Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 35

Craig and Paige sat in the back of the T Program conference room as if they belonged there; they were the only two to show up on time for the briefing they had accidentally heard about, thanks to Tansy Beaumont.

The other team members came bustling in at least five minutes late. Craig watched the motley group of young geniuses hurry in. Some of the programmers carried personal mugs of coffee, but most held the ubiquitous cans of Diet Coke, as if signifying membership in a club. Craig marveled at their casual clothes, their disregard for basic personal hygiene. He couldn’t imagine how people could consider themselves professionals, and yet dress so sloppily.

Paige, on the other hand, sat next to him wearing a bright teal dress with a subtle floral pattern marked out in lighter blue. Her scent carried just a hint of perfume, enough to make Craig notice, though he was unable to identify the brand.

The people lounging in the room chatted in low voices, fidgeting with the obvious distaste for meetings that so many of the scientists seemed to have.

Breathless, Gary Lesserec plowed through the door, his red hair unkempt. He headed straight for the overhead projector resting at the head of the long table, dodging chairs and glancing at his watch. He slapped a manila folder filled with plastic transparencies on the table, looked up at the gathered coworkers, and froze for just an instant when he saw Craig.

Then Lesserec ignored him entirely and addressed his team. “I’ll keep this short,” he said. “I promise. We’ve got to get back to work, but I figured it’s best if we all know where we stand. I’m going to give you a summary of everything to expect for tomorrow’s high-explosive demonstration out at the Nevada Test Site.”

“Awww, high explosives,” a thin black woman said with a frown. “Why don’t we just use a nuke ourselves to test things out?”

Lesserec sighed. “Believe me, we would if we could, Danielle — but the testing moratorium has screwed up all the timing at NTS. The President has only cleared one device out of the stockpile, and we’ve got to save that one for the big bells and whistles when the foreigners are watching.”

Lesserec shot a cold glance at Craig and cleared his throat. “I take it I don’t need to introduce our uninvited visitors. Mr. Kreident here with the FBI is investigating Hal’s death. I suggest we give him our full cooperation”—Lesserec’s tone said exactly the opposite—“so he can be on his way and off bothering somebody else as soon as possible.

“Meanwhile,” Lesserec turned back to the projector and flipped on the bright bulb, “our counterparts out at Frenchman Flat in Nevada have set up a nice little practice bang for us. Five hundred tons of high explosive laced with our special detectors and high-speed fiberoptic data-transmission cables. Kaboom! to the sixth power.

“One lucky volunteer is going to get to sit inside the VR chamber hooked up and watching the explosion realtime — but don’t worry,” Lesserec said, pushing down with his hand as if to quell imaginary grumbling, though no one in T Program had said a word. “It’s recorded of course, so you’ll all get to watch it, one by one, after the test. It won’t make any difference.”

Lesserec slapped a transparent viewgraph on the glass of the overhead projector. Photos of the barren desert flat out in Nevada where nuclear tests had been conducted blurred across the white screen as Lesserec cranked the focus knob.

He put up a diagram explaining the type of explosive and the configuration for the test blast, but Craig paid little attention. Instead, he studied the laser-printed list clipped to a yellow legal pad on which he jotted detailed notes. The Bureau had obtained the telephone numbers dialed and the duration of calls made from Gary Lesserec’s home line. Paige had given him a printout of calls made from the office phone in Lesserec’s cubicle on site.

Craig had already spent hours skimming the numbers, the calls, the names, eliminating the obvious ones. Lesserec’s parents in Ohio, frequent calls from the office to Lesserec’s home, presumably to talk to his “aspiring poet” girlfriend.

Most curious, though, were a dozen or so phone calls to electronic gaming and toy companies. Some calls had occurred during working hours, but others — after detailed digging by Craig, as well as Agents Goldfarb and Jackson back at the main Oakland office — had been made late at night to the homes of chief executives in various entertainment companies.

Craig had circled several of the most suspicious calls with a pink highlighter. Now, in the conference room, he tapped his pen against the phone numbers, thinking, staring at them, running possibilities over in his mind.

Paige glanced at him, then looked up as Lesserec continued to talk about actual preparations for the down-hole detonation, the first underground nuclear explosion in years: the test that dozens of foreign nationals would observe, putting their virtual hands on the outside casing of an American device. They would watch with enhanced computer speed the slow-motion detonation of the equivalent of a thousand-kiloton nuclear bomb.

From the evidence of the phone numbers, and the obvious fact of living beyond his established means, Craig decided that Lesserec was almost certainly involved in illegal activities. But he had been following the wrong train of thought when he considered that the red-haired kid might be selling secret research data to the Middle East or China.

No, industrial espionage could be even more insidious. Lesserec was a bright, highly motivated researcher. His talent was undeniable, but so was his naiveté.

Hal Michaelson had seemed a lot more savvy. Had the T Program leader found out what Lesserec was doing, then asked too many questions? Had Lesserec killed him as part of a coverup?

At the front of the room, Lesserec continued his talk, filled with “umms” and the disorganized shuffling of viewgraphs, strained jokes. Craig looked up to see a diagram of the T Program VR chamber.

“For the actual event, first we’ll go through our boring benchmark demonstration, having the foreign observers visit and walk around the LLNL Plutonium Facility so they can get the right look and feel for the VR systems.”

Lesserec’s muddy green eyes sparkled as he grinned, making his freckles flow across his chubby cheeks like scum on a pond. “Then we’ll take our guests downhole and blow their socks off.”

“Excuse me,” Craig said, raising his hand.

Lesserec stopped in mid-sentence and looked at Craig. “Yes, Mr. FBI?” The kid’s sarcasm was maddening, but Craig was too professional to let his annoyance show.

“Are these foreign representatives qualified in any particular way to observe the explosion? I mean, do they need training to use the VR chamber?”

Lesserec rolled his eyes. “You seem to be unclear on the concept, Mr. Kreident. You just sit there and watch, like in a movie theater. The VR technology does all the work. Our 3-D sensors plunge you into the environment. The suspended microspheres and our special effects technology inside the chamber make it all seem real, but you don’t have to do anything, just occupy space.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lesserec,” Craig said. “That’s just what I thought. Since you’ve been unable to find the simulation Dr. Michaelson was running on the evening of his death, I’m still interested in learning about this technology and how it could be connected. So I have a suggestion — why don’t you let me be the observer tomorrow? I’ll be your guinea pig in the VR chamber for the demonstration.”

A group of the T Program members began grumbling loudly. “Wait a minute, I wanted to be first!”

“We should draw names.”

“That’s no fair. He hasn’t worked at all on it.”

“I’ve been giving up my weekends for this thing.”

Lesserec looked offended at Craig for a moment, then suddenly he smiled. “Shut up!” he yelled at the others in the room. “Why would you want to be a guinea pig, Mr. FBI?”

Craig shrugged, spreading his hands innocently on top of the yellow legal pad on his briefcase. “Think about it, and you’ll see it makes sense. All the rest of you are intimately familiar with the VR technology. You know what to expect, and you’re going to watch the demonstration with an ultra-critical eye. Myself, though, I’ll be like one of those foreign visitors. I’m willing to let you… what was your phrase? Knock my socks off.”

“Craig, do you know what you’re doing?” Paige said quietly, but he squeezed her forearm for reassurance.

“As you say,” Craig continued, “you’re recording the whole simulation. Everybody’s going to get their chance to experience it. So what difference does it make? You couldn’t find a better test case than me.”

Lesserec remained silent, looking at the others who were obviously not happy. But Craig ignored them, fixing his attention on Gary Lesserec alone. He thought he saw an inner smile behind the redhead’s carefully controlled expression.

“All right,” Lesserec said. “Does anyone here have serious technical objections to Mr. FBI being our guinea pig? Or are they all just childish complaints?”

Nobody answered. “Okay,” Lesserec said. “Walter and Danielle, after this meeting gets out, take Mr. Kreident into the chamber and give him a user-friendly tour of everything he’s going to need to know.”

As eyes fastened on him, Craig pondered whether he should feel elated with his victory — or trepidation about what he had gotten himself in to.

After Gary Lesserec finished returning a few of the calls that had piled up during the meeting, he returned to his small cubicle. He wondered when he could appropriately shift everything into Michaelson’s empty office, since it appeared he would be Acting Group Leader for quite a while. Michaelson’s office was a lot larger than his own dumpy little desk and cloth-partition walls, and his new position demanded more prestige.

With a splatting sound, Lesserec dropped his folder full of plastic viewgraphs onto the narrow workspace. Then he noticed Craig Kreident’s dark blue suitjacket draped over the chair; the FBI man’s briefcase and notes took up half the space in the cubicle.

Annoyance and simmering anger bubbled within him. Even now, with all the work left to be done, the FBI agent had taken two of his best programmers to show him how the VR chamber worked, as if he owned the place. Luckily, the engineers had installed the rest of the new beta-test enhancement chips yesterday.

Of all the workspaces available for Kreident to set up camp, the FBI man spent most of his time in Lesserec’s cubicle, as if it were his own. He wondered if it was some kind of childish power play, Kreident showing off that he could walk wherever he wanted, horn in on whichever office or space he chose, like a bully on a playground.

Consciously, and with a smirk on his face, Lesserec used his left arm to sweep Kreident’s briefcase and notepad onto the floor.

“Oops!” Lesserec said with mock dismay. He enjoyed the feeling for a moment, but then thought better of it. He didn’t need to act as childish as the FBI man did. He bent over to pick up the briefcase and the notepad. He stuck it in an out-of-the-way corner by the other computer user’s manuals.

A white paper on top caught his attention as he saw a list of telephone numbers — a printout from the phone company, and another one from the LLNL telephone system. He noticed his own name at the top… and felt the cold of liquid nitrogen seep through his body.

“What the hell?” he said and picked up the numbers, scanning them. It seemed to be his complete telephone records for the last month or so. Several numbers had been highlighted, and although Lesserec didn’t have a photographic memory for specific phone numbers, he knew exactly which ones Craig Kreident had identified.

“Holy shit!” he said, swallowing hard. Then he carefully replaced the briefcase and notepad exactly where Kreident had left them, hoping the FBI man would not notice his belongings had been disturbed.

Lesserec backed out of his cubicle and decided to use one of the other phones. He scratched his head, feeling sweat prickle through his reddish hair. His mind whirled.

He was trapped and could not decide how best to handle the situation, how to exercise sufficient damage control.

He was afraid he would have to take some drastic measures, change a few plans.