Jim could feel his brow furrowing.
“So our first question has spawned three more,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “If the binotech ash—of however many different types—isn’t fully activated, then how do we go about achieving full activation? What’s the most likely result of fully activating them? And if nobody we know built the damn things, then who did?”
“We don’t yet have solid answers to those questions—only speculations,” Beech replied flatly.
“We are working on a sort of ‘cytological’ classification of the binotech types,” Wang added, “but it’s not easy. These devices blur the lines between organic and inorganic mechanisms in ways that are truly unprecedented.”
“Very well,” Brescoll said, waving off further explanations and thinking that he’d heard words like “cytological” far too often of late. “What about those embedded images from the holo-cast?”
“Our informants report that Detective Lu did some investigative work at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial,” Beech said, flashing into their shared screenspace images of the Memorial and newsclips about a terrorist raid. “Went there on the same day the Memorial was attacked by a New Teachings Warriors cell, curiously enough. However, Zuo Wenxiu, the operative we tentatively identified from the Hui murder and the Victoria Peak meeting, wasn’t among those taken in the failed raid.
“Lu’s investigation seems to have hit a roadblock at the Memorial, too, at least for the moment. Our operative in her lab indicates that she and a colleague videocataloged the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, but have done nothing further with that material.”
Jim wondered for an instant about the “curiousness” of the terrorist raid—and how much Beech’s “informants” might know about that group—but he decided to let it pass.
“And the painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art? The one with the nobleman pointing at a maze.”
“Not a maze, technically,” Beech corrected him. “A labyrinth.”
“And the difference is…?”
“A maze offers many potential paths. There are forks in the road, places where you have to make a choice. You can also make wrong choices, and hit dead ends.
“A labyrinth, however, is unicursal—offering only one course or path through it. No choices, but no dead ends on the way to the center. The journey from the periphery of the labyrinth to the center, and from the center to the periphery, are mirror images. You can get lost in a maze and never complete it, but so long as you persist in a labyrinth you never really get lost. If you have the time, you’ll always complete it.”
Noting the expression on the deputy director’s face, Beech shut up, as if he had said too much. For Brescoll, he had—and too much of it had been pedantic, and more than a little condescending.
“Well, let’s ‘persist’ then, and continue our journey toward making sense of that painting.”
“Aside from being captioned with an enigmatic phrase—” Wang began.
“‘Hide insane plight in plain sight,’” Brescoll said, nodding.
“—we’ve learned nothing further,” Wang continued, “beyond verifying the fact that Jaron Kwok visited the Museum over a year ago. He likewise once visited the Sun Yat-sen Memorial.”
“What about this Cybernesian who eluded the dragnet in Philadelphia?” Brescoll asked. “Don Markham, or Sturm, or whatever other aliases he works under?”
The three looked vaguely embarrassed as Beech replied.
“Initially, that seemed unrelated. I suggested to my colleagues in Central Intelligence that our contacts at FBI and Homeland Security might want to move against Markham, on the pretext of a cryptographic arms trading violation. Since he was involved with the Kwok holo-cast, we thought it might be helpful to have him in custody. We only discovered Markham’s interest in the Dossi painting after he eluded capture. He seems to have disappeared somewhere between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and his hotel. We suspect he had help, although from whom is not yet clear.”
Jim nodded. He suspected that some of the “we” Beech was talking about might have Tetragrammaton connections. Well, Jim had connections of his own, fly-fishing hereabouts in the stream of time. He would have to stop playing dumb now, and only hoped he had the mental concentration to pull off acting smart.
“I have to confess that I may have been wrong,” the deputy director began, “in my initial doubts about the interest you three showed in those sixteenth-century memory systems. Here we have a sixteenth-century Dossi painting that’s proving to be important. One of my sources has also suggested we might want to look at that painting and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, in the context of an artificial memory system.”
“How so?” Wang said, uncharacteristically terse.
“My sources indicate that the painting may be a ‘memory image,’ an important visual placeholder in the overall memory system. They also suggest the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall itself may be a real-world model for the ‘memory palace’ or ‘memory theatre,’ the basis for an entire memory system—one which includes the painting.”
Jim Brescoll watched as the lights flashed on in the eyes of his three advisors, and they began to talk among themselves in hurried shorthand.
“What about your third area, then?” Wang asked. “What is the link, if any, between the holo-cast with its embedded images, and how the binotech operates? Did your sources say anything about that?”
“No, I’m afraid they didn’t.”
“It might be a good question to ask them,” Beech said dryly. “Even without such sources, we think we may have an answer to your fourth question—who we have competing with us, and what the various groups may be after.”
“And?”
Beech looked at Lingenfelter, who nodded.
“This falls into the category of the ‘speculations’ Doctor Beech mentioned earlier,” Bree Lingenfelter said, “but we think it’s possible that the binotech ash Kwok left behind may, when properly activated and programmed, constitute the fully operational universal quantum DNA machine the Chinese and we ourselves have been working on.”
“A binotech quantum computer,” Wang said, “powerful enough to address either or both the cryptographic and cryptanalytic sides of the security problem.”
“The ultimate informational weapon,” Jim said quietly. “We’re supposed to be years away from perfecting it, but you’re saying it may already exist? That somebody has actually bestowed it upon us?”
“Yes, sir,” Beech said. “Like a gift from the gods. But as of now, all we’ve got is a bunch of components of unidentified manufacture—the ‘ash.’ We don’t really understand the shape of the black box they constitute, not to mention where the on/off switch might be located.”
“What about reverse engineering?”
Wang shook his head.
“Awfully hard to reverse-engineer something when all you have are the pieces, you’re not sure you have all of them, and you don’t know how they go together. Better if you can get it to put itself together and show you what it does, first. That’s why the response to blood-media is still important, even if it’s only partial at best.”
“Which brings us full circle, back to my first point,” the deputy director said, nodding. “I have some verification of the information provided by the CIA plant in Lu’s forensics lab. This is from the wire and the pinhole cameras Deputy Legal Attaché Adjoumani was wearing.”
Brescoll started a grainy, low-grade video feed, playing it on their shared screenspace. The sound from Adjoumani’s wire was spotty, but they could hear with reasonable clarity Lu’s and Cho’s discussions about the effect her blood had on the tiny organomechanisms, about the swirling patterns they made, and the ensuing discussion of fingerprints.
As the deputy director let the record play, he happened to note Baldwin Beech’s expression. The man turned ghostly pale. Almost in spite of himself, Brescoll listened and watched the surveillance record even more carefully, and waited a while before he cut it off.
What the vide
o showed seemed to be an irrelevant digression: Lu and Cho discussing identical twins, their nonidentical fingerprints, and how identicals could be made to appear nonidentical. Why would that so distress Beech, if that was what was causing his discomfiture? The point at which all the blood had drained from Beech’s face seemed to coincide with the moment Lu asked Cho for a blood sample. You’d think the woman had stuck a large-gauge needle into Beech himself.
Brescoll made a mental note to view the record again more carefully later, then switched it off.
“I think you were right to go after Markham,” Brescoll said. “If he was involved in the way Kwok usurped the worldwide computershare, it would be good to have him in custody. It’s very unfortunate that he eluded capture. He might have been able to suggest how Kwok’s work with memory palaces and memory theaters might relate to the infosphere and cyberspace.”
“Excuse me,” Bree Lingenfelter said, “but I don’t see the connection.”
“I think I do,” Steve Wang said. “And it’s precisely about connection. How internal artificial human memory might connect to external artificial machine memory.”
“Yes,” Beech said, the color slowly returning to his face. “And not just memory. Will, and action. A seamless link between mind and machine, so that what is willed, will be done, no matter what the distance—constrained only by the ordinary laws of physics.”
“Is that possible?” Lingenfelter asked, her voice sounding more than a little skeptical.
“The mind does it with the machine of the body all the time,” Wang said with a shrug.
“But that’s different—”
“No, it’s not, not in principle—”
“Enough!” Brescoll said, chuckling. “Work out the details on your own time, and give me a report. Right now, we need to determine whether the fact that the ash binotech was created at the same time as the Kwok holo-cast was just a coincidence, or if it might have some deeper, causal connection. While you’re at it, if you can’t figure out who created the ash, then let’s at least try to figure out how. I doubt that it was created out of nothing. The answer might show us how to fully activate it.”
The three scientists agreed, and left soon thereafter. As they did, Brescoll noticed that Beech still looked somewhat disconcerted.
Returning to his office, the deputy director wondered how much more disconcerted Beech would be if he knew that the directions Brescoll had just outlined had been suggested to him by his own secretive sources. And that those same sources had, in their fly-files, included a transcript of a conversation between two unidentified men, one of whom spoke of “ashes” that might somehow provide an edge over both the “corrupt Chinese communists” and “decadent Western democracies,” while the other party spoke of “living fossil codes.”
Sitting down behind his desk, Brescoll wondered how, in his report to the director, he would describe the progress of the investigation into Kwok’s disappearance. That last word bothered him, reminding him again, as it did, of how quickly Director Rollwagen had shut down discussion at the end of that early gathering—seemingly ages ago—when the disappearance of prototype quantum code devices had come up.
He and the director had discussed other aspects of the investigation since then, covering everything from Borges and Babel to quantum DNA entanglements and reality as a simulation—but Brescoll had never pushed to know more about those disappearances, and the director had never been forthcoming about them.
Did Janis Rollwagen have sources of her own? What if she had only been “playing dumb,” too? He’d have to talk with her sometime about certain unspoken matters, and he felt certain that time was coming closer.
EIGHT
SYMMETRY…
LAKE NOT-TO-BE-NAMED
Nils Barakian’s private jet flew them to a small airport outside San Jose, where they transferred to a dark-windowed four-seat helicopter. When Don asked where they were headed, Barakian only tipped his hat and said that it was a location “beside a certain lake in the Sierras.” Don didn’t know quite what to make of that.
He mulled it over in silence as he watched the terrain below—a broad agricultural plain that lay between the Coastal Range and the Sierra Nevada Mountains—pass into and out of view.
“What do you think of the Great Central Valley, Don?” Barakian asked, over the thrum of the helicopter.
“It looks like somebody upholstered the landscape in gray and brown corduroy.”
Barakian laughed.
“That’s because it’s winter. The fields and their crops look quite a bit different in spring. More like a big patchwork quilt. All sorts of colors, then.”
“Maybe,” Don said, looking over the landscape and trying to imagine something less monochromatic, “but the only color I see is some nubby green corduroy, there.”
“Orange groves,” Barakian said, nodding his hat brim in their direction. “Ah, the wonderful smells—of all kinds of fruit trees. I remember March days when the orchards blooming on the valley floor were pews of flowers in a cathedral of rain.”
“Sounds like you know this area pretty well.”
“Well enough,” Barakian said. “I grew up here. My grandparents moved here from Turkey, not long before the Armenian genocide. Some of the folks around here didn’t like Armenians all that much either, though.”
“No?” Don asked. Having grown up in the American Midwest, until his early twenties Don had assumed that prejudice was mostly a black/white thing. He had traveled since, however, and had encountered many other varieties of stereotyping. Historical prejudices of the Japanese toward Koreans. British toward Australians. Even, in American sunbelt areas, prejudice toward Canadian “snowbirds,” supposedly based on their driving and tipping practices. Seemed people could take a preemptive dislike to one another with almost no provocation at all.
“Called us ‘Fresno Indians,’” Barakian continued. “But eventually sons and daughters met and married. That’s how I ended up with the first name of Nils. Lots of Swedes and other Scandinavians around Kingsburg—one of whom was my mother.”
“Hmm,” Don grunted noncommitally, not knowing what to say to that. He turned his attention to the snowcapped Sierras, looming ever more prominently into view ahead. Down in the foothills, the Euclidean geometry of the farm fields began to break up, giving way to fractal forests of oaks on the lower hillsides. Then, except for the occasional scars of roads, houses, and power-line tracts, only broad bands of pines added variety to the land, before being themselves limned with snow. Far ahead, Don saw that even the snow and pine cover broke off, amid windswept granite and jagged peaks above the treeline.
They never reached that starker and more sublime terrain, though. The helicopter began settling earthward toward a lake surrounded by snow-covered pine forests and punctuated by the occasional treeless granite dome. On one such headland not far from the lake, he saw snowboarders, happy plankster gangsters shredding the pristine whiteness. Noting that the shore at one end of the lake was ruler straight, Don concluded that “shore” was a dam, and the lake was man-made.
The helicopter headed toward a cul-de-sac parking lot, a mile or two from the large marina at the lake’s northernmost end. Something that looked like a cross between a combat vehicle and a black stretch limo was already parked there.
“Our destination lies just ahead,” Barakian announced, “at the end of that access road. In less security-conscious times, the name of this facility was imprinted into the concrete in foot-tall letters above the tunnel entrance. I’m afraid I’m not allowed to mention its name, nowadays. Nor the name of the lake either. I suppose I should blindfold you, but instead I’ve decided to trust you, I think.”
The pilot put the helicopter into a slow circle, waiting.
“All right,” said Barakian. “Let’s go down.”
Don felt as much as saw their landing. Barakian took him by the arm and steadied him as he stepped down from the chopper. As they exited, the blades above their heads slowed to a
stop.
“Here’s our car,” Barakian said, holding his hat on his head with one hand while gesturing with the other to their stretch limo—a Hummer sheathed in a titanium and solar-electric skin. They entered the relative quiet of the waiting vehicle. Once inside, they drove only a short distance before they came to a stop once more.
Looking about them, Don saw that they had passed completely through a tall, gated entrance. They were parked just inside the mouth of a long tunnel, the entrance of which was framed by tremendous icicles. A large sign on the wall beside them read All Persons Shall Log In And Check In With Operator When Entering Station. Armed security guards stood watch, questioning their driver and eyeing Barakian and his guest.
The driver got out and one of the guards held out a telephone. He spoke briefly into it, then resumed his place behind the wheel. Satisfied, the guards tipped their hats respectfully to Barakian and waved them through.
The tunnel seemed to go on for miles, with no discernible light at its other end. They passed more signs—All Vehicles Use Low Gear and Speed Limit 15—but not much else. The lurid glare of the tunnel’s work lights revealed only the smooth road sloping downward, and the seemingly patternless pattern of fractured granite, arching overhead. The slow trip downhill made Don nervous, as if he were descending into a dungeon, or the bowels of the earth.
“What is this place?”
“Let’s just call it a powerhouse tunnel,” Barakian replied. “The road takes us a mile into the mountain.”
“And at the end is…a powerhouse?”
“That’s right. A powerhouse tucked into an artificial cavern. The cave is shaped like a loaf of bread, one hundred feet high and three hundred feet long. Here inside the mountain, we’re a thousand vertical feet below the surface, or about as far below ground as the top of the Empire State Building is above it. Most of the tunnel and cavern are smooth-wall blasted out of the rock, or shotcreted where the rock’s too fractured.”
The Labyrinth Key Page 22