“See this.” After scratching his upturned nose, he indicated his diagram, which looked like a bell jar, inside of which were clusters of thin vertical pipes. At the bottom of each was a small box. It was to one of these that he now pointed. “This’s the S.I.T., or ‘security intervention trigger.’ My most brilliant engineer came up with the idea. If someone moves a Pocket Sun without authorization or tries to break into the fuel compartment, the S.I.T. blows the uranium pellets into dust and floods them with a substance I’ve invented, a mesoporous nano material. It binds with the uranium and makes it useless in weapons. No other SMR manufacturer has anything like it.”
The cherub suddenly vanished; his other side — the angry side — emerged.
He leaned slightly forward and pointed a blunt finger for emphasis. “We do spot inventories. A few days ago the auditors found components’d gone missing, along with some mesoporous material. Somebody here is making an S.I.T. He’s — or she’s — going to sell it to a competitor. They have to be stopped. Agent Pepper said this’s the sort of thing you could do. Twenty thousand if you catch him and recover the trigger, Mr. Shaw. I’ll pay expenses too.”
Shaw considered what he was hearing. “You think it’s going overseas. If it were a U.S. competitor you could just sue for theft of trade secrets and patent infringement. Get a good lawyer and you could probably close them down.”
For a time, after college, Shaw had worked in a law office in California. He liked the challenge of the law, though he decided that however mentally stimulating the profession was, office jobs were a poor fit for someone known as the Restless Man.
Harmon said, “Exactly right. I know my competitors in the States. It’s not them. Look, we’re a small company, running on fumes. The S.I.T. is one of the few things that differentiates us. It’s a huge selling point. Somebody else gets it, undercuts our price, we’re gone. And I’m the only manufacturer who’s planning installs in the Third World. And, okay, let’s be grown-ups. I want to make some change myself. Too many people apologizing for capitalism. Bullshit. I make profits, I sink them into the next big thing, employing workers, making products that people...” He stopped himself and waved his hand, as if swatting away a hovering lecture.
“Tom Pepper told me the local FBI can’t handle it.”
A grimace. “Backlogged. And the Ferrington PD? They’ve cut staff by fifty percent. I even said I’d contribute a shitload to the benevolent fund. But they can’t keep up with drugs, homicides and domestics. A missing gadget’s not even on their radar.”
Shaw said, “I’ll take the job.”
The man strode forward and, though diminutive, delivered a powerful handshake.
Harmon returned to his desk and made two brief calls, summoning people.
No more than five seconds passed before his door opened and a tall woman walked inside. Her long black hair was tied back with a blue scarf, which matched the shade of her studious eyeglasses. High cheekbones, generous lips. She wore a tailored suit. Shaw wondered if she’d been a fashion model.
Harmon introduced Shaw to his assistant, Marianne Keller. “Mr. Shaw’s going to be helping us with the trigger.”
“Ah, good, Marty.” Her face bloomed with relief. Shaw supposed that a company like this fostered a sense of family. A betrayal stung them all.
“Anything he needs for expenses, carte blanche.” Then he frowned. “Okay with no private jets?”
“Off the table,” Shaw assured him.
“Yessir,” Keller said. Shaw handed her a card containing only his name and current burner phone number. And he took down her direct line on the back of another.
As she left, someone else entered. As tall as Keller, this woman was blond, hair braided carefully and affixed behind her head. She too had an alluring face. Her build was athletic, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she ran marathons.
Sonja Nilsson, it seemed, was head of Harmon Energy security.
“Mr. Shaw,” she said, also shaking his hand firmly. “Good to meet you.”
He expected an accent and he got one, though it placed her not in Stockholm but within a hundred miles of Birmingham, Alabama.
“Colter,” he said.
Nilsson offered, “Marty told me he was talking to you. I looked you up. Rewards for a living?”
“Like a private eye who doesn’t bill unless he delivers.”
She sat perfectly upright and moved her hands and arms economically. She held a tablet but didn’t fiddle with it. She wore a complex analog watch and no jewelry other than a ring on the index finger of her right hand. It seemed to be a serpent. He couldn’t tell for certain. Shaw made another deduction: she was a veteran. And that she’d seen combat. The eyes — a rare green shade — were completely calm.
Nilsson said, “I’ve gone as far as I can, looking for the thief. Nothing. We need a fresh take.”
Shaw now opened a notebook, 5 by 7 inches. From his jacket he removed his fountain pen, a Delta Titanio Galassia, black with three orange rings toward the nib. He knew some might think in this day and age using an instrument like this was pretentious. But Shaw took lengthy notes during the course of his rewards jobs, and a fine pen like this — it was not inexpensive — was kinder to his hand than ballpoints. It was also simply a pleasure to write with.
As she described what had happened in detail, he jotted notes in his perfect handwriting, the lines horizontal on the unruled paper. This was a skill that had not been taught to him but simply passed down from his father. Both were calligraphers and artists.
When he felt he had enough to get started, he said, “I want to see employees’ RFID log-ins and log-outs. And security tapes.”
Nilsson said, “I’ve already pulled that together.”
They rose and shook hands once again, Shaw nodding away the effusive thanks and hoping a businessman’s hug would not be forthcoming.
9
Sonja Nilsson’s office, curiously, was bigger and contained better furniture than her CEO’s. Good art on the walls too. Landscape photos mostly. He wondered if she’d shot them herself.
They sat on a couch before a long glass coffee table, on which were neat stacks of manila file folders.
Together, they reviewed employee records and the data from digital key entry and exit points, Shaw taking occasional notes. She lifted a seventeen-inch laptop onto the files, booted it up and logged on with both fingerprint and password. On this she called up surveillance tapes of the corridors where the S.I.T. components had been stored. Even though they fast-forwarded the tapes, this took a solid hour.
When they’d finished, Shaw said, “Again.”
It was halfway through the second viewing that Shaw spotted the fly.
He scrubbed back and examined the scene again.
“Look.”
He pointed to a video of the corridor leading to the facility where the S.I.T. components were stored. No one was seen entering or leaving the place between the closing time of 5:30 and the start of business at 8:00 the next morning.
He froze a frame and pointed to the insect on the wall.
“Okay. Got the little critter,” she drawled.
“Now look at the next day.”
He ran that tape to the time he recalled.
The same fly landed in the same place.
“Well, damn.” The latter word was two syllables.
Somebody had gotten to the security videos and replaced them with one downloaded earlier. For two evenings, the thief would have had unobserved access to the storage facility.