Impact (5 page)

“Twenty percent higher than the going rate: six hundred American dollars an uncut carat. That’s six million dollars, in case math isn’t your strong suit.” Ford gave an appropriately stupid grin.

“I will make a call. Do you have a card, Mr. Mandrake?”

Ford produced an impressive, Asian-style card on heavy card stock with stamped gold embossing, English on the front, Thai on the back. He handed it to Boonmee with a flourish. “One hour, Mr. Boonmee.”

Boonmee inclined his head.

With a final handshake, Ford walked out of the shop and stood on the corner, looking for a cab, waving off the tuk-tuks. Two illegal cabs came by but he waved those off as well. After ten minutes of pacing about in frustration, he took out his wallet, looked through it, and went back inside.

He was immediately rushed by the salesgirls. Bypassing them, he went to the back of the shop. He rapped on the door. After a moment, the little man appeared.

“Mr. Boonmee?”

He looked at him, surprised. “A problem?”

Ford smiled sheepishly. “I gave you the wrong card. An old one. May I—?”

Boonmee went to his desk, picked up the old card, handed it to him.

“My apologies.” Ford proffered the new card, slipped the old one into his shirt pocket, and hustled back out into the hot sun.

This time he found a cab right away.

8

Amazing how places like this always look the same
, thought Mark Corso as he walked down the long polished halls of the National Propulsion Facility. Even though he was on the other side of the continent, the halls of NPF smelled just like those at MIT—or Los Alamos or Fermilab for that matter—the same mixture of floor wax, warm electronics, and dusty textbooks. And they looked the same, too, the rippled linoleum, the cheap blond-wood paneling, the humming fluorescent panels spaced among acoustic tiles.

Corso touched the shiny new identity badge hanging on a plastic cord around his neck almost as if it were a talisman. As a kid he’d wanted to be an astronaut. The Moon was taken but there was Mars. And Mars was even better. Now, here he was, thirty years old, the youngest senior technician in the entire Mars mission, at a moment in human history like no other. In less than two decades—before he was fifty—he would be part of the greatest event in the annals of exploration: putting the first human beings on another planet. And if he played his cards right, he might even be mission director.

Corso paused at an empty glass case in the hall to check his reflection: spotless lab coat casually unbuttoned, pressed white cotton shirt and silk foulard tie, gabardine slacks. He was punctilious with his dress and careful to avoid any suggestion of the nerd. Gazing at his reflection, he pretended to be seeing himself for the first time. His hair was short (read: reliable), beard (unconventional), but neatly trimmed (not too unconventional), his frame thin and athletic (not effete). He was a good-looking guy, dark in the Italian way, chiseled face, big brown eyes. The expensive Armani glasses and tailored clothes reinforced the impression: no geek here.

Corso took a deep breath and knocked confidently on the closed office door.

“
Entrez
,” came the voice.

Corso pushed open the door and entered the office, standing in front of the desk. There was no place to sit; the office of his new supervisor, Winston Derkweiler, was small and cramped, even though the team leader could have gotten himself a much bigger office. But Derkweiler was one of those scientists who affected a disdain for perquisites and appearances, his blunt manner and sloppy look broadcasting his pure dedication to science.

Derkweiler eased himself back in the office chair, where his soft corpulance settled in, conforming to the chair’s contours. “Adjusting to the asylum, Corso? You got a big new title now, new responsibilities.”

He didn’t like being called Corso, but he’d gotten used to it. “Pretty well.”

“Good. What can I do for you?”

Corso took a deep breath. “I’ve been going over some of the Martian gamma ray data—”

Derkweiler suddenly frowned. “Gamma ray data?”

“Well, yes. I’ve been familiarizing myself with my new responsibilities and as I was going through all the old data . . .” He paused as Derkweiler continued to frown ostentatiously. “Excuse me, Dr. Derkweiler, is something wrong?”

The project manager was looking at him instead of the data printout that Corso had laid in front of him. His hands were folded pensively. “How long have you been looking at old gamma ray data?”

“This past week.” Corso suddenly felt apprehensive; maybe Derkweiler and Freeman had had a run-in over the data.

“Every week we have half a terabyte of radar and visual data coming in here, piling up, unlooked at. The gamma ray data is the least important.”

“I understand that, but here’s the thing.” Corso felt flustered. “Dr. Freeman, before he, ah, left NPF, was working on an analysis of the gamma ray data. I inherited his work in the area and in going over it, I noted some anomalous results . . .”

Derkweiler clasped his hands and leaned forward on the desk. “Corso, do you know what our mission is here?”

“Mission? You mean. . .?” Corso found himself flushing like a school-boy who’d forgotten his lesson. This was ridiculous, a senior technician being treated this way. Freeman had complained to him repeatedly about Derkweiler.

“I mean—” Derkweiler spread his arms with a big smile and looked around his office. “Here we are in beautiful suburban Pasadena, California, at the lovely National Propulsion Facility. Are we on vacation? No, we are not on vacation. So what are we doing here, Corso? What’s the mission?”

“Of the Mars Mapping Orbiter or NPF in general?” Corso tried to keep his face neutral.

“Of the MMO! We’re not raising organic fryers here, Corso!” Derkweiler chuckled at his bon mot.

“To observe the surface of Mars, looking for subsurface water, analyzing minerals, mapping terrain—”

“Excellent. In preparation for future landing missions. Perhaps you haven’t heard yet that we’re in a new space race—this time with the Chinese?”

Corso was surprised to see it put in such stark, cold-war terms. “The Chinese aren’t anywhere near the starting line.”

“Not at the starting line?” Derkweiler almost hopped out of his seat. “Their Hu Jintao satellite is a few weeks from Mars orbit!”

“We’ve had orbiters around Mars for decades, we’ve landed probes, we’ve been exploring the surface with rovers—”

Derkweiler waved him silent. “I’m talking about the long-range picture. The Chinese have leapfrogged the Moon and are going straight to Mars. Don’t underestimate what they can do—especially with the U.S. dithering around with its space program.”

Corso nodded agreeably.

“And here you are messing around with gamma rays. What do stray gamma rays have to do with the Mars mission?”

“There’s a gamma ray detector on the MMO,” Corso said. “Analysis of that data is part of my job description.”

“That detector was stuck on at the last minute,” Derkweiler said, “by Dr. Freeman, over my objections, for no discernable reason. Gamma rays were Dr. Freeman’s little hobby horse. Look—I don’t fault you. You’re trying to straighten out the mess Freeman left behind and you haven’t learned the priorities. May I therefore suggest that you stick to the mission—the SHARAD mapping data?”

Struggling to maintain his best ass-kissing smile, Corso picked up the gamma ray plots and slid them back into the manila envelope. He would get along with Derkweiler come hell or high water. “I’ll get to work on that right away,” he said crisply.

“Excellent. Your first presentation as senior staff is in a week—I want you to do well. First impressions and all. You understand?”

“I do. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. It’s my job to be a pain in the ass.” Another chuckle.

“Right.”

As Corso turned to go, Derkweiler said, “One other thing.”

He turned.

“You’ll probably be interested in this.” He tossed over a stapled sheaf of papers that landed on the desk in front of Corso. “That’s the final police report on Dr. Freeman’s murder. It was a robbery—looks like Dr. Freeman came home at the wrong time. Bunch of stuff stolen, a Rolex, jewelry, computers . . . I thought you might like to see it. I know you were close to him.”

“Thank you.” Corso took it.

He walked back to his office, slipped behind his desk, and shoved Freeman’s old gamma ray plots into a drawer and slammed it. Freeman had been right, Derkweiler was the boss from hell. Still, the gamma ray anomalies that he’d seen on Freeman’s hard drive—and that he’d followed up on at work—were startling. More than startling. Freeman was right: it could be a major discovery, potentially explosive. The more he thought about the implications, the more frightened he became. He just had to keep his head down, work up the data, and present it in a cool, objective manner. Derkweiler might not like it, but what counted was the opinion of the mission director, Charles Chaudry, who was everything Derkweiler was not.

He took up the report on Freeman’s death and flipped through it. It was written in cop-speak, using phrases like “the perpetrator committed aggression on the victim with a piano-wire garrote” and “the perpetrator searched the premises and effected rapid egress from the scene of the homicide on foot.” As he read, he felt his sorrow and horror at Freeman’s murder mingling with a feeling of relief at the random nature of the crime. And they’d caught the guy—a drug addict looking for money. The usual sad and senseless story. He closed the report with a shiver of mortality. He had been shocked that only about twenty people had come to Freeman’s funeral, and that he was the only one from NPF. It had been one of the saddest experiences of his life.

Shucking off these morbid thoughts, Corso turned his attention to his workstation and pulled up the SHARAD data, the shallow-ground-penetrating radar which the MMO was using to map the subsurface features of Mars. He worked on it uninterrupted until the close of day, processing the data and fine-tuning the resulting imagery. He still had the hard drive back at his apartment and he could continue to work on the gamma ray data at home. Despite two security audits, still no one realized the hard drive was missing; Freeman had somehow bypassed all security checks and procedures. If the missing drive ever were noted, Corso had a plan to get rid of it immediately. But until then, it was exceedingly useful to have it at home, where he could work on it uninterrupted until late in the night.

This discovery, he reflected, was going to make his career.

9

Wyman Ford entered his suite in the Royal Orchid and stood gratefully in the blast of air-conditioning coming from a vent in the ceiling in the middle of the room. Through the giant picture window covering one end of the room, he could see the longtail boats coming and going on the Chao Phraya River. At noon, the sun was at its zenith and a brown pall lay over the burning city, the color washed out of everything. Even by Bangkok standards it was a scorcher.

The last time he had been in Bangkok was four years ago, with his wife, just before she was murdered. They had stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, in a wildly extravagant suite, with strategically placed mirrors—he stamped down hard on the memory, forcing his thoughts into another channel. His eye roved the cityscape below and settled on the spires of the Temple of the Dawn, which in the dead, polluted air looked like a cluster of gilded toothpicks rising from a sea of brown.

With a long sigh, he went to the hotel safe, unlocked it, and withdrew his laptop and an unusual USB card reader. When the computer had booted up, he took the original business card, the one he had retrieved from Boonmee, and inserted it into the reader. A window opened on his computer screen, and he downloaded the contents of the microchip embedded in the thick paper of the card. He packaged it as an audio file and e-mailed it to Washington.

Fifteen minutes later his account chimed and he downloaded the return e-mail.

Call to cell phone number: 855-0369-67985
Location of receiving phone: Sisophon, Cambodia

Registered owner of receiving phone: Prum Forgang
Transcription of conversation (translated from Thai):

A: Hello?

B: This is Boonmee Adirake. Much health and prosperity to you, Prum Forgang.

A: I am honored to receive your call, Boonmee Adirake.

B: I have an American looking to buy ten thousand carats of honey stones.

A: You know very well I can’t get that much.

B: Let me explain. This man was carrying a colored topaz, not even in a lead box. He knows nothing. He has rich backers and it’s a one-time deal. He’s an idiot. We could sell him anything.

A: What do you suggest?

B: An assortment of raw, low-grade honey stones, mixed in with enhanced topaz or heat-treated citrine.

A: That I can do.

B: I need them within twenty-four hours. The man is in a hurry.

A: Good for you that he is in a hurry. And?

B: I will get the highest possible price and you will get forty percent of it.