It wasn't the conversation Pierce thought he was going to get into with her. He walked inside from the balcony and back into the living room. He had two new chairs but took his usual spot on the old couch.
"Robin? I don't even know your last name."
"LaPorte. And my name isn't Robin, either."
"What is it?"
"It's Lucy."
"Well, I like that better. Lucy LaPorte. Yeah, I like that. It's got a good sound."
"I have to give everything else to these men. I decided I'd keep my name."
She seemed to have stopped crying.
"Well . . . Lucy, if I can call you that. You keep my number. When you're ready to walk away from that life, you call me and I'll do everything I can to help you do it. Money, job, an apartment, whatever you need, just call me and you've got it. I'll do what I can."
"It's because of your sister that you'd do it, isn't it?"
Pierce thought about this before answering.
"I don't know. Probably."
"I don't care. Thank you, Henry."
"Okay, Lucy. I think I'm going to crash now. It's been a long day and I'm tired. I'm sorry I woke you up."
"Don't worry about it. And don't worry about the cops. I'll handle them."
"Thanks. Good night."
He ended the call and then checked his voice mail for messages. He had five. Or rather, Lilly had three and he had two. He erased Lilly's as soon as he determined they were not for him. His first message was from Charlie.
"Just wanted to see how it went in the lab today and to ask if you'd had a chance to review the patent apps yet. If you see any problems, we should know first thing Monday so we have time to fix —"
He erased the message. His plan was to review the patent applications in the morning.
He'd call Charlie back after that.
He listened to the entire message from Lucy LaPorte.
"Hey, it's Robin. Look, I just wanted to say I'm sorry about what I said to you at the end.
I've just been mad at the whole fucking world lately. But the truth is I can tell you care about Lilly and want to make sure she's okay. Maybe I acted the way I did because I wish there was somebody in the world that cared that way about me. So, anyway, that's it. Give me a call sometime if you want. We can just hang out. And next time I won't make you buy a smoothie. Bye."
For some reason he saved the message and clicked off. He thought maybe he'd want to listen to it again. He bumped the phone against his chin for a few minutes while he thought about Lucy. There was an underlying sweetness about her that pushed through her harsh mouth and the reality of what she did in order to make her way in the world. He thought about what she had said to him about using the name Robin and keeping the name Lucy for herself.
I have to give everything else to these men. I decided I'd keep my name.
He remembered the police detective sitting in the living room, talking to his mother and stepfather. His father was there, too. He told them that Isabelle had been using another name on the street and with the men she went with to get money. He remembered that the detective said that she used the name Angel.
Pierce knew that Renner had him pegged. What had happened so long ago was always close below the surface. It had bubbled up over the top when the mystery of Lilly Quinlan presented itself. In his desire to find Lilly, to maybe save her, he was finding and saving his own lost sister.
Pierce thought it was an amazing and horrible world out there. What people did to one another but mostly to themselves. He thought maybe this was the reason he shut himself away in the lab for so many hours each day. He shut himself away from the world, from knowing or thinking about bad things. In the lab everything was clear and simple.
Quantifiable. Scientific theory was tested and either proved or disproved. No gray areas.
No shadows.
He suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to talk to Nicole, to tell her that in the last two days he had learned something he hadn't known before. Something that was hard to put into words but still palpable in his chest. He wanted to tell her that he no longer was going to chase the dime, that as far as he was concerned, it could chase him.
He clicked on the phone and dialed her number. His old number. Amalfi Drive
. She picked up the phone after three rings. Her voice was alert but he could tell she had been asleep.
"Nicole, it's me."
"Henry . . . what?"
"I know it's late but I —"
"No . . . we talked about this. You told me you weren't going to do this."
"I know. But I want to talk to you."
"Have you been drinking?"
"No. I just want to tell you something."
"It's the middle of the night. You can't do this."
"Just this one time. I need to tell you something. Let me come over and —"
"No, Henry, no. I was sound asleep. If you want to talk, call me tomorrow. Good-bye now."
She hung up. He felt his face grow hot with embarrassment. He had just done something that before this night he was sure he would never have done, that he couldn't even imagine himself doing.
He groaned loudly and stood up and went to the windows. Out past the pier to the north he could make out the necklace of lights that marked the Pacific Coast Highway
. The mountains rising above it were dark shapes barely discernible below the night sky. He could hear the ocean better than he could see it. The horizon was lost somewhere out there in the darkness.
He felt depressed and tired. His mind drifted from Nicole back to thoughts about Lucy and what he now knew appeared to have been Lilly's fate. As he looked out into the night he promised himself that he would not forget what he had said to Lucy. When she decided she wanted out and was ready to make the move, he would be there, if for no other reason than for himself. Who knows, he thought, it could end up being the best thing he ever did with his life.
Just as he looked at it, the lights of the Ferris wheel went out. He took that as a cue and went back inside the apartment. On the couch he picked up the phone and dialed his voice mail. He listened to the message from Lucy one more time, then went to bed. He had no sheets or blankets or pillows yet. He pulled the sleeping bag up onto the new mattress and climbed inside. He then realized he hadn't eaten anything all day. It was the first time he remembered that ever having happened during a day spent outside the lab.
He fell asleep as he was mentally composing a list of things to do when he woke up in the morning.
Soon he was dreaming of a dark hallway with open doors on each side. As he moved down the hallway he would look through each doorway. Each room he looked into was like a hotel room with a bed and a bureau and a TV. And each room was occupied.
Mostly by people he didn't recognize and who did not notice him looking. There were couples who were arguing, fucking and crying. Through one doorway he recognized his own parents. His mother and father, not his stepfather, though they were at an age that came after they were divorced. They were getting dressed to go out to a cocktail party.
Pierce moved on down the hallway and in another room saw Detective Renner. He was by himself and was pacing alongside the bed. The sheets and covers were off the bed and there was a large bloodstain on the mattress.
Pierce moved on and in another room Lilly Quinlan was on the bed, as still as a mannequin. The room was dark. She was naked and her eyes were on the television.
Though Pierce could not see the screen from his angle of view, the blue glow it threw on Lilly's face made her look dead. He took a step into the room to check on her and she looked up at him. She smiled and he smiled and he turned to close the door, only to find there was no door to the room. When he looked back to her for an explanation, the bed was empty and only the television was on.
17
At exactly noon on Sunday the phone woke up Pierce. A man said, "Is it too early to speak to Lilly?"
Pierce said, "No, actually it's too late."
He
hung up and looked at his watch. He thought about the dream he'd had and set to work interpreting it, but then groaned as the first memory of the rest of the night poked into his thoughts. The call he'd made to Nicole in the middle of the night. He climbed out of the sleeping bag and off the bed to take a long, hot shower while he thought about whether to call her again to apologize. But even the stinging hot water couldn't wash away the embarrassment he felt. He decided it would be best not to call her or try to explain himself. He'd try to forget what he had done.
By the time he was dressed his stomach was loudly demanding food but there was nothing in the kitchen, he had no money and his ATM card was tapped out until Monday.
He knew he could go to a restaurant or a grocery store and use a credit card but that would take too long. He had come out of the embarrassment of the Nicole call and the baptism of the shower with a desire to put the Lilly Quinlan episode behind him and let the police handle it. He had to get back to work. And he knew that any delay in getting to Amedeo might undermine his resolve.
By one o'clock he was entering the offices. He nodded to the security man behind the front dais but did not address him by name. He was one of Clyde Vernon's new hires and had always acted coolly toward Pierce, who was happy to return the favor.
Pierce kept a coffee mug full of spare change on his desk. Before beginning any work, he dropped his backpack on the desk, grabbed the mug and took the stairs down to the second floor, where snack and soda machines were located in the lunchroom. He almost emptied the mug buying two Cokes, two bags of chips and a package of Oreos. He then checked the lunchroom refrigerator to see if anybody had left anything edible behind but there was nothing to steal. As a rule the janitorial crew emptied the refrigerator out every Friday night.
One bag of chips was empty by the time he got back to the office. Pierce tore into the other and popped one of the Cokes open after sliding behind the desk. He removed the new batch of patent applications from the safe below his desk. Jacob Kaz was an excellent patent attorney but he always needed the scientists to back-read the introductions and summaries of the legal applications. Pierce always had the final signoff on the patents.
So far, the patents Pierce and Amedeo Technologies had applied for and received over the past six years revolved around protecting proprietary designs of complex biological architectures. The key to the future of nanotechnology was creating the nanostructures that would hold and carry it. This was where Pierce had long ago chosen for Amedeo Tech to make its stand in the arena of molecular computing.
In the lab Pierce and the other members of his team designed and built a wide variety of daisy chains of molecular switches that were delicately strung together to create logic gates, the basic threshold of computing. Most of the patents Pierce and Amedeo held were in this area or the adjunct area of moleculary RAM. A small number of other patents centered on the development of bridging molecules, the latticework of sturdy carbon tubes that would one day connect the hundreds of thousands of nanoswitches that together would make a computer as small as a dime and as powerful as a digital Mack truck.
Before beginning his review of the new group of patents, Pierce leaned back in his chair and looked up at the wall behind his computer monitor. Hanging on the wall was a caricature drawing of Pierce holding up a microscope, his ponytail flying and his eyes wide as if he has just made a fantastic discovery. The caption above it said "Henry Hears a Who!"
Nicole had given it to him. She'd had an artist on the pier draw it after Pierce had told her the story of his favorite childhood memory, his father reading and telling stories to him and his sister. Before his parents split. Before his father moved to Portland and started a whole new family. Before things started to go wrong for Isabelle.
His favorite book at the time had been Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! It was the story of an elephant who discovers a whole world existing on a speck of dust. A nanoworld long before there was any thought of nanoworlds. Pierce still knew many of the lines from the book by heart. And he thought of them often in the course of his work.
In the story Horton is outcast by a jungle society that doesn't believe his discovery. He is most persecuted by the monkeys —known as the Wickersham gang —but ultimately saves the tiny world on the speck of dust from the monkeys and proves its existence to the rest of society.
Pierce opened the Oreos and ate two of the cookies whole, hoping the sugar charge would help him focus.
He began reviewing the applications with excitement and anticipation. This batch would move Amedeo into a new arena and the science to a new level. Pierce knew it would flatout rock the world of nanotechnology. And he smiled as he thought about the reaction his competitors would have when their intelligence officers copied the nonproprietary pages of the applications for them or when they read about the Proteus formula in the science journals.
The application package was for protecting a formula for cellular energy conversion. In the layman's terms used in the summary of the first application in the package, Amedeo was seeking patent protection for a "power supply system" that would energize the biological robots that would one day patrol the bloodstreams of human beings and destroy pathogens threatening their hosts.
They called the formula Proteus in a nod to the movie Fantastic Voyage. In the 1966 film a medical team is placed in a submarine called the Proteus, then miniaturized with a shrink ray and injected into a man's body to search for and destroy an inoperable blood clot in the brain.
The film was science fiction and it was likely that shrink rays would always remain the purview of the imagination. But the idea of attacking pathogens in the body with biological or cellular robots not too distant in imagination from the Proteus was on the far horizon of scientific fact.
Since the inception of nanotechnology the potential medical applications had always been the sexiest side of the science. More intriguing than a quantum leap in computing power was the potential for curing cancer, AIDS, any and all diseases. The possibility of patrolling devices in the body that could encounter, identify and eliminate pathogens through chemical reaction was the Holy Grail of the science.
The bottleneck, however —the thing that kept this side of the science theoretical while rafts of researchers pursued molecular RAM and integrated circuits —was the question of a power supply. How to move these molecular submarines through the blood with a power source that was natural and compatible with the body's immune system.
Pierce, along with Larraby, his immunology researcher, had discovered a rudimentary yet highly reliable formula. Using the host's own cells —in this case, Pierce's were harvested and then replicated for research in an incubator —the two researchers developed a combination of proteins that would bind with the cell and draw an electrical stimulus from it. That meant power to drive the nanodevice could come from within and therefore be compatible with the body's immune system.
The Proteus formula was simple and that was its beauty and value. Pierce imagined all forward nanoresearch in the field being based upon this one discovery. Experimentation and other discoveries and inventions leading to practical use formerly seen as two decades or longer out on the horizon might now be half again as close to reality.
The discovery, made just three months earlier while Pierce was in the midst of his difficulties with Nicole, was the single most exciting moment of his life.
"Our buildings, to you, would seem terribly small," Pierce whispered as he finished his review of the patents. "But to us, who aren't big, they are wonderfully tall."
The words of Dr. Seuss.
Pierce was pleased with the package. As usual, Kaz had done an excellent job of blending science-speak and layman's language in the top sheets of each patent. The meat of each application, however, contained the science and the diagrammed segments of the formula. These pages were written by Pierce and Larraby and had been reviewed by both researchers repeatedly.
The application package was good to go, in Pierce's opinion. He was excite
d. He knew floating such a patent application package into the nanoworld would bring a flood of publicity and a subsequent rise in investor interest. The plan was to show the discovery to Maurice Goddard first and lock down his investment, then submit the applications. If all went well, Goddard would realize he had a short lead and a short window of opportunity and would make a preemptive strike, signing up as the company's main funding source.
Pierce and Charlie Condon had carefully choreographed it. Goddard would be shown the discovery. He would be allowed to check it out for himself in the tunneling electron microscope. He would then have twenty-four hours to make his decision. Pierce wanted a minimum of $18 million over three years. Enough to charge forward faster and further than any competitor. And he was offering 10 percent of the company in exchange.
Chasing the Dime (2002) Page 15