The Genius Wars (45 page)

‘I was afraid you’d notice that there wasn’t a breath of wind in those old shots,’ he added. ‘But you didn’t.’

‘I did. I mean,
subconsciously
I did.’ Cadel remembered the niggling sense of unease he’d felt, upon viewing a wildly tossing palm tree. ‘Something was bugging me – I just didn’t have a chance to work out what.’

‘Mmm.’ Though clearly not convinced, Prosper continued his narrative. He explained that Rex had tried to escape from Prosper’s team by hiding in the panic house. When that tactic had failed, Rex had retreated into the tunnel, never realising that its
automatic locking mechanism could be compromised. ‘Vee disabled the doors at both ends, so they wouldn’t open,’ said Prosper. ‘He hacked into the system and changed a set of protocols. I should have asked him to change them back, but I never did. Too squeamish, I suppose.’ As Cadel gasped, Prosper wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘I mean, what was the point? Rex was already underground; why go to the trouble of interring him somewhere else?’

Cadel closed his eyes.
This is a bad dream,
he thought.
I’ll wake up soon.

‘It was his own fault,’ Prosper insisted. ‘I kept asking him to cooperate, and he wouldn’t. He must have thought he could hold out forever, because there were emergency supplies on that boat of his. But something went wrong. It must have been a heart attack.’

Cadel’s eyes flew open. ‘You killed him. I knew it. I
knew
you killed him!’

‘I didn’t kill him. He killed himself.’ Prosper’s tone was oddly peevish, as if he were discussing a lazy gardener, or an especially stupid pet. He seemed to be expecting a measure of sympathy from his audience. ‘Do you think I wanted him to die? It would have been
so
much easier if he’d cooperated, but he wouldn’t. And as a result, I had to do all kinds of tedious and expensive things. I had to get his voice cloned from old recordings, with something called concatenate speech synthesis. I had to commission a digital double, and that wasn’t easy: I didn’t have a body scan, you see, because a
dead
body’s no good in these cases – especially one that’s been dead for a while. His measurements had to be recreated from existing footage, which cost a
mint.
I must have lost half his estate already, paying off technical support. As for the time involved … well, all I can say is, thank God I had the sense to target a recluse. With someone like Rex, no one worries when he disappears off the radar for a couple of months …’

As Prosper rambled on, Cadel stared at him, dumbfounded. Prosper never rambled. It was completely unlike him. Was he
losing his mind? Had two months inside a windowless rabbit-warren driven him mad?

Checking the monitor screens, Cadel saw that Kale had made no visible progress. The panic-room door remained tightly shut.

‘… but of course you’re not interested in any of this,’ Prosper was saying, having spotted Cadel’s sidelong glance. ‘You’re interested in how you’re going to get out. Well, I can help you with that – providing you help me first.’ He tightened his grip on Cadel’s hunched shoulders. ‘You see, my original plan was to wait here, snug as a bug, until your FBI friends finally gave up and went home. Which they would have done, I’m sure, if you hadn’t started making pointed remarks about the size of this building. That was when I realised the tunnel would soon be my only option.’

By now Cadel was as tense as a bow-string. His fists were clenched so tightly that his fingernails were hurting his palms.

He knew what was coming.

‘Unfortunately, I can’t get hold of Vee, at the moment,’ Prosper continued, ‘which is why
you’ll
have to open up the tunnel instead. I’m sure you’re quite capable of doing that.’ He reached out with one hand to grab a wheeled typist’s chair, which he dragged towards the computer keyboard. ‘And since we don’t have much time, you’d better get started.’

Cadel didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He was too busy thinking.

If Prosper let him onto the system, would it be possible to warn Kale somehow? Without alerting Prosper at the same time?

‘Oh – and I wouldn’t try to open any
other
doors,’ the psychologist smoothly remarked, right on cue, ‘because if that happens, someone’s going to get hurt.’ He fished around beneath his jumper, before pulling out something that he pressed against Cadel’s skull. ‘I’m not saying it’ll be you, necessarily. It might be one of your FBI friends. All I’m saying is that there
will
be bloodshed. And I’m sure you don’t want that.’

Cadel couldn’t see the gun, but he recognised the feel of it.
His scalp seemed to burn where it touched the barrel. His skin crawled. His stomach heaved.

‘You always end up waving guns around,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Because they’re effective.’

‘It always comes to this, doesn’t it? You point a gun at me and tell me what to do.’ Cadel’s voice was shaking with fear and despair. ‘I’m
so sick
of it. Do you know that? I’m so sick of you and all your
crap.
’ Memories flashed into his head, one after the other: memories of Sonja’s bloody face, of Saul’s unconscious form, of a house collapsing and wet concrete rising. ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ Cadel cried, tormented beyond endurance by these images. ‘Why don’t you change the script, for once?’

‘Oh, I have,’ said Prosper, through his teeth. ‘In
this
script, I’m not your dad any more. In this script, I’m just a well-disposed friend who could easily run out of patience.’ When Cadel recoiled, Prosper gave a snort of derision. ‘Did you really think I hadn’t heard? I might be in hiding, dear boy, but I still manage to catch up on all the latest news.’

Cadel swallowed.
Oh God,
he thought.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.

‘So let’s remind ourselves, at this point, that I no longer have a stake in your survival,’ Prosper snarled, with the kind of venom that he’d formerly reserved for people like Saul Greeniaus, and Sonja Pirovic ‘I mean, it’s not as though you’re carrying my DNA, is it? There’s no genetic imperative to stop me from blowing your brains out. Which is why we’re going to skip all this silly posturing, and proceed to the business at hand.’ He applied so much pressure to the gun that Cadel’s head was pushed to one side. ‘Open that tunnel.
Now.
Before I lose my temper.’

Cadel’s heart was in his throat. He was convinced, by this time, that something had changed.
Prosper
had changed. His cool facade was beginning to crack. The controlled menace of his speech – the hard glint of amusement in his eye – were both giving way to something wilder and more vicious.

What would he do, if Kale managed to get in? Bullets would fly, certainly. Gas might be used. At best, there would be some kind of siege; Cadel might be stuck in an underground cupboard
with Prosper for days. For
weeks,
if the emergency supplies held out.

Such a prospect was unimaginable.

‘Even if I do this, what makes you think you’ll get away?’ Cadel faltered. ‘What makes you think someone won’t shoot your boat full of holes?’

‘Because
you’ll
be in it,’ Prosper replied. ‘I’m going to need you.’

‘Which is why you won’t kill me now,’ said Cadel, with as much defiance as he could muster. He braced himself for a violent reaction, but wasn’t the least bit surprised when it didn’t come. Once again, Prosper’s mood had changed. In a matter of seconds, he’d reverted from a red-eyed beast to a suavely bantering professional.

‘Oh, I think we’ve already established that,’ he drawled. ‘Right now I won’t shoot you, for any number of reasons. But if the FBI come busting in here … well, who knows?’

Glancing up, Cadel found himself trapped in the force-field of Prosper’s regard. They stood staring at each other. Then Prosper sighed.

‘The thing is, Cadel – and I’ll be frank with you on this, because it’s an important consideration – the thing is that I’ve been stuck inside here for several months, and it’s not been easy. Not at all.’ The strain of it, in fact, was roughening Prosper’s voice, and drawing harsh shadows across his face. Suddenly he looked much, much older. ‘There’s no way on God’s earth I’m going to let anyone lock me up for another twenty years. It’s just not going to happen. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Slowly Cadel nodded. He understood, all right.

‘So it’s up to you,’ Prosper concluded. ‘Either we stay here and go through ten kinds of hell, culminating in God knows how many casualties, or you accompany me on a quiet little marine jaunt, which might very well end when we agree to split up and go our separate ways. What do you think?’ When Cadel remained silent, Prosper added, ‘I mean, you’re supposed to be a
genius, aren’t you? And it doesn’t take a genius to work out what ought to be done, here.’

Cadel couldn’t concentrate. Not with Prosper’s anthracite gaze drilling into his eye sockets. Only by wrenching his own gaze firmly away from Prosper, and training it on the multiple views of busy FBI agents, was Cadel able to focus clearly on the dilemma confronting him.

He noticed that someone was disassembling a fuse box – and he wondered if the panic-room door might be booby-trapped. Suppose it blew up if you tried to force it?

I’ll have a better chance outside than I will stuck in here,
he decided.
Outside will be full of variables. Inside, there’s only one way things can go.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

Then he dropped into the typist’s chair.

With the passwords that Prosper gave him, Cadel found it easy to isolate the automatic door locks. It was quite a relief to be working with computers again; by fixing his attention firmly on source codes and file format identifiers, Cadel was briefly able to forget where he was, and how he was feeling. He was even able to forget Prosper, who remained very quiet as Cadel wriggled his way past Vee’s rather sloppy checkpoints. Vee hadn’t put much effort into his door-disabling protocol. It was obviously a rushed job, which hadn’t been treated as something that required much of a defensive shield.

In just a few minutes, Cadel had repaired the original program. He didn’t restore its biometric subroutine, but he did scrub out Vee’s numerous modifications, which were really quite ugly, and far too elaborate. For the first time, Cadel realised how much Richard Buckland had influenced his opinion on such things. Though Vee’s programming was effective, it could have been more effective. It could have been cleaner, leaner, and harder to mess with.

‘Okay,’ Cadel finally announced, resisting the temptation to stray into any other parts of the system, ‘that’s done.’ He spun around in his chair. ‘There’s a new password now. If you enter that manually, the tunnel doors will open up.’

Prosper narrowed his eyes. He had been standing behind Cadel, silently watching the monitor screens.

‘The new password is “Sonja”,’ Cadel added, without expression.

Prosper seemed to accept this. He certainly didn’t comment on it.

‘So the locks still work?’ was all he said.

‘They have to. The doors won’t open unless the locks work.’

‘Right.’ Prosper grasped Cadel’s arm, pulled him out of the chair, and guided him towards the kitchen cupboards. To Cadel’s amazement, Prosper then dropped to one knee and removed a portion of kickboard beneath the dishwasher. Without a kickboard to restrain them, two parallel stainless-steel rails immediately sprang across the floor.

Prosper used them to pull the dishwasher out from beneath the benchtop.

‘It’s got wheels,’ he explained, as the appliance rolled forward about a metre or so, along the rails. Behind it, in the wall, was a hatchway. And beside the hatchway was a small, touch-screen interface device.

‘Now,’ he said, waving his gun, ‘get down there and key in that password.’

‘Do you –’ Cadel began, then hesitated.

Prosper frowned at him.

‘What?’

‘Do you know where … um …’

‘Where Rex is?’

Cadel nodded.

‘He’s nowhere near the hatch, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Prosper sounded impatient.

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because I’ve seen the footage. That tunnel has cameras in it.’ When Cadel continued to stand there, unconvinced, Prosper yanked open a pantry cupboard. There was a brief and noisy interlude as cans and jars were pushed around. Then Prosper shoved a plastic bottle of dishwashing powder under Cadel’s
nose. ‘There. Just keep your face shoved up against that,’ Prosper advised. ‘It’ll mask the smell.’

Cadel cleared his throat. ‘It’s not the
smell
I’m worried about,’ he said plaintively. But before he could point out that he had never seen a corpse, and was scared of what Rex might look like, Prosper interrupted him.

‘Well you
should
be worried about the smell. Because there’s bound to be one. And if you feel like throwing up, kindly refrain from doing it all over me.’ Using the gun for emphasis, Prosper gave Cadel a sharp prod. ‘Go on. Hurry. We haven’t got all day.’

Cadel forced himself to kneel. In a rather pathetic delaying tactic, he then removed his bottle’s screwtop lid, surreptitiously placing the little plastic disc to one side, on the floor, where Kale might see it.

‘Nice try,’ said Prosper. The lid quickly disappeared into his pocket. ‘And don’t start throwing that detergent around, either, or I’ll make you eat it.’

With Prosper breathing down his neck, Cadel had run out of options. There was only one way to go. Cadel therefore did as he was told; clutching his bottle, he squeezed under the benchtop, shuffling forward on his knees and elbows until he was able to key his revised password into the touchscreen security device.

As soon as he hit ‘enter’, the hatch in front of him swung open – releasing a faceful of damp, fetid air.

‘Oh, man …’ he muttered.

‘Go on,’ said Prosper, from above him.

Cadel started to crawl. Luckily, he wasn’t crawling headfirst into a pitch-black hole. Beyond the hatchway, fluorescent lights were flickering on. (Had they been triggered by an infrared movement sensor?) He could see grey concrete walls, and some cable ducts running off into the distance. His detergent bottle was wedged uncomfortably into his chest.