d have no complaints.

Seurat admired the woman’s sleeping body, taking great pleasure in looking at every exposed millimeter without having to pretend he wasn’t staring, without the need for a social pretext that what he saw didn’t attract him and draw him in completely.

She lay on her side, her rich, long hair dark against his ivory silk sheets, her tanned skin lightly dotted with freckles, each of which seemed utterly fascinating. Her head was turned toward her chest, her chin tucked in, and the rise and fall of her chest seemed to raise her breasts to almost touch her face, sheltering it with every breath.

Her hip rose from the bed, a graceful arc that beckoned him to put his hand on it, a call that he had answered many times already this night. One long leg was hooked over his duvet, and he admired its utter smoothness, its grace.

He realized he was looking at her with the intensity he usually reserved for paintings, and grinned. She was a beautiful artwork that was all the more amazing for being
real,
and all the more exciting for being in
his
bed. He grinned again when he realized how much the comparison would amuse her.

And an
American.
Who would have thought?

The last day had been full of surprises. To think that he’d very nearly missed this one!

He had been outrageously irritable since the most recent attack, which had crashed the local CyberNation node, lashing out at his staff, wanting answers, pushing them to work harder, when they all wanted the same thing he did, and very nearly as much as he wanted it.
Le boss
was being the ass, and everybody knew it, no one more so than the boss himself. . . .

In his last communication with Gridley, the man had obliquely hinted at a brute-force approach that was being tried on the attack, designed to find the mechanism by which their network had been compromised. Seurat had not been surprised, since it was the approach he would have expected from the Americans anyway. Never use a scalpel when a chain saw will serve. . . .

But his own team had not been able to suggest a better approach.

He liked to think of himself and of CyberNation as smarter, more able to figure out the linchpin, the keystone of a problem, and to use that knowledge rather than force to achieve victory. A dagger rather than a blunt instrument.