Craig Kreident #1: Virtual Destruction (28 page)

The document control officer looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“So what does that really mean about the missing memos?” Craig asked, turning to the fidgety man.

“I suppose it could mean that Michaelson might have tossed everything he got from DOE into the burn bag without even reading it.”
 
He made an expression of disgust.
 
“Possibly without even documenting them as destroyed.”

“That’s the type of guy he was,” Tansy said, putting in her two-cents’ worth.

“But we don’t know that for sure,” Craig persisted.

The thin man looked sour, but conceded.
 
“That’s right.”

Craig thought for a moment.
 
“Who else would have had access to these memos?”

“Nobody.
 
Except for the Associate Director, no one else at LLNL has a need-to-know once DOE HQ documents are received.”

Paige spoke up suddenly.
 
“José Aragon is Michaelson’s Associate Director.”

“
Was
.”
 
Tansy looked around.
 
“Dr. Michaelson’s upper management right now is God and nobody else.”
 
She shrugged her bony shoulders.
 
“‘Course, that’s pretty much the way he worked when he was alive, too.”

The two FBI agents on either side of Paige exchanged glances.
 
Craig straightened.
 
“Would Michaelson have realized these classified memos were numbered and inventoried?”

The document control officer gave a weary grin.
 
“We’ve been on Michaelson’s case since day one.
 
Why do you think this entire program is in an exclusion area?
 
Not because their virtual reality work is any more classified than other programs.
 
No, Michaelson racked up so many security violations he would have been tossed out
years
ago—if he’d been an ordinary employee, that is.
 
They put him here, behind a second fence, so he didn’t have to be so careful.”

Craig tapped his fingers on Michaelson’s desktop.
 
“So, did he know the memos were inventoried or not?”

Tansy answered.
 
“I doubt if he cared much either way.”
 
She extended her finger toward Craig like a grandmother lecturing.
 
“I suppose you could believe they were stolen if you want—but my guess is that Dr. Michaelson just took them home to work on them, and got killed before he could bring them back.
 
Why don’t you go out to the ranch and take a look around his desk there?”

Craig pushed up from his seat and shook the document control officer’s hand.
 
“I appreciate your time.
 
Could I get a copy of those missing document titles?”

“No problem.
 
I’ll burn a copy right now and fax it back to the STU phone here?”
 
He raised his eyebrows questioningly at Tansy.

“I’ll give you the number,” she answered and led him out of Michaelson’s office.

Craig looked at Paige.
 
“What’s a STU?”

“Secure telephone unit.
 
A phone for classified conversations and faxes.”

Craig laughed.
 
“With all these acronyms, this case is getting more complicated than one of my patent law classes at Stanford!”
 
He motioned to the two FBI agents.
 
“Paige, have you met Special Agents Jackson and Goldfarb?”

She nodded to them.
 
“Yes, we met in the VR chamber, after you and I returned from Mr. Aragon’s.”

Craig shook his head and flopped back down into the chair.
 
“That’s right, I must be going crazy.
 
In only two days, this is the goofiest investigation I’ve ever conducted.
 
It’s like pulling teeth trying to get information from people, and we’re all supposed to be on the same team—PSOs ‘sanitizing’ the site of a mysterious death for classified material before anybody got a look, Lesserec and his weird priorities, and now Michaelson and his missing documents.
 
I came here to investigate a murder and uncovered Peyton Place instead.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair.
 
“Did you get that computer listing of who used the CAIN booth?”

Paige felt her cheeks grow warm.
 
“I’m working on it, but the database is down.
 
We’ll have it by Monday.”

“It takes three days just to get a computer listing?” Craig said in disbelief, shaking his head.

“And these guys pulled off the Manhattan project?” muttered Jackson.
 
Goldfarb snickered.

“All right, let me think.”
 
Craig lifted his head and rubbed at his eyes.

Paige felt sorry for the man.
 
He’d been going at full speed all yesterday and today.
 
Maybe she could haul him out somewhere, get him to exercise, or maybe just kick back and relax.

“All right, Jackson—did you and Goldfarb go through Michaelson’s house?”

“We went over and knocked this morning, but nobody was home.
 
The guy lived alone, I take it,” said Jackson.

“Okay.”
 
Craig looked as though he had made up his mind. “With these missing documents we can probably get a search warrant PDQ.
 
Paige, do you know where Michaelson lived?
 
Once we get that list of document titles, we can take a look around.
 
Tansy told me she’s got a spare key.”

“Guy must have really trusted his secretary,” Goldfarb muttered.

“
Administrative assistant
,” both Craig and Paige said in unison, then they laughed.

“If we find those missing classified memos, we might find a link to all this,” Craig said.

CHAPTER 28

Friday

Michaelson’s Ranch

Tracy, California

The high brown grass surrounding Hal Michaelson’s ranchhouse near the rural town of Tracy made the dead scientist’s residence look like home on the range.
 
But the dead grass was not wheat; and Michaelson’s ranch sat not in a remote area, but near where the I-580 freeway spewed commuters over the rolling Altamont hills toward San Francisco.
 
The Friday afternoon going-home traffic made a constant, droning white noise in the air, even more than a mile from the Interstate.

Craig stepped from Paige’s MG, stretched his legs, and held a hand up to shade his sunglasses.
 
The sun slanted low over the golden hills, making the air too yellow, too bright.

Paint peeled from Michaelson’s white two-story farmhouse.
 
A long dirt drive ran to a circle in front of the house; an old porch held half a dozen chairs, and off to the left stood a large, rundown storage barn exactly where Craig expected to see one.
 
Creosote-covered utility poles carried a thick above-ground powerline to the house and the barn.

Not the sort of place he expected an important Lawrence Livermore scientist to choose, Craig thought . . . but then Hal Michaelson had been eccentric in everything else.

Paige slammed her car door, making the only sound over the whisper of the nearby freeway.
 
Craig expected to see a couple of big black dogs stirring to life on the porch, sauntering over to bark at visitors.
 
But the farm remained quiet.
 
Since he lived alone, Michaelson probably hadn’t had time to bother with pets.

Craig took off his suitjacket and folded it over the passenger seat in Paige’s green MG.
 
He sniffed the air.
 
“No cattle or horses around.
 
I wonder what Michaelson kept in there.”
 
He rolled up his shirt sleeves as he started toward the old barn.
 
Paige followed.

Craig knocked a long metal hook out of an eye that served as the only lock on the barn door.
 
He grunted as he shoved sideways, sliding the square plank door along a rusty track.
 
As the afternoon light poured into the shadows, he whistled.
 
“What in the world is all this junk?”

Open wooden crates stood in stacks against the far barn wall filled with white, pink, and green styrofoam peanuts.
 
Big white blocks of packing material lay discarded in the grimy corners.

In the middle of the barn, a square concrete pad extended fifty feet on a side, on which rested an army of
 
scattered old computers like a bizarre high-tech chess game.
 
Two towering machines stood sentinel in the middle of the whole mess, thick phallic symbols six feet high.
 
Red padded seats encircled each tower like a slanted bench.

With Paige beside him, Craig stepped into the barn.
 
She found a light switch near the rickety door, and flicked it on, flooding the shadowy interior with light from a set of naked bulbs wired to the rafters above.

The barn smelled musty, as if it had not been aired out in a month.
 
Standing among the dusty monitors and clunky keyboards on the concrete pad, Craig placed a hand on one of the towering machines and rubbed at a tarnished and fading placard.

CRAY: Serial 001.

“These are Cray-1s,” said Craig.
 
“He’s got the original Cray 1 supercomputer in here, serial one.”
 
Glancing around, he made out the hulk of another squat computer with the words CDC CYBER 6600.
 
He spotted a CYBER 7600 and an IBM 360 occupying their own territory on the concrete slab.
 
“Jeez, do you think he’s got an old Texas Instruments hand calculator around here, too?
 
The kind that weighed a few pounds, cost a hundred bucks, and could add, subtract, multiply, and divide?
 
Maybe he’s got a slide rule, or an abacus!”

Paige joined him on the concrete pad and surveyed the junk around her.
 
“What was Michaelson doing with this stuff?”

“Who knows?” Craig said, lifting up a plastic cover and smelling the unique odor of old electronics.
 
“They’ve got computers a million times faster than these back at the Lab.
 
Is there a market for antique computers?
 
I doubt it.
 
Maybe he was just collecting them.”

“Other people collect stamps,” Paige observed.

Craig poked around the rest of the barn, but soon decided that Michaelson was probably nothing more than a high-tech pack rat.
 
Wiping a dusty hand on his suit pants, he said, “Let’s check out the house.
 
No telling what he’s got squirreled away in there.”

Craig dug in his pocket for the key to Michaelson’s house Tansy had given him.
 
He rang the doorbell, just for the sake of procedure, knowing no one would answer.
 
After a few seconds, touching his crisp new search warrant for reassurance, he slid the key into the lock.

Pushing the door open, Craig and Paige stepped into a richly decorated hallway.
 
The walls were filled with framed photographs, some of them black and white glossies, some in color.
 
Every one of them showed Michaelson standing and grinning with at least one other person.
 
Craig recognized the president, the former governor of California, several senators, the House majority leader, venerable old scientists, Edward Teller, Clifford Rhoades . . . .

Craig finally stopped.
 
“Michaelson was well connected.”

“A lot of friends—and a lot of people who couldn’t stand him,” Paige said.

They walked past the wall of photographs to a meticulously decorated living room.
 
It reminded Craig of his grandmother’s formal parlor.
 
He wondered who Michaelson entertained in there.

The kitchen gave him an entirely different impression altogether: dirty dishes, aluminum TV trays, and ripped-open empty frozen-dinner boxes cluttered the sink.
 
Green Perrier bottles, stacked three and four levels high, lined the tile counter.
 
The smell of days’ old food made the air thick and sour.

Paige wrinkled her nose.
 
“What a mess.”

“Think of it as a . . . uh, as a treasure hunt,” Craig said.
 
“Try not to disturb too much, but we’ve got to look for those memos.
 
I’ll look around upstairs if you want to check out the study down here.”

“Just don’t expect me to do the dishes,” she said.

“Ah, that would be destroying evidence.”

Craig walked briskly through the upstairs of the house, giving a cursory examination to the master bedroom, a guest room, and a bathroom.
 
He found nothing.
 
Just off the hall he saw a narrow set of wooden stairs that led up to an old door.
 
He creaked up the stairs, feeling as if he were in an old horror movie.