“The Breen Machine?” I said politely.
“Yes, yes, the machine that made Apple and the Cloud and all the rest of it possible. My dad wanted to call it the BREENIAC, sort of flipping a finger at Johnny von Neumann and the MANIAC at Princeton, but his lawyers persuaded him it wasn’t worth a court fight. I was sixteen at the time it came onstream; Edward took me out of school so I could be there. Everything at Metargon grew out of that afternoon.”
The young man who’d escorted me to Terry Utas came in through a side door with a tray. The coffee surprised me: it was creamy and rich. Breen nodded approval at my enjoyment.
“Yes, yes, I see you have a good palate. Adam, tell Terry we’ll need about twenty minutes without interruptions.”
He waited until the door had shut again before adding, “Now, let’s hope you have an equally good investigator’s palate. Tell me what you know about Martin Binder.”
I rolled Breen’s words and the sideways glance from under his thick-knit brows around on my investigator’s taste buds. I saw no reason to lie, especially since I knew so very little. I repeated my shopworn tale of Martin’s mother’s flight, the visit to his grandmother, the fact that he was a loner and that no one had heard from him.
“Ms. Utas told me you learned about his disappearance from your daughter,” I added. “Not from Jari Liu.”
“Yes, yes, I talked to Jari about that; he’s a brilliant engineer, but sometimes brilliant engineers can’t put two and two together. My daughter, Alison, was part of the college crew that worked at the lab this summer, so she got the e-mail Jari sent out after he saw you on Tuesday. She called me this morning, very concerned, as well she should have been.”
He paused, shaking his head, his daughter’s behavior still troubling him. “Jari said he showed you a demo of the system that young Binder was working on, right? We don’t let anyone take code out of the building. We also monitor outgoing messages to intercept anything they might be uploading from our systems, but Binder is an odd young man, a kind of idiot savant in some ways. He could have memorized, oh, not a million lines of code, but the broad outlines of the system. It’s far better than anything else being done in that arena, even at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. It would be worth a lot to any number of competitors, in and out of the defense industry.”
“I assume you do a background check on anyone you let into your lab,” I said.
“Of course, but we overlooked some things about Binder.”
“Like what?” I drank some more coffee; tone casual, puzzled, a mistake always to betray eagerness.
“We knew he lived with his grandparents but we didn’t realize his mother was an addict. We also didn’t realize he’d wanted to go to college but his family vetoed it: we thought he was one of the computer cowboys. You often find them in this business—they’re self-taught, uninterested in formal education. According to Liu, Martin had a chip on his shoulder with the kids from the Ivies who worked on the Fitora project with him. If he sold our system, he could afford to spend the rest of his life taking classes at Caltech or MIT. The thing that alarms me is that he’s gone dark.”
I shook my head.
“Binder unplugged himself from the Net and from cellular systems.” Breen’s tone was impatient: my palate was proving mediocre. “He canceled all his ISP connections, he isn’t sending or receiving e-mail or texts, at least not under any address that Jari’s team can find, and they are skilled hunters. That’s what’s making me fear he could be re-creating my system for another company, or even another government.”
So Jari Liu hadn’t been spinning me around by giving me the wrong details for Martin, as I’d feared.
“I’ve never met Martin, so I can’t give you an opinion,” I said. “Everyone I’ve met agrees he’s both brilliant and a bit awkward socially, but that doesn’t tell me whether he’s poised to become another Unabomber, or another Feynman.”
Breen made a sour face. “Sunny—Alison—thinks he’ll be a second Feynman. Jari says he’d be astonished if Binder was selling our secrets, but frankly, after almost fifty years in this business, I’ve seen even the most socially balanced people sell out their companies if the stack of cash in front of them is high enough. What bothers me as much as anything is that Alison let him into our home.”