Kevin was standing before a yellow wall with a general system schematic showing as an organization chart of colored boxes with interconnections appearing as patch-cords. He expanded one of the boxes to reveal its inner structure, then zoomed in to locate the high-level control subsystem. He isolated the device control supervisor by unplugging its virtual connecting cords, and exchanged it for the box representing the modified program, which in his last expedition to this part of the system he had left hanging conveniently on a virtual nail sticking out of the virtual wall. He repatched the cords to install it, and the box for the Channel Assignment Table, which until now had been blank, activated to display available options. He knew then that this was going to work.
His excitement rising, he selected the code assigned to Taki’s relay in the trunk of the Jaguar, and attempted a test link. The entry line in the box changed color, and an icon lit up, confirming a connection. He reset to operator mode, checked the two choices that were offered, and selected Mr. Toad. Moments later he found himself in a dark recess surrounded by plastic tatters and foam rubber. There was distant wind noise and the sound of tires humming on road.
Vanessa sat down before the console and dialed the number to interrogate the Jaguar’s satellite-referenced positioning system. The response showed as a cursor on a map of central Washington state being presented on one of the screens. The door of the room opened, and Finnion came back in with Garsten.
“He’s just coming to the winding part where the cliffs are,” Vanessa announced. “Just a couple more minutes. . . .” The other two said nothing.
Vanessa attached the interface lead to the body suit, donned the helmet, and activated the system. She flexed muscles and moved her head, and after a few seconds of adjustment “became” the assassin bug in the box that she had left in the car.
She was looking up out of a deep, rectangular pit. Far above was the foreshortened shape of a car window, streaked by raindrops driven in the slipstream. “It looks as if it’s raining there,” she remarked. “This is perfect. Accidents happen on wet days in places like that all the time.”
For several seconds Kevin lay motionless, soaking up the feeling of relief as if it were sunshine. Then he extricated himself from the hiding place at the back of the trunk and crawled through the gap in the rubber sealing to the space behind the rear seat. He climbed out of the canyon of fuzzy vine-mesh walls onto the seat, and waded through grass toward the smoother expanse of leather lining the front edge. The vault of the car’s interior curved high above like a sky within the sky. The one outside looked gray and stormy, with streaks of rain running down and back across the windows. The sound system was playing an aria that sounded like Mozart. A briefcase lay on the back seat, and two open cardboard boxes containing a variety of objects were wedged below on the floor.
Before him, the leather back of the driver’s seat towered like a Himalayan wall, the blond waves of Eric’s hair above the headrest forming a distant, lofty summit.
Then something moved below, right at the edge of Toad’s broad-angle cone of vision. Kevin looked down. Something was coming up out of one of the cardboard boxes.
Kevin moved forward onto the rounded bulge at the edge of the seat. It was a mec unlike any that he had seen before—black and insectlike, with six legs articulating from a horizontal body, and a low, tapered head flanked by short pincers. Everything about the way it came up out of hiding and seemed to creep with slow, purposeful menace triggered an instinct that sensed evil. The beetle-like creature crawled over the edge of the box and fell out of sight to the floor; seconds later, it came into view again, climbing up the back of the plinth below the armrests of the two front seats. It got to the top of the plinth, crossed the gap to the fabric-covered side of the driver’s seatback, and began ascending, inches below and behind Eric’s elbow.