Jericho Iteration (11 page)

“Not even for tea. I’ll see you out front in fifteen minutes.” John gave me the thumbs-up and I went straight for the stairs.

Pearl didn’t glance up from his desk as I slipped past his cubicle; for a moment I had the guilty notion that I should drop by, knock on the door, and tell him where I was headed. But if I did, he would probably insist that I stay put in the office until I had met the deadline for my column, even if it was more than twenty-four hours away. The notion, along with the guilt, quickly evaporated. My column could wait; for the first time in months, I had a real story to pursue, even if it was John’s byline that would appear on the final product.

I wanted a hot story.

For my sins both past and future, I was given one. When it was all over and done, I would never want to tag along on another assignment again.

C
RAIG BAILEY’S DARKROOM WAS
in the basement, down where a microbrewery would eventually have been located had his father been successful in opening a saloon on the ground floor. I found Jah slouched in front of his VR editor, wearing an oversized HMD helmet as his hands wandered over a keyboard, manipulating various pieces of videotape and computer-generated imagery into his latest work of interactive cinema.

Working for his dad as the
Big Muddy’
s photo chief was just a day job for Jah, and a temporary one at that. His real ambition was to move to California and go to work for Disney or LucasWorks, and every cent he earned from his grumpy old man went to buying more hardware and software to feed his obsession. For this, the University of Missouri basketball coach was crying bitter tears; Jah stood about six-ten in his stocking feet, plus or minus a few extra inches of dreadlocks. He was hell on the half-court—I once made the mistake of playing one-on-one with him after work for a dollar a point and lost half a day’s take-home pay—but Jah would rather dick around in virtual reality while blasting old reggae and techno CDs at stone-deaf volume.

I had no problem getting the extra press invitation from Jah; he was involved with his latest project and really didn’t want to go out to west city just to take pictures of business types swilling martinis. He loaned me one of the paper’s Nikons, loading a disc into the camera for me and reprogramming the thing to full-auto so that I wouldn’t have to futz around with the viewfinder menu, and gave me a spare necktie from the pile next to the disk processor, thus making the disguise complete. A tie with a washed-out denim shirt would look a little strange where I was going, but formal wear for news photographers usually means that they changed their jeans today.

“Got a minute to look at this?” he asked when we were done. He held up the VR helmet. “Sort of a documentary … you might like it.”

I shook my head as I pulled the camera strap over my shoulder. “Catch me in the next episode, okay? I gotta book outta here before your pop finds I’m missing.”

He looked disappointed but nodded his head. “I hope you’re not fucking with him. He’s kinda pissed at you these days.” He glanced at the door as if expecting to see the elder Bailey’s shadow lurking in the stairwell. “Fact, man. He’s been talking about making some changes ’round here, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but neither did I have time to further inquire what Bailey and son discussed over the dinner table. “Believe me, I’m not trying to fuck with your dad. I’m just trying to—”

“Hey, that’s cool.” Jah held up his hands, keeping his distance from the bad vibes between his father and me. “So long as you come back with some shots for next week, we’re solid.”

“Sold for a dollar.” We elbow-bumped, then he headed back to his workbench as I made for the basement door, avoiding taking the stairs back to the office.

John was waiting for me across the street from the office, leaning against the hood of his Deimos. “I don’t think Pearl missed you,” he said in reply to my unasked question as he dug a remote out of his pocket; the Pontiac’s front doors unlocked and pivoted upward. “He’s busy editing the arts page for next week.”

“Fine with me.” I walked around to the passenger side and slid into the seat as John took the driver’s seat. “I just talked to Jah, though. He says Pearl’s thinking about making some staff changes.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” John pressed his thumb against the ignition plate as the doors closed; the car started up as the seat harnesses wrapped themselves around our bodies. “Pearl’s always talked that way,” he said, opening the steering column keypad and tapping in the street address for the Tiptree Corporation. “When he had his band, he used to say the same thing whenever he had an off night. Y’know … ‘That drummer sucks, I gotta get a new drummer before the next gig.’ That sort of thing.”

“Uh-huh.” A map of metro St. Louis appeared on the dashboard screen, a bright red line designating the shortest course between us and our destination. “How many drummers did the Howlers have?”

“Umm … I think I lost count,” he murmured as he eased away from the curb. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing—”

“Yeah. Okay.” John was trying to be candid and comforting at the same time, yet I couldn’t refrain from glancing up at the second-floor windows as we headed down Geyer toward Broadway. I couldn’t see Pearl, but nonetheless I could feel his angry presence.

Something had better come out of this field trip, or I was screwed.

The main office of the Tiptree Corporation was located on the western outskirts of St. Louis in Ballwin, not far from the Missouri River. We took Route 40/I-64 until downtown faded far behind us, then got off on the I-270 outer belt and followed it until we found the Clayton Road exit. By now we were in the gentrified suburbs, where subdivisions and shopping plazas had replaced farms in the latter part of the last century. The quake had destroyed most of the flimsier tract homes and cookie-cutter malls that had been thrown up during the building boom of the eighties; bulldozers and backhoes could be seen from the highway, completing the demolition of homes and stores that had been initiated by New Madrid. Architectural Darwinism: quakes kill buildings, but only the sick and feeble ones.

John briefed me on Tiptree along the way. The company was a relative newcomer in the computer industry, one of the many that had been started during the late nineties as a result of the seventh-generation cybernetic revolution. Unlike other companies, though, Tiptree had not gone after the burgeoning consumer market for neural-net pocket computers or virtual reality toys. Instead, it had become a big-league player in the military aerospace industry, albeit a quiet one.

“Name a major Pentagon program,” John said as we drove down Clayton, “and Tiptree probably has something to do with it. It’s a major subcontractor to the Air Force for the Aurora project, for instance. Now—”

“You have reached your destination,”
a feminine voice announced from the dashboard.
“Repeat, you have reached your
—”

Tiernan stabbed the navigator’s Reset button, hushing the voice. We had already spotted the company’s sign, a burnished aluminum slab bearing the corporate logo of a
T
transfused with a stylized oak tree. “Now they’ve delivered on their largest contract yet,” he continued as he turned right, following a long driveway just past the sign. “Want to guess which one?”

I was studying the plant itself, seen past ten-foot-high chain mesh fences artfully obscured by tall hedges. It was your typical postmodern industrial campus: a long white three-story edifice surrounded by tree-shaded parking lots and some smaller buildings, unimaginatively designed by an architect who probably collected old calculators as a hobby. If Tiptree’s headquarters had been damaged at all by the quake, they had been rebuilt quickly; there were a few scaffolds around one end of the main building, but that was the only indication that the company had been affected by New Madrid.

“Umm … a player piano for the Air Force Academy?”

John smiled but said nothing as he pulled to a stop in front of a gatehouse. A uniformed private security guard walked out to the car and bent low to examine the invitation John held up for him. He stared at me until I showed mine as well, then he nodded his head and pointed the way to a visitors’ parking lot on the east side of the main building.

“Does the name Project Sentinel ring a bell?” he said as we drove toward the designated lot.

I whistled; he glanced at me and slowly nodded his head. “That’s what this is all about,” he went on. “They designed the c-cube for the satellite … that’s command, control, and communications. The bird’s being launched from Cape Canaveral at noon, so it’s show-and-tell day for these guys.”

“Probably more show than tell,” I said. “And you think this ‘ruby fulcrum’ business has something to do with—”

“Shhh!” he hissed, and I dummied up as he looked sharply at me. “Whatever you do,” he said very softly, “don’t say that again … not even in the car with me.”

He tapped his left ear and pointed outside the car. It wasn’t hard to get the picture. We might be invited guests for a public reception, but as soon as we had driven through the gates, we were in injun territory. Any high-tech company involved with a defense project as sensitive as Sentinel was probably capable of hearing a sparrow fart within a mile of its offices.

John pulled into an empty slot. “Pick up your camera and make like a log,” he murmured. “It’s showtime.”

Showtime, indeed.

We walked into the main building through the front entrance, wading through a small crowd hanging around the lobby until we found the reception table. A nice young woman took our invitations, checked them against a printout, then smiled and welcomed us by name—Jah’s, in my case—as she clipped a pair of security badges to us, each of them reading
PRESS
in bright red letters, which either made us honored guests or social lepers. She handed a press kit to John and ignored the disheveled beatnik with the camera behind him, then a polite young man who could have been her chromosome-altered clone pointed us through the crowd to a high archway leading to an atrium in the center of the building.

I had to rethink my opinion of the architect’s style; whoever designed this place had more on the bean than just playing with antique calculators. The atrium was three stories tall, its ceiling an enclosed skylight from which hung a miniature rain forest of tropical ferns. Small potted trees were positioned across the black-tiled floor, and dominating the far end of the room was a videowall displaying a real-time image of a Cape Canaveral launch pad so large that it seemed as if the shuttle was just outside the building.

Yet that wasn’t what immediately captured my attention. Holographic projectors, cleverly concealed among the hanging plants, had suspended a monstrous machine about twenty feet above the floor: the
Sentinel 1
satellite, its long, thin solar arrays thrust out from its cylindrical fuselage, gold Mylar-wrapped spherical fuel tanks nestling against its white segmented hull just short of the black maw of its gun. The image had been shrunk somewhat—the real
Sentinel
was nearly as long as a football field—but the overall effect was nonetheless impressive: a giant pistol in the sky, and God help whoever tried to stare it down.

Milling around the atrium was a large crowd of business types, clustered in conversation circles, standing in front of the bar or taking drinks from the robowaiters, idly watching the shuttle countdown on the videowall. There was a buffet table at one side of the room; the aroma of hors d’oeuvres was too tempting for someone who hadn’t eaten all day, so I excused myself from John to go get some free chow.

After wolfing down a plate of cocktail shrimp, fried mushrooms, and toasted ravioli, I was ready to start thinking like a professional journalist again. John was nowhere in sight; I eased myself into a vacant corner of the room and took a couple shots of the holograph, then began to scan the room through the Nikon’s telescopic lens under the pretense that I was grabbing a few candid shots. The nice thing about posing as a down-at-the-heels news photographer is that, under circumstances such as this, you fade right into the woodwork; no one pays much attention to the photog because no one wants to seem as if they’re posing for pictures.

At first sight, no one seemed particularly remarkable; you’ve seen one suit, you’ve seen ’em all. The only exception was another photographer across the room, a young lady in jeans and a sweater who looked just as seedy as I. She scowled at me before melting into the crowd. Professional rivalry; she was probably from the
Post-Dispatch.
I wondered if she could help me adjust my F-stops …

Enough of that. Like it or not, I was still married, even if Marianne had sent me to the darkroom. I continued to check out the atrium.

For a few moments I didn’t see anyone recognizable. Then I spotted Steve Estes. The most right-wing member of the City Council was standing in the center of the room, yukking it up with a couple of other guys who looked as if they were fellow alumni of Hitler Youth. The pompous prick was probably bragging about how he had managed to get ERA to roust a bunch of panhandlers out of the park the night before.

Estes was clearly maneuvering for a run against Elizabeth Boucher in next year’s mayoral election; every public statement he had made since the quake hinted that he was going to oppose “Liberal Lizzie” (to use his term) on a good ol’ Republican law-and-order platform. It would be an easy run; Liz had been caught off guard by the quake and everything that occurred afterward, and in the last few weeks she had been rarely seen or heard outside of City Hall. Rumor had it that she was suffering from a nervous breakdown, a drinking problem, or both, and her foes on the council, chief among them Big Steve, had been quick to capitalize on the rumors. If she ran for reelection, it would be as an unstable incumbent; if you believed Estes’ rants, you’d think Boucher had gone down to New Madrid and jumped up and down on the fault line to cause the quake herself.

Estes glanced in my direction; the grin on his face melted into a cold glare. I took the opportunity to snag his picture before he looked away again. If anything, the shot could be used for Bailey’s next editorial against Estes and his hard-line policies. Then I happened to notice a small group of people standing across the room.