by Randy Moffat
He started to peel another finger and just waggled the whole hand instead.
“Oh never mind! Look at security for the cave. Make us as low profile as possible . . . . It will not work of course, it never does. Village gossip at the local Masonic lodge will have us pegged inside that cave in less than a week, so plan a cover story that we can float to the local fourth estate. Some kind of business that is doing something super harmless like testing teething rings or manufacturing sex toys—employ locals for outside work only . . . security . . . buildings and grounds . . . etcetera. You decide . . . . by the way . . . whatever you do, keep Craig on the payroll, that guy is a walking database on the cave . . . and think about putting him charge of security if he is up to it . . . he’s actually pretty sharp for a hillbilly. You know the drills . . .
Wong nodded, shaking fingers now cramped from tapping blackberry keys furiously.
Bear drove on remorselessly.
“. . . benches, chairs, pencils, lots of places to plug in coffee pots, oh . . . and improve the lighting so it mimics outside daylight . . . try some of those sunlight lamps and bulbs that recreate sunlight.
Bear shrugged.
“There will be more, but those are a good start. I will meet with you and O’Hara at Redstone in three days—give me the details on what’s what then . . . .”
Wong looked surprised.
“You aren’t coming with me? I thought you had tickets on the same flight?”
Bear shook his head.
“No. I changed mine to a later hop to Chi town. I am headed for the University of Chicago to meet with a grad student there who wrote an interesting paper on quantum point particles.”
“A grad student!” Wong exclaimed, he could not have been as surprised if Bear had said ‘a massage therapist.’
Bear nodded.
“I am thinking outside the box . . . Einstein did some major work as a grad student.”
Wong looked thoughtful and then grunted—an eerie imitation of Craig. For a moment Bear envisioned him as a doddering old man . . . with a club in his hand shuffling though Anglewood looking for a woman to knock on the head and drag back into the dim recesses. Java Erectus Anglewoodia—Java man resurgent.
Bear had a feeling of falling into a past life as he walked across the campus of the U of Chicago. Colleges are always the same no matter how different. The grounds smelled indefinably of age, great thoughts and way too much concrete. The Coeds didn’t look aged though. Most of them didn’t look like they’d ever had a great thought either. And no wonder, the young men whose attentions they were unconsciously competing for seemed utterly insipid. The boys sported loads of tacky jewelry, drooping eyelids and heaps of empty beer bottles wherever they sat or sprawled. This was the school where the first atomic pile had been built in a racket ball court under the stands at Stagg stadium and had provided the bulk of the staff for the Manhattan project—he had hoped to find similar talent here now but was not encouraged by the sight of the student body lolling in the quadrangle imitating Night of the Living Dead.
He found the physics department which gave him a slightly different sense of history when he asked for a student named Antonin Petrovski. The secretary for the department was just as snotty as all the ones he had ever met in the past. She sent him packing with a bagful of ignorance and three cans of ice cold don’t-give-a-shit.
Bear wasn’t to be put off that easily though. His background check had shown that Petrovski’s father had been a first generation émigré who carried his two year old son out of the old USSR on his back to Finland just before the Soviet Republic devolved into Russia again. The father had worked as a mathematician at the former Soviet Science City in Siberia and came to the US and spent five years trying to rebuild credentials as an academician, first working as a janitor and finally settling for a government middle level position at Argonne national laboratories once their staff figured out that he really was a practical physicist from a college other than the University of the Barbados. It was at Argonne Antonin had grown up around the physics center—playing among engineers, technicians and the occasional Nobel laureate—a better education than any school could ever hope to provide. He had excelled in high school sciences and written a thesis in the first month of his second year of college that was absolutely brilliant and got him his baccalaureate degree after only one year. His second thesis on string theory was relatively routine and took another two years; good enough for a master’s but nowhere as brilliant as his freshman effort. Bear figured he must have discovered beer or something during that time which explained the hiccup in the quality of his output. He was a graduate doctoral student now, fully three and a half years into his time at the school and was back on track. He had just co-authored a paper six months before that showed that he was totally sober. It had appeared in Scientific American to some critical acclaim. The topic had been a method for establishing a second proof of the mass of the elusive Higgs bosons that further predicted their measuring out at around 189 Giga electron volts. The article was almost incomprehensible to Bear even after five readings, but it was pretty highly praised on the web and his co-author, with a remarkable degree of candor for an academic discussing his credentials, explained on the phone that his own contributions to the paper had been very slight and mostly editorial in nature. The work was essentially Petrovski’s.
Bear now exercised futility with vigor, trying to track Petrovski all over the campus. After two hours he located Antonin in the end by standing up on a chair and shouting to the crowd at the student union who he was looking for. A hefty girl with purple lipstick and nail polish the color of obsidian sidled over and gave him Antonin’s secret location with a conspirator’s wink. She followed the wink with a disturbing Goth come-hither look that made him feel naked and bent over a table. He had felt fewer chills down his spine in combat.
Ultimately she knew her stuff. He found Petrovski crouched in an old laboratory that sat in a sub basement and looked like it had been built and last cleaned thirty five years before; a place clearly not used anymore. He was sitting in the silence doodling mathematical symbols on a pad of legal paper and apparently thinking hard when Bear arrived a second behind the cloud of dust raised by thrusting the door open joyfully.
“Antonin Petrovski?” Bear asked knowing full well it was him from a picture in the FBI file.
For all his mental skills the young man had learned no facial control at all in his short time on the planet. Annoyance at interruption was painted plainly in four inch brush strokes all over it.
“Yeah—You a fucking cop?” Petrovski vocalized the annoyance that lay in the tense lines his body had erected on Bear’s entry. There was an air of dirty élan and cannabinoids clinging to his clothes. No scent of soap though. Thinkers are not necessarily washers.
Bear grinned—his own short hair was a kind of semaphore for ‘government drone’ to a certain number of people who did not realize how comfortable it was in the summer heat. He fell into his best Mickey Spillane imitation.
“Nah—‘m just a fucking contractor? How do I know you’re not the heat?”
Petrovski smiled at that, imagining a cop looking back at him in the mirror during the process of not shaving his scraggly chin in the morning. It broke the ice a bit. He liked his cops sassy apparently.
Petrovski wore his own poorly washed hair to his shoulders and had a lip piercing that made the gesture of smiling look more like a scary sneer. The twinkle of a tiny gem in his nose matched an answering pair in his ear. He had the kind of blotchy look to his skin that said that teenage pimples had just passed the day before and even then had fled the ragged field of his face reluctantly. In sunlight his clothes and fingerless gloves would have been taken for Goth, in the murk of the abandoned laboratory they simply looked appropriate to a Lon Chaney film—An unlikely Einstein, but Bear persisted.
Bear sat down on a
laboratory stool opposite him uninvited and stuck out his hand.
“Bear MacMoran.” He said simply.
Petrovski thought hard about it first and then shook it hesitantly with the limp, thoughtless handshake of the young who think nothing about the symbolism of a handclasp. Shaking hands was a chore to be gotten over rather than an initial human social interaction of any moment.
Formalities done, Bear leaned back.
“This is a real shit hole.” He said looking around. “Library quiet though . . . morgue quiet really! A place to focus?”
Petrovski squirmed and smiled shyly. Bear had hit the nail on the head with that shot.
“Yes.” He said softly confirming it. He was too shy or too well mannered to point out it wasn’t as quiet as it had been. A nanosecond later his eyes wandered off, obviously taking the mind behind them with it. His body language shifted mercurially through a hint of possible liking, then slipped like a loose clutch back into more interest in mathematical calculations whizzing through his brain. Within seconds his body was just on the edge of ‘park’ and shouting. ‘I want to work, please fuck off.’
Bear reached into his pocket before Petrovski’s body told his mouth what it was thinking and pulled out a copy of the article Petrovski had written and dropped it on the table between them.
“This is your work?” It was only half a question.
Petrovski angled his neck only slightly curious, to read the title, and nodded. No more talking apparently. It only encouraged Bear to hang around.
“Nice work! I liked some of your conclusions on notional particles and the link to inertia . . . how they congregate on accelerating matter . . . very clever.”
“What do you want?” The student asked again reluctantly. His question was mostly rhetorical. He was only communicating now to find a way to shut Bear up. Still, few people can resist flattery of their work and their instinct is somehow to fish for more.
Bear reeled in his guppy.
“I want to pay you a lot of money to take a year’s sabbatical while you work for me and the government on solving a problem.”
It was a test of a kind. He waited a moment to see which of the two statements goth boy bit on.
His respect for the younger man rose when he asked the correct question.
“What problem?”
Intellectual curiosity not money was his primary motivation then. It comforted Bear. He could have handled money as a requirement, but a kid’s intellect was much nicer to work with than his naked greed. It might actually help get Bear’s problem solved faster if he was married to the research.
“The basic issue is sending coherent information in a reliable way using quantum teleportation or spooky action at a distance.” He responded honestly. It was a national secret, but Petrovski hung out like an aged bottle of cabernet in a dusty cellar, who was he going to tell?
He let Petrovski absorb that for thirty seconds. He only needed 20.
“I have some ideas about that . . .” His Goth said with unfocused eyes.
Bear held up his hand.
“I imagine you do. I’ll give you 60,000 dollars a month to work for me for at least six months with an option for another year if we both like it or we need more time.”
Petrovski rubbed his eyes and cocked his head as if uncertain he had heard correctly. His eyes focused back on reality as if staring suddenly at mountains of dollar bills.
“60 . . . . A month? That’s a lot of money!” The younger man stated the obvious.
“You’re right. So I will ask you to work really really really hard for it.” Bear met his eyes evenly to establish credentials of sincerity with overtones of future taskmasterliness.
“Can I get an advance?” Asked the young man with admirable curiosity—at the end Bear could respect enlightened self interest too.
Bear smiled only slightly and pulled an envelope with 17,000 dollars in it—the exact amount Petrovski currently owed the bursar at the college plus a thousand extra for incidentals like some first-class celebratory weed. Bear said nothing but put it down lightly on the counter in front of the younger man. It should be enough of a business card to lure him in, but not enough to allow him to run off.
Petrovski opened the envelope, counted the money and grinned lewdly. It was doubtful he had ever had so much dough in one place in his whole life and it showed in a look of suddenly poster quality avarice. He did not really have to say he had just thrown his ante in the pot.
“I like quiet when I work.” He said matter-of-factly.
Bear looked around him at the basement space; dark, dusty and little used.
“Like this?”
“Yes.”
“Have I got the place for you!” Bear said and smiled, finding he rather liked the man forming around the mind beneath the callow and rude exterior.
Qing Li sat on the back porch of his upscale house in one of the nicer upper middle class satellite communities that orbited around the urban galactic hub of Boston. His fine flagstones lay not far from the statue of the embattled farmer and he smelled the scent of charcoal lighter fluid from another suburban palace across the neatly trimmed hedge while admiring his own reflection in the glass of his sliding patio doors. His face was photogenic when lit from below by the glow of his laptop. He looked in command. It fit him. For all practical purposes Li actually was in command of all Chinese covert intelligence in the entire eastern United States as far as the Mississippi river. His deep cover life in Boston was a good one that held only occasional compromises with personal safety and rare threats from his espionage activities. He had long ago farmed most of the danger out to subordinates. Then he winced at a follow-on thought.
His primary nightmare had for some time been something stupid being done by his nominal superior, a horrible old man called No Pants Po who had made only three good decisions to Li’s knowledge in his entire life. The first redeeming decision had been when he recruited Li during his malleable and susceptible youth at Peking Polytechnic, a time when he had been filled with revolutionary zeal for communism and universal brotherhood—especially universal brotherhood with certain Chinese women. Ironically, he had developed a reputation for revolutionary zeal primarily because he had wanted to get into the pants of a girl named Lucky Stone Lee. She had been passionately mad for Marx at the time and Li had wanted to make marks with her; he jumped into her political party and her bed in two little skipping hops. Lucky Stone the slut had bored easily though. She wandered off three months later with another flavor of socialist who Li could not now recall; though he remembered every inch of her body even after all these years. You never forget your first radical.
By the time the woman Lee left him, he was already at the party’s party. He stuck around on a sort of zealous autopilot. Communists really knew how to party. Po had met Li while he was trying to forget in the usual way. By that time he was ready for a change of scenery and certainly got it when Po slurred his query as to whether Li would like to be a member of Po’s flying squad of Chinese intelligence agents.
Seduced by the promise of action and a gallon of wine Li said yes instantly.
The second Po move that had merit had come shortly after that when Po had chosen to lump Li in with an amateur cadre of other wet-behind the-ears students and agents recruited to be sent to the United States in the early days of détente between the two countries with the aim of having him infiltrate the mysteries of Western Civilization. Of course, by that time Li had been well aware of General Po’s limitations having woken up in two different alleys and a bordello beside him during the previous four months. Li had given fate a hand in Po’s good decision that time. He had baldly manipulated the old man into the assignment. A few bottles of a bad knock off Whiskey and a timely reminder to sign paperwork just before he passed out had seen to it.
Though the assignment was made
by Li’s own cunning design it had been a good move for China overall. Li had served the motherland well during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The maneuver placed him in the forefront of Chinese industrial espionage at a time when China’s industry was little better than that of France in the age of Rousseau. After some initial success in breaking and entering to send technology home, Li proved himself too valuable to bring back to China because by that time Li had finished attending day school while working with a flashlight and a crowbar at night. By sweet luck he’d apprenticed in computer programming just as computers took off a rocket.
He burrowed in and remained buried in the chaotic civilian capitalist structure of the United States at a time it was inventing the technological revolution that shoved the planet kicking and screaming into the Computer Age. Ironically legitimate positions within big American companies had made perfect hides for hunting information and avoided all the risks of picking actual locks. Li instinctively layered on camouflage thicker than a ghillie suit. He went completely native adopting American ways, improving his idioms and accent until he passed for someone born in Chicago, talked intelligently about baseball over a water cooler and cultivated a taste for shorts and t-shirts on formal occasions. By ‘89 he’d sprinted up several steps of the corporate ladder in a cutting edge computer company on the ring road around Boston. By the early 90’s he found himself well established as the keystone in the eastern arch of Sino-computer technology theft and espionage.
About the time Li was reaching this milestone, General Po made his third and last excellent decision and showed up like a stray cat scratching at Po’s door after being banished from China.
Like most human decisions, what to do with Po fell under the umbrella of the three dimensional personality that was Li.
Pity was not on the list of the conflicting emotions he felt for the bedraggled Po shivering on his welcome mat. In fact, his very first instinct was to slam the door on Po’s foot and leave the old man to founder like a carp on the riparian embankment of the new world. This feeling met resistance from a combination of years of a spy’s lessons in suppressing first instincts and a deep seated genetic cultural gene for veneration of elders that made him hesitate for a crucial moment. Serious reflection kicked in then and he still wanted to get rid of the old man, but some other tingling instinct made him decide to hang on to the ancient. Li had sensed, as much as seen intellectually how he might use Po. His ultimate design grew after Li casually parked Po in an old safe-house in a little town in upstate Michigan where his drinking, repulsive manners and gun-toting had been transparent to many of the local eccentrics. Li had chosen the spot whimsically at the time because there was a liquor store across the street and he knew Po’s poorer habits of old.