Razing Beijing: A Thriller (48 page)

With the sails safely secured—so, too, the crew’s long
female hair by all manner of ties, rubber bands, and hats—Joanne sat back
against the cabin with her arms snugly around Ashley. All three of Stuart’s
passengers gazed out over the bay. Soon his daughter’s eyelids became droopy,
and she drifted to sleep.

Lewis unleashed a glance at Emily, and then shifted her
eyes back to Stuart. “Perry and I think dinner with the senator went well the
other night. A few more days schmoozing the DOE boys might actually produce a
re-draft of the contract. The terms seem to be moving more favorably for the
company.”

Stuart eased over the helm as they rounded a buoy. “You
weren’t there, but earlier in the afternoon, Perry suggested to Milner that
future control of the industry, if ever there is one, should be subordinated to
a new shipping branch of the U.S. Post Office or some damn thing.”

“And what did Milner say to that?”

“He looked like a Doberman salivating over a slab of meat.”
Lewis appraised him scornfully, and Stuart realized he’d just reduced to mere
bribery the entire complex of mysterious political machinations over which she
performed her lobbyist magic. “On the other hand, Perry’s only wasting his
breath without your involvement. I’m sure he knows how much he really needs you
up there.” He looked at the compass to check their heading until, from the
corner of his eye, he saw Joanne direct her intensity elsewhere.

“CLI is certainly in no position to bargain,” she said. “And
what’s wrong with a government role? You don’t seem to mind when they’re
handing you money.”

When they’re handing me
back
my money, he wanted to
say. Stuart knew how that argument would end, Joanne condescendingly
professorial, he outdone by style over substance.
Lawyers,
he thought,
must
drive each other friggin’ nuts
.

Stuart slid back the sleeve of his sweater; almost 7:00
P.M
. Under power, the sailboat glided past the
Nomini light house to starboard, its silhouette bleak against a faint gray sky.
His eyes eventually found their way to Emily’s. She returned his smile and
brushed strands of hair from her face.

Stuart said to Joanne, “I’ve got an unfortunate situation I
was hoping you could advise me on. How much do you know about settling an
estate when there aren’t any heirs?”

“You mean, intestate?”

“I guess.”

“Anybody I know?”

“I don’t think so, a guy from Thanatech. So how does
‘intestate’ work...?”

WHITECAPS WERE FROTHING
the
inlet and the sky was threatening to unload. Stuart reached down to throttle
back the Volvo Penta diesel. He then noticed the figure walking tentatively to
the end of the dock, hands in his pockets. It was Thackeray—perfect timing, he
thought. Ashley would know what to do.

Mystic
closed on the dock and Stuart notched the
throttle lever to neutral. Ashley shouted to Thackeray, who readied his hands,
suddenly unsure of taking commands from a little girl at the bow of a yacht
that was barreling straight at him. Ashley steadied her feet, and with all her
might flung the coil of rope—Thack’s eyes went wide as he reached to retrieve
it. Ashley shouted again; Thackeray passed one loop around a dock cleat and
pulled out the slack.

With the sailboat securely cleated to the dock, Stuart shut
off the engine and covered the instruments in the midst of a downpour. Emily
and Joanne joined Ashley racing up the dock for the boathouse. Stuart had known
for some time Thackeray’s visceral fear of the water, so he waved him aboard.

He was below deck switching off the instruments when
Thackeray’s wobbly legs appeared descending the steps. “Dammit Thack, you’re
letting the rain in!”

Thackeray planted his feet at the base of the stairs. “Awesome.
It’s like the Ritz Carlton down here.”

Stuart slid the hatch cover and shut out the pounding rain.
“I’d have shamed you aboard long ago if I’d known how to do it.” He removed two
cans of Coors from the fridge. He handed one along with a towel to Thackeray. “What
brings you out here?”

Thackeray toweled the rain from his beard. “You never came
back to watch the senator’s demo the other day.”

“Shit, I still had the whole evening in front of me to
waste. Did I miss something spectacular? Nobody said anything at dinner.”

“They wouldn’t have. Perry was too busy calming Milner to
bring them down to the well. I guess the senator must’ve shit his pants. We
gave him earplugs, you’d have thought he’d be prepared to hear something loud. But
anyway, we found this on the destination cart.” Thackeray removed a cellophane
bag from his pocket and handed it to Stuart.

“What is it?” Stuart held the bag up to a recessed overhead
light. He saw what looked like the sharp corner of broken quartz, no larger
than a shirt button. Then it dawned on him. “I don’t believe it...Thack—you’ve
done it! Teleportation! Why the hell hasn’t this news been bouncing off the
walls?”

“Only a couple of us know about it.”

“Why?”

“We’re not so sure it’s very good news.” He put the beer to
his lips and tilted his head back.

Dumbfounded, Stuart looked again at the small chunk of
quartz in his hand. The entire target pyramid weighed shy of fifteen pounds. “So
what if it’s not the whole enchilada. You’re a lot further along than you were a
month ago.”

Thackeray looked at him as if the news he was about to
deliver would signal the end of all humanity. “Actually, it’s probably very bad
news.”

Stuart finally realized that Thackeray displayed not the
slightest sense of triumph. “What do you mean?”

Thackeray crushed the empty beer can. “One of our Swiss buddies
came up with a theory. Even Keilig seemed to dismiss it at first. I happen to
respect him. Did you know he’s one of the world’s renowned—”

“We all think Keilig’s a genius. What theory?”

“Well, Vaughan came into my office some months ago, back
when we were having all that trouble getting Reedy off dead-center. By then we
were consistently failing to get the target object to reappear. Back in the
nineties, early quantum teleportation experiments demonstrated we could
entangle two photons, separate them, then entangle one of them—call it the
messenger photon—with what we at CLI would call the target photon.
Pooff—
both
target and messenger are destroyed. The destination photon assumes all quantum
and classical properties of the original target photon—you have the essence of
teleportation. I guess it’s sort of easy teleporting one or two particles.

“Now, this guy Franz’s theory goes something like this.” Thackeray’s
lips turned down in a sneer, as if bile was ascending his throat. “As you
teleport larger and larger objects, naturally the quantity of particles
increases—more atoms, more molecules. Franz is afraid that maybe the quantity
of possible
destinations
increases exponentially to the number of
particles
.”

“Destinations...as in
plural?
”

“For all we know, little bits of our pyramids are scattered
all over Creation—literally. If Franz’s fears hold true, the target object
would never fully reconstitute.”

Stuart stared at his trusted project manager.

“It’s just a theory,” Thackeray added.

“Why haven’t I heard of any such theory?”

Thackeray smiled weakly. “Wouldn’t exactly appear in
keeping with the program, would it?”

“Thack!”

“Hey, they only came up with it sort of
back-of-the-envelope.”

“You seem to have bought into it!” Stuart pondered the
implication of flushing tens of millions of dollars down the proverbial toilet.

Thackeray saw that Stuart was turning red. “You don’t have
to shout.”

“How the
fuck
do we control a process like that!”

“We don’t, of course. Like I said, it’s only a theory, one
of many. There are still the other obstacles to worry about. We’re a long way
from incorporating the improvements you got Perry to approve.”

“But if Keilig’s people are right, this is a goddamn
showstopper!
Multiple
destinations?! You can’t just sit on information
like this!”

“Jeez, Stu, will you calm down? I don’t see moving a piece
of grit from one table to the other as any reason to jump up and down.”

Monday, June 15

“I HAVE BEEN ORDERED
back
to Beijing tonight in order to brief the brass,” Deng informed his top two
engineering managers. “Please bring me up to speed on the interferometry work. However...”
He slipped his laser protective goggles on over his last few square centimeters
of exposed skin. “I have neither the time nor interest in a doctoral thesis.”

Deng managed to see Wen-ho glance at Valeriy Korzhakov and
tightly smile. From the moment he had met the young, Beijing-appointed
replacement for his missing physicist, Deng considered the man a bit too clever.
“Enjoy life’s humor while you can, comrade. A few more negative briefings like
my last one, and we are all going to be reported missing.”

Wen-ho’s mouth fell open to speak. He abruptly closed it
and returned Deng’s glare.

Korzhakov broke the heavy silence. “This way,
Commissioner.”

Deng followed the ex-Soviet directed-energy weapons
specialist and Wen-ho through a door-lock.

Their short walk did little to ease the tension as they
emerged atop the five-story tall gantry. Deng did his level best to conceal his
deep personal pride. Supported vertically in its assembly jig, stabilized by
two 35-tonne overhead cranes, stood Satellite Weapon Number Two.

Korzhakov explained to him, “However convinced we are of a
software glitch in our orbiting vehicle, we cannot on basic principle ignore
the possibility of a systemic error in the beam steering mechanism, even something
which might include...well, the dreaded ‘H’ word.”

“A hardware problem.”

“Correct. So, the interferometry test underway permits us
to assess the processing of the laser beam from the instant that it is
generated, to when it fully emerges from inside the weapon. As you know, the beam
must criss-cross between a handful of adaptive mirrors, each with a role in
steering, compensation for thermal blooming, and other atmospheric effects. During
our test we articulate these mirrors, very precisely, and compare the actual
measured shift in wavelength—”

“To the beam’s nominal path length,” Deng surmised.

Korzhakov smiled broadly. “The actual is subtracted from
nominal and reported as error.”

As complicated as it sounded, Deng suspected this probably
represented something of a simplification. The purpose of the Pointing Control
System originally devised by the Soviets now included terrestrial fluorescence
detection
—an
innovation unique to the Chinese design.

Korzhakov led them down spiral steps that wound around the
satellite—Deng admired in silent awe the satellite’s exterior contour. Beneath
the matte black ablative surface that was designed to defeat bombarding radar
and laser energy, thousands of capillary tubes circulated high-pressure liquid
helium for cryogenically cooling the spacecraft’s copper skin. At 73 Kelvin,
bulk infrared signature during orbital maneuvers would blend the vehicle into
the background of space for even America’s most sensitive detectors. It struck
Deng as ironic that stealth was so far their most successfully proven feature,
yet the steps taken to acquire the enabling technologies had nearly exposed the
Security Ministry’s foreign subterfuge and terminated the entire undertaking.

Korzhakov directed Deng’s attention through an access plate
that had been removed to expose the focal plane, located thirteen meters behind
the primary mirror. “Deep inside the carbon composite bowels of the PCS is the
heart of the optical sensor suite—the retina of the eye, as it were. The Visual
Light Photon Counter array...ah, here we are. Looks like we have some initial
results.”

They approached a portable computer console connected to an
umbilical snaking out of the satellite. The avalanche of numbers marching down
the monitor all reported mechanical system error in the range of .00000015
meters—less than a quarter wavelength of light.

Not bad, thought Deng, considering the complexity of the
mechanism. He looked up from the monitor to find Korzhakov wearing a
self-satisfied grin.

“From an altitude of 300 kilometers,” Korzhakov said, “I
will deliver you point-and-hold stability within the button on your shirt.”

“Your bravado strikes me as a bit premature.” Deng scratched
his cheek through his nylon mask. “This is good news, then?”

“It certainly strengthens the case for an isolated software
glitch.”

The men resumed their descent of the stairs. Deng recognized
numerous ‘off-the-shelf’ technologies, from charge coupled devices and
piezoelectrics to wave front processors—many of them similar to those in use
aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, currently loitering beyond the moon’s
orbit within the second LaGrange point. That such technologies had been lifted by
necessity from another country’s shelf still managed to give him pause. Descending
all the way to the assembly floor, the trio stood quietly for several moments
gazing up at their towering creation. At length, Wen-ho excused himself in
order to attend the daily status review.

Deng watched the man leave. Wen-ho’s ongoing attempt to
assign blame for their current problems to the foreigners seemed like a flawed
strategy for fostering their cooperation, and only the latest wrinkle of an
unfortunate eleventh hour management shuffle. Notwithstanding the man’s grasp
of English and technical wherewithal, his eyes and ears in Xichang was proving
to be a thoroughly incompetent manager. Only this morning, a trusted member of
his staff approached him with evidence that Wen-ho was secretly reporting
directly to Rong and his cronies inside Zhongnanhai. Dr. Zhao’s absence, he
sorely realized, was taking its toll.