Blasphemy (17 page)

Her face softened. “Trust me, Wyman, you don’t want to know.”

“I do want to know. I
need
to know. It’s my job. This isn’t like you, Kate, keeping secrets.”

“What makes you think we’re keeping secrets?”

“Ever since I arrived, I’ve had the feeling you’re hiding something. Volkonsky alluded to it. So did you. Something’s seriously wrong with Isabella, isn’t it?”

Kate shook her head. “God, Wyman, you never change—always that damnable curiosity.” She looked down at her shirt, plucked a piece of straw from her shoulder, frowned.

Another long silence. Then she focused her intelligent brown eyes on him and he saw she had reached a decision. “Yes. Something’s wrong with Isabella. But it’s not what you might think. It’s uninteresting. Stupid. It has nothing to do with you or your work here. I don’t want you to know because . . . well, it could get you into trouble.”

Ford said nothing. He waited.

Kate issued a short, bitter laugh. “All right. You asked for it. But don’t expect some big revelation.”

He felt a hideous flush of guilt. He shoved the emotion down—he would deal with it later.

“You’ll understand, when you hear this, why we’ve been keeping it secret.” She looked at him steadily. “Isabella’s been sabotaged. A hacker is making fools of us.”

“How so?”

“Someone planted malware in the supercomputer. It seems to be a kind of logic bomb that goes off just as Isabella is about to reach one hundred percent power. First it produces a bizarre image on the Visualizer; then it shuts down the supercomputer and posts a stupid message. It’s incredibly frustrating—and extremely dangerous. At that high energy level, if the beams kink or get thrown off track, we could all be blown up. Even worse, a sudden energy fluctuation could create dangerous particles or miniature black holes. It’s the
Mona Lisa
of hacks, a real masterpiece, the work of an incredibly sophisticated programmer. We can’t find it.”

“What’s the message?”

“You know, GREETINGS or HELLO or ANYBODY THERE?”

“Like the old AI programming saw, HELLO, WORLD.”

“Exactly. An inside joke.”

“And then what?”

“That’s it.”

“It doesn’t say more?”

“There’s no time for it to say more. With the computer crashed, we’re forced to initiate an emergency shutdown of the system.”

“You haven’t engaged it in conversation? Gotten it talking?”

“Are you kidding? With a forty-billion-dollar machine about to blow up? Anyway, it wouldn’t help—it would only spew out more crap. And with the supercomputer crashed, running Isabella is like driving at night on a wet road at a hundred miles an hour with the headlights off. We’d be crazy to sit around chatting with it.”

“And the image?”

“Very strange. It’s hard to describe—really spectacular, all deep and shimmery like a ghost. Whoever did this was an artist in his own way.”

“You can’t find the malware?”

“No. It’s devilishly clever. It appears to be moving itself around the system, erasing its tracks as it goes, evading detection.”

“Why not tell Washington and get a specialized team out here to fix it?”

She was silent for a moment. “It’s too late for that. If it came out that we were flummoxed by a hacker, there’d be a furious scandal. The Isabella project just barely scraped by the Congress . . . . It would be the end.”

“Why didn’t you report it right away? Why are you hiding it?”

“We were going to!” She brushed back her hair. “But then we decided it would be better to delete the malware before we reported it, so we could say we’d already taken care of the problem. A day went by, then another and another, and we couldn’t find the malware. A week passed, ten days—and then it dawned on us we’d waited too long. If we reported it, we’d be accused of a cover-up.”

“That was a blunder.”

“I’ll say. I don’t quite know how it happened . . . . We were just crazy with stress, and it takes a minimum of forty-eight hours to complete a single run cycle . . . .” She shook her head.

“Any idea who’s behind it?”

“Gregory thinks it may be a sophisticated group of hackers who planned a deliberate act of criminal sabotage. But there’s always the unspoken fear . . . that the hacker might be one of us.” She paused, breathing hard. “You see the position we’re in, Wyman.”

A horse nickered softly in the shadows.

“This must be why Hazelius seems to think Volkonsky’s death was a suicide,” Ford said.

“Of course it was a suicide. As the software engineer, the humiliation of being the victim of a hacker fell on him like a ton of bricks. Poor Peter. He was so fragile, an emotional twelve-year-old, just a hyperactive, insecure kid in T-shirts that were too big for him.” She shook her head. “He couldn’t take the pressure. The guy never slept. He was in there with the computer day and night. But he couldn’t find the slag code. It tore him to pieces. He started drinking and I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into harder stuff.”

“What about Innes? Isn’t he supposed to be the team psychologist?”

“Innes.” Her brow furrowed. “He means well, but he’s hopelessly out-gunned intellectually. I mean, these once-a-week ‘rap’ sessions, this let’s-talk-it-all-out crap, it might wash with normal people, but not with us. It’s so easy to see through his tricks, his leading questions, his little strategies. Peter detested him.” She brushed away a tear with the back of her gloved hand. “We were all very fond of Peter.”

“All except Wardlaw,” said Ford. “And Corcoran.”

“Wardlaw . . . Well, he doesn’t really like any of us, except Hazelius. But you have to realize, he’s under even more pressure. He’s the team’s intelligence officer, the guy who’s supposed to be in charge of security. If this came out, he’d go to prison.”

No wonder he’s a little high-strung
.

“As for Melissa, she’s had dustups with quite a few of the team members. It wasn’t just Volkonsky. I’d . . . be careful of her.”

Ford thought of the note, but said nothing.

She pulled off her gloves and tossed them in a basket hung on the wall. “Satisfied?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

As Ford walked back to his casita, he repeated the question to himself.
Satisfied
?

PASTOR RUSS EDDY HAD GOTTEN INTO his old Ford pickup and was staring at the gas gauge, caculating if he had the gas to get up the mesa and back, when he saw the telltale corkscrew of dust on the horizon that indicated an approaching vehicle. He got out of the truck and leaned against it, waiting.

A few moments later a Navajo Tribal Police car eased to a stop in front of the trailer, the plume of dust spiraling away in the wind. The door opened and a dusty cowboy boot appeared. A tall man unfolded himself from the inside and straightened up.

“Morning, Pastor,” he said, touching his hat.

“Morning, Lieutenant Bia,” said Eddy, trying to keep his voice easy and loose.

“Going somewhere?”

“Oh, no, just checking the gas level in the truck,” said Eddy. “Actually, I was thinking of driving up to the mesa, introducing myself to the scientists up there. I’m concerned about what’s going on up there.”

Bia gazed around, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting the endless horizon in every direction he looked. “Haven’t seen Lorenzo around lately, have you?”

“No,” said Eddy. “Haven’t seen him since Monday morning.”

Bia hitched up his pants, his dangling accoutrements clinking like a giant charm bracelet. “Funny thing is, he hitched a ride to Blue Gap around four o’clock Monday, told the folks there he was heading out this way to finish up his work. They saw him walking down the mission road—and then he seems to have disappeared.”

Eddy let a beat pass. “Well, I never saw him. I mean, I saw him in the morning, but he left around noon or maybe before and I haven’t seen him here since. He was supposed to be working for me, but . . .”

“Hot out here today, eh?” Bia turned and grinned at Eddy, and glanced toward the trailer.

“Can I talk you into a cup of coffee?” Bia asked.

“Of course.”

Bia followed Eddy into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Eddy filled the percolator pot with fresh water and turned on the burner. Navajos habitually reused their grounds, and Eddy figured Bia wouldn’t mind.

Bia laid his hat on the table. His hair was plastered down in a wet ring. “Well, I’m actually not here about Lorenzo. I personally think he took off again. The folks at Blue Gap said he was pretty drunk when he came through on Monday.”

Eddy nodded. “I noticed he’d started hitting the juice.”

Bia shook his head. “Too bad. That kid had just about everything going for him. If he don’t show up soon, they’ll revoke his parole and he’ll go back to Alameda.”

Eddy nodded again. “A shame.”

The coffee began to perk. Eddy took the opportunity to busy himself getting out the mugs, sugar, and Cremora, placing them on the table. He poured out two cups and sat down again.

“Actually,” said Bia, “I’m here about something else. I was talking to the trader in Blue Gap yesterday, and he told me about the . . . problem you’d had with the collection money.”

“Right.” Eddy took a swallow of coffee, burned his mouth.

“He told me how you marked up some money and asked him to keep an eye out for it.”

Eddy waited.

“Well, yesterday a bunch of those bills showed up.”

“I see.” Eddy swallowed.
Yesterday
?

“It’s kind of an awkward situation,” said Bia, “which is why the trader talked to me about it, instead of calling you. I hope you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you. I don’t want to make a big deal about it.”

“Sure thing.”

“You know old lady Benally? Elizabeth Benally?”

“Of course, she attends my church.”

“She used to graze her sheep up on the mesa every summer, had an old hogan up there near Piute Spring. It wasn’t her land, she didn’t have any right to it, but she’d been using it most of her life. When the tribal government took over the mesa for that Isabella project, she lost that grazing land and had to sell her sheep.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It wasn’t so bad for her. She’s in her seventies, and they got her into a nice HUD house down in Blue Gap. Problem is, with a house like that, you suddenly have electric bills, water bills—you know what I mean? She’s never had to pay a bill in her life. And now her income’s down to just her government stipend because she doesn’t have any more sheep.”

Eddy said he understood.

“Well, this week her granddaughter’s having her tenth birthday and yesterday old lady Benally bought her a Gameboy at the Trading Post as a present, had it gift-wrapped and everything.” He paused, looking steadily at Eddy. “She paid for it with your marked bills.”

Eddy sat there, staring at Bia.

“I know. Pretty surprising.” Bia removed a wallet from his back pocket. His big dusty hand slipped out a fifty and pushed it across the table. “No point in making a big deal over it.”

Eddy could not move.

Bia rose, put the wallet away. “If it happens again, just let me know and I’ll cover the loss. Like I said, there’s no point in the law getting involved. I’m not sure she’s all that
compos mentis
anyway.” He picked up his hat and fitted it back down over the sweat mark on his salt-and-pepper hair.

“Thanks for your understanding, Pastor.”

He turned to go, then paused. “And if you see Lorenzo, give me a holler, okay?”

“Sure will, Lieutenant.”

Pastor Russ Eddy watched as Lieutenant Bia walked out the front door and disappeared, then reappeared through the window, striding across his front yard, right over where the body was buried, his cowboy boots kicking up streamers of dust.

His eye fell on the soiled fifty-dollar bill, and he felt sick. And then angry. Very angry.

FORD ENTERED HIS LIVING ROOM AND stood at the window, gazing at the crooked form of Nakai Rock rising above the cottonwoods. He had completed his assignment, and now he faced a decision: Should he report it?

He flung himself into a chair and dropped his head into his hands. Kate was right: if the news got out, it would fatally damage the project. It would destroy their careers—Kate’s included. In the field of science, the whiff of a cover-up or a lie was a career killer.

Satisfied
? he asked himself again.

He got up and angrily paced the room. Lockwood had known all along that he would find the answer by asking Kate. He’d been hired not because he was some brilliant ex–CIA agent turned PI, but because he just happened to have dated a certain woman twelve years ago. He should’ve walked out on Lockwood when he had the chance. But he’d been intrigued by the assignment. Flattered. And, if the truth be told, way too attracted to the idea of seeing Kate again.

For a moment he longed for his life at the monastery, those thirty months when life seemed so simple, so clean. Living there, he’d almost forgotten the awful grayness of the world and the impossible moral choices it forced on you. But he never would have made a monk. He had gone into the monastery hoping it would give him back his certainty, his faith. But it had done just the opposite.

He bent his head and tried to pray, but it was just words. Words spoken into silence.

Maybe there wasn’t any such thing as right or wrong anymore—people did what they did. He made his decision. There was no way he was going to take a step that would damage Kate’s career. She had had enough hard knocks in her life. He would give them two days to track down the malware. And he would help them. He strongly suspected that the saboteur was a member of the team. No one else would have the access or the knowledge.

Walking out the front door, Ford took a turn around the house as if taking the air, making sure Wardlaw wasn’t hanging around. Then he went into his bedroom, unlocked a filing cabinet, and removed his briefcase. He punched in the code to unlock it and tapped in the number.

Lockwood answered so fast, Ford thought the science adviser must have been waiting by the phone.

“News?” Lockwood asked breathlessly.