by John Barnes
“It is possible, of course, that the relevant authorities will not see things at all in that way. Should that prove true, then we will have to run this race at a spectacular disadvantage, but it will be all the more necessary to win it. So we also need to know exactly which documents Negon obtained, whose knowledge they were able to tap, which secure sites they had access to, and so forth—and on exactly which dates, ideally at what times. Bottom line, we need to know exactly how Negon stole exactly what aspects of Gaudeamus, and once we have that, we’ll be figuring out what to do about it, and at that point there will be more work for you, probably even more lucrative than this.”
“So that final report, then, it’s got to document that they violated security to get the data, and it has to spell out the names of everything they got access to and the time and date when they did, with a complete explanation for how they got everything. But I’m not supposed to learn too much about Gaudeamus itself—not more than I already know from knowing that it’s a Q-tip project. That about cover it?”
“That’s it.”
I wrote all that down on my steno pad, showed it to him, and he agreed that that was still what he meant. Then I asked the big question—“How much?”
“One hundred twenty thousand, plus expenses. Bonus of thirty thousand if you complete within this month.”
I was blinking, John. And I swear, normally, I never let it show on my face when a client talks money and it’s more than I expected—I mean, that’s just business sense. But this time, before god and jesus and that whole crowd, I admit, I was blinking.
If I got done within that month, I’d get a check for three years of my gross. Now I know you and I both admire old Fast Eddy Edwards, four times the governor of Louisiana, for being the man who said, on Sixty Minutes, “I looked at it, and I seen it was money, so I took it.” And in the spirit of our hero, that’s what I did.
“I’ll try to make you glad you hired me,” I said, and I noticed my voice was a little deeper and my accent a little thicker. It gets that way whenever a client seems nervous, to make them think they hired the Lone Ranger, or Chuck Yeager, or Tommy Lee Jones. “So, then, you think—multiple sources? One guy spying on his coworkers? Some kind of ring?”
“No idea.”
“Motive? Political, or pure money, or what?”
Hale raised an eyebrow like I’d conjugated a verb wrong. “You know, with the Sovs gone, we never even think about politicals anymore, but it’s possible that some of our employees could be involved in some political movement, anti-American or maybe antigovernment. For that matter, it could easily be organized crime, Mafia or drug gangs or something, branching out. It doesn’t have to be a leak that was instigated by Negon for their purposes, at all; they might just be the buyer. But odds are it’s just Negon getting an unfair advantage in the bidding.”
I nodded. “Is there anyone you’re already certain is involved?”
“Only managers have access to the whole array of what we know must have been stolen, but they wouldn’t have understood it well enough to target the thefts so precisely, so at least some engineers have to be involved, and probably some of the Q-tip scientific team. At a guess, a manager to get the documents together, and two to five engineers and scientists—at least one engineer and at least one scientist—to explain to the other side what it means. At least three people, more likely more.”
“Sounds like you’re very on top of it,” I said. “What do you need a detective for?”
“Ah, but, Mr. Bismarck—” (Honest to god, John, who else would begin a sentence with “ah, but …” except an upper-crust fourth-generation Ivy nitwit?) “We need to know the structure of how this is all being done; how Negon (or Negon and someone else) corrupted one whole section of a place that is entirely SCI. And we need to be able to act on the information. Not only are you much more apt than our own security to find out the things we need to know, but if we get the information from an outside source, that will allow us to make better use of it—better use meaning, possibly, just authorizing the outside source to take whatever steps are needed. To be as frank as I dare.”
“Now, John,” Travis said, “I’m only about halfway to the weird part. Weird shit is like wilderness—you have to go through so much stuff that isn’t it to get to it, nowadays. I guess. Or that might be a bourbon insight.”
“It might be,” I agreed, checking through my notes. “What’s SCI?”
“Sensitive compartmented information—security clearances above top secret. ‘Compartmented’ means that supposedly each guy only gets exactly the information needed to do their job, though in fact there’s usually a few big-picture guys around that you can’t keep on strictly need-to-know because they’re the only guys that know what it is that they need to know. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, but I’m scared to admit it.”
He ignored that, gestured grandly with his coffee cup, and said, “See, SCI’s more an attitude than a designation; it’s the level where you stop saying ‘this guy is cleared to know secret stuff’ and start saying ‘this stuff is so secret, does anybody need to know it?’ Like the default is to not tell anybody, see?”
“I guess I see I think.” I looked at my notes again. “So Negon is the other company, the bad guys—”
“For all I know they’re vegetarian saints who carry blankets to the homeless, John. Eventually I realized that for every Xegon secret Negon bought, Xegon bought one of theirs. I sometimes wonder whether anybody at either company even theoretically remembers that they are on the same side.” He got up and went to look out the window. “Dawn comes up kind of pretty here, doesn’t it? Sky so deep blue and the light glinting off the snow on the pine trees—”
“Yeah,” I said. “Early mornings up here are great. They make you want to run right out and start doing … something. Then you remember it’s Gunnison and there’s nothing to do.”
“Gotta be hunting and fishing and hiking, all that woods to go out and play in—”
“That’s right,” I said, to shut him up, because I didn’t need to hear another lecture like the ones I got constantly from my healtho-outdoorsy neighbors. “There is nothing to do up here. Unless you’re the sort of adult whose tastes in entertainment froze at the age of eight—and what you really want to do is ride your bicycle up and down hills, hang out in the woods, and never have any real use for good clothes, or even a bath.”
“You must be looking forward to your Denver trip—”
I made a face. “It’s a science fiction convention, Travis. Like being caught in a mass police roundup of geeks and your lawyer’s out of town for the weekend.”
“Wow, you’re a lot of fun, these days, John. All right, I feel sorry for you, bud. I’m just dying for you, that you’re forced to live in a place where people spend their life savings to get to live there, and that people who like your work invite you to come to big parties with them so they can meet you. My pity meter is on red-line overload and about to blow.” He hooked a leg over the heavy wooden rail of the futon couch, wagging one red and white sock at me. “Stand by for pity detonation … Ten, nine, eight …”
The worst thing about having friends who are good at mocking you is that you have to be a good sport about it. “You were telling an interesting story.”
“Oh, that. Sure. Got any more Pure Black Evil, no Turkey this time?”
“Hit your limit?”
“I want to stay up till the little—that is, till old Kara gets up. Maybe longer. Might not want to sack out till I get to a motel in Denver this evening. And as long as I’m awake I might as well stay coherent.” He stretched and yawned, then woofed as Corner the Cat, seeing a chance for somewhere warm to sleep, sprang with all eighteen pounds onto Trav’s skinny belly. “Stupid cat. What if I’d spilled some of this good coffee and bourbon?” Corner purred loudly. “Better make sure it’s safe,” Travis added, draining the cup and holding it out. He scratched the big cat’s blotchy black and white head. “What’s your name
, Rorschach?”
“Corner,” I said. I took his cup. “Though Rorschach wouldn’t be a bad name for him, either.” Corner was now purring and kneading. “Stay right where you are and pet the oversize hairball, while I get you more coffee. If you get out from under Corner right now, he’ll decide you don’t love the cat enough, and make a nuisance of himself for the next half hour until he’s had enough attention.” I walked into the kitchen, filled Trav’s cup. Normally I consumed about a pot and a half of coffee in a good working morning. Today the third pot was about to get started.
When I got back, Corner was stretched out on Travis, belly up, eyes closed, rumbling and slobbering in pure bliss.
“Corner because of Kitty Corner?” he asked.
“Yep, like that cat we had in St. Louis was named Astrophe,” I said. “If I’d known Corner’s habits I’d have named him Saliva. Then we could have said things like ‘I’ve got eighteen pounds of Saliva on my lap,’ ‘Is Saliva on the couch?’ and ‘I was in the basement and I heard Saliva running down the stairs …’”
“The worst thing about that would be that you and Kara would get competitive about it,” he said.
“True. If you’ve got that cat about smoothed out, how about getting on with the story?”
He took a deep, appreciative gulp, rubbed Corner’s ecstatic head one more time, and said, “I was working on figuring out what the real first steps were going to be. Obviously this case was really about embarrassment.”
“Embarrassment?”
“Yep. The lower level the case, the more it’s about what they say it’s about. This was a high-level case.”
“Low and high—okay, Trav, I’m getting lost, and I’m not the one that’s been drinking.”
“Low level is ordinary people with garden variety problems that they sometimes need a detective for. Like finding a runaway teenager or proving that some deadbeat dad who says he can’t work because of his bad back is lifting at a gym to impress his new girlfriend, and bouncing in the bar where she strips. In those kinds of cases, you don’t have to worry about why people want you to do what they’ve hired you to do, because it’s fucking obvious. But in a case that involves large amounts of money, or great power, or deep secrecy, or more likely all of the above—what I call a high-level case—your first job is figuring out what the real job is—because they won’t tell you.”
“Like?”
“Well, maybe it’s easier to see at a middle level. Suppose some guy and his wife are the biggest couple at the country club, maybe he’s a banker and she’s an officer in the DAR, and their daughter goes to Vassar and collectively they are the hottest shit ever shat in the little town of East Buttfuck, Wyoming. Their fame reaches as far up I-90 as Possum Droppings, Montana, and maybe as far down I-25 as Jesus Junction. They are major regional players. And she is divorcing him because she has finally realized that her parents were right and he is a moron, and furthermore a moron who treats her with no respect at all.
“So her lawyer thinks he’s getting some on the side, and hires me.
“Now, does the lady want material for some discreet pressure about settlement or custody? Then she wants evidence that the mistress is getting a hundred grand a year in this-and-thats while the wife drives a ’95 Explorer that doesn’t even have leather seats. Or is it that the wife is good and mad and wants the sonofabitch too humiliated to ever show his face at the country club again? Then what they really want is some nice clear shots that show his wrinkled old face and his hairy huge old fishbelly and a bored-looking trailer-trash girl half his age with her hand on his tiny dick. Or is the mistress the wife’s onetime best friend, and does she want them both shamed? Then you want flattering photos of the candlelight dinners, and financial records of the trip to the hideaway at some beach in the Quintana Roo, and a bunch of stuff that looks like travel brochure things, because what she wants to do is take all the fun they had and make them feel so guilty that they’d rather roll over and die.”
“Nice line of work you’re in.”
He grinned in the way that always creeped me out. “I see people acting just like I expect them to, and it confirms my view of the world. Like the phrase goes, it works for me.
“Now, when you get up to the Xegon level, you’ve got theft of important stuff from an above-top-secret lab. Normally that’s a federal problem; quiet guys in black suits who never take off their sunglasses show up for that. So instead they’re hiring a one-man operation out of Billings, Montana, a guy who spends most of his time on employee drug cases, adultery, runaways, and guys faking bad backs?
“No way. They ought’t’ve called in the Men in Black right away. Whatever the whole story was, they wanted it all wrapped up before the high-end secret-government types even knew there was a problem. So it had to be worse than just losing something big they were supposed to be careful with. This was going to be the equivalent of finding a cocaine ring inside the Manhattan Project or a circle of pederasts inside Stealth.”
I was starting to think he was being creepy deliberately, enjoying it for some reason. “Which is the kind of case you dream about.”
“Yeah, in my good dreams and in my nightmares, bud.” He took another slurp from his coffee cup.
CHAPTER FOUR
Yeah, you’re right, I’m not getting any nearer to the story, am I?
Well, the job started off the way they always do, pure algebra. What I did was, I got the dates for when Xegon was sure that Negon had one of their tricks. Along the way of doing that, noticing how much Xegon knew about Negon’s internal operations, I figured out that Xegon had a pretty good industrial espionage op of its own going. (It was none off mine, though, since I knew which one wrote my checks.) The more I looked at the way the two companies related, the more it looked like Xegon and Negon were like twin brothers that hated each other so much they couldn’t leave each other alone.
So, you worked in some R&D shops a long time ago, right, John? Back when you were in New Orleans? You know about how they log ideas going through the chutes, partly for patent and partly so they know the creative types aren’t sloughing? So they record all the dates from the first rough idea memo, to discussion summaries, to a seminar memo, to a paper, to when they put the done-and-ready cookbook version into the manual. They treat every idea the way a high-end Dallas sorority girl treats her first marriage and her first baby—every time it crawls forward a little bit or heaves up something gooey, they shoot pictures and date them and file them. I was thinking of the baby, but of course you’re right, that could be the marriage too. I got cousins and I’ve seen that whole story, plenty.
So, anyway, you have this nice neat who-thunk-what-when for every little equation and bit of theory and algorithm and experiment—not just what they did and what they recorded, but who they talked to when, who put it on paper when, who read the paper and attached comments, who could’ve read the paper and might’ve spilled coffee on it, all the way till they blue-stamp it PCK, Project Common Knowledge—the point where everyone has access and it’s pretty much just known to be true. Plenty of it never goes that far and stays SCI forever, of course.
So I took the concept history logs, and the schedule for reporting upstairs, and my list of the dates when Xegon’s people had first suspected that Negon had the same thing, and worked up a chart on a few big sheets of layout paper, taped together, hanging on my hotel-room wall. Four days later, that wall was covered, and I’d boiled the list of all the engineers, technicians, managers, and scientists in the Q-tip down to a list of about thirty maybes, a list of seven probablies, and one for-sure.
My for-sure was the senior technical guy, the one in charge of explaining things to management, in the Q-tip, a guy named Calvin Durango. They couldn’t be doing what they were doing without his being aware of it, but if he was in on it, then everything else was possible. Therefore he was, and if I could find out what old Calvin was doing, and how he was doing it, the rest of the solution ought to just tumble out, the way one of those
logic puzzles does when you realize that the Swede lives in the blue house and drinks beer. In particular, old Calvin was the only single point they passed four areas through—qubits, subnucleonics, QT (which I figured was probably Quantum Teleportation), and something called QN or Core Gaudeamus that apparently was the hottest of the hot and the thing they were most worried about. He was the point guy for subnucleonic qubits, which I suspect means computing with quarks, and for studies of QT-qubit interaction, which I’m almost certain was a matter of having massively parallel processors that weren’t limited by how fast light could get across the box, from one side of the computer to the other. And all that seemed to be part of the problem of explaining QN, or Core Gaudeamus, or what one young physicist (who wasn’t security conscious enough) referred to as the “What the Fuck? Effect.”
But I already knew enough about the science side—more than they wanted me to know. What I needed to learn was something more in my area of specialty—Calvin Durango’s bad habit.
Trav was stretched out at full length on that huge old futon couch, one arm thrown over his eyes; I guess the increasing morning light was bothering him. “It would be okay with me if you caught a nap and filled me in later,” I added.
“But it wouldn’t be okay with me. I’ll explain why in a little bit. You won’t believe it, John, but at least it’ll make sense.” He sat up, sighing. “I’m not kidding. I could probably get away with sleeping some this afternoon, but it would be safer if I didn’t, and I gotta make it awake through at least lunchtime. If you could pour some more Pure Black Evil into me—”
“I’ll need to start another pot,” I said. “Follow me on out to the kitchen and keep talking.” I rinsed the pot and basket, scrubbed them with a few swipes of 409 and a paper towel, rinsed them again, and checked to make sure they were really clean—the coffee I make for writing leaves a residue you could pave a road with. I pulled out a bag of my standard heavy African coffee, dark roasted till the beans drip oil. I ground it down to molecules, filled the basket about a third beyond what the directions would say, added deonized water just above freezing to the reservoir, and switched it on. “It’ll take a bit,” I said.
