Chasing the Dime (40 page)

‘Come on. How'd you know the combo? We change it every month — your idea, in fact. We put it out on e-mail to all the lab rats but you said you haven't checked the sniffer in two years. So how'd you know the combo?'

Pierce turned and gestured to the sniffer. Zeller's eyes followed and landed on the device. Then the focus of his eyes moved slightly and Pierce saw him register something. He stepped back into the lab and let the mantrap door close behind him with a loud
fump.

‘Henry, why do you have the monitor off? I see you've got the tower on but the monitor's off.'

Zeller didn't wait for an answer and Pierce didn't give one anyway. Zeller stepped over to the computer station and reached down and pushed the monitor's on/off button.

The screen activated and Zeller bent down, both hands on the desk, to look at it. On the screen was the transcription of their conversation, the last line reading, ‘Henry, why do you have the monitor off? I see you've got the tower on but the monitor's off.'

It was a good program, a third-generation high resonance voice-recognition system from SacredSoftware. The researchers in the lab used it routinely to dictate notes from experiments or to describe tests as they were conducted.

Pierce watched as Zeller pulled out the keyboard drawer and typed in commands to kill the program. He then erased the file.

‘It will still be recoverable,' Pierce said. ‘You know that.'

‘That's why I'm taking the drive.'

He squatted down in front of the computer tower and slid it around so he could get to the screws that held the shell in place. He took a folding knife out of his pocket and snapped open a Phillips bit. He pulled out the power cord and began to work on the top screw on the shell.

But then he stopped. He had noticed the phone line jacked into the back of the computer. He unplugged it and held the line in his hand.

‘Now Henry that's unlike you. A paranoid like you. Why would you have the computer jacked?'

‘Because I was online. Because I wanted that file you just killed to be sent out as you said the words. It's a SacredSoft program. You recommended it, remember? Each voice receives a recognition code. I set up a file for you. It's as good as a tape recording. If I have to, I'll be able to match your voice to those words.'

Zeller reached up from his crouched position and slapped his tool down hard on the desk. His back to Pierce, the angle of his head rose, as if he were looking up at the dime taped to the wall behind the computer station.

Slowly he stood up, going into one of his pockets again. He turned around while opening a silver cell phone.

‘Well, I know you don't have a computer at home, Henry,' he said. ‘Too paranoid. So I'm guessing Nicki. I'm going to have somebody go by and pick up her drive too, if you don't mind.'

A moment of fear seized Pierce but he calmed himself. The threat to Nicole wasn't counted on but it wasn't totally unexpected, either. But the truth was the phone jack was just part of the play. The dictation file had not been sent anywhere.

Zeller waited for his call to go through, but it didn't. He took his phone away from his ear and looked at it as if it had betrayed him.

‘Goddamn phone.'

‘There's copper in the walls. Remember? Nothing gets in but nothing gets out either.'

‘Fine, then I'll be right with you.'

Zeller punched in the door combination again and moved into the mantrap. As soon as the door closed Pierce went over to the computer station. He picked up Zeller's tool and unfolded a blade. He knelt down by the computer tower and picked up the phone line, looped it in his hand and then sliced through it with the knife.

He stood up and put the tool back on the desk along with the cut piece of phone line just as Zeller came back through the mantrap. Zeller was holding the scramble card in one hand and his phone in the other.

‘Sorry about that,' Pierce said. ‘I had them give you a card that would let you in but not out. You can program them that way.'

Zeller nodded his head and saw the cut phone line on the desk.

‘And that was the only line into the lab,' he said.

‘That's right.'

Zeller flicked the scramble card at Pierce like he was flipping a baseball card against the curb. It bounced off Pierce's chest and fell to the floor.

‘Where's your card?'

‘I left it in my car. I had to have the guard bring me down here. We're stuck, Code. No phones, no cameras, no one coming. Nobody's coming down here to let us out for at least five or six hours, until the lab rats start rolling in. So you might as well make yourself comfortable. You might as well sit down and tell me the story.'

Cody Zeller looked around the lab, at the ceiling, at the desks, at the framed Dr. Seuss illustrations on the walls, anywhere but at Pierce. He caught an idea and abruptly started pacing through the lab with a renewed vigor, his head swiveling as he began a search for a specific target.

Pierce knew what he was doing.

‘There is a fire alarm. But it's a direct system. You pull it and fire and police come. You want them coming? You want to explain it to them?'

‘I don't care. You can explain it.'

Zeller saw the red emergency pull on the wall next to the door to the wire lab. He walked over and without hesitation pulled it down. He turned back to Pierce with a clever smile on his face.

But then nothing happened. Zeller's smile broke. His eyes turned into question marks and Pierce nodded as if to say,
Yes
,
I disconnected the system.

Dejected by the failure of his efforts, Zeller walked over to the probe station furthest from Pierce in the lab, pulled out the desk chair and dropped heavily into it. He closed his eyes, folded his arms and put his feet up on the table, just inches from a $250,000 scanning tunneling microscope.

Pierce waited. He had all night if he needed it. Zeller had masterfully played him. Now it was time to reverse the field. Pierce would play him. Fifteen years before, when the campus police had rounded up the Doomsters, they had separated them and waited them out. The cops had nothing. Zeller was the one who broke, who told everything. Not out of fear, not out of being worn down. Out of wanting to talk, out of a need to share his genius.

Pierce was counting on that need now.

Almost five minutes went by. When Zeller finally spoke, it was while in the same posture, his eyes still closed.

‘It was when you came back after the funeral.'

That was all he said and a long moment went by. Pierce waited, unsure how to dislodge the rest. Finally, he went with the direct approach.

‘What are you talking about? Whose funeral?'

‘Your sister's. When you came back up to Palo Alto you wouldn't talk about it. You kept it in. Then one night it all came out. We got drunk one night and I had some stuff left over from Christmas break in Maui. We smoked that up and, man, then you couldn't stop talking about it.'

Pierce didn't remember this. He did, of course, remember drinking heavily and ingesting a variety of drugs in the days and months after Isabelle's death. He just didn't remember talking about it with Zeller or anyone else.

‘You said that one time when you were out cruising around with your stepfather that you did actually find her. She was sleeping in this abandoned hotel where all the runaways had taken over the rooms. You found her and you were going to rescue her and bring her out, bring her back home. But she convinced you not to do it and not to tell your stepdad. She told you he had done things to her, raped her or whatever, and that's why she ran away. You said she convinced you she was better off on the street than at home with him.'

Now Pierce closed his eyes. Remembering the moment of the story, if not remembering the drunken confession of it to a college roommate.

‘So you left her and you lied to the old man. You said she wasn't there. Then for a whole 'nother year you two kept going out at night, looking for her. Only you were really avoiding her and he didn't know it.'

Pierce remembered his plan. To get older, get out and then come back for her, to find and rescue her then. But she was dead before he got the chance. And all his life since then he knew she would be alive if he had not listened and believed her.

‘You never mentioned it again after that night,' Zeller said. ‘But I remembered it.'

Pierce was seeing the eventual confrontation with his stepfather. It was years later. He had been handcuffed, unable to tell his mother what he knew because to reveal it would be to reveal his own complicity in Isabelle's death, that one night he had found her but then let her go and lied about it.

But, finally, the burden grew until it outweighed the damage the revelation could cause him. The confrontation was in the kitchen, where the confrontations always were in that house. Denials, threats, recriminations. His mother didn't believe him, and in not believing him, she was denying her lost daughter as well. Pierce had not spoken to her since.

Pierce opened his eyes, relieved to leave the haunting memory for the present nightmare.

‘You remembered,' he said to Zeller. ‘You remembered and you held it tight and you kept it for the right time. This time.'

‘It wasn't like that. Something just came up and what I knew fit in. It helped.'

‘Nice penetration, Cody. You have a picture of me up on the wall with all the logos now?'

‘It's not like that, Hank.'

‘Don't call me that. That's what my stepfather called me. Don't ever call me that again.'

‘Whatever you want, Henry.'

Zeller pulled his folded arms tighter against his body.

‘So what's the setup?' Pierce asked. ‘My guess is you have to deliver the formula to keep your end of the deal. Who gets it?'

Zeller turned his head and looked at him, challenge or defiance in his eyes. Pierce wasn't sure which way to read it.

‘I don't know why we're playing this game. The walls are about to come down on you, man, and you don't even know it.'

‘What walls? Are you talking about Lilly Quinlan?'

‘You know I am. There are people who will be contacting you. Soon. You make the deal with them and everything else goes away. You don't make the deal, then God help you. Everything will come down on you like a ton of bricks. So my advice is, play it cool, make the deal and walk away alive, happy and rich.'

‘What is the deal?'

‘Simple. You give up Proteus. You hand over the patent. You go back to building your molecular memory and computers and make lots of money that way. Stay away from the biologicals.'

Pierce nodded. Now he understood. The pharmaceutical industry. One of Zeller's other clients was somehow threatened by Proteus.

‘Are you serious?' he said. ‘A pharmaceutical is behind this? What did you tell them? Don't you know that Proteus will help them? It's a delivery system. What will it deliver? Drug therapy. This could be the biggest development in that industry since it began.'

‘Exactly. It will change everything and they're not ready for it.'

‘Doesn't matter. There's time. Proteus is just a start — we're a minimum ten years away from any kind of practical application.'

‘Yeah, ten years. That's still fifteen years closer than it was before Proteus. The formula will excite the research, to use a phrase from one of your own e-mails. It will kick start it. Maybe you are ten years away and maybe you're five. Maybe you're four. Three. Doesn't matter. You are a threat, man. To a major industrial complex.'

Zeller shook his head in disgust.

‘You scientists think the fucking world is your oyster and you can make your discoveries and change whatever you want and everybody will be happy about it. Well, there's a world order and if you think the giants of industry are going to let a little worker ant like you cut them down to size, then you are living in a goddamn dream.'

He unfolded his arms and gestured toward one of the framed pages from
Horton Hears a Who!
Pierce's eyes followed and he saw it was the page that showed Horton being persecuted by the other jungle animals. He could recite the words in his head.
Through the high jungle tree tops, the news quickly spread. He talks to a dust speck. He's out of his head!

‘I am
helping
you by doing this, Einstein. You understand? This is your dose of reality. Because don't expect the semiconductor people to sit around while you cut them down, either. Consider this a fucking heads up.'

Pierce almost laughed but it was too pathetic.

‘My heads up? Man, that's great. Thank you, Cody Zeller, for setting me straight in the world.'

‘Don't mention it.'

‘And what do you get for this great gesture?'

‘Me? I get money. Lots of it.'

Pierce nodded. Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.

‘So what happens?' he asked quietly. ‘I make the deal and what happens?'

Zeller sat quietly for a moment while he fashioned an answer.

‘Do you remember that urban legend about the garage workshop inventor who came up with a form of rubber that was so strong, it would never wear out? It was a fluke. He was trying to invent one thing but came up with this rubber instead.'

‘He sold it to a tire company so the world would have tires that would never wear out.'

‘Yeah, that's right. That's the story. The name of the tire company was different depending on who told the story. But the story and the end were always the same. The tire company took the formula and put it in a safe.'