Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

He stood in his stirrups and cupped his hands. “ Boy !”

The scruffy figure came out from behind a low rock, buttoning his fly. “Here, put a sock in your boatrace. I was just visiting the gents’.”

Relaxing, Nye turned his horse, bringing him quickly back to a trot. Thirty miles to the ambush point. He would be there before midnight.

The image on the huge screen was of a rambling Victorian house in pure Gothic Revival style, bedecked almost self-consciously with ponderous mansard roof and widow’s walk. A white portico ran across the front of the house and along both sides. Panning his view upward, Levine noticed that the entire structure was dark, save for a small, eight-sided garret atop the central tower, its oculus windows piercing the fog with a yellow glow.

He maneuvered his cyberspatial self up the road to an iron gate that hung open on broken hinges, wondering why the house itself wasn’t guarded; why Scopes had depicted the yard as being overgrown with chokecherries and burdock. As he approached, he noticed that several of the windows were broken and that paint was peeling from the weathered clapboards. The house and yard had been lovingly tended the summer he’d spent there as a youth.

He looked up again at the octagonal garret. If Scopes was anywhere inside, he would be there. Levine watched as a stream of colored light, like a tongue of fire, burst from the roof of the garret and disappeared into a dark hole in the fog that hovered overhead. He’d seen similar data transfers flashing between the huge buildings he’d first encountered in GeneDyne cyberspace. This must be the encrypted TELINT satellite uplink that Mime had detected. Levine wondered if the messages were encrypted before or after they left this inner sanctum of Scopes’s cypherspace.

The front door stood partly open. The interior of the house was dim, and Levine found himself wishing for some way to illuminate the view. The sky had slowly darkened, turning the fog to a leaden gray, and Levine realized that—at least within this artificial world of Scopes’s—night was coming on. He looked at his watch and saw it was 5:22. A.M. or P.M.? he found himself wondering. He had lost all track of time. He shifted position on the elevator floor, flexing one leg that had gone to sleep and massaging his tired wrists, wondering if Mime was still somewhere in the GeneDyne network, running interference. Then, taking a deep breath, he returned his hands to the laptop keys and moved forward into the house.

Here was the large parlor of his memory, with a worn Persian rug on the floor and a massive stone fireplace on the left-hand wall. A stuffed moose head hung above it, cobwebs woven thickly between its antlers. The walls were lined with old paintings of barques and schooners, and scenes of whaling. and fishing.

Straight ahead was the curving staircase that mounted to the second floor. He maneuvered up the staircase and along the second-floor balustrade. The rooms off the balustrade were dark and empty. He chose one at random, maneuvering through it to a worn and battered window. He looked outside and was surprised to see not the narrow road winding down into the mist, but a bizarre jumble of gray and orange static. A bug in cypherspace ? Levine wondered, moving back to the balustrade through the dim light. He turned in to a second hallway, curious to see the room he’d slept in that summer so many years before, but a burst of computer code filled the screen, threatening to dissolve the entire vast image of the house before him. He hurriedly backed away, perplexed. Every other area of the island seemed to have been knit together by Scopes with such care. Yet the re-creation of his own childhood home was disheveled and empty, with rends in the very fabric of his computerized creation.

At the far end of the balustrade was the door to the garret stairs. Levine was about to ascend the stairs when he remembered a back staircase that led to the widow’s walk. Perhaps it would be better if he took a look into the windows of the garret before broaching it directly.

Fog rushed up to embrace him as Levine moved forward onto the widow’s walk. He swiveled the laptop’s trackball:, looking around cautiously. Ten feet ahead of him, the angular form of the garret jutted from the walkway. Levine moved forward and peered into the oculus window.

A bent-looking figure sat inside the garret, his back to Levine. Long white hair flowed over the high collar of what appeared to be a dressing gown. The figure was perched in front of a computer terminal. Suddenly, a tongue of fire came shooting down out of the fog, plunging into the side of the garret. Without hesitation, Levine moved forward into the stream of color, and in an instant words were flashing across the enormous screen:

... have discussed your price. It is outrageous. Our offer of three billion stands. There will be no further negotiation.

The stream subsided. Levine waited, motionless. Within minutes, a burst of colored light shot up from the tower:

General Harrington: Your impertinence just cost you an additional billion, and the price is now five billion. This kind of posturing is displeasing to me as a businessman. It would be much nicer if we could settle this like gentlemen, don’t you think? And it isn’t even your money. It is, however, my virus. I have it, and you don’t. Five billion would reverse that situation.

The stream subsided.

Levine stood on the widow’s walk, stunned. It was worse than he could ever have imagined. Not only was Scopes mad, but he had in his possession a virus—a virus he was selling to the military. Perhaps even to rogue elements within the military. Judging by the prices involved, the virus could only be the doomsday virus Carson had told him about.

Levine sagged back against the elevator wall, overwhelmed by the enormity of what he was up against. Five billion dollars. It was staggering. A virus wasn’t like a nuclear weapon— hard to transport, difficult to hide, hard to deliver. A single test tube in someone’s pocket could easily contain trillions of them. ...

Sitting up again, Levine maneuvered himself back along the widow’s walk, down the flight of stairs, and along the corridor to the garret stairway. As with all unlocked doors in Scopes’s creation, the garret doorway opened as he collided with it. At the top of the dark stairway was another door. As he ascended, Levine could see light coming from the jamb.

This door was locked. Levine banged into it again and again in frustration and rage.

Then something occurred to him. It had worked with Phido; there was no reason to think it wouldn’t work here.

In capital letters, he typed: SCOPES!

Instantly, the name reverberated from the speaker into the narrow confines of the elevator. A minute ticked by, then two. Suddenly, the door to the garret room burst open. Levine could see a wizened figure looking out at him. What he had taken to be a dressing gown was actually a long robe, sprinkled liberally with astrological designs. Hair fell in streams of white and silver over the jug ears, and the skin that lay across the forehead and along the sunken cheeks was lined with an infinity of wrinkles, but Levine knew the face, as he knew few others. He had found Brent Scopes.

The sun felt brittle, like a rainfall of glass. The water had restored a little moisture to their throats, yet it had only intensified their thirst. And it had made the horses unruly. Beneath him, Carson could sense that Roscoe was panicking, preparing to run. Once that happened, he’d run until he died.