Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach

Author:Andreas Eschbach [Eschbach, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: AmazonCrossing
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

He was getting home later every night, and it was all thanks to those damned blueprints. Even the doorman had noticed. “Good evening, Mr. Adamson. Hardly worth going home these days, is it?” he’d quipped recently.

And despite that, he had gotten nothing done. He just sat there with the blueprints spread out on his desk, staring at them as though waiting for divine inspiration or for his gaze to burn holes in the paper. He’d noticed a few things, of course. That the paper on which the plans were drawn smelled faintly of something that might have been joss sticks. And that the Chinese didn’t care about sticking to international conventions for technical drawing. And that Hiroshi Kato didn’t seem to care about the conventions for anything.

All useless insights, of course. The truth was he spent his evenings staring at the plans until he felt his eyes would start bleeding, understanding nothing at all. He still had no idea what the big picture was supposed to look like when all these parts combined. Instead of understanding anything, he was developing a growing hatred of Hiroshi Kato in particular and of geniuses in general, of anybody capable of inventing things he would never have thought of in his whole lifetime. Things he only understood when he saw them finished and ready under his nose. Being able to recognize genius was his only useful talent, aside from a knack for business networking, and now it had failed him.

But this evening he had spotted something that might get him a little further. And he had only seen it because the ceiling light had begun to flicker so distractingly that he had to switch it off. Only then did he notice the tiny shadows cast on the paper by his desk lamp, impressions along the upper edge of the blueprint. They were numbers. Someone had put a piece of paper on top of this diagram and jotted something down, probably a telephone number. Adamson opened his desk drawer and took out a soft pencil. Carefully, he rubbed across the dents and grooves until he could see what they were. There was a name underneath the number: Mitch Jensen. The telephone number began with 703-482. That was the CIA’s dial code. He shoved the drawings aside, switched his computer on, and pulled up the internal phone directory. There was indeed a Mitch Jensen with the CIA, and that was his telephone number. Bingo. That could only mean he knew something about this whole business.

Adamson thought for two days about whether he dared use the number, and then late one afternoon he called this Mitch Jensen. First came the usual back-and-forth as they made sure they were speaking on a secure line, and then he introduced himself. “William Adamson. I’m head of robotics at DARPA. I’d like to talk to you about Hiroshi Kato.”

Mitch Jensen coughed. It sounded like a smoker’s cough, and it also somehow sounded as though Jensen didn’t take regulations quite as seriously as the rest.

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