“I left the phone in the car when I went into the hospital. I guess someone could have broken into my car, erased the message, then locked the car back up. But even then there’d be a record of it on my message log.” Mary knew her Sherlock Holmes. Eliminate the impossible and what remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. “You’re right. It was the phone. It had to be. Something just happened.”
“Take it to Joe’s office. Give it to what’s-his-name…Dave-”
“Don Bennett. Joe’s boss.”
“Have him take a look at it.”
“I don’t like him. He practically tried to rip the phone out of my hands last night. He scares me.”
“The FBI scares me, too, hon, but I trust ’em.”
“I know them better than you.” Mary tried her best to recall Joe’s words. She closed her eyes and saw them hovering just out of reach. “It’s just that I can’t remember everything he said.”
“Give it time. It’ll come.” Carrie nodded toward the door. “And the girls?”
“Jessie is in her room with her door locked. Gracie woke up and cried until she fell back asleep. They’re in shock.”
“Does Jess know about the message?”
“No,” said Mary forcefully, surprising herself. “I won’t tell her. It wasn’t her fault I missed the call. She was just doing what she always does.”
“She’s really into that tech stuff,” said Carrie. “Programming and creating apps.”
“Her summer school teacher told me that some people just get it, and Jess is one of them. He said she has the gift.”
“Mark was that way, too. Turned out good for him, even if he is still a geek.” Carrie stood and came closer. “What’re you going to do, hon?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t imagine moving again. The schools are good. Grace likes her new doctor. Besides, where would we go?”
“I’d imagine you’d want to be nearer your folks.”
“They’re all gone. I’ve got a brother floating around on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific, and Joe’s got two sisters in Boston. That’s it. I don’t have anyplace to go.”
“Texas has done right by us. You could do worse.”
“Do I have to become a Republican?”
“Mandatory after five years-otherwise they kick you out.” Carrie went to the door. “Can’t keep your fan club waiting forever.”
“Five minutes.”
“Take ten. I’ll stall for you.” Carrie winked and closed the door.
Mary picked up the newspaper again. She looked at the shattered windshield and the body on the ground. She contrasted the picture with Bennett’s muddled explanation of what had occurred. Something didn’t match. Or, as she’d heard some good ol’ boy say, “That dog don’t hunt.”
Mary walked to the bathroom, washed her face, put on makeup, and brushed her hair. It wouldn’t be right to show them how devastated she was. The admiral wouldn’t stand for it.
She picked up her phone on the way out, pausing at the door to access the calls log. She spotted the number she wanted right away.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I direct your call?”
“Don Bennett, please.”
12
It was not this hot in England.
Ian tried not to hurry as he crossed the broad expanse of lawn known as the Meadow. Christ Church, and the comfort of his air-conditioned office, were ten steps behind him and already he was sweating. He continued up Dead Man’s Walk, then cut over to Merton Street, passing Oriel and University before reaching High Street.
Oracle had its “Emerald City.” Google had its “Googleplex.” Ian had his own private Oxford.
There was New College and Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library. There was even the River Isis. The buildings were exact replicas of the originals, built from the same English limestone and mortar on a three-hundred-acre plot of land overlooking Lake Travis, five miles from the Austin city limits. A little bit of England in the Texas Hill Country.
He crossed the High and entered a warren of alleyways, heading toward Brasenose, the “college” that housed ONE’s research-and-development labs. Each “college” contained offices, a cafeteria, and a quad where employees could get outside and recreate. New College housed the Server Division. Oriel housed Online Sales. And so on.
Great Tom sounded the quarter hour. Like the original hanging in Tom Tower, the bell weighed six tons and was cast from smelted iron. It tolled over a hundred times at nine each night, not in memory of the original students enrolled in Christ Church, but to celebrate each billion dollars of ONE’s annual sales. In the year of our Lord 2015, Great Tom was programmed to toll 201 times each night.
“Ian!” It was Peter Briggs, coming out of the White Stag.
“Come on,” Ian called. “They’re waiting on me.”
Briggs pulled up alongside him. “That bastard May’s remarks made it into an article about the race in the Reno papers.”
“The sports section.” Ian had seen the piece while doing a little background on Gordon May. “Right before the part about the race stewards denying his objection.”
“He sounds serious.”
“Like I said, he’s a sore loser. Now everyone knows it. Anything else about John Merriweather comes out of his mouth, we’ll sue him for defamation. Shut him up once and for all.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
“To think,” said Ian, dismissing May’s monstrous accusations. “John Merriweather was a dear friend.”
The men walked a ways farther, leaving the main campus and continuing along a paved road toward the R &D facility, a black glass rectangle the size of a city block surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall fence.
“This is it, then?” said Briggs as they passed through the security checkpoint. “You get the cooling system all squared away?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
“Better have,” said Briggs. “Utah’s ready to rock ’n’ roll. They don’t like delays in D.C.”
Ian ignored the admonishing clip to his voice. “Let me worry about D.C.”
“Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”
–
It was an object of beauty.
Ian ran a hand over the face of the machine. An undulating wave of black titanium as alluring as a centerfold’s curves glimmered beneath the lab’s soft lighting. Form married to function. The ONE logo had been painted across the panels in electric-blue ink that seemed to lift right off them. The apotheosis of design and intellect.
Titan. The world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Half a dozen engineers were conducting last-minute checks of the equipment. All wore hoodies or fleece. One sported a down parka. Outside, the temperature was pushing 100°. Inside, it was a chill 58°.
“Ah, Ian, welcome,” said Dev Patel, the chief programmer on the Titan project, hurrying toward him. “Can we get you a jumper?”
“I’m fine,” said Ian. “Are we all hooked up?”
“All according to your instructions.” Patel placed a hand on top of Titan. He was short and round, a native of Madras who’d come to ONE by way of IIT, Caltech, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’ve connected two hundred machines for today’s test. Our footprint is about four thousand square feet.”
“Two hundred? That enough?”
“Good lord, yes.” Patel tugged at the thatch of graying hair that fell across his forehead, looking like nothing so much as an aging schoolboy. “And then some.”
Ian patted him on the back. John Merriweather’s coup was to marry graphics processing units (GPUs) with conventional central processing units (CPUs) to create a hybrid that was at once more energy-efficient than anything before it and capable of an order of magnitude increase in computational power. Titan used 25,000 AMD Opteron 16-core CPUs and 25,000 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. “Memory?”