The Genius Wars

  ‘Not bad, is it?’ Prosper remarked. ‘Can’t say I admire Rex’s taste in rieslings, but it would be oafish to complain.’

  Cadel said nothing. As he was hustled out of the room into another passage, he tried to keep himself calm and focused by tackling an important question that had so far been left unanswered: namely, what in the world he might have done to spook Dot and Com in the first place. It didn’t make sense. He hadn’t been searching for either of them, back before the appearance of Prosper’s digital double. In Prosper’s own words, Cadel had been ‘behaving himself’. There had been no attempt to reconvene Genius Squad; no half-hearted monitoring of Vee’s old command-and-control chatrooms. Instead, Cadel had turned his back on the past, stayed off the hacker sites, and concentrated on his studies.

  Of course, he’d continued to mix with a few former members of Genius Squad, but never once had he asked Judith about her police work. Never once had expressed the slightest interest in going after Prosper English. Like a model student, Cadel had been keeping his nose clean – except for the modest amount of hacking he’d done to connect Sonja’s wheelchair with a certain Elevator Management System. And even that had been more of a noble undertaking than a piece of industrial sabotage …

  All at once Cadel caught his breath.

  ‘SCATS!’ he exclaimed.

  Prosper blinked. ‘Come again?’

  ‘I was about to start hacking into the Sydney traffic system!’ Cadel was thinking aloud; he couldn’t help himself. ‘I wanted to make sure that Sonja didn’t have to push any buttons at pedestrian crossings!’

  But Prosper wasn’t enlightened. ‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  ‘Com was already in SCATS!’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He must have been scared that I’d find his trail! What a fool he is!’

  ‘Yes. Well. The real world was never exactly his forte, was it?’ Prosper didn’t seem terribly interested. He nudged Cadel forward, adding, ‘There’s a staircase round the next corner. Just watch your step.’

  Cadel briefly considered breaking free and heading for the nearest exit, then dismissed the idea. For one thing, he didn’t know where the nearest exit actually was. For another, he had a feeling that Prosper might be armed. And although the psychologist had refrained from shooting him on previous occasions, it had since been established that the two of them weren’t really father and son.

  Cadel wasn’t sure exactly how far this news had spread. But he was afraid that, if the truth had filtered through to this dim little bolthole, it might have changed Prosper’s outlook on certain things.

  ‘Not far now,’ said Prosper, as they reached the top of a circular staircase. ‘When you get to the bottom, turn right.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Cadel asked, before experiencing a sudden flash of insight. ‘Are we inside that big pillar? In the vestibule?’

  ‘Very good.’ Prosper poked him between the shoulder blades. ‘And it’s a long way down, so don’t try my patience.’

  The walls of the stairwell were probably soundproofed. Even if Kale was running up the outside stairs, it seemed unlikely that he would hear raised voices coming from inside the pillar.

  Nevertheless, Cadel decided to make a bit of noise.

  ‘Have you been in here ever since you escaped?’ he said, as loudly as he dared.

  ‘Not quite,’ was Prosper’s terse response.

  ‘Where’s Wilfreda?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘So she’s not in the house, then?’

  ‘My dear boy, surely you’ve worked that out?’ Prosper didn’t trouble to hide his exasperation. ‘Wilfreda hasn’t been near this place for a week. All of the footage you saw was recorded. It’s old. I just played it back on some of the external monitors.’

  ‘The external monitors?’ Cadel echoed.

  ‘You’ll see what I mean in a minute.’

  At the bottom of the stairs, another door led into a curving passageway. This passageway (which had a chilly, clammy, subterranean feel to it) opened onto a large, low room divided into several well-defined zones. There was a kitchen zone, with granite benchtops and a full complement of plumbing and appliances; a dining zone, which contained one small table and a single chair; and a zone occupied by an enormous amount of computer technology.

  Cadel stared in amazement at the monitor screens, which outnumbered the panic room’s array by two to one. Every screen displayed several views of the house or garden. There was even a shot of the empty panic room itself, taken from above.

  ‘I see your friends haven’t got in yet,’ said Prosper. ‘That buys us a bit of time. With any luck, they might think you’ve collapsed. Or that you can’t get the door open.’

  ‘I didn’t see any camera in there.’ Cadel was confused. He couldn’t understand how he had missed something so important. ‘I’m sure there was no camera on the ceiling …’

  ‘Of course not!’ Prosper snapped. ‘It’s inside the ceiling. Aimed at an air-conditioning vent.’ He pointed at another screen, where five or six agents were gathered outside the panic room. ‘There they are. See? Looks as if they’ve tried shooting a hole in the lock.’ With a snort, he added, ‘Much good it’ll do them. That’s steel plate – it was built to withstand a bomb blast.’

  Cadel was putting everything together in his head. He was so impressed by the ingenuity of the set-up that he almost forgot to be frightened.

  ‘So this here is the master system?’ he demanded. ‘This one controls the other one?’

  ‘Clever, isn’t it?’

  ‘And there are microphones, as well.’ It wasn’t a question; it was a deduction. Cadel recalled that Prosper had been quoting his own remarks back to him. ‘You can listen to people talking.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Every room is wired for sound.’ Prosper gave a satisfied nod, evidently pleased that Cadel had inferred this from the available evidence. ‘Speaking of which, I should tell you that I would never use Old Spice, no matter how desperate I was –’

  ‘Did Vee design all this?’ Cadel interrupted, gesturing at the bank of screens.

  ‘Good God, no!’ said Prosper. ‘It was Rex’s doing.’

  ‘So his architect knows about it.’ Cadel remembered that Kale had been looking for the architect. It was an encouraging thought. But before Cadel could derive any comfort from the prospect of imminent rescue, his hopes were dashed.

  ‘Believe me,’ Prosper declared, ‘whatever that architect knew, it was buried with her.’ As Cadel glanced up, eyes widening, Prosper raised both hands in an attitude of injured innocence. ‘Not my doing, I assure you. That was all down to Rex.’

  ‘What – what are you talking about?’ Cadel stammered, though he already knew. He just couldn’t accept what he was hearing.

  ‘Rex killed the architect.’ Prosper spelled it out matter-offactly. ‘He took a contract out on her because she knew too much about this place. All the other construction workers were from Mexico. Illegal immigrants. God knows what happened to them.’

  Cadel was appalled. But he reminded himself that he was listening to a very accomplished liar. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he croaked.

  The psychologist shrugged.

  ‘Believe what you like,’ he rejoined. ‘I’ve watched hours of old security footage, and it’s all there.’ Laying a heavy arm across Cadel’s shoulders, he adopted the light, gentle, soothing accents that he had customarily employed when counselling troubled adolescents, back in his days as a Sydney psychologist. ‘So you see, dear boy, Rex Austin was no great loss to the world. I’ve always said that there’s nothing more dangerous than a rich old plutocrat with rampant paranoia.’

  Cadel swallowed. The time had come to ask, so he asked. Through dry lips he muttered, ‘What did you do to him?’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Now that’s what I want to discuss with you.’ Prosper steered Cadel towards the computer keyboard. ‘It seems that Rex caused a bit of a problem when he tried to escape. But I’ve got a feeling that
you might be able to reverse that problem. And if you do, we’ll all be much better off …’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Prosper explained his predicament, calmly and succinctly. It appeared that Rex Austin hadn’t entirely trusted the panic house. Frightened that it wasn’t secure enough, he had also built himself a hidden escape route. According to Prosper, an underground tunnel led directly to the base of a nearby cliff, where a small motorboat was concealed.

  ‘The door in the cliff is a masterpiece,’ he said. ‘It looks just like a rockfall. I suppose it must have been prefabricated, then installed overnight.’

  Prosper had personally gone to examine this door, wearing orange overalls and a baseball cap. Though footage of his excursion was more than two months old, it had still fooled Kale and Larry – and Cadel, too. In fact Prosper hadn’t set foot outside since visiting the cliff face, because he’d decided that it wasn’t safe to do so.

  ‘I was afraid you’d notice that there wasn’t a breath of wind in those old shots,’ he added. ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘I did. I mean, subconsciously I did.’ Cadel remembered the niggling sense of unease he’d felt, upon viewing a wildly tossing palm tree. ‘Something was bugging me – I just didn’t have a chance to work out what.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Though clearly not convinced, Prosper continued his narrative. He explained that Rex had tried to escape from Prosper’s team by hiding in the panic house. When that tactic had failed, Rex had retreated into the tunnel, never realising that its automatic locking mechanism could be compromised. ‘Vee disabled the doors at both ends, so they wouldn’t open,’ said Prosper. ‘He hacked into the system and changed a set of protocols. I should have asked him to change them back, but I never did. Too squeamish, I suppose.’ As Cadel gasped, Prosper wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘I mean, what was the point? Rex was already underground; why go to the trouble of interring him somewhere else?’

  Cadel closed his eyes. This is a bad dream, he thought. I’ll wake up soon.

  ‘It was his own fault,’ Prosper insisted. ‘I kept asking him to cooperate, and he wouldn’t. He must have thought he could hold out forever, because there were emergency supplies on that boat of his. But something went wrong. It must have been a heart attack.’

  Cadel’s eyes flew open. ‘You killed him. I knew it. I knew you killed him!’

  ‘I didn’t kill him. He killed himself.’ Prosper’s tone was oddly peevish, as if he were discussing a lazy gardener, or an especially stupid pet. He seemed to be expecting a measure of sympathy from his audience. ‘Do you think I wanted him to die? It would have been so much easier if he’d cooperated, but he wouldn’t. And as a result, I had to do all kinds of tedious and expensive things. I had to get his voice cloned from old recordings, with something called concatenate speech synthesis. I had to commission a digital double, and that wasn’t easy: I didn’t have a body scan, you see, because a dead body’s no good in these cases – especially one that’s been dead for a while. His measurements had to be recreated from existing footage, which cost a mint. I must have lost half his estate already, paying off technical support. As for the time involved … well, all I can say is, thank God I had the sense to target a recluse. With someone like Rex, no one worries when he disappears off the radar for a couple of months …’

  As Prosper rambled on, Cadel stared at him, dumbfounded. Prosper never rambled. It was completely unlike him. Was he losing his mind? Had two months inside a windowless rabbit-warren driven him mad?

  Checking the monitor screens, Cadel saw that Kale had made no visible progress. The panic-room door remained tightly shut.

  ‘… but of course you’re not interested in any of this,’ Prosper was saying, having spotted Cadel’s sidelong glance. ‘You’re interested in how you’re going to get out. Well, I can help you with that – providing you help me first.’ He tightened his grip on Cadel’s hunched shoulders. ‘You see, my original plan was to wait here, snug as a bug, until your FBI friends finally gave up and went home. Which they would have done, I’m sure, if you hadn’t started making pointed remarks about the size of this building. That was when I realised the tunnel would soon be my only option.’

  By now Cadel was as tense as a bow-string. His fists were clenched so tightly that his fingernails were hurting his palms.

  He knew what was coming.

  ‘Unfortunately, I can’t get hold of Vee, at the moment,’ Prosper continued, ‘which is why you’ll have to open up the tunnel instead. I’m sure you’re quite capable of doing that.’ He reached out with one hand to grab a wheeled typist’s chair, which he dragged towards the computer keyboard. ‘And since we don’t have much time, you’d better get started.’

  Cadel didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He was too busy thinking.

  If Prosper let him onto the system, would it be possible to warn Kale somehow? Without alerting Prosper at the same time?

  ‘Oh – and I wouldn’t try to open any other doors,’ the psychologist smoothly remarked, right on cue, ‘because if that happens, someone’s going to get hurt.’ He fished around beneath his jumper, before pulling out something that he pressed against Cadel’s skull. ‘I’m not saying it’ll be you, necessarily. It might be one of your FBI friends. All I’m saying is that there will be bloodshed. And I’m sure you don’t want that.’

  Cadel couldn’t see the gun, but he recognised the feel of it. His scalp seemed to burn where it touched the barrel. His skin crawled. His stomach heaved.

  ‘You always end up waving guns around,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Because they’re effective.’

  ‘It always comes to this, doesn’t it? You point a gun at me and tell me what to do.’ Cadel’s voice was shaking with fear and despair. ‘I’m so sick of it. Do you know that? I’m so sick of you and all your crap.’ Memories flashed into his head, one after the other: memories of Sonja’s bloody face, of Saul’s unconscious form, of a house collapsing and wet concrete rising. ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ Cadel cried, tormented beyond endurance by these images. ‘Why don’t you change the script, for once?’

  ‘Oh, I have,’ said Prosper, through his teeth. ‘In this script, I’m not your dad any more. In this script, I’m just a well-disposed friend who could easily run out of patience.’ When Cadel recoiled, Prosper gave a snort of derision. ‘Did you really think I hadn’t heard? I might be in hiding, dear boy, but I still manage to catch up on all the latest news.’

  Cadel swallowed. Oh God, he thought. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  ‘So let’s remind ourselves, at this point, that I no longer have a stake in your survival,’ Prosper snarled, with the kind of venom that he’d formerly reserved for people like Saul Greeniaus, and Sonja Pirovic ‘I mean, it’s not as though you’re carrying my DNA, is it? There’s no genetic imperative to stop me from blowing your brains out. Which is why we’re going to skip all this silly posturing, and proceed to the business at hand.’ He applied so much pressure to the gun that Cadel’s head was pushed to one side. ‘Open that tunnel. Now. Before I lose my temper.’

  Cadel’s heart was in his throat. He was convinced, by this time, that something had changed. Prosper had changed. His cool facade was beginning to crack. The controlled menace of his speech – the hard glint of amusement in his eye – were both giving way to something wilder and more vicious.

  What would he do, if Kale managed to get in? Bullets would fly, certainly. Gas might be used. At best, there would be some kind of siege; Cadel might be stuck in an underground cupboard with Prosper for days. For weeks, if the emergency supplies held out.

  Such a prospect was unimaginable.

  ‘Even if I do this, what makes you think you’ll get away?’ Cadel faltered. ‘What makes you think someone won’t shoot your boat full of holes?’

  ‘Because you’ll be in it,’ Prosper replied. ‘I’m going to need you.’

  ‘Which is why you won’t kill me now,’ said Cadel, with as much defiance as he could muster. He braced himself f
or a violent reaction, but wasn’t the least bit surprised when it didn’t come. Once again, Prosper’s mood had changed. In a matter of seconds, he’d reverted from a red-eyed beast to a suavely bantering professional.

  ‘Oh, I think we’ve already established that,’ he drawled. ‘Right now I won’t shoot you, for any number of reasons. But if the FBI come busting in here … well, who knows?’

  Glancing up, Cadel found himself trapped in the force-field of Prosper’s regard. They stood staring at each other. Then Prosper sighed.

  ‘The thing is, Cadel – and I’ll be frank with you on this, because it’s an important consideration – the thing is that I’ve been stuck inside here for several months, and it’s not been easy. Not at all.’ The strain of it, in fact, was roughening Prosper’s voice, and drawing harsh shadows across his face. Suddenly he looked much, much older. ‘There’s no way on God’s earth I’m going to let anyone lock me up for another twenty years. It’s just not going to happen. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Slowly Cadel nodded. He understood, all right.

  ‘So it’s up to you,’ Prosper concluded. ‘Either we stay here and go through ten kinds of hell, culminating in God knows how many casualties, or you accompany me on a quiet little marine jaunt, which might very well end when we agree to split up and go our separate ways. What do you think?’ When Cadel remained silent, Prosper added, ‘I mean, you’re supposed to be a genius, aren’t you? And it doesn’t take a genius to work out what ought to be done, here.’

  Cadel couldn’t concentrate. Not with Prosper’s anthracite gaze drilling into his eye sockets. Only by wrenching his own gaze firmly away from Prosper, and training it on the multiple views of busy FBI agents, was Cadel able to focus clearly on the dilemma confronting him.

  He noticed that someone was disassembling a fuse box – and he wondered if the panic-room door might be booby-trapped. Suppose it blew up if you tried to force it?

  I’ll have a better chance outside than I will stuck in here, he decided. Outside will be full of variables. Inside, there’s only one way things can go.