Pyramid Lake (25 page)

It had really messed me up, too. I catalogued the physical sensations as my interrupted fight-or-flight reflexes wound down. My stomach was queasy, my limbs loose and unsteady. My facial muscles still wanted to pull in unfamiliar directions. This wasn’t just fear’s aftershocks. Fear, I was plenty familiar with. Fear was what I felt for Amy now, every day, as I maneuvered to protect her from the same unjust system that had mangled me as a child. No, what my body was reacting to right now was older and more primitive than fear.

Deep inside the reptile part of my brain, Blake’s little joke had done something bad to me. As ridiculous and irrational as it was, I felt smaller than before. Powerless, unworthy—diminished, somehow, by the knowledge that I had let a dumb piece of metal treat me with contempt.

It was a nasty feeling, festering inside my head like a maddening itch—one I couldn’t scratch. I wasn’t used to letting myself be physically intimated like that.

No one had been able to do it to me for a very long time.

Cassie had to repeat herself twice before I could make sense of her words. Then I sat up straight, opened my eyes, and reached for the printout she held.

“How long has it been going on?” I asked.

“I
had the ops manager at the power plant e-mail me these,” Cassie said. “His team pulled these numbers right off their meters, so I’m pretty sure we can trust them. Besides, most of the time they do match ours.”

“They should
always
match,” I said. “I designed Frankenstein for maximum energy efficiency, too. When his CPUs aren’t one hundred percent busy he automatically powers down unused racks.” Running my finger down the printed column of megawatt-hour figures, I compared them to Cassie’s affine-scaled CPU graphs, displayed on Frankenstein’s monitor screen. “The fact that they match some of the time tells me your math is correct.”

“Of
course
my math is correct. And this discrepancy isn’t related to your recent side project—a project which, you should notice, I’m respecting our little agreement and not asking Frankenstein about, even though it’s been maxing his CPU usage out at a hundred percent ever since you started.”

She shook her head. “No, whatever’s causing this has been going on for at least six months. As you can see, some of the time Frankenstein’s been drawing far more electrical power than his own CPU-usage records indicate he should be.”

“That’s weird,” I said. And it was.

“It gets even weirder,” Cassie said. “I looked at the time-stamp history of your software changes, Trevor. I wanted to see if you were intermittently checking in some buggy SNMP code that hosed up the tracking of Frankenstein’s actual CPU usage—”

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “I don’t make mistakes like that.”

“—but I found something else, instead.”

Cassie brought up another window. “Here’s an hourly graph of your code check-ins, plotted against the unaccounted-for power usage. By the way, it also shows you spend way too much time here at work.”

I stared at the graph. “But according to this, the weird extra power draw only happens when I’m
not
here. This has been going on for
six months
?”

“At least,” she said.

In the past six months, Bennett had been here fourteen times. When I showed Frankenstein to him, he had called it
“a necessary element, but only a peripheral one.”
I bit down on a hard kernel of anger that threatened to disrupt my train of thought.

“If I were them, here’s how I’d do it,” I said. “To hide my tracks, I’d use the same virtualization that Frankenstein’s operating system is built on. Whenever I wanted to steal cycles for some stealth project without leaving any traces, I’d launch a new virtual machine and cripple its SNMP, which would make it more or less invisible—a ghost in the machine. Then I’d use
it
as a hypervisor to launch as many additional hidden virtual machines as I needed. And when I finished, I’d roll them all back and delete them, leaving no record that they had ever existed at all.”

“But this doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If someone was using Frankenstein that way, they couldn’t save any of their work. It would all get wiped out, every time the virtual machines were deleted.”

“Forced amnesia,” I said. “Every time they used him, they erased his memory of it. They made him forget what he had done.”

“It sounds cruel when you put that way,” she said. “I don’t blame you for being mad.”

“Frankenstein’s a computer, not a person. You can’t be cruel to a machine; he doesn’t have feelings. No, I’m mad for a different reason: McNulty was doing all this
behind my back
.”

“Why go to all this trouble instead of just telling you?” Cassie asked.

“Because, whatever they were up to, McNulty knew I’d never go along with it. But he and…”
Linebaugh
, I almost said, but I didn’t want to upset Cassie. “…whoever else is involved… they must have figured
you
would.”

She frowned. “No one said anything to me about a second stealth development project, also using our supercomputer. But I can think of only one kind of project that wouldn’t actually require saving your progress.”

“The operational kind,” I said. “These bastards aren’t
developing
anything, Cassie. They’re
using
what we’ve developed for them already.”

A
fter Roger dropped us off at my place Cassie went home. She was flying back to California for the weekend, and staying through Monday, to help her old team at LLNL with some transition tasks. She was officially still employed there, but on a six-month sabbatical leave. I figured it was pretty smart of her to leave her options open. It gave her leverage, to make sure Linebaugh delivered on his education-money promises.

I called Hertz in Reno, rented a car, and paid a hundred dollars extra to have a guy drive it the two hours to my place. Then, sitting on the couch, I called Frankenstein. The new processors had already made a difference. His diagnostic accuracy had improved to 86 percent, and he was confident he’d be over 95 percent after the weekend. I figured that Monday afternoon, with Cassie out of the lab, was a safe bet.

That would also give me the weekend to dig into the disturbing discovery we had made: this sneaky, premature operational use of MADRID without my knowledge. I planned to learn exactly what they were doing with my computer, and put a halt to it.

To help my daughter, Frankenstein and I needed every bit of computing power we had.

I called Jen to make sure she and Amy could speak to Dr. Frank on Monday. With those arrangements made, it was time for the conversation I had been dreading.

“Jen…” My throat closed. Swallowing, I forced the words out. “I met someone.”

The silence that followed felt heavy, freighted with the weight of my words. It felt like broken glass, irreversible and unfixable, but still able to cut you deeply when you tried to clean it up.

“You… met someone,” she finally said. Her voice sounded dull and lifeless, but I could hear the storm clouds beneath. I
knew
that voice. It was Jen’s most upset voice—her voice when I’d well and truly fucked things up.

I closed my eyes.

“Why are you telling me?” she asked. “Isn’t this hard enough already?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I felt guilty
not
telling you.”

Another long silence.

“Isn’t it enough that we have to live this way? That I have to raise our daughter all alone?”

I had no answer for that.
Jen
was the one who had divorced
me
. The silence stretched again.

Then she sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m being unfair to you. I just thought… I thought… I don’t even know what I thought.” Her voice caught. “I’m happy for you.”

She wasn’t, though. I could tell. Not at all.

“I’m happy for you and Dan, too,” I lied.

“Dan?” She laughed—a brittle, pained sound. “Dan’s been a friend when I badly needed one. There’s nothing between us. For the longest time, I even thought he was gay. But then I realized just how terrified he is of you.”

“I never threatened him,” I said. “I never even said a word to him.”

Jen let out another bitter laugh. “You don’t have to say anything. The way you
look
at people is threatening. Even the way you walk into a room intimidates people. You’re a human pit bull.”

“I can’t help how other people react,” I said. “That’s not something I can control.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit, because I know you far too well. I’m your
wife,
Trevor. I know you
fucking
damn well
can
control it, because I’ve seen how you turn it off at will. But when you
do
—when, all of a sudden, you go as meek as a mouse—that’s when people really
should
be terrified of you. You’re like one of those deep-sea monster fishes with the light-bulb thing—always playing possum to lure some poor loudmouthed loser closer, right before you put him in the hospital. They never see it coming, do they?”—her voice cracked into a sob—”Just like I didn’t see
this
coming. I’m sorry, I’ve gotta go.”

Listening to her, I was having a hard time keeping it together myself.

“Next weekend,” I said. “Bring Amy, and
you
come stay for a couple of days, too. Please, Jen. Let’s talk.”

“There’s nothing for us to talk about, because there’s no point. I need to go. I’m picking up Amy at school in an hour. I’m sorry, Trevor, I’ve gotta go now.”

A
bright white-green flare lit the fuzzy darker green of the MP’s arm and face, then faded out as she lowered her arm. Checking the time on her cell phone. Again. What with McNulty’s murder and all, I would have expected her to be a little more vigilant.

The MP moved off, circling the giant Quonset hut where Roger had given Cassie the tour earlier today. As I followed her progress, her green-lit image was distinct against the rounded steel side of the warehouse.

With the 4X magnification of my D-740 Gen3 night-vision riflescope, I could make out her bored expression quite clearly. Keeping the crosshair reticle centered on her head, I tracked her around to the front again, where three more MPs joined her. After a brief four-way conversation, they all took up their watchful station at the front of the darkened warehouse.

After spending three hours hunched inside my dark, cramped hiding spot, I almost sighed with relief. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait much longer now.

An electric golf cart rolled silently along the paved lane between the buildings, carrying four Navy guardsmen with AR-15 rifles slung over their shoulders. The cart stopped in front of the hangar-size double doors on the end of the building. I lowered the optic and rubbed my eyelids, blinking in the sudden darkness, then raised the night-vision riflescope to my eye again.

Of course, I didn’t have the scope actually mounted on the rail of my own AR-15 right now. I wasn’t some sort of lunatic, after all.

My rifle was back in the garage at home, locked securely inside my gun safe. But the detached scope was the only piece of night-vision equipment I owned, and I was now using it to monitor the activity around the warehouse. Despite the graininess of the pixelated image, it let me see plainly what was going on.

One of the Navy guys unlocked the big double doors, then waved another guy over to help him push, and together they slid the doors wide open. From my place of concealment, I couldn’t see what was inside. Then three of the Navy guys lined up on each side of the doors, facing outward, rifles held at port arms, looking like an honor guard.

I heard the train before I saw it, because it was running without lights.

It came from the north, where the tracks entered the Navy base through a wide gate topped with razor wire. The gate was always closed during the daytime, and usually unmanned, but someone must have opened it minutes ago to let the train through. The train’s arrival didn’t surprise me at all, though.

I had been expecting it.

Roger had mentioned getting more ammunition for his new toy tonight. It was obvious to me that the GAU got delivered last night, because Roger wouldn’t have been able to keep his mouth shut about it if he’d gotten it any sooner. And I knew it had come in by rail, because its empty delivery crate was still sitting in the train-depot warehouse this afternoon for Cassie and me to hide in while Roger smuggled us into our building.

He had simply been retracing his steps from this morning, when he had no doubt carted the gun over to be installed in his lab.

Later this afternoon, the same crate had served to smuggle Cassie and me back out of our building. After tossing Roger’s key-card holder back to him, I had made a big stink about needing to get home right away. My show of impatience had forced him to abandon the empty crate next to a stack of pallets a hundred yards from the warehouse instead of taking it back inside.

Now, six hours later, I was inside the crate once again, watching the train through a three-quarter-inch gap that split the corner seam.

Roger’s GAU-8 Gatling was an incidental delivery, I knew. The midnight trains served another purpose—one hidden even from most of the Top-Secret/SCI-cleared personnel in this half-decommissioned Navy base. Tonight, I would find out what that purpose was, but I had a growing suspicion that I knew already.

The train was rolling slowly—two or three miles an hour—as it approached the open doors of the hangarlike warehouse. The individual cars were short—no longer than fifteen feet. Each flatbed railcar supported a round-roofed gray compartment that looked like a horse trailer, complete with air slots on the sides. A raised section ran along the centerline of each compartment’s roof, with a row of narrow mesh-covered windows along its length.

A couple of dozen figures wearing black fatigues spilled from the sides of the railcars and started walking alongside the slow-moving train, looking alert and ready. Ensuring that the perimeter was clear, they flanked the train as it rolled into the warehouse building. They were armed with AR-15s and sidearms—SIG 229 or 239, I couldn’t tell which. No visible insignia adorned their featureless black SWAT-style outfits.