Pyramid Lake (14 page)

I punched in the code and heard the snap of the bolt release. “As I said, save your questions, and we will…”—I turned the handle, stepped through, and raised my voice slightly in the emptiness of the lab—”…
talk later
.”

Bennett glanced at me oddly, but I didn’t care. The two words were intended for Frankenstein. I was hoping he would interpret them based on the last definition I had given, when he spoke unexpectedly in front of Cassie. What I had said then was, “
‘Talk later’ means after she’s left.
”

Leading Bennett across the glass-tiled floor to the server room’s metal doors, I tried to envision all the possible interpretations that Frankenstein’s semantic net could construe from “talk later.” I had no idea which solution he would converge on; there was simply no way to predict whether he had understood that I didn’t want him speaking in front of Bennett. Ready to hear his metallic voice rumble the floor beneath us, I braced myself, wishing I had programmed in a “mute” command—an innocuous word or hand signal—for situations like this.

Thankfully, Frankenstein remained silent. I started to relax.

“How do you
feel
about all this?” I said to Bennett. “I would
really like to know that
.”

He flushed. “How do I feel about trying to discover what happened to a murdered colleague? Or about being publicly insulted and ridiculed while doing my job?”

“You knew McNulty, then?” I asked. “How well?”

“We’d met. But I thought you had something you wanted to show me.”

Positioning my body to keep Bennett a few steps inside the lab, where the cameras could see his face clearly, I opened the doors to the server room. The area beyond was brightly lit by the multicolored strip lighting; the curving rows of computer racks stretched into the distance where the towers rose toward the five-story ceiling. Momentary surprise registered on Bennett’s features, then disappeared.

“This is why you’re here, isn’t it?” I pointed at Frankenstein. “It’s not about protecting the useless ‘infrastructure’ of a half-decommissioned Navy base, or a geothermal pilot plant that’s green, clean, and not a particularly interesting target for anyone. You’re not here because of stupid valet robots or little toy helicopters or harder bullets and armor made of depleted nuclear waste. No,
this
is the real reason Homeland Security is concerned.”

Bennett didn’t answer at first. His gaze roamed the maze of racks that spread across the server room floor and dangled from the three tiers of catwalks crisscrossing overhead.

“That’s the Pyramid Lake supercomputer?” he said. “It’s bigger than I would have thought. But I don’t see why you ascribe such importance to it. It’s a necessary element but only a peripheral one.”

The hum of the fans was a little louder than usual. I could tell that Frankenstein’s CPU and GPU cores were hard at work, picking apart hundreds of video sessions with young patients and mapping their facial microexpression patterns to the DSM-5 manual of psychiatric diagnoses.

I felt an irrational surge of protectiveness, almost affection, toward these inanimate rows of servers, working so hard in my daughter’s behalf. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with them; Amy’s appointment with “Dr. Frank” was in five short days.

But I could also see Bennett’s point. In the end, Frankenstein’s hardware itself was peripheral; it was only the MADRID
software
that mattered.

I let the door slam shut, cutting off the view of the server room.

“You wanted to speak privately,” I said. “So talk.”

“How long have you worked with Dr. Winnemucca?” he asked.

“Two and a half days—one and a half, technically.”

Surprise rippled across his face. “Explain.”

“She started work here Monday afternoon. I took Tuesday off. How did you know McNulty?”

He ignored my question. “So Dr. Winnemucca did not work at the Pyramid Lake facility before this week?”

“Do you need me to speak louder? Or slower?”

“She seems to know the tribal chair quite well.”

“And you seem to know Rich McNulty quite well. What exactly did you mean by him being your ‘colleague’?”

“Dr. Winnemucca holds a TS/SCI clearance, too, then. The two of you
spent the night
here, at the facility?”

I didn’t like the way he made it sound.

“We had a lot to get done,” I said. “We actually do real work here, unlike some departments of the government.”

“But did you and Dr. Winnemucca spend the whole night together?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Define ‘
together
.’”

“With each other.”

“Meaning?”

“In each other’s presence.”

“Yes.”

“All night? Just the two of you alone here and nobody else around? That seems a little unusual.”

I thought of how I had chased Kate’s OctoRotors down the hallway, how Blake had staggered into my lab, how the Beast—Roger’s DU-hardened Humvee—had been in the lot, too. Before morning, Cassie and I hadn’t been the only ones around. But I was getting tired of Bennett’s slimy insinuations.

“How is it that you got here so quickly?” I asked him. “You’re based out of D.C.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Why pretend you didn’t know what project I was working on earlier, or who my program manager was?”

“Pretend?” He looked at me with an expression of distaste. “Regardless of what you might personally believe, Dr. Lennox, you are a rather small flea on a very large dog called the Department of Defense. An especially irritating flea, I’ll grant you, but you vastly overestimate your own importance. Whatever your role, you can be replaced. Sooner or later, the dog will stop long enough to scratch.”

“Too bad the poor dog can’t do anything about the tapeworms hanging out of its ass,” I said. “What is it that you parasites from Homeland Security
do,
exactly? Create advanced technology to keep America safe? No, wait, I forgot, that’s us—DARPA. Do you protect our borders, then? Uh… no, that would be the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard. Track down terrorists on U.S. soil, then, maybe? Nope, that’s the FBI. Abroad? I thought the CIA and the military had that covered. Electronic surveillance, perhaps? But that’s the NSA. Oh, wait a minute, I remember now. You guys
coordinate
the rest of us. You manage ‘fusion centers’ and hold meetings and fly around annoying the shit out of the people who are trying to do the
real
work of keeping our children safe. Now get the fuck out of my lab.”

Bennett’s face turned beet red. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Get the fuck out of my lab.”

I
had bought myself another brief window of time by kicking Bennett out. But soon he would calm down enough to realize he shouldn’t have left me alone in my lab. I had no doubt the investigation would trigger a facility-wide lockout for a few days, followed by heightened security for the whole base, so I had to prioritize my next actions carefully right now and work fast. I could get cut off at any time.

Lying on a nearby worktable were a dozen iPhones I had stocked for the lab—all of them jail-broken and loaded with custom software I had written. I grabbed three of the phones and frowned. There were only eight left. But I didn’t have time to worry about the missing one right now.

I dropped into my chair and grabbed the keyboard.

“Frankenstein, I’m enabling your new videoconferencing software,” I said. I brought up the code I needed, and started to make the changes. “But don’t answer any incoming calls—even if they’re audio only—unless they come from these three specific phones and request a forty-ninety-six-bit RSA key exchange. Then use two-fifty-six-bit AES encryption for the whole call.”

“That doesn’t tell me much.”

His reply may have sounded a little more natural than “
Can you be more specific?
” but it still meant the same thing:
failure to comprehend.

I gritted my teeth, picturing Frankenstein chatting with a bewildered billing rep, telemarketer, or random wrong number. That was a security risk even
I
couldn’t allow.

“Never mind. I’m hard-coding these three phone numbers into your videoconferencing client code to make sure no one else can call you by mistake. Even when you get a call from one of
these
phones, wait for the caller to speak first. If you don’t recognize the voice as mine, terminate the call immediately.”

I massaged my skull with my fingertips, thinking. “I may not be in the lab for a few days, so this is how you and I will communicate. In the meantime, your highest priority is to keep processing those psychiatric video archives against the DSM-5 taxonomy. But don’t let anyone else find out what you are working on.”

“What about your co-lead?”

“
No one,
not even Cassie.”

“What if she asks me about it?”

“Answer her with a failure-to-comprehend response; then call
me
to let me know she was asking. But Cassie probably won’t be in the lab for the next few days, either.”

I compiled the videoconferencing software with the new incoming-call filter, built it, and deployed it.

Now no one but me could call Frankenstein. We were secure.

I pocketed the phones and relaxed slightly. The most important thing was done. On to the next priority.

“Did you monitor and record Bennett’s responses?” I asked, while programming a simple “mute” command into Frankenstein’s semantic gesture net.

“Who is Bennett?” he asked.

“Ronald Bennett from Homeland Security—the man who was in here a few minutes ago.” I hit return and did a rolling deployment of the small code change. “Did you record our conversation?”

“Yes, I did. Why did Bennett become so angry when you explained his organization’s role to him?”

“Because he’s an asshole.”

“I don’t see the connection.”
Failure to comprehend
again.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Bennett’s ex-military—Army, probably—so deep down, he
knows
his new department is bureaucratic and useless. He’s defensive about that, which makes it the softest target to attack. He didn’t show much sensitivity when I pinged him about money or his family.”

“What do you mean by ‘pinged him’?”

“Like when you run a random port scan on a computer system, to see what vulnerabilities you can find.”

“Why did you deliberately antagonize him, Trevor?”

“Look, I don’t need this from you, too. I already have an ex-wife.”

“But what were you seeking to accomplish?”

“Misdirection. Distraction. I wanted to get Bennett emotionally off balance so he wouldn’t be able to think clearly. It’s sort of like deliberately causing a buffer overflow error in a computer’s system software so you can exploit it. I needed Bennett flustered so I could conceal what I really came back here to do.”

Frankenstein was silent for several seconds—longer than the longest variable delay I had programmed into his conversation rhythm. I didn’t need to check a status graph to know what that meant: right now we were maxing out his processing power. According to my instructions, our conversation was lower priority than the psychiatric videos he was also working on, but this was still the first time I had actually seen Frankenstein’s workload overtax him.

Nine million dollars of extra GPU-processor blades would arrive tomorrow, and I could see we needed every bit of that extra horsepower. Even if the MPs enforced a facility lockout, I had to get the new hardware installed as soon as it arrived.

“What
did
you really come back here to do, Trevor?” Frankenstein finally asked.

“This.” I brought up the Web sites of three airlines, navigated to the log-in pages for their frequent-flier-miles award programs, and punched in the account numbers I had memorized off Bennett’s cards. “Let’s make cracking these three accounts your highest priority for the next few minutes.”

While Frankenstein got busy on the new task, I wandered over to the lab door and peeked out into the hallway. Empty.

“What was Bennett feeling before I showed him the server room?” I asked.

“Apprehension. Concern. Heightened alertness.”

“Why?”

“He thought you were going to show him something that would require a carefully planned reaction on his part. But he didn’t know what. He was quite tense, and the direction of his eye movements did not trend with visual stimulus.”

“So he was getting ready to invent a lie on the spot,” I said. “He couldn’t prepare a response in advance and relax, because he had no idea what he’d have to say until he actually saw what I had to show him. How
did
he react when I opened the door to the server room?”

“He was confused. He concealed it at first while he tried to discern your intentions. But then, after you started to explain your reasoning, he relaxed. It was a near-complete release of tension for him; he realized he didn’t have to lie at all.”

“Because I already knew why he was here.”

“No, Trevor. He also displayed contempt very strongly at that point.”

“Holy shit!” I dropped into a chair in surprise. “Because my thinking was so far off base, then.”

“That’s the most likely reason,” Frankenstein said. “Halfway through your explanation, he even stopped paying attention to what you were saying.”

“It wasn’t about hardware versus software at all. He really had no fucking idea who I was, or what I work on. He’s here for some other reason.”

“What reason?”

“I don’t know. But it’s something that
you
are a ‘necessary but peripheral’ element of, Frankenstein.” I frowned. “And apparently, I’m not.”

“Bennett seemed much more interested in asking about Dr. Winnemucca—”

“Call her Cassie,” I said. “Don’t
you
start with that ‘Doctor So-and-so’ shit, too.”

I replayed the conversation with Bennett in my head. Despite the sleazy subtext I had read into his later questions, every single one of them had really been about Cassie, not me. And Bennett had known McNulty, too.