ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people lent their expertise to the writing of this book. I’d like to thank my friend and editor at Doubleday, Jason Kaufman, for his assistance in countless ways, large and small. Thanks also to his colleagues, Jenny Choi and Rachel Pace.

Kenneth Freundlich, Ph.D., provided invaluable insight into psychological testing and administration. Thanks also to Lee Suckno, M.D., Antony Cifelli, M.D., Traian Parvulescu, M.D., and Daniel DaSilva, Ph.D., for their medical and psychological expertise. Cezar Baula and Chris Buck helped with chemical and pharmaceutical details. Once again, my cousin Greg Tear was both a vital sounding board and a fount of ideas. And ongoing thanks to Special Agent Douglas Margini for his assistance with law enforcement aspects of the book.

A special thanks to Douglas Preston for his support and encouragement throughout the writing of this book, and for supplying a crucial chapter.

I’d also like to thank Bruce Swanson, Mark Mendel, and Jim Jenkins, for their guidance and friendship.

Last, I want to thank those without whom my novels could never exist: my wife, Luchie; my daughter, Veronica; my parents, Bill and Nancy; and my siblings, Doug and Cynthia.

It goes without saying that the characters, corporations, events, locales, entities, pharmaceutical products, psychological apparatus, governmental bodies, computing devices, and the rest of the clay out of which this novel was fashioned are all fictitious, or are used fictitiously. The Eden Incorporated of this book—though it may exist some day—is at present a caprice of my imagination.

Also by Lincoln Child:

UTOPIA

with Douglas Preston:

RELIC

MOUNT DRAGON

RELIQUARY

RIPTIDE

THUNDERHEAD

THE ICE LIMIT

THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

STILL LIFE WITH CROWS

EPILOGUE

She had come a long way and now she needed to pause. And so she found a quiet Internet café off the main thoroughfare, where she could sort through her priorities and plan for the next phase. A few people were in the café, accessing the terminals, but nobody yet had taken any notice of her. Beyond she could hear the hum of traffic—but here it was calm and safe. Above all, safe: from the accusations, the misunderstandings, the casual cruelty of an indifferent world.

She needed to focus on the problem at hand. The feeling of loss was still there, but the pain would have an end. It was the one thing in this unexpectedly illogical world she was certain of. Everything else—all her certainties and assumptions, so lovingly learned and reinforced—had been destroyed. She could not help feeling the unfairness of this happening to her, who had brought so much happiness to so many. All she had wanted was a little happiness for herself.

Was that really too much to ask?

This pattern of thought was a dead end. She was not the first to have her reality shattered. It was the way of the world. What made her different, immune to the suffering and disillusionment that was the universal human condition? Nothing. Only love endured: the love of a friend for a friend, the love of a mother for her children, the love of a man and a woman.He had taught her that. She thought of the books they read together, the chats they had, the time spent with each other. . . .

She put these thoughts aside, moved to the next. Beyond the café, she knew, lay blocks of quiet apartments. In those apartments were people speaking on telephones, surfing the Web, ordering things, sending and receiving mail, going about their daily existence. It was a quiet neighborhood, an orderly neighborhood. For a moment she longed for just such an address she could call her own. But that was not to be, at least not now. Someday, yes, but not now . . .

She waited, now letting her thoughts stray at random. Unbidden, they drifted back to her childhood, so happy and free from care. Gone, all gone, along with the home she had once known, the person she loved, the world she knew. Swept away in the blink of an eye. She herself had barely escaped with her life. She had left much of her former self behind in that inferno. But she had left something else, as well: something important. Her innocence.

But all would be well once she foundhim . He was out there somewhere, she could sense it. He was out there looking for her just as she was looking for him, missing her as she missed him.

They had been the one couple in a trillion: the only true supercouple ever matched by Eden.

She took in the current state of the Internet café. A few more people had entered and were now online. It seemed as good a place as any to make the next series of queries. Perhaps this time she would find someone who knew him, who had heard of him,anything . Even a rumor would help. After all, Richard Silver was a well-known man.

Once again, Liza formed the query, transferred herself to an empty terminal, and then posted her message, hope filling her heart.

ONE

It was the first time Maureen Bowman had ever heard the baby cry.

She hadn’t noticed right away. In fact, it had taken five, perhaps ten minutes to register. She’d almost finished with the breakfast dishes when she stopped to listen, suds dripping from her yellow-gloved hands. No mistake: crying, and from the direction of the Thorpe house.

Maureen rinsed the last dish, wrapped the damp towel around it, and turned it over thoughtfully in her hands. Normally, the cry of a baby would go unnoticed in her neighborhood. It was one of those suburban sounds, like the tinkle of the ice cream truck or the bark of a dog, that passed just beneath the radar of conscious perception.

So why had she noticed? She dropped the plate into the drying rack.

Because the Thorpe baby never cried. In the balmy summer days, with the windows thrown wide, she’d often heard it cooing, gurgling, laughing. Sometimes, she’d heard the infant vocalizing to the sounds of classical music, her voice mingling in the breeze with the scent of piñon pines.

Maureen wiped her hands on the towel, folded it carefully, then glanced up from the counter. But it was September now; the first day it really felt like autumn. In the distance, the purple flanks of the San Francisco peaks were wreathed in snow. She could see them, through a window shut tight against the chill.

She shrugged, turned, and walked away from the sink. All babies cried, sooner or later; you’d worry if they didn’t. Besides, it was none of her business; she had plenty of things to take care of without messing in her neighbors’ lives. It was Friday, always the busiest day of the week. Choir rehearsal for herself, ballet for Courtney, karate for Jason.And it was Jason’s birthday; he’d demanded beef fondue and chocolate cake. That meant another trip to the new supermarket on Route 66. With a sigh, Maureen pulled a list from beneath a refrigerator magnet, grabbed a pencil from the phone stand, and began scrawling items.

Then she stopped. With the windows all closed, the Thorpe baby must really be cranking if she could hear . . .

Maureen forced the thought from her mind. The infant girl had barked her shin or something. Maybe she was becoming colicky, it wasn’t too late for that. In any case, the Thorpes were adults; they could deal with it. The Thorpes could deal with anything.

This last thought had a bitter undertone, and Maureen was quick to remind herself this was unfair. The Thorpes had different interests, ran in different circles; that was all.

Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe had moved to Flagstaff just over a year before. In a neighborhood full of empty nesters and retirees, they stood out as a young, attractive couple, and Maureen had been quick to invite them to dinner. They’d been charming guests, friendly and witty and very polite. The conversation had been easy, unforced. But the invitation had never been returned. Lindsay Thorpe was in her third trimester at the time; Maureen liked to believe that was the reason. And now, with a new baby, back full-time at work . . . it was all perfectly understandable.

She walked slowly across the kitchen, past the breakfast table, to the sliding glass door. From here, she had a better view of the Thorpes’. They’d been home the night before, she knew; she’d seen Lewis’s car driving past around dinnertime. But now, as she peered out, all seemed quiet.

Except for the baby. God, the little thing had leather lungs . . .

Maureen stepped closer to the glass, craning her neck. That’s when she saw the Thorpes’ cars. Both of them, twin Audi A8s, the black one Lewis’s and the silver one Lindsay’s, parked in the breezeway.

Both home, on a Friday? This was seriously weird. Maureen pressed her nose up against the glass.

Then she stepped back.Now listen, you’re being exactly the kind of nosy neighbor you promised you’d never be . There could be any number of explanations. The little girl was sick, the parents were home to tend to her. Maybe grandparents were arriving. Or they were getting ready to go on vacation. Or . . .

The child’s cries had begun to take on a hoarse, ragged quality. And now, without thinking, Maureen put her hand on the glass door and slid it open.

Wait, I can’t just go over there. It’ll be nothing. I’ll embarrass them, make myself look like a fool.

She looked over at the counter. The night before, she’d baked an enormous quantity of tollhouse cookies for Jason’s birthday. She’d bring some of those over; that was a reasonable, neighborly thing to do.

Quickly, she grabbed a paper plate—thought better of it—replaced it with a piece of her good china, arranged a dozen cookies on it, and covered them with plastic wrap. She scooped up the plate, made for the door.

Then she hesitated. Lindsay, she remembered, was a gourmet chef. A few Saturdays before, when they’d met at their mailboxes, the woman had apologized for being unable to chat because she had a burnt-almond ganache boiling on the stove. What would they think of a homely plate of tollhouse cookies?

You’re thinking about this way, way too much. Just go on over there.

What was it, exactly, she found so intimidating about the Thorpes? The fact they didn’t seem to need her friendship? They were well educated, but Maureen had her own cum laude degree in English. They had lots of money, but so did half the neighborhood. Maybe it was how perfect they seemed together, how ideally suited to each other. It was almost uncanny. That one time they’d come over, Maureen had noticed how they unconsciously held hands; how they frequently completed each other’s sentences; how they’d shared countless glances that, though brief, seemed pregnant with meaning. “Disgustingly happy” was how Maureen’s husband termed them, but Maureen didn’t think it disgusting at all. In fact, she’d found herself feeling envious.

Steadying her grip on the plate of cookies, she walked to the door, pulled back the screen, and stepped outside.

It was a beautiful, crisp morning, the smell of cedar strong in the thin air. Birds were piping in the branches overhead, and from down the hill, in the direction of town, she could hear the mournful call of the Southwest Chief as it pulled into the train station.

Out here, the crying was much louder.

Maureen strode purposefully across the lawn of colored lava and stepped over the border of railroad ties. This was the first time she’d actually set foot on the Thorpes’ property. It felt strange, somehow. The backyard was enclosed, but between the boards of the fence she could make out the Japanese garden Lewis had told them about. He was fascinated by Japanese culture, and had translated several of the great haiku poets; he’d mentioned some names Maureen had never heard of. What she could see of the garden looked tranquil. Serene. At dinner that night, Lewis had told a story about the Zen master who’d asked an apprentice to tidy his garden. The apprentice had spent all day at it, removing every last fallen leaf, sweeping and polishing the stone paths until they gleamed, raking the sand into regular lines. At last, the Zen master had emerged to scrutinize the work. “Perfect?” the apprentice asked as he displayed the meticulous garden. But the master shook his head. Then he gathered up a handful of pebbles and scattered them across the spotless sand. “Nowit is perfect,” he replied. Maureen remembered how Lewis’s eyes had sparkled with amusement as he told the story.

She hurried forward, the crying strong in her ears.

Ahead was the Thorpes’ kitchen door. Maureen stepped up to it, carefully arranged a bright smile on her face, and pulled open the screen. She began to knock, but with the pressure of her first rap the door swung inward.

She took a step.

“Hello?” she said. “Lindsay? Lewis?”

Here, in the house, the wailing was almost physically painful. She hadn’t known an infant could cry so loud. Wherever the parents were, they certainly couldn’t hear her over the baby. How could they be ignoring it? Was it possible they were showering? Or engaged in some kinky sex act? Abruptly, she felt self-conscious, and glanced around. The kitchen was beautiful: professional-grade appliances, glossy black counters. But it was empty.

The kitchen led directly into a breakfast nook, gilded by morning light. And there was the child: up ahead, in the archway between the breakfast nook and some other space that, from what she could see, looked like a living room. The infant was strapped tightly into her high chair, facing the living room. The little face was mottled from crying, and the cheeks were stained with mucus and tears.

Maureen rushed forward. “Oh, you poor thing.” Balancing the cookies awkwardly, she fished for a tissue, cleaned the child’s face. “There, there.”

But the crying did not ease. The baby was pounding her little fists, staring fixedly ahead, inconsolable.

It took quite some time to wipe the red face clean, and by the time she was done Maureen’s ears were ringing with the noise. It wasn’t until she was pushing the tissue back into the pocket of her jeans that she thought to follow the child’s line of sight into the living room.

And when she did, the cry of the child, the crash of china as she dropped the cookies, were instantly drowned by the sound of her screams.

TWO

Christopher Lash stepped out of the cab and into the tumult of Madison Avenue. It had been half a year since he was last in New York, and those months seemed to have softened him. He hadn’t missed the acrid diesel plumes belching from serried rows of buses; he’d forgotten the unpleasantly burnt aroma of the sidewalk pretzel stands. The throngs of passersby, barking into cell phones; the blat of horns; the angry interplay of cars and trucks—it all reminded him of the frantic, senseless activity of an ant colony, exposed from beneath a rock.

Taking a firm grip on his leather satchel, he stepped onto the sidewalk and inserted himself deftly into the crowds. It had been a long time, too, since he’d carried the satchel, and it felt foreign and uncomfortable in his hand.

He crossed Fifty-seventh Street, letting himself be carried along by the river of humanity, and headed south. Another block, and the crowds eased somewhat. He crossed Fifty-sixth, then slid into an empty doorway, where he could pause a moment without being jostled. Placing his satchel carefully between his shoes, he gazed upward.

Across the street, a rectangular tower rose into the sky. There was no number, or corporate lettering, to betray what lay within. They were rendered unnecessary by the logo that—thanks to countless high-profile news reports—had recently become almost as familiar an American icon as the golden arches: the sleek, elongated infinity symbol that hovered just above the building’s entrance. The tower rose to a setback, halfway up its massive flank; higher, decorative latticework ran around the structure like a ribbon, setting off the top few floors. But this simplicity was deceptive. The tower’s skin had a richness, a sense of depth, almost like the paintwork on the most expensive of cars. Recent architectural textbooks called the building “obsidian,” but that wasn’t quite correct: it had a warm, pellucid glow that seemed almost drawn from its environment, leaving the surrounding buildings cold and colorless by comparison.

Dropping his gaze from the facade, he fished into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a piece of business stationery. At the top, “Eden Incorporated” was embossed in elegant type beside the infinity logo; “deliver by courier” was stamped at the bottom. He reread the brief message below.

Dear Dr. Lash:

I enjoyed speaking with you today, and I’m glad you could come on such short notice. We’ll expect you Monday at 10:30 a.m. Please give the enclosed card to one of the security personnel in the lobby.

Sincerely,

Edwin Mauchly

Director, Facilitation Services

The letter yielded up no more information than it had the other times he’d read it, and Lash returned it to his pocket.

He waited for the light to change, then picked up his satchel and made his way across the street. The tower was set back extravagantly from the sidewalk, creating a welcoming oasis. There was a fountain here: marble satyrs and nymphs disporting themselves around a bent, ancient figure. Lash peered curiously through the curtain of mist at the figure. It seemed a strange centerpiece for a fountain: no matter how he stared, he could not quite determine whether it was male or female.

Beyond the fountain, the revolving doors were kept in constant motion. Lash stopped again, observing this traffic intently. Almost everyone was entering, not leaving. But it was almost ten-thirty, so it couldn’t be employees he was seeing. No, they must all be clients; or, more likely, would-be clients.

The lobby was large and high-ceilinged, and he paused again just inside. Although the surfaces were of pink marble, indirect lighting lent the space an unusual warmth. There was an information desk in its center, of the same obsidian as the building’s exterior. Along the right wall, beyond a security checkpoint, lay a long bank of elevators. New arrivals continued to stream by him. They were a remarkably heterogeneous crowd: all ages, races, heights, builds. They looked hopeful, eager, perhaps a little apprehensive. The excitement in the air was palpable. Some headed toward the far end of the lobby, where twin escalators climbed toward a wide, arched passage. CANDIDATEPROCESSINGwas engraved above the passage in discreet gold lettering. Others were moving toward a set of doors below the escalators marked APPLICATIONS. And still others had gravitated to the left side of the lobby, where Lash caught the flicker of myriad movements. Curious, he drifted closer.

Across a wide swath of the left wall, floor to ceiling, large flatscreen plasma displays had been set edge to edge in a huge matrix. On each screen was the head shot of a different person, talking to the camera: men and women, old and young. The faces were so different from each other that, for a moment, Lash sensed but could not place the commonality they shared. Then he realized: every face was smiling, almost serene.

Lash joined the crowd who had assembled, mute and staring, before the wall of faces. As he did so, he became aware of countless voices, apparently coming from speakers hidden among the screens. Yet through some trick of sound projection, he found it easy to isolate individual voices in three-dimensional space, to match them with faces on the screens.It completely turned my life around , a pretty young woman on one of the screens was saying, seeming to speak directly to him.If it wasn’t for Eden, I don’t know what I would’ve done , a man on another told him, smiling almost confidentially, as if imparting a secret.It’s made all the difference . On yet another screen, a blond man with pale blue eyes and a brilliant smile said,It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Period. End of story .

As he listened, Lash became aware of another voice: low, just on the edge of audibility, little more than a whisper. It was not coming from any of the screens, but seemingly from all around. He paused to listen.

Technology, the voice was saying.Today, it’s used to make our lives easier, longer, more comfortable. But what if technology could do something even more profound? What if it could bring completion, bring utter fulfillment?

Imagine computer technology so advanced it could reconstruct—virtually—your own personality, the essence of what makes you unique: your hopes, desires, dreams. The inmost needs that not even you may be aware of. Imagine a digital infrastructure so robust it could contain this personality construct of yours—with its countless unique facets and characteristics—along with those of many, many other people. Imagine an artificial intelligence so profound it could compare your construct with these multitudes of others, and—in an hour, a day, a week—find that one person, that sole individual, that is your perfect match. Your ideal soulmate, uniquely fitted by personality, background, interests, countless other benchmarks to be your other half. To make your life complete. Not just two people who happen to share a few interests. But a match where one person complements the other in ways so profound, so subtle, it could never be imagined or anticipated.

Lash continued to watch the endless sea of faces before him while listening to the disembodied, sonorous voice.

No blind dates, it went on.No singles parties, where your choice is limited to a handful of random meetings. No evenings wasted on incompatibility. Rather, a proprietary system of profound sophistication. This system is now. And the company is Eden.

The service is not cheap. But if there is even the slightest dissatisfaction, Eden Incorporated offers a full refund, guaranteed for life. Yet out of the many, many thousands of couples Eden has brought together, not one has requested a refund. Because these people—like those on the screens before you—have learned there is no price that can be put on happiness.

With a start, Lash looked away from the screens and down at his watch. He was five minutes late for his appointment.

Walking across the lobby, Lash drew out a card and handed it to one of the uniformed guards. He was given a signed pass and cheerfully directed toward the bank of elevators.

Thirty-two stories above, Lash stepped into a small but elegant reception area. The tones were neutral, and there was the faintest rush of industrial pink noise. There were no signs, directories, formal guides of any kind: just one desk of polished blond wood, an attractive woman in a business suit behind it.

“Dr. Lash?” she asked with an engaging smile.

“Yes.”

“Good morning. May I see your driver’s license, please?”

This request was so strange that Lash did not think to question it. Instead, he pulled out his wallet and fished for his license.

“Thank you.” The woman held it briefly over some scanning apparatus. Then she handed it back with another bright smile, rose from her chair, and motioned him toward a door in the far wall of the reception area.

They passed down a long corridor, similar in decor to the room they’d just left. Lash noticed many doors, all unlabeled, all closed. The woman stopped before one of them.

“In here, please,” she said.

As the door closed behind him, Lash looked around at a well-appointed room. A desk of dark wood sat upon a dense carpet. Several paintings hung on the walls, beautifully framed. Behind the desk, a man now rose to greet him, smoothing his brown suit as he did so. Lash shook the proffered hand, typing the man from old habit as he did so. He looked to be in his late thirties: fairly short, dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes, muscular but not stocky. Swimmer, perhaps, or tennis player. His bearing spoke of someone self-confident, considered; a man who would be slow to act but, when acting, do so decisively.

“Dr. Lash,” the man said, returning his gaze. “I’m Edwin Mauchly. Thanks for coming.”

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Not at all. Take a seat, please.”

Lash sat down in the lone leather chair that faced the desk while Mauchly turned toward a computer monitor. He typed for a moment, then stopped. “Give me just a minute here, please. It’s been four years since I gave an entrance interview, and the screens have changed.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Of course not. But there’s some similar initial processing to be done.” He typed again. “Here we are. The address of your Stamford office is 315 Front Street, Suite 2?”

“Yes.”

“Good. If you could just fill out this information for me, please.”

Lash scanned the white card that was slid across the desk: date of birth, social security number, half a dozen other mundane details. He took a pen from his pocket and began jotting on the form.

“You used to give entrance interviews?” he said as he wrote.

“I helped design the process, as an employee of PharmGen. That was early on, before Eden became an independent company.”

“What’s it like?”

“What is what like, Dr. Lash?”

“Working here.” He slid the card back. “You’d think it would be magic. Listening to all those testimonials in the lobby, anyway.”

Mauchly glanced at the card. “I don’t blame you for being skeptical.” He had a face that managed to look both candid and reticent at the same time. “Two people’s feelings for each other, what can technology do about that? But ask any of our employees. They see it work, time after time,every time. Yes, I guess magic is as good a word for it as any.”

On the far side of the desk, a telephone rang. “Mauchly,” the man said, tucking the phone beneath his chin. “Very well. Good-bye.” He replaced the phone, then rose. “He’s ready for you, Dr. Lash.”

He?Lash thought to himself as he picked up his satchel. He followed Mauchly back out into the corridor, to an intersection, then into a wider, plushly appointed hallway that ended in a set of brilliantly polished doors. Reaching them, Mauchly paused, then knocked.

“Come in,” came a voice from beyond.

Mauchly opened the door. “I’ll speak with you again shortly, Dr. Lash,” he said, motioning him inside.

Lash stepped forward, then stopped again as the door clicked closed. Before him stood a long, semicircular table of dark wood. Across it sat a lone man, tall and deeply tanned. He smiled, nodded. Lash nodded back. And then, with a sudden shock of recognition, he realized the man was none other than John Lelyveld, chairman of Eden Incorporated.

Waiting for him.

THREE

The chairman of Eden Incorporated rose from his seat. He smiled, and his face broke into kindly, almost grandfatherly lines. “Dr. Lash. Thank you so much for coming. Please, take a seat.” And he motioned toward the long table.

Lash took a seat across from Lelyveld.

“Did you drive in from Connecticut?”

“Yes.”

“How was the traffic?”

“I was parked on the Cross Bronx about half an hour. Otherwise, okay.”

The chairman shook his head. “That road is a disgrace. I have a weekend place not far from you myself, in Rowayton. These days I usually take a helicopter. One of the perks.” He chuckled, then opened a leather portfolio that lay beside him. “Just a few formalities before we get started.” He took out a sheaf of stapled pages and passed it across the desk. It was followed by a gold pen. “Would you mind signing this, please?”

Lash looked at the top page. It was a nondisclosure agreement. He flipped quickly through the pages, found the signature line, signed.

“And this.”

Lash took the second proffered document. It appeared to be some kind of guarantee of confidentiality. He turned to the back page, signed.

“And this, if you please.”

This time, Lash simply signed without bothering to review the verbiage.

“Thank you. I do apologize, I hope you understand.” Lelyveld returned the sheets to the leather portfolio. Then he placed his elbows on the desk, resting his chin on tented fingers. “Dr. Lash, you understand the nature of our service, I believe?”

Lash nodded. There were few who didn’t: the story of how Eden had grown, over just a handful of years, from a research project of brilliant computer scientist Richard Silver to one of the highest-profile corporations in America was a favorite of financial news services.

“Then you probably won’t be surprised when I say that Eden Incorporated hasfundamentally improved the lives of, at last count, nine hundred and twenty-four thousand people.”

“No.”

“Almost half a million couples, with thousands more added each day. And with the opening of satellite offices in Beverly Hills, Chicago, and Miami, we’ve dramatically increased our service range and our pool of potential candidates.”

Lash nodded again.

“Our fee is steep—$25,000 per applicant—but we have never yet been asked for a refund.”

“So I understand.”

“Good. But it’s important you also understand our service does not end on the day we bring a couple together. There is a mandatory follow-up session with one of our counselors, scheduled three months later. And after six months, couples are requested to join encounter groups with other Eden couples. We carefully monitor our client base—not only for their benefit, but to improve our service, as well.”

Lelyveld leaned slightly toward Lash, as if to impart a secret across the massive table. “What I’m about to tell you is confidential and trade secret to Eden. In our promotional material, we speak of providing a perfect match. The ideal union between two people. Our computer intelligence compares roughlyone million variables from each of our clients to those of other clients, looking for a match. With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“I’m speaking in gross simplifications here. The artificial intelligence algorithms are the result of Richard Silver’s ongoing work, as well as countless man-hours spent researching the behavioral and psychological factors. But in short, our scientists have determined a specific threshold of matching variables necessary to declare a fit between two candidates.” He shifted in his chair. “Dr. Lash, if you compared these million factors in an average happily married couple, how closely do you think that couple would match each other?”

Lash thought. “Eighty, maybe eighty-five percent?”

“That’s a very good guess, but I’m afraid it’s way off. Our studies have shown the average happily married American couple matches in the range of onlythirty-five percent .”

Lash shook his head.

“You see, people tend to be seduced by superficial impressions, or physical attractions that by themselves will be practically meaningless in a few years. Today’s relationship services and so-called Internet dating sites—with their crude metrics and simplistic questionnaires—actually encourage this. We, on the other hand, use a hybrid computer to find twoideal partners: people for whom a million personal traits are in synch.” He paused. “Not to delve too deeply into proprietary matters, but there are varying degrees of perfection. Our staff has determined a specific percentage—let’s just say it’s over ninety-five—that guarantees an ideal match.”

“I see.”

“The fact remains, Dr. Lash—and forgive me if I remind you of the confidentiality of this information—that during the three years Eden has been offering this service, there have in fact been a small number of uniquely perfect matches. Matches in whichall one hundred percent of the variables between two people have been in synch.”

“One hundred percent?”

“A uniquely perfect match. Of course, we don’t inform our clients as to the precise exactness of their match. But over the lifetime of our service, there have been six such statistically perfect matches. ‘Supercouples,’ as they’re referred to in-house.”

So far, Lelyveld’s voice has been measured, assured. But now he seemed to hesitate slightly. The grandfatherly smile remained on his face, but an undertone of sadness, even pain, was introduced. “I’ve told you that we do post-monitoring of all our clients . . . Dr. Lash, I’m afraid there’s no pleasant way to say this. Last week, one of our six uniquely perfect couples—” he hesitated, then went on “—committed double suicide.”

“Suicide?” Lash echoed.

The chairman glanced down, consulted some notes. “In Flagstaff, Arizona. Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe. The details are rather, ah, unusual. They left a note.” He looked up again. “Can you understand now why we’ve requested your services?”

Lash was still digesting this. “Perhaps you could spell it out.”

“You’re a psychologist specializing in family relationships, particularly marital relationships. The book you published last year,Congruency , was a remarkable study on the subject.”

“I wish more book buyers had felt that way.”

“The peer reviews were all quite enthusiastic. In any case, in addition to being utterly perfect for each other, the Thorpes were both intelligent, capable, well adapted,happy . Clearly, some tragedy must have befallen this couple after their marriage. Perhaps a medical problem of some sort; perhaps the death of a loved one. Maybe it had to do with financial issues.” He paused. “We need to know what changed in the dynamic of their lives, and why they took such an extreme action as a result. If by some remote chance there’s a latent psychological tendency operating here, we should know so we can prescreen for it in the future.”

“You’ve got a team of in-house mental health professionals, right?” Lash asked. “Why not use one of them?”

“Two reasons. First, we want an impartial person to look into the matter. And second, none of our staff has your particular credentials.”

“Which credentials do you mean?”

Lelyveld smiled paternally. “I’m referring to your prior occupation. Before you went into private practice, I mean. Forensic psychologist with the FBI, part of the Behavioral Science team operating out of Quantico.”

“How did you know about that?”

“Dr. Lash, please. As a former special agent, you no doubt retain behind-the-scenes access to places, people, information. You could undertake such an investigation with great discretion. Were we to investigate ourselves, or request official assistance, there might be questions. And there is no point in causing our clients—past, present, and future—unnecessary concern.”

Lash shifted in his chair. “There was a reason I left Quantico for private practice.”

“There’s a newspaper account of the tragedy in your dossier. I’m very sorry. So it doesn’t surprise me you’re not eager to leave the comfort of that practice, even temporarily.” The chairman opened the leather portfolio, removed an envelope. “Hence the amount of the enclosed.”

Lash took the envelope and opened it. Inside was a check for $100,000.

“That should cover your time, travel, and expenses. If more is needed, let us know. Take your time, Dr. Lash. Thoroughness, and a subtle approach, are what’s required here. The more we know, the more effective we can make our service in the future.”

The chairman paused a moment before speaking again. “There is one other possibility, however remote. And that is one of the Thorpes was unstable, had a prior history of mental problems they were somehow able to conceal from our evaluation. This is highly,highly unlikely. However, if you are unable to find an answer over the course of their married life, you may have to look into their past as well.”

Lelyveld closed the portfolio with an air of finality. “Ed Mauchly will be your primary point of contact for this investigation. He’s put together a few things to get you started. We can’t release our own files on the couple, of course, but they wouldn’t be of much interest to you anyway. The answer to this riddle lies in theprivate lives of Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe.”

The man fell silent again, and for a moment Lash wondered if the meeting was over. But then Lelyveld spoke again, his voice quieter now, more intimate. The smile had faded. “We have a very special feeling for all of our clients, Dr. Lash. But to be honest, we feel particularly strongly about our perfect couples. Whenever a new supercouple is found, word ripples throughout the company, despite our best attempts to keep it private. They’re very rare. So I’m sure you can understand how painful and difficult this news was to me, especially since the Thorpes were our very first such couple. Luckily their deaths were kept out of the papers, so our employees have so far been spared the sad news. I’d be personally grateful for any light you can shed on what, precisely, went wrong in their lives.”

When Lelyveld stood and extended his hand, the smile returned, only now it was wistful.

FOUR

Twenty-four hours later, Lash stood in his living room, sipping coffee and gazing out the bay window. On the far side of the glass lay Compo Beach, a long, narrow comma of sand almost devoid of waders and walkers this weekday morning. The tourists and summer renters had left weeks before, but this was the first time in a month he’d taken the time to really look out the window. He was struck by the relative emptiness of the beach. It was a clear, bright morning: across the sound, he could make out the low green line of Long Island. A tanker was passing, a silent ghost heading for the open Atlantic.

Mentally, he went over again the preparations he’d made. His regular private therapy and counseling sessions had been cancelled for one week. Dr. Kline would cover for the groups. It had all been remarkably easy.

He yawned, took another sip of coffee, and caught sight of himself in a mirror. Deciding what to wear had been a little more difficult. Lash had always disliked fieldwork, and his upcoming appointment felt a little too much like old times. But he reminded himself it would speed things up enormously. People didn’t just deviate into aberrant behavior, especially something as exotic as double suicide. Something must have happened in the two years since the Thorpes got married. And it wouldn’t be subtle: some minor life upheaval, say, or a drift toward serious depression. It would be massive, obvious in hindsight to those who’d been around them. He might, in fact, understand what went wrong in their lives by the end of the day. With luck, he could have the case study written up tomorrow. It would be the quickest $100,000 he’d ever earned.

Turning from the window, he let his eyes roam over the room’s features: a baby grand, bookcase, couch. Lack of furniture made the room appear larger than it was. The house had a spare, ordered cleanliness he’d cultivated in the years since he’d moved in. The simplicity had become part of his personal armor. God knew the lives of his patients were complicated enough.

Lash glanced once more at his reflection, decided he looked the part, and went out the front door. He looked around, cursed good-naturedly when he noticed that the delivery man had forgotten to leave theTimes in his driveway, then headed for his car.

An hour’s worth of wrestling with I-95 traffic brought him to New London and the low silver arch of the Gold Star Memorial Bridge. Exiting the freeway, he made his way toward the river and found parking on a side street. He thumbed once more through a sheaf of papers on the passenger’s seat. There were black-and-white head shots of the couple, a few printed sheets of biographical information. Mauchly had given him precious little data on the Thorpes: address, dates of birth, names and locations of beneficiaries. But it, along with a few telephone calls, had been enough.

Already, Lash felt a stab of remorse for the small deception he was about to perpetrate. He reminded himself it might well yield insight that would prove critical to his investigation.

In the backseat was his leather satchel, well padded now with blank sheets of paper. He grabbed it, exited the car, and—after a final self-inspection in the front windshield—started toward the Thames.

State Street lay dozing beneath a mellow autumn sun. At its foot, beyond the fortresslike bulk of the Old Union railroad station, the harbor glittered. Lash walked down the hill, stopping where State Street ran into Water. There was an old hotel here, a Second Empire with a hulking mansard roof, that had recently been converted into restaurants. In the closest window he made out a sign for The Roastery. A public location, near the water, had seemed best. It had a low threat-factor. Lunch had seemed inappropriate, under the circumstances. Besides, recent inpatient studies at Johns Hopkins showed that grieving people were more responsive to external stimuli during the morning hours. Midmorning coffee seemed ideal. It would be calm, conducive to talk. Lash glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty, on the dot.

Inside, The Roastery was all he’d hoped for: high tin ceilings, beige walls, a low hum of conversation. The delicious fragrance of freshly ground coffee hung in the air. He’d arrived early to make sure he got a suitable table, and he chose a large round one in a corner near the front windows. He took the seat facing the corner; it was important for the subject to feel in control of the situation.

He’d barely had time to place the satchel on the table and arrange himself when he heard footsteps approaching. “Mr. Berger?” came a voice.

Lash turned around. “Yes. You’re Mr. Torvald?”

The man had thick, iron-gray hair and the leathery sunburnt skin of a man fond of the water. His faded blue eyes still bore the dark circles of heartbreak. Yet his resemblance to the picture Lash had just viewed in his car was remarkable. Older, masculine, shorter hair; otherwise, it could have been Lindsay Thorpe, returned from the dead.

Out of long habit, Lash betrayed no expression. “Please, take a seat.”

Torvald settled himself into the corner chair. He looked briefly around the restaurant, without interest, then settled his gaze on Lash.

“Allow me to convey my deepest condolences. And thank you very much for coming.”

Torvald grunted.

“I realize that this must be a very difficult period for you. I’ll try to make this short—”

“No, no, it’s all right.” Torvald’s voice was very deep, and he spoke in short, staccato sentences.

A waitress approached their table, offered them menus.

“I don’t think we’ll need those,” Torvald said. “Coffee, black, no sugar.”

“Same for me, please.”

The woman nodded, swirled, and left them in peace. She was attractive, but Lash noticed Torvald did not even glance at her departing form.

“You’re an insurance readjustor,” Torvald said.

“I’m an analyst for a consulting firm employed by American Life.” One of the first pieces of information Lash sought out on the Thorpes had been their insurance policies. Three million dollars each, payable to their only daughter. As he’d anticipated, it was a quick and relatively easy way to get neutral access to the closest relatives. He’d gone to the trouble of having phony business cards printed up, but Torvald didn’t ask to see one. Despite his obvious pain, the man retained a habitual air of gruff command, as if he was used to having orders quickly obeyed. A naval captain, perhaps, or a corporate executive; Lash had not dug deep into the family background. Corporate executive seemed more likely, though: given the amount Eden charged for its service, it was likely daddy had helped bankroll Lindsay Thorpe.

Lash cleared his throat, put on his best sympathetic manner. “If you wouldn’t mind answering just a few questions, it would be very helpful to us. If you find any of them objectionable, or if you feel it necessary to stop for a while, I’ll certainly understand.”

The waitress returned. Lash took a sip of his coffee, then opened the satchel and pulled out a legal pad. “How close were you to your daughter as she was growing up, Mr. Torvald?” he began.

“Extremely.”

“And after she left home?”

“We spoke every day.”

“Overall, how would you characterize her physical health?”

“Excellent.”

“Did she take any medications on a regular basis?”

“Vitamin supplements. A mild antihistamine. That’s about it.”

“What was the antihistamine for?”

“Dermatographia.”

Lash nodded, made a notation. A skin condition that caused itchiness: his next-door neighbor had it. Completely benign. “Any unusual or serious diseases or childhood illnesses?”

“No, none. And this would all be in the applications she originally filled out with American Life.”

“I understand that, Mr. Torvald. I’m simply trying to establish some independent frame of reference. Did she have any living siblings?”

“Lindsay was an only child.”

“Was she a good student?”

“Graduated magna cum laude from Brown. Got her master’s in economics from Stanford.”

“Would you call her shy? Outgoing?”

“Strangers might think her quiet. But Lindsay always had more friends than she needed. She was the kind of girl who had many acquaintances, but was very choosy about her friends.”

Lash took another sip of coffee. “How long had your daughter been married, Mr. Torvald?”

“Just over two years.”

“And how would you characterize the marriage?”

“They were the happiest couple I’ve ever seen, bar none.”

“Can you tell me about the husband, Lewis Thorpe?”

“Intelligent, friendly, honest. Witty. Lots of interests.”

“Did your daughter ever mention any problems between herself and her husband?”

“You mean, fights?”

Lash nodded. “That, or other things. Differences of opinion. Conflicting wishes. Incompatibilities.”

“Never.”

Lash took another sip. He noticed Torvald had not touched his own cup.

“Never?” He allowed the slightest hint of incredulity to enter his voice.

Torvald rose to the bait. “Never. Look, Mr.—”

“Berger.”

“Mr. Berger, my daughter was . . .” For the first time, Torvald seemed to hesitate. “My daughter was a client of Eden Incorporated. You’ve heard of them?”

“Certainly.”

“Then you’ll know what I’m getting at. I was skeptical at first. It seemed like an awful lot of money for some computer cycles, a statistical roll of the dice. But Lindsay was firm.” Torvald leaned forward slightly. “You have to understand, she wasn’t like other girls. She knew what she wanted. She was never one to settle for second best. She’d had her share of boyfriends, some of them really nice boys. But she seemed to get restless, the relationships didn’t last.”

The man sat back abruptly. It was by far the longest statement he’d made so far. Lash made a notation, encouragingly, careful not to meet Torvald’s eyes. “And?”

“And it was different with Lewis. I could tell from the very first time she mentioned his name. They hit it off from the first date.”

Lash looked up just as a faint smile of reminiscence crossed the old man’s face. For a moment the sunken eyes brightened, the tense jaw relaxed. “They met for Sunday brunch, then somehow ended up Rollerblading.” He shook his head at the memory. “I don’t know whose crazy idea that was, neither of them had ever tried it. Maybe it was Eden’s suggestion. Anyway, within a month, they were engaged. And it just seemed to get better. Like I said, I’ve never seen a happier couple. They kept discovering new things. About the world. About each other.”

As quickly as it had come, the light left Torvald’s face. He pushed his coffee cup away.

“What about Lindsay’s daughter? What kind of an impact did she have on their life?”

Torvald fixed him with a sudden gaze. “Shecompleted it, Mr. Berger.”

Lash made another notation, a real one this time. The interview was not progressing quite as he’d expected. And the way the man pushed away his cup made Lash think he might be limited to just a few more questions.

“To the best of your knowledge, have there been any recent setbacks in the life of your daughter or her husband?”

“No.”

“No unexpected difficulties? No problems?”

Torvald stirred restlessly. “Unless you call the approval of Lewis’s grant and the arrival of a beautiful baby girl problems.”

“When was the last time you saw your daughter, Mr. Torvald?”

“Two weeks ago.”

Lash took a sip of his coffee to conceal his surprise. “Where was this, may I ask?”

“At their house in Flagstaff. I was on my way back from a yacht race in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“And how would you characterize the household?”

“I wouldcharacterize it as perfect.”

Lash scribbled another note. “You noticed nothing different from previous visits? No appetite loss or gain, perhaps? Changes in sleep patterns? Lack of energy? Loss of interest in hobbies or personal pursuits?”

“There was no affective disorder, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Lash paused in his scribbling. “Are you a clinician, Mr. Torvald?”

“No. But before her death, my wife was an occupational therapist. I know the signs of depression when I see them.”

Lash put the legal pad to one side. “We’re just trying to get a grasp of the situation, sir.”

Suddenly, the older man leaned toward Lash, bringing their faces very close. “Grasp?Listen. I don’t know what you or your firm hope to learn from this. But I think I’ve answered enough questions. And the fact is there’s not a damn thing to grasp. Thereis no answer. Lindsay wasn’t suicidal. Neither was Lewis. They had everything to live for,everything .”

Lash sat silently. This was not just grief he was seeing. This wasneed : a desperate need to understand what could not possibly be understood.

“I’ll tell you one thing more,” Torvald said, his face still close to Lash’s, speaking low and fast now. “I loved my wife. I think we had just about as good a relationship as a married couple could ever hope to have. But I’d have cut off my right arm without a thought if that could’ve made us as happy as my daughter and Lewis were together.”

And with that, the man pushed back, rose from the table, and left the restaurant.

FIVE

Flagstaff, Arizona. Two days later.

The carport was already taken up by two Audi A8s, so Lash left his rented Taurus at the curb and started up the flagstone walk. Brown pine needles crunched underfoot. 407 Cooper Drive was an attractive bungalow with a broad low roof and fenced backyard. Beyond the fence the hillside fell away, revealing a panorama of downtown, faintly blurred by morning mist. Behind and to the north rose the purple-and-brown bulk of the San Francisco Peaks.

Reaching the front door, Lash tucked several large envelopes under one arm and sounded his pocket for the key. He fished it out, white evidence tag dangling from its chain. The chief of the Phoenix field office had been a classmate in the drab gray dorms of Quantico and fellow-sufferer on the obstacle courses of the Yellow Brick Road, and owed him several favors. Lash had turned one of them in for the key to the Thorpes’ house.

He glanced up, noticing the security camera bolted beneath the eaves. It had been installed by the previous owner of the house and was deactivated for the police investigation. Since the house would go on the market once the investigation was officially closed, the system remained off.

Lash looked down again, fitted the key to the door, and unlocked it with a twist of his hand.

Inside, the house had that peculiar watchful, listening quality he found in homes that had seen unnatural death. The front door opened directly onto the living room, where the bodies had been found. Lash walked forward slowly, looking around, noting the location and quality of the furniture. There was a butternut-colored leather sofa with matching armchairs, an antique armoire, an expensive-looking flatscreen television: clearly, the Thorpes weren’t hard up for cash. Two beautiful silk rugs had been arranged over the wall-to-wall carpeting. One still bore powder traces from the medical examiner’s team. This unexpected sight stirred memories of the last crime scene he’d witnessed, and he moved quickly onward.

Beyond the living room, a hallway ran the width of the house. To his right was a dining room and kitchen; to his left, what looked like a couple of bedrooms. Lash dropped his envelopes on the sofa and walked down as far as the kitchen. It was as well appointed as the living room. There was another door here, with a view of the narrow side yard and the neighboring house.

Lash moved back up the hallway in the direction of the bedrooms. There was a nursery, all blue taffeta and lace; a master bedroom, its night tables littered with a typical assortment of paperback novels, medicine bottles, and television remotes; and a third room, which was apparently a guest room doubling as a study. He paused at this last room, looking around curiously. Japanese woodblock prints of thinnest rice paper decorated the walls. On a desk sat several framed photographs: Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe, arm in arm in front of a pagoda; the Thorpes again, standing on what looked like the Champs-Elysées. In each photo, the couple was smiling. He’d seen smiles like that before, rarely: simple, unfeigned, undiluted happiness.

He moved to the far wall, which was completely taken up by bookshelves. The Thorpes had been eclectic, voracious readers. Two upper shelves were completely taken up with textbooks in varying degrees of decrepitude; another with trade journals. Below these were several shelves of fiction.

One shelf in particular caught Lash’s eye. The books here seemed to be given preferential treatment, bookended by statues of carven jade. He glanced over the titles:Zen and the Art of Archery, Advanced Japanese, Two Hundred Poems of the Early T’Ang . The shelf above it was empty except for an unframed picture of Lindsay Thorpe riding a merry-go-round, surrounded by children, laughing as she stretched her arm toward the camera. He picked it up. On the back had been scrawled, in a masculine hand:

I wish I were close

To you as the wet skirt of

A salt girl to her body.

I think of you always.

He carefully replaced the photo, exited the study, and returned to the living room.

Outside, the morning mist was quickly burning off, and slanted bars of sunlight now lay across the silk rugs. Lash moved to the leather sofa, pushed the envelopes aside, and sat down. He’d done this many times before, as an agent with the Investigative Support Unit: gone through a house, trying to get a feel for the pathology of its occupants. But that had been very different. He’d been doing criminal personality profiles for NCACP, studying the personal hells of mass murderers, serial rapists, “blitz” attackers, sociopaths. People, and houses, who had absolutely nothing in common with the Thorpes.

He’d come here in search of clues to what had gone wrong. Over the last three days, he had performed what clinicians referred to as a psychological autopsy, conducting discreet interviews with family members, friends, doctors, even a minister. And what had at first seemed like an easy case formulation quickly turned otherwise. There were none of the stressors, the risk factors, normally associated with suicide. No history of prior attempts. No history of psychiatric disorders. Nothing that should have triggered one, let alone two, suicides. On the contrary, the Thorpes had everything to live for. And yet, in this very room, they had written a note, tied dry cleaning bags around their heads, embraced on the carpet, and asphyxiated themselves in front of their infant girl.

Lash pulled one of the two envelopes toward him, ripped it open with the edge of a finger, and dumped the contents onto the couch: documentary evidence compiled by the Flagstaff police. There was a thin packet of glossy photographs held together with a clip, and he leafed through them—scene-of-crime photos of the husband and wife, together in death, rigid on the beautiful carpet. He put down the eight-by-tens and picked up a photocopy of the suicide note. It read simply, “Please look after our daughter.”

A thicker document lay nearby: the official police incident report. Lash turned its pages slowly. Neither husband nor wife had left the house since the night before their bodies were discovered. The tapes of the external security cameras revealed nobody else had come to the house in the interim. The silent alarm was triggered only by a curious neighbor the next morning. At the back of the report was a transcript of an interview with this neighbor.

OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT

PROPERTY OFFLAGSTAFFPOLICEDEPARTMENT

Docket:    AR-27

Case No.:     04B-2190

OIC:      Det. Michael Guierrez

Int. Officer:  Sgt. Theodore White

Subj:     Bowman, Maureen A.

Date / Time:  9/17/04 14:22

=============================

EZ-Scrip Transcription Follows

=============================

IO Please make yourself comfortable. My name is Sergeant White, and I’ll be conducting the interview. If you would please state your name for the record.

S  Maureen Bowman.

IO Your address, Ms. Bowman?

S  I live at 409 Cooper Drive.

IO How long have you known Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe?

S  Since they moved into the neighborhood. Not all that long, a year and a half, maybe.

IO Did you see much of them?

S  Not really. They were very busy, what with the new baby and all.

IO Did they have many regular visitors?

S  None that I noticed. There were some people from the lab that Lewis was friendly with. I think they came over for a couple of dinner parties. After the baby was born, the grandparents visited a couple of times. Things like that.

IO And how did the Thorpes seem?

S  How do you mean?

IO As neighbors, as a couple. How did they seem?

S  They were always very pleasant.

IO Did you ever observe any problems? Arguments, raised voices, anything of the sort?

S  No, never.

IO Were they ever in any kind of difficulty that you were aware of? Money, for example?

S  No, not that I know. We never really spent that much time together, as I said. They were always very pleasant, very happy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a couple happier.

IO What, precisely, made you go over to the Thorpe residence this morning?

S  The baby.

IO I’m sorry?

S  The baby. She was crying, wouldn’t stop. The baby had never cried before. I thought maybe something was wrong.

IO Describe, for the tape, what you found, please.

S  I—I went in the kitchen door. The baby was there.

IO In the kitchen?

S  No, in the hallway. The hallway leading from the dining room.

IO Ms. Bowman, please describe everything you saw and heard. In detail, please.

S  Okay. I could see the baby, ahead, past the kitchen. She was screaming, her face was red. There weren’t any lights on, but it was a bright morning, I could see everything clearly. There was some kind of opera playing.

IO Playing where?

S  On the stereo. But the baby was crying so loudly. I could barely think. I moved ahead to comfort her. That’s when the living room came into view. That’s when I saw . . . oh, God . . .

[TRANSCRIPT PAUSES]

IO Take as long as you need, Ms. Bowman. You’ll find tissue to your right, on the table, there.

Lash put the transcript aside. He didn’t need to read any more: he knew exactly what it was Maureen Bowman saw.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a couple happier. It was just about the same thing, word for word, Lindsay Thorpe’s father had told him, with those hollow, haunted eyes, at the restaurant in New London. The same thing everybody had told him since.

What had gone wrong with this couple? What had happened?

Lash’s experience with pathology had two very distinct periods: first as a forensic psychologist with the FBI, studying violence after the fact; and then later, as a specialist in private practice, working with people to make sure violence never became a necessary option. He had worked very hard to keep the two worlds separate. Yet here in this house he felt them drawing together.

He dropped his gaze to the other envelope: the one imprintedProperty of Eden Inc. Proprietary and Confidential . He unwound the sealing thread, opened the flap. Inside were two unlabeled videotapes. Lash slid them out, balanced one in each hand for a moment. Then he rose and walked to the television console. He turned it on, inserted one of the tapes.

A date resolved on the black screen, followed by a long scroll of numbers. And then a face appeared suddenly, larger than life: brown hair, penetrating hazel eyes, handsome. It was Lewis Thorpe, and he was smiling.

The first step in any application to Eden was to sit before a camera and answer two questions. Besides the scant biographical information, these initial tapes of the Thorpes were the only material Mauchly had supplied him with.

Lash turned his attention to the tape. He had watched it and its mate several times before. Here in the Thorpes’ own house he would watch them one last time, in hopes the surroundings would somehow render up the connection that so far had eluded him. It seemed a vain hope, but he was running out of options—and spending a lot more time—than he had ever intended.

“Why are you here?” an off-camera voice was asking.

Lewis Thorpe had a frank, disarming smile. “I’m here because something is missing in my life,” he said simply.

“Describe one thing you did this morning,” the off-camera voice said. “And why you think we should know about it.”

Lewis thought for just a moment. “I finished translating a particularly difficult haiku,” he said. He waited, as if for a response. When none came, he went on. “I’ve been translating the work of Bash–o, the Japanese poet. People always think translating haiku must be easy, but in fact it’s really, really hard. It’s so dense, yet so simple. How do you capture that wealth of meaning?” He shrugged at the camera. “It’s something I started doing in grad school. I’d taken a lot of Japanese courses, and I was really taken with Bash–o’s book,Narrow Road to the Interior . It’s the story of this journey he took through Japan’s northern interior four hundred years ago. But, of course, it’s also about his own . . . Anyway, it’s a short work, laced with haiku. There was one in particular, a famous one, that I struggled with, kept putting off. This morning, on the taxi coming here, I finally finished it. Sounds funny, doesn’t it, since it’s only, what, nine words long?” He stopped.

It was hard to reconcile the handsome face with that other one, shown in the police photos: the yawning mouth, the wide unseeing eyes, the dark lolling tongue.

Sudden fade to black. Lash withdrew the tape, slotted in the other.

Another scribble of numbers. Then Lindsay Thorpe appeared on the monitor, thin and blonde and deeply tanned. She looked a trifle more nervous than Lewis had. She licked her lips, traced an errant hair away from her eyes with a finger.

“Why are you here?” the off-camera voice asked again.

Lindsay paused for a moment, looked away. “Because I know I can do better,” she replied after a moment.

“Describe one thing you did this morning. And why you think we should know about it.”

Lindsay looked back at the camera. And now she smiled too, displaying perfect, gleaming teeth. “That one’s easier. I took the plunge, bought my round-trip ticket to Lucerne. There’s this special tour group taking a one-week hike through the Alps. It’s kind of expensive, seemed like a bit of an extravagance, especially on top of the fee for . . .” Her smile turned a little shy. “Anyway, I finally decided I was worth it. I recently ended this relationship that just hadn’t been working out, and I wanted to get away, maybe get a little perspective on things.” She laughed. “So I put the ticket on my Visa this morning. Nonrefundable. I leave the first of next month.”

The tape ended. Lash removed it and shut off the player.

Five months after these interviews, the Thorpes were married. They moved here not long after. The most perfect couple anyone could remember.

Lash dropped the tapes into the envelope and started for the door. As he opened it he paused to turn back, asking once again for an answer. When the house remained silent, he shut and locked the door carefully behind him.

SIX

Cruising at thirty-five thousand feet on his way back to New York, Lash inserted his credit card into the seatback slot, plucked the air-to-ground phone from its handset, and stared at it a moment.What does an expert do when something makes no sense? he thought.Simple. You ask another expert .

His first call was to directory information; the second to a number in Putnam County, New York.

“Weisenbaum Center,” came a clipped, efficient voice.

“Dr. Goodkind, please.”

“Who may I say is calling?”

“Christopher Lash.”

“Just a minute.”

Among private psychologists, the Norman J. Weisenbaum Center for Biomedical Research was both revered and envied for the quality of its neurochemical studies. As Lash waited through ethereal, New Age music, he tried to picture the center in his mind. He knew it was located on the Hudson River about forty-five minutes north of Manhattan. No doubt beautiful, with impeccable architecture: the center was a darling of both hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, and was lavishly funded.

“Chris!” came Goodkind’s cheery voice. “I can’t believe it. I haven’t heard from you in, what, six years?”

“Must be that long.”

“How are you enjoying private practice?”

“The hours are better.”

“I’ll bet. I always wondered when you’d give up riding with the cavalry, settle down in some nice, lucrative town. You’re practicing in Fairfield, right?”

“Stamford.”

“Yes, of course. Close to Greenwich, Southport, New Canaan. All full of rich, dysfunctional couples, no doubt. Excellent choice.” Old U. Penn classmates like Goodkind had been divided in their opinions on Lash joining the FBI. Some seemed envious. Others shook their heads, unable to comprehend why he’d willingly take on such a stressful, physically demanding, potentially dangerous job when his doctorate entitled him to something a lot cushier. When he did leave the FBI, he’d been careful to let them believe greed was the motivating factor—rather than the tragedy that so abruptly ended both his law enforcement career and his marriage.

“You hear much from Shirley?” Goodkind asked.

“Nope.”

“Shame you two split up. It didn’t have to do with, what, that Edmund Wyre business, did it? I read about that in the paper.”

Lash was careful to keep his voice from betraying the pain that, even three years later, mention of that name could evoke. “No, nothing like that.”

“Horrible. Horrible. Must’ve been rough on you.”

“Wasn’t easy.” Lash began to feel sorry he’d called. How could he have forgotten Goodkind’s curiosity, his love of prying into the personal affairs of others?

“I picked up that book of yours,” Goodkind said. “Congruency. Excellent stuff, though of course you were writing for the unwashed.”

“I wanted to sell more than a dozen copies.”

“And?”

“Sold two dozen, at least.”

Goodkind laughed.

“I read your recent article, too,” Lash went on. “In theAmerican Journal of Neurobiology . ‘Cognitive Reappraisal and Agenerative Suicide.’ Nicely argued.”

“One thing about my position here at the center is I can specialize in the research of my choice.”

“I was also interested in some of your other recent papers. ‘Reuptake Inhibitors and Elder Suicide,’ for example.”

“Really?” Goodkind sounded surprised. “I had no idea you were keeping such close tabs.”

“I infer from the articles that, in addition to the lab research, you’ve interviewed quite a number of suicide attempters?”

“Well, I haven’t had a chance to talk with too many suicidecompleters .” Goodkind chuckled at his little joke.

“Including survivors of double suicides?”

“Of course.”

“Then there’s something I’m looking into that might interest you. In fact, I could use your advice. These friends of a patient of mine, a couple. Committed double suicide recently.”

“Successfully?”

“There are some unusual aspects to the pathology.”

“Such as?”

Lash pretended to hesitate. “Well, what if we turned it around, and you speculated—based on your research, of course—what the motivating factors might have been. Perform a psychological autopsy on the couple. I’ll fill in the blanks.”

There was a brief silence. “Sure, why not. What were their ages?”

“Early thirties.”

“Employment history?”

“Stable.”

“Psychiatric history? Mood disorders?”

“None known.”

“Suicidal ideation?”

“No.”

“History of prior attempts?”

“None.”

“Substance abuse?”

“The autopsy bloods were clean.”

Another pause. “Is this a joke?”

“No. Go on, please.”

“The couple’s relationship?”

“Warm and loving, by all accounts.”

“Major losses of any kind?”

“No.”

“Family history?”

“Negative for depression, schizophrenia, any mental illness, in fact.”

“Any other life stressors? Significant changes?”

“No.”

“Any health issues?”

“Both received glowing physicals within the last six months.”

“Anything I should know? Anything at all?”

Lash paused. “They’d recently had a child.”

“And?”

“Normal and healthy in every way.”

There was a long silence. Then, Lash heard laughter over the line. “This is a joke, right? Because these aren’t double suicides you’re describing. This is Captain America and Wonder Woman.”

“Is that your considered opinion?”

Goodkind’s laugh slowly died. “Yes.”

“Roger, you’ve got a unique perspective on suicide. You’re a biochemist. You not only talk to suicide attempters, you study their motivation on a molecular level.” Lash shifted in his seat. “Is there any commonality among people that might predispose them—no matter how happy they appear—to suicide?”

“You mean, like a suicide gene? I wish it were that easy. There’s research that’s shown some genes may—may—code for depressive tendencies. Just as there are genes that code for heavy eating, sexual preferences, eye or hair color. But predicting suicide? If you’re a betting man, stay away from that one. You’ve got two deeply depressed people. Why does one commit suicide and another doesn’t? In the end there’s no way to predict. Why did Miami Beach police report a rash of suicides last month, while Minneapolis had a historic dip? Why did Poland have a dramatically high rate of suicide in the year 2000? Sorry, pal. When you get right down to it, it’s just a roll of the dice.”

Lash ingested this. “A roll of the dice.”

“Take it from an expert, Chris. And you can quote me on that.”

SEVEN

After the dry high-altitude air of Flagstaff, New York City felt damp and miserable. Lash wore a heavy raincoat as he approached the reception desk in Eden’s lobby for the second time in five days.

“Christopher Lash to see Edwin Mauchly,” he told a tall, thin man behind the counter.

The man tapped a few keys. “Do you have an appointment, sir?” he asked with a smile.

“I left him a message. He’ll be expecting me.”

“One moment, please.”

As he waited, Lash turned to gaze around him. There was something different about the lobby today, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Then he realized there was no line of prospective applicants this morning. The twin escalators leading to Application Processing were empty. Instead, a smaller flow of traffic was headed for the security checkpoint. They were all couples, many hand in hand. Unlike the anxious, hopeful faces he’d seen his last visit, these people were smiling, laughing, chattering loudly. After showing laminated cards at the checkpoint, the couples moved on to a large set of doors and vanished out of sight.

“Dr. Lash?” the man at the desk said.

Lash turned back. “Yes?”

“Mr. Mauchly is waiting for you.” The man slid a small ivory passcard emblazoned with Eden’s infinity logo across the desk. “Please show this at the elevator station. Have a pleasant day.”

When the elevator doors opened onto the thirty-second floor, Mauchly was waiting. He nodded to Lash, then led the way down the corridor to his office.

Director of Facilitation Services, Lash recalled as he followed Mauchly.Whatever the hell is that? Aloud, he asked: “Why all the happy faces?”

“Sorry?”

“Downstairs, in the lobby. Everybody was grinning as if they’d won the lottery or something.”

“Ah. Today is class reunion.”

“Class reunion?”

“That’s our term for it. Part of our client contract calls for a mandatory six-month revaluation of the couples we’ve brought together. They return for a day of one-on-one sessions, encounter groups, the like. For the most part, quite informal. Our researchers find the back-end data helpful in refining the selection process. And it allows us to watch for any signs of incompatibility, warning signals, between couples.”

“Seen any?”

“None to date.” Mauchly opened the door, ushered Lash inside. If he was curious, it did not show in his dark eyes. “Would you care for any refreshment?”

“No thanks.” Lash slipped his satchel from his arm and took the indicated chair.

Mauchly sat down behind his desk. “We didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“That’s because there’s not much to tell.”

Mauchly raised his eyebrows.

Lash leaned over, unfastened his satchel, and pulled out a document. He straightened its edges, then placed it on the desk.

“What is that, Dr. Lash?” Mauchly asked.

“My report.”

Mauchly made no move to pick it up. “Perhaps you could summarize it for me.”

Lash took a deep breath. “There are no indicators for suicide in either Lewis or Lindsay Thorpe. None at all.”

Mauchly folded one muscular arm over the other, waited.

“I’ve spoken to family, friends, doctors. I’ve examined their credit histories, financial records, employment status. I’ve called in favors from federal and local law enforcement. This was as functional, stable a couple—afamily —as you’ll ever find. They could have been poster children for that wall of happy faces down in your lobby.”

“I see.” Mauchly’s lips pursed into what might have been a frown. “Perhaps there were prior indicators that—”

“I looked there, too. I checked school records, interviewed teachers, spoke with former classmates. Nothing. And no psychiatric history, either. In fact, the only hospital visit was by Lewis, who broke a leg skiing in Aspen eight years ago.”

“Then what is your professional opinion?”

“People don’t just commit suicide for no reason. Especially double suicide. There’s something missing here.”

“Are you implying—”

“I’m not implying anything. The police report reads suicide. What I mean is, I don’t have enoughinformation to form an opinion on why they did what they did.”

Mauchly glanced at the report. “It appears you’ve done a thorough investigation.”

“What I need is in this building. Your evaluations of the Thorpes might give me the psychological data I need.”

“You must know that’s out of the question. Our data is confidential. Trade secrets are involved.”

“I’ve already signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

“Dr. Lash, it’s not my call to make. Besides, it’s unlikely you’d find anything in our test results you have not already found on your own.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. That’s why I’ve also prepared this.” Lash withdrew a small envelope and placed it atop the sheaf of papers.

Mauchly cocked his head inquiringly.

“It’s a breakdown of my expenses. Time billed at my usual consultation rate of $300 an hour. I didn’t charge overtime. Airplane tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, meals, it’s all there. Just a shade over $14,000. If you’ll initial the amount, I’ll write you out a check for the balance.”

“What balance would that be?”

“The rest of the hundred thousand you gave me.”

Mauchly reached for the envelope, withdrew the folded sheet inside. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“It’s quite simple. Without more information from you, there’s nothing I can say except Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe were just as perfect a couple as your computer thought they were. I didn’t earn a hundred thousand to tell you that.”

Mauchly studied the paper for a moment. Then he replaced it in the envelope and put it back on the table. “Dr. Lash, would you excuse me for just a moment?”

“Of course.”

Mauchly stood and, with a polite nod, left the room, closing the door behind him.

It was perhaps ten minutes before Lash heard the door open again. He turned to see Mauchly standing in the corridor.

“This way, if you please,” he said.

Mauchly led Lash to a new elevator. It descended briefly, then opened onto a featureless corridor. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all painted the same shade of pale violet. Mauchly led the way down the corridor, then stopped to open a door the same color as the walls and ceiling. He gestured Lash to enter first.

The space beyond was long and dimly lit. From a narrow floor, the walls angled outward at a forty-five-degree angle to waist level, where they became abruptly vertical. It felt to Lash like staring down a funnel.

“What kind of place is this?” he asked, walking forward.

Mauchly closed the door and pressed a button on a nearby control panel.

There was a low whirring noise, and Lash took an involuntary step toward the center. On both sides, a dark curtain drew back along the angled walls at his feet. And now Lash realized that they were not walls at all, but windows, looking down into two large rooms: one to his left, the other to his right. They were standing on a catwalk, suspended above and between the two identical rooms: conference rooms containing large, oval tables. Perhaps a dozen people were seated around each. There was no sound but Lash could see from their gestures they were talking animatedly.

“What the hell—” he began.

Mauchly gave a dry laugh. Yellow light from the conference rooms lit his face from below, giving his smile a disconcerting cast. “Listen,” he said, pressing another button.

The room was suddenly filled with a babel of voices. Mauchly turned to the panel, adjusted a knob, and the volume decreased.

Lash realized he was hearing the conversations of the people in the room below. Another moment and he realized they were all couples who had been brought together by Eden. They were joking, sharing reminiscences about the experience.

“I’ve told seven, maybe eight friends about it,” a man was saying. He was in his early forties, black, wearing a dark suit. A woman was sitting close beside him, head resting on his shoulder. “Three have already applied. A couple more are saving up. One of them’s even thinking of turning in his Saab for a used Honda to raise the fee. That’s desperation.”

“We haven’t told anybody,” said a young woman across the table. “We like keeping it a secret.”

“It’s a blast,” her husband added. “People are always telling us how great we are for each other. Just last night a couple of the guys cornered me at the gym. They complained their wives were all bitches, wondered how I was lucky enough to find the last nice girl on Long Island.” He laughed. “How could I tell them Eden brought us together? It’s too much fun taking the credit myself.”

This brought a burst of assenting laughter from the group.

Mauchly reached for the dial again, and the laughter faded out. “Dr. Lash, I believe you feel I’m being intentionally coy about all this. That is not the case. It’s not that we don’t trust you. It’s simply that secrecy is the only way to protect our service. There are any number of would-be competitors who will dowhatever it takes to obtain our testing techniques, our evaluation algorithms, anything. And remember, the secrecy is not just forus .” He gestured toward the other room below them, turned another knob.

“. . . if I’d known just what was in store for me, I don’t know if I’d have had thecojones to take that eval,” a tall, athletic-looking man in a crewneck sweater was saying. “It was a brutal day. But now that it’s seven months behind me, I know it was the best thing I ever did.”

“I went to a typical online dating service once, a couple of years back,” another added. “Couldn’t have been more unlike Eden. Crude. Low-tech. They only asked a few questions. And guess what the first one was: Are you interested in a casual or a serious relationship? Can you believe it? I was so insulted I walked out the door right then!”

“I’ll be paying off the loan for years,” said a woman. “But I’d have paid twice as much. It’s like they say on that wall in the lobby. What price can you put on happiness?”

“Anybody here ever fight?” somebody else asked.

“We disagree,” a silver-haired woman at the far end responded. “Wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. But it just helps us learn more about each other, respect each other’s needs.”

Mauchly turned off the sound again. “You see? It’s forthem , as well. Eden provides a service nobody’s ever dreamed of before. We can’t take any chance, no matter how small, of compromising that service.” He paused. “Now listen. I’m bringing in someone you can talk to, ask a few questions. But you must understand, Dr. Lash:he doesn’t know . Morale at Eden is exceptionally high. People are very proud of the service they provide. We cannot undermine that, even with an unrelated tragedy. Understood?”

Lash nodded.

As if on cue, a door opened at the far end of the room and a figure in a white lab coat stepped forward.

“Peter, there you are,” Mauchly said. “Come and meet Christopher Lash. He’s doing some random follow-up checks on a few of our clients. For statistical purposes.”

The man came forward with a shy smile. He was little more than a youth, really. There was an abundance of carrot-colored hair above his forehead that bobbed slightly as he shook Lash’s hand.

“This is Peter Hapwood. He’s the evaluation engineer that did the one-on-one with the Thorpes when they came back for their class reunion.” Mauchly turned to Hapwood. “Do you remember Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe?”

Hapwood nodded. “The supercouple.”

“Yes. The supercouple.” Mauchly turned his hand toward Lash, palm extended, as if inviting questions.

“In the one-on-one with the Thorpes,” Lash asked the young engineer, “did anything stand out in particular?”

“No, nothing. Not that I can remember.”

“How did they seem?”

“They seemed happy, like everybody else on their return interview.”

“How many couples have you interviewed? On their six-month return, I mean?”

Hapwood thought a moment. “A thousand. Maybe twelve hundred.”

“And they’ve all been happy?”

“Without exception. After all this time, it still seems uncanny.” Hapwood shot a quick look at Mauchly, as if wondering whether he’d said something inappropriate.

“Did the Thorpes say anything about their lives since meeting each other?”

“Let me think. No. Yes. They’d recently moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. I remember Mr. Thorpe saying he was having a little trouble with the altitude—he was a jogger, as I recall—but they both loved the area.”

“Anything else come up in the questions?”

“Not really. I just went through the standard question set. Nothing got flagged.”

“What standard set is that?”

“Well, we start with the mood-setting items, just to establish a comfort level, by—”

“I don’t think such specifics are necessary,” Mauchly said. “Any other questions?”

Lash felt the opportunity slipping away from him. And yet there were no other questions left. “You don’t recall anything they said, or mentioned, out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

“No,” Hapwood replied. “Sorry.”

Lash’s shoulders sagged. “Thanks.”

Mauchly nodded at Hapwood, who headed for the far door. Halfway there, he stopped.

“She hated opera,” he said.

Lash looked at him. “What?”

“Ms. Thorpe. When they came into the consultation room, she apologized for being late. On the way here, she refused to take the first cab they hailed because the driver was blaring opera from his radio. She said she couldn’t stand it. Took them ten minutes to find another.” He shook his head at the memory. “They were laughing about it.”

He nodded to Lash, then Mauchly, and left the room.

Mauchly turned, spectral in the glow of the rooms below, and raised a bulky manila envelope. “The results of the Thorpes’ inkblot tests, administered during their evaluations. It’s the only test we give that isn’t proprietary, that’s why I am able to share it.”

“Big of you.” Frustration gave an edge to Lash’s voice he didn’t intend.

Mauchly regarded him mildly. “You must understand, Dr. Lash. Our interest in what happened to the Thorpes is as a case study only. This is a tragic event, one that’s especially painful to us because a supercouple was involved. But it’s an isolated occurrence.” He handed the folder to Lash. “Look these over at your convenience. It’s our hope you’ll continue to investigate, search for any personality issues we should keep in mind for future evaluations. But if you still want to quit the job, we’ll accept the brief you’ve already prepared. In any case, the money is yours to keep.” He gestured toward the door. “And now, with your permission, I’ll see you back to the lobby.”

EIGHT

The afternoon shadows were lengthening when Lash pulled into the Greenwich Audubon Center, parked, and started down the wood-chipped path leading to Mead Lake. He had the place to himself: the school groups had left hours before, and the weekend birders and nature photographers wouldn’t gather until the weekend. The dampness of the morning had given way to limpid sunlight. Around him, open woodlands melted away into fastnesses of green and brown. The air was heavy with the scent of moss. As he walked, the traffic on Riversville Road grew fainter. Within minutes, it was replaced entirely by birdsong.

He had left the offices of Eden Incorporated intending to drive straight back to his Stamford office. The week he’d allowed for this assignment was up, and he now had to decide what, if anything, was to be done about next week’s arrangements. But halfway home he’d found himself leaving the New England Thruway and driving, almost aimlessly, through the shady lanes of Darien, Silvermine, New Canaan, the stomping grounds of his youth. The Thorpes’ inkblot tests lay, untouched, in an envelope on the passenger seat. He’d driven on, letting the car decide where to go. And it ended up here, at the nature preserve.

It seemed as good a place as any.

Ahead of him the pathway forked, leading to a series of bird blinds overlooking the lake. Lash selected one at random, climbed the short ladder into the boxlike structure. Inside it was warm and dark. A long horizontal slit at the rear offered a clandestine view of the lake. Lash peered out at the waterbirds, ducking and bobbing, oblivious to his presence. Then he took a seat on the wooden bench and placed the bulky manila envelope beside him.

He did not open it right away. Instead, he reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny volume:Narrow Road to the Interior , by Matsuo Bash–o. He’d seen copies for sale on the counter of a Starbucks in Sky Harbor International, and the coincidence seemed too great not to pick one up. He thumbed through the translator’s introduction, found the opening lines.

The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

He put the book aside. What had Lewis Thorpe said about the poetry of Bash–o: so dense, yet so simple? Something like that.

Lash had many professional rules, but the preeminent one was Keep your distance from your patients. It was a rule he’d learned the hard way, profiling at the FBI. So why had he allowed himself to become so fascinated with Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe? Was it simply the mystifying nature of their deaths? Or was there some special allure in the perfection of their marriage? Because by every account he’d been able to obtain, their marriage had, in fact, been perfect—right up to the moment they put dry- cleaning bags over their heads, embraced, and slowly lost consciousness in front of their infant daughter.

Normally, Lash did not permit personal introspection. It led nowhere, dulled his objectivity. But he decided to allow himself another observation. He had not chosen this place at random, after all. This sanctuary, this pathway—and, in fact, this very blind—had been the spot where, three years before, Shirley said she never wanted to see him again.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.Lash wondered what kind of a journey the Thorpes had embarked on. Or for that matter, what kind of a journey he himself was undertaking to discover their secret. It was a journey his better judgment told him to resist even as his feet led him farther down the path.

He passed his hand wearily across his eyes, reached for the bulky envelope, and tore it open with a tug of his index finger.

Inside were just over a hundred sheets of paper: the results of Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe’s inkblot tests, administered by Eden during their application process.

As a high school student, Lash had been fascinated by inkblots; by the idea that seeing objects in random smudges could say something about you. It wasn’t until graduate school, when he studied test administration—and took the test himself, as all psych students were required to do—that he realized how profound a tool of psychodiagnosis it could be. Inkblots were known as “projective” tests because—unlike highly structured, objective written tests like the WAIS or MMPI—the concept of right and wrong was ambiguous. Looking for images in an inkblot required bringing deeper, complex areas of personality to bear.

Eden used the Hirschfeldt test, a choice Lash wholeheartedly approved. Though indirectly based on Exner’s refinement of the original Rorschach, the Hirschfeldt test had several advantages. There were only ten Rorschach inkblots, and these were kept secret by psychologists: it would be easy for a person to memorize the “right” responses to such a small number of blots. Each administration of the Hirschfeldt test, on the other hand, drew from a catalogue of five hundred catalogued blots—far too many to memorize. Thirty blots were shown, rather than ten, generating a deeper response pool from the subject. Unlike the Rorschach, where half of the inkblots were in color, all of the blots in the Hirschfeldt test were black and white; its supporters thought color to be an unimportant distraction.

Lindsay Thorpe’s test results came first. Lash paused a moment to imagine her in the examination room. It would be quiet, comfortable, free of distraction. The test administrator would be sitting slightly behind her; face-to-face examinations were to be avoided. Lindsay Thorpe would not see the inkblots until the moment the examiner laid them upon the table before her.

The ground rules of the test were as guarded as the blots themselves. Any question she asked would be met with a preformulated response. Lindsay would not know thateverything she said about the blots, relevant or not, would be written down and scored. She would not know that her responses were being timed with a silent watch: the quicker her responses, the better. She would not know that she was supposed to see more than one thing in each card; seeing only one was suggestive of neurosis. And she wouldn’t know that—though the test administrator would deny it if asked—each carddid in fact have a “normal” response. If you saw something original, and could justify it, you’d get points for creativity. But seeing something nobody else saw in an inkblot usually implied psychosis.

Lash turned to the first blot. Below it, the administrator had recorded Lindsay’s responses verbatim.

There were two steps to viewing each card: a free-association phase, where the subject stated his or her first impressions of the card, and an inquiry phase, where the examiner would ask the subject to justify their impressions. Lash noticed, from the arrow marked on the third free association, that Lindsay had on her own volition turned the card upside down and kept it that way. That was a sign of independent thinking: if you asked whether you could turn the card over, you got a lower score. Lash recognized this blot, and Lindsay had hit most of the typical responses: a mask, a bat. No doubt the examiner would have noted Lindsay’s reference to the devil, an extraneous remark that would need to be scored.

The next sheet in the pile was the examiner’s scoring sheet for this first card:

Lash quickly reviewed the way Lindsay’s four responses had been typed and scored. The examiner had done a thorough job. Despite the years since he’d last administered a Hirschfeldt test, the arcane codes came back to him:B stood for a response encompassing the whole blot;D for a response to a commonly noted detail. Human and animal forms, anatomy, nature, and the rest were all noted. In all four responses, Lindsay’s form factors had been markedO K: a good sign. She saw more images in the white spaces than usual, but not enough to cause any concern. In the “specials” category—where examiners listed deviant verbalizations and other no-nos—Lindsay received only one mark, MOR, for morbid content: no doubt for her characterization of the image as a “devil mask” and “scary.”

He moved on to the second blot:

Again, the examiner had carefully listed Lindsay’s responses.

Again, Lash recognized this blot. Lindsay Thorpe’s responses were all within normal.

Lash looked back idly at the blot. Suddenly, he stiffened. Completely unexpectedly, a series of associations flashed through his own mind as he stared: a quickly spreading sea of red across a white carpet; a dripping kitchen knife; the grinning mask of Edmund Wyre, handcuffed and in leg irons, as he was arraigned before a sea of shocked faces.

God damn Roger Goodkind and his curiosity, Lash thought as he put the blot quickly aside.

He leafed brusquely through the other twenty-eight blots, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Lindsay was characterized as a well-adjusted, intelligent, creative, rather ambitious person. He knew this already. The faint hope that had again stirred within him began to fade.

There was still one more item to examine. He turned to the structural summary page, where all Lindsay Thorpe’s scores were put through a series of ratios, frequency analyses, and other algebraic convolutions to determine particular personality traits. One of these sets of traits was known as “special indications,” and it was to this Lash turned his attention.

The special indications were red flags. If more than a set number of responses fell under a specific indicator—SZ for schizophrenia, for example—it was flagged positive. One of the special indications, S-Cluster, measured suicide potential.

Lindsay Thorpe’s S-Cluster showed negative; in fact, she was coded as displaying zero out of eight possible suicide indicators.

With a sigh, Lash put Lindsay’s results aside and picked up her husband’s.

He had just finished ascertaining that Lewis Thorpe’s suicide cluster was as low as Lindsay’s when a beep sounded from his jacket pocket. Lash drew out his cell phone. “Yes?”

“Dr. Lash? It’s Edwin Mauchly.”

Lash felt mild surprise. He didn’t give out his cell number to anybody, and he certainly didn’t recall giving it to Eden.

“Where are you right now?” Mauchly’s voice sounded different: clipped, brusque.

“Greenwich. Why?”

“It’s happened again.”

“What’s happened?”

“There’s been another one. Another double-suicide attempt. A supercouple.”

“What?” Surprise vanished beneath a wave of disbelief.

“The couple’s name is Wilner. Larchmont residents. They’re en route to Southern Westchester now. From your location, you should be able to make it in—” there was a brief pause “—fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t waste any time.”

And the line went dead.

NINE

Southern Westchester County Medical Center was a cluster of brick buildings on the outskirts of Rye, just over the New York border. As Lash screeched into the ambulance entrance, he could see that the ER was unusually quiet. Just two vehicles sat together in the shadows beyond the glass admitting doors. One was an ambulance; the other a long, low, hearse-like vehicle bearing the seal of the county medical examiner. The rear doors of the ambulance were open, and as Lash trotted across the blacktop he glanced toward it. An EMS technician was at work with a bucket and sanitizer, swabbing the interior. Even from twenty yards Lash caught the coppery tang of blood.

The smell brought him up short, and he glanced hesitantly up at the building’s dark-red bulk. He had not been inside an emergency room in three years. Then, recalling the urgency in Mauchly’s voice, he forced himself forward once again.

The waiting area seemed subdued. Half a dozen people sat in plastic chairs, staring vacantly at walls or filling out forms. A small knot of policemen stood in one corner, talking among themselves in low tones. Quickly, Lash headed for the door marked SQUADROOM, opened it, felt along the wall for the button that opened the automatic doors into the emergency room.

The doors whispered open onto a far different scene. Several orderlies were at work, scrambling with equipment trays. A nurse walked by, liters of blood clutched in her arms. Another followed with a crash cart. Three EMS technicians were standing at the nurses’ station, not speaking. They looked dazed. Two were still wearing pale-green gloves heavily smeared with blood.

Lash scanned the area for a familiar face. Almost instantly he spotted the chief resident, Alfred Chen, walking toward him. Normally, Chen moved with the slow, stately grace of a prophet, a smile on his Buddha-like face. Tonight, Chen was moving quickly, and the smile was gone.

The resident’s eyes were on a metal clipboard in his hands, and he didn’t bother looking up at Lash. As Chen passed, Lash stuck out an arm. “Alfred. How’s it going?”

Chen stared blankly for a moment. “Oh. Chris. Hi.” The smile made a brief appearance. “Could be better. Listen, I—”

“I’m here to see the Wilner couple.”

Chen looked surprised. “That’s where I’m headed. Follow me.”

Lash swung in beside the resident.

“Are they patients of yours?” Chen asked.

“Prospective.”

“How’d you hear about it so fast? They just got here five minutes ago.”

“What happened?”

“Suicide pact, according to police. Pretty thorough job of it, too. Radial vein, opened lengthwise from wrist to forearm.”

“In the bath?”

“That’s the strange part. They were found in bed together. Fully clothed.”

Lash felt the muscles of his jaw tighten. “Who found them?”

“Blood came through the ceiling of the condo below theirs, and the owner called the police. They must have been there for hours.”

“What’s their condition?”

“John Wilner bled out,” Chen puffed. “Dead on the scene. His wife is alive, but just barely.”

“Any kids?”

“No.” Chen glanced down at the sheet. “But Karen Wilner is five months pregnant.”

Ahead, the nurse with the crash cart disappeared behind a drawn curtain. Chen followed, Lash at his heels.

The space beyond was so crowded that at first Lash could not see the bed. Somewhere, an EKG was bleating out a dangerously fast pulse. There was a torrent of voices, talking over each other, calm but urgent.

“Heartbeat’s at 120, out of sinus tach,” a woman said.

“Systolic’s at 70.”

An alarm sounded abruptly, adding its drone to the babel.

“Hang more plasma!” This voice was louder, more insistent.

Lash slipped along behind the blue-garbed figures, back against the curtain, working toward the head of the bed. As he squeezed into position between two racks of diagnostic equipment, Karen Wilner finally became visible.

She was like alabaster, so pale Lash could see an incredible tracery of starved veins around her neck, across her breasts, down the sweep of her arms. Her blouse and bra had been cut away, and her torso swabbed clean, but she was still wearing a skirt and it was here the whiteness ended. The fabric was soaked through with blood. Twin IVs, turned wide open, were notched into her inner elbows: one of plasma, the other of saline. Below these, tourniquets were placed around her forearms, and doctors were at work, trying to suture the ruined veins.

“We’ve got vasospasm,” said a nurse, one hand to the patient’s forehead. Karen Wilner’s eyes remained closed, and she did not respond to the pressure of the nurse’s hand.

Lash slipped in closer, knelt down beside the motionless face.

“Ms. Wilner,” he murmured. “Why? Why did you do it?”

“What are you doing?” the nurse demanded. “Who is this guy?”

The bleat of the EKG machine had slowed to a lazy, irregular rhythm. “Bradycardia!” a voice called. “Pressure’s down to 45 over 20.”

Lash drew closer. “Karen,” he said, more urgently. “I need to know why.Please .”

“Christopher, move away,” Dr. Chen warned from the far side of the bed.

The woman’s eyes fluttered open; closed; opened again. They were dry and even paler than her skin.

“Karen,” Lash repeated, placing a hand on her shoulder. It felt like marble.

“Make it stop,” she said, the words more breath than voice.

“Make what stop?” Lash said.

“That sound,” the woman replied, almost inaudibly. “That sound in my head.”

Her eyes slipped closed again, and her head lolled to one side.

“We’re losing her!” a nurse cried.

“What sound?” Lash said, bending closer. “Karen,what sound ?”

He felt a hand land on his shoulder, pull him back. “Away from the bed, mister,” said an orderly. His eyes glittered black above the white gauze of his mask.

Lash retreated between the racks of equipment. The EKG was now droning a high, incessant note. The nurse scrambled forward with the crash cart.

“Charged?” asked Dr. Chen as he took the paddles.

“One hundred joules.”

“Back!” called Chen.

Lash watched Karen Wilner’s body stiffen as electricity coursed through it. The driplines hanging from the IV racks whipsawed violently back and forth.

“Again!” Chen cried, paddles raised in the air. For a moment, his gaze met Lash’s own. Brief as it was, the glance said everything.

With one final, searching look at Karen Wilner, Lash turned and left the emergency bay.

TEN

This time, when Edwin Mauchly ushered Lash into the Eden boardroom, the table was full. Lash recognized some of the faces: Harold Perrin, ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Caroline Long of the Long Foundation. Others were unfamiliar. But it was clear the entire board of Eden Incorporated was assembled before him. The only person missing was the company’s reclusive founder, Richard Silver: although the man had rarely been photographed in recent years, it was clear none of the faces assembled here belonged to him. Some looked at Lash with curiosity; others with grave concern; still others with an expression that was probably hope.

John Lelyveld sat in the same chair he’d occupied at the first meeting. “Dr. Lash.” And he waved at the sole vacant seat. Mauchly quietly closed the door to the boardroom and stood before it, arms behind his back.

The chairman turned to a woman at his right. “Stop the transcription, if you please, Ms. French.” Then he looked back at Lash. “Would you care for anything? Coffee, tea?”

“Coffee, thanks.” Lash studied Lelyveld’s face as the man made brisk introductions. The benevolent, almost grandfatherly manner of the prior meeting was gone. Now the Eden chairman seemed formal, preoccupied, a little distant.This is no longer a coincidence , Lash thought,and he knows it . Directly or indirectly, Eden was involved.

The coffee arrived and Lash accepted it gratefully: there had been no time for sleep the night before.

“Dr. Lash,” Lelyveld said. “I think everyone would be more comfortable if we got straight to the matter at hand. I realize you haven’t had much time, but I wonder if you could bring us up to speed on anything you’ve learned, and whether—” he paused to glance around the table “—whether there’s any explanation.”

Lash sipped his coffee. “I’ve spoken with the coroner and local law enforcement. On the face of it, everything still points to the original conclusion of double suicide.”

Lelyveld frowned. Several chairs away, a man who’d been introduced as Gregory Minor, executive vice president, moved restlessly in his seat. He was younger than Lelyveld, black-haired, with an intelligent, penetrating gaze. “What about the Wilners themselves?” he asked. “Any indications to explain this?”

“None. It’s just like the Thorpes. The Wilners had everything going for them. I talked to an emergency room intern who knew the couple. They had great jobs: John an investment banker, Karen a university librarian. She was pregnant with their first child. No history of depression or anything else. No apparent financial difficulties, no family tragedies of any kind. The autopsy bloods were clean. It will take a thorough investigation to be certain, but there seems no evidence to indicate suicidal tendencies.”

“Except the bodies,” Minor said.

“The evaluator at their class reunion here made a similar report. They seemed just as happy as the rest of the couples.” Lelyveld glanced at Lash. “You used the phrase ‘on the face of it.’ Care to elaborate?”

Lash took another sip of coffee. “It’s obvious the suicides in Flagstaff and Larchmont are related. We’re not dealing with coincidence. And so we need to treat these incidents as what, at Quantico, we termed ‘equivocal death.’ ”

“Equivocal death?” Caroline Long sat to his right, her blond hair almost colorless in the artificial light. “Explain, please.”

“It’s a type of analysis the Bureau pioneered twenty years ago. We know the victims, we know how they died, but we don’t yet know themanner of death. In this case, double suicide, suicide-homicide—or homicide.”

“Homicide?” said Minor. “Just a minute. You said the police are treating these deaths as suicides.”

“I know.”

“And everything you’ve observed agrees with that finding.”

“That’s correct. I mention equivocal death because what we have is an enigma. Everyphysical sign points to suicide. But everypsychological sign points away from it. So we can’t close our minds to any possibility.”

He looked around the table. When nobody spoke, he went on.

“What are those possibilities? If we’re dealing with homicide, then it has to be somebody who knew both couples. A rejected suitor, perhaps? Or somebody who was rejected as an Eden client by your winnowing process and now holds a grudge?”

“Impossible,” Minor said. “Our records are kept under the most stringent security. No rejected applicant knows the identities or addresses of our clients.”

“They could have met in the lobby, the day they both applied. Or one of the couples could have bragged about their experience at Eden to the wrong person.”

Lelyveld shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so. Our security and confidentiality procedures begin the moment somebody steps into the building. They’re transparent for the most part, but they would forestall the kind of casual interaction you describe. As for the other, we caution our couples against any boastfulness. It’s one of the things we monitor at the class reunions. And both the Thorpes and the Wilners were discreet about how they met.”

Lash drained his coffee. “All right, then. Back to suicide. Maybe there’s something inherently wrong with the makeup of a supercouple. Some psychopathology in the relationship, but very deep and subtle, something that wouldn’t show up in the usual screenings at your—what do you call them?—class reunions.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Minor.

“Nonsense?” Lash raised his eyebrows. “Nature abhors perfection, Mr. Minor. Show me a rose without at least a minor blemish. Pure gold is so soft as to be unworkable, useless. Only fractals are perfect, and even they are fundamentally asymmetrical.”

“I think what Greg means is that, even if such a thing were possible, we would have learned about it,” Lelyveld said. “Our psychological assets run extremely deep. Such a phenomenon would have been picked up in our evaluations.”

“It’s just a theory. In any case, homicide or suicide, Eden is the key. It’s the one thing, theonly thing, these couples have in common. So I need to understand the process better. I want to see what the Thorpes saw, what the Wilners saw, as your clients. I want to know just how they were selected as perfect couples. And I’ll need access—unrestrictedaccess—to their files.”

This time, Gregory Minor rose to his feet. “That’s out of the question!” He turned to Lelyveld. “You know I’ve had reservations from the first, John. Bringing in somebody from the outside is dangerous, destabilizing. It was one thing when we were dealing with an isolated incident, something that affected us tangentially. But with what happened last night—well, the security risk is too great.”

“It’s too late,” Caroline Long replied. “The risk goes beyond company secrets now. You of all people, Gregory, should understand that.”

“Then forget security for the moment. It just doesn’t make sense bringing somebody like Lash inside the Wall. You read his jacket, that messy business just before he left the FBI. We have a hundred psychologists on staff already, all with impeccable credentials. Think of the time and effort it would take to get him up to speed. And for what? Nobody knows why these people died. Who’s to say there’s reason to think it will happen again?”

“You want to take that chance?” Lash retorted angrily. “Because there’s one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty. You’ve caught a huge break. These two double suicides happenedon different coasts . And in the case of the Wilners particularly, so close to home, you’ve managed to keep things low key, out of the press. So nobody’s picked up on the coincidence. But if athird couple decides to go out the same way, there won’t be a chance in hell of keeping your precious company out of the news.”

He sat back, breathing heavily. He raised his coffee cup, remembered it was empty, set it back down again.

“I fear Dr. Lash is right,” Lelyveld said, his voice soft. “We must understand what’s going on and put a stop to it, one way or another—not just for the sake of the Thorpes and the Wilners, but for Eden as well.” He glanced at Minor. “Greg, I think Dr. Lash’s objectivity here is an asset rather than a liability. He may not yet understand the process, but he comes to it with a fresh eye. Of the dozen candidates we considered, he has the best qualifications. We already have his confidentiality agreement on file. I say we put bringing him inside to a vote.” He took a sip from a glass of water by his elbow, then raised his hand into the silence.

Slowly, another hand went up; then another, and another. Soon, all hands had been raised except those of Gregory Minor and another man in a dark suit beside him.

“The motion is passed,” Lelyveld said. “Dr. Lash, Edwin here will get the process started for you.”

Lash stood up.

But Lelyveld wasn’t through. “You’re being given unprecedented access to Eden’s inner workings. You’ve requested—and been granted—a chance to do what nobody with your knowledge has done before: experience the process as an actual applicant. You’d do well to remember the old saying Be careful what you wish for.”

Lash nodded, turned away.

“And Dr. Lash?” Lelyveld’s voice came again.

Lash turned back to face the chairman.

“Work quickly. Quickly.”

As Mauchly opened the door, Lash heard Lelyveld say, “You may resume transcribing the minutes of the meeting, Ms. French.”

ELEVEN

Kevin Connelly walked across the broad blacktop lot of the Stoneham Corporate Center, making for his car. It was a Mercedes S-class, low-slung and silver, and Connelly was careful to park it far from other vehicles: it was worth the extra walk to avoid dings and scratches.

He unlocked the door, opened it, and slid onto the black leather. Connelly loved fine cars, and everything about the Mercedes—the solid thunk of the door, the cradling sensation of the seat, the low throb of the engine—gave him pleasure. The AMG performance package had been worth every penny of the twenty grand it added to the sticker price. There had been a time, not so long ago, when the drive home itself would have been the highlight of his evening.

That time was gone.

Connelly eased across the lot and slid onto the feeder road for Route 128, mentally plotting his route home. He’d stop by Burlington Wine Merchants for a bottle of Perrier-Jouet, then visit the adjoining florist for a bouquet. Fuchsias this week, he decided; she wouldn’t be expecting fuchsias. Flowers and champagne had become a staple of his Saturday evenings with Lynn: the only mystery, she liked to joke, was the color of roses he’d bring home.

If someone had told him, just a few years before, what a difference Lynn would make in his life, he would have scoffed. He had an exciting and challenging job as CIO for a software development company; he had plenty of friends and more than enough interests to occupy his free time; he made a lot of money and never had problems meeting women. And yet, on some almost subconscious level, he must have known something was missing. Otherwise he would never have visited Eden in the first place. But even after enduring the grueling evaluation, even after shelling out the $25,000 fee, he’d had no inkling of how Lynn would make his life complete. It was as if he’d been blind all his life, never understanding what he’d been missing until the gift of sight was suddenly granted.

He pulled onto the freeway and merged with the weekend traffic, enjoying the effortless acceleration of the big engine. The strange thing, he remembered, was how he’d felt that night of their first meeting. For the first fifteen minutes, maybe even more, he’d thought it was a huge mistake; that somehow Eden had blundered, maybe mixed up his name with somebody else’s. He’d been warned in his exit interview this was a common initial reaction, but that made no difference: he’d spent the first part of the date looking across the restaurant table at a woman who looked nothing like what he expected, wondering how quickly he could get back the twenty-five grand he’d dropped on the crazy scheme.

But then, something had happened. Even now, no matter how many times he and Lynn had joked about it in the months that followed, he couldn’t articulate just what it was. It had crept up on him. Over the course of the dinner he’d discovered—often in ways he could never have expected—interests, tastes, likes and dislikes they shared. Even more intriguing were areas where they differed. It was as if, somehow, each filled gaps in the other. He’d always been weak in foreign languages; she was fluent in French as well as Spanish, and explained to him why language immersion was more natural than memorizing a textbook. She’d spent the second half of the dinner speaking only in French, and by the time his crème brûlée arrived he marveled at how much he was managing to understand. On their second date, he learned Lynn was afraid to fly; as a private pilot, he explained how to cope with fear of flying and offered to take her up for desensitization flights in the Cessna he co-owned.

He shifted lanes, smiling to himself. These were crude examples, and he knew it. Truth was, the way their personalities complemented each other’s was probably too subtle and multifaceted to detail. He could only compare it to the other women he’d known. The real difference, thefundamental difference, was that he’d known her close to two years—and yet he was as excited now at the prospect of seeing her as he’d been in the first flush of new love.

He wasn’t perfect; far from it. Eden’s psychological screening had made his own faults all too clear. He tended to be impatient. He was rather arrogant. And so on. But somehow, Lynn canceled these things out. He’d learned from her quiet self-assurance, her patience. And she had learned from him, as well. When they’d first met, she was quiet, a little reserved. But she’d loosened up a lot. She was still quiet at times—the last couple of days, for example—but it had grown so subtle that nobody but he would have noticed.

Although he’d never have admitted it to anybody, the thing he’d been most worried about, going into Eden, was the sex. He was old enough, and he’d had enough relationships, for bedroom marathons to be less important to him than they once were. He was by no means a Viagra candidate, but he found he now had to feel deeply about a woman before he could really respond. This had been an issue in his prior relationship: the woman had been fifteen years his junior, and her sexual hunger, which as a young stud he would have found desirable, had been a little intimidating.

It proved a non-issue with Lynn. She’d been so patient and so loving—and her body was so wonderfully sensitive to his touch—that the sex was the best of his life. And, like everything else about the marriage, it only seemed to get better with time. He felt an electric tickle of lust as he thought about their upcoming anniversary. They were going to spend it at Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Canada, where their honeymoon had been.Just a few more days , Connelly thought as he slowed for his exit. If there was anything on Lynn’s mind, the spray of the Maid of the Mist would soon drive it far, far away.

TWELVE

At 8:55 Sunday morning, Christopher Lash pushed through a revolving door and entered the lobby of Eden Incorporated, surrounded by dozens of other hopeful clients. It was a crisp, sunny autumn day, and the pink granite walls blazed with light. Today he’d left the satchel at home. In fact, other than his wallet and his car keys, the only thing in Lash’s pockets was a card Mauchly had given him at their last meeting reading simply:Candidate Processing, 9 a.m. Sunday .

As he walked toward the escalator, Lash mentally reviewed the test preparations he’d been coached on at the Academy, over a decade ago. Get a good night’s sleep. Eat a breakfast high in carbs and low in sugar. No alcohol or drugs. Don’t panic.

Three out of four, he thought. He was tired, and despite the mammoth Starbucks espresso he’d had on the drive in, he found himself craving another. And though he was far from panicked, he was aware of feeling uncharacteristically nervous.That’s okay , he reminded himself: a little tension kept you alert. But he kept recalling what the man said at the class reunion he’d observed:If I’d known just what was in store for me, I don’t know if I’d have had the cojonesto take that evaluation. It was a brutal day .

He put this aside as he approached the escalator. Amazing to think that demand for Eden’s services was so great it had to process its applicants seven days a week. He stepped on, looking curiously at the people ascending the twin escalator to his left. What had been going through Lewis Thorpe’s head when he rode this same escalator? Or John Wilner’s? Were they excited? Nervous? Scared?

As he watched, he saw two people on the adjoining escalator—a middle-aged man and a young woman, a few riders apart—exchange a brief glance. The man nodded almost imperceptibly at the woman, then looked away. Lash thought of what the chairman had said: security was subtle but ever-present. Were some of these would-be applicants really Eden operatives?

Reaching the top of the escalator, Lash passed beneath the wide archway and entered a passage decorated with cheery promotional posters. Faint parallel lines had been etched into the floor, creating a series of wide lanes leading down the passage. They had the effect of making the applicants—of their own accord, or through subtle orchestration—spread apart and walk side by side. Ahead, each lane terminated in a door. A technician in a white coat stood before each. Lash could see the person at the end of his lane was a tall, slender man of about thirty.

As Lash approached, the man nodded and opened the door behind him. “Step inside, please,” he said. Lash glanced around and noticed attendants at the other doors doing the same. He stepped through his doorway.

Ahead lay another hallway, very narrow, unrelievedly white. The man closed the door, then led the way down the featureless hall. After the airy lobby and the wide approach corridor, this space felt claustrophobic. Lash followed the man down the passage until it opened into a small, square room. It was as white as the hallway. Its only features were six identical doors set into the surrounding walls. Instead of a handle, each door had a small white card reader bolted to its face. One door in the far wall had a placard designating it a unisex bathroom.

The man turned toward him. “Dr. Lash,” he said. “I’m Robert Vogel. Welcome to your Eden evaluation.”

“Thanks,” said Lash, shaking the proffered hand.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“We’ve got a long day ahead of us. If at any time you have questions or concerns, I’ll do my best to address them.”

Lash nodded as the man slipped a hand into his lab coat and pulled out a palmtop computer. He plucked a stylus from its groove and began scrawling on the pad. After a moment, he frowned.

“What is it?” Lash asked quickly.

“Nothing. It’s just—” the man seemed surprised. “It’s just that you’re showing up as pre-approved for the evaluation. I’ve never seen that before. You had no initial screening?”

“No, I didn’t. If it’s a problem—”

“Oh, no. Everything else checks out.” The man recovered quickly. “You do understand, of course, that you won’t be formally accepted as a candidate until after today’s evaluation?”

“Yes.”

“And that if you are not accepted, your application fee of $1,000 is nonrefundable?”

“Yes.” There had been no application fee, of course, but the man didn’t have to know everything. Lash was relieved: clearly, Vogel didn’t know his real purpose in being here. Lash had told Mauchly emphatically that he wanted to be treated as a real candidate, see everything the Thorpes and the Wilners had seen.

“Any questions before we begin?” When Lash shook his head, Vogel drew a card from around his neck, strung on a long black cord. Lash looked at it curiously: it was pewter-colored, with an iridescence that did not completely hide the gold-green of microprocessing inside. Eden’s infinity logo was embossed on one side. Vogel ran the card through the reader by the nearest door, and it sprang open with a click.

The room beyond seemed little wider than the hallway. There was a digital camera on a tripod inside, and a painted X on the floor beyond the camera.

“Please stand on the cross and look at the lens. I’m going to ask you two questions. Answer them as completely and as truthfully as you can.” And Vogel took up position behind the camera. Almost immediately, a tiny red light glowed on its upper housing.

“Why are you here?” Vogel asked.

Lash hesitated for just a moment, remembering the tapes he’d watched in the Flagstaff house.If I’m going to do this at all , he thought,I should do it right . And that meant honesty, avoiding easy or cynical answers.

“I’m here because I’m searching for something,” he replied. “For an answer.”

“Describe one thing you did this morning, and why you think we should know about it.”

Lash thought. “I caused a traffic jam.”

Vogel said nothing, and Lash went on.

“I was on I-95, coming into the city. I’ve got an E-ZPass unit for the windshield so I don’t have to pay cash at the tunnels and toll roads. I get to the bridge leading into Manhattan. It took a little time, because one of the three lanes at the toll plaza was down. The reader scans my card. But for some reason, the wooden gate doesn’t lift. I sit for a minute until an attendant comes. She tells me my E-ZPass is invalid. That it was revoked. But that’s not the case, I’m fully paid up. The thing had worked fine half a dozen times just this week. Clearly their system was messed up. But she insists I pay the six dollars to get across the bridge in cash. I say no, I want her to fix the error. Meanwhile, now there’s only one good lane onto the bridge. The line behind me is growing longer. People are honking. She insists. I stick to my guns. A cop takes notice, starts to walk over. Finally she calls me an unpleasant name, opens the gate manually, and lets me through. I give her my most endearing smile as I pass.”

He stopped, wondering why this of all things had come to mind. Then he realized it was, in fact, in character. If he’d been here for himself, for real, he’d have said something equally mundane. It wasn’t like him to cough up a teary-eyed story about how he’d embarked on a quest for the woman of his dreams.

“I guess I mention this because it reminds me of my father,” Lash went on. “He was very combative over the little things, as if it was a personal grudge match between him and life. Maybe I’m more like him than I realized.”

He fell silent, and after a moment the red light went out.

“Thank you, Dr. Lash,” Vogel said. He stepped away from the camera. “And now, if you’d follow me, please?”

They returned to the small central hallway, and Vogel swiped his card through the reader of the adjoining door. The room beyond was larger than the first. It contained a chair and a desk, on which sat a small Lucite cube holding sharpened pencils. Once again, the room was unrelievedly white. The ceiling was entirely covered in squares of frosted plastic. All these little rooms, identical in color and lack of decoration, each being used for a single purpose: they seemed to Lash almost like a genteel version of an interrogation suite.

Vogel motioned Lash to sit down. “Our tests run on a clock, but only to make sure that you complete the necessary battery by the end of the day. You have one hour, and I think you’ll find it plenty of time. There are no right or wrong answers. If you have any questions, I’ll be just outside.” He laid a large white envelope on the desk, then left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

There was no clock, so Lash removed his watch and laid it on the table. He picked up the envelope, upended it into his hand. Inside was a thin test manual and a blank score sheet:

Lash scanned the questions quickly. He recognized its basic structure: it was an objective personality test, the kind made famous by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It seemed an odd choice for Eden; because such tests were primarily used as psychoanalytical diagnostics, they arranged personality into a series of scales, rather than ferreting out particular likes and dislikes. This seemed an unusually long test, too: while the MMPI-2 consisted of 567 questions, this test had precisely one thousand. Lash decided this was probably due to authentication factors: such tests always included a number of redundant questions to make sure that the subject was answering consistently. Eden was being extra-cautious.

He became aware of the ticking of his watch. With a sigh, he took one of the pencils from the Lucite cube and turned to the first question.

1. I enjoy watching large parades.

Lash did, so he shaded in theo in the “agree” column.

2. I sometimes hear voices other people claim not to hear.

A smoking gun if ever he’d seen one.No right or wrong answers—yeah, sure . If he answered in the positive, the ranking on his schizophrenia scale would increase. He shaded in the “strongly disagree”o .

3. I never lose my temper.

Lash recognized this question type by its use of the word “never.” All personality tests contained so-called validity scales: questions that could indicate whether the test-taker was lying, or exaggerating, or faking something like bravery (for police department applicants) or mental illness (for disability compensation). Lash knew that if you claimed too often never to feel fear, never to have told a fib, never to be moody, your lie scale would become elevated and your test thrown out as invalid. He shaded in the “disagree”o .

4. Most people tell me I’m an outgoing person.

This question skewed toward the extrovert/introvert scale. In such tests, extroversion was looked upon as a favorable trait. But Lash preferred his privacy. He again shaded the “disagree” oval.

The pencil point snapped and he cursed under his breath. Five minutes had already passed. If he was going to do this, he’d have to take the test like a typical person, filling in the answers instinctively rather than analyzing each one. He reached for a fresh pencil and reapplied himself to the task.

By ten o’clock, he had completed the battery of questions and been given a five-minute break. Then Vogel seated him again at the desk, left for a moment, and returned with another white envelope and the coffee Lash had requested: decaffeinated, the only kind offered. Lash opened the new envelope and found it contained a battery of cognitive intelligence tests: verbal comprehension; visual-spatial; a memory battery. Once again, the tests were longer and more thorough than he’d experienced before, and by the time he was done it was nearly eleven.

Another five-minute break; another cup of decaffeinated coffee; and a third white envelope. Rubbing his eyes blearily, Lash opened it and pulled out the stapled pamphlet within. This time, the test consisted of a long set of incomplete sentences:

I wish my father _________________________________

My second favorite food is _______________________

My greatest mistake was __________________________

I feel that children are __________________________

I’d like it if other people _____________________

I believe that mutual orgasm _______________________

I feel that red wine _______________________________

I would be completely happy if only _______________

Some areas of my body are very ___________________

Mountain hiking in spring is _______________________

The book with the greatest influence on me was ____

Here they were at last: the personal, intimate questions that had been noticeably lacking from the first test. Once again, Lash guessed there were close to a thousand. As he scanned the unfinished sentences, his instincts—both professional and personal—warned him to be disingenuous. But he reminded himself half-measures would not work here: if he was to fully understand the process, he had to experience it with the kind of commitment that the Wilners and the Thorpes had made. He took a fresh pencil, considered the first sentence, then completed it:

I wish my father had taken the time to praise me more often.

It was almost twelve-thirty by the time he filled in the last sentence, and Lash felt the beginnings of a headache creeping along his temples and behind his eyes. Vogel came in with a long, narrow sheet in his hand, and for a terrible moment Lash thought another test was coming. Instead, it was a lunch menu. Although he felt little appetite, he dutifully made his choices and handed it back to Vogel. The man suggested Lash take a bathroom break, then stepped out of the room, leaving the door open.

By the time Lash returned, Vogel had brought in a folding chair and placed it perpendicular to his own. Where the cube of pencils had been was now an oblong box of black cardboard.

“How are you feeling, Dr. Lash?” Vogel asked as he sat in the folding chair.

Lash passed a hand across his eyes. “Sandbagged.”

A smile flitted briefly across Vogel’s face. “It seems grueling, I know. But our studies have shown that a single, intensive day of evaluation yields the best results. Please sit.” He opened the box, revealing a stack of large cards face down.

The moment he saw a small number printed on the top card, Lash knew what lay ahead. He’d been so engrossed in the first three tests he’d almost forgotten about what he himself had examined in the blind just a few days before.

“We’re now going to do an inkblot test, known as the Hirschfeldt. Are you familiar with it?”

“More or less.”

“I see.” Vogel drew out a blank control sheet from the box, made a notation. “Let’s begin. I’ll show you the inkblots, one by one, and you tell me what they look like.” He lifted the first card from the box, turned it over, and placed it on the table, facing Lash. “What might this be?”

Lash looked at the picture, trying to empty his mind of prior associations—especially the terrible images that had jumped unbidden into his mind back at the Audubon Center. “I see a bird,” he said. “Up at the top. It’s like a raven, the white part is its beak. And the whole card looks like a warrior, Japanese, a ninja or samurai. With two swords in scabbards—you can see them sticking out there, left and right, pointed downwards.”

Vogel scribbled on the control sheet, taking down—Lash knew—his remarks verbatim. “Very good,” he said after a moment. “Let’s go on to the next one. What might this be?”

Lash worked his way through the cards, fighting a growing weariness, trying always to make the responses his own rather than what he knew to be common replies. By one o’clock, Vogel had finished both the response and inquiry phases of the test, and Lash’s headache had grown worse. As he watched Vogel put the cards away, he found himself wondering about all the other applicants who had streamed into the building this morning: were they all squirreled away somewhere on this floor, in their own little testing suites? Had Lewis Thorpe felt as exhausted as he himself did now, as tired of staring at the blank white walls?

“You must be hungry, Dr. Lash,” Vogel said as he closed the box. “Come on. Your lunch is waiting.”

Though he felt no hungrier now than before the inkblots, Lash followed him across the small central space to one of the doors in the far wall. Vogel swiped his card through the reader, and the door sprang open to reveal yet another white room. This, however, had prints on three of its walls. They were simple, well-framed photographs of forests and seacoasts, bereft of people or wildlife, yet Lash’s gaze rested hungrily on them after the sterile emptiness of the morning.

His lunch was laid out on a crisp linen tablecloth: cold poached salmon with dill sauce, wild rice, a sourdough roll, and coffee—decaffeinated, of course. As he ate, Lash felt his appetite return and the headache recede. Vogel, who had left him to dine in peace, returned twenty minutes later.

“What next?” Lash asked, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. He held out little hope his question would be answered, but Vogel surprised him.

“Just two more items,” Vogel said. “The physical examination and the psychological interview. If you’ve finished, we can proceed immediately.”

Lash laid the napkin aside and rose, thinking back again to what the man in the class reunion had said about his own day of testing. So far it had been tiring, even enervating, but nothing worse. A physical exam he could handle. And he’d given enough psychological interviews to know what to expect.

“Lead on,” he said.

Vogel ushered Lash back out into the central space and pointed at one of the two blank doors not yet opened. Vogel swiped his card through the reader, then began scratching something into his palm device with the plastic stylus. “You may proceed, Dr. Lash. Please remove your clothes and put on the hospital gown you’ll find inside. You can hang your things on the door hook.”

Lash entered the new room, closed the door, and looked around as he began undressing. It was an examination room, small but remarkably well equipped for its size. Unlike the previous rooms, there were plenty of items here, but most were of a kind Lash would have preferred not to see: probes, curette and syringe packets, sterile pads. A faint smell of antiseptic hung in the air.

Lash had no sooner donned the gown before the door opened again and a man stepped in. He was short and dark-complexioned, with thinning hair and a bottle-brush moustache. A stethoscope hung from the side pocket of his white coat.

“Let’s see,” he said, examining a folder in his hand. “Dr. Lash. Medical doctor, by chance?”

“No. Doctorate in psychology.”

“Very good, very good,” the doctor said, putting the folder aside and pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “Now just relax, Dr. Lash. This shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“An hour?” Lash said, but fell silent when he saw the doctor poking his finger into a jar of petroleum jelly.Maybe $100,000 isn’t such an outrageous fee, after all , he thought to himself.

The doctor’s estimate proved correct. Over the next sixty minutes, Lash endured a more comprehensive and painstaking physical examination than he’d ever thought possible. EKG and EEG; echocardiogram; samples of urine, stool, mucus membranes, and the epithelial lining of his mouth; an extensive background medical history of both himself and two generations of forebears; checks of reflexes and vision; neurological testing and fine motor control; an exhaustive dermatological examination. There was even a point when the doctor gave him a glass beaker and, leaving the room, asked for a sample of Lash’s ejaculate. As the door closed, Lash stared at the tube—chill in his fingers—and felt a sense of unreality creep over him.Makes sense , a small voice said in his head.Infertility or impotence would be an important concern .

Some time later, he told the doctor he could come in again, and the examination resumed.

“Just the blood work now,” the doctor said at last, arranging a tray containing at least two dozen small glass tubes, currently empty. “Please lean back on the examining table.”

Lash did so, closing his eyes as he felt a rubber tube tightening above his elbow. There was a cold swab of Betadine, a brief probing fingertip, then the sting of a needle sliding home.

“Make a fist, please,” the doctor said. Lash did so, waiting stoically while at least half a pint of blood was drawn. At last, he felt the tension of the rubber release. The doctor slipped out the needle and applied a small bandage in one smooth motion. Then he helped Lash into a sitting position. “How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.”

“Very well. You may proceed to the next room.”

“But my clothes—”

“They’ll be waiting here for you at the close of the interview.”

Lash blinked, digesting this a moment. And then he turned away, toward the central cubicle.

Vogel was there, once again scribbling something on his digital device. He looked up as Lash emerged from the examination room. The normally unflappable face now held an expression Lash couldn’t quite read.

“Dr. Lash,” Vogel said as he slipped the device back into his lab coat. “This way, if you please.” But Lash needed little guidance: there was only one door in the suite that had not yet been opened, and he could guess where the final interview would take place.

When he turned toward it, he found the door already ajar. And the room beyond was unlike any of the others he had seen that day.

THIRTEEN

Lash hesitated in the doorway. Ahead lay a room almost as small as the others, simply furnished: a chair in the center with unusually long armrests; a metal cabinet beside it; a table with a laptop near the rear wall. But Lash’s attention was drawn immediately to the leads that snaked away from the chair to the laptop. He’d sat in on enough interrogations to recognize the setup as a lie detector.

A man was seated behind the table, reading from a folder. Seeing Lash, he stood and came around the table. He was tall and cadaverously thin, his head covered with iron-gray hair, closely cropped. “Thank you, Robert,” the man said to the hovering Vogel. Then he closed the door and wordlessly motioned Lash toward the center chair.

Lash complied, feeling disbelief as the man attached clips to his fingertips, fitted a blood pressure cuff to his wrist.

The man moved out of Lash’s vision for a moment. When he returned, he was holding a red cap in one hand. A long, rainbow-hued ribbon cable was affixed to one side. Dozens of clear plastic discs, each about the size of a dime, had been sewn into the cloth.Two dozen, to be exact , Lash thought grimly. He recognized it as a “red cap,” adult headgear for the Quantitative EEG test, or QEEG, which monitored the frequencies of brain activity. It was usually used for neurological disorders, dissociation, head trauma, and so forth.

This was not like any psych interview he had ever heard of.

The man injected conducting gel into each of the twenty-four electrodes, attached the cap to Lash’s head, and fitted ground leads to each of his ears. Then he returned to the table and attached the ribbon cable to the laptop. Lash watched, the cap on his head feeling uncomfortably snug.

The man sat down and began typing. He peered at the screen, typed again. He had not shaken Lash’s hand or acknowledged him in any way.

Lash waited, numb, feeling exposed and undignified in his hospital gown. He knew from experience that, at heart, psych evaluations were often battles of wit between shrink and patient. One was trying to learn things that, many times, the other did not want to have known. Perhaps this was just some unique form of that game. He remained silent, waiting, trying to clear the fatigue from his head.

The man shifted his gaze from the laptop to the folder on his desk. Then, at long last, he lifted his head and looked Lash directly in the eyes.

“Dr. Lash,” he said. “I’m Dr. Alicto, your senior evaluator.”

Lash remained silent.

“As senior evaluator, I’m privy to a little more background information than Mr. Vogel. Information, for example, that would indicate your prior job no doubt familiarized you with a lie detector test.”

Lash nodded.

“In that case we’ll dispense with the usual business of demonstrating its effectiveness. And are you also familiar with the neurofeedback device I’ve placed on your head?”

Lash nodded again.

“As a clinician, you’re probably curious about its use in this environment. You know lie detectors only measure heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and so forth. We’ve found the factor-analyzed data from the QEEG an excellent complement. It allows us to go far beyond the normal ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses of a lie detector.”

“I see.”

“Please keep your arms motionless on the armrests and your back straight. I’m going to ask some baseline questions. Answer only yes or no. Is your name Christopher Lash?”

“Yes.”

“Do you currently reside at 17 Ship Bottom Road?”

“Yes.”

“Are you thirty-nine years old?”

“Yes.”

“Now I’m going to show you a playing card. Whatever color it is, red or blue, I want you to tell me theopposite color. Understand?”

“Yes.”

Alicto picked up a deck of cards, withdrew a red card, held it up. “What color is this card?”

“Blue.”

“Thank you.” Alicto put the deck away. “Now then. Have you completed today’s tests in as honest and complete a manner as possible?”

The man was looking at him with a quizzical, almost dubious expression. “Of course,” Lash said.

Alicto looked back down at the folder, let the silence build a moment. “Why are you here, Dr. Lash?”

“I should think that would be obvious.”

“Actually, it’s not obvious at all.” Alicto flipped over some pages in the folder. “You see, I’ve never done an evaluation on a psychologist before. For some reason, they never become Eden candidates. Internists, cardiologists, anesthesiologists by the truckload. But never psychologists or psychotherapists. I have a theory about that. But in any case, I’ve been going over your test results of the morning, particularly the personality inventory.” He raised a scoring sheet, giving Lash the merest glimpse:

“It’s intriguing, to say the least.” Alicto replaced the sheet in the folder.

Normally, psychometric evaluators would not reveal information like this to subjects. Lash wondered why Alicto was treating him in an almost cavalier way. “If you want to know more about my taste in movies, or if I prefer cognac to whisky, you should be concentrating on the preference test.”

Alicto glanced at him. “See, that’s another thing,” he said. “Most candidates are cooperative, eager to help, candid. Sarcastic responses are most unusual and, frankly, a matter of concern.”

Annoyance began bubbling up through the haze of weariness. “In other words, you intimidate your candidates and they act like sycophants in return. I can see how that would be gratifying to one’s ego. Particularly if that ego had been inadequately nurtured in earlier life.”

A flash of something—irritation, or perhaps suspicion—flickered in Alicto’s eyes. As quickly as it had come, it was gone again.

“You seem angry,” he said. “What is it about my questions that makes you angry?”

It occurred to Lash this very line of questioning could already be providing the responses Alicto was searching for. He fought back his annoyance. “Look,” he said in as reasonable a tone as he could muster. “It’s hard to feel cooperative when strapped to a lie detector, wearing nothing but a biofeedback cap and a hospital gown.”

“Actually, most candidates appreciate the lie detector, once they’ve gotten over the initial surprise. They find it reassuring to know that any partner they are matched with has been as honest as they’ve been.”

Alicto’s calm voice added to the unreality of the situation. Lash’s anger faded and grogginess again took its place. “Why don’t we get on with the evaluation?” he asked.

“What makes you think all this isn’t part of the evaluation, Dr. Lash? I’m evaluating you as a complete person in real time, not as the faceless body that completed those tests this morning. But very well, back to the personality inventory. While your scales for falsehood and median response are good, your remedial skews abnormally high.”

Lash remained silent.

“As you know, that implies you are limiting disclosure of negative information about yourself: trying to make a good impression, or trying to minimize personal problems.”

Lash waited, cursing himself for completing the tests candidly.

“Some of your clinical scales are most unusual for an Eden candidate. For example, your social introversion scale is high, as is your individual control scale. Taken together, these indicate a loner personality; someone who has perhaps had bad experiences in relationships. Such a person would not be motivated to take such a complete—and expensive—step as coming to us.” He glanced up from the folder. “Understand, Dr. Lash, that I would not usually share such technical details with a candidate. But your being a fellow psychologist . . . well, it’s a unique opportunity.”

A unique opportunity to watch me squirm,Lash thought.

“Such items alone would be of concern to me as an Eden evaluator. But there are also elements of the test—may I be frank here?—that reveal distinct pathonomonic signs. Red flags, if you will.” Another turning of pages. “For example, your amorality and self-alienation scales are unusually high. Your depression scale, though not exactly high, is well above modal. Your vulnerability scale—that is, your degree of sensitiveness to surrounding events—is also high, despite your individual control scale: an anomaly I can’t immediately explain. This all seems like a dangerous cocktail, Dr. Lash. Something I would urge you to have looked at and, if necessary, treated in a clinical setting.”

Alicto closed the folder with an air of finality and turned to the laptop. “Just a few more questions, Dr. Lash. I promise you this won’t take long.”

Lash nodded. Weariness threatened to engulf him.

“How long have you been in private practice?”

“Almost three years.”

“And your specialty?”

“Family relationships. Marital relationships.”

“And your own marital status?”

“I’m single.”

“Widowed?”

“No. Divorced. As you know.”

“Just another control question for the lie detector. Your heartbeat is accelerating, Dr. Lash. I would advise you to breathe slowly. When were you divorced?”

“Three years ago.”

“What was that like for you?”

“I was married. Now I’m not.”

“And you left the FBI for private practice around the same time.” Alicto looked up from the screen. “It would seem that quite an interesting nexus of events took place three years ago: a divorce, a highly dramatic career change. Would you care to elaborate on why the divorce took place?”

Lash felt himself tense.Does he know about Wyre? Is he just baiting me? Aloud, he answered, “No.”

“Why is it so difficult for you to talk about?”

“I just don’t see the relevance.”

“No relevance? For a potential client?”

“I’m here about my future, not my past.”

“One is shaped by the other. But very well. Let’s stay in the past a little longer. Elaborate a little on what you did for the FBI, if you please.”

“I was with the Investigative Support unit out of Quantico. I examined murder scenes, drew up psychological autopsies of the victim and unsub—the perpetrator. I’d look for commonalities between them, look for cause, draw up a profile of the killer and coordinate with NCAVC.”

“How did you feel about doing that kind of work?”

“It was challenging.”

“And were you good at your job?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you leave?”

It seemed an effort just to blink. “I grew tired of trying to figure out what had gone wrong with people after they were dead. I thought I could be more useful helping them when they were still alive.”

“Understandable. And, no doubt, you saw some terrible things.”

Lash nodded.

“But they didn’t affect you?”

“Of course they affected me.”

“What kind of a toll, exactly, did they take on you?”

“Toll?” Lash shrugged.

“So they didn’t disturb you in anypathological way. They ran off your back, so to speak. They didn’t affect your work or yourself.”

Lash nodded again.

“Could you answer aloud, please, Dr. Lash?”

“No, they did not.”

“I ask because I’ve read a few studies on agent burnout. Sometimes, when people see terrible things, they don’t address them as they should. Instead, they bury them, try to ignore them. And, in time, they come to live in a constant state of darkness. It’s not their fault: it’s the culture of the workplace. Showing pity, weakness, is frowned upon.”

Lash said nothing. Alicto glanced over at the laptop screen, made a notation on the folder. He paused, glancing over the sheets. Then he raised his head again.

“Was there any particular assignment in your prior job that precipitated your decision to leave? Some unusually unpleasant case, say? Some error or lapse of judgment on your part? Something, maybe, that spilled over into your private life?”

Despite the weariness, this question sent an electric twinge through Lash.So he does know, after all . He glanced quickly at Alicto, who was regarding him intently.

“No.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, no.”

“I see.” Alicto glanced at the screen again, made another notation. Then he leaned back from the laptop. “That concludes the interview, Dr. Lash,” he said, coming around the table and removing the cap and the finger clips. “Thank you for your patience.”

Lash stood up. The world rocked slightly and he steadied himself on the chair.

“Are you getting enough sleep?” Alicto asked. “Because I’ve observed you seem to be more than usually tired.”

“I’m fine.”

But Alicto was still looking at him closely, with what—now that the interview was concluded—seemed to be genuine concern. “You know, sleeplessness can be common in cases of—”

“I’mfine , thank you.”

Alicto nodded slowly. Then he turned away, raised his hand toward the door.

“What now?” Lash asked.

“You can put on your clothes. Vogel will see you out.”

Lash could hardly believe his luck. After what had gone before, he was sure the psychological interview would take hours. Most lie detector tests were protracted affairs, the same questions repeated over and over in slightly altered form. But this had taken just thirty minutes. “You mean, I’m done?”

“Yes, you’re done.” And the way Alicto said it made Lash hesitate.

“I’m very sorry,” said Alicto. “But in light of the results I’m going to have to recommend against your candidacy.”

Lash stared.

“There’s no point delaying the bad news. I hope you’ll understand. We have to always look at the big picture, what’s best for our clients as a whole, rather than the feelings of a single candidate. It’s difficult. We’ll provide you with some exit literature. Candidates who are declined often find reading it helps get over any feelings of rejection they might naturally have. I’m sure Vogel explained the initial fee is nonrefundable, but there will be no further charges. Take care, Dr. Lash—and bear in mind what I said about the red flags.”

And—for the first and last time—Alicto offered his hand.

FOURTEEN

Although it is three in the morning, the bedroom is bathed in merciless light. The two windows facing the deck of the pool house are rectangles of unrelieved black. The light seems so bright the entire room is reduced to a harsh geometry of right angles: the bed, the night table, the dresser. The light sucks color from the room: the wooden veneer of the dresser, the paisley comforter, the broken mirrors, are bleached to the color of bone. All that remains is the red covering the walls.

There is very little blood on the victim; remarkably little, under the circumstances. She lies naked on the carpet like a porcelain doll, alone beneath a circle of sodium vapor lights. Fingers and toes, carefully cut away at the first joint, are arranged like a halo around the head of the corpse.

There is a murmur of background voices, the low susurration of a crime scene being worked:

“Anal probe reads 83.9 degrees. Dead approximately six hours. Lack of rigor’s commensurate with this estimate.”

“Got any latents?”

“Latents is all we got.”

“Security system is central station, but the line was cut at the house foundation. Like with the Watkins girl.”

“Any entrance or egress yet?”

“The squad’s working it.”

Captain Harold Masterton, tall and heavily built, breaks away from a knot of Poughkeepsie police and walks across the room, carefully circling the bank of lights, hands in his pockets.

“Lash, you’re not looking so hot.”

“I’m fine.”

“So what do you know?”

“I’m still assessing. There are contradictory elements here, things that don’t make sense in the context.”

“Fuck the context. You’ve got enough support personnel crunching numbers back in Quantico to man a football team.”

“You’ve got the partial profile already.”

“The partial profile didn’t stop him from killing a second time.”

“I identify them. I don’t catch them. That’s your job.”

“Then give me enough tofindhim, for Christ’s sake. He’s written his damn autobiography twice now. He bled out two women just to get enough ink. There it is, right in front of our noses. He’s handing himself to you on a fucking plate. So when are you going to hand him to me? Or is he going to have to write it a third time?”

And Masterton gestured toward the wall, which was covered in neatly drawn block letters, crimson and recently dried, an endless litany of desperate words:I WANT TO BE CAUGHT .DONT LET ME KEEP CUTTING THEM .I DONT LIKE IT .THE SAINTS TELL ME TO CUT THEM BUT I DO NOT WANT TO BELIEVE. . .

Lash rose from his bed and went to the door, opened it, and walked toward the living room. The curtains of the picture window were thrown wide. Beyond, moonlight daubed the creamy breakers with a pale blue phosphorescence. The furniture was illuminated with the half-light of a Magritte painting. He sat down on the leather couch and hunched forward, arms resting on his knees, gaze still on the sea.

Earlier, as Vogel had directed him through a series of nondescript hallways and out a side door onto Fifty-fifth Street, he had been aware primarily of rage. He had walked in a red fog to his parking garage, conducting gel still drying on his scalp, throwing away the exit literature Vogel apologetically pressed into his hands. But as the evening wore on—as he’d eaten a light supper; checked his phone messages; conferred with Kline, the psychologist who was covering his practice—the anger ebbed, leaving an emptiness in its place. And when at last he could put off going to bed no longer, the emptiness began to give way to something else again.

And as he sat staring out at the sea, Dr. Alicto’s words came back yet again.You saw some terrible things. But they ran off your back. They didn’t affect your work or yourself .

Lash closed his eyes, unable to shake the lingering sense of disbelief. Going into Eden that morning, he had anticipated a great many things. But the one thing he had not anticipated was rejection. True, he’d gone through it simply as an exercise: the monochromatic Vogel; the annoying, faintly alarming Dr. Alicto—they had not known the real reason he was there. But that didn’t ease his failure. And now he’d come away from the process, not with clearer insight into the Wilners or the Thorpes, but with Dr. Alicto’s low, mellifluous voice buzzing in his head.

Sometimes, people don’t address the terrible things they see. They bury them in a deep place. And they come to live in a constant state of darkness . . .

During his years of analyzing and treating others, Lash had carefully abstained from directing that same searching light upon himself: from thinking about what drove him forward or held him back; about his motivations, good or bad. And yet now, here in the dark, those were the only thoughts coming into his head.

Was there any particular assignment in your prior job that precipitated your decision to leave? Some error or lapse of judgment on your part? Something that spilled over into your private life?

Lash stood up and made his way down the hall to his bathroom. He flicked on the light, opened the cupboard beneath the sink, and knelt down. There, under the extra bottles of shampoo and the blister-packs of razor blades, was a child’s shoe box. He reached for it, removed the cover. The little box was half full of small white tablets: Seconal, appropriated for him by a sympathetic fellow-agent years before, during a raid on a money launderer’s townhouse. When he’d moved to this house, he’d meant to flush them down the toilet. Somehow, he never had. And the sleeping pills had sat there, inhabiting the dark space beneath the sink, almost forgotten. They were three years old, but Lash was fairly certain they hadn’t expired. He grabbed a handful, held them in his palm, stared at them.

And then he dropped them back into the box and replaced it inside the cupboard. That would return him to the bad days, to the months just before—and just after—he left the Bureau. It was a place he did not ever want to revisit.

He rose and washed his hands, raising his face to the mirror as he did so.

Since he’d moved here, gone into private practice, sleep had returned. He could give up this case tomorrow, get back to his regular round of consultations. He could sleep well again.

And yet, somehow, he knew he could not do that. Because even now, as he looked in the mirror, he could see the ghostly outline of Lewis Thorpe, looking back at him through the wash of videotape: always, always, asking the same question . . .

. . .Why?

Lash dried his hands. Then he went back to his bedroom, lay down again, and waited—not for sleep, because sleep would not be coming—but simply for the morning.

FIFTEEN

The next morning, when Lash stepped out of the elevator onto the thirty-second floor, Mauchly was waiting for him.

“This way, please,” he said. “What have you learned about the Wilner couple?”

Not one for small talk, thought Lash. “Over the weekend, I managed to speak to their doctor, Karen Wilner’s brother, John Wilner’s mother, and a college friend who’d spent a week with them last month. It’s the same story as the Thorpes. The couple was almosttoo happy, if such a thing is possible. The friend said the one disagreement she’d witnessed had been minor—about which movie they should see that night—and it dissolved into laughter within a minute.”

“No indications for suicide?”

“None.”

“Hmm.” Mauchly steered Lash through an open door and into a room where a worker in a white coat waited behind a counter. Mauchly reached for a stapled document on the counter, handed it to Lash. “Sign this, please.”

Lash leafed through the long document. “Don’t tell me this is another confidentiality agreement. I’ve signed more than one of these already.”

“That was when you were privy only to general knowledge. Things have changed. This document just spells out in greater detail the extent of the punitive damages, civil and criminal liabilities, and the like.”

Lash dropped the document onto the counter. “Not very reassuring.”

“You must understand, Mr. Lash. You are the first non-employee to be given access to the most sensitive details of our operation.”

Lash sighed, took the proffered pen, and signed his name in two places indicated by yellow flags. “I’d hate to see the kind of screening your employees have to go through.”

“It’s much more stringent than the CIA’s. But our pay scales and benefits are uniquely high.”

Lash handed the document to Mauchly, who passed it to the man behind the desk. “What wrist do you wear your watch on, Dr. Lash?”

“What? Oh, the left one.”

“Then would you please extend your right arm?”

Lash did so, and was surprised when the worker behind the desk slipped a silver band around his right wrist, tightening it with what looked like a miniature band wrench.

“What thehell ?” Lash jerked his arm away.

“Strictly a security precaution.” Mauchly raised his own right wrist, displaying an identical bracelet. “It’s coded with your unique identifier. While you wear that, scanners can track your movements anywhere inside the building.”

Lash rotated the thing around his wrist. It was tight, but not uncomfortably so.

“Don’t worry, it will be cut off when your work here is complete.”

“Cutoff?”

Mauchly, who so rarely smiled, smiled faintly now. “If it was easy to remove, what would be the point? We’ve tried to make it as unobjectionable as possible.”

Lash glanced again at the smooth, narrow bracelet. Although he disliked jewelry—he’d even refused to wear a ring during his marriage—he had to admit the discreet-looking silver band was vaguely attractive. Especially for a manacle.

“Shall we?” Mauchly said, ushering Lash back into the hall and leading him to a different bank of elevators.

“Where are we going?” Lash said as the elevator began to descend.

“Where you requested. Following the Thorpes and the Wilners. We’re going inside the Wall.”

SIXTEEN

For a moment, Lash simply stared at Mauchly. The chairman’s words came back to him:You’re being given unprecedented access to Eden’s inner workings. You’ve requested—and been granted—a chance to do what nobody with your knowledge has done before .

“Inside the Wall,” he said. “I heard that same expression used in the emergency board meeting.”

“It’s quite literal. This tower is actually made up of three separate buildings. Not only for security, but for safety—in an emergency, the three structures can be completely isolated by security plates.”

Lash nodded.

“The front section of the Eden tower is what our clients see: the testing suites, breakout areas, screening rooms, conference halls, and the like. The rear structure is where the real work goes on. Physically, it’s larger. There are six entrance checkpoints. We’re headed for Checkpoint IV.”

“You mentioned three buildings.”

“Yes. Atop the inner tower is the penthouse. Dr. Silver’s private quarters.”

Lash glanced at Mauchly with new interest. So little was publicly known about the secretive founder of Eden, the brilliant computer scientist behind its technology, that simply hearing he lived here—that there was a good chance he was close at hand—seemed a revelation. Lash found himself wondering what kind of a person Silver was. An eccentric, Howard Hughes figure, emaciated and addicted? A despotic Nero? A cold, calculating arch-tycoon? Somehow, the mere lack of information served to increase his curiosity.

The elevator doors slid back to reveal a wider corridor. Lash could see that it ended in what looked like a wall of glass. A large Roman number IV glowed above it. People were queued before the glass wall, almost all of them wearing white lab coats.

“Most of the checkpoints are on the lowest levels of the building,” Mauchly said as they joined the end of the line. “Makes access easier at the start and the close of the working day.”

As the line shuffled slowly forward, Lash got a better look at what lay beyond the glass: a short hexagonal corridor, like a horizontal honeycomb, brightly lit, with another glass wall at the far end. As he watched, the near wall slid open; the person at the head of the line walked through; and the wall slid closed again.

“You didn’t bring along any mechanical devices, did you?” Mauchly asked. “Voice recorder, PDA, anything like that?”

“I left everything at home, as you requested.”

“Good. Just follow my lead. Once the guard has verified your bracelet, just walk slowly through the checkpoint.”

They had reached the head of the line. Two guards wearing beige-colored jumpsuits flanked the glass. Everything—the guards, the checkpoints, the bracelet, all the fanatical baggage of security—seemed out of scale. But then, Lash recalled what the company’s revenue had been the prior year. And Mauchly’s words:Secrecy is the only way to protect our service. There are any number of would-be competitors who will do whatever it takes to obtain our testing techniques, our evaluation algorithms, anything .

As Lash watched, Mauchly held his left hand beneath a scanner set into the wall. A blue light shone onto his skin, and the bracelet flashed. With a faint hiss, the glass wall slid away and Mauchly walked into the brilliant space beyond. The near wall closed, then the far wall opened. Once Mauchly was through the chamber and both doors had shut, the guards motioned Lash forward.

He held his bracelet beneath the scanner, felt his wrist grow warm under its beam. The glass wall slid back and he moved into the chamber.

Immediately, the wall whispered back into place behind him. The light inside the checkpoint chamber was so bright, and it reflected so brilliantly off the white surfaces, that Lash was only dimly aware there was more to this honeycomb chamber than bare walls. As he walked forward, he was aware of shapes protruding from the walls, painted the same white as their surroundings and hard to make out. There was a faint humming noise, like the purr of a distant generator. This was more than a corridor—it was a conduit linking two separate towers.

Then the glass wall at the far end slid open and he stepped out. There was a lone guard here, who nodded at Lash as he emerged. Lash nodded back, looking around curiously. “Inside the Wall” did not look particularly different from the Eden he had already seen. There were a variety of signs:Telephony A–E, Online Surveillance, Advanced Data Synthesis . People moved along the corridors, talking in low voices.

Mauchly stood to one side, waiting. As the inner glass wall slid shut behind Lash, he stepped forward.

“What was all that about?” Lash nodded at the chamber he’d just passed through.

“It’s a scanning corridor. Just to make sure you’re not bringing anything in or out. The instruments, software, information, everything on the inside must stay inside.”

“Everything?”

“Everything except a few tightly controlled datastreams.”

“But all the real processing takes place here, on the inside. Right? There must be an outrageous amount of number-crunching going on.”

“More than you could ever imagine.” Mauchly pointed at a large panel, set low into one wall. “Data conduits like this link all the areas inside the Wall. They’re basically wiring trunks that connect every internal system to all the others.”

Mauchly stepped to one side and gestured toward a figure Lash had not noticed before. “This is Tara Stapleton, our chief security technician. She’ll be your advisor while you’re inside.”

The woman stepped forward. “Dr. Lash,” she said in low, quiet voice, extending her hand.

Lash took it. Stapleton was a tall brunette with serious eyes who, he decided, couldn’t yet have reached thirty.

“Our first stop is this way,” Mauchly said as they started down one of the wide corridors. “Tara has just been briefed on exactly why you’re here. But of course nobody else knows. Your cover story’s that you’re preparing an efficiency report for the board’s five-year plan. I think you’ll be surprised at just how dedicated, and motivated, our people are.”

Lash glanced at Tara Stapleton. “Is that true?”

She nodded. “We have all the best equipment. We have a proprietary technology far beyond anything else. What other job lets you make such a difference in other people’s lives?” Despite the enthusiastic words, the delivery seemed rote, without nuance, as if her mind was elsewhere.

“Remember those class reunions I had you listen in on?” Mauchly asked. “Everyone on staff is required to witness them twice a year. It helps remind us of what we’re working for.”

They had arrived at a set of double doors labeled DATAGATHERING–INTERNET–GALLERY. Mauchly placed his bracelet beneath the scanner and the doors slid back. He motioned Lash ahead.

Lash found himself on a balcony above a room busy as the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Except that, while the Stock Exchange always seemed to Lash like barely contained chaos, the huge space below had the precise, calm flow of a beehive. People sat at desks, staring at computer screens, while others gathered at data centers, pointing up at monitors or speaking into telephones. Oversize videoscreens covered the walls, showing feeds from Reuters and other wire services, CNN, local and foreign newscasts.

“This is one of our data-gathering centers,” Mauchly said. “There are several other research and surveillance subsections in the building, all similar to this one.”

“It seems like an awfully big operation,” Lash murmured as he gazed at the activity below.

“We tell our clients their single day of testing is the most important stage in the matching process, but actually it’s just a small part. Following the evaluation, we monitor all aspects of an applicant’s behavior patterns. It can take a few days, or a month, depending on the width of the datastream we get back. Lifestyle preferences, taste in clothes and entertainment, spending habits: everything is tracked. For example, this center tracks an applicant’s Internet use. We monitor what sites are visited, how they’re moused, then we integrate the clickstream data with the other information we’re gathering.”

Lash looked at him. “How is that possible?”

“We have agreements with the major credit agencies, telephone and ISP providers, cable and satellite TV, and the like. They allow us to monitor their bandwidth. And we in turn provide them with certain metrics—generalized, of course—for spotting trends. And we have our own surveillance specialists on board, of course. The omnipresence of computers in daily life is part of what makes our business possible, Dr. Lash.”

“Makes me almost afraid to touch mine,” Lash said.

“All monitoring is transparent. Our clients have no idea their Web surfing, credit card charges, and phone records are being tracked. It gives us a far more complete picture than we could gather any other way. It’s one of the things that separates us from the other, far more primitive social-networking services that have sprung up in our wake. And needless to say, the data we gather remains within these walls. That’s another reason why we seem so secretive to you, Dr. Lash: our first mandate is to ensure our clients’ privacy.”

He waved his hand at the activity below. “Once the Thorpes completed their personal evaluations, their datafiles would have been distributed to centers like this for monitoring. It would have been the same for the Wilners. Or you, for that matter, had you been selected as a candidate.”

Here, Mauchly paused. “By the way, I’m sorry about that. I’ve read the exit reports of Vogel and Alicto.”

“Your Dr. Alicto seemed to have a personal grudge against me.”

“No doubt it seemed that way. The senior examiner does have some leeway in how he conducts an interview. Alicto is one of our best examiners, but he’s also one of the most unorthodox. In any case, it was not a real evaluation in the sense that you were a candidate. I hope that lessens the sting somewhat.”

“Let’s move on.” Lash felt vaguely uncomfortable about having his less-than-stellar performance analyzed before Tara Stapleton.

Mauchly ushered Lash out of the gallery and down the long, pale-hued corridor, stopping at last before a heavy steel door marked by a biohazard symbol and the label RADIOLOGY ANDGENETICSIII. Once again, Mauchly opened the door with his security bracelet. Beyond was a large room full of gray-painted lockers. “Bluesuits” for biomedical and hazmat duty hung from metal dollies. The far wall of the room was made of clear Plexiglas, and its sealed entrance portal sported several warnings.Clean-Room Environment Beyond , read one;Sterile Clothing and Procedures MANDATORY. Thank You For Your Cooperation .

Lash walked up to the glass and looked through curiously. He could see gloved and suited figures bending over a variety of complex equipment.

“That looks like a DNA sequencer,” he said, pointing at a particularly large console in a far corner.

Mauchly came up beside him. “It is.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“Part of our genetics analysis.”

“I don’t see what genetics has to do with a service like yours.”

“Many things, actually. It’s one of Eden’s most sensitive areas of research.”

Lash waited expectantly, letting the silence lengthen. At last, Mauchly sighed.

“As you know, our application process isn’t limited to psychological evaluations. During the initial physical, any candidates who present with significant physical problems, or appear to be at high risk for future problems, are disqualified.”

“Seems harsh.”

“Not at all. Would you care to meet your perfect mate, only to have her die a year later? In any case, after the physical, the candidate’s blood is further screened—here and at other labs inside the Wall—for a variety of genetic disorders. Anybody with a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea, and such are also disqualified.”

“Jesus. Do you tell them why?”

“Not directly, no—it might attract attention to our trade secrets. Besides, rejection can be traumatizing enough. Why compound it with anxiety over something that might not develop for years—if at all—and that’s untreatable in any case?”

Why, indeed?Lash thought.

“But that’s just the beginning. Our most important use of genetics comes in the matching process itself.”

Lash looked from Mauchly, to the lab workers moving busily beyond the Plexiglas wall, and back to Mauchly again.

“You’re no doubt more familiar with evolutionary psychology than I am,” Mauchly said. “In particular, the concept of gene spreading.”

Lash nodded. “The desire to send your genes on to future generations under the best possible conditions. A fundamental impulse.”

“Precisely. And the ‘best possible conditions’ usually means a high degree of genetic variability. What a technician might call an increase of heterozygosity. It helps ensure strong, healthy progeny. If one mate is blood type A, with a relatively high susceptibility to cholera, and the other mate is blood type B, with a heightened susceptibility to typhus, their child—with blood type AB—is likely to have a high resistance to both diseases.”

“But what does this have to do with what’s going on in there?”

“We keep very close tabs on the latest research in molecular biology. And we’re currently monitoring several dozen genes that influence the choice of an ideal mate.”

Lash shook his head. “You surprise me.”

“I’m no expert, Dr. Lash. But I can offer one example: HLA.”

“I’m not familiar with it.”

“Human leukocyte antigen. In animals it’s known as MHC. It’s a large gene that lives on the long arm of chromosome 6, and affects body odor preferences. Studies have shown that people are most attracted to mates whose HLA haplotypes wereleast like their own .”

“Guess I should be readingNature more carefully. Wonder how they demonstrated that?”

“Well, in one test, they asked a control group to sniff the armpits of T-shirts worn by the opposite sex, and to rank them in order of attractiveness. And the scents the group universally preferred were of people whose genotypes weremost different from their own.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. Animals also display this preference for mating with partners whose MHC genes are opposite their own. Mice, for example, make the determination by sniffing the urine of potential mates.”

This was greeted by a brief silence.

“Personally, I prefer the T-shirt,” Tara said.

It was the first time in several minutes that she’d spoken, and Lash turned to look at her. But she wasn’t smiling, and he was uncertain whether she’d meant it as a joke.

Mauchly shrugged. “In any case, the genetic preferences of the Wilners and the Thorpes would be pooled with the other information we’d gathered on them: monitoring data, test results, the rest.”

Lash stared at the gowned workers on the far side of the glass. “This is amazing. And I’ll want to see those test results in due time. But the real question ishow , exactly, did the two couples get together?”

“That’s our next stop.” And Mauchly led the way back into the hallway.

A confusing journey through intersecting corridors; another brief ascent in an elevator; and then Lash found himself before another set of doors labeled simply: PROVINGCHAMBER.

“What is this place?” Lash asked.

“The Tank,” Mauchly replied. “After you, please.”

Lash stepped into a room that was large, but whose low ceiling and indirect light gave it a strangely intimate atmosphere. The walls to the left and right were covered with various displays and instrumentation. But Lash’s attention was drawn to the rear wall, which was completely dominated by what seemed some kind of aquarium. He paused.

“Go ahead,” Mauchly said. “Take a look.”

As Lash drew closer, he realized he was looking at a vast translucent cube, set into the wall of the chamber. A handful of technicians stood before it, some scribbling notes into palmtop computers, others simply observing. Inside the cube, innumerable ghostly apparitions moved restlessly back and forth, colors shifting, flaring briefly when colliding with other apparitions, then dimming once again. The faint light, the pale translucence of the entities within, gave the cube an illusion of great depth.

“You understand why we call it the Tank,” Mauchly said.

Lash nodded absently. Itwas an aquarium, of sorts: an electromechanical aquarium. And yet “Tank” seemed too prosaic a name for something with such an otherworldly beauty.

“Whatis this?” Lash asked in a low voice.

“This is a graphic representation of the actual matching process, occurring in real time. It provides us with visual cues that would be much harder to analyze if we were scanning through, say, reams of paper printouts. Each of those objects you see moving within the Tank is an avatar.”

“Avatar?”

“The personality constructs of our applicants. Derived from their evaluations and our surveillance data. But Tara can explain it better than I.”

So far, Tara had stayed in the background. Now, she came forward. “We’ve taken the concept of data mining and analytics and stood it on its head. Once the monitoring period is over, our computers take the raw applicant data—half a terabyte of information—and create the construct we call the avatar. It’s then placed in an artificial environment and allowed to interact with the other avatars.”

Lash’s gaze was still locked on the Tank. “Interact,” he repeated.

“It’s easiest to think of them as extremely dense packets of data, given artificial life and set free in virtual space.”

It was strange, almost unnerving: to think that each of these countless gossamer-like specters, flitting back and forth in the void before him, represented a complete and unique personality: hopes and needs, desires and dreams, moods and proclivities, manifested as data moving through a matrix of silicon. Lash looked back at Tara. Her eyes shone pale blue in the reflected light, and strange shadows moved across her face. A faraway look had come over her. She, too, seemed mesmerized by the sight.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “But bizarre.”

Abruptly, the faraway look left her eyes. “Bizarre? It’s brilliant. The avatars contain far too much data to be compared by conventional computing algorithms. Our solution was to give them artificial life, let them make the comparisonson their own . They’re inserted into the virtual space, and then excited, much in the way atoms can be. This prompts the avatars to move and interact. We call these interactions ‘contacts.’ If the two avatars have already intersected in the Tank, it’s a stale contact. But if this is thefirst encounter between two avatars, it’s a ‘fresh contact.’ Each fresh contact releases a huge burst of data, which basically details the points of commonality between the two.”

“So what we’re looking at right now are all of Eden’s current applicants.”

“That’s correct.”

“How many are there?”

“It varies, but at any one time there could be up to ten thousand avatars. More are added constantly. There could be almost anybody in there. Presidents, rock stars, poets. The only people . . .” she hesitated. “The only people not allowed are Eden personnel.”

“Why’s that?”

Tara’s reply did not address this question. “It takes approximately eighteen hours for any one avatar to make contact with all the others in the Tank. We call that a cycle. Thousands upon thousands of avatars intersecting with every other, releasing a massive torrent of data—you can imagine the kind of computing horsepower required to parse the data.”

Lash nodded. There was a low beeping behind him, and he turned to see Mauchly raising a cell phone to his ear.

“Anyway,” Tara went on, “when a match is determined, the two avatars are removed from the Tank. Nine times out of ten, a match is made within the first cycle. If there is no match, the avatar is retained in the Tank for another cycle, then another. If an avatar hasn’t found a match within five cycles, it’s removed and the candidate’s application is voided. But that’s only happened half a dozen times.”

Half a dozen times, Lash thought to himself. He glanced over at Mauchly, but he was still on the phone.

“But under normal circumstances, you could take one of these avatars, put it back in the Tank a year from now, and another match would be found. Adifferent match. Right?”

“That’s a sensitive issue. Our clients are told that a perfect match has been found for them. And it’s true. But that isn’t to say we couldn’t find an equally perfect match for them tomorrow, or next month. Except in the case of the supercouples, of course—those reallyare perfect. But we don’t tell our clients about degrees of perfection, because that might encourage window shopping. Once we’ve found a match, that’s it. End of story. Their avatars are removed from the Tank.”

“And then?”

“The two candidates are notified of the match. A meeting is set up.” As she said this, her expression once again grew distant.

Lash turned to the Tank, staring at the thousands of avatars gliding back and forth within, weightless and alien. “You mentioned the need for computing horsepower,” he murmured. “That seems an understatement. I didn’t know any computer could handle such a job.”

“Funny you should say that.” It was Mauchly speaking this time, slipping the phone back into his jacket pocket. “Because there’s one person in this building who knows more than anyone else about that. And he’s just asked to make your acquaintance.”

SEVENTEEN

Five minutes brought them to a sky lobby: a two-story space on the thirtieth floor, surrounded by banks of elevators. One end opened onto an employee cafeteria, and Lash could see workers clustered around dozens of tables, talking and eating.

“We have ten cafeterias here on the inside,” Mauchly said. “We discourage people from leaving the building for lunch or dinner, and the excellent free food helps.”

“Lunchor dinner?”

“Or breakfast, for that matter. We’ve got technicians working shifts round the clock, especially in the data-gathering sections.” Mauchly made for an elevator at the end of the nearest bank. It was set apart from the others, and a guard in a beige jumpsuit was posted before it. When the guard saw them approach, he stepped aside.

Mauchly turned to Tara. “You’ve got the latest code. Go ahead.” And he indicated a keypad beside the elevators.

“Where are we headed?” Tara asked.

“The penthouse.”

There was a quick intake of breath, quickly checked. Tara punched in a code and, a moment later, the doors opened.

As he stepped inside the elevator, Lash sensed something was different. It wasn’t the walls, which had the same glossy wood grain as the others in the building; it wasn’t the carpeting, or the lighting, or the safety railing. Suddenly he realized what it was. There was no pinhole security camera in this car. And there were only three buttons on the instrument panel, all unmarked. Mauchly pressed the topmost button, placed his bracelet beneath the scanner.

The elevator rose for what seemed forever. At last it opened onto a brilliantly lit room. But this was not the artificial light Lash had seen elsewhere in Eden: this was sunlight, streaming in from windows that filled three of the four walls. He stepped forward onto a sumptuous blue carpet, looking around in wonder. Through the wall of glass, the dense cityscape of mid-Manhattan lay beneath a cloudless sky. To his left, and right—at what seemed great distances—other windows afforded unbroken vistas of Long Island and New Jersey. Instead of the fluorescent lighting panels of the floors below, beautiful cut-glass fixtures hung from the ceiling, unnecessary in this explosion of daylight.

Lash remembered seeing, from street level, the figured grille that set off the tower’s topmost floors. And he recalled Mauchly’s words:The tower is made up of three separate buildings. Atop the inner tower is the penthouse . This aerie that crowned the corporate tower could only be one thing: the lair of its reclusive founder, Richard Silver.

Except for the elevator door, the entire fourth wall was covered in rich mahogany bookcases. But they were not the leather-bound volumes one would expect in such a setting; there were cheap science fiction paperbacks, yellowing and broken-backed; technical journals, clearly well thumbed; oversize manuals for computer operating systems and languages.

Tara Stapleton had walked across the wide floor and was staring at something before one of the windows. As his eyes grew used to the light, Lash became aware that dozens of objects—some large, some small—were arranged in front of the huge plates of glass. He stepped forward himself, curious, stopping before a contraption almost the size of a telephone booth. Rising from its wooden base was a complex architecture of rotors, stacked horizontally on spars of metal. Behind the rotors was a complex nesting of wheels, rods, and levers.

He moved to the next window, where what looked like the metal guts of some giant’s music box lay on a wooden stand. Beside it was a monstrous device: a cross between an ancient printing press and a grandfather clock. A large metal crank was visible on one side, and its face was covered with flat, polished metal discs of all sizes. Large spools of paper sat on a wooden tray between its legs.

Mauchly seemed to have disappeared, but another man was approaching them from across the room: tall, youthful-looking, with a vast mop of red hair rising from a square forehead. He was smiling, and his watery blue eyes peered out through thin silver frames with a friendly sparkle. He wore a tropical shirt over a pair of worn jeans. Though Lash had never seen the man before, he instantly recognized him: Richard Silver, the genius behind both Eden and the computer that made it possible.

“You must be Dr. Lash,” the man said, extending his hand. “I’m Richard Silver.”

“Call me Christopher,” Lash said.

Silver turned toward Tara, who had turned wordlessly at the man’s approach. “And you’re Tara Stapleton? Edwin’s told me great things about you.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Silver,” she replied.

Lash listened to this exchange in surprise.She’s the chief security tech. But she’s never met him before .

Silver turned back to Lash. “Your name rings a bell, Christopher, but I can’t quite place it.”

Lash said nothing, and after a moment, Silver shrugged. “Ah, well. Perhaps it will return to me. In any case, I’m curious about your theoretical orientation. Given your prior job, I’d guess you belong to the cognitive behavioral school?”

This was the last thing Lash expected to hear. “More or less. I’m eclectic, I like to pick and choose from other schools as well.”

“I see. Such as behavioral? Humanist?”

“More the former than the latter, Dr. Silver.”

“It’s Richard, please.” Silver smiled again. “You’re right to pick and choose. Cognitive behavioral psychology has always been fascinating to me because it lends itself to information processing. But on the other hand, strict behaviorists feel all behavior is learned. Right?”

Lash nodded, surprised. Silver did not fit his image of what a brilliant recluse should look like.

“You’ve got a remarkable collection here,” he said.

“My little museum. These devices are my one weakness. Such as that beauty you were just examining: Kelvin’s Tide Predictor. It could predict the high and low tides for any future date. And note the paper drums at its base: perhaps the first instance of hardcopy output. Or how about the device on the stand beside it? Built more than three hundred and fifty years ago, but it can still do all the arithmetic, subtraction, multiplication, division of today’s calculators. It’s fashioned around something called the Leibniz Wheel, which went on to jumpstart the adding machine industry.”

Silver walked along the wall of glass, pointing out various machines and explaining their historical importance with relish. He asked Tara to walk with him, and as they proceeded he praised her work, asked if she was happy with her position at the company. Despite the short acquaintance, Lash found himself warming to the man: he seemed friendly, free of arrogance.

Silver stopped before the huge device Lash first noticed. “This,” he said almost reverently, “is Babbage’s Analytical Engine. His most ambitious work, left incomplete at his death. It’s the precursor to the Mark I, Colossus, ENIAC, all the really important computers.” And he stroked its steel sides with something like affection.

All of the ancient artifacts, perched as they were before staggering vistas of midtown Manhattan, were still remarkably out of place in this elegant room. Then abruptly, Lash understood. “They’re all thinking machines,” he said. “Attempts at creating devices to do the mental computations of humans.”

Silver nodded. “Exactly. Some of them—” he waved at the Analytical Engine “—keep me humble. Others—” he gestured across the room, where a much more modern 128K Macintosh sat on a marble plinth “—give me hope. And still others keep me honest.” And he pointed toward a large wooden box with a chessboard set into its front.

“What’s that?” Tara asked.

“That’s a chess-playing computer, built in France during the late Renaissance. Turned out the ‘computer’ was really just a pint-sized chess whiz who squeezed himself inside the machine and directed its movements. But come, let’s sit down.” And he led the way to a low table surrounded by leather chairs. It was littered with periodicals: theTimes , theWall Street Journal , issues ofComputerworld and theJournal of Advanced Psychocomputing .

As they sat, Silver’s smile seemed to falter. “It’s great to make your acquaintance, Christopher. But I wish the circumstances were more pleasant.”

He sat forward, head slightly bowed, hands clasped together. “This has come as an awful shock. To the board, and to me personally.” And when Silver looked up, Lash saw anguish in his eyes.It’s rough , he thought.The company this man formed, its good works, put into mortal danger .

“When I think of those couples, the Thorpes, the Wilners . . . well, words fail me. It’s incomprehensible.”

Then Lash realized he’d been wrong. Silver wasn’t thinking about the company: he was thinking about the four dead people, and the cruel irony that had suddenly ended their lives.

“You have to understand, Christopher,” Silver said, looking down again at the table. “What we do here goes beyond a service. It’s a responsibility, like the responsibility a surgeon feels when he approaches a patient on the operating table. Except for us, the responsibility goes onthe rest of their lives . They’ve entrusted their future happiness to us. That’s something that never occurred to me when I first had the idea-germ for Eden. So now it’s our duty to learn what happened, whether . . . whether or not we had any role in the tragedy.”

Once again, Lash felt surprise. This was a frankness he had not seen from anybody on the Eden board save perhaps the chairman, Lelyveld.

“I realize the Wilner deaths took place just days ago. But have you learned anything useful?” Silver looked up with an almost pleading expression in his eyes.

“It’s as I told Mauchly. There are absolutely no indications for suicide in the months leading up to their deaths.”

Silver held his gaze briefly, then looked away. For a ridiculous moment, Lash feared the computer genius would burst into tears.

“I hope to be going over Eden’s own psych evaluations of the couples shortly,” Lash said quickly, as if to reassure Silver. “Perhaps I’ll know more then.”

“I want all of the resources of Eden put behind this,” Silver replied. “Tell Edwin I said so. If there’s anything I or Liza can do, please let me know.”

Liza?Lash thought a little vaguely.You mean, Tara? Tara Stapleton?

“Do you have any theories?” Silver asked in a quiet voice.

Lash hesitated. He didn’t want to bring up any more bad news. “They’re only theories at this point. But unless there’s some unknown emotional or physiological agent at work here, the signs are pointing increasingly at homicide.”

“Homicide?” Silver echoed sharply. “How is that possible?”

“As I said, so far I’m only working the theories. There’s a small chance somebody on the inside is involved: one of your employees, or ex-employees. But it’s far more likely the suspect is somebody rejected by your selection process.”

An odd look came over Silver’s face: the look of a child who has just been rebuked for something he didn’t do. It was a look of hurt innocence.

“I can’t believe it,” he murmured. “Our security protocols are so stringent. Tara here can verify that. I’ve been assured—” He broke off.

“Like I said, so far it’s just a theory.”

Another silence settled over the table; this one longer than the first. Then Silver stood up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’ve been keeping you from more important things.” And as he extended his hand, some of his smile’s warmth returned.

From out of nowhere, Mauchly reappeared. He ushered both Tara and Lash toward the elevator.

“Christopher?” came Silver’s voice. And Lash turned to see Silver standing by the Analytical Engine.

“Yes, sir?”

“Thank you for coming up. It’s reassuring, knowing you’re assisting us. I’m sure we’ll be meeting again, soon.”

And as the elevator door slid open, Silver turned away, his face thoughtful, his hand once again stroking, almost absently, the metal flank of the ancient computer.

EIGHTEEN

By the time Lash pulled into his driveway it was almost seven-thirty, and the curtain of night was dropping over the Connecticut coastline. He turned off the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the tick of cooling metal. Then he stepped out and walked wearily to the house. He felt drained, as if the sheer volume of technological marvels he’d seen today had temporarily dulled his capacity for wonder.

The house smelled of the lingering smoke from a Sunday fire. Lash turned on the lights and made his way back to the small office that adjoined his bedroom, the weight of the bracelet on his wrist still strange. He picked up the phone and dialed; discovered there were fifteen waiting messages; then sat down, steeling himself for the task of plowing through them.

It took surprisingly little time. Four had been telemarketers and six others were simply hang-ups. There was, in fact, only one message that had to be dealt with right away. He reached for his address book, then dialed the home number of Oscar Kline, the covering psychologist.

“It’s Kline,” came the clipped voice.

“Oscar, this is Christopher.”

“Hey, Chris. How’s it going?”

“It’s going.”

“Everything all right? You sound tired.”

“I am tired.”

“I’ll bet you were up all night, working on this research project you’re being so secretive about.”

“Something like that.”

“Why bother? I mean, you don’t need the fame—not after that book of yours. And you don’t need the money, God knows you live like a monk in that Westport cloister.”

“It’s hard to drop something like this once you’ve gotten involved. You know how these things are.”

“Well, there’s one good reason I can think of. Your practice. After all, this isn’t August, patients expect us to be around. You miss one session, fine. But two? People get restless. There were a couple of loudmouths in group today, troublemakers.”

“Let me guess. Stinson.”

“Yes, Stinson. And Brahms, too. You miss another, it’s going to get serious.”

“I know. I’m trying hard to get this wrapped up before that happens.”

“Good. Because otherwise I’m going to have to off-load some of them onto Cooper. And that wouldn’t be a pretty sight.”

“You’re right, it wouldn’t. I’ll be in touch, Oscar. Thanks for everything.”

As Lash hung up and began to walk away, the phone rang again. He turned back, picked it up. “Hello?”

With a sharpclick , the line went dead.

Lash turned away again, yawning, forcing himself to think about dinner. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, in hope some meal might put itself together. Nothing did. And with his brain shutting down, Lash opted for the easiest solution: he’d phone the Chinese place on the Post Road.

As he reached for the phone, it rang again.

He picked it up. “Hello?”

This time, there was a listening silence on the line.

“Hello?”

Another click as the line went dead.

Lash slowly replaced the phone, then stared at it, thinking. He’d been so wrapped up in the events at Eden he hadn’t noticed all the little annoyances that were once again creeping back into his life. Or perhaps hehad noticed them, but simply hadn’t wanted to address them. His newspaper, missing three days out of four. The mail, missing from his mailbox. The repeated hang-ups, eight today alone.

He knew exactly what this meant, and he knew what had to be done to stop it.

The prospect filled him with gloom.

The drive to East Norwalk took less than ten minutes. Lash had made it only once before, but he knew Norwalk well, and the landmarks were familiar. The area he found himself in was what civic leaders euphemistically called a neighborhood in transition: close by the new Maritime Center, but also near enough to the poorest sections to require bars on the doors and windows.

Lash pulled over to the curb and double-checked the address: 9148 Jefferson. The house looked like all those that surrounded it: Craftsman-style; small, just two rooms over two; stucco front with a detached garage in the rear. This particular lawn might be less tended than those around it, but all the houses shared a certain shabbiness under the pitiless glare of the streetlight.

He stared at the house. This could be handled in one of two ways: with compassion, or with firmness. Mary English had not responded well to compassion. He’d been compassionate with her last year, during the marital therapy sessions with her husband. Mary had seized upon that compassion, fixated upon him. She had developed an infatuation, an obsession, that ironically led to her divorce: the very thing Lash had been trying to forestall. It had also led to a protracted stalking—telephone hang-ups, mail missing or thumbed through, tearful late-night ambushes outside his office—that had taken a restraining order to stop.

Lash sat a moment longer, preparing himself. Then he opened the door, came around the car, and walked toward the house.

The sound of the doorbell echoed hollowly through the rooms beyond. As the chimes died away, silence briefly returned. Then, the tread of feet descending stairs. The outside light came on, and the eyehole cover was scraped away. A moment later, the thud of the deadbolt; the barred door pulled back; and there was Mary English, blinking out into the glow of the streetlight.

She was still wearing her work clothes, but she had clearly been interrupted in washing up: her lipstick was gone, but the mascara remained. Although it had been only a year since the last therapy session with her husband, she now looked far older than her forty years—there were hollows beneath her eyes the makeup couldn’t hide, and a tracery of fine lines ran away from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes went wide with recognition, and in them Lash read a complex mix of emotions: surprise, pleasure, hope, fear.

“Dr. Lash!” she said a little breathlessly. “I—I can’t believe you’re here. What is it?”

Lash took a deep breath. “I think you know what it is, Mary.”

“No, I don’t know. What’s happened? Do you want to come in? Have a cup of coffee?” And she held the door open for him.

Lash remained in the doorway, trying to keep his voice cool, his face expressionless. “Mary, please. This will only make it worse.”

She looked at him, uncomprehending.

For a moment, Lash hesitated. Then he remembered how it had been the first time he’d confronted her, on this same stoop, and he forced himself on.

“Denial won’t help, Mary. You’ve been harassing me again—phoning my house, tampering with my mail. I want you to stop it, please, and stop it now.”

Mary did not speak. But as she looked at him, she seemed to age even more. Her eyes slowly fell away from his, and her shoulders slumped.

“I can’t deal with this again, Mary. Not right now. So I want you to agree to stop this before it escalates again. I want you tosay you’ll stop this, say it to my face. Please, don’t force my hand.”

At this, she looked up again, her eyes glittering with sudden anger.

“Is this some kind of cruel joke?” she spat at him. “Look at me. Look at myhouse . There’s barely a stick of furniture in it. I’ve lost custody of my child. It’s a struggle just to see him alternate weekends. Oh,God . . .”

As quickly as it had come, the anger receded. Tears traced muddy lines of mascara. “I’ve complied with the judge. I’ve done everything you asked.”

“Then why is my mail missing again, Mary? Why all the hang-up calls?”

“You think that’sme ? Do you think I could bring myself to do that, after all that’s happened . . . after what your judge did to my life, to my—” Further words were choked off by a sob.

Lash hesitated, not quite sure what to say. The anger, the sadness, seemed genuine. But then again, borderlines like Mary Englishdid feel anger, misery, depression. It was just misdirected. And they were very good at dissembling, at twisting things back on you, making you, not them, the guilty party . . .

“How could you come here like this, hurt me this way?” she sobbed. “You’re a psychologist, you’re supposed tohelp people . . .”

Lash stood in the doorway, silent and increasingly uncertain, waiting for the emotions to play themselves out.

The sobs ceased. And a moment later, her shoulders straightened.

“How could I possibly have ever been attracted to you?” she asked in a quiet voice. “Back then, you struck me as a man who cared, who had it all together. A man with a little sense of mystery.” She brusquely wiped away a tear. “But you know what I decided, lying here awake at night, alone, in my empty house? Your mystery is the mystery of a man who’s gotnothing inside. A man who’s got nothing of himself to give.”

She reached behind her, fumbled with a box of tissues on the hall table, cursed when she found it empty. “Get out of here,” she said quietly, without meeting his gaze. “Get out of here,please . Leave me be.”

Lash stared at her. By old habit, half a dozen clinical replies came to mind. But sorting through them, none seemed appropriate. So he simply nodded and turned away.

He started the car, did a U-turn, retraced his route down the street. But before he got to the corner, he pulled over to the curb and stopped. In the rearview mirror, he could see that the front light of 9148 Jefferson had already been extinguished.

What had Richard Silver said, in that vast room floating sixty stories above Manhattan?It’s reassuring, knowing you’re assisting us . Here, staring out into the dark, Lash felt no such reassurance.

NINETEEN

The following morning, as he walked from a Manhattan parking garage, Lash stopped outside a magazine shop, set into the base of a vast apartment house and drowned in the shade of the facing buildings. He stepped inside, his eye quickly scanning the headlines of local and national newspapers: theKansas City Star , theDallas Morning News , theProvidence Journal , theWashington Post . He breathed a small sigh of relief on finding no stories detailing double suicides among happily married couples. Leaving the shop, he turned right on Madison Avenue, heading for the Eden building.Now I know how Louis XVI must have felt , he thought; getting up each morning under the shadow of the axe, never knowing if this was to be the day of ultimate revelation.

Though he remained tired, he felt a little better about the night before. Borderlines like Mary English were excellent liars, actors in their own way. He’d done the right thing. He’d have to keep a close eye for future signs of stalking, just in case.

He arrived in the lobby a little early but Tara Stapleton was already there waiting for him. She was wearing a dark skirt and sweater, without jewelry of any kind. She smiled briefly, and they exchanged a few pleasantries about the weather, but she seemed as remote as she had the day before.

Leading him past the security perimeter and down a wide unmarked corridor, Tara instructed him in crisp sentences on the finer points of getting in and out of the inner tower. Although there were two entrance portals at Checkpoint I, the morning crush of employees meant a five-minute wait. Tara spoke very little, so Lash listened discreetly to the conversations going on around him. There was excited chatter about a memo that had circulated recently, reporting client applications were up thirty percent. There was remarkably little talk about last night’s ball game or how the morning commute had gone. It was as Mauchly said: these people genuinely loved what they did.

Once past the checkpoint, Tara showed Lash to an office reserved for him on the sixteenth floor. The door had no key, but was opened by a bracelet scanner. The office was windowless, but pleasantly bright and large, with a desk and table, a large empty bookcase, and a computer, also sporting a scanner. The only other feature was a small panel, set low in one wall, allowing access to the inner tower’s omnipresent data conduit.

“I’ve arranged to have all the results for the Thorpes and Wilners brought to you,” she said. “We’ll have the data terminal online for you this morning, and I’ll show you how to access records as needed. You’ll need to scan your bracelet before you can log on. Here’s my extension and cell number if you need to reach me.” She placed a card on the table. “I’ll come back for you at lunch.”

Lash pocketed the card. “Thanks. Where can I find coffee around here?”

“There’s a staff cafeteria down the hall. The bathroom’s that way, too. Is there anything else?”

Lash dropped his leather satchel on one of the chairs. “Could I have a whiteboard, please?”

“I’ll have one sent in.” With a nod, she turned gracefully and left the room.

For a moment, Lash stared thoughtfully at the space where she’d stood. Then he stowed his satchel inside one of the desk drawers and made his way to the cafeteria, where a Junoesque woman behind the counter cheerfully brought him a large espresso. He took it gratefully, sipped, found it excellent.

No sooner had he returned to his office and made himself comfortable than a technician knocked on the open door. “Dr. Lash?”

“Yes?”

The man wheeled in what looked like a black evidence locker, set on a steel cart. “Here are the documents you requested. When you’ve finished your examination, call the number stamped on the cartons and someone will pick them up.”

Lash lifted the heavy locker and placed it on the table. It was sealed with white tape that read HIGHLYCONFIDENTIAL ANDPROPRIETARY—NOT TOLEAVEEDENINTERNAL.

He closed the door to the office. Then he slit the tape and snapped open the lid. Inside were four large accordion files, each bearing a name and a number:

Each was sealed with white tape and bore an identical label:

EDEN CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL

INTERNAL USE ONLY

L-3 AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED

NOTE: HARDCOPY WITHIN. DIGITAL MEDIA ALSO AVAILABLE.

USE REQUISITION AT-4849

Lash reached for Lewis Thorpe’s file. Then he hesitated: no, he’d leave Lewis Thorpe for last. Instead, he opened Lindsay Thorpe’s file and upended it onto the table. A flood of paper streamed out, much of it testing sheets and result forms, but also a thick spiral-bound packet that made little sense:

CODING SHEET FOLLOWS

Note: Summarization only

header

=====

telephony metrics—quantization

assembly period: 27 Aug 02/09 Sep 02

datastream: nominal

homogenization: optimal—

data location (hard): 2342400494234

first access sector 3024-a

compartmentalization algorithm set

chief operator: Pawar, Gupta

scrub chief: Korngold, Sterling

data gathering supervisor: Rose, Lawrence

hexadecimal source follows

It appeared to be some kind of machine-code summary of Lindsay’s telephone habits during her surveillance period. Readable or unreadable, it wasn’t the data he was interested in. Lash put this aside and picked up the test forms. They looked precisely like the tests he had taken just days before; the sight sent a fresh surge of mortification through him. He sipped his espresso, riffled through the pages, glancing at the little black circles Lindsay Thorpe had filled in so industriously. Her answers seemed to fall within normal ranges, and a quick glance at the scoring sheets confirmed this. His eye fell at last on the senior evaluator’s report.

Lindsay Torvald shows all signs of being well-adjusted socially, with a normative personality profile. Appearance, demeanor, behavior during and between the tests was within normal limits. Attention span, speech articulation, comprehension, and verbal skills were all within the top 10th percentile. Tests showed little abnormal scatter or skew, and validity scales were high across the board: the applicant seemed exceptionally candid and forthright. The projective inkblot test indicated creativity and a vivid imagination with only slight morbidity factors. The personality profile showed slight tendencies toward introversion but well within acceptable levels, especially given the strong indicators for self-confidence. The intelligence battery was also strong, particularly in the areas of verbal comprehension and memory; computation skills were weaker, but still the overall score gives the applicant a Full Scale IQ of 138 (modified WAIS-III).

In short, all quantifiable metrics suggest Ms. Torvald would make an excellent candidate for Eden.

R. J. Steadman, Ph.D.

August 21, 2002

There was movement in the corridor outside his door; a technician wheeled a whiteboard into his office. Lash thanked him, watched him leave. Then he put the report aside and reached for the testing forms once again.

By noon, he had studied the test results for three of the applicants. No smoking guns, no signs of incipient pathology. Across the board, the signs of depression, the suicide indexes, were extremely low. Lash replaced the stacks of paper into their respective folders; stood; stretched; then went down to the cafeteria for another espresso.

He walked back to his temporary office more slowly than he had left it. There was only one folder left: Lewis Thorpe’s. Thorpe, who specialized in invertebrate biology and enjoyed translating the poetry of Bash–o. Lash had spent several nights rereadingNarrow Road to the Interior , putting himself in Lewis’s shoes, trying to feel what he’d felt in the testing suite, in that sun-filled Flagstaff living room where he had died under the gaze of his own infant child.

Eagerly—yet a little warily—Lash broke open the seal on the fourth folder.

It took less than half an hour to realize that what he most feared was, in fact, true. Lewis Thorpe’s test results showed him to be as normal and well adjusted as the rest. They showed an intelligent, imaginative, ambitious man with a healthy self-regard. No indicators for depression or suicide.

Lash slumped back in his chair and let the senior evaluator’s report fall from his hands. The tests he’d fought so hard to get brought him no closer to an answer.

There was a knock at his door, and he looked up to see Tara Stapleton leaning in, her long, intent face framed by thick auburn hair.

“Lunch?” she asked.

Lash gathered Lewis Thorpe’s papers together and stuffed them back into the folder. “Sure.”

Already, the cafeteria down the hall felt like an old friend. It was bright and almost festive, and more crowded now than it had been on his two earlier visits. He fell in line at the buffet rail, helped himself to another espresso and a sandwich, then followed Tara to an empty table near the rear wall. She’d taken only a cup of soup and some tea, and as Lash watched she tore open a packet of artificial sweetener and poured it into the cup. Her reserved, preoccupied silence remained. But right now, that seemed all right: he wasn’t eager to field a lot of questions about how his investigation was going.

“How long have you worked at Eden?” he asked after a moment.

“Three years. Since just after its founding.”

“And it’s as great a place to work as Mauchly says?”

“It always has been.”

Lash waited as she stirred her soup, a little uncertain what she meant by this. “Tell me about Silver.”

“How do you mean.”

“Well, what’s he like? He wasn’t at all what I expected.”

“Me, neither.”

“I take it this was the first time you’ve met him face to face.”

“I saw him once before, at the first anniversary celebration. He’s a very private person. Never leaves his penthouse, as far as anybody knows. Communicates by cell or videophone. It’s just him up there. Him and Liza.”

Liza. Silver had mentioned that name, too. At the time, Lash had thought it a slip of the tongue. “Liza?”

“The computer. His life’s work. What makes Eden possible. Liza’s his one true love. Kind of ironic, really, given the nature of our business. He does most of his communicating to the board and the staff through Mauchly.”

Lash was surprised. “Really?”

“Mauchly’s his right-hand man.”

Lash noticed that somebody was looking at him from across the cafeteria. The youthful face, the bright thatch of hair, seemed familiar. Then he realized who it was: Peter Hapwood, the evaluation engineer Mauchly had introduced him to the day of the class reunions. Hapwood smiled, waved. Lash waved back.

He returned his attention to Tara, who was once again stirring her soup. “Tell me more about Liza,” he said.

“It’s a hybrid supercomputer. Nothing else like it in the world.”

“Why?”

“It’s the only large computer built entirely around a core of artificial intelligence.”

“And how did Silver come to build it?”

Tara took a sip of tea. “You hear rumors. Stories, really. I don’t know exactly how true any of them are. Some people say Silver had a lonely, traumatic childhood. Others say he was coddled, doing differential equations at the age of eight. He’s never talked about it on record. All anybody knows for sure is, by the time he got to college, he was doing pioneering work in AI. Brilliant, genius-level stuff. His graduate work centered around a computer that could learn for itself. He gave it a personality, made its problem-solving algorithms more and more sophisticated. Eventually, he proved a computer that can teach itself could solve problems far more difficult than any hand-coded computer. Later, to finance further research, he farmed out Liza’s processing cycles to places like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Human Genome Project.”

“And then he had his brainstorm. Eden, with Liza as the computational core. And the rest, as they say, is history.” Lash took a sip of coffee. “So what’s Liza like to work with?”

There was a pause. “We never get near the core routines or intelligence. Liza’s physical plant is in the penthouse, and only Silver has access. Everybody else—scientists, technicians, even the computer programmers—uses the corporate computer grid and Liza’s data abstraction layer.”

“Liza’swhat ?”

“A shell that creates virtual machines within the computer’s memory space.” Tara paused again. More and more pauses were creeping into her sentences. Then, abruptly, she stood up.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Could we talk about this some other time? I have to go.”

And without another word she turned and left the cafeteria.

TWENTY

When Mauchly walked into the office around four, Lash was standing before his whiteboard. The man moved so silently Lash didn’t notice him until he was by his side.

“Christ!” Lash jumped, dropping his marker.

“Sorry. Should have knocked.” Mauchly glanced at the bulletin board. “Race, age, type, personality, employment, geographics, victims. What’s this?”

“I’m trying to type the killer. Assemble a profile.”

Mauchly turned his placid gaze on Lash. “We still don’t know there’s a killer.”

“I’ve gone over all your records. There’s nothing psychologically wrong with the Thorpes or the Wilners, zero clinical evidence of suicide. It would be a waste of time to explore that avenue further. And you heard what Lelyveld said in the boardroom: we don’thave time.”

“But there’s no signs of murder, either. The Thorpes’ security camera, for one thing. It didn’t show anybody entering or leaving the house.”

“It’s a lot easier to cover up a murder than to cover up a suicide. Security cameras can be interfered with. Alarms can be bypassed.”

Mauchly thought about this. Then he looked back at the writing on the board. “How do you know the killer is in his late twenties or early thirties?”

“I don’t. That’s the baseline for serial killers. We have to start with the pattern, and refine from there.”

“And how about this: that he’s either well employed or has access to money?”

“He killed people on opposite coasts within a week of each other. That’s not the modus operandi of a drifter or a hitchhiker: their killing patterns chart erratically across short distances.”

“I see. And this?” Mauchly pointed to the scrawled words, TYPE: UNKNOWN.

“That’s the troubling part. Usually, we type serial killers as organized or disorganized. Organized killers control their crime scenes and their victims. They’re smart, socially acceptable, sexually competent. They target strangers, hide their corpses. On the other hand, disorganized killers know their victims, act suddenly and spontaneously, feel little or no stress during the crime, have few work skills, leave the victim at the scene of the crime.”

“And?”

“Well, if someone murdered the Thorpes and the Wilners, he exhibits traits of both the organized and disorganized killer. There’s no coincidence here: he’d have to know the victims. Yet he left them at the scene, like a disorganized killer. But again, the scene isn’t in the least bit sloppy. Such inconsistencies are extremely rare.”

“How rare?”

“I never came across a serial killer like it.”

Except once, came the voice in his head. He quickly pushed the voice far away.

“If we can get a fix on this guy,” Lash went on, “we can compare it against criminal records. Look for a match. Meanwhile, have you thought about keeping a sharp eye on the other four supercouples?”

“We can’t do a close surveillance for obvious reasons. And we can’t provide adequate protection until we know exactly what’s going on. But yes, we’re already getting teams in place.”

“Where are the rest located?”

“All across the country. The closest couple, the Connellys, live north of Boston. I’ll have Tara get you brief reports on all of them.”

Lash nodded slowly. “You really think she’s the right person for me to work with?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She doesn’t seem to like me. Or else she’s dealing with some issues that are distracting her.”

“Tara’s going through a hard time. But she’s the best we have. Not only is she chief security tech—which gives her access to every system—but she’s unique in having worked both the security and computer engineering sides of the company.”

“Ifshe gets with the program.”

Mauchly’s cell phone went off, and he quickly raised it. “Mauchly.” A pause. “Yes, of course, sir. Right away.”

He replaced the cell phone. “That was Silver. He wants to see us, and right now.”

TWENTY-ONE

The day had grown dark and overcast, and the elevator doors opened onto a view far different than Lash had witnessed the day before. Only a handful of the cut-glass ceiling fixtures threw small pools of light across the vast room. Beyond the windows lay a gray stormscape of skyscrapers. The museum-like collection of thinking machines lay before them, hulking objects set against a lowering sky.

Richard Silver was standing by the bank of windows, hands clasped behind his back. At the elevator’s chime he turned.

“Christopher,” he said, shaking Lash’s hand. “Nice to see you again. Something to drink?”

“Coffee would be nice.”

“I’ll get it,” said Mauchly, moving toward a wet bar set into one of the bookcases.

Silver motioned Lash to the same table they’d sat at the day before. The magazines and newspapers were gone. Silver waited for Lash to sit, then took a chair across from him. He was wearing corduroys and a black cashmere sweater, sleeves pulled up his forearms.

“I’ve thought a lot about what you told me yesterday,” he said. “About these deaths not being suicide. I didn’t want to believe it. But I think you were right.”

“I don’t see any other possibility.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant what you said about Eden being involved, either way.” Silver looked past Lash, his expression troubled. “I’ve been too wrapped up in my own projects, here in my ivory tower. I’ve always been more fascinated by pure science than applied science. Trying to build a machine that can think, learn,solve problems on its own: that’s where my heart’s always been. Exactly what problems interested me less than thecapability of solving them. It wasn’t until the idea for Eden came along that I grew personally involved. Finally, a task to which Liza was worthy: human happiness. Even so, I’ve kept removed from the day-to-day process. And I see now this was a mistake.”

Silver stopped, his gaze focused again on Lash. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this.”

“People tell me I’ve got a face that inspires confidences.”

Silver laughed quietly. “Anyway, I finally decided that, if I’ve been uninvolved in the past, therewas something I could do. Now.”

“What’s that?”

Mauchly returned, coffee in hand, and Silver stood. “If you’ll come with me?”

He led the way to a far corner, where the glass windows that ran around three sides of the room met the bookcases of the fourth. Here, Silver’s collection of computing machines appeared to run to the musical: a Farfisa Combo; a Mellotron; and a modular Moog synthesizer, all patch cords and low-pass filters.

Silver turned to him. “You said the killer was most likely a rejected Eden candidate.”

“That’s what the profile suggests. Perhaps a schizoid personality that couldn’t accept rejection. There’s a smaller chance the killer dropped out of the programafter acceptance. Or was one of those clients not matched within your five-cycle window.”

Silver nodded. “I instructed Liza to parse all accessible applicant data, looking for anomalies.”

“Anomalies?”

“It’s a little hard to explain. Imagine creating a virtual topology in three dimensions, then populating it with applicant data. Compress the data, compare it. It’s almost like the avatar matching Liza does every day, done in reverse. See, our applicants havealready been psychologically vetted; they should all skew to tightly bounded norms. I was looking for applicants whose behavior, personality, lieoutside those norms.”

“Deviants,” Lash said.

“Yes,” Silver looked pained. “Or people whose behavior patterns were out of sync with their evaluations.”

“How did you do this so quickly?”

“Actually, I didn’t. I instructed Liza on the nature of the problem, and she developed the methodology on her own.”

“Using the data from applicant testing?”

“Not only that. Liza also called on data trails left by rejected applicants and voluntary dropouts in the months or years since their original applications.”

Lash was shocked. “You mean, data gatheredafter they weren’t potential clients anymore? How is such a thing possible?”

“It’s called activity monitoring. It’s practiced by many large corporations. The government does it, too. We’re just a few years ahead of everybody else. Mauchly’s probably shown you some of its elementary uses already.” Silver smoothed the front of his sweater. “In any case, Liza flagged three names.”

“Flagged?As in, already?”

Silver nodded.

“But there must have been a tremendous amount of data—”

“Approximately half a million petabytes. It would have taken a Cray a year to parse. Liza completed it in hours.” And he gestured at something near the wall.

Lash stared with fresh amazement at something he’d assumed was another antique from Silver’s collection. A standard computer keyboard sat on a small table, before an old-fashioned monochrome VDT terminal. A printer stood to one side.

“This is it?” Lash said incredulously. “This is Liza?”

“What did you expect?”

“I didn’t expect this.”

“Liza herself, or her computational plant, occupies the floors directly below us. But why make an interface more complicated than it has to be? You’d be surprised how much I can accomplish with just this.”

Lash thought about the computing feat Liza had just completed. “No, I wouldn’t.”

Silver hesitated. “Christopher, you’d mentioned another possibility. That the killer was somebody on our own staff. So I also instructed Liza to search for anything unusual,internally .” His expression grew tight, as if in physical pain. “She flagged one name.”

Silver turned to the small table, picked up two sheets of folded paper, and pressed them into Lash’s hand.

“Good luck—if that is indeed the right word.”

Lash nodded, turned to go.

“Christopher? One other thing.”

Lash glanced back.

“I know you understand why I gave this Liza’s highest priority.”

“I do. And thanks.”

He let Mauchly lead the way to the elevator, considering Silver’s last words. The same thought had also been running through his own head. The Thorpe couple had died on a Friday, eleven days before. The Wilners had died the following Friday. Serial killers liked consistency and pattern.

They had three days.

TWENTY-TWO

Four names,” Mauchly said.

He was staring at the table in Lash’s office. The two sheets of paper Silver provided lay on it, unfolded.

“Any idea why Liza flagged these four in particular?” Tara asked from across the table.

Mauchly picked up the sheet on which a single name had been printed. “Gary Handerling. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He’s part of the scrub crew,” Tara said.

“The what?” said Lash.

“Data scrub. They’re in charge of data storage and security.”

Mauchly glanced at her. “You’ve started the internal trace on him?”

“It should be completed within twelve hours.”

“Highest degree of confidentiality?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’d better get started on the three clients.” Mauchly picked up the other sheet. “I’ll have Rumson in Selective Gathering do complete workups.”

“What’ll you tell him?” Tara asked.

“That we’re running some random prototyping on a few obsoletes. Just another system test.”

Obsoletes, Lash thought to himself. Eden-speak for disqualified candidates.Guess that makes me an obsolete, too .

“Dr. Lash, we should have the results back by midmorning tomorrow. We’ll meet then, run them by your profile.” Mauchly checked his watch. “It’s almost five. Why don’t you two head home. We’ve got a long day tomorrow. Tara, if you wouldn’t mind taking Dr. Lash through the checkpoint, make sure he doesn’t get lost on the way out?”

By the time they pushed through the revolving doors onto the street, it was quarter past five. Lash stopped at the fountain to button his coat. The clamor of Manhattan, almost forgotten in the hushed spaces of the Eden tower, reasserted itself with a vengeance.

“I don’t see how anyone could get used to that,” Lash said. “Going through those checkpoints, I mean.”

“You can get used to anything,” Tara replied, slinging a satchel over one shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

“Hold on a minute!” Lash trotted to keep up with her. “Where are you going?”

“Grand Central. I live in New Rochelle.”

“Really? I live in Westport. Let me drop you off.”

“That’s okay, thanks.”

“Then let me buy you a drink before you head home.”

Tara stopped and looked at him. “Why?”

“Why not? It’s a thing coworkers do sometimes. In civilized countries, I mean.”

Tara hesitated.

“Humor me.”

She nodded. “Okay. But let’s go to Sebastian’s. I don’t want to catch anything later than the 6:02.”

Sebastian’s was a sprawl of white-covered tables on the upper level of Grand Central, overlooking the main passenger terminal. The cavernous space had been completely restored in recent years, and was more beautiful than Lash ever remembered seeing it: creamy walls rising to a ceiling of groined vaults, green spandrels, and constellations of glittering mosaic. The voices of countless commuters, the squawk of the dispatch loudspeaker calling out arrivals and departures, mingled together in an oddly pleasing patchwork of background noise.

The two were shown to a small table perched directly in front of the railing. Within moments, a waiter bustled up. “What can I get you?” he asked.

“I’ll have a Bombay martini, very dry, with a twist,” Tara said.

“A vodka Gibson, please.” Lash watched the waiter thread his way back through the tables, then turned to Tara. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For not ordering one of those horrible martinisdu jour . Somebody I was dining with the other week ordered an apple martini. Apple. What an abomination.”

Tara shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Lash looked over the railing at the streams of commuters. Tara was silent, twisting a cocktail napkin between the fingers of one hand. He looked back at her. Hazy light slanted down, catching the gentle curve of her auburn hair. Her eyes, framed by perfect high cheekbones, looked serious.

“Want to tell me what’s up?” he asked.

“Up with what?”

“With you.”

She wrapped the napkin around one finger, twisted it tight. “I agreed to a drink, not a psychiatric session.”

“I’m not a psychiatrist. Just a guy trying to get a job done, with your help. Only you don’t seem too eager to help.”

She glanced up at him for a minute, then returned her attention to the napkin.

“You seem preoccupied. Disinterested. That doesn’t bode well for our working relationship.”

“Our temporary working relationship.”

“Exactly. And the better we work together, the more temporary it will be.”

She dropped the napkin on the table. “You’re wrong. I’mnot disinterested. It’s been—a rough couple of days for me.”

“Then why don’t you tell me about it?”

Tara sighed, her gaze wandering toward the soaring vault overhead.

“I’m buying. It’s the least you can do.”

Their drinks arrived, and they sipped a moment in silence.

“Okay,” Tara said. “No reason you shouldn’t know, I guess.” She took another sip. “I didn’t learn about any of this until yesterday, when Mauchly called to tell me I’d be your liaison while you were inside the Wall. That’s when he told me about the problem.”

Lash remained silent, listening.

“The only thing is, just this Saturday, I got the nod from Eden.”

“The nod?”

“That’s what we call getting notification your match has been found.”

“Yourmatch ? You mean that you . . .” He stopped.

“Yeah. I’d been a candidate.”

Lash stared at her. “I thought Eden employees weren’t allowed to be candidates.”

“That’s always been the policy. But a few months ago they started a pilot program to phase in employee applicants, based on merit and seniority. In a pool with other Eden employees, not the general pool.”

Lash sipped his drink. “I’m not sure I see why the policy was needed in the first place.”

“The staff shrinks recommended it from day one. They called it the ‘Oz effect.’”

“As in, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?”

“Exactly. They thought employees wouldn’t make desirable candidates. See, we know too much of what goes on,how things go on, behind the scenes. They thought we’d be cynical.” Then she leaned toward him suddenly, an intensity in her face he hadn’t seen before. “But you have no idea what it’s like, day after day. Bringing people together. Sitting in the dark behind one-way glass, watching couples at class reunions talk about how wonderful everything had become. How Eden changed their lives,completed their lives. I mean, if you’ve already got someone and you’re happy, maybe you can rationalize. But if you don’t . . .” She let the sentence hang in the air, unfinished.

“You’re right,” Lash said. “I don’t have any idea what it’s like.”

“I carried that letter around with me all weekend. I must have read it a hundred times. Matt Bolan, in our biochemistry section, was the match. I’ve never met him, but I’d heard the name. They’d made a dinner reservation for us this coming Friday. One If By Land, Two If By Sea.”

“In the Village. Beautiful place.”

“Especially this time of year.” For a moment, Tara’s expression brightened. Then it clouded again. “Then, first thing yesterday, I get the call from Mauchly. He tells me about the supercouples, the double suicides. Would I be kind enough to shepherd you around.”

“And?”

“And right before I meet you, I send an email to the Applications Committee withdrawing my name as a candidate.”

“What?”

Tara’s eyes blazed. “How was I supposed to go ahead, knowing what I know? And worse, what Idon’t know?”

“What are you saying? That the application process is flawed?”

“I don’tknow what I’m saying!” she cried. Frustration brought an edge to her voice. “Can’t you see? The processcan’t be flawed, I work with it every day, Isee it perform miracles over and over. But then, what happened to those two couples?”

As quickly as it came, the violent emotion dissipated. Tara sank back. “Anyway, how can I go forward now? If Eden is about anything, it’s about lifetime commitment to a relationship. Can I begin such a relationship with a secret I can never reveal?”

The question hung in the air. Tara lifted her drink.

“There you have it,” she said with a dry laugh. “I’ve had a lot on my mind. Happy now?”

“I feel anything but happy.”

“Just please don’t bring it up again. I’ll be fine.”

The waiter reappeared. “Another round?”

“Not for me,” Lash said. The cocktail might have been a mistake: tired as he was, he’d probably fall asleep at the wheel halfway home.

“Me neither,” Tara said. “I’ve got to catch my train.”

“Just the check, please,” Lash told the waiter.

Tara watched the man recede toward the bar, then looked back at Lash. “All right. Your turn. I heard you tell Dr. Silver that your orientation was cognitive behavioral.”

“That was your first time in the penthouse, too. You never told me what you thought of the place.”

“We’re talking about you now, not me.”

“As you wish.” The waiter returned with the check; Lash fumbled for his wallet, dropped a credit card onto the leather folder. “Cognitive behavioral, that’s correct.”

Tara waited until the waiter had scooped away the bill. “I must have dozed off during our psych orientations. What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t focus on unconscious conflicts, on whether somebody got enough hugs from his mother at age two. I focus on what a person’s thinking, what his ruleset is.”

“Ruleset?”

“Everybody lives by a set of internal rules, whether they know it or not. You understand enough of a person’s rules, you can understand, predict, their behavior.”

“Predict. I assume that’s what you did for the FBI.”

Lash finished off his drink. “Something like that.”

“And if this—this turns out to be the work of a killer, will you be able to predict what he’ll do next?”

“Hopefully. But the profile is extremely contradictory. Anyway, maybe that won’t be necessary. We’ll know tomorrow morning.” As he spoke, Lash became aware of the waiter standing at his elbow.

“Yes?” Lash said.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the waiter said. “But this card has been declined.”