My stop at the guard station had been just long enough for other people at Xegon to get their act together, and a nice young woman wearing a stewardess suit, referee shoes, a shoulder holster, and an ear dingus met me in the parking lot to walk me through the building to Hale’s office.
Hale was wearing a Dickey Pocket-T with tiny dots of paint on it and a small hole in one armpit. It hung untucked over his chinos, which slumped over his Bass moccasins. He seemed to have thrown on whatever was handy; there were so many different colors of paint, in such small spots, that I wondered if he painted for a hobby. Maybe he was regretting having stayed up an extra hour to finish a landscape.
Before he spoke, he poured a gigantic mug of coffee from the thermos on the sideboard, and drank about half of it straight down. “Any for you?” he asked.
“There won’t be at that rate. Sure, I’ll take a cup.”
He filled another mug and set it down in front of me. On one side of it, O. B. Joyful was holding up a middle finger (out of three),
and on the other side, Monique from Sinfest was also giving the finger. Around the bottom, it said “Coincidence? How did you happen to think of that?”
“We have Bad Attitude Friday once a month,” Hale said. “People bring in things to work out their hostilities.” He held up his own giant cup, which read “COFFEE consumes FIFTEEN TIMES its weight in Excess BULLSHIT!!!”
“Very cool. I’ve worked a lot of places that should’ve had that,” I said. I dumped in three teaspoons of sugar and stirred so that the coffee cup tinkled like a dinner bell. “And it holds coffee, too. Now, what’s up, what do you need me for, and what will you pay?”
Hale tented his fingers in front of his face. “We’ve had something vital stolen.” Then he made himself rest his hands flat on the desk—probably practicing for something unpleasant he was going to have to say to people who were going to be much less pleasant than me. “For all practical purposes, with a little reverse engineering, whoever has it, has all of Gaudeamus. We certainly know how they stole it—the actual theft was a pure brute force job. I need you to find out who they are, how they knew as much as they did about our security system, and where they took it. ASAP.”
He set a number that would have seemed impossible a couple of weeks ago, with a bonus if I got all the information within seventy-two hours. “This is probably beyond hope, but if you recover the object itself, we’ll come up with some reward—it will be considerably more than that, but I don’t have any idea how much more. Enough that we’d have to do some kind of special budget thing to pay you even remotely adequately.”
“Why me?”
“You already know just about everything I would be allowed to tell you. And you’ve already got as much clearance as I can give you. And you don’t have to keep the kind of idiotic records that my
own people do, or report to superiors six times an hour, or waste all the time they’re going to make me and my people waste.” He sighed. “I was private for some years before I took this job, and there are times when I’d give anything to be private again. I used to specialize in child recovery. And as far as I can see, the problem I have here is sort of like a stranger abduction—what’s really essential is going to be moving fast, before they get it too far away or too well hidden.”
“I’ve done some child recovery too,” I said. “So I know what you mean. There’s no chance they’d destroy it?”
Hale shook his head. “They’d be about as likely to burn the Mona Lisa, if they’d stolen that. A Gaudeamus machine—that’s the object—is only of value to them intact. And they have to keep it long enough to get it to a real heavy-lifter of a physics lab, and work on it for a while, before they’ll be able to copy it, which is when all the payoffs come in. So it’s only extremely unlikely that you’ll recover it, but not impossible. Let’s get you out working on it. Here’s what you’re looking for.”
Hale turned around and opened up a big black briefcase, one of those hard-sided rectangular boxes that’s designed to get a computer through airline baggage check. He pulled out a flat white enameled-metal box, the kind of thing you get at an electronics shop to build your own stuff into, the same height and about twice the area of a cable box. It had three buttons, labeled X, Y, and Z, each with an LED above the button. There was a red button labeled “ACT” on the left, and a white Edison 3-prong socket on the right. Across the top of the white box, along the edge, a thin black strip with silver letters read XEGON CORP at one end and GAUDEAMUS at the other. It sat on small black rubber feet.
I stood up and looked it over. There were eight USB ports and two big multipin ports along the back.
“Those back ports are for instrumentation and telemetry,” he said, which told me exactly nothing.
The top of the box was marked with two red arrows that bled slightly, like they’d been done with a Sharpie and a steel rule; one pointing to the back was labeled Z, and one to the right was labeled X, scrawled in the same red ink. On the right side, as it faced me, there was another arrow, labeled Y. At the base of each arrow was a more carefully applied tiny black dot—no, a hole. I leaned over and saw the shiny, melted beading around the holes—laser-drilled.
The whole thing was put together with ordinary recessed Philips screws. Except for the incongruously precise tiny holes, it was a standard piece of shopwork that any proficient Heathkit builder might have done to finish off something he wanted to keep. In the reflected glare of the fluorescent lights I could see some smudgy gray fingerprints, and it was stained a little with ink and pencil dust; this little machine worked for a living.
When I got to that stage of detail, I figured I’d seen enough to be able to tell a Gaudeamus machine from a washing machine, and looked up.
Hale said, “We had ten of these, and now we have nine. We also have a senior engineer who’s had a terrible beating, and fifty security people who keep trying to tell me that since this couldn’t have happened it must not have and therefore it didn’t.”
Hale carefully positioned the box on the corner of the desk nearest me and said, “All right, now let me show you what it does.” He pushed the X, Y, and Z buttons, and all the LEDs lit up with zeros. Then he pushed the ACT button once. “That tells it to mark its present position as zero,” he said.
Then he got out a tape measure and measured from one tiny hole along the arrow and out onto the desk. “Nineteen centimeters this way,” he said, and entered “19” by holding the Z button down,
same way you set an alarm clock. Then he measured across the front of the desk, from the other top hole, and said, “Sixty this way,” and entered “60” into X.
He handed me a set of protective phones, just the regular things that you use on the pistol range, but with an extra pad of Swedish wool inside each. Then he handed me super-dark shades—welding—goggle, solar-eclipse dark.
“You will want all of these. Are you armed?”
“No, why?”
“Because, once, when I demoed this thing to one of my security people, he was startled and drew his weapon. He didn’t fire. I was grateful for that, as, when he drew it, he pointed it at me. Since then I make a habit of telling armed people what they will see, first. It spoils the surprise but on the whole I think it’s better. But since you’re not armed, you get to have the full experience. Now, put the glasses and the earphones on. Watch this space.” He pointed to the empty spot he’d run his steel tape out to.
In the dark blur of my peripheral vision, I saw him push the ACT button.
It’s kind of hard to tell you what it was like, John. Put it this way: I once knew a guy, from a bar in Billings, who we all called Ed-the-Gun-Nut, like it was one word. Being known as “the Gun Nut” in Billings is kind of like being known as “the Village Idiot” in New York City; you really have to overachieve.
Of course Ed hand-loaded, and had a dozen cute little insanely dangerous tricks that he’d made up, all of them things that would make any engineer or tech rep wet himself to see Ed doing. He was very proud of one he called the “blinder,” which was one of his already-way-overloaded rounds doped with powdered aluminum and a powdered oxidizer, to goose the temperature and pressure way up. It made a really hot, bright flash coming out of a .357
Desert Eagle, and Ed thought it would add to the terror of the guy you were shooting at. Plus, he said, the flash would blind him so that if you missed with your first shot, he wouldn’t get a shot at you.
The few times I saw him fire one, it surely was blinding and deafening.
As for terror, well, one day Ed the Gun Nut really terrified two buddies of mine when he was out plinking with them. Ed’s 357 Desert Eagle, having coped with all that extra heat and pressure one too many times, blew up and tore his hand apart on its way backward into his face. It got him a change of nickname, though, from Ed-the-Gun-Nut to “Clawhand Ed With No Teeth.”
This flash and bang in the office at Xegon was about as loud and bright as one of Ed’s juiced .357 rounds—about like a welding arc for brightness, and maybe as loud as four or five simultaneous pistol shots. I jumped and yelled “Jesus!” and even Hale, who knew what was coming, lurched away.
The flash had come from that space of empty desk, but it wasn’t empty anymore. The Gaudeamus box had appeared there.
I could barely see Hale take off his goggles and phones—the tint on my goggles was that dark. I took mine off. “Touch the box, carefully,” he said.
I did. It was hot, not kitchen-stove hot, but definitely hot enough to be uncomfortable.
“So you set the position in centimeters and it goes there,” I said. “How fast does it actually go?”
“Instantaneous,” he said. “True zero time. And it doesn’t go to anywhere in between; we’ve shown visiting generals and bureaucrats that it will go right out of a concrete box into a closed wall safe. It’s true teleportation.
“When the Gaudeamus machine arrives in a space, no matter what is occupying that space, it all counter-teleports to the nearest
point outside the teleported volume. So all the air that was in the volume of the box was instantaneously jammed into a one-molecule thick layer of extremely compressed air on its surface. The flash is what happens as that layer expands, and the bang is partly from that and partly from the implosion where the Gaudeamus machine was before.”
“Can people ride on those?”
“Probably. If we had a bigger one. Box number five has an interior capsule for biological specimens. So far two mice, about twenty goldfish, hundreds of bugs, and billions of germs have made the trip. No apparent harm, except that if you’re a germ on the surface of the box the heat is enough to sterilize it. So I guess so far it hasn’t killed anything bigger than a single-celled organism.”
“So far?”
“Well, one use for it is as a weapon, obviously. Send it into something denser than air and you get a huge explosion—we disposed of box eleven by teleporting it into rock under the Nevada Test Range, and the next day the arms control people were all over Livermore and Los Alamos, accusing them of conducting a nuclear test in violation of the moratorium.
“For that matter, send it into the world leader of your choice’s head or chest and you get flying stew. Theoretically if you jump it into the core of a neutron star, all those trillions of tons of neutronium that would take up the same volume would end up as an even thicker film of neutronium on the surface and you’d have a major starquake. Right now the reason we can’t try that out is that we’d have to wait decades or centuries for the light to get here so that we could see the starquake happen.
“No doubt you can see how many uses there are for this, militarily. As long as your rangefinder is good enough, you could teleport a block of explosives into a tank, a plane, an ammo dump—or an
incoming missile. A miniaturized Gaudeamus bullet could have a proximity fuse so that when it sensed something a meter away, it would teleport one-point-oh-oh-five meters forward, and reappear on the other side of armor or blow a meter-wide hole in a bunker wall. Or you could send Army Rangers into a hostage situation on an airliner with an unbelievable flash and bang to cover their arrival—you’d probably want them in thermal suits for that.”
“This thing is bigger than the bomb,” I said.
Hale nodded and ran a hand through the hopeless blond curly mess of his hair; he really looked like he needed to be home in bed. “And for all the spy scandals the Manhattan Project had, nobody ever actually knocked down Oppenheimer and walked out of Los Alamos with an atomic bomb on his shoulder. But that’s what just happened to us.”
He unplugged his desk lamp from the wall and said, “Now let me show you something less dramatic but probably more important.” He plugged the lamp into the socket on the front of the Gaudeamus machine and turned it on. The lamp lit, fully as bright as it had been from the wall plug.
“That’s some battery,” I said. “How long does it last? How far can it jump on one charge?”
“Not a battery,” he said. “You can’t charge a battery fast enough. Huge, very fast capacitors—that’s what most of the space in this box is—to capture the energy every time it jumps. The process of making a jump produces much more energy than it consumes. This lamp would stay lighted for many hours, basically till the charge leaked out of the capacitors, just on the energy from that thing jumping two feet. If we didn’t capture all that energy into the capacitors, the machine itself would have melted—actually some of it might have boiled. Set one of these to vibrate in place, for a few seconds every hour, and you can pull enough power out of that plug to
run the whole Xegon facility. We did just that, recently, as a demo. You’re looking at the thing that replaces every motor in every form of transport from Segways to submarines, eliminates nearly all pollution, and probably takes the human race to the stars.”
My first thought was trivial. “Can I take half my pay in stock options?” Hale grinned and was about to answer when suddenly an entirely different thought hit me. I realized why that flash and bang—and the box being hot—had seemed so familiar. “Uh—” I said, not sure how to ask this “—uh, do you think that you’re the only company that has the Gaudeamus technology?”
Hale looked shocked. “Do you have a reason to think we’re not?”
“Can Gaudeamus be used to send objects somewhere, rather than just sending itself?”
“That’s a theoretical possibility, or so the scientists say. There’s a group working on it.”
“And—this might be a really stupid question—can it be used for time travel?”
“Have those documents leaked out?” Hale seemed to be in a near panic, so I figured he had just answered the question, and didn’t make him formulate his answer into complete sentences.
I told him about my burglary of Lena Logan’s place. I figured if he’d been private, for a while, himself, especially in a shades-of-gray area like child recovery, he wouldn’t be too shocked that I’d done a little breaking and entering.
If he was, he didn’t show it, anyway. He listened to my story the whole way through without saying anything, and at the end, he said, “Well, it’s certainly consistent with the idea that someone else has Gaudeamus, and they’ve been penetrating us, not to steal it, but to see how far we go—or maybe to send us barking up the wrong tree.”
I nodded. “Look, here’s what I think. I think they’ve got a probably more advanced, definitely different version of Gaudeamus
technology, which they use for purposes of their own. That flash and bang from your Gaudeamus box was like a bigger, slower version of the one from what their machine did to my quarter.
“What I think is that there was a mini causal loop right then. That quarter went back one second in time—because one of the variables I set was a one, probably—and one meter up, and one meter behind me. When it reappeared it was carrying a big old load of energy, because Lena Logan’s team, whoever they are, don’t have your energy-absorbing system, so it popped out way hotter than that box did. Or maybe backwards time travel releases more energy. Where’s the energy come from anyway? Does this thing repeal the laws of thermodynamics?”
“I have tried asking every scientist in the Q-tip that question, from time to time. I have a degree in physics, so you would think they’d be able to explain it. I am always lost after five minutes. They talk about Casimir power and zero point and neuroquantumistic effects interacting with neuroquantumological effects. And wave their hands. A lot. Would you understand more of it than I do?”
“Only if they were quoting comic books or sci fi novels,” I admitted. “I’ve heard of Casimir and zero point. Some idea that plain old vacuum contains all kinds of untapped energy that can do a bunch of very weird things. And I never heard of anyone making a distinction between ‘-istics’ and ‘-ologies’ before and then saying they interact. All I can tell you is, I think the bang from the quarter reappearing startled me, one second later, into pushing the button that sent it back in time, and to me that looks like there’s some kind of conservation law operating. The bang and flash and heat are all consistent with the idea that the process makes more energy than it uses. Though why Lena Logan needed a supercomputer to control her Gaudeamus, and you just have a box—”
“A lot of what’s in the box is hard-coded and not reprogrammable,” Hale said, “as a safety measure. My guess would be that it’s an engineer’s choice—allowing three inputs, instead of twenty-two, is a pretty good way to keep people from hurting themselves.” He rubbed his face; it seemed to me that every few minutes he looked grayer and older. “Look, at this point, you have already been worth your weight in gold; there’s so much you’ve picked up we wouldn’t have gotten any other way. Keep it up and—are you all right?”
I wasn’t. I was having a feeling like that strange sexual hallucination I’d had while I was driving—well, except without the sex. And without the hallucination. This wasn’t the hallucination, but it felt like a hallucination trying to arrive. I didn’t know quite what it was, but I also figured I had already told Hale enough strange stories about me bending the rules, at least for the moment. “Uh, I’m fine, and I’ll explain later, but I just realized we absolutely totally got to get me out there working, as soon as possible,” I said. “Real quick, tell me how they took it.” The strange, itchy feeling in my head grew more intense. I had visions of a man stumbling around in the dark, mad at everyone, especially mad at Lena Logan, because they had made him leave the car so far away and he had gotten lost walking to it in the dark—
I made myself concentrate on Hale’s story.
As I listened, I thought that the job had been done by some very professional amateurs, or possibly professionals freelancing with no resources or backup. The whole operation didn’t absolutely require more than three people, maybe four or five would be useful but any more would be in each other’s way. Expenses were probably less than two grand, and the whole thing had run slicker than snot on a brass doorknob.
According to Hale, here’s what happened:
Norman Lawton, a senior NQ physics engineer in the headquarters section of the Q-tip, was working late, alone in the lab, planning to sleep on the bed in his office. This was not unusual. Some Gaudeamus experiments take as long as fifteen hours to run, and since they weren’t well understood, often an engineer or physicist would elect to sleep near it, with a bunch of detectors and alarms set, just in case something interesting happened.
I recognized Norman Lawton’s name from his two visits to Lena Logan’s place during the time I was listening in. He was fifty-five years old and had bulgey toad-eyes, a petulant expression, irregular shaving habits, and one of those hanging bellies that looks like he’s hiding a giant spare brain under his navel. He had the manner and personal style of one of those janitors that reads the encyclopedia and the almanac constantly and will follow you down the hall late at night telling you all about the braided rings of Saturn or exactly how much the federal government spent on the designs for a nuclear dirigible, the kind you can only get rid of by taking a really long dump or asking them about their emotions.
But maybe he was hiding a giant spare brain in that belly. Instead of being an eccentric janitor, Norman Lawton was taking up his space in the universe as a brilliant engineer with triple phuds, physics, chem E, and neurology. People in his shop called him “Always Right Norman.”
He had four marriages in his past, none of them more than two years from license to final decree. What I could gather from my bug was that he was one of those very businesslike engineers that treats it as “the job of sex” and doesn’t seem to want to waste any time on irrelevancies like enjoying himself. Both times I had listened in on him with Lena Logan, he did what he was going to do (not much, very briefly), bought forty goddies, and left. That might have had a thing or two to do with his marriage record.
His large frequent buys of goddies made me suspect that he was a low-level pusher for goddies someplace, but now that I knew they were sex enhancers, I was inclined to think that he just needed a lot more than most people.
In midevening, about the time that I was buying my goddies from Lena, Norman Lawton had been sitting watch over a long-running Gaudeamus experiment, while typing up a technical paper about what happened to excited barium nuclei when they made a Gaudeamus jump. He was hungry and tired, and it was going to be a long night, so he ordered a pizza, something they allowed them to do because, as Hale explained, “it’s better to have a pizza wagon you can search come into the secured area, driven by someone who has no idea of what’s going on, than it is to have employees start developing smuggling routes, which anything or anyone might travel along.” He sounded like he really wanted me to say that’s the way to do things (after all just now he had every reason to be worried about his job), so I assured him it was what I would have set up if I’d had his responsibilities. He seemed to draw comfort from that.
So old Norman lay down to take a nap till the pizza got there, since he knew it would be at least forty minutes—the facility is a ways out, even though the pizza parlor is in the just-off-base noncom strip. Also, it takes some time to get through security. Atom Bomb Pizza did it because Xegon will pay them a huge surcharge to do it; that was another advantage Hale derived from that arrangement—there was only one pizza place that would actually deliver to the facility, and only three approved drivers.
The bad guys had some kind of surveillance on the connections between Xegon and the outside world, obviously. Nobody could possibly have had timing as good as theirs without that. And they had been watching the facility a long time, with people in place, because there wasn’t much of a crack to slip in through, and they
went in and out mighty goddam fast, and without touching the sides. If they hadn’t committed a murder along the way, I might even have kind of admired them, in a purely professional way.
There’s about seven hundred feet of access road, after the guard station and before the lab building, that’s not under constant observation. That seven-hundred-foot stretch is seen at irregular intervals, for maybe five minutes at a time, two to four times an hour, by an armed patrol in an off-road vehicle. There are three patrols, crew of two each, out at all times.
Each armed patrol takes a randomized route through the open land around the facility, checking all the guardposts along the way and surveilling various blind spots like that seven hundred feet of gravel road. They are also supposed to provide backup for any emergencies at the facility itself, so “they’ve got a little more to cover than they should have, ideally,” Hale said.
I agreed that he was right about that too. So far he’d been a smart, supportive guy to work for, old money Yankee or no, and I didn’t want to trade him in on an unknown, especially not right after he’d made me a verbal contract for more money than I’d seen on any six jobs put together before.
The pizza car cleared the guard checkpoint just as it always did. Cheryl Tusson, the twenty-four-year-old single mother of two who was driving the car, stopped and kidded with the guard at the checkpoint (Paul San Luis, age forty-nine, a longtime reliable Xegon employee, who knew her from church) for her usual minute or two.
Exactly one minute and fifteen seconds before the pizza car entered that hidden area, several widely scattered strings of firecrackers went off on the far side of the sandy hills to the west of the road, all at least a few feet off the ground. Two patrols were close enough to hear the bursts and roared over the low sandy hills to investigate. Just as Cheryl’s Celica, with its little Atom Bomb Pizza flag, slowed
on a curve in the hidden area, a flash bomb, like the bright concussion bursts in an aerial fireworks show, went off one more ridgeline to the west. Both patrols headed in that direction.
As Cheryl was coming out of that turn, which had a good deal of loose gravel and was poorly banked, she slowed to about twenty-five miles per hour. She saw a man in a Xegon guard’s uniform flagging her down. She pulled to a stop in the middle of the road—traffic was uncommon and would see her hazard flashers in plenty of time, and besides the shoulder was soft.
Then the man in the guard’s uniform killed her and took the car.
Her death was probably not entirely deliberate; probably, whoever they were, they just didn’t care very much what happened to bystanders. Cheryl was about five feet tall and more than a hundred pounds overweight, a quiet lady whose main recreations were AA and church, so she wouldn’t have put up much of a fight if they had just ordered her out of the car. I sure as hell don’t think she would have risked her life and her children’s future to save one Godzilla Size El Garbago Thick Crust, and two two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, for a rude engineer.
But she didn’t get a choice. The phony guard had a bear tranquilizer dart in a little handheld gadget he could conceal in his palm. When she opened her door he reached in and jammed the dart-head against her skin and fired it straight into her neck. The little pop from the dart gadget was no doubt totally lost in the third round of fireworks now detonating out on the hills.
Cheryl Tusson took most of the tranquilizer right into the carotid. The attacker stripped off the guard uniform jacket and put Cheryl’s Atom Bomb Pizza smock on over his t-shirt. He left her in the gravel road, where she’d fallen after he’d opened the car door. Somewhere in the next few minutes she stopped breathing, or went into cardiac arrest, or choked on vomit, and died.
They found her next to a guard uniform jacket, lying on her side, her clothing undisturbed except for the missing smock. Probably the guard jacket was the one that had been stolen from the dry cleaner’s three months before, about which they’d never been able to find a thing.
Police were out there right now with Xegon and Kirtland security.
“It happens,” Hale said, “that I met Cheryl a few times, and she was a very nice young woman who always had a pleasant word for everyone, getting her life back together after a really bad start—when I cleared her to be our regular delivery person out here, I read her record, and she was just one of those women who finds Mr. Wrong in high school and doesn’t get rid of him for a while. I’d talked with her a few times when I was working late, and she’d shown me pictures of her children. So although (unfortunately), Mr. Bismarck, I can’t authorize company money for you to find Cheryl’s killer, I can mention that the people you are being paid to find are the ones who killed her, and that it is my personal and unprofessional opinion that if you do find the son of a whore, and anything bad happens to his worthless ass, I will probably believe and corroborate anything you later tell the authorities.”
I was getting to like Hale better and better.
Wearing that pizza smock, our boy drove straight to the lab. Norman Lawton opened the door and caught a face full of Mace and the end of a softball bat, then about twenty hard ones, real systematic, like a pro who is trying not to kill you but wants to make sure you wish he had. The fake pizza guy gave Lawton some damage to his tailbone, floating ribs, forearms, shins, ankles, and soles of the feet, finishing off with a hard one in the nads probably just out of pure meanness. Old Norm wasn’t going to be getting around much, for research or anything else, for weeks or months.
That was interesting too. They didn’t kill him; they wanted him to keep working, I would guess, but they didn’t want him to be doing it quickly or soon. And they didn’t want a guy who would make too good a witness.
Then the guy in the pizza smock grabbed the Gaudeamus box, leaving the leads to the recording computer lying on the table (so he knew which of several pieces of apparatus on that table to take). He also took the paper copy of the research paper from the printer. He got back into that pizza wagon and drove it out a road pizza drivers usually didn’t take, one that led east, away from Albuquerque and into the boondocks.
Meanwhile someone else hack-spoofed the security switchboard and told the guard post on the end of that road that the pizza car would be leaving by a different route because there was a major security breach on the usual road and they were sealing it off. (That much was even true—at the time of the fake call, they were just in process of figuring out that all the flashes and bangs had been a diversion, but they hadn’t found Cheryl’s body yet.)
My boy sailed right through the guard point onto a ranch access that goes through to 1-40. Three miles up that, he left the pizza car by the roadside, and picked up whatever vehicle had been left for him.
Ten minutes later, when the whole Xegon facility was in an uproar and Kirtland base security, and every other test facility’s security, were all getting into one big honking commotion, a helicopter spotted the pizza car’s warm engine on IR, circled in, and ID’d it with a spotlight. A team rushed out there and made a careful approach, but the guy had left a little bitty thermite pipe bomb jammed down into the gas fill pipe, probably triggered by a motion detector. As soon as the security team got close, the vibrations set that little bomb off, and the gas tank blew while everyone was still
backpedaling. Casualties there were three guys shaken up badly, with minor burns; one of them, who had fallen or been knocked over backwards, maybe had a broken rib. They weren’t going to get much evidence out of what was left of the car.
Just then, that was about as far as they knew. Everyone was pretty much assuming that the on-the-scene bad guy had escaped in another car, but he might be out there on foot, still making his rendezvous with someone, or he could even have been picked up by a light plane that flew in under radar or got very lucky with not getting detected; that access road was paved and there were no tracks. Anyway, the sonofabitch had an almost-two-hour head start on me. He could even have dashed to the Albuquerque airport, boarded a flight to Mexico City, and already be out of the country, maybe just boarding a flight to Havana.
Now, that weird about-to-have-a-vivid-sex-hallucination feeling, which I figured was an aftereffect of the goddies, got more and more intense as I was listening to Hale, and then got more and more focused. I was getting a picture in my mind. Of a guy throwing a pizza uniform smock into an arroyo.
Anyway, the funny thing was, I wasn’t picturing my boy doing it, I was like, being him, in my head. I felt the cold sweat and the feeling that he didn’t want to take one second extra and the nervousness about something he had heard on the police scanner. I felt that he knew he was supposed to bring the smock along to be destroyed, and not delay to do this, and he was so afraid of being seen dropping it into the arroyo, but he was real afraid of being caught with it, and he didn’t want the others to see the blood on the collar because he had been supposed to shoot her in the thigh, but hell any dumbass knew a tranquilizer in the neck would—he didn’t want them mad at him, he really wanted them to understand—fuckin’ fuckers had no business judging him at all. At all. Fuckin’ at
all. He really had to get out to someplace just off Montgomery Avenue, near the Christian conservatory.
He was visualizing Lena Logan’s place. He hadn’t been there very often and the Christian conservatory, which has a distinctive modernist bell tower, was his landmark.
I knew where he was and how long he expected to take and I knew that if I whipped out of Xegon and got back onto 40 and floored it, and luck was with me, I could meet up with him just before he got there—I saw all the paths in my head.
Now, I’ve had hunches before—half my business is having hunches—but this was more like the hunch having me, like it totally took over my head, John, I’m not fucking kidding it was weird.
Well, hell with it, I’d played hunches that weren’t half that strong before, so I said to Hale that I had an idea and thought I should act on it right away, and that if he could have the guard at the gate have my bag ready—
“Of course,” Hale said. “I’ll walk you out to the lot.” He got up, and we walked, and he talked on his cell and set me up with an escort guard car.
“Hey,” I said, “thought. Maybe useful thought. Send a blank round via Lena Logan’s Gaudeamus machine, and what happens when it arrives? It arrives white-hot and blows up, right? And there was a box of those blanks beside her computer, right by her Gaudeamus platform. And for a bigger boom—put two butane torch cylinders into a paper bag with some black powder, and send the whole works—”
“Boom,” Hale agreed. “I’ll tell them to look for bits of fused and melted metal out there, for analysis. But I would bet you’re right.”
As we walked out the front door into the sodium-glare parking lot that held back the vast dark night around it, the escort car was just pulling up.
Hale walked with me to my car. He hadn’t asked me a single question. Right then I decided he was the best guy at Xegon, even if he was a lipless inbred Yankee child of wealth. You can forgive a lot of a guy who doesn’t ask stupid questions when the clock’s running and you don’t have answers anyway.