Micro

Chapter 28

Manoa Valley 30 October, 1:45 p.m.

The pickup truck wound up the single-lane road leading to the Manoa Valley. It was a beat-up Toyota, spray-painted several different colors, with a surfboard rack and fat tires that seemed affected by elephantiasis. It arrived at the gate in front of the tunnel and stopped, and a man got out. He walked up to the gate and read the sign: PRIVATE. NO ADMITTANCE.

“Shit.” Eric Jansen rattled the gate. He examined the lock. It was a keypad. He tried some corporate codes, but nothing worked. Fucking Vin had changed the code on the lock, for sure, Eric thought.

He backed around and drove down the road a short distance, to a turnout, where he rammed the truck into the undergrowth. If anybody from Nanigen noticed it, they’d assume he was a pot farmer gone off to tend his crop on the mountain. Not a vice president of the company, looking for his brother.

He put on a knapsack and hurried down the road, slipped underneath the gate, jogged down the tunnel. Beyond the tunnel, in the valley, he went off the road and into the forest, out of sight, where he opened the knapsack and took out a laptop computer and complicated-looking box of electronic circuits. It had a homemade look: soldered boards, an antenna. He put on a pair of headphones and began to listen, scanning around the seventy-gigahertz band. He heard nothing. He switched frequency, checking the band of Nanigen’s private wireless communication network, and heard a garbled hiss. He always heard it. Intracompany chatter. The problem was to decipher it.

He waited three hours, listening, until the battery began to run down. He packed up the gear and hurried down the road, through the tunnel and back to the truck, and drove off. Nobody had noticed him; nobody had been around, anyway. He would be back tomorrow to listen again. Just in case Peter and the others were somewhere in the valley. He didn’t know where they were, only that they had gone missing.