Cloak, page 12
“Seems to me I remember overhearing Dr. Chandler talking to Dr. Underwood about trapdoors in the programming, too,” Esteban said. “They may not even have half of what they came for.”
Kingsley shivered. “I wonder if that means they’ll be back for the rest.”
“If they do, we’ll be ready for them,” Garcia promised grimly.
Delgado threw a sideways glance at Talbot, found the other looking back at him. Did the thieves’ only partial victory imply that none of the three techs had been the inside man? “You said this was a prototype,” he said, looking back at the techs. “What’s the difference between this and the ones that were stolen?”
“The final versions were equipped with the kinesthetic sensor fibers Scott mentioned earlier,” Esteban said. “Those let the computer know where there are folds or wrinkles in the Cloak so that it can compensate.”
“Obviously, the programming had to be completely redone for that,” Kingsley put in. “Dr. Chandler and Dr. Underwood have been working a lot of nights lately. Especially lately,” he added, his voice suddenly sounding a little odd.
“Something?” Delgado prompted.
“No,” Kingsley said, a little too hastily. “Anyway, along with reprogramming for the corset—that’s what Dr. Fowler called the kinesthetic frame—they also found some shortcuts for making the sampling procedure faster.”
“How much faster?”
The techs looked at each other. “I’d say the Baby Bears could go active in ten seconds or less,” Esteban hazarded. “I don’t remember ever actually timing them.”
“I know Papa Bear could go in less than three minutes,” Burke offered. “On our last big test Dr. Fowler made a joke about this being the world’s biggest egg timer, but that we would always undercook it.”
“And Mama Bear would have been somewhere in the middle,” Kingsley concluded.
“What happens if you try moving with a Cloak over you?” Delgado asked.
In answer, Kingsley reached over and tapped the Cloak. As with the last time it was disturbed, a section of the black material instantly reappeared. “Obviously, we haven’t been able to crack that problem,” he said. “It wasn’t important, though, for this first test. Once the project has more funding—”
He broke off, lips compressing briefly. “The project, hell. The three of them were the project. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this now.”
For a long moment there was silence. The lull lasted until the visible section of Cloak winked out again. “This is all fine and dandy if everything holds still,” Garcia said. “But what if something nearby is moving?”
In answer, Esteban stepped to the desk and waved a hand slowly behind the Cloak. It looked perfectly normal. “Do that again,” Delgado said, leaning a little closer.
Esteban did so. Even watching carefully for discontinuities, Delgado couldn’t see any. “How fast can you go before the sampling can’t keep up?” he asked.
“Reasonably fast,” Esteban said. “I don’t know if anybody did any official experiments.”
“The newer ones can also handle faster movement than the prototype,” Kingsley put in.
“So what’s the difference between something moving past the Cloak and the Cloak itself moving?” Garcia asked. “Seems to me to be six of one and half a dozen of the other.”
“You’d think so, but it’s not,” Burke said. “In essence, it sort of comes down to the Cloak’s awareness of where it is. You get it set and it can handle changing light patterns around it just fine. You start it moving, though, and its entire frame of reference goes completely crazy.”
“When Ramon waves his hand behind it, the rest of the landscape is still stationary,” Kingsley added, gesturing toward the Cloak. “Only the data from the moving hand has to be changed. But when the Cloak itself moves, everything changes, and all at once.”
“The software can’t handle it and basically shuts down,” Burke said. “You saw how the prototype goes black when it’s touched. Same thing happens to the others when you try to move them.”
“It’s going to take sheer brute-force computing power, I expect,” Esteban said. “That, and faster clock speeds. Give the industry four or five more product generations, and we should have a crack at it.”
“We might have, anyway,” Kingsley muttered.
There was another short silence. “Well, thank you for the demonstration,” Garcia said at last. “And your cooperation.”
“So what happens now?” Kingsley asked.
“Unless Lieutenant Delgado needs you for anything else—” Garcia looked questioningly at Delgado.
“No, we’re finished for the moment,” Delgado confirmed. “You can go home if you’d like. Just keep yourselves available in case we have more questions.”
“All right.” Kingsley looked at the Cloak. “Uh—”
“Just leave it running,” Talbot said. “I’d like to study it a little longer.”
Kingsley hesitated, then nodded. “Sure. Just turn off the workstation when you’re done.”
“You’d better lock the Cloak away somewhere, too,” Burke added.
“Don’t worry,” Delgado assured him. “This whole place is going to be locked down for quite a while.”
The techs shambled from the room, all three looking suddenly very tired. Small wonder, considering everything they’d been through. “I suppose I’d better go talk to director what’s-his-name,” Garcia said. “Tarlington. You know which office he’s in?”
“Actually, he headed over to Building A just before you got here,” Delgado said. “He was meeting with the board and senior staff in the main conference room over there.”
“Okay.” Almost grudgingly, Delgado thought, the chief nodded to Talbot. “Special Agent Talbot.”
“Good day, sir,” Talbot nodded back.
“Not likely.” Garcia took one more lingering look at the desk, shook his head, and strode from the room.
Delgado turned to Talbot. “So how deep exactly would you say the kimchi is on this one?”
Talbot shook his head as he stepped up to the desk and crouched down in front of it, peering at the Cloak. “Pretty damn deep,” he conceded. “You believe this thing?”
“I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it,” Delgado agreed soberly. “So which of our fine upstanding lab techs do you think iced their bosses?”
“I’m not convinced that it was one of them,” Talbot said. “All their reactions to your death announcement looked pretty authentic to me.”
“Drama schools teach that kind of authenticity.”
“They don’t teach how to make your face go pale.”
Delgado nodded. “Yes; Kingsley. Well, if not one of them, then who? The security readings show Angie Chandler was the only other one here at the right time to spike the downstairs coffeepot.”
Talbot poked gently at the Cloak. Once again, a small section appeared, this one not much larger than his fingerprint. “There’s the downstairs guard,” he pointed out. “He could have set everything in motion and then drugged himself.”
“How did he spike the lab’s coffee without anyone remembering he’d dropped in?”
“Point,” Talbot conceded. “I didn’t check earlier—was the coffee up here in cans or pouches?”
“Pouches, both here and downstairs,” Delgado said. “I suppose the guard could have slipped a poisoned package into the lab’s supply sometime before last night. Trouble is, how could he control when it was used?”
“He couldn’t, unless he poisoned all of them,” Talbot nodded. “But unless he did the switch just before the last pot was brewed—”
“And everyone was still here at that time,” Delgado put in.
“Right,” Talbot said. “Unless he did it then, they would have keeled over much earlier in the day.”
“I suppose he could have come in after all the techs had gone,” Delgado offered thoughtfully. “Chatted with the scientists and poisoned the coffee then.”
“Pretty risky,” Talbot said. “You said the cleaning crew was already working the far end of the hallway by then, right?”
“And going semi-randomly in and out the doors down there,” Delgado agreed. “I’ll have Greer ask if they saw anyone wandering the halls after Burke took off at two a.m. We’ll confiscate all the rest of the coffee pouches, too, and give ‘em a look.”
“Good,” Talbot said. “You’ll want to do a background on the guard in any case, but I’m guessing he’s clean. We also have Dr. Tarlington in here at one-thirty in the afternoon.”
“Which is way too early.”
“Right, but he might have learned then that the Cloaks were ready to go,” Talbot said. “He might have a way of gimmicking the doors to sneak in unannounced.”
“What about the gate guard?”
Talbot straightened up again. “Maybe Tarlington’s got a private entrance,” he said. “I suppose we should wait and see what the lab boys come up with before we start rushing off in all directions. Who’s the M.E. going to be on this one?”
“Probably Barry,” Delgado said. “He was here at the scene, so he’ll probably take it.”
“Competent?”
Delgado shrugged. “Reasonably so.”
“I suggest you impress on him that he do a thorough job on the autopsies,” Talbot said. “And I mean really thorough.”
“I’ll do that,” Delgado promised. “Unfortunately, there’s one slight problem with sitting on our hands until we have all the facts.”
“Our little early-morning fracas at Greenleaf Center,” Talbot agreed sourly. “That one had better be my first priority.”
He lifted the edge of the Cloak, bringing most of it back to visibility, and reached under to the workstation’s power switch. There was a click, and the entire Cloak appeared as the quiet hum of the cooling fans wound down. “You might not want to get quite so involved just yet,” Delgado warned as the two of them headed for the door. “At least not until the chief has officially borrowed you.”
“I’m already involved, thank you,” Talbot growled as he stepped into the lab. “Another fine mess you’ve gotten me—”
He broke off. “What?” Delgado demanded, hand going automatically for his gun as he shot a quick look around the empty room.
“The notepad,” Talbot said quietly. “The one your boss wrote the license number on.”
Delgado looked at the table. The sticky-pad was still there, right where he and Garcia had left it.
Except that where a single sheet of yellow had been showing, the pad had now inexplicably turned lime green.
Or, rather, not so inexplicably. “It’s upside down,” he said.
“It is indeed,” Talbot agreed, stepping over to the table. “I wonder why.” He picked up the pad and turned it over.
It was immediately apparent why. The single yellow sheet that had been on top of the pad was gone, leaving the first sheet of the red layer showing.
The two men looked at each other. “I’d say someone wanted that license number,” Delgado said.
“Looks that way,” Talbot agreed, setting the pad down the way he’d found it and heading for the door. “I think I’ll skip the mall and head over to the Chandlers’ house. Garcia said you had people there?”
“I’ll give them a head’s-up,” Delgado said, pulling out his phone.
And then Talbot was gone. “Yes, indeed,” Delgado murmured to himself as he punched in the number. “Another fine mess we’ve gotten us into.”
09
It was just after twelve thirty when Talbot finally made it in to the office. By all rights, certainly by all expectations, Special Agent in Charge Paul Lyman should have been out to lunch at that time.
He wasn’t. He was waiting for Talbot.
And he was loaded for bear. A twelve-foot Kodiak bear.
“Nice of you to drop by,” he greeted Talbot darkly as the agent stepped through the door into the squad room. He couldn’t have been standing there the whole morning, Talbot knew; clearly, someone downstairs had tipped him off. “Join me in my office.”
Silently, they walked through the squad room toward Lyman’s office. None of the men and women working or eating at their desks, Talbot noticed, paid them the slightest attention. Either Lyman hadn’t ranted enough about this to draw anyone’s notice, or else he’d ranted so much that everyone was carefully keeping his or her head down.
Sometimes deductive logic was a big help.
They reached Lyman’s office and went inside, Lyman closing the door behind them. “So,” he said, sitting down behind his desk and waving Talbot to the line of three identical chairs facing it. “I hear you want to join the San Jose Police Department.”
“Yes, sir,” Talbot said, easing carefully into the center chair. One of these chairs had a horrendous and utterly disconcerting squeak, and Lyman was forever switching them around to throw his subordinates off stride. “Temporarily, of course.”
“Uh-huh,” Lyman grunted, leaning back in his chair. “And what exactly are your interest and involvement in this case?”
“Sir?”
“Interest, as in you’re questioning suspects before you’re even officially on loan,” Lyman said. “Involvement, as in Lieutenant Delgado called you practically before he called his own chief.”
“Ah,” Talbot said, choosing his words carefully. “Actually, there’s nothing mysterious about it. Delgado and I have consulted on a couple of previous cases, and we’ve always worked well together. So when there was trouble at an important research facility in his jurisdiction, particularly trouble that might have national implications, I was the obvious one to call.”
“And you didn’t think it worth calling in yourself?”
“As I said, there was only the potential for national implications,” Talbot said. “Until we knew for sure, I didn’t want to bother anyone else with it.”
“Part of my job is to be bothered with things like that,” Lyman reminded him tartly. “Chief Garcia and I don’t agree on a lot of things, but one of the things we do agree on is not liking it when our subordinates play their cards under the table where we can’t see them.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Good,” Lyman said. “So let’s see your cards.”
“Sir?”
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Lyman said, turning his gaze up to full shrivel power. “I want it. Now.”
Talbot lifted his hands innocently. “You’ve got all of it, sir,” he said, his mind kicking onto afterburners. “Lieutenant Delgado asked me in on a case he thought the Bureau should be involved in, that’s all. Now that we know it does indeed have Federal implications, we naturally want our presence to be official. Hence, Delgado’s request and Chief Garcia’s phone call.”
For a long moment Lyman just gazed at him. “This is why McPherson kicked you out of D.C., isn’t it?” he said at last. “This kind of passive insubordination.”
“I meant no insubordination, sir,” Talbot protested. “Passive or otherwise.”
“You remind me of my kid sister when we were little,” Lyman went on. “She had a lot of your same style: the same innocent look, the same ‘gosh-shucks’ humility. When she couldn’t finagle Mom’s permission to do what she wanted, she usually just did it anyway. When she got caught, she pulled such a terrific remorseful groveling act that she usually got away with only token punishment. Drove me crazy.”
“You’re lucky, sir,” Talbot said. “My sister used to deliberately get in trouble and then throw me the blame.”
“That is why McPherson exiled you out here, isn’t it?” Lyman persisted. “Insubordination? Something to do with the Clarkston kidnapping case last summer?”
“You’d have to ask Director McPherson about that,” Talbot said politely.
“I have,” Lyman said, making a face. “He won’t tell me.”
“Playing his cards under the table,” Talbot said, nodding knowingly. “Don’t you just hate that in a superior?”
“You’ve got a smart mouth, too,” Lyman said. “Fine—keep your little secrets. It’s not my career. Fill me in.”
“The three scientists were apparently murdered in order to get hold of the fruits of their recent work,” Talbot said, breathing a little easier. There’d been the potential for a real mine field on this one, but he’d apparently made it through intact. “Specifically, they wanted four Cloaks of invisibility.
Lyman’s eyebrows lifted. “Cloaks of what?”
“You heard me right,” Talbot assured him. “I know; it sounds like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I wouldn’t have believed it either, except that the lab techs demoed a prototype version the thieves left behind.”
“And?”
“The thing works, sir. Damn well.”
Lyman shook his head. “Hell in a handcart,” he muttered.
“At least,” Talbot agreed. “Still, it’s not as bad as it could have been. For one thing, the Cloaks can’t keep up with any sort of movement, so we’re not looking at the ultimate stealth fighter.”
“Do they make you invisible to radar, too?”
“No,” Talbot said. “Actually, they only affect visible light, so stealth aircraft are out anyway. The thieves also skipped out without the equipment to manufacture more of the stuff, and the techs say you can’t reverse engineer it. If we can recover these four Cloaks we may be able to tourniquet this particular technology hemorrhage before it gets started.”
“Unless they plan to come back for the rest of it,” Lyman pointed out.
“Already thought of that,” Talbot said. “Delgado’s putting a guard setup together.”
“What about the techs themselves?” Lyman asked. “They must know how to make the things.”
“To varying degrees, yes,” Talbot said. “Actually, it’s when you start looking at the techs that things start getting murky.”
Lyman eyed him. “Let me guess. An inside job?”
“Very much so,” Talbot said grimly. “There could conceivably be other players, but at least one of the techs absolutely has to be involved.”
“Give me the rundown.”
