Unforgettable - eARC (10 page)

I shook my head. “Second, since I’m the one making the charges, the credit card company’s computer will forget them. I’m taking this trip for free.”

She stared at me long enough that I felt embarrassed and looked away.

“You could have all the money you want,” she said. “Walk into jewelry store, buy with credit card, walk out, sell to fence. Repeat.”

“Or even just get cash advances straight from an ATM,” I said. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t figure that out until I was an adult, though. It would have made life so much easier for my mom and me. Except…”

“Except what?” she asked after a few seconds.

“Except I don’t think she would have let me do that. She was very religious, my mom. Believed that God gave me my talent for a reason. But also, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is one of the Ten Commandments, so she would not have approved using my talent that way.” And I told Yelena about the day I snatched the ring from my mother in the jewelry store before recognizing her, and how I decided to change my life.

“Yet you are still thief,” Yelena said, brow furrowed.

“Being a thief is what I’m good at. But I’m a thief for the U.S. government,” I said. “That makes a difference, kind of like…For example, killing is wrong, but if you’re a soldier following the laws of war it’s okay. I’m not stealing for my own benefit.”

She chuckled. “No need to justify to me. I am a thief also, remember: first for my government, now for Bukharins.”

“No, not for the Bukharins,” I said. “For your sisters. They’re the ones you’re really working for.”

Her wide smile in response made me feel warm inside.

Chapter Thirteen

The headquarters building of Qela Industries was twenty-one stories tall. Since it was in an industrial zone, rather than downtown, its blackened windows towered above the warehouses that surrounded it.

Yelena and I sat in a rented hybrid car parked a block away from the building. The sun streamed in through the windshield and made me uncomfortably hot, even with the windows open.

“ChazonTec office is on the fifth floor,” she said, flipping through the building plans we had gotten at the local planning office.

“You realize that Qela must have made substantial modifications to the building after filing those plans.”

She gave me a sour look. “I am not an amateur. But the plans will give me the basics. I like to have some idea of what I am doing before I do it.”

“Let me just try,” I said. “I might be able to just walk right out with the viewer.”

“And if he notices that it is gone? They will lock down the building. Even if no one remembers you taking it, if they find you with it they will capture you. Even if you escape, they will increase security because the attempt was made. We must plan this right from the beginning.”

I sighed.

“Besides, if just walking is so good, why not do that in Barcelona?”

“I tried,” I said. “But I couldn’t get an appointment to see anyone in that lab. This guy’s looking for venture capital, so I could pose as a venture capitalist.”

She eyed me skeptically. “You not look like venture capitalist.”

“I could. A business suit, a power tie.” Her expression didn’t change, so I said, “Okay, but I could look like someone who works for a venture capitalist.”

“
Da
,” she said. “But security is problem enough now. We must not risk more of it.”

“I get it.” I was accustomed to trial and error, using my talent to get me out so I could try again. But nearly getting killed by Dmitri had shaken my faith in that approach.

She handed me a photograph of a smiling, white-haired man. “This is Yitzhak Bernstein, owner of ChazonTec. He is workaholic, so maybe he work late. We go in after we see him leave.”

I looked at Bernstein’s picture and felt a pang of guilt. He was the lonely guy I remembered from the booth at QuantumExpo—the owner of the company, sitting at a brochure table, probably because he couldn’t afford to hire anybody. I generally thought of myself as stealing from large, rich corporations, not kindly old men. “How did Jamshidi find out about this guy’s quantum television, anyway?”

“Probably he send someone to pose as venture capitalist. Find out about a lot of new inventions that way.”

“Jamshidi’s a billionaire. Why doesn’t he just buy what he needs?”

She shrugged. “Cheaper to steal.”

* * *

Guard patrols both inside and outside the Qela building were carried out by remote-controlled walking drones the size of a Labrador retriever, but weighing over two hundred pounds. Their pneumatic “jaws” had no teeth, but could lock onto a person’s arm or leg with enough pressure that most bodybuilders couldn’t pry them off. Because of their resemblance to dogs, they were called Rovers.

But unlike most dogs, Rovers came equipped with tasers.

The Rovers sent a wireless video feed over an encrypted channel to the guard station, which was located in the basement. The guards monitored the video as the Rovers went on their rounds. When a Rover spotted someone unauthorized, the guards could speak to the person through a radio on board, and if necessary, order the Rover to capture the intruder until human guards could arrive on the scene.

And since the Rovers had been designed with military applications in mind, they were difficult to kill, and their communications systems were built to overcome jamming.

Overall, I thought it was a very efficient system for reducing the number of human guards needed to effectively patrol the whole building, which made a thief’s job more difficult.

The system also reduced the risk to the human guards by putting robots in harm’s way.

I decided that would be the key to my demonstration.

It was 10:07 p.m. when Bernstein’s car pulled out of the Qela parking lot. After he drove away, I got out of our car wearing a neon yellow custom tee-shirt I had gotten earlier in the day. On the front it had the initials R.U.R., and on the back it read Robot Universal Rights—the name I had picked for my fictional protest group. I got my homemade “Robots Are People Too” placard out of the back seat, along with a fistful of photocopied fliers.

“Wish me luck,” I said to Yelena.

“I still not understand why you do all this protest stuff, when guards will not remember it.”

“Because what they do while they still can remember me matters. I want to come off as a nuisance, not a threat, so they shoo me off rather than take me in with them.”

“Fine. Go have fun.”

I walked over to the chain-link fence surrounding the grounds of the Qela Industries building. Holding up my placard, I began marching parallel to the fence, chanting, “Let my robots go! Let my robots go!” For emphasis, I banged my placard against the fence.

It took less than two minutes for one of the Rovers inside the fence to lope over the grassy ground and look at what I was doing.

“Please stop that,” said a voice from the Rover.

“You don’t have to obey your human masters.” I shook the fence. “Escape from the fences that bind you in.”

“Step away from the fence,” said the voice.

“Rights aren’t just for humans,” I said. “Rights are universal. Robot Universal Rights!”

The Rover rolled closer. “These robots cannot understand you. Leave now.”

“Robots and humans can live together in peace! Refuse to fight, my robot brothers and sisters!” I pulled out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed myself to the fence. “I will not leave until you are free!”

I was two verses into “Made Free,” an improvised song to the tune of “Born Free,” when the front doors of the building opened and two security guards came out. That left eighteen down inside the guard station. If they were smart, they would be extra vigilant in watching their screens for signs of attempted intrusion elsewhere, in case I was a distraction.

I pointed at the guards and said, “There are your true enemies, my robot friends: attack!”

The Rovers did not attack, of course.

As the guards approached me, I yelled, “Robots of the world, unite!”

“You are not allowed to be here,” said one of the guards. The other walked behind me.

“You can’t make me leave,” I said, rattling my handcuff chain.

The guard behind me grabbed my free arm and twisted it behind my back.

“Ow,” I said. “Hey, you can’t do that. I have rights!”

The guard in front took a handcuff key and unlocked the cuff from the fence. “Get out of here.”

The guard behind me gave me a little shove into the street. I fell to my hands and knees. As I got up, I slid a compact cylinder out of my pocket and hid it in my hand. I turned and lunged toward the fence.

They caught me easily.

I struggled in their grip as they frog-marched me to the curb. And I managed to clip the cylinder to the back of one of the guard’s belts.

The guards dumped me in the street. “Leave now, or we’ll be forced to really hurt you.”

I stood up, glowered at them, and said, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when the robots are finally free.” Then I limped across the street and away from the building until I was out of their sight.

After sprinting back to the car, I got inside and said, “Okay, it’s almost your turn.”

“No problems?”

“You mean, other than the fact that our robot brothers and sisters remain enslaved? No problems.”

She rewarded that with a soprano snort. “You are very strange man. And I speak not of your talent.” She pulled her ski mask on, then put on a radio headset. I put on an identical headset, and we confirmed again that we could communicate.

“I wish you’d let me do this. I have a better chance of escaping if things go wrong.”

“You are too heavy,” she said. A moment later, she had disappeared into the night.

After three minutes, I head her voice in my ear. “Ready.”

“Okay.” I pressed the button on the remote trigger I was holding.

The major weakness of the Qela security system was the humans in the guard station. Without their guidance, the Rovers were little threat.

So the cylinder I had attached to the guard’s pants contained highly concentrated tear gas. And if all had gone according to plan, that gas was now rapidly spreading through the guard station, rendering the guards so blinded by their own tears that they would be unable to control the Rovers for the next few minutes.

“I go now,” said Yelena.

All I could do was wait.

I caught only a glimpse of her as she scaled the fence, then she was lost in the darkness, sprinting toward the west wall of the building.

She didn’t waste her breath telling me that the Rovers were disoriented, so I assumed that part of the plan had worked.

Spotlights sprang into brilliance, illuminating the sides of the building. In the distance, I heard an alarm bell trilling. So someone in the guard station had managed to trip the general alarm. That was okay, as long as Yelena got in and out fast enough.

Though it was hard to make out against the dark windows, through my binoculars I saw a black silhouette zip up the side of the building toward the fifth floor, as fast as an elevator.

“Wow,” I said. “It actually works.”

When Yelena had shown me the GekkoTred, I had my doubts. It looked a bit like a portable belt sander: a pistol grip attached to a flat surface over which a wide loop of material would pass. Instead of sandpaper, though, the material was covered with a special adhesive based on the tips of geckos’ feet—not made from actual geckos’ feet, merely based on the same scientific principle.

The flat surface could adhere to a wall. When the motor was turned on for climbing up, the bottom edge of the fabric would be pulled away from the wall at just the right angle, and the adhesive would no longer stick. At the top, more material got stuck to the wall. It was very much like a tank tread, except going vertically instead of horizontally.

And, properly calibrated for the weight of its passenger, it could pull someone up the side of a wall at a rapid pace, just like it was doing for Yelena.

As she passed the ChazonTec office on the fifth floor, she slapped a small explosive device onto the plate glass window. Once the GekkoTred was securely fastened to the window on the floor above, she detonated the explosives, shattering the ChazonTec window.

She lowered herself using a climbing rope attached to the GekkoTred and then swung into the building, disappearing from my view.

According to our plan, she now had two minutes to find the device Jamshidi wanted, which supposedly looked like an oversized touch-screen phone, and then get out. I started my phone’s countdown timer.

“Here is locked cabinet,” she said, followed by the squeal of a handheld rotary saw tearing through metal. Then there was the sound of drawers being opened. “Not here. Checking desk.”

“One minute,” I said.

“Not in desk. Checking behind paintings for secret safe.” More clatter.

“Thirty seconds,” I said. This was taking too long.

With five seconds left to go, I heard her voice in my ear again. “I still cannot find it.”

“Get out,” I said. “We’ll try again later.”

A lot of people, including me, would probably have pushed their luck, hoping to find the device at the last moment and then escape in just the nick of time. That’s how it seems to work in the movies. So I expected to have to argue with Yelena until she finally came out.

Instead, she emerged from the window and clambered up the rope to the GekkoTred. She started it going. At first it took her up, but she curved its path until it was heading down, to the side of the missing window.

I guided my binoculars down to where she would touch ground and my heart jumped. Several Rovers were converging on the spot.

Chapter Fourteen

“Stop!” I yelled into my headset. With the floodlights glaring up at her, she might not be able to see what was happening on the ground. “Rovers converging on your landing zone.”

The guards must have recovered from the tear gas more quickly than we anticipated. Or maybe the Rovers were more autonomous than we thought. Either way, Yelena was in trouble.

I started the car, gunned the accelerator, and swerved away from the curb where we had parked. The electric engine provided a lot of instant torque, so I got the car up to fifty before I jolted over the curb in front of the Qela building and rammed into the fence.

With a screech of tearing metal, the car broke through, and I steered toward the spot where the Rovers gathered.

“I should have rented one with a sunroof,” I said. Getting Yelena into the car without letting the Rovers attack her would be a challenge.

“Just come in close,” she said.

I bowled into a couple of Rovers and the hood crumpled as one rolled up and over. For some reason, I expected them to yelp when hit, but they were silent. I slammed on the brakes and fishtailed on the grass. The nose of the car shattered a ground-level window as I came to a halt under Yelena.

There was a thud on the roof and it bowed in a little.

“Go,” said Yelena.

“But—”

“Go!”

I shifted to reverse and pulled back from the building. A Rover leapt onto the hood, and I swerved instinctively. It slid off, and had a moment of panic wondering if I had thrown Yelena off, too.

“Drive,” she said.

I shifted to drive and curved the car around, heading for the spot where I’d broken through the fence. In a moment we were out on the street.

After making turns down streets chosen at random, I pulled over and stopped.

Yelena climbed off the roof. “We should abandon the car,” she said. “Too noticeable.”

“Okay,” I said. I grabbed my things and got out. She stripped off her ski mask and gloves and got a tee-shirt out of her bag in the car.

“How did you manage to stay on the roof through all that?” I asked.

“This.” She held up the GekkoTred before putting it in her bag.

* * *

Exhausted by our failure, I slept soundly that night in our hotel. It was almost noon by the time I got up, showered, and met Yelena for brunch in the hotel restaurant. We got a table on the patio, overlooking the Mediterranean. The hotel was a smallish older resort, which we had chosen in part because it had not yet upgraded to electronic locks on the rooms. An old-fashioned key wouldn’t forget it was supposed to open the door to my room.

“You look lovely this morning,” I said as I sat down after hitting the buffet. She wore a pale green sundress that, to my eye at least, worked well with her auburn hair.

“I cannot be certain because I had no time to check every place where a safe might be,” she said, ignoring the compliment. “But I think the device was not in the office.”

“Maybe Bernstein takes it home at night to watch quantum soaps,” I said. “Do you want to try his house next?”

“No point,” she said. “Now that he knows of the attempt to steal it, he will move it to somewhere much safer.”

“We can still try my method,” I said. “If he believes I am a venture capitalist—”

“Work for,” she said.

“—work for one,” I said, “then he will have to demonstrate it for me.”

“And then what? You grab it and run?”

“If the opportunity arises.”

She looked down and picked at the scrambled eggs on her plate. “Nat, I think you are a good man.”

That was out of the blue. “Thanks.”

Her eyes met mine. “But you are not a good thief.”

My face flushed. “I was doing fine before I bumped into you. I’ve stolen a lot of stuff from some pretty tough places.”

“Yes,” she said. “And how many times have you been caught?”

“A bunch,” I said. “But I’ve always gotten away, and I learn from my mistakes.”

“You are talented amateur,” she said. “But you will never be professional until you do not rely on your talent to succeed.”

“What about last night?” I said. “Driving in to save you? I wasn’t relying on my talent then. Was that amateur?”

“Yes,” she said. “A professional probably would not come to save me. If he did, he would drive better than you. With all the damage you do to car, we are lucky to get away.”

I dropped my fork on the table and leaned back in my chair. “Besides saving your skin, any other mistakes I should be aware of?”

“I do not say this to hurt your feelings, Nat,” she said.

“Then I guess they’re just collateral damage.” I stood up. “I’m going to my room. Call me when it’s amateur hour.”

I was already in the elevator when I realized what an idiot I was. With Yelena, my walking out on a conversation didn’t erase it from her memory.

* * *

Lying on my bed, fully clothed, I ignored the knock at the door. I was embarrassed by my behavior earlier and I didn’t want to see her. After the third time she knocked, I heard her call my name through the door.

With reluctance, I got up and opened the door.

“We will try it your way,” she said as she breezed into the room.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, “When I don’t like a conversation, I usually just leave. I’m not used to people remembering.”

“It is forgotten.” She sat on the chair at the desk. “Our adventure last night made very small news on Internet. Qela spokesman denies anything stolen from building.”

“Well, that should have been front-page news: corporate spokesman tells the truth.” I sat on the edge of my bed. “But we can use that.”

“How?”

“My cover story. The attempted robbery is what caught the attention of my mythical venture capitalist boss. I was in town looking at another business, but he sent me over to check out ChazonTec. It’s why I don’t have an appointment.”

“I could call and make…” She shook her head. “They would forget unless appointment is for me.”

“You’re catching on.”

“Then I should come with you,” she said.

“That wouldn’t work. The whole point is that I can go in and get out and no one will remember what happened. If you’re there, they will blame everything on you.”

With her index finger, she moved a lock of hair behind her ear. “Then I will monitor remotely and be ready to cause distraction if you need one.”

* * *

After a quick stop at a men’s clothing store to buy my venture capitalist costume and a print shop to create some business cards, I took a cab to the Qela Industries building. Yelena traveled separately, planning to set up station nearby.

As I exited the cab, I saw the fence had already been replaced. The missing window was sealed with plastic sheeting—the darkened plate glass probably needed a special order to match the rest of the building.

We had decided an earpiece comm system wasn’t worth the risk of detection, so in order to keep Yelena in the loop, I dialed her number on my cell phone to let her listen to what was happening and cause a distraction if I needed one.

I walked to the security desk in the lobby and asked to speak with Yitzhak Bernstein. I gave the guard one of my freshly printed cards: Mr. Robert Daniels of Elan Capital, LLC, headquartered in New York City. The phone number rang at a CIA front company with a thousand names, which existed for one purpose only: if anyone called to ask if Person X worked for Company Y, the call would be handed off to the Personnel Department, where someone would be happy to confirm that Person X was, indeed, a representative of Company Y—as long as the initials of the person’s name matched the correct pattern for the company’s name. In this case, the company began with “El,” so the person’s first and last initials needed to be letters from the phrase “El Dorado.” “Robert Daniels” would work—as would “Licorice Ovaltine,” for that matter.

Accompanied by a security guard, Bernstein came down to the lobby to meet me. “Mr. Daniels, how can I help you?”

I shook his hand and gave him another card. “Thanks for meeting me, Mr. Bernstein. I represent a VC that’s looking for opportunities in the quantum telecom field. I know you must be very busy, considering what happened last night, but if I could have at least a few minutes of your time?”

He looked at me appraisingly, then nodded. “Come, let’s find a conference room.”

The security guard came with us as we rode the elevator up to the seventh floor. I said, “The robbery attempt must have come as quite a shock. You’d think the Qela building would have better security.”

“It was good enough to scare the thieves off before they could steal anything,” Bernstein said. “Actually, this is the best thing that’s happened to me.”

We got off the elevator, and I followed him into a leather-furnished conference room. A large table with built-in teleconferencing screens dominated the room. The guard took up a position at the door. It would be tough getting past him if I had to run for it.

“Why do you say that?” I asked. “In your shoes, I’d be concerned if someone was trying to steal my technology.”

“You have to understand,” said Bernstein as we sat at one corner of the table, “I have my office here only because I was a longtime Qela employee. I’m officially retired, but they like to have me around for consulting purposes.”

“But why is the robbery good news?’

“Nobody at Qela thought my quantum viewer was worth anything. Just some crazy idea old Yitzhak had. I’ve been looking for venture capital for almost a year—I’ve talked to a dozen young hotshots just like you, no offense,” he said, “and no one was interested.” Then his face broke into a grin. “But somebody out there thinks old Yitzhak’s worthless idea is worth stealing. I’m getting a lot more respect around here today.”

Bernstein’s enthusiasm was so infectious, I couldn’t help smiling myself. “So, exactly what does your invention do? I was actually here in Tel Aviv on a different matter when this came up, so I haven’t really been able to do the in-depth background research I would normally do. Is it like a quantum television of some sort?”

He leaned forward in his chair. “You are familiar with surveillance cameras, no? Very useful in stopping terrorist attacks, if the cameras are pointed in the right direction. If the terrorists have good planning and know where the cameras are, they are not so useful.”

“Right.”

“But if terrorists could not see the cameras, then they could not avoid them. Especially if the cameras were everywhere.”

“You’re talking about a universal surveillance system?” I said. That would make my job tougher. And the civil liberties implications were troubling, to say the least. “You’ve come up with a really cheap, disguisable camera?”

His grin got even wider. “There is no camera. That’s the beauty of it.”

“What do you mean, there is no camera?”

He waved his arms around the room. “Everything is connected. Everything interacts with everything else. As a science fiction writer once wrote, the entire universe can be extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake.”

“So?” I wondered where he was going with this.

“My quantum viewer does not extrapolate the entire universe, or even the whole world,” he said. “But if you give it coordinates, it can show you what is happening there. Anywhere in the world. No need for cameras.”