Critical Mass by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page B

hold and in another minute my virtue was rewarded: the voice was replaced by someone who announced himself in an incomprehensible squawk, but added he’d meet me in the lobby in twenty.
    The gates rolled open and I walked into an industrial park totally at odds with the clamor on the street outside. The lab looked like the latest thing in functional modernity, steel and glass, solar panels on the roof, white screens at the windows to minimize the heat. Beyond the drive, a pond surrounded by marsh grasses created a completely different mood, contemplation, peace. As I crossed the parking lot toward the main entrance, I saw a man emerge from a copse on the pond’s far side. He stopped to stare at the water.
    Since I had twenty minutes to fill I went over to stare at the watermyself. I could see carp lazing about under the surface. Ducks were hunting for food in the reeds, and the ubiquitous geese, the rats of the urban parkscape, were waddling along the bank. If you had to come up with an idea for a new kind of energy or rocket, the water and the birds might bring you to that calm interior space where creativity lives. Staring, thinking about nothing—my neck muscles began to relax from Kitty’s battering.
    I finally made my way back to the research building. A burnished sculpture of indeterminate shape stood outside the entrance, next to a metal sign that read “Metargon: Where the Future Lies Behind.” I wondered how much they had paid a branding company to come up with that cryptic slogan.
    The entrance doors were locked; I announced myself again through an intercom and was buzzed into a small lobby. A semicircle of tan leather chairs and hassocks made up a waiting area. Two people sat there, one thumbing through a magazine, the other typing on her laptop. On the other side of the lobby stood a glossy wooden counter, where a woman handled an intercom and phone bank. I gave her my card, told her someone had promised to talk to me about Martin Binder.
    “Oh, yes, that would be Jari Liu. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
    I wandered around the small space, looking at awards and pictures or models of machinery: the Orestes booster rockets which had sent up modules to probe the reaches of the galaxy (Metargon photovoltaics powered the space probe); a mock-up of a nuclear reactor (Metargon’s first plant, designed with a unique core, still powering southern Illinois); the Presidential Freedom Medal, awarded to Metargon’s founder by Ronald Reagan.
    “V. I. Warshawski, is it?”
    I jumped and turned around. Jari Liu had come up behind me on such soft crepe soles that I hadn’t heard him. He was a stocky man in his thirties with lank black hair falling over high cheekbones. In theold days engineers wore white shirts and ties, but Liu had on jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed “In God We Trust, All Others Show Data.”
    He shook my hand and propelled me toward the doors that led to the interior. “I’m Martin Binder’s boss, assuming he ever resurfaces and that we take him back. Normally we prefer people to phone in advance for appointments, but I happen to be free right now, so let’s go into the back and talk. I need to take your cell phone and your iPad—we don’t like anyone surreptitiously taking pictures while they’re pretending to talk about AWOL employees.”
    I took my cell phone out of my pocket, but removed the battery pack before I gave it to him. “I don’t like anyone copying my files while they’re pretending to answer my questions.” For the iPad, I’d have to hope my encrypted lock would keep snoopers at bay, although it probably wouldn’t hold off anyone as sophisticated as the Metargon team.
    Liu led me quickly to the inner doors. The two people who’d been in the holding pen when I arrived looked at me sourly as we sailed past: they’d been here longer, why did I get priority?
    Liu bent to press the security card he wore around his neck against a control panel and the doors opened