The Fold: A Novel Part 18

"Fair enough."

"So why me?"

Reggie stared at him through the monitor. "You alone there?"

"It's six-thirty in the morning. Who else would be here?"

"I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Answer the d.a.m.ned question."

"Yes, I'm alone."

"You're there because we couldn't find anything."

The ants scurried about with images of reports and memories of Reggie talking and arranged all of them in new patterns. "They're not paranoid," said Mike. "You have been trying to steal their tech."

"I can't steal it. I'm the one who paid for it. Besides, imagine if Arthur and Olaf died in a car crash or something? I would've been pouring hundreds of millions down a hole with nothing to show for it. Not to mention the greatest invention in human history-gone, just like that."

"You wouldn't get their work?"

Reggie shook his head. "Arthur's contract is ironclad, legally. Nothing about the Albuquerque Door can be released without his approval. That approval isn't transferable or inheritable. An asteroid hits him tomorrow, the project is over."

"How'd your people get into the computers? There's no wireless in the main building."

"They don't have the wireless turned on," corrected Reggie. "It doesn't mean it's not there if you know what you're doing."

"And you couldn't find anything," said Mike. It was a statement.

"Not a thing," agreed Reggie. "No in-house files, no cloud backups, no e-mails, no Facebook posts. They've hidden everything. That's high-level paranoia, even for government employees."

"So I'm here to find a back door for you?"

Reggie shook his head. "You're there to evaluate it, just like I said. And if you end up with three-quarters of the project in your head, and if something ever happened to Arthur and Olaf...then we might have another talk."

"You're going against the contract."

Reggie bit down on a response and took a breath. "I'm not stealing anything," he said, "and I don't want you to steal anything. I'm not releasing anything to anyone, not even to my own staff. I'm bending the terms of the agreement, yes, but I need to know there's a way to get at all this data in a worst-case scenario. That's all. Even if you can just confirm he's writing everything down somewhere and not doing it all in his head, that'd be fantastic."

"Why is everyone against people doing stuff in their head?"

"Because you can't share anything that way."

"True," said Mike. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

"Are we good?"

"Yeah. Sorry I doubted you."

"I'm sorry I didn't explain everything."

"Well, I'm supposed to be the smart one."

"True," Reggie said.

"Is there anything else you need to tell me?"

"About?"

"About all of it. Anything else you're keeping from me or forgot to mention or think you're going to slip past me?"

Reggie smiled and settled back in his chair again. "I've known you too long to slip anything past you."

"Not an answer."

"No, there is nothing else I'm keeping from you. I want you to spend the month there and come back a.s.suring me that I have nothing to worry about with the Albuquerque Door. Or its future."

"Okay," said Mike. "I don't want to lie to anyone."

"Your integrity's safe," Reggie said. "Or as safe as it can be for any government employee."

NINETEEN.

"Good morning," Arthur said, looking up from his desk. "I was about to call you."

"Sorry," Mike said. "Talking with Reggie. Mr. Magnus."

"All good things, I hope."

"Some good, some bad."

Arthur waited a moment, and when Mike didn't continue, he nodded. "We're going to be up and running in about half an hour. Bob's already over at Site B."

"He's coming through the other way?"

"There's no difference. None we've ever been able to detect, anyway. It's the same doorway either direction. We just change it up so we have records of all possibilities."

"Ahhh."

"I need to check in with Jamie in the control room and then we can head out onto the main floor." Arthur locked the office door behind them and they headed down the hall toward the stairs.

"I've got a few questions," said Mike, "if you don't mind."

"Go ahead."

"You told the board the Albuquerque Door has never failed."

"It hasn't."

"But what about-"

"You want to know about the one-nineties? Jamie mentioned you'd talked last night."

Mike nodded. "It reads like seven failures to me."

Arthur shook his head. "It didn't fail. We couldn't even get the system to activate."

"Again, that sounds kind of like failure."

"For the Door, failure is a collapse of the magnetic field or a technical glitch. You can't lose a race if your horse was never on the track."

"You can if it was supposed to be out there," Mike said.

"Now you're arguing semantics."

"Pot, meet kettle."

Arthur chuckled. "Point taken." He swiped his keycard and the control room door buzzed open.

Jamie glanced over her shoulder at them, then turned back to her monitors. "I'm defragging some of Johnny's drives," she said. "We should be ready to go on schedule."

"Excellent." He handed her a flash drive. "The changes we talked about."

"I'll get them in as soon as I can."

Mike looked down at the main floor. Olaf and Neil were discussing something in front of the mouth. The G.o.dmike wasn't on, so he couldn't hear them. Olaf threw back his head to growl at the ceiling and saw Mike watching. He muttered something to Neil, who looked up over his shoulder at the control booth. They split up. Olaf went to his station, Neil headed across the room to check the oversized resistors.

He turned back just as Jamie held up a finger for silence. "This is Jamie Parker, it's June twenty-fifth, two thousand fifteen, and this is trial run one hundred sixty-nine. Traveler is Bob Hitchc.o.c.k, which I'm sure comes as a complete surprise to everyone listening to these." She tapped her keyboard.

"Are you good?" asked Arthur.

"Yeah," she said, "I've got everything up here."

He glanced at Mike and gestured at the door. "Shall we?"

"I'll catch up with you," said Mike. "I've got another question or two for Jamie."

She glanced at him and sighed.

Arthur's shoulders hunched a bit. Then he nodded and turned. The door thumped shut behind him.

She turned back to her screens. "What do you want now?"

He bit his lip. "Do you do all the hardware work on the computers here?"

"I work on Johnny, sometimes on the system up here. Sasha or Bob help sometimes, depending."

"What about the office computers?"

She turned to him. "D'you have another problem with something?"

Mike took a slow breath. The ants scurried out with a collection of images and sounds. The student code of conduct. Lecturing his school's quarterback about plagiarism. Slipping Reggie the answers for a pop science quiz junior year. Teachers in the staff room talking in an uninformed way about surveillance and phone lines.

"I think," he said, "you should disable the Wi-Fi on all the computers here."

"It's already turned off."

"Disable it," he said. "Unplug the hardware. Physically remove it."

Jamie studied his face. "Why?"

He pressed his lips together. They looked at each other for a moment. "You were right, by the way," he added. "Your timer wasn't the problem. It was fine."

She furrowed her brows. "Thanks?"

He headed back out into the hall.

Arthur was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. "That didn't take long."

"I didn't have much to ask her."

They headed out onto the main floor. The twin rings loomed in front of them. The large flatscreen was on, and showed Sasha and Bob over at Site B. It struck Mike that he still hadn't gone over to examine the other s.p.a.ce.

"Defrag's done," boomed Jamie's voice from a speaker. "We'll be up and ready to go in about five minutes."

"Excellent," said Arthur.

"Hey, Mike," said Bob from the flatscreen. "This is your first time seeing the Door work up close, right?"

"Yep."

"Arthur," said the redhead, "can we do a physics test?"

"I think so." He glanced at Olaf.

Olaf grunted and pitched it high enough to sound affirmative.

Mike looked from the screen to Arthur. "Physics test? I saw that on a few dozen reports."

Arthur walked over to the other desk and tugged open the bottom drawer. He removed something and tossed it at Mike, who caught it one-handed. It was a baseball. Not a high-end one. It was dirty, but not scuffed. Dropped, but never hit with a bat.

"We are up and running," Jamie said. "Ready in four."