The Robot and the One You Love | Page 2

the one you love.
He painted her face into Search Chip Memory. It began its routines, matching her face against local hotels' register tapes, district police updates to the National Data Bank, composite travel records compiled from trains, buses, airplanes. And there, on the passenger list of a United flight that had come in three days earlier from Miami, she turned up. But Jerome was asleep when that happened. Only the diener was awake to hear the bell ring, and it moved with a ripple of black tentacles across rose and watched her face begin to expand across the paintscreen, color and shape flowing as if someone were dropping pigment into invisible set forms. The diener extruded a black cable and plugged into the Search Chip interface, which gave all it had on Connie Stone.
From atop the Riggs Bank at the corner of M and Wisconsin, a flat, black camera sat on the golden dome and watched for any of eight "Sons of Bright Water"--descendants of Hiroshima survivors rumored heading for the base of the Washington Monument with two-kiloton suitcase bombs. This was a CIA search program, and Jerome had piggybacked it to look for Connie Stone. It was not, however, the CIA's camera but a Safeway's "sidewalk sentry"--a blue aluminum box surrounded by fine wire mesh--that spotted her getting into a Yellow Cab on Wisconsin Avenue near the National Cathedral. She still carried the cold bag, and in close-up her eyes were red shot, tired, and wary.
Jerome's search programs had a fix. They sounded the alarm to tell Jeremy she had been found.
Jerome sat at his console and watched the cab's coordinates trace a path along Connecticut Avenue toward downtown. Now he had her. What should he do?
When the cab dropped her on K Street in front of the New Millennium Hotel, eighteen stories of silvered glass, he was watching through the hotel's entrance monitor, and he thought, First, Connie Stone, I've got to find out who you are.
Until three years ago, she had been just another medical lab assistant. Then, according to the National Data Bank, her employment history went off record and stayed that way. She did not marry or otherwise change her name and did not appear on unemployment compensation, welfare, or disability rolls. More peculiar yet, she had disappeared from credit records as well. The state of California might forget her, Jerome thought, but Masterchip, VisaBanque, Amex? No way.
He had to dig in forbidden ground to find her. A quick raid, very quick--their reprisals were vicious--on the IRS records indicated a complex arrangement with a company named American Bioforms, which somehow was not her real employer. The IRS knew this but didn't mind; it was getting its cut of her salary.
The Dow Jones computer coughed up a string of parent companies and blinds terminating in a Caribbean bank. Home Free: The bank's computer told him she was working for I G Biochemie in the Dominican Republic. Finally the CEO Intel Digest told him that the I G Biochemie compound was located on the Dominican Republic's northern coast near a little town called Sosua, a place with a strange history. In 1940 Rafael Trujillo, an almost forgotten twentieth-century dictator, had invited German Jews to come to the Dominican Republic and promised them sanctuary and their own town, Sosua. A few Jews had come, but over the years their numbers dwindled, so that by the end of the twentieth century there were none left.
A few decades later, in came I.G. Biochemie and a horde of Germans, very few of them Jews. And a few years later, in came Connie Stone.
Looking at life as a secret sharer had put some very strong torque on Jerome's already strange worldview. He walked a path signposted with paranoid conceits and occult symbols some real, some at least arguably real, others purely delusional. Connie Stone's blind employment history; associations with genocide, old dictators, German cartels it all reeked of geoconspiracy, multicorporate plot. Jerome lit up like yellow phosphorus in sunlight.
"Locate l.G. Biochemie Sosua data processing station," he said, beginning the instructions to his computer. "Call and institute mole programs. Compile user data establish operating-system codes. Load virus and execute. Terminate on unforeseen interrupt, and restart only on verbal authorization." It might take days to penetrate the corporation's security shells, but he was betting the I G. Biochemie computer would fall.
Connie Stone sat beneath a green, white, and red umbrella. Blown in summer breeze, her hair was tangled around a red plastic barrette above her left ear. She wore a tropical print dress red and blue and green flowers on a white background that rode to her thighs as she sat with her foot touching the white bag of crumpled foam beneath her table. Her skin was pale white, lightly freckled; her look was