by Peter Clines
“Don’t mention it. I’m just sucking up so you’ll give me Olaf’s job when you get everyone else fired.”
“I’m not getting anyone—”
Bob held up a hand. “Relax, man. It’s just a joke.”
“Sorry.”
“Let me go sign out and grab the truck. I’ll meet you back here in…ten minutes?”
Twelve minutes later they were rumbling down the road. The pickup was a huge, rusted beast, a relic of a time before the term “fuel efficiency.” According to Bob, they’d picked it up for under a thousand dollars. Mike didn’t find it hard to believe.
“So, I have to ask,” said Bob, “how often do you hear the ‘young Alan Rickman’ thing?”
“Often enough,” he said, “although it’s mostly kids, so it’s usually phrased as ‘young Severus Snape.’ ”
Bob laughed.
“How often do you hear ‘Ron Weasley’?”
“Not as much as I did in high school, thank God.” He shook his head. “I shaved it all off junior year, about five years before bald became trendy. Spectacularly bad decision for a kid heading for class salutatorian.” He flipped the directional and swung them into a turn lane. “Six months of everyone calling me Lex Luthor.”
Two and a half hours later, Mike had a truckload of new furniture pieces with quasi-Swedish names to assemble. Bob helped him pile it all in his trailer, then loaned him a small toolbox to help assemble the futon frame.
Mike looked at the pile of bags and boxes. The reports still sat on his cot, and the sight of them made the ants seethe in his mind. He brushed them away. “I think I owe you dinner, at least.”
“Nah. It was no big deal. And if it puts you in a better mood while you’re here, it works out for everyone.”
“I insist. Besides, I need someone to show me a few good places to eat.”
“I can go with you, but don’t worry about feeding me.”
“Technically,” Mike said, “Reggie’s feeding both of us.”
“If you put it that way,” said Bob, “I wouldn’t want to risk offending the man in charge.”
They ended up at a pizza place just down the street from the main building. It was a strip mall restaurant with bare-bones Italian atmosphere. Menus were examined, orders placed, and they sat back in their booth to wait for their drinks. Bob studied Mike across the table.
“So why are you here?”
“You said the pizza was good.”
Bob smiled. “Why are you here? What are you really looking for?”
Mike shrugged again. “What do you think I’m going to find?”
The waiter came back with a lemonade for Mike and a Pepsi for Bob.
“I think,” Bob said, “that a person can always find what they’re looking for, whether it’s there or not. They’ll just see what they want to see.”
“Fair point,” said Mike, “but all I’m looking for are ways to reassure Reggie so he can reassure all those other people who need to sign off on your budget.”
Bob put his glass up to his lips and swallowed twice.
“Is there some reason I wouldn’t find that?”
Bob shrugged. “What did Magnus tell you to look for?”
“Nothing,” said Mike. “Everyone in Washington was already on edge when Ben Miles had his…breakdown. Reggie just wants me here so I can confirm everything’s going great.”
Bob took a noisy sip from his straw and stared at Mike some more. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
“You believe me?”
“We’re not doing anything wrong,” said Bob. “We’ve got nothing to hide.”
Mike felt the corner of his mouth twitch. “Except all the stuff you insist on hiding.”
“Look,” said Bob, “I’m not going to give you my ATM code, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got a ton of drug money or something in my account. Everybody’s got secrets, and they’ve usually got perfectly good reasons to keep them.”
“True.”
“We all know this isn’t the normal way things get done,” he said, “but this isn’t a normal project. You saw it. This changes everything. Is it that weird that we want to keep an iron lock on everything until we’re one hundred percent sure it’s ready to go?”
“What if someone jumps the gun and just announces it?”
“If they’re not going to fund us, why would they announce it?”
“Just a hypothetical situation.”
“None of those suits or soldiers are going to go public without solid proof. They’d take a huge credibility hit, probably end up running a Taco Bell or something.”
“What if they force you to reveal it?”
“Arthur’s got a team of lawyers on speed dial, just in case. Unless they send in the Army—like, actual guys with guns and tanks—they can’t force us to do anything.”
The pizza arrived. It was a good size for the price. The waiter added a basket of bread and apologized that he hadn’t brought it sooner.
Mike freed a pair of slices and slipped them onto his plate. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Straight question, straight answer?”
Bob smiled. “I’m still not giving you my ATM code.”
“Who put you up to this?”
The smile faltered. “I don’t know what you—”
“Come on,” said Mike. “Straight question, straight answer.”
Bob’s smile returned. It wasn’t quite as wide, but it was more honest. “Arthur,” he said. “Although Neil suggested it.”
“Not so hard, was it?”
“What gave me away?”
“Oh, come on. You offered to spend your free time helping me move furniture. There are people I’ve worked with for years who won’t do that.”
Bob chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it was a little much.”
“Did they give you a list of things to casually drop into conversation?”
“Nah. They just wanted me to be friendly.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Neil was worried we’d gotten off on the wrong foot with the maintenance thing this morning.”
“Ahhh. Thanks for helping,” said Mike, “regardless.”
“No big deal,” said Bob. “Straight question for you?”
“Go for it. My pin number’s nine-seven-one-three.”
“Why you?”
“Reggie’s been trying to get me to do some work for him for ages. This was the first thing he ever told me about that interested me.”
“Yeah,” Bob said, “but why you? Even with Miles out of commission, he’s got to have a couple dozen guys already working for him who’d be interested in what we’re doing. And—no offense—I’d bet half of them have more of the background they’d need to evaluate the project.”
“None taken. Like you said, no one’s ever done anything like this before. He was probably thinking I’d be able to take in a lot and approach it all without any preconceptions.”
Bob used a pizza crust to wipe up some oil on his plate. “Meaning you’ll remember everything you see and you’ve got the brainpower to analyze all of it.”
“You could put it that way, yeah.”
Bob bit off the end of the crust. “I know he’s your friend and all that,” he said, “but did you ever think maybe that’s the reason he sent you here?”
“That I could steal all your work passively?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course I did,” said Mike. “But it won’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not what he hired me to do, and I wouldn’t do that anyway. I’m just supposed to analyze and make a recommendation.”
Bob popped the rest of the crust in his mouth and crushed it between his teeth. “Cool,” he said. “If you’re just here to reassure Magnus it’s all good…then we’re good.”
“Good.”
They each ate a slice in silence.
“Actually,” said Bob,
“can I bounce something else off you?”
“Sure.”
Bob set his fingertips on the table and bounced his hands up and down. He bit his lip. “Has Arthur said anything about me? Officially?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just…” Bob’s hands shifted. Ten fingers tapped on the tabletop. “Look, in the big scheme of things, I’m still the new guy. I get that. But for the past two weeks or so, everyone’s been—”
“Bob,” said a dry voice. “Shouldn’t you be working on the new ring algorithms?” Olaf stood a few feet away holding a Kindle.
“We finished early,” said Bob. He gestured at Mike. “I’ve been helping him get moved in.”
Olaf made a grunting noise.
“Do you want to join us?” asked Mike. He shuffled over a bit in the booth. “We just got our food a few minutes ago.”
Another grunting noise from Olaf, this one followed by a sharp sniff. “No, thank you. I prefer to eat alone.” He took a few steps across the room and sat at another booth. He put his back to the window so he could stare at them over his e-reader. The waiter brought him an iced tea. He sniffed again and dabbed at his nose with a paper napkin.
“I’m not sure if he’s the friendly one or Jamie is,” Mike said.
Bob chuckled. “They’re not so bad, once you get to know them.”
“You play a lot of jokes on him? That’s what Arthur says.”
The other man shook his head. “Not really. Just one or two. But he got it stuck in his head, and now anything that goes wrong in his life is an elaborate practical joke from me.”
“I know a couple people like that. So, you were saying?”
“About what?”
“The past two weeks,” said Mike. “You wanted to know if Arthur had said something.”
“Oh,” said Bob. He glanced over at Olaf. “Yeah, it was probably nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
FIFTEEN
Mike heaved the futon up and let it drop down onto the frame. The metal pipes rattled. He tossed the pillow at one end, unwrapped the blanket, and called the bed done, for now.
The furniture filled the space just enough so it didn’t feel empty. He’d chosen bright appliances deliberately to add some color. The noise of the little fridge and the smell of leftover pizza gave it some life. He’d need to see if there were any spare roach traps, just in case the food attracted them.
The files were on the table now. They were still closed. He’d moved them there when he folded up the cot and pushed it over to the door.
He glanced at his phone. Not even ten o’clock. He was going to be up for another two hours. Maybe more.
Time to start earning his pay.
The geometry teacher at his school, Jack Casey, was a self-confessed alcoholic. Six years sober this summer. He’d told Mike about standing outside bars for half an hour, arguing with himself about going in for “just one drink.” He wasn’t afraid of drinking, he explained, he was afraid of not being able to stop. It was like a constant stress dream of driving and not being able to hit the brake pedal, no matter how many times he stomped his foot down.
Mike knew just what he meant.
He closed his eyes and took a few breaths to calm his nerves. He found the first report with his fingers. He opened the file and his eyes at the same time.
Mike flipped through the first report. Eight pages. Three and five had text on both sides. Plus notes on the inside cover. Signatures from Arthur, Olaf, and Neil on different pages.
The second report was nine pages. Two double-sided again. Page seven was folded on the upper left corner. The same three signatures.
The third report was eight pages. Four double-sided this time, although one was only three handwritten lines. There was a Post-it note on page six with two lines about processor power, signed with a capital J. Mike flagged the handwriting as Jamie’s.
The fourth report…
The fifth report…
The sixth report…
He opened each file, turned each page over, and set it aside. It gave him a steady pace of about two files every minute. His mind worked slower than his eyes took things in, but not by much. Patterns began to develop. He arranged the reports in mental rows and columns. He called up the reports Reggie had given him, the ones he’d read on the flight out to San Diego, and his chart expanded into three dimensions.
The fourteenth report was the first one to not include Arthur’s signature.
The fifteenth report…
The sixteenth…
The seventeenth…
There were scattered pictures and diagrams in the reports. Mike constructed a mental model of the main floor with the Albuquerque Door components. He labeled many of them and began tagging them in relation to the different files. He’d need the maintenance logs, too. He could ask Arthur for them in the morning.
The twentieth report…
The twenty-first…
The twenty-second…
The twenty-third report had an extra two pages from Jamie about speeding up calculation times. The forty-second was signed by Sasha instead of Neil. The fifty-first had a coffee-cup stain on the upper right corner. The brown ring matched the circumference of Jamie’s oversized mug.
The black ants and red ants roamed free in his mind. Thought and memory. Huginn and Muninn in Norse mythology. They charged at each other and became a seething mass of red and black static. Images and patterns rose and fell in the cloud as Mike made more and more and more connections.
The fifty-seventh…
The fifty-eighth…
The fifty-ninth…
The sixty-third report had a note in the margins from Neil. Bugs were getting into the machinery. Actual bugs. He’d found a few dozen of them in the Site B rings. Mike had never heard of green cockroaches before, and he wondered if they were native to San Diego.
The sixty-fourth…
The sixty-fifth…
The sixty-sixth…
SIXTEEN
Arthur found Mike waiting outside his office door. “Good morning,” he said. “Waiting long?”
Mike shook his head.
“Good.”
“Sorry to ambush you like this,” Mike said, “but I had some questions for you.”
Arthur nodded and unlocked the door. “Of course. I’ll answer whatever I can, within the limits of our…”
Mike waved his hand in the air as they stepped into the office. “I know,” he said. “You have a contract with DARPA. I’m not asking about any of that.”
“What can I do for you, then?”
“Do you mind if I close the door?”
Arthur’s face hardened. It hadn’t been soft to begin with. “Why?”
“You’re the one who’s big on keeping secrets.”
He looked at Mike for a moment, then nodded at the door. Mike gave it a nudge and it swung shut, closing with a click.
“So,” Arthur said, “what’s this about? Another problem with the maintenance schedule?”
“Funny you should ask,” said Mike. “At first, I thought this was a big embezzlement scam.”
Arthur paused halfway down into his chair. He glared at Mike. “What?”
“Well, half embezzlement, half kickbacks. I’m not sure if there’s a legal distinction there.”
“You’d better have something to back up these accusations,” said Arthur, “because I can assure you being friends with the director won’t protect you from—”
“All the maintenance you’ve got them doing on the floor,” Mike said. “Changing tanks and couplings and everything else. But nothing needs to be replaced. You’re just switching out one set of working components for another one. Replacing gas tanks that are still three-quarters full.”
Arthur shook his head. “All this because they replaced a leaky coupling.”
“It wasn’t leaking,” Mike said.
“No offense,” Arthur said, “but how would you know?”
“Because I was watching
when you turned it on the other day. There wasn’t a leak.”
“You might’ve missed it. We were both up—”
In Mike’s mind, yesterday’s experiment played out again frame by frame, a procession of black ants carrying pictures. He watched through the windows of the control room and in his peripheral vision he could see three different camera views of the main floor on monitors. Two cameras covered the coupling. He watched it play out again four times, focusing on a different part of the image with each repetition.
There was nothing coming from the connector.
“—in the booth.”
Mike tapped the side of his head. “If it happened, I couldn’t miss it.”
Arthur simmered in his chair.
Mike sat down in the chair across from the physicist. “In a way, the fact that you only use paper for your work would help out a lot in something like that. Everything gets entered piecemeal into a Washington computer, so no one’s ever seeing all of it at once, except a few interns who’ve probably gone numb from the mindless labor.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“I think,” Arthur said, “I should have a talk with Mr. Magnus.” He reached for his desk phone.
Mike shook his head. “Don’t bother. I said I thought it was an embezzlement scam, but it’s not. I talked with Reggie first thing this morning, Washington time. I asked for copies of your budget for the past two years. It’s shrunk over the past six quarters.”
“I know, believe me.”
“I also went back over the budget, taking into account the idea that you’re just recycling the same components, and everything lines up.”
“That must’ve been some impressive math.”
Mike shrugged. “You also have an out-of-date laptop and you drive a cheap car.”
“It’s not that cheap.”
“It is for someone stealing tens of millions. Just the fact that you automatically think of a Dodge as a not-cheap car tells me you don’t have piles of cash in your mattress.”
“So you decided to dramatically announce that we’re not stealing millions from DARPA?”
“No. I wanted to make it clear to you that I’m not going to jump the gun and incriminate you or your work.”
“But you called Magnus.”
“I called him and asked for the budgets. He sent them. That’s all.”
