Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  “Some nefarious MHD research? No sign of any magnetohydrodynamics in the lab today.”

  “Somewhere else, then.”

  But he had stopped listening. A mental Rubik’s cube spun and clicked, all six faces resolving suddenly to uniform colors. So, that’s why . . .

  “Jon? Hello?” Marianna was talking to him. He blinked and looked at her. “You went away there for a minute,” she said.

  Knox was opening his mouth to respond when Sasha came up and slapped him on the back. “Hey, lovebirds! Time for lunch! Must eat, keep strength up!”

  Rusalka’steered for the main channel of the Patapsco and gathered speed. It was past one by the time she rounded Swan Point and entered the broads of the Chesapeake proper. All through the afternoon she plied the calm, sun-flecked waters of this, the largest inland tidal body on the Eastern seaboard, the drowned nether valley of the Susquehanna.

  The long day waned, the slow moon climbed, the last streaks of sunset faded from the sky. It was nearing midnight and moondown when they passed beneath the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at the mouth of the great estuary. On the Virginia coast the Cape Henry light gleamed and was gone.

  From his vantage up on main deck Knox watched a small motor launch pull alongside in the dark, matching speed and course with her giant sister. An access door swung open midway along Rusalka’s shimmering flank and a Jacob’s ladder clattered down to the smaller craft. Oblique angle and dim blue light made it hard to be certain, but Knox could have sworn that someone, something, just a darker blot against the general darkness really, was clambering up hand over hand, toward the open hatchway. By the time he’d rubbed his eyes, whoever it was, was gone.

  Ship’s bells chimed eight times: midnight. The Bay pilot, job done, descended the rope ladder to the deck of his launch, then turned to flip a salute at the bridge high above in the starlight. Dancing its assigned measure in the stately old pavane of ships putting to sea, the pilotboat arced away from the great vessel and sped back toward the lights of home.

  Her gleaming bulk shuddered imperceptibly, her engines thrummed a deeper note, as Rusalka, alone now under the stars, made for the open sea.

  15 | Patterns

  “YOUR PARDON, COMRADE Director.” An intercom window popped V open on the wall-sized display, Merkulov’s squint-eyed, broad-featured face filled its frame. “You asked to be informed the moment Geladze arrived back on board.” The high-pitched, tremulous voice didn’t seem to go with the thick lips and pendulous jowls that produced it, as though Rusalka’s security chief were a badly-dubbed character in a foreign movie.

  Arkady Grishin looked up at the interruption, pushed back from his console. “Thank you, Vadim Vasiliyevich. Please send him to see me immediately.”

  “Very good, Comrade Director. You may expect him at the headquarters suite in five minutes.”

  “No, not the headquarters. The hour is late. I will see him here, in the Residence.”

  A look of surprise flashed across Merkulov’s fat face as the window closed. The security chief himself had never been invited to Grishin’s private quarters. Few ever were.

  Russians by nature abhor an information vacuum, and GEI’s staff and crew were no exception. At any given time there were half a dozen rumors circulating as to what sybaritic splendors lay behind the case-hardened steel portal at Rusalka’ s heart. None even came close to the truth.

  Grishin’s eyes roved around the blank off-white walls and Spartan furnishings of his quasi-monastic cell. A replica, complete to the smallest detail, of his old office out in “The Woods,” as KGB Foreign Intelligence’s suburban headquarters had been known. As such it offered a welcome refuge when the wretched excess reigning elsewhere throughout Rusalka began to cloy. And more than a refuge: a place to remember one’s beginnings.

  And one’s ends. His gaze came to rest on the room’s sole decorative touch, an outsized portrait of former Chairman of the State Security Committee, the late General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov. A small brass plaque set into its frame identified the painting as having been presented to one Mstislav Platonovich Gromov, Major KGB, for meritorious service and exemplary commitment to duty.

  The artist had captured the deep-set, watchful eyes well enough that they seemed to demand such service, such commitment, still.

  Ah, Yuri Vladimirovich! We shall redeem the faith you reposed in us. As you shall redeem ours.

  The heavy steel door slid back to admit the other Yuri, Geladze. Rusalka’s master computer had tracked his movements by the radio-frequency locator badge he wore, just as it tracked the movements of everyone else aboard the vessel. Almost everyone else. It was the two exceptions that had occasioned this late-night meeting.

  “Welcome back, Yuri. I trust you had a pleasant flight?”

  The Georgian just stood there, not deigning to respond. Unless that noncommittal grunt counted as a response.

  Grishin ignored the impropriety. “Yes, well, it seems we have a small problem here. Unexpected American guests. Sasha took it upon himself to invite two friends to accompany us to Europe.” A keystroke brought up names and images on the wall-sized screen.

  Here, too, Yuri withheld comment, though he studied the faces on the wall with predatory intensity.

  “Foolish, of course.” Grishin shook his head. “Especially now that we are so close to our goal. I was going to have them put ashore again, when I saw they had already encountered Galina Mikhailovna.”

  “Ah,” Yuri said, as if much had just become clear. “Your orders?”

  “For the moment, only to watch. Much as he may deserve it, it would not do to upset Sasha unduly while his efforts remain essential to success. And, in any case, final disposition of this matter is better left until after Mr. Knox and Ms. Peterson have disembarked in London. There can be no point in calling unnecessary attention to ourselves.

  “Only watch, for now,” Grishin repeated. “After all, where can they go, what can they do that we will not learn of, here on Rusalka!”

  Rusalka’steamed on through the night, past the towering Chesapeake Light fourteen miles east of the mouth of the Bay. Knox watched its strobes, the last signal fires of land, disappearing astern.

  He leaned over the rail and peered down into the darkness. Breathed deeply, filling his nostrils with the sharp tang of brine. The vessel’s bow cleaved the dark water cleanly, churning out patches of sizzling, starlit froth that merged into her phosphorescent wake. The gentle rise and fall was mesmerizing, an ocean-going version of highway hypnosis. Come, drift along with me, the midnight sea murmured, just drift along and leave trouble far behind . . .

  “Jon?” A voice came from behind him. Trouble was back.

  He turned to see Marianna framed in the pantographic doorway. Or, almost see her.

  “Pm not sleepy yet,” she said. “Think I’ll take a turn around the deck before packing it in.”

  There was something subtly wrong about the way the light was playing around her backlit form. He rubbed his eyes and looked again as she walked up to him.

  “Don’t worry, your eyes aren’t going on you. This outfit is made out of a high-refraction nano-block synthetic. It’s hard to keep in focus.” She wriggled mock-coquettishly to illustrate, leaving moiré afterimages on his retinas. “Why, in some lights I’m practically invisible.”

  “How come we’re whispering?”

  “Force of habit. I already swept our staterooms and put the bugs to sleep.”

  “And the Catwoman get-up?”

  “Goes with the midnight-prowl thing.”

  “Want some company?”

  “Sorry, no.” She looked down and adjusted something on a belt studded with matte-black tool holsters, “Even two would be a crowd.”

  “In that case, how about a roadmap?”

  “Come again?”

  “Do you have any idea where you’re going, or what you’re looking for?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever they’ve got
Galina working on, wherever that is.”

  “In some sort of secret lab, right?”

  “Call it that. As to finding it, I was planning on running a standard reconnaissance sweep. Why? You’ve got a better idea?”

  “You hired a consultant. The least you can do is let him consult.”

  She half-smiled. “Be my guest—consult away.”

  “Step into my office.” Knox took her arm and escorted her back down the corridor to his stateroom. “You did say we’re okay to talk in here?”

  In response, Marianna knelt and pried out a section of the platform bed’s toekick base. She pointed to a silvery disk maybe half an inch in diameter clipped to the bedframe.

  “The walls have ears,” she said. “Japanese manufacture, wireless, self-contained. Fits anywhere, hears everything. Five in your room, one in mine.” Marianna made a small moue to show what she thought of being rated the secondary target.

  “All of them convinced we’ve gone to bed for the night. Like this.” She grinned and flipped the disk over to show a small black chip epoxied to the back. “A phase inverter: takes any incoming sound, computes the inverse wave, and pumps it out, a hundred-eighty degrees out of phase. The net output vector is white noise. It’s the same noise-cancellation technology that the Navy’s been installing for the deck crews on aircraft carriers.”

  She replaced the panel. “Can’t just leave it at that, of course. Grishin wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if he didn’t expect to hear something. So this base-unit in here . . .” She led him through the door connecting the two staterooms and into her bathroom, where she pointed out what looked like a compact WaterPik recharger sitting atop the cosmetics shelf. “. . . broadcasts an overlay signal that the phase inverters will pass on to all those waiting microphones.”

  “What does it broadcast?”

  “Just something CROM Countermeasures whipped up for the occasion. Typical night sounds, snoring and such—all synched to a built-in timer.”

  “I don’t snore.”

  “No one ever does,” Marianna said. “Anyway, trust me, we’re covered. Now, what’s this about a roadmap?”

  “Process first, then product.” Knox was determined to elevate his status in her eyes. Right now it seemed to be hovering somewhere between dinner companion and excess baggage.

  “Whatever.” Marianna shrugged.

  “Okay. Start by describing our grand tour of Rusalka this morning.”

  “Well, Sasha basically showed us everything. Took us all over, bridge to barnacles. It all checked out against the schematics we got from Oskarshams.” The Swedish yard’s vow of silence did not extend to Interpol. CROM’s liaison had secured their cooperation, and their deck plans, months ago.

  “Yeah,” Knox said, “I’d been going back over them in my head, shortly before you made your entrance and put an end to all rational thought.”

  That earned him a brief smile.

  “So, anyway, did anything stand out?” he asked.

  “That research facility, of course. It took up a healthy chunk of one whole deck.”

  “Right, the lab. Now, for the next part, we need some light.” He sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the headboard lamp. “And that pad and pencil. We’ll do this scientifically.”

  “Here you go, Mr. Science.” She fetched the items from the night-stand, then sat down alongside him.

  “Okay. So, describe the layout of the lab.”

  “Um, a big box, subdivided into four rooms.”

  “So, a bird’s eye view would give you a rectangle with an ‘H’ inscribed in it, divvying up the interior into two big rooms and two smaller ones.” He scribbled on the pad as he spoke. “More or less like so, right?”

  She leaned over to see what he had sketched:

  “An artist, too? Yep, that looks about right. Where’s the problem?”

  “Well, for starters, why so big? It seemed like they had way too much room in there for the amount of work they had going on.”

  “Grishin’s legendary largess.” She shrugged again. It made her petite breasts jiggle slightly beneath the jumpsuit and cast a disconcerting aura of stray lightbeams into the surrounding air. “Maybe it’s to impress visiting VIPs like us. It works for that, and it’s not like he can’t afford it.”

  “But then why carve it up into four separate rooms?” Knox was fighting the distraction of having her so near. His ability to stay focused when in the throes of a presentation was no less the stuff of legend than Arkady Grishin’s munificence, but this was pushing it. “If impact’s what they’re after, one continuous space would be lots more impressive. Why not lose the partitions?”

  “You mean the firewalls?” She leaned against him as she studied the diagram. Inadvertently maybe, but she stayed that way. “But that’s regulation laboratory construction, Jon.”

  “Or protective coloration. But let it go for a moment, and reconstruct what we did in there.”

  “We came in through a door here.” She pointed halfway up the left side of the outer rectangle. “That put us in this first wide room with the big GEI crest on the wall and the mothballed seismographic lab—the one you labeled A.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Sasha took us around through this firedoor down here into the room you marked C, at the bottom of the drawing. Mostly seawater chemistry and aquatic biotelemetry in there. Oh, and that big specimen tank, the one with all the jellyfish. They used it instead of a wall to divide Lab C from Lab B, this other little lab room up here at the top.” She tapped at the paper, leaning even closer. “You could look through the aquarium from one room into the other. That was how we spotted Galina.”

  “Or she spotted us.”

  “That’s right, Galina saw you first and waved, then ran to join us. We all walked through into Room D, your other big room, and met her halfway, right here.” Her fingertip rested on the right side of the rectangle.

  “And that gives us enough to hazard a guess at the location of your secret lab.”

  “How?”

  “Try this: visualize the layout again. Now, didn’t it strike you that the two firedoors seemed too far apart when you looked at them from outside, in the long room?”

  “I’m not sure I . . . no.” She shook her head; her dark hair shimmered in the lamplight.

  “I think maybe the middle section is divided into three rooms, not two. Here, look, this isn’t to scale but it’ll give you the idea.” Knox erased part of the diagram and redrew it:

  “That can’t be right,” Marianna said. “We looked straight through the specimen tank from C into B. We saw Galina standing on the far side of the glass, in the middle of that other lab. If your Room X was between us and her, how come we didn’t notice it?” She snickered. “Or is it supposed to be full of jellyfish?”

  “Let me answer that question with a question: how can you spend half of every working day in Pete’s office and not see what it is they’ve done here?”

  Her dark eyes half closed as she mulled it over. Then: “Oh, God! Not a datawall?”

  “Close enough.” That little highlight was playing about her upper lip again. Marianna was enchanting. Also very well armed. Knox set aside his fantasies and continued his exposition: “Sitting behind maybe three feet of real water and real jellyfish.”

  He sketched that in.

  “One half-tank each in Lab B and C?” Marianna asked. “With what, videocams hidden behind the display scrim and broadcasting a view of the other lab in real time?”

  “Not really. Pete’s datawall is just a convenient analogy, a way to get the point across. No, I think what we’ve got here is a much older, simpler technology: a conjurer’s chamber. Did you ever see that trick where a magician takes a box, shows it’s empty by opening the front and the back so you can see his hand through it, then closes it and pulls out a rabbit?”

  “Sure. Standard smoke-and-mirrors.”

  “Right, literally: there’s a mirror set at an angle inside the box, with
a rabbit hidden behind it. You only think you’re looking through the box to the other side. Actually the mirror’s bending light around what the magician doesn’t want you to see.”

  He showed her the results of his sketching. “Now, what we’ve got here is probably two big Fresnel mirrors, one on the back wall of each half-aquarium. Those mirrors angle the light down to two more in the space below the lab and then back up and out. Anyone looking through those two half-aquariums is actually looking around Room X in the middle. Any imperfections in the displays are hidden by tinted glass and lighted water. Smoke and mirrors, like you said.”

  Marianna shook her head. “I don’t buy it. Why would Grishin go to all that trouble just to hide a room? It’s his boat; he can do anything he likes, right out in the open.”

  “Except he’s got visiting dignitaries parading through here all the time. That’s the beauty part: hide everything in plain sight. That way, if there’s ever any trouble, you’ve got legions of blue-ribbon witnesses ready to swear you’re pure as the driven snow.”

  Knox thought a moment more, then added, “And maybe they get off on it, pulling the wool over people’s eyes, I mean. If I had a billion or so to play with, it’s the sort of thing I’d do.”

  “Maybe that’s my problem with it,” she said. “The whole scenario sounds a lot more like you than Grishin. I co-authored the psych evaluation on Arkady Grigoriyevich, and, believe me, that’s one serious dude. Whereas you . . .”

  “Don’t say it.” Knox cut her off before she could bring up the Aristos incident again. “I didn’t mean Grishin himself. More than likely, Sasha put him up to it. Now, Sasha I could definitely see running a scam like this. His favorite short story is Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter.’ ”

  “The original hide-in-plain-sight scenario,” she mused. Difficult as Marianna could be, it was nice working with a client who actually got most of his literary allusions for a change.

  “So, is that what put you on to this?” she said.

  “One of the things. Anyhow, the theory’s easy enough to test—all we have to do is figure out where the entrance to the hidden lab is and stake it out.”