Bella Downs had members of the New Paradise Police Department on her payroll. At five thousand dollars just to get through the door of her house of horrors, she certainly could afford it. A town the size of New Paradise, there couldn't be more than six, maybe eight cops on that force. It was possible she'd bought them all. That was her strength, how she guarded her home turf. Bradley and Mike inside, and the cops on speed dial should they ever be required.
She'd shown me her best cards, I realized, and I started to laugh, and kept on laughing, not caring how much it hurt, because I saw it then, saw what to do and the way to do it. Bella Downs didn't know who Matthew Twigg was, she couldn't be sure how I'd found her, and she didn't know what I really wanted. As far as she was concerned, I'd strayed off course and into her operation, and so she'd shown me her best cards to convince me to go away and not come back.
If I'd been a man named Matthew Twigg, I probably would've listened.
With effort, I pulled myself to my feet. The walk back to the rental was going to be a long and painful one, but I knew the car would still be there. The cops from New Paradise would make sure of that. The drive back to Vegas would be even longer, and probably hurt worse. But none of that mattered.
Tiasa was close, and I finally had a way to reach her.
CHAPTER
Thirty-one
There were three students at work in the RF lab at the
Howard R. Hughes School of Electronics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when I walked in during lunch hour the next day. Of them, only one looked up, a young Hispanic man in wire-frame glasses and a Green Lantern T-shirt, apparently mid-process of assembling some piece of electronics or another.
“Dude,” he said. “What happened to your face?”
“Lost a bet,” I said.
“Some bet. Can I help you with something?”
“I'm looking for Sharala Chandna. Professor Blackstone gave me his name.”
The other two at work—another man and a woman, each perhaps in their mid-twenties—broke off from their respective tasks, listening. The man was Caucasian, and the closest to the cliché I'd walked in expecting, despite myself, in black cargo pants and white work shirt, pens and a calculator in his breast pocket. The woman looked to be Indian, wearing torn and weathered jeans, and a faded light blue T-shirt with the words
Big Blue Marble
barely legible beneath an iron-on Planet Earth.
“That would be me.” The woman pushed the laptop she'd been working at to the side. There was a decal on the lid of the computer, a caricature of a girl in horn-rim glasses with a mop of black hair. The words
Flirty, Dirty, and Nerdy
had been printed beneath.
“Beg your pardon,” I said. “He led me to believe I was looking for a guy.”
“Yeah, Blackie does that.” Sharala Chandna nodded. “Likes to poke holes in the stereotypes. He tell you to look for the one with a pocket protector, too?”
“Nerd glasses, actually.”
Sharala Chandna approached, leaving her workbench and her laptop behind. Various pieces of equipment that I hadn't the first idea about populated the workshop, along with circuit boards, spare antennae, soldering equipment, oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and tools of every shape and size. The two men went back to their respective projects, and I didn't even try discerning what they were working on.
Sharala looked me over, and I had a good idea what she was seeing, and so didn't take it personally. Aside from my jeans, T-shirt, and boots, I had a new selection of bruises, including a cheerfully swelling one rising quickly on my right cheek. My lower lip had been split at the corner. In my short sleeves, the bandage covering the stitches on my forearm was clearly visible.
“I'd offer to shake your hand, but I'm afraid it'd fall off,” she said.
“The right one works fine.” I offered it to her. “My name's Matt.”
She shook my hand briskly. “What can I do for you?”
“I'm looking for someone to build something for me, and to build it quickly. I'm willing to pay for the time and materials. Professor Blackstone said I should come down here and ask for you. He said you were a, uh, ‘maker’?”
She grinned. “He said that? He'd know. What sort of thing are we talking about?”
I pulled the schematics I'd printed out that morning from my back pocket, handing them to her. I'd found them online, at a website that had offered the designs as open hardware. Once I'd found them, I'd brought up the website for UNLV, and in short order that had led me here.
“Oh fuck!” Sharala said. “Oh fuck yeah, it's Limor!”
Both men looked up sharply from what they were doing, immediately and visibly curious. The one with the pens in his pocket asked, “Which one?”
“The Wave Bubble! He fucking wants a Wave Bubble!”
“No shit?” This from the other one, the one who'd asked what had happened to my face. “Let me see!”
All three of them crowded around the schematic, and then Sharala handed them the sheets and grabbed her laptop, pulling it over to the worktable nearest them. She opened her web browser, typing in a URL from memory, then clicking once, twice, giggling to herself the whole while.
“Yeah, it's Limor's Wave Bubble, all right!” she said gleefully. “I made her Minty MP3 like a year ago, that was so cool.”
“The POV—”
“On the bicycle wheels! Fuck yeah!”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Did you see the new Arduino stuff? Fucking awesome.”
“No, the TV-B-Gone! The TV-B-Gone is genius, I fucking
love
that thing. You heard about Greenberg, right?”
“What'd he do?”
“He built one, took it down to the Strip. Started going through the casinos, hitting each of the sports bars, fried every LCD screen he could find. Got all the way to Caesar's before they caught him.”
“Outstanding.”
“Excuse me,” I said again.
They all stared at me, seemingly having forgotten I was there.
“I assume this means you can make me one?” I asked Sharala.
“Oh yeah, hell yeah.” She was almost dismissive. “Couple of weeks, sure. Limor lays everything out—she's fantastic, I love her, I would have her babies if I could, seriously.”
“Thing is, I need it sooner. End of the week, if possible.”
“That's harder. You gotta do the Gerber plots, then have the PCBs made. We can get those done in town, but it's more expensive. And some of the components, they'll have to be ordered.”
“And I need it boosted.”
That caught her by the curiosity. “How much?”
“It has to be able to blanket a house, a big one. Some of the exterior.”
“But still this scale?”
“It can scale up,” I said. “Just needs to be portable, something I can carry.”
“Sure, yeah, you get a bigger battery, a power amplifier, that's one way to do it. Just factor up the math.”
“Wait.” The one with the pens in his pocket was staring at me. “Why?”
“Why?” Sharala asked.
“Why does this guy need a Wave Bubble, one that's stepped up?” He was still staring at me. It was a fair question, and I was a little surprised it had taken this long to be asked. “Why does he need to jam all forms of communication going into or out of a great big house running between eight hundred megahertz and two point eight gigahertz?”
All three of them gave me the hairy eyeball.
“I've got to do something,” I told them. “And I don't want the people I'm doing it to making any phone calls while it's being done.”
“Yeah, see,” he said. “That kinda sounds like something maybe Sharala and Solomon and me wouldn't want to be a part of.”
“What's your name?” I asked him.
“Augustyn.”
“Auggie,” said the one in the glasses. Solomon. “We call him Auggie.”
“You guys mind if I close the door?” I asked.
“Why?” asked Sharala.
“Because I want to answer the question, and I don't want us being overheard while I do it.”
“Go ahead,” Auggie said. “But, man, you try anything and we'll shove a soldering iron so far up your ass you'll have smoke coming out your nose.”
I nodded, turned to close the door. None of them had moved when I turned back, each of them watching me as if trying to determine how I myself was wired.
“Let me tell you about a girl,” I said.
Sharala, Auggie, and Solomon, it turned out, were all “makers,” and all of them were looking to change the world. By “makers,”
I learned, they meant those who actually built things, who tinkered and dinked and took apart and put together and built workshops in their garages. They differentiated themselves from “abstracts” and the “normals.” The “abstracts” were the abstract thinkers, the ones who, as they put it, sat around all day dreaming about what could work, would work, how to make this more efficient and that more powerful and this more elegant without ever getting their hands dirty. Professor Blackstone, who had referred me to them, they said, was “abstract.” Conversely, Limor Fried, the creator of the Wave Bubble, was, by their account, a Saint of Makers.
“And the normals?” I asked. We were at a restaurant a few miles from the campus that they had suggested, a place called Metro Pizza. So far, they'd worked their way through a cheese pizza and a pitcher of beer, and seemed eager to start on a second round of each.
“Normals are the ones who do it for a living,” Solomon said, pouring a fresh glass of beer for himself. “They get their degree and then they go to work for The Man. But never mind that, this stuff about this girl, Tiasa—this shit's for real?”
“Yeah,” I said. I hadn't told them everything, because there were things they didn't need to know to help me. But I'd told them about Tiasa, about how she'd been taken from her home, about how I'd been chasing after her for a month.
“Still doesn't explain the need for the Wave Bubble,” Auggie said. Of the three, he was the most suspicious, not because he distrusted me, I'd realized, but because he was very concerned with how what he made might be used.
“Where she is now—where I think she is—the people who have her, they've got some police in their pocket,” I said. “All of these people are using cell phones, they don't like landlines, they don't like anything that can be traced. I don't want them calling for help when I go to get her.”
“How do you know they've got the cops in their pocket?” Solomon asked.
I indicated my face.
“Go to the feds,” Sharala said. “Or the state police.”
“And what if someone tips these people off first?” I asked. “Then I lose her. I can't take the risk.”
“This one girl, she's there, maybe, but… but there are other girls there, too. You're just going to leave them there?”
“No,” I said.
“What're you going to do for them?”
“I'm working on it. Look, I've told you guys as much as I think it's safe to tell you. I'm dealing straighter with you than I've dealt with anybody in a long, long time. Are you willing to help me or not?”
“Of course we'll help you,” Sharala said.
“I'll pay for the equipment, anything you need,” I said. “I'll pay for your time.”
“We'd do it for free,” Auggie told me.
“But money's good, too,” Solomon added.
“So what do we do now?”
“Now?” Sharala asked, with a grin that seemed almost too delighted for her face to hold. “Now we make shit.”
CHAPTER
Thirty-two
I went apartment hunting that afternoon. I found myself
a cheap place on West Cheyenne for six-fifty a month, and had a rental agreement with Matthew Twigg's name on it by four in the afternoon. That gave me just enough time to get to the DMV before they closed at five. With the rental agreement in one hand and my Washington State driver's license in the other, I was able to provide proof of residency, and left just as they were locking the doors with a brand new Nevada State driver's license.
I raced down to Tropicana, jockeying through traffic and watching the clock. My haste wasn't truly necessary, but the more I got out of the way now, the less I would have to do later,
and the plan I was forming—such as it was—was going to keep me fairly busy for the next few days. According to the rental's clock radio, it was seven past six when I pulled into the parking lot of The Gun Store, and when I went inside I got eyefucks from just about everyone behind the counter, which is never a nice thing, and all the less pleasant when the people delivering them are also wearing firearms, as all of them were.
I made it easy on them, though, because I knew what I wanted, and they had it. I picked up a Glock 19 and one hundred rounds of nine-millimeter, and while I was at it I acquired a small Benchmade knife from their selection. They ran my brand new driver's license while I listened to the sound of gunfire in all calibers coming from the shooting range. They even had submachine guns and a Squad Assault Weapon available for rental. The check on Matthew Twigg came back, and nothing in it said I wasn't to be trusted with a pistol.
Next task was to find an electronics or, better, an office-supply store, but the hour had gone late enough that I didn't think I'd be able to manage it today. I headed back to the hotel, ordered up some food, and set about checking the pistol I'd purchased, fieldstripping it and reassembling its parts before loading it and stowing it deep in my messenger bag. I was sore and tired, and when I looked at the clock, I realized it was time to call Ballygar.
Alena answered this time, sounding miserable.
“What's wrong?” I asked.
“I've been sick,” she told me. “Throwing up.”
“Something you ate?”
