When I got the call from Xegon, all they said was that it was an industrial espionage case. That was no surprise at all. I’d worked for Xegon before; they’re a high-tech company in Albuquerque, with an office in an old storefront building along Montgomery Avenue and a lab in the secure area out east of Kirtland AFB. Which ought to be enough to tell you they’re on the spooky side of defense.
Companies like that live in a permanent cloud of worry about spies, all the time; their military masters worry about foreign spies, and they worry about their rivals. What they worry about, more than anything else, is the employee with the hidden problem who needs a pile of money to deal with it, because that’s the guy who will shoot a pile of documents over to the competition.
So I’m always getting hired to find the man with the golden nose, or the geekamatoid engineer that thinks he’s in love with a teenage crack whore, whenever management has noticed that the competition is suddenly right up with them in the proprietary areas and they’re wondering who might have sold them the voodoo. It’s a
nice little sideline because those places always pay promptly and at a premium, and I’m always glad to get the work.
Xegon was good for about a job every other year, all very routine stuff; the most interesting Xegon job I had had up till then was a good Christian girl particle physicist who had paid for some grad school textbooks with a porn shoot some years before. Then she’d found Jesus and married his right-hand man, who wasn’t quite as good at forgiving as his homie was. So she was being blackmailed by her old-hippie California mother. Two weeks of banging my head against the wall while nobody would tell me anything that was going on, and then I found myself in a happy little family conference that was like a successful attempt to do ten hours of the Springer show in forty minutes. But that’s another story for another time.
Apart from that one, no previous case had taken more than a week, or been difficult at all, but all of them had been way, way lucrative. So when I came back from Anaconda, where I’d been doing insurance work, photographing a guy who was supposed to be crippled up with a bad back while he taught an advanced techniques in rock-climbing class, and found that message from Xegon on my answering machine, I figured, hot puppies, I’m gonna pay my rent for a while. I called them back, they booked me the flights, and I caught the first flight out of Billings to Denver, and then a flight from Denver to Albuquerque.
It started out completely usual. The taxi dropped me off in a parking lot surrounded by little strip malls, most of them fake Southwest mission stuff; that whole part of Albuquerque, just west of the intersection of Montgomery and Tramway, is a mixture of CBS block buildings and places that look like they used to be Taco Bells. I went through the phony-stucco arches into the lower gallery, then up the stairs to the nondescript second floor. Xegon
had acquired all the offices on that floor and put in connecting doors, so it was a bigger place than it looked like from the outside.
The only person I recognized from any previous trip was the receptionist, and I didn’t know her name. Every time I’ve ever gone there, the person who gave me the assignment, the person who accepted my report, and the person who had me sign all the in-strictest-confidence documents and handed me the check, had been three different people, with no overlaps between any trips.
The guy whose office they sent me in to was a Mr. Hale, who they said was head of security.
Hale was a familiar type, but not familiar for where he was, which was maybe my first hint that something strange was up. He was like one of those guys we used to see at Wash U, John, products of upper-class inbreeding: head like a rat, chinless and Roman-nosed and tiny-eyed, with curly blond hair, perfect self-assurance, and a skinny little body, lousy for digging ditches or bar fighting, but perfect for squash, looking good in a suit, or buggery. The kind of people that America exists to support.
This guy was probably a little bit of a miser, or maybe from the well-bred-but-not-rich cousins that go into academia, law, or medicine. His jacket was okay, but his shirt was high-end Penney’s or low-end Bean, and the shoes were plain old Bass loafers.
Oh, yeah, John, all that matters. See, Hale fit into his setting like a clarinet in a gun rack. I told you he was like the Wash U old-money kids we went to school with. Well, that kind of family goes CIA or State, not DoD.
These last five years I’ve been flying to New Mexico, Utah, southern Cal, central Idaho, a lot, because people that do defense work refer you around and I’d been a good boy, gotten things done quick and cheap and discreet. So after a while you get to know what type guy to expect to find where. Normally, I’d expect to find
a little hyper-high-tech defense company, especially its squarest-of-the-square offices like security, crawling with DoD types—Sunbelt state university, upscale fundie church, football and golf, calls his mother Mom, a Republican whose grandparents were Democrats.
And Hale was Ivy-Plus-Fifty, Episcopalian, baseball and tennis, calls his mom Mother, and either Republican back to Lincoln or Democrat back to Jefferson.
And yeah, that made Hale weird. Management guys at superscience companies listen to Tom Clancy audiobooks, have cathedral ceilings and barbecues, sing along with oldies on the car radio, and dress like they’re trying to infiltrate Real Estate Professionals for Jesus. This old boy probably knew who Francine Prose is, had some third-world art on his walls, and could talk Monk and Bird and Trane. I couldn’t figure how the hell he could’ve gotten past the interview to get hired, unless he was a fucking stone genius, and the geniuses at those companies don’t work in security; they’re the ones kept behind closed doors, with shitty haircuts, duct tape on their horn-rims, and obese Wiccan wives. Spend enough time in the territory, you get to know everyone’s ethnic dress.
Hey, another Turkey-and-Evil? Yeah, I know I’m gulping them like milkshakes. I’m also avoiding the subject I wanted to talk about, because, being honest, John, I’m scared shitless.
All right. So, Hale was weird, maybe just his family’s odd duck, but definitely one more weirdity among all the weirdiosity. They’re words now. I used ’em and you understood ’em, they’re words. Don’t get me further off track than I already was, okay? Thanks. This better be my last Turkey and after that I’m into straight Evil.
Hale’s office was a little white room, no pictures on the walls, no windows, just a large square closet with a totally bare desk without even a phone on it, a chair behind that desk, and a chair in front of it.
Hale sat down behind the desk and gestured for me to take the
other chair. “We’ve got a leak. Probably a major one. We need to plug it quickly and discreetly. We know that it’s in the Q-tip. From your past work with us, I presume you know what the Q-tip is?”
“Quantum Teleportation and Information Physics. They’re the synthesis group that all your other research reports to. They work on some physics thing called simultaneity that I don’t understand. Has to do with consequences of quantum events observed at large distances, so that you get an effect that looks something like information traveling faster than light, and something to do with this guy Wolf-something that has the idea that the universe is governed by algorithms and not equations. Is that what I need to know?”
“I’m impressed. You’ve remembered enough from your last couple of jobs so that we can skip the briefing.” He nodded a couple of times like he was deciding that I was a good antique at the price, or maybe that he’d like to breed me to his prize Persian cat. I mean, if I’d been a Persian cat, myself. Though with some of those old money families, I’d believe anything—one time I was looking into an insurance fraud case up in Beaver Creek and—well, that’s neither here nor there. Must be some good place in Gunnison to get drunk and tell stories, John; we’ll go there sometime when I’m not working. Right, Mario’s or the Cattleman. I’ll remember.
Anyway, now that Hale had decided I was a good do-bee, he straightened his too-tightly knotted, too-loose-at-the-collar, skinny tie, like a shy high school principal who got his job too young. “We have a number of excellent reasons, which we’d rather not share with you, to think that the leaks are going mainly to Negon, who I know you’ve had run-ins with in the past—and you’ve never worked for them?”
“Never.”
“Good. This needs to be done quickly, we have to be able to trust you completely, and, frankly, we think Negon might offer anyone
working for us a great deal of money to drag his feet for a few crucial weeks. Let me add by way of incentive—and I realize your personal sense of honor is my real security—that if you get an offer from Negon, whatever they offer you to shaft us, we’ll add fifty percent to it to keep you loyal, and double it if you can turn it against them. Not because we don’t trust you but because at this point—I can tell you this, anyway—our upper management will pay just about anything to get even with those bastards.
“We are in a bidding struggle with Negon, regarding two different approaches to a phenomenon which is code-named ‘Gaudeamus’ and which I suggest you try to know as little as you can possibly manage about. Their thefts from us have put them far ahead of us, since in effect they have the benefits of an understanding derived from two radically different approaches. So first of all we need to be able to go to the relevant authorities and argue that we are entitled to an extension—or to Negon’s temporary disqualification—due to the gross unfairness of the advantage they have gained by intellectual theft. Your work will provide much of the evidence for that.
“It is possible, of course, that the relevant authorities will not see things at all in that way. Should that prove true, then we will have to run this race at a spectacular disadvantage, but it will be all the more necessary to win it. So we also need to know exactly which documents Negon obtained, whose knowledge they were able to tap, which secure sites they had access to, and so forth—and on exactly which dates, ideally at what times. Bottom line, we need to know exactly how Negon stole exactly what aspects of Gaudeamus, and once we have that, we’ll be figuring out what to do about it, and at that point there will be more work for you, probably even more lucrative than this.”
“So that final report, then, it’s got to document that they violated
security to get the data, and it has to spell out the names of everything they got access to and the time and date when they did, with a complete explanation for how they got everything. But I’m not supposed to learn too much about Gaudeamus itself—not more than I already know from knowing that it’s a Q-tip project. That about cover it?”
“That’s it.”
I wrote all that down on my steno pad, showed it to him, and he agreed that that was still what he meant. Then I asked the big question—“How much?”
“One hundred twenty thousand, plus expenses. Bonus of thirty thousand if you complete within this month.”
I was blinking, John. And I swear, normally, I never let it show on my face when a client talks money and it’s more than I expected—I mean, that’s just business sense. But this time, before god and jesus and that whole crowd, I admit, I was blinking.
If I got done within that month, I’d get a check for three years of my gross. Now I know you and I both admire old Fast Eddy Edwards, four times the governor of Louisiana, for being the man who said, on Sixty Minutes, “I looked at it, and I seen it was money, so I took it.” And in the spirit of our hero, that’s what I did.
“I’ll try to make you glad you hired me,” I said, and I noticed my voice was a little deeper and my accent a little thicker. It gets that way whenever a client seems nervous, to make them think they hired the Lone Ranger, or Chuck Yeager, or Tommy Lee Jones. “So, then, you think—multiple sources? One guy spying on his coworkers? Some kind of ring?”
“No idea.”
“Motive? Political, or pure money, or what?”
Hale raised an eyebrow like I’d conjugated a verb wrong. “You know, with the Sovs gone, we never even think about politicals
anymore, but it’s possible that some of our employees could be involved in some political movement, anti-American or maybe antigovernment. For that matter, it could easily be organized crime, Mafia or drug gangs or something, branching out. It doesn’t have to be a leak that was instigated by Negon for their purposes, at all; they might just be the buyer. But odds are it’s just Negon getting an unfair advantage in the bidding.”
I nodded. “Is there anyone you’re already certain is involved?”
“Only managers have access to the whole array of what we know must have been stolen, but they wouldn’t have understood it well enough to target the thefts so precisely, so at least some engineers have to be involved, and probably some of the Q-tip scientific team. At a guess, a manager to get the documents together, and two to five engineers and scientists—at least one engineer and at least one scientist—to explain to the other side what it means. At least three people, more likely more.”
“Sounds like you’re very on top of it,” I said. “What do you need a detective for?”
“Ah, but, Mr. Bismarck—” (Honest to god, John, who else would begin a sentence with “ah, but …” except an upper-crust fourth-generation Ivy nitwit?) “We need to know the structure of how this is all being done; how Negon (or Negon and someone else) corrupted one whole section of a place that is entirely SCI. And we need to be able to act on the information. Not only are you much more apt than our own security to find out the things we need to know, but if we get the information from an outside source, that will allow us to make better use of it—better use meaning, possibly, just authorizing the outside source to take whatever steps are needed. To be as frank as I dare.”
“Now, John,” Travis said, “I’m only about halfway to the weird part. Weird shit is like wilderness—you have to go through so much stuff that isn’t it to get to it, nowadays. I guess. Or that might be a bourbon insight.”
“It might be,” I agreed, checking through my notes. “What’s SCI?”
“Sensitive compartmented information—security clearances above top secret. ‘Compartmented’ means that supposedly each guy only gets exactly the information needed to do their job, though in fact there’s usually a few big-picture guys around that you can’t keep on strictly need-to-know because they’re the only guys that know what it is that they need to know. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, but I’m scared to admit it.”
He ignored that, gestured grandly with his coffee cup, and said, “See, SCI’s more an attitude than a designation; it’s the level where you stop saying ‘this guy is cleared to know secret stuff’ and start saying ‘this stuff is so secret, does anybody need to know it?’ Like the default is to not tell anybody, see?”
“I guess I see I think.” I looked at my notes again. “So Negon is the other company, the bad guys—”
“For all I know they’re vegetarian saints who carry blankets to the homeless, John. Eventually I realized that for every Xegon secret Negon bought, Xegon bought one of theirs. I sometimes wonder whether anybody at either company even theoretically remembers that they are on the same side.” He got up and went to look out the window. “Dawn comes up kind of pretty here, doesn’t it? Sky so deep blue and the light glinting off the snow on the pine trees—”
“Yeah,” I said. “Early mornings up here are great. They make you want to run right out and start doing … something. Then you remember it’s Gunnison and there’s nothing to do.”
“Gotta be hunting and fishing and hiking, all that woods to go out and play in—”
“That’s right,” I said, to shut him up, because I didn’t need to hear another lecture like the ones I got constantly from my healtho-outdoorsy neighbors. “There is nothing to do up here. Unless you’re the sort of adult whose tastes in entertainment froze at the age of eight—and what you really want to do is ride your bicycle up and down hills, hang out in the woods, and never have any real use for good clothes, or even a bath.”
“You must be looking forward to your Denver trip—”
I made a face. “It’s a science fiction convention, Travis. Like being caught in a mass police roundup of geeks and your lawyer’s out of town for the weekend.”
“Wow, you’re a lot of fun, these days, John. All right, I feel sorry for you, bud. I’m just dying for you, that you’re forced to live in a place where people spend their life savings to get to live there, and that people who like your work invite you to come to big parties with them so they can meet you. My pity meter is on red-line overload and about to blow.” He hooked a leg over the heavy wooden rail of the futon couch, wagging one red and white sock at me. “Stand by for pity detonation … Ten, nine, eight …”
The worst thing about having friends who are good at mocking you is that you have to be a good sport about it. “You were telling an interesting story.”
“Oh, that. Sure. Got any more Pure Black Evil, no Turkey this time?”
“Hit your limit?”
“I want to stay up till the little—that is, till old Kara gets up. Maybe longer. Might not want to sack out till I get to a motel in Denver this evening. And as long as I’m awake I might as well stay coherent.” He stretched and yawned, then woofed as Corner the
Cat, seeing a chance for somewhere warm to sleep, sprang with all eighteen pounds onto Trav’s skinny belly. “Stupid cat. What if I’d spilled some of this good coffee and bourbon?” Corner purred loudly. “Better make sure it’s safe,” Travis added, draining the cup and holding it out. He scratched the big cat’s blotchy black and white head. “What’s your name, Rorschach?”
“Corner,” I said. I took his cup. “Though Rorschach wouldn’t be a bad name for him, either.” Corner was now purring and kneading. “Stay right where you are and pet the oversize hairball, while I get you more coffee. If you get out from under Corner right now, he’ll decide you don’t love the cat enough, and make a nuisance of himself for the next half hour until he’s had enough attention.” I walked into the kitchen, filled Trav’s cup. Normally I consumed about a pot and a half of coffee in a good working morning. Today the third pot was about to get started.
When I got back, Corner was stretched out on Travis, belly up, eyes closed, rumbling and slobbering in pure bliss.
“Corner because of Kitty Corner?” he asked.
“Yep, like that cat we had in St. Louis was named Astrophe,” I said. “If I’d known Corner’s habits I’d have named him Saliva. Then we could have said things like ‘I’ve got eighteen pounds of Saliva on my lap,’ ‘Is Saliva on the couch?’ and ‘I was in the basement and I heard Saliva running down the stairs …’”
“The worst thing about that would be that you and Kara would get competitive about it,” he said.
“True. If you’ve got that cat about smoothed out, how about getting on with the story?”
He took a deep, appreciative gulp, rubbed Corner’s ecstatic head one more time, and said, “I was working on figuring out what the real first steps were going to be. Obviously this case was really about embarrassment.”
“Embarrassment?”
“Yep. The lower level the case, the more it’s about what they say it’s about. This was a high-level case.”
“Low and high—okay, Trav, I’m getting lost, and I’m not the one that’s been drinking.”
“Low level is ordinary people with garden variety problems that they sometimes need a detective for. Like finding a runaway teenager or proving that some deadbeat dad who says he can’t work because of his bad back is lifting at a gym to impress his new girlfriend, and bouncing in the bar where she strips. In those kinds of cases, you don’t have to worry about why people want you to do what they’ve hired you to do, because it’s fucking obvious. But in a case that involves large amounts of money, or great power, or deep secrecy, or more likely all of the above—what I call a high-level case—your first job is figuring out what the real job is—because they won’t tell you.”
“Like?”
“Well, maybe it’s easier to see at a middle level. Suppose some guy and his wife are the biggest couple at the country club, maybe he’s a banker and she’s an officer in the DAR, and their daughter goes to Vassar and collectively they are the hottest shit ever shat in the little town of East Buttfuck, Wyoming. Their fame reaches as far up I-90 as Possum Droppings, Montana, and maybe as far down I-25 as Jesus Junction. They are major regional players. And she is divorcing him because she has finally realized that her parents were right and he is a moron, and furthermore a moron who treats her with no respect at all.
“So her lawyer thinks he’s getting some on the side, and hires me.
“Now, does the lady want material for some discreet pressure about settlement or custody? Then she wants evidence that the mistress is getting a hundred grand a year in this-and-thats while the
wife drives a ’95 Explorer that doesn’t even have leather seats. Or is it that the wife is good and mad and wants the sonofabitch too humiliated to ever show his face at the country club again? Then what they really want is some nice clear shots that show his wrinkled old face and his hairy huge old fishbelly and a bored-looking trailer-trash girl half his age with her hand on his tiny dick. Or is the mistress the wife’s onetime best friend, and does she want them both shamed? Then you want flattering photos of the candlelight dinners, and financial records of the trip to the hideaway at some beach in the Quintana Roo, and a bunch of stuff that looks like travel brochure things, because what she wants to do is take all the fun they had and make them feel so guilty that they’d rather roll over and die.”
“Nice line of work you’re in.”
He grinned in the way that always creeped me out. “I see people acting just like I expect them to, and it confirms my view of the world. Like the phrase goes, it works for me.
“Now, when you get up to the Xegon level, you’ve got theft of important stuff from an above-top-secret lab. Normally that’s a federal problem; quiet guys in black suits who never take off their sunglasses show up for that. So instead they’re hiring a one-man operation out of Billings, Montana, a guy who spends most of his time on employee drug cases, adultery, runaways, and guys faking bad backs?
“No way. They ought’t’ve called in the Men in Black right away. Whatever the whole story was, they wanted it all wrapped up before the high-end secret-government types even knew there was a problem. So it had to be worse than just losing something big they were supposed to be careful with. This was going to be the equivalent of finding a cocaine ring inside the Manhattan Project or a circle of pederasts inside Stealth.”
I was starting to think he was being creepy deliberately, enjoying it for some reason. “Which is the kind of case you dream about.”
“Yeah, in my good dreams and in my nightmares, bud.” He took another slurp from his coffee cup.