by Greg Iles
“I know what you think,” Skow said. “Take no steps without my approval.”
“Asshole,” Geli said, but Skow was already off the line.
She pressed a button that connected her to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Her liaison there was a young man named Conklin.
“Hello, Ms. Bauer,” he said. “You calling about the FedEx query again?”
“What do you think?”
“I’ve got what you want. The package was dropped into a collection box at a post office in Durham, North Carolina. The sender was listed as Lewis Carroll.”
So, Fielding had sent something to Tennant. She knew he hadn’t dropped it off himself, but his wife almost certainly had. Geli clicked off and leaned back in her chair, reassessing the situation.
Seven hours ago, she had killed a man on Godin’s order, without knowing precisely why. She had no problem with that. Fielding posed a threat to the project, and under the conditions of her contract, that was enough. If she needed a moral justification, Project Trinity was critical to American national security. Executing Fielding was like killing a spy caught in the act of treason. Still, she was curious as to motive. Godin had told her that Fielding was sabotaging the project and stealing Trinity data. Geli wasn’t sure. Rigorous precautions had been taken to prevent sabotage. No one could physically move data in or out of the building. And as for electronic theft, Skow’s NSA techs made sure that not a single electron left the building without first being cleared by him.
So, why did Fielding have to die? Six weeks ago, he and Tennant had gotten the project suspended by raising medical and ethical concerns. If that were the motive, then why wait to kill Fielding? And why kill only him? Peter Godin had appeared almost desperate when he visited Geli last night. And she had never seen Godin desperate before. Was he that anxious to get the project back on-line? She knew little about the technical side of the Trinity research, but she did know that success was still quite a ways off. She could read that in the faces of the scientists and engineers who reported to work every day.
Project Trinity was building—or attempting to build—a supercomputer. Not a conventional supercomputer like a Cray or a Godin, but a computer dedicated to artificial intelligence—a true thinking machine. She didn’t know what made this theoretical computer so difficult to build, but Godin had told her a little about the genesis of the project.
In 1994, a Bell Labs scientist had theorized that an almost infinitely powerful code-breaking computer might be built using the principles of quantum physics. Geli knew little about quantum physics, but she understood why a quantum computer would be revolutionary. Modern digital encryption—the code system used by banks, corporations, and national governments—was based on the factoring of large prime numbers. Conventional supercomputers like those used by the NSA cracked those codes by trying one key after another in sequence, like testing keys in a lock. Breaking a code this way could take hundreds of hours. But a quantum computer—in theory—could try all possible keys simultaneously. The wrong keys would cancel each other out, leaving only the proper one to break the code. And this process wouldn’t take hours or even minutes. A quantum computer could break digital encryption codes instantaneously. Such a machine would render present-day encryption obsolete and give whatever country possessed it a staggering strategic advantage over every other nation in the world.
Given the potential value of such a machine, the NSA had launched a massive secret effort to design and build a quantum computer. Designated Project Spooky, after the description Albert Einstein had given to the action of certain quantum particles—“spooky action at a distance”—it was placed under the direction of John Skow, director of the NSA’s Supercomputer Research Center. After spending seven years and $600 million of the NSA’s black budget, Skow’s team had not produced a prototype that could rival the performance of a Palm Pilot.
Skow was probably days from being terminated when he received a call from Peter Godin, who had been building conventional supercomputers for the NSA for years. Godin proposed a machine as revolutionary as a quantum computer, but with one attribute the government could not resist: it could be built using refinements of existing technology. Moreover, after a conversation with Andrew Fielding, the quantum physicist he’d already enlisted to work on his machine, Godin believed there was a strong chance that his computer would have quantum capabilities.
By dangling these plums before the president, Godin had been able to secure almost every concession he demanded. A dedicated facility to work on his new machine. Virtually unlimited government funds to pay for a crash effort modeled on the Manhattan Project. The right to hire and fire his own scientists. For government oversight he got John Skow, whom he had compromised years before by bribing Skow to choose Godin computers over Crays for the Supercomputer Research Center. The president’s single demand had been on-site ethical oversight, which materialized in the form of David Tennant. And Tennant had seemed only a minor annoyance in the beginning. Everything had seemed perfect.
But now two years had passed. Nearly a billion dollars had been spent, and there was still no working Trinity prototype. In the secret corridors of the NSA’s Crypto City, people were starting to draw parallels to the failed Project Spooky. The difference, of course, was Peter Godin. Even Godin’s enemies conceded that he had never failed to deliver on a promise. But this time, they whispered, he might have taken on more than he could handle. Artificial intelligence might not be as theoretical as quantum computing, but more than a few companies had gone bankrupt by promising to deliver it.
Which was why Geli didn’t understand the necessity of Fielding’s death. Until last night, Godin had apparently viewed the brilliant Englishman as critical to Project Trinity’s success. Then suddenly he was expendable. What had changed?
On impulse, she punched her keyboard and called up a list of Fielding’s personal effects, which she had made after his death, at Godin’s request. Fielding’s office had been a jumble of oddities and memorabilia, more like a college professor’s than that of a working physicist.
There were books, of course. A copy of the Upanishads in the original Sanskrit. A volume of poetry by W. B. Yeats. Three well-thumbed novels by Raymond Chandler. A copy of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Various scientific textbooks and treatises. The other objects were more incongruous. Four pairs of dice, one pair weighted. One cobra’s fang. A mint copy of Penthouse magazine. A saxophone reed. A Tibetan prayer bowl. A wall calendar featuring the drawings of M. C. Escher. A tattered poster from the Club-à-Go- Go in Newcastle, England, where Jimi Hendrix had played in 1967, autographed by the guitarist. A framed letter from Stephen Hawking conceding a wager the two men had made about the nature of dark matter, whatever that was. There were store-bought compact discs by Van Morrison, John Coltrane, Miles Davis. The list of objects went on, but all seemed innocuous enough. Geli had flipped through the books herself, and a technician was listening to every track on the CDs, to make sure they weren’t fakes being used to store stolen data. Aside from Fielding’s office junk, there were his wallet, his clothes, and his jewelry. The jewelry was simple: one gold wedding ring, and one gold pocket watch on a chain, with a crystal fob on the end.
As she pondered the list, Geli suddenly wondered whether all this stuff was still in the storage room where she had locked it this afternoon. She wondered because John Skow had access to that room. What if Fielding had been killed for something in his possession? Maybe that was why they’d wanted him to die at work. To be sure they got whatever it was they wanted. If so, it would have to be something he carried on him. Otherwise they could simply have taken it from his office. Geli was about to go check the storage room when her headset beeped again.
“I think we’ve got a problem,” Corelli said.
“What?”
“Just like Tennant’s house. They’re inside, but I’m not hearing any conversation. Just faint echoes, like spillover from mikes in a distant room.”
“Shit.” Geli r
outed the signal from the Fielding house microphones to her headset. She heard only silence. “Something’s going down,” she murmured. “What do you have with you?”
“I’ve got a parabolic, but it’s no good through walls and next to useless with a window. I need the laser rig.”
“That’s here.” She mentally cataloged her resources. “I’ll have it to you in twelve minutes.”
“They could be gone in twelve minutes.”
“What about night vision?”
“I wasn’t expecting anything tactical.”
Goddamn it. “It’s all on the way. Check Tennant’s car for that FedEx envelope. And give me the address of the driveway where you’re parked.”
Geli wrote it down, then pressed a button that sounded a tone in a room at the back of the basement complex. There were beds there, for times when her teams needed to work around the clock. Thirty seconds later, a tall man with long blond hair shuffled sleepily into the control center.
“Was ist this?” he asked.
“We’re going on alert,” Geli said, pointing to a coffee machine against the wall. “Drink.”
Ritter Bock was German, and the only member of her team handpicked by Peter Godin. A former GSG-9 commando, Ritter had worked for an elite private security service that provided bodyguards for Godin when he traveled in Europe and the Far East. Godin had hired Ritter permanently after the former commando averted a kidnapping attempt on the billionaire. Ruthless, nerveless, and skilled in areas beyond his counterterror specialty, the twenty-nine-year-old had turned out to be Geli’s best operative. And since she had spent her early summers in Germany, there was no language problem.
Ritter sipped from a steaming mug and looked at Geli over its rim. He had the gray machine-gunner’s eyes of the boys who had attracted her as a teenager, while her father was stationed in Germany.
“I need you to deliver the laser rig to Corelli,” she said. “He’s parked in a driveway near the UNC campus.”
She tore off the top sheet of her notepad and laid it on the desktop beside her.
Ritter sniffed and nodded. He hated gofer jobs like this one, but he never complained. He did the scut work and waited patiently for the jobs he was born to do.
“Is the laser in the ordnance room?” he asked.
“Yes. Take four night-vision rigs with you.”
He drained the steaming coffee, then picked up the address off the desk and left the room without a word. Geli liked that. Americans felt they had to fill every silence, as though silence were something to be feared. Ritter wasted no effort, either in conversation or in action. This made him valuable. Sometimes they worked together, other times she slept with him. It hadn’t caused problems yet. She’d been that way in the army, too, taking her pleasure where she could find it. Just as she had at boarding school in Switzerland. There was always risk. You just had to be able to handle aggressive men—or women—and the fallout after you’d finished with them. She had always been up to both tasks.
“Corelli?” she said. “What are you hearing now?”
“Still nothing. Faint spillover. Unintelligible.”
“I’m calling an alert. Ritter’s on the way.”
There was only static and silence. Geli smiled. Ritter made the others uncomfortable. “Did you hear me?”
“Affirmative. I’m at Tennant’s car now.”
“What do you see?”
“No FedEx envelope. He must have taken it inside with him.”
“Okay.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to your car and wait for Ritter.”
“Right.”
Geli clicked off and thought again about Fielding’s personal effects in the storeroom. She had a feeling something was missing, and her instincts were usually dead-on. But she didn’t want to leave the control center now. Once Ritter reached the scene, things could happen fast.
Chapter
6
I pulled Rachel into the foyer of the Fielding house. The door closed quickly behind us, and we turned to face an Asian woman just under five feet tall. Lu Li Fielding had lived most of her forty years in Communist China. She understood English well enough, but she didn’t speak it well at all.
“Who this woman?” she asked, pointing at Rachel. “You not married, are you, Dr. David?”
“This is Rachel Weiss. “She’s a good friend of mine. She’s a physician, too.”
Suspicion filled Lu Li’s eyes. “She work for the company?”
“You mean Argus Optical?”
“Tlinity,” she said, substituting an l for the r.
“Absolutely not. She’s a professor at the Duke University Medical School.”
Lu Li studied Rachel for several moments. “You come in, too, then. Please. Hurry, please.”
Lu Li bowed and led us into the den, which opened to the kitchen. I smiled sadly. When Fielding had occupied this house alone, it always looked as though a tornado had just blown through it. Books and papers strewn about, dozens of coffee cups, beer bottles, and overflowing ashtrays littering every flat surface. After Lu Li arrived, the house had become a Zen-like space of cleanliness and order. Tonight it smelled of wax and lemon instead of cigarettes and stale beer.
“Sit, please,” Lu Li said.
Rachel and I sat beside each other on a pillowy sofa. Lu Li perched on the edge of an old club chair opposite us. She focused on Rachel, who was staring at a plaque hanging on the wall behind Lu Li’s chair.
“Is that the Nobel Prize?” Rachel asked softly.
Lu Li nodded, not without pride. “Andy win the Nobel in 1998. I was in China then, but still we knew his work. All physicists amazed.”
“You must be very proud of him.” Rachel spoke with a calm that her wide eyes belied. “How did you two meet?”
As Lu Li responded in broken English, I marveled at the union of this woman and my dead friend. Fielding had met Lu Li while lecturing in Beijing as part of a Sino-British diplomatic initiative. She taught physics at Beijing University, and she’d sat in the first row during each of Fielding’s nine lectures. Party bureaucrats held several receptions during the series, and Lu Li attended them all. She and Fielding had quickly become inseparable, and by the time the day arrived for him to leave China, they were deeply in love. Two and a half years of separation followed, with Fielding trying desperately to arrange an exit visa for her. Even with the supposed help of the NSA brass, he made no progress. Fielding eventually reached a point where he was considering paying illegal brokers to have Lu Li smuggled out of the country, but I convinced him this was too risky.
Everything changed when Fielding began delaying Project Trinity with his suspicions about the side effects we were all suffering. As if by magic, the red tape was cut, and Lu Li was on a plane bound for Washington. Fielding knew his fiancée had only been brought to America to distract him, but he didn’t care. Nor did her arrival have its desired effect. The Englishman continued to painstakingly investigate every negative event at the Trinity lab, and the other scientists grew to hate him for it.
“Lu Li,” I said during a pause, “first let me express my great sadness over Andrew’s passing.”
The physicist shook her head. “That not why I ask you here. I want to know about this morning. What really happen to my Andy?”
I hesitated to speak frankly in the house. Seeing my anxious expression, she went to the fireplace, knelt, and reached up into the flue. She brought out a sooty cardboard box, which she set on the coffee table. I’d seen the box before. It contained several pieces of homemade electronic equipment that reminded me of the Heathkit projects my father and I had worked on when I was a boy. Lu Li withdrew an object that looked like a metal wand.
“Andy sweep house this morning before work,” she said. “Plugged all the mikes. Okay to talk now.”
I glanced at Rachel. The subtext was clear. Lu Li knew the score on Trinity, or at least she knew about the NSA’s security tactics. Geli Bauer would probably have
this house torn apart as soon as Lu Li left for the cleaner’s or the grocery store. I was surprised she had waited even this long.
“Have you left the house at all today?” I asked.
“No,” Lu Li said. “They won’t tell me what hospital they take Andy to.”
I doubted Fielding had been taken to a hospital. He’d probably been flown to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, probably to some special medical unit for an autopsy, or worse. The British might complain later, but that would be the State Department’s problem, not the NSA’s. And the British—framers of the Official Secrets Act and the “D” notice—had a way of falling into line with the United States where national security was concerned.
“I still think we should whisper,” I said softly, pointing at the wand. “And I think I should take that box with me when I go. I’m afraid the N”—I stopped myself—“the company security people might search this house the first time you leave. You don’t want anybody to find it.”