The Price of Innocence (17 page)

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

‘The new engine. The display says it uses nitrogen crystals, but pure nitrogen doesn’t come in crystals and they aren’t flammable at any rate.’

He – or at least his glasses – regarded her for a while, no doubt wondering if she always sounded this incoherent in the wee hours. ‘I’m Mr Lambert’s chief of security. Not usually here at night but then these aren’t usual circumstances. So though I may be just a teensy bit slow from being up past my bedtime, can I help you?’

‘Um … it has to be some kind of compound, but what else is in the compound? If it’s going to fire a piston, there must be …’

After another long minute, her Buddha took a deep breath and said, ‘Seeing that this is the answer to the gas crisis and a way to free America from dependence on the oil of those hostile to us, and that the first Lambert Industries IPO is scheduled to be offered next week, I suppose Mr Lambert didn’t care to post his formula in a glass box in a public lobby.’

‘Mmm, yes, well.’ There didn’t seem much to say to that. ‘How does it work, then? I mean, gas is a liquid and a vapor. How do you convert an internal combustion engine to working on—’

‘Sand,’ the security chief said.

‘Sand?’

‘It’s like sand. That’s how tiny the crystals are. They’re in a plastic ring. You ever have a cap gun when you were a kid?’

‘No. But I got one for a Halloween costume once.’

‘Yeah? What did you go as?’

At this, the first spark of interest in the man’s voice, she didn’t have the heart to tell him she couldn’t remember. ‘A cowgirl.’

‘Ah.’ He paused, clearly trying to picture her in that outfit, and she squirmed. ‘Well, you know how caps for revolver type cap guns come in a preformed, plastic ring? Same thing here. Only instead of caps, the sections on the ring feed the sand into the cylinders one grain at a time.’ The wide face beamed, as proud as if he had invented it himself. ‘It fires like a gun, so there’s no spark plug to gum up. The engine oil dissolves any residue, so there’s little maintenance.’

Theresa sorted out the idea in her head. ‘What happens when the ring runs out of sand?’

‘You take that ring out and put in another. They’re only a foot in diameter and weigh less than a pound, so it’s not like it’s hard. A warning light will tell you when you’re low, just like a gas tank, so you don’t wind up dibbser.’ At her frown, he added, ‘DBSR – dead by the side of the road.’

‘Oh.’

‘Mr Lambert says dibbser is what Americans fear most of all, and no alternative engine will ever catch on unless we can assure them that will never, ever happen.’

‘That makes a lot of sense. So where do you buy these rings – oh, duh. Here.’

‘At first. It’s not a complicated design, and any chemist could break down the formula for the crystals, so Mr Lambert knows there will be knock-offs available almost immediately. If he can just keep the patent on the engine, he’ll be happy.’

‘What about the EPA?’

‘They love it. No harmful fumes. No lead, no benzene. Nothing to leak out of underground tanks or spill on the freeway. Well, the sand could spill, but it can be swept or vacuumed. Much better for human beings all around. You can store extra rings in your garage or your trunk. No more making a weekly stop at the gas station.’

There had to be some drawback – there always was – but without knowing more Theresa could not guess what it might be and had no doubt that Lambert had found or would find a way around it. Trying to out-think Bruce Lambert was like trying to out-golf Tiger Woods or out-sing Barbra Streisand.

‘Very interesting,’ she told him. ‘Have you been working with Mr Lambert a long time, to learn all this?’

‘Only a couple of years, since I got out of the service. But I’ve been a friend of his older brother since they lived in the hood.’

‘Cool,’ she said, and meant it.

‘A lot of the guys here are from when we were kids. Mr Lambert doesn’t forget his friends.’

‘I can respect that.’ The conversation lagged, and she asked for directions to the ladies’ room.

‘Right down here, ma’am,’ he pointed to a hallway behind him, ‘past the workrooms.’

‘Really.’ It didn’t make much sense to have the restrooms not in the public area, seemed to be a flaw in the security system.

‘It’s OK, ma’am.’ Buddha still smiled. ‘All entrances to the factory are closed. You can’t get lost.’

‘That’s a relief.’ She set off once again, feeling that it could not be good to wander into Bruce Lambert’s workspace. She might find herself pulverized by a robotic sentry with a ray gun. Or another bomb. She made a beeline for the ladies’ room, then found her way back along the corridor.

She could still smell the faint odor of iodine, unless it was just her imagination. Either it or the healing scratches made her skin itch.

She looked through the window as she walked, seeing the room she had toured through only hours earlier. It still had a large hole in the wall, but most of the blackened, destroyed items had been removed and an effort made to clean the walls and floor. It wouldn’t surprise her to see it back in operation by tomorrow – things could get fixed quickly with all the money in the world – but the room on the left had not been badly damaged. She studied it, once again mesmerized by the chaos of invention. A lightly cushioned, molded seat had been brought in and sat on the floor next to the still ash-covered chassis. The engine block – which appeared to her to be a standard, six-piston engine block – sat on a table covered with tools. The entire car frame dangled, caught in the four prongs of a huge crane claw. No doubt this piece of the puzzle would be lowered on to the chassis at some point, but for now the car frame looked like a toy forgotten by a gargantuan child who had been called to dinner.

Bruce Lambert had come a long way from his mother’s garage, but Theresa wondered if he truly found the slick, modern fishbowl more comfortable. ‘I couldn’t work like that,’ she said aloud.

‘Yeah, I know,’ snorted a voice to her left. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking when I designed it.’

T
heresa stared in surprise at her third encounter that day with Bruce Lambert, über-genius. She would have been both startled and self-conscious had she not been so completely exhausted.

He had cleaned off the blood and plaster dust and changed into a plain T-shirt, a well-worn pair of jeans and a weary smile. ‘I wanted my place to be transparent, I guess. I’ve always loved clear stuff, glass, those telephones in the clear acrylic so you can see the mechanism, Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. But it came out more like—’ He glanced around at the windows, the room, the hallway suspended across the center of it, mouth working as if searching for the right word. ‘Like—’

‘Disney World?’

He half turned, looked directly at her. ‘Exactly. I wanted the process to be visible, so people could distinguish it from magic. Invention doesn’t require magic. It doesn’t even require genius. All you need is time and persistence.’

‘Don’t you worry about people stealing your ideas, if they can stand here and watch you work?’

‘Nah. The lobby is only open to the public three times per week, and even then it’s mostly school groups. Industrial spies don’t usually collaborate with fourth-graders. At least I hope not. Electronic transmissions are monitored, and there’s no cell service past the lobby. The entire building is one giant Faraday cage.’ At her look, he said, ‘A Faraday cage is—’

‘A container that shields all electronic signals, yes. We use the bags for seized cell phones so no one can delete information by remote. But I received a call standing in your workroom.’

‘That was because someone had just blown a big hole in the wall, so the bag had a leak. Check it now.’

She did. No bars.

He went on, ‘If someone wants to steal my plans, they get a job here. That’s happened four times in the past two years.’

‘Could one of them have left that bomb in your supply closet?’

‘No.’

She didn’t ask how he could be sure of that, knew that he would have his ways. Bruce Lambert presented himself to the world as a curious little boy, the geek that made good. But there was nothing geek-like about the tightly coiled body under that T-shirt and no one built such a financial powerhouse without both shrewdness and cunning. If the bomb had been an inside job, it had been left by a new threat, and obviously Lambert would be much better placed to figure that out that she could hope to be. Perhaps he would let the Feds help him, perhaps not. People at his level made up their own procedures for justice and resolution. The rich
are
different.

That said, at the moment he just looked tired. ‘You should get some rest.’

He chuckled and slumped against the window. ‘I’ve been out at Leroy’s house. Two kids and one more on the way. I have no idea what they’re going to do if he dies. Leroy had to grow up without a father, said that’s the one thing he would never do to his own. And in the end he may not get a choice about it.’

There was nothing she could say to that, nothing anyone could say.

Then he added, ‘I never asked what you thought of the tour.’

‘I think I should buy some stock in Lambert Industries.’

He chuckled again. ‘You’ll get your chance next week. The IPO comes up first thing Monday morning.’

‘I heard.’ This would be a significant change for him. People who knew business and industry only wondered why he had waited so long. ‘Going public’, or offering stock in the company for public sale, meant the owner could shed the liability while increasing personal profits – provided the stock remained popular, and this stock would. Bruce Lambert, surmised the business section of the
Plain Dealer
, would move from being the fourth richest man in the country to the richest man in the world by Monday’s closing bell.

No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

‘So how does your sand crystal engine work?’ she asked.

His grin widened. ‘You would know if you hadn’t been chatting up that guy instead of listening.’

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘The crystals are nitrogen triiodide?’

He looked surprised, then intrigued, then amused in rapid succession. ‘Interesting idea, but impractical. Too unstable.’

‘So what are they?’

‘Remember what I said about science not rewarding the unobservant?’

She raised her eyebrows, waiting.

‘It doesn’t reward the inattentive, either. And now I have to go, but it was a pleasure talking with you.’

‘You too,’ she said, and watched him walk away, wondering how to categorize his brush-off: clever or petulant? She decided on petulant, though couldn’t really begrudge him a bit of rancor for a woman who would find David Madison more fascinating than a gas-free internal combustion engine which might revolutionize the globe, alter foreign policy and make Cleveland the center of the country once again.

But then, he hadn’t met David Madison.

She carted three cups of coffee back to the wreck of the Bingham, puzzling over both her sudden attraction to the unusually situated David Madison and the equally sudden significance of nitrogen to her life. Was the nitrogen triiodide that destroyed the Bingham building a bad batch from Lambert’s prototype? But why store it next door? Why store it at all? Lambert disassembled his failures, didn’t waste space on them. Had Kadam somehow stolen the compounds from Lambert? Perhaps he’d been one of those four former employees. But how, and why store them next door? None of it made sense.

She sighed, making her careful way down the metal staircase. If an answer existed, her brain was too fried to find it.

‘Everything come out OK?’ Don asked, raising his voice over the noise of the generator.

‘Why do men think that’s so freakin’ funny?’

‘Because it is. OK, clothes are done. That leaves us all this boxed-up stuff piled against the wall. What is it?’ Don asked. He had not had the pleasure of removing items to storage quite as often as Theresa and her overdeveloped sense of order had.

‘Just that. Stuff. Quite a variety of stuff. Take this, for instance.’ She hefted a rectangular cardboard box, still in fairly good shape as it had been tucked up against the outer wall. ‘Remember our window washer who fell thirty-eight floors?’

‘Distinctly.’

‘Well, after OSHA had finished inspecting the harness, I called them to see if I could get an OK to destroy it. The guy there said they had completed their work with it, but there might be other interested parties, so to err on the side of caution I asked him to send me a list. His letter included seven, from the victim’s family to the harness manufacturer down to his union. I said forget it, put the thing in a box and sealed it up.’

‘Your campaign against clutter had hit a wall.’

‘You could say that.’ She tucked the box with the harness into one of the new boxes and followed it with other items, including an unwrapped axe with a faded yellow tag and a bicycle wheel, the only residue of a mob boss who went missing in the early seventies during his daily ride.

Dr Banachek abandoned his X-rays for a while and came by to chat. He rested himself on a folding chair which someone had left in the storage room long before and had survived the explosion with only minor mangling. It listed slightly when he settled on it, but did not fall over. ‘Remind me again why we had to do this in the middle of the night.’

‘I would if I could,’ Don grumbled. ‘Law enforcement agencies seem to be addicted to the wee hours.’

‘Aw, man,’ Theresa exclaimed in disappointment, holding up a shattered glass case which held a human skull, its surface chalky white with areas of brown. ‘It broke.’

‘Is that real?’ Dr Banachek asked.

‘It’s a real skull but not the result of homicide. A supposed satanic cult bought it or stole it from a medical school or some such thing.’ She removed the gaping shards of glass from the frame, setting them on top of the crushed fencing.

‘Don’t cut yourself,’ Don said. ‘I suppose we should have stored it in something sturdier.’

‘Well, we couldn’t have known the ceiling was going to fall in. Besides, it’s not evidence of any crime. Leo hung on to it for sentimental reasons.’