Michael slowed to a standstill, crickets singing in the sweet night air. He took a long moment breathing it all in before finally speaking. “So let me make sure I’ve got this,” Michael said. “She’s MI6, he’s CIA, now you’re CIA too? Did any of you ever consider the private sector? You make better money and you’re less likely to get shot.”
“No job security,” Ted said. “But you’re right about the getting shot part. That’s why I took early retirement. I’m a part-time lecturer for the Royal Asiatic Society now. With the exception of what happened to your father, I haven’t looked back since.”
“So is there a reason you didn’t tell me any of this back in Hong Kong?”
“Yeah. You were better off not knowing.”
Michael shot a glance at Kate, but her expression was hard to read. There was no doubt she wanted to hear more, but her body language seemed to suggest that the discussion was between Michael and Ted and that she should be left out of it. It didn’t matter. Michael could conduct this conversation on his own.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why do I need to know now?”
“Because I can see now there’s no keeping you out of it.” Ted lowered his voice. “When I first brought you into this, I was thinking closure. I thought the whole mess would end with Larry. That he’d cop to what he knew and you could go to the police with it and put the whole thing behind you. With everything you’ve been through, both before and now, I knew that would be important to you.”
“And now?”
“Now I can see you’re in way deeper than that. Nothing I say or don’t say is going to make a difference. And if that’s the case, you might as well know it all.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much.” Ted turned back toward the lobby. “Now get some rest. I’ll meet up with you two in the morning.”
Watching him go, Michael finally opened his mouth. “Ted?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“No problem, kid.” Ted grinned in the moonlight and continued on his way.
Chapter 25
Mobi was escorted out of the restroom and down a waiting elevator by two men who were about as far removed from the prototypical laid back JPL employee as you could get. They wore buzz cuts and plain gray suits, and even though they weren’t in uniform per se, it wasn’t much of a stretch to see that they were military, most likely Air Force like Rand. The men silently escorted him to a secure lower level of the laboratory that Mobi had never been to. Though this lower level of the facility was officially designated as storage, it was rumored to be much more: a covert laboratory for projects requiring many times the normal civilian security clearance. So despite the pain from the handcuffs on his wrists and the foreboding in the pit of his stomach, Mobi’s eyes were wide as his escorts led him down the worn corridor. A moment later, a key card was swiped through a cipher lock and Mobi found himself inside a mid-sized room.
The space was closer to a broker’s office than the torture chamber Mobi had been expecting. An Ultrasuede sofa sat in one corner, a Mission Revival desk in the other. One of the military types removed Mobi’s cuffs while the other entered some kind of code into a Blackberry. Then, without another word, they both exited the room, the steel reinforced wood paneled door clicking shut behind them. Less than five seconds later, an automatic panel slid open on the far wall and Deputy Director Alvarez entered the space.
“I see you made it past security,” Alvarez said, handing Mobi a cup of coffee. “I’d have spared you the escort, but that’s how they run this section of the lab.
“Exactly which section are we talking about?” Mobi asked.
“The fun one.”
Alvarez beckoned Mobi to follow her out the open panel in the wall. He was right to think of the preceding area as some kind of waiting room, because the corridor he found himself in was all business, though significantly more sterile business than Mobi was used to. The original structures at JPL dated back to the nineteen forties and even though there had been substantial construction since then, the buildings, for the most part, had a tired feel to them. This underground corridor, however, was different. The walls were sheathed in white polycarbonate panels that bore no sign of wear, while an illuminated yellow line embedded in the floor indicated direction of travel. It was weird. Even though Mobi realized that the corridor was probably designed in this way to minimize airborne contaminants, he still felt like he was treading the corridors of the Death Star. If R2D2 had reared his head, Mobi had no doubt he would have chirped right back at him and taken another slug on his java.
Alvarez led Mobi past several closed doors into a marginally wider section of corridor overlooking a massive clean room. Mobi now realized that his hypothesis as to why the walls were coated in the polymer panels was correct. It would be a means of keeping the particulate count in the air low given that this corridor no doubt provided entry and egress to the clean room, a room that unequivocally had to stay sterile. There was a reason for that of course; it was because they assembled spacecraft there. And looking down through the transparent polymer panels of the observation corridor, Mobi laid eyes on a team of scientists in bunny suits tending to the most unusual spacecraft he’d ever seen.
“The JPL Horten Project,” Alvarez said.
Mobi took a moment. He had seen the blueprints. He knew what the Horten was supposed to look like and this wasn’t it. Not even close. The object in question was roughly the shape of a shallow bowl, about fifteen feet in diameter, and composed of what looked like a molybdenum skeleton covered with a titanium skin. Inside the bowl were a series of outtake valves and tubes that clearly constituted an engine or propulsion device of some kind. It was only partially assembled. Mobi could see that. But he was having difficulty imagining what he saw as part of a larger machine. Still, Alvarez was a serious woman. If she said this was the JPL Horten Project, this was the JPL Horten Project.
“Not impressed?” Alvarez asked.
“No, it’s not that.”
“Is it that in the last however many minutes you’ve been arrested, brought to a level of the lab that isn’t supposed to exist, and shown a secret project that doesn’t look anything like you thought it would?”
“That about sums it up,” Mobi said.
“Then you’re really going to like what comes next.”
Alvarez opened a door in the corridor revealing an office. It was a sterile cube, about fifteen by fifteen with a polished steel desk and three chairs. There was a window overlooking the corridor and a multi-line telephone on the desk, but other than that the space was bare. She led him inside, closing the door behind her.
“Look, we don’t have a lot of time here. I was lucky to get you away from Rand’s guys at all so I’m going to get straight to the point. You’re on a level of the lab that as far as the rest of world is concerned, isn’t here. Why it’s here I’ll save for another time, but for now, just know that Rand had you arrested because we traced your hack. He figures you’re more bother than you’re worth. I know better. That’s why I’m bringing you into the fold.”
“So am I under arrest or not?”
“If Rand gets his way, probably. There’s no gray area with him. As far as he’s concerned, you became a security breach the minute you broke protocol and hacked into the system. His job is to plug the hole.”