The Sign (38 page)

Rydell stank. His clothes had rips in them, and he was battered and bruised from bouncing around the empty metal box. He was wheezing, his breath coming in brief, ragged bursts. A nasty, bleeding gash had been cut into his left cheek. He was wobbly, totally unbalanced, and had to lean against the truck, breathing in heavily, shutting his eyes, gathering his senses, and probably doing his best not to throw up.

Matt allowed him a few seconds to recover, than raised the big silver handgun the shooter at the airport had lost and held it inches from Rydell’s face.

“What did you do to my brother?”

Rydell raised his eyes at him. They were still half-dead, drowning in a morass of pain and confusion. He glanced at Matt, then across to Jabba, who was hovering nervously a few steps back, but Rydell’s head was still spinning and he still wasn’t totally there. His eyelids slid shut and his head lolled forward again as his hands came up to rub his temples.

“What did you do to my brother?” Matt growled.

Rydell raised a hand in a stiff back-off-and-give-me-a-second gesture. After a moment, he looked up again. This time, his expression was alive enough to telegraph his not having a clue about who Matt and Jabba were or what Matt was asking him.

“Your brother . . . ?” he muttered.

“Danny Sherwood. What happened to him?”

The name resuscitated Rydell. His eyes flickered back to life, like a succession of floodlights getting switched on in a stadium. He winced, visibly struggling with how to answer.

“As far as I know, he’s okay,” Rydell said with a hollow voice. “But it’s been a few weeks since I saw him.”

Matt flinched at his words. “You’re saying he’s alive?”

Rydell looked up at him and nodded. “Yes.”

Matt glanced over at Jabba. Jabba put his almost-debilitating unease on hold and gave him a supportive, relieved nod.

“I’m sorry,” Rydell continued. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“Of course you did,” Matt shot back. “It’s called free will.” He was still processing the news. “So this sign . . . this whole thing. You’re doing it?”

Rydell nodded. “I was.”

“You ‘were’? ”

“The others . . . my partners . . . they’re doing it their way now.” Rydell sighed, clearly weighing his words. “I’ve been . . . sidelined.”

“What really happened? In Namibia? Was Danny ever really there?”

Rydell nodded again, slowly. “Yes. That’s where we did the final test. But there was no helicopter crash. It was all staged.”

“So Reece, the others . . . they’re also still alive?”

“No.” Rydell hesitated. “Look, I didn’t want any of that. It’s not how I do things. But there were others there . . . they overreacted.”

“Who?” Matt asked.

“The security guys.”

“Maddox?” Matt half-guessed.

Rydell looked at him quizzically, clearly surprised by Matt’s familiarity with the name.

“He got rid of them,” Matt speculated. “When you didn’t need them anymore.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Rydell objected. “None of them knew what we were really planning. Not Reece, not your brother. And then when I finally told Reece, he didn’t want to hear of it. I thought I could have convinced him. I just needed a bit of time . . . He would’ve come on board. And the others would have joined in too. But I never got the chance. Maddox just snapped and . . . it was insane. He just started firing. I couldn’t stop him.”

“And Danny?”

“He ran,” Rydell said.

“But he didn’t get away.”

Rydell shook his head witheringly.

“And you kept him locked up, all this time.”

Rydell nodded. “He designed the processing interface. It works perfectly, but it’s very sensitive to the smallest variations in air density or temperature or . . .” He caught himself, as if he realized he was rambling on unnecessarily. “It was safer having him around.”

“So all this time . . . you kept him alive, to use him now.”

Rydell nodded again.

“Why would he keep doing what you asked? He had to know you’d kill him once it was all over.” He studied Rydell, inwardly hoping he wouldn’t hear the answer he was dreading. “He’s not doing this of his own free will, is he?”

“No,” Rydell replied. “We—they—threatened him.”

“With what?”

“Your parents,” Rydell said, then added, “and you.” He held Matt’s gaze, then dropped his eyes to the ground. “They told him they’d hurt you. Badly. Then they’d get you thrown back into prison, where they’d make sure your life was a living hell.” He went silent for a beat, then added, “Danny didn’t want that.”

Matt felt an upwelling of anger erupt inside him. “My parents are dead.”

Rydell nodded with remorse. “Danny doesn’t know that.”

Matt turned and stepped away, his face clouding over. He looked away into the distance, hobbled by Rydell’s words. His kid brother. Going through hell for two years, living in a cell, cut off from the world, made to wield the fruit of his brilliance for something he didn’t believe in . . . going through it all to protect him. To keep Matt safe.

After everything Danny had already done for him.

Matt thought of his parents, how they’d been devastated by the news of Danny’s helicopter crash, and a crushing sense of grief overcame him. He glared back at Rydell and felt like ramming his fist down his throat and ripping his heart out.

Jabba watched Matt struggle with the revelation with a pained heart, but didn’t interfere. Instead, he took a hesitant step closer to Rydell.

He couldn’t help himself. “How are you doing it?” he asked him, his tone reverent, as if he still couldn’t believe he was here, face-to-face with one of his gods, albeit a fallen, battered, and bloodied one.

Rydell tilted his head up to take stock of him, then just shook his head and turned away.

“Answer him,” Matt barked.

Rydell looked at Matt, then back at Jabba. After a brief moment, he just said, “Smart dust.”

“Smart dust? But that’s not . . . I mean, I thought . . .” Jabba stammered, shaking his head with disbelief, a deluge of questions battering his mind as it stumbled over Rydell’s answer. “How small?”

Rydell paused, reluctant to engage Jabba, then shrugged. “A third of a cubic millimeter.”

Jabba’s mouth dropped an inch. According to everything he’d read or heard about, that just wasn’t possible. Not even close. And yet Rydell was telling him it was.

“Smart dust”—minuscule electronic devices designed to record and transmit information about their surroundings while literally floating on air—was still a scientific dream. The concept was first imagined, and the term coined, by electrical engineers and computer scientists working at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in the late nineties. The idea was simple: Tiny motes of silicon, packed with sophisticated onboard sensors, computer processors, and wireless communicators, small enough to be virtually invisible and light enough to remain suspended in midair for hours at a time, gathering and transmitting data back in real time—and undetected. The military was immediately interested. The idea of scattering speck-sized sensors over a battlefield to detect and monitor troop movements was hugely appealing. So was sprinkling them in subways to detect chemical or biological threats, or on a crowd of protestors to be able to track their movements remotely.
DARPA
had kicked in the initial funding, as, although the concept also had a host of potential civilian and medical uses, the more nefarious surveillance possibilities were even more alluring. But funding doesn’t always lead to success.

The concept was sound. Breakthroughs in nanotechnology were inching the dream closer to reality. Theoretically, manufacturing the motes was possible. In practice, we weren’t there yet. Not overtly, anyway. Making the sensors small enough wasn’t the problem. The processors that analyzed the data, the transmitters that communicated it back to base, and the power supply that ran the whole minuscule thing—typically, some kind of minute lithium battery—were. By the time they were added on, they turned the dust-sized particles into hardly stealthy clusters the size of a golf ball.

Clearly, Rydell’s team had managed to overcome those hurdles and achieve new levels of miniaturization and power management.

In secret.

Jabba was struggling to order the questions that were coming at him from all corners. “You were working on it for
DARPA
, weren’t you?”

“Reece was. The applications were endless, but no one could figure out how to actually manufacture them. Until he did. He told me about it before letting them know he could do it. We stayed up late one night, imagining all kinds of things we could use it for.” He paused, reliving that night. “One of them stood out.”

“So that whole biosensor story?” Jabba asked.

Rydell shook his head. “Just a smoke screen.”

“But . . . how? Where are they coming from? You dropping them from drones or . . . ?” His voice trailed off, his mind still tripping over the very notion.

“Canisters,” Rydell told him. “We shoot them up, like fireworks.”

“But there’s no noise, no explosion,” Jabba remarked. “Is there?”

“We’re using compressed air launchers. Like they’re now using at Disneyland. No noise. No explosion.”

The questions were coming to Jabba fast and furious. “And the motes . . . How are they lighting up? And how’d you get the power source down to a manageable size? What are you using, solar cells? Or did you go nuclear?” Sensing, sorting, and transmitting data used up a lot of juice. One option scientists were exploring was to sprinkle the motes with a radioactive isotope to give each mote its own long-term energy supply.

Rydell shook his head. “No. They don’t actually need an onboard power source.”

“So what are they running on?”

“That was Reece’s brilliant brainchild. They feed off each other. We light them up with an electromagnetic signal from the ground. They convert the transmission into power and spread it across the cloud where it’s needed.”

The answer triggered a new barrage of questions in Jabba’s mind. “But how do you get them to light up?”

Rydell shrugged. “It’s a chemical reaction. They’re Janus particles. Hybrids. They light up and switch off as needed to take on the shape we want, like skydivers in an aerial display. They burn up after about fifteen minutes, but it’s long enough.”

Jabba was visibly struggling to absorb the information and complete the puzzle. His voice rose with incredulity. “But they’re constantly moving around. They’ve got to be. I mean, even the slightest breeze pushes them around, right? And yet the sign wasn’t moving.” He extrapolated his own answer, then his eyes widened. “They’re self-propelled?” He didn’t seem to believe his own words.

“No.” Rydell shook his head, then glanced over at Matt, his expression darkening with remorse, his shoulders sagging, before looking away again. “That’s where Danny came in. His distributed processing program . . . more like massively distributed intelligence. He designed it. He came up with this brilliant optical system based on corner-cube reflectors. It lets them communicate with each other very elaborately while using up virtually no energy. It literally brought the motes to life.” He exhaled uncomfortably, then continued, “We needed the shape—the sign—to stay in one place. But you’re right, the motes, they’re so small, so light, they’re floating around, moving in the air like dandelion seeds. So we needed them to be able to talk to each other. Several hundred times a second. When one mote that’s lit up moves away, it turns itself off and the one that drifts closest to where it was lights up instead and takes its place and assumes its position in the display. So the sign appears stationary even though the dust particles are always changing position. Factor in that we wanted the sign to constantly morph in shape to appear like it’s alive, and . . . it’s a hell of a lot of processing power in a machine the size of a speck of dust.” He lifted his gaze back at Matt, guiltily. “We couldn’t have done it without Danny.”

“Oh, well in that case, I guess you did the right thing by locking him up all this time,” Matt retorted.

“You think this has been easy?” Rydell shot back. “You think this is something I just got into on a whim? I’ve put everything on the line for this. And the way things are going, I’ll probably end up dead because of it.”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Matt confirmed dryly.

“I had no choice. Something had to be done. This thing’s getting out of hand, and no one’s paying attention.”

“Global warming?” Jabba asked. “That’s what this is all about, right?”

“What else?” Rydell flared up, pushing himself to his feet. “You don’t get it, do you? People out there—they’ve got no idea. They don’t realize that every time they get into their cars, they’re slowly killing the planet. Killing their own grandchildren.” He was gesticulating wildly, all fired up. “Make no mistake, we’re getting close to the point of no return. And when that happens, it’ll be too late to do anything about it. The weather will just shift dramatically and that’ll be the end of us. And it’s happening faster than you think. We owe it to our kids and to their kids to do something about it. Sometime in the next hundred years, people will be living on what will undoubtedly be a very unpleasant planet to live on, and they’ll look back and wonder how the hell no one ever did anything about it. Despite all the warnings we had. Well, I’m doing something about it. Anyone who’s in a position to do something about it has to. It would be criminal not to.”

“So you decided to go out and kill off a bunch of decent guys to get everyone’s attention,” Matt said.

“I told you, that wasn’t part of the plan,” Rydell snapped.

“Still, you’re going along with it.”

Matt’s point must have hit home, as Rydell didn’t have a quick answer for him. “What did you want me to do? Give up on the whole thing and turn Maddox and his people in? Waste everything we worked on for all those years, throw away a plan that could change everything?”

Matt didn’t waver. “But did you ever even consider it?”

Rydell thought about it, and shook his head.

Matt gave him a small, pointed nod with his head. Rydell’s face sank and he looked at Matt blankly before turning away.