Spectre Black (13 page)

Chapter
12

Everything about their “date” went wrong. Jace showed up at her door with flowers. She asked him in and put the expensive red roses in a vase. Roses always reminded Jolie of funerals—although usually they were white. These had a moldy smell, as if they’d been kept in the back cooler at the Safeway for too long.

She asked him to sit down and he sat on her couch. He wasn’t much for small talk, so Jolie found herself having to fill the gap. Imagine a rich kid like him not being able to hold up his side of the conversation, but that was how it was. He wasn’t shy; he wasn’t awkward. Maybe the word for him was “distracted.”

As they walked out to the car, he rested his arm around her shoulder. It lay there like a dead animal. Jolie knew then that this was a bad idea.
Worse
than a bad idea. It would be a long evening, and she was already making plans to find a way to duck out after the main course.

And that was when she saw the car for the first time—up close. How hideous it was. In the late afternoon sunshine, she could see the uneven paint job, almost like a lava flow only sanded down. Whoever had painted it made mistake after mistake, slapping on more coats of paint to cover it up, and finally they just sprayed another two or three coats on, really rough—almost like powder.

“It looked like a chunk of charcoal.”

This was his pride and joy? Jolie would have unloaded it ages ago.

They went to an upscale restaurant. The Cliffs was up in the foothills where the tony places were. California Fan Palms, their trunks ringed with white fairy lights, led to a circle around a fountain. The restaurant consisted of three brown stucco cubes scattered among beautiful gardens and tall palms, and they all looked down on the small city through walls of glass. So nice, but to her the glass fronts made her think of ice. It made her feel cold.

Maybe it wasn’t the place so much as the person she was with.

Of course there was valet parking. Jolie noticed that the valet was courteous and treated Jace’s car like a freshly laid egg, despite its condition. He must have seen it many times.

But Jolie couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between the expensive restaurant and Jace’s chariot.

She described the car again to Landry. Almost as if she had to get it
right
.

It was so
ugly
. Something you’d see at a chop shop. The way the paint was slapped on it, so dull that it seemed to swallow the light. Jolie thought it was some kind of primer, although she’d always thought of primer as gray. An eyesore.

This
was the precious car Dan Atwood seized?

Hard to wrap her mind around.

The date—and it really had all the awkwardness that the word
date
implied—lurched on from there. There was very little in the way of conversation. It was strange. The waiter, the maître d’, the table settings, the sparkling glasses, the linen, the view, the low voices and clink of silverware—it should have been a magical evening. The exquisite lighting, and the
food
, which was excellent. Perhaps the best meal she’d ever tasted.

But the company . . . Jolie said she was probably not the best conversationalist in the world, but compared to Jace Denboer, she was brilliant. She tried a half-dozen times to get him to talk about
something
, before realizing that she was trying too hard and probably came off like a performing monkey.

“To say it was small talk would be insulting to all the small-talkers out there,” Jolie told Landry. “He had virtually nothing to say. He just stared at me and kept asking me about myself. He just phrased it in different ways.

“Honestly. I don’t even know why he asked me out. Except for talking about the car, and asking me inane questions, like where was I from, was I a good shot, did I like cars, who were my friends. Like he was testing me, somehow.

“He just kept staring at me, as if he expected me to produce a litter of kittens. It was like he didn’t want to be there at all—I got the impression this was something he had to do. Like an arranged marriage. He excused himself partway through dinner and went off to the bathroom and God only knows what he did in there. If he was jerking off, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking of me. It was a total waste of time, on his part as well as mine. I’m surprised we lasted an hour. It was like he had to be there. He definitely didn’t want to get me in bed”—she shuddered at the thought—“and I don’t think he made eye contact with me the whole evening. The only thing he did to impress me was to let me ride in his car. And that strange stunt with the shirt.”

“His shirt?”

“I’ll get to that.”

At one point during dinner, Jace grimaced and said, “What’s that smell?”

Jolie didn’t smell anything except the food. But Jace became increasingly agitated. He called the waiter over and questioned him at length. That’s when it came out: he believed there were cardamom seeds in the salad.

The waiter told him there weren’t. Jace became even
more
agitated. Jolie didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. He questioned the waiter at length about it. The waiter even brought the chef out to explain the ingredients, but Jace didn’t believe either one of them.

“The cardamom seeds were the most important thing he talked about all night,” Jolie said. “Between the flat affect and the paranoia, I’m wondering if there’s something medically wrong with him. He’s in his midtwenties—twenty-four, to be exact—and that’s about the age when schizophrenia begins to take hold in young men. The weirdest thing was that damn car.

“But it gets even weirder than that.”

She told him.

Their dinner didn’t take long. After Jace’s minitantrum, he tersely ordered the check and they left. He drove her straight home, without saying a word. Still agitated.

Angry.

Seething. Jolie could feel it. She could almost smell it. Like an animal backed into a den.

The last of the sunset lost its color. They reached her street. The one thing the neighborhood had was good streetlights. Probably put in years ago when the tract houses were built.

He insisted on walking her to her door. It felt like one of those old movies from the fifties or sixties—she was surprised he didn’t ask to see her dad.

Jolie thanked him for the evening. Again, like the 1950s. Maybe
Father Knows Best
. He stood there, looking at her, his face pale in the dusk. She couldn’t read him.

“The flat affect. There’s something really wrong with him. He said, ‘Just a minute.
’
”

He walked back to the car. He turned his back on her and ducked through the open window of the Camaro, as if he were looking for something. Reaching in, fiddling with something.

Jolie carried a gun in a specially made compartment in her purse, built for concealed carry. She unzipped the bag and curled her hand around the stock, finger on the trigger. She didn’t want to turn her back on him to go into the house. Jace and his butt-ugly car were approximately twenty feet away. As a cop, Jolie knew the “twenty-one-foot rule.” If a man threatening you was within twenty-one feet, you had to shoot immediately to stop him from getting to you. He could get to you in an instant, across twenty-one feet.

Heart thumping. Mouth dry.

But determined. She’d been trained always to shoot to kill.

His back was still to her as he leaned into the car. He was stretched forward; she could see the waist of his jeans pull down just a little. Jolie wondered if he was reaching into the glove compartment, even now grabbing his own weapon. Was that his plan? To shoot her?
Why?

Why would he take her out to dinner and then shoot her at her door?

The sky was turning darker by the minute. Jace and his shadowy Camaro were getting harder to see, even with the streetlight reflecting down on them. He remained bent, his upper body inside the car. Rummaging. Rummaging around for something. Jolie’s hand tightened on her Sig. Then, still bowed over, he reached down to his waist, rucked his shirt up and pulled it over his head. His bare back to her.

“He took off his
shirt
.”

Jolie could see the faint outline of what must be his head, his arms. He’d ducked in again. Now he was wrestling with something, pulling it over his head.

He was
changing
shirts.

Landry said, “He changed shirts.”

“Yes and no.”

“He didn’t change shirts?”

“It wasn’t really a shirt . . . it was more like a poncho. But I couldn’t see it very well. Whatever he changed into, the . . . the
garment, it
was . . . it made him . . .transparent. I could see the interior of the car right
through
him.”

Somewhere out on the water, a motorboat whined by. There was another noise, too, louder than you’d expect: a fly buzzing at the inside window. But Jolie heard nothing, saw nothing on the boat—everything she saw was interior. She was back at her house with Jace and the Camaro.

She said: “It wasn’t the best view in the world, but I could see the interior of the car.

“I could see it right
through
him. The steering wheel, the passenger window, the street scene beyond.

“That red light on the dash, too. The infrared light. And the windshield—I could see the control panel; it was faint but I could see it. Right through him, but no interior lights.”

“No interior lights?”

“None.”

Landry waited. She wasn’t done.

“The poncho was fairly big. Hip length. I could see his legs, his feet, but I couldn’t see his waist. It was . . . disturbing. Freaky. Like something from a horror movie. I could see his jean legs, his shoes, halfway up to his waist. Above that, nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing, except . . .” She looked him in the eye. “I could see his head, from the neck up.

“
Just floating there
.”

Chapter
13

Landry said to Jolie, “How well do you know Jerry Boam and Rand McNally?”

“Very well.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because both Rand McNally and Jerry Boam lost loved ones to homicides.”

“Both of them? In Branch? They were your cases?”

“Just Jerry. He lost his adult son. That was here in Branch. I investigated the case and it came to a successful close—as successful as it could
be, when you’ve lost a child you’re never getting back. We got the guy.
Rand is a transplant—his sister lives out here. His wife was killed during a robbery attempt in Phoenix. They were part of a support group.”

“You trust them.”

“I even checked Rand’s story out, just to be on the safe side. So what is this about? Do you have any idea?”

“I’m pretty sure Jace is playing around with cloaking tech. You’ve heard of that?”

“I’ve heard the term. What is it?”

“Does Rand have a 4G phone?”

“I think so.”

“Ask him if we can get Wi-Fi.”

Rand followed Jolie back into the cabin. “I can’t get any bars here, but if we go out on the lake, we should be able to.”

“Let’s do that, then.”

It wasn’t long before they had 4G. Landry suggested using the phone as a hot spot. Rand went into his Wi-Fi settings on the laptop and connected them to the Internet. “What am I looking for?”

“Google ‘cloaking technology,
’
” Landry said. “Select ‘Images’ on the toolbar.”

The screen filled with photographs. A woman in her living room, cut in half by the couch she should be sitting on and the carpet where she would rest her feet. The top part of her there, the bottom part, gone. A van with its midsection gone, replaced by bridge pillars. A man, standing in a field, only his legs and his boots showing. A tank driving through the desert, kicking up dust—the entire back section gone, as if it had been cut in half. Many of the images—other than the photo of the tank—were clumsy and awkward.

“Looks like a stunt to me,” Jolie said. “Freakish.”

Landry pointed at the legs of the man. “The secret is to fill in the rest of these people and vehicles with your eye. Where would the man’s body be?”

“He’s like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.” Jolie squinted at the photo.

Rand cleared his throat. “This kind of stuff gives me a headache. I
think I’ll go do a little fishing. Later I can swing by the marina and get us
something to eat. You can call in your orders to me around dark, okay?”

He stepped down into his boat, pulled the cord on the motor, and pulled away from the Bayliner. The sound soon faded to a faint whine as he disappeared past an outcropping of rock and grass.

Jolie said, “He doesn’t want to step in this.”

“Smart.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You already stepped into this big-time when Jace Denboer showed you his magic suit. It could be he’s too dumb to know that, so let’s hope it stops there.”

“How’d he land on this? You think Daddy gave him his Magic Car?”

“Could be.”

“Miko Denboer works with the federal government. But I thought it was agricultural. He has one of those farms.”

“People are into all sorts of things. They don’t need to be connected.”

Jolie said, “So give me the short version of what this is about. Be gentle—I almost flunked physics in high school.”

The long version would have taken too much time to explain—he’d be at it all night, and while he’d made a study of the technology, he probably knew only one percent of what really went on. The long version probably wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, anyway, since the technology kept morphing.

He told Jolie that there was a standard stealth tech for hard objects—
for military hardware, aircraft, and boats. The Stealth Bomber was the most obvious example. These “hard objects” were coated to fool radar
and sonar. To accomplish this, the military used a special kind of paint.
“Write this down so you won’t forget it: carbon nanotube stealth paint.”

“
‘Carbon nanotube stealth paint,
’
” Jolie said. “Is that anything like Batman’s decoder ring?”

“Batman doesn’t have a decoder ring.”

“You sure about that?” She grinned at him, but her smile faltered. “Seriously, carbon nanotube stealth paint? Who comes up with this stuff? Is this pie-in-the-sky stuff?”

“No—you’ve already seen it. On Jace’s car. Ultra black.”

“Ultra.”

“Blacker than black. As you said, his car seemed to swallow light, not reflect it.”

“It looks like shit.”

Landry grinned. That was Jolie—no sugarcoating it. “The paint might look like shit to you, but there are microcrevices and pinholes inside all those layers, to ‘eat light.’ Multiple coats of paint, building one on top of the other so it’s harder to see at night. You said it looked like a chunk of charcoal. Powdery, porous—”

“Ugly.”

“But also, hard to see.”

Jolie nodded. She’d known that better than anybody.

Landry explained that the big players focused their military and scientific research on “metamaterial”: the blackest black imaginable. This could render an object virtually invisible, depending on the circumstances.

Jolie had seen it in action, seen it for herself. Or rather, she
hadn’t
seen it. “Nice trick.”

“It has its uses, especially in the military. C-130s painted Spectre Black are good for flying at night, because they’re hard to spot. Same with the Stealth Bomber. Three things make the Stealth Bomber virtually invisible. One is the paint job. Another is altitude—they’re too high up to be seen. And third, the shape. The Stealth Bomber is built to cheat radar—it’s configured like a diamond with many facets. The facets break up what would normally be flat surfaces on the aircraft. With a regular plane, its flat wing surface makes it detectable to radar—large points of the fuselage bounce back to the radar center. Radar can’t reflect off the Stealth very well, if at all. The military—ours and everyone else’s in the world—know that stealth is going to be more and more of a commodity as things change.

“Look at submarines. The biggest Achilles’ heel for a submarine back in the old days was the noise. A submarine’s worst enemy was the enemy’s sonar. So they quieted their subs down, came up with nanocoding to foil sonar. Instead of engine noise or propeller noise, they used a worm drive. A corkscrew that propelled the sub smoothly, and
quietly
, through the water.”

Nanotechnology was adapting and changing dramatically, every new adjustment speeding the technology forward, and farther. This was mostly due to the military.

He told her about miniature netting.

The netting was so small it couldn’t be handled by human hands. A strand was half the width of a strand of human hair. It could be used to support certain kinds of material, so that you could affix that material to an object. Landry compared it to sticky-note paper. You peeled it off and pasted it on. Landry said, “You can manhandle it, roll it out on the roof of a house or the side of the car. The netting is what holds everything together—it transfers electricity. It’s a conductor. It transfers electricity from the cameras to the projectors. Whatever it is you need to apply. Infinitesimal. Say you spray the adhesive on the side of the car—it’s heat-activated. You can roll it out, just the way you want it, use a heat gun, warm it up, fuse it to the car’s surface. Like clear coat. Clear polyurethane. Nanowire with one or two coats.”

“That’s not the same thing as what Jace has, right? He’s just got the black paint.”

“You’re right. It’s not the same. Different technology, same goal. That’s where technology is going.”

“I don’t understand what Jace did. How can you see through an object if the person is standing right there? How can you see right through him?”

“You don’t.”

“Then how do you make it seem like you do?”

Landry said, “Remember how tiny everything is. So tiny it’s just this side of nonexistent.”

“I get that.”

“The netting, the adhesive, the things that hold it together, that’s the key.”

“To
what?
”

“To the material you want to put on the netting. In this case, it’s an
infinitesimally small camera placed side by side with an infinitesimally
small projector. Multiplied exponentially. Receiving and transmitting
constantly.”

“Like two beads placed next to each other,” Jolie said. “Rows and rows of them?”

Jolie was a quick study.

“Like that,” Landry said, “Only these beads are too tiny to be visible to the human eye. Picture two infinitesimally small beads, one next to the other. One bead is the camera. The second bead is the projector. Repeat the pattern, on and on—a camera next to a projector next to a camera next to a projector.”

“That’s nanotechnology?”

“One kind of nanotechnology. ‘Nano’ means tiny.”

Jolie got it. “So—does this mean the cameras take pictures of what’s behind you, and the projectors display them for you to see? Say you have a van parked outside, and behind that there’s desert and mountains. If the van is wearing the cameras and projectors, the projectors are relaying an image of the desert, right? Not the van. Is that right? That’s what you’d see. A projection. Like a hologram?”

Landry thought of the man who walked past him near the bridge. “Something like that.”

“Wouldn’t those cameras and projectors have to be on both sides of the object?” Jolie added. “So the cameras could record what’s behind the object?”

“Yes.”

“Judging from these photos on Google Images, they’ve got a ways to go. They’re not very good.”

“No,” Landry said. “But look at the difference between the Wright brothers’ plane and the Stealth Bomber. Technology is always moving. Technology evolves.”

“This is what Jace’s father’s involved in?”

“Could be.”

“Could be?”

Landry shrugged. “Maybe Jace got his hands on the Camaro another way.”

“How?”

“Got me.”

“So what do we do?”

“Go black.”

“If you mean go into hiding, I
did
go black.”

“How many people helped you get here?”

“Just two. Jerry Boam—his actual name is Jerry Bartlett, by the way—and Rand. I called you because I thought—”

“You have to go.”

Her eyes turned stony. Two gray-blue marbles in her head. “Go where?” she asked. Her voice low, quiet. Contained.

“You think you’re safe here? You think they’re not looking for you? Jace did you a big favor, showing you that car. Now it’s all out in the open. But you know what? Even if you don’t know much, it’s possible—fifty-fifty—that they believe you know too much.”

“Because of a car?”

“And Dan Atwood.”

She said nothing.

“You found him at the agricultural farm with the poplars. Isn’t that Miko Denboer’s farm?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t—”

“They came after you once.”

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. He could feel her anger. It was a living thing, writhing in the air between them like an electric wire.

Jolie looked away and remained quiet. It made Landry want to tell her how he admired her, how tough she was. He had a list of reasons, all logical, for her to stand down. She was a known quantity in the town. And she’d already gone on the run. But he didn’t say any of it. She would have to come to her own conclusion.

Whatever it was, he would deal with it.

At last she said, “I need to think about this.”

“Think fast.”

Landry heard the whine of a boat on the water—they looked at each other. The sound changed to a drone, the boat coming closer. Landry grabbed his .32 Colt. “You stay hidden, just in case,” he said. The gun was small enough to fit inside his hand. He held it back and slightly behind his thigh and went above.

It was Rand McNally, holding up his branch with the blue underwear tied on. He threw the rope and Landry secured the boat. There was a grease-spotted paper bag on the bench seat behind him—their dinner—but Rand left it there. Landry could tell by McNally’s face that something was wrong.

Not just wrong.

Devastating.

Jolie materialized beside him.

Rand’s face was drawn in the last red light. Landry could see the sun behind him, its eye almost closed, a few plum-dark clouds above. It was like a snapshot.

A snapshot of the moment when something had changed, drastically.

Landry looked at Jolie.

She was a cop, with a cop’s sixth sense.

She knew it was something bad.

Landry gave Rand a hand onto the Bayliner. Rand clutched a newspaper in his fist. His face was pale. Stricken.

“Bad news,” he said. “Really bad news.”

“What happened?” Jolie demanded.

“You live on Turner Avenue, right?”

He handed Landry the paper. It was today’s edition. One photo took up the front page above the fold. Blackened timbers, smoke, a firefighter traipsing through a puddle. Landry stared at the address, read it over three times. It was her house—burned to the ground.