Lord of All Things (27 page)

From time to time she went up to the surface. She wandered along strange streets, looking at ramshackle old buildings, restored houses, and brand-new ones. She gave a fifty-ruble note to a beggar in a threadbare, gray-and-white overcoat. She admired the work of a street artist who stoically kept working in the pouring rain with only a sheet of plastic to protect him. She dodged a dog that barked furiously at her. She was lost in thought.

On one of these trips up to the surface it suddenly began to rain so heavily that all she could do was take shelter in the nearest shop. Hanging bells jangled as she opened the door, and she stood there for a moment with her pants soaked through, gasping for breath as the rain drummed against the windowpane and blurred the world beyond. Smears of light passed by from the cars creeping slowly along through the downpour. She looked around. It was an antiques shop. Old furniture, oil paintings in bulky frames, faded lace, cut glass. Books. Solid silver tableware. She felt the breath of history on her cheek. She felt the fear, the grief, the hard necessity that had led to all these different objects being offered up for sale. It took a while before she realized there were voices talking farther back in the shop. She heard someone with an English accent stumbling along in broken Russian.

She followed the voices. The next room was full of musical instruments, and an old man with a sour expression on his face—evidently the owner—was standing there listening to another man who had his back to her. The second man had a wild mane of hair and, Charlotte thought at first glance, the same gray-and-white coat as the beggar she had met earlier.

“Perhaps I can help?” she asked in English.

He turned around. She saw a rosy, round face full of freckles, with cheeks like a cherub and cornflower-blue eyes, a gentle mouth, and Cupid’s-bow lips. “I beg your pardon?” he said. “Oh, do you speak Russian?”

“A little.” Charlotte noticed the man was holding a pocket dictionary. “What would you like to ask?”

He pointed to the instrument in front of him, which looked something like a piano. “I’m trying to explain that I need a document proving this harpsichord really was built by Christian Zell in 1741. I can only buy it if it’s an original.” He sighed. “He keeps telling me to listen to the timbre, and saying he can sell me some scores to go with it, but that’s not what I’m interested in. And as for the timbre…it’s hopelessly out of tune. It needs an awful lot of repair work.”

Charlotte looked at the harpsichord. It was shaped like a concert piano but was much smaller. It was a very modest-looking piece, built of wood, and varnished dark brown, the only ornamentation a thin stripe of gold paint. She put her hand on it. All at once it was easy.

“He’s not telling you the truth,” she said. “This instrument was built around 1960.”

He goggled at her. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Even when it was built, it was meant as a forgery.”

All of a sudden the antiques dealer understood English perfectly well. He turned red and unleashed a string of inventive curses. Charlotte took a step back. The young man with the wild hair took her arm and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here!”

They fled into the pouring rain, running through puddles and gutters as though the shopkeeper were still after them, laughing all the while. Charlotte found herself imagining the antiques dealer waving a musket at them as they ran.

“There’s a McDonald’s at the corner,” the young man said. He looked to be around thirty. “Can I invite you for a cup of bad coffee?”

The restaurant was crammed full, and all they could do was lean up against a counter. The man in the gray-and-white coat was called Gary McGray and came from Scotland, near Aberdeen. He made his living by traveling the world in search of antique keyboard instruments—preferably harpsichords—buying them, restoring them, and then selling them to museums, collectors, and musicians. It was the kind of job you had to put your heart and soul into, and it didn’t bring in much of an income, but his biggest problem was forgeries. If someone persuaded him to part with a lot of money for an instrument that turned out to be a copy, it drove Gary to the edge of financial ruin, since he had to sell it for less money than he had paid in the first place.

They spent the rest of the day leaning up against the counter, hardly noticing the hours pass. When Charlotte went back home to her parents that evening, she announced, “I’m in love!”

It always worked this way: whenever a new director took over the agency, the first thing he would do was summon all the divisional directors to give their reports. Which was logical enough. Logical, too, that these meetings couldn’t be planned down to the minute—if the new director had questions, then he would take his time hearing the answers. Which is why William Hughes Adamson found himself waiting in the secretary’s office for over an hour, with his thick leather briefcase on his lap containing his computer and a stack of documents, and nothing to do but stare at the wall. It may all have been very logical, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. And he didn’t.

Finally, the intercom on the desk buzzed. “Yes, Mrs. Jacobs,” said the secretary, then she released the button and gave him a thin smile. “She’s ready for you now, Mr. Adamson.”

He cast another glance at the clock. One hour and eleven minutes late.

The director’s office at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research wing, was impressively big and just as impressively furnished. Adamson knew it well. The office had a great view over Arlington, for those who liked that sort of thing, as well as of the huge brown condo opposite. Someone was standing out on a balcony over there right now, watering plants; the other hundred or so balconies were all empty.

Roberta Jacobs, the first female director of DARPA, looked just as young face-to-face as she did in the photos that accompanied the news of her appointment. All the same, he was still surprised to meet her: she was so young, and such a looker. She really looked good. Adamson would even have said sexy. She wore her mahogany-brown hair in a pageboy cut that made her look even younger than her years, and her bangs swung as she shook his hand. She gestured toward a chair, next to which was a coffee cup and a video hookup for his computer. Her most impressive feature was her lively, searching, light blue eyes, which followed his every move keenly as he plugged in the video cable.

He could have given the presentation in his sleep. The only extra work had been picking out which diagrams, photos, and film clips to use. He gave a very brief overview of the basics of the Future Combat System; he could assume she knew most of it. He showed some classified clips of refinements on the BigDog robot, a four-legged machine that could move like a dog over terrain, and then turned to the Autonomous Combat Robot projects. He gave her an update on the Urban Ops Hopper, a jumping jack of a robot that could clear obstacles greater than its own height. The machine was designed to be able to deliver cargo to specified locations in urban combat zones so that they could, for instance, resupply units with ammunition. Here, he had a neat little film clip to show—a robot jumping comically up and down on one leg in a hangar while men in white coats pelted it with cardboard boxes, lumps of wood, stones, sandbags, and other missiles to try to make it lose its balance. All in vain.

“Looks good,” the director said. “So what’s the problem?”

Adamson stopped the film. “The positioning system. The computers can compensate for jumps and landing, but they don’t yet have the capacity to steer it to a predetermined destination in any even remotely complex environment.”

He reported progress on the EATR, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. This was a machine designed to be able to turn any kind of biomass into fuel—to eat, as the name suggested—so that in principle it could operate indefinitely in the field. He reported his division’s work on insect-sized reconnaissance drones. He reported on the concept of chemical robots, still very much at the theoretical stage right now.

“That sounds interesting,” Roberta Jacobs said. “What’s that exactly?”

Adamson cleared his throat. She had crossed her arms under her bosom, which he found distracting, and fixed him with an attentive gaze. She wore a dark blue suit that could have clashed horribly with her hair but suited her.
She looks good
, he thought again.
Could be a successful hotel manager or something along those lines. Instead of which she’s in command of the most secret weapons-research program of the most powerful nation on earth.
The idea took some getting used to.

“We call them ChemBots,” Adamson explained. “The idea is to develop a completely new kind of machine—soft, flexible units capable of squeezing through openings narrower than themselves. Then they should be able to reassume their earlier shape, with all systems functioning, and carry out their instructions.” He pulled up some diagrams that showed the scope of the program. “The idea is to build a bridge between robotics and materials chemistry,” he explained. “At the moment our research is focused on transitions between gel and solid states, on material deformation and flux processes in general, or with specific reference to magnetic or electrical stimuli. We’re looking at geometric transitions, reversible chemical or colloidal bonds, and bond-breaking—”

“I’d like to see an up-to-date budget plan and a breakdown of results so far,” she interrupted him.

“It’ll be on your desk tomorrow morning,” Adamson declared. All he needed to do was pull up the data and print it out, but the way he had phrased it sounded more impressive. It was one of the first tricks he had learned after arriving here fresh out of MIT.

“Good. Thank you for what you’ve shown me today,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long.”

“No problem,” Adamson replied, switching off his computer. As he unplugged the video cable, he added, “While I’m here, I’d like to recommend someone. Kind of. This isn’t exactly a Human Resources matter. It’s about a fellow student from my time at MIT. Hiroshi Kato.”

Her bright blue eyes grew suddenly cold. “They warned me you would get around to this. They even say it’s an obsession of yours. Kind of.”

Adamson wound the cable back into his laptop bag, untroubled. “I know they warned you. Did you know Dr. Blackwell?” Simon Blackwell had been the director before last, in office when Adamson first started at DARPA.

She tilted her head, but said nothing.

“We didn’t see eye to eye,” Adamson confessed. He had been too outspoken, and Blackwell had seen him as a threat. “And Dr. Blackwell knew how to bear a grudge.” Which was probably one of the reasons he had died of a heart attack at the age of just sixty, right here in this office.

Roberta Jacobs leaned forward, placed her folded hands on the desk in front of her, and said, “You have five minutes.”

“Okay.” Adamson took the documents out of his case, chose a sheet of paper, and handed it to her. “That’s him. Hiroshi Kato. He must be—what?—around twenty-seven years old by now. Japanese mother, American father; he has Japanese citizenship. He studied with me at MIT, a couple of years behind me, and published a number of very interesting articles while he was there. Not quite five years ago, he simply dropped out from one day to the next and vanished without a trace. He hasn’t been seen since.”

Jacobs looked at the sheet with its photograph from the MIT yearbook. “Go on.”

Adamson sat down. “Mrs. Jacobs,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know how to judge people for their potential. When it comes to robotics, Hiroshi Kato is a genius. He is also, unfortunately, very much his own man. He takes it to extremes. When I approached him and tried to bring him onboard with the Robot 21 strategy paper—I’m sure you know it…”

“Adamson’s Laws of Robotics.” The director nodded.

He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Well, that’s something of an exaggeration. I have no idea how it came to have that name.”

He knew perfectly well, of course. He had worked hard to make sure it happened that way. It was a textbook case of successful self-promotion.

“Coming back to Kato,” he went on, “nothing worked. I even…” And here he hesitated. “Right after Kato turned me down quite brusquely, I was appointed as academic referee for a project he proposed. At the time I thought it tactically useful to recommend that it be refused. Not that there was anything academically wrong with it, but because I had hoped to be able to cut a deal with him, so to speak. I wanted to shake him out of his maverick mode. Do you follow me? Granted, it was morally somewhat dubious, but I thought that the end justified the means. Unfortunately, he vanished almost the same day. And I don’t like the thought that he may have been working for a foreign power ever since.”

Mrs. Jacobs studied the sheet, which summarized everything he had been able to find out about Hiroshi Kato. “What do you suggest?” she asked.

“We should look for him. And see to it he works for the United States.” She regularly had lunch with the director of the CIA. It would only take a few words and a smile from her.

Her face gave nothing away. “I’ll think about it,” she declared at last and stood up. A clear sign his five minutes was up.

“Thank you,” said Bill Adamson. It was five minutes more than her predecessor had ever given him.

Back in his office he took one more look at the Hiroshi Kato file. How many times had he read through it? Perhaps the ones who said he was obsessed were right. And what if they were? Every great man in history had his obsession. It was the only way to achieve anything. Without an obsession, all you had was an ordinary life.

It was all here. Hiroshi’s project proposal. And the resubmission, asking for extra funds. When he read the specifications and Hiroshi’s arguments, it was as clear as day this was only one piece of a puzzle, and that he had not the first idea what the big picture might look like. But he needed to know. And he was willing to bet any sum that for Hiroshi, this project application had been merely the first step toward something big, something truly breathtaking. The question was, what? Bill Adamson wanted to know the answer more than anything in the world. And he would find out. One day he would see the big picture, whatever the cost.