Seven Grams of Lead (15 page)

“What else do we get to do here?” Mallery eyed the cart, on which a small scalpel blade gleamed in the light cast by the battery-powered lamp on the tent wall. Thornton thought he glimpsed squeamishness through her shell of poise.

“First, I’m going to remove the devices.” O’Clair snapped on an opaque white surgical glove. “Then, to minimize the chance of anyone detecting their removal, I’ll place the devices in this miniature Faraday tent.” Pulling on a second glove, he tapped the lunchbox. “After that, I’ll hustle them down the hall to my office; I’ve calculated that the capacitors store ten to twelve minutes of charge, meaning that once they’re out of your bodies and operating autonomously, I’ll have only that amount of time to track the signals.”

Mallery sucked at her lower lip. “What happens if the signals’ destination is the digital equivalent of a post office box?”

“We’ll get actual physical coordinates regardless. If it turns out to literally be a post office box, or, say, a storage container in the middle of nowhere rented anonymously by someone paying cash, we can still get a fix on other devices transmitting to that location, meaning we’ll be able to learn who else has eavesdropping devices implanted in their heads. From that we ought to be able to derive a single common denominator.”

Mallery dug her hands into her coat pockets. “But there may be hundreds of people with these devices in their heads. You wouldn’t have time to collect all of their coordinates.”

“Hundreds of people with devices wouldn’t be bad, for our purposes,” O’Clair said. “The hardware necessary to handle that much data would be hard to conceal.”

“What if the eavesdroppers get wind of what we’re doing and empty the place?”

“I’ll be monitoring cell phone tower data only. I can’t think of any reason they’d be able to detect that. In the worst-case scenario, if they did catch me and rolled up their data-storage facility immediately, we’d still have collected a trove of intel. Even if I could safely get the two of you into NSA headquarters, we couldn’t hope for better than that. And we could do
a lot worse, because by going to the agency, we would alert the eavesdroppers to our intentions, in which case they flip a switch and the devices will cease to transmit, end of story.”

“Reasonable,” Mallery said. “By the way, is this going to hurt?”

O’Clair indicated a pair of small, preloaded hypodermic needles, as well as two bigger ones with red plungers. “I’m going to use a local anesthetic to numb the area of the scalp around the device, so it shouldn’t hurt. But why don’t we find out on Russ?”

O’Clair tapped the top of the nearest stool. Thornton draped his coat over the back and settled onto the seat.

“If for whatever unforeseen reason this does hurt, let me know,” O’Clair said. “Just in case, I readied syringes with a minimal dose of instant-acting general anesthetic—you’d be out five minutes tops.”

O’Clair stepped directly behind Thornton, who’d given no thought to pain until now. He resolved to smile throughout the procedure, for Mallery’s sake. He felt a cold, damp swab pressed onto the skin behind his left ear. He recognized the tart scent of Betadine. The insertion of the needle didn’t hurt so much as surprise him, but the anesthetic flowed in like fire.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked O’Clair.

Not buying the bravado, Mallery blanched.

O’Clair poked with the scalpel. “Feel anything?” he asked.

“Only the stool,” Thornton said. True enough.

“Good, the local anesthetic has succeeded. Now I’m going to open the area.”

Thornton felt only slight pressure, first from the incision and, again, from the insertion of another instrument.

“Tweezers,” O’Clair told him.

With a faint clink, pincers clasped the device. O’Clair then extracted what looked like a grain of rice that had been steeped in marinade. He plunged it into a plastic cup full of a granular purple substance.

“Play sand,” he explained, withdrawing the empty tweezers from the cup and snapping on a lid. “I experimented with a few things, but it turns out this is just right to replicate the pressure the device is accustomed to within the scalp—in the event it senses pressure at all, I should say.”

“What if a change in pressure sends an alert that the devices have been removed?” Mallery asked.

“The only way to find out is to remove them.” O’Clair waved her over.

With the devices
in plastic cups in the ten-by-eight-by-four-inch Faraday container he’d cobbled together for the occasion, O’Clair hurried down the corridor to his office, leaving Thornton and Mallery in the lab. In the offices he passed, activity was minimal, here the odd unnatural fluctuation of shadows, there a faint click of a keyboard. Late on a nippy Sunday, even the most ardent workaholics—the science building had more than its share—could be found at home reading a book or cheering on the Giants.

O’Clair’s cell phone vibrated. He fished it from his pocket, not bothering to check the caller ID, just powering the thing off to avoid further distraction. Every second he wasted was that much less power in
the devices’ capacitors; one second might prove decisive in whether he pinpointed the destination of their transmissions.

He’d intentionally left the door to his office unlocked, which saved him nine or ten seconds now. Inside the spartan workspace, he set the homemade Faraday container onto his desk in front of his bulky university-issued Dell computer, which was playing a video of his son’s second grade class production of
The Thanksgiving Story.
O’Clair skipped his customary smile at the sight of Nathan in the role of Pilgrim number 3, the boy struggling to keep the brim of the Scotch-taped-together black poster-board hat from falling over his eyes. Earlier, O’Clair had cued up the Dell’s video player so that an eavesdropper might conclude that Thornton and Mallery were in the office along with their devices, and the captive audience of an overly proud father. The idea was to explain their silence.

“Beryl, why don’t you and Russ have a seat and enjoy the show?” O’Clair said, as if they were here. “It won’t take me more than a couple minutes to finish up.” For effect, he leaned across his desk and sent each of the guest chairs rasping over the carpet.

Dropping into his own chair, he unsnapped the Faraday container’s lid and removed the cups of purple play sand, placing each one onto its own coasterlike docking station wired to an effectively anonymous laptop computer he’d borrowed from a lab. Each
docking station contained a microprocessor-driven signal-isolation system.

Both bugs were transmitting. Good news. Their signals—the relationship between normalized power log
₁₀
N
²
and frequency log
₁₀
Hz—were clearly depicted on the laptop’s monitor as sound waves among a sea of similar waves. Unfortunately, it was a larger sea by half than O’Clair had estimated, meaning that identifying which two signals were generated by the bugs would require 50 percent more time than he’d allotted. He wished he’d contrived a visit to meet Thornton and Mallery in Nantucket—or anywhere other than Manhattan. A quiet Sunday afternoon notwithstanding, some 185,783 denizens of this part of the Upper West Side alone were talking on cell phones, texting, piloting radio-control helicopters, and so forth, with each electronic device generating a signal nearly identical to those of the listening devices.

Nevertheless the laptop might have enough time to find the right pair of signals. The frequency-detection and data-tracking software eliminated other waves in a fashion similar to a game of musical chairs. The wave-filled monitor faded to white, refreshing a moment later with 25,781 fewer waves; 160,002 remained. At this rate, O’Clair calculated, the program would isolate the twin signals generated here within—

The shrill ring of the desk telephone not only interrupted his thoughts, but raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He couldn’t remember the last time
anyone had called the landline. Certainly not on a Sunday. Between his cell and his landline at NSA, where he spent almost all of office hours, he had no reason to give out the Columbia number.

“Probably just a telemarketer,” he said for the benefit of his audience. Also probably true, he thought.

Stabbing at the lever on the base of the phone, he muted the ring. As soon as the laptop found the matching pair of waves, he would need to spring into a Jerry Lee Lewis act on the keyboard in order to trace them.

The laptop refreshed again, minus another 21,494 waves. A minute or so and O’Clair would be down to the winning pair. He counted the seconds under his breath if only to negate his inner voice, which was saying that this process was interminable.

Fifteen more seconds and the system had whittled the total to 63,034 waves. The software was learning from experience, thus picking up speed. As its author, O’Clair might have felt pride, but he had no room for anything but apprehension. Nine minutes and fifteen seconds had elapsed since he extracted Thornton’s device. Its capacitor couldn’t last much longer without a human host.

A rap at the door shook him. Someone in the hall. The chatty guard from down in the lobby, Raj, maybe, bringing a Giants-Redskins game update. O’Clair sat quietly, focused on the monitor, hoping whoever it was would go away.

The handle turned.

Dammit.
In his rush, O’Clair had forgotten to lock the door behind him.

The door opened a crack. Raj leaned his head in. He was panting, his face flushed. A big touchdown by the Giants, O’Clair figured—or nothing he had time to hear about. He kept his focus on the laptop.

Down to 5,629 waves.

“Doctor—”

“Can it wait, Raj?”

“Sarah’s trying to get you on the phone. Says it’s an emergency.” Raj backed into the hall, allowing O’Clair privacy.

O’Clair eyed the desktop phone. Incoming calls flashed on both lines. He’d also racked up three voice-mail messages. His ex-wife would call only if something had happened to Nathan. He snatched up the handset.

“Is Nathan okay?” he cried into the mouthpiece.

“He’s okay for now,” came the voice of a woman—or possibly the electronically altered voice of a man—that could have fooled Sarah’s friends. “And he will be as long as you give us the two devices.”

O’Clair’s breath froze in his chest. “Where is he?”

“The Madagascar building.”

It meant nothing to O’Clair, until he recalled Nathan’s mention of a soccer team trip to the Bronx Zoo.

“Apparently he wandered away from his pack, and he didn’t pay attention to the Do Not Enter signs,” the
voice continued. “Open the e-mail we just sent to your personal account, and you can see him for yourself.”

O’Clair swatted the space bar, freezing the video of the second-grade play on the university-issued computer. He clicked into his Gmail and opened the message titled
HI
,
DAD
! Activating the hyperlink in its text box opened streaming video of Nathan standing on a narrow concrete barrier that formed the border between two dark pools lit greenish yellow. Wearing his team’s replica Manchester United soccer jersey, the boy was trembling. A dark form floated across the surface of the water in the foreground.

“That’s a crocodile, eighteen feet from snout to tail,” said the voice. “The Madagascar building is closed until April for renovation. There’s no other human there now except my colleague with the stun baton that’s keeping the crocs from little Nathan—for now, and, we hope, for good. Your boy has absolutely blown us away with his mathematical ability.”

“How do I know this video is real-time?” O’Clair asked.

“Give me a word or phrase and we’ll have Nathan repeat it.”

“We’re going to Disney World after this.”

Over his computer’s tinny speakers, O’Clair heard a man repeat the phrase, the words resounding against the habitat’s damp walls. Nathan turned toward the camera. One of the overhead spotlights revealed his tears.

“We’re going to Disney after this,” he stammered. “Help me, Daddy!”

Agony clawed O’Clair’s intestines.

The woman said, “Now, Dr. O’Clair, take the listening devices and bring them to the service elevator room down the hall. Give them to a man who’ll answer to the name Mr. Kentucky? Got it?”

“Service elevator room, Mr. Kentucky, got it.” O’Clair eyed the laptop. The data streams had dwindled to just 78. Remove the plastic cups from the docking stations now and the entire extraction would be for naught: The capacitors in the listening devices would run out of charge, and the data captured to that point would essentially be reduced to a screenshot of jagged lines, the recipient impossible to track.

The sound of a splash snapped O’Clair’s attention back to the video feed from the zoo. Inches to Nathan’s left, a snout pierced the surface of the murky water. The boy backpedaled, arms flailing in an effort to keep from falling off the slippery balance beam. A pole entered the video camera’s frame, its tip producing a starburst and a blast of electrical static. With a growl, the crocodile submerged.

“Sixty seconds and our man walks out of the Madagascar building,” the woman told O’Clair. “Starting now.”

O’Clair’s mind was a beehive of panic.

On the laptop, a mere seven data streams remained.

“Fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight—”

Balancing the headset between jaw and shoulder, O’Clair pulled both cups containing the devices free of their docking stations.

“Good. Now, bring them to Mr. Kentucky, who’s waiting in the service elevator room at the end of the corridor, to your right, and around the corner. You have forty-nine seconds.”

O’Clair swiveled in his chair, rising swiftly, smashing a hip into the sharp edge of the steel-topped desk. He struggled to retain his grip on the two plastic cups, stacking them in one hand in order to yank open the door with the other.

He found the hallway deserted and silent. He burst into his practiced lope, needing just six or seven strides to reach the service elevator room, which was quiet but for the groans of the cables within the elevator shaft. Stacking the containers again, he plunged the lever handle, opened the door, then backed into the tiny concrete space that served as the service elevator landing. He nearly ran into its lone occupant, a stocky man with prematurely gray hair and a whisk broom of a mustache, both probably fake. The man wore a cigar-brown UPS jumpsuit and a pair of surgeon’s glasses, the lenses extending into loupes.