“And then we can send it to the supreme leader?” Jiao asked.
Khang glanced at Jiao, suddenly realizing that the supreme leader would absolutely love the little flying saucer. Khang wanted the credit for getting the disc to Kim himself.
The girl nodded at Jiao.
“No!” Khang said vehemently. “First you must open it up and let us look inside!” He turned to Jiao angrily, “What if they put an explosive or some dangerous chemical inside?!”
Jiao looked cowed and suitably frightened, but the girl just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Okay, let’s open it up.”
A few minutes later, she had removed four screws and pried the top half of the disc off the bottom half. The little disc was filled with wiring and electronics, but certainly didn’t contain any reservoirs for poison or materials that looked like they could be explosive. Khang focused on the one fairly large object in the case, “What’s this?”
“The battery,” she said. “Here, I’ll remove it and you’ll be able to see it doesn’t work without the battery.” She made good on this promise. Eventually, Khang had to admit that the device looked safe enough. A few minutes later, he took it outside and flipped the fourth switch. He didn’t think she could cause trouble by going outside, but there was no reason to let her. Sure enough, when he nudged it, it floated away but quickly swerved back to the location he’d nudged it away from. He had the impression that its positioning wasn’t as precise as it had been inside the room, but that was to be expected with it using GPS rather than infrared lasers for positioning. Curious, he grasped it firmly and threw it hard as he could. It traveled about three meters, but only went about one meter before it had turned up until he was looking at the top side of it. It slowed, reversed direction, and flew back to where he’d thrown it from. As it approached its original location it tipped the other way to bring itself to a halt. Soon it hung in the air not far from where he’d first grabbed it to throw it.
He took the disc and its charger to the head of the guard detail and told him it was a gift to the supreme leader from the project. He wrote out a note to go with it, saying that he’d disassembled and checked it for dangerous substances, but that he would still recommend that it be subjected to chemical sniffers before it was actually delivered to the supreme leader.
When he came back into the building without it, Jiao looked disappointed. “Did you already send it?” Jiao gave Khang a secretive grin, “I kind of wanted to play with it a little bit myself before we sent it away.”
Khang gave Jiao an ugly look, “It is not for us to be playing. Besides, you fool, we don’t want to give it back to them once it has collected GPS data! They might be able to determine their location if it recorded the data.”
Jiao drew back disbelievingly, “Knowing their location wouldn’t do them any good!”
“I don’t think it would do them any good either. But I still don’t want them to know. I don’t trust Gettnor, what if he managed to send his location back to his government.”
“How could he do that?! You watch him like a hawk when his computer’s connected to the datalink!”
“I don’t think he can! But I know he can’t if he doesn’t have the data.” Khang didn’t express his disquiet regarding just how good Gettnor was with computers. After all this time, Gettnor’s computer continued to look like its OS had just been installed. Humiliated, Khang felt far too embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t figure out how Gettnor was doing it.
***
Lisanne stared at another message window Vaz had surreptitiously placed on her screen. He hadn’t sent her anything for weeks which had made her worry that something terrible had happened. Now this had arrived, so terse that it had taken her some time to realize that it was simply answers to the questions she had posed weeks ago. She’d had her AI line the questions and answers up for her so she could understand his replies.
Please tell me your location, as exactly as you can give it.
“North Korea.”
How big is the building you’re being kept in?
“500 square meters.”
Are you in that building day and night, or do they move you to a different building to sleep?
“Day and night.”
How many guards do they have watching you?
“Six.”
Are there also guards outside the building you’re being kept in?
“Yes.”
What kind of weapons are the guards armed with?
“AK-47s.”
Lisanne squeezed her eyes shut as she wondered whether the short responses indicated that Vaz didn’t have time or wasn’t able to answer fully. No, she thought, this is just typical Vaz. Even in person, he frequently produced short answers that only addressed the specific question asked. With some disquiet, Lisanne thought about how his answers became even shorter when he was hiding something. Is he hiding something? she wondered. If so, what? Is he trying to spare us the horrific details of their imprisonment? That didn’t sound like Vaz, but she just couldn’t think of anything else he might be hiding. Maybe Tiona had told him to spare them the details.
His location maybe? It just seemed so unlikely that Vaz couldn’t pin down their location any better than “North Korea.” The man was a genius at solving puzzles. With a window and his mathematical skills, he could have at least calculated his latitude just from the angle of the sun. She thought he would have delighted in doing so. If they were keeping him in a windowless room, but he had access to a computer and an internet connection, she felt certain that he could determine his location better than “North Korea.”
Obviously he had an internet connection or she wouldn’t be getting these messages!
Oh well, she thought, I’d better forward this information to General Cooper.
***
Darby Alston, director of the CIA, speared General James Cooper with a disbelieving look. “And you people want our help in covertly entering North Korea for the purpose of retrieving two of our citizens?! I hope you realize we’ve left a lot of our citizens moldering in prisons elsewhere. It’s not our habit to invade sovereign countries to retrieve one or two people.” He shook his head, “Have you even considered the fact that you will probably get a lot more than two of our citizens killed going after them, to say nothing of the high likelihood that the Gettnors themselves will be killed during such a risky endeavor?!”
Cooper’d never liked Alston. Now he drew a deep breath and tried to keep his voice even as he responded, “These people are important! The technology they’ve developed is going to change our world and we do not want the North Koreans to be the ones who have a lock on it.”
Alston waved dismissively, “The tech was invented at UNC. Even without the actual inventors, the University will be able to develop the technology for us.”
“They might be able to, if they knew how the Gettnors actually did it!”
“There’ve got to be records. And, lots of smart people to go through those records!”
Cooper glared, “Even if that were true, which it isn’t, Gettnor’s a freaking genius! We want him here, not just for what he’s already invented, but for the other things he might invent in the future! His daughter’s no slouch either!”
Alston gave another dismissive wave and turned to the president. “Ma’am, there are way too many ways this kind of operation can go wrong. We do not want to stick our di… finger in that meat grinder, there’s much too high a chance we’ll lose it. The international outcry if we are found sending a hostile mission into another country will be horrendous.” He spread his hands, “It’s just not worth the kind of international embarrassment this would bring us!”
President Miles had watched the confrontation between the two men with a bemused look on her face. Now she said, “Darby, first of all you have totally underestimated the importance of this man to our country.” She raised a halting hand when Alston drew a breath to interrupt, “Second, you seem to have forgotten that North Korea sent a hostile
mission into our country to kidnap the Gettnors in the first place. They killed a number of our citizens, admittedly undesirable ones, but nonetheless, citizens. We should not be embarrassed if we do the same to them.” Once again she stopped Alston when he looked like he was about to interrupt, “We should be embarrassed, however, if you guys fail to retrieve the Gettnors. I hereby direct you to figure out how to do this so you don’t get your ‘dicks’ stuck in that grinder.”
***
Cooper said, “Really?! That’s all the information he gave you?! I’ve finally got permission from the President herself to go after him and he can’t help any more than that?!”
Lisanne tried not to get angry. “Remember, this is the way he is. He answered your questions. Not elaborating with further information beyond the simplest possible answers to the questions you posed is very typical for him. I’d suggest that you give me a list of further questions in which you ask exactly what it is you want to know. Don’t assume that he will tell you things you might think are obvious.”
“Okay,” Cooper said, sounding exasperated. “I’ll work on a list of precision questions and send it to you in the next few hours.” He sighed, “Ask him to answer them as soon as he possibly can. Remind him we’re trying to get him free!”
“You need to consider that he may not have access to the internet all that often.”
“Yeah, sorry. I’m sure you want him back here even more than I do…”
***
Vaz and Tiona bent toward one another over the precipitation of a one meter disc. They’d been talking nonsense chemistry for some time now and Lim and Ko, their scientific keepers, had finally become bored.
At first, when they’d begun actually precipitating thruster membranes and the two North Korean scientists had begun watching very carefully, Tiona had worried that her dad was giving away the thruster secret. Then she’d watched as he consistently used the wrong chemicals. At first, she thought he planned to simply make nonfunctional thrusters and claim he couldn’t do it there in North Korea. Comprehension slowly dawned when she saw him pick up a bottle of a solution that he called “sodium chloride.” She clearly remembered him mixing up that solution a couple of days before using lithium chloride. At the time he’d called it sodium chloride and she passed it off as a simple slip of the tongue. Now she saw that he’d also labeled it sodium chloride!
She’d begun to realize another reason why he’d ordered so many chemicals beyond those that were actually needed to precipitate the thruster membranes. He made up solutions quickly, using different chemicals and different concentrations than he said he was using as he spoke for the video recordings that Lim and Ko were making. He quickly and surely mislabeled almost every chemical he used and surprised her with sleight-of-hand as he switched chemicals between measuring them out and putting them into their solutions. The changes were so many, and so quick that she found herself astonished that he managed to keep the chemicals straight when he was done. That he kept them straight while they were labeled wrong was just as surprising as the fact that he was doing this in the first place.
Actually, as obsessive as he was about carefully labeling everything, it was hard to believe that he was even willing to mislabel something, even to throw someone off!
Vaz made up a lot of chemicals and solutions which were completely unnecessary, then eventually dipped parts in them as if he were treating them chemically, then discarded the solutions, calling them by the name of one of the mislabeled solutions that they actually did use. Someone trying to figure out how the membranes had actually been made by going through the video and audio record with a fine toothed comb would surely find it impossible to reconstruct the process.
Then, when he did actually precipitate the doped graphene membranes, he would subsequently precipitate layers of other chemicals on top of them which Tiona realized would make attempts to determine the actual doping scheme by subsequent analysis extremely difficult.
She found it hard to believe that someone like her father, whom she had never thought of as having a devious bone in his body, could be so deceitful and underhanded.
It made her proud.
In any case, Lim and Ko were far enough away now that they wouldn’t really know what was being said over the precipitation. Tiona flipped on a noisy magnetic stirrer and quietly asked, “You got GPS data from the little disc when they took it outside?”
“Uh-huh, and all the way to the leader’s home,” Vaz said softly.
“What?!” Tiona hissed, still careful to keep her voice barely audible. “How?!”
“It records GPS data all the time. Whenever it gets near a Wi-Fi it downloads it to me.”
“Have you found a way to stay hooked up to the internet even when they have the fiber optic connection cut off?”
“No, everything’s just stored in a couple of randomly chosen computers on the outside. The data’s downloaded to me whenever Khang hooks up the fiber-optic connection.”
“So, you’ve sent our location on to General Cooper?”
Vaz didn’t say anything for a long time. When he finally responded, all he said was, “No.”
“Why not?!” Tiona hissed.
Again, he didn’t respond for a while, then he said, “I think they’ll send people to try to break us out.”
“Exactly! I hope so.” She gave him a curious look, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Some of them’ll get killed.”
This brought Tiona to an abrupt halt. She’d considered in the abstract that someone might get injured, but thought of it as a possibility, not a certainty. “These are the kinds of things those people do! They’re really good at it.”
Vaz raised his eyes to hers, “We shouldn’t risk their lives to save ours, should we?”
Tiona felt her world shift under her. She and her father had rarely if ever had any discussions about morality. Because of his odd personality she’d always thought of herself as having the more moral outlook on the world. If her father had morals, she’d thought of them as rudimentary. To be confronted now with her life on the line, with the idea that they shouldn’t risk soldiers’ lives to save their own, brought her up short. She stared at him for a moment before coming up with a response, “You’ve said you were willing to kill these guys so we could go free.”
He frowned, “Of course,” he said giving her a look as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t understand. “The people who’ve enslaved us are evil. Any soldiers who might come to rescue us would be good people trying to win our freedom. They don’t deserve to die.”
“But… Dad, I don’t want to stay here,” Tiona said blinking back tears. The tears irritated her because she always thought of herself as a strong woman, not the kind who might break down in moments of stress.
Vaz blinked at her a few moments, then said, “Of course not, but we can get ourselves free.”
Tiona stared at him for a moment, “How?!”
Khang started walking their way. Vaz tilted his head a little querulously and said, “Like we talked about before.” It sounded like he thought it was obvious.
Tiona didn’t want to ask any more questions with Khang standing over them. She wondered which conversation he meant from before. Maybe the one where I thought he was talking about making weapons?
***
“So,” Rachel said, “the best I could talk either Ford or Boeing into, was an agreement to suspend the contract. They won’t demand any of their money back, but they certainly won’t advance us any more. They both insisted on a codicil to our original agreement which sets them free to negotiate with UNC, or in fact anyone else who figures out how to make thrusters.”
Gary turned to Dante, “And your sister’s boyfriend hasn’t had any luck figuring out how to make thrusters, has he?”
Landon looked at Dante. His friend looked just as depressed as he’d looked every day since half of his immediate family had been kidnapped. He blinked slowly, then looked like he’d come back to reality. He turned his
eyes toward Gary, then slowly shook his head.
Gary stared at him for a moment then said, “Sorry man. I’ve hung in here as long as I can. I’ve got an offer to go back to Axel VC and I’m going to have to take it.”
Dante said, almost mournfully, “OK, but we’d be happy to keep you on salary here if you want to stay.”
Gary shook his head, “No, I don’t want to just have a decent salary, even if I hardly have to work for it. I want to bust my ass out on the bleeding edge for the chance of a big kill.” He shrugged his shoulders, “Sorry man, that’s just the way I am.”
“Okay,” Dante said. He looked around the rest of the table, “How about the rest of you guys?”
Steve said he was going to have to start looking. Landon was embarrassed about the implication that he was willing to accept his decent salary without working for it. He started thinking that he should be wanting to be out on the bleeding edge as well.
But then Rachel laughed and said, “GSI is the bleedingest edge there is. And there’s no chance for a bigger kill anywhere else in the solar system. You guys are idiots! I’m sticking it out. As I see it there’s three things we should be doing. First, preserving the contracts we’ve already signed like I’ve been working on. Second, helping any way we possibly can to retrieve Dante’s father and sister. Third, hiring more scientists to try to help Nolan Marlowe figure out the tech, just in case we never get the Gettnors back.” Her eyes scanned the table again, “I think any of you who’re just sitting around drawing your salary ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
Landon did feel ashamed, but didn’t admit it. Instead, he said, “I agree with Rachel. I’ve watched her busting her ass to maintain the contracts we have.” He looked at Dante, “If you don’t mind, I’ll take on trying to find people to help Marlowe.”
Disc Page 23
