Critical Mass (19 page)

“Ms. Warshawski? Cordell Breen. I know it’s an inconvenience, a major one, for you to come out to Northbrook, but I’m hoping I can persuade you. My problem is that everything we do at Metargon is sensitive. We have hackers and snoopers trying to eavesdrop on us or break through our firewalls twenty-four/seven. Even when I think my phone lines are secure they may not be; I’d like to be free to speak to you frankly.”

When he put it like that, of course it was hard not to be persuaded. I muttered gracelessly that if I could move my lunch meeting to the afternoon I’d be able to get there around one-thirty.

“Terry!” I heard him shout. “Get me clear at one-thirty and give Ms. Warshawski directions.”

Terry, Terry Utas, the secretary, came back on the line and explained
that their headquarters were on the west side of the lab I’d visited the other day. Ms. Utas’s main instruction, besides telling me which access road to take, was to make sure that the name she gave to security exactly matched what was on my photo ID.

I went back to my report on the Saskatchewan project manager, but in the back of my mind, I was hoping Breen wanted to hire me. I wondered, too, about his daughter, how she’d come to tell Breen that Martin had disappeared.

As soon as I’d finished the report, I went to one of my subscription databases for a quick rundown on the family. The entry was meager; I suppose Metargon’s computer resources combined with their security fears meant Breen could do a good job of keeping most of his personal information personal.

All I learned was that Breen had apparently married late, or at least started his family late: he was seventy-four, but his only child, Alison, was twenty. Alison was taking a gap semester from Harvard. No word on what she was doing. He and his wife, Constance, lived in an eighteen-room shack in Lake Forest.

There was a little background on the early days of Metargon, when Edward Breen had done highly classified work in rockets and weapons. He’d been in Europe at the end of the war, working for something called Operation Paperclip. This seemed to be the code name for a program that brought Nazi rocket and weapons personnel into the States; when I looked it up, I discovered we apparently had let in some notorious war criminals without questioning their backgrounds, just to keep them out of Soviet hands.

It was Edward Breen’s early work on computers, more than his rocketry, that moved his little company forward. Just at the time that John von Neumann was bringing the first big computer online at Princeton, Edward Breen came up with a relativistic model for the matrix that altered the mechanics of core memory. I read that last sentence three times and decided that English might not actually be my first language.

I was so happy in my cutoffs that I hated to change into work clothes, but Breen would treat me more seriously, and I’d behave more professionally, in a jacket and trousers. I drove back to my apartment to change, pulling on my soft Lario boots, which always made me feel like a million dollars—perhaps because that was what I’d paid for them.

16

SOURCE CODE

S
INCE I’D MADE
such a song and dance about my limited time, I skipped lunch and headed straight to Northbrook. Metargon’s corporate offices were behind the research lab I’d visited earlier in the week. For once in a blue moon, the traffic was moving fast. I reached the electronic gates surrounding Metargon Park with ten minutes to spare—I could have eaten lunch after all.

The Metargon security team whisked me through with surprising speed, but after the gates had opened I realized I was being photographed. Computer screens in the guard station showed all the traffic on the access roads, including close-ups of license plates and occupants. I hadn’t noticed this when I’d been to the lab because I’d entered on foot.

Once I was inside the park, I followed a drive that curved around the lab’s south side, away from the pond. While the lab was a severely functional structure, the limestone headquarters building managed to create an aura of both prosperity and tranquillity. A thicket of trees blocked any view of the lab but this part of the campus had its own pond, where a pair of swans was swimming. Much classier than ducks.

Breen and his staff were prepared to respect my time. As soon as I reached the receptionist, a poised young man appeared to escort me upstairs.
Traffic was good? Had I had a pleasant summer
?
He’d hand me over to Terry Utas, Mr. Breen’s secretary; she’d take good care of me.

Terry Utas, with her pearl earrings and salmon-colored dropped-waist dress, made me feel dowdy, even in my Lario boots. Her makeup had been put on with a sure hand, whereas I’d forgotten even to run a lipstick over my mouth. She stopped in the middle of whatever she was doing to tell an intercom the good news of my arrival.

Breen himself appeared a moment later, a tall man whose broad shoulders and flat waist showed a rigorous attention to the workout room. His thick hair still had some dark streaks in it.

“Ms. Warshawski, thanks for interrupting your day for me. I only learned this morning that Martin Binder had gone AWOL, and it’s a source of concern.” He put a hand between my shoulder blades to nudge me toward his office. “Terry, let’s have some coffee in here, or tea, if you’d rather?” he added to me.

I murmured that coffee would be fine. Breen gestured toward a corner where a glass-topped table stood underneath a big painting of purple squares. Rothko’s name was on a discreet plaque for ignorant people like me. When I sat down, I saw an array of wires embedded in the table’s top.

Breen smiled at my look of surprise. “The team made this for my father on the fortieth anniversary of the Breen Machine. We all knew, including him, he wouldn’t live for the fiftieth.”

“The Breen Machine?” I said politely.

“Yes, yes, the machine that made Apple and the Cloud and all the rest of it possible. My dad wanted to call it the BREENIAC, sort of flipping a finger at Johnny von Neumann and the MANIAC at Princeton, but his lawyers persuaded him it wasn’t worth a court fight. I was sixteen at the time it came onstream; Edward took me out of school so I could be there. Everything at Metargon grew out of that afternoon.”

The young man who’d escorted me to Terry Utas came in through a side door with a tray. The coffee surprised me: it was creamy and rich. Breen nodded approval at my enjoyment.

“Yes, yes, I see you have a good palate. Adam, tell Terry we’ll need about twenty minutes without interruptions.”

He waited until the door had shut again before adding, “Now, let’s hope you have an equally good investigator’s palate. Tell me what you know about Martin Binder.”

I rolled Breen’s words and the sideways glance from under his thick-knit brows around on my investigator’s taste buds. I saw no reason to lie, especially since I knew so very little. I repeated my shopworn tale of Martin’s mother’s flight, the visit to his grandmother, the fact that he was a loner and that no one had heard from him.

“Ms. Utas told me you learned about his disappearance from your daughter,” I added. “Not from Jari Liu.”

“Yes, yes, I talked to Jari about that; he’s a brilliant engineer, but sometimes brilliant engineers can’t put two and two together. My daughter, Alison, was part of the college crew that worked at the lab this summer, so she got the e-mail Jari sent out after he saw you on Tuesday. She called me this morning, very concerned, as well she should have been.”

He paused, shaking his head, his daughter’s behavior still troubling him. “Jari said he showed you a demo of the system that young Binder was working on, right? We don’t let anyone take code out of the building. We also monitor outgoing messages to intercept anything they might be uploading from our systems, but Binder is an odd young man, a kind of idiot savant in some ways. He could have memorized, oh, not a million lines of code, but the broad outlines of the system. It’s far better than anything else being done in that arena, even at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. It would be worth a lot to any number of competitors, in and out of the defense industry.”

“I assume you do a background check on anyone you let into your lab,” I said.

“Of course, but we overlooked some things about Binder.”

“Like what?” I drank some more coffee; tone casual, puzzled, a mistake always to betray eagerness.

“We knew he lived with his grandparents but we didn’t realize his mother was an addict. We also didn’t realize he’d wanted to go to college but his family vetoed it: we thought he was one of the computer cowboys. You often find them in this business—they’re self-taught, uninterested in formal education. According to Liu, Martin had a chip on his shoulder with the kids from the Ivies who worked on the Fitora project with him. If he sold our system, he could afford to spend the rest of his life taking classes at Caltech or MIT. The thing that alarms me is that he’s gone dark.”

I shook my head.

“Binder unplugged himself from the Net and from cellular systems.” Breen’s tone was impatient: my palate was proving mediocre. “He canceled all his ISP connections, he isn’t sending or receiving e-mail or texts, at least not under any address that Jari’s team can find, and they are skilled hunters. That’s what’s making me fear he could be re-creating my system for another company, or even another government.”

So Jari Liu hadn’t been spinning me around by giving me the wrong details for Martin, as I’d feared.

“I’ve never met Martin, so I can’t give you an opinion,” I said. “Everyone I’ve met agrees he’s both brilliant and a bit awkward socially, but that doesn’t tell me whether he’s poised to become another Unabomber, or another Feynman.”

Breen made a sour face. “Sunny—Alison—thinks he’ll be a second Feynman. Jari says he’d be astonished if Binder was selling our secrets, but frankly, after almost fifty years in this business, I’ve seen even the most socially balanced people sell out their companies if the stack of cash in front of them is high enough. What bothers me as much as anything is that Alison let him into our home.”

“They weren’t dating, were they?” That surprised me—I pictured Breen’s daughter as too sleek and sophisticated to be attracted to an awkward nerd. I remembered Nadja Hahne’s description of Martin—
those brooding good looks, his aloofness—perhaps a sleek and sophisticated young woman would see that as a challenge.

Breen paused. “Alison seems to have some romantic ideas about Binder, as if he might be a Horatio Alger hero. While my wife and I were at our place in Bar Harbor, Alison held a picnic for all the fellows in the summer program. She included Martin, even though he wasn’t one of the college crew, because he was their age, worked on the same project. And she felt she could do something for him.”

He made a face that was part sour, part proud. “I love my girl, but she’s always been the kind that brings stray kittens home with her. Anyway, she let the kids explore my dad’s workshop. Edward used to do a lot of his drawings or build his prototypes in his third-floor workroom; he liked the view of Lake Michigan. Sunny let Martin and the others wander around in there. No telling what he might have made off with.”

The first sour taste on my palate. “I would imagine all your father’s inventions would be here, in the Metargon labs, not lying around the house for your daughter’s stray friends to pick up.” I poured more coffee and leaned back in the chair to look at him over the cup rim.

“Yes, yes,” Breen said. “You’re right, up to a point.”

He fidgeted with his own cup, then said, “My father was involved in some top-secret work after the war. Defense work, you understand. He was proud of his signed letters from presidents and Nobel Prize winners. He also had things on his desk that ought to be in a vault.

“I never got around to putting them away after he died; frankly, I never thought about them; they were just part of the background of my life. It was only when Alison told me she’d let the kids explore the workroom that I remembered the letters. Metargon’s code, coupled with any of those letters—well, just say that my father played a part in thermonuclear weapons development, and you’ll see that it would be better that we didn’t let outsiders read some of those letters.”

“Without seeing them, I can’t judge, but surely all that history is in the public domain by now,” I said.

“Not all of it,” Breen said sharply. “That’s my point.”

I didn’t believe him: there was something in his father’s workshop that he was ashamed of an outsider seeing, but I didn’t have any hunch of how to probe for it. I changed the subject.

“Your father knew Benjamin Dzornen, didn’t he?”

“How did you know that?” Breen sat up straight, his voice still sharp.

I widened my eyes, naive detective. “You said he liked to display his signed letters from Nobel laureates. Dzornen worked on the Manhattan Project; your father did defense work. It’s not a stretch.”

Breen relaxed again. I obviously hadn’t found the danger spot.

Something didn’t add up, Martin had said. Had he seen a letter in Edward Breen’s old workshop that told him something about his family history? Or that suggested my own theory about the stolen Nobel Prize?

Breen and I spoke, or fenced, a little longer; we were both feeling rumpled when I got up to leave.

“Martin left his home to talk to someone the morning he disappeared. Was that your daughter?”

“Unlikely,” Breen said. “She flew out to Mexico City right after the summer fellows left. She’s been there almost six weeks now.”

“Mexico City?” I echoed. “What, is she doing a junior year abroad?”

“It’s a gap year, or semester,” Breen said sourly. “She’s helping build a tech lab for some high schools in Mexico City. Metargon is supplying computers and Metar-Genie game boxes. It’s all well and good to want ‘to give back to the community,’ but not when you’re an heiress who’s connected to a firm like Metargon. You don’t go to kidnap central. Her mother and I couldn’t talk her out of it, though.”

“Any chance Martin is down there with her?” I asked.

That did startle Cordell. He started to rap out a denial, but then he sat back, fingers steepled together.