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Thirty-Nine

There had to be some mistake. Maybe she'd joined the RPs in the last few days and her details hadn't reached the employee files. Maybe Kevin was wrong. Maybe . . .

Gary and Howard argued at speed while Graham listened, waiting for an opening that never came—by the time he'd thought of something constructive to add, someone had either said it, refuted it or the argument had moved elsewhere.

"Quiet!" shouted Annalise. "Kevin's double-checked. She doesn't even exist on six of the seventy-one worlds."

Gary shook his head. "It's too much of a coincidence. She works for ParaDim on only sixty-five worlds and on sixty-one of them the RP is closed down."

"Sixty-five," said Annalise. "Kevin checked. Every time she works for ParaDim, the RP closes."

"She must have stumbled upon something," said Gary. "Something to do with Graham and the resonance wave."

"If she did, she never wrote it down," said Howard. "I've been all over the closed Resonance logs. They're interested in Graham Smith but they never say why."

"We'll check again," said Gary. "There's another forty-six logs to look through."

They checked and sifted, the two men scrolling and searching for anything written by or mentioning Maria Totorikaguena. They found nothing. All sixty-three logs ended with a note saying they were downloading every file they could find on Graham Smith but none of them gave a reason.

"Maybe she didn't write anything down," said Annalise. "If she liked to work on her own, maybe she kept her ideas to herself."

"Until someone found out what she was doing," added Howard.

"Like Adam Sylvestrus," said Graham.

"It makes sense," said Howard, nodding in agreement. "Sylvestrus has to be involved. He must have seen something in Maria's work that forced him to take drastic action."

Graham could see how that could explain the sixty-five closures where Maria and Sylvestrus worked together, but the other six? Could the same action repeated in quick succession across sixty-five worlds resonate so powerfully that it influenced the decisions of the other Adam Sylvestruses? Was sixty-five enough? Wouldn't you need more?

"It's not Sylvestrus," said Gary, raising his voice. "If he is involved, it's as an unwitting agency. Maybe he told the wrong person about Maria's discovery."

"Who?" said Howard. "We've been through the ParaDim files. There's no one else."

"Then it's someone outside ParaDim," snapped Gary. He was becoming increasingly agitated. Graham couldn't understand his continued defense of Sylvestrus. Even Annalise looked surprised.

"Someone in government," continued Gary. "Or the intelligence community. Maybe they were bugging his office."

"Why do you keep defending Sylvestrus?" asked Graham. "You said yourself it had to be someone with power, someone who could close you down without questions being asked. Who better than Sylvestrus?"

Gary sighed and shook his head. "This is getting us nowhere. It can't be Sylvestrus."

"Why not?" asked Graham. "I've met him. He's creepy—the way he looks at you. And I saw him on TV during the middle of the London riots. He wasn't trying to stop weapons proliferation, he was defending it."

Gary still wouldn't have it. "Trust me, it won't be Adam Sylvestrus."

"Then explain it to us," said Annalise.

Gary activated his monitor and called up a search. He clicked through several pages until he came to the one he wanted.

"Because of this," he said.

The front page of the New York Times appeared on the screen. It was dated several months earlier. Sylvestrus Assassinated. Stark headlines besides an even starker picture. A man lay slumped on the pavement, a coat thrown over his head, a dark pool of liquid seeped out from under the coat.

"It's the same on every world," said Gary. "Within six months of the trade talks collapsing, the Americans move against ParaDim. Sylvestrus is the first to go. The Americans throw their hands up and deny everything, no one believes them, one of the Asian countries retaliates and suddenly everyone's mobilizing and pressing buttons."

"We call it 'the Chaos,'" said Howard.

"Now you see why Sylvestrus has to be the last person who'd want the resonance wave to proceed unchecked. It brings about his death."

Graham was unconvinced. He'd met the man. The others hadn't.

"Besides," continued Gary. "He's the one who initiated the Resonance projects. Why start something you want to close down?"

"Maybe it took a path he wasn't expecting?" said Graham.

"You?" said Annalise, looking worried.

Graham didn't reply. Sylvestrus had been strangely interested in him that time they'd met. And why had they met? What was the CEO of a huge company like ParaDim doing trying to persuade lowly Graham Smith to take a medical. Why hadn't he left that to his Resonance team?

"Someone has to benefit from all this," said Gary. "There has to be a motive. Who gains from the resonance wave?"

"I'll set up a series of scans this afternoon on all the Chaos worlds," said Howard. "Off the top of my head, I'd say everyone loses. No one stays in power long enough to benefit. But we might have missed something."

* * *

Graham and Shikha left at one-thirty. He felt strange walking through the revolving doors of the Cavendish Clinic. He half expected the receptionist to leap up and shout "Stop!" the moment he saw him. But he didn't. Everyone smiled and nodded and couldn't be more polite.

The medical took the rest of the afternoon. He was scanned from all angles, poked and prodded. But he didn't try to escape. He didn't even complain when they asked him to remove his clothes. For some reason he felt he deserved the indignity. It was his small sacrifice in the war against resonance.

And besides, Adam Sylvestrus didn't exist on this world.

 

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