The Eighth Day (35 page)

Kevin, famous for his passionate enthusiasms, was behind it, but that didn’t matter. The dream had been pursued by the three of them for months on end. In its earliest days, as much as fifteen dollars a week—money earned by mowing lawns or, legend had it, by searching the couch and the car seats for lost change—had been secretly deposited. The limited dimensions of the cache made it necessary for the change to be regularly converted into dollar bills, which Danny did each week. And then, every other week. And then—once a month . . . or every other month. He’d take the coins in a Tupperware container to the local Safeway, where a machine counted the change in return for a cut.

Eventually, Kev did the math and revealed that it would take about three hundred years for them to save enough money to buy (he’d already named it) Yankee Pasha. And so the money remained where it was, abiding the moment when they might all agree on how it should be spent. Which they never did.

Getting down on his knees, Danny reached into the storage box that his father had built and removed the false panel at the bottom. Reaching inside, he rooted about until he came up with a fistful of hard cash in each hand. Taking the money to the bed, he sat down and separated the currency by denomination. This done, he found that he had two stacks of bills, containing 126 notes. When counted, the total came to $182.

As “walking-around money,” the bankroll was at best an awkward asset, so thick that it would not allow him to fold his wallet. Going down to the kitchen, he found a rubber band in the “junk drawer” next to the stove and trussed the money into a thick cylinder. Pocketing the cash, he saw with a groan that, on inspection, the bankroll made him look like a pervert.

But there was nothing he could do about that. Wandering through the house, he thought about sleeping downstairs on the big bed in his parents’ room, but when he got there it didn’t seem right. Though his own bed was short and the space cramped, the little room at the top of the stairs had been a refuge throughout his childhood and adolescence. It was no different now.

The birds woke him at six. His mother fed them and even paid one of the neighbor kids to “keep them going” while she was gone. The holly tree outside his window sounded like a bird ghetto. He went downstairs and made himself a cup of coffee, then sat by the window overlooking the garden, doodling on one of his father’s yellow legal pads.

He wanted to call someone—Caleigh most of all—but
someone
in any case. His brothers. His parents. But no. That would only put them in harm’s way, and there was nothing to be gained from it—except solace. And he wasn’t that selfish. Besides, he wasn’t ready to face that cold High Plains look that Caleigh got when she was mad or feeling victimized. Better—
safer
—to let Zebek think that they were through (which, in the absence of a miracle, they were).

By now, the yellow-lined paper was covered with radiant lines and constellations of dots. Danny thought for a moment, then scribbled:

1) Dew
2) Patel case

Then he reached for the phone and dialed a number he knew by heart: Fellner Associates. At the prompt, he tapped in the code for Mamadou’s extension.

A soft voice answered distractedly, “Boisseau.”

“Dew? It’s—”

Click.

He stared at the phone, baffled. Dialed it a second time. Got the voice-mail recording.
Maybe someone’s in his office,
Danny thought, and made a second cup of coffee. He’d try Dew later, at his apartment.

Except he didn’t have to because, a few minutes later, the phone rang and when he picked it up it was Mamadou at the other end, sounding out of breath and outside. Danny could hear the surf of traffic in the background.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Dew exploded. “Were you outta your mind?”

“I don’t think so,” Danny replied. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“First you cut out the firm on work for one of its biggest accounts. So Fellner’s pissed, but that’s not so bad, ’cause the client came to you—right?”

“Right.”

“Only then you ask
me
—your poor African-American friend—to put together a dossier on the guy, which makes me, like, an
accessory
.”

“To what?” Danny asked.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“Industrial espionage!” Dew barked.

“What?!”

“That’s what they call it. That’s the kind of case they’re building,” Dew explained. “You take a job with the guy, walk off with all kinds of proprietary intelligence—”

“Oh, bullshit—”

“Lemme ask you a question,” Dew suggested.

“Okay,” Danny replied, feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

“Did you pick up a computer for someone? In Italy?”

“Yeah.”

“And you claimed to be a cop, right?”

“Well—”

“Jesus Christ, man! You’re going to the joint!”

“Dew—”

“This ain’t no bullshit—this guy Zebek, he’s hired the firm to find you!”

“Calm down,” Danny told him. “It’s not like that.”

“I’m telling you: you’re our biggest case! I am now talking on the telephone to our biggest case!”

Hmnnn . . .
Danny took a deep breath and hoped that Mamadou would take the opportunity to do the same. “Whose case is it?”

“Pisarcik.”

Ooof.
Until the year before, Pisarcik had headed up the CIA’s operations directorate.

“If it was me,” Dew said, “I’d stay away from known haunts. In fact, if it was me, I’d think about . . . Yokohama. Or the Bering Strait, or something.”

“You mean—”

“I mean your apartment’s under twenty-four-hour surveillance.” He let that sink in. “You know how much that costs? Three two-man teams, giving twenty-four/seven coverage?”

Danny groaned. “Where else?”

“
Every
where else! Pisarcik’s got a wall map with pins in it: the gallery, your studio, your folks’ place, Caleigh’s office—”

“My folks’ place, huh?”

“I told you—everywhere. Pisarcik even hired a local to keep an eye on your parents place in Maine. So forget about that too. But the Adam’s Morgan apartment is the only place that’s twenty-four/seven. Everywhere else, it’s mobile. Guys making the rounds, going from one place to the other.”

A thought occurred to Danny. “So how did
you
know where I was?”

“Rocket science! I got Caller ID.”

Danny sighed. He could hear the traffic rocking past his friend. Finally, he said, “Well, I owe you one.”

“There’s more!”

“About what?” Danny asked.

“Zebek’s firm.”

“Sistema—”

“Not that one,” Dew insisted. “The one on the Coast! VSS.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a nanotech firm.”

“Which is what?” Danny asked.

“ ‘The next big thing.’ Get it?”

“No.”

“Nanotech. Very Small Systems! ‘Big thing’?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s like . . . one of those just-around-the-corner things. Gonna change everything.”

“
Is
it—”

“Unh-huh.”

“And how’s it gonna do that?” Danny wondered.

“I don’t know. But the whole thing is: It’s
small
.
Very small,
get it? A way of building things from the ground up—like nature. Except we’re talking robots—the size of molecules. These particular bots, they’re like . . . proteins. And that’s what this guy, Zebek, is into. Technically, VSS is a subsidiary of the Italian company, but trust me, it’s the tail wagging the dog, you know what I’m saying?”

Danny was about to say
Unh-huh
when the doorbell went off in his head like a cluster bomb—and his heart dove for cover. “Someone’s at the door,” he whispered.

“Well, don’t answer it.”

Danny checked the sight lines. From where he was sitting, he couldn’t be seen. And there were no lights on in the house. It was morning, and the kitchen was the brightest room.

With the phone pressed to his ear, he went into the dining room, where the windows were shuttered against the street. Through a slit in the shutters, he saw two men in suits standing at the front door. The doorbell rang a second time.

“Guys in suits,” Danny whispered.

“You recognize them?”

“No.”

“Then they’re probably subs.”

Subcontractors.
“Probably,” Danny agreed.

One of the men pressed his nose to the sidelight next to the door, shaded his right eye, and peered into the house. After a moment, he said something to the second man, and they returned to their car, a gray Camry, parked across the street in front of the Lanmans’. Danny waited for them to drive away, but . . . they didn’t. “They’re just sitting there,” he said.

“Where?”

“In the car.”

“So wait ’em out,” Dew advised. “They got a whole checklist of places. Half an hour, they’ll be gone.”

“Then what?”

Dew chuckled. “Flaps up—head down. Learn a foreign language.”

He found an old L.L. Bean backpack in the mudroom, picked out a change of clothes from the chest of drawers in his room, added some extra T-shirts and boxers, a toothbrush, a razor. That done, he made sure that he had his passport, the new credit card, and the Yankee Pasha bankroll. Then he sat down with a copy of
Harper’s
and waited.

Dew obviously knew what he was talking about. After twenty-five minutes, the Camry roared to life and pulled away from the curb. Danny gave it another ten minutes, in case they came back, then let himself out through an old garage door whose existence was concealed by a vast and overgrown camellia bush. Pushing out through the screen of heavy foliage, he remembered the many times he sneaked out that way when he was a kid. He felt a little stupid and theatrical as he cut through the Whitestones’ yard. Until he remembered Remy Barzan. Inzaghi. Chris Terio.

The King Street Metro was only a few blocks away. When he got to the station, he fed a couple of dollar bills into the fare-card machine, caught the blue line train, and rode it to Rosslyn, a clusterfuck of high-rises opposite Georgetown on the Virginia side of the Potomac.

He was thinking about nanotech. What little he knew owed more to a half-forgotten NPR program than to anything that Dew had said. The program was the
Diane Rehm Show,
and he’d listened to it in the car, riding out toward Harpers Ferry with Caleigh.

Mamadou had it right: the basic idea was to create machines capable of working at the atomic level. That way, you could make things from the bottom up. Instead of tunneling into rock to extract diamonds from a mine, you’d fabricate them one atom at a time—just as nature does. In theory, then, you could make almost anything—diamond wire or a perfect rose—from materials as common as seawater, air, and sand. And it wasn’t just what the machines could
make
that gave nanotech so much promise: it was what they might someday be able to
do
. Working at the atomic level, they’d be able to restore the ozone layer, identify and eliminate individual contaminants from the water supply, and a lot more.

The train rolled along: Crystal City, Pentagon City, Pentagon. Danny thought about Chris Terio’s house and in particular the bookcase in his study. He had all those books on religion, of course, but there were other books that didn’t seem to belong. Danny didn’t remember the titles, but one of them was about “protein computers” and another one—at
least
another one—had
nanotech
in the title.

So Terio was onto it, knew enough to reach out to Patel. And who was Patel? The main tech guy at Very Small Systems. And what was VSS? According to Remy Barzan, it was Zebek’s baby. And it was burning through cash like there was no tomorrow.

Georgetown itself doesn’t have a Metro stop. When the subway was being built, the neighborhood’s upscale residents balked at the prospect, worried about “the kind of people” who use mass transit.

Danny rode the escalator to ground level in Rosslyn, emerging in the heat of the day, surrounded by twenty- and thirty-story buildings. Rosslyn always struck him as strange. Beyond the purview of the District’s height restrictions, it seemed to happen all at once, rising up out of nowhere, the architectural equivalent of Ayer’s Rock. Gannett’s silver towers gleamed in the sun as Danny walked across the Key Bridge into Georgetown.

At a safe remove from the city’s commercial heart, Georgetown University’s campus was organized around an old-fashioned quad. Entering the university library, Danny relished the arctic air that enveloped him.

Working for Fellner, he’d long ago learned that most universities were generous with their resources. While you needed a card to check out books, no one seemed to pay much attention to who was using the computers or reference materials. The assumption was that you were a student or faculty member.

Taking a seat at the end of a long table, he logged onto the Lexis/Nexis database and searched for newspaper and magazine articles that mentioned Jason Patel.

Unlike Chris Terio’s “suicide,” Patel’s death was a brutal and unsolved murder, a high-profile case with lots of media coverage. It only took a minute or so to come up with 126 hits—everything from MSNBC transcripts to newspaper reports and obits in the
San Jose Mercury
and other, smaller papers.

Basically he was looking for names. Friends, relatives, coworkers—anyone who knew Patel and who might be willing to talk about him. He printed out a selection of stories and clicked on the
NEW SEARCH
button.

He wanted to see how much there was on the Net about “Very Small Systems or VSS or V.S.S.” Not much, as it turned out: only twenty-seven hits—which was nothing when you considered that Nexis included even the most obscure technical and business journals.

Danny looked at each of the citations and found that most of them stemmed from a single conference on protein engineering, held three years earlier in Philadelphia. VSS had hosted a hospitality suite, and the organizers of the conference had mentioned the fact in a press release.

A search for “Zerevan Zebek” turned up next to nothing. Danny wondered how someone with so much money could keep a profile that low.