Collision (11 page)

“Good. Now, this is very, very important. Strike the Microsoft symbol key at the bottom left.”

Ursula did so, and Sprague said, “Okay,” while looking at a string of symbols and a list of words that he did not understand.

“Next, hit Default Programs and choose Change AutoPlay Settings. Got it?”

Ursula nodded her head vigorously and Sprague said, “Got it.”

“Now, type this,” Hamilton said, speaking slowly: “lowercase ‘f,' lowercase ‘r,' six, eight, four, nine.”

“Done,” Sprague said when Ursula finished.

“Now, insert a thumb drive and strike the Caps Lock key.”

“What?” Sprague said inadvertently. Ursula smothered a laugh.

“For heaven's sake, Paul. This isn't rocket science. Strike the Caps Lock key and insert a thumb drive.”

“Wait. I need to get one,” Sprague said, his headache pounding, his voice wavering. Ursula hit the mute button, went to her desk, and swiftly returned with a small box containing several thumb drives. She took the top off a black thumb drive labeled
DataTraveler
, inserted it, and struck the Caps Lock key.
PRIVATEDATA.DOC
appeared on the screen for an instant and then vanished. A green light blinked in the thumb drive.

“I don't see anything,” Sprague said, as much to Ursula as to Hamilton.

“Good Lord,” Hamilton said, “that's why it's called
private.
It's going directly from the computer hard drive to the thumb drive
.
”

“Oh, no, I can't get the top off the thumb thing,” Sprague moaned, scrawling a note and holding it in front of Ursula's spectacled eyes:
Make copy.

She nodded, swiftly removed the thumb drive, plucked a white one out of the box, removed the top, and, smiling at Sprague, held it at the ready.

“Paul! You're acting like an idiot. This is very important to me. Okay. Just do it again. The system allows one bad try.”

“Great. Here goes,” Sprague said.

“Come on, Paul. I haven't got all day.”

“Okay. Done,” Sprague said, giving Ursula the “OK” hand signal as soon as Ursula removed the second thumb drive.

“Okay. Now turn the computer off and then restart it again. This time, when you get the warning, just type in any six random numbers. Anything but the ones I gave you previously. Then hit Enter.”

Ursula followed the instructions and the laptop screen went completely blank. Then a long, thin oblong window opened at the bottom of the screen. After the empty window filled, it quickly became empty again, indicating that all of the data in the computer was being deleted.

 

22

As Sprague watched the
screen go blank, a sudden thought came from the deepest brain cells, the ones that had to do with survival:
If Davidson was taken out, what about me?

Sprague motioned Ursula to leave the room and switched off the speaker. She closed the door silently behind her.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “You've just destroyed evidence in a—”

“
I
didn't destroy anything. I simply—with your assistance—retrieved information that was illegally taken from me. You're free to turn over the computer to whomever you think has a right to my property.”

“I'm going to turn it over to the police. And what am I supposed to say when they see that everything is gone?”

“You can explain that you simply wanted to see if this was your firm's computer and when you tried to log in, whatever was in it was deleted. Someone must have programmed the computer to self-destruct.”

“Jesus … Okay.”

“Please, Paul, do not blaspheme.”

“Yes, sorry. But…”

“Now just hold on to that thumb drive. A messenger will pick it up.”

For a long moment, Sprague stared at the screen.
What have I done?
He took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “Security is needed. I will deliver it to you in person.”

There was a short pause.

“You're the one with the passion for security,” Sprague said. “Remember what I told you about government eavesdropping on face-to-face conversations? Government interceptions of those oral conversations are in violation of the Wiretap Act and cannot be used against you as evidence in a criminal trial.”

“What about those NSA data sweeps?”

“Another issue. Court orders for bugs or telephone taps run to more than one hundred to one over face-to-face conversations. If you're feeling the government is tracking you, it's highly unlikely that you are actually being followed and having your oral conversations bugged.”

The man on the phone waited a second before he said, “As you know, I have been summoned—”

“Asked,” Sprague said, “you have been asked—not summoned or subpoenaed, asked—to appear at Collinsworth's hearing on NASA's budget on the twelfth. The boys out at Goddard are trying to get back into the business of setting up a little colony on the moon. Next thing, it'll be asteroid mining. You need to be there.”

“Right, we could have our face-to-face then. And besides there'd be a client-lawyer privilege. right?”

“That's nearly three weeks off,” Sprague said. “What if—”

“I don't deal in ‘if's. A face-to-face handoff is the absolute best choice.”

Sprague smiled at a familiar maneuver: taking someone else's idea and making it sound as if it had originated in the mighty brain of Robert Wentworth Hamilton.

“At that fancy place you have in Georgetown,” Hamilton said, pausing to check his cell-phone calendar. “Three p.m.”

“And in the meantime?”

“I'm sure that Sullivan and Ford—or, I mean,
you—
have a way to keep a thumb drive safe.”

“Are you sure?”

Another pause, then: “I am always sure about my decisions. This object has no time aspect. I merely want to have it for what you might call assurance. There is no need to move quickly. Or to panic.” A click and the call was over.

Sprague put the white thumb drive into his shirt pocket and leaned back, his head still pounding.

 

23

The day after the
shooting, Dr. Benjamin Franklin Taylor stepped into a taxi at Reagan National Airport and was taken directly to the Air and Space Museum, on the Washington Mall. He had been away on a tour to publicize his latest book,
It's Your Universe
, based on his popular PBS show,
Your Universe
. Taylor seemed always to be in a hurry, but today he was even more so. His wheeled suitcase bounding along behind him, he took the broad museum steps two at a time, nodded to a security guard, and sprinted across the entrance gallery to the staff elevator.

The elevator opened on the top floor, above the museum's two floors of immense galleries—“Exploring the Planets” directly below him, and Otto Lilienthal's 1894 hang glider (“Early Flight”) directly below that. Taylor sometimes thought of himself as a gallery, for he was full of information that he dispensed about space, flight, and the universe. Besides being assistant director of the museum, he ran the new state-of-the-art Albert Einstein Planetarium on the museum's first floor. And there was the monthly television show
Your Universe
, which combined Taylor's easygoing, fact-filled commentary with dazzling images of Earth, the solar system, and the Great Cosmic Beyond.

Traditionally, astrophysicists treat the operators of planetariums as entertainers rather than astronomers. But Taylor's MIT doctorate and his postdoc work at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics earned him the acceptance of scientists, just as his television fans applauded his approach to astronomy—“a down-to-earth approach,” he called it with a punster's smile. He maintained a solid reputation with scientists, many of whom vied for guest appearances on his prize-winning television show.

“We all know he has the brainpower of a rocket scientist. And we can see that he still has the physique of a running back,” the secretary of the Smithsonian said eight years before, when he introduced Taylor as the new director of the planetarium. “He was a Heisman Trophy nominee at Michigan. And after graduating at the top of his class, he had a choice: go pro or go for a PhD. We can all be thankful that he chose the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in astrophysics. But he still plays a mean game of touch football on the Mall when Air and Space takes on our other museums.”

Taylor was proud of his ability to compartmentalize his mind and control the time he doled out to his various projects. Thanks to his on-time flight home, he had arrived at the museum earlier than usual, and he looked forward to a time of relative quiet, when he could arrange the day ahead.

But the shootings flared in his mind, and he realized that some days are rearranged by violence and madness. The first he knew about the shootings was a text message he received from his daughter Darlene—
SHOOTING AT SEAN'S FIRM.
4
OR
5
DEAD. HE'S OK
—while he was waiting to speak at Powell's Bookstore in Chicago. He hit the app for the
Washington Post
Web page and saw an account of the shootings.

Two gunmen armed with semi-automatic weapons terrorized the landmark Sullivan & Ford Building near Capitol Hill today, killing four people. One gunman plunged to his death during a desperate struggle with former Senator Sean Falcone, a partner in the firm. “Mr. Falcone risked his life and stopped a massacre,” Detective Lieutenant Tyrone Emmetts said. “Those guys were planning to wipe out the tenth floor.” The second man, who shot at Falcone and missed, fled the scene and apparently escaped.

Police said two men entered the lobby of the ten-story glass building around 11 a.m. and told a lobby security guard they were from a local television station, which police did not identify, and had an appointment to interview a partner on the tenth floor. The partner was identified by police sources as Harold Davidson, a senior partner. He followed procedure by sending a receptionist to the lobby to escort the men to the tenth floor, the so-called senior partner floor. The three got into a private express elevator, which could only be entered via the receptionist's keycard. One of the men carried a duffel bag supposedly containing a television camera.

Once on the tenth floor, the two men began their rampage, killing the receptionist

Sean Falcone? Hal Davidson?
Taylor was stunned. He had been to Falcone's office a few times and could envision the site of the killings. He remembered the cheery receptionist, and now, from the
Post
story, he learned her name. Ellen Franklin. In his mind's eye he saw her lying in her own blood.
And Hal.
Taylor had known Harold Davidson since they were both in Cambridge, two black strivers getting by on their brains. They lost each other for a while, when Hal finished his studies at Harvard Law, but they had renewed their friendship when Taylor moved to Washington and looked up his old friend.

and a man and a woman believed to be clients. As one of the gunmen was about to claim other victims, he was tackled by Falcone. In the struggle, one of the gunmen plunged down the atrium of the glass-sheathed building. The other shot at Falcone, entered the elevator and reached the lobby. He fled on foot as police, including SWAT teams, responded to panicky 911 calls.

Detective Lieutenant Emmetts said that the crime was being handled as “an interrupted mass shooting with one shooter still at large.” A spokeswoman for Paul Sprague, the managing partner of Sullivan & Ford, referred all inquiries to the police.

The story went on, noting Falcone's Vietnam record and Senate years, along with Davidson's career, which began when he became one of the first African Americans to be made a clerk to a justice of the Supreme Court. The story ended with a paragraph recalling other mass murders, noting that four was “usually considered the minimum number for a crime to qualify as a mass murder.”

Hal's dead,
Taylor thought, a wave of guilt flowing through his mind, the guilt of the living when death claims a neglected friend.
We just didn't keep up with each other.
Davidson had been one of those old friends that somehow slip away, he with one life, you with another. The last time he had seen Hal, Taylor remembered, was at the memorial service for a mutual friend; they had both been surprised and found little to say to each other.
We just didn't keep up with each other.

*   *   *

Now, in the sanctuary
of his office, Taylor pushed all thoughts about the shootings deep into his mind, text-messaged his safe arrival to Darlene, decided he would call Falcone later, took his laptop out of his suitcase, and walked from his desk to a high-legged table in a corner of the office. He spent far more time at that table, where he could stand and pound away at a keyboard, than he did seated at his desk. He had rigged computer cables and connections so that he could choose to work on one of four widescreen desktop monitors, which he called his Four-Eyed Monster. He plugged the laptop into the system's central dock, downloaded its latest contents onto his hard drive, and clicked on the four monitors.

One monitor displayed a page in an overdue quarterly report on museum attendance (up twenty-three percent over the previous year). On the second monitor was a video of a new program that was scheduled to be premiered next week in the planetarium theater: “Are We Alone? Discovering Planets That May Support Life.” On the third were rough cuts of scenes from a show about asteroids that he was proposing to
NOVA
. On the fourth monitor he brought up a recording of the GNN's
SpaceMine Special
.

He was soon lost in the special. He nodded when Molly Tobias stuck her head in, saw he was at the table, and closed the door without a word. A widow in her sixties, she had kept charge of him and his office since his first day at the museum. Molly never expected more than a good-morning—or even that when he was at the table, fixated on his computers. Chatter time would inevitably come at eleven o'clock, when Taylor brought them coffee from the nearby staff cafeteria and sat down at a chair alongside her desk.