The Protégé

by Stephen Frey

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Just consider it,” Ganze urged.

  “You’ve got my word,” Gillette said, “and that’s all you’re going to get.”

  “That’s not enough,” Boyd growled.

  “Too bad.”

  “Mr. Gillette,” Ganze said, “I really think—”

  “Well, this was a huge waste of time,” Gillette interrupted, standing up.

  “Sit down,” Boyd ordered.

  Gillette turned to go.

  “Don’t leave,” Ganze pleaded.

  Gillette turned back around.

  “Do we have your word?” Ganze asked.

  “I just told you that.”

  “Mr. Boyd needs to hear it once more,” Ganze said, gesturing at his superior.

  Gillette glanced at Boyd.

  Boyd nodded.

  “Okay, you’ve got my word.”

  “Prison isn’t our only option,” Boyd warned. “I assume you understand that.”

  “Come on, Norman,” Ganze said. “We don’t have to—”

  “I understand that,” Gillette said grimly, sitting down. They could always take that step whenever they wanted. But he wasn’t going to give them the ability to unilaterally stick him in Leavenworth for the rest of his life. That would be worse than death.

  Boyd made an irritated face and shook his head wearily.

  As though he were dead tired of taking on so much responsibility, Gillette thought. At least they had that in common.

  “Have you ever heard of DARPA?” Boyd asked.

  Gillette thought for a second. “I’m not sure. What does it stand for?”

  “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

  “Oh, sure.” Gillette recognized the full name. “The guys who invented GPS and the Internet, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s basically the Defense Department’s dream tank,” Ganze explained. “They contract with chemists, engineers, biochemists, physicists, and other kinds of doctors from the best universities and companies in the country, then let them loose to develop next-generation weapons and systems for the armed forces. But, as you pointed out, Christian, lots of great things they’ve invented have ultimately gotten into the hands of the public, too. Things that have made everyday life more efficient, safer, and, in some cases, more fun. The computer mouse, the Hummer. A lot of people don’t know that the government invents this stuff, then gives it away when it’s declassified.”

  “Sells it, too,” Gillette added. “A lot of people don’t know that, either.”

  “What’s wrong with the government getting a return on its money?” Boyd demanded. “Companies do.”

  Ganze rolled his eyes. “Norman, don’t—”

  “The government isn’t in business to make a profit,” Gillette shot back. “At least, it isn’t supposed to be.”

  “Don’t be naÏve,” Boyd warned.

  “Believe me,” Gillette said forcefully, “I’m not. Look, I wouldn’t care if those government profits reduced taxes, but from what I hear there are bureaucrats walking around D.C. making a damn good living off selling what the government invents. I doubt that’s what Washington and Jefferson had in mind.”

  “Washington and Jefferson didn’t have to worry about profits,” Boyd snapped, “they were already rich.”

  Gillette said nothing.

  Boyd fumed for a second, then put his hands flat on the desk. “Let’s not get off track here. I don’t want to get into some damn philosophical discussion about what the government might or might not be in business to do. Let’s talk about one thing we’d all agree the government is in business to do, and that’s protect our country from its enemies.” He held out his arms, palms up. “All right?”

  Gillette nodded.

  “Good.” Boyd took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Like I said, DARPA’s mission is to come up with next-generation defense technologies. Star Wars stuff. Body armor that can start healing wounds even before soldiers make it to a forward hospital; telepathic command systems for fighter pilots; research on hemispheric sleep that allows one side of the brain to function while the other rests, so a soldier can effectively fight twenty-four hours a day. Darkening glass that can save at least one of a pilot’s eyes during a nuclear blast. Cutting-edge projects that might seem like science fiction today but could ultimately become reality.”

  “Are you guys DARPA?” Gillette asked.

  “Not technically,” Ganze answered, “but we work closely with them. We’re called GARD, the Government Advanced Research Department. We’re set up to take on projects that are too secret for DARPA to handle.”

  “Why can’t DARPA handle projects that are so secret?”

  “Like most agencies,” Boyd spoke up again, “over time, DARPA’s developed an infrastructure and, worse, a reputation. For excellence, I’ll grant you, but in this business you want to run quiet like a nuclear sub. You don’t want any reputation. Another reason they run into problems on the supersecret stuff is the temporary nature of the agency’s employees. Like I told you, we pull experts out of the private sector, which the companies and universities aren’t happy about, so we have to plug them back in at some point. But that revolving door facilitates information flow, if you get my drift.”

  “Sure.”

  “So we need an agency that can handle the very top-secret stuff when there’s a problem.”

  “Like what?” Gillette asked.

  “Spies, basically. On projects that involve national security. I mean, we don’t care much if our enemies find out about little things DARPA invents before they’re declassified.” Boyd’s expression turned grave. “But there are certain projects that have to stay hidden from everyone. From terrorists right on down to some of our own senators and congressmen,” he said. “I don’t like hiding important things from our own lawmakers, but some of them just can’t keep secrets. Sad, but true.”

  “I can relate to that,” Gillette muttered. “I assume you have that situation now,” he said, anticipating where Boyd was headed. “A spy issue, I mean.”

  “Right. And this project involves one of the most incredible technologies I’ve ever seen. We’ve got to keep this thing protected.”

  Gillette was interested now. “What is it?”

  Boyd stared at Gillette evenly for several moments before answering. “Nanotechnology.”

  Gillette nodded. He’d heard about nanotech.

  “The ability to produce structures at the molecular level,” Boyd continued. “I’m talking about being able to build self-assembling micromachines with a diameter eighty thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.”

  Gillette had talked to several venture capitalists who’d set up pools of money to fund preliminary research on nanotech. “I know there’s a lot of work going on in that space, but people I talk to say that stuff is way out in the future. At least thirty to forty years before anything meaningful is developed. They say it might not even be real at all, just hype so scientists and institutes can get research dollars and maintain lifestyles. And the guys I’ve talked to would know.”

  “Forget for a second when and think about what,” Boyd suggested. “Think about what it could do for us, for our military and intelligence capabilities, specifically.” His eyes were flashing. “We could develop supersoldiers. Using nanotech machines, men could carry hundreds of pounds of the latest battlefield equipment but still run three times faster than the fastest men we have today. They’d be able to wear thick armor that could withstand almost anything while remaining agile. They’d be able to carry computers and heavy weapons that would make today’s soldiers look like minutemen. They’d be almost invincible.”

  “How would nanotechnology help us develop supersoldiers?” Gillette asked.

  “Scientists could develop exoskeletons, like intelligent armor that would fortify with artificial muscles what the body could do. They would synchronize with microsensors injected into the soldiers’ bodies.” />
  “But how?”

  “The machines carry micro-microcomputers, nanocomputers, that take their cues from what the brain wants to do. They transmit those cues from the soldier’s body as signals to the exoskeleton. The exoskeleton amplifies the physical abilities of the soldier. It’s much faster and tremendously more effective than any kind of physical training. It’s superhero shit come to life, Christian.” Boyd took a breath. “Then there’s the whole repair side. Scalpels and stitches will seem like butcher tools after we perfect nanotech. We’ll be able to direct cells to discard the dead, then reform and renew. Fast. There’ll be no such things as scars anymore, external or internal. More important, we’ll be able to fight diseases at the molecular level. We’ll send armies of nanoterminators into the body to kill cancer cells, AIDS cells, whatever.” Boyd spread his arms wide. “Things we can’t come close to doing now. The possibilities are endless.”

  Gillette’s mind was humming. He was fascinated. “You mentioned intelligence, too. What’s the application there?”

  “We’ll be able to inject undetectable nanochips into the bodies of our undercover agents. Like microcameras, they’ll record everything. Audio and video, so that the information can be retrieved later. Nothing will be left to memory. No mistakes will be made.” He held up his hand. “Better still, in situations where we can’t penetrate, we can actually use the enemy to help us without them even knowing.”

  “How?”

  “Say we want to listen in on the Russian embassy here in Washington. We can put a nanochip into the nose drops or cold medicine of a Russian secretary who’s sick, or into the aspirin of the ambassador or one of his or her staff who suffers from migraines. The machine the chip is attached to directs the chip to become lodged in a certain sector of the target’s body—the eye, the ear—and suddenly we have a direct line into the embassy without the host or his associates ever knowing. No more digging tunnels beneath streets, no more clandestine missions trying to plant bugs that are detected within hours anyway and put people’s lives at risk.”

  There were negative implications to all this, too. How negative was the question. “What do you want from me?” Gillette asked.

  “Remember how you said that the people you talked to, those people who would know, told you that nanotechnology was decades off? That maybe it was just hype so researchers could maintain lifestyles by taking dollars from investors, including the government, who desperately want to see it happen?”

  “I don’t think I said all that,” Gillette answered, “but I understand what you’re saying.”

  “It isn’t just hype, Christian. We’re close.” Boyd glanced over at Ganze. “Very close.”

  Gillette’s eyes flickered between Boyd and Ganze. He wondered how many other secrets of this magnitude they kept. “How do I fit in?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Boyd answered. “So far, this project has been housed inside DARPA, not actually at DARPA’s headquarters, which is over in Arlington not far from here, but at a university in the Northeast. Unfortunately, as you guessed, we think we have a spy problem. One of the senior biochemists on the project has been contacted by someone with close ties to al-Qaeda. The top people on the project don’t know it, but we watch them constantly. The biochemist and the terrorist link have met three times. We haven’t been able to record their conversations yet, but we don’t have the luxury of time or giving our guy the benefit of the doubt.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “That’s where you come in, Christian. We need to strip the project out of DARPA and use a cutout.”

  Gillette was familiar with the term. At one of their dinners, Senator Clark had described how the government sometimes used private companies to hide, or as fronts for, clandestine operations involving the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies. How back in the sixties the International Telephone and Telegraph Company had bugged foreign embassies for the United States government, mostly in South America, while installing telephone systems for profit. How cutouts had become even more prevalent today and how typically only a few of the top officers in the company knew what was really going on. How numerous Fortune 500 companies were involved in such projects.

  “You want to use an Everest company?” Gillette asked, anticipating what they were looking for.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why don’t you just take the guy who’s been contacted by the terrorist link off the project? Or take out the terrorist link?”

  Boyd shook his head. “That would alert al-Qaeda that we know what’s going on. Then they might try to get to someone else, or panic and do something crazy. We think it’s a better idea to quietly lift the vital components of the nanotech project out of DARPA and slip it into one of your companies. We’ve already identified it.”

  “Which one do you want to use?”

  “Beezer Johnson. Your medical products company. Specifically the division that develops and manufactures pacemakers, heart valves, and other very specialized products. That division works well for us from a number of different perspectives. First, and most important, it’s based in Minneapolis. One of the leaders of the nanotech project, one of the people we trust implicitly, is from Minneapolis and has very good connections at the university’s medical school and at the Mayo Clinic down in Rochester. Both will be excellent resources as the team finishes this thing. We intend to remove her and two other members of her team from the group and relocate them into space at Beezer in Minneapolis. We’ll add a few people she’s selected from a couple of other universities and companies in the U.S. to replace the people who will remain where the project is based now.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Won’t the people who stay, including the person who’s been contacted by the terrorist link, won’t they be suspicious when those people don’t show up one day?” Gillette asked.

  “No,” Boyd answered quickly. “There’s going to be an accident, Christian, a plane crash. No one, including their families, will know that they are really alive and well until after the project is complete. When it’s done, they’ll be able to go home. Hopefully within six months.”

  “Do these people have families? Spouses and kids, I mean.”

  “They’re all married, and they all have children,” Ganze spoke up. “Unfortunately.”

  Gillette groaned. “Shouldn’t you at least tell the spouses what’s really going on?”

  “I can’t risk detection,” Boyd snapped.

  “What if one of the spouses is so upset they commit suicide?”

  “We’re going to monitor that carefully,” Ganze said. “Hopefully we’ll recognize the signs and be able to stop anything—”

  “But ultimately I can’t worry about it,” Boyd interrupted, his voice rising. “My job is to protect the project and this country. I can’t allow what we have to get into our enemies’ hands. It has to be kept secret at all costs. If someone is so weak they have to kill themselves because of the loss of a loved one, well, that’s not my problem. And I won’t lose a minute of sleep over it. I’m trying to make the world better for millions here, not individuals.” He stuck his chin out fiercely. “Will you cooperate with us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You better decide fast.”

  Gillette eased back into his chair. “What about my questions?”

  Boyd pointed at Ganze. “Daniel.”

  Ganze took out a small notepad from his jacket pocket. “Here’s what I can tell you right now.”

  Gillette looked up. He’d been staring down, considering everything he’d heard.

  “Your blood mother still lives in Los Angeles. Her name’s Marilyn McRae.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ganze held up his hand. “Don’t try to contact her yet. We need to talk to her again first. Give us twenty-four hours.”

  “Okay,” Gillette agreed, his blood pressure ticking up with each passing moment. “What about
my father?”

  “What I’ve been able to find out, what my sources have uncovered, is that sixteen years ago your father may have stumbled onto a plot to assassinate the president. This is still sketchy, and I should know more in the next few days, but it appears that he uncovered a left-wing conspiracy to kill George Bush. Obviously, it didn’t go anywhere, but your father was killed so he couldn’t tell anyone.”

  The room blurred in front of Gillette. “What?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “I know it sounds incredible, but we think that’s what happened. Like I said, we should have more information in the next few days.”

  “So, you gonna help us?” Boyd growled.

  Gillette looked across the desk.

  “Well?” Boyd demanded.

  Gillette glanced from Boyd to Ganze several times. He’d made a career out of taking risks. But never one like this.

  THE FLIGHT TO the Eastern Shore would take no more than a few minutes. As the jet powered up and began accelerating down the runway, Gillette put his head back and tried to relax. But it was hard. So many things were running through his mind. Apparently, his father had been murdered after all. He’d felt that in his gut for so long, but now he was close to proving it. And he was finally going to meet his blood mother.

  He desperately wished Faith would call him back. He couldn’t tell her much about what had happened, but he wanted to share with her the part about meeting his real mother.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Gillette swiveled toward Stiles. He stared at the other man for a few moments but said nothing.

  “Come on, Chris,” Stiles urged. “What happened in the meeting?”

  Gillette ran both hands through his hair. “I made a deal.”

  “So? You make deals every day.”

  “Not like this.” He looked out the window as the plane lifted off. It was a crystal clear day, and suddenly he had a beautiful view of Washington, D.C. “I agreed to let them use one of our companies in return for information that’s only important to me.” He thought about how he could justify the deal in the name of national security, but that wasn’t why he’d done it. “That’s a first for me, and it doesn’t feel good. But I’ve got to know what happened to my dad,” he said under his breath.