In Death 15 - Purity in Death

bastard who had killed his family was dead, and his blood hot on Jamie's hands.
    He couldn't remember actually doing it. Not the moment, not the instant when he'd plunged the blade into Alban's heart. It was like some time blip, and he couldn't remember.
    But it had happened. It hadn't been a dream. And Dallas had told Feeney and Peabody and the other cops who burst in that Alban had been killed during the struggle. She'd grabbed the ritual knife from him, put her own prints on the handle, and lied.
    Because she'd stood for him, too.
    "Jamie. Stay focused."
    He blinked, blushed, and hunched his shoulders at Roarke's brisk order. "Yeah, sure. Right."
    He was working on a virus simulation, his third since they'd started.
    "These sims aren't going to generate hard data without results of a diagnostic on one of the infected units."
    "So you've said, in a variety of ways, six or eight times already."
    Jamie swiveled away from his workstation. Behind him Roarke worked on filter construction. He was doing most of the programming manually, with fast flicks and taps of his fingers. In Jamie's estimation, any e-man worth his chips had to be able to do manual as well as voice and should know when one method suited the job better than the other.
    Roarke was the ultra mag e-man.
    "It'd take me five minutes, tops, to run a diagnostic," Jamie continued.
    "No."
    "Give me ten and I can locate and isolate the virus."
    "No."
    "Without an identification on-"
    He broke off when Roarke held up a hand and shut his mouth.
    He finished the sim, input the resulting data, then started the next program. He let it run on auto as he got up to dig out a tube of Pepsi from the full-sized cooler.
    "I'll have one of those," Roarke said without looking around.
    Jamie pulled out a second tube. Across the room Feeney and McNab worked on filter analysis. Jamie had never been in a house that boasted its own fully equipped e-lab.
    Then again, he'd never been in any other house like this one. What it didn't have, hadn't been invented.
    The floor was a steel gray tile. The walls were a pale green and covered with screens. The light came from sky windows, a half a dozen of them, all tinted to cut the glare and heat that could play havoc with the equipment.
    And that equipment was so cutting-edge, the edge hadn't even been cut yet. There were a full dozen data and communication centers, including one of the RX5000Ks that he'd seen tested in R and D. It wasn't scheduled for release for three months, maybe six. There were three VR stations, a sim tube, a holo unit, with d and c capabilities, and a global and interstellar search-and-scan navigator he was itching to get his hands on.
    He glanced toward his own screen, checked the status of his sim run, then sat beside Roarke. He scanned the codes jammed end to end over the screen, calculated.
    "If you filter out the sound, blank all frequencies, you won't get the ID or source."
    "You've missed something. Look again." Roarke continued to work while Jamie rearranged the codes in his head.
    "Okay, okay, but if you flipped this equation, see? And this command. Then-"
    "Wait." Roarke's eyes narrowed as he read his own program, considered the direction of Jamie's suggestions.
    The boy was good.
    "That's better. Yes, that's better yet." He made the adjustments, and with them in mind began on the next series of commands.
    "Roarke."
    "There's no point in asking me again. Answer's still no."
    "Just listen, okay? You always say a guy should be able to make his pitch."
    "Nothing more irritating than having your own words tossed back at you." But he stopped, sat back, and took the tube of Pepsi. "Pitch then."
    "Okay. Without a diagnostic, with direct data from one of the infected units, we're blind. You can come up with filters, with shields, but no matter how good they are you can't be a hundred percent that they'll shut out the virus. If it is a virus, which we don't know without a diagnostic."
    "We'll be a great deal more certain of operator safety once we have shields in place. If it's a subliminal, which is the highest probability, using either visual or audio to infect, I've dealt with something similar before and am constructing a series of shields to filter it out."
    "Yeah, but similar isn't a hundred percent. So you're still going to be playing odds."
    "Son, playing odds is a kind of religion to me."
    Jamie grinned, and because he wasn't being dismissed, dug in. "Okay, odds are good, given the log time Detective