Escapade

by Lisa Marie Rice

  You need a keeper.

  Bennett was the first to break eye contact. Elle could feel the rush of blood to her cheeks and cursed her fair skin. Her mortification must be clear to read on her face. Stop-light red was a hard color to ignore.

  It was lucky she’d never been so attracted to a man before. Not even close. The one time she’d felt this amount of blood rush to her head, it had been because a student pointed out a fallacy in a formula on the screen during a lesson.

  When Bennett turned his head away, it was like she’d been unplugged. A huge source of energy suddenly cut off.

  He rose, cleared the dishes, put them in the sink. Well, he’d made her feel unsettled. As payback, he should clear the table. Only fair.

  Speaking of which …

  “You owe me a problem,” she called out to his broad back, big hands handling the delicate porcelain plates with care.

  When he turned back to her, he had a half smile on his face. “I do.” The smile became complete. “It’s a doozy. Let’s see you think your way out of this one. It’s going to be fun to watch.”

  Bennett handed her the thorniest of thorny problems his company was dealing with. He’d hired fifteen new operatives — ten men, five women — for this single operation. All of them were assigned to round-the-clock surveillance. Another twenty were on SIGINT — signals intelligence. Which was a fancy way of saying they manned surveillance stations 24/7 monitoring cellphones, computers, landlines, security video footage.

  The two of them were sitting at the big desk that had been cleared and was now their workstation. It was so weird. This was day two of their collaboration and already Bennett felt comfortable. Elle sat with her hands in her lap, laptop open, fully turned to him, ready to hear what she called ‘the parameters’ of the problem.

  The parameters of the problem were that it was shitty.

  “This is a private company so there are no national security implications. I am going to consider you a temporary subcontractor of my company so there are no issues with giving you full access to intel.”

  She cocked her head. “A temporary subcontractor? How much will you pay me for my services?”

  He smiled. “Name your price.” His company’s contract was huge. They could afford more or less whatever she wanted.

  “Tickets to Les Mis.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. They are almost impossible to find, particularly in London. So I want two tickets to my favorite musical when this is over and I want you to accompany me.”

  Oh man. He’d never seen Les Mis. Fuck yeah. “Done. And dinner first.”

  “Okay.” She lifted her hands and placed them over her keyboard. His hands went to his own laptop next to hers and he transferred a big file. A really big file. While it was loading, he gave her an oral brief. “It’s a big tech company. Sydotek.”

  She whistled. “That is big.”

  Bennett nodded. “They are working on something that has huge implications, could revolutionize computing and could potentially be worth billions.”

  Elle nodded, intelligent face sober. “Probably something to do with the next step toward quantum computers.”

  Bingo.

  He stared. “How did you — never mind.” All he had to do was look at that bright face and those intelligent eyes to figure out how she’d figured it out. This was her domain. He felt hope stirring. Maybe she really would be able to help them.

  She sighed. “If that’s it, you didn’t overstate it. It would be revolutionary and worth billions. Someone is stealing the research.”

  This time he didn’t stare, but he did smile. “Four hundred years ago you would have been burned at the stake.”

  She didn’t smile back.

  He glanced at her monitor. His file had already loaded which meant her computer was amazingly powerful. He knew for a fact that the file took even the most powerful commercially-available computers at least a quarter of an hour to load. Hers just sipped it right up like a fine wine.

  “Ok. What you have in that file is an immense amount of data, including footage. I don’t know how you can get through it in less than a week but I’m giving it to you anyway. The head office discovered proprietary research popping up in a state lab in China. This lab is following Sydotek’s developments step by step. Someone is feeding them intel from the inside.”

  “That’s very bad,” she said. “How many people work in the Sydotek lab?”

  “It’s a big one, but only five people have access to all the research and would understand it. Four men and a woman. All PhDs, all super smart, all seemingly innocent, all going about their daily business normally, no one with unexplained sums of money in the bank. The company is terrified of accusing the wrong researcher. They are all rainmakers, all essential. The company doesn’t want to make a mistake. But on the other hand, as the research gets closer and closer to a working model, they also don’t want the work to appear in China first. It would be a huge blow.”

  “Understandable,” she murmured.

  Her index finger with the blue fingernail polish stroked the side of her laptop. Ordinarily Bennett hated that crap — black lipstick, dark fingernail polish. But on her it looked really good, highlighting the fine pale skin of her hands. He shook his head. How could he be thinking of fingernail polish right now? The Sydotek contract was worth well over five million dollars, they were nowhere near wrapping it up and here he was mooning over the paint on her fingernails.

  “So what is in that mega file?”

  “A ton of stuff,” Bennett said with a touch of exasperation in his voice. They’d spent countless man-hours collecting it and had fuckall to show for it. “I’ve got a lot of men and women combing through their work emails, following them, on round-the-clock surveillance, going through bank statements. One of our guys even went dumpster diving because he thought one of the researchers threw something suspicious away. It was cat litter and my guy stank of cat piss for days afterward. So you’ll have to sort things out for yourself. I don’t want to give you any guidance because, by definition, we have missed something. You might catch it if I don’t bias you.”

  “Okay.” She bent forward a little, studying what he’d sent. A lot of material organized as best he could. Her eyes scanned the screen like a metronome.

  “It’ll take you a while to familiarize yourself with the material, and how it’s structured,” he said uneasily. He’d thrown a massive knotty lump of data at her. It was really unfair. “Listen.” He shifted in his chair. “Maybe we should try another issue …”

  Elle flicked her fingers at him, never taking her eyes from the screen. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  Well, yes, yes he did. A lot of it actually. Admin stuff, mostly. New equipment to assess and order. Bonuses. Fielding job applications. There was a lot to catch up on. It was why he rarely accepted close protection assignments, because you dropped out of the world for the duration of the assignment and he had a big company to run.

  So he did what Elle did — he disappeared into his computer. Not quite as thoroughly as she did, though. Every once in a while he’d look up from his screen to glance at her. Just to reassure himself that aliens hadn’t abducted her while he dealt with the bids on a new corporate jet.

  But she wasn’t looking up to check up on him, nope. She was so immersed in what she was doing that she put him to shame. Damn it, he ran a billion-dollar business, he should be as focused as she was.

  Her focus was actually alarming.

  After a while, he realized that she wasn’t stopping for anything. He got up to put a cup of tea next to her elbow. He’d stocked up on a wide variety and prepared his favorite black tea for her, Lady Grey. She sipped absent-mindedly. At 4 pm he ordered scones and a fruit platter for both of them. She ate every bite without taking her eyes from the monitor. It was amazing.

  Bennett dug deep into work, printing off specs and comparing them. It would be his third corporate jet and he needed to balance an ability to fly
at least twenty people in comfort over long distances with fuel efficiency. He consulted with his chief pilots in chat function and was close to a decision when Elle made a sound.

  His head whipped up. It was the first sound she’d made in five hours. The sky outside had turned dark gray.

  She was sitting back, arching her spine to work the kinks out. “You okay?” he asked. “Listen, quit for the day. You can pick it up tomorrow, when you’ve rested. I don’t want —”

  “I got it,” she said, smiling at him.

  He stared at her. She was just so beautiful. He hadn’t looked at her in over two hours and he was struck anew by just how gorgeous she was. “Got what?” he asked stupidly.

  She looked at him oddly. “The culprit.” Elle shook her head. “Remember? The physicist who is selling intel?”

  “You got him?” Bennett’s eyes widened. His best minds had been at work for almost a month on this. “You sure?”

  She didn’t take offense. She was too smart for that. “I’m sure. And I got her, not him.”

  “The woman?” Bennett felt like he’d just woken up, was just catching up to her. He scooted his chair closer to hers. “Show me.”

  Elle pulled up something that looked weird. Graphics of some type. Twisted cubes with bright lines running through them, bottom to top. Five of them. They were beautiful in an abstract sort of way.

  Elle clicked a button and the image of the cubes sharpened until they looked like CGI. They were intriguing and even attractive, like a form of art. But they had no meaning for him.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Elle clicked another button and those handsome tantalizingly enigmatic cubes did a little dance. Originally, they had been in a row, the same size, taking up the width of Elle’s monitor. Suddenly, the first one expanded in size and the other four disappeared. Then they all were lined up again, and the second one loomed in the foreground while the other four disappeared. Then the third, the fourth and the fifth.

  Then the process started all over again.

  It was mesmerizing, almost beautiful.

  “Bennett?”

  It was almost impossible to pull his eyes away. “Huh?”

  She blew out a breath. “Pay attention. It’s important.”

  He was being chastised. That was okay. It was Elle chastising him. “Yes, ma’am.” He repeated his question. “What am I looking at here?”

  She tapped the screen with a fingernail. “You’re looking at a representation of Minkowski space. Minkowski space is where three dimensional Euclidean space is united with time into a four-dimensional manifold.”

  Bennett’s mouth opened and closed. He grunted.

  “In simpler terms, what we’re looking at is a graphic representation of the three dimensions of space together with the fourth dimension, time.”

  Bennett grunted again.

  Elle’s fingernail slowly rose from the bottom of the twisted cube to the top. Inside the cube was a brightly lit line. “This line is a series of dots. Each dot represents something important about the scientist’s life. The dots form a line which is the timeline. So from bottom to top is a representation of the scientist’s life, over a period of time. You’ll notice that the line becomes thicker at a certain point.”

  Bennett peered closely. “Yep.” That was safe to say. It did become thicker about a quarter of the way up.

  “The line is a condensation of data. Where it becomes thicker is where your company started observing and there’s more data. From before that point in time, I put together what data I could on the basis of the information you sent. After which, I did data analysis on your five candidates. I know your guys have already studied the scientists’ bank accounts and spending habits to see if they have extra money that is unaccounted for.”

  Bennett nodded. Yeah, his team of analysts had gone over the five physicists’ records with a fine-tooth comb. “They didn’t find much. Certainly nothing definitive.”

  She nodded back. “I knew your guys would be good, so I didn’t go over that ground. It would have been a waste of time. So I took a different tack, taking it as a given that if one of these five is selling info, their habits would change, even while being stealthy. It would be more an unconscious thing. I think anyone smart enough to work on a quantum computer is smart enough to cover their tracks. They won’t be suddenly buying real estate, at least not in the US, or buying mink coats or a Porsche or suddenly spending wildly. They would be too smart for that. But I also felt that whoever it is would be in a state of … excitement, for lack of a better word. He or she wouldn’t spend wildly, but money would have a different meaning for them. They are each probably pulling down at least 300k per year, but if someone is selling secrets, his or her income has suddenly gone up tenfold, at least. That changes the way they deal with daily life. Does this make sense so far?”

  Bennett put his hand on her shoulder. As always, he felt a little electric shock, like she was a source of energy. This beautiful woman practically hummed with it. “Yeah. Makes sense.”

  “So these Minkowski cubes represent the five scientists’ lives starting from six months before your starting point. I took as many elements as I could — use of utilities, time spent watching streaming TV channels, evenings out, books ordered and read, meal takeouts — and weighted them. Most people’s lives are like Brownian movement at a constant temperature. Lots of movement but in the aggregate nothing changes. So look at the five lives over time.”

  She tapped the keyboard and the cubes sliced themselves horizontally and curled up, giving a clearer view of the lines which he could now see become discrete points of light.

  Bennett looked at the cubes again, beginning to understand them. Each cube’s bright line forged a different path but somehow they were similar as they snaked their way up the cube from the bottom, sort of like five heartbeats of a hospital monitor only vertical instead of horizontal. There were changes for all of them but the patterns repeated over and over. Each pattern was slightly different, but each pattern for each person remained the same.

  “So their lives are fairly regular,” Elle said as they watched January turn into February and March. Then the spring and summer. “In summer everyone’s life sort of picks up.” Like watching a patient’s heart rate increase.

  “Here.” Elle’s voice was calm but Bennett sat up straight. In one of the cubes the line of light went haywire. He checked the timeline and it was when secrets began leaking. Leaning forward to check the monitor, he heard Elle say, “Don’t bother checking. It’s the woman, Dr. Haverson.”

  “Whoa.” Bennett leaned back. “We checked carefully. Her bank balance didn’t change. She didn’t make any major purchases.”

  “No. She has a PhD in particle physics and a masters in electrical engineering. She’s not a dummy. But her life changed enormously and the graph bears it out. Everything she did, she did more of. Speeded up. Joined a gym. Joined two gyms, actually, but rarely went to either one. Went to more movies, went out to dinner more often, made more phone calls, used more internet bandwidth. I peeked. She used it mainly to scout foreign real estate. So she didn’t spend money but she was a little … feverish because she knew she had a lot of it. And more was coming.”

  He pointed to wild zigzags, while the other scientists’ data remained fairly smooth. “What’s this?”

  “Well, that’s my point. Look, your scientists are top tier. They get paid generous salaries and they all drive late model luxury vehicles. Which have wireless tire pressure monitors. I hacked into them. Four drove the same amount of miles with a margin of about 10%. Her miles went up and up and up. I didn’t follow where she went. I think it just shows that her Brownian movement speeded up. Someone applied heat. A lot of it.”

  “Wow.” Bennett leaned forward and kissed her cheek, velvety and smelling of some kind of herb, something maybe you’d put in a tea cup. Or take a bath in. And maybe there was some fairy dust mingled in, because God knew the woman was magic. “Now that we kn
ow who it is, we can dig more.” Her mouth tightened and she looked away from him. “What?”

  “Well,” she said sheepishly, “since I was there, I did a little digging myself.”

  He smiled. Sure she had. “What did you find?”

  She pointed. “This.”

  Bennett stared at a screen full of hieroglyphs, numbers and letters, completely incomprehensible. Before he could say anything, the screen started moving, scrolling down. And sure enough, comprehensible words showed up.

  He leaned closer. An email exchange but nothing like email exchanges organized by Gmail or Outlook or any of the other email programs. This was just plaintext, like text messages on a phone.

  Maybe they were. “Are these email or text messages?”

  “Email. But we’re in the dark web and they aren’t organized.”

  Bennett didn’t navigate the dark web swamp very often. The dark web was mostly made up of overlay exchanges — unregulated, unseen, unknown. Bennett was usually okay with computers, though nothing like at Elle’s level. His things were weaponry and close protection and security issues. The dark web was mainly foreign terrain for him. He studied the screen carefully then sat back. “It’s messages between 123 and MF. Do we know who they are?”

  “It took some doing, but 123 is the Chief Officer of Cybersecurity of a People’s Liberation Army unit in Shenzhen. And MF is our scientist. I don’t know why she is characterized as MF.”

  “Wouldn’t be motherfucker, would it?” Bennett mused, giving her a sidelong glance. “Sorry.”

  She frowned. “No, it wouldn’t be that because she was the one who gave herself the handle, and she wouldn’t call herself motherfucker. But the identifiers are not the interesting part. What the two parties say is what’s interesting.”

  Bennett squinted and she enlarged the fonts. “Thanks.”

  Elle nodded and waited for him to read the texts, scrolling down.

  “Son of a bitch,” he breathed when he’d reached the bottom. He’d just read an offer to sell the building blocks of his client’s quantum computer to an agent of the Chinese military. MF understood quite well what she was doing, and who she was selling to. And the damage it would do to her company and, ultimately, her country.