The Fold: A Novel Part 15

The black ants and red ants roamed free in his mind. Thought and memory. Huginn and Muninn in Norse mythology. They charged at each other and became a seething ma.s.s of red and black static. Images and patterns rose and fell in the cloud as Mike made more and more and more connections.

The fifty-seventh...

The fifty-eighth...

The fifty-ninth...

The sixty-third report had a note in the margins from Neil. Bugs were getting into the machinery. Actual bugs. He'd found a few dozen of them in the Site B rings. Mike had never heard of green c.o.c.kroaches before, and he wondered if they were native to San Diego.

The sixty-fourth...

The sixty-fifth...

The sixty-sixth...

SIXTEEN.

Arthur found Mike waiting outside his office door. "Good morning," he said. "Waiting long?"

Mike shook his head.

"Good."

"Sorry to ambush you like this," Mike said, "but I had some questions for you."

Arthur nodded and unlocked the door. "Of course. I'll answer whatever I can, within the limits of our..."

Mike waved his hand in the air as they stepped into the office. "I know," he said. "You have a contract with DARPA. I'm not asking about any of that."

"What can I do for you, then?"

"Do you mind if I close the door?"

Arthur's face hardened. It hadn't been soft to begin with. "Why?"

"You're the one who's big on keeping secrets."

He looked at Mike for a moment, then nodded at the door. Mike gave it a nudge and it swung shut, closing with a click.

"So," Arthur said, "what's this about? Another problem with the maintenance schedule?"

"Funny you should ask," said Mike. "At first, I thought this was a big embezzlement scam."

Arthur paused halfway down into his chair. He glared at Mike. "What?"

"Well, half embezzlement, half kickbacks. I'm not sure if there's a legal distinction there."

"You'd better have something to back up these accusations," said Arthur, "because I can a.s.sure you being friends with the director won't protect you from-"

"All the maintenance you've got them doing on the floor," Mike said. "Changing tanks and couplings and everything else. But nothing needs to be replaced. You're just switching out one set of working components for another one. Replacing gas tanks that are still three-quarters full."

Arthur shook his head. "All this because they replaced a leaky coupling."

"It wasn't leaking," Mike said.

"No offense," Arthur said, "but how would you know?"

"Because I was watching when you turned it on the other day. There wasn't a leak."

"You might've missed it. We were both up-"

In Mike's mind, yesterday's experiment played out again frame by frame, a procession of black ants carrying pictures. He watched through the windows of the control room and in his peripheral vision he could see three different camera views of the main floor on monitors. Two cameras covered the coupling. He watched it play out again four times, focusing on a different part of the image with each repet.i.tion.

There was nothing coming from the connector.

"-in the booth."

Mike tapped the side of his head. "If it happened, I couldn't miss it."

Arthur simmered in his chair.

Mike sat down in the chair across from the physicist. "In a way, the fact that you only use paper for your work would help out a lot in something like that. Everything gets entered piecemeal into a Washington computer, so no one's ever seeing all of it at once, except a few interns who've probably gone numb from the mindless labor."

They stared at each other for a moment.

"I think," Arthur said, "I should have a talk with Mr. Magnus." He reached for his desk phone.

Mike shook his head. "Don't bother. I said I thought it was an embezzlement scam, but it's not. I talked with Reggie first thing this morning, Washington time. I asked for copies of your budget for the past two years. It's shrunk over the past six quarters."

"I know, believe me."

"I also went back over the budget, taking into account the idea that you're just recycling the same components, and everything lines up."

"That must've been some impressive math."

Mike shrugged. "You also have an out-of-date laptop and you drive a cheap car."

"It's not that cheap."

"It is for someone stealing tens of millions. Just the fact that you automatically think of a Dodge as a not-cheap car tells me you don't have piles of cash in your mattress."

"So you decided to dramatically announce that we're not stealing millions from DARPA?"

"No. I wanted to make it clear to you that I'm not going to jump the gun and incriminate you or your work."

"But you called Magnus."

"I called him and asked for the budgets. He sent them. That's all."

Arthur leaned back in his chair. "You didn't tell him why you wanted them?"

"No," said Mike. "Here's the catch, though. It's not embezzlement, but it's something. And unless your engineers are a lot dumber than they look, they're all in on it, too. Which means there's something going on here."

Arthur's face hardened again.

"I'm just trying to make a point. You need to start being honest with me, because I will figure out what's going on. If it's something harmless, fine. Reggie won't care. Or maybe he doesn't even need to know. But if it's not..."

"Yes?"

Mike leaned back in his own chair.

"Thank you," Arthur said after a moment, "for not running to Magnus with your initial theory."

"You're welcome."

"I know he's worried about things here, and the last thing we need is more suspicion." He leaned forward and tapped his fingers on the desk. Then he leaned back again. "This project involves...well, a lot of math. Calculations. Code. Minor engineering tweaks. Most of the people we're reporting to are bureaucrats. Lawyers, businessmen, former military officers. Many of them don't have an appreciation for how much work these things can be."

"I can understand that."

"So we do constant maintenance. Yes, about ninety percent of it is busy work at this point, but it gives us paperwork and material we can wave to prove we've been doing something. It also gives me a reason to keep most of the senior engineering staff on payroll."

"Awfully generous of you."

"The h.e.l.l it is," said Arthur. "They've signed nondisclosure forms, but people's att.i.tudes change a lot when they're downsized. I don't want to give them all a chance to rethink their loyalties."

"Do you think they would? Rethink their loyalties?"

Arthur thought about it for a moment, then leaned forward again. "I don't know," he said. "A few years ago, I would've said not a chance. Olaf and I have known each other for almost fifteen years at this point. Jamie and Neil have been working with me for eight. But after all these...all this secrecy..." He looked past Mike to the diagram of the Albuquerque Door on the wall. "Half the time I feel like I'm surrounded by strangers."

"The secrecy was your choice," Mike said after a moment.

Arthur blinked and looked at him. "Not really," he said. "Sometimes things just have to happen a certain way. You know that."

"Maybe."

Arthur shook off his mood. "So, if you're convinced I'm not an embezzler, what can I do to get you out of my office so I can start my day?"

Mike stood up. "When you gave me access to the trial logs, Jamie said they were the basic reports. Are there more detailed versions?"

"Yes, the full travel reports. They cover everything except internal mechanics. Times, power usage, flux measurements. I think we even noted sunspot activity on some of them. There's almost six hundred of them, going all the way back to the first runs with test objects and rats." Arthur reached out and adjusted the plastic Wile E. Coyote on his desk, turning the carnivore's head to the left. "I'll make sure you get them as soon as you're done with the human trials."

"I finished them last night."

Arthur raised an eyebrow. "All of them?"

Mike shifted his shoulders in a half shrug. "There were only a hundred and sixty-seven of them."

"And you reviewed our budgets this morning?"

"Just back to two thousand eleven, but yeah."

"If I didn't know what you could do," said Arthur, "I'd be tempted to call you a liar."

"You still can, if you like. You wouldn't be the first." He shoved his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out. "It's a memory thing. Once everything's in my head, I don't have to deal with any input or output limitations. No turning pages, no eye fatigue, I can just go through all of it as fast as I can think."

"When you're done with this a.s.signment, I really might try to steal you away from Magnus."

"Good luck with that."

Arthur smirked. "I'll ask Olaf to get you the travel reports. Anything else?"

"I think that'll do it for today."

"Good. We were going to run another trial tomorrow, if you'd like to watch."

"Yeah, thanks. Who's going through?"

"I think it's going to be Bob."

SEVENTEEN.

"Really?" said Mike. "Never?"

"No," Olaf said. "I've never felt the need."

The room was lined with file cabinets. Ten stood against the north wall, each one four drawers high, and another ten against the south. Three of them stood across from the door, placed not to interfere with the others. A clipboard with half a dozen dog-eared sheets of paper hung on the wall next to the door. A small table sat at the center of the room, but no chairs.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes." Olaf flipped to the next key on the ring and tried it in the lock. The tumblers clicked inside the cabinet, and he slid the drawer out an inch to check. He nodded to himself, and inched the key back around until it popped free of the lock. It had DO NOT DUPLICATE stamped into it.

"You must've been tempted," Mike said.