Paranoia (48 page)

Now what?
I
couldn’t
stop here, just feet from the entrance to the AURORA Project! Not this close!

I had to keep going.

The alarm went on,
hoo-ah, hoo-ah
, deafeningly loud, like an air-raid siren.

I pulled the spray can out of my overalls—a can of Pam spray, that aerosol cooking oil—then leaped up at the camera and sprayed the lens. I could see an oil slick on the glass eyeball. Done.

The siren blared.

Now the camera was blind, its optics defeated—but not in a way that would necessarily attract attention. Anyone watching the monitor would see the image suddenly go blurry. Maybe they’d blame the network wiring upgrade they’d been warned about. The blurred-out image probably wouldn’t draw much attention in a bank of TV monitors. That was the idea, anyway.

But now that careful planning seemed almost pointless, because they were coming, I could hear them. The same guards I’d just bamboozled? Different ones? I had no idea, of course, but they were coming.

There were footsteps, shouts, but they sounded far away, just background chatter against the ear-splitting siren.

Maybe I could still make it.

If I hurried. Once I was inside the AURORA laboratory, they probably couldn’t come after me, or at least not easily. Not unless they had some kind of override, which seemed unlikely.

They might not even know I was in there.

That is, if I could get in.

Now I circled the room, keeping out of camera range until I reached the other camera. Standing in its blind spot, I leaped up, sprayed the oil, hit the lens dead on.

Now Security couldn’t see me through the monitors, couldn’t see what I was about to try.

I was almost in. Another few seconds—I hoped—and I’d be inside AURORA.

Getting out was another matter. I knew there was a freight elevator there, which couldn’t be accessed from outside. Would Alana’s badge activate it? I sure hoped so. It was my only shot.

Damn, I could barely think straight, with that siren blasting, and the voices getting louder, the footsteps closer. My mind raced crazily. Would the security guards even know of the
existence
of AURORA? How closely held was the secret? If they didn’t know about AURORA, they might not be able to figure out where I was headed. Maybe they were just running through the corridors of each floor in some wild, uncoordinated search for the second intruder.

Mounted on the wall to the immediate left of a shiny steel door was a small beige box: an Identix fingerprint scanner.

From the front pocket of my overalls I pulled the clear plastic case. Then, with trembling fingers, I removed the strip of tape with Alana’s thumbprint on it, its whorls captured in traces of graphite powder.

I pressed the tape gently on the scanner, right where you’d normally put your thumb, and waited for the LED to change from red to green.

And nothing happened.

No, please, God
, I thought desperately, my brain scrambled by terror, and by the unbearably loud
hoo-ah
of the alarm.
Make it work. Please, God.

The light stayed red, stubbornly red.

Nothing was happening.

Meacham had given me a long session on how to defeat biometric scanners, and I’d practiced countless times until I thought I’d gotten it down. Some fingerprint readers were harder to beat than others, depending on what technology they used. This was one of the most common types, with an optical sensor inside it. And what I’d just done was supposed to work ninety percent of the time. Ninety percent of the time this goddamned trick
worked!

Of course, there’s the other ten percent
, I thought, as I heard footsteps thunder nearer. They were close, now, that much I knew. Maybe a few yards away, in the cubicle farm.

Shit, it
wasn’t
working!

What were the other tricks they’d taught me?

Something about a plastic bag full of water . . . but I didn’t have anything like a plastic bag with me. . . . What
was
it? Old fingerprints remained on the surface of the sensor like handprints on a mirror, the oily residue of people who’d been admitted. The old fingerprints could be re-activated with moisture. . . .

Yes, it sounds wacky, but no crazier than using a piece of tape with a lifted print on it. I leaned over, cupped my hands over the little sensor,
breathed
on it. My breath hit the glass, condensed at once. It disappeared in a second, but it was long enough—

A beep, sounding almost like a chirp. A happy sound.

A green light on the box went on.

I’d passed. The moisture from my breath had activated an old fingerprint.

I’d fooled the sensor.

The shiny steel door to Secure Facility C slid slowly open on tracks just as the other door behind me opened and I heard, “Stop right there!”

And: “Stay right there!”

I stared at the huge open space that was Secure Facility C, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My eyes couldn’t make sense of it.

I must have made a mistake.

This couldn’t be the right place.

I was looking at the area marked Secure Facility C. I was expecting laboratory equipment and banks of electron microscopes, clean rooms, supercomputers and coils of fiber-optic cable. . . .

Instead, what I saw was naked steel girders, bare unpainted concrete floors, plaster dust and construction debris.

An immense, gutted space.

There was
nothing
here.

Where was the AURORA Project? I was in the right place, but there was nothing here.

And then a thought came to me which made the floor beneath my feet buckle and sway:
Was there in fact no AURORA Project after all?

“Don’t move a fucking
muscle!
” someone shouted from behind me.

I obeyed.

I didn’t turn around to face the guards. I froze.

I couldn’t move if I wanted to anyway.

88

Slack-jawed, dizzy, I turned slowly and saw a cluster of guards, five or six of them, among them a couple of familiar faces. Two of them were the guys I’d scared off, and they were back, furious.

The security guard, the black guy who’d caught me in Nora’s office—what was his name, again? The guy with the Mustang? He was pointing a pistol at me. “Mister—Mister
Sommers?
” he gasped.

Next to him, in jeans and a T-shirt that looked like they’d been thrown on moments ago, his blond hair a tousled mess, was Chad. He was holding his cell phone. I knew at once why he was here: he must have tried to sign on, found that he was
already
signed on, and so he made a call. . . .

“That’s Cassidy. Call Goddard!” Chad bellowed at the guard. “Call the goddamned
CEO!
”

“No, man, that’s not the way we do it,” the guard said, staring, his gun still aimed at me. “Step
back,
” he shouted. A couple of other guards were fanning out to either side. He said to Chad, “You don’t call the CEO, man. You call the security director. Then we wait for the cops. That’s my orders.”

“Call the fucking CEO!”
Chad screamed, waving his cell phone. “I’ve got Goddard’s home number. I don’t
care
what time it is. I want Goddard to know what his goddamned executive assistant, this fucking
hustler
, did!” He pressed a couple of buttons on the phone, put it to his ear.

“You asshole,” he said to me. “You are so fucked.”

It took a long time before anyone answered. “Mr. Goddard,” Chad said in a low, deferential voice. “I’m sorry to call so early in the morning, but this is extremely important. My name is Chad Pierson, and I work at Trion.” He spoke a few minutes more, and slowly his malevolent grin began to fade.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

He thrust the phone at me, looking deflated. “He says he wants to talk to you.”

PART NINE
A
CTIVE
M
EASURES

Active Measures:
Russian term for intelligence operations that will affect another nation’s policies or actions. These can be either covert or open and can include a wide variety of activities, including assassination.

—
Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage

89

It was close to six in the morning when the security guards put me in a locked conference room on the fifth floor—no windows, only one door. The table was littered with scrawl-covered notepads, empty Snapple bottles. There was an overhead projector, a whiteboard that hadn’t been erased, and, fortunately, a computer.

I wasn’t a prisoner, exactly. I was being “detained.” It was made clear to me that if I didn’t cooperate, I’d be turned right over to the police, and that didn’t seem to be a very good idea.

And Goddard—sounding weirdly calm—had told me that he wanted to speak with me when he got in. He didn’t want to hear anything else, which was good, because I didn’t know what to say.

Later I learned that Seth had just made it out of the building, though without the truck. I tried e-mailing Jock. I still didn’t know how I could explain myself, so I just wrote:

Jock—

Need to talk. I want to explain.

Adam

But there was no reply.

I remembered, suddenly, that I still had my cell phone with me—I’d tucked it into one of my pockets, and they hadn’t found it. I switched it on. There were five messages, but before I could check my voice mail, the phone rang.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Adam. Oh, shit, man.” It was Antwoine. He sounded desperate, almost hysterical. “Oh, man. Oh, shit. I don’t want to go back in. Shit, I don’t want to go back inside.”

“Antwoine, what are you talking about? Start from the beginning.”

“These guys tried to break in your dad’s apartment. They must’ve thought it was empty.”

I felt a surge of irritation. Hadn’t the neighborhood kids figured out yet that there was nothing in my dad’s shithole apartment worth breaking in
for?

“Jesus, are you okay?” I said.

“Oh,
I’m
okay. Two of ’em got away, but I grabbed the slower guy—oh,
shit!
Oh, man, I don’t want to get in trouble now! You gotta help me.”

This was a conversation I really didn’t feel like having, not now. I could hear some kind of animal noise in the background, some sort of moaning or scuffling or something. “Calm down, man,” I said. “Take a deep breath and sit down.”

“I’m sittin’ on the motherfucker right now. What’s freaking me out is this fucker says he knows you.”

“
Knows
me?” Suddenly I got a funny feeling. “Describe the guy, could you?”

“I don’t know, he’s a white guy—”

“His face, I mean.”

Antwoine sounded sheepish. “Right now? Kinda red and mushy. My bad. I think I broke his nose.”

I sighed. “Oh, Jesus, Antwoine, ask him what his name is.”

Antwoine put down the phone. I heard the low rumble of Antwoine’s voice, followed immediately by a yelp. Antwoine came back on. “He says his name is Meacham.”

I flashed on an image of Arnold Meacham, broken and bleeding, lying on my dad’s kitchen floor under three hundred pounds of Antwoine Leonard, and I felt a brief, blessed spasm of pleasure. Maybe I
had
been watched when I’d dropped by my dad’s apartment. Maybe Meacham and his goons figured I’d hidden something there.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “I promise you that asshole’s not going to cause you any more trouble.” If I were Meacham, I thought, I’d go into the witness protection program.

Antwoine now sounded relieved. “Look, I’m really sorry about this, man.”

“Sorry? Hey, don’t apologize. Believe me, that’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard in a long time.”

And it would probably be the last.

I figured I had a few hours to kill before Goddard would show up, and I couldn’t just sit there anguishing over what I’d done, or what would be done to me. So I did what I always do to pass the time: I went on the Internet.

That was how I began to put some things together.

90

The door to the conference room opened. It was one of the security guards from before.

“Mr. Goddard’s downstairs at the press conference,” the guard said. He was tall, around forty, wore wire-rim glasses. His blue Trion uniform fit badly. “He said you should go down to the Visitors Center.”

I nodded.

The main lobby of Building A was hectic with people, loud voices, photographers and reporters swarming all over the place. I stepped out of the elevator into the chaos, feeling disoriented. I couldn’t really make out what anyone was saying in the hubbub; it was all background noise to me. One of the doors that led to the huge futuristic auditorium kept opening and closing. I caught glimpses of a giant image of Jock Goddard projected on a screen, heard his amplified voice.

I elbowed my way through the crowd. I thought I heard someone call my name, but I kept going, moving slowly, zombielike.

The auditorium’s floor sloped down to a glittering pod of a stage, where Goddard was standing in a spotlight, wearing his black mock turtleneck and brown tweed jacket. He looked like a professor of classics at a small New England college, except for the orange TV makeup on his face. Behind him was a huge screen on which his talking head was projected five or six feet high.