Jericho Iteration

by Allen Steele

  Barris reached into his desk again, rifled through some papers, and produced a three-page document. “This is a secrecy pledge,” McLaughlin went on as Barris handed it across the desk to me. “In short, it says that you will not divulge to any third party any classified information that has been confided to you. Once you’ve signed it, you could be arrested under federal law for various felony charges—possibly including high treason—if you reveal anything that’s said in this room.”

  I glanced through the document; as much as I could make out the single-spaced legalese, it was as McLaughlin said. The minimum penalty for airing out Uncle Sam’s dirty laundry was ten years in the pen and a fine so harsh I would never pay it off by stamping out license plates in Leavenworth.

  “Sounds pretty stiff, Mr. McLaughlin.” I dropped the pledge back on Barris’s desk. “What makes you think I’d want to sign anything like this?”

  Barris shrugged. “For one thing, it’ll get us a little closer to nailing the guy who killed John Tiernan,” he said. “That should mean something to you. Second, it’ll help you get your belongings returned. And third, once this whole affair is said and done, you’ll be the one reporter in town who has the inside story … within certain limitations, of course.”

  “Uh-huh. And what happens if I don’t sign?”

  The colonel smiled and said nothing. Farrentino stared at me, his face dark and utterly serious. Huygens pulled his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms across his chest, and studied me like an alley cat contemplating a small mouse it had just cornered. McLaughlin simply waited for me to add two and two together.

  If there’s anything I’ve learned in life, it’s how to take a hint.

  Now I knew the reasons why they had arrested me without charges, hustled me in here in handcuffs, and allowed me to see a group of prisoners being herded down to underground cells beneath the stadium. They had wanted to show me the true value of my life. These men could make me disappear without so much as a ripple if I refused to play their game. It was like the old saw about some guy asking his lawyer what his negotiating position should be. “Bending over,” the lawyer says.

  It was midnight, and if I didn’t say or do the right thing, I’d never see the sun again.

  After a moment, Barris picked up a pen from his desk and, without saying a word, held it out to me. I hesitated, then took the pen from his hand, laid the document flat on his desk, and signed on the dotted line at the bottom of the third page. I wonder if Faust had felt the same way.

  “You’ve done the right thing, Gerry,” Huygens said. “For once you’re playing with the right team.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered under my breath. “Call me when we make the playoffs.”

  McLaughlin probably heard me, but he didn’t say anything. When I was through signing my pact with the devil, Barris accepted it from me. He studied my signature for a second, then slipped it into the drawer and slammed it shut.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rosen,” he said as he cupped his hands together. “You may not believe it now, but you have done the right thing. For this your country is grateful.”

  McLaughlin reached across the desk to pick up the glass snowball; he shook it a couple of times, then held it upright in his hand as he watched the tiny blizzard swirl around the miniature Gateway Arch.

  “And now,” he said, “it’s time to tell you about Ruby Fulcrum.”

  12

  (Friday, 12:52 A.M.)

  WHEN THE MEETING WAS over, Mike Farrentino escorted me out of the Stadium Club. We didn’t say anything to each other while we rode the elevator down to the ground level, and once we had cleared the guarded front foyer I turned to walk away from the stadium.

  “Hey, Rosen!” he called out. “Wait up a minute!”

  I turned back around, hands shoved in the pockets of my jacket, and waited for him to walk over to me. “Need a lift back to your place?” he asked. “I got my car parked over here.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll hoof it. It’s not far.” Nor was a ride necessary. Barris had assured me that I now had safe conduct on the streets after curfew, so long as I played by his rules. He had given me a laminated plastic card before I left and told me to carry it on my person at all times; it was printed with the ERA logo, and Barris told me if I was stopped or questioned by an ERA patrol, I was to show them the card. Sort of like getting a hall pass from the principal.

  The plaza was almost empty now, save for a few troopers manning the barricades. Most of the LAVs I had seen earlier had vanished, presumably off patrolling various parts of the city. The downtown area somehow looked very peaceful: no traffic on the streets, no city noises, only the faint twitter of night birds in the branches of the elm trees, abruptly broken by the low moan of an Apache coming in for a landing within the stadium walls.

  Farrentino looked up at the chopper as it flew low overhead. “How much of that do you believe?” he asked in a soft voice, casting a glance at the ERA soldier standing guard near the Stadium Club entrance. “I mean, how much of that was bullshit or what?”

  I hesitated. I had my opinions, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to trust them to a cop. “I don’t know, Lieutenant,” I said carefully. “You’re the one who’s been investigating this mess, so you tell me.”

  “Mike,” he said. “My friends call me Mike—”

  “And so I’m your friend now, huh, Mike?” I looked him straight in the eye. “Most of my friends wouldn’t have my door kicked down and have me dragged off in the middle of the night.”

  “Whoa, fella. Chill off.” He held his hands up defensively. “The colonel ordered the raid, not me. I simply reported that the evidence bag had been tampered with and that the disk was missing and that you were the most likely suspect. He was the one who sent in the goon squad …”

  “Yeah, sure, Mike. Have a nice night.” I started to turn away again, but then he grabbed me by the arm. Before I could do anything, he pulled something out of his raincoat pocket and held it out to me.

  It was Joker. “I got it out of the impoundment room when I went to take a leak,” he explained. “You should be getting the rest of your junk back sometime tomorrow.”

  I took Joker from his hand and studied it. The PT didn’t look as if it had been tampered with—even the mini-disk was still in drive—but I couldn’t be sure until I had Jah run it through a full diagnostic. “Thanks,” I said as I slipped the little ’puter in my jacket pocket. “I’ll catch you later—”

  “Look, Gerry,” he said, his voice almost a whisper now, “I know you don’t believe this, but …”

  He hesitated. “Things aren’t always what they seem, y’know what I mean? I don’t think Barris and McLaughlin gave either of us the full lowdown. In fact, I don’t think this Payson-Smith character is the mad scientist they made him out to be.”

  “Yeah?” The night was getting cold; I zipped up the front of my jacket. “And what do you think is the full lowdown?”

  “I don’t know yet. All I know is, I smell a rat.” He paused, looking over his shoulder again. “You may not believe this,” he went on, “but truth is, not everyone in authority is crazy about ERA. We might have a lot of problems in St. Louis right now, but we don’t need tanks and helicopters to get them fixed.” He shrugged. “They’re only making things worse …”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said, “but that still doesn’t make me trust you. So far as I can tell, you’re just a big swinging dick with a badge.”

  Farrentino turned red, but he nodded his head. “I understand that, but let me tell you … there’s some bigger swinging dicks out there who are getting out of line, and I don’t trust them any more than you trust me.”

  I looked into his face and saw only honesty. He was no longer a homicide detective and I was no longer a reporter; we were now only two men who had seen a lot of crazy shit go down in recent months and were scared by what was happening to our hometown. I’ve never been the greatest fan of the SLPD as a whole, but I knew that there we
re individual cops who did care about their line of work, who weren’t just playing out old cop-show fantasies of busting heads and breaking down doors. Mike Farrentino might be one of these guys.

  And besides, I had a weird hunch I wanted to follow up on …

  “You say you got a car parked around here?” I asked. He nodded. “Want to give me a lift out to Webster?”

  He glanced at his watch and shrugged. “Sure. I’m off the clock and it’s on my way home. Why Webster?”

  “I want to drop in on my ex,” I said as I began to follow him toward the unmarked Chrysler four-door parked on the street just beyond the barricades. “Give her a big surprise when I show up at one o’clock in the morning in a cop car.”

  The drive out to Webster Groves didn’t take long. Farrentino hopped on I-44 at the Poplar Street Bridge, and traffic in the westbound lanes was very sparse, mostly interstate trucks on their way to Springfield or Oklahoma or Texas. A light rain had begun to fall, and the car was filled with the sound of the windshield wipers and the ethereal murmur of voices from the police scanner mounted beneath the dash.

  We didn’t say much to each other. He was tired, I was tired, and all we wanted to do was to get home, although his wife was expecting him to come through the door while mine … well, I would have to cross that doormat when I got to it. I lay back in the seat, watched the trucks pass by, and contemplated all that had been told to me in Barris’s office.

  Mainly, it was a matter of counting all the occasions my bullshit detector had rung a bell.

  Ernest Hemingway, the godfather of all self-respecting word pimps, once said that the most valuable gift a writer could have was an unshakable, foolproof bullshit detector. For reporters, that means learning to know instinctively when someone is trying to pull a fast one. I’ve grown a half-decent b.s.-o-meter over a lifetime of writing, and even though it’s neither unshakable nor foolproof, it had rung at least four, maybe five times while I was sitting in the Stadium Club.

  Ruby Fulcrum, McLaughlin had said, was the Pentagon code name for an R&D project within the Tiptree Corporation’s Sentinel program: the development of a precise space-based tracking system to pinpoint the trajectories of suborbital ICBMs. The first major obstacle had been to develop an energy weapon that could penetrate Earth’s atmosphere without losing too much power, and that had been licked when the whiz kids at Los Alamos had invented a chemical laser that substituted fluorine/deuterium for ordinary hydrogen as its fuel source.

  The next big hurdle had been to devise a c-cube system for Sentinel 1. Given the chance that a missile might be fired from a ship or sub off the Atlantic coast, Sentinel’s onboard computer system would have to be virtually autonomous, capable not only of detecting and tracking an ICBM during its boost phase, and thus enabling the satellite to shoot it down before it reentered the atmosphere, but also of differentiating between possible decoy-missiles and real targets. The problem was made even more hairy by the fact that if an SLBM was launched from a vessel just off the Eastern seaboard, Sentinel 1 would have only a few minutes to accurately detect, track, and destroy the missile before its nuclear warhead detonated above Washington or New York.

  Richard Payson-Smith had been the leader of the Ruby Fulcrum team, since his scientific background included both high-energy lasers and cybernetics. The team had also included three other scientists: Kim Po, a young immigrant from United Korea who had previously worked with Payson-Smith at Los Alamos; Jeff Morgan, even younger than Kim, who had been recruited straight from MIT to work on the program, and—no surprise here, although I had been careful not to let on—Beryl Hinckley, a former CalTech professor who had recently escaped from academia to pursue a more lucrative career in private industry.

  “We knew that Richard had some misgivings about Sentinel when the company assigned him to the program,” McLaughlin had said. “He had a—well, call it a pacifist streak, if you will—but we needed his expertise nonetheless. We thought that, since Sentinel is purely defensive in nature, he would overcome his leftist tendencies. And so it seemed, at least at first …”

  But as the project went along and the team gradually managed to overcome the technical hurdles, Payson-Smith’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. His temper became shorter; he began to berate his colleagues over minor mistakes or even for taking time to answer personal phone calls or making dentist appointments in the middle of the week. Payson-Smith managed to calm down after a while, but as he did he also began to voice his objections to Sentinel, calling it a “doomsday machine,” “a Pentagon war wagon,” and so forth. As Ruby Fulcrum’s objectives were gradually achieved and Sentinel 1 inched closer to deployment, Payson-Smith became actively hostile toward the other three members; no one dared venture into his office lest they be subjected to a political harangue. He had also become manic-depressive, sliding into silent fugues that could last for weeks on end.

  “Didn’t your company notice?” I had asked. “If the project was that crucial, why didn’t you have him replaced, or at least force him to seek psychiatric—”

  “Because, as you said, the project was crucial.” Huygens gave me an arch look: you don’t know what you’re talking about. “The program was on a time-critical basis, so we couldn’t just up and fire him. Where would a replacement come from? How could we get one to fit in with the team at this late stage? We—”

  McLaughlin shot a look at Huygens; the PR man shut up. “It was impossible to get Richard to see the staff psychologist,” McLaughlin continued in more patient tones. “When we made appointments for him, he’d find a way to avoid them. He was stubborn and, well …” He raised his hands in helplessness. “We just had to work with him and hope for the best.”

  That was the first time my bullshit detector had gone off. Now, upon reflection, I knew why.

  First, whatever purpose Payson-Smith had fulfilled in the Ruby Fulcrum team couldn’t have been so critical that Tiptree had been unable to replace him, even in a pinch. However brainy this man was, I hadn’t heard his name mentioned in the same breath as Robert Oppenheimer’s, and they had replaced him, too, way back when. Oppenheimer’s only mistake had been in openly expressing his objections to the atomic bomb, and that was after it was exploded over Japan. No one had ever claimed he was mentally ill, only that he was a suspected commie sympathizer.

  If Huygens was telling me the truth, then Payson-Smith should have been canned immediately, for being mentally unhinged and opposed to Sentinel before it was even built, let alone made operational. But they wouldn’t have kept him on the project … and that, I now realized, was why the first alarm had rung.

  At the same time this was going on, McLaughlin continued, certain spare parts and lab instruments had turned up missing from the company storerooms; they included various high-quality mirrors, lenses, Pyrex tubes, small carbon dioxide and water tanks, and a portable vacuum pump. The theft of the items had not been detected, it later turned out, because someone had managed to access the company’s computer inventory system and delete their removal from the records. The loss was discovered only when other scientists complained to the company comptroller that they couldn’t find items that had been there last week.

  Then, almost exactly one week ago, Kim Po was found dead outside his condominium in Richmond Heights. He had apparently been coming home from a late night at the lab when he was shot just outside the condo’s front door … not by a conventional rifle, but by a laser weapon of some sort, one that had drilled a self-cauterizing hole straight through the back of his head from a parked car. As with John’s murder, no one had heard gunfire, nor had a bullet been recovered from either man’s body.

  “We’ll cut to the chase,” Barris said. “Judging from the information Cale has given us and the near identical circumstances of both Dr. Kim and Mr. Tiernan’s murders, it seems as if a high-power laser had been used.”

  McLaughlin coughed into his fist. “A CO2 laser rifle, to be exact,” he said. “Not like something you see in movies, of
course. It would be extremely large and cumbersome … at least the size of a rocket launcher, in fact … but my people tell me it could produce a beam capable of burning through metal, wood, plastic, just about anything … and that includes flesh and bone.”

  He shook his head. “It’s a nasty weapon, probably even more powerful than the one that kid in Chicago used a couple of years ago. Silent, invisible, absolute flat trajectory, almost infinite range. If you had a good infrared sight to go with it, you could fire it through a closed window, provided it was made of nonreflective glass, and hit a target several blocks away. No one would even know where the shot came from.”

  “And you think someone from Tiptree concocted this thing?” I asked.

  McLaughlin glanced hesitantly at both Barris and Huygens. He put the glass snowball down on the desk and leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees. “No, not just anyone,” he replied, looking embarrassed by the admission. “We think Richard’s the one. He had the training and the technical ability, plus access to the parts he needed.” He looked at Mike Farrentino. “Lieutenant? If you’ll continue …?”

  For the first time since we had entered the colonel’s office, Farrentino spoke up. “After Mr. Huygens tipped us off,” he said quietly, “some of my people visited Payson-Smith’s home earlier this evening. He was missing, but they found a small workshop in his basement. Something had been built on a bench down there, all right, and there were pieces of burned-through metal that looked as if they might have been used for target practice.”

  “But why would he …?”

  “Why would he kill Dr. Kim and Mr. Tiernan?” Barris shrugged. He picked up the glass snowball and juggled it in his hands. “Who knows what goes on in a sick mind? Maybe he’s upset at the other members of his team for having built Sentinel … that’s our theory, at any rate. First he knocked off Dr. Kim, then he tracked down Dr. Hinckley when she was trying to tell Tiernan about Kim’s murder and tried to kill her, too. Unfortunately he nailed your friend instead.”