She went inside, and Oscar called Reed again, getting his secretary, who put him through. They lined up a time for Oscar to visit him at the Pentagon, bringing Layton along. Layton had said he'd make any day available.
'I'm going to bring Rosanna Monk, as well,' Oscar said. 'With Miles gone, she's our best researcher. I'm sure she'll impress you.'
'Okay,' Reed said. 'I've entered you in my diary.' Rosanna returned with a clear plastic tray containing a jug of water and a couple of plastic tumblers. She put it down on the cane table, and pulled up a chair in the shade of the umbrella. With her pale complexion and large eyes, she looked like some nocturnal mammal.
Oscar got to the point. 'I just spoke to Jack Reed in Washington. He wants to meet you. I told him that you're our top researcher on the nanochip device. After Miles, of course.
'Maybe.' Her skinny hand shook slightly as she poured water for them both.
'I don't think there's much doubt,' he said. 'Look, I won't stay long-this must be tough on you. I guess you think it could have been you last night.'
'Am I that easy to read?' She looked at him in an odd way, as if they'd only just met, and she was sizing him up
'No, I'm sorry. But I've been having similar thoughts.'
Her expression softened a bit, and she nodded. 'Okay.
'Those maniacs could have picked me to call on, just as easily as Miles. It makes you think.'
'That's an understatement.'
'I'm sure we're not the only ones in the company who are shaken up, but you and I must have been next in line.'
'Yeah. Cheery thought, eh?' She gestured for him to eat some of the grapes. 'Maybe it's not safe anymore, doing this kind of research.'
Was she getting cold feet? He couldn't afford to lose her. 'Well,' he said, changing his voice a little, trying to tone things down and get some rapport, 'one of the mysteries is how Sarah Connor even knew about it. There must be stuff the police haven't uncovered yet You know her background, I take it?'
'Not much, only what I've heard this morning-that she tried to blow up an AI lab in San Diego a year or two back. They caught her that time.'
'Yeah, and they should have last night, too. Our guards got a message to the police-there was nothing wrong with our security arrangements. But somehow Connor and the others fought off a whole SWAT team and God knows how many other cops. How they did that is beyond my reckoning.' He drank some of the water.
'Well, what next?' Rosanna said.
'I've got to go to Washington with Charles, the day after tomorrow. I want you to come with us.'
'So I can meet Reed?'
'Yeah, I think that's pretty important. He really does want to meet you, and I want you to meet him. we've got to rebuild the team, and the relationships.' He chewed one of the fat white grapes, then finished his water. 'You said before-on the phone-that the project is still viable.'
'Yes. I've been thinking about it some more, while I was waiting for you. I'm sure it could be done. It's just a question of how long we'd need.'
'All right, that was my next question. Answer it frankly-this is no time for false optimism. I need your best assessment of how close Miles was, and how long it would take us to reconstruct his work.'
'How close? You mean when he might have licked all the problems?'
'Yes, how close he was to making a workable nanochip. You can assume that I've read all his reports and that I have a pretty good technical understanding.'
She smiled thinly. 'Yeah, boss, I know you're an old tech at heart.'
'The point is, I need to take stock of where the project sits right now. It's crucial to our future.'
'Miles was in a good mood about it last week,' she said thoughtfully. 'I didn't talk to him about it yesterday, but I know he worked on it over the weekend.'
'When did you last discuss it?'
'On Friday. At that stage, he thought he was within an inch of solving the problem. My guess is he would have wrapped it up in a month or three.'
'All right, now we need to be realistic. Regardless what Miles thought or anything else, how far away are we now?'
'Now that he's dead?'
'Exactly.'
'That depends.'
'Realistically, Rosanna.'
'Yes, I know that, but it still depends. Miles did most of the work on this himself.'
'Sure. It was his baby.' Cruz rolled his eyes in mock despair. 'It's Miles's baby! That's what everyone used to say.'
She laughed at that. 'Well, it's true. No one else had anything like the same kind of knowledge. Look, Oscar, I could reconstruct his work pretty quickly if I had his records.'
'So could I. That's not what I'm asking. Look, it's all gone; we should assume that. The bomb went off in the AI lab, and it looks this morning as if they did a thorough job of destroying every bit of information on site. We'll find out more as the week goes on, but I'm not optimistic.'
'What about back-ups off-site?'
'No. I thought of that, but it's not the kind of thing that we back-up routinely, not like financial records and so on-in fact, it's more the sort of information that we keep very close to our chests. Of course, Miles had his own back-ups...'
'But?'
'Again, it's too early to be sure. Tarissa hasn't been very cooperative, which surprises me, by the way. And the police have been to the Dyson house, and their impression is that the Connors did a thorough job
This was another of life's mysteries, he thought. Miles would surely have had a thousand ways to outsmart the Connors. Perhaps he had, and there was still information he'd hidden somewhere. But it didn't look that way.
'I hope I'm wrong, Rosanna, but we're not expecting to find anything at all useful at Miles's house.'
'What about the 1984 chip?'
'As best I can make out, it's been stolen. It's like everything, though-it only happened last night. It's not as if I can inspect it for myself-it's supposed to be too dangerous for me to go inside the building. So I've been traipsing around with the cops. But it seems that there's nothing like the arm and the chip still there where the Vault was.'
'So the Connors took them?'
'Looks like it—which means we might get them back if the cops can track down the Connors. But no one's optimistic about that. As of this morning, the trail's gone cold.'
'I heard on the news. They were in those big car crashes at the steel mill.'
That's right, but it's all we've got to go on, so far. It seems they left the mill by an emergency door, and got clean away.'
Rosanna removed the tray, then returned from the kitchen. She seemed less on edge now. The talk must have been doing her some good. 'Thanks for coming to see me,' she said. 'It's nice to be kept informed.'
'No problem. This affects you pretty directly.'
'Yes, I suppose it does. Oscar, when I told you the project was viable I was assuming the worst. I can do it.'
'Okay. That's my assessment, too.'
She gave him another funny look, as if not expecting that he'd have his own assessment. 'The trouble is I'm going to have to reinvent a lot of Miles's work, relying on the little I know about it, plus my own expertise. It could take me years to get to where he was. Are you sure you can put up with that?'
'From my point of view, yes. Miles's work was so far advanced... We'd still have a head start over our
