Critical Mass (55 page)

Curly took Alison’s free arm. He pulled her forward so hard that she stumbled. My feet got tangled in hers and I almost fell. He kept us moving fast, his gun in Alison’s neck.

Martin and Moe were at the top of the stairs.

“Martin?” Judy’s scratchy voice came down to us. “What have they done to you? Did this man hit you? Why did you do that to my baby?”

“Oh, get out of the way, you dried-up drug-fucked cunt,” Moe said.

She was outlined in the doorway above them, swaying. “You don’t talk to me like that and you don’t hurt my baby,” she rasped.

She suddenly grabbed a mop from the brackets at the top of the stairs and shoved it at Moe’s head. He jumped out of the way, but he lost his hold on Martin, and stumbled backward on the stairs.

I felt Curly move his gun away from Alison. I grabbed her hand below our cuffs and dragged her up the stairs. “Move!” I yelled, as she hesitated.

Moe recovered his footing. He lunged for me just as Curly shot up the stairs at us. Moe bellowed in pain and fell heavily in front of us.

I yanked on Alison, got her over Moe and out the door at the top of the stairs. Judy had collapsed, clutching the mop. Martin was bending over her, not sure what to do.

“Martin, pick her up, carry her outside,” I ordered.

“But Dorothy?” Alison quavered.

“Meg’s gone for help,” I said. “If we split up, they won’t shoot her: they’ll have to explain it to the sheriff. Go, go, go!”

I wrenched Alison out of the doorway and slammed the basement door on the agents. Martin collected his mother and followed us out the back door.

52

VIRTUAL REALITY

W
E’D BEEN
with Tinney’s police force for an hour, stuck in separate interrogation rooms, telling our many different stories, when Cordell Breen arrived. He’d flown in on Metargon’s Gulfstream with enough lawyers to start a good-sized firm right on the spot. He also had with him the Chicago-area Director of Homeland Security, a brisk woman named Zeta Molanu.

When Molanu and Breen arrived, the Tinney police chief, Duke Barrow, brought us all into his office to sort out who was going where with whom. Barrow had grown up with Meg Ferguson. He cut off one of Breen’s lawyers mid-sentence to order a patrol officer to take Meg home with Lily and Dorothy.

“I’m going to have an officer spend the night at your place, so don’t worry, just get some sleep,” Barrow assured Meg.

“These women are making accusations against two federal agents,” Zeta Molanu objected. “You can’t release them.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Molanu,” the chief said. “You can complain about it for weeks in front of a judge, if you want. I’m just a cop trying to decide who gets arrested and who gets to sleep in her own bed after being beat up this afternoon.”

It was thanks to Meg knowing Chief Barrow that we’d made our ultimate escape. While Martin was struggling across the yard with
Judy in his arms, Curly and Durdon had roared out of the kitchen, firing at us. Before they managed to hit us, the patrol cars Meg had summoned pulled up.

One squad car took Judy Binder to the Tinney hospital, with Martin sitting in the backseat with her. When a unit went inside to collect Moe and Dorothy, they saw that Moe was bleeding from the shoulder. They called an ambulance for Moe, but sent Alison, Dorothy and me into the police station along with Curly and Durdon.

Molanu told Barrow that he didn’t have any authority to arrest Homeland Security agents. “If my agents have gone beyond the scope of their orders, we’ll deal with that as a matter of internal discipline.”

Curly’s face turned crimson. “But ma’am, Director, you told us to cooperate with anyone Metargon assigned—”

“You are always to use good judgment and discretion in the field, Bonner. Neither you nor Gleason showed good judgment when you held a small child hostage.”

“We were doing what Breen’s man told us, Director,” Curly tried to argue, but Molanu said that could all wait until they were back in Chicago.

The local chief protested on different grounds. He wanted the FBI to look into a charge of kidnapping; he’d already called an agent in the Peoria office to come interrogate Durdon and the two Feds for seizing Lily and Meg; someone was supposed to arrive at any second.

“We’re in the middle of a giant misunderstanding here,” Breen began in his warm baritone. “I don’t think the FBI—”

“Don’t worry about that,” Zeta Molanu told Breen. “I’ll sort it out with the head of the Northern District. I know you were concerned that defense secrets were heading into Iranian hands, which may have made your staff overzealous. We’ll take young Binder in for questioning so we know exactly what he was doing with the Fitora code.”

“No,” Alison said.

“Sunny—” Cordell began.

“No ‘Sunny,’ Dad. I am not a sunshine person. You cannot accuse Martin Binder of stealing the Fitora code. You know he did nothing with the code—Jari Liu told you and me and Vic that there’s not a whiff of interest in the code anywhere on the Net or among our competitors. You know that all Martin’s been doing is looking for what work his great-grandmother did before Granddad stole her design for the ferromagnetic memory core.”

“Sunny, you’ve had a lot of shocks this afternoon,” her father said urgently. “The Warshawski woman got you into something deeper than you could handle. We’ll be filing separate charges against her before we get back to Chicago. Chief—Barrow, is it?—do you have a room where I can be private with my girl?”

“We’re not going to be private, Dad.” Alison’s face was stony, her voice like flint. “If you take any action against Vic or against Martin, I am going to the Board to explain how you’ve been abusing your power. I will vote my shares against you and I’ll get Mom to vote hers, too.”

Breen’s ego was built on the grand scale. He said, “Alison, you’re in shock; we’ll talk when you’re feeling more yourself. We’re going back to Chicago in the Gulf; you can get something to eat in the plane, get a nap and you’ll get over this.”

“No, Dad. I’m not getting over you acting like a rhinoceros on a rampage. It would be such a big help if you listened to anyone. No wonder Mom drinks the way she does; she’s tired of you acting like she isn’t there.”

“Your mother does not have a drinking problem,” Breen said. “It’s very wrong of you to discuss our private home life in public. Haven’t I told you that a thousand times?”

“I tried to warn you about her,” Durdon said. “I told you I didn’t think you could trust her loyalty.”

“We’ll get you to see a therapist, Sunny. You’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome,” Breen said. “Chief Barrow, I think my lawyers have dotted the
i
’s you need. I’m taking Durdon back to Chicago with me. And you don’t need Alison anymore, either.”

“Dad, I’m staying with Vic and Martin. If you want Durdon to blow them and me up, I guess you’ll give the necessary orders. Or you can talk this Director Molanu into doing it for you; she seems eager to please.”

Under Molanu’s makeup, her face turned a blotchy red. I wondered if she was sleeping with Breen.

“That is enough, young lady!” Breen blazed, grabbing her arm. “You’ll come home with us, you’ll get some therapy and we won’t have any more of this nonsense.”

“Dad, no!” She pulled away and ran to Martin’s side.

Breen seemed finally to realize that he had lost her, at least for the time being. Or he was just worried about how much fuel he was wasting, with the Gulfstream’s engines still running. He let Durdon and the lawyers take him away.

After that, Chief Barrow wrapped things up with us in short order. He was angry at having his authority usurped by Homeland Security; he saw Martin, Alison and me as ranged on his side of the table and gave us his cell phone number—“In case anyone tries to bother you while you’re in town.”

One of his officers drove us back to Dorothy’s house so I could collect the Mustang. Martin wanted to retrieve his great-grandmother’s papers, as well. Dorothy and Meg were less than ecstatic at seeing us again, although they thawed a bit after Alison gave them an earnest apology on behalf of her father and Metargon.

“I’ll see that someone rebuilds Martin’s great-grandmother’s workshop, if you want,” she promised. “It feels like, oh, sacred space, this lady who survived the Nazis, working here all these years, staying
involved with physics and looking at the stars. Wouldn’t you like to see it restored to how it was before they tore it up today?”

Dorothy said gruffly that they’d think about it. “But I still don’t understand what they were after, why they had to attack Lily and do all that damage.”

“Breen was protecting Metargon’s reputation,” I said.

“But he’s destroying it!” Alison cried. “When people learn what he’s been doing, they’ll lose confidence in him as CEO.”

“I’m not defending him,” I said. “He’s indefensible. I’m just trying to understand what’s been driving him. I think it’s his idea of Metargon’s reputation as the great innovator in computing and technology. Metargon, ‘beyond energy.’ ‘Where the future lies behind.’ Those are your company’s mottos.

“When Wall Street learns that your grandfather didn’t create the BREENIAC, that he stole the design from a Holocaust survivor, it’s what I said earlier—people will lose confidence in you. The public isn’t going to be very forgiving, either.”

“But why were they chasing me?” Martin asked. “I knew Mr. Breen was upset about the prisms, but he didn’t know they were Martina’s signature.”

“But he did know. He wanted all of Martina’s surviving papers so he could destroy any evidence connecting her to the BREENIAC sketch. Besides, he wanted the copy of the patent that was mailed to Martina. You said the Patent Office’s copy of it had disappeared, that there’s a record of her getting the patent for the design in 1941, but no trace of the actual document in their files. This long after the fact, we’ll never know what happened to it, but I’m betting that Edward Breen, who had a lot of contacts in Washington, got someone to remove the file for him back when he realized he could make a fortune from the stolen BREENIAC sketch.”

“Why did they think I would have something?” Martin persisted.

“If the documents that were mailed to Martina in 1941 survived the war, Cordell thought you’d lead him to them.”

Martin shook his head. “I never saw those, either here or in the papers from Martina that my mom stole.”

“I know where they are,” I said. “At least, I know where they were in November 1941.”

VIENNA, NOVEMBER 1941

Letter from America

E
VER SINCE THE
children left for England, the overcrowded flat on the Novaragasse has felt empty, hollow. But now, two years into the war, it is truly empty. His beloved daughter, Sofie, his Butterfly, weak from her difficult pregnancy, was taken from him yesterday, along with her husband and his parents and all the aunts and nephews and cousins.

A father should be able to protect his daughter. A father should not sit uselessly by as men point weapons at his daughter and force her to her feet. A father should not have to see his daughter so thin and weak from malnourishment that her breastbone and ribs protrude like a plucked pigeon, but so he has done. He wants to sit on Sofie’s mattress and tear his hair out, wailing. He eyes the bedding, neatly folded by his wife after their beloved’s departure, her hands trembling, folding the thin blanket and stroking it over and over as if it still held her child. If he sits and howls he will never get to his feet again and his poor Charlotte will be left to cope on her own.

Felix Herschel blinks back tears, puts on his one remaining suit and shirt—the others long since bartered for food—and follows a lifetime of habit. He shaves in cold water, brushes his teeth, boils water to make a cup of ersatz coffee for Charlotte.

At least little Lotte is safe in England, with her brother and Käthe Saginor. Before the war began, before Europe was sealed, they received two letters from their Lottchen. He worries constantly about how his
wife’s cousin Minna is treating their darling. Minna is an angry woman, always jealous of his wife, spiteful toward Sofie. He worries that she will abuse their little Charlotte, but what choice did they have? Only the children were allowed visas into England.

He goes down the four flights of stairs and stands in the street to do the breathing exercises that have been part of his morning routine since he was a university student at the turn of the century. He tries as much as possible to follow his decades-old schedule: shaving, dressing for the day, bringing his wife her morning coffee.

It’s been two years since he last was in the office on the Park Ring, where he was once a highly regarded attorney. Until the war, a number of his clients continued to consult him surreptitiously: Felix Herschel’s advice was always carefully and intelligently crafted. He knew what could and couldn’t be done even after the Anschluss.

In exchange, he received the gold coins that his wife sewed beneath the buttons in Lottchen’s waistband. When she reached cousin Minna, little Lottchen wrote carefully,
Hugo and Käthe and I are safe. I still have all my buttons. I love you and miss you, Opa
. Minna would have been as likely as the Nazis to steal the small hoard that Felix intended for his granddaughter’s survival; the message told him that she has managed to hold on to her legacy.

Before the war began, Felix tried to persuade his wealthy clients to pay him with visas, to anywhere, Argentina, Cuba, even Iran, but they did not feel so loving toward him that they would use up their own stock of government favors on a Jew’s behalf.

As Herr Herschel stands in the doorway, rotating his arms, the postman arrives. So little mail goes in or out of the Leopoldstadt these days that the arrival of mail is always an occasion. His heart beats faster: perhaps something from his granddaughter. Since the war, they have received two letters from her, twenty-five words, mediated by the Red Cross and still censored. They don’t know if their own letters to her made it through or not.