Critical Mass (38 page)

She pulled out her iPhone and typed in a URL. “Look—this is the photograph of it they use in electronics texts.”

I bent over the tiny screen. The web page showed the Metargon-I’s interior, which didn’t appear much different from what we could see in the scale model.

“Looks like a deep-fat fryer,” Mr. Contreras said. “Like what my pa used to make French fries—he was a fry cook at the Woolworth’s in McKinley Park.”

I thought it looked more like the potholders we used to make for our mothers in grade school art. “Where were the equations you mentioned?”

Alison slid the image to the right and pointed to the top left corner. “He wrote them in this tiny hand, not like his usual writing—I guess in a battlefield he had to conserve paper. And then there was a name next to the grid, someone called Speicher. He was probably one of Granddad’s buddies, Dad says. I always picture him talking over the design with his buddy, and then his buddy dying, so Granddad included his name when he drew up the schematic.”

She tapped the screen again and moved to the lower right side of the image. “In this corner there was a circle with a design in it. Interlocking triangles and maybe a sunburst; it was kind of hard to make out. Dad couldn’t tell me what it meant, so I thought it was part of his tribute to his dead friend. I mean, ‘Speicher’ could be a Jewish name, and the design could be a deconstructed Star of David.”

“A little circle with triangles inside?”

My voice came out queerly, even to my own ears. Alison and Mr. Contreras stared at me.

I took the iPhone from her and went to the Virtual-Bidder site, to King Derrick’s effort to sell the details of the Innsbruck reactor.

“Was it like that?” I pointed to the small circle at the bottom of the FOI document that I’d noticed yesterday.

“It might be.” Alison peered at the screen. “This is so grainy I can’t be sure.”

She went to her grandfather’s desk and fished a magnifying glass from one of the cubbyholes. When she held it over her phone, we could see jagged lines like a child’s drawing of the corona of the sun.

We heard Cordell Breen on the stairs just then. Alison went to the door of the workshop to meet him. “Look, Dad.” She held out the phone. “Isn’t this queer? This is the same logo that is on the BREENIAC sketch.”

Breen snatched the phone from her and stared at it. “What the—what is this? Where did you find it?”

I told him about “King Derrick’s” auction, now shut down. “Just part of my ineffectual search for Martin Binder. Until he was murdered two weeks ago, Derrick Schlafly was his mother’s landlord.”

Breen used his thumbs on the screen with the speed of a teenager. “I don’t get it. This is an FOI document about the Nazi nuclear weapons program. This makes no sense at all for the same image to be on it and on the Metargon-I sketch.”

He used his thumbs some more. “I’m e-mailing the URL to our research department, see if they can get a handle on it. I owe you an apology, Ms. Warshawski—you were ahead of my whole team on this one. Thanks for sharing. If we turn up anything, I’ll let you know.”

A buzzer sounded. Mr. Contreras and I both were startled, which made Alison and her father laugh.

“We have computer monitors for the house up here,” Alison explained. “Dad and I both like to work up here when we’ve got a tough problem to solve, but we’re so remote that we don’t hear anything in the house. Mother insisted that we install them.”

I hadn’t noticed the monitors, but I saw now that there was a modern worktable against the far wall, behind the row of Metargon
machines. I walked over and saw the gates we had come through. A car was on the far side. We couldn’t see the face behind the steering wheel, but the license plate was being photographed.

Someone inside the house was speaking through an intercom, which garbled her voice. We heard the driver say that he would wait for Breen, either outside the gates or inside the house, but that he wasn’t going to leave without seeing him.

“You listening in on one of your fancy gadgets, Cordell?” The electronics flattened the voice into a quack. “I’m tired of you hiding behind the wall of secretaries and pit bulls you built out of Edward’s little machine.”

“Dad, who is it?” Alison cried.

Breen made a shushing motion and spoke into an invisible mike. “We don’t have anything to talk about. You turned a trivial event into the crime of the century and you want to drag me down into a pit with you, but I’m not going there, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend, Breen, not for one second. Someone using my name was digging around in the university archives. If that was you—”

Breen pressed another button, cutting off the man in the car, and switching to a room in the house where a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt was standing. “Imelda, let him in. Tell Durdon to take him around the back; I’ll meet him there in a minute.”

He turned to his daughter. “Sunny, you up to driving Ms. Warshawski and her friend home? I need Durdon here. This is a crackpot who’s been threatening me over patent infringements. It’s outrageous that he’s stalked me here at home and I need Durdon’s big shoulders to make it clear this is the last time he does that.”

Alison demanded that he call the family’s lawyer. Breen laughed easily. “Sweetheart, the legal beagles know all about this guy. I want to make it clear to him personally that he can’t charge into our home as if we’re a public meeting. In a business like ours, there are always going
to be people who think you took their ideas and this jerk is one of them. You get our guests back to the city, okay?”

Alison agreed, reluctantly. She sent Mr. Contreras and me down a third staircase that led to an underground garage; she wanted to stop to tell her mother where she was going.

My neighbor and I went through a room the size of an auditorium that held a golf practice range, a full-sized pool table, and a small basketball court. On the other side was the garage, which was as immaculate as the rest of the house. The cars ranged from the Maybach sedan to two convertibles, a Miata and a Lotus, which I figured as Breen’s testosterone car. A Land Rover and a 1939 Hudson completed the collection.

When Alison rejoined us, her face was still troubled. “Mother doesn’t know anything about this man, although Dad isn’t very good at letting her in on company business. Now that I’ve been away from home for a few years, I’m beginning to see how hard it is on her.”

She pointed to the Land Rover. “Mother told me to take this. The Miata’s mine, and I adore it, but one of you would have to curl up in the trunk. Probably you, V.I.; you’re more flexible.”

She was trying to lighten her mood; Mr. Contreras and I both laughed obligingly. We climbed into the Land Rover, me in the backseat. Alison hit a button on the SUV’s steering wheel and the garage door opened onto a steep drive at the back of the house. I looked around for the car that had shown up on the monitor, but didn’t see it.

Another tap on the steering wheel opened the gates at the end of the drive, letting us back onto the narrow road that skirted the ravine. The lighting was bad, but Alison drove so fast that Mr. Contreras demanded she slow down.

“There’s a cop car at the light up ahead, case you hadn’t noticed,” he added.

At the red light on Sheridan Road, I looked at the squad car, but the
officer inside was focused on his tablet, not on reckless drivers. As Alison turned south onto Green Bay Road, the squad car turned right, toward the Breen house. I could see the markings, dark brown on tan, but couldn’t read the jurisdiction. Had Breen felt threatened enough by his visitor that he’d called the local cops?

35

PHISHING

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
we were back on the Edens Expressway heading south that I brought up the logo we’d seen on the Innsbruck reactor report.

“You realize, don’t you, that it’s that little design that must have upset Martin when he was here for your picnic,” I said.

“I know,” Alison agreed, her voice small. “But that doesn’t mean he stole Granddad’s sketch.”

“He might have borrowed it,” I suggested. “Here’s the thing: his mother stole a set of papers from his grandmother about seven years ago. Martin saw them at the time, but he was only thirteen or so; they didn’t mean anything to him. Those little triangles on the BREENIAC sketch made him remember the same design on those old documents. He could have taken the sketch down to where his mother was living, to compare it with the papers she’d stolen. After seeing his mother, he knew he had to go into hiding. Whether it’s because he’s afraid of Derrick Schlafly’s killers or some other reason, we won’t know until we find him.”

Alison swerved around a line of cars, accelerating to eighty.

“Slow down, gal,” Mr. Contreras said. “Vic don’t mean you no harm, and driving like that could get us all killed. It don’t matter so much at my age, but you got your life in front of you.”

“Mine, too,” I murmured.

“I thought Vic was my friend,” Alison protested.

“I am your friend,” I said sharply. “But we can’t get anywhere if I have to play ‘Let’s pretend.’ You know Martin, I don’t. I believe you when you say he wouldn’t be interested in selling it or the Fitora code. He’s not a guy who cares about money, he cares about his work: I get that. I’m just saying he might have taken the sketch, fully planning to return it. Is that so awful?”

“I guess not,” she agreed in a subdued voice. “But where could he be, after all this time?”

Her father’s odd reaction when I’d said he, too, was clueless about Martin’s whereabouts, unless he’d shoveled him into a hole in the ground, came back to me. It wasn’t so much that he’d shown alarm as that he’d been taken off-guard. Surely Cordell Breen hadn’t murdered Martin. But what about Durdon, the muscle who could make it clear to late-night callers that they needed to stay strictly away? Would he murder on Breen’s orders?

“Tell me about Durdon,” I said. “Is that a full-time job, driving for your dad?”

Alison seemed happy to change the subject. “Driving wouldn’t keep him busy full-time, not when all three of us like to get around on our own. He’s a good mechanic, so he looks after all the cars and keeps on top of the plumbing and stuff in the house.”

“It looks as though one of your machines fought back,” I said. “That was quite a bruise on his cheek.”

“That was the first thing I saw when I came home this afternoon,” Alison said. “Durdon told me he’d been clumsy with one of the lifts in the garage.”

“Must’ve been lying there funny to take it on the side of his face like that,” Mr. Contreras said. “He could have got his whole face crushed.”

“Don’t!” Alison said. “It sounds terrible when you put it like that.”

“You’re close to him?” I asked.

“No,” Alison said slowly. “He’s been with us since I was little,
but—well, some of the staff, like Imelda, went out of their way when I was a kid, but Durdon, he always seems a bit—oh, like he’s polite because it’s his job, but he doesn’t really like me.”

“He lives in the house?” I asked.

“He and Imelda, she’s the housekeeper, they both have suites in the south wing. An outside contractor keeps up the grounds and Imelda has someone come in three days a week to do the heavy cleaning. Do you think someone from the cleaning service could have taken the sketch?”

“Something to keep in mind,” I said.

When she pulled up in front of our building, I asked if she thought she’d feel better spending the night with us, but she wanted to get back to Lake Forest; she was worrying about her mother.

“I ought to be getting ready to go back to Mexico,” she said. “But I kind of don’t feel like going until I see what’s—well, you know—Martin, the sketch—and there’s my mother—” She broke off unhappily.

Mr. Contreras gave her a rough embrace. “You just keep your chin up, Alison, leave the rest to Vic and me. We got your back, okay?”

She produced another gallant smile and hoisted herself back into the Land Rover. I went outside with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. It had been a long day and I was tired, but I tried to listen to my neighbor’s rambling: he’d had a long day, too.

Constance Breen had shown him her paintings while she worked her way through a bottle of chardonnay. “You’d think she might paint that gal of hers. Alison’s got the kind of face I’d like to hang on my wall, I told her. She laughed at that, said she’d do a portrait for me.”

He chewed it over in his mind, then added, “These pictures, they’re like they’re the inside of her head out there on a piece of canvas. Lots of gray paint with one spot of red, like it was a red dot of anger in the middle of her body.”

It was an impressive summary, which dovetailed with what Alison
had said, her mother feeling shut off in the Lake Forest mansion, away from other artists, her husband lost in the world of machines and money. Her daughter, too, at least the machine part. I wondered about Constance Breen’s relationship with Durdon, the driver-mechanic-muscle-man. Did she like him, trust him, sleep with him, keep him at arm’s length?

I finally went up to my own place, where I’d started the evening three hours ago. I went back to the DMV site to check the license plate of the car that had been outside the Breen gates when Cordell hustled us out of his mansion.

It belonged to a seventeen-year-old Honda. Which was registered to Julius Dzornen. My jaw dropped. Julius demanding an audience with Cordell Breen? I rubbed my aching eyes.

Cordell had been dismissive of Julius tonight for crying over what he called sarcastically “the crime of the century.” However, Julius’s reason for driving up to Lake Forest took Breen by surprise: he didn’t know someone had used Julius’s name to get into the library. That in itself was an odd thing—why had it made Julius angry enough to drive so far late at night? Perhaps he was drunk. Or it was the last straw, the final insult in a half-century of them?

More interesting were the little triangles on the BREENIAC and King Derrick documents. Breen had looked surprised when Alison showed him the design, but I wondered if what surprised him was my connecting those two dots. I was supposed to be the imbecile that he could run rings around while he chewed gum, texted and played the tuba.