A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  “Do they let women into the SEALS?” Ingrid asked.

  “Irrelevant. Lia would never pass the training program.”

  I bared my teeth at him and he threw up a shielding hand. “Sorry, Lia, but you probably don’t weigh ninety pounds dripping wet. I can’t see you as a rough, tough SEAL.”

  “It’s a mean ninety pounds,” I told him.

  “And she’ll probably weigh a lot more if she keeps letting Boris ply her with beer and Mexican food,” Ingrid said.

  “Don’t tease the animals,” I warned her. “Cette animale est tres méchante; quand on l'attaque elle se defend.” This animal is vicious; when attacked she defends herself. That set Ingrid’s lips moving as she worked it out. She might know enough to satisfy the language requirement, but mathematical French is a lot easier than bits of French doggerel.

  (My Aunt Alesia’s husband was French, and fifteen years after his death she still pretended to speak French as her first language and bombarded us with French phrases over the morning koulouri and cheese. In case you were wondering. It’s not just my parents who are insane.)

  A third cup of coffee, with maybe some pancakes, would have done a lot to improve my mood. Unfortunately, what I got was a chance to observe Ben doing Lock Picking 101.

  From a distance.

  One thing I had to (grudgingly) admit in favor of a pre-dawn mission: it was actually possible to park within sight of our target. Ingrid and Jimmy and I sat in the car while Ben worked on the front door. Ingrid didn’t seem to be invoking Camouflage yet; presumably she was saving her best efforts until we got into the building. Finally he beckoned to us to come on in.

  “About time,” I said.

  “You expected a high-speed result? I should maybe have just shot the lock off like your boyfriend would probably have done?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend, and yes, a little more speed would have been welcome. Two large cups of coffee, remember?”

  Fortunately, there was a restroom under the stairs, and it was not locked. After taking care of that little matter I headed upstairs to join the others in 21A, but that door was still locked and I didn’t see anyone but Jimmy.

  “Ow! You stepped on my foot.”

  Ben was bent over the locking mechanism while Ingrid was standing back, frowning and staring into space.

  “You’re getting really good at Camouflage. Ben, are you sure it’s not actual invisibility?” Praise where praise is due, and when was Ben going to share that algorithm with me?

  21A turned out to be not just vacant, but completely empty. As in, no furniture. Ben and Jimmy slid down against the wall it shared with 21B; Ingrid and I took the opposite wall.

  After a while I asked Ben how it was going.

  “It isn’t,” he murmured, lips barely moving. “I can’t sense anything. Either he left his computer turned off or he moved it. I’m going with turned off, because then we still have a chance.”

  “Can’t Jimmy show you how to turn it on?”

  “Told you, I can’t pick up anything. Besides, what happens if he comes into the office to find it humming away, when he knows he turned it off last night?”

  I hadn’t realized that the second phase of the Oh-Dark-Thirty plan involved sitting on the floor of an empty office until normal business hours commenced… and who was to say that this Raven Crowson even kept regular hours? I was glad I’d used the facilities downstairs when I had a chance.

  After a really long, boring wait we heard people coming in the front door. They sounded surprised; I concentrated, picked out words and worried. The first-floor tenants were bothered by the fact that the front door had been unlocked when they got there.

  “Didn’t you relock the door?” I asked Ben.

  “Couldn’t. Remember, my whole defense in case of capture is that everything was unlocked and we just wandered in.”

  Ingrid shushed us both.

  Eventually the chatter downstairs died out as the people who’d come in settled into their offices. I heard a phone ringing from time to time, but not much else.

  We waited some more. I started running through some minor problems in my head, until Ingrid kicked me and I realized that I’d been herding dust bunnies into a floor space bounded by a simple closed curve.

  Finally there were feet on the stairs. Ben tensed. Ingrid closed her eyes and concentrated, and that eerie deep blue light surrounded us again. I hoped Ben could hear movements next door through the quivering stillness inside the visualization.

  His eyes were closed too, now, and his lips were moving. Of course – he didn’t need to listen for actual sounds; he knew when the computer was on. I hoped he was tiptoeing through the files more carefully than when he’d experimented with Ingrid’s machine.

  “Should have brought a laptop,” Jimmy muttered. He sighed and fished out his phone, punched in the password and put it in Ben’s open hand. The screen blinked on, very bright inside our little hidden space, and I could just see symbols zipping across it as Ben poured whatever he was reading into the smartphone.

  There were more feet on the stairs: two people with heavy treads. The door to 21A swung open and a flashlight pierced the room; Ingrid’s eyes opened and the deep blue faded, leaving us in a dusty room with natural light pouring in through the windows.

  And there were two men in generic light blue uniforms blocking the only door.

  “Want to explain what you’re up to in here before we hand you over to the cops?”

  Ben jammed the phone into his pocket. “Ah – well – nothing really. See, we’re looking for an office to rent; we were supposed to meet a Mr. Fourier here. We found the door unlocked, and we wanted to make sure nobody had vandalized the space….”

  If we hadn’t all been sitting on the floor, it might have been more convincing. But it was fairly obvious Ben’s story was not going over well. I took a deep breath. “Don’t bother, Ben. Let’s just tell them the truth.”

  I stood up and faced the security guards. “How did you find us?”

  “We got a call about suspected intruders.”

  “From this building.”

  I filed that for later reference.

  “Well, it’s like this, gentlemen. We belong to an institute devoted to the study of magic. The head of the Center for Applied Technology likes to send us on field work assignments to make sure that what we do in the lab can be translated into actual real world results, and today he wanted us to try magically accessing an unfamiliar, randomly chosen computer when we weren’t actually in the same room with it. We evaluated conveniently located office buildings and selected this one because of the empty office, which gave us maximum privacy for our experiments. Sadly, we were unable to fulfil the assignment. We were just sitting here because nobody wanted to be the first one reporting our failure.”

  One of the rent-a-cops was smiling broadly by the time I finished this farrago of half-truths; the other one was sniffing the air. “If they’re stoned, they must have been smoking somewhere else,” he said.

  “I guess they’re just insane,” said Smiler, “or else there’s some new kind of happy juice going around.”

  “It’s not going to look good for us if we left this room unlocked,” brooded Sniffer. He looked at me. “Are you sure it was unlocked when you got here? And the front door too?”

  “It was your turn to lock up,” Smiler said to Sniffer. “Not going to look great on your record.”

  “Do we look like expert lock pickers?” I countered.

  Smiler and Sniffer eventually decided that if we would just go away and never come back, the whole incident could be forgotten.

  Nobody spoke until we were safely back in Ben’s car.

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack, Lia,” were the first words out of Ben’s mouth. “Standing up and announcing you were going to tell them the truth – what were you thinking?”

  “That it wouldn’t be nearly as effective if I announced that I was going to lie to them. And anyway,” I said, thinking
back, “I actually did tell them the truth. Well, some of the truth. It would have passed the Verrick Test. Parts of it.” Dr. Verrick believed that if you told people the literal truth and they misinterpreted it, you hadn’t lied. I shared his opinion – sometimes – as in, when it was convenient.

  “I couldn’t make up a whole convincing story out of scratch.”

  “Yeah,” Ben acknowledged. “Too bad we didn’t have Annelise along.”

  “I am getting tired of hearing how your little girlfriend could have solved every problem we encounter,” Ingrid said.

  “She’s got a real talent for it,” Ben protested. “You should see her in action.”

  “Anyway, I did tell one huge lie,” I said. “I hope… What were you doing with Jimmy’s phone? Downloading Raven Crowson’s computer files, I hope?”

  “Oh!” Ben contorted himself, trying to drag the phone out of his pocket, and nearly hit a couple of students who leaped for the side of the road and yelled at us.

  “Better wait till we get back,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh well, they looked like engineering students,” said Ingrid. “It wouldn’t have been a great loss if Ben had hit them.”

  “Bad for my paint job,” Ben said, “and think of the paperwork. It could ruin my whole day.” But he stopped twisting and turning and trying to get at Jimmy’s phone. “We didn’t even access all of the data. I did find Crowson’s Contacts list. And then I found some concealed folders.” He looked sick.

  “Let me guess,” Ingrid said. “You got complete plans for this ‘birthday party,’ plus a list of known terrorists, and you can pass all that on to Lensky and he’ll go away?”

  “I never knew you to engage in such unbridled flights of optimism, Ingrid,” said Ben. “Are your hopes and dreams the same, Lia?”

  “Not hardly.” For one thing, I didn’t want Lensky to go away thinking he’d gotten away with all his double-entendres. I wanted to deliver a crushing blow to his ego, and then…. Well… I still couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for his disappearance. Probably I needed more than one ego-crushing line to even the balance between us.

  Chapter 8

  The spook was in the break room when we got back to Allandale House. He exploded out of there like a man looking for a fight. “Where have you been?” He was looking at me, but I assumed the question was meant for all of us.

  His dark blue eyes were giving off sparks and there was a tiny vein fluttering in and out on his temple. Left side. It didn’t seem like the best time to tease him. So I did anyway.

  “Where did we go? Out,” I said. “And what did we do? Nothing.”

  He said something in Polish that hardly needed translation; his eyes said it all.

  “We’ve been getting the information you wanted,” Ben said, dragging Jimmy’s phone out of his pocket with a flourish. “Some of it, anyway. Yesterday you were complaining because we hadn’t got it, now do you want to complain because we have it? Boris?”

  Lensky closed his eyes. “Just tell me this excursion didn’t involve cops or, worse, Crowson spotting you.”

  “Couple of rent-a-cops,” Ingrid said, “and Lia persuaded them we were insane or drugged.”

  “That shouldn’t have been hard,” Lensky snarled.

  “And,” I said reluctantly, “somebody called them from inside the building. That could have been Crowson.”

  “You were in Crowson’s building?”

  “What’s biting you, Boris? You gave us his office address yesterday. What did you think, we could mess with his computer by sitting in a circle and staring at the words?” Actually, Ben had tried just that, but there was no need to remind Lensky.

  “You should have waited for me.”

  “Parking’s a lot easier before dawn,” I pointed out. I hadn’t been a big fan of that starting hour, but it was done now and we needed to put up a united front before the spook.

  “You.” This snarl was directed at me. Lensky grabbed my wrist and spun me around him, towards the door. “In the break room. Now.”

  He followed me in, slammed the door and turned the thumb latch. Well, Ben knew how to fix that.

  I didn’t hear the door being remotely unlocked, though. Nor did I hear anything at all from my three co-conspirators.

  So much for the united front. The cowards were leaving me to calm down Lensky all by myself.

  “No more funny stuff. Get this: You. Do. Not. Go. Out. Without. Me!” He actually had the nerve to shake a finger in my face.

  “Oh, sure, Mother,” I said. “I’ll never go down to the end of the town if I don’t go down with you. Count on it.”

  “I warned you about being funny,” he said, grabbing my shoulders. I think his intention was to shake me, but it didn’t work out quite that way. There was a hot and breathless interlude and then he let me go. And it was a good thing I wasn’t wearing lipstick, because it would have been thoroughly smeared by now.

  “Is that how you convey the seriousness of your orders?” I asked, only gasping for breath a little bit, and very quietly. I backed away from him and sat down with the table between us. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to touch me again. The trouble was that I did want him to.

  A man who was only temporarily in town.

  And who had no tact.

  In the office, no less.

  This was a three-star Bad Idea. I was counting on the table to give me time to get over the feeling.

  “It’s how I convey the seriousness of protecting you,” he growled. “I wanted you and your buddies to do some nice quiet voodoo, not to risk tangling with a man like Crowson who deals with terrorists.”

  “You mean, you suspect him of dealing with terrorists. And don’t say ‘Tomato, tomahto.’ I’m tired of that line.”

  “I should have been with you. I want you to promise that you won’t go on any more field trips without me.”

  Like that was going to happen.

  “For heaven’s sake, I wasn’t exactly playing the sacrificial virgin! There were four of us. Two of whom were young, healthy men.”

  “Neither of whom was carrying,” Lensky said.

  “No. Believe it or not, even in Texas we usually manage to go about our daily business without taking our six-shooters along.”

  Now Ben banged on the door. “If you two are quite through,” he shouted, “I would like to discuss our data with Boris.”

  So much for Ben’s protection. Interrupt a furious spook intent on doing violence to my person? Naah, leave the man alone. But showing off data? Definitely worth some banging and yelling. I began to warm – ever so slightly – to Lensky. He might be a rude, crude s.o.b., but he did have this streak of protectiveness toward me. Most men were pretty clear that I could take care of myself; for some reason I found Lensky’s foggy vision touching.

  I understood Ben’s priorities better once we were all seated around the table and he put Jimmy’s phone in front of him. “First thing I got was Crowson’s contact list,” he repeated. “But that’s not important.”

  “I decide what’s important,” Lensky said immediately.

  “I’m the one with the data,” Ben countered.

  Am I the only person in the world who thinks that life could run perfectly well without men doing their King-of-the-Mountain thing all the time? Anyway, Ben wasn’t as bright as I’d thought he was if he wanted to start that kind of competition with Lensky. The spook had plenty of faults – now I could add a couple more to my growing list – but he was always going to dominate any room he was in.

  “Take a look at the pictures I downloaded off of his hidden files and say that again.” Ben swiped at the screen with one finger.

  Then he tried two fingers.

  Then he poked at it.

  Talk about not being willing to ask for directions!

  “Let me.” Jimmy retrieved his phone and did some series of swipes and pokes that must have been different from the ones Ben had tried. “See, here are the pictures…”

  His voice trailed
off and he looked as if he was about to puke. I glanced around the room, just in case I needed to find the wastebasket in a hurry.

  Jimmy swallowed – hard – and found his voice again. “Ben’s right. We need to deal with this first.”

  I happened to be sitting between him and Lensky. The jerk reached out behind me to pass Lensky the phone, which the spook held at an angle that concealed the screen from me. One eyebrow shot up as he looked at – I guessed – the first of these mysterious pictures Ben had been talking about.

  “Not within my remit,” he said, sounding just slightly sorry about it. “My agency has no jurisdiction over domestic crimes. I would like you to continue working the angle we’d been discussing.”

  “It’s got to be illegal to have that stuff on your computer,” Ben insisted.

  “What stuff?” I was tired of being excluded, and Ingrid looked as if she felt the same way. Actually, she looked as if she was ready to pull a Viking axe out of her elaborate coronet of braids.

  “Believe me, Lia, you don’t want to see those pictures. I wish I hadn’t seen them.” Ben too looked slightly greenish. Maybe I should put the wastebasket between him and Jimmy? “I want to bleach my brain.”

  “I want to bleach my eyeballs,” Jimmy said.

  Lensky started to speak, then cleared his throat and started again. “It’s kiddie porn, Thalia,” he said. “Of a particularly revolting sort.”

  It was news to me that one kind of child porn was more revolting than another, but Jimmy and Ben were both nodding.

  “And rather amateurish photography,” Jimmy said.

  “Which suggests that Crowson, or somebody close to him, may be producing this stuff personally.”

  “As a labor of love, you might say?” Ingrid asked. She was sitting on the far side of Lensky; he turned the phone screen towards her and I could see the desire to tease the spook fade from her face. Now we had three people turning green. Lensky and I appeared to be the only good sailors – so to speak – in the room. And I hadn’t actually been exposed to the pictures.