Razing Beijing: A Thriller (39 page)

“That’s a question that hasn’t been answered. Besides being
bulky the aluminum back-plates would have set off the detectors. That’s why you
won’t see any portable hard or flash drives around. From the beginning,
security insisted we only use these tape cartridges.”

Emily shared an uncomfortable look with Stuart, who turned
to ask Thackeray, “Were any theories tossed around as to who and why somebody
might be stealing software?”

“If I had to guess?” Thackeray’s expression hardened. “It
was the French. Those brie-blowin’ frogs are always trying to pry their
shit-hooks into our master code. One good call Perry made was not negotiating
away CLI’s authority to manage all the code. Still pisses ’em off.”

Stuart glared at Thackeray. “As this thing doesn’t actually
work, why would anyone risk serious prison time going after the software?”

“Beats me! Oh, they should be about ready. We ought to
get to the well.”

“WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT
to
see requires an ungodly surge of electrical power,” Thackeray explained to Emily
and Stuart. Shouldering their way against the flow of foot traffic, it became
obvious not everyone was cleared to witness the test. Identification badges
clipped to breast pockets of white-smocked technicians bore designations of
various corporations; ‘TRW,’ ‘UTRC,’ ‘CLI.’ A profusion of brown badges
attested to the international representation on the project; these individuals
quietly discussed preparations for tonight’s demonstration in German or French.
The trio passed through a set of revolving doors at the facility entrance.

“Our first experiments practically knocked out the whole
west suburban D.C. power grid,” Thackeray continued. “We eventually worked out
a deal with VP&L where—”

“Excuse me, Thack,” Stuart interrupted him. “What’s with
the breeze?”

“Oh, that. We introduce a slightly positive pressurization
into the lab in order to purge aerosol-borne biohazardous agents.”

Stuart and Emily shuffled to a stop.

Thackeray’s face broke into a devilish grin. “Jeez, Stu. I’ve
never seen you so gullible. We purge dust and small particulate matter out of
the lab, that’s all.” Thack and Emily laughed.

A small observation deck sign appeared above the next
doorway; they followed Thackeray inside. The room in certain respects was
similar to a theater balcony, poorly lit and complete with several elevated
rows of folding chairs. The observation deck overlooked the laboratory floor
some twenty feet below through a wall of wire-reinforced plate glass, against
which the control console provided the three men hunched over it with an
unobstructed view of the ‘well.’ A young man wearing headphones turned to see
who had entered the room—he tapped the dial of his watch, and returned his
attention to the panel of instruments. Thackeray politely excused himself and
headed for the console.

Stuart accompanied Emily to the glass partition. The
polished white floor of the ‘well’ below appeared to be the size of a
basketball court. Attending to tall banks of electronic instruments lining the
floor were dozens of technicians making final adjustments. Two technicians
appeared amid the activity, each wheeling a cart toward the center of the
floor. The surface of one cart was bare, on the other a small box. Emily
watched with growing interest as the woman pushing the cart with the box
stopped to carefully align it within a set of dark lines painted on the floor. Checking
further to see that the cart was properly positioned, the woman arched her neck
to look over her head at the ceiling.

Stuart and Emily followed her gaze. That the ceiling was
another twenty feet over their heads explained why the peculiar sight had
slipped their notice. Suspended from the ceiling high over the floor of the
well were two massive, inverted conical objects, their fiberglass exterior
surfaces smooth and white. Each cone measured roughly six feet in diameter at
the base and ten feet in height. The apex of each was directed straight down at
the floor and truncated to reveal a dark, open recess like a gaping mouth. Aerial
catwalks allowed for servicing the devices; technicians reached over their
heads making adjustments within the open cowling of one of the huge cones. Hydraulic
actuator rods spaced evenly around its base indicated the capability to
directionally articulate.

“And those are the lasers,” Stuart told Emily, stating the
obvious.

“With some elaborate modifications.” Ralph Perry said,
appearing behind Stuart and Emily. “Which somebody else will have to explain.” The
three exchanged hellos.

Perry asked, “What do you think so far, Emily?”

“Very exciting,” she said, returning his smile. “There’s
quite a lot to absorb. I’m overwhelmed.”

“A little too exciting.” Perry gestured over their heads. “As
big as they are, they’re proving every bit as temperamental as our early
medical guns.” He described a litany of problems with the megawatt-class
free-electron lasers, culminating with their decision to deposit a 10-angstrom
layer of gold on the observation windows in order to reflect lased radiation.

“That,” Perry somberly observed, “should prevent a repeat
of some of the earlier injuries. I’m surprised you haven’t asked about the
source of that humming sound.”

“Now that you mention it,” Stuart said, “it’s annoying as
hell.”

Perry gestured toward a heavy, windowless door fixed with
an OSHA placard displaying the words liquid nitrogen. “Behind there is the
largest super-conducting capacitor in the world. We can discharge enough
megawatt-hours in the blink of an eye to power the city of Richmond for nearly
an hour. We began charging it several days ago during off-peak periods, and
still
we draw down the power grid.”

Stuart shook his head in disbelief. Twenty years to launch
all this claptrap into orbit seemed wildly optimistic.

A shrill klaxon and rotating amber lights flooded the
well’s interior. Perry gestured them back the way they had come.

The observation deck filled with engineers and technicians
clearing the laboratory floor. Affixed to the opposite wall of the well, large
red digits descended through four minutes on the countdown toward zero. Soon
there was standing room only; thirty or so people jostled to see through the
glass to the floor below. Stuart nudged Emily and pressed a pair of foam
earplugs into her hand.

A bone-rattling alarm sounded and the crowd inched closer
to the thick plate glass. An electronic display flashed ‘warning - prepare for
discharge.’ The console operators sat motionless as the automated sequence
advanced. Down on the floor of the well in place of the box stood a crystalline
pyramid, diffracting a pastel splash of color onto the surface of the cart. A
buzzer sounded—the timer digits counted down through thirty seconds.

Stuart and Emily glanced overhead in time to see both
lasers conduct a rapid actuation test—the massive conical objects gimbaled
wildly before again coming to rest, like witnessing an elephant break into a
sprint and then stop on a dime. Spectators shifted anxiously; three green
laser-targeting reticules converged slowly on the pyramid and then vanished.

The lead console operator announced over a loudspeaker,
“EPR correlation in ten—
mark
.”

The digits on the timer descended through nine, eight,
seven...

Emily glanced to her right. Stuart was watching with arms
folded, an apprehensive crease in his brow. “Keep your eye on the pyramid,” he
said.

Four, three...

The ambient light dimmed and fluctuated.

Two, one...

KABOOM—
Emily flinched as the loud thunderclap
rumbled the floor beneath her feet and a bright flash of light filled the well.
The glass partition rattled angrily in its frame—her mind’s eye relived the
scene at Mojave, shards of glass would shower over them any second...

Instead, there rose a chorus of disappointed sighs. On the
surface of the cart below was absolutely
nothing
—the crystal pyramid was
nowhere in sight. Emily’s first reaction was that it had obliterated into tiny
particles, but the surface of the cart looked perfectly bare. So, too, was the
other cart, positioned several yards to the right.

Already the crowd was dispersing. “What did we just see
happen?” Emily turned to gauge Stuart’s reaction in time to glimpse him
following Perry out through the door.

JOANNE LEWIS’S ENTRY
to
the room caused the usual lull in the conversation, her sleek gabardine suit
not quite crossing over the line of professional etiquette. Retained with the
Washington, D.C. lobbying firm Smolowitz & Leininger, Coherent’s acting
chief counsel took her seat, smiled across the table at Stuart and tossed back
her hair.

Seated beside Ralph Perry at the conference table was CLI’s
chief financial officer, along with Steve Reedy, Stuart’s predecessor in charge
of the Project. Ralph Perry appeared to Stuart’s eye pale, perhaps even ill. It
was obvious that the picture was bleaker than what Perry had painted. He would
certainly expect delays and burdensome technical problems plaguing any
‘tele-transportation’ project worthy of the name. That these were inevitably
quantum related could not, however, justify the monetary black hole draining
the company’s coffers faster than even the spend thrifty Department of Energy
was prepared to replenish. As a consequence of CLI falling behind on key
milestones, the government contract stipulated that progress payments be
‘evaluated’ on a monthly basis until such time that CLI rectified their
problems. Meanwhile, the company was poised to report a serious quarterly loss.

“Okay...” Perry let out a breath. “Joanne?”

“I’ve got a bit of encouraging news,” their lobbyist began
cheerfully. “Your ‘friends’ appear to be applying some pressure—the ice at DOE
is beginning to thaw, as are those mixed signals coming from Senator Milner’s
office. His staff have supported us in the past, but until yesterday, I
couldn’t even get back onto their calendar.”

Perry mulled her appraisal. “Milner has the clout we’re
going to need. He’s the one I told you about, Stu, who replaced Wendell on that
green initiatives committee. And he chairs budget appropriations.”

“So I finally managed a meeting tomorrow with Kenneth
Hobbs, his senior aide.”

Perry narrowed his eyes. “You know, Milner did express his
desire to witness a demonstration. That might just be an opportunity to
orchestrate a little goodwill. I’m thinking of inviting him soon, so you ought
to feel free to bring it up.”

“Isn’t that a little bit risky?” Lewis studied Perry a
moment. “What if the test doesn’t work?”

Stuart looked at Perry and laughed.

“All right, ha, ha,” Perry said to Stuart. “Look, Joanne, we
don’t expect it to work, not by then. The idea is we bring him down here to
schmooze, show him what we’ve got, to demonstrate the earnest folks that we are.”

“I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“For Christ’s sake, everyone’s aware that we’re having
problems. Speaking of which, I almost hate to ask. When’s the next status
review?”

“With DOE? Three weeks.” Lewis leveled her gray eyes on
Stuart. “For my meeting with Hobbs in the morning, I’ll need to know exactly
how much program tinkering you think we’re going to need.”

“Exactly?” Stuart asked. He looked around at the others. “Legally
speaking, how exact do you need it?”

Lewis folded her arms but struggled to suppress a smile.

Stuart flashed her a grin and left it at that. He opened
his folder and passed to each of the others a copy of the hand-written charts
constructed last night after putting his daughter to bed. “You remember those
old blue-team, red-team competitive run-offs we used to do?”

Perry stared down at the charts, tapping his fingers. “They
ate up a lot of time and money.”

“They also produced results, if that’s what you want. Nothing
produces better than unleashing two opposing camps, each armed with a
sufficient level of talent, and allow a little competition to synthesize a
direction. I know it’s going to be expensive. Given the lack of clarity, I
don’t see that we have much choice.”

“Sounds sort of archaic,” Lewis offered.

“Keep going, Stu.”

Stuart proceeded to explain the three separate options he
had prepared with the help of his staff. The first was to continue down the
current path of further refining anode detector accuracy. With the exception of
Reedy, this option was the least favored by virtually all who were associated
with the Project. On the basis that recent testing and analysis had proved
ineffective, Stuart recommended they sideline further efforts.

“I’m still not convinced the software changes were properly
executed,” Reedy interjected. “Until we’re certain, I’d like to continue
studying it with a low level of activity.”

Reedy’s statement angered Stuart—continuing that effort was
not what the two had agreed. Ralph Perry fixed his stare at a point on the
table and listened, nodding occasionally as Reedy defended his position. Stuart
had decided that such a decision risked the diffusion of precious engineering
and said so. He privately recalled Thackeray’s words:
Reedy insists on
polishing the head of a pin.

Before Stuart could say anything more, Perry looked hard at
Reedy. “I’m afraid I agree with Stu. We’ve already spent nearly fourteen
million on that. We’re in no position to carry any sort of expensive insurance
policies. If we hit a wall later on, we’ll consider going back to examine it.”

Reedy only shrugged.

Angered by Reedy’s blatant disregard for their agreement, Stuart
breezed over the second option and that most favored by two key Swiss and
French scientists. Citing work performed at the CERN institute, both were
insisting on the need to develop more highly refined entanglement factors and
Podolsky-Bell constants—concepts which Stuart had not understood without a
heavy dose of tutoring. Even though the option’s cost and schedule alone
disqualified option two, the fact that both Reedy and Thackeray weighed in so
heavily against it accounted for most of what he needed to know. For at least
the time being, given his illiteracy of reducing quantum physics to practice, Stuart
had no choice but to rely almost totally on such inputs. At other times it
seemed that the more he understood, the more disturbed he became.