“This is one of my attorneys, Karen Harper. I asked her to sit in.”
“Does she speak?”
“Where appropriate,” Gaddis said and tapped on the window, gazing up at the logo mounted atop a tall pole overlooking the restaurant. “You like burgers?”
“I’m from Texas,” she said, although, in truth, it had been years since she’d had one. Burgers from a food printer just never tasted right, and most burger chains had either shut down or pivoted to new gimmicks. There were those who decried the decline of the cheeseburger as a tragedy, but most people simply couldn’t afford to pay those kinds of prices for genuine ground beef.
“When I was a kid, there were more than fifty thousand burger places in this country,” Gaddis said. “Every corner, every airport, every ballpark. Burgers, burgers, burgers. As American as apple pie. Now you hardly see them anymore, and it makes me angry and sad. Which is idiotic. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had one. So why do I care so much? Why is it that the more I change, the more I need everything around me to stay the same? It’s a perverse design flaw in our species. That even something as inconsequential as a cheeseburger, which doesn’t affect my life one iota, still threatens my understanding of the world. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“You did invent cloning.”
“Well, your aunt did the inventing, but I sure sold it. I suppose that makes me the Ray Kroc of cloning. I sold America one of the most profound changes in human history and am frustrated and disappointed by the country’s inability to adapt. Yet my feelings are hurt that people aren’t eating enough cheeseburgers. That takes a special kind of hypocrisy, don’t you think? But here we sit, the cheeseburgers of Virginia.”
“I got the impression you’d never set foot here again,” Con said.
“There have been developments.”
“What developments?”
“I want you to come back to the island with me. It’s not safe here.” Gaddis paused and corrected himself. “Well, it was never safe, but now it’s way beyond that.”
“I have things left to do. I’m not finished here.”
“We had a deal. You wanted to know what happened to your original. Now you do. The police have a suspect in custody. What’s left?”
“Levi didn’t do it.”
“Levi?” Gaddis said, seemingly surprised to hear her use his first name. “The husband had ample motive, opportunity, and the details of the crime are very personal to him. The fact that he has a childhood connection to that farm is damning. There’s also a surplus of evidence against him. The murder weapon, for one.”
“How exactly do you know all that?” Con demanded. According to Clarke, none of it was public knowledge yet.
“I’m worth three billion dollars,” Gaddis said, deeming it a more than adequate explanation. Con supposed it was—that kind of money bought access to almost anything. Or anyone. Buying Laleh Askari a clone for her brother would be pocket change to Vernon Gaddis. He could also know all this because he had framed Levi Greer and needed Con to believe the lie.
“How nice for you,” Con said.
“But I don’t need a fortune to know it’s not safe for you in Virginia. So give me one good reason why you wouldn’t come back to Maryland with me?”
“Because my original was murdered to activate me. Levi Greer was framed so there would be someone to blame. It was either Fenton or it was you. You both want whatever’s in my head. That much is obvious, even though you both get cute about it and won’t just tell me what it is.”
To her surprise, Gaddis laughed to himself as if realizing his predicament. “So because I need your consent to make an upload of your consciousness, the more I offer my help—”
“The less I trust you. Yeah, that’s about it.”
Gaddis took a moment, weighing his options. He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded. Then he said, “The scan we took before you left. I have the results.”
“And?” Con didn’t much like the way his voice had deepened.
“When Brooke told you about seeing a cluster of voids in the log of your download, it jogged my memory. One of the projects that Abigail was working on at the time of her death was a technique for inserting accessible data into an upload. Augmented consciousness, she called it. Instant expertise.”
“I’m sorry, that sounds like science fiction to me,” Con said, aware that was ironic coming from a human clone.