Razing Beijing: A Thriller (36 page)

“Why not? We’re a team—you fuck me over, then I fuck you
over. Do you expect me to believe Milner picked up the phone and volunteered
that somebody threatened him with his own dirt?”

Kosmalski didn’t have an immediate answer for that. “Perhaps
Ahmadi wasn’t working alone. Whoever was working with him could’ve leaked the
story to the
Post
. We don’t know who that is and the
Post
isn’t
saying.”

“Give me the tape. I’ll find out who it is.”

Kosmalski laughed.

“Why not?”

“Why don’t we sit down, Sam.”

McBurney observed the worried expression on Kosmalski’s face.
Both men sat down. Kosmalski tapped his hand on his knee, avoiding McBurney’s
gaze.

“Let me guess,” McBurney said. “Your dog ate the tape.”

Kosmalski cleared his throat. “Off the record, what do you
think the Bureau’s assessment was—is—of who murdered Ahmadi and Prouty?”

McBurney took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
I am
going to get to the bottom of this.
“I hope it’s the same assessment that
we have. That Ahmadi was burned, murdered by his Iranian handler because...” Kosmalski
was looking at him strangely. Suddenly he knew what the FBI agent was about to
assert: the CIA had learned of Herman’s dalliance with Ahmadi and compromised the
secrecy of their negotiation, which had gotten him and Katherine Prouty killed.
That’s why they won’t hand over the surveillance record.

“You dirty bunch of double-dealing bastards,” McBurney
said, shaking his head.

“Wait a minute, Sam. I think you’re—”

“So you have never, ever trusted us, have you? Us lowbrow,
Cold Warrior spies. Artifacts. Curios. Or was it just me?”

“Now don’t get paranoid. You’re reading too much—”

“Am I under scrutiny?” McBurney narrowed his eyes.

Kosmalski didn’t respond.

“If Ahmadi’s handlers did kill him, have you considered
what that says about the contents of the surveillance tape?” McBurney leaned
forward over the desk. “Or, how about this: the CIA arranged Ahmadi’s meeting
with Senator Milner, and his murder, and...
and
my pestering you for the
tape is part of the ruse. Yeah, those gullible FBI boy scouts—er, girl scouts. Those
spit ’n polish
dickheads
.”

Kosmalski’s eyes grew wide enough to explode. He pounded
his fist on the table and caused McBurney to flinch. Kosmalski said in a harsh,
raspy whisper: “What makes you so sure that it’s the
CIA
I’m worried
about?”

Friday, June 5

STUART SAT BACK
in
his CLI office chair, feet propped on a cardboard box while staring off into
space. Open but upside down in his lap was the technical memorandum,
Teleporting
an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
Channels
. A colleague on the pretext of professional courtesy had handed
him the obscure research primer, and Stuart had detected a sneer that seemed to
suggest, ‘You ought to read up on this but I doubt you’ll understand it.’ Weeks
into the job at the company
he
co-founded, Stuart had a sense that the
avalanche of mind-boggling information was designed to confuse him.
Great,
he
thought,
now
I’m
becoming paranoid
.

In truth, his difficulty to focus on anything or anyone was
due to Emily Chang—their quagmire seemed to both begin and end with her. There
was also the sad tragedy that had become Jim Cole’s life. Every man responds in
his own way to personal tragedy. As a father himself, Stuart would have thought
that the death of his daughter would compel Cole to delve relentlessly into the
cause of the crash, a suspicious event from whatever direction one chose to
approach it. At some point Cole would have to face the harrowing truth that his
daughter and others were not accidental victims, they were
murdered
. That
was not a day that Stuart was eager to see.

He toyed with the note on his desk from his secretary. Stuart
reached for the phone and dialed the number at Thanatech.

Marlene Schwegman conveyed to him the latest round of
distressing news. “Paul Devinn has disappeared.”

Stuart recalled that Devinn was supposed to be out on temporary
leave. “You mean, he’s missing in Canada?”

“The Royal Canadian Mounted Police traced his employment
history and called Thanatech yesterday. They wanted to know if he’d contacted
anyone here at the office.”

“Has he?”

“We were hoping maybe you had heard something.”

“He hasn’t called me.”

“Oh, dear.” Marlene’s voice was breaking; she exhaled a
recuperative breath. “I guess there was a big storm on the lake where he was
fishing. They said...they said somebody found his fishing boat. I remembered
you two went back a few years.”

Stuart remembered a picture of Devinn inside his college
dorm room holding a fish over his head, his fellow student passing it off as
some sort of a cynical joke. “So they haven’t actually located him?” Or his
body, he chose not to say.

“The Mounties were stingy on details. I was left with the
impression that they’re not so optimistic and that their call to the office was
some sort of formality. I hope I’m wrong. I certainly hope he doesn’t wind up
on your list, at least not this way.”

“My list?”

“That list of Thanatech ex-employees I drew up for you. Remember,
the one you wanted to use for hiring leads...? Have you had any luck?”

“Oh. No, not yet.”

“Something strange happened the other day. A nice young man
from the FBI came by and asked for that very same list. Isn’t that a
coincidence?”

Stuart lifted his feet from the box. “What, are they hiring
too?”

“No, silly. He said it would help them investigate the
Thompson murder. He was tickled when I handed it right over. I hope you don’t mind
that I gave you all the credit.”

Stuart didn’t respond for several seconds. Might this be
good news? he wondered. Maybe the door had cracked open for deeper
investigation, after all. “I thought they already concluded that Thompson’s
murder was drug related.”

“I thought so, too.”

“I had heard they never found the party responsible for
murdering Sean. Good to know they’re not giving up.”

Later that day, Stuart looked up from a rare
disruption-free session of reading and rubbed his eyes. Standing in the doorway
to his office was Milton Thackeray. Stuart had not quite gotten comfortable
with his absurdly full, lumberjack beard. Stuart asked, “Who the hell are you?”

“Your worst fuckin’ nightmare.”

“Just the guy I need. Come in.”

Thackeray stepped inside. With twenty-eight patents to his
name in the fields of optoelectronics and multi-photon photoelectron
spectroscopy, Dr. Milton Peter Thackeray was CLI’s unrivaled go-to geek and
chief technology officer. Seven years after Stuart had recruited him, now lavishly
vested with options and wealthy in his own right, Thack preferred his Florsheim
wing tips unpolished and his auburn hair pulled into a pigtail.

Stuart thumbed through a stack of green-and-white printout
to one of many blaze orange Post-its. “I keep coming across this VLPC
thing-a-mah-jig. It seems to be the object of a staggering level of spending. What
can you tell me about it?”

Thackeray jutted his chin toward the technical documents
scattered about the desk. “I take it you haven’t had a chance to read about the
Visual Light Photon Counter array?”

Stuart shook his head. “But am I ever chomping at the bit.”

Thackeray ran a beefy hand over his pate. “Okay... Think of
what we’ve built downstairs as a great, big, light-scattering spectroscope. We
raster a lazed beam across a target—CLI built its reputation on being able to
control that type of process very well. The hard part comes with processing the
lazed light-to-matter interaction in order to establish the constituents of the
target. We’re talking for each target molecule its atomic structure, right down
to the spin, momentum, and orbit of each individual electron. The next step,
which these crazy Swiss were supposed to have brought to the party, involves
organizing the trillions of bits of spectroscopic data and teleporting it to
another location.”

“Listen, Thack, all I—”

“Of course these steps all require that our photo-diode
processing is state-of-the-art, dead fuckin’ nuts-on accurate. The beauty of
using a laser is you can communicate these quantum properties without changing
them, without specifically measuring each of the individual subatomic
properties.” Thackeray stumbled over Stuart’s expression. “You following me?”

“What gives with the beard? I mean, really.”

“Bearded people are afforded certain discriminatory
protections.”

“Oh, so that’s it. For a moment when you first walked in
here I thought I was staring into the backside of an ape.”

“I guess that’s a familiar sight for you?” Thackeray
smiled.

Stuart shook his head. “No, I’m
not
following you. Sounds
like we’re trying to skirt the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.”

“In a way. The Swiss algorithms take a Heisenberg
statistical approach, but not to predict the energy states so much as
entangling the communicated data.”

“Entangling...goddamn it, then how do the Swiss—”

“Hold on.” Thackeray grinned, a twinkle in his eye. “This
is where the VLPC array has become such a thorny issue. We had one bitch of a
time getting our avalanche detection—”

“I ask for the time—you build me a watch!”

Thackeray looked at him. “
You
are the one who asked
me
about the VLPC.”

“You’re right—I’m being a dope. Can you just give me the
Wikipedia version, or something? So, why all the money?”

“If what you’re after is a budget review, you should talk
to Steve Reedy.”

Stuart referred again to the printout. “Says here you ran
the VLPC project.”

“That’s right, all I did was run the project. Talk to Reedy
about spending.”

“I’m talking with you, I don’t need to talk to him.”

“Then talk to Perry!”

“What is your hang-up with Reedy?”

Thackeray thought for a brief moment. He rose from Stuart’s
desk and shut the door to his office. Stuart could see that something was
troubling the man.

Thackeray cleared his throat into his fist. “We’ve known
each other awhile. Can I be frank?”

“You feel the need to ask?”

Thackeray narrowed his gaze. “What do you make of Steve
Reedy?”

Stuart considered what might have generated such angst. He
had noticed the other day that Ralph Perry was inclined to defer to Reedy’s
judgment, especially in matters of disagreement between Reedy and Thackeray. It
hadn’t seemed to Stuart at the time that Thackeray’s nose was particularly bent
out of joint; perhaps he was wrong. “Seems like an okay guy. I really can’t say
much about his competence yet.” He shrugged. “A little opinionated. I guess the
dismal state of the project might say something about him. Maybe not.”

“Well, we worked, and worked, and
worked
to get the
VLPC detection right. Topping it all off, we get this extra security rammed
down our throats!” Thackeray paused to study his boss. “I’d bet my life it’s at
least as good as we need. In fact, much better than we need.”

“Doesn’t sound like a problem.”

Thackeray balled his fists and lowered his head, shaking it
slowly. “The problem is, Reedy’s driven the whole organization to the brink in
order to make the avalanche detector more accurate than we need it to be. You
know me, I may be a physicist, but I’m also an engineer. Reedy, on the other
hand, insists on polishing the head of a pin. It’s ludicrous that for the last few
months all we’ve done is re-write code for the sole purpose of trying to make
this thing track
perfectly—
Jesus
Christ!!”

“Don’t blow a gasket.”

“Look, Reedy’s a really smart dude. Don’t take my word for
any of this. You should put out a feeler for what the Swiss think of Mr. Reedy.
When it comes to actually working with the guy, for Perry’s sake they’re
careful to put on the good team face—Perry controls the consortium budget. Privately,
I know for a fact they’d like to strangle the fucker.”

“So where is Perry on this?”

Thackeray rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “We all know
Ralph. Ralph’s no rocket...he’s not technically gifted. Since you left the
company his big thing has been scurrying up to Washington, I guess to panhandle
for contracts. Or off he goes to Hungary or Ethiopia for peddling medical
lasers to their government clinics, whatever.”

“Ralph’s a good salesman, always has been.”

Thackeray flicked his wrist. “I guess. In between he beats
us up to quit spending so much money. He finally hired Reedy to fill your shoes
and that’s what he trusts him to do. In fairness to Steve, Ralph really doesn’t
know which end of a laser is which. The upshot is, until now Perry’s
fair-haired boy has pretty much gotten free reign.”

Stuart suspected Thack’s beef with Reedy had much to do
with old-fashioned professional jealousy. “And now we’ve wasted all this time
and money... But won’t surplus detector accuracy put us ahead of the curve once
we loft these gizmos into satellite orbit?”

Thackeray took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “I
suppose. Unless we quit fucking around and actually demonstrate the ability to
teleport something, we’ll never get into orbit.”

Monday, June 8

THE COMMISSIONER
of
National Defense Science, Technology, and Industry retrieved from his desk
drawer the bottle kept in reserve strictly for bridging the cultural crevasse. Unlike
his guest, Deng Zhen preferred a good single malt scotch to one-hundred proof
vodka.