Spates’s spine tingled.
“One of my flock has a brother in the Tribal Police. The latest rumor is that it was actually a suicide. All hush-hush.”
“The dead scientist’s name?”
“Don’t know.”
“You’re sure it was one of the scientists, Russ, and not somebody else?”
“Believe me, if it had been a Navajo, I’d know. This is a very tight-knit community.”
“Have you run into any of the scientists on the team?”
“No. They pretty much keep to themselves.”
“Is there a way you can make contact?”
“Well, sure. I suppose I could drop by, introduce myself as the local pastor. Real friendly-like.”
“Russ, that is an excellent idea! I’m interested in finding out more about the fellow who runs Isabella, guy named Hazelius. You heard about him?”
“The name’s familiar.”
“He declared himself the smartest man on earth. Said everyone was beneath him, called us all a race of morons. Remember that?”
“I think I do.”
“That’s quite a thing to say, isn’t it? Especially coming from a man who doesn’t believe in God.”
“It doesn’t surprise me, Reverend. We live in a world that worships evil.”
“That we do, son. Now: Can I count on you?”
“Yes, sir, Reverend, you bet you can.”
“Here’s something important: I need this information in two days, so I can use it on Friday’s Roundtable America. You ever listen to my show?”
“Since you’ve Webcast it, I never miss it.”
“This Friday, I’ve got a physicist on the show, someone with a Christian perspective, to talk more about the Isabella project. I’ve just got to have more information—not the usual PR stuff. I’m talking dirt. Like this death—what happened? Talk to that Navajo cop you mentioned. You understand, Russ?”
“Absolutely, yes, you got it, Reverend.”
Spates replaced the phone in its cradle and gazed pensively out the window. Everything was falling into place. The power of God knew no bounds.
20
ON HIS RETURN FROM BREAKFAST, FORD was about to enter his casita when Wardlaw stepped from the side of the house and blocked his entry.
Ford had been expecting something like this.
“Mind if we chat?” Wardlaw said, his voice sham-friendly. He worked a piece of gum with his jaw, the muscles above his ears bulging rhythmically.
Ford waited. This wasn’t the moment for a showdown, but if Wardlaw wanted it, he would get it.
“I don’t know what your game is, Ford, or who you really are. I’m assuming you’re operating in some kind of semiofficial capacity. I sensed it from the day you arrived.”
Ford waited.
Wardlaw stepped so close, Ford could smell his aftershave. “My job is to protect Isabella—even from you. I’m guessing you’re here undercover because some bureaucrat back in Washington needs to cover his ass. That doesn’t offer you much in the way of protection, does it?”
Ford remained silent. Let the man vent.
“I’m not going to mention your little escapade last night to anyone. Course, you’ll report it to your handlers. If it gets brought up, you know what my defense will be. You were an intruder and my rules of engagement are shoot to kill. Oh, and if you think the broken windowpane and screen are going to get Greer in a lather, they’ve been fixed. None of this goes beyond the two of us.”
Ford was impressed. Wardlaw had actually thought things through. He was glad that the SIO was no fool. He had always found it easier to go up against an intelligent adversary. Stupid people were unpredictable. He said, “Are you finished with your little speech?”
The carotid artery pounded in Wardlaw’s thick neck. “Watch your back, cop.” He stepped aside, just barely, to allow Ford to pass.
Ford took a step forward and then paused. He was so close to Wardlaw, he could have kneed the SIO in the groin. He looked at the man, inches from his face, and said pleasantly, “You know what’s funny? I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
The shadow of a doubt flickered across Wardlaw’s face as Ford moved on.
He went in the house and slammed the door. So Wardlaw wasn’t absolutely certain that Ford had been the man he’d chased. That uncertainty would slow him down, make him cautious. Ford’s cover had been compromised, but it wasn’t blown.
When he was sure Wardlaw had left, he threw himself on the sofa, annoyed and frustrated. He’d been on the mesa almost four days, but he knew scarcely more than he had back in Lockwood’s office.
He wondered why he had ever thought this would be an easy assignment.
The time had come for him to take the next step, the step he had hoped to avoid ever since Lockwood showed him Kate’s dossier.
AN HOUR LATER, FORD FOUND KATE in the stables feeding and watering the horses. He stood in the doorway, following her with his eyes as she filled buckets with oats, broke open a bale of alfalfa, and tossed a flake or two into each stall. He watched the way she moved, her body slender and supple, performing the banal tasks with sureness and grace, despite her obvious exhaustion. It felt like twelve years ago, watching her sleep under that table.
Rock music, turned down low, filtered from inside the barn.
She tossed the last flake and then turned, seeing him for the first time.
“Going for another ride?” she asked, her voice subdued.
He stepped into the cool shade. “How are you, Kate?”
She put her gloved hands on her hips. “Not so good.”
“I’m very sorry about Peter.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I give you a hand?”
“All done.”
The music played on softly in the background. He recognized it now.
“Blondie?”
“I often play music while working with the horses. They like it.”
“Do you remember—?” he began.
She cut him off. “Yes.”
They faced each other silently. At MIT, she used to start the day at the LEES lab, the electronics lab, by blasting “Atomic” out across Killian Court. When he got there, she was usually dancing around the room, earphones on and coffee mug in hand, making a spectacle of herself. She had enjoyed spectacles—like the time she’d poured a pint of gasoline into Murphy Memorial Fountain and lit it on fire. He felt a sudden pang at the memories, the time gone. How full of naïve hopefulness she had been, how sure that life was always going to be a laff-riot. Life eventually clobbered everyone—her especially.
He shook off the memories and focused on the mission. With Kate, the most direct way was always the best. She hated people who beat around the bush. Ford swallowed. Would he ever forgive himself for what he was about to do?
Point-blank he asked the question: “Okay, what are you all hiding?”
She looked at him steadily. No feigned surprise, no protest, no pretense of ignorance.
“None of your business.”
“It is my business. I’m part of the team.”
“Then ask Gregory.”
“I know you’ll be straight with me. Hazelius—I don’t know what to make of him.”
Her face softened. “Trust me, Wyman, you don’t want to know.”
“I do want to know. I need to know. It’s my job. This isn’t like you, Kate, keeping secrets.”
“What makes you think we’re keeping secrets?”
“Ever since I arrived, I’ve had the feeling you’re hiding something. Volkonsky alluded to it. So did you. Something’s seriously wrong with Isabella, isn’t it?”
Kate shook her head. “God, Wyman, you never change—always that damnable curiosity.” She looked down at her shirt, plucked a piece of straw from her shoulder, frowned.
Another long silence. Then she focused her intelligent brown eyes on him and he saw she had reached a decision. “Yes. Something’s wrong with Isabella. But it’s no
t what you might think. It’s uninteresting. Stupid. It has nothing to do with you or your work here. I don’t want you to know because . . . well, it could get you into trouble.”
Ford said nothing. He waited.
Kate issued a short, bitter laugh. “All right. You asked for it. But don’t expect some big revelation.”
He felt a hideous flush of guilt. He shoved the emotion down—he would deal with it later.
“You’ll understand, when you hear this, why we’ve been keeping it secret.” She looked at him steadily. “Isabella’s been sabotaged. A hacker is making fools of us.”
“How so?”
“Someone planted malware in the supercomputer. It seems to be a kind of logic bomb that goes off just as Isabella is about to reach one hundred percent power. First it produces a bizarre image on the Visualizer; then it shuts down the supercomputer and posts a stupid message. It’s incredibly frustrating—and extremely dangerous. At that high energy level, if the beams kink or get thrown off track, we could all be blown up. Even worse, a sudden energy fluctuation could create dangerous particles or miniature black holes. It’s the Mona Lisa of hacks, a real masterpiece, the work of an incredibly sophisticated programmer. We can’t find it.”
“What’s the message?”
“You know, GREETINGS or HELLO or ANYBODY THERE?”
“Like the old AI programming saw, HELLO, WORLD.”
“Exactly. An inside joke.”
“And then what?”
“That’s it.”
“It doesn’t say more?”
“There’s no time for it to say more. With the computer crashed, we’re forced to initiate an emergency shutdown of the system.”
“You haven’t engaged it in conversation? Gotten it talking?”
“Are you kidding? With a forty-billion-dollar machine about to blow up? Anyway, it wouldn’t help—it would only spew out more crap. And with the supercomputer crashed, running Isabella is like driving at night on a wet road at a hundred miles an hour with the headlights off. We’d be crazy to sit around chatting with it.”
“And the image?”
“Very strange. It’s hard to describe—really spectacular, all deep and shimmery like a ghost. Whoever did this was an artist in his own way.”
“You can’t find the malware?”
“No. It’s devilishly clever. It appears to be moving itself around the system, erasing its tracks as it goes, evading detection.”
“Why not tell Washington and get a specialized team out here to fix it?”
She was silent for a moment. “It’s too late for that. If it came out that we were flummoxed by a hacker, there’d be a furious scandal. The Isabella project just barely scraped by the Congress . . . . It would be the end.”
“Why didn’t you report it right away? Why are you hiding it?”
“We were going to!” She brushed back her hair. “But then we decided it would be better to delete the malware before we reported it, so we could say we’d already taken care of the problem. A day went by, then another and another, and we couldn’t find the malware. A week passed, ten days—and then it dawned on us we’d waited too long. If we reported it, we’d be accused of a cover-up.”
“That was a blunder.”
“I’ll say. I don’t quite know how it happened . . . . We were just crazy with stress, and it takes a minimum of forty-eight hours to complete a single run cycle . . . .” She shook her head.
“Any idea who’s behind it?”
“Gregory thinks it may be a sophisticated group of hackers who planned a deliberate act of criminal sabotage. But there’s always the unspoken fear . . . that the hacker might be one of us.” She paused, breathing hard. “You see the position we’re in, Wyman.”
A horse nickered softly in the shadows.
“This must be why Hazelius seems to think Volkonsky’s death was a suicide,” Ford said.
“Of course it was a suicide. As the software engineer, the humiliation of being the victim of a hacker fell on him like a ton of bricks. Poor Peter. He was so fragile, an emotional twelve-year-old, just a hyperactive, insecure kid in T-shirts that were too big for him.” She shook her head. “He couldn’t take the pressure. The guy never slept. He was in there with the computer day and night. But he couldn’t find the slag code. It tore him to pieces. He started drinking and I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into harder stuff.”
“What about Innes? Isn’t he supposed to be the team psychologist?”
“Innes.” Her brow furrowed. “He means well, but he’s hopelessly out-gunned intellectually. I mean, these once-a-week ‘rap’ sessions, this let’s-talk-it-all-out crap, it might wash with normal people, but not with us. It’s so easy to see through his tricks, his leading questions, his little strategies. Peter detested him.” She brushed away a tear with the back of her gloved hand. “We were all very fond of Peter.”
“All except Wardlaw,” said Ford. “And Corcoran.”
“Wardlaw . . . Well, he doesn’t really like any of us, except Hazelius. But you have to realize, he’s under even more pressure. He’s the team’s intelligence officer, the guy who’s supposed to be in charge of security. If this came out, he’d go to prison.”
No wonder he’s a little high-strung.
“As for Melissa, she’s had dustups with quite a few of the team members. It wasn’t just Volkonsky. I’d . . . be careful of her.”
Ford thought of the note, but said nothing.
She pulled off her gloves and tossed them in a basket hung on the wall. “Satisfied?” she asked, an edge in her voice.
As Ford walked back to his casita, he repeated the question to himself. Satisfied?
21
PASTOR RUSS EDDY HAD GOTTEN INTO his old Ford pickup and was staring at the gas gauge, caculating if he had the gas to get up the mesa and back, when he saw the telltale corkscrew of dust on the horizon that indicated an approaching vehicle. He got out of the truck and leaned against it, waiting.
A few moments later a Navajo Tribal Police car eased to a stop in front of the trailer, the plume of dust spiraling away in the wind. The door opened and a dusty cowboy boot appeared. A tall man unfolded himself from the inside and straightened up.
“Morning, Pastor,” he said, touching his hat.
“Morning, Lieutenant Bia,” said Eddy, trying to keep his voice easy and loose.
“Going somewhere?”
“Oh, no, just checking the gas level in the truck,” said Eddy. “Actually, I was thinking of driving up to the mesa, introducing myself to the scientists up there. I’m concerned about what’s going on up there.”
Bia gazed around, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting the endless horizon in every direction he looked. “Haven’t seen Lorenzo around lately, have you?”
“No,” said Eddy. “Haven’t seen him since Monday morning.”
Bia hitched up his pants, his dangling accoutrements clinking like a giant charm bracelet. “Funny thing is, he hitched a ride to Blue Gap around four o’clock Monday, told the folks there he was heading out this way to finish up his work. They saw him walking down the mission road—and then he seems to have disappeared.”
Eddy let a beat pass. “Well, I never saw him. I mean, I saw him in the morning, but he left around noon or maybe before and I haven’t seen him here since. He was supposed to be working for me, but . . .”
“Hot out here today, eh?” Bia turned and grinned at Eddy, and glanced toward the trailer.
“Can I talk you into a cup of coffee?” Bia asked.
“Of course.”
Bia followed Eddy into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Eddy filled the percolator pot with fresh water and turned on the burner. Navajos habitually reused their grounds, and Eddy figured Bia wouldn’t mind.
Bia laid his hat on the table. His hair was plastered down in a wet ring. “Well, I’m actually not here about Lorenzo. I personally think he took off again. The folks at Blue Gap said he was pretty drunk when he came through on Monday.�
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Eddy nodded. “I noticed he’d started hitting the juice.”
Bia shook his head. “Too bad. That kid had just about everything going for him. If he don’t show up soon, they’ll revoke his parole and he’ll go back to Alameda.”
Eddy nodded again. “A shame.”
The coffee began to perk. Eddy took the opportunity to busy himself getting out the mugs, sugar, and Cremora, placing them on the table. He poured out two cups and sat down again.
“Actually,” said Bia, “I’m here about something else. I was talking to the trader in Blue Gap yesterday, and he told me about the . . . problem you’d had with the collection money.”
“Right.” Eddy took a swallow of coffee, burned his mouth.
“He told me how you marked up some money and asked him to keep an eye out for it.”
Eddy waited.
“Well, yesterday a bunch of those bills showed up.”
“I see.” Eddy swallowed. Yesterday?
“It’s kind of an awkward situation,” said Bia, “which is why the trader talked to me about it, instead of calling you. I hope you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you. I don’t want to make a big deal about it.”
“Sure thing.”
“You know old lady Benally? Elizabeth Benally?”
“Of course, she attends my church.”
“She used to graze her sheep up on the mesa every summer, had an old hogan up there near Piute Spring. It wasn’t her land, she didn’t have any right to it, but she’d been using it most of her life. When the tribal government took over the mesa for that Isabella project, she lost that grazing land and had to sell her sheep.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It wasn’t so bad for her. She’s in her seventies, and they got her into a nice HUD house down in Blue Gap. Problem is, with a house like that, you suddenly have electric bills, water bills—you know what I mean? She’s never had to pay a bill in her life. And now her income’s down to just her government stipend because she doesn’t have any more sheep.”
Eddy said he understood.
“Well, this week her granddaughter’s having her tenth birthday and yesterday old lady Benally bought her a Gameboy at the Trading Post as a present, had it gift-wrapped and everything.” He paused, looking steadily at Eddy. “She paid for it with your marked bills.”
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