With regret, she watched them go, and realized only when they were nearly gone that Wyatt Rider had studied her intently all the while that she was fixated on the elk.
He said, “On a summer night, have you ever seen a thick cloud of fireflies weave complex patterns in the air, as if performing for an audience?”
Warily, she said, “What a strange idea.”
“Have you seen coyotes and wolves prowling together in large packs, acting more like domesticated dogs than like what they are?”
“Have you seen such a thing, Mr. Rider?”
“I’ve seen the fireflies, Ms. Chase. And the current owners of the ranch—I’ve accepted an assignment from them—they’ve seen the coyotes and wolves. Have you seen either?”
“There weren’t many wolves when I lived here. They’d almost been hunted to extinction and were only just beginning to make a comeback.”
For a long moment, he regarded her in silence, and if she read his expression correctly, he was acutely aware that she had twice evaded answering his question.
He said, “I’m a private investigator, Ms. Chase. A city-boy gumshoe out of my element and, I’m beginning to think, in over my head. Aside from your being a novelist whose most recent bestseller I’ve read, what else are you, and why are you here? Don’t tell me you’ve come to research a memoir of your days on the ranch. I liked your book, and I want to like you, but I despise liars.”
36
The building was in an industrial district of greater Seattle, on a fenced property, and it appeared to be a warehouse: a concrete base, corrugated steel walls, roll-up doors capable of admitting the largest trucks, with no windows except a series of small clerestory panes in the drop edge of a curved steel roof.
The guard shack at the gate was always manned by two combat-experienced US Marines, although for the benefit of the passing public, they wore generic security-guard uniforms and carried no visible weapons. Within the shack, they had easy access to fully automatic carbines.
Between the two large roll-ups was a man-size door that opened only after a visitor had been cleared by a facial-recognition scan. Beyond lay a vestibule with formidable concrete walls. Dr. Ganesh Patel waited here while he was fluoroscoped for concealed weapons and olfactory electronics analyzed the air for free molecules of explosive materials.
Ganesh didn’t carry a gun or have a bomb strapped to his body; nor had he ever come armed on any of the many other visits he had made to this facility. Nevertheless, he didn’t take offense at being an object of suspicion, because such scrutiny was a wise protocol. Ganesh Patel rarely took offense at anything; to do so was a waste of emotional energy. Nor did he grow impatient about the delay, for impatience was a characteristic of those who didn’t understand that time flowed to a purpose that neither impatience nor haste could change for the better, though often for the worse.
Opposite the door by which he’d entered the vestibule stood another steel door. After hardly more than a minute, it slid aside with no more sound than a dying man’s sigh.
Beyond lay a one-acre room with a pale-gray ceramic-tile floor. Supplies for the project were stored in hundreds of wire baskets in rows of racks that were vertical, motorized Ferris wheels. Warehouse robots on wheels loaded their bins with items they had been directed to retrieve. Ganesh was the only living person in sight, but others toiled in the extensive laboratories and workshops below.
He followed the center aisle to a bank of three elevators at the far end of the building. After another facial-recognition scan, the doors on one of the cabs slid open to admit him.
Five floors lay below the main one. He descended to the lowest level. The labs and workshops were above him now; he was in the sanctum, where the history of Project Olivaw, a rare and at times strained cooperative effort between government and the private sector, was maintained along with the fruit of all the research.
The cool air was without the faintest scent. The corridors lay as silent as a deaf man’s dream, and Ganesh’s footsteps struck no sound from the floor. In the diffuse lighting, he cast no shadow. Dressed all in white except for a red patent-leather belt, he moved through a maze of white hallways with the grace of a spirit in a strangely sterile afterlife, until he came to the conference room that, today, was reserved for him.
Seven chairs were spaced around the convex curve of a crescent-shaped conference table. He settled in the center seat. In the far wall, a thirteen-foot-wide eleven-foot-high video screen was at the moment blank.
Because the work done here was, by orders of magnitude, more secret than the Manhattan Project, which had developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s, communication with those in this building was, with one exception, never conducted from outside by phone or the internet. Appointments were requested in writing and responded to in the same fashion, in sealed envelopes carried by former military men who qualified for the highest security clearance. Although this structure contained more supercomputers than any other building or complex of buildings in the world, only one of them was online, and it was not linked to any of the others; therefore, none but the one was vulnerable to data theft, and even it was not likely to be hacked, for it was of a unique nature and had special protections. In respect of the need for absolute security, Ganesh and others like him on the board of directors of Blue Sky Partners—developers of Project Olivaw—were limited to in-person visits when they wished to obtain or provide information.