CHAPTER 1
Rob Tarrant suspected that thirteen-year-old Kenny was jerking his old man's chain with the claim that a naked lady was polishing some guy's Porsche across the street. Rob adjusted him magnifying goggles, tenderly clamped what looked like a very large dragonfly wing in a fixture, and smiled as he looked around to the boy, who was hovering at Rob's shoulder. "Yeah, right," said the father. "I suppose you're borrowing that three-in-one oil to give the lady a rubdown."
The boy shook his head. "Gonna fix my bike out back," he said, and paused on his way into the hall. "But straight deal, it's a bitchin' black 928." A moment later the back screen door slammed.
Yeah, right, Rob repeated to himself. If Kenny were serious, he would've described the lady, not the car. Or maybe not yet, but in another year, for sure.
Still, it seemed worth a glance while the cement dried on Rob's latest hobby project, as long as Corrine didn't catch him. "Ogling," she would call it, bugging her bedroom eyes and drawing out the "ooooh" syllable in derision. It wasn't as if she'd lost her looks, she would say, cocking a provocative hip; and he would earnestly agree. He had learned to avoid rejoinders along the lines of: Since you seldom play the game these days, you shouldn't mind my enjoying spectator sports. But Corrine minded just the same. On the other hand, she was shopping in the San Jose suburb of Cupertino at the moment.
Rob figured it wouldn't hurt to check out the kid's bizarre report from the kitchen window while he nuked a cup of coffee, but he was wrong about that. Given Rob's tendency to string ideas together like firecrackers, the view from his window turned deadly in distinct steps.
At thirty-six, Rob used magnifying lenses only for the gossamer bits of his hobby projects. He didn't need glasses to appreciate that the woman across the street, really no more than a girl in her late teens, wasn't entirely nude in her string bikini. Close enough, though. She was put together like a blow-up doll of Kim Basinger, just a wee bit overinflated, and in ten years she'd probably look like the Michelin Man. But right here, right now, in a Silicon Valley suburb on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, she made a man feel guilty just watching.
The fact was, Rob decided, this girl seemed to be getting off on her chore, using a swatch of orange parachute silk the size of a pillowcase against the gloss black of that Porsche 928, actually climbing onto the damn thing, writhing in joy, probably doing more harm than good to the car's glossy finish. Well, California girls were notorious car nuts and this sight was one to take back to his fellow engineers at General Standards, if only he had a video camera; better still, a camera small enough to mount on one of his tiny mantis aircraft. He could imagine standing on the front porch, guiding a mantis with his Furtaba transmitter so that it flitted unnoticed with its electric drive whirring in almost perfect silence over hedges, car, and girl, recording every languid whisk and voluptuous shimmy with—what, a standard videotape rig?
Nope, far too heavy. A CCD with its own microtransmitter was a better match, if he could afford charge-coupled devices on the salary of a GenStan engineer. His grin became less guilty, more calculating, as he thought about it, coming nearer to the point that would detonate his entire life.
Colleagues called his toys "models," though the flying mites weren't models of anything. They were UAVs, "unmanned aerial vehicles." When a winged critter is no bigger than a man's hand, the rules of aerodynamics begin to change. Air that seems almost intangible to a Boeing can seem thick as pancake syrup to an insect—or to a minuscule flying machine. For some years, toys of this sort had been almost entirely the province of a few hobbyists.
Some of Rob's UAVs looked like insects, wings covered by plastic film, landing gear stripped from bundles of carbon fiber, their propellers sweeping a circle scarcely larger than a silver dollar. Corrine's father Gus, who built conventional radio-controlled models spanning four feet and more, had given Rob a flyswatter as a gag, in case his bugs got the better of him. Both men pursued their hobby using a minimum of funds and a maximum of ingenuity. Okay, since a CCD is too spendy I could build a still camera, Rob thought. Or I could install a company chemchip right now and find out whether she's wearing perfume.
At that point the Porsche's owner came outside and raised hell with the zaftig Miss Teeny-Weeny Bikini, grabbing her polishing rag and, as she retreated, popping the rag in the direction of her butt, where a lot of guys would have been snapping at it like a collie. Rob had to renuke his caffeine again, sipping thoughtfully as he returned to his study and the carrel he'd built for his tiny UAVs. If you put one of the company chemchips into a mantis, you could run chemical analysis of perfume—no, make that insecticide spray patterns instead—over a hundred acres of apricot orchard for a few dollars, and do it in ten minutes flat. What microchip nerds called a "killer application."
And GenStan would make a bazillion bucks, and the guy who dev eloped this killer app would be switched onto the fast track, maybe even rekindle some respect from his bored wife. All a man had to do was build a prototype and demonstrate it to bean-counters who'd never thought seriously about air-craft that would circle in your living room; who might snicker at the very mention of it unless proof was literally flitting down Mahogany Row over their expensively styled haircuts.
Most of the managers gave lip service to creativity but thought it was antisocial to color outside the lines with anything that hadn't been created already. And if you proved something new, these same guys would try to steal the idea.
Rob recalled a slogan, one of a score that Gus had pinned up over his workbench when Kenny was four or five, before Gus retired. It said,
A LIE BY THE COMPANY IS A MATTER OF POLICY.
A LIE BY THE EMPLOYEE IS GROUNDS FOR DISMISSAL.
So, rather than get caught up in charges and counter-charges, a smart employee wouldn't spread such ideas around until he had the demo ready, but Corrine's dad Gus was a special case. He could help with the circuitry, too.
And that was the moment when Robert Paul Tarrant, class of '84 from Oregon State University, went from being a harmless hobbyist to a man who needed killing.
Copyright © 2000 by Dean Ing