The whisky washed through me, and I felt warm for the first time since I’d left Mexico City at New Year’s. I sat at my desk and smiled sweetly at Petra. “You’ll have to buy your own beer. You towed the Pathfinder . . . Then what?”
“Oh, well,” she said, “then we came here to see if you, like, needed anything done. And there was a message from Cheviot labs. Mr. Rieff, he called to say they’d found something really amazing when he ran his tests for you. Guess what they found?”
“The codes for the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” I suggested.
“Oh, Vic, nothing that amazing. Just—the stuff that was supposed to be in the body armor—the, uh, ceramic or whatever it is—someone took it out and replaced it with ordinary beach sand. Can you believe that?”
I put my whisky down.
“Did he say . . . Could he prove that it was inside the shield to begin with? I mean, Chad had poked a bunch of holes in the shield. How do we know what was in it first?”
Petra hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know.”
“Uh, ma’am . . . Uh, Vic . . . We did get the report. Since we didn’t know where you were or what you needed, we drove up to Northbrook and picked it up from Mr. Rieff.”
Marty handed me a sealed envelope with the familiar crest of the Cheviot rams in the corner. I slit it open and scanned the pages, which bristled with “moieties,” “van der Waals forces,” “carbon 60,” and other arcane phrases that I should have paid more attention to in Professor Turkevich’s chemistry lectures when I was an undergraduate, but it was too late to fret about that now.
I called up Cheviot labs. Sandy Rieff was working late. That was one good thing.
“This ratio you have in the report,” I asked, “seventy-five percent sand mixed with twenty-five percent fullerene, how is that different from what it should be?”
“It should be a hundred percent gallium arsenide fullerenes,” said Rieff.
“And how sure are you that this diluted mix was in Chad’s shield from the get-go?”
“My best materials engineer, Genny Winne, did the analysis. Winne says that she’s prepared to testify on both those points. And she doesn’t say that unless she thinks her results are unimpeachable.”
I thought back to the Fortune article, to Tintrey’s rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. “So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn’t stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to analyze the content?”
“Will do,” Rieff said. “What kind of priority?”
“Priority service, but not premium.”
“Have you read the whole report?” Rieff asked. “One of the oddities Winne found was scorching around the holes in the mitt. That fabric is too tough to cut without a special blade, so he must have burned it to get into it. That’s the one thing a defense lawyer could jump on in claiming the contents had been tampered with.”
He hung up, but I held on to the receiver, staring at the desktop. If Chad knew that his buddies had died because their armor didn’t protect them, no wonder he’d freaked out when he saw Nadia paint the Achilles logo on the Body Artist. He’d accused Nadia of spying on him. He must have thought she worked for Tintrey.
I looked up to see Petra watching me anxiously.
“Vic,” she said, “is there some kind of problem?”
“Not a problem,” I said slowly. “Just—I think I understand what happened, but not how to prove it. Not who pulled the trigger on the gun that shot Nadia Guaman but why they did, and why they framed Chad. Marty, how much did Chad say about the body armor?”
Jepson frowned. “He never stopped talking about it, ma’am—Vic. We knew he was angry. But he was always angry about the way him and his men had been treated generally.”
“But did he talk about the armor malfunctioning?”
“He said his men should be alive, that their armor didn’t protect them. But, ma’am, no disrespect, you get these IEDs, and nothing can protect you.”
“So he didn’t say the shields were full of sand instead of the nanoparticles they were supposed to contain?”
He shook his head, trying to remember. “I know he said he was going to tell the whole world how his squad got butchered, but, you know, that was just talk. It was his way of letting off steam. Least, that’s how Tim and me and the other guys took it. I don’t remember him ever saying he did like you did, sent the armor to a lab to get it analyzed.”
“No: I think he tested it by shooting at it.” That explained the burn marks around the holes in the mitt as well as the holes in Mona’s bedroom wall that had bothered her so much. Chad had attached the shield to the wall and shot at it. The bullet went through the armor and destroyed the drywall behind it. That was his proof. But how had the men at Tintrey known what he was doing?