Pyramid Lake (12 page)

Thirty feet behind me, behind a rooftop air-conditioning unit, the small dish I had mounted lay hidden, giving me Internet access in defiance of every network security rule at Pyramid Lake. I needed it to stay live for six more days.

Life was about to get very complicated.

“Base security and MPs will need to be involved,” I said. “Hope you enjoyed that cigarette, Blake, because you just smoked away your TS clearance and your pension. And mine. And probably Cassie’s, too.”

“What?”

“Where the three of us are standing right now—where you’re going to have to tell them you saw
that
from… Remind me,
how
did we get up here, again?”

“That damn alarm you disabled…” Blake closed his eyes, and squeezed the rail with both hands.

“Actually, they’ll probably let Cassie slide. But for you and me, it’s time to get those commercial-world jobs lined up. Maybe you ought to quit—smoking, I mean.”

Cassie started to dial. “Security violations aren’t important right now. A person is dead.”

“No, wait. Wait a minute, please.” Blake stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and spread his hands. “Look, maybe I… maybe we
didn’t
see it from up here. Maybe we saw it from somewhere else instead—”

“Lie?” Cassie looked back at the legs, but she had stopped dialing, at least. “That doesn’t seem like a real sound idea under these circumstances.”

“She’s right,” I said. “They’ll be looking at the three of us very closely.” I walked away from them, across the rooftop, and they followed me to the far edge.

“Why would it matter where we saw it from?” Blake said. “What matters is that they find out who did it.”

I looked down into our parking lot, seeing what I expected to. “They’re going to interrogate us, Blake. As possible suspects.”

“But that makes no sense. Why would I be a suspect? Or you, or Cassie? Because we reported it? We don’t even know who that is.”

“Yes we do,” I said.

I crossed the roof again. Blake and Cassie joined me as I stared down at the legs—the black trousers. But any dark pants would look black like that when wet. Even gray pants.

Like the pair of gray pants I had last seen eighteen hours ago.

“Rich McNulty didn’t go home last night,” I said. “His car is in the same spot where he parked it yesterday. I think we’re looking at McNulty right now.”

H
uffing with exertion, Blake carried the three-foot cylindrical ashtray hugged to his chest. I felt bad for him. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. We went out the main doors and trooped along the side of the lab building.

“You’re not thinking clearly,” Cassie said, walking alongside him.

“Rich was my friend,” he said. “He wouldn’t have wanted me to lose my job.”

I trailed behind the two of them as we rounded the corner and the geyser’s plume came into view. The column of steam rose in the near distance, drifting through the fence toward us.

Blake put down the ashtray and leaned against the wall to catch his breath. His face contorted. “What kind of person could
do
something like that?”

“Did you?” I asked.

Cassie shoved my shoulder. “How can you even ask him that?”

I shrugged. Blake was old and slow, but he was a big guy. When I had monkeyed with PETMAN and made it dance, I had seen a moment of true rage on his face. It was something I had never seen before from him, but I knew that people were capable of hiding a lot—sometimes even from themselves.

Blake wiped his forehead. “So I was right
here
when I spotted him,” he said.

I shook my head. “No.”

“But I
do
come out here sometimes.” He pointed at old butts littering the ground. “See?”

“That’s disgusting,” I said. “The lake’s a wildlife sanctuary. Clean that up. Right now.”

“I’m calling,” Cassie said.

“Hold on,” I said. “I can’t watch this moron send himself to prison over a cigarette.”

They both turned to stare at me.

“Can you even
see
McNulty from here?” I asked.

“Oh, shit.” Blake pushed off the wall and headed for the fence. “Oh, shit, you’re right. But maybe I took a walk down toward the water while I was smoking…” With nervous strides, he lumbered in the direction of the lake.

Cassie shook herself in frustration and started to follow. I held her back by the elbow and leaned into her ear. “Would
you
hire him?”

She pulled away and stared at me with a strange expression.

“Seriously,” I said. “How’s he going to do in an interview? Maybe he’d fit in at Lockheed or Raytheon or some defense contractor like that, but
they
won’t hire him without a security clearance, either.”

Cassie continued to study my face with those big, expressive dark eyes. Her serious, probing gaze made me feel strange.

“You’re hiding something from me,” she finally said. “But you didn’t kill anyone.” She turned away, punched in a number, and raised the phone to her ear.

I walked a small distance from her, plugged my earbud headphones into my ears, and dialed a different number. “Security,” I said, and waited to be connected.

The kid who answered sounded half awake. “Yes, I know the damn fence is shorting out again—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Go wake up the base commander and get the MPs. Do it right now.”

“Who is this?”

“Don’t speak. Listen.” I checked the time. “You’ve got maybe forty minutes before the tribal police arrive. Send the MPs to the northwest corner of the lab building.”

“The DARPA one? Near the geyser?”

“Yeah. There’s a dead guy outside the fence, getting the full sauna treatment, and he’s probably one of ours.”

B
ack in the lab, I grabbed my MacBook and thrust my way into the server room. I sped between the curving rows of computer racks and dashed up the metal steps onto the catwalk that wound around tower 2—the tower housing all of Frankenstein’s hot-running networking switches and hardware. My high-tops banged against the aluminum grille flooring as I circled the catwalk and pounded up the steps to the next level.

Forty seconds later, I stood at the highest section of catwalk, five stories up. The server room remained empty below me. I tossed my laptop onto the top of the eight-foot-tall server rack beside me, grabbed the upper crossbar, and pulled myself up to the rim.

Standing balanced on the nineteen-inch-wide rim, I looked down into the center of the cylindrical tower. Cool air blew against my face, coming up through the circular void that dropped six stories through the tower’s tapered hourglass structure. The shaft continued through the wide gap in the floor to bottom out sixty feet below in the nest of network cables, high-voltage power lines, and cooling pipes that made up the supercomputer’s understory.

Outside, a few minutes earlier, Blake’s reaction had abruptly turned emotional. He had swung from disbelief to horror to depression with surprising speed, and Cassie had her hands full keeping him from doing anything stupid. Leaving the two of them alone together made me a little nervous. But I knew the MPs were on their way, so this was the only opportunity I would get.

I sat down cross-legged on the tower rim, invisible from below, and opened the lid of my MacBook.

I had a limited window of time—thirty minutes, tops—before Pyramid Lake turned into a five-ring circus. There was a lot I needed to get done before that happened.

Tunneling through Blake’s compromised workstations, I launched a brute-force attack on the encryption of the administrative subnet. The hum from Frankenstein’s server fans drifted up from below, rising in volume all around me as I focused more total processing power than most first-world countries could muster, onto cracking the encryption that protected McNulty’s computer.

Frankenstein’s metallic voice rumbled through the tower’s structure, rising above the loud whoosh of air. “Trevor, why are you agitated?”

“Don’t talk to me,” I said. “I’m not here right now.”

McNulty had signed the energy-efficient lighting requisition a month ago, and I still had the e-mail attachment. I brought up a digital version in Photoshop and used the trackpad to carefully cut out his signature. I faded the background to transparent and free-warped the image of the signature so it wouldn’t be identical to the source version.

In another window, I brought up the digital copy of my recent GPU-cluster upgrade requisition form. Nine million dollars of my approved grant money—Frankenstein’s money—was sitting idle in an account, blocked indefinitely by the lack of McNulty’s signature.

To help my daughter, Frankenstein needed that extra processing power right now.

I pasted McNulty’s signature into place, alpha-blended its edges, and tweaked the image file headers to recalculate checksums, hiding my manipulation.

An alert window popped up on my screen: McNulty’s computer had been breached. I root-kitted it with a few quick keystrokes so I would have full remote control, then brought up McNulty’s email account on my screen.

Scrolling through until I found the last requisition email he had sent, I modified it and attached the nine-million-dollar upgrade I had just signed for him. Using a packet sniffer, I changed the time stamps on the headers to eight p.m. yesterday and sent the e-mail on its way.

Filtering through the reams of other pointless administrative e-mails in McNulty’s inbox, I found one from the VAR reseller who would supply our GPU-processor boards. I had called them last week to expedite the order, which sat ready for delivery but currently on hold, awaiting a final email from McNulty to release it.

I sent them that e-mail from McNulty now, also tweaking its time stamps to eight p.m. yesterday.

There was nothing I could do about the actual time the e-mails would arrive. But at least now it would appear as if they had been sent last night, then got delayed for a few hours by an intermediate server. Confusing the issue.

Rubbing my head with the fingertips of one hand, I took a breath and stopped to think a bit. I was fully aware that what I had just done could turn into a big problem for me later. But I couldn’t worry about myself right now.

Amy overrode every other consideration.

Still, I had done all I could for her at this point. I could focus on less important things for a while. What else did I need to do?

I hadn’t killed McNulty. But
someone
had, that was for damn sure. I recalled the haunted expression on his face when I’d surprised him at his desk—that lost, doomed look. The phone forgotten in his hand.

Who had he been talking to, just before I came in?

In hindsight, as soon as I’d seen that face I should have dragged McNulty back to my lab on some pretext. Five minutes in front of Frankenstein, with me asking a few pointed questions, and I would have had the answers.

“Trevor?” Cassie’s voice floated up from ground level. “Are you in here?”

I ignored her.

Had McNulty died because of something related to his work at Pyramid Lake? Or was it unrelated—a problem from his personal life? The murder had been deliberate, the placement and display of his corpse carefully staged for maximum impact here at the base.

“Where are you?” Cassie called, closer now. “I don’t want to break my promise by asking Frankenstein…”

“Up here,” I yelled. “I’m coming down.”

I set an rsync running, to copy the entire contents of McNulty’s hard drive to a hidden sector on Blake’s workstation. Then I closed my laptop and stood up.

Cassie’s anxious face peered up at me from five stories below. “That looks dangerous,” she called. “What are you doing up there? You should come outside with me.”

I jumped down from the tower rim to the highest level of catwalk. “Tribal police arrive yet?” I asked.

She nodded. “They’re calling the tribal chair right now. The MPs are talking to them, but they have to wait for some folks from NCIS. Washoe County Sheriff’s Department is here, too, and the FBI arrived by helicopter ten minutes ago. Base security is keeping all of them out of the Top Secret buildings and labs. BIA is on its way. Everybody’s on the phone with their bosses.”

I circled my way down the tower to join her.

“The geyser is on sacred ground,” she said. “No Paiute would ever desecrate our ancestral heritage like that.”

Cassie’s comment seemed irrelevant at first, unless she was trying to exonerate herself, which I doubted. But then I thought about it a little and understood what she was getting at.

If McNulty’s killer was Paiute, then murder on the reservation was a federal crime, not a state one. In either case, the tribal police would assist, but until the ethnicity of the murderer was known, that meant neither the feds nor the Washoe County Sheriff’s could step aside to let the other take over the investigation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs would have to mediate. And because the crime scene violated sacred ground, the tribal council would insist on greater than usual authority over proceedings.

The situation was actually even
more
complicated than that.

McNulty’s dual role as DARPA’s Navy liaison meant he was technically a civilian employee of the Navy. He was base personnel, which mean NCIS—Navy Crime Investigative Services—would automatically be involved, even if the actual murder happened off base. But the hole in the fence raised the strong possibility McNulty had been killed inside our perimeter. The likelihood of an on-base murder kept the MPs—the military police—at the forefront of the investigation, too.

“Jurisdiction on this is going to be an absolute clusterfuck,” I said.

“I doubt that’s an accident,” Cassie said. “Either.”

I followed her out, thinking about the spying OctoRotors I had chased at five in the morning and seen disappear into Kate’s lab. About Blake’s uncharacteristic early arrival, and Roger’s, too—I’d spotted the Beast in the lot when I checked for McNulty’s car.

“No,” I said. “Nothing about this is an accident.”