There was an old Navy saying that ships were like mistresses: beautiful, alluring, mysterious, requiring lots of attention, and, ultimately, marriage killers.
“I’ll look at it right now,” he said. The edge in his voice caused her to prop herself up on one elbow and study him.
“You can say it, Jamie,” she said. “Whatever you want, just say it.”
He kissed her on the forehead, not trusting anything that might come out of his mouth. His heavy footsteps said enough. The same frustration he felt at work was now part of his home.
After a half hour of struggling in vain with the toilet, he gave up and went back to the bedroom to find the kids asleep in bed with Lindsey. He must have woken them with all the rummaging around with the tools his father had left wedged behind the sink. He sat down in the old leather recliner in the corner of the room and watched them in the near darkness, trying to let the sounds of the trio’s breathing drain away his stress and frustration. What he wanted to fix most, he feared he could not.
When he woke, it was just past five in the morning. Shit. He had overslept by an hour.
“Did you fix the potty, Daddy?” asked Martin groggily from the bed.
“No, sweetie, it’s still broken,” he said.
“Call Grandpa! He can fix it,” said Claire.
“You should call him,” said Lindsey, eyeing him warily.
He shook his head as the room’s sensors picked up their movement and began to gradually brighten the overhead lights. “I said I’m gonna fix it and I will.”
“We want Grandpa!” Claire and Martin shouted.
“It’s not time to get up yet, kids,” said Lindsey, shooing them out of the bed. “Back to your rooms.”
“We’re not calling him,” said Jamie in a whisper as she walked past, leading the kids down the hall.
He went to the bathroom and showered. Under the unrelenting spray of the cold water he cursed himself. There were too few days before he went out to sea for them to have a night like this. He turned off the shower and shivered. Was this how his dad had felt when he helplessly watched his connection with the family fray? Or had he just been unwilling to try to fix it? That was the difference; his dad hadn’t wanted to try. It had to be the difference. Jamie was not willing to give up.
I’m a better man than my dad, Jamie told himself as he blinked away the fatigue and cold water. Even on my worst days.
Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
Carrie wiped her hands on the front of the old black Hurley pullover that she’d worn to the beach. Then she took her backpack into the bathroom and shut the door.
She pulled her still-wet bathing-suit bottom out of the bag, tossed it into the shower, and rinsed out the sand in the hot water. Then, as the bathroom filled with steam, she undressed, looking at herself in the fogged mirror. The naked body she saw, its beauty obscured by the moisture on the glass, could have been anybody’s. She was anonymous.
After she got out of the shower, she pulled a small makeup compact from the backpack. She tapped it twice on the counter and the cover popped up. She licked her index finger on her right hand and rubbed it around the rim of the compact. There.
She held up her hand to the light and saw the hair. She pulled her fiancé’s black plastic brush from the jewelry box on the counter. She blew gently on her finger, and the hair fell onto the brush. Carefully, she put the brush back in the box.
Carrie sat down on the toilet and closed her eyes. Now she saw them again. Then she saw her fiancé, and, finally, she saw her father.
The inch-long cuts she made on her left thigh wiped the images of the men away. Eyes still shut, she didn’t see the blood dripping onto the blue tile at her feet. The clatter of the scissors on the floor jarred her back from the moment. She stifled a cry of pain and began to wipe the blood away with her palms. She moved to the sink for a towel and then stopped. The fog on the mirror receded just enough for Carrie to look herself in the eyes. I am not anonymous, she told herself. I am death.
Wal-Mart Printing Facility, Ogden, Utah
In many ways it was like watching an old Xerox copy machine in action. A thin layer of graphene chips was sprayed down by a roller that moved from one side of the table to the other. Essentially carbon atoms laid out in the same hexagonal structure of chicken wire, graphene was light and strong, and it was a great conductor. But more important, it was made from the same carbon atoms that formed everything from graphite to charcoal, so it could be sourced easily. Indeed, the graphene in this run of the machine had been pulled from the smoke of a coal-fired power plant.
There was a burning smell as a laser fired, igniting a tiny flame where the light beam came into contact with the graphene dust, melting and fusing the particles together. Then the roller swept back in the other direction, laying down another thin layer, the laser firing again, back and forth, back and forth.
In each microscopic layer, the laser carved out new shapes in the powder. Slowly, a form began to rise, akin to pieces of paper stacking up. As the laser fused it all together, the form grew into an intricate latticework, almost like a honeycomb. The roller paused as a robotic hand reached over, turned the object thirty degrees, and inserted a feed of electrical wire, and then the layering began again. In ten minutes, the form was complete. The robotic hand reached back in and lifted it up, and a spray of air blew off the remaining dust that clung to the object. The arm then moved the object outside the machine and put it in a cardboard box. After sixty forms had been placed in the box, an alarm rang.
A human worker scurried over, quickly closed the box, and ran a line of packing tape over it, sealing it shut. He slapped a barcode sticker on it, and another worker loaded the box onto a robotic pallet mover that drove itself down the aisles. Where once garden gnomes and children’s bicycles had been stacked and stored, ready for distribution across the retail network, there now stood boxes of reverse-engineered spare parts, from machine-gun belts to wheel brackets to, in this case, a power coupling needed at Mare Island. Outside the warehouse, an eighteen-wheeler truck waited with a manifest for the various items that would be distributed and delivered by the next day.
Back inside, the direct-digital manufacturing machine, also known as a 3-D printer, continued its work. A new software package had been downloaded, and now the device began to build an entirely different object. The process had the efficiency of an assembly line but the flexibility to shift on demand and build any design that could be modeled with computer software.
And, even better, it could reproduce itself. The protocol, as voted on by Lee-Ann’s shareholders, dictated that every tenth run would produce parts for additional 3-D printers. These would then be sold at a discount to the firms that had originally been in Wal-Mart’s supply chain. The seeds of both a manufacturing revolution and a new kind of defense industrial complex were being sown within the world’s largest retail chain.
Lotus Flower Club, Former French Concession, Shanghai
Ritual could be deadly. But ritual also offered its own protection. If you followed the same patterns day after day after day, those watching knew that you had nothing to hide.
So Russian air force major general Sergei Sechin had been going to the Lotus Flower Club now for three years. The same girl. He never asked her name. He knew her only by her number: Twenty-Three.
Twenty-Three wore her jet-black hair short, cropped in a spiky mess that looked sultry, not sloppy. She might have been from Tibet; he wasn’t sure. He never asked, never bothered her with fake conversation. Maybe that was why her dark eyes seemed to light up just a slight bit whenever she saw Sechin, which was once every two weeks. That was enough. He was no longer a young man.