by Draker, Paul
The kid who answered sounded half awake. “Yes, I know the damn fence is shorting out again—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Go wake up the base commander and get the MPs. Do it right now.”
“Who is this?”
“Don’t speak. Listen.” I checked the time. “You’ve got maybe forty minutes before the tribal police arrive. Send the MPs to the northwest corner of the lab building.”
“The DARPA one? Near the geyser?”
“Yeah. There’s a dead guy outside the fence, getting the full sauna treatment, and he’s probably one of ours.”
CHAPTER 27
Back in the lab, I grabbed my MacBook and thrust my way into the server room. I sped between the curving rows of computer racks and dashed up the metal steps onto the catwalk that wound around tower 2—the tower housing all of Frankenstein’s hot-running networking switches and hardware. My high-tops banged against the aluminum grille flooring as I circled the catwalk and pounded up the steps to the next level.
Forty seconds later, I stood at the highest section of catwalk, five stories up. The server room remained empty below me. I tossed my laptop onto the top of the eight-foot-tall server rack beside me, grabbed the upper crossbar, and pulled myself up to the rim.
Standing balanced on the nineteen-inch-wide rim, I looked down into the center of the cylindrical tower. Cool air blew against my face, coming up through the circular void that dropped six stories through the tower’s tapered hourglass structure. The shaft continued through the wide gap in the floor to bottom out sixty feet below in the nest of network cables, high-voltage power lines, and cooling pipes that made up the supercomputer’s understory.
Outside, a few minutes earlier, Blake’s reaction had abruptly turned emotional. He had swung from disbelief to horror to depression with surprising speed, and Cassie had her hands full keeping him from doing anything stupid. Leaving the two of them alone together made me a little nervous. But I knew the MPs were on their way, so this was the only opportunity I would get.
I sat down cross-legged on the tower rim, invisible from below, and opened the lid of my MacBook.
I had a limited window of time—thirty minutes, tops—before Pyramid Lake turned into a five-ring circus. There was a lot I needed to get done before that happened.
Tunneling through Blake’s compromised workstations, I launched a brute-force attack on the encryption of the administrative subnet. The hum from Frankenstein’s server fans drifted up from below, rising in volume all around me as I focused more total processing power than most first-world countries could muster, onto cracking the encryption that protected McNulty’s computer.
Frankenstein’s metallic voice rumbled through the tower’s structure, rising above the loud whoosh of air. “Trevor, why are you agitated?”
“Don’t talk to me,” I said. “I’m not here right now.”
McNulty had signed the energy-efficient lighting requisition a month ago, and I still had the e-mail attachment. I brought up a digital version in Photoshop and used the trackpad to carefully cut out his signature. I faded the background to transparent and free-warped the image of the signature so it wouldn’t be identical to the source version.
In another window, I brought up the digital copy of my recent GPU-cluster upgrade requisition form. Nine million dollars of my approved grant money—Frankenstein’s money—was sitting idle in an account, blocked indefinitely by the lack of McNulty’s signature.
To help my daughter, Frankenstein needed that extra processing power right now.
I pasted McNulty’s signature into place, alpha-blended its edges, and tweaked the image file headers to recalculate checksums, hiding my manipulation.
An alert window popped up on my screen: McNulty’s computer had been breached. I root-kitted it with a few quick keystrokes so I would have full remote control, then brought up McNulty’s email account on my screen.
Scrolling through until I found the last requisition email he had sent, I modified it and attached the nine-million-dollar upgrade I had just signed for him. Using a packet sniffer, I changed the time stamps on the headers to eight p.m. yesterday and sent the e-mail on its way.
Filtering through the reams of other pointless administrative e-mails in McNulty’s inbox, I found one from the VAR reseller who would supply our GPU-processor boards. I had called them last week to expedite the order, which sat ready for delivery but currently on hold, awaiting a final email from McNulty to release it.
I sent them that e-mail from McNulty now, also tweaking its time stamps to eight p.m. yesterday.
There was nothing I could do about the actual time the e-mails would arrive. But at least now it would appear as if they had been sent last night, then got delayed for a few hours by an intermediate server. Confusing the issue.
Rubbing my head with the fingertips of one hand, I took a breath and stopped to think a bit. I was fully aware that what I had just done could turn into a big problem for me later. But I couldn’t worry about myself right now.
Amy overrode every other consideration.
Still, I had done all I could for her at this point. I could focus on less important things for a while. What else did I need to do?
I hadn’t killed McNulty. But someone had, that was for damn sure. I recalled the haunted expression on his face when I’d surprised him at his desk—that lost, doomed look. The phone forgotten in his hand.
Who had he been talking to, just before I came in?
In hindsight, as soon as I’d seen that face I should have dragged McNulty back to my lab on some pretext. Five minutes in front of Frankenstein, with me asking a few pointed questions, and I would have had the answers.
“Trevor?” Cassie’s voice floated up from ground level. “Are you in here?”
I ignored her.
Had McNulty died because of something related to his work at Pyramid Lake? Or was it unrelated—a problem from his personal life? The murder had been deliberate, the placement and display of his corpse carefully staged for maximum impact here at the base.
“Where are you?” Cassie called, closer now. “I don’t want to break my promise by asking Frankenstein…”
“Up here,” I yelled. “I’m coming down.”
I set an rsync running, to copy the entire contents of McNulty’s hard drive to a hidden sector on Blake’s workstation. Then I closed my laptop and stood up.
Cassie’s anxious face peered up at me from five stories below. “That looks dangerous,” she called. “What are you doing up there? You should come outside with me.”
I jumped down from the tower rim to the highest level of catwalk. “Tribal police arrive yet?” I asked.
She nodded. “They’re calling the tribal chair right now. The MPs are talking to them, but they have to wait for some folks from NCIS. Washoe County Sheriff’s Department is here, too, and the FBI arrived by helicopter ten minutes ago. Base security is keeping all of them out of the Top Secret buildings and labs. BIA is on its way. Everybody’s on the phone with their bosses.”
I circled my way down the tower to join her.
“The geyser is on sacred ground,” she said. “No Paiute would ever desecrate our ancestral heritage like that.”
Cassie’s comment seemed irrelevant at first, unless she was trying to exonerate herself, which I doubted. But then I thought about it a little and understood what she was getting at.
If McNulty’s killer was Paiute, then murder on the reservation was a federal crime, not a state one. In either case, the tribal police would assist, but until the ethnicity of the murderer was known, that meant neither the feds nor the Washoe County Sheriff’s could step aside to let the other take over the investigation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs would have to mediate. And because the crime scene violated sacred ground, the tribal council would insist on greater than usual authority over proceedings.
The situation was actually even more complicated than that.
McNulty’s dual role as DARPA’s Navy liaison meant he was technicall
y a civilian employee of the Navy. He was base personnel, which mean NCIS—Navy Crime Investigative Services—would automatically be involved, even if the actual murder happened off base. But the hole in the fence raised the strong possibility McNulty had been killed inside our perimeter. The likelihood of an on-base murder kept the MPs—the military police—at the forefront of the investigation, too.
“Jurisdiction on this is going to be an absolute clusterfuck,” I said.
“I doubt that’s an accident,” Cassie said. “Either.”
I followed her out, thinking about the spying OctoRotors I had chased at five in the morning and seen disappear into Kate’s lab. About Blake’s uncharacteristic early arrival, and Roger’s, too—I’d spotted the Beast in the lot when I checked for McNulty’s car.
“No,” I said. “Nothing about this is an accident.”
CHAPTER 28
Twenty-odd people stood in scattered clumps near the fence. Segregated by uniform, they spoke quietly among themselves, like groups of kids on the playground after an ugly fight sent someone to the hospital.
Four tribal police stood outside the chain-link barrier, creating a cordon around the geyser. Red and blue flashers flickered from two tribal police cars parked nearby. Three sheriff’s deputies were outside the fence, too, talking to the tribal cops. I spotted my new buddy from the shooting range, Evan Peterson.
The group of men in dark suits on the base side of the fence were probably the Feds, and the nearby men and women in blue suits were NCIS. The MPs had cordoned off the area around the fence hole and stood at parade rest with impassive faces.
Everyone seemed to be waiting—just standing around, costing the taxpayer a of couple thousand dollars an hour. And doing nothing while the upside-down dead guy’s legs waved lazily in the geyser’s spray like a dancing windsock man in front of some car dealership.
It pissed me off. Even McNulty deserved more respect than this.
Triangulating the impatient glances from the different groups, I followed their collective gaze toward a cluster of men gathered at the corner of the parking lot. I headed in that direction.
Cassie followed without a word. A tall, fit native guy in his fifties, wearing a tan blazer, jeans, and cowboy boots, stepped away from the others to meet her.
She pulled ahead of me to embrace him. The tribal chairman, I figured.
He returned her hug with what looked like genuine affection, deep lines crinkling around his eyes and in his cheeks. “I’m so sorry you had to come home to this, Cassandra,” he said.
“Just tell me how we can help.” She turned toward me. “Uncle Jim, this is Trevor Lennox, my project co-lead at DARPA.”
“James Barry,” he said. His eyes narrowed slightly as he shook my hand in a powerful grip. He looked like a no-bullshit kind of guy, and I wondered how much Cassie had told him about me. Judging by his expression, he had already heard about my little misunderstanding with Tank-Top Ray.
“Aren’t you supposed to have some kind of authority?” I asked him. “They’re all standing around looking at you while a dude slow-cooks in there.”
“We’re waiting for an interagency MOU,” he said. “A memorandum of understanding, to establish—”
“I know what a MOU is, Jim. But who is actually in charge here?”
“That would be me, Dr. Lennox.” Another man detached himself from the group and wandered over to join us. “Ronald Bennett.”
“Trevor,” I said.
Bennett nodded to Cassie also. “Dr. Winnemucca.” He wore a tan blazer and slacks, and a surprisingly ugly shirt—rust orange and slightly glossy. Maybe a wife’s sad attempt to dress him hip. To his credit, at least he wasn’t wearing a tie. He held out two business cards to us.
I took one, glanced at it, and had to resist the urge to crumple it and toss it aside in annoyance—the bozo brigade was here.
“Department of Homeland Security?” I said. “Give me a fucking break. Who invited you clowns to this party?”
Bennett was definitely ex-military. He had the look, from his parade-rest stance to his iron gray razor haircut. He had probably put in his twenty years, then started a second career as a bureaucrat, on top of his military retirement package.
I watched his jaw harden.
“Dr. Lennox, surely you of all people understand the sensitive nature of DARPA’s mission here at Pyramid Lake.”
“Yeah, I know why we’re here,” I said. “What I don’t understand is why you’re here.”
He gestured toward the fence and started walking. “Follow me.”
“Seriously?” I asked James Barry. “Homeland Security is taking point?”
The tribal chairman shared a resigned smile with Cassie. “Our people lost the battle for homeland security a hundred and fifty-three years ago, so we’re the wrong ones to ask. But it does look like the county coroner has arrived as well.” He started after Bennett, and the rest of the group followed.
Bennett pushed through the cordon of MPs and led us through the hole in the fence. “Dr. Lennox—”
“Trevor,” I said.
“You reported the victim to base authorities,” he said. “I’m curious about the timing. How did you happen to be here at”—he checked his watch—”six a.m. more or less?”
“I had a lot of work.”
“What were you working on?”
“That’s classified,” I said.
“I hold a current TS clearance.”
“The ‘C’ in a TS/SCI means ‘compartmented,’ in case you weren’t aware,” I said. “Surely you of all people understand the sensitive nature of what we do here.”
“Can you describe the nature of your DARPA work to me in general terms, then?” he asked.
“Defense. Advanced. Research. Projects.”
We joined the wide circle surrounding the geyser. Warm sprinkles drizzled over us as the wind shifted. The plume of water made the dead man’s projecting legs dance at the top of the rocky tufa cone. They flopped in grotesque kicks as if he were still alive and trying to swim deeper into the geyser.
The coroner and his assistant spread a plastic tarp on the ground nearby. They were getting ready to pull him out.
Roger threw me a desultory salute from fifty feet around the circle, where he stood with a bunch of Navy personnel. Closer by, Kate’s eyes met mine and widened. She turned to whisper something to one of her team members, pointing me out.
Blake was seated listlessly on the ground thirty feet away, his back to the geyser and a cigarette in his hand. An MP crouched alongside, speaking to him. I couldn’t hear their conversation, because Bennett was yapping in my ear again.
“I respect your commitment to security, Dr. Lennox, but I’m going to need more cooperation from you,” he said. “I’m sure your program manager would agree with me.”
“Probably,” I said.
He looked around the circle. “Perhaps I should speak to him or her first, then.”
“Be my guest.” I watched the coroner and his assistant, wearing heavy forearm-length rubber gloves and averting their faces from the hot spray, each grab one of the corpse’s ankles. Together they dragged him out of the hole and onto the plastic.
I was right. It was McNulty.
I waved Bennett forward, toward the steaming corpse. “Let me know what he says.”
CHAPTER 29
Wisps of steam rose from McNulty’s peeling, fish-white hands and bathtub-wrinkled fingers. He lay faceup on the tarp, his forearms raised defensively above him, clawing at the sky—frozen in place by rigor mortis.
His purple-mottled face was bloated to twice its normal size, his nose indistinguishable, the press of swollen flesh folding his ear like a fat guy’s. One milky, bulging eye stared like a poached egg; the other had burst, leaving shreds of tissue dangling from the empty socket.
Cassie made a faint noise and turned away. I didn’t blame her. But I couldn’t help staring at the sight even as I felt my stomach tighten. A chorus of gasps and other
muted reactions rose around us, followed by the hushed murmur of shocked conversation.
McNulty’s puffy, discolored cheek sagged, shifting with the pull of gravity. Then it sloughed away, splitting the skin and separating under its own weight, like overcooked stew meat, to reveal clenched teeth and a bare strip of jawbone beneath. The flesh inside the split was boiled lavender-white all the way through. He had been in the geyser for a long time.
Several of his teeth had broken off, too. The degree of agony that could make someone clench his jaw hard enough to do that wasn’t something I wanted to think about.
My own jaw tightened in helpless rage. McNulty was an asshole, true, but he had been my co-worker for the past four years. Now these Homeland Security bozos were going to fumble around with their MOUs and waste everyone’s time while whoever killed him got away with it.
Bennett cleared his throat. “The victim was your supervisor?”
“Shut up,” I said. “I need a minute.” I took a deep breath and looked at McNulty more closely. The knot in my stomach hardened as I stared at the boiled turkey that had been his head, realizing what kind of damage I was really looking at.
Across from me, Kate’s cheeks were blanched with shock. Her wide-eyed gaze was focused on the corpse, too.
“Why is his face all purple like that?” she called to the coroner, a white-haired guy.
He looked up from where he knelt beside the corpse. “That’s normal,” he said, sounding annoyed. “He was upside down, and after death, blood settles in the lowest part of the body. But let’s wait for the autopsy results.”
I glanced at Bennett beside me and spotted the momentary lift then tightening of eyebrows, followed by an even briefer crows-feet wrinkle at the corner of his eye before his face relaxed into neutrality again: surprise, anger, and then approval at the coroner’s carefully chosen words.
Neither of these guys was dumb. They were both seeing exactly the same thing I was seeing, although they didn’t want to advertise it—yet.
