Grady stood across a granite-topped island from him. “Who else is in this building?”
“You mean what else: floors and floors of truth in advertising—cold storage. Very useful for erasing thermal signatures from questionable fusion experiments.”
Alexa glared at him. “Fusion? Cotton, you’re not supposed to have that level of technology out of BTC headquarters.”
He poured another glass. “Cognac, Mr. Grady? You look like you could use one.”
Grady nodded.
He poured. “Drawn from casks lost in a shipwreck off the coast of France in 1873.”
“Good lord, it must have cost a fortune.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Cotton slid a snifter along the stone counter to him. Grady just barely caught it before it went over the edge.
Alexa persisted. “What else do you have in this hideaway of yours?”
“Nothing dangerous, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, this is strictly a stealth operation. We are safe from all known tracking technologies here.”
“Not a q-link transmitter.”
Cotton finished off another finger of cognac. “No. But then, we took care of that, didn’t we?” He offered her a drink with his eyes.
She just made a disgusted sound and headed down the corridor, clearly irritated.
Grady watched her go.
“She could probably use some alone time.” Cotton started moving pots and pans around, turning on gas burners on his massive stove.
Grady actually felt bad for her. “Alexa just walked away from her whole world for us. I remember having mine taken from me, and that was hard enough.” He took a sip of the cognac and savored it on his tongue. “My God, this is like a mist going down.”
“Yeah, pretty smooth…” Cotton was getting ingredients out of what turned out to be some sort of walk-in fridge.
“You’re cooking?”
“Sure, why not? I always try to have a nice meal after near-death experiences. The food never tastes better. Thought I’d make a bouillabaisse. You hungry?”
“Okay.”
Cotton stabbed a finger at the ceiling. “This calls for Bizet…” He shouted at the ceiling in respectable French. “Les pêcheurs de perles—‘Au fond du temple saint’!”
Suddenly the opera began to fill the loft. Beautiful music. Grady could see the colors in waves. He felt the depth of the day’s events and took another sip of cognac.
“I am sorry that you wound up in Hibernity, Mr. Grady. Please know that I was given no choice.” Cotton was gathering fresh seafood onto the counter.
Grady nodded absently. “How on earth is there fresh seafood here?”
He gestured to the walk-in fridge. “Inert storage. Uses noble gases—argon. Like cryogenics but without freezing. Food takes ages to go bad.”
“Another world-changing innovation hidden in a vault.”
Cotton seemed unfazed as he shelled large prawns. “This whole building is a ten-story freezer two blocks long. We’d probably find Prohibition-era gangsters in here if they ever thawed the place out.”
“So how is it you’re here, Cotton? Why were you playing the BTC’s mad bomber all these years?”
Cotton grimaced. “Bad luck, really.”
Grady gave him a look.
“Oh, right. I guess you were unluckier than I was. What I mean is, I was caught trying to break into BTC headquarters about… oh, I guess a dozen years ago.”
“You were trying to break into the BTC?”
“Well, I never claimed I was smart.”
“How did you even know they existed?”
“I didn’t. It was a job. I made it my business to obtain difficult-to-obtain information for interested parties. The BTC building had come to the attention of certain people—certain low-profile people—who let me know just how ultrasecure this very run-of-the-mill building smack-dab in downtown Detroit was. It was anomalous to say the least.”
Cotton stopped peeling seafood for a moment to stare wistfully into the distance. “I thought I had it all figured out back then.” He laughed. “But we don’t know what we don’t know until we know.”
“Someone hired you to break into the BTC?”
“It’s not like I tossed a brick through the window. I had a sophisticated operation. I am a master thief. It’s just that there is no breaking into the BTC.” He opened a glass-faced wine cabinet and held up a bottle of red. “Châteauneuf-du-Pape?”
Grady nodded toward his half-full cognac. “No, I’m good, thanks.”
Cotton started opening the wine as he continued. “And that low-profile client, I later found out, was the CIA. Wish I’d known that back then. They have a rather dismal history when it comes to break-ins.
“I thought I was clever, but I got caught before I even got into the premises. Turns out the exterior of their building is a facade in more than the traditional sense. There are no windows. No surface-level doors—or at least none that go anywhere. Behind the concrete-and-glass perimeter are thirty millimeters of diamond-aggregate nanorods, black as Sauron’s tower—that’s where I got the idea for this place, by the way. The BTC HQ goes a few hundred feet underground—that I know of. They project holograms on the walls inside to make it appear like you’re looking out a window at the real world. The human eye can’t detect the difference with the tech they’re using. So they’re constantly switching the view to live shots taken by their video dust cameras scattered around the world—extradimensional transmitters link all their comms.” He looked up. “You probably figured that out by now. It’s why no one can eavesdrop on them.”
Grady considered this as he took another sip of the precious cognac. After savoring it for a few moments, he said, “And they caught you?”
Cotton nodded as he started cleaning seafood again. “Yeah, and you can imagine I had my eyes opened fast. A barbarian hauled before Caesar. The director at the time, a little waif of a man named Hollinger, was impressed I’d gotten as far as I did. He offered me a deaclass="underline" I could either work for them as the public face of the Winnowers—become the infamous Richard Louis Cotton—or I could get pushed through an exothermic decomposition beam.” He turned back. “And you saw what one of those did to our friend Agent Davis.” Cotton paused for a moment. “Poor woman.”
“So you became the Antitech Bomber.”
“No one in the BTC wanted to be Cotton, and they needed a new antitech boogeyman. They kept me on a short leash for quite some time. The plan was that after a decade they’d retire Cotton, too. I was supposed to relax in idyllic splendor among the other godlings.” He chuckled as he took a sip of wine from the crystal bulb he’d half filled. “But then, I never really believed that. And also I’d never forgotten the job I’d been hired to do. After all, how often does a thief get a chance to steal back the future?”
“Then you already had a plan? Which we disrupted…”
“You might say we have something in common, Mr. Grady.”
Grady finished off his cognac, then pulled the video projector from beneath his shirt on its chain. “Maybe you can help me then. I need to decode the data on this device—it’s DNA-formatted.”
Cotton shrugged. “That’s the only real format there is.” He looked at the thin piece of bone. “What is it?”
Grady thumbed the button, and Chattopadhyay’s image appeared on the wall. “My name is Archibald Chattopadhyay, nuclear physicist and amateur poet. I have a lovely wife, Amala, who has given me five wonderful children. I led the team that first perfected a sustained fusion reaction…” Grady paused it.