MOTHER OF GOD Tessa Lambert is young, beautiful — and a genius. She has just created the first viable artificial intelligence programme. But her discovery is so controversial that she must keep it a secret even from her colleagues at Oxford University. How could Tessa have been aware that soon there was to be a hacker stalking her on the Internet: a serial killer who has already terrified California, a killer who unbeknownst to anyone is about to give her secret invention its own terrifying and completely malevolent life . . . MOTHER OF GOD BY DAVID AMBROSE Complete and Unabridged CHAPTER 1 SHE thought she might tell him when they took their Easter break together in Brittany. It depended how things went. She wasn't trying to trap him into anything. She accepted full responsibility: she was twenty-nine years old — old enough to run her own life. All the same, he had a right to know. Whether he was interested or not was up to him. If he was horrified at the idea of a child, then they would go their separate ways without rancour. She had already decided that she wasn't going to ask for financial support. She would bring up the child herself. Other women — women she admired — had done it, and so could she. What worried her was that he might propose some sort of half-measure: for instance, that she have the baby but they keep their relationship on its present easy-going basis, no commitments either way. This, she had decided, wouldn't work. The child would have a full-time father or none at all. The streets of Oxford were relatively free of undergraduates when she drove to the lab that morning. Most of them had already left for the Easter vac. She and Philip were due to set out for France on Thursday. She was going to pick him up in London at his friend Tom's flat in Earl's Court, where the two of them were putting together the summer issue of the poetry magazine they co-edited. She had hardly spoken to Philip in the last few weeks; he had been frantic down there, and she had been equally busy up here. She had joined him for one brief weekend, but it had been mostly parties and people and a fringe theatre show, and there had been no time to talk about a baby. It would be easier abroad, walking on the beach, perhaps, with Mont St Michel in the distance. That was how she imagined it. His handwriting was immediately recognizable on the second letter she pulled out of her mail box. The postmark was London, Saturday. She opened it quickly, not giving herself time to wonder what it was all about. But she had only to read the first couple of lines to know. My dear Tessa, This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write. Part of me wishes I had the nerve to tell you to your face, but the rest of me thanks God that I don't, because I couldn't have borne that look of strange resignation you always get when something, or someone, disappoints you. He went on to tell her that he'd been seeing this other woman for three months now. The trips to London to work on the magazine had been increasingly a cover. The woman, whose name he didn't mention, came like him from Australia. Now that his twelve-month visiting lectureship at Oxford was coming to an end, they had decided to go back together. He didn't give any more details, just finished off with some standard sentiments about how his time with Tessa had been precious, how he would always be grateful and would never forget her. Et cetera. Goodbye. She realized she was still standing there gazing blankly at the letter some moments, maybe even minutes, after reading it a second time. She began again, but stopped. There was no point, no more to get out of it, no secrets between the lines. It was over. Footsteps echoed around her on the old, cracked marble floors of the administrative building as people went about their business. Fortunately no one she knew well went past; she didn't know how she would react if someone spoke to her. She turned and walked out quickly, got into her car, and sat behind the wheel. Why would he have sent the letter here to the lab instead of to the cottage? Not that it mattered, but there must have been a reason. She unfolded the letter again and her eyes ran over the familiar phrases. There it was: time. He and the woman were leaving Heathrow this morning. They would be in the air before she got to the lab. That must have been how he wanted it. No thought that she could absorb a shock like this better at home than where she worked. That wouldn't have occurred to him. How little he understood her. How little he cared. How little in the end, she told herself, it mattered. She crumpled the letter into a ball inside her fist, then wondered what to do with it. She pushed it deep into the pocket of her long, loose jacket. Then she wondered what to do with herself. Damn it, she would go in to work. That was always the best therapy. If someone asked her about Easter, which they were sure to do, or mentioned Brittany, because she had told her friends, she would just say that there had been a change of plan. She wouldn't go into details. It was nobody's business but hers. Like the baby. That was now nobody's business but hers. But she had been prepared for that; she just hadn't been prepared for the decision to be made so soon. Well, it was behind her. So was Philip. He never would have made a father anyway. The idea was ridiculous. She and the baby were well shot of him. She shut her car door firmly, locked it, and started briskly back across the gravel towards the labs. She paused only for an instant. Anyone watching would have thought that she was trying to remember something that she might have left behind. What she was actually doing was asking herself whether she, Tessa Lambert, one of the brightest minds in this university of very bright minds, was capable of looking after a helpless, infant life. CHAPTER 2 SPECIAL AGENT Tim Kelly peered down from the helicopter as it started its descent towards the hills behind Malibu. He could see the cluster of vehicles already at the crime scene and the tent which had been erected over the body. Moments later he was inside the tent with Lieutenant Jack Fischl of the Los Angeles Police Department, and Bernie Meyer, the medical examiner. "Two kids from Pepperdine found it on their morning run," Jack Fischl was saying, jerking a thumb in the general direction of the nearby university campus. "Scared off a couple of coyotes who'd started breakfast. Hard to know how much was the coyotes and how much him." Tim looked down at the remains of what had been a young woman, and an attractive one if the other victims were anything to go by. Not that they'd looked much better than this one when they'd been found, but subsequent identification and comparison of photographs had shown that he went for a certain type. She was white, in her twenties or early thirties, not heavy but with a full figure. The modesty implied by the pale bikini lines on the stretches of her flesh that had remained untouched was mocked by the grossness of her death. She was his seventh in eighteen months. Predictably enough, the press had already dubbed the killer 'the LA Ripper'. Bernie Meyer rolled her on to her side to examine the dark patches of post-mortem lividity on her back. Rigor mortis had set in and Tim noticed that the bruise-like spots where blood had congealed beneath the skin after death did not correspond with the points at which the body had been in contact with the dry, uneven ground beneath it. Like the others, she had been killed elsewhere, then dumped. "Dead twelve to fifteen hours is my guess," Bernie said in his matter-of-fact tenor. The light voice came unexpectedly from his stocky frame and bullet-like bald head. "Strangled, then dumped here before rigor set in — say between midnight and 3 a.m. Can't say much more till I get her to the lab." Tim knew that there wouldn't be much more to say even then if the killer was running to form. None of the autopsies had yielded any secretions: semen, blood, or tissue. They had nothing to go on apart from psychological profiles, but no leads and no suspects. Jack Fischl ducked down to get out of the confined space with its smell of death, and Tim followed him. They both breathed in the sea breeze blowing off the Pacific. All around them the Crime Scene Unit was going over the ground with their usual fine-tooth comb, bagging anything from cigarette ends to buttons, book-matches, and strands of hair, always on the lookout for any soft piece of earth that might have held a tyre-print or a footprint. But there was little chance of that up here. Jack Fischl lit a cigarette and offered one to the bored photographer sitting on his camera box, waiting to see if he'd be needed again. Then he looked over at Tim with a little shrug of helplessness. Tim liked the slow-moving, middle-aged cop. Relations between the FBI and local police weren't always easy, but Jack had no chips on his shoulder or old axes to grind. "You don't have to stick around if you don't want to," he told Tim. "I'll fax everything over to you — soon as we have anything." "There's not much I can do till we have some ID," Tim said, glancing at his watch. "It's still early for missing person reports." "Anything from the phone traces?" Tim shook his head. "Slow, slow, slow," he intoned. Jack nodded in sympathy. Both knew what they meant: phone taps across state lines, not to mention international frontiers, were impossibly complex to get approved and set up. The problem was that in this case phone taps were their best and perhaps only hope. The killer's first two victims had belonged to the same computerized dating service, which had led the police to believe that they had a relatively simple task to break this case. But after every single male who conceivably had access to the information had been checked out without even one likely suspect being thrown up, they realized that it wasn't going to be so easy. Then Fischl himself had the idea of using phone taps to find out if some hacker was getting into the data bank illegally; and sure enough they found one. But their elation was short-lived. The hacker was coming in over the Internet, which is the point at which the FBI became involved. The Agency had established that the calls were entering the nationwide network from an international one, at which point the trail vanished into a geometrically horrifying multitude of possibilities, each one protected in its turn by a stack of legal safeguards and political obstacles. By the time that the enormity of the problem became clear, there had been four murders, all of them in the Greater Los Angeles area. Logic dictated that LA was where the killer lived; but tracing him around the world and back to his lair, somewhere in the region's eighteen million-plus inhabitants, would have daunted Superman, let alone Special Agent Tim Kelly. As the helicopter climbed back into the sky and turned southeast for the FBI building in Westwood, Tim gazed out with growing depression at the hazily overcast urban carpet beneath him. There was something unnatural about this city. It had grown in a desert along earthquake fault-lines where cities didn't belong. That it should nurture more than its fair share of maniacs and misfits was somehow to be expected. But what was he, or any of his kind, the law enforcers of the land, supposed to do about it? What do you do when there is nothing you can do? Except pray, if you believe in prayer. Tim didn't. But to his surprise, as he sat there with the roar of the helicopter's motor in his ears, he found the words of a prayer forming in his brain. "God help us to find this one. Because if he doesn't, I don't know who will." CHAPTER 3 HELEN TEMPLE'S rambling house in north Oxford was, as always, a tumble of children and dogs. Tessa wondered at the energy required to manage all this, plus a brilliant but charmingly vague husband, and still run a full-time career as a doctor. When she had asked one time, Helen had only laughed and said, "The trick is not to panic." Her friend was, Tessa suspected, a truly happy woman. The thought filled her with awe and fear, a certain amount of envy, a touch of scepticism, but above all with curiosity. That was why, whenever her emotions became confused, Tessa turned to Helen. "I'd already made up my mind that I was going to have the baby. I'd thought of every possible combination of Philip's reactions, both sides of all the arguments, the good and the bad compromises ... I was ready for everything. Except this." "In reality," Helen said after a while, "you're only in the position you were quite prepared to put yourself in if he hadn't been willing to promise that he'd be a proper father to the child: on your own, without him." "Logically that's true. But that's not how it feels." "You feel betrayed. And you have been. He's behaved like the selfish bastard we both knew he was." Tessa was silent. "Maybe I didn't have the right to give him the choice of being a father or not. I mean, it was just my definition of the role that I was imposing on him ..." "You never even got the chance to try, did you? At least you were going to face him with what was on your mind. What did he do? Screwed around furtively behind your back, and sent you a coward's letter. If you're going to get involved with a shit, at least pick one with some courage." There was a silence between them in the kitchen which overlooked the leafy garden, a silence broken only by a grunt from one of the dogs as he heaved himself away from the warmth of the Aga and drank noisily from a bowl. The children had dispersed for football, the cubs, and choir practice, so the house was briefly still. "If there were a cure ..." Tessa began. "... we'd bottle it and make a fortune," Helen finished for her. It had been their old joke ever since Tessa had spent some time in analysis. She'd broken off when she said that now she understood her problem, but couldn't see any chance of a cure this side of getting too old to bother with men anyway. So she went on falling for bastards who betrayed and hurt her, and never for the nice guys who wouldn't. The trouble was that bastards were more fun. They made her feel sexy and exciting. They took everything for granted, and yet nothing at all. The worst, the silliest thing, was that there always came a point in the relationship where she told herself that she would be the one to change him — this time. She laughed with resigned self-knowledge when she thought about how classically she fitted into all the textbooks. But knowing didn't change anything. It was supposed to, but it didn't. Knowledge, she had decided, sometimes had feet of clay. If there were a cure . . . "A cure in this case," she said after a while, "implies a simple answer. And the price you pay for simple answers is being wrong — consistently." "You manage to be consistently wrong about the men in your life, and yet I've never heard you give a simple answer about anything." Tessa smiled. Her friend's frankness, brutal though it was at times, was the emotional anchor of her life. She wondered if Helen understood just how important she was, and decided that she probably did; it was just that Helen carried all responsibility, including this one, so lightly. It was a gift of some kind. A gift for life. How Tessa would have liked to have it. But then how could she, when they had such different backgrounds? "You know something," she began hesitantly, "this is completely illogical, but for a second when I read the letter, I found myself thinking that I wasn't going to keep the baby after all. As you said, I'd been prepared to throw Philip out of my life and have it; but when he walked out, I wondered. Can you understand that?" Helen turned her gaze from the early evening light outside the window and studied her friend's downcast face for a while before speaking. "What it suggests," she said eventually, "is that maybe you're not as confident about having this child as you want to think you are." Tessa looked up and met her gaze. Helen saw pain in the look, but also indecision, and pressed on. "Look," she said, leaning forward slightly in the creaky wicker chair, "suppose you had confronted Philip, and he'd said very plainly that he wanted you but didn't want the baby. You think you would have told him that that wasn't an option. But you don't know. You can't be sure what you'd have done. There's still that little area of doubt — that maybe you aren't as committed to going through with this as you've told yourself you are." Tessa leaned back against the cushions of the corner seat and rubbed her fingers down the centre of her forehead. "The only good thing about not keeping the baby," she said, "would be that I could have a large gin, right now." Helen smiled sympathetically. They had been through the arguments together many times. Helen was a Catholic, though with a flexible attitude to dogma. She believed in birth control and abortion in certain circumstances, no matter what the church might say. No Pope or College of Cardinals came between Helen and the God she felt she understood better than any of them. Tessa, on the other hand, had no beliefs: at least not of a religious kind. She did not believe that there was anything sacred about a human egg, fertilized or otherwise. It was not yet, she told herself, a living being, just a biochemical process in its early stages. As a scientist, Tessa knew that sharp distinctions between life and non-life did not exist; nature was infinitely subtle, shaded, and ambiguous. "All the same," she said with quiet firmness, "I want the baby. This baby. I don't know why, but I know I do." "Okay," Helen nodded and pushed herself up from her chair. "Then we'll leave the gin where it is, and I'll make a fresh pot of tea." CHAPTER 4 HE sat in darkness except for the glow of his screen. His fingers moved over the computer keyboard with the relaxed precision of a jazz pianist coaxing out an improvisation for his own amusement. His staring eyes rippled strangely as they reflected and at the same time absorbed the dense streams of information that scrolled endlessly before them. But although his body sat in a basement room in California, his mind reached out and travelled at the speed of light around the world, sliding down the information highways, switching deftly from one to another without any of them knowing he was even there. He was Superman — or would have been if the name hadn't been taken already. Spiderman would have done fine; he liked the image of himself as the spider at the centre of his web. But that name too, unfortunately, was gone. So in the end he settled for Netman. It didn't have the pizzazz of the first two, but it conveyed the way he felt about this other, mythic version of himself that lived out there: invisible, all-knowing, all-powerful when he chose. The stupid name the press were using -— 'LA Ripper' — just proved how far they, the cops, the FBI and all of them were from getting even close to him. Falling back on a cliche like that was, in his view, just pathetic. But maybe it sold newspapers. Who cared? He didn't waste much time thinking about them. He was scanning the patient list of a medical practice in Beverly Hills. The first time he had seen her she had been coming out of the building. He had been in the coffee shop opposite and had watched her walk to the parking lot and had memorized the licence plate of the car she had driven off in. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles computer, the car was registered in the name of Mrs Rosa Korngold. But this girl didn't look like a 'Mrs'. He'd made more checks and discovered that Mrs Korngold was sixty-five years of age, she had been a widow for ten years, and was a wealthy woman. He listed her stockholdings, investments, and real estate interests, and was impressed. But money was not his concern here. The girl could have been Mrs Korngold's granddaughter, except there was no record of Mrs Korngold's having children. That left a wide range of possibilities. He fanned out from her bank accounts, drawing up a profile of her interests, habits, and activities. There were regular payments to several charities connected with animal welfare, and she had standing orders for at least a dozen periodicals on the subject. One name stood out and looked promising. A regular monthly payment to a Sandra M. Smallwood went back to the beginning of the year, the equivalent of a generous secretarial salary. Tracing the payments through Ms Smallwood's account, he found her address listed as that of Mrs Korngold herself. Netman's interest was already engaged; now his curiosity was aroused. His rules were strict. There must be no personal contact between himself and the subject, or anyone connected with the subject, until such time as he deemed it appropriate. By then he would know more about the subject than the subject herself; but all that information would have been gathered secretly and electronically, leaving no trace of his interest behind. He made a search of the animal welfare mailing lists, and found that Ms Smallwood was on most of them, and had been prior to her association with Mrs Korngold. That had to be the connection. On one of the mailing lists he found an undeleted previous address for Ms Smallwood. It was in Van Nuys, well down the economic ladder from her current residence in Beverly Hills. This made his tricky work with social security records a little easier. Sandra Smallwood had worked in a pets' parlour in Westwood, having earned her diploma, he eventually discovered, at the grandly titled Animal Husbandry College of Phoenix, Arizona. That was where her parents and immediate family still lived. Others were scattered across the country. He assembled a file on them and memorized it. Most importantly, he found a place where he himself could fit in: the distant cousin whose credentials would be beyond suspicion when finally he made contact. Now, scrolling down the names and details in the medical centre's computer, he was checking out a family history — a tendency in both male and female members to kidney stones, especially in later life, though sometimes in youth. But it turned out that, on the day he had first seen her, barely a week ago now, Sandra had been undergoing only a routine gynaecological check-up. There was no indication in any of her medical records from infancy onwards of any kidney problems. Not that it mattered. He was into the fine print now, satisfying a prurient curiosity that he disapproved of in himself. But the minutiae always became an obsession with him at this point: the minutiae of a life that would end soon. And only Netman knew why. CHAPTER 5 TESSA woke early to the first spring morning of the year. The sun hung low in a clear sky and glinted in the moisture of her rambling country garden. She pulled on the nearest pair of jeans, an old sweater and a pair of pumps, and went out to smell the air. George, the cat who had adopted her, appeared and wrapped himself about her ankles. She picked him up and he purred as she carried him around, checking what was out or coming out, what needed pruning, thinning, trimming, weeding. Tessa didn't know much about gardens, but she was picking up a good deal from Mr Bryson, who came from the village three mornings a week, more when necessary. Mr Bryson had been part of the overall deal when she rented the place. She started down the winding path to the apple orchard with its archways of gnarled branches that suggested hidden depths and secret places, but when George squirmed and jumped from her arms to go off in search of some adventure of his own she went to sit on the old wooden bench in front of a clematis-covered wall. She leaned back and closed her eyes, placing her knees slightly apart and her hands on them. It was an attitude of meditation, one of the many she'd learned over the years. But it didn't work. She needed concrete things this morning, not abstractions; though sometimes the two could become confused. She got up and walked back into the cottage. Wooden beams darkened by age. An old sash window, wisteria falling across it. A blue coffee pot. A simple earthenware mug and plate. Old carving knives and cutlery with worn ivory handles. She had lived in a house like this until she was five years old, and the day she first walked into this kitchen the memories had come back across a quarter of a century with such force that for a moment she had been disoriented, almost to the point of panic. Then she had realized that this was what she had unconsciously been looking for. She took the place immediately, with no more than a cursory glance at the other rooms. As she made herself breakfast, Tessa let her thoughts drift back to the day that had marked the end of her childhood. For many years she had tried not to think about it. Now, in this room, she thought about it often. The process, she had come to realize, was therapeutic: good memories were replacing painful ones. Her mother had been proudly showing her a book with drawings in it — drawings that Tessa had watched her father make in the big light room where he worked at the back of the house. Tessa had loved to be in there with him, surrounded by paper, paint, and coloured pencils. They were still looking at the book when Daddy had come in. Then they all played a game with Happy, the black and white mongrel puppy they'd had for just two months. Her parents had still been laughing when they left. She had watched their car drive off down the quiet lane. There were good smells from something her mother had left cooking slowly in the oven. She remembered Jenny checking on it now and then. Jenny was the girl from the farm who sometimes looked after Tessa for an hour or so. That day the hour or so had gone on and on. Jenny had grown anxious and called her mother. It was dark when Jenny's mother came, accompanied by two policemen. Jenny's mother had been in tears, and Jenny began to cry too after they had whispered together. Then they both cried over Tessa, and took her to sleep at the farm that night. They let her sleep with Happy on the bed. The next day Auntie Carrie came with Uncle Jack in the car. She was crying, too. She told Tessa that Mummy and Daddy had gone to live with Jesus in heaven and weren't ever coming back. Tessa could not understand how they could have gone away without taking her. Or Happy. Auntie Carrie had offered no explanation. She just told Tessa that from now on she would live with them because they had no children of their own. Auntie Carrie was fifteen years older than Tessa's mother, Uncle Jack a good deal older than that. Their house was a long way away and very different. Outside it looked like all the others in the street. Inside it was dark and had strange odours. But the worst thing was that she hadn't been allowed to bring Happy. Auntie Carrie was allergic to animals, so he stayed on the farm. They had said she could visit him, but Uncle Jack never seemed to have the time to drive her over. After a while, in response to her persistent questions about the little dog, Tessa was told that he too had gone to live in heaven with Mummy and Daddy, so there was no point in asking about him any more. At school she made few friends, and even they were hard to keep because she wasn't allowed to bring them home; her aunt and uncle were anxious about noise. Nor was she allowed to go out and 'run wild'. Most of her time was spent alone in her room, reading. She spoke little, and never unless spoken to. Her life seemed to be happening somewhere else, and she viewed it remotely from a distance. That she did well in exams was no surprise: she had nothing else to fill her time. The other kids teased her sometimes and called her a swot, but on the whole left her alone. She didn't curry favour with the teachers, and mostly just faded into her surroundings. It came as a surprise when her headmistress said she was being entered for an Oxford scholarship, and an even bigger one when she won it. They let her go up two years earlier than was usual, and at last her life began again. She took a first in maths, then did her doctorate. She tutored for a couple of terms, then went to work for a software company, finally coming back to the Kendall Laboratory, which was part of the university though with external funding and dedicated to pure research. Her special interest became cybernetics. *** It was still only 8 a.m. when Tessa took a second cup of coffee upstairs with her to change. In the event she changed only her sweater — for something looser. The baby didn't show yet — it was only twelve weeks — though she was thickening slightly at the waist. It was a curiously comfortable feeling. She turned her face from side to side and studied her reflection in the mirror, first of all pulling her longish hair back, then up. She decided that today would be an up day. Her clear blue eyes gazed back at her as she pinned it in place. They saw an undeniably attractive woman: high cheekbones, a full mouth, and a complexion with a slightly olive richness acquired from a half-Greek father and a Welsh mother. Everybody told her — lovers, colleagues, friends — that she was animated, alive, and full of energy when she talked. Her smile, they said, lit up a room. That puzzled her, because whenever she looked in a mirror, all she saw was the blank, unformed gaze of the child she had once been and who still wasn't sure what to say or how to behave. She got up and realized that her hand was on her stomach, feeling for the life hidden there. As she turned she caught sight once more of her reflection — and for the first time in as long as she remembered, she found it smiling back at her. Surprised by happiness, she went through to the next room where she had installed her computers. Last night she had logged into Attila, the mainframe in the lab, and worked till late. After that she had made a few notes on her PC and copied them on to floppy disk. Now she took the disk out and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans to review later. Then she locked up the house and set out in her car for the twenty-minute drive to Oxford. CHAPTER 6 SANDRA SMALLWOOD — Sandy to everyone — took the call on the private line that Mrs Korngold had installed for her in the garden wing of the main house. "Hello?" "I'm sorry to trouble you," said a man's voice, "but could I possibly speak with a Miss Sandra Smallwood, please?" The voice was young and the tone polite. "This is she." "Miss Smallwood, I doubt if you'll remember me, but I'm a relative of yours. My father is your mother's cousin. I think that makes us second cousins." "What's your name?" "Darren Wade." "From Philadelphia?" "Right." "You're Bill and Naomi's — " "Right, that's right ..." "I haven't heard from them in years. How are they?" "They're on a world cruise right now. I don't know if you heard, Dad had some luck with some stock he bought in a little firm ten years back that isn't a little firm any longer ..." "I didn't hear. That sounds great." "I hope you don't mind my calling like this." "No, not at all." "It must be, God, how many years since we saw each other?" "Don't ask," she laughed. "I've got a picture somewhere." "You do? Of me?" "Both of us together. At some wedding. You must have been four, five years old, tops." "Sandra, let me tell you why I'm calling ..." "Sandy. Everybody still calls me Sandy." "Sandy. I really don't want to intrude, please say if this is in any way an intrusion ... "Of course not. I'm happy to hear from you." "It's just that I was working earlier this year as a volunteer with Pets Aid in Atlanta, and I came across your name on our subscribers' list. I made a note of your address and thought if I was ever in LA I'd call you up and see if it was really you." "You're in LA?" "I'm starting a course at UCLA as part of my veterinary training." "You're a veterinarian?" "I will be. Eventually I'm hoping to practise here in California." "Maybe I can help you." "Oh, no, look, I didn't call for — " "The person I work for knows everybody." "Who d'you work for?" "Her name's Mrs Rosa Korngold." "Korngold? That kind of rings a bell." "She's on a lot of boards and stuff. I look after her dogs. That's my job." "What kind of dogs?" "Retrievers. She has eight of them." "Eight!" Sandy laughed. "She really likes retrievers." "Listen, Sandy, like I said, I don't want to intrude into your life, but I wondered if maybe we might meet up and have a cup of coffee some time, you know?" "Why don't you come over to the house?" "No, really, I don't want — " "Meet Mrs Korngold. She's a nice lady. And when she hears you're a veterinarian ..." "Are you sure?" "Of course I am." "I'd really like to do that. Only . . . well, just for the first time we meet, I'd kind of thought we could maybe get together just the two of us. I mean, just to catch up on family and stuff." CHAPTER 7 TESSA was smiling as she slowed and turned left off Banbury Road. She had been amusing herself by thinking up stupid names for the baby. Why did the idea of calling a boy 'Walter' make her laugh? Or a girl 'Myrtle'? And what was wrong with 'Herbert', 'Sybil', 'Stanley', 'Vera', 'Percival', or 'Mabel'? They were perfectly ordinary names that people had been happy to live with, yet she was laughing aloud at the idea of calling her baby by any of them. How was it that words took on associations that totally altered their original significance? In fact she had already decided on the names: 'Paul' after her father, and for a girl 'Rachel', her mother's name. She negotiated a right turn around the redbrick gothic mass of Keble College, then a left into South Parks Road. She pulled in through a gate with overhanging laurels and drove through the spread of buildings that made up what was called the 'Science Area' until she found her parking space. The Kendall Laboratory had been constructed in the late fifties as an extension to a Victorian block which now housed its administration. In fact it wasn't a single lab at all, but a series of self-contained units, flexible in number and size, according to who was working with whom on what project at any given time. It functioned as part of the university's Department of Computer Science, though its considerable outside funding meant that it was in touch with industries and government agencies around the world. Artificial Intelligence — AI for short — could not be seriously discussed anywhere without mention of the Kendall Lab. Tessa's mail this morning contained nothing more than a couple of periodicals and the draft of an article on frame recognition that someone she knew at MIT was preparing for publication. She said hello to a few people as she went up the stairs, stopped in the door of a couple of offices for a brief chat. The atmosphere was, as always, informal, open, and low-key. People came here from all over the world. All of them could have made relative fortunes in industry, but they preferred the freedom to pursue the objects of their own intellectual curiosity rather than serve the requirements of some paymaster. Tessa had worked in a large electronics company for a time, but found the atmosphere stifling. She had been in the process of setting up her own consultancy when she was invited to come back to the Kendall and had jumped at the offer. She was explaining something to a Swedish statistician when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a tall distinguished figure in a pin-stripe suit watching her from the landing above. With a shock she realized she had forgotten her meeting with Jonathan Syme from the Department of Trade and Industry. She excused herself to the Swede and hurried up the stairs, glancing at her watch. Luckily she was only ten minutes late. He greeted her with a smile and a handshake, brushing aside her apologies. Jonathan was around forty. He was smart, charming, and often amusing. A high-flyer in the civil service, he was also a quondam Fellow of All Souls and came up to dine maybe twice a month. He would sometimes stay overnight in college, which accounted for his occasional early morning visits to the lab to see what Tessa was doing with the government money which made up part of her funding. It was all informal and without any interference, though Tessa knew perfectly well that he would be dictating an official memo the moment he settled into the back of the car that waited to drive him down the M40 to London. "So how's Fred this morning?" Jonathan asked as they strode along the passage to where she worked. "Let's find out," she said. "I was doing a little work on him from home last night. I'm curious to see if he was paying attention." Fred was a robot who carried a mass of sophisticated sensory devices that fed data back into Attila, the big computer in the lab two floors below, where his 'brain' was a program that Tessa had written. It was that program she had been working on until the early hours from her home computer linked by phone into the lab. Fred had, in fact, made startling progress in the last couple of weeks, but she wondered how much of this would be obvious to a relative outsider. An hour later she watched Jonathan lean back on the hard plastic chair where he had sat enthralled, watching Fred negotiate an increasingly complex series of mazes with flawless precision. Tessa hoped she didn't look too pleased with herself. "It's amazing. A hundred per cent improvement, if not more. What on earth have you done?" She gave a little shrug. "It could be a fluke of course ..." "Come on, Tessa — if it were a fluke he wouldn't go on improving every time. I know that's the idea behind neural nets — adaptation, evolution, all of that. But this is extraordinary." He sat looking at her, waiting for some explanation until ultimately she felt compelled to offer one. "I've been helping the system to reorganize itself in terms of its experience. I added a couple of functions to the program which re-order the response networks dynamically — effectively to 'chunk' its experience." She stopped, hoping to see him nod wisely, look at his watch, and say that he must be on his way. Instead he raised an eyebrow inquiringly as the silence lengthened, as though amused by her reticence. "You mean it's improving with practice. Is that what you're saying?" "That's the general idea." He was looking at her intensely now. "But that's unheard of, isn't it?" She tipped her head on one side. "It's the first time it's been applied to a system of this complexity." "How did you do it?" "The first thing I did was modify the neural net manager to create a set of mutated response networks whenever the circumstances were sufficiently new." "Forcing the program to evolve in response to stimuli." "Yes, essentially. The mutations were random, so I had to add a genetic algorithm that kept the ones that worked and threw out the ones that didn't." "How did you do that?" Tessa took a breath. It was an instinctive reaction to the problem of explaining in lay terms something that she herself barely understood outside of technical jargon. She immediately regretted the action, hoping that he wouldn't interpret it as boredom or open rudeness. But he seemed unconcerned. "I hooked the program into Attila's virtual reality simulation of the lab as well as into Fred's physical body in the lab." "Allowing the program to look before Fred leaped, as it were?" "Yes, sort of," she said, meeting his gaze and reflecting, not for the first time, that he was remarkably quick on the uptake for a non-scientist. But then a first in Greats and a fellowship at All Souls suggested an intelligence that could probably master anything it applied itself to. She found herself thinking what a pity it was that he was gay; then wondering how she knew he was. A woman's instinct? Or just the obvious fact that he was forty-something, attractive, and unmarried? Jonathan was looking at Fred standing motionless by his maze. He frowned thoughtfully. "Did you find he learned fast?" he asked eventually. "Faster, I mean, than you expected?" Again Tessa was surprised by the shrewdness of the question. "As a matter of fact he did," she said. "Not right away. First of all he froze, and I thought it just wasn't going to work. But when I interrogated Attila I found a huge amount of computation going on. I couldn't work out what it meant to begin with. Then I realized that the program was replaying everything that had ever happened to Fred from Attila's archive. It went on like that for two days, then everything settled down and Fred started to get better. But after every session he spends time replaying what he's just done." "As though he's dreaming?" She made a little movement with her head, as though disapproving of the term, but at the same time not totally denying its applicability. "If you like. What made you ask if he was learning faster than I'd expected?" Jonathan stood up, arching his back to throw off the remaining vestiges of stiffness, and sauntered over to a window. "Something I read recently. Theories of artificial life. It's as though life, in this case intelligent life, wants to emerge. I'm not suggesting a life force. In fact I'm not suggesting anything. I'm just noting what several scientists have said: that, given a little push, randomness organizes itself into patterns much faster than the laws of probability predict." She didn't say anything until he looked over at her, wanting a response. "It seems to be so," she said, then added a note of caution. "Though to what extent 'patterns' equals 'life' is another question." "Quite." He turned back to look out at the trees for a while before continuing. "If as you say the program — Fred's brain — has evolved a way of reorganizing his responses to new inputs in the light of his acquired knowledge ... Here he broke off and turned to look at her again, but this time with a seriousness in his face that she found a little daunting. "... if," he continued, "that is what is happening, then surely we have applications here that go far beyond mere robot guidance systems. Don't we?" Tessa shifted uncomfortably. She didn't like the question because it was too close to her own speculations, and for the moment she preferred to keep them to herself rather than have them show up in some semi-official report that could come back to haunt her. "I'm not sure we'd be justified in going that far yet." "Yet," he echoed, as though it was the crucial loophole in her argument — which, she knew, it was. "I'd rather stick to what we know than speculate." Tessa was afraid she might have sounded a little priggish, but was determined not to be drawn any further. He smiled again, diffusing the slight tension between them, and — at long last — looked at his watch. "Must be getting back to London," he said. "Thanks for the demonstration. We'll talk again soon." They shook hands and made their goodbyes. From her window she watched his car drive off towards the main gates. She was glad to be left alone with her speculations. CHAPTER 8 CENTURY CITY was built on what had once been the back lot of the Twentieth Century Fox film studio. Perhaps that was why it still had an odd air of unreality about it. The glass-faced office blocks soared improbably high into the clear blue sky, and the walkways, shopping malls, gardens and cinema complexes combined to produce a limbo-like, slow-moving carnival air. Sandy Smallwood looked at her watch with mounting impatience and decided to give her second cousin exactly five more minutes before leaving. She was sitting at a table on the terrace of a small cafe where they'd arranged to meet. Punctuality was a courtesy that she had been brought up to value — unlike, apparently, some distant members of her family. This whole thing had been his idea. How dare he keep her waiting! She looked at her watch again. Four minutes, then she would leave. That would make twenty minutes in all that she had been here. About fifty yards away, on the mezzanine floor of another building, powerful binoculars were trained on her through the tinted window. He was trying to make sure, as far as possible, that she was alone. Certainly she had arrived alone. Nobody had settled at a neighbouring table either just before or just after she got there. As the minutes went by and her impatience grew, she gave no tell-tale glances towards people who might be watching her, nothing to indicate that there might be somebody out there waiting to spring from hiding and grab the man for whom she served as bait. With each one he had to be more careful now. He varied the routine as much as possible, but there were always certain danger points. They were unavoidable, and this, the actual meeting, was the biggest of them all. He lowered the binoculars on to the seat beside him and picked up a video camera. He got a nice shot of her, zooming in until she filled the frame, glancing at her watch again. She looked good with her legs crossed like that, hair falling across her face. Any minute now some guy would start hitting on her. That would be a nuisance; he hoped she wouldn't wait too long. At last she pushed back her chair and started to walk away. She didn't make any sign, didn't look around as though for guidance. Just did it. That was good. He picked up the binoculars again, scanning the area around her for signs of coordinated movement. There was none. He was satisfied that she was alone. He went into action. A little over two minutes later he was hurrying towards her along the walkway he knew she had to take to reach the elevator to the basement parking lot where he'd watched her leave her car. He had timed the whole thing so that he could reach her before she got there, even if she was walking briskly. In the event he found her looking in a bookshop window, in no hurry at all. He stopped a couple of yards from her. "Sandy?" She turned, keeping her look cold, because if this was Darren she wasn't going to let him off the hook easily for being late. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I'm supposed to meet somebody who said she'd be wearing a white and blue dress like the one you have on ..." Their eyes met. He was a little under six feet, in his late twenties or early thirties. And good looking. "Are you Sandy?" "You're twenty-five minutes late," she said, glad to hear her voice sounding a little angrier than she felt. His face fell. "I'm sorry. There was an emergency in the practice where I'm working just now. Somebody came in with their dog that had been hit by a car. There was a double fracture in the left foreleg. I didn't have any choice. I got over as fast as I could." "How is he — the dog?" "I think he'll be all right. Anyway, I'm sorry." "Forget it. But that story about the dog better be true." "You can come and see him in the surgery if you like." She smiled. "Why don't we just go get a cup of coffee like we said?" "Let me make it up to you. You said on the phone it was your day off. Are you busy tonight?" "I'm going to a party later." It was the little shrug with which she accompanied the statement that gave her away; it told him that she was prepared at least to consider a change of plan. Nonetheless, he played disappointed. It wouldn't work if he seemed too far ahead of the game, too sure of himself. He widened his eyes, puckered his chin slightly; he knew just how to look like a grown man with a little boy still in him. It was, he knew, his most disarming strategy. "Do you really have to?" he asked. "I promised." "I was going to suggest we drive out to the beach. We could take a walk, talk a while. I know a great place for dinner." "Sounds nice, but my friend Carol's expecting me to pick her up later." "You could call her, tell her you can't make it." "That wouldn't be fair." "I guess you're right." He looked genuinely disappointed. "I'd suggest we do something over the weekend, only the trouble is I have to work. Maybe next week?" "Sure." "No, wait, I just remembered I have to be in San Francisco ..." He fixed her with his most appealing look. "Couldn't you tell your friend Carol that you're sick? Or your aunt's been hit by a truck and you have to go see her in the hospital?" "That's terrible," she protested, but heard herself laughing as she spoke. "I know what we can do," he said, breaking into a mischievous grin. "777 call her and say I'm with the FBI and you've been kidnapped and we're not expecting a ransom demand for a while yet and we found your diary and know you were supposed to collect her for the party tonight, and ..." "All right, all right, I'll call Carol and tell her I can't make it." "That's great!" "I'll go find a phone." "Before we do anything else, do you mind if I make a video of you?" As he asked the question, he pulled the camcorder out of his bag. She looked surprised. "A video?" "It's for the family — to show Mom and Dad when they get back. You know, what I'm doing, where I'm working, where I live — and, hey, look, I met Sandy!" Her surprise evaporated into a smile. "Sure. Go ahead." She posed self-consciously as he moved around her, his face screwed up with concentration, the camera steady. "Say something," he said. "We have sound." "Oh, gosh . . . 'Mary had a little — ' Oh, no, that's no good . . . Oh, this isn't fair, you've taken me by surprise." "It's the only way to get a good shot. You're doing fine." "Can we wipe this and start again? I'll know what I'm doing next time." He laughed, and stopped. "Sorry," he said, lowering the camera. "That was a little sneaky. We'll do some more later." A moment passed between them, just long enough to make her quite sure that there was something in this man that she wanted to know more about. And after all, he was family. Just. Second cousins. You could marry second cousins. Not that anything of that kind was really in her mind. He broke the silence. "I suppose you've got a car here." "I'm parked downstairs." "Why don't we take mine, then we can pick yours up after dinner? How's that sound?" "Okay." "Great. Let's go." "Oh — I've got to make that call." "We can do it from my car." He swung his bag over his shoulder. Then, as though suddenly remembering his manners and reproaching himself for the lapse, he held out his hand. "It's really good to see you again, Sandy." CHAPTER 9 TIM KELLY watched his father pouring drinks around the table. The big man was sixty, but still light on his feet like the boxer he had once been. There was only a suggestion of thickness at his waist, and his shoulders moved with bulky muscularity beneath his shirt. This was a man who could still pack a punch if he had to, though at the moment his huge fists were curled delicately around two bottles that looked like aeroplane miniatures the way he held them. One was a California Cabernet, and the other, for those who preferred it, best Irish whiskey. He filled every glass except his own, which contained, as it had for nineteen straight years now, nothing stronger than tap water. As though sensing his eldest son's gaze, and perhaps the thoughts behind it, Matt Kelly raised his glass, winked, and toasted him across the table. Tim picked up his wine and toasted him back, smiling at that broad moonscape of a face that he loved so unreservedly, and which he had once feared and hated with an intensity that still scared him when he recalled it. Esther Kelly bustled in from the kitchen with two more of the aromatic, fresh-roasted, corn-fed chickens which were the centre of the family's Easter lunch. Josh, Tim's younger brother by three years, was already on his feet, carving knife and fork at the ready. That Josh carved the roast whenever he was home was one of those family traditions that went back further than anyone remembered; back to days, in fact, that no one cared to remember, the days they lived in fear of big Matt's alcoholic rages. Somehow Esther had held the family together through those dreadful times, protecting her sons from the worst of their father's violence, and at times absorbing a terrible amount of it herself. Tim still felt sick when he remembered the cuts and bruises, the discoloured swellings on her face when she would tiptoe into the boys' room, whispering so as not to wake up Josh, and ask Tim to help her drag his father to bed from wherever he had finally passed out. The big cop would be lying there, sometimes still in his uniform, sometimes in his underwear, sometimes naked except for the robe that Esther had struggled to wrap around him before going for her son. Those were the times when Tim, if he had still believed in God the way he knew his mother did, would have prayed for his father to die. Further down the table Josh laughed and swapped family jokes with the dozen or so aunts and uncles, cousins and children, as he refilled their plates. But his thoughts were on his brother Tim, as they always were at these gatherings. He knew that the flight across the country, the cab ride from Kennedy to the same old place in Queens, brought back memories for Tim that were almost unbearable. To be truthful, Josh's own memories of those days were oddly vague. He suspected that he'd blacked them out because they were too painful. But there was one day that he had never forgotten and never would. That was the day when fifteen-year-old Tim had finally stood up to his father and told him that he couldn't do this to them any longer. The big man had gone berserk. He'd beaten the boy almost to death, breaking his arm, his nose, three ribs and rupturing his spleen — before Mom had somehow gotten the old man's service revolver out of its holster and loosed off two shots into the wall to quieten him down. It was then, in that moment, that something had happened to big Matt. It was as though the alcohol had drained from his head and been replaced by the clear, cold knowledge of what he was, what he had become, and what he'd done. He had fallen to his knees, gathered his battered son into his arms, and not let go of him until he'd seen him safely on a stretcher in the hospital's emergency unit. They had been given a police escort and wailing sirens — which had meant that the department got involved, not least because questions had to be answered about those two shots fired in the apartment. Cops being what they are, however, the whole thing was hushed up the way that Matt's drinking on duty had been hushed up for years. But from that day on Matt had never again touched alcohol. He'd been a good cop and even made sergeant, before retiring after thirty years' service and going to work for the private security firm where he became chief supervisor. And as a husband and father he'd been textbook perfect. It was hard, Josh reflected, to understand how two such different personalities could co-exist within one man: Jekyll and Hyde, with nothing more than a few shots of alcohol to separate them. Later, when the food and drink were finished, the two brothers took a walk together around the old neighbourhood. They were both California-based now and came back only for visits. Oddly, though, they saw more of each other back east than out there. Josh, who according to Tim had always been the one with the brains in the family, was teaching physics and researching super-conductivity at Caltech, while Tim and the Bureau were a more or less twenty-four hour a day item with no time for socializing. That was one of the reasons, Josh knew, that Tim's marriage had broken up: that, plus the fact that he had been far too easygoing on that bitch of a wife when she'd started running around with someone else. But Tim had lived in fear of being a bully; he'd seen too much of where that led. In consequence, Josh felt, he'd leaned too far the other way and given the woman anything she asked, including freedom. Tim never blamed her, just said she had ambitions of her own that didn't coincide with his. Ambition, Josh thought sourly, was the right word. She had eventually married the president of an airline, and her constant presence in the gossip columns was one reason why Tim had transferred out to the LA Bureau. "Stay over till tomorrow," Josh was saying. "We'll go to O'Malley's tonight, see some of the old gang." Tim shook his head. "Listen," he said, "I did damn well even to get here at all. I was in conference on this case till I got in a cab for the airport, then I carried on by phone till I actually boarded the goddamn red-eye." Josh nodded sympathetically, then stopped short. "You were conferencing on a cell-phone? Don't you realize how easily the killer could monitor that? You already said he was a computer wizard!" "Relax." Tim's grin had a hint of self-congratulation. "The whole thing was staged to make him think we know less than we do — if he was listening. I wanted him to think we didn't have a clue how he was stalking his victims, though we know damn well he's using the networks. Unfortunately knowing isn't much help." Josh looked away for a few moments, thinking. Not far away a bunch of kids were playing basketball on a fenced-in corner between the crumbling walls of two empty buildings. When he looked back and opened his mouth to speak, he didn't say what he'd intended saying. "Hey, big brother," he said, "I don't like that. I don't like what I'm seeing." Tim turned and looked full at him as he screwed the cap back on the little metal flask and returned it to his pocket. "I know what you're thinking." Tim spoke with a deep weariness. Slowly he lowered himself to sit on the slab of concrete in front of what had been the window of an Italian deli but was now just another boarded-over shop front. "I know, because I'm thinking it myself, and it scares me. Maybe I'm beginning to understand Pop a lot better than I ever thought I would. Maybe it's just in the genes, nothing you can do." "Don't talk like that." Josh sat down alongside his brother. He wanted to embrace him, but he didn't. There was no physical embarrassment between them, but this felt too serious for a simple hug. "Before you start," Tim said, "let me say one thing — okay? Everything's on hold till I close this case. When I do — if I do — I'll dry out, I'll join AA, I'll take up Zen yoga if that'll help. But right now getting through the nights and days and finding answers is what matters." Josh was silent a while, then he said, "Tell me about the case. Why is this one so tough?" Tim filled him in on every detail. They'd talked about the killings before, but not like this. For one thing, there hadn't been so many killings when they'd spoken previously, and Tim's sense of angry helplessness had not been so developed. "We've got our own and the phone companies' best people trying to track down the son of a bitch, but it's next to impossible, and he obviously knows it. He goes from network to satellite to network, dials through nodes where we lose his trail, breaks into just about any computer he chooses and exits with a new bunch of phoney UDIs to hide behind." Josh frowned. "I think you mean UIDs," he said. "User Identifications." "Yeah, that's it. I know squat from computers, and never expected I'd even know this much. What I do know is it's damn near impossible to make governments, companies, security agencies and assorted watchdogs understand that if they don't start cutting the bullshit and red tape, then more girls are going to die." Unthinking, he took another swig from the flask in his pocket. Josh watched him with concern. "Do you want me to help you out?" Tim looked at him. "What can you do?" "For a start I know about computers. Maybe not as much as your guy — then again, maybe I do. Plus I'm in touch with a lot of people like me all around the world. And we can all break the law more easily than you can." Tim thought a moment. "You reckon?" "I don't reckon — I know. We do it all the time." "No — I mean d'you really think you can organize some kind of posse to go after him?" "I hadn't thought of putting it like that, but . yeah, that's exactly what I think I could organize. A posse. Provided you hand over to me every last detail you have on the case." "You realize it's my ass if this gets out." "It won't. Trust me." "Of course I trust you, but — " "If you like I can break into the Bureau computer and steal the files, then you can deny any involvement and mean it." Tim looked shocked. "You could do that?" "Easy as falling off a log." "Jesus Christ, you guys are scary." "We do our best." Tim was silent a while. His hand moved towards his pocket as though he was thinking about another drink, but he checked himself. "All right," he said eventually, pushing himself forward off the window slab and back on to his feet, "you've got a deal. Soon as we're back in LA I'll give you everything we've got. Unofficially." "Of course. Unofficially is the only way this thing is going to work." By the time they returned to their parents' place, Tim was feeling sufficiently cheered to have agreed to stay over the extra night and fly back with his brother in the morning. But the moment he got in the door and his mother told him that he'd had a call from Jack somebody — she'd written down the number — in LA, he knew that his evening at O'Malley's was a gonner. A call from Jack Fischl could mean only one thing. They'd found another girl. CHAPTER 10 AS soon as he'd dumped the body in one of the winding roads off Mulholland that he didn't even know the name of, he'd driven straight home. He'd driven with a kind of lunatic obsessive care that made him smile when he realized how tense he was, observing the speed limit and paying special attention to those right turns on a red light which were legal in California — provided there was no sign saying otherwise. You had to watch for those signs, because the cops would sometimes lie in wait for people who missed or ignored them. It would be too bad to be picked up on some dumb traffic violation and then have to sit and watch the whole thing start to unravel from there. That would be a pisser. So there he was, driving with this outward calm and this pressure-cooker inside of him, wanting only to get home and out of his clothes and into a hot bath. Above all he wanted to wash that dye out of his hair. Every time he met one of them he dyed his hair. It meant that if anyone remembered seeing the girl, and if by any chance they remembered seeing her meet him, they would describe a dark-haired young man, not him. Not him at all. Somebody else. Somebody else. He stood by the window looking up into the darkening sky. Ever since he'd discovered the scratch on the side of his neck his nerves had been stretched to breaking point. How could he not have felt it? How could he have missed it until now? In the mirror in his bathroom he'd seen the livid red tear in his skin that must have been made by one of her nails. They would be sure to find it, no question about that. They were good within their limits, those people: good enough to have his DNA analysis within the ten to fifteen days he knew it took. They wouldn't have anything with which to make a positive comparison because he'd never been DNA fingerprinted. But if ever he became a suspect, for whatever unlikely reason, they'd have him cold. His first thought had been to go back and retrieve the body, or at least do something about the hands. But it was too risky. Almost two hours had elapsed between dumping it and discovering the scratch on his neck. He couldn't go back; there might be someone there already. He'd listened to the police radio and dipped into their computer, and there was no mention of her having been found. But that could be deliberate. It could be a trap. It was night when he turned back from the window and switched on the light. People were waiting for him nearby, people who thought they knew him well, but who in reality knew nothing. For all their goodwill towards the man they thought he was, he could never trust any one of them to know and understand him truly. So he put on his face, the face he wore to meet the faces that he met (he liked that line from Eliot), and went out to join them. CHAPTER 11 HELEN followed Tessa into the room on the third floor of the Kendall Lab. It was not large, with two windows taking up most of the outside wall and offering a leafy view of the university parks. There was very little in the room other than a desk, a computer terminal and an adjustable office chair in front of it. "You'll be in touch with two other terminals in other rooms in the building," Tessa explained. "One of them will be operated by a man, the other by a program that I've written. They will be known to you only as 'A' and 'B' Your job is to ask them questions, and decide which is the man and which the machine." "I really have to be out of here in half an hour." "You will be, I promise. Sit down, let me tell you the rules." Helen sat down and adjusted the chair's height as she listened. "The program is allowed to lie," Tessa explained, "but the man must always tell the truth. That's so you can't catch the program out by asking trick questions — like the colour of its hair, or some calculation that only a machine could do." "Okay." "Also," Tessa continued, "the man is a