Page 28 of Devil's Due

“Didn’t seem very convenient to me,” he said. “Considering I’d already had the crap beaten out of me.”

“Maybe they decided you’d suffered enough.”

“Let’s just say that little things like compassion don’t enter into the equation for the Cross Society. And I mean that literally, by the way.”

She slid onto a bar stool and sipped from her bottle. She hadn’t offered a glass; he hadn’t seemed to mind. “I don’t think I understand.”

“What Simms does—you understand about him, right? That he’s looking at alternate realities, not just telling the future?”

“Excuse me?”

McCarthy shook his head.

“Oh boy. You’ll need a lot of beer, somebody smarter than me and some kind of consulting physicist.” He shrugged. “Okay. There’s this thing called string theory. Don’t ask me how it works—I’m just a cop, okay? But the idea is that there are a whole bunch of realities all layered up against each other. Every decision everybody makes, there’s a slightly different chain of events, right? Take six billion people times about a billion decisions—good, bad or indifferent—and you get how many potential realities we’re dealing with here. The thing is, most of these decisions end up being meaningless, in the great scheme of things. They cancel each other out, and such. So instead of sixty fazillion realities, you get some manageable number, like a couple of million that simultaneously exist in the here and now.”

Lucia listened, thinking hard. Mostly, she happened to be thinking that she’d never really believed the unlikely story of the Cross Society, or Max Simms, though Jazz seemed to have come closer to buying it, and Jazz was hardly the credulous type. “So, Simms supposedly can use all this theory to predict the future.”

“No, Simms is the real deal, he’s some kind of savant. He doesn’t need theory to do what he does—he just sees it. Like some psychic in the circus.”

“Then why the physics explanation?”

“That’s what where the Cross Society comes in. They made what he does scientific.”

“Uh-huh. And Eidolon…?”

Ben flipped a hand in assent. “Started out the same way, but Eidolon took it further. Has to do with predictive math, or something. Both the Cross Society and Eidolon can track decisions and look at the different outcomes. Only problem is, once playing god gets to be a multiplayer game, it gets nasty. Eidolon actually came first, by the way. It got a ton of defense department money, and Simms actually worked with a staff of high-level physicists to develop a computer system that could do what he did. That was his mistake. He created himself right out of a job. Then he founded the Cross Society to do the same thing, once he realized Eidolon was going to manipulate events to their own advantage. Counter of a countermove.”

“And when Eidolon wanted him gone …”

“The new CEO made sure that he was taken out of the picture. I figure Simms should have been killed, but he managed to work the decision tree enough that he only got convicted and sent to prison. You’d better believe that Eidolon’s been working hard to keep him there, or better yet, make sure he dies behind bars.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I was in early.” McCarthy shrugged and turned his beer bottle in neat, precise circles. “Simms wanted people in the Cross Society who could carry out orders, not just sit around and talk theory. I was …” He fell silent for a few seconds, eyes hooded. “I was supposed to help them make things better. But I figured out pretty fast that wasn’t how it worked. You start out fighting the good fight, but pretty soon you’re just fighting for your life.”

“And you didn’t agree.”

He took a drink, then another. “I didn’t say that. I’m no saint, Lucia.”

“If you agreed, then why did the Cross Society put you in prison?”

“I told you. I refused to carry out an order.”

“To stand by and let Jazz get killed,”

His shrug was so small it could have been interpreted as fidgeting. “Hey, even a total bastard’s got limits.”

“So what’s changed? Why let the evidence come to light to get you out?”

“Why the hell do they do anything? Their spreadsheets or Simms or whatever told them I could do something for them.”

She nodded. Silence fell, broken by the clink of their bottles on the black marble counter. It seemed eerily quiet, here above the city, in this hermetically sealed building.

The buzz of the intercom made both of them jump, though McCarthy tried to look nonchalant about it.

“Pizza,” she said.

She kept the gun handy anyway.

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