The Big Wheel

by Scott Archer Jones

  He ripped out his crooked grin. “Oh. I thought his name was O’Brien’s PA.”

  “You’re not going to be laughing when you see what he gave me. You see, Allen’s gay, and he knows my little secret. We’ve got a bond.”

  “Like a fraternity?”

  She glared at him like he was a recalcitrant child. “Just stop it, and listen. He gave me an image off his copy machine, out of the memory bank. It’s not good news. Here, I printed it out.”

  She handed it to him. He scanned it. A list of names, eight in all. The first two had a line drawn through them—a note for each, “Auto,” and “Fall from deck.” His name was last on the list. He stared at her. “What is this?”

  “I went to our employee data bank. Seven of these people work for us in Georgia, with titles like Laboratory Technician. Two have just died, and employee death-benefits are kicking in for the families. I think these seven are the auxiliaries that helped build the Artifact. I bet LeFarge is killing them, one by one. I would guess O’Brien ordered up at least the first seven.”

  “But maybe not the eighth.”

  “Does it matter?”

  ***

  Under the truck, Sibyl couldn’t see Robko—she could barely see her own knees or her hands in black gloves. The tires hissed away, a sibilant rumble close to her head. The blacktop slipped past them smelling like creosote. They lay in cradles hung from the truck frame.

  Through the Bluetooth headset he whispered to her, “Front door coming up.”

  They swayed as the truck turned into the compound.

  “Those cameras set in the ground. We made a mistake—they’re bound to spot us under the truck,” she whispered.

  “Naah. Black cloth cradles, low light, black clothes. Relax.”

  The truck stopped at the gatehouse. They couldn’t hear any conversation over the idling engine, but she imagined the driver conferring with the guard. A huge flash of light—the driveway all around lit up from dark to blinding in the blink of an eye.

  “Just be still,” he whispered. “Some guard with a jimber for the job turned on the lights above the apron. This helps hide us.”

  The truck rolled forward, past the lights and into the compound. She whispered back, “I nearly peed my pants.”

  “Side effect of the job.”

  “We did it!”

  “Only the front gate. There’s more to come.”

  Robko and Sibyl lay quiet as ghosts in the slings while the driver shut the truck down and the guard searched the cab and the back. The stink of diesel dissipated as the breeze pushed the fumes away.

  He whispered, “Wait for it. They’ll pull around to the big lab building.” The driver swung up into the cab, fired up the engine, and drove them about a half mile around the complex. “The second he stops… before he starts backing,” he whispered.

  The truck shuddered to a halt. They rolled out of the cradles and landed on their hands and knees. The truck began to back.

  “Jesus! He’s turning! He’ll crush us!” she hissed. They rolled out the right side between the wheels of the trailer and tractor. They scuttled, low to the ground, until a transformer against the building concealed them.

  “You okay?”

  Her breath shuddered out hard. “I didn’t think it would be that scary.”

  “Piece of cake. The guards are always bored, so if they see, they see by accident.”

  “I meant the truck tires.”

  “I know what you meant. Ace, seriously ace! Pumps up the old adrenaline.”

  He led the way over to a small wing that jutted out from the main building block. “Wait here.” He wedged his back and shoulders into the corner, splayed his hands, knees, and feet out onto the walls and sidled upwards. Three floors later, he disappeared over the roof’s edge. In a moment, he dropped a line. She clipped into the loop and closed her eyes. Faced into the corner, she cat-walked up the wall while the rope tugged her up. She bounced and swayed, struck her shoulders first on one side of the V and then the other. She didn’t open her eyes until the rope changed angle. She clambered over the edge, thirty feet up.

  “You’re a pro,” he said as he coiled up the line.

  Irritation flashed through her like fire—he wasn’t even breathing hard. “It was worse than the truck wheels.”

  “The next part is the loud part.” He scrambled over on his haunches to the air conditioning, a mass of blowers and a snarl of two-foot tubes. “It ain’t Hollywood. In the real world, security always ignores the AC.”

  “God! The blowers are huge.”

  “That’s good for us. Nice fat ducting.” They knelt and applied themselves to screws and a panel. A black square, two by two, yawned open in front of them. “Okay….” He led the way, lighting up the duct with a lamp strapped to his forehead. The fans howled and the frigid air pushed hard behind them. The wind made her eyes water.

  She shouted into her Bluetooth, “This is awful. I have to sneeze.” She did, for the next hundred feet. She damped it with her sleeve.

  “Shush,” his disembodied voice said in her ear.

  “Right, asshole! Let’s get out of this ducting. I can hear my teeth chatter.”

  He fished out a pair of shears and cut a three-foot long hole out of the duct’s side. “No way to be quiet with this one.” With some banging and reverberation, he folded a rectangle of metal out. “Now we’re out in the ceiling, but we’ll be coming back through here.”

  “Crawling back into that wind… great.”

  ***

  Robko could see her, all angular in the grid work of the ceiling, cradling her little flashlight. He crawled along to her in the dark, his head-mounted lamp flashing back and forth. “Fixed it. Security cameras are telling lies to the guards. How are you doing?”

  “I hate this. I’m going to fall one way or the other.” She breathed short sharp huffs.

  “Brace with your other hand on the steel deck above, like I showed you.”

  “That’s how I cut my hand on a screw.”

  “It will be easier going back.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Let’s see what else they have in store for us.” He wedged up the edge of a ceiling tile, inserted his camera, and inspected his iMob. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” He twisted it around.

  “What?”

  “As bad as I thought. One more defense—lasers.” He fished up the tile and set it aside. He jammed his toes against the wall below and lowered himself. “Come on down. I’ll turn on the lights.”

  He steadied her as she hung and dropped from the ceiling, her toes sliding down the wall. She found herself inside the lab, in front of a steel door, in a square marked out on the floor by the door. “Don’t step out of the box,” he said.

  “Duuh.”

  He pointed at the security cameras up in the four corners. “Don’t worry. They’re watching reruns.” He handed her vinyl gloves.

  The lab sprawled out in front of them, big and cluttered. One wall held cages full of white mice; some of them rustled, quiet but awake in their pine shavings. The left wall housed four large cages of chimpanzees. All slept but one—he contemplated Sibyl and Robko while he made small crooning sounds and picked at his ear. Towards the end of the room a dentist’s chair trailed wiring harnesses into a junction box.

  “There it is… the Frankenstein machine,” she said. “I expected a giant computer, not that screen thingy beside it.”

  “It’s probably hooked to something big somewhere.”

  “So where are the Artifacts?”

  “Personally I would keep them in that vault over there, on the back wall.” He pointed at a twenty-by-twenty steel cage with a solid door.

  “So where are these lasers?”

  “There’s a regular grid—see the emitters along the top of the wall? You can’t see the beams with the regular lights on.”

  He watched her blink rapidly, her shoulders hunched, her fists in tight balls. Bottled-up stress. No wonder she was so caustic.

&n
bsp; “Now what?” She shook her hands like she was shaking blood down to the fingertips.

  “We turn the lasers off. I see the push button for ’em on the wall over by the vault. First person in the lab each morning would walk through the beams and switch off the system. The alarm will be on a delay.”

  She clapped her hands and gave out a shaky laugh. “So go turn them off.”

  “Bit more tricky than that. Security would know, even if the alarm doesn’t sound. Red lights on the board.” He knelt and fished more gear out of his backpack.

  “So you have to wiggle through the beams, like in the movies?”

  “Not me. You.” He handed her a night vision mask like ski goggles and tugged on his own.

  “Why me?”

  “Because you whined about the air conditioning.”

  “Right. Thanks.” She turned on the goggles, flipped off the regular lights in the lab, and saw—a tracery of light beams across the room.

  He nudged her. “See the hole in their defense? They didn’t train beams across the lab bench. You can wriggle down the counter.”

  “Me? I thought you were joking.”

  “Why not you? You’re smaller than me. Besides, if you trip the alarm, we were fated to fail. If you don’t, then we were fated to win, and you get to keep the five hundred dollars.”

  “I’m about to have a heart attack.”

  “Calm down. Think it through. Act it out in your mind.”

  “I have to pee.”

  “No, you don’t. It’s the excitement.”

  She crouched on the floor and stared into the geometry of the beams. “Don’t rush me.” Several deep breaths. She sidled forward to the first lab bench, stepped over one ray, and ducked beneath another. She hopped up onto the bench and slithered onto her stomach. She had a clear path most of the way down into the lab. Only at one point did she have to inch under an angled beam.

  Her ghost voice breathed in his ear, “God, I hate you, you gozo.”

  At the far end, she hopped down from the bench, lay down on the floor, and rolled under the last net of light. Rising up by the steel cage, she slapped the red alarm button. The grid disappeared. “Turn on the lights.”

  “Your wish is my command. Now we better hot-wire the button so they think the lasers are still on.” He started down the room towards her.

  “There’s another button here on the wall. It says, ‘Pressure Alarm.’ What the hell is that?”

  He froze. “That means there are floor sensors. No mention of them on the plans.”

  “Pressure plates that I could have triggered—while I was rolling around?”

  “Uh-huh. But our luck held. Fortune was with us.”

  “Jesus! Sometimes you’re such a jerk.” She slapped that button too.

  Chapter Twenty-Six: A Ship without a Sailor

  The coffee bar stank of grounds and burnt milk. It had seized a normally pleasurable smell and amped it up until the nose couldn’t tolerate it and shut down. At a booth in the back, Angie and Thomas waited for exotic NYC drinks. They needed a half-hour of small talk, a half-hour away from the office pressure cooker. As casually as he could, he asked, “You seeing anyone?”

  “The theft caught me between relationships. Good thing too, since I’ve had no time for a personal life. And you?”

  He gave a shrug. “Nothing except casual. Tighty-whitey prep girls. A singer in a band.”

  “That your type?”

  He shook his head. “I thought you were my type. What about you?”

  She indicated the black barista clacking up in heels with their confectionary coffees. “She’s my type.” She paused, waited for the ritual of the saucers, cups, and spoons. They watched the broad shoulders and the cornrowed hair sway away.

  He admitted, “Statuesque.”

  She laughed out loud, astonished he got it. “Ace. Ace-and-a-half.” For a couple of beats, she mixed foam into the coffee with a tiny spoon. “Thomas, you asked me how you would set a brake on the Governor?”

  “Yes, nudge him our way. Pressure him to fire LeFarge. That type of thing.”

  “As long as LeFarge remains on the scene, it’s going to be tough. And he’s not giving up his meal ticket.”

  He gave half a shrug. “I’ve beat my head on that wall too.”

  “You should install a different kind of failsafe, something for if it all goes wrong.”

  “Hmm, the get-out-of-jail-free card?”

  She tapped the table and lectured him in her voice of reason. “A persuader that would make O’Brien protect you rather than throw you to the wolves. You should record him when you two talk about anything dubious or illegal.”

  He banged his fist on the table. His eyes glazed as he thought about her suggestion, her brilliant suggestion. “That could work. Something to bargain with when we’re talking to the Federal prosecutors. Something we can threaten him with after the arrest. Damn, how could we have missed it? Record him, huh?”

  “Only for the dirty stuff.”

  “Hmm. That’s all we talk about. You don’t see us using it for day-to-day?”

  She shot him the knowing grin. “Not with O’Brien. If he knew what you were doing, he’d scrub you out right away. Even in company takeovers, his motto has been….” She held her hand out to him, inviting the answer.

  “Remove the man; remove the problem.”

  “Yes.”

  ***

  Robko and Sibyl knelt in front of the vault and stared at the electronic lock, a fingerprint reader with an evil red light. She rocked back on her heels. “I thought you expected a combination lock?”

  “I did. I brought the drill and a listening probe.”

  “Are we stymied?”

  “No. Remember what we did to Steward’s desktab in Ithaca? I need something like talcum powder.” They both ranged up and down the room, searching in cupboards below the lab benches.

  She said, “A whopping big box of artificial sweetener? Looks like rat poison, but it should work.”

  “Sure.” They circled through the room, dusting for prints. “This lock reads thumbs. Thumbprints show up on things you pick up. Beakers, coffee cups, baseball bats, marital aids, that type of thing.” They found ten smudges for every clear print, and of course, thumbprints were in the minority.

  She discovered a full, perfect print on a bottle of water. “All right!” he said. “Now, let’s lift it with this packing tape.” He handed her the roll.

  She stared at him but took it. She eased a piece of tape onto the print and carried the tape to the lock.

  “Go ahead. You’ve seen it done. Just don’t get it upside down.”

  The light turned green. “I did it!” She laughed. “That ought to be worth something to you.”

  He could see her infectious grin and her eyes, open round, delighted with success. “Why do I think it’s five hundred dollars?”

  They opened the door to the cage. Besides memflashes, files, loaded test tube racks and drugs, the vault held a bonanza of Artifacts.

  She prodded at a rack of small lucite boxes with her forefinger. “Look at these itty-bitty ones. Weird.”

  “Those are the mouse-size versions, don’t you think? I wonder if they fill up the Artifacts with tiny mouse lives or try to load up one mouse with another’s brain?”

  Her finger traced back and forth across the small plastic boxes. “How can we find out? That would explain a lot about O’Brien and why he wants to keep this for himself. I mean, storing yourself is one thing. Stealing a body is another.”

  “Nasty thought. O’Brien’s brain riding around in some kid’s head-case.”

  She glanced down at the floor. Her eyes came up to meet his. “Would you do it? I think I would. Plenty of brain-dead pretty girls out there.”

  “Really? Murder?”

  She shrugged. “I’d think about it. Especially when I hit sixty.”

  “Anyway, we don’t know if they can do it.”

  She held her hands up at shoulder level,
palms up. “No, seriously. How can we find out? If they’re close to a solution, the value of the Artifacts skyrockets. And the danger.”

  He tugged at his eyebrow. “We read their lab records, the memdevices lying here.”

  “Yes! I found a box of new flashchips back over there. Something to copy to. I’ll grab a desktab and start with the latest.”

  “Good idea. You’ll make us rich yet.

  “While I slave away, what will you do?”

  “Break into this cabinet here. They’d keep their really good paraphernalia in that. It’s just a single-keyed lock.” He slipped out a book of picks and chose his standard probe. “Too fat.” Sliding out a probe with a long triangular point, he tried again. “There’s one pin—can’t reach the second.” He chose another thin-tipped pick with a shorter triangle. “Uh, yeah honey, that’s it. Too easy.”

  She let out a tchaa sound. “Would you please hush? Don’t you know it’s rude to talk to yourself when you have to share space with your co-workers?”

  “Don’t go all giddy. Any luck with the memdevices?”

  “They’re downloading fine.”

  He opened the door with a simple handle. “Man-sized Artifacts! I’ve seen these babies before.”

  She gazed into the box where two large Artifacts nestled in foam. “Okay, now what?”

  “You pack them away. I want to fake up decoys, something that will satisfy a quick scan.”

  “Secretive gozo, aren’t you? There’s a box of Artifact parts in the first bench. Second or third drawer.”

  Robko found parts and assembled two boxes. “You haven’t seen any crystal packing, have you?”

  “Not me. You could empty out Mouse Artifacts.”

  “No, they’d catch that. I’ll use your artificial sweetener.” He packed the fakes, snuggled them into the rectangular foam pads and locked the cabinet. “Ready?”

  “Ready.” She swung the vault closed. “Now what?”

  “Clean up where we dusted for prints.”

  “What if we let the chimp out instead? Like his door wasn’t locked? Anything messed up gets blamed on him.”

  “A stroke of genius! After that, you can guess the drill. Crawl back up in the ceiling and wriggle our little asses back down the shaft into the air conditioner blast. And last but not least, explain the alarms being off by tripping the circuit breakers for the building.”