The Trigger Page 23

  The smug superiority in Wayne's voice kept Horton's slow burn alive. 'I'm afraid it won't be possible to show you a working specimen -'

  'In that case, why not save my time and yourself some money, and file a declaration of abandonment instead - what?'

  '- without authorization from the Joint Chiefs of Staff,' Morton continued. Turning one over to you is out of the question.'

  This is a government project? I saw nothing about that in the application. If you're an employee of the Federal government, you may not even be eligible for a patent -'

  'It's a private project by a private research firm,' said Brohier. 'Now classified, on the President's orders. That's why Dr Horton applied for a secret patent.'

  'I don't see how any patent can be granted. This is completely irregular.'

  'We're strangers here ourselves,' said Horton, thinking he saw Wayne's arrogance wavering. 'How can we help each other?'

  The overture was sharply rebuffed. This isn't a mutual assistance society, Dr Horton. For a valid patent, I have to certify that the invention you've described is both novel and usable. Since you say you can offer me neither a demonstration nor an explanation of its function -'

  'Would you accept certification by General Thorn Vannigan, head of the Pentagon's Office of Defense Technology?' Horton asked.

  'Are you representing to me that working specimens of this invention have already been delivered to the government -'

  'Yes.'

  'Working specimens?'

  'Yes.'

  An annoyed frown appeared on Wayne's face. Then tell me how it works. If your explanation's satisfactory, perhaps I can drop the requirement that you submit an example.'

  Horton allowed himself a little laugh. 'We don't know how it works yet. We only know that it does.'

  That's not acceptable,' Wayne said, shaking his head. 'Not acceptable. A patent must be specific as to process -'

  Brohier leaned back in his chair and grunted. 'I told you to just tell 'em that was classified, too.'

  'Dr Brohier, if that's your contribution to this meeting -'

  'Dr Wayne, what would you have done with an application for a patent on the atomic bomb in 1945? Or radar in 1939?'

  'I would have approved them,' the examiner said unhesitatingly. 'They were significant technical advances with a sound theoretical foundation. You, on the other hand, are pulling a rabbit out of a hat - and you won't show me the rabbit or the hat. My hands are tied. Your patent would never stand up to a challenge. I earnestly doubt any other PCT signatory nations would issue reciprocal paper on it.'

  'I'm not planning to seek patent protection overseas,' said Horton.

  'Not even if your American patent is eventually published?'

  'No.'

  Now looking completely perplexed, Wayne folded his arms over his chest. 'Then what exactly is the point of your application? If the technology's classified, you can't benefit from a patent anyway -your only customer is the Pentagon. Is this just an ego issue? Or a money hunt - are you chasing some sort of bonus from Terabyte?'

  Horton glanced sideways at the director before answering. 'Dr Wayne, I don't think my reasons are germane to the application and review process.'

  'No - you're right. They aren't. But I thought you might want to offer me some motivation to read the procedure manual as creatively as you wrote your technical disclosure.' He covered his mouth with his right hand and blew a sigh through it. 'Do you have that certification from General Vannigan with you?'

  Horton produced a security-sealed Tyvek envelope and passed it across the desk. It's a read-once,' he cautioned.

  Nodding, Wayne tore open the seal and studied the letter within. It was already beginning to disintegrate when he sighed again and placed the letter on his desk. In less than a minute, it crumbled to a fine white powder, unreadable, unreconstructable.

  'Sorry about the mess,' Horton said, gently breaking the silence.

  Wayne waved the apology away. These are - special circumstances, as you said, Dr Brohier,' he said slowly. 'Classified technology - an immature theoretical domain - a patent which won't be published unless and until the Pentagon approves the release. All that's really required is to preserve your date of precedence in the event this does become an open patent.' He drummed his fingertips on the desktop, making the dust dance. 'Based on the, um, supplementary documentation presented here, I can approve a provisional - ah, provisional and conditional patent.'

  'The condition being -'

  'You'll have to provide an amended technical disclosure, setting out the theoretical basis for the device. If you don't do so before the restrictions are lifted and the patent submitted for publication, the patent will be invalid - withdrawn.' Wayne sat back in his chair, hands folded in his lap. 'That's the very best you're going to get from me, gentlemen. I suggest you take it.'

  As Horton listened to the pronouncement, he felt the weight of expectations pressing down on him more heavily than ever. But Brohier stood up and offered his hand and a cheerful smile. 'Very good. Thank you, Dr Wayne. That will suffice - yes, that will do nicely.'

  Brohier had built some slack into the schedule for their return -enough, he told Horton proudly, to allow for an early but leisurely dinner at Mamarand's in Alexandria.

  After seven months, every meal away from the Annex - even their hasty lunch in a Denver airport tavern - was a palate-cleansing pleasure. But Mamarand's was a surpassing delight in any context, a four-star Capital landmark that had held the allegiance of Washington notables for nearly two decades.

  Horton threw caution to the wind and opted for one of the notorious 'cardiac cut' specialties, the bacon-wrapped Twin Filet. 'If I thought this would taste half as good tomorrow, I'd order another one to take with us,' he told Brohier.

  'If I thought my body would forgive me for it by tomorrow, I'd order one to have now,' Brohier said, eyeing his own light fish entree with regret.

  Mamarand's walls were papered with autographed caricatures of famous customers. The few tourists lucky enough to get a table -always before seven - invariably gave themselves away by gawking or giggling. The regulars only took notice of new hangings.

  'Are you here somewhere?' Horton asked. He had been entertaining himself with a third glass of cabernet and a little game of seeing how many faces in a row he could recognize without recourse to the autographs.

  'Me?' Brohier chuckled. 'Jeffrey, out in the real world, the typical Nobel Prize winner is a news story with a half-life of twelve hours. I'm not famous. At best, I'm answer B on question one hundred ninety of someone's cultural literacy test.'

  But as though in direct refutation, they were interrupted half a dozen times before the end of their meal by late-arriving diners stopping by the table and greeting Brohier by name.

  Horton knew none of them. After the ritual introductions, he found he also knew of none of them. But having Brohier explain to him who they were after they'd moved on toward their own tables only reinforced Horton's feeling of living a disconnected life. Each cheery greeting nudged him further into a dour dissatisfaction. He fell silent, and Brohier misread the silence as fatigue.

  'You know, I was thinking that it's really not necessary that we return tonight,' he suggested gently. 'We can take a couple of rooms at the Northwind, and recharter in the morning. It'll do us good to let someone pamper us a bit - the Jacuzzi, a massage, plush towels, a king-size bed.' He chuckled to himself. 'I think when we get back I'll hire someone to put little chocolates on everyone's pillows.'

  Horton doubted a single night of luxury would leave him any more enthusiastic about returning to the Annex. 'Let's do that -the Northwind, I mean, not the chocolates.'

  Dabbing at his mouth with his napkin, Brohier fished his comset out of an inside pocket. 'Let me see what I can arrange.'

  But nothing touched Horton's melancholy - not the spectacular view of the capital's brightly-lit panorama of monuments from his hotel window, nor the blistering heat of a long four-head shower,
nor the indulgence of a room-service Shrimp Cocktail For Two at midnight, nor the plush comfort of the long white hotel robe, nor even 500 channels of music, theater, and film delivered through a shadow-box holowall.

  When a hard swim in the hotel pool did nothing to urge him toward bed and sleep, Horton realized he was prolonging the day as a way of postponing the morning. In that same moment of clarity, he also realized what had to change. That was how Horton found himself standing in the corridor in his robe at five minutes to one, tapping at the door to the other suite.

  'This will only take a minute,' he promised when Brohier finally opened the door and squinted sleepily out at him.

  Brohier grunted crossly and retreated from the doorway, allowing Horton to enter. 'I would have thought you'd have been asleep two hours ago. I was. This couldn't have waited until morning?'

  'I really need to resolve this now, Karl - if I don't, I don't know if I'll even be here in the morning. The way things are right now, I don't think I could make myself get on that plane with you.'

  The door closed behind Horton as he was speaking, leaving only the pale glow from a lamp dimmed to night-light intensity. 'All right,' the older man said, the annoyance leaving his voice. 'What do you need from me?'

  'A change. I'm not having any fun beating my head against the wall. I don't know what the reason is, and I've lost interest in trying to figure it out. The fact is I'm stumped. I've gone mentally stale. No, it's worse than that - I've developed a bad attitude about the whole business.'

  'Do you want out?'

  Horton felt himself tempted, but pushed the thought away. 'I wondered if I could interest you in swapping problems?'

  A sardonic chuckle rumbled deep in Brohier's throat. 'Why do you think I'd be any more successful? You can't know how much harder it is for me to concentrate than it was when I was your age. Maturity has nothing to offer the physicist, Jeffrey - nothing that makes up for the wear on the instrument.'

  'Why do you think I'll believe that you're not interested, that you haven't been thinking about it all along?' Horton shot back. 'You can stop respecting the territorial boundaries. I just erased them. You gave me every chance to put it together on my own.

  Well, I can't do it. I'm asking for help - exactly as you said I should. I should have done it months ago.'

  'Do you think I would have kept silent if a worthy thought had strayed into my consciousness? Really, Jeffrey, you have too generous an estimation of me, and too harsh an assessment of yourself.'

  'I don't think so. Even if you can't solve this yourself, you can bring together the people who can. You know everyone in the field, and they know you. There's no one who won't take your call, respect your confidences, trust your word -'

  'Oh, there are a few,' Brohier said, smiling wryly. 'More than a few.'

  'Not as many as would do what I did, and jump at a chance to work with you. I know you expected more from me -'

  Brohier sighed. 'That you could say such a thing makes your case for you - you need a change of scenery. Trying too hard is a mistake that can sabotage you in almost any field. So, very well, then - I accept your proposal.'

  Thank you -' The rush of relief was more intense than Horton had expected.

  'Not because I expect the problem to yield to my superior brain,' Brohier added quickly, clapping Horton on the shoulder, 'but because it does interest me, and because we are friends. And you're right about something else, too. We are separated by two generations, and I can reach out to my peers and down to the younger physicists more easily than you can reach up to them. So I'll do that, and we'll see what we see.' He shrugged. 'It may well be that it just isn't time yet.'

  After that, sleep came easily.

  * * *

  15: Trickery

  Kupang, Timor - A peaceful 'March of the Forgotten' turned into a bloody massacre Wednesday as Timorese security forces loyal to embattled President Gusmao fired on a crowd of more than two thousand demonstrators as they approached the government offices in central Kupang. The death toll was estimated at 'more than forty', with as many as 200 others injured. A spokesman for Gusmao called the marchers 'brigands' and 'Indonesian terrorists' who were exploiting the island's economic difficulties.

  Complete story Timeline: Tangled History

  1996 Nobel Prize 'brought no one peace'

  The brainstorming sessions during which the bulk of the Basing & Deployment Site Manifest had been generated had been some of the liveliest and curiously enjoyable meetings of the Brass Hat team. But when it came to assigning priorities to the more than 14,000 candidates, consensus proved impossible past the first hundred places. In the end, the prioritization was primarily the work of General Stepak, after consultations with the President and the service secretaries.

  Escorted by their T-teams and ops units, Triggers went to the Air Force for installation in Global Hawk battlefield intelligence drones, E-8D Joint STARS flying radar stations, and KC-10B Extender tankers - all unarmed aircraft crucial to the twenty-first-century concept of war. The Navy had plans to turn four Sturgeon-class attack submarines into torpedo-interceptors for its precious aircraft carrier task forces, and was toying with reviving the Pegasus hydrofoil patrol boat as both an attack platform and a defense against sea-skimming cruise missiles.

  On the ground, the Army wanted every cavalry squadron to have two Trigger-equipped M113A3 armored personnel carriers to serve as mine-clearing combat vehicles. The Marine Corps was evaluating the system's usefulness in amphibious assault, as a means to clear a path through fortified and booby-trapped beaches. It planned to create test beds using Osprey tilt-rotors. Super Cobra helicopters, and its Navy-operated LC AC air-cushion landing craft.

  Over the years, a variety of offices in the law enforcement and intelligence communities had invested many thousands of man-hours in creating exhaustive lists of the possible high-value targets for attack by terrorists and hostile forces. These threat assessments and targeting analyses amounted to a classified catalog of vital national assets, from communication and transportation infrastructure to key research centers and records archives. The FBI and the Pentagon had both provided the Brass Hat committee with their lists, and from them Stepak selected one-of-a-kind civilian and military sites in almost every state.

  America's space industry received a priority allocation, from the Venture Star launch centers in Florida, California, and southern Texas to satellite dish farms in nine states. And Stepak wanted to go further than that - all the way to orbit. He was pressing the NASA Administrator to equip the agency's six SSTO orbiters with Triggers and order the commercial fleet to follow suit. In the last two years alone, there'd been one confirmed and three suspected cases of airliners shot down on takeoff or landing by Stinger-type shoulder-launched missiles.

  But the NASA Administrator was resisting. None of those incidents had taken place in the United States, he argued, and every kilogram of payload was precious now that eighteen people were living aboard the expanded International Space Station. Stepak had scheduled a meeting between President Breland and the NASA chief to resolve the dispute.

  The secretary of state had no such reservations. Every American embassy from Dhaka to Gaborone was slated to receive two Trig-gers, along with a special addition to its Marine guard contingent. Most of those Triggers would be deployed cold, as insurance against the unpredictable vicissitudes of Third-World politics. But half a dozen would go hot from the start, as insurance against the unpredictable violence of political terrorists.

  Neither Breland nor Stepak was ready to turn control of a Trigger unit over to any law-enforcement agency, even the FBI. But staging depots - dubbed 'rental agencies' by Richard Nolby - were being prepared at six sites scattered around the continent. Each would be the home base for as many as a dozen mobile Trigger teams, available for loan to local and state police and the FBI for specific raids and investigations.

  The President's pet idea for the Trigger was to use it as 'a filter in the flow', to intercept wea
pons in transit. 'There are places people already know you can't take a gun, places they already expect to be screened and searched,' he told Stepak. 'They don't need any further warnings for us to make sure that they follow the rules. No more road-rage shootings. No more letter bombs. No more courthouse rampages or schoolyard feuds.'

  Nolby tried to convince Breland that the actual number of such incidents was too small and the number of necessary deployments too high to justify an allotment from the first thousand. But Breland was unmovable.

  'The numbers may be small, but their impact isn't,' he said. 'Every killing like that makes the news, lingers in people's memories. Kids shooting each other outside math class - letter bombs killing middle-aged professors - airliners full of French students blowing up in midair - these are the sort of moments that tell people life is insane, that their world is turning wrong. That's what makes them afraid.'

  On hearing that, Nolby remembered that Breland's childhood home of Williamsport was j ust a few miles from Montoursville, the hamlet that was hit so hard by the Flight 800 tragedy. Rather than rehash the still-controversial verdict or argue with the emotional memories of the young Breland, Nolby acquiesced. Restricted-power Triggers and Kevlar blast boxes went into the baggage-handling systems of forty-four airports and the sorting systems of the Postal Service's central mail facilities.

  But Stepak did manage to persuade Breland that the schools would have to wait until those placements could be made openly. The presence of soldiers could not easily be explained away, and, as Stepak observed, 'Absurd as it is, injured kids are almost always seen as innocent victims And if they're the good guys, we're the sneaky bad guys - which is not how we want to introduce the Trigger to the public.'

  Senator Grover Wilman followed all these developments through his monthly meeting with the President and biweekly updates from the Brass Hat team, which then became the basis of his own classified reports to the Joint Congressional Committee on Security.

  He did so with a growing dissatisfaction, one that the President's reassurances did less and less to assuage. Wilman had his own list and his own priorities, and as month after month passed without him seeing them reflected in the deployments, he began to wonder if he ever would. By the time the July meeting approached, Wilman had thoroughly lost all faith in the promises Breland had made at that momentous first meeting.