The Paris Option - Страница 73

The door opened, and Marty turned, a sharp remark ready to be flung at whoever dared interrupt his misery.

But it was Jon standing there, tall, muscular, and imposing in his dark bomber jacket. Although his dusky face was battered, a grin as wide as the Atlantic Ocean was aimed at Marty. Crowded behind were Peter and Randi, also grinning. As he was growing up, Marty had not been good at reading people's emotions. Learning that the corners of an upturned mouth were a smile, which meant happiness, and that a frown could mean sadness, anger, or a range of other less joyful feelings had taken some time. But now Marty saw not only that his three friends were happy to be here, but they also had a sense of urgency about them, as if they had arrived only to leave again. Things were not good, but they were putting a brave face on the situation.

They strode into the room, Jon talking: "We're all right here, Mart. Great to see you. No need to worry about us."

Marty let out a whoop and then drew back and scowled. "Well, it's about time. I hope you three have been enjoying yourselves." He pulled himself up to his full height. "I, however, have been vegetating in this boring abattoir with no one but that" he glared at Dr. Cameron in the armchair" Scottish barber."

Cameron chuckled. "As you can see, he's in fine shape. Tiptop and well on his way to complete recovery. Still, best keep him from any more injuries. And of course, if he gets nauseated or dizzy, he'll need to have his head examined."

Marty started to protest, but Jon laughed and threw an arm around Marty's shoulders. Marty grinned and looked Jon, Randi, and Peter up and down. "Well, at least you're back. You appear to be all in one piece."

"That we are, lad," Peter agreed.

Jon added, "Thanks to Randi and Peter."

"Fortunately, Jon was in a mood to be saved," Randi explained.

Jon started to release Marty's shoulder, but before he could, Marty turned quickly and hugged him. As he gave Jon one last little squeeze and moved away, Marty spoke in a low voice: "Gosh, Jon. You scared the willies out of me. I'm so glad you're safe. It just wasn't the same without you. For a long time, 1 really thought you were dead. Couldn't you start living a more sedentary life?"

"You mean like you?" Jon's navy-blue eyes twinkled. "You're the one who got the concussion from the bombing at the Pasteur Institute, not me."

Marty sighed. "I thought you might bring that up."

As Dr. Cameron said his good-byes and left, the disheveled and weary trio sank into chairs. Marty returned to his bed, punched and patted his pillows into a white mound, and settled back against them, a plump sultan on a cotton throne. "I sense urgency," he told them. "Does that mean it's not over? I'd hoped you'd tell me we could go home now."

"I wish," Randi said. She pulled off the band that held her ponytail and shook her hair free. She massaged her scalp with both hands. Blue half-circles of weariness showed under her black eyes. "We think they're going to try to strike again soon. I just hope there's time for us to stop them."

Marty asked, his eyebrows knit, "Where? When?"

To save time, Jon described only the high points of what had happened since his capture at the villa in Algeria, ending with their conclusion that Emile Chambord and Captain Bonnard had been using the Crescent Shield not only to do most of their dirty work, but to hide their complicity in a scheme to use the DNA prototype. Now the pair had disappeared with Thérèse Chambord.

"My thought is," Jon concluded, "that they've got to have a second prototype. Is that possible?"

Marty sat upright. "A second prototype? Of course! Emile had two so he could test various molecular sequences for efficiency, speed, and capacity at the same time. You see, molecular computers work by encoding the problem to be solved in the language of DNA the base-four values are A, T, C, and G. Using them as a number system, the solution to any conceivable problem can be encoded along a DNA strand and"

Jon interrupted. "Thanks, Marty. But finish what you were saying about Chambord's second prototype."

Marty blinked. He looked at the blank expressions on Peter's and Randi's faces and sighed dramatically. "Oh. Very well." Without missing a beat, he picked up where he had left off. "So, Emile's second setup vanished. Poof! Into thin air! Emile said he'd dismantled it because we were so close to the end that there was no need for another system. It didn't make a lot of sense to me, but it was his decision to make. All the bugs were ironed out, and it was only a matter of fine-tuning the prime system."

"When did the second one disappear?" Randi asked.

"Less than three days before the bombing, even though all the remaining big problems had been ironed out more than a week earlier."

"We've got to find the second one right away," Ranch told him. "Was Chambord missing from the lab for any length of time? A weekend? A holiday?"

"Not that I remember. He often slept on a bed he had put into the lab."

"Think, lad," Peter pressed. "A few hours perhaps?"

Marty screwed up his face in concentration. "I usually went to my hotel room for a couple of hours' sleep every night, you see."

But he continued to think, summoning memory the way a computer does. From the hour the bomb had exploded at the Pasteur, his mind screened back minute by minute, day by day, his neural circuits connecting in a remarkably accurate reverse chronology until at last he nodded vigorously. He had it.

"Yes, twice! The night it disappeared he said we needed pizza, but Jean-Luc was off somewhere, I don't recall exactly where, so I went. I was gone perhaps fifteen minutes, and when I returned Emile wasn't there. He came back in another fifteen minutes or so, and we zapped the pizza in our microwave."

"So," Jon said, "he was gone at least a half hour?"

"Yes."

"And the second time?" Randi urged.

"The night after I noticed the second setup was gone, he was gone nearly six hours. He said he was so tired he was driving home to sleep in his own bed. It was true he was pooped. We both were."

Randi analyzed it. "So the night it disappeared, Chambord wasn't gone long. The next night, he was gone about six hours. It sounds to me as if the first night he probably just took it home. The second night, he drove it somewhere within three hours of the city, probably less."

"Why do you think he drove?" Peter asked. "Why not fly or go by rail?"

"The prototype's too big, too clumsy, with too many parts and pieces," Jon told him. "I've seen one, and it's definitely not portable."

"Jon's right," Marty agreed. "It would've required at least a van to transport, even dismantled. And Emile would've trusted no one but himself to move it." He sighed sadly. "This is all so incredible. Horribly incredible. Incredibly horrible."

Peter was frowning. "He could've driven anywhere from Brussels to Brittany in three hours. But even if we're looking for a place less than two hours away, we're talking hundreds of square miles around Paris." He considered Marty. "Any way you could use that electronics wizardry of yours to solve our problem? Locate the bloody prototype for us?"

"Sorry, Peter." Marty shook his head. Then he picked up his new laptop from his bedside table and put it on his crossed legs. The modem was already connected to the phone line. "Even assuming Emile left the security software we designed for it in place, I wouldn't have the power to break through. Emile has had plenty of time to change everything, including the codes. Remember, we're up against the fastest, most powerful computer in the world. It evolves its codes to adapt to any attempt to locate it so swiftly that nothing we have today can track it."

Jon was watching. "So why have you turned your laptop on? Looks to me as if you're going online yourself."

"Clever of you, Jon," Marty said cheerfully. "Yes, indeed. As we speak, I'm logging onto my supercomputer at home. I'll simply operate it from this laptop. With the use of my personally designed software, I hope to make a lie out of what I've just told you was impossible. Nothing to lose, and it'll be fun to try" He stopped speaking abruptly, and his eyes grew large with astonishment. Then dismay. "Oh, dear! What a rotten trick. Dam you, Emile. You've taken advantage of my generous nature!"

"What is it?" Jon asked as he hurried to the bed to look at Marty's screen. There was a message in French on it.

"What's happened?" Randi asked worriedly.

Marty glared at the monitor, and his voice rose with indignant outrage. "How dare you enter the sanctity of my computer system. You sinister satrap! You'll pay for this, Emile. You'll pay!"

As Marty ranted, Jon read the message aloud to Peter and Randi in English:

Martin,

You must be more careful with your defensive software. It was masterful, but not against me or my machine. I've taken you offline, closed your back door, and blocked you out totally. You are helpless. The apprentice must yield to the master.

Emile

Marty raised his chin, defiant. "There's no way he can defeat me. I'm the Paladin, and the Paladin is on the side of truth and justice. I'll outwit him! II"

As Jon moved away, Marty's fingers flew over the keyboard, and his gaze grew hard and focused as he tried to convince his home system to power itself back on. Glumly, Jon, Peter, and Randi watched. Time seemed to be passing much too swiftly. They needed to find Chambord and the prototype.