The God Wave (25 page)

Dice paled. “Do you think you were followed?”

“If we were, we lost him. We drove through a parking structure and out again . . . twice.”

Lanfen nodded. “Dice and I took separate cars and separate routes. I went home, parked my car, and took my motorbike.”

“Wow, you guys certainly weren't taking any chances,” Chuck said, slightly impressed.

“We've taken enough chances with these people,” Mini stated.

So they ordered pizza. They stayed in the kitchen because Lorstad's gadget (and Chuck prayed to God he was using it right) seemed to say they were bug-free there. Feeling very special ops himself, Chuck started an action movie on the TV in his living room, just in case. It would drown out their conversation and really make it seem like they were all there just hanging out. They talked for two hours, comparing notes and wondering what, if anything, they could do. They decided Dice would be
the best person to talk to Matt since he'd worked with him longest and knew him best. Dice was demonstrably unhappy about that, but he had to admit it made sense.

It was pretty much the only thing that did.

THEY MADE UP A SCRIPT
of safe questions and put the call on speakerphone, using Dice's cell. Dice sat at the end of the peninsula in Chuck's gourmet kitchen and sweated even though the fall evening was balmy. Everyone else held their breath.

“Hey, Matt,” Dice said. “You still in the office?”

“No, I'm home. What's up?”

“I want to talk to you about something that I . . . I'm not sure should bother me.”

“You aren't sure it should bother you? What are you talking about?”

“At Deep Shield the other day, they had me in to fix a gyro component from one of their new bots. They wouldn't let me see the bot. They wouldn't let me see the whole brain case. They took out the CPU before they let me get into the gyro.”

“And you want to know if that level of secrecy should bother you?”

“Something like that.”

“They're the government, Dice. They're professional paranoids.”

“Yeah, about that—which branch of the government are they exactly?”

“Does it matter?”

“That depends on why they are hiding things from us.”

“Were you able to fix the problem?”

Dice considered how honest he should be. “I'm not really sure,” he said carefully. “I suggested what might be causing the problem, but I have no way of knowing if I'm right. I have no way of testing my hypothesis.”

He could almost hear Matt's shrug. “So let them test it. That's what they signed up for—to take our designs and fine-tune them for different applications.”

“Someone told me they've built bots with tank treads.”

“Who told you that?”

Was he imagining a sudden sharpness to Matt's tone? He glanced up at the four others sitting around the table. They wore almost identical expressions of concern.

“One of the tech aides. I don't know his name.”

“Then I guess it's not such a big secret after all if a tech aide knows about it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you're right. Hey, um, just out of curiosity, why did you fire the gardening service?”

“I what? The . . . I didn't fire the gardening service. Why would I do that?”

“That's kind of what we—I was wondering.” Dice rolled his eyes, but the slip had been made.

“We? We who?”

Dice glanced up; his sweating increased threefold. Mini caught his eye and pointed to herself.

“Um, Mini, actually. She—uh, she came into the lab this evening to ask Chuck if he'd fired the garden guys. She'd developed a friendship with Jorge Delgado, the guy who ran the crew. Chuck didn't know anything about it.”

There was a significant silence on Matt's end of the line. When he spoke again, his voice was distant, tentative. “Neither do I. I suppose the owners of the business park might have hired a new service.”

Mini was shaking her head vigorously, making her short, coppery curls dance.

“Yeah,” Dice said. “You're probably right. It was probably the park association. It's sort of odd they didn't tell us, though, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” said Matt. “It is sort of odd at that. Has Chuck said anything to you about any of this?”

“Chuck? Not really. He's mentioned that the increased security is taking some getting used to.”

“Well, I'm afraid he's just going to have to get used to it.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Um, one more thing. Are we—this is going to sound really stupid and paranoid—but are we under surveillance?”

“What's Chuck been telling you?”

Startled, Dice glanced across the table at Chuck and felt a swift surge of anger. “Chuck? Chuck hasn't been telling me a damned thing—which is about par for the course, I guess. You sure as hell don't tell me anything about anything. Are you really unaware of the kind of crap that's been going on at the shop, or are you just stonewalling?”

Chuck had gone pale, and Eugene was making a “calm down” gesture with both hands. Mini looked vaguely stunned; Lanfen looked grim but determined, as if willing Dice on.

“Why would I do that? What's gotten into you, Dice?”

“What's gotten into
me
? What about
you,
Matt? It's like you have tunnel vision, solely focused on keeping your sweet deal going. Nothing's gotten into
me
. Nothing but the perfectly normal, rational desire to do the work I love in an atmosphere that isn't toxic.”

There was a long pause before Matt asked, “Is it really that bad?”

Dice blew out a gust of air. “Well, maybe I'm exaggerating a little. But dammit, Matt, the level of secrecy and security they've got in place—”

“Is necessary, Dice. We're dealing with Second Amendment stuff here—the security of a free state.”

Dice felt the absurd desire to laugh. “Trust you to come up with a new take on the Second Amendment.”

“It's not a new take. In great part that's what the Second Amendment is about—keeping the state free from the predations of its enemies. That's also what General Howard is about. Protecting the United States from whatever threatens it.”

“What about the Fourth Amendment? Due process?”

“You're starting to sound like Chuck now. Are you sure you haven't talked to him about any of this?”

Dice glanced up at the neuroscientist and grimaced. He was a dreadful liar and knew it. “A little. I was there—you know—when Mini told him about the gardeners.” That much was true.

“DON'T TALK TO HIM ABOUT
it anymore, okay? It just gets him all worked up. I need to keep him calm and out of the way. You understand.”

“Oh, yeah. I do. I guess I'll see you Monday then.”

“See you Monday,” Matt echoed and rang off.

Dice sat and stared at his cell phone blankly for a moment.

“Keep me calm and out of the way?” repeated Chuck.

Eugene shook his head. “Definitely don't like the sound of that. I mean, it sounds like you're a threat to Howard or something.”

Unexpectedly, Chuck laughed. “More likely I'm just an irritant.”

“No,” Dice said, very serious. “Don't trivialize it. Everything we've seen from them indicates they have unimaginably deep pockets and a lot of leeway where the law is concerned. I don't think putting your contractors under surveillance and bugging their offices and replacing their gardening crew with agents is strictly legal, but who you gonna call?”

Chuck frowned and raised a hand to his shirt pocket, where Lorstad's card was tucked away, but shook his head and said, “I have no idea who to call.”

“Maybe we should find out,” said Lanfen. “Maybe we should
try to find out what General Howard's chain of command is. Just in case things get really uncomfortable.”

“As opposed to now,” asked Eugene, “when we're meeting secretly—we hope—and suspect we've been followed and bugged?”

“They're isolating us,” said Mini softly. “Replacing our security team, our gardeners, our maintenance people with people they can trust.”

“Which sort of makes sense,” said Dice, “when you consider how groundbreaking what we're doing is and how important they think it is.”

Mini glared at him. “You're defending them?”

“No. Just trying to see things from their point of view. They're focused. Really, really focused on the kinetics program. I think organizations like that tend to lose track of anything outside that focus. It's something we all do as individuals. It's something all of us in this room do. I've seen it. But when an organization with a lot of money and power does it . . .”

“So what can we do?” asked Eugene. He looked at Chuck as if he expected the Ph.D. in neuroscience to go all Nick Fury and call in the superhero brigade.

Chuck leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, his face held a look Dice had rarely seen on it—a resolve that maybe wasn't up to steely, but it was pretty solid-looking all the same. “All right, look. I'm going to try to find out if there isn't a higher power that Howard answers to. Someone who might rein him in a bit.”

“We could keep asking our Deeps,” said Mini. “Maybe one of them will slip up and tell us something useful. There's this young corporal in my group who seems more open than the others.”

“No.” Chuck shook his head. “I don't want any of you to get yourselves or any of their folks in trouble with Howard. I have
a feeling anyone who slips up and tells us something we aren't supposed to know will be reprimanded pretty severely—at best. I'll take that on.” He turned to Lanfen. “Can you get inside again, do you think? Get a better idea of what they're doing?”

She looked scared for a moment but quickly composed herself. She and Chuck were like bookends—purpose personified. Dice might have laughed if the situation were not so serious.

“I'll do it. I've been thinking . . . Well, I have an idea.”

She didn't want to expand on that at the moment, so they parted company, everyone carrying foil-wrapped pizza and acting as if they'd just left a party. If any of them were followed home, they didn't see the tail.

Dice wondered, if Deep Shield was so good, if they would ever
see
a tail again.

General Howard called Matt early Saturday morning, waking him out of a sound sleep. “We need to talk, Dr. Streegman.”

Despite his irritation at being awakened by business on a weekend, Matt chuckled. “Are you breaking up with me, General?”

“Please take this seriously, Doctor.”

“Take what seriously, Leighton? Why are you calling at this ungodly hour?”

“Are you aware that a group of your colleagues got together yesterday evening at Dr. Brenton's house?”

What the hell?
“What? They threw a party without me? How dare they?”

“I'm going to ignore your inappropriate humor, Doctor. It may have been a party. It may have been something else.”

Matt sat up, pushing aside his covers. He vaguely noticed that his pajama bottoms had a hole at the knee. He poked at it with a fingernail. “What else could it have been? My colleagues social
ize all the time. Hell, Eugene and Mini are practically in each other's pockets, and I'm pretty sure Chuck is sweet on a woman who could kick his butt six ways from Sunday.”

“That was pretty much the attendance at the party. The only one you missed was Dr. Kobayashi.”

“So?” Matt asked. A moment later the full implications of what Howard was saying hit him like a giant water balloon. He stopped worrying about the hole in his pajamas. “Wait a minute . . . how do you know who was there? You have them under surveillance? And me? You have me under surveillance?”

“For your own protection, Matt. Consider how valuable you might be to foreign interests who discover our involvement with you. You would go from a possibly crackpot bunch of entrepreneurs to a military asset overnight.”

A military asset. Is that what we are now?
“Our own protection? If you're so concerned about our protection, why are you asking me about an after-hours party some friends had?”

“I am asking you precisely because you were not on the guest list. I find that odd, don't you?”

Matt opened his mouth to make a snarky comeback but changed his mind. “As it happens, I was on the guest list. I was just so exhausted last night and had some work to do on a paper I'm writing for the American Mathematical Society. I begged off. Besides, you can only watch
The Princess Bride
so many times before you start reciting the dialogue in your sleep.”

There was a brief hesitation on the other end of the line. “Then you knew about the gathering?”

“Yeah, I knew. General, you need to get out more. You're beginning to sound a bit paranoid.”

The general ignored that observation. “Your partner is an idealist, Dr. Streegman. As nice as that is in concept, it can be
extremely dangerous in practice. The next time Charles Brenton has a party at his house, I strongly recommend you attend. He bears watching.”

“Chuck? He's harmless.”

“No one's harmless once you let your guard down.”

After the general had hung up, Matt sat back against the headboard and reviewed the conversation. The
party
at Chuck's didn't bother him in and of itself. What bothered him a great deal was the certain knowledge that Dice had called him from there with his concerns about Deep Shield surveillance, probably with the other members of the group listening in.

Matt swore. He'd thought at the time that the connection sounded a bit hollow. He'd chalked it up to a bad signal. Now he realized he must have been on speakerphone, so everyone could hear both sides of the conversation.

He catapulted out of bed and scrambled for a quick shower. He needed to get to Chuck before his partner could throw another “party.” If General Howard thought there was some sort of subversive undercurrent at Forward Kinetics, who knew what he'd do to stomp it out?

CHUCK WAS WELL AND TRULY
worried now—as much by his own state of mind as by the situation they were in. He'd called in a few favors from Johns Hopkins alums and gotten phone numbers for the CIA and an office at the Pentagon. Those got him at least a bit behind the public curtain of the two organizations. He had his own high-level clearance in at the FBI, having done some neurological studies for them and having participated in training two teams of profilers, and he would exploit that, too.

He had called the Pentagon contact first and said he was an associate of General Leighton Howard at Deep Shield, and he needed to speak to someone about the robotics program. He
drew a complete blank at that office but did get shunted to someone in a loftier position, an assistant director of technology. There he took a different tack. He was a defense contractor considering working with General Howard's outfit. He wanted to make sure Deep Shield was legitimate. That had the virtue of being at least partially true.

More blanks. The assistant director bumped him to his director, to whom he repeated his story, and the director put him on hold for fifteen minutes before coming back and requesting his name and a number where he could be reached. He gave it reluctantly, though he didn't actually expect they'd try to contact him.

He had just gone through the same exercise with the contact at the CIA when Matt rang his front doorbell. To say he was surprised to see his business partner standing on his doorstep at nine thirty on a Saturday morning was an understatement. In the time they'd been working together, Matt had not once come to his house. They were business partners and colleagues—collaborators, not friends.

Chuck's surprise was followed swiftly by chagrin then wariness when he saw the look in Matt's eyes. “What's up?”

“That's what I was about to ask you, Doctor.” Matt glanced back out at the street, wriggled his shoulders, and stepped into Chuck's spacious foyer. “Nice,” he said, glancing around. “Tudor, huh? You alone?”

“Yes. What's wrong?”

Matt uttered a bark of laughter. “Who said anything was wrong? Coffee?” He nodded toward the kitchen, from which the aroma of a freshly brewed pot wafted.

“Sure. Come on into the kitchen.”

Chuck led the way, moving to the counter to pour Matt a cup of coffee. Matt, meanwhile, stood staring through the French doors that opened out onto the patio, ostensibly admiring the
wisteria-draped pergola. He was frowning and fidgeting with his pocketed car keys.

Chuck put a mug of coffee on the kitchen table and sat down with his own half-full mug. “Care to tell me what's got you so unnerved?”

“That obvious, is it?”

“Yes.”

Matt sat down and picked up his coffee. He took a sip before speaking again. “General Howard called me this morning. Early. Something about a party you threw at your house last night.”

Chuck tried to hide his sudden unease but knew he failed abysmally. He had one of those faces that give up their secrets before a person even has a chance to remember what they are. “Is that what he called it—a party?”

“Yes, but he also called it a meeting. I called it a party. I told him I'd been invited but had work to do. I told him we socialize all the time.”

Chuck turned that over in his head for a moment, then said, “He at least suspects that isn't true, I'm sure. He's been watching us, after all.”

Matt's gaze jerked to Chuck's face. “You knew?”

“That's sort of what the meeting was about. Dice, Euge, Lanfen, and Mini have all had . . . experiences with Deep Shield surveillance.”

“Jesus Lord, Chuck! Weren't you afraid Howard's guys might be listening in?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Let's just say I can be sure and let it go at that.”

“Let me guess—Dice noodled some high-tech jamming device for you.”

Chuck said nothing. He was frankly (and dismally) afraid that
if he showed Matt the jammer his mysterious visitor had given him, he'd insist on turning it over to the general.

“Howard is suspicious of you, my friend,” Matt told him. “He thinks you might be plotting behind closed doors.”

“He's worried about what
I'm
doing behind closed doors?”

“If you're plotting something, yes.”

“We're not ‘plotting.' Our staff came to me because they are understandably concerned about the fact that they're being spied on and that Deep Shield has started to . . . to manipulate our environment. Without our permission.”

“They need to protect us, Chuck.”

Matt had lowered his voice and leaned in across the table, though Chuck was now certain there was no one listening. Lorstad's gizmo had apparently worked as advertised. That was something, at least.

“Do you understand why?” Matt asked. “We've become a very important asset to them. They want to make sure that some foreign organization doesn't swoop in and offer us a deal we can't refuse. We would be a tremendously potent military asset to another country or to a terrorist organization.”

Chuck made a wry face. “Is that what Howard told you?”

“Yes. Don't you think he's right?”

“Probably. But doesn't it bother you to go from being a person to being a
military asset
? It bothers the hell out of our staff.”

“Is that what this is all about? Well, set their minds at ease, okay? Howard is just trying to protect important human resources from becoming prey.”

Chuck did not miss the rhetorical shift. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

Chuck opened his mouth to tell Matt what Lanfen had seen at Deep Shield but checked himself.

Matt caught his hesitation. “What?”

“I called a contact at the Pentagon to ask about Deep Shield. I must've talked to half a dozen people, two at the director level. They've never heard of it.”

Matt sat back in his chair. “Well, of course they haven't. Or at least they wouldn't tell you if they have. It's top secret.”

“The director of technology was asking
me
questions about them, Matt. The CIA said they had no idea who these guys were and—”

Matt stood, setting his coffee mug down with a sharp thump. Coffee sloshed onto the table. “Good grief, Chuck. You're as paranoid as the general. Get a grip. They do classified work. Would you tell some cold caller all your secrets?”

“Paranoid? I'm paranoid?” Chuck forgot his reservations about full disclosure. “Matt, Lanfen discovered they're hiding a small army of robots they've been making on their own. Robots they've been taking pains to conceal even from Dice.”

“So? They're experimenting with different forms. We expected that, didn't we?”

Chuck took a deep breath. This was going nowhere good. He let the breath out and shook his head, feigning chagrin. “Yeah. Yeah, we did expect that. You're right. Of course you're right. The team is just being . . . hypersensitive. I'll try to talk them down.”

“Will you?” Matt's eyes shone with relief. “Good, because they'll listen to you. Even Dice thinks I'm too cozy with Howard.”

“There's an image,” murmured Chuck. “Yeah, sure. I'll talk to them. First thing Monday.”

“Good,” said Matt. “Good. Maybe even before then if you can. Maybe you should throw another party this weekend.” He seemed to pull himself together then and left Chuck sitting at the table with his cell phone poised to call the FBI.

THE ALPHA ZETAS, AS THEY
jokingly called themselves, had formed a tight clique within the ranks at Forward Kinetics. The better to protect themselves, Sara thought. They watched their watchers intently and compared notes on a daily basis. They were not afraid of surveillance; Tim had found ways to defeat the cameras at the software level while Mike could make listening devices go belly-up mechanically and make cameras simply look the wrong way. Sara was learning to employ both forms of manipulation on her own but had nowhere near their facility with it.

Mike was especially ruthless when it came to the Deeps' surveillance equipment. He'd found bugs at his house and was so riled by having his family's private space invaded, he'd caused several of their devices to die of “natural” causes.

“Watching me is one thing,” he'd told her. “Watching my wife and kids is something else. They're not part of this classified crap, and they're not gonna be.”

If the Deeps had any idea that their occasional equipment failures and communication snafus were anything more than random glitches, they didn't say as much, and the zetas were careful not to tip their hands. They stuck slavishly to the program, teaching only what they were contracted to teach: basic, bonehead manipulation of Dice's patented servos and software engines with a high-level Kobayashi module that facilitated their work. It was perhaps no surprise then that none of the Deeps—not one—could work directly with the hardware or software.

The alpha zetas communicated with the other members of the team—the beta zetas, as Sara had come to think of them—often enough to know they were also working directly with their devices, and they were no more sanguine than the alphas about the Smiths or the Deep Shield Humvee with its blacked-
out windows or the government facility none of them had ever seen the outside of.

“It could be under the freaking White House,” Tim had commented one day. “Or the Washington Monument. Wouldn't it be crazy if it's under the Washington Monument?”

The chilling news that Eugene had found himself being tailed was enough to send Sara into Chuck's office on a Wednesday afternoon to see if she could get some sense of his reaction to all this. Once she got there, she was at a loss for what to say.

They stared at each other like a pair of startled owls for a moment before Sara said, “So do you have any idea how many more teams of trainees we're going to see before the contract is complete?”

Brenton blinked at her, pulling off his wire-rimmed glasses. “Actually, I'm not one hundred percent sure, but I'd imagine at least two more.”