Nolend laughed. “A couple years ago, after a brutally long and fruitless week of focus groups at a mall in Boise, one of our clients threw up his hands and said that he would pay any amount of money to be a fly on the wall in typical consumers’ homes, to hear what they really thought as opposed to what they said in skewed focus groups. It gave me an idea. I had dinner with another old F-Sixer, a tech guy who was teaching electrophysics down at Stanford, and we ended up creating a device that actually allowed clients to be the fly on the wall and then some. To make a long story short, it bought me an island.”
“So what’s the ‘it’?” Thornton asked as though merely interested.
Nolend seemed to deliberate, fighting back a smile before giving in. Thornton guessed that pride had won out. “You’ve seen a nanodrone before, right?”
“No, and I thought nobody can see one.”
“You can — if you know where and when to look, and it catches the light. We reverse-engineered an F6 model, added audio, then flew the thing right into a prospective customer’s kitchen.”
“Probably Pollyannaish of me to ask, but isn’t that illegal?”
“No, not if you get a signed release. For what the ad agency pays, the subjects never bother to read the fine print. Still, in case one of our rivals or some rabble-rouser gets a look at the release form, I’m checking into relocating our listening post from San Francisco to Barbados. When I played for the Sixers, I heard rumint about a domestic black op that put a listening post on Barbados because the island has virtually no electronic eavesdropping regulations. The audio goes to a transcription service, then the people at the service send the spooks in the U.S. written transcripts. It’s a legal loophole.”
Good old Barbados, Thornton thought. The Caribbean island was an offshore business paradise based on the minimal extent to which laws were enforced.
“As you can imagine, the intel we’ve gotten has been fantastic,” Nolend went on. “Our proprietary research won the accounts I was able to found my agency on, and since then, business has been going so well it feels like cheating.”
This was not the sort of admission made by someone complicit in a crime, Thornton thought. In any case, it provided the flimsiest of leads. If the domestic eavesdropping operation were black — the “black” meaning the elimination of any connection between what’s being done and who’s doing it — Nolend probably knew no more about it, and Thornton would find it near impossible to learn anything, even without the encumbrance of his eavesdropper. If and when such black ops appeared on government ledgers, they were veiled as “Transit Analysis Project” or “Currency Classification Initiative” or something even blander. Always best to keep Congress in the dark, the spooks believed; oversight has a way of revealing the intelligence services’ best-laid clandestine plans to their targets.
Thornton still intended to extract all the information he could from Nolend. But before he could ask another question, they reached the Madaket pier, where a small crowd of event planners descended upon the host.
While changing into his tux in a palatial room in the “guesthouse”—essentially a twelve-bedroom luxury hotel — Thornton reflected that his investigation had yet to advance beyond square one: Some entity has a superbug. The telephone company vans and Nolend’s invitation — mailed to Thornton’s apartment two months ago and printed weeks before that — were probably just coincidence after all. Thornton considered the familiar espionage refrain, There are no coincidences. He countered it with the fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died of natural causes on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And five years later, July 4, 1831, president number five, James Monroe, succumbed to mortality.
Thornton didn’t see Nolend again until that evening, at a predinner speech in a room that evoked a royal reception hall. Nolend was introducing the speaker, the director of the famine relief organization the event benefited, when Thornton found a seat in an audience of 400 people, many of whom he recognized from their positions in American government, business, and entertainment. His eyes were drawn to a strikingly beautiful woman in the last row. During the speech, he stole a look over his shoulder every chance he got. He’d seen her before on television, where she appeared pale. In the flesh, her paucity of cosmetics emphasized creamy skin, and silvery strands highlighted a chute of black hair. She wore a full-length, glittering amber gown that took to her lithe form like gold foil on fancy chocolate. Far and away her most compelling feature, though, was a detail Thornton had read about her recent run for political office: By revealing secrets from her personal life that she’d reportedly never shared, her opponent, Senator Gordon Langlind, had narrowly won reelection.
15
For security’s sake, Tim Eppley had committed the directions to the safe house to memory. He was careful to keep his rental Kia below the speed limit. A fifty-buck ticket now could end up costing him a thousand times as much later tonight. Driving eastbound on the Chesapeake Bay Road, staying below forty miles per hour was no problem. The two-lane route was winding, slick, and dark — lined by so many trees that it was hard to believe there was a 64,000-square-mile body of water a few feet to his left. The still-leafy branches extended over the road, obscuring the moon and stars. The Kia’s headlights reached into the darkness like luminous sleeves, revealing only the rutted pavement ahead and the occasional pine bough flying past.
Eppley tried to tone down his excitement in order to focus on driving. He’d been paid $25,000 in advance, and now, having finished assembling the E-bomb prototype, he stood to get another fifty K. Not bad for three weeks’ work, especially for an unemployed twenty-year-old Cal-Tech dropout. Better, he stood to land a full-time gig at Blaise, arguably the most innovative advanced weapons development shop since the Skunk Works. The best part about the prospective gig was the chance to get to know his idol, Curtis Brockett, who, too, had wasted a year in school, at MIT, before founding Blaise and, five years later, making the Forbes list.
Three weeks ago, Brockett sent Eppley an e-mail beginning with a quotation from Sun-tzu’s The Art of War: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.” The remainder of the message was just one sentence: “Opportunity’s knocking, amigo.” It was signed, “CB.”
Eppley wasted no time in responding with another of the ancient Chinese general’s maxims: “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
A few hours later, Eppley’s trial assignment commenced with a Hushmail from Steve Griffin, the VP of security based at Blaise’s D.C. office. When deciphered, the message instructed Eppley to go to the Starbucks a mile from his Denver apartment, then check beneath the composting barrel left outside, full of coffee grounds for use by gardeners. The metal hoop around the bottom of the barrel extended below the base by an inch. Duct-taped into the hollow beneath the base, Eppley found a freezer bag with $45,000 in cash, his advance plus operating expenses.
Now Eppley turned right onto Griffin’s street, Hill Road. After a mile, the beachy houses ended, as did the pavement, but Hill Road itself continued in dirt, ascending its namesake, terminating after another mile. He swung the Kia onto the dirt driveway, his headlights showing him a solitary saltbox cottage on a bluff with a commanding view of a bay, a matrix of purples, blacks, and grays intermittently flickering white in the starlight. There was one car in the driveway, another Kia. Although Hertz had given Eppley his Kia at random, he congratulated himself for driving the same car as Griffin, who was probably, like most tech-firm security guys, ex-CIA.