Conviction

26

Though much of his view was obscured my machinery, piping, lighted control panels, and stanchions, it appeared that the room ran the length and breadth of the laboratory above; the banks of gray metal storage cabinets along the walls told him it also served as a storage area. Aside from sporadic blinking lights from the control panels, the space was dark. The only sound came from the throbbing of the pumps.

With just his head jutting from the hatch, he scanned the room, pausing first on the most likely spots for sensors and cameras before checking the rest. He spotted twelve cameras — one in each corner and two spaced along each wall. All were fixed and, judging from the Tridents’ EM, nonoperational.

Curiouser and curiouser, Fisher thought. Privately run or not, this facility dealt with arguably the most sophisticated technology of the twenty-first century, and yet he’d seen not a single active security measure. If Lucchesi was calling the shots, why would he decline to protect his life’s work? The special operator’s part of Fisher’s brain whispered trap, but he discounted it. An ambush, to what end? And why wait until he’d penetrated the facility?

Fisher climbed out of the hatch, closed it behind him, and moved among the pipes and stanchions until he reached a steel door set into the wall. A quick check with the flexicam revealed an alcove and a set of stairs leading upward. He could see a wall-mounted camera on the next landing — it, too, was dead. He opened the door, crossed the alcove, and started up the steps until he reached what he assumed was the first floor landing. Here the door was made of reinforced steel, with shielded hinges and a biometric keypad lock. Fisher was reaching for his OPSAT when he stopped and, on impulse, pressed down on the door handle. It clicked open. He eased the handle back to its original position. He checked the jamb. There wasn’t enough space for the flexicam. He gave the door an EM/ IR scan. Nothing. He pressed his ear to the door. Silence.

Too much good news, Fisher thought, and drew his SC pistol.

He pressed himself against the wall on the door’s knob side, eased the door open an inch, and braced it with his foot. He raised the SC to chest height, aimed the muzzle at the gap. He waited. Ten seconds. Thirty. A full minute.

No ambush, no shots, no rushing of armed security personnel through the door.

The hell with it.

Fisher swung the door open, peeked around the corner, and found himself staring into a dark, cavernous space.

He flipped on his night vision and looked around. The lab was in fact six stories tall but contained no floors, at least not in the traditional sense, but rather concentric, spiraling catwalks connected by narrow gantries. The slit windows cast stripes of pale light over the walls and catwalks and floors, leaving Fisher with the sensation that he’d stepped into a giant colander.

Hulking pieces of equipment dominated the floor, some of them tall and narrow, rising thirty and forty feet; others squat and featureless save a few control panels and LED displays. Clear acrylic tubes crisscrossed the space, entering and exiting the machinery at odd angles. Nothing looked familiar to Fisher, but he was unsurprised. The manufacture of molecule-sized devices would of course require specialized equipment and procedures.

After performing his now token NV/EM/IR scans, and once again coming up with nothing, he began moving through the space until, finally, he found a raised platform of white Lexan tiles in the northeast corner. Measuring roughly thirty feet square, the platform was surrounded on three sides by railing, while the wall side was dominated by a row of computer workstations. In the center was a rectangular chrome-and-glass conference table. Fisher was about move to ahead when his subconscious spoke up again: Complacency. He stopped, backed into the shadows beside one of the machines, and flipped on the night vision.

A lone figure was sitting in a chair before one of the workstations. The broad shoulders and height told Fisher it was a man. He sat hunched over, elbows resting on his knees, face cupped in his hands. SC raised and extended, Fisher crept ahead to the platform steps, then stopped.

“Don’t move,” Fisher whispered. “I’m pointing a gun at you.”

The man obeyed, save for a slight lifting of his head so he could see who was talking.

“Who are you?” the man said in Italian.

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“I am Terzo Lucchesi,” he muttered halfheartedly.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“He sent you to kill me. So kill me.”

“No one sent me to kill you.”

Lucchesi sat up in his chair. Light from one of the slit windows reflected off wire-rimmed glasses. “You’re American.” Lucchesi switched to English. “Why did he send an American? Were you cheaper?”

“Raise your hands above your head,” Fisher ordered. None of this felt right.

With a fatalistic shrug, Lucchesi raised his hands. “Are you a good shot? Please tell me you’re a good shot.”

“For the last time, I didn’t come here to kill you. Ask me about it one more time and I’ll start rethinking my plan.”

“I don’t understand, then. Who are you? Why are you here?”

“Let’s get some lights on,” Fisher said, taking a little of the edge from his voice. “Anything goes wrong, I’ll shoot you in the kneecap.”

“All right,” Lucchesi said hesitantly, and reached his hand toward one of the monitors.

“Wait.” Fisher mounted the platform steps and sidestepped around Lucchesi until his back was facing the wall and he could see the rest of the facility. He knelt down, making himself a smaller target. He flexed his rear foot, readying himself to spin should targets present themselves. “Go ahead. Carefully.”

Lucchesi tapped a series of buttons on the keyboard and, above, a series of halogen pendant lights glowed to life, illuminating the platform like a stage; then slowly more lights came on throughout the space until it was bright as daylight.

Lucchesi took in Fisher’s tac-suit, Trident goggles, face half covered in his balaclava, and tilted his head to one side as though he’d just seen a dodo bird. “My, you must have been expensive.”

Fisher sighed and lifted the SC, taking aim on Lucchesi’s forehead. The Italian raised his hands and nodded apologetically. “Sorry, sorry…”

“What’s going on here?” Fisher asked. “Why are you shut down? Where is everyone?”

“In order,” Lucchesi replied, “absolutely nothing is going on, we are shut down because we are broke, and everyone has gone home.”

“Explain.”

“My funding has been revoked.”

“The military?”

“My father.”

“Say again?”

“My father decided — and I quote—‘you’ve wasted enough time on your invisible robots and bugs.’ That was just his excuse, though.”

“Who’s your father?”

“You have heard of Graziani Motors, yes?”

Fisher nodded. Since the early 1950s Graziani Motors had specialized in custom-made sports cars. Special-order Graziani coupes began at eight hundred thousand dollars. At the age of seventeen Calvino Graziani started the company in his garage in what was then the village of Sassari; now seventy-four, Graziani remained at the company’s helm. Conservative estimates put his net worth at 14.2 billion.

Before Fisher could ask the next obvious question, Lucchesi said, “When my parents divorced, I was a teenager. I took my mother’s maiden name in protest.”

Fisher was running on instinct now, having decided against simply demanding the Ajax code from Lucchesi. Perhaps it was the vulnerability Fisher saw in the man, or genuine sympathy, or both, but his gut told him there might be a better way of skinning this cat.

“You said something about your father’s excuse… ”

Lucchesi gave another shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Tell me anyway.”

He studied Fisher for a moment. “I think you Americans call this the ‘bartender effect.’ You know, you tell your secrets to a complete stranger who happens to be serving you drinks. Or holding a gun on you.”

Fisher lowered the SC to a forty-five degree angle but kept it pointed in Lucchesi’s general direction.

“I should have expected that my father wasn’t helping me out of the goodness of his heart,” Lucchesi said. “He has none of that. He gave me just enough money to build this place, hire the best people, and make some progress before springing his trap. I was to start making nanotech-based weapons for his new start-up company. Father wanted to become an arms dealer, you see. Evidently, fourteen billion dollars isn’t enough.”

“So you refused.”

Lucchesi shrugged. “We argued. I tried to stall, I tried to compromise, and then a couple of days ago he pulled the plug, as you say. I came back from Milan and found this.” He swept his hand across the expanse of the laboratory. “Everything shut down. My staff gone. Every scrap of data removed from the mainframe. They pulled every hard drive, took every CD and USB flash drive.”

“Why didn’t you just go along — give him something so you could keep working on your own projects?” Fisher thought he knew the answer to this question, but he wanted Lucchesi to verbalize it so the man’s moral compass snapped back into focus.

“I got into the nanotech field to help people. To help the world. I inherited that weakness from my mother — if you listen to my father, that is. A soft bleeding heart with his head in the clouds.”

There it is, Fisher thought. “What if I told you I might be able to help?”

“You? Hah! I’m a dreamer, not an idiot. Anyone who dresses like that and carries the weapons you carry is more like my father than me.”

“You should know better than to make broad assumptions, Doctor. Sometimes you have to do a little bad to do a lot of good. Hear me out.”

Lucchesi wagged his head from side to side, thinking, then said, “Why not?”

Leaving out names and places and the specifics of 738 Arsenal, Fisher outlined his goal: help stop a massive arms deal from taking place and round up some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. “It’s probably not quite what you had in mind,” Fisher said, “but as you’re fond of Americanisms, what you’ve got here is lemons.”

Lucchesi smiled. “So I should make lemonade.”

Fisher nodded.

“How do I know you’re not lying to me?”

Fisher made a snap decision. He holstered his SC, took off his Trident goggles, and removed his balaclava. He looked Lucchesi in the eye. “I’m not lying.”

Lucchesi held his gaze for a long ten seconds. “No, you’re not, are you?”

“The kind of people you’re worried about would’ve stopped talking a long time ago.”

“I will trust your word on that. So these weapons… They are bad?”

“Very. And the people who want them are worse.”

Lucchesi considered this for a few moments, then stood up, ran his hands through his disheveled hair, and said, “What do you need?”

“Ajax?” Lucchesi said after Fisher explained what he needed. “I abandoned that months ago.”

“We didn’t.”

“Too many bugs. We couldn’t get it to work with enough chipset brands.”

“Define ‘work.’ ”

“There were too many variables in the maintenance protocols. The bots would find their way to the correct location, then get stuck in a feedback loop. Even the simplest maintenance tasks crashed them.”

“What if they only had one task?”

“Wait a moment… You said, ‘We didn’t.’ What does that mean?”

“We built our own version of Ajax. But we ran into a problem.”

Lucchesi smiled. “Ah, the fail-safe code. That’s what you came here for. They refuse any execute commands you give them?”

“Right.”

“What is this one task you want them to do?”

“Use whatever internal communication hardware and software they come across to send out a burst transmission.”

“Like GPS coordinates, perhaps?” Lucchesi was smiling more often now, warming to his new task. At Fisher’s nod, he rubbed his hands together. “Interesting… So you essentially want them to phone home. What kinds of hardware?”

“Laptops, desktops, cell phones, PDAs, GPS devices — anything that communicates electronically.”

“Which is everything nowadays, yes? Oh, this is wonderful!” Lucchesi shook his finger at Fisher. “You see, this is the problem with scientists. We tend to overthink problems. Often, instead of reducing, we add… You have schematics for me? Code?”

“I can get it. But that doesn’t solve our problem — the line of code we need was confiscated along with everything else.”

“Hah! One line of code — what was it, six or seven thousand characters long?”

“Four.”

“Four!” Lucchesi waved his hand dismissively. “I can write that in a few hours. Come on, come on. Get me the data. I want to play!”

It took several exchanges on the OPSAT before Grimsdóttir accepted the unusual course Fisher had chosen and acquiesced. When the schematics and code finally appeared in the OPSAT’s download folder, attached was a note from Grim:

You’re mellowing in your old age.

While Fisher had been communicating with Grim, Lucchesi had trotted off to a nearby file cabinet, retrieved a fifteen-inch MacBook Pro, and returned to the platform’s central conference table.

Fisher asked, “I thought you said—”

“They found it. There’s not a file left on it, but we don’t need those, do we? What media does that gadget accept?” Lucchesi asked.

“You name it.”

Lucchesi fished into his pants pocket, pulled out a 16 GB microSD card, and tossed it to Fisher, who inserted it into the OPSAT’s multiport and began the download process. Fisher sat down at the conference table.

“So you took quite a risk, yes?” Lucchesi asked.

“How so?”

“I assume men in your business aren’t encouraged to ask for anything. Plus, you’ve shown yourself to me. I could identify you — I won’t, of course, but I could.”

Fisher found himself liking Lucchesi. The man was a pure scientist, a man without guise or ulterior motive. Fisher rarely met such people in his line of work. Outside his own environment Lucchesi was probably socially maladroit. In his element he was perceptive and amiable.

“I know you won’t,” Fisher replied, keeping any inflection from his voice.

“So these weapons and these men… What happens once you’ve tracked them?”

“Bad things.”

“Ah, the good kind of bad things.”

“Right.”

The OPSAT beeped. Fisher removed the microSD card and handed it to Lucchesi, who plugged it into an adaptor, and then into the MacBook’s USB port.

For ten minutes Lucchesi stared at the screen, scrolling, pausing, typing random notes, until finally he looked up. “Very elegant. Your people did this?”

“More or less.”

“I’m impressed. And they got the bots to work — all but the execute command?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll need one more thing. That person you were talking to on the other end of your device… They have access to databases? The Internet?”

Fisher smiled. “You have no idea.”

On its face, Lucchesi’s request was daunting: He needed the specifications of every piece of hardware that matched their parameters and had been manufactured in the last decade. When Fisher put the question to Grimsdóttir, she simply typed back:

What format?

Fisher put the question to Lucchesi.

“XML spreadsheet should do nicely.”

An hour later the OPSAT chimed again. Fisher read the screen, then looked up at Lucchesi. “Done.”

“You’re joking with me.”

“No. Give me the card.”

Grimsdóttir’s data took up two gigabytes of space on the microSD card. Lucchesi spent a few minutes scanning the spreadsheet, then shook his head in wonder. “Amazing. You have a powerful friend there. Okay, I’ll get started. There’s a break room off the second-tier catwalk. Would you mind terribly much making coffee?”

“Twist my arm,” Fisher said, then got up.

Lucchesi was as good as his word. Three hours after he started, he gave the keyboard a final, definitive tap, then pushed away from the conference table with a heavy sigh. “Done. Can your people run the simulation?”

While Lucchesi went to the bathroom, Fisher plugged the microSD card into the OPSAT and uploaded the code to Grimsdóttir. She replied:

Team already called in; standby. Ninety minutes to run sim.

Fisher and Lucchesi passed the time talking. It was, Fisher decided, one of the most surreal missions he’d conducted: He infiltrates a high-tech nanotechnology laboratory, finds it abandoned except for the chief scientist, who is sitting alone in the dark, dejected after being financially cut off by Daddy, and now they are sitting together, like old friends, over coffee.

The OPSAT chimed again. Fisher read the screen, smiled, then turned it so Lucchesi could see the message:

Sims complete. Green across the boards.

Lucchesi clapped his hands once, stood up, did a victory lap around the conference table, then shook Fisher’s hand and sat down again. He leaned across the table, his eyes wide. “So what now?”

“I go do my job and you… You’re broke?”

“Broke?” Lucchesi chuckled. “No, no. I sold a few patents here and there — Apple, HP, Kodak… Miniaturization processes. Very rudimentary, but profitable.”

“Enough to restart—”

“No, not enough for that. But enough that I can take some time and gather my thoughts. Can you at least let me know whether Ajax worked as designed?”

“That I can do.”

“I have a villa in Tuscany. I can give you the address.” Lucchesi stopped and smiled. “I don’t suppose you people need addresses, do you?”

Fisher smiled back. “We’ll find you.”