Disc (24 page)

“Wait one… um, one of our linguists says that there’s some swearing in Korean on the audio record. I imagine the accent may prove to be North Korean.” After a brief pause, he continued, “Three vehicles left the scene, all in different directions. None of them with active transponders or hooked into the AI network so we really don’t know where they went.”

“Dammit,” Cooper said despondently.

***

The flight seemed to take forever and the air ambulance landed twice, apparently to take on fuel.

When it landed for the third time, their catheters were removed and their handcuffs attached to their waists instead of the stretchers. Ankle cuffs were also applied. As they shuffled off the plane Tiona asked several people where they were. None of them responded, but by the shabby appearance of the airfield she suspected North Korea.

***

Landon looked up when the others did as Dante entered the room. He opened his mouth to speak, but then saw the pale, stunned expression on Dante’s face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

Dante said, “My sister and father… they’ve been… kidnapped.”

“Oh my God! For ransom?”

“No. No ransom demands. They think it might be a foreign country, probably North Korea.”

Rachel asked, “They? You mean the police? How did they come to
that
conclusion?”

“National security people. Apparently the government’s a lot more interested in this than I would have imagined. We’ve had military security, FBI, and all kinds of other spooky type people poking around.”

“Oh, man!” Gary said, “The kidnappers are after the technology?”

“We don’t
know
, but that’s what the FBI thinks.”

Rachel said, “Surely North Korea doesn’t think they can compete with the US in commercializing this stuff?!”

“Weapons,” Gary said. “Those sons of bitches are looking at the military applications and trying to get the jump on everyone else.”

Rachel’s eyes widened, “Military applications?”

Gary gave her a look suggesting he couldn’t believe how naïve she was. “Dropping asteroids on other countries. Heavy military transport. Stable airborne weapons platforms. Taking out the other guy’s satellites. The list goes on and on.”

Landon got up and embraced his friend, “Dante, we’re all
so
sorry! What can we do?”

Hoarsely, Dante said, “I don’t know… I just don’t know…” He gave them a wan look. “I hope
you
think of something, because I
don’t
want to just sit around waiting for someone else to rescue them… but so far
I
haven’t had any brilliant ideas.”

***

Tiona walked around the facility they’d been placed in.
Prison,
she thought. Her handcuffs and her ankle chains were gone and she’d been assigned a fellow she thought of as her “keeper.” Jiao was an anxiously-eager, chronically-underfed young Asian man who spoke English of a sort. She had a distinct feeling that his English was all book learning and audio repetition with little involvement of any actual native English speaking teachers.

“So, what else you need for build flying car?” the young man asked.

“Freedom,” Tiona said, wondering, despite herself, what they actually
would
need to be able to build thrusters here. The building had concrete walls, barred windows, and multiple small rooms which all looked like they’d been outfitted for research back in the 1970s. Outside the windows she could see a barren concrete yard and high walls topped with razor wire. Though they called it a “lab” there was very little equipment. She’d seen a fume hood, some Bunsen burners, a random supply of laboratory glassware, an ancient gas chromatograph, and some shelves that had old electronic equipment such as power supplies, soldering irons, and transformers. Tiona would have bet that someone had recently swept this place out, then gone to a warehouse where the North Koreans stored out of date scientific equipment to load up a couple of trucks with gear.

“Yes, yes, freedom,” the young man said eagerly. “You have freedom soon. First you mus’ build thrusters.” He looked around the room they were in, “You need more equipment, you let me know. I get.”

“Where’s my father?”

“He come soon. You tell me equipment. When he come, you be all ready—build flying car.”

Tiona wondered whether there was
any
chance they’d let her and her dad go home if she did actually teach them how to build thrusters.

***

Cooper said, “AI, call Dante Gettnor.”

A couple of minutes later, Cooper heard Dante’s voice, “Hello General, I hope you’ve got good news?”

Cooper sighed, “Not much in the way of good news, I’m afraid. Our linguists tell us that, by their accents, the men who captured them were almost certainly from North Korea...”

Dante interrupted, “I thought there were some Americans in the group too?”

“Yes,” Cooper said heavily, “and we found their bodies in a landfill on the north side of Raleigh. One of the Koreans was there also…” He paused a moment then continued reluctantly, “All shot in the head from close range.”

“It sounds like these are… pretty rough people,” Dante said hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Cooper said, wanting to soften the blow, but having decided before he called not to sugarcoat the ominous nature of his report.

“Do you know where they’ve taken them?”

“They flew them to Vancouver in an air ambulance.”

Sounding astonished, Dante asked, “They were able to bring an air ambulance from Korea to North Carolina?”

“Oh, no, they rented one from an American company. These things are
really
expensive and come with a flight crew and nursing personnel. We suspect they were keeping your father and sister in a heavily sedated condition and wanted the ICU equipment on the ambulance to keep them safe.”

“Nurses would be willing to keep healthy people heavily sedated? That sounds like it would be at
least
unethical, if not against regulations.”

“We think they killed the nurses shortly after they got on board and the pilots when they got to Vancouver. In any event, when the plane left Vancouver, the tower said it had new pilots with Asian accents. No one’s heard from the original pilots or the nurses.”

“Oh my God, these people are… I don’t know what to call them! They have
no
respect for human life… and now they’ve got Tiona and my dad?”

“Try to focus on how many people you’ve got working on your side to try to get your sister and father back. Remember, they almost certainly want to know how to make thrusters and fusors. They won’t want to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.”

“At least not until they’ve extracted the golden eggs anyway,” Dante said, sounding depressed. “Are you able to tell where they’re being held in North Korea?”

“Not yet, but we have some very good people working on it.”

Dante sighed, “Not much chance the United States is going to invade a sovereign country to rescue two people though, is there?”

“Nooo,” Cooper said, dragging the word out. “But, some kind of covert extraction might be possible, depending on where they’re being held.” He paused for a second, then continued onto ground he really didn’t want to cover, “Sorry to ask you this, but it’s important for national security.
Can
GSI build more thrusters without your sister and father?”

A long silence followed during which Cooper wondered if he’d overstepped the bounds. Instead, Dante was realizing that he’d been so distraught over the kidnapping he hadn’t considered the effect it would have on their new company. GSI wouldn’t amount to much if the intellectual property holders never returned. He’d been feeling like their loss was an emotional tragedy without considering the consequences for his company. Somehow, he’d felt like GSI
knew
how to build thrusters, which in a sense it did, but only because Tiona and Vaz were part of GSI. With dawning horror, he realized that
they
were the
only
ones who knew how to build thrusters, and if they never returned… Hesitantly, Dante said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t give this any thought until you just asked me. We actually might
not
have anyone who knows how to build the thrusters. Maybe…” there was a long pause as he considered options, “Maybe Nolan Marlowe could figure out how to make the thrusters since it involves a modification of the graphene precipitation process that he discovered. Powering the thrusters though, that could be a real problem if it’s not in their notes. I remember Tiona saying that the electrical current which works has a weird frequency and something else which is kinda counterintuitive…”

When it became evident that Dante wasn’t going to say anything more, Cooper replied, “Well, they’re both trained scientists, surely their notes are good enough to figure it out.”

Dante said, “You’re probably right… there might still be a problem though. Dad encrypted his computer and always encrypted mine for me too. He probably encrypted Tiona’s as well.”

Cooper felt relieved, “Well, if you can’t figure out the passwords, remember I can ask the NSA to decrypt their computers. Those guys eat encryption for breakfast.”

Hesitantly, Dante replied, “My dad, he doesn’t use commercial products, he programs his own encryption.” Anxiously, he said, “I hope the NSA can still figure it out.”

Cooper gave a little chuckle, “I’m sure the spooks will find it a lot easier than taking down commercial programs.”

“I don’t know…” Dante said, doubtfully.

***

Tiona was sitting, staring off into space when the guards opened the door and brought her dad in. She leapt to her feet and ran to him, throwing her arms around him, “Dad! Are you okay?”

Vaz gave her a typically clumsy hug, patting her back with a hand that thumped a little too hard. Nonetheless, it felt wonderful to be reunited. He said only, “I’m fine.”

He didn’t ask how she felt and she couldn’t help but suspect that was because he could tell she was physically okay and didn’t want to hear about her emotional state.

Looking down, Tiona noticed that large patches of hair were missing from her father’s arm. Presumably, he’d been pulling it out in response to stress. She thought sadly about how he’d been doing so well recently. She didn’t mention his trichotillomania, instead asking, “Have they hurt you?”

“No. They’ve stuck me with a few needles. But those didn’t hurt.”

“Have they told you what they want?”

“They want us to build thrusters for them.”

She leaned back to look at his face, saying quietly, “I don’t think we should, do you?”

“If we don’t, they’ll hurt you.” His expression didn’t change. He looked as if he had about as much emotional involvement in that statement as most people would in the weather. But then he shrugged, “So we have to.”

In that simple statement Tiona felt her father’s love as powerfully as anyone had ever felt the love of a parent. From years of experience, she felt it even though others might have doubted it. Others would have wanted more emotion. Some hugging, perhaps some weeping, possibly a choked statement. Though Vaz had displayed none of the expected expressions of his feelings, his simple statement, “So we have to,” said it
all
to Tiona. He’d been confronted with a dilemma and made an absolute decision based on what mattered to him—and his decision said that Tiona mattered. She hugged him tightly again, squeezing so hard that she couldn’t help noticing the hard ridges of his muscular definition.

Not at all put off by how uncomfortable he was to be hugging her back, the thought went through her mind that she was hugging him for
her
comfort, not his. Speaking into his neck, she said in a muffled tone, “Dad, they may kill us anyway, once we tell them what they want to know.”

He lowered his face until his lips touched her ear. Then, “We’ll just have to kill them first,” he whispered, sounding just as unemotional about that statement as he did about almost anything else. She realized with some surprise that she’d never heard her father whisper before.

Shocked, Tiona clung to him a moment longer, then drew back to look him in the eye again. His expression remained completely flat, at least in appearance. She pulled him close again and spoke quietly near his ear, “How?!”

He said, “Remember what I told that general when he came to our house? We’ll do some of that.”

Tiona’s mind raced through her memories of the day Cooper had visited, vaguely remembering her dad saying something about how “almost anything could be a weapon,” or something to that effect. “Um,” she said quietly, “I remember, but I’m not sure I know how to do those things.”

“I can do them. Just… go along… don’t ask too many questions.”

Tiona wondered what he meant, then realized that normally, when she saw him working on a new project, she asked him questions about it, trying to figure out what it was. If they were supposedly building thrusters, something she was supposed to know about, but Vaz was building a weapon instead… it could be a huge problem if she asked him what he was doing.

Another man had come in the door with Vaz. Tiona thought he was probably her dad’s keeper like Jiao was her keeper. He and Jiao were talking to one another, presumably conferring about them.

Still holding on to her father, Tiona saw the new man step away from Jiao and stalk toward them.

Sounding angry, he said, “Hey! What going on? You American perverts having father-daughter sex?”

Vaz jerked away from Tiona and at first she thought he might be embarrassed to have been holding her, but then she saw his face, incandescent with rage. He pivoted and slammed his fist into the approaching man’s stomach, folding the guy like a broken doll. As the man collapsed to the floor like an empty sack, Vaz stood over him with fists that slowly unclenched and relaxed down to his sides. The red anger left his face to be replaced by a peacefully contented look. Gazing down at the man, Vaz simply said, “No.”

Jiao had danced back when Vaz attacked. He began shouting frantically at his AI. A siren sounded and a red light started flashing over the door. The door slammed open and a troop of six men came running in with batons.

At first Tiona feared they might beat her father, but instead they chivvied him away with the ends of the batons. She got the impression that the batons were something like cattle prods. When they stuck Vaz with the batons he grimaced and moved away. However, he moved in his typically deliberate fashion, rather than cringing or jerking back like she would have expected.

Evidently the Koreans found his responses unusual as well. One of them lifted his own leg and poked it with his prod, then howled and hopped away grasping his calf. From this reaction, Tiona decided that the prod must be fully functional, but that her father’s reaction to it was atypical.

Jiao came over, grasped Tiona’s elbow and tugged her away from the confrontation, saying, “Your father, he mus’ be better behaved.”

With Vaz braced up against the wall and four of the guards standing around him with their prods, one of the guards knelt to look at her father’s keeper. Tiona looked at the man too. She’d been thinking he’d had the wind knocked out of him and would soon be getting back to his feet. However, he remained curled on his side, grasping his own stomach and looking pale. He gasped a few words to the guard in Korean, then the guard began speaking on his AI.

About ten minutes later, more men came in through the door carrying a stretcher. They loaded up the “keeper” and took him away. A few minutes later, the six guards who’d entered appeared to be getting ready to leave when Jiao began shouting at them in Korean. Tiona didn’t know what he said, but he kept glancing at Vaz.

The guards stayed in the room rather than leaving and Tiona got the impression they were going to be guarded from inside the room from then on.

Jiao sidled over to Tiona. With a nervous glance at Vaz, he said, “What is deal with your father?”

Wanting to make sure that both she and her father held value to the North Koreans, Tiona said, “He knows some parts of how to build the thrusters and I know others.”

“No, I mean, why he go crazy and try kill Chin?”

“Because, Chin accused him of incest.”

“Incest?”

Tiona found herself explaining the word to Jiao. Jiao said, “That bad thing to say, but not so bad he should
hit
Chin.”

Tiona gave Jiao a look of disdain, “My father and I never did
anything
to you people, yet you’ve
kidnapped
us!”

Jiao gave a little shrug. Tiona wasn’t sure whether he was acknowledging her point or downplaying the seriousness of kidnapping.

After a little time for everything to calm down, Jiao started asking Tiona again for a list of equipment she and Vaz would need to build a flying car. It continued to surprise her how focused he was on the application which would make a car fly rather than any of the other uses for thrusters.

Until then, Tiona had been answering noncommittally and somewhat nebulously in an effort to delay any transfer of the technology. Vaz suddenly spoke, “I can give you a list.”

Tiona and Jiao both turned to stare at him, then Jiao stepped forward quickly and eagerly. He stopped suddenly before he got very close, evidently thinking of Chin and deciding he didn’t want to be within arm’s reach. “Yes please, Mr. Gettnor! Give me list.”

Vaz looked at him for a moment, then began speaking, giving him the name and model number of a very modern, very high end computer system which he wanted already loaded with the software for an extremely sophisticated AI. He followed this immediately with the name, brand, and model number of a pH meter and of a laboratory scale, then he began listing glassware.”

“Wait! Wait!” Jiao said, “Slower, I mus’ write down! Is first item computer?”

“Yes,” was all Vaz said.

“We get you computer, but not specific model. We get you what we have.”

Vaz’s expression didn’t change. He said, “If you want a paper airplane, you can just get me a sheet of paper. If you want a flying car, you’ll have to get me what I need to build it. We must have high-end computers loaded with sophisticated AIs that are connected to the internet at a very high speed and have excellent graphic HUDs.” He proceeded to tell Jiao that if he couldn’t get that particular computer he could get a competitor’s product. He gave another name and model number.

Jiao had been staring at him. He exclaimed, “No! Absolutely
no
internet connection!”

“No,
absolutely
no flying car then,” Vaz replied calmly. “I have to connect to the computer in my laboratory back in Raleigh to download the specifications for the thruster discs, power converters, and batteries.” He tilted his head as he looked at Jiao, “Unless, you’re willing to wait 20 to 30 years for us to repeat all the experiments necessary to develop these technologies in the first place?”

“But you can’t connect to the internet! You would call for…”

“I would call for what? Rescue? I thought you people said that I would like it so much here that I wouldn’t want to go back home? I thought you told me that once I’d spent enough time here to understand how good things are in your country you would set me free to leave if I wanted? If those things are true, surely you don’t care if I call home, do you?”

Tiona stared at her father. He rarely strung together so many sentences or tried to argue to make a point. Even more astonishing, when Jiao glanced away, Vaz winked at Tiona.

Jiao said, “No internet. You might cause trouble in many ways.”

Vaz shrugged, “You can bring in a computer expert to watch me any time that I’m connected to the internet. He can make sure that I don’t do anything to cause trouble. Or… you can tell your bosses that I can’t build a flying car for them.”

Jiao stared at him for a long minute, then said, “Give me rest of you list and I write down. After that, I talk to boss about computer.”

Tiona listened in growing amazement as her father listed the name, brand, and model number of well over 100 pieces of scientific equipment. Many of them were items of equipment that Tiona felt fairly certain were in her dad’s lab back home in the basement. Some were equipment that she was fairly certain he didn’t have. Jiao kept stopping him to check that he’d written down numbers correctly and to opine that it might be difficult to get so much equipment. Vaz continued adamantly warning Jiao that without the equipment he wanted, he couldn’t build a flying car.

Finally, Vaz finished his list by saying, “That’s all I can remember. Once I get the internet connection, I’ll look up the rest of the stuff we need and add it to your list.”

When Jiao left, he gave Tiona the distinct impression of a beaten dog with its tail between its legs.

***

Dante sat down across from Nolan and studied his face. He looked drawn and had puffy eyes. Dante’d been thinking of Nolan as Tiona’s somewhat serious boyfriend who might or might not last the next few months. He supposed that might still be, but Nolan looked really broken up about her kidnapping. Nolan said, “Have you heard anything new?”

Dante shook his head sadly, “General Cooper assures us that they’re doing everything they can to find her and my dad. The government apparently considers them to be a ‘national resource,’ so they’ve got that going for them. The State Department is trying to open negotiations with Pyongyang, but you’re probably aware that our two governments don’t get along, so just getting the North Koreans to
talk
about it is apparently a real problem. So far, of course, they claim they ‘don’t even know who the Gettnors are.’ Even if we got the North Koreans to acknowledge their presence, there’s a real question whether we could do anything to get them free without an invasion.”

Nolan’s shoulders drooped, “Yeah, I was wondering how we could apply leverage, but apparently the US has already arranged severe trade embargoes through the international community. There’s hardly anything more we could threaten to do to them that way.” Sounding really depressed, Nolan said, “And I suppose that invading them to rescue two scientists is a little bit too much to expect.”

“Yeah, that’s about what Cooper said. He did talk about a possible ‘covert extraction,’ whatever that means.”

Nolan said nothing for several minutes, so Dante decided he needed to broach the subject he’d set up the meeting for. “Nolan, I hate to bring this up, but there’s a lot of people counting on the thruster technology. I’m supposed to be CEO of a company founded
just
to exploit the thrusters and I have a lot of employees depending on the attack now. Unfortunately, it’s become more and more obvious to me that we might not know how to build thrusters without my sister and father. I’ve got to ask, do you think you could figure out how to build them?”