I finally made my way back to the research building. A burnished sculpture of indeterminate shape stood outside the entrance, next to a metal sign that read “Metargon: Where the Future Lies Behind.” I wondered how much they had paid a branding company to come up with that cryptic slogan.
The entrance doors were locked; I announced myself again through an intercom and was buzzed into a small lobby. A semicircle of tan leather chairs and hassocks made up a waiting area. Two people sat there, one thumbing through a magazine, the other typing on her laptop. On the other side of the lobby stood a glossy wooden counter, where a woman handled an intercom and phone bank. I gave her my card, told her someone had promised to talk to me about Martin Binder.
“Oh, yes, that would be Jari Liu. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
I wandered around the small space, looking at awards and pictures or models of machinery: the Orestes booster rockets which had sent up modules to probe the reaches of the galaxy (Metargon photovoltaics powered the space probe); a mock-up of a nuclear reactor (Metargon’s first plant, designed with a unique core, still powering southern Illinois); the Presidential Freedom Medal, awarded to Metargon’s founder by Ronald Reagan.
“V. I. Warshawski, is it?”
I jumped and turned around. Jari Liu had come up behind me on such soft crepe soles that I hadn’t heard him. He was a stocky man in his thirties with lank black hair falling over high cheekbones. In the old days engineers wore white shirts and ties, but Liu had on jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed “In God We Trust, All Others Show Data.”
He shook my hand and propelled me toward the doors that led to the interior. “I’m Martin Binder’s boss, assuming he ever resurfaces and that we take him back. Normally we prefer people to phone in advance for appointments, but I happen to be free right now, so let’s go into the back and talk. I need to take your cell phone and your iPad—we don’t like anyone surreptitiously taking pictures while they’re pretending to talk about AWOL employees.”
I took my cell phone out of my pocket, but removed the battery pack before I gave it to him. “I don’t like anyone copying my files while they’re pretending to answer my questions.” For the iPad, I’d have to hope my encrypted lock would keep snoopers at bay, although it probably wouldn’t hold off anyone as sophisticated as the Metargon team.
Liu led me quickly to the inner doors. The two people who’d been in the holding pen when I arrived looked at me sourly as we sailed past: they’d been here longer, why did I get priority?
Liu bent to press the security card he wore around his neck against a control panel and the doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. We were in a long, high room filled with machine tools and banks of computer consoles. Liu zipped me along too fast for me to have more than a confused impression of a giant magnet lifting a piece of metal that looked like an outsized Frisbee, of men in safety glasses bent over a lathe, a woman in a lab coat and hard hat checking the dials on something that looked like a vat of witches’ brew.
We passed a room labeled “Decontamination,” another with the familiar inverted triangles announcing radiation, and moved through a corridor to the second section of the building. Everything in here was quieter.
Liu took me to the corner of a room that held several dozen computer monitors, some with the traditional screen most of us know, others with the transparent glass that wowed me in the Bond movies with Judi Dench.
Liu looked me up on the Internet, using one of the glass screens so I could see exactly what he was doing. My website came up. Liu pressed a switch on the rim of the screen. There was a tiny flash, and my face suddenly appeared on the monitor next to my website profile. He dragged the image onto the photo I use on my home page.
He grinned as he saw my eyes widen. “Yep: you’re the same person. Whether you’re really who your website claims, that I can’t tell. Now you tell me why you’re here asking about Martin Binder.”
“He’s vanished,” I said bluntly. “The last time anyone saw him was ten days ago, which you must know: someone from your office called his home last week, looking for him. He lives with his grandmother, but he didn’t say anything to her about where he was going. He’s not answering e-mails or his cell phone. I know he went out with some college kids who were summer interns here. I’d like to get their names so I can see if he told any of them what was in his head, why he took off.”
Liu leaned back in his chair, pursing his lips into a gargoyle frown. “I don’t think I can give you names. I was the mentor for the summer fellows—they aren’t interns, by the way, they’re too grand for that. It would be an invasion of the privacy of the kids in the group. What I can do is send an e-mail to them and ask them to get in touch with you if they feel like talking.”
I pushed on him, stressing the urgency of asking questions now, before the trail got any colder.