Nightstalkers (15 page)

He reached into the drawer and moved aside the neat pile of socks dedicated to matching his various golfing outfits and picked up the laptop. He felt a rush of excitement, like the redneck would if one of those girls on the calendar actually entered his man-cave.

He’d finally broken a rule, but it was going to make him rich. Technically, richer than he’d been once upon a time, but why quibble over some zeros?

His students thought ten million was a lot of money, but he knew it wasn’t. Not when you had to fill the watch winder with six timepieces of quality and then support the timepieces with the lifestyle worthy of them and buy a house in Senators Club. And then fill that house with things required of a house in Senators Club.

It was a big house.

He’d been surprised when he’d received that e-mail from Craegen out of the blue.

But sometimes life gives you opportunities and you have to make the best of them.

Craegen had been ambitious; Winslow remembered that much about him. The e-mail was a boast, a slap at a professor
who years ago had blown off a young freshman who had been too eager and not paid his dues. Somehow Craegen had gotten a bootleg copy of the original Rift program. And he was going to do it, figure it out, be acknowledged as the genius he was by doing what no one had done before: bring it under control. Winslow’s eyes had glazed over as the slaps in the face had come one after another. Near the end Craegen had temptingly written some of the algorithms. Incomplete, but enough to let Winslow know he was for real, which was the staggering blow.

But now he had what had once been Craegen’s. It had never occurred to Winslow to ask the strange man how he had gotten the drive or where Craegen was or how he even knew about the e-mail. Such details weren’t essential. What was on the drive was the key.

It had all been very cloak-and-dagger yesterday and last night, full of dire warnings, and the garbage can full of dog shit had not been fun, but the prize overwhelmed even the five hundred thousand he’d forked over.

Winslow paused for the first time, a slight ripple of concern slopping through his brain. The money had been surprisingly easy to obtain, but that had been cloak-and-dagger, too. Winslow’s mother had warned the children that they should never, ever borrow money. But Winslow’s mother had died in the farmhouse, as the auctioneers were selling everything off and Winslow was away on his full scholarship ride. Winslow knew Lilith would not be pleased if she knew whom he had gone to for the loan and the terms he had agreed to. But it wasn’t about the money. Even he was aware of that.

Perhaps it was a midlife crisis?

What is a midlife crisis for a physicist? Not a red sports car or dewy-eyed grad students. He’d already been through both those, the latter several times.

But the Nobel?

The ultimate prize for a physicist whose career was on the way down, because they aged like ballerinas, the youngest and the brightest getting all the attention. He’d struggled through enough productions of
Swan Lake
with his wife to see that the leads never had crow’s-feet. Not around their eyes anyway. The old physicists tended to stick ever tighter to what they thought they knew, never reaching out for the new for fear of learning that what they’d believed for decades was wrong.

He could admit he was wrong if this turned out right.

He’d arranged the dinner party to empty out the lab this evening except for Ivar, so the student could move the final pieces downstairs at UNC. He trusted Ivar to an extent, because behind his bland expression, Winslow could see the intelligence minus the same hungry ambition eating away at most grad students’ chests. The perfect combination to be used. Winslow found it a bit amusing that Ivar had taken the lack of an invitation to the party as a deliberate slight, when it was really an invitation to share greatness. Rather, more to touch it, as there would be no sharing. One did not share with students. One took.

Ivar was willing to work eighty hours a week like the rest of them for no pay so they could get their doctorates, so they could work other kids behind them for eighty-hour weeks while they tried to invent something they could sell to the corporate world they all professed to despise, or, even better, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, since everyone knew the government overpaid for everything.

But Ivar was meticulous, so the professor felt reasonably secure knowing the kid was the one in the special lab he’d secretly designed earlier today in a remote corner of the basement of the physics research building for the beginning of this. It was the
perfect setup, used years ago for experiments with toxic and radioactive materials and perfectly shielded. More importantly, Winslow needed someone he could trust and who had the smarts to deal with things, since this was the first time he had ever gone off the grid; the first time he hadn’t followed the instructions.

The laptop Winslow now held was old, one that had been in the lab forever. Passed beneath the fingers of countless grad students and postdocs. The top was layered with faded stickers of bands long defunct. The key to the laptop was that it was linked to the mainframe that Ivar should have finished moving by now, so its own capabilities weren’t important. It was just the originator of the program. The mainframe in the secret lab was going to do the crunching and run the program. Winslow dug deeper in the sock drawer, behind the specially padded ones he’d used during his running phase. He retrieved the hard drive, meticulously labeled by Ivar:
Dr. Winslow
.

Ivar labeled everything that came in and out of the lab and had already fastened the label on the drive during the five minutes Winslow had left the disk in the lab in order for its contents to be copied into the mainframe. Ivar hadn’t even asked about the ASU label, his level of curiosity nil.

Winslow dug his thumbnail under the label and peeled it off. He pressed open the slide on the left edge of the laptop and gingerly pressed the hard drive in. He smiled as he watched the computer buzz to life, much like his toothbrush.

He pulled out his cell phone and sent the e-mail he’d saved in draft, with the specific instructions on what Ivar was to do in the secret lab at the same time. Based on the e-mail he’d received from Craegen, and his own examination of the algorithms, it would take weeks for the program to crunch the algorithms and be ready to activate, but they’d be weeks well spent. He put the
laptop back in the drawer, making sure the power cord was still connected and leaving the lid open enough so it would stay on. On second thought, he wedged a pair of socks in between the top and the blank spot next to the touch pad, ensuring that it wouldn’t accidently close and shut the program down. He covered the laptop with socks. Then he had second thoughts. The laptop might overheat, buried like that, and no one came in here anyway. He cleared the socks off the top.

He put on his suit pants, shirt, tie, and jacket. Then he went back to the sock drawer. He could see the slight glow from the partially open laptop as he did the choosing of the socks. It made him smile. He pulled out his favorite pair.

Then he hovered over the watch winder, mesmerized as it rocked back and forth.

Tonight was a Rolex night.

Ivar was splitting his attention between watching the mainframe monitor set on a table in the middle of the room, waiting to start a replay of this evening’s Duke–UNC alumni charity basketball game, and labeling things. It was after eight and he knew the game was probably over, but he’d studiously avoided accessing any social media on his iPhone or laptop so that he wouldn’t accidently find out the score.

Unfortunately, by not checking either, he also hadn’t received the e-mail from Doctor Winslow about changing the setting on a critical dampener and shutting down the Internet connection from the mainframe to the old laptop once they both initiated.

For lack of a nail.

It was a saying that would have been lost on the student.

Instead, he was using a label maker. Things had to be organized. This room was below ground level, in the subbasement that was mainly used to store old tables and chairs and desks. Even the building’s maintenance people rarely came down here. Why Doctor Winslow had chosen this room off the beaten path, Ivar didn’t consider worth pondering. Winslow could have explained to him why he’d chosen this particular room—that the room was shielded and that a single trunk line brought in power and Internet and a landline for a phone—but Winslow didn’t believe in explaining to grad students. Besides, Ivar’s main concern was that all this gear, new and old, lacked labels. He’d just spent two hours simply hauling the last of it down here from the main lab upstairs.

Ivar glanced over at the monitor. All within parameters. Organized. Doing what it was designed to do, which Ivar knew was something that could be very, very original, although the professor had been rather vague on what the end result should be.

Since he had to miss the game live, he should have been invited to the dinner party, Ivar thought as he labeled a drawer
Label Maker
. It held the extra cartridges to load into the machine. He saw no irony in this.

He checked the clock on the wall. The game had to be over by now. Even if it went to overtime, which would be cool, but fuck those Duke Blue Devils anyway. He’d attended a lecture up there in Durham and one could feel the snobbery slithering off the Duke professor at being made to talk to a bunch of dumb UNC grad students. Everyone had been looking forward to this off-season charity game because it would be played by some of the most famous graduates of both programs.

Okay, Ivar decided. He sat down on the old Naugahyde couch and picked up the remote.

Game time.

Behind him, the first crackle of a golden spark arced around the mainframe.

Inside Doctor Winslow’s sock drawer, the screen of the laptop shimmered out of the darkness and took on the faintest hint of gold.

Deep under Area 51, it sounded like a hundred angry grasshoppers had been loosed in the cavern holding the Can. Several cycles ago, someone had remembered from an undergraduate physiology class that a clicking sound activated the reticular formation with a higher degree of success than any other form of alarm. They had then taken that to the extreme, just in case both people on duty had fallen hard asleep or into a coma during their duty shift.

Both, however, were awake, and while one turned off the clicking, the other activated the alarm to be transmitted to the Nightstalkers, Japan, and Russia.