BETA - Project Avatar, page 18
“Well, it’s not your fault,” Ramsey said, jumping to her defense. “He fooled a lot of people. Besides, how were you to know? Hey, look at me; I have no idea what people do with all the computer chips I’ve designed.”
But Dee was less inclined to forgive herself than he was. “No wonder Brice ended up losing his grip. Anyway, go on. You’re saying he sold something to XCorp?”
“Yeah, as I said, I have a friend who was working there. Petronille had got hold of the specifications of some secret project that was under development, and XCorp snapped at the bait. They apparently gave Petronille a lot of money to tap his government sources for more information. After that, the story gets pretty sketchy. Maybe Petronille couldn’t deliver, or something else went wrong. I gather that nowadays there’s some serious bad blood between XCorp and Petronille.”
She nodded. “He doesn’t seem too fond of them. So. What was the secret project?”
Ramsey took a couple of mouthfuls of beer. He seemed a lot more confident now that he was immersed in his exciting role as underworld informer. “Some kind of personal avatar application.”
Dee stared. It looked as though she would need something stronger than coffee before this conversation was over. With jittery hands, she fished her smartphone out of her shoulder bag, flicked on the screen, and turned it so that Ramsey could see.
Beta’s head and shoulders appeared. Seeing Ramsey’s unfamiliar face through the camera lens, the avatar pouted warily, then waited for further instructions.
“Maybe something like this?” Dee asked quietly.
Ramsey frowned, and all his newfound confidence took only a second or two to evaporate. “I guess so. I mean . . . where’d you get it?” he croaked.
“I’m testing it for a company called Endyne.”
“Hey, listen,” he said, “I probably shouldn’t get involved in this. If it’s what I think it is, you shouldn’t be showing me.”
Belatedly, Dee realized he might be right. If Beta really had something to do with her troubles, then the fewer people she showed it to, the better. She switched the screen off and put it away.
“Are you all right?” she asked. His face, which had been rather pasty-looking to begin with, had gone even paler.
“I think I’m . . . I’ll just . . .”
Suddenly Ramsey jumped up from his place and vanished into the bar at a quick trot.
Chapter 18
Dee sat alone at the little table, drinking her coffee and brooding over what she had just heard. If XCorp was in competition with Endyne over Beta’s software, was it possible that she and Ed had somehow become trapped in a vicious game of industrial espionage? If so, there were still a lot of missing pieces to the puzzle. How did the UMBRA goons fit in? Could they have been hired as some kind of corporate mercenaries? That sounded awfully far-fetched. The waitress came past and Dee ordered a glass of white wine in her halting French. She certainly wasn’t about to use Beta as a translator after Ramsey’s response to seeing the little avatar, a response that seemed to have strange echoes of Brice’s reaction just yesterday.
Ramsey came back out, looking a little wobbly. He sat down heavily, stared at his beer for several seconds, then pushed it decisively away to the other side of the table. He glanced sheepishly at Dee. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess it’s just, well, the sight of the avatar on your screen—it suddenly made it all seem so real. I suppose part of me has always thought the whole thing was, you know, just a bunch of stories.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shown it to you,” Dee said. Then, more firmly, “And you know that you really mustn’t tell anyone.”
He nodded. “I won’t, believe me. But you know, it looks great.”
“The application? Oh, it’s fantastic! It’s going to be the product release of the decade.”
He held up a forestalling hand. “No details, please! I’ll read about it in the trades, after it comes out. I admit, I’m kind of a busybody, but this is just out of my league.”
Dee nodded. “Mine, too. I really appreciate the help you’re giving me. Now, listen. I know most of the software developers at Endyne pretty well. Do you know who Brice’s contact there was?”
Ramsey looked confused. “At Endyne? I doubt that Petronille had any inside contacts there.”
“Then how could he spy for XCorp?”
“No, no, you don’t understand. All of Petronille’s best information came from government sources. That’s what XCorp wanted: government files related to the project.”
The rain began to fall in greater earnest. Occasional gusts of chilly wind peppered them with droplets, which dried quickly under the red glow of the heat lamp. Ramsey kept glancing around like someone eager to be on his way.
“Why the government?” Dee said. “It’s an Endyne product. What would the government know about it?”
Ramsey looked at her and bit his lip, then made a wobbling movement in the air with his hand. A brilliant flicker high above the horizon illuminated the plaza: silent lightning somewhere over the distant snowfields of the Alps. “I don’t know. This is strictly in the realm of rumors now. My understanding was that Endyne bought the original code from some Pentagon project.”
The words hit Dee like a beam of light cutting through fog. “A Pentagon project,” she repeated. The sound of Beta’s voice echoed in her mind. Establishing line-of-sight vulnerability. Advance with maximum stealth. Ready your arms. “So the code was written by the military.” It seemed so obvious now that she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it herself.
“It’s just a rumor, but you can see how it kind of makes sense. XCorp doesn’t have any market in commercial software, but they do have a subsidiary that does military contracting.”
“Do they? I didn’t know that.” Now she really did need a drink. “So you think XCorp wanted to work on the military version. Modify it somehow and sell it back to the Pentagon.”
He thought about this before answering. “That kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It does.”
Ramsey’s thirst had apparently returned, and he picked up his beer. Just then, the waitress bustled past, and delivered Dee’s wine. She took a few sips as she thought about how to press on with the conversation.
“So . . . do you think XCorp was planning to isolate the military portions of the Endyne code and expand on them?”
Ramsey cocked his head. “No, of course not,” he said, looking confused again. “The Endyne version is completely civilian . . . isn’t it?”
She hesitated for half a beat, then said, “Of course it is. What was I thinking?”
“Because you would know, right? I mean, you’ve actually used it.”
“There’s nothing military about it. It’s purely civilian.”
This bald-faced lie seemed to satisfy him. “The whole thing wouldn’t make any sense otherwise,” he said. “I mean, Endyne doesn’t know anything about military contracting. They make games and spreadsheets and stuff like that.”
This was true, and she agreed heartily. “Endyne doesn’t write military code.”
“So the answer to your question is no. XCorp wasn’t hoping to steal any military secrets from Endyne. My guess is, they just wanted to see Endyne’s code so they could set up a basic platform for their military application. Then they hired Petronille to swipe files from the military research group that had developed the original code, perhaps to help kick-start the project of weaponizing the thing.”
She tapped a finger on the metal tabletop. “If it started as a military project, doesn’t that mean there’s already a military version in use? How could XCorp develop it and sell it to the Pentagon when the original code was developed by a Pentagon research group?”
He shook his head. “You got me. I told you, these are just rumors. Hey, what are you doing?”
Dee was rooting around in her bag once again. She found her Bluetooth insert and slipped it into her ear. “Beta,” she said.
“Yes, Karen.”
Ramsey watched with a mixture of horror and fascination. He relaxed a bit when he saw that she wasn’t going to fish out the smartphone and turn on the screen again.
“Tell me about your provenance.”
“PAX version 1.3, build 512.agf.060220-1751: service pack 1,” Beta recited. “This and all previous versions trademarked and copyrighted by Endyne Corporation, Mendocino, California. All foreign rights reserved.”
She shrugged and shook her head at Ramsey, who was watching closely to see her reactions since he could hear only one side of the conversation.
“Any other sources?” she asked Beta. “Other programming groups? Other license holders?”
“All versions of the PAX software are the products and exclusive property of Endyne Corporation.”
“Thanks, Beta,” Dee said. She had developed the habit of using this phrase to get Beta to stop responding to her voice. To Ramsey she said, “It doesn’t have any record of code written anywhere but Endyne. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but I figured it was worth checking.”
“That application can understand you when you talk to it like that?” Ramsey asked, looking rather awed. “You can ask it questions in plain English, and it gives you useful information?”
“Not always. But usually, yes.”
He sipped his beer. “Tomorrow morning, I’m moving all my money into Endyne stock.”
Dee took some money out and left it on the table to cover her side of the bill. Ramsey watched her, looking a little disappointed. Maybe he was starting to enjoy playing a cloak-and-dagger role.
“What are you going to do next?” he asked.
She hesitated. “Why do you ask?”
He raised his hands defensively. “Hey, it’s none of my business! I just want to be helpful if I can.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “You could help me with one thing. Do you think I could meet with your old contact, the one who used to work at XCorp?”
“He’s not there anymore. I doubt if he could help you much more than I have.”
“Well, then,” she said, making a little show of gathering herself together, a preamble to leaving, “I suppose that’s about it.”
“Also, he didn’t work for the Do Sul branch. He was designing cell phones.”
Dee stopped fidgeting and thought about this. “What’s the Do Sul branch?”
“The subsidiary that does all the military contracts. XCorp do Sul. Sorry, I figured you knew that.”
“Ramsey,” she told him, “until yesterday, all I knew about XCorp was that they make calculators.”
“XCorp do Sul,” he repeated. He took another mouthful from his glass of beer, milking the moment for all it was worth. “They would have been the ones who tried to buy leaked information through Petronille. They’re located in Brazil.”
“Where in Brazil?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. São Paulo, maybe?”
“Beta, where is the headquarters of the XCorp do Sul corporation?”
“Twelve Avenida Erasmo Braga, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.”
“Thanks, Beta.”
His doughy face was grinning at her, incredulous. “It told you?”
“Yes. They’re in Rio.”
“I have got to get me one of those.”
For the past thirty seconds or so, Dee had been watching a black van out of the corner of her eye as it crossed the parking lot, moving slowly from the main entrance toward the front of the plaza. She was becoming the kind of nervous, criminal-minded individual who watched such things with suspicion, as if they might have something to do with her.
From a hundred yards away, the black van suddenly roared toward them, making great fans of spray behind its spinning wheels. Dee leaped to her feet, knocking her tall iron chair backward onto the concrete under the heat lamp behind her.
Through the front windshield of the van, she could now see a blond-haired man, crew-cut, with wolfish features and cold blue eyes, staring directly at her. She had no doubt that it was the hijacker, Holtz. For a moment, she froze, unable to flee.
If the van’s momentum had continued, it would have run her down where she stood. But at the last moment, Holtz cut the wheels right, and the van skidded sideways, sliding to a perfect halt with its left flank facing the open seating of the brasserie, no more than five feet in front of Dee’s face. The side of the van was an expanse of windowless black steel, with a sliding door that caught the braking momentum and flew open just as the van stopped. Ramsey was yelling at her over the screams and shouts of the alarmed patrons around them.
Out of the gaping rectangle behind that big door jumped two soldiers in black night gear. Both were carrying stubby assault weapons with silencers almost as long as the guns themselves. One of the men was very tall, and the other had close-cropped red hair. UMBRA.
For a moment she felt lightheaded—almost ill. Holtz and UMBRA.
Dee had only the briefest view of those familiar, terrifying faces. Suddenly she snapped out of her trance. The confusion of the other diners scrambling away from their tables provided her with a few moments of cover as she turned and ran through the front door into the brasserie. She was down the length of the room in a few quick strides, and through the kitchen door before she even knew where she was going.
The kitchen had a long fry grill and counter, with a rubber-floored aisle separating it from the glass-fronted, refrigerated room filled with beer-brewing tanks. She bolted straight for the back.
Some part of her brain registered the padlock on the back door—no exit that way. She spotted an open ventilation window up at ceiling height, perhaps two feet high and four feet wide. Two steps before the back wall, she leaped up and grabbed a water pipe that ran horizontally along the ceiling, her body remembering a standard bar routine that she had executed thousands of times in her teens. Letting her momentum carry her forward, she threw both feet out the window, let go of the pipe, and let her body fly in a clean arc out and into the night beyond. Her shoulder bag on its leather strap followed, tracing the arc of her trajectory.
She landed on the packed dirt of a driveway behind the strip mall, coming down cleanly on both feet and “sticking” her landing perfectly with hands high in the air, just as her coaches had always taught her to do. For a moment, she was so proud of the move that she forgot she was running for her life.
Then she turned right and sprinted hard into the misty darkness. She was between the back of the row of shops and a chain-link fence, in a driveway that contained a number of waste bins and a few pieces of abandoned machinery. There were trees beyond the fence, and she was tempted to jump it and make a run through the suburban woods. But instinct told her that the men behind her were better than she at that sort of chase. Also, she didn’t want to put that fence between herself and her car if she could help it.
She ducked behind an old panel truck, parked against the back wall of a store, and stood panting for air, trying to decide what to do. Then she remembered that she still had the Bluetooth in her ear.
“Beta!”
“Yes, Karen.”
“Go to advisory mode. I’m under pursuit.”
“Position confirmed by GPS. You are behind the FNAC chain-store outlet in Bois des Frères, facing north. Please confirm: you still have access to a personal vehicle.”
She glanced around the corner of the panel truck. No one yet. Maybe they were still looking for her in the kitchen. “Yes,” she said. “But I can’t use it. They’ll be watching it.”
Beta said, “Please confirm: pursuers have established the identity of your vehicle.”
Suddenly, she realized they didn’t know which car was hers. No one but John and Abe knew about the Audi.
“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t confirm that.” She began running for the pathway skirting the far end of the strip mall.
“Then proceed to the vehicle immediately,” Beta was saying in her ear. “Rapidly but with caution.”
Just before she made the corner, she heard wood splintering behind her. Without turning to look, she knew that the commandos had kicked their way through the padlocked door.
A few steps brought her to the front of the line of shops, and she paused in the last shadow before the storefront lights and the broad open expanse of the parking lot. Glancing around the corner, she could see her car, not far away. The lot was empty except for one other car standing between her and the Audi. It was going to be a dash across open space with no cover.
Very carefully, she glanced farther around the corner of the building. Through the rain, she could see Holtz standing outside the open door on the driver’s side of the van, holding a submachine gun across his chest in a guard position. There was no one else to be seen; the clientele of the Brasserie des Frères were presumably cowering under tables and counters inside.
She waited until Holtz’s head was turned the other way, then bolted from cover and headed out across the open blacktop through the dull drizzle of the rain. Within seconds, the bulk of the van obscured her from his view. A few more seconds, and she had ducked behind the lone car that sat parked between her and the Audi. She peeked out and, seeing no one, ran the last few steps.
She opened her car door, ducked inside, and quietly pulled the door shut behind her.
Dee was just about to place the key in the ignition, when she saw Ramsey come running out of the barroom door. Under the mercury arc lights of the parking lot, his face was round and pale as the moon, and he was haloed in the red glow of the heat lamps behind him. His expression was a caricature of horror: big round eyes behind big round glasses, over a big round, shrieking mouth.
Holtz turned and trained his weapon on Ramsey’s wide, running body. The movement of the weapon happened in such a fast snap that it seemed instantaneous, and she had no doubt that a round was already chambered and ready to fire. Holtz yelled, “Halt!” in a voice that would not be easy to ignore.
Ramsey, in his panic, appeared to be seeing and hearing nothing. But although Holtz was no more than five feet away as Ramsey ran by, he didn’t fire, and he didn’t give chase.
