“Give me your matches,” he said to the man standing next to him. He grabbed them roughly from the man’s hand and turned back to the gasoline-soaked underbrush. There were twenty matches in the pack and he went through them one by one. The flame on each one winked out as soon as it touched the underbrush.
Cursing under his breath, he rose to his feet. The thought of facing Señor Martinez with his failure terrified him. There had to be something more he could do. Suddenly it came to him. He remembered it from his army survival training.
José Lacerda walked back to his Jeep, picked up the clipboard sitting on the passenger side, and removed the long yellow pencil placed above the clip. For the first time he allowed himself to smile. Señor Martinez would definitely be impressed when he told him how he had solved the problem.
He cut two deep grooves in the wood of the pencil, one at either end, to expose the graphite center. Next, he gathered dry wood and twigs and tore a pad of paper into strips for kindling.
Returning to the Jeep, he lifted a set of jumper cables from the back. A few of his men had gathered around, watching what he was doing with great interest. He saw his son and hoped he would learn something from his father’s ingenuity.
He attached the positive and negative leads to the two deep grooves on the pencil and placed the pencil in the middle of the kindling. Taking the other set of leads, he connected them to the battery in the Jeep.
Less than a minute later he sighed with relief as the kindling burst into flame. Smoke rose up and the larger pieces of wood began to catch fire.
“Hurra! Hurra! Hurra!” the work crew shouted.
From out of nowhere a cloud of black flies appeared. They surrounded the fire and extinguished it in seconds. José watched in horror as they moved on to the Jeep. Two seconds later the car battery exploded with a flash and the Jeep burst into flames. More black flies gathered about it and the fire disappeared. A plume of oily smoke hung in the air above the engine block and a horrible stench of burnt rubber filled the air.
José Lacerda groaned in despair. Now he had three problems. He and his men had a five mile walk back to the estate, where he would then have to explain his failure to start a fire to Señor Martinez. And he would also have to explain how he had managed to destroy a Jeep.
As they began their silent trek, he searched for ways to spare his son whatever fate awaited the rest of them.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Even though he had never met the man, Jon had heard a lot about Doug Sanderson. Doug had started at HTPS Industries when the company was primarily involved with hardware. He was an engineer of the old school, a dapper little man with a reputation akin to Harry Sale’s. He had all the social aplomb of a stinging insect. Any mistake in exposition, reasoning, or logic in his presence would set off an avalanche of criticism. People, including Benton Reeves, feared and avoided him. It was an old joke in the annals of the company: if you had your choice of seeing Harry or Doug, who would you prefer? The answer was, “What’s the difference? Would you rather get eaten alive by an alligator or a crocodile?” It was not surprising that Harry and Doug became the best of friends.
The casual observer would never imagine that these two even liked each other. They seemed to delight in yelling, shouting, and arguing. People on the first floor claimed that they could hear their shouting matches through the heating vents. But anyone who witnessed their fierce interaction came away with the distinct impression that both men exulted in it. Harry always said he never really had a handle on hardware issues until he met Doug. He also said that the day Doug died was the saddest day in his career at HTPS.
Jon walked around his sixth floor office for the last time. He paused in front of the large double window to look out at the park below and the forest of pines in the distance. He was sad to lose this view, but if giving up the office made Lettie happy, it would be worth it. He sighed and picked up the cardboard box containing his papers and other personal possessions. Swinging open the door, he took one glance back and walked toward the elevators.
When the elevator opened in the basement and Jon stepped out into the hallway, the first thing that hit him was the cold. Upstairs the temperature was maintained at a constant seventy-four degrees. The basement was at least ten degrees cooler. Jon shivered.
A quick survey of the corridor left him depressed. The walls were painted a flat, hard metallic green. Puke green, Jon thought. The semi-functioning and filthy fluorescent light tubes in the ceiling made the atmosphere even more dismal.
His new office was equally unimpressive. It was basically an elongated box, eight feet by twelve feet and painted dull gray. The ceiling was slightly over six feet high, barely giving him clearance. It was definitely not an office for anyone with claustrophobia.
Jon walked over to his new desk, an old steel beast from the ’60s painted gunmetal gray. When he took his seat there for the first time, he found that his knees barely fit under it. The desk drawers were pockmarked with scrapes and dings. He shook his head from side to side, wondering what had given Harry this bright idea.
A short while later he was ready for work. When he opened his email and leaned back in his chair, it collapsed to one side, at a cockeyed angle. “Oh great!” he said aloud. He stood and flipped the chair over. A couple of minutes later he had succeeded in making a temporary repair with the screwdriver on his pocket knife.
What the hell was Harry thinking when he chose the basement offices? Jon thought again as he reseated himself. Harry must have an overriding reason for his decision. Was it because of the hardware fabrication facility that was located in the basement, adjacent to Doug Sanderson’s old office?
As Jon began to plug away at his day’s work, an odd idea arose spontaneously in the back of his mind. At first he tried to dismiss it as foolish, a plan that could really backfire. But the idea kept bouncing back. It would be so easy. He could go up to the sixth floor and knock on Lettie’s door. He could tell her he had lost his favorite pen during the move and was wondering if he had left it in the top drawer of the desk. This would get him in her office and face to face with her. From there, he could wing it.
All morning he wrestled with this idea. Shortly after rejecting it completely, he found himself walking to the elevator. Almost without volition, he punched the button for the sixth floor.
When he knocked tentatively, Lettie called out, “Come on in. The door’s open.”
Jon entered the office and was surprised to see Lettie regarding him with complete composure. She smiled, but it was not one of her radiant smiles. It was the formal and polite smile she reserved for passing acquaintances.
“I had a feeling you would stop by,” she said. “What’s up?”
For a dreadful moment Jon remained paralyzed, unable to speak. “My pen,” he finally managed to sputter. “I think I forgot my pen.”
Lettie’s face lit up with genuine amusement, quickly suppressed. “You think you forgot your pen ….” she echoed.
“The t-top drawer of the desk,” Jon stammered. “I might have left it there.”
Lettie stood and stared down at his right hand. It suddenly dawned on him that he was manically flipping a small pencil back and forth between his first two fingers. His hand froze, and his face grew hot.
Lettie opened the top desk drawer, backing away so that she could pull it all the way out. “Nope. It’s definitely not there,” she said.
Jon was completely flummoxed. “Well, thanks for checking,” he said lamely, after a long pause.
“Is there anything else, Jon?” she said, her smile mocking him.
“How do you like having your old office back?” Jon blurted out.
Lettie shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess.”
Her noncommittal tone did not register on him. “Harry and I pulled some strings to make it happen, you know.”
“I know. Ted Blume told me all about it.” Her tone turned frosty.
“I thought it would make you happy.”
Lettie’s eyes flashed. “Well, the next time you and Harry decide you want to make me happy, could you please check with me first?”
Jon was taken aback. “But I thought it was what you wanted, why you were so upset with me.”
Lettie looked down at her desk, unwilling to meet his eyes.
Jon could not let it drop. “I heard that George Ludwig had been moved to the office near yours. I was really worried about that.”
“You and Harry are so far out of the loop ….” she said angrily.
“What do you mean?”
“George Ludwig isn’t even around anymore. He had a nervous breakdown. He’s been hospitalized.”
“I didn’t know,” Jon said.
“Obviously.”
Jon was so distressed by her hostility that he couldn’t remember a single topic he had planned to broach. He just stood dumbly in front of her desk.
“Is there anything else?” Lettie asked. When he showed no signs of leaving, she added, “Well, if you don’t mind, thanks to you and Harry, I have a great deal of work to do.”
When he returned to his new office, it seemed even colder and damper than before. The florescent lights flickered and gave off a subdued hue, much as you would expect in a mausoleum.
He dropped into his chair and it collapsed to one side, at the same cockeyed angle as earlier. Muttering under his breath, he stood up and flipped the chair over to fix it. The same screw had worked its way loose.
Maybe she’s just having a bad day, he thought. Maybe it’s just that time of month for her.
Jon sat and did nothing for a good ten minutes. A long train of “maybes” ran through his head. In the end, however, he concluded that he had messed things up forever with Lettie and there would be no going back. He tried to accept that fact intellectually, but it did no good. The memory of their encounter made him physically ill. For a minute or two he actually thought he was going to be sick.
Harry did not arrive at his new office until shortly past noon. When Jon heard his footsteps outside in the hall, he went out to greet him.
“Why so glum?” Harry asked. “You look like you just came from a funeral.”
Without waiting for a reply, Harry opened his door and walked into his new office. Jon followed him in and observed that Harry’s office was every bit as bad as his own. It was much larger, but it suffered from the same dismal faults—the bad lighting, the gunmetal gray décor, the cold, damp air and the decrepit office furniture.
“Isn’t it great?” said Harry, opening his arms wide to encompass the space.
Jon groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Harry.”
Harry turned to him in amazement. “What’s not to like?”
Jon spelled it all out for him in a few choice sentences.
“Well,” said Harry, “maybe there are a few small details that could be improved. But we’ll get it fixed up.”
“Good luck with that one,” said Jon sarcastically. “The maintenance department takes six months just to change a light bulb.”
“I’ll tell you what; you make a list of things you need changed and I’ll take care of it personally.”
Harry walked farther into his office, passing steel bookshelves weighted down with volumes and volumes of systems documentation. From the look of it, the documentation must have gone back to the IBM 1401 computer.
The office was shaped like an inverted L. The long corridor of bookshelves took a dogleg to the right, where the actual office was located. Harry pointed to a barely visible door in the wall behind a steel desk.
“This is why I wanted this office.” He swung open the door to reveal a set of stairs. “Those stairs lead down to the old hardware fabrication facility,” he said. “I’ll have to show it to you some time. Of course, they don’t use it anymore, but the workshop is an engineer’s dream come true.”
Harry shut the door before Jon could ask why the subbasement was essential to his plans.
“What a neat chair,” Harry said, walking toward the old office chair in front of his desk. “My father used to have one just like it at NASA.”
When Harry dropped into the chair, there was a groaning noise and the sound of a steel spring snapping. The back collapsed and Harry was ejected so violently that his feet went up into the air. He lay on the floor in stunned silence and then roared with laughter.
“Are you okay?” Jon asked as he helped his friend to his feet.
“Typical HTPS,” said Harry. “They give you something with their right hand and take something away with their left. They’ve been finding ways to shaft me ever since I started here.”
To Jon this remark sounded slightly paranoid, but he didn’t bring that observation to Harry’s attention. He just watched as Harry flipped the chair over and examined its underside. Harry took a small apparatus out of his pocket that resembled a pair of bottlenose pliers, but with an assortment of tools built into the handles. Jon smiled. Who else but Harry would carry something like that?
Harry fixed the chair in less than a minute and reseated himself in front of his new desk. He booted up his PC and logged onto Big Moe. A half minute later an odd-looking screen came up.
Jon was puzzled by the cryptic characters at the top and bottom but still thought he recognized it. “Is that some kind of program editor?” he asked.
“It is, indeed. It’s a program editor and interface to the quantum computer.”
“I thought you said you had some kind of telepathic connection to the quantum computer.”
“I do,” said Harry. “But it’s impractical for programming. Things happen way too fast. It was sort of like trying to pilot a space shuttle when you’re only used to driving a donkey cart. I found a programming tool in the root directory designed to build a more primitive interface. It’s really cool.”
“What are you working on today?”
“Phase three, as we discussed the other night. And I found some great tools to help me. I can program nano-microbes that will selectively terminate chemical processes. For example, I can make a complete hash of all the chemical processes involved in making flourochlorocarbons.”
“FCCs are pure poison,” said Jon. “I know they’ve tried to ban them because of the damage to the ozone layer, but they’re still used in all kinds of industrial processes, especially in China.”
Harry did not reply. He was already lost in the code. Jon could see no point in sticking around, so he began to walk away. When he was halfway to the door, Harry called out to him.
“Don’t forget the list of the changes you want to your office. And be sure to give me as much detail as you can. Tell me exactly what you want. The more complete the specs, the happier you’ll be.”
When Jon returned to his office, he decided to take his friend’s offer literally. He downloaded specs from the Internet for the office furniture he wanted, complete with diagrams and descriptions. Next he made a detailed list of all the other changes on his wish list. What the hell, he thought. Harry asked for detail and he’s going to get it.
A little later, Jon started in on the more mundane issues of the day. He groaned when he read the emails waiting for him. A slew of meetings were on the week’s roster, involving Ted Blume, Tina Johnston and Ed Merkle, assorted Pentagon personnel, and also Lettie. A few hours ago he would have eagerly anticipated a meeting with Lettie, but now he felt only dread.
Also included in his emails were attachments with the cryptographic specifications for the AES and DES codes. Great, just what I need, he thought. Nothing could be more boring than going over the generic documentation for the Advanced Encryption Standards and the Data Encryption Standards.
By the end of the day, Jon’s eyes were blurry and his brain was fogged. He was only one day into AES and DES encryption and he already wished never to hear another word on the subject. His only break—if you could call it that—during the day beside lunch was a meeting with Tina Johnston and Ed Merkle. He found working with the two of them to be completely exasperating. Ever
y little detail had to be gone over countless times. Any time a shade of interpretation was required, the two argued endlessly.
When Jon glanced at his watch and saw that it was after six, he rose to his feet, yawned, and stretched. For the first time all day he actually had something to look forward to—getting the hell away from HTPS Industries.
On the verge of leaving, he remembered the wish list of improvements for his office. He retrieved it and went next door to Harry’s office to drop it off. Harry was buried so deep in code he barely acknowledged Jon’s presence.
As Jon pulled out of the parking lot, the fog of the day began to lift. Maybe things weren’t as bad with Lettie as he first thought. Maybe he had just caught her at a bad time. It was definitely too soon to give up. He tried to recall what she had told him in the last phone conversation—something about needing space and time to work things out.
Jon lowered the window and let the fresh air of early evening revive him. He began to whistle softly and the frustrations of the day vanished into the background. As he relaxed, he recalled how Lettie had kissed him good night after dinner at her apartment. There was definitely something there. He just had to be patient.
Jon’s stomach growled and he remembered that he didn’t have so much as a TV dinner at home. On impulse, he decided to have a quick dinner at Miller’s.
It was happy hour and the place was packed. Unattached men and women drifted back and forth from the bar. The juke box was blasting away and there were even a few couples on the dance floor.
As Jon entered the dining area he froze. Lettie was seated at a back table. For a brief moment the identity of the man sitting across from her didn’t register, but when it did, it was with the force of a hammer. Eric Meyers.
Jon remained transfixed, his jaw hanging open, before finally collecting himself enough to get the hell out of there.
The Infinity Program Page 19
