Eve & Adam (Eve & Adam #1)(47)

“You need a ride?” the driver asks.





– 33 –



I’m frantic. I still have my phone, but I don’t have Solo’s number. I ask my phone where I can find a computer for rent. I follow the directions and head toward it at a trot.

This is happening too fast. I can’t let Solo do it.

Can I?

The copy center is closed. It doesn’t open for another two hours. I look around, desperate. I’m in the financial district now, a midget at the feet of giants. The Transamerica Pyramid is in one direction, the Bank of America building in the other. I head toward the B of A, hesitate, stop, wish I had psychic powers, look carefully in every direction. Nothing. No one but a street person, an older woman, who pushes a shopping cart toward me while muttering, “I told her it was okay, I told her it was okay.”

Schizophrenia, a genetic condition. The kind of terrifying disease that might be cured with the right knowledge, if you knew just where to find the particular genetic codes and could snip, snip, paste, paste.

Would the mentally ill street person want to be cured if she knew that it meant a basement full of freaks and monsters?

Don’t be a fool, I tell myself. Of course she would. Just about anyone would.

Where did Solo go?

He could be anywhere, I realize. He doesn’t need to wait for some library or printing company to open. There are computers all around me. They’re piled seventy stories high. Solo, being Solo, may have already found an office left unlocked, or charmed his way past a security guard. The odds are that the deadly data is already propagating across the Web.

This isn’t his decision. It’s our decision.

“Yeah, well, screw you, Solo,” I say bitterly. “You can drop dead and die!”

I’m aware of the redundancy in that statement.

I head dejectedly back to the pier warehouse. I pause at a doughnut shop. I go in, telling myself I’ll just grab a cup of coffee. I come out with a dozen doughnuts, some of them still so fresh they’re hot. I devour two on my way home.

It isn’t far back to the pier. The door’s unlocked, just as I’d left it. Some part of me hopes Aislin’s returned. I want to hear her tease me for resorting to comfort pastry.

Some other part of me is hoping Solo’s returned, so I can scream at him and then, quite possibly, kiss him for several days.

More doughnut.

As soon as I’m inside, I know I’m not alone.

The rising sun beams through the high windows. It lights the tops of the statues glaring down at me with animal ferocity.

The sun also lights one side of his face.

He sees me.

He doesn’t move.

“Evening?” he asks.

“Adam,” I say.





– 34 –





SOLO


On the twenty-seventh floor of the Bank of America building I find a big law firm. They aren’t open for business, but they work the lawyers hard at places like this. A rushing, harried young woman is on her way in. She fumbles with the key, gets it finally, and throws open the door before hurrying inside.

The door swings shut, but not fast enough. I stick the toe of my sneaker in, just barely, to keep it open. I wait three minutes to make sure the lawyer has gotten to her own office. Then I slip inside.

The lights are dim, the reception desk empty, the floors carpeted. I try to guess which way the lawyer has gone, decide it was to the left. I go right. Some individual offices are locked, others are wide open.

Their computers look pretty up-to-date, but I’m able to find one with a USB port. I enter the office and close the door behind me. There’s a nice view down California Street.

The computer’s password protected. I try the basics: 1,2,3,4. QWERTY. YTREWQ, which is querty backward. PASSWORD. A few others. Whoever uses this computer isn’t quite that dumb. They are, however, dumb enough to write it down in the corner of the desk blotter.

I check the clock, stick in the flash drive. It’s slow to load. Very slow, since there are a lot of hi-res images.

From here it will be simple. All I have to do is attach the file to a dozen e-mails: CNN, the New York Times, various members of Congress from both parties, contacts I know in the hacker collective Anonymous, the FBI.

I type the addresses in. Each will know the others have received the same documents, so there will be no chance of a cover-up.

All I have to do is push “send.”

All. I have to do.

Is push “send.”

What follows won’t happen overnight. The world doesn’t move that fast. But in days or weeks the FBI will descend on Terra Spiker.

Congress will schedule hearings.

Documents and files will be seized. In the end, likely, handcuffs will grind shut around the wrists of Terra and Tattooed Tommy and probably lots of others.

I sit, unmoving, staring at the screen.

A crime’s been committed. Many crimes. Some may be more than criminal; they may be evil.

But I can’t lie to myself and pretend that’s my only motive. I’m angry at Terra Spiker for the life she’s given me. For treating me like one of her low-level employees after my parents died. For keeping me, if not quite a prisoner, then close to it in the walled-off world of Spiker Biopharm.

For doing to me what she did to Eve.