Razing Beijing: A Thriller (27 page)

“You mean, like our super—”

“The Silicon Graphics machine? Ancient history. I’ll have
somebody who knows what they’re talking about describe our nifty IBM / Sun
machinery. So, they had some Nobel prize-winning economist weigh in before
Wendell’s committee. Then the secretary of energy began a lobbying effort, all
very hush-hush. Wendell’s committee quietly tapped a few companies to place
secret bids on the project, which as you’ll see is essentially a systems
integration nightmare involving a number of disparate research grants from
around the country. At the urging of the current administration, France and
Austria are also contributing to the effort.” Perry shrugged.

“So I had the guys put a proposal together. Wendell’s
committee liked the technological synergy they perceived in our SDI origins. CLI
won the contract.” Perry looked at him. “You, uh, are you familiar with quantum
mechanics?”

“Not really.”

“Neither am I.” Perry leaned forward and looked Stuart in
the eye. “They convinced Wendell that in, say, fifteen or twenty years, if you
could loft a constellation of satellites into orbit with the ability to
teleport
stuff
—cargo—you could put a big dent in the vast amounts of fossil
fuel consumed to ship goods. The numbers are staggering. Think of all the
airborne freight, rail, trucking, maritime—we’re talking tens of millions of
barrels of fuel worldwide per day just to transport
stuff.
Sure, you
wouldn’t eliminate all of it. Along with reducing our imported energy, deficit trade
account and all the other economic negatives that we associate with those
things, you’d also reduce air traffic and roadway congestion. Businesses are
panicking over how to meet President Denis’s latest round of CO2 emissions
targets. I mean, shit, just think about it. CLI’s share of the carbon credits
alone should recoup our investment a hundred times over! The list of cascading
benefits is...what?”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Stuart was stunned.

“See why I wanted you back? I know it sounds like a bit of
a stretch.”

“A stretch? Goddamn it, Ralph—this is a
government
research
project?”

Perry’s face reddened to match Stuart’s. “Listen. Landing
this contract was the coup of a lifetime. Don’t you realize how this positions
the company? I know it sounds a little risky.”

“A little risky! Have you forgotten why we were able to buy
this place out from under the previous owners? ‘Teleport?’ That’s pure
technology shit!”

“No reason to shout.”

“Great, Ralph. We’ve taken this place from Star Wars to
fucking Star Trek.”

Perry stared back at him.

“At least the previous owners had the sense to build their
business around a real product. You said teleport
cargo,
not...people?”

“Bad breath ’n all?” Perry cracked a smile. “Erase a few
memories along the way? No, not people. Thackeray tells me it’s theoretically
possible—“

“Thackeray?”

“That’s right, Thack’s on the team. I guess such massive
quantities of information are needed to communicate the quantum essence of
living matter that it’s completely unfeasible. Not even within our
great-grandchildren’s lifetime. By the way, the word we prefer to use around
here is
teletransport
. Sounds a little less science fiction-esque. We
can’t have our congressional benefactors thinking we’re too far out in left
field.”

“That’ll do the trick.” As he thought about it, Stuart recalled
reading of actual experiments involving teleportation of individual atoms and
molecules. But re-materializing whole objects...? He supposed that it made
sense for ever more powerful computing to prevail upon the challenge of
teleporting objects of increasing complexity. “This sounds like a commercial
transportation project. What’s the Department of Transportation say about it?”

Perry cocked an eyebrow. “They don’t know about it.” He
watched with an amused grin as Stuart’s mind raced.

“Why all the secrecy?”

“It’s black, doesn’t exist.”

“I know that it’s black. Why is it black?”

“It depends on who you ask. The key is fundamental economic
transformation—many institutional oxen to gore; countless businesses adversely
affected or put right out of business; potential shenanigans by the oil lobby
along with all manner of transportation and labor interests who provide money
for political campaigns. Then there’s Pentagon queasiness over military
potential; consumer groups fretting over re-constituted DNA in their tofu. You
think that Frankenfood blather was bad? And we’ve recently had to incorporate
classified anti-missile technology into the hardware. So, to answer your
question, the whole nine yards. If they want it black, black it will be.”

“You mentioned pulling together research grants...?”

“A good deal of spade work has been ongoing for decades, so
it helps to think of this as ‘scaling up.’ Think of the yawning gap in time and
technology between Galileo and the space telescope. CLI’s charter is to propel
this technology along a comparable path. Just where we are along that path,
well, remains to be seen.”

Stuart shook his head, reached for the clear resin pyramid
from Perry’s desk and began absently turning the object over in his hands. Aside
from disbelief that his partner had been taken in by so hare-brained a concept,
he was a little intimidated. He examined the intricate detail of the miniature
black tree entombed inside the resin, replete with not only tiny leaves and
limbs but also the
scale
of bark on the
tiniest
branches.

Perry noted his interest. “Do you know what that is?”

“I could guess.”

“It’s a stereolithography model. The guys made it for me
from an early test scan using the project’s lasers.”

“Incredible detail.”

“Detail, that?” Perry chuckled. “That is
nothing
.”

“What the hell is it you expect me to do?”

“Just do what you do!” Perry rose from behind his desk. “If
I had all the answers I wouldn’t need you, would I? You are beyond a doubt the
best damn integrator of complex technical projects I’ve ever known.” Perry
walked over and looked out the window. “As much as I hate to admit it, this
place would have been turned back into a cow pasture if not for you.”

“At least then we could sell the manure. Seriously, Ralph. This
is more than a little hard to believe.”

“I know, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Damn thing doesn’t even
begin
to work.” Perry
turned from the window. “Not even close.”

What a surprise
, Stuart chose not to remark,
having already spouted enough pessimism for one day. He looked at his watch. “Excuse
me for a minute. I need to step out for a phone call.”

*     *     *

“ARE YOU ALONE?”

Emily closed her hand over the mouthpiece. “I have to take
this,” she said to the person seated in front of her. “It’s a personal call.”

Ian Vickers nodded and gathered his papers off her desk. She
waited for him to walk out of her cubicle before whispering into the
mouthpiece: “I don’t think we should talk here.”

“I’ll give you my number—”

“I’ve got it,” she said, eyeing the caller ID display.

Twenty minutes later, leery of even her cell phone, Emily
stood in a phone booth next to a convenience store several miles south of the
plant.

Stuart answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t reach you at home.”

“I’ve got an unlisted number.” She read it to him.

“I called to find out how you were, and if you’d gotten any
news regarding your parents.”

“My mother is very ill, and nobody I’m in touch with knows yet
where she and my father have gone. I am very worried.” Emily closed her eyes,
trying to blot out the unspoken hopelessness of her last phone conversation
with her cousin. With luck the smugglers would be contacting her sooner rather
than later.

“I’d like to know what I can do to help you resolve this.”

“That’s very kind of you, but I’m not sure you can do much
of anything.”

“It’s been awhile since you discovered that note in your
apartment.”

“The note made clear what they would do to my parents.”

“I understand that. The problem is that the longer we wait,
not only do the medical risks for your mother increase but whatever trail these
bastards left behind becomes more difficult to find. With no indication as to
how long—”

“I didn’t drag you into this because I expected you to
solve all of my problems.”

“If we discreetly approach the authorities—”

“No!” Her voice sounded loud in the confines of the
telephone booth. “I’m sorry. I am afraid that the wrong people would learn I’ve
gone to the police and decide to harm my parents. You must believe me when I
tell you that people do this sort of thing where I come from. But I do expect
to hear something soon. Then I’ll call you, and we’ll decide how to proceed
with the modules that I hid for the ECU.”

“Emily.” Stuart’s voice sounded tense. “I refuse to accept
that there’s nothing we can do, or that there is nobody we should contact for
help. If this is a regular tactic, maybe you should try their embassy in
Washington. What if in another few weeks you still haven’t heard? How would you
then
see this being resolved?”

It was already being resolved, or so she wanted to believe.
Neither she nor her cousin in San Jose had yet heard anything encouraging from
the smugglers she had hired. She had put a large sum of money down, with the
promise of more once they located her parents—was that not the way of resolving
things in an unjust world? How might Stuart react upon learning her plans to
violate American immigration law? Would he understand, and what possible good
could come of telling him?

“We should keep something else in mind,” Stuart said. “I’m
sure Jim Cole still blames himself for the death of his daughter. He must have
no idea that sabotage played a role.”

Emily could think of no sensible way to trade one set of
victims off against the other, and she sighed. “There are certain people in
China who are right now looking for my parents.”

“What kind of people?”

“Family friends out of Hong Kong.” Technically speaking,
this wasn’t a lie. “I expect to hear something within the next week or so.”

“Another week?”

Stuart’s apprehension reminded her that he also had
legitimate reasons for wanting justice done. Emily pointed out that there are
many places to investigate within so vast a country. “It might take a bit
longer. Maybe the authorities will turn up something on their own in the
Thompson murder investigation.”

“You said they’ve already concluded the murder was drug
related. I’ve been trying to think what I would do if I were assigned to figure
out who might have sabotaged Thanatech’s flight test, and so I’ve got a
proposal. You don’t think Thompson or whoever did this was acting alone, do you?”

Emily still had a hard time envisioning Sean intentionally
harming anyone. “I can’t imagine what might explain his acting alone.”

“Then we should try to find out who else might have left
the company, because anyone still there—”

“They could have organized the sabotage from anywhere.”

“Emily, we can’t look
everywhere
. Let’s start with
the assumption they were inside the company and knew enough to be able to plan
it. This we can do discreetly.”

“But discreetly enough?”

“I can’t answer that question. But are you willing to just
sit back and let this thing play out?”

Monday, June 1

FRUSTRATION WEIGHED
HEAVILY
on the third floor of the Washington Metro field office where
members of the President’s Special Joint Counter Terrorism Task Force were
convened. The elite FBI, CIA, and NSA individuals presently seated around the
polished table were nowadays exempt from the 1978 statutory prohibitions on
sharing information between them, as well as what few restrictions remained
following the reinstituted Patriot Act. It was a worrisome fact lost on none of
them that despite their exceptional powers, the high visibility investigations
they spearheaded had yet to produce a single criminal indictment.

Today’s eight attendees began with the usual reminder that
the evidence trail in the wake of the terrorist strike on the Holocaust
Memorial remained cold. They knew little from the two stolen motorcycles used
by the terrorists and later recovered in an abandoned Lincoln Heights warehouse.
Likewise no fingerprints had been found on the spent rocket launchers recovered
from the scene; serial numbers on the American-made weapons were traced to an
army weapons cache stolen from EUFOR in northwest Bosnia. Some ten weeks of
intense investigation had elapsed since the mutilated body of Katherine Prouty
was discovered with the dead Iranian spy inside his Rivergate apartment. With
evidence including plastique explosive, phony passports, DNA-traceable hair and
blood specimens, the team had enlisted the help of Israeli intelligence. Mossad
had provided only limited insight beyond the level of collaboration between
Mohammad Ahmadi and Nijad Jabara first reported by Samuel McBurney. Like
McBurney, the Israeli foreign intelligence service seemed more concerned with
the implications of the missile defense technical data found in the Iranian
diplomat’s possession. No single bit of evidence, no personal associate, no
financial transaction, no background investigation had shed any light as to the
identity of Katherine Prouty’s murderer. President Denis had called the team
each week to express his outrage.