Lock In (12 page)

“Was there?” I asked.

“No,” Diaz said. “There were no chips inside the headset.”

“If there are no chips inside, then it wouldn’t work. It’s a dummy headset,” I said.

“That would be my thinking, yes,” Diaz said.

I turned to Vann. “Seriously, what the hell is going on here?” I said.

“What do you mean?” Vann asked.

“I mean, what the hell is going here. We’ve got two Integrators, one of whom shouldn’t be an Integrator, and a dummy headset. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Vann turned to Diaz. “Fingerprints on the headset?”

“Yes,” he said. “They match Sani, not Bell.”

“So Sani brought the headset to the party, not Bell,” Vann said, then looked back at me. “What does that suggest to you?”

“Maybe that Bell didn’t know Sani was an Integrator,” I said. “And that Sani didn’t want him to know he was one, either.”

“Right,” Vann said.

“Okay, but again, why?” I asked. “What possible use is there for Sani to convince Bell that he’s just a tourist? Without the headset he can’t even be that. Unless there’s some Integrator-to-Integrator ability I don’t know about.”

“No,” Vann said. “There’s a sort of neural feedback loop that happens when you try to put one Integrator into the head of another. You can fry people’s brains that way.”

“Like
Scanners
?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“An old movie. About psychics. They could make your head blow up.”

Vann smiled. “Nothing that outwardly dramatic. But inwardly it’s not supposed to be pleasant. It’s blocked at the network level in any event.”

“So it couldn’t have been that,” I said. “Plus the whole suicide thing again.”

Vann was quiet again.

Then: “What time is it in Arizona?”

“It’s two hours behind here, so about eight thirty,” I said. “Maybe. Arizona is weird about time zones.”

“You need to go out there today and talk to some people,” Vann said.

“Me?”

“Yes, you,” Vann said. “You can get there in ten seconds for nothing.”

“There’s the small fact I will have no body,” I said.

“You’re not the only Haden on the FBI staff,” Vann said. “The Bureau keeps spare threeps at the major field offices. Phoenix will have one for you. It won’t be
fancy
”—she motioned to my threep—“but it will get the job done.”

“Are the Navajo going to cooperate with us?” I asked.

“If we let them know we’re trying to figure out the death of one of their own, they might come around,” Vann said. “I have a friend in the Phoenix office. I’ll see if he can make things easier. Let’s get you out there by ten their time.”

“I can’t just call?” I asked.

“You need to tell some family their son or dad is dead and then ask them a bunch of personal questions,” Vann said. “Yeah, no, you can’t just call.”

“It’ll be my first trip to Arizona,” I said.

“Hope you like hot,” Vann said.

*   *   *

At 10:05 I found myself in the Phoenix FBI field office, looking at a bald man.

“Agent Beresford?” I asked.

“Damn, that’s creepy,” the man said. “This threep’s been in the corner for three years without moving, and suddenly it gets up. It’s like a statue coming to life.”

“Surprise,” I said.

“I mean, we’ve been using it as a hat rack.”

“Sorry to deprive you of your office furniture.”

“It’s only for the day. You Shane?”

“That’s right.”

“Tom Beresford.” He held out his hand. I took it. “I don’t mind telling you I’ve never forgiven your dad for crushing the Suns in four.”

“Oh, that,” I said. He was talking about Dad’s second NBA title. “If it means anything, he always said that series was closer than it looked.”

“It’s nice of him to lie like that,” Beresford said. “Come on, I’ll take you down to meet Klah.”

I started walking and stopped. “Jesus,” I said, and started jerking my leg.

“Something wrong?” Beresford stopped and waited on me.

“You weren’t kidding when you said this thing didn’t move,” I said. “I think something’s rusted up in this thing.”

“I can get you a can of WD-40 if you want.”

“Nice,” I said. “Just give me a second.” I fired up the threep’s diagnostic system to find out what was going on. “Great, it’s a Metro Courier.”

“Is that a problem?” Beresford asked.

“The Metro Courier is like the Ford Pinto of threeps.”

“We could try to find you a rental threep if you want,” Beresford said. “I think Enterprise might have some at the airport. It’ll just take forever and you’ll spend your day filling out requisition forms.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. The diagnostic said there was nothing wrong with the threep, which may have meant there was something wrong with the diagnostic. “I’ll walk it out.”

“Come on, then.” Beresford started off again. I followed, limping.

“Agent Chris Shane, Officer Klah Redhouse,” Beresford said, after we reached the lobby, introducing me to a young man in a uniform. “Klah went to Northern Arizona with my son. As it happens he was in Phoenix on tribal business, so you got lucky. It would be a two-hundred-eighty-five-mile walk to Window Rock otherwise.”

“Officer Redhouse,” I said, and held out my hand.

He took it and smiled. “Don’t meet a lot of Hadens,” he said. “Never met one who was an FBI agent before.”

“A first time for everything,” I said.

“You’re limping,” he said.

“Childhood injury,” I said. And then, after a second, “That was a joke.”

“I got that,” he said. “Come on. I’m parked right outside.”

“Be right there,” I said, and then turned to Beresford. “There’s a possibility that I might need this threep for a while.”

“It’s just collecting dust with us,” Beresford said.

“So it won’t be a problem if I keep it in Window Rock for a while,” I asked.

“That’s going to be up to the folks up there,” Beresford said. “Our official policy is to defer to their sovereignty, so if they want you away when you’re done, head to our office in Flagstaff. I’ll let them know you might be on the way. Or get a hotel room. Maybe someone will rent you a broom closet and a plug.”

“Is this a problem?” I asked. “I’m not really versed in the relations between the FBI and the Navajo.”

“We don’t have any problems at the moment,” Beresford said. “We’ve cooperated with them just fine recently, and they have Klah taking you up, which says they don’t have a problem with you. But other than that, who knows. The U.S. government gave the Navajo and a lot of the other Native American nations a whole lot more autonomy a couple of decades back, when it downsized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service. But that’s also given us an excuse to ignore them and their problems.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Hell, Shane, you might be able to sympathize,” Beresford said. “The U.S. government just pulled the plug on the Hadens, didn’t it? It’s something you folks might say you have in common with the Navajo.”

“I’m not entirely sure I want to be going around making that comparison,” I said.

“That’s probably wise,” Beresford said. “The Navajo have a two-hundred-year head start in the ‘getting screwed by the U.S. government’ category. They might not appreciate you jumping on the train. But now you might understand why some of them might decide to be touchy about you showing up and asking questions. So be polite, be respectful, and go if they tell you to go.”

“Got it.”

“Good,” Beresford said. “Now go on. Klah’s good people. Don’t keep him waiting.”

Chapter Ten

T
HE RIDE UP
to Window Rock took four and a half hours, with Redhouse and me passing the time in innocuous conversation followed by long lapses of silence. Redhouse seemed to enjoy my stories about getting to travel the world with my father and noted that his own travels had been far less extensive.

“I’ve been in the four states the Navajo Nation sits in,” he said. “And the most time that I spent away from it was when I went to Flagstaff for college. Other than that, been nowhere but here.”

“Have you wanted to go anywhere else?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “When you’re a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.”

“Pretty sure that’s a universal thing,” I said.

“I know,” Redhouse said, and smiled. “And now I don’t mind it so much. I like my family better now that I’m older. Have a fiancée. Have a job.”

“Did you always want to be a police officer?” I asked.

“No,” he said, and smiled again. “I went to college for computer science.”

“That’s kind of a left turn,” I said.

“Just before I went to college the Council decided to invest in a huge server facility outside Window Rock,” Redhouse said. “It would serve the needs of the Navajo and other nations, and then also be used by the surrounding state governments and even the federal government for nonconfidential processing and storage. Solar powered and zero emission. It was going to employ hundreds of Navajo and bring millions of dollars into Window Rock. So when I went to college I studied computing so that I could have a job. The Flagstaff news site even did a story about me and some of my classmates at Northern Arizona. They called us ‘The Silicon Navajos,’ which I didn’t like very much.”

“So what happened?”

“We built the facility and then none of the promised state or federal contracts came in,” Redhouse said. “We were told about budget cuts and reorganizations and changes in agendas and new governors and presidents coming in. We have this state-of-the-art facility now and it’s operating at three percent of capacity. Not so many people got hired to staff it at three percent. So I went to the police academy and became a police officer.”

“Sorry about the switch,” I said.

“It’s not so bad,” Redhouse said. “I had family who were officers before me, so you could say it was a tradition. And I’m doing some good, so that helps. But if I’d known my degree was going to be useless I might have not scheduled so many eight
A.M.
classes. Did you always want to be an FBI agent?”

“I wanted to be one of those CSI agents,” I said. “Problem for that was my degree is in English.”

“Oof,” Redhouse said. “We’ll see the computer facility as we drive in. You can get a look at what wasted potential looks like.”

An hour later, just south of Window Rock, we rolled by a large, featureless building surrounded on three sides by solar panels.

“I’m guessing that’s it,” I said.

“That’s it,” Redhouse said. “The one positive thing about it is that since we don’t need all the solar capacity we installed, we sell energy to Arizona and New Mexico.”

“At least you’ll make a profit somehow.”

“I wouldn’t call it a profit,” Redhouse said. “It just means running the computer facility bleeds us more slowly than it would otherwise. My mother works for the Council. She says that they’re going to give it a couple more years, tops.”

“What will they do with the building?” I asked.

“That is the question, isn’t it, Agent Shane?” Redhouse said. He sat up, pressed a button on his dash, and took over manual control of the police car. “Now, let’s get you checked in at the station and then we can take you to go see Johnny Sani’s family. My captain is probably going to want to have an officer accompany you. Is that going to be a problem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, good,” Redhouse said.

“Is it going to be you?” I asked.

Redhouse smiled once more. “Probably.”

*   *   *

Sani’s family lived in a well-kept double-wide in an otherwise less-than-spiff trailer park outside of Sawmill. The family consisted of a grandmother and a sister. Both sat on a couch looking at me, numbly.

“Why would he kill himself?” his sister, Janis, asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

“How did he do it?” asked the grandmother, May.

“
Shimasani,
you don’t want to know that,” Janis said.

“Yes I
do,
” May said, forcefully.

I looked over to Redhouse, who was standing next to the chair I was sitting in, holding the glass of tea they had offered him. They offered me one as well. It sat on the table in front of me, between me and Sani’s relatives.

Redhouse nodded at me. “He cut his throat,” I said.

May looked at me balefully but said nothing else. Janis held her grandmother and looked at me, expressionless. I waited for a couple of minutes and then began again.

“Our records show—” I said, and then stopped. “Well, actually, we don’t have any records for John.”

“Johnny,” Janis said.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Johnny. All the records we have for Johnny are from here. From the Navajo Nation. So our first question is why that’s the case.”

“Until last year Johnny never left here,” Janis said.

“All right,” I said. “But why is that?”

“Johnny was slow,” Janis said. “We had a doctor test him when he was thirteen. He said his IQ was seventy-nine or eighty. Johnny could figure things out if he worked at it, but it took him a long time. We kept him in school as long as we could so he could have friends, but he couldn’t keep up. He stopped going and we stopped making him go.”

“He wasn’t always that way,” May said. “He was a smart baby. A smart little boy. When he was five he got sick. He wasn’t the same after that.”

“Was it Haden’s?” I asked.

“No!” May said. “He wasn’t crippled.” She stopped and considered what she had said. “Sorry.”

I held a hand up. “It’s perfectly all right,” I said. “Sometimes people get sick with Haden’s but they don’t get locked in. But it can still do damage. When you say he got sick, did he have a fever? And then meningitis?”

“His brain swelled up,” May said.

“That’s meningitis,” I said. “We scanned his brain after he died and we saw the brain structure there that was consistent with Haden’s. But we found something else, too. We found that he had something we call a neural network in there too.”

Janis looked up at Redhouse for this. “It’s like a machine in his head, Janis,” he said. “It let him send and receive information.”

“I have one in my head back home,” I said, and tapped my head. “It lets me control this machine here so I can be here in the room with you.”