As if granitized, Hendrickson for a moment draws no breath as he stands behind the technician at the workstation. On the large monitor, the screen is divided vertically, and though the two faces are beautiful, they are also portraits of menace, versions of that third of the three Fates, Atropos, who cuts the thread of life.
An inspiration for paranoia in many people over the years, Hendrickson succumbs to paranoia of his own. The facial-recognition software confirms that the countenance of the woman in the tavern matches, to the millimeter and to the precise degree of angle, each of twenty-eight points of comparison to the on-file image of Jane Hawk, which is the most recent photo taken for her Bureau ID.
She damn well is a polymorphic virus, as some have called her.
Randall Larkin might have been fully broken, might have told her about Iron Furnace. But there were things Larkin didn’t know for the simple reason that he had no need for that information. Within Arcadian circles, details are supposed to be shared solely on a need-to-know basis, just as is the case in official agencies like the CIA. Larkin had no need to know the sentence that accessed the command mechanism in an adjusted person—Play Manchurian with me—and therefore could not have revealed it to Jane Hawk.
However, the cunning bitch has gotten those four words. She is now able to take control of any of the adjusted people, not just in Iron Furnace but wherever she might find them.
Hendrickson expels his breath in two words spoken as one, “Ohshit!”
Another thought: If Hawk somehow has learned of the whispering room, she can use one of the adjusted people in this town to access all of them and issue a command that they will uniformly obey.
What if by phone she tells them to leave Iron Furnace en masse? Tells them to proceed to some authority unlikely to be within the Arcadian sphere of influence and there announce their enslavement with one voice? Or directs them to convene in Times Square or some even more public venue to denounce D. J. Michael and insist on the existence of the nanomachine implants that control them?
He feels lightheaded and nauseated, as if an ulcerous mass has ruptured, flooding his stomach with blood, leaving his brain starved of oxygen.
That she hasn’t already done something dramatic with these six hundred adjusted people is surely because she has not yet thought of it. Perhaps caught up in the urgent need to free the children and convey them to some safe redoubt, she hasn’t had the time or the clarity of mind to realize the power she possesses.
There is a way to change the accessing sentence by which the command mechanism is opened for new instructions, make it something other than Play Manchurian with me. But Hendrickson is ignorant of that process because it hasn’t been deemed that he needs to know it.
“Please excuse me,” he says to Stacia O’Dell and the security technicians, as if he owes their kind courtesy, which he does not. They are of a class far beneath him and were before being adjusted; they are now at the bottom of any conceivable caste structure.
He retreats to a far corner of the bunker to use a phone there. Because of his fumbling fingers, he has to call Eva Kleitner, the director of the lab in Virginia, three times before he gets the number correct.
The tremor in his voice embarrasses Booth Hendrickson as he urgently conveys to Kleitner the need to use the whispering room to change the accessing sentence as quickly as that can be done, by whatever process it can be accomplished. He speaks frankly because his phone is programmed to scramble his words, and hers is capable of unscrambling them.
She says, “The good little plebs in Iron Furnace have all had the recent upgrade, the whispering room, so I’ll only need about an hour and a half.”
“Excellent.”
“But what about all the rest of these plodders—the walking dead on the Hamlet list, the proles in key positions, the Aspasia pumps? They’re all over the country. None have had the upgrade. We don’t even know yet whether we want them to have the upgrade. That was for the special situation of Iron Furnace. We’ll have to contact them one at a time to change the access sentence.”
“Whatever it takes. It has to be done.”
“Even if I put all my trusted people on it, that’s going to take weeks.”
“Weeks? How many are you talking about?”
“All classes combined—over sixteen thousand.”
Because he has known little fear in life, Hendrickson rises above it now. If he is still trembling, it is with anger bordering on rage that an uppity piece of tail like Jane Hawk should by some combination of animal instinct and blind luck have caused them so much grief. “None of this would be necessary if the cheeky bitch were as dead as she deserves to be.”
“Why don’t you see to it?”
“I soon will. We’re running her down right now. Meanwhile, change the access sentence for the six hundred locals here and everyone at the four Aspasias. Those are the only adjusted people she knows about. Before she can find another one, she’ll either be dead or adjusted herself.”