Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  Once I was inside the park, I followed a drive that curved around the lab’s south side, away from the pond. While the lab was a severely functional structure, the limestone headquarters building managed to create an aura of both prosperity and tranquillity. A thicket of trees blocked any view of the lab but this part of the campus had its own pond, where a pair of swans was swimming. Much classier than ducks.

  Breen and his staff were prepared to respect my time. As soon as I reached the receptionist, a poised young man appeared to escort me upstairs. Traffic was good? Had I had a pleasant summer? He’d hand me over to Terry Utas, Mr. Breen’s secretary; she’d take good care of me.

  Terry Utas, with her pearl earrings and salmon-colored dropped-waist dress, made me feel dowdy, even in my Lario boots. Her makeup had been put on with a sure hand, whereas I’d forgotten even to run a lipstick over my mouth. She stopped in the middle of whatever she was doing to tell an intercom the good news of my arrival.

  Breen himself appeared a moment later, a tall man whose broad shoulders and flat waist showed a rigorous attention to the workout room. His thick hair still had some dark streaks in it.

  “Ms. Warshawski, thanks for interrupting your day for me. I only learned this morning that Martin Binder had gone AWOL, and it’s a source of concern.” He put a hand between my shoulder blades to nudge me toward his office. “Terry, let’s have some coffee in here, or tea, if you’d rather?” he added to me.

  I murmured that coffee would be fine. Breen gestured toward a corner where a glass-topped table stood underneath a big painting of purple squares. Rothko’s name was on a discreet plaque for ignorant people like me. When I sat down, I saw an array of wires embedded in the table’s top.

  Breen smiled at my look of surprise. “The team made this for my father on the fortieth anniversary of the Breen Machine. We all knew, including him, he wouldn’t live for the fiftieth.”

  “The Breen Machine?” I said politely.

  “Yes, yes, the machine that made Apple and the Cloud and all the rest of it possible. My dad wanted to call it the BREENIAC, sort of flipping a finger at Johnny von Neumann and the MANIAC at Princeton, but his lawyers persuaded him it wasn’t worth a court fight. I was sixteen at the time it came onstream; Edward took me out of school so I could be there. Everything at Metargon grew out of that afternoon.”

  The young man who’d escorted me to Terry Utas came in through a side door with a tray. The coffee surprised me: it was creamy and rich. Breen nodded approval at my enjoyment.

  “Yes, yes, I see you have a good palate. Adam, tell Terry we’ll need about twenty minutes without interruptions.”

  He waited until the door had shut again before adding, “Now, let’s hope you have an equally good investigator’s palate. Tell me what you know about Martin Binder.”

  I rolled Breen’s words and the sideways glance from under his thick-knit brows around on my investigator’s taste buds. I saw no reason to lie, especially since I knew so very little. I repeated my shopworn tale of Martin’s mother’s flight, the visit to his grandmother, the fact that he was a loner and that no one had heard from him.

  “Ms. Utas told me you learned about his disappearance from your daughter,” I added. “Not from Jari Liu.”

  “Yes, yes, I talked to Jari about that; he’s a brilliant engineer, but sometimes brilliant engineers can’t put two and two together. My daughter, Alison, was part of the college crew that worked at the lab this summer, so she got the e-mail Jari sent out after he saw you on Tuesday. She called me this morning, very concerned, as well she should have been.”

  He paused, shaking his head, his daughter’s behavior still troubling him. “Jari said he showed you a demo of the system that young Binder was working on, right? We don’t let anyone take code out of the building. We also monitor outgoing messages to intercept anything they might be uploading from our systems, but Binder is an odd young man, a kind of idiot savant in some ways. He could have memorized, oh, not a million lines of code, but the broad outlines of the system. It’s far better than anything else being done in that arena, even at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. It would be worth a lot to any number of competitors, in and out of the defense industry.”

  “I assume you do a background check on anyone you let into your lab,” I said.

  “Of course, but we overlooked some things about Binder.”

  “Like what?” I drank some more coffee; tone casual, puzzled, a mistake always to betray eagerness.

  “We knew he lived with his grandparents but we didn’t realize his mother was an addict. We also didn’t realize he’d wanted to go to college but his family vetoed it: we thought he was one of the computer cowboys. You often find them in this business—they’re self-taught, uninterested in formal education. According to Liu, Martin had a chip on his shoulder with the kids from the Ivies who worked on the Fitora project with him. If he sold our system, he could afford to spend the rest of his life taking classes at Caltech or MIT. The thing that alarms me is that he’s gone dark.”

  I shook my head.

  “Binder unplugged himself from the Net and from cellular systems.” Breen’s tone was impatient: my palate was proving mediocre. “He canceled all his ISP connections, he isn’t sending or receiving e-mail or texts, at least not under any address that Jari’s team can find, and they are skilled hunters. That’s what’s making me fear he could be re-creating my system for another company, or even another government.”

  So Jari Liu hadn’t been spinning me around by giving me the wrong details for Martin, as I’d feared.

  “I’ve never met Martin, so I can’t give you an opinion,” I said. “Everyone I’ve met agrees he’s both brilliant and a bit awkward socially, but that doesn’t tell me whether he’s poised to become another Unabomber, or another Feynman.”

  Breen made a sour face. “Sunny—Alison—thinks he’ll be a second Feynman. Jari says he’d be astonished if Binder was selling our secrets, but frankly, after almost fifty years in this business, I’ve seen even the most socially balanced people sell out their companies if the stack of cash in front of them is high enough. What bothers me as much as anything is that Alison let him into our home.”

  “They weren’t dating, were they?” That surprised me—I pictured Breen’s daughter as too sleek and sophisticated to be attracted to an awkward nerd. I remembered Nadja Hahne’s description of Martin—those brooding good looks, his aloofness—perhaps a sleek and sophisticated young woman would see that as a challenge.

  Breen paused. “Alison seems to have some romantic ideas about Binder, as if he might be a Horatio Alger hero. While my wife and I were at our place in Bar Harbor, Alison held a picnic for all the fellows in the summer program. She included Martin, even though he wasn’t one of the college crew, because he was their age, worked on the same project. And she felt she could do something for him.”

  He made a face that was part sour, part proud. “I love my girl, but she’s always been the kind that brings stray kittens home with her. Anyway, she let the kids explore my dad’s workshop. Edward used to do a lot of his drawings or build his prototypes in his third-floor workroom; he liked the view of Lake Michigan. Sunny let Martin and the others wander around in there. No telling what he might have made off with.”

  The first sour taste on my palate. “I would imagine all your father’s inventions would be here, in the Metargon labs, not lying around the house for your daughter’s stray friends to pick up.” I poured more coffee and leaned back in the chair to look at him over the cup rim.

  “Yes, yes,” Breen said. “You’re right, up to a point.”

  He fidgeted with his own cup, then said, “My father was involved in some top-secret work after the war. Defense work, you understand. He was proud of his signed letters from presidents and Nobel Prize winners. He also had things on his desk that ought to be in a vault.

  “I never got around t
o putting them away after he died; frankly, I never thought about them; they were just part of the background of my life. It was only when Alison told me she’d let the kids explore the workroom that I remembered the letters. Metargon’s code, coupled with any of those letters—well, just say that my father played a part in thermonuclear weapons development, and you’ll see that it would be better that we didn’t let outsiders read some of those letters.”

  “Without seeing them, I can’t judge, but surely all that history is in the public domain by now,” I said.

  “Not all of it,” Breen said sharply. “That’s my point.”

  I didn’t believe him: there was something in his father’s workshop that he was ashamed of an outsider seeing, but I didn’t have any hunch of how to probe for it. I changed the subject.

  “Your father knew Benjamin Dzornen, didn’t he?”

  “How did you know that?” Breen sat up straight, his voice still sharp.

  I widened my eyes, naive detective. “You said he liked to display his signed letters from Nobel laureates. Dzornen worked on the Manhattan Project; your father did defense work. It’s not a stretch.”

  Breen relaxed again. I obviously hadn’t found the danger spot.

  Something didn’t add up, Martin had said. Had he seen a letter in Edward Breen’s old workshop that told him something about his family history? Or that suggested my own theory about the stolen Nobel Prize?

  Breen and I spoke, or fenced, a little longer; we were both feeling rumpled when I got up to leave.

  “Martin left his home to talk to someone the morning he disappeared. Was that your daughter?”

  “Unlikely,” Breen said. “She flew out to Mexico City right after the summer fellows left. She’s been there almost six weeks now.”

  “Mexico City?” I echoed. “What, is she doing a junior year abroad?”

  “It’s a gap year, or semester,” Breen said sourly. “She’s helping build a tech lab for some high schools in Mexico City. Metargon is supplying computers and Metar-Genie game boxes. It’s all well and good to want ‘to give back to the community,’ but not when you’re an heiress who’s connected to a firm like Metargon. You don’t go to kidnap central. Her mother and I couldn’t talk her out of it, though.”

  “Any chance Martin is down there with her?” I asked.

  That did startle Cordell. He started to rap out a denial, but then he sat back, fingers steepled together.

  “Someone is supposed to be keeping an eye on her for me, but I suppose Alison could have worked her way around that; she has a trust fund. I’m going to get the FBI to start hunting Martin. If he is in Mexico with my girl, they’ll sort that out pretty fast. In the meantime, if you get any whiff of where he is, I want to know at once.”

  “Are you proposing to hire me, Mr. Breen?” I asked. “If you become my client, I’ll certainly report my findings to you—as long as working for you doesn’t conflict with my existing client.”

  He paused again, then gave a smile that must have opened a lot of cookie jars for him. “Yes, yes, I see your point. I doubt a solo operator who doesn’t have great computer skills can track down a computer-savvy guy like Martin, but if you do, I would be prepared to offer a, well, call it a reward. A reward for knowing where he is.”

  “I’ll think about it.” I got up. “As I said, I can tell you nothing without my client’s permission, but with that proviso, I’ll let you know when I’ve located Martin. Assuming the Feds don’t shoot him, or anything drastic like that.”

  Breen thought that was amusing enough to tell me I had a good investigative palate, after all, but we both knew he thought I had as much chance of finding Martin as I did of explaining relativistic models of matrix theory to a kennel of Chihuahuas.

  17

  V.I. CAN’T TURN TRICKS

  I PASSED A FOREST preserve on my way to the expressway and pulled into it. The trees were starting to turn; despite the continued warm days, summer was over. Ahead lay Chicago’s winter roulette: last year’s mild one or the previous year’s endless snow and bitter cold?

  Sitting in my car, watching the squirrels and birds without really seeing them, I tried to parse my conversation with Cordell Breen.

  Martin Binder had gone dark. Breen thought that was to keep anyone from finding where he’d absconded with Metargon’s precious code. Call that possibility A. I started to type it into my iPad, then thought of Breen’s boast about Metargon’s hacking skills. If Breen believed I knew where Martin was, he’d sic Liu on my computer.

  I pulled a pen and a legal pad from my briefcase—change is good, but old-fashioned ways still have merit. Possibility A: Martin Binder was in Shanghai or Tehran, or even Tel Aviv, reconstructing a million or two lines of the code that allowed Princess Fitora to fight off five attackers.

  Liu had touted the system as a breakthrough for people with stroke or spinal cord damage. Breen had suggested the project had defense applications. I tried to imagine what those might be.

  My mother had hated guns and weapons of all kinds. My father’s service weapon had to be locked each night in a high cupboard, away from my cousin Boom-Boom’s enterprising fingers. No toy weapons could be used in our yard or house, but Boom-Boom would grab a doughnut and fit it in his hand like a gun. Humans can turn anything into weapons.

  If Metargon was a world leader in computer design and applications, they could easily design a cyberwar virus; perhaps that was what really lay behind blinking at Princess Fitora’s sword-arm.

  Which led me to possibility B: far from trying to sell Metargon’s code to the Chinese, Martin had realized he was actually helping design a cyberwar system, some kind of advanced Stuxnet worm. He had vanished until he could come up with a WikiLeaks style of publicizing what the company was doing.

  Martin was at that age, the cusp of adulthood, where idealism runs strong. Someone like him, who didn’t have friends to give him ballast, might go in any direction—join a jihad or the Peace Corps, or drop out of sight in a monastery.

  I’d been alone in the parking area, sitting so still that rabbits were hopping close to my car. I know they destroy gardens, but their soft brown fur and dark liquid eyes make them seem innocent, helpless.

  “What do you think?” I asked through my window. “Unabomber or ultra-idealist?”

  They didn’t stop nibbling. I was overlooking something obvious, they seemed to be telling me.

  A third possibility lay in whatever Martin had seen in old Edward Breen’s workshop. It had to do with Benjamin Dzornen, because that was what had made Cordell Breen tense up. But if it was something shameful, Edward wouldn’t have put it up on the wall. Or he had pulled a fast one on Dzornen; Dzornen had written in protest and Edward framed the letter to remind himself that even if he didn’t have that beautiful gold medallion, he was smarter than a Nobel laureate.

  If I could find Alison, would she tell me whether something in the workshop had upset Martin? There were only twenty million or so people in Mexico City; it shouldn’t be too hard to locate her.

  I drummed my fingers on my steering wheel. I needed to know whom Martin had gone to see right before he vanished. It couldn’t have been Cordell because Cordell was in Bar Harbor. It might have been Jari Liu; Liu could have put on a good show of feigned astonishment or worry when I saw him at the lab three days ago.

  I was certain Martin had tried to contact Julius and Herta Dzornen, but I had no way of knowing if it was before or after he’d been to the Breen mansion. He could have been wanting them to admit their father was also his great-grandfather, and that they needed to fork over Dzornen’s prize money. The King of Sweden gives you a million or so dollars; if Dzornen had invested it wisely there should have been a substantial inheritance. Not, of course, judging by Julius Dzornen’s coach house.

  I drew some rabbit ears and whiskers on my legal pad. Lotty thought Dzornen must have paid whatever f
ees and bribes it took to get Kitty Binder out of Vienna in 1939. That meant he acknowledged her paternity and his children knew it. But so what? They wouldn’t have done away with Martin. Unless Martin had proof that the prize was bogus. I was going around in circles.

  Whatever awful secret Martin saw in Edward Breen’s old workshop couldn’t have been a blatant statement from Dzornen that he’d faked his research. That was a big “if,” anyway. It also couldn’t have been a photo of Dzornen’s wife shooting Kitty, since Kitty was still alive. Or she’d shot and only hit an arm or a leg. Basta, Vic! I admonished myself. No wild fancies here!

  Edward Breen worked with all those Nazi rocket scientists after the war. Pre-war physics was a small world; even Nazi physicists would have known Dzornen; that photo from the Radium Institute in Vienna showed him and Martina, with Norwegian and German scientists. Those Nazi rocketeers Edward Breen helped bring into the States, they would have known Martina, too. I could imagine the gossip. Oh, Dzornen, he saved his skin but he sacrificed his student. Yes, she died doing slave labor for our rocket program. And then Breen rubbing Dzornen’s face in it.

  I tried to picture young Martin seeing a letter about his great-grandmother. Is that what hadn’t added up for him? Nothing to do with his work at Metargon, only the nagging questions about his family?

  In that case, maybe he’d trundled downstate to the meth house where his mother was pretending to be in rehab. Look, Mom, we could blackmail the Dzornen family, after all. Not over Dzornen’s research, but over their paternity. Her drug pals liked the idea of easy money; they started blackmailing Herta Dzornen, and she sicced some thugs on them.

  I flung my pen onto the seat in disgust. Speculation, speculation, with no knowledge of anything, including Martin Binder’s character.

  The rabbits fled into the underbrush, but not because of me. A gray-haired woman had roared into the area, driving my dream car, a red Jaguar XJ12. She let a pale-gold retriever out of the back; the two of them headed for a creek that runs through the woods. That’s what I should be doing, making enough money to spend my days driving my dogs around in Jaguars, not second-guessing someone who understood relativistic principles.