The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (7 page)

The apartment surprised Shaw, who had been expecting the bare walls and adapted furniture of a fugitive. Instead the apartment was lush with green plants, a small trickle of water noise from the corner, and large black and white photographs on the walls.

Ono was saying goodbye to a small tabby cat, cradling the cat close to him and whispering into his ear. Shaw was legitimately touched. For all Ono knew, he was going to his death, and the only soul he had to say goodbye to was his cat.

Ono reversed into the bedroom where he was packing, but the process was quick—there wasn’t much to pack if you were going to be busy destroying the Lattice in two days. He reversed back out into the main room and fell back on the couch, picked up and played with a small black sphere on a side table, and then began reading a graphic novel.

Shaw stared at him. The man who was so filled with energy and purpose since he’d been watching him suddenly looked like a teenager, slouched on a couch for the summer. Shaw paused the reverse and then put it back into forward time. Ono looked up from his book when the black sphere on the table seemed to flash with a blue light, something Shaw hadn’t noticed when things were in reverse. The sphere rested in a crack between the glass and wood of the table. It was a perfect sphere, about five inches in diameter. Black and reflective—was it glass?

Shaw looked over Ono’s shoulder at the sphere. The blue was fading from the surface of the black sphere, as if it had grown hot with the light and was now cooling off. As the glow faded, there was writing left on the surface. In plain English, it said, “SAN FRANCISCO. TOMORROW MORNING.”

That faded and then another bit of blue text appeared, “FIND DR. GOWER, PLASTIC SURGEON.”

Ono waited for the text to fade and traced out a reply with his finger. “ON MY WAY.”

The determination in Ono’s eyes was back as he picked up the sphere and carried it into the bedroom. It was the first thing he packed.

It was in the U.S. Ono had brought it with him.

Shaw left the jump, his mind reeling. He couldn’t believe how quickly Ono had been willing to drop everything when he’d been called. Called by … by what?

What the hell was that thing?

Shaw slid out of the jump box, his wrap already illuminating with the news of an incoming call. Braybrook.

Shaw said, “Accept.” Braybrook’s avatar appeared to be standing in the room with him, but of course it was just an illusion of his mind’s eye, placed there by the implant in his temple. Everyone in the military was required to have an avatar that looked like themselves, but in the civilian world, the avatars people used for calls and in chat rooms ranged from the absurd to the very obscene.

“My assistant tells me you discovered the sphere,” Braybrook said, his avatar speaking for him.

“Yes, sir. Have you recovered the sphere yet?”

Braybrook hesitated. “No.”

“Did Ono dump it somewhere before getting to the Installation?”

“No, he carried it with him right through our security. It didn’t seem special in any way and wasn’t flagged.”

“So why don’t we have it yet, if he carried it all the way to the Lattice? Shouldn’t it be there?”

“It … ah. It disappeared.”

“
Disappeared
?”

“A few minutes after Ono left his duffle, it … shrank. Vanished into thin air. Same with the one the hovercraft pilot had.”

“He had one too? In the hovercraft?”

“No. He left it in the hangar. A few minutes after he began piloting the hovercraft out of the hangar the sphere shrank and vanished, same as the other.”

“Where did Ono get it then? I’m sure you had someone trace it back to when he got it.”

“We did.”

“And?”

“It grew. It grew out of thin air and was waiting for Ono on the table when he came home. I’ll add the date to your list of tags.”

Shaw was stunned. “It just showed up? How is that possible?”

“We don’t know yet. I have the boys in white lab coats working on it. They think it’s … entangled, I think is the word they used. With another sphere somewhere else.”

“Even if we don’t have one in front of us, can’t we study Ono’s or the pilot’s in a jump?”

“Of course. We already know—just a sec. I have it here. Nitrogen. It’s solid crystallized nitrogen, apparently only made with very high pressure. A nitrogen diamond, essentially. I’ll send over the weight and density. But forget the chemistry. It’s a fucking glass sphere. It’s sensitive to heat, which is how messages can be passed back and forth—the surface is like a touchpad and it just picks up your body heat. But the sphere itself doesn’t seem special. It’s how it was sent and retrieved that has my boys stumped.”

“There’s no way to trace it?”

“We tried tagging it in the jump before it shrank to see if we could follow it, but it got us nowhere. The jump box just lost the tag. However the sphere moves, we don’t have a way to track it after it disappears.”

Shaw tried to think of a question, but he couldn’t. “I’m at a loss for words.”

“Everyone is.”

“No one in the preliminary jumps caught them last night?”

“It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. Not a normal call or conversation. The news feeds found it at about the same time we did this morning. It’s all anyone’s talking about. But don’t go watching a feed right now. Your instincts were right. Follow this thing on your own. No one’s isolated any more—maybe a lone genius can get somewhere.”

“I’m no genius, sir.”

“You live with one, that’s good enough for me. Ask Ellie what she’d do. Because we’re at a loss.”

While Shaw waited for Ellie to come home, he went back into the jump box and once again pulled up the Lattice Installation. Instead of scrolling inside of it, he swiped to the west, and eventually found the remains of a very recent nuclear detonation—clouds in the air, a small crater, and a glass desert surrounding it where the sand had melted together, now reflecting the sun.

Shaw rewound time again, the hovercraft emerging from a nuclear mushroom cloud and backing up across the desert. He tagged it to follow it, and as he flew along beside it he couldn’t help but marvel at its beauty. Certainly its mission didn’t require it to be beautiful—the craft would have flown fine without the sleek body style. But someone had taken the time to
design
it, to make it look worthy of the Paris Air Show, even if its only mission was this one.

Shaw followed it back to the small town of Beatty, where it had launched from the back of a horse trailer. Once it was back on the trailer, the lone pilot reversed back to a small desert airport. A few hangars dotted the runway, and the horse trailer wheeled into one.

Inside, Shaw found a mechanical shop. Clearly this was where the craft had been built. He looked around at the many tools and noticed the black sphere on the workbench. He understood why none of the preliminary jumpers had noticed it. It looked like a paperweight. But now that he knew its significant, it loomed.

Shaw couldn’t help himself. He removed the jump tag from the craft and scrolled to jump time forward again. The horse trailer wheeled out of the hangar again, but Shaw kept his eyes on the sphere.

Nothing happened for several minutes, and then … it was light playing tricks—no, it was definitely smaller now, and shrinking. The black sphere was the size of an apple … an eyeball … a marble … a ball bearing … a speck of dust. And it was gone.

Shaw reversed back and forth several times, watching it grow and shrink in time. Even though Braybrook said it wouldn’t work, he tried tagging the sphere before it shrank, but it did nothing. The sphere disappeared, and the jump box vibrated slightly underneath his body, the sign that the tag had been lost.

He decided to let it go for now. He threw the scrollball into reverse, hours passing in mere seconds, but no one came to disturb the craft. Days were passing outside. The craft had been waiting for a long time. Waiting for the rest of the pieces of the plan to fall into place. Waiting for a new hire at Lattice security. Yang was the first to be recruited into the command room in months, his experience in Geneva making him one of the few outsiders who had passed through the intensive background jumps. The raiders needed a new face on the inside, someone who didn’t live on site and whose particular quirks and mannerisms weren’t already known.

Finally, light cracked on the door again, and three men entered the hangar. They worked on the craft and Shaw stopped time. One was the pilot, which left two more people to keep track of. He’d only done Ono so far. He still needed to check out the pilot, the plastic surgeon and his nurse, whoever had drugged Yang, and now these two. Oh, and whoever took out the lasers! How big was this conspiracy?

Shaw left the jump. He checked the screen—the date the hovercraft was last worked on was four months ago. These people were nothing if not patient.

Stepping out of the office, his wrap rang again. Expecting the General again, Shaw said, “Accept.”

The avatar of a middle-aged woman appeared before him, a corporate smile on her perfectly designed face.

“Hello, Byron. I’m Zella Galway of Dvorak Systems. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

Shaw froze, as if the avatar had spotted him. Zella Galway was not just “of” Dvorak Systems. She was CE-fucking-O of the largest manufacturer of jump boxes in the world and alone worth hundreds of billions. What was she doing calling him?

“Ah … Ms. Galway, yes, I have some free time just now. Although judging by the timing of the call, I’m guessing you knew that.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt. The Lattice might be able to read any thought, but it can’t read a thought that hasn’t formed. You were doing good work in there, just like you did yesterday. A thinker and a man of action … what a rare combination.”

“Just doing my job.”

“No,” she said. “Taking a hit from a nanoshock—not only that, but
surviving
it, and then passing it back to your assailant—that’s above and beyond your job description. I’m pleased the President has allowed us to install the lead shielding, so you won’t have to put yourself in harm’s way ever again.”

Shaw tried to imagine what his job would be like. Hiding behind lead shielding and twiddling his thumbs? “Well, I’m sure I’ll still have work to do. No barrier is one hundred percent effective,” he said, politely, he hoped.

“This one will be. Imagine a lead cloak draped over the entire facility. Nothing will be able to penetrate it. Your quick action prevented a world-wide economic meltdown, but—and I mean no offense by this, but if you’d taken another one point eight seconds to get to Yang it would have been too late. The rest of the Lattice manufacturers and myself are not willing to bank the world economy on those one point eight seconds.”

One point eight seconds. Was that it? Shaw hadn’t heard that number, but it felt about right. And someone was always jumping in to history to research stupid things like that.
Of course
someone had calculated Shaw’s margin of error.

He wasn’t sure why, but this call was making him decidedly uncomfortable. Shaw looked down at his forearm, where the wrap had already predicted his interest in Galway and Dvorak.

The wrap also showed a list of messages he’d accumulated in the last twenty-four hours—hundreds of congratulatory calls and requests for interviews that had been filtered by his privacy screen. Only officers at the Installation and his closest friends and family were able to reach him directly at any time. Zella Galway was not one of those.

“I’m sorry if this sounds rude, Ms. Galway, but how did you get past the privacy screen to reach me?” Shaw asked.

“Marc’s a friend,” she said, and it took Shaw a moment to connect “Marc” with General Braybrook. “He authorized me. I hope that’s all right? You see, I want to help you catch these raiders, Byron. If you need them, all the resources of Dvorak Systems are yours to command.”

Shaw’s eyebrows went up. “That’s very kind,” was all he could think to say.

“I can put a hundred people on it today, and more later if you need it. You just need to tell me where to point them.”

“General Braybrook has a whole battalion of men working on this, I—”

“Just give me a direction. The spheres? The pilot? The plastic surgeon? The lasers?”

“Truly, we don’t—”

“I’m going to tell them to research
something
. It may as well be something that would be helpful to you.”

Shaw realized he was going to lose. “All right. Thank you. Can you research the surgeon and the three who built the hovercraft? Until yesterday, most of the raiders on the Lattice have been relatively low-skilled. I want to know if there are any similarities between these two. Kind of school, kind of teachers. What would draw these people in?”

“We’re on it. I’ll get back to you within twenty-four hours. And would you mind adding me to your privacy screen? I don’t want to have to beg Marc for authorization again,” she said, laughing. But it only made Shaw feel trapped as he added her to his privacy settings.

When Ellie came home she found Shaw on their small balcony again. She kissed his forehead and draped her arms around his shoulders.

“I’m surprised you’re out here,” she said. “We’re scheduled for more rain soon.”

“So soon? I thought St. Louis won its bid for weather this week.”

“We did win, but the farms needed some rain, so they scheduled it tonight. Come on inside.”

“Not yet. I want to enjoy it while I can. How was your day?” he asked, running his hand along her arm.

“Fine. Nothing special. But all I could think about was what you were doing.”

“How much did you hear about it?”

“Pretty much everything, I think. I checked in with the news feeds during my breaks. You were researching the imposter. Then some sort of sphere that appears and disappears and can’t be traced. And then you got a call from a woman with billions in the bank and added her to your exclusive list of names who can call you day or night. Should I be worried?”

Shaw shook his head in amazement. “The feeds reported all that?”

“And that’s not all! Braybrook apparently thinks you should consult me. So the feeds are speculating about my IQ now. That’s when I decided to head home and make my genius available to you.”