by Fritz Galt
Were the Moroccans really going to raid Brahim Abbad’s house? He couldn’t count on it.
Lots of momentum could be lost in the chain of command between his friend Ali’s department in Rabat and a local police precinct in some rural outpost.
He blew a chest full of smoke into the air, where it lingered, fragrant and still.
Gus would have to go there in person.
Chapter 38
Dry, unwavering heat lay heavily on Natalie that last day of public mourning for Mustapha Skah.
Khalid pressed his fingertips against the windows of his house. “Let’s go out and do something,” he suggested.
“I’m with you,” she said.
They jumped into a Peugeot that Khalid had borrowed from a friend, and Khalid drove them across town. A hot, dusty breeze blew in through her window, evaporating the perspiration on her brow.
She glanced at Khalid and tried to think of him as “Brahim Abbad,” an undercover operative who worked for Proteus and, indirectly, O’Smythe. She couldn’t imagine it. He was still Khalid Slimane, the inept engineer out of his element in Geneva, revering his mother in Morocco.
“Where are we headed?” she asked.
“To a private tannery. One of the best in the country.”
“Good. I might be able to refinish some furniture.”
The ride did wonders for Khalid’s mood, which grew expansive. Driving with one hand on the wheel and the other gesturing animatedly, he described the leather industry in his country.
Europe had once prized Moroccan leather and had shipped many a library collection to Morocco for the exquisite binding and tooling produced there.
The tanning industry still flourished, using traditional methods. Unfortunately, quality control had become an issue.
“Unless you oversee the process personally,” he said, “your books might come back covered upside down and backward.”
Khalid jumped the curb and parked on the sidewalk in front of a line of small shops.
Natalie stepped out of the car and stood in the baking heat. Immediately before them was a long, low building that was open air on three sides.
She waved a hand to fan herself and let the small currents of air flutter her wide collar.
Khalid leaned against her, nominally to support her, but she knew he was angling for a better view.
With Mick having walked out on her, it helped to know that a man could still show interest in her. Even if he was psycho.
They stepped into the relative cool of the wooden structure. Illuminated by the bright street, the entire tanning process revealed itself.
“Whew,” she said as tears welled in her eyes.
Two men wearing gloves and fezes used caustic green lye to soften the leather. The process instantly cleared her sinuses.
Through an open door to the rear, she watched scantily clad men dying hides in sunken baths. The crumbled stone ruins in which they worked reminded her of Roman baths. Perhaps the process was that old.
A robed woman hurried from another room carrying a stack of stained black leather. Two others pressed the brown and black skins with an electric machine.
“What kind of leather is this?” Natalie asked a foreman who was standing nearby.
“Sheep,” he said through his drooping mustache.
“Choose the pieces you want,” Khalid told her.
She flipped through a stack of leather and ran her hands over the soft brown surfaces. When she pinched the hide, it sprang back as spongy as foam rubber.
She could use the leather to refinish Mick’s favorite armchair. She pulled out three evenly tanned pieces and handed them to the foreman.
“Merci,” he said. “Follow me.”
They walked across the street to a storefront office. On the way, Khalid drew close and whispered in her ear, “My mother isn’t home today. Tonight we’ll sleep in my bedroom.”
“Like hell we will,” she retorted, and drew away from him. She jumped lightly onto the sidewalk, her exposed cleavage bouncing bright and hot in the sunlight.
Let it drive him crazy. He deserved it.
He lagged behind her as the three entered the office.
Tables were stacked high with leather samples. The man uncovered a large machine and ran the pieces she had selected through it, presumably scanning them to measure their size. A readout gave a precise determination of the square area.
All together, the pieces came to slightly less than two square meters.
“What does it cost?” she asked.
The man punched figures into a calculator. Then he rotated it toward her, as if that made his price more official. Whatever he had punched into the calculator came to 500 dirhams, roughly fifty dollars.
Not bad for two square meters of soft sheep leather. She shot Khalid a satisfied look.
But he gasped in horror.
The man frowned as if he had made a mistake, punched in new numbers and countered with another calculation: 450 dirhams.
Khalid shook his head. “We can’t afford that. What do you think we are? Tourists? I’m sorry.” He squeezed Natalie’s arm to lead her away. His grip was not gentle.
The man tugged his mustache and looked forlornly at his miserable factory across the street. He shook his head sadly.
“A man has to feed his family,” he said. “And look at all those hard workers out there. Do you think money comes easily?”
“Look at this leather,” Khalid replied. “There’s much better quality in Marrakesh. These pieces are deformed.” He held them to the light. “And the dyes aren’t even.”
Natalie was convinced that she was buying a piece of crap.
“Five dirhams,” Khalid offered.
The man acted as if Khalid had just kicked his grandmother.
Khalid’s glum eyes strayed to the door. His face conveyed an utter lack of interest.
“Let’s go,” he said, and hauled Natalie to the doorway.
“Wait,” the man called. “For you, I’ll sell this at a special price. 350 dirhams.”
“We can buy twice as much elsewhere at fifteen dirhams.”
The man seemed amused by that and began to fold and put away her selections.
“Thanks anyway,” Khalid said, and they stepped onto the sidewalk.
Natalie pried her arm free. She wasn’t going to lose that leather, not after all she had gone through to get it.
The man pursued them outside with the leather, the calculator and a new price: 250 dirhams.
“No, I’ve changed my mind,” Khalid said, and led Natalie across the street to the car.
“100 dirhams,” the man offered. “I have a wife and five children.”
Khalid pushed Natalie into the car and slammed her door shut, shooting her a look that told her he intended to leave immediately.
As he circled to the drivers’ side, she leaned out her window to take another look at the leather. She wasn’t sure if it looked like a precious commodity or a pile of rubbish.
The man’s eyes lit up. “Ah, bien. I’ll sell you this excellent leather for fifty dirhams.”
“We don’t want it,” Khalid shouted. “Merci, bien. Au revoir.”
“Thirty dirhams. That’s my final offer.”
Khalid threw the car into reverse and bounced off the sidewalk and into the street.
The man trotted next to them. “Twenty dirhams for you. You’re a very special customer.”
Khalid gunned the motor.
That was it.
Natalie grabbed his hand on the steering wheel and leveled a look at him. “I want my leather.”
Khalid put the car in neutral, but her heart was in high gear.
“I’ll take it,” she yelled at the man, and held a twenty-dirham note out the window.
The man looked deeply hurt, but he accepted the money and handed her the leather.
“We have many fine goat skins as well—”
As he drove away, Khalid shook his head. “I could have bargained him
down to ten dirhams, no problem.”
He probably could, but what was the point? She felt sick about the miserable quality of the leather she had just bought, and virtually criminal about paying so little for it.
But the leather wasn’t the point for Khalid. She knew that. She was the point.
She didn’t know what kind of engineer he made, but he could sure make a woman feel admired one moment and treat her like dirt the next.
He drove swiftly, but with skill, around several trucks that labored in the heat. He seemed to be working out his aggressions.
“Do you feel safer here?” he asked.
She jumped as he interrupted her thoughts. “Safer?” When she thought about it, she hadn’t felt more vulnerable in her life.
He flashed a white-toothed grin at her reaction. “I mean from those who are chasing you.”
She stared straight ahead. He would only accept one answer.
“Sure,” she said. “I feel like we’re a million miles away. Thank you.”
In truth, she would rather be running away from the man who was after the transcript or the police in Geneva whom Everett sent to round her up at the hotel than holed up with an immature psychopath in a country that she couldn’t begin to understand.
“We’ll sleep in my room tonight,” he said with finality.
She looked down at her open collar. She had offered him plenty of titillation. Now it was time to slam the door shut.
She gathered the lapels of her blouse and pulled them around her neck.
He swallowed hard and looked hurt.
Blinking, he scanned the human shadows that moved about in the glare.
Then his eyes turned hard and alert. He stiffened in his seat and scanned the street from side to side as if looking for an escape.
All she saw were the same light-colored cars, the donkeys and the wandering families.
“What is it?” she asked.
His eyes flashed at her with a look of accusation, as if trying to make her crack.
“Get ready to go tomorrow,” he said, his voice dry and hard.
“Go where?”
Suddenly his thoughts seemed far away, and sadness had crept into his face. Shut out of his thoughts, she felt abandoned.
“It was a simple question,” she said. “Where are we going?”
Shifting his attention back to her, he said, “I have some business to transact.”
“Engineering?”
“No. Something to sell. Something that was once very valuable to me.”
Chapter 39
Mick was determined to learn more about the CERN project.
He had spent the entire flight from Casablanca to JFK reviewing what Yashito had said about thin film forming superconducting chips. Somehow that advance was going to power a new generation of computers, and the Japanese didn’t want America to dominate the market.
Mick had driven across New York City on an elevated highway, much like an electron with a free pass over a substrate. And from the traffic jam at the stadium exit, it looked like the Mets were able to pin the magnetic flux.
Now he was talking like Yashito. And the scary part was that he had no idea what he was talking about.
On the outer fringes of the city were modern buildings with slick, yet featureless faces. They were the kind of structure that could house any type of enterprise, from an investment firm to a suite of dentists.
He rubbed his tongue over the explosive plastique in his teeth. Boy, he could use a dentist.
In suburban New York, he nosed the rental car up to a guard booth at the T.J. Watson Research Center. The hazy atmosphere and mowed lawns of IBM’s top laboratory were a far cry from the landscape where he had left Natalie and Alec just a day ago.
From JFK, he had called ahead and arranged a meeting with an old high school buddy who he hoped would school him on the latest advances in electricity. Mick was prepared to give Chris’s name to the guard.
But the booth was empty and the gate was up.
Clearly there was no heightened sense of security at the lab. It was a refreshing change from the garrison mentality he was accustomed to at American embassies.
But just how well did IBM safeguard the secrets they discovered there?
He drove through a grove of flowerless trees. At last, he reached a stunning, semi-circular building with a glass façade. He saw people moving about inside wearing business suits. Maybe it wasn’t a lab after all.
Arrows on the road guided him around back. There he found tennis courts, a picnic area and several parking lots full of the latest model cars.
The place had all the openness of a university campus.
The only sign of activity was men loading long cylinders off a specially built truck. They rolled the tubes behind a chain link fence and locked the enclosure with a padlock. Okay, so maybe it was a lab.
He entered through the front of the building and gave the young female receptionist his name. Meanwhile, a metal sculpture swung above him like a finely honed blade.
The receptionist told him to wait, and placed a call.
He sat down and picked up a corporate brochure.
According to the literature, IBM’s foresight and investment had led to the world’s largest corporate research operation. And that building was its nerve center.
Research enclaves spanned from Beijing and Tokyo to Zurich and Haifa. The results of their experiments had led to revolutions in many fields.
He read with fascination that experimentation with superconductivity at the pastoral IBM Schweiz laboratory outside Zurich had led to the discovery of certain ceramics that became the world’s first high temperature superconductors.
Apparently, that discovery touched off a high-speed race at laboratories around the world to find the ultimate material to conduct electricity.
He heard heavy footsteps padding toward him, and set the brochure down.
Christopher McNulty had always been a big guy, but the way Mick still recognized him was his clever little smile. Tufts of brown hair hung around his ears from a bald pate, giving him a clownish appearance. His necktie was askew and his loafers were well worn. In short, he pushed the limits of Big Blue’s dress code.
“Chris,” Mick said, rising.
He sank his hand into his friend’s paw, and they grinned at each other.
“Albuquerque 37, Taos 10,” Chris said.
Mick struggled to place the reference. Then it dawned on him. “That was twenty years ago, high school homecoming.”
“Yeah, we stunk,” Chris said, then wrinkled his nose. “And something still does. What’s that smell?”
“Sorry. That’s me.”
His friend stepped back with a perplexed look.
“How do I smell?”
“You smell okay, Chris.”
Chris shrugged, “Either you’ve really changed, or somebody cut the Limburger.”
Mick didn’t want to tell his friend that he hadn’t bathed, changed his clothes or brushed is teeth in days.
“I’ll take you up the back stairs,” Chris whispered, and led him up a rear staircase to his office.
Mick was vaguely disappointed by what he found there. Or, rather, by what he didn’t find. He had expected to see a laboratory, complete with condensation billowing out of supercooled tubes, or electrical gadgetry with wires hanging out in every direction. Instead, Chris had a cubicle no different from others in a sea of cubicles around him.
It took all of the glamour out of the private sector.
“Grab a seat,” Chris said, and fell into his swivel chair.
Mick took the only other seat.
“Superconductivity, huh?” Chris said, picking up where the two had left off on the phone. “It has an interesting background.”
Mick allowed Chris to sweep the past twenty years aside in favor of a good conversation.
The scientist wiped his lips and began his standard lecture on the subject of superconductivity.
“Some of our labo
ratories study the nature and applications of superconductivity, but I must say, the going has been slow. It has mostly degenerated from physical science and theory into materials science and the engineering of spin-off devices. For example, we’re developing sensing and electromechanical devices for the space station to make use of the cold of space. There have been no great breakthroughs since the big one at Zurich in ’86. That was a phenomenal discovery.”
Mick nodded, and Chris went on.
“The best confirmed mark at which physicists have produced superconductivity under normal pressure is 134 degrees Kelvin. That was a mercury-barium-calcium-copper oxide. You can squeeze the compound and raise the critical temperature to 164 degrees Kelvin. That’s a little under minus 100 degrees Celsius. That’s cold, but attainable with simple technology such as what we use in household air-conditioning.”
“A fairly cold air conditioner,” Mick observed.
Chris didn’t seem amused. “Rather than have me fishing around in the dark, why don’t you tell me specifically what you’re looking for?”
“I’m most interested in the application of superconductors,” Mick said. “For example, can you use them in computers?”
“Well, so far the real work is in thin film and wires.”
“Let’s stick to thin film,” he said.
“Okay. Companies are already making thin film for use in filters, resonators and delay lines that operate at microwave and radio frequencies. They’re mostly used for military instruments and communications systems.”
“Why use thin film superconductors?”
“You see, if you build these suckers with superconducting materials, you get better signal strength and far more efficient signal processing, plus they don’t take up your entire bedroom. For example, in a four-inch square component, you can reproduce a delay line that the military uses to deconstruct signals. It used to require seventy feet of stainless steel coaxial cable.”
“Cool.”
“Yes. Very cold. So far, the best superconductor for thin film is called YBCO. This is a ceramic compound and carries a lot of current. It’s simple to produce, if you’re a materials person.”