The elevator stopped at the next floor. “I’m listening.”
“Come by. I’ll show you.”
Uzi pressed the floor button for the lab. “I’m headed up now. I’m in the building.”
“That makes one of us. I’m supposed to be off today, remember? I went home. Come by my house.”
“You’re working at home? On your day off?”
“That’s what the section chief loves about me. My work ethic.”
“You said that already.”
Meadows chuckled. “He really means it.”
After jotting down the directions to Meadows’s house in Arlington, Uzi called DeSantos and invited him along for the ride. They arrived at the small two-story colonial residence half an hour later. A tattered American flag hung on a brass flagpole cemented into the front corner of the brown lawn that was dotted with hearty green weeds. Uzi found the doorbell and rang it.
Meadows’s voice came from nowhere. “Who is it?”
“Uzi. And my partner.”
A buzzer sounded. “Come in and go directly down the stairs to your left.”
“Nice setup,” DeSantos said to Uzi.
“Thank you,” Meadows responded through the hidden speaker.
As they descended the staircase, the scent of mildew poked at Uzi’s nose. “Jeez, Tim, you should do a little disinfecting.”
“You talking about bugs, or bugs?” Meadows asked from somewhere behind a line of free-standing, floor-to-ceiling metal shelves.
“The mildew kind.”
The basement was unfinished. Curtained windows poked through the tops of the cement walls at ten-foot intervals. Spider cracks in the concrete extended in several directions, like tree roots branching out in search of water.
Their heels clicked against the brown tile flooring as they strolled down one of the rows, taking in dozens of half-finished projects that lay in various stages of completion.
“What is all this stuff?” DeSantos asked.
“I dabble in my free time,” Meadows said. He squinted at DeSantos. “You are?”
“Sorry,” Uzi said. “Hector DeSantos, DOD. He’s on the Marine Two task force, coordinating with JTTF.”
Meadows cocked his head, sizing up DeSantos. “DOD, huh?” He extended a hand, and DeSantos took it.
“Uzi said you found something.”
“Yes, yes,” Meadows said, then motioned them to follow him across the room.
As they passed a six-foot-tall black lacquer safe, Uzi said, “You in the banking business?”
“More like munitions,” DeSantos said. “This is a gun safe. A big gun safe.”
“I keep my projects in there. And my backup data. Media’s kept in a smaller compartment, though. Had to build it myself. Tolerance to one hundred twenty-five degrees. Otherwise the SSD drives melt.”
“SSD?” DeSantos asked.
Uzi said, “Solid State Disc drives. Flash memory. Safer and more stable than a regular hard drive, which is an electrical-mechanical device that’s destined to fail.”
DeSantos tilted his head back and looked at Uzi through the lower half of his glasses. “I knew that.”
“Yeah,” Uzi said. “Of course you did.”
“And yes, before you ask, I’ve also got cloud backup.” Meadows moved a few paces to his right, where an LCD monitor stood on a makeshift table that consisted of a plywood board resting on two beat-up sawhorses.
They followed Meadows and stopped behind him, then watched as he tapped at the keys. “After you left, I did some more digging on those large-caliber rounds.”
Uzi turned to DeSantos and explained what they had learned about the Russian SV-98 sniper rifle and the spent brass casing they’d recovered from the scene.
“I found an unusual residue on the inside of the casing.”
“How unusual?” Uzi asked.
“Unusual enough to be able to give you a specific location of manufacture. Like the former Eastern bloc. Czech Republic.”
DeSantos nodded. “That goes with the weapon. And begs the question of who these people are, who they’re affiliated with. This is all good stuff. We need to get this info over to the Agency, have them start working it up.”
“I’ll give it to Leila. She’s now on the M2TF, liaison to JTTF.”
DeSantos leaned back. “Is that right.”
“Don’t give me any shit. I had nothing to do with it. Shepard’s idea.”
“Uh huh.”
A series of long, shrill beeps emanated from across the oblong room. Meadows’s fingers played across the keyboard and a three-dimensional diagram filled the screen. He leaned closer to the monitor and studied it, as if trying to locate a small side street on a city map. He struck another key and the beeping stopped. “Sorry about that.”
“What was that?” Uzi asked.
“‘That’ was that.” He swiveled in his chair to indicate a ten-foot-long table on the other side of the room, barely visible behind one of the rows of shelving. “My crown jewel.”
“Part of your dabbling?” Uzi asked.
“I’ve got twenty-three patents already.”
DeSantos raised an eyebrow. “Any of them worth anything?”
“Not a dime. Yet. But I don’t do it for money, Mr. DeSantos, I do it for the challenge.”
“And what kind of a challenge is your crown jewel?” DeSantos asked.
“Come, I’ll show you.” He rose from his chair and led the way. He stopped in front of the long table. Old-fashioned vacuum tubes projected from wood and metal boards, which were crisscrossed several times with multicolored wires bundled at regular intervals with plastic lock-ties.
“What does it do?”
“It’s a new kind of sensor that can detect all kinds of nasty stuff.”
“‘Nasty stuff’?”
“Bombs, guns, knives, trigger mechanisms, you name it. If it can be made into a weapon, this thing will find it.”
“Even plastic resin or carbon fiber composites?” DeSantos asked.
“Yup.”
“Don’t we already have something like that?”
“Yes and no. We’ve got all kinds of fancy sensors, most of them developed after 9/11. But they can’t do all the things this can do. Most check for metal or metal alloys. Some sniff for explosive materials. Some can detect certain kinds of resin composites. But this thing can find it all. Along with the software I’m writing for it. Best yet, it’ll do it for a fraction of the price these companies are charging the government for their high-tech gizmos. With an off-the-shelf Intel chip, this thing’ll only run a couple hundred bucks, assuming it’s mass produced with economies of scale.”
“Yeah, but does it really work?” Uzi asked.
“Seeing is believing. Here, I’ll show you.”
DeSantos checked his watch. “We really should get this info over to Leila—”
Meadows turned to a shelf behind him and dug into a shoebox full of parts. “It’ll only take a couple of minutes. You gotta see this.”
Before DeSantos could object, Meadows was handing Uzi a tiny square of light gray plastic. “Hide this somewhere.”
Uzi did as instructed, dropping it into his left jacket pocket. Meadows lifted the screen of a nearby laptop and hit a button that woke it from sleep. He poked another key, then grabbed a thick, brushed stainless steel wand fitted with blue LEDs. “It’s all wireless,” he said proudly.
Meadows started at Uzi’s head and brought the wand down slowly. The device was silent, until the same shrill beep they had heard moments ago blared from a console on the table.
“Hmm,” Uzi said. “Impressive.”
But Meadows’s gaze was still directed at the wand. He continued to wave it over Uzi’s coat, two LEDs flashing blue, then three, then four. And then the wand began vibrating.
“Take it off for a sec,” Meadows said.