Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (11 page)

So, yeah, he was glad to see her interested in a project of
her own devising. By why investigate McDougall’s warning? That was a real
mystery. Odds were that there was nothing to it; just a ploy by McDougall, as
Paul had said. So why had his lovely wife latched onto this for a project?

And then he thought, did the why truly matter? She obviously
thought it important. Probably nothing would come out of her investigation. But
just the act of investigating the threat might prove highly beneficial to her
recovery. That itself was worth allowing her to conduct it.

On the heels of that conclusion, he realized that there was
another reason to let her go, a reason nearly as important as aiding her
recovery. Capie was growing, developing her powers, becoming a full-fledged and
powerful wizard in her own right. She needed, in fact deserved, the opportunity
to step out of his shadow and exercise her powers, develop her skills, and grow
in her new role. Oh, yes, there was risk. But she was not a child. Without
risk, she could not be all that she could be.

So he took a really deep breath and reluctantly said, “Okay,
so you put yourself in the lion’s den. Then what?”

“From what McDougall said, other wizards of
Errabêlu
are planning something. That means other countries are up to mischief. Like
maybe Russia, China, North Korea and the other usual suspects. I’ll go to the
Canadian intelligence service, to their directors, and talk to their avatars—”

“At night, when they are asleep,” Paul interrupted her, “after
you make sure that there are no Oni around.”

Capie smiled. “Does that mean yes, you approve?”

Paul made a sour face. “Yes. I think so. However, you are
making the assumption that the Canadian government knows something and that
McDougall got his information from them. But what if he found out from one of
his own Oni or even from another wizard?”

His wife shrugged. “Then there won’t be anything I can do to
stop those deaths he’s talking about. And all I have wasted is a little time.”

Paul grunted and glanced at the items on the dining room
table without really seeing them. “Okay. But I expect to be kept informed. And
I want your promise to be very very careful and to duck out at the first sign
of trouble.”

“Done,” she faithfully promised him with a big smile. “I’ll
leave tomorrow in the morning, right after breakfast.”

• • • •

Even though Capie had only been gone for two days, the
garage had already taken on the look of a cluttered junkyard, with two large
workbenches, assorted small tables, platforms, and metal support frames holding
a wide array of tools, molds, widgets, glass, and cardboard containers of
various types and sizes, small machines, a very wide variety of electronic
equipment, and clusters of odd-looking doohickeys and thingamajigs of all sorts,
sizes and descriptions.

A holographic image of Captain Montgomery Scott stood
nearby, arms folded across his chest, a frown furrowed on his face.

Paul threw down a clipboard on the work bench and rubbed his
temples in frustration.

“I
think
I am making progress. It’s hard to tell. This
whole thing of building a quantum computer is really hard! It’s so terribly
complex! But we seem to be making some progress with the quantum dot approach,”
he told the hologram, nodding at the conglomeration of glass dishes with
silicon wafers, circuit boards, electronic equipment, and a virtual spaghetti
of various colored wires and cables on the near end of the work bench.

Scotty nodded with an enthusiastic smile. “This is based on
the work by Daniel Loss and David P. DiVincenzo. They proposed using the
quantum states of the intrinsic
½
spin of electrons in a semiconductor gate array.”

“Oh, I just love it when you talk techno-babble,” Paul
commented as he rubbed his right arm.

“Keep going,” Scotty encouraged him. “Try decreasing the thickness
of the substrate, but mount it on a silver-plated ground plane. And tighten the
spacing between nodes.” He practically beamed with excitement. “You might just have
the first qubit prototype ready to test before lunch,” he declared with a gleam
in one eye.” He eyed the equipment again. “Well, maybe by dinner.”

“Okay,” Paul said and then made a face. “I hope you are
right.”

“Call me when you are ready for the test. This I want to
see.”

• • • •

“And now, Jace Abernathy, what can you tell me about various
plots around the world that could involve the death of a lot of people,” Capie
asked, cupping her chin thoughtfully with one hand.

The avatar of the Director of the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service seemed to consider its response to the question for
several seconds before replying in emotionless tones.

“There are many such plots, from a variety of countries.
Most of the groups involved are being monitored carefully and have little or no
chance of succeeding.”

Capie sighed and tugged on one ear lobe. Without knowing
what she was looking for and having next to no experience in matters of spying
or the operations of
Errabêlu
, she just didn’t know the right questions
to ask.

She was parked, in the dead of the night, in a large rental
GMC Yukon on a side street not far from the director’s home in Manor Park, not
far from downtown Ottawa. Parking here, close to where the director lived, was
primarily to keep the distance short and the energy of her microportal as low
as possible. Outside the car, she could hear the sound of the crickets chirping
away endlessly in the still of the warm night air. Abernathy’s avatar was
sitting in her passenger seat, looking back at her with those dead
expressionless eyes. It gave her the creeps. Still, this was important. If she
couldn’t handle this, she might as well go home. Well, back to San Jose,
anyway.

Her father wouldn’t give up this easily and neither would
she.

“Tia, some assistance here, please,” she said.

The holographic image of the Queen of the Fairies leaned
forward from the back seat, between the two front bucket seats, craning her
neck for a better look at the avatar.

“Ask him about the briefings McDougall gets,” the simulacrum
suggested.

“Ooh, that’s a good thought,” responded Capie, turning back
to the avatar. “Tell me, do you know if Kenneth McDougall receives intelligence
briefings from the Canadian government?”

“Yes, he does.”

“And what sort of briefings does Kenneth McDougall get?”

“Weekly in-depth security briefs. The same as for many of
the cabinet ministers.”

“Ah! And the last two – no, make it the last three such
briefings. Was there anything specific, anything new that might involve a
threat, perhaps a terrorist plot, a new weapon of mass destruction, a new
strain of disease, anything like that?”

This time the pause was much longer before Abernathy’s avatar
replied. “There was very little that was new in any of those briefings. Only
minor updates and status reports of security measures and programs. Some
information from friendly governments. Nothing significant. There was one
exception. The American CIA reported the suspicious death of a Russian citizen
in the Middle East. However, in the briefings since, no additional information
has come to light.”

“That’s it?” Tia asked, doing a double-take before turning
her head to give Capie a look of disbelief. “McDougall considered one mere death
to be a major threat to world peace?”

Capie closed her eyes, her shoulders dropping in silent
submission before replying, “So Paul was right. McDougall lied. There was no
threat.”

Tia snorted. “You think? Can we go home now?”

Capie bit her lower lip, thinking hard. “And tell Paul that
he was right all along?”

The Queen of the Fairies chuckled. “You have a good point,
young one. You should never tell a man he’s right. It’ll go to his head for
sure.”

Capie leaned forward, wetting her lips. “Tell me, Jace, was
McDougall interested in the death of that Russian?”

“Yes. It was reported to me that he asked several questions
about it.”

“That’s interesting,” Capie commented, a thoughtful frown on
her face now. “Tell me about the death of the Russian.”

“The Americans did not provide many details,” the image of
the director reported. “A Russian collapsed at an amusement park in Dammam, Saudi
Arabia. He was suffering from a gunshot wound. He was rushed to a local
hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.”

“Died in an amusement park, heh?” Capie mused sadly,
obviously now uncertain that this little interrogation was going anywhere. A
lot of people died from bullets in the Middle East. “So what was so special
about the death of this man?”

“The Saudi Investigative Police Force looked into the death.
Since it involved the murder of a foreign national, they passed on their report
to Interpol who passed it on to the Americans. The CIA has a file on the man.
He was a former member of the Russian military, an expert on munitions. He
worked on a number of different ordnance systems, including Russia’s largest
laser guided bomb, the KAB-1500. The CIA suspected him of selling his expertise
to terrorists in the Middle East.”

Capie’s mouth dropped open, aghast and speechless.

“Well, well!” Tia remarked sagely. “A Russian bomb expert in
the Middle East, heh?” The simulacrum cocked her head. “Care for a suggestion?
Let’s go talk to the CIA and find out what they know.”

Capie finally found her voice. “Washington, D.C.? That would
be really dangerous.”

Tia shook her head. “Maybe, maybe not. The information we
need, if it exists at all, might be in multiple places and with multiple people
outside of Washington.”

Capie gripped the steering wheel hard in her left hand and
closed her eyes. She wasn’t quite sure of her motivations for proposing and
making this trip, despite what she had argued with Paul. A part of her—a
logical part of her—argued that it was likely a wild-goose chase, as Paul had
so succinctly pointed out.

But what if it weren’t? What if a lot of Normals were about
to die at the hands of a wizard of
Errabêlu
? Just like her father had.

Her stomach turned again in a twisted knot of anguish, just
as it had every time she had that thought, ever since Paul had told her about
McDougall’s threat.

It was an emotional decision through and through, without a
doubt. But a part of her decreed that it was well worth the risk, both of
personal danger and of the potential—nay, probable—fool’s errand she was on. But
she had ignored the risk to her father and look what had happened. She would
never make that mistake again. She simply could not ignore this.

Capie opened her eyes and brushed a strand of hair from her
forehead. “Yes, of course. CIA headquarters is in Langley, Virginia, quite a
few miles out from Washington. And there are probably people other than the CIA
director that would know about events in the Middle East. But it does look a
tad more serious, doesn’t it?”

Tia shrugged. “McDougall seemed to think so too. We should
leave in the morning, I think. Agreed?”

• • • •

The quantum dot prototype worked even better than Paul
anticipated and furthermore had a low decoherence factor. From there, he
started designing and building a four qubit prototype. The first one failed,
due to lack of sufficient error correction circuitry.

The days crawled by while he worked on the redesign.

At least a hundred times each day, he wondered where his
wife was and why he had not heard from her.

Fairfax Marriott Hotel

Lee Jackson Memorial Hwy

Fairfax, Virginia

July

Wednesday 10:58 p.m. EDT

U
pon
reaching Fairfax, Virginia late the next evening, Capie checked into a
Courtyard hotel room. Over the course of four days, she threw everything she
had into her effort to acquire the information she was looking for—or even to
determine if it existed at all.

On the first morning, she rented a Ford Escape and drove
over to the Langley Fork Park. From a park bench under the shade of a huge elm
tree, she cast a spell for a microportal and magical LAN connection to the
Agency’s mainframe and hacked the CIA’s personnel database, spending a few
hours putting together a rough estimate of the organizational chart and who
held which senior slot. The operational database on the main server also helped
establish for her the working flow of intelligence data, and how and what got
into the briefings, especially for foreign governments such as Canada.
Backtracking, she identified specific individuals (and there were a lot of them
too) that might have been briefed on the information that had peaked
McDougall’s interest. She wrote the names on a note pad she carried with her.

Thereafter, each night, she would pick out the homes of two
or three of the most likely individuals in the CIA that might be able to answer
her detailed questions. She would find an obscure place to park close by and go
to work. In three such excursions, she had learned nothing of value.

Unlike in Canada with the director of the CSIS, the director
of the CIA was not approachable. His home was in Georgetown, the director’s
office in downtown Washington, D.C. Capie dared not get that close to what was
surely deeply held enemy territory in central Washington.

After talking to the avatars of half of the most senior CIA
management and not learning anything new, she decided a different approach was
needed. Instead, she focused on the group of analysts in the CIA Middle East
section. In retrospect, she thought they might have more details anyway, being
closer to the raw data.

The first such interview that night was unproductive. For
the second interview, she drove to Reston, Virginia, winding her way through a
neighborhood of well-appointed two-story wood frame houses in a relatively
up-scale neighborhood. She reached a quiet cul-de-sac off of Stowe Road and
parked as far from the porch and street lights as she could get.

According to her information, the house back around the
corner belonged to one Henry Chapple—a forty eight year old analyst for the
Agency.

She cast her spells, opening a microportal to the man’s
house and then a second spell to create the avatar.

Henry Chapple looked exactly as she expected: a short pudgy
man in his late forties with balding forehead, gray at the temples, a prominent
hawkish nose and thick horn-rimmed glasses. She could easily picture him
hunched over a computer screen all day long, looking for clues on the internet
about terrorists.

Over the course of the CIA interrogations she had conducted
thus far, she had learned to cut to the heart of the matter.

“Hello, Henry,” she said with a tight grim smile at the
avatar. “Do you know anything about the Russian ex-soldier that died recently
in Dammam?”

“Yes.”

His reply didn’t surprise her much. Other CIA officers had
known of the Russian but only the basics, the same as the CSIS director.
“Consider this to be one of your standard briefings then. Tell me what you
know.”

“The murdered man has been identified as Grigory Kuzmin. We
have a short file on him. He was fifty two at the time of his death. Was in the
Russian Army until the 2008 down-sizing, which forced him to retire early, at
the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Was considered to be an expert on the
manufacturing and handling of munitions, especially for the Russian Air Force.
Spent five years working on the KAB-1500 program and its derivatives. After his
retirement, he disappeared from public view. According to his passport file, he
has traveled extensively abroad, including the United States. The theory here
is that he hired out his services to various governments and terrorist
organizations around the world. Then, a little over a month ago, he approached
the Dolphin Village Amusement Park in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Witnesses say he
staggered around a bit and then collapsed to the ground, apparently from lack
of blood due to a gunshot wound. He was taken to the Emergency Center at the Al
Amal Hospital, but was pronounced DOA. When the local police realized he was a
Russian national, they called in the Investigative Police Force. They filed a
report with Interpol and the CIA received a copy.”

“Do you know who he was working for at the time of his
death? Or who shot him?”

“No. That information was not provided to us. But there are
many terrorist organizations and several countries in the Middle East that
might have hired him.”

“Well, that leaves quite the puzzle, does it not?” asked Tia
from the back seat. “An expert in bombs shot by parties unknown. Possibly a
dissatisfied customer? Or to silence him, perhaps? And we haven’t a clue who he
might have been working for either. Humph.”

“It does seem challenging, doesn’t it?” Capie replied with a
heavy sigh as she leaned back in her seat. “We have a lot of questions and very
little information. But McDougall saw a pattern here, one that might lead to
the death of a lot of Normals.”

“So he
said
.”

“It’s still worth checking,” Capie protested. “The man was
an expert in bombs and someone did kill him—”

“Whoa, relax. I’m on your side, sweet thing.” The older
woman pondered the situation for a moment. “Looks like a trip to Dammam next.
To talk to the Saudi police—”

“Ugh!” groaned Capie with a distasteful grimace on her face.

The Middle East! And she had hesitated to make the trip to the
Washington D.C. area! Good grief!

How could she possible justify a trip to Saudi Arabia? Sure,
Ottawa and Washington had been a bit risky, though in the end they had both
turned out okay. But the Middle East was not friendly to women. And as an
American, she would stand out even more, making her efforts there to stay
unobserved very difficult.

As a paraplegic for eleven years, she had learned both
restraint and courage, though it would have been challenging to explain to
anyone who had never sat in a wheelchair the supposed dichotomy involved. Those
lessons, as hard as they had been to learn and as valuable as they were,
remained with her still. And they were telling her not to risk a journey to
Saudi Arabia. That the risk was too great.

“I need to touch base with Paul first, before I go half way
around the world,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

“As you will. I suggest you send him an email. But just
remember one thing. Dammam is NOT a capital city.”

Capie thoughtfully considered that fact for a moment. Her
husband would not be happy with her decision to run off halfway around the
world. This might be one of those cases where forgiveness was easier to get
than permission. “It’s not, is it? Well, I suppose that what Paul doesn’t know won’t
hurt him, right?”

• • • •

In five hundred mile hops, she crossed the Atlantic,
spending the night at the very charming and swank Caleta Hotel at Gibraltar,
and then moved on the next morning across the Mediterranean, but in shorter one
hundred mile jumps. Just east of Port Said, she turned south, following the
Suez Canal and the Gulf of Suez down to the southern tip of the Sinai
Peninsula. From there, she threaded her way east across Saudi Arabia in ever
smaller portal hops until reaching the outskirts of Dammam late in the hot
afternoon sun. The evening air was still and difficult to breathe. But just in
case there might be Oni in the city, she decided to be as stealthy as possible,
approaching the city using a minimum of magical energy.

She walked a ways down a deserted two lane road, nothing but
desert sand in all directions until she reached a gas station. Before she went
in, she cast a disguise spell, now projecting the image of a young Saudi male dressed
in the traditional white Thobe ankle-length garment, a scarf-like Ghutra on her
head and the Ogal black band to hold the Ghutra in place. Inside the station,
she borrowed a phone and, in Arabic, called a cab. The driver, an elderly man
with bad breath and a crooked smile, took her to the Sheraton Dammam Hotel
& Towers, a five star hotel that oozed luxury from every seam. On the way
to her room, she noted with silent gratitude that the air conditioning was
working flawlessly. That evening, she dropped the disguise and stayed in an
Executive suite, soaking long in a large bathtub.

She felt more than a bit guilty, having not told Paul about
her trip to Dammam in the email that she had sent him. But she rationalized it
to her herself on the basis that she really didn’t have all that much to report
yet. A dead Russian and a crazy theory that he might have helped a government
or maybe some terrorists to build a bomb. As theories went, it was pretty
feeble.

Still, she felt the driving obsession to check the story
out. She was a wizard now and she wanted—no, was under the compulsion to help
the Normals of the world. With luck, she might be able to prevent a lot of
deaths.

And that, in a small way, would assuage some of the guilt
she still felt at not preventing the death of her father.

There, she had thought the unthinkable. And somehow, she
felt better for doing it. With an extra degree of confidence, she set out the
next morning back under a disguise into the already warming air to find the
people in the city who had known Grigory Kuzmin before he had died.

In the interests of speed and leaving Saudi Arabia as soon
as possible, she elected to conduct her avatar interrogations during daylight
hours this time. She took a quick cab ride to the Al Amal Hospital and, from
the lobby, accessed the hospital’s computer network. In two minutes, she found
and scanned the meager records on the Russian patient and learned the names of
the doctors and nurses that had worked on him.

From the avatar of the principle doctor who had examined
Kuzmin, she learned that there had been no sign of a bullet; that it had gone
clean through the man’s shoulder. She also learned that it was a very serious
wound but had not necessarily been a fatal one; that with the proper treatment
early enough, he could have lived. Also, she learned that the wound would have
been extremely painful and would have immediately incapacitated most men.
Moreover, the Russian could have been shot hours or even a day earlier, and
that Kuzmin was in remarkably good shape for a man in his early fifties. But
that was all the doctor could tell her.

She learned nothing new from the nursing staff. They had not
seen or heard anything significant, nothing that Chapple had not already told
her.

Only an hour after her arrival, she left the hospital,
taking another taxi ride to return to her hotel. Once back in her room, she
kicked off her shoes and ordered a tall cold glass of lemonade from room
service. After it arrived, she sat back on the overstuffed, but very
comfortable sofa to sip the drink and contemplate her next move.

Since Kuzmin was not a native of the city he likely didn’t
have a car or own a house here. Therefore, he might have been staying with
someone or, more likely, in a hotel room somewhere and rented a cab anywhere he
went. She could spend days investigating all the possibilities and tracking his
movements in the city, but in reality what would it tell her? Probably very
little.

On the other hand, over a month had gone by since the murder.
The police would have investigated all of those possibilities by now and would
likely have more information on the case. Since she was only a few blocks from
the EP Police Directorate on King Abdulaziz Street, she decided she would take
the chance, waving her hand to create a microportal link to that location,
hacking into the Police server and displaying the information on a holographic
viewer in front of her. She had no trouble running down the appropriate
records. And from them, she quickly learned that the agent on the case in the
Investigative Police Force was a First Lieutenant Hossien Khouri.

And then she noticed the classification label on the file
itself.

“The case is
CLOSED
!?” she bellowed, rising half off
the sofa in stunned disbelief. How could the case be closed? Had the man been
murdered by some street thug instead? Someone the police already had in jail?
She was going to be sorely disappointed if it turned out that she was wasting
her time on some wild goose chase here.

Well, as long as she
was
here, she was determined to
check it out. Very little effort was needed to find Khouri’s office, in the
same building, and determine that yes, he was there, at his desk. With another
snap wave of the hand, she created an avatar of him and placed it in the
wingback chair across the coffee table from her.

The avatar sat dispassionately, staring back at her, waiting
patiently.

She forced herself to calm down a bit and to organize her
thoughts before asking her first question. “Okay, Khouri. What’s the situation
here? Have you caught the man who murdered Kuzman?”

“No.”

“Then why is the case
closed
?” she demanded.

“Orders from the office of the Ministry of the Interior,” he
responded.

She folded herself back in the sofa, pondering his reply.
The Ministry of the Interior? Did this case involve political ramifications?

She contemplated the image in front of her. The agent in
front of her wouldn’t know the answer to that question. He would simply be
following orders. What he
could
tell her was how far the investigation
had gotten before the case had been ordered closed.