Mark heard it in Remo’s voice—this was not any I kind of kidding around. “I can’t ignore Dr. Smith.”
“‘Dear Dr. Emperor Smitty.’ Type it exactly as I say it, Junior.”
Mark Howard sighed and typed.
“‘Please refer to my previously stated conditions for continuing this conversation.”’
“What previously stated conditions?” Mark demanded.
“It’s not to you. You don’t need to know.”
“If I don’t understand. I’m sure Dr. Smith won’t.”
“Fine. ‘Conditions are as follows.’ Type that. ‘Conditions are as follows. Dr. Smith will give Remo no crap and Remo defines what is crap. Otherwise Remo gets off the plane.’”
“You can’t get off…”
“Send it.”
Mark sent it. A few minutes later an email came back. “Will discuss only the current assignment.”
“I don’t trust him, but I’ll give him another chance.” It was a cold, cold Dr. Smith who came back on-line when Mark reconnected.
“This is the situation, Remo, as of this moment.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I’m here,” Remo said.
“Good.”
Remo could almost feel the unspoken sarcastic comment that was something like, “I thought maybe you got off the plane.” Let the old fart stew.
“There has been a number of thefts in recent months that defy explanation. The targets have all been research labs for U.S. defense industries.”
“Explain ‘defy explanation,”’ Remo said.
“I will. In four recent cases research labs in the southwestern United States have been burgled.”
“Burgled?”
“Burgled. Defenses penetrated by an individual with rather startling capabilities. These are among the most highly secure laboratories anywhere, designed to be j impenetrable by an army or even a skilled special- forces unit. Still, someone broke into each of them and made off with valuable military technology.”
“How?”
“We think we have a partial answer to that,” Smith said. His voice had ceased being icy and was now simply frosty. “Here’s how it happened. Mark?”
Mark typed on the computer and quickly brought a computer-generated graphic onto the wide screen. The pale yellow map had light brown broken lines for the state borders of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Colorado. There was a red dot in each state for the capital city, but there was nothing for the Sun On Jo reservation. Remo was already wishing he was back there. He felt cheated.
“What’s with the slide show?” he asked. “I don’t usually get the whole secret-agent briefing.”
“One reason, we have time,” Smith said dryly. “For another, it is pertinent, as you’ll see. Mark?”
“Mark?” Remo echoed.
Mark shot Remo a dark look and fiddled with the keys of the computer, bringing up a small blinking star. “This was three weeks ago. A technology firm was hit about ten miles south of Flagstaff. The laboratory was ransacked and the company mainframes were destroyed. One hard drive was stolen, as well as test materials. Then the lab was burned to the ground.”
“Somebody really hated that lab, I guess,” Remo said.
“Someone was very determined to steal the technology the firm was developing for the U.S. military, and they were also determined to be sure no one else would have it. They left no usable electronic or hard files.”
Remo frowned. “Didn’t they make backup copies? You know, like on a floppy disc?”
“First of all, Remo” Smith said sourly, “the amount of data the company generated would not fit onto ten thousand floppy discs. The company did make remote backups of their data, but their data generation was dynamic. The material they were developing was actually being formulated using a software that combined attributes of various chemicals and their deposition technologies and measuring the theoretical results.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The software was the real marvel,” Mark explained. “The software was what was creating the materials for the military. A software copy and a six-day-old data dump were stored off-site. The problem was that the hardware to run the software is unique and will have to be rebuilt before the software can be run again.”
“I understand perfectly,” Remo said. “So what?”
“The materials being developed by the firm were for stealth paint,” Smith said.
“Stealth paint? To make your split-level invisible to radar?”
“To make just about anything invisible to radar, lidar, infrared, you name it,” Mark explained. “It was just about perfected. The thief knew the right moment to strike. He got the coating and he left the research firm incapable of recreating its own technology for the immediate future.”
“The thief also took the only test batch of the material. The older samples were poured out and ruined in the fire,” Smith said. “We believe the thief then used the material as a coating when he next penetrated two military laboratories in rapid succession in a high-security complex near Phoenix.”
“Okay,” Remo said, hoping to hurry all this along. “The thefts were for missile guidance systems. Old systems, outdated by current U.S. state-of-the-art but decades ahead of the systems used by most global militaries,” Mark said. “They’ve got a lot of black market value. The last theft took place a week ago.”
The screen lit up with a marker in south central New Mexico.
“This time the thief targeted a research lab operated at White Sands,” Mark said.
“Wasn’t the Air Force being especially careful after the first three thefts?” Remo asked. “Who did this, anyway? Who could get into a military base, let alone a top- secret compound, without being noticed? I could. Chiun could. I don’t know who else could.”
Remo realized he was fibbing. He did know who else could. Freya could, if what he had witnessed in recent days was any indication.
“Hey, they weren’t doing any testing on animals, were they?” Remo added.
“What?” Mark said.
“Forget it.”
“Interesting that you should mention yourself and Chiun,” Smith said in a droll voice. “We’ve got some video from the surveillance at White Sands. Mark?”
“Mark?” Remo added.
Mark made an effort to ignore Remo as he brought a video onto the screen. It was a dark concrete lot, a small drift of sand swelling over it in a steady breeze. “White Sands. We tapped into their security system and found three conditions of security tape from the time of the theft. This is unaltered tape, and yet we see no sign of the intruder.”
“Because he’s covered in stealth paint?” Remo asked.
“Watch,” Mark said.
Remo spotted the movement. It was a flash of a tiny, whirling blade and it moved outside of the chain-link fence that towered out of sight on the screen. It moved up, over and down, and the flicker was enough to attract the attention of the motion-sensitive camera. It targeted the spot, turning to bring the movement to the center of the frame.
“The camera automatically switches to thermal, senses nothing,” Mark said. The image became green with bright spots, showing just a faint glimmer of something beyond the fence. “Then it switches to a white negative view, and finally back to normal vision. Sound and laser landscape measurement systems are also at work. They sense nothing.”
“There’s something there,” Remo protested. He could see it, although the limitations of the video recording made it indefinable.
“According to the algorithms driving the security system, there’s nothing,” Smith said. “It watched the same spot for two hours and there was no further movement Not so much as the rising and falling of a breathing human being.”
“Then this, after two hours,” Mark said. He touched a key and the camera was still on the same spot on the fence, although Remo could see a shifting of the stars in the background to prove time had passed. The camera jerked abruptly to the right, falling upon a tiny mechanical device that hopped across the concrete and froze against the fence.