The first unnerving question showed up immediately: Whom to tell about this thing?
On paper there was an easy answer to that. There were proper channels to go through—certain people at the Defense Department that Bayliss Labs was supposed to report to, when they came upon any kind of breakthrough.
“And that would’ve been fine if all they’d created was a better radar system for drones,” Claire said. “But this stuff … For God’s sake, Bayliss’s official contact at Defense was a man who’d been investigated for fraud less than a year before. What was the right move? Tell that guy everything and hope for the best? Or go over his head to someone else, and basically still just cross their fingers?”
Whitcomb had settled on a different route, she said. He had personal connections in D.C., people he’d had lunches and dinners with, time and time again during his long career in the gray space between business and government. At least some of them were decent people, he believed, beneath all the politics. Whitcomb decided the safest move was to set up a meeting with several of them all at once and demonstrate the technology for them. Show it to those hand-picked safe bets and enlist their help and guidance on how to proceed.
He would need prep time to line it all up. Time to be sure he had the right people in mind, then more time to get them all together without telling them anything in advance. Given the schedules of people like that, it would take some number of weeks to arrange. Maybe as much as a month.
Which scared him just a bit.
A month was a long time for a whole company to keep a secret.
Bayliss Labs wasn’t large by any count: fewer than twenty people, the whole enterprise housed at a single site in Palo Alto. The lab space, the offices—everything under one roof. But even with so few in the loop, Whitcomb was terrified of leaks. He had good reasons for that. Some of his employees were on close terms with powerful outsiders. One of the financial guys had gotten his job because he was a nephew of a major shareholder. It was hard not to picture the guy telling his uncle at least some of the big news. There were half a dozen other weak spots like that, mostly connections back to the original company, the big defense contractor.
“Dale asked me to come on board within the first three days after the breakthrough,” Claire said. “I guess he just wanted an ally there with him. At least one person he could absolutely trust.”
“What happened when you hired on?” Dryden asked.
“For a while, nothing. Everyone was saying all the right things. They agreed with Dale’s ideas on how to approach the government, and in the meantime the research continued. They built other prototypes of the machine. They tried tweaks in the design, but always got the same results. The time difference is always ten hours and twenty-four minutes. And there’s no way to tune it—you can’t go up and down the dial or anything. You just hear what you hear. But anyway, yes, everything seemed fine at the beginning.”
“Seemed,” Dryden said.
Claire nodded. “And then it didn’t.”
Dryden waited.
Claire leaned forward and folded her arms atop the steering wheel. She rested her forehead on them. Enough time went by that Dryden thought she might have passed out. Then she began speaking again.
She and Dale had done their best to be vigilant for leaks, she said. To the point of being paranoid. They’d enlisted one of the computer techs, a guy named Curtis whom Dale had known longer than anyone else in the company, to help snoop on all the rest. The snooping included personal communications in employees’ homes, illegal as it was. There was just so much at stake.
But for nearly four weeks, nothing struck the three of them as suspicious. Nothing seemed wrong. Until three days ago.
Claire’s phone had rung at five minutes before six, Wednesday morning. Dale calling, sounding panicked.
Get out of your house right now. Get in your car and go somewhere.
What is it? Dale, what’s happening?
Curtis found something. Evidence of something going on.
What do you mean?
We think there are people at Bayliss who’ve been working with someone on the outside, sharing the designs for these machines, maybe since the first days after the breakthrough. Someone out there with high-level resources, we don’t know who it is yet.
Dale—
Jesus, Claire, just get in your car—
I’m going right now.
Do you remember the safe location you picked out, when you protected my family? The place we’d all meet up if something happened?
Yes.
I’m going to hide one of the machines there. I want you to pick it up later today.
Dale, what are you going to do?
Nothing too risky if I can help it.
Where’s Curtis?
He’s going to meet me later. He says he copied a huge amount of data from these people—some kind of secure server they were using for all their communication. He already told me some of what he found. It’s scary stuff, Claire.