Chastain held up a document. “Warrant to seize computers, other electronic communications equipment, hard drives, and other documents stored here and in your aircraft hangar. Mind handing over the keys? I’d hate to punch the locks on your pretty little plane.” Patrick nodded to Brad, who produced the hangar and aircraft keys. “Thank you, son. I have a warrant to search your trailer too, but I guess that’ll have to wait until the fire inspector and OSI are done. Any other locked safes I need keys for?”
“No.”
“Fine. Now, you’re not under arrest, General — yet — but I’m telling you not to go anywhere unless you notify me first. It might not look so good for you at the grand jury if we find you’ve disappeared.” He held up another document. “I have a warrant to search Jonathan Masters’s aircraft and seize certain pieces of equipment, including the robot and the armor you terrorized myself and my agents with. The plane is not in its hangar. Where is it?”
“I want to speak with a lawyer before I answer any questions.”
“You’re not under arrest, General,” Chastain said. He looked at Patrick carefully, studying every movement on his face. “Where did Masters go?” No answer. “When did he leave?” Still no reply. “I’ll just check the control tower’s records. But it’s another example of how uncooperative you are. I’m sure the grand jury will want to hear that also. I still have my suspicions about you, General. You’re not the Sir Lancelot in shining armor the rest of the world thinks you are.”
He stepped closer to Patrick so they were almost nose to nose. “Do you know, Agent Brady will never be able to raise his left arm above his shoulder again, thanks to you and your buddy? He’ll be driving a desk from now on, maybe get himself a medical retirement if they can’t get the pain under control. And you know what else, you bastard? You know that pill you made me swallow? I’m told whenever it’s interrogated and transmits a signal, it could cause cancer. I’ve got a wife and two young kids, you son of a bitch. Maybe you should have killed me, McLanahan… because I’m about to make your life a living hell.” And he turned and stormed out of the office.
“What are we going to do now, Dad?” Brad asked. “Where are we going to go?”
Patrick spent several long minutes feeling a mixture of puzzlement and suspicion, then turned back to his son. “First, I want to look for Gia,” he said. “She was pretty upset, and I didn’t notice it. Next, we should get some lunch. After that, we should go to the store so we can pick up some supplies. If we find Gia, we’ll go to transient billeting for the night; if we don’t, I think we’ll just camp out here in the office on cots, okay?”
“Sure. I can get some cots and sleeping bags out of the CAP storage locker.”
“Good. And while we’re at the store, I want to get a really good laptop. I’ve got some studying to do.”
Ten
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
Patrick was reviewing the hundreds of gigabytes of sensor data that David Bellville had copied onto flash drives before their laptops were seized by the FBI. Brad was asleep in a sleeping bag on a cot just a few feet away. Patrick had been staring at sensor images for six hours and nothing was jumping out at him. He had the last twelve hours of images in front of him from two different sensor passes. The computer was flagging about a dozen points of interest, but when Patrick zoomed in on those particular spots, nothing was apparent. The computer could tell him when something had changed, but it couldn’t tell him if that particular something was relevant to anything. Besides, even if he wanted to take a look, he couldn’t — he had no planes.
Patrick activated his subcutaneous transceiver: “Jon?”
“Hey, dude,” Jon Masters replied a few moments later. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad. The FBI showed up and took all the laptops and downlinks.”
“They’ve been calling every hour on the hour, the pricks. They’d like to speak to me, Charlie, and Wayne, and they say they have a warrant to seize my plane, the CID, and the Tin Man. I referred their butts to the legal department.”
“That’ll delay them a little bit, but not for long. Where are you?”
“Classified. Hush-hush.”
“We’re secure.”
“You think so? I don’t.”
Patrick paused. “The comparative analysis that your sensor software does: it looks for changes, right?”
“I told you that already. It flags unusual changes in travel patterns over time. Where are you?”
“In my office. We’re camping out here for the night. You heard about my trailer?”
“On the news,” Jon said. “If you need anything, let me know. Gia is okay racking out in your office with Brad?”
“She’s MIA.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
“Sorry, bro.”
“All this was too much for her, I guess.”
“If she wants to hang with the McLanahans, she’s got to toughen up her act more than a few notches,” Jon said. “I’ve worked with you for fifteen years and I’m still trying to upshift.”
“Your middle name is ‘upshift,’ ” Patrick said. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For being there,” Patrick said. “For standing beside me.”
“I stand for nothing but the science and the profit, my friend,” Jon said. “Everything else is… oh, hell, I don’t know. If I’m standing anywhere, it’s with my hand out, expecting renumeration. Ideas, gadgets, and juicy contracts, that’s what I’m all about. You want anything else — well, pay me first, and then we’ll talk.”
“Sure,” Patrick said.
“You see anything interesting in those sensor images?” Jon asked.
“No — I don’t get it,” Patrick said, frowning at the laptop. “I mean, I see the flags, but there’s nothing there that I can see.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the biggest cluster of flags is around one of the copper mines around here that belongs to Judah Andorsen,” Patrick said. “It’s called Freedom-7. But why the flags? It’s a mine. They have trucks coming and going all the time. They take ore to a railroad spur that takes it to a main rail line and on to the smelters.”
“But remember, Patrick, that the computer records and compares normal activity, and then flags unusual activity.”
“I know. I get it.”
“Then you’ve got unusual activity out there, my friend,” Jon said. “Normal truck or rail movements wouldn’t be flagged after a few passes. Stop trying to rationalize it. If the computer flagged it, especially over several days, something’s going on down there, and you should go take a look.”
“That’s a problem too. They seized my plane and all the other planes with the sensors on them.”
“Pricks. Can you send me some of those images and let me take a look?”
“Sure.” It took just a couple mouse clicks to send a series of sensor images to Jon’s secure e-mail address. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m still talking with the legal beagles, but they’re saying I have to go and turn myself in eventually — sooner, rather than later,” Jon said. “I’ll probably fly the Skytrain back to Battle Mountain with the other gadgets. What about you?”
“Not a hell of a lot else I can do except hang around here.”