rise two thirds of the way up, then killed its motor. The heavy lid just held there, cantilevered over the yawning, stinking cavity of the truck’s hold.
Matt leaned in. “Get out here,” he ordered.
A short moment later, Rydell stumbled out, shielding his eyes from the day’s glare.
The truck was parked in a deserted, narrow alley that ran parallel to and behind a busier, low-rise commercial street, at the back of a closed-down Blockbuster video store. It was six blocks from the municipal service center where Matt had stolen the truck. The green Bonneville was parked nearby. They stood by the mouth of a narrow passageway, out of view, shielded from any potential passing cars by the bulk of the truck.
Rydell stank. His clothes had rips in them, and he was battered and bruised from bouncing around the empty metal box. He was wheezing, his breath coming in brief, ragged bursts. A nasty, bleeding gash had been cut into his left cheek. He was wobbly, totally unbalanced, and had to lean against the truck, breathing in heavily, shutting his eyes, gathering his senses, and probably doing his best not to throw up.
Matt allowed him a few seconds to recover, than raised the big silver handgun the shooter at the airport had lost and held it inches from Rydell’s face.
“What did you do to my brother?”
Rydell raised his eyes at him. They were still half-dead, drowning in a morass of pain and confusion. He glanced at Matt, then across to Jabba, who was hovering nervously a few steps back, but Rydell’s head was still spinning and he still wasn’t totally there. His eyelids slid shut and his head lolled forward again as his hands came up to rub his temples.
“What did you do to my brother?” Matt growled.
Rydell raised a hand in a stiff back-off-and-give-me-a-second gesture. After a moment, he looked up again. This time, his expression was alive enough to telegraph his not having a clue about who Matt and Jabba were or what Matt was asking him.
“Your brother . . . ?” he muttered.
“Danny Sherwood. What happened to him?”
The name resuscitated Rydell. His eyes flickered back to life, like a succession of floodlights getting switched on in a stadium. He winced, visibly struggling with how to answer.
“As far as I know, he’s okay,” Rydell said with a hollow voice. “But it’s been a few weeks since I saw him.”
Matt flinched at his words. “You’re saying he’s alive?”
Rydell looked up at him and nodded. “Yes.”
Matt glanced over at Jabba. Jabba put his almost-debilitating unease on hold and gave him a supportive, relieved nod.
“I’m sorry,” Rydell continued. “We didn’t have a choice.”
“Of course you did,” Matt shot back. “It’s called free will.” He was still processing the news. “So this sign . . . this whole thing. You’re doing it?”
Rydell nodded. “I was.”
“You ‘were’? ”
“The others . . . my partners . . . they’re doing it their way now.” Rydell sighed, clearly weighing his words. “I’ve been . . . sidelined.”
“What really happened? In Namibia? Was Danny ever really there?”
Rydell nodded again, slowly. “Yes. That’s where we did the final test. But there was no helicopter crash. It was all staged.”
“So Reece, the others . . . they’re also still alive?”
“No.” Rydell hesitated. “Look, I didn’t want any of that. It’s not how I do things. But there were others there . . . they overreacted.”
“Who?” Matt asked.
“The security guys.”
“Maddox?” Matt half-guessed.
Rydell looked at him quizzically, clearly surprised by Matt’s familiarity with the name.
“He got rid of them,” Matt speculated. “When you didn’t need them anymore.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Rydell objected. “None of them knew what we were really planning. Not Reece, not your brother. And then when I finally told Reece, he didn’t want to hear of it. I thought I could have convinced him. I just needed a bit of time . . . He would’ve come on board. And the others would have joined in too. But I never got the chance. Maddox just snapped and . . . it was insane. He just started firing. I couldn’t stop him.”
“And Danny?”
“He ran,” Rydell said.
“But he didn’t get away.”
Rydell shook his head witheringly.
“And you kept him locked up, all this time.”
Rydell nodded. “He designed the processing interface. It works perfectly, but it’s very sensitive to the smallest variations in air density or temperature or . . .” He caught himself, as if he realized he was rambling on unnecessarily. “It was safer having him around.”
“So all this time . . . you kept him alive, to use him now.”
Rydell nodded again.
“Why would he keep doing what you asked? He had to know you’d kill him once it was all over.” He studied Rydell, inwardly hoping he wouldn’t hear the answer he was dreading. “He’s not doing this of his own free will, is he?”
“No,” Rydell replied. “We—they—threatened him.”
“With what?”
“Your parents,” Rydell said, then added, “and you.” He held Matt’s gaze, then dropped his eyes to the ground. “They told him they’d hurt you. Badly. Then they’d get you thrown back into prison, where they’d make sure your life was a living hell.” He went silent for a beat, then added, “Danny didn’t want that.”
Matt felt an upwelling of anger erupt inside him. “My parents are dead.”
Rydell nodded with remorse. “Danny doesn’t know that.”
Matt turned and stepped away, his face clouding over. He looked away into the distance, hobbled by Rydell’s words. His kid brother. Going through hell for two years, living in a cell, cut off from the world, made to wield the fruit of his brilliance for something he didn’t believe in . . . going through it all to protect him. To keep Matt safe.
After everything Danny had already done for him.
Matt thought of his parents, how they’d been devastated by the news of Danny’s helicopter crash, and a crushing sense of grief overcame him. He glared back at Rydell and felt like ramming his fist down his throat and ripping his heart out.
Jabba watched Matt struggle with the revelation with a pained heart, but didn’t interfere. Instead, he took a hesitant step closer to Rydell.
He couldn’t help himself. “How are you doing it?” he asked him, his tone reverent, as if he still couldn’t believe he was here, face-to-face with one of his gods, albeit a fallen, battered, and bloodied one.
Rydell tilted his head up to take stock of him, then just shook his head and turned away.
“Answer him,” Matt barked.
Rydell looked at Matt, then back at Jabba. After a brief moment, he just said, “Smart dust.”
“Smart dust? But that’s not . . . I mean, I thought . . .” Jabba stammered, shaking his head with disbelief, a deluge of questions battering his mind as it stumbled over Rydell’s answer. “How small?”
Rydell paused, reluctant to engage Jabba, then shrugged. “A third of a cubic millimeter.”
Jabba’s mouth dropped an inch. According to everything he’d read or heard about, that just wasn’t possible. Not even close. And yet Rydell was telling him it was.
“Smart dust”—minuscule electronic devices designed to record and transmit information about their surroundings while literally floating on air—was still a scientific dream. The concept was first imagined, and the term coined, by electrical engineers and computer scientists working at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in the late nineties. The idea was simple: Tiny motes of silicon, packed with sophisticated onboard sensors,
