“Really? Your grandmother says that? Your ninety-eight year old Chinese grandmother.” The lock suddenly clicked open. “OK. I take it back. How did you—”
“Don’t ask,” Lulu said, cutting him off.
Decker reached into his ski jacket and pulled out the Python he had picked up from the assassin in Georgetown. He held the gun up with both hands near his face.
“You really think we’re going to need that?” said Lulu. “The house is deserted. Has been for months, ever since Zimmerman’s death. The only people who ever come here now are the cleaning service — not due until Tuesday — and the real estate agent from Bondville Realty, who’s shown the place a grand total of three times since it was first listed. For some reason, in this robust economy, she’s having a hard time unloading a seventeen-million-dollar, one-of-a-kind contemporary. Go figure.” Lulu pushed the door open with the palm of her hand and climbed to her feet.
Decker slipped the gun back in its holster and followed her in.
To say that Zimmerman’s house was beautiful would be like saying that Da Vinci knew how to draw. The house was exquisite. More than 15,000 square feet, on seven separate levels, the structure appeared to inhabit the mountainside rather than to merely sit upon it. In fact, unlike most of the more imposing lots on Mt. Stratton, this one had not been bulldozed and clear-cut of its trees when the mansion was built. On the contrary, much time and effort had been spent ensuring that the root systems of the indigenous oaks, maples, white birches and pine were protected. Now, the trees grew through the house, as if the entire structure, each level, were an organic growth rooted to the mountain by the canopy.
As they made their way through the house, Decker could not shake the feeling that they were being watched, but Lulu assured him that the security system was off. She had triple-checked once they’d gotten inside.
At the topmost level of the structure, they came upon the master suite. Besides an impressive office made virtually entirely of glass so that it seemed to float above the forest canopy below, there was a spiral staircase surrounded on three sides by bookshelves, a maelstrom of different colored spines, leading up to a great balcony in the treetops, a cedar deck three hundred feet long, with an infinity pool at the end. Decker and Lulu stood by the swimming pool looking out over the valley. The trees were bare. Patches of snow sprinkled the higher elevations but most of the valley was clear. Only the runs above them were covered in snow. Man-made. Or, more precisely, machine-made.
Man made the machines.
From this angle, as Decker looked out over the lip of the infinity pool, it appeared as though the water were literally filling the cerulean sky, rising up in great clouds of steam from the fervid liquid beneath.
“Nice to be a Net billionaire,” Lulu said, staring out at the valley. “Kind of like Tarzan meets Koolhaas. You sure you don’t want to give up government service for your shot at an IPO?”
“He still ended up dead in a ditch.”
“Beaver pond,” Lulu corrected.
“Right. Beaver pond. I think it’s more Gaudi than Koolhaas.”
She came up beside him. For a second there Decker was convinced she was going to reach for his hand. Either that, or lean round and punch him. In either event, he was ready. But she pulled away at the very last moment.
“Still trying to picture him,” Decker said, “but I’m having a difficult time. What did he look like? Weird how there isn’t one picture of him anywhere in the house. Not one. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, no problem. Julian Assange, Bono, Nelson Mandela — sure. But not one of Matt Zimmerman himself.”
Lulu shrugged. “Good looking guy. Didn’t like cameras, though. Said they steal your soul.”
They headed down the long wooden staircase back to the master suite. “I need to get to his lab,” Lulu kept saying. “That’s where we’ll find what we’re looking for.”
“And what exactly are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. I’ll know that when we find it.”
The lab was in the sub-basement, below the “cave” or wine cellar, which was under the cellar itself, carved into the side of the mountain. It came equipped with showers and sleeping accommodations for six, plus a breakfast nook, kitchen and pantry. In fact, it looked a lot like a bunker or bomb shelter — something some wealthy family in the 1950s might have constructed, in fear of some pending disaster — equipped with white leather Pop furniture and a real Salvador Dali. But the technology was anything but outdated. Decker had never seen anything like it, and he had worked at some very high-tech facilities during his tenure at the FBI, not to mention all those times he’d been loaned out to the CIA and NSA through the years. There were consoles everywhere, keyboards and tablets, various input devices, including a virtual reality headset.
Decker found himself fascinated by the VR equipment he saw. But he did not know why until he came upon what appeared to be some kind of 3-D printer, a stereolithographic device, in the corner. The VR headset was made of the same plastic material as the stuff in the printer tray.
Lulu was sitting by one of the terminals, typing away at a keyboard. She barely glanced up at Decker as he began picking at the plastic material. “Yep, it’s the same stuff,” she said.
There was some kind of metal robotic hand by the tray, Decker noticed, apparently designed to pick up finished objects and move them to an adjacent rinsing platter for cleaning. “What stuff?” said Decker, looking over at her. She kept typing away.
“That living LCD tissue taken from your Georgetown assassin. The material used in that bio-cyborg implant and the stuff in that 3-D printer are both examples of liquid UV-curable photopolymers, a substance used in rapid manufacturing and prototyping. Same with the VR equipment. They were all prototyped the same way. You design the part you want using any popular 3-D software package, and it’s automatically carved out of the photopolymer using an ultra-violet laser — with incredible precision, in just a few minutes, and down to the tiniest detail. If you can draw it, you can build it. Virtually instantly.” She gasped. “Oh, my God.”
“Oh my God, what?” Decker said, gliding over to her.
Lulu’s eyes were fixed to her computer screen. She kept reading and typing away. “Give me a few minutes,” she said. “I think I’ve found something.”
Almost an hour later — after Decker had combed through the whole house, stem to stern, for the third time — Lulu called him back down to Zimmerman’s lab once again. She pointed to a stool by the 3-D printer and urged him to sit.
“What you got?” he inquired.
“Three things. First, Mr. X was right. Zimmerman’s death wasn’t an accident. He was murdered.”
“Murdered? Murdered by whom?”
“Not by whom.”
“What do you mean, not by whom?” Decker said. “By what, then? A beaver? A moose?”
“By his car.”
Slowly but surely, the story spilled out. Lulu had managed to hack her way into Zimmerman’s network. Much of his data files had been destroyed, entire drives and back-up systems wiped clean, but some of them she’d been able to reconstruct using tools from her “bag of tricks.” Apparently, she told Decker, it was his IP-enabled Toyota that had killed Zimmerman… or, more accurately, someone had manipulated his car to dispatch him remotely.
“How do you know that?” asked Decker. He was playing with some of the leftover plastic stuck in the fingers of the robot hand by the 3-D printer tray. It was gooey and soft, studded with chiplets, like clusters of silicon cells.
“Because I was able to perform a telematics diagnostic,” she said, “which revealed Zimmerman was traveling at a high rate of speed, more than ninety, when the pressure in his front right tire suddenly vacillated, and he crashed. See for yourself.” She spun the monitor about so he could see the screen from his stool. “The instruction to deflate the tire at precisely that moment was issued remotely.”