Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  “You trust them.”

  “I even checked Rand’s story out, just to be on the safe side. So what is this about? Do you have any idea?”

  “I’m pretty sure Jace is playing around with cloaking tech. You’ve heard of that?”

  “I’ve heard the term. What is it?”

  “Does Rand have a 4G phone?”

  “I think so.”

  “Ask him if we can get Wi-Fi.”

  Rand followed Jolie back into the cabin. “I can’t get any bars here, but if we go out on the lake, we should be able to.”

  “Let’s do that, then.”

  It wasn’t long before they had 4G. Landry suggested using the phone as a hot spot. Rand went into his Wi-Fi settings on the laptop and connected them to the Internet. “What am I looking for?”

  “Google ‘cloaking technology,’” Landry said. “Select ‘Images’ on the toolbar.”

  The screen filled with photographs. A woman in her living room, cut in half by the couch she should be sitting on and the carpet where she would rest her feet. The top part of her there, the bottom part, gone. A van with its midsection gone, replaced by bridge pillars. A man, standing in a field, only his legs and his boots showing. A tank driving through the desert, kicking up dust—the entire back section gone, as if it had been cut in half. Many of the images—other than the photo of the tank—were clumsy and awkward.

  “Looks like a stunt to me,” Jolie said. “Freakish.”

  Landry pointed at the legs of the man. “The secret is to fill in the rest of these people and vehicles with your eye. Where would the man’s body be?”

  “He’s like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.” Jolie squinted at the photo.

  Rand cleared his throat. “This kind of stuff gives me a headache. I think I’ll go do a little fishing. Later I can swing by the marina and get us something to eat. You can call in your orders to me around dark, okay?”

  He stepped down into his boat, pulled the cord on the motor, and pulled away from the Bayliner. The sound soon faded to a faint whine as he disappeared past an outcropping of rock and grass.

  Jolie said, “He doesn’t want to step in this.”

  “Smart.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You already stepped into this big-time when Jace Denboer showed you his magic suit. It could be he’s too dumb to know that, so let’s hope it stops there.”

  “How’d he land on this? You think Daddy gave him his Magic Car?”

  “Could be.”

  “Miko Denboer works with the federal government. But I thought it was agricultural. He has one of those farms.”

  “People are into all sorts of things. They don’t need to be connected.”

  Jolie said, “So give me the short version of what this is about. Be gentle—I almost flunked physics in high school.”

  The long version would have taken too much time to explain—he’d be at it all night, and while he’d made a study of the technology, he probably knew only one percent of what really went on. The long version probably wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, anyway, since the technology kept morphing.

  He told Jolie that there was a standard stealth tech for hard objects—for military hardware, aircraft, and boats. The Stealth Bomber was the most obvious example. These “hard objects” were coated to fool radar and sonar. To accomplish this, the military used a special kind of paint. “Write this down so you won’t forget it: carbon nanotube stealth paint.”

  “‘Carbon nanotube stealth paint,’” Jolie said. “Is that anything like Batman’s decoder ring?”

  “Batman doesn’t have a decoder ring.”

  “You sure about that?” She grinned at him, but her smile faltered. “Seriously, carbon nanotube stealth paint? Who comes up with this stuff? Is this pie-in-the-sky stuff?”

  “No—you’ve already seen it. On Jace’s car. Ultra black.”

  “Ultra.”

  “Blacker than black. As you said, his car seemed to swallow light, not reflect it.”

  “It looks like shit.”

  Landry grinned. That was Jolie—no sugarcoating it. “The paint might look like shit to you, but there are microcrevices and pinholes inside all those layers, to ‘eat light.’ Multiple coats of paint, building one on top of the other so it’s harder to see at night. You said it looked like a chunk of charcoal. Powdery, porous—”

  “Ugly.”

  “But also, hard to see.”

  Jolie nodded. She’d known that better than anybody.

  Landry explained that the big players focused their military and scientific research on “metamaterial”: the blackest black imaginable. This could render an object virtually invisible, depending on the circumstances.

  Jolie had seen it in action, seen it for herself. Or rather, she hadn’t seen it. “Nice trick.”

  “It has its uses, especially in the military. C-130s painted Spectre Black are good for flying at night, because they’re hard to spot. Same with the Stealth Bomber. Three things make the Stealth Bomber virtually invisible. One is the paint job. Another is altitude—they’re too high up to be seen. And third, the shape. The Stealth Bomber is built to cheat radar—it’s configured like a diamond with many facets. The facets break up what would normally be flat surfaces on the aircraft. With a regular plane, its flat wing surface makes it detectable to radar—large points of the fuselage bounce back to the radar center. Radar can’t reflect off the Stealth very well, if at all. The military—ours and everyone else’s in the world—know that stealth is going to be more and more of a commodity as things change.

  “Look at submarines. The biggest Achilles’ heel for a submarine back in the old days was the noise. A submarine’s worst enemy was the enemy’s sonar. So they quieted their subs down, came up with nanocoding to foil sonar. Instead of engine noise or propeller noise, they used a worm drive. A corkscrew that propelled the sub smoothly, and quietly, through the water.”

  Nanotechnology was adapting and changing dramatically, every new adjustment speeding the technology forward, and farther. This was mostly due to the military.

  He told her about miniature netting.

  The netting was so small it couldn’t be handled by human hands. A strand was half the width of a strand of human hair. It could be used to support certain kinds of material, so that you could affix that material to an object. Landry compared it to sticky-note paper. You peeled it off and pasted it on. Landry said, “You can manhandle it, roll it out on the roof of a house or the side of the car. The netting is what holds everything together—it transfers electricity. It’s a conductor. It transfers electricity from the cameras to the projectors. Whatever it is you need to apply. Infinitesimal. Say you spray the adhesive on the side of the car—it’s heat-activated. You can roll it out, just the way you want it, use a heat gun, warm it up, fuse it to the car’s surface. Like clear coat. Clear polyurethane. Nanowire with one or two coats.”

  “That’s not the same thing as what Jace has, right? He’s just got the black paint.”

  “You’re right. It’s not the same. Different technology, same goal. That’s where technology is going.”

  “I don’t understand what Jace did. How can you see through an object if the person is standing right there? How can you see right through him?”

  “You don’t.”

  “Then how do you make it seem like you do?”

  Landry said, “Remember how tiny everything is. So tiny it’s just this side of nonexistent.”

  “I get that.”

  “The netting, the adhesive, the things that hold it together, that’s the key.”

  “To what?”

  “To the material you want to put on the netting. In this case, it’s an infinitesimally small camera placed side by side with an infinitesimally small projector. Multiplied exponent
ially. Receiving and transmitting constantly.”

  “Like two beads placed next to each other,” Jolie said. “Rows and rows of them?”

  Jolie was a quick study.

  “Like that,” Landry said, “Only these beads are too tiny to be visible to the human eye. Picture two infinitesimally small beads, one next to the other. One bead is the camera. The second bead is the projector. Repeat the pattern, on and on—a camera next to a projector next to a camera next to a projector.”

  “That’s nanotechnology?”

  “One kind of nanotechnology. ‘Nano’ means tiny.”

  Jolie got it. “So—does this mean the cameras take pictures of what’s behind you, and the projectors display them for you to see? Say you have a van parked outside, and behind that there’s desert and mountains. If the van is wearing the cameras and projectors, the projectors are relaying an image of the desert, right? Not the van. Is that right? That’s what you’d see. A projection. Like a hologram?”

  Landry thought of the man who walked past him near the bridge. “Something like that.”

  “Wouldn’t those cameras and projectors have to be on both sides of the object?” Jolie added. “So the cameras could record what’s behind the object?”

  “Yes.”

  “Judging from these photos on Google Images, they’ve got a ways to go. They’re not very good.”

  “No,” Landry said. “But look at the difference between the Wright brothers’ plane and the Stealth Bomber. Technology is always moving. Technology evolves.”

  “This is what Jace’s father’s involved in?”

  “Could be.”

  “Could be?”

  Landry shrugged. “Maybe Jace got his hands on the Camaro another way.”

  “How?”

  “Got me.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Go black.”

  “If you mean go into hiding, I did go black.”

  “How many people helped you get here?”

  “Just two. Jerry Boam—his actual name is Jerry Bartlett, by the way—and Rand. I called you because I thought—”

  “You have to go.”

  Her eyes turned stony. Two gray-blue marbles in her head. “Go where?” she asked. Her voice low, quiet. Contained.

  “You think you’re safe here? You think they’re not looking for you? Jace did you a big favor, showing you that car. Now it’s all out in the open. But you know what? Even if you don’t know much, it’s possible—fifty-fifty—that they believe you know too much.”

  “Because of a car?”

  “And Dan Atwood.”

  She said nothing.

  “You found him at the agricultural farm with the poplars. Isn’t that Miko Denboer’s farm?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t—”

  “They came after you once.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. He could feel her anger. It was a living thing, writhing in the air between them like an electric wire.

  Jolie looked away and remained quiet. It made Landry want to tell her how he admired her, how tough she was. He had a list of reasons, all logical, for her to stand down. She was a known quantity in the town. And she’d already gone on the run. But he didn’t say any of it. She would have to come to her own conclusion.

  Whatever it was, he would deal with it.

  At last she said, “I need to think about this.”

  “Think fast.”

  Landry heard the whine of a boat on the water—they looked at each other. The sound changed to a drone, the boat coming closer. Landry grabbed his .32 Colt. “You stay hidden, just in case,” he said. The gun was small enough to fit inside his hand. He held it back and slightly behind his thigh and went above.

  It was Rand McNally, holding up his branch with the blue underwear tied on. He threw the rope and Landry secured the boat. There was a grease-spotted paper bag on the bench seat behind him—their dinner—but Rand left it there. Landry could tell by McNally’s face that something was wrong.

  Not just wrong.

  Devastating.

  Jolie materialized beside him.

  Rand’s face was drawn in the last red light. Landry could see the sun behind him, its eye almost closed, a few plum-dark clouds above. It was like a snapshot.

  A snapshot of the moment when something had changed, drastically.

  Landry looked at Jolie.

  She was a cop, with a cop’s sixth sense.

  She knew it was something bad.

  Landry gave Rand a hand onto the Bayliner. Rand clutched a newspaper in his fist. His face was pale. Stricken.

  “Bad news,” he said. “Really bad news.”

  “What happened?” Jolie demanded.

  “You live on Turner Avenue, right?”

  He handed Landry the paper. It was today’s edition. One photo took up the front page above the fold. Blackened timbers, smoke, a firefighter traipsing through a puddle. Landry stared at the address, read it over three times. It was her house—burned to the ground.

  Chapter 14

  It had been a half hour and Jolie had still not said a word. She sat at the dinette, hands clasped so hard her knuckles were white.

  Landry said, “Tom probably got to them first.”

  “Why doesn’t he answer?”

  “He might be away from his phone.” Landry didn’t explain that the man who had flown him here was very low tech, despite his hours in the cockpit. Tom was hard to reach, because he wanted it that way. He had an abundance of caution. Landry got the feeling he let his calls pile up before answering them.

  “You’re sure he came and got them?”

  “I told him to do it ASAP.”

  “There’s an alarm system—”

  “That was no problem.”

  She nodded. “I guess not. So you think he got them.”

  “I think so. But I’m not sure.”

  “Try your friend in San Clemente again.”

  Landry tried his friend Louise. This time the call went through—to voice mail. He left a message, asking her to call him as soon as possible.

  Jolie said, “So he came and got them and he flew them to your friend, Louise . . . How does she figure in?”

  “She lives next door. I can count on her.”

  “That’s good, then.”

  Landry nodded. What he didn’t say: he thought it was about fifty-fifty at best.

  “They’re trying to get me to come out of hiding. That’s what they’re doing. That they would do that to two helpless . . . They—”

  She pulled the laptop to her and called the article up online. There was a photo of the house—burned timbers, part of her carport standing, firemen, hoses, water running down the street, everything in black and white. Now she saw it in living color.

  She closed her eyes. “I hope your friend Tom got them.”

  Landry read through the article. There wasn’t much there. Nothing to indicate there were people dead in the house. Nothing to indicate that there were pets, either.

  “We need to make sure who and what we’re dealing with. Who have you had run-ins with, besides members of your own department and Jace Denboer?”

  “The sheriff, the undersheriff, some of the people I work with—at least one of my fellow detectives. I couldn’t believe the corruption. It’s all out in the open, like confiscating the cars. Waldrup clamped down on my investigation into Dan Atwood’s death.”

  “How’d he do that?”

  “He kept giving me other stuff to do. Busywork. He buried me in it.”

  “Why?”

  “I included the Denboers in my investigation, since the kid was killed and buried on their farm.”

  “Did you interview Miko Denboer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?�
�

  “The sheriff said it wasn’t necessary. He made that clear.”

  PART TWO

  Chapter 15

  Jace Denboer reached up to take the joint from Carla’s fingers, sucked in the smoke, and held it in as long as he could. On the exhale, he closed his eyes and smiled.

  “You look like a choirboy,” Carla said.

  Jace knew he had an angelic smile. It had saved his ass many times. All his life, he’d been able to turn it on and off any time he felt like it. He’d been told a hundred times how lucky he was, how he’d been on the receiving end of the good looks on both his mother’s and father’s sides.

  Those good looks pretty much eased him down any path he chose to take.

  Good looks ran in the family. Look at his half sister. Carla was the hottest-looking bird in New Mexico. He liked to call women “birds” because a friend of his was English and that’s what he’d called them. It sounded different from what his other friends said, and he liked to differentiate himself from the crowd.

  And Carla was the only bird who could keep up with him, sexually and in every other way. The only one who was like him on this whole, fucked-up planet.

  They were very similar, except that she was older than him by three years. And she was a woman, not a man. “Big differences there,” he muttered. “Vive la différence.”

  Carla finished pulling up her skirt, concentrating hard as she fiddled with the clasp at her waistband. She’d already covered up those awesome boobs with the lace bra, the one with the front catch he’d had a hard time fumbling open. She took another toke from him and sat down on the edge of the bed to pull on her boots.

  Her mind seemed far away.

  She spent less and less time with him. He wondered if he should feel insulted.

  Outside, the lawn mower droned. He glanced out the window by the bed and watched as Hector Canazales, the groundskeeper, rode the mower across the huge lawn. The lawn didn’t look real. It was as green and flat as the felt on a billiard table, shaded by royal palms on one side and a gigantic Aleppo pine on the other. The Aleppo pine had been planted when he was born. It was his mother’s idea. It was the last decent thing she’d ever done for him.