windows cast stripes of pale light over the walls and catwalks and floors, leaving Fisher with the sensation that he’d stepped into a giant colander.
Hulking pieces of equipment dominated the floor, some of them tall and narrow, rising thirty and forty feet; others squat and featureless save a few control panels and LED displays. Clear acrylic tubes crisscrossed the space, entering and exiting the machinery at odd angles. Nothing looked familiar to Fisher, but he was unsurprised. The manufacture of molecule-sized devices would of course require specialized equipment and procedures.
After performing his now token NV/EM/IR scans, and once again coming up with nothing, he began moving through the space until, finally, he found a raised platform of white Lexan tiles in the northeast corner. Measuring roughly thirty feet square, the platform was surrounded on three sides by railing, while the wall side was dominated by a row of computer workstations. In the center was a rectangular chrome-and-glass conference table. Fisher was about move to ahead when his subconscious spoke up again:
A lone figure was sitting in a chair before one of the workstations. The broad shoulders and height told Fisher it was a man. He sat hunched over, elbows resting on his knees, face cupped in his hands. SC raised and extended, Fisher crept ahead to the platform steps, then stopped.
“Don’t move,” Fisher whispered. “I’m pointing a gun at you.”
The man obeyed, save for a slight lifting of his head so he could see who was talking.
“Who are you?” the man said in Italian.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I am Terzo Lucchesi,” he muttered halfheartedly.
“You don’t sound sure.”
“He sent you to kill me. So kill me.”
“No one sent me to kill you.”
Lucchesi sat up in his chair. Light from one of the slit windows reflected off wire-rimmed glasses. “You’re American.” Lucchesi switched to English. “Why did he send an American? Were you cheaper?”
“Raise your hands above your head,” Fisher ordered. None of this felt right.
With a fatalistic shrug, Lucchesi raised his hands. “Are you a good shot? Please tell me you’re a good shot.”
“For the last time, I didn’t come here to kill you. Ask me about it one more time and I’ll start rethinking my plan.”
“I don’t understand, then. Who are you? Why are you here?”
“Let’s get some lights on,” Fisher said, taking a little of the edge from his voice. “Anything goes wrong, I’ll shoot you in the kneecap.”
“All right,” Lucchesi said hesitantly, and reached his hand toward one of the monitors.
“Wait.” Fisher mounted the platform steps and sidestepped around Lucchesi until his back was facing the wall and he could see the rest of the facility. He knelt down, making himself a smaller target. He flexed his rear foot, readying himself to spin should targets present themselves. “Go ahead. Carefully.”
Lucchesi tapped a series of buttons on the keyboard and, above, a series of halogen pendant lights glowed to life, illuminating the platform like a stage; then slowly more lights came on throughout the space until it was bright as daylight.
Lucchesi took in Fisher’s tac-suit, Trident goggles, face half covered in his balaclava, and tilted his head to one side as though he’d just seen a dodo bird. “My, you must have been expensive.”
Fisher sighed and lifted the SC, taking aim on Lucchesi’s forehead. The Italian raised his hands and nodded apologetically. “Sorry, sorry…”
“What’s going on here?” Fisher asked. “Why are you shut down? Where is everyone?”
“In order,” Lucchesi replied, “absolutely
“Explain.”
“My funding has been revoked.”
“The military?”
“My father.”
“Say again?”
“My father decided — and I quote—‘you’ve wasted enough time on your invisible robots and bugs.’ That was just his excuse, though.”
“Who’s your father?”
“You have heard of Graziani Motors, yes?”
Fisher nodded. Since the early 1950s Graziani Motors had specialized in custom-made sports cars. Special- order Graziani coupes began at eight hundred thousand dollars. At the age of seventeen Calvino Graziani started the company in his garage in what was then the village of Sassari; now seventy-four, Graziani remained at the company’s helm. Conservative estimates put his net worth at 14.2 billion.
Before Fisher could ask the next obvious question, Lucchesi said, “When my parents divorced, I was a teenager. I took my mother’s maiden name in protest.”
Fisher was running on instinct now, having decided against simply demanding the Ajax code from Lucchesi. Perhaps it was the vulnerability Fisher saw in the man, or genuine sympathy, or both, but his gut told him there might be a better way of skinning this cat.
“You said something about your father’s excuse… ”
Lucchesi gave another shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He studied Fisher for a moment. “I think you Americans call this the ‘bartender effect.’ You know, you tell your secrets to a complete stranger who happens to be serving you drinks. Or holding a gun on you.”
Fisher lowered the SC to a forty-five degree angle but kept it pointed in Lucchesi’s general direction.
“I should have expected that my father wasn’t helping me out of the goodness of his heart,” Lucchesi said. “He has none of that. He gave me just enough money to build this place, hire the best people, and make some progress before springing his trap. I was to start making nanotech-based weapons for his new start-up company. Father wanted to become an arms dealer, you see. Evidently, fourteen billion dollars isn’t enough.”
“So you refused.”
Lucchesi shrugged. “We argued. I tried to stall, I tried to compromise, and then a couple of days ago he pulled the plug, as you say. I came back from Milan and found this.” He swept his hand across the expanse of the laboratory. “Everything shut down. My staff gone. Every scrap of data removed from the mainframe. They pulled every hard drive, took every CD and USB flash drive.”
“Why didn’t you just go along — give him something so you could keep working on your own projects?” Fisher thought he knew the answer to this question, but he wanted Lucchesi to verbalize it so the man’s moral compass snapped back into focus.
“I got into the nanotech field to help people. To help the world. I inherited that weakness from my mother — if you listen to my father, that is. A soft bleeding heart with his head in the clouds.”
“You? Hah! I’m a dreamer, not an idiot. Anyone who dresses like that and carries the weapons you carry is more like my father than me.”
“You should know better than to make broad assumptions, Doctor. Sometimes you have to do a little bad to do a lot of good. Hear me out.”
Lucchesi wagged his head from side to side, thinking, then said, “Why not?”
Leaving out names and places and the specifics of 738 Arsenal, Fisher outlined his goal: help stop a massive arms deal from taking place and round up some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. “It’s probably not quite what you had in mind,” Fisher said, “but as you’re fond of Americanisms, what you’ve got here is lemons.”
Lucchesi smiled. “So I should make lemonade.”
Fisher nodded.
“How do I know you’re not lying to me?”
Fisher made a snap decision. He holstered his SC, took off his Trident goggles, and removed his balaclava. He
