Storm Cycle Page 2
“At first we were afraid that we might be having another campus killing spree, but we’ve changed our mind. We don’t believe it was a random shooting. You were the only target. Do you have any idea who would have reason to try to kill you?”
“Not at the moment.”
“No enemies? No one hates you enough to kill you?”
“Lots of people hate me enough to kill me. I just didn’t think they would. It takes a certain kind of personality actually to commit to violence.”
“Give me names of possible suspects.”
“Tomorrow will be soon enough.” She had a sudden thought. “Wait. Send someone to watch my house. My sister, Allie, and my housekeeper, Letty Clark, are alone there.”
“You think they’re in danger?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t take chances.”
“If you’ll cooperate, we’ll cooperate.”
She studied him. “Don’t try to blackmail me. Your job is to guard citizens. Now guard them. You said I was the only target. Simon and Val weren’t hurt?”
“Your assistants? No.”
Relief poured through her. “Good.” She closed her eyes. “Keep an eye on them, too.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to have to replace them if you let them get killed.”
“We already have them under surveillance.”
“I need to see Simon right away.”
“You’re not allowed visitors. They made an exception in my case.”
“Then go away and tell the doctor I need more meds. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She could sense him hesitating. She opened her eyes again. “You’re not going to get anything else from me right now. I’m not going to turn you loose on anyone unless I’m sure there’s a chance they’re guilty.”
“It’s our job to determine that.”
“No, the buck always stops with me, and I’ve accepted it,” she said curtly. “I can’t think, much less analyze the situation. You’ll get your names when I can.”
He frowned. “I’ll leave, but I don’t want to wait for—”
“Go away or I’ll scream and they’ll come in and kick you out. I may even throw in a harassment charge.”
He stood there staring at her for an instant, then turned on his heel. “You’re right. It may take too long right now to go through the list of suspects who might want to kill you.”
She had antagonized him she realized vaguely as he left the room. Too bad. He was only doing his job. But she had no time or strength to argue with him now. She had to rest and heal and get back to doing her job.
Someone had tried to kill her. It was a strange and chilling thought. She had tried not to show the shock she was experiencing to that detective. Shock was a form of weakness, and she must never be perceived as weak. She couldn’t let her guard down and let that cop see that she was afraid. There was no use whining when she had always known the risks of what she was doing and was prepared to deal with them.
She mustn’t let this madness get in the way. Let the police find out who had shot her. It was probably some crackpot who had decided she was the cause of all his problems. She had to live. She had to work. There were too many people depending on her. Allie was depending on her. She would get through this as she had all the other barriers she’d had to leap.
Get over the pain. Heal. Get back to work.
“Tough nut,” Gonzalez murmured as Detective Finley came out of Rachel Kirby’s room. “She looked like a broken angel lying there until she opened her mouth.”
“An angel she’s not,” Finley said emphatically. “But we need to know what else she could be. Call the president of the university and get a report on Rachel Kirby and her work there.”
“I already called him and made an appointment.” He handed him a few sheets of paper. “This is the initial report on her, Simon Monteith, and Val Cho. Nothing about her work at the university, just the bare bones. That last line is interesting. They have top secret government clearance.”
“For the work they’re doing?”
“Why else? It has to be something to do with that computer in the science lab. From what I’ve heard, that computer has a capacity that the Pentagon would envy.”
“Get me details.” He scanned the report, then headed for the waiting room. “Are Simon Monteith and Val Cho still waiting to see her?”
Gonzalez nodded. “They said they’d wait until she was well enough for them to see her. They seem upset. They must be pretty close to her.”
“Then it must go only one way,” he said sarcastically. “She said the reason she didn’t want them shot was because she’d have to replace them. She’s a real sweetheart.” He was glancing at the scanty info on Rachel Kirby. “Unmarried, parents dead, one sister, Allie, two years younger. Send a car to set up surveillance on the sister.” He’d tried to bluff Rachel Kirby, but if there was a chance her family was in danger, it was his job to protect them. And Rachel had known he would do his job. Even in her pain she had been able to see through him, dammit.
And Gonzalez was right, he realized, as he entered the waiting room. The young man and woman who worked with Rachel Kirby seemed genuinely worried. They were both in their twenties, dressed in jeans and sweaters, and were very different in appearance. Simon Monteith was big and muscular with blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. Val Cho was obviously of Asian descent, medium height, dark-haired, dark eyes, and strikingly attractive.
“I’m Detective Finley. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“We don’t know anything,” Val Cho said flatly. “Don’t waste your time talking to us. Get out there and find the son of a bitch who shot Rachel.”
“Easy,” Simon said gently. “He has to follow procedure, Val.”
Finley sized up Val for a moment. “A bit defensive, aren’t you? Got a problem with authority?”
Simon turned to the detective. “You might, too, if you’d spent the first ten years of your life in a North Korean concentration camp.”
“I don’t need you to make excuses for me, Simon,” Val said curtly. She looked the detective in the eye. “Are we under suspicion?”
“No, we’ve checked, and you were both in your lab when the shooting occurred. I thought you might have an idea who might have done it. Dr. Kirby wasn’t willing to cooperate.” He paused. “And she was a little belligerent.”
“You must have caught her in a good mood,” Simon said lightly. “She’s usually more than a little. Particularly when she’s feeling helpless.”
“Is that why she said there were people wanting to kill her?”
“Nah. Who kills someone because she’s testy? Look, they let you talk to her. Can you get them to let Val and me in to see her? She’ll feel better if she knows we’re keeping things running.”
“What things?”
“The lab.”
“And what do you do in that lab? I understand it houses one of those supercomputers.”
“It’s not a supercomputer in the traditional sense. But still, Jonesy could eventually have the capacity to run the entire country.”
“Jonesy?”
“Just our nickname for the computer. Matthew Alvin Jones donated the computer to the university. When you live and work with a computer as intimately as Val and I do, it becomes almost a person to you.”
“I wouldn’t think anyone could become intimate with a computer.”
“You’re wrong. You should see Rachel working with it. She can make it do tricks that are pretty amazing. It’s almost an extension of her.”
“And what do you do in that lab?” he repeated.
Monteith chuckled. “Well, we’re not trying to undermine Wall Street or concocting biological weapons. We just process and allocate data.”
“Boring?”
“Sometimes.”
“Good money?”
“Fair.”
He glanced down at the dossier. “Then why would you give up an offer at AT&T that would have put you on a very lucrative fast track?”
“Money isn’t everything. I like university life. Lots of beer parties and football games. It’s relaxing.”
Val snorted. “For God’s sake, stop hedging, Simon. If you don’t want to tell him, don’t do it.” She looked Finley in the eye. “It’s a good job with potential to develop into something extraordinary. We’re both learning a hell of a lot from Rachel, and we’re grateful. Yes, she’s tough as nails, but she has to be. She doesn’t deserve some nut trying to kill her.”
He leafed through the dossiers. “Her report says she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science when she was fifteen and her Doctorate in Medicine at twenty. Impressive. She worked in Japan for four years before she returned to the U.S. You were working in a government lab in Yokohama during that period. Is that where you met?”
“Yes.”
“And later she pulled strings and brought you over here when she started working here at the university. You must be grateful.”
“No, Rachel doesn’t accept gratitude as a concept.” She smiled faintly. “She says it gets in the way. The giver tends to feel sanctimonious, and the receiver feels a tinge of resentment at owing a debt. She brought me here because she wanted to do it. I came because I wanted to do it.”
“Why you? Why not a U.S. student?”
“I’m brilliant.” She glanced blandly at Simon. “And look what she got when she hired Simon.”
“A bonanza,” Simon said. “Not a Madame Butterfly who thinks she’s a Nobel Prize candidate.”
“Madame Butterfly was Japanese.”
“Whatever.” Simon turned back to the detective. “Can you get us in to see her?”
“Maybe.
She said she wanted to see you. Why do you have to have security clearance to work in the lab?”
“Ask Rachel.” He stood up. “And you know the reason I have security clearance is because I’m not a blabbermouth. Now will you get me in to see her?” He paused. “It’s important.”
Finley hesitated.
Val took a step closer, her hands clenched into fists. “I know she probably made you angry. She has to wheel and deal so much that she has a tendency to be blunt as hell when she lets down her guard. But Rachel has to juggle problems you couldn’t even imagine. Give her a break.”
“Give me a break. I have my captain hot on my ass to find who this shooter is. Who’s to know if that sniper might not decide to choose another target? School shootings are a nightmare. Every parent of every student at the university will be on the phone wanting to know why he wasn’t caught and why we didn’t know this was going to happen. I’m walking around in the dark, and I don’t like it.” He paused. “So you get me out of hot water and give me something to tell me my captain and I’ll get you in to see her.”
Val hesitated. “What do you want to know? We have no idea who shot her.”
“Too many candidates?”
“Maybe thousands. I’m not joking. We get thousands of applicants who want us to dole out processing power to their research. We might make or break careers. To some of these people, it may even be a matter of life or death.”
“Processing power? I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It can’t be that important.”
“Believe me, it’s that important.”
“And what exactly do you do in that lab?”
Val spoke simply, as if talking to a child. “You know the expression ‘two heads are better than one’?”
Finley nodded. “Of course.”
“Think about how much better three hundred thousand heads would be. Because that’s what we have.”
“What?”
“People all over the world let us use their computers when they’re not using them. They do this by installing a small program that lets us send and receive data to and from their systems. Our computer, Jonesy, divides up problems and distributes them through the Internet to these thousands of smaller computers.”
Finley nodded, trying to understand. “So you’ve got all these other computers working together on the same problem.”
“Exactly. We get people to donate their computer’s processing power to our projects. We measure this power in terms of computing cycles. The more cycles we can get, the better.”
Simon smiled. “And it’s not just from computers. Tell me, do you have children?”
The detective’s eyes narrowed on him. “Yeah. A boy.”
“Does he have a game console at home? Nintendo, X-box, PlayStation?”
“Sure.”
“There’s more computing power in that box than most businesses have. If the owners of those game consoles agree to leave them powered on and connected to the Internet even when they’re not being used, they can let us use their processing power—their computing cycles—for all kinds of projects.”
“And you get them to donate the use of their computers?”
Val nodded. “Absolutely. It costs them nothing, except maybe a few cents in electricity. And Rachel’s software is designed to only use the donor’s systems when they’re not being used for anything else. We use computing power from home users, businesses, anywhere we can get it. And they get to be a part of all kinds of worthwhile causes. It’s a win-win.”
“What kind of causes?”
“All kinds of things, but it’s fantastic for disease research. In one of our projects, we’re examining millions of tissue-sample images and comparing them with cancer-patient diagnoses and disease progressions. It might help detect cancers earlier and maybe even help cure some types. It’s also useful for comparing DNA strands with certain traits and diseases.”
“So you deal mostly with health-care projects?”
“Not at all. Jonesy is also helping to develop alternate-energy sources. Another project will combat global warming. And by analyzing meteorological patterns over the last fifty years, we’ll be able to forecast the weather with more accuracy than ever before. These are projects that might take years with a traditional mainframe computer, but with the help of your kid’s Play-Station computing cycles, it might only take a few months in our system.”
“Who chooses the projects?”
“Rachel. And only Rachel. It was part of her deal. The university isn’t as interested in the good works projects as it is in Rachel’s software. It could revolutionize computing.”
“But haven’t people been doing this already?”
“Not this well. There have always been several weak links in the chain, and Rachel has come up with solutions for almost all of them. Complicated problems need to be divided up, distributed to thousands of computers, then recombined. It’s a tough thing to do.”
“Unless you’re Rachel Kirby, I guess.”
Val shrugged. “She’d say it’s tough, too. But her solutions are brilliant. Her software detects the computing potential of each of the thousands of systems and adjusts for the amount and complexity of calculations parsed out to them.”
“Why the government clearance?”
“Rachel was forced to accept a government project from the NSA. They needed the computing time.”
“Couldn’t they commandeer it?”
“Yes, but they didn’t want to go through regular channels. Jonesy had the power and privacy.”
“What kind of power?”
“Right now, I’d say we control more computer power cycles than the government computer systems in all of Western Europe combined.”
“My God.” Finley and Gonzalez looked at each other in surprise. Finley asked, “And Rachel Kirby is head of this program?”
“She is the program. She persuaded the university to let her run the lab when she heard it was being donated. They get the praise and prestige, and she does the work. She goes out and gets contributions to fuel the computer. Every medical and scientific organization in the world would give their eyeteeth to be accepted by Rachel. She only accepts ten a year.”
“Including a government think tank from the NSA.”
“She had no choice. They were pressuring the university, and we have to have Jonesy.”
“And possibly the shooter could have been someone who didn’t want this government project to succeed?”
“Maybe. You could say that about most of the projects. Someone always has an axe to grind or a slight to avenge.” Simon said impatiently, “You can tell your captain that. Now, will you get them to let me see her?”
Finley hesitated, then turned on his heel. “I’ll do what I can.”
TWO
“Rachel.”
Simon. Rachel forced herself to lift her lids. “I didn’t think that detective would get you in. The doctor just gave me a shot . . .” She didn’t know how long she could keep awake. She had to be quick. “Allie. Make sure she’s okay . . .”
“I’ll go there right after I leave here.” He took her hand. “It’s going to be fine, Rachel. Val and I are handling everything.”
“That’s . . . scary.”
He grinned. “I thought that would jar you out of that bed. I told you I believe in incentives.”
“The leak . . .”
“See? Your curiosity probably kept you alive. If I’d told you right away about the relay, that would—”
“Simon.”
His smile faded. “I found a discrepancy from the flow in the Galveston relay. It was very cleverly camouflaged, and I almost had to stumble on it before I noticed. Whoever is siphoning off our cycles is damn sharp.”
“I knew that before. I made it impossible for any hacker to get into Jonesy. Did you pinpoint the entry?”
“One of them.”
“One of them?”
“I think he has other backdoors he’s made in the system.”
“No way.”
“I saw traces.”
Rachel sighed wearily. “Dammit, it will take time to fix this. I’d better go to Las Vegas.”
“You’re not really going to see Demanski, are you?”
“There’s no other way. He’s sitting on a massive amount of unused computing power. That could really help us until we get our own system back to a hundred percent.”
“You don’t pick easy marks. I heard he managed to even make the Mafia back down once. Why him?”