Devil s Due Page 0,28

up, watching - yes, she'd been right - baseball.

"Beer?" she asked. He turned to look at her, and kept looking. "I assume beer and baseball still go together."

"Sorry," he said, and muted the sound on the TV. "It's been awhile."

Whether he meant baseball or something else was open to interpretation. He stood up and joined her in the kitchen as she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold bottle. Imported beer, the only kind she willingly drank. She popped the cap with an opener and handed it to him, opened a soft drink for herself, then clinked their bottles together. "To surviving another day," she said.

"Amen."

They tipped bottles and drank. McCarthy was still watching her, but his eyes closed when the taste of the beer hit his tongue. Sheer ecstasy, from the look on his face.

"Wow," he said, when he put the bottle down on the counter. "It really has been awhile. And obviously, you know beer."

"I try." She took down two plates. "You want to tell me anything?"

"Like?"

"Like your theory on why the evidence exonerating you showed up so conveniently when it did?"

He took another sip of beer. Stalling for time.

"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