Thornton and Mallery found two security guards sitting in lawn chairs by the gate, their police-model Segway electric personal transports — or, as he thought of them, $6,500 scooters — standing at the ready. The men nodded hospitably as Thornton and Mallery ambled past. The guards’ primary functions, he guessed, were fending off panhandlers and dissuading freshmen from doing the things that freshmen do.
At the Science Building, an austere bluish gray steel tower, they pushed through a revolving door and entered a creamy marble lobby that offset the severity of the exterior. Probably typical for a Sunday, the vast space was empty, save for one more member of the campus security force, a bony, dark-skinned man in his sixties who sat at a small desk to the side of the entrance. He looked up from his magazine long enough to ascertain that Thornton wasn’t carrying an assault rifle.
Then he fixated on Mallery. “I’ve seen you on TV, yes?” he asked with a musical Indian accent — Gujarati, Thornton guessed.
“It’s possible,” she said.
“Are you an actress?”
“Not by profession.”
“Oh, well, so much for adding to my granddaughter’s autograph collection.” With a smile, the man returned to his reading.
And that, Thornton suspected, was the extent of the safeguarding of classified research here — a story for another day.
They rode an escalator up to an elevator bank across from floor-to-ceiling windows framing West 120th Street, a stretch of four- and five-story redbrick academic buildings. The elevator stopped at the fourth floor, the doors snapping open to reveal a corridor that evoked the Death Star. Lighting panels flush with the ceiling caused the metallic walls to shimmer a dull blue. Thornton led Mallery past a row of what appeared, through frosted glass portholes, to be laboratories.
A door to an office swung open and O’Clair wandered out. “Oh, hey, guys,” he said, as if he hadn’t been eagerly awaiting their arrival.
Thornton made introductions while O’Clair guided them down the hall.
“Russ has told me a lot of great things about you,” Mallery said.
“That’s only because he owes me money.” O’Clair admitted them to a laboratory, in which they passed beneath a flap and into a glossy silver mesh fifteen-by-fifteen-foot tent. At its center stood a pair of stools and a cart that held surgical instruments and a lunchbox-size container made of the same silvery material as the tent.
With a wave at the surroundings, O’Clair said, “This is a Faraday tent, generally used for computer forensic tests. It’s made of a highly conductive textile that redistributes electrical charges to cancel out external nonstatic electric fields. In other words, you can say whatever you want now and it won’t be overheard or recorded.”
“What else do we get to do here?” Mallery eyed the cart, on which a small scalpel blade gleamed in the light cast by the battery-powered lamp on the tent wall. Thornton thought he glimpsed squeamishness through her shell of poise.
“First, I’m going to remove the devices.” O’Clair snapped on an opaque white surgical glove. “Then, to minimize the chance of anyone detecting their removal, I’ll place the devices in this miniature Faraday tent.” Pulling on a second glove, he tapped the lunchbox. “After that, I’ll hustle them down the hall to my office; I’ve calculated that the capacitors store ten to twelve minutes of charge, meaning that once they’re out of your bodies and operating autonomously, I’ll have only that amount of time to track the signals.”
Mallery sucked at her lower lip. “What happens if the signals’ destination is the digital equivalent of a post office box?”
“We’ll get actual physical coordinates regardless. If it turns out to literally be a post office box, or, say, a storage container in the middle of nowhere rented anonymously by someone paying cash, we can still get a fix on other devices transmitting to that location, meaning we’ll be able to learn who else has eavesdropping devices implanted in their heads. From that we ought to be able to derive a single common denominator.”
Mallery dug her hands into her coat pockets. “But there may be hundreds of people with these devices in their heads. You wouldn’t have time to collect all of their coordinates.”
“Hundreds of people with devices wouldn’t be bad, for our purposes,” O’Clair said. “The hardware necessary to handle that much data would be hard to conceal.”
“What if the eavesdroppers get wind of what we’re doing and empty the place?”
“I’ll be monitoring cell phone tower data only. I can’t think of any reason they’d be able to detect that. In the worst-case scenario, if they did catch me and rolled up their data-storage facility immediately, we’d still have collected a trove of intel. Even if I could safely get the two of you into NSA headquarters, we couldn’t hope for better than that. And we could do a lot worse, because by going to the agency, we would alert the eavesdroppers to our intentions, in which case they flip a switch and the devices will cease to transmit, end of story.”
“Reasonable,” Mallery said. “By the way, is this going to hurt?”
O’Clair indicated a pair of small, preloaded hypodermic needles, as well as two bigger ones with red plungers. “I’m going to use a local anesthetic to numb the area of the scalp around the device, so it shouldn’t hurt. But why don’t we find out on Russ?”
O’Clair tapped the top of the nearest stool. Thornton draped his coat over the back and settled onto the seat.
“If for whatever unforeseen reason this does hurt, let me know,” O’Clair said. “Just in case, I readied syringes with a minimal dose of instant-acting general anesthetic — you’d be out five minutes tops.”
O’Clair stepped directly behind Thornton, who’d given no thought to pain until now. He resolved to smile throughout the procedure, for Mallery’s sake. He felt a cold, damp swab pressed onto the skin behind his left ear. He recognized the tart scent of Betadine. The insertion of the needle didn’t hurt so much as surprise him, but the anesthetic flowed in like fire.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked O’Clair.
Not buying the bravado, Mallery blanched.
O’Clair poked with the scalpel. “Feel anything?” he asked.
“Only the stool,” Thornton said. True enough.
“Good, the local anesthetic has succeeded. Now I’m going to open the area.”
Thornton felt only slight pressure, first from the incision and, again, from the insertion of another instrument.
“Tweezers,” O’Clair told him.
With a faint clink, pincers clasped the device. O’Clair then extracted what looked like a grain of rice that had been steeped in marinade. He plunged it into a plastic cup full of a granular purple substance.
“Play sand,” he explained, withdrawing the empty tweezers from the cup and snapping on a lid. “I experimented with a few things, but it turns out this is just right to replicate the pressure the device is accustomed to within the scalp — in the event it senses pressure at all, I should say.”
“What if a change in pressure sends an alert that the devices have been removed?” Mallery asked.
“The only way to find out is to remove them.” O’Clair waved her over.
21
With the devices in plastic cups in the ten-by-eight-by-four-inch Faraday container he’d cobbled together for the occasion, O’Clair hurried down the corridor to his office, leaving Thornton and Mallery in the lab. In the offices he passed, activity was minimal, here the odd unnatural fluctuation of shadows, there a faint click of a keyboard. Late on a nippy Sunday, even the most ardent workaholics — the science building had more than its share — could be found at home reading a book or cheering on the Giants.
O’Clair’s cell phone vibrated. He fished it from his pocket, not bothering to check the caller ID, just powering the thing off to avoid further distraction. Every second he wasted was that much less power in the devices’ capacitors; one second might prove decisive in whether he pinpointed the destination of their transmissions.