“A little circle with triangles inside?”
My voice came out queerly, even to my own ears. Alison and Mr. Contreras stared at me.
I took the iPhone from her and went to the Virtual-Bidder site, to King Derrick’s effort to sell the details of the Innsbruck reactor.
“Was it like that?” I pointed to the small circle at the bottom of the FOI document that I’d noticed yesterday.
“It might be.” Alison peered at the screen. “This is so grainy I can’t be sure.”
She went to her grandfather’s desk and fished a magnifying glass from one of the cubbyholes. When she held it over her phone, we could see jagged lines like a child’s drawing of the corona of the sun.
We heard Cordell Breen on the stairs just then. Alison went to the door of the workshop to meet him. “Look, Dad.” She held out the phone. “Isn’t this queer? This is the same logo that is on the BREENIAC sketch.”
Breen snatched the phone from her and stared at it. “What the—what is this? Where did you find it?”
I told him about “King Derrick’s” auction, now shut down. “Just part of my ineffectual search for Martin Binder. Until he was murdered two weeks ago, Derrick Schlafly was his mother’s landlord.”
Breen used his thumbs on the screen with the speed of a teenager. “I don’t get it. This is an FOI document about the Nazi nuclear weapons program. This makes no sense at all for the same image to be on it and on the Metargon-I sketch.”
He used his thumbs some more. “I’m e-mailing the URL to our research department, see if they can get a handle on it. I owe you an apology, Ms. Warshawski—you were ahead of my whole team on this one. Thanks for sharing. If we turn up anything, I’ll let you know.”
A buzzer sounded. Mr. Contreras and I both were startled, which made Alison and her father laugh.
“We have computer monitors for the house up here,” Alison explained. “Dad and I both like to work up here when we’ve got a tough problem to solve, but we’re so remote that we don’t hear anything in the house. Mother insisted that we install them.”
I hadn’t noticed the monitors, but I saw now that there was a modern worktable against the far wall, behind the row of Metargon machines. I walked over and saw the gates we had come through. A car was on the far side. We couldn’t see the face behind the steering wheel, but the license plate was being photographed.
Someone inside the house was speaking through an intercom, which garbled her voice. We heard the driver say that he would wait for Breen, either outside the gates or inside the house, but that he wasn’t going to leave without seeing him.
“You listening in on one of your fancy gadgets, Cordell?” The electronics flattened the voice into a quack. “I’m tired of you hiding behind the wall of secretaries and pit bulls you built out of Edward’s little machine.”
“Dad, who is it?” Alison cried.
Breen made a shushing motion and spoke into an invisible mike. “We don’t have anything to talk about. You turned a trivial event into the crime of the century and you want to drag me down into a pit with you, but I’m not going there, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend, Breen, not for one second. Someone using my name was digging around in the university archives. If that was you—”
Breen pressed another button, cutting off the man in the car, and switching to a room in the house where a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt was standing. “Imelda, let him in. Tell Durdon to take him around the back; I’ll meet him there in a minute.”
He turned to his daughter. “Sunny, you up to driving Ms. Warshawski and her friend home? I need Durdon here. This is a crackpot who’s been threatening me over patent infringements. It’s outrageous that he’s stalked me here at home and I need Durdon’s big shoulders to make it clear this is the last time he does that.”
Alison demanded that he call the family’s lawyer. Breen laughed easily. “Sweetheart, the legal beagles know all about this guy. I want to make it clear to him personally that he can’t charge into our home as if we’re a public meeting. In a business like ours, there are always going to be people who think you took their ideas and this jerk is one of them. You get our guests back to the city, okay?”
Alison agreed, reluctantly. She sent Mr. Contreras and me down a third staircase that led to an underground garage; she wanted to stop to tell her mother where she was going.