a simple water sprinkler system. This was the one connected to the lever which Jason gripped. If he pulled that, the water would rain down and destroy this entire operation.
The lady wants to kill herself. The lady was Cass, and John was certain now just what kind of not-human she was.
“Cass is the Sorter.” he said.
She'd appeared to Jason like the ghost of Christmas future and told him to pull those board out. She told him to hang tight on that switch and reappeared outside in some kind of half-baked state. She was the Sorter. It was possible. John knew it was possible. What was more frightening was the question of who she worked for. Was she operating under the command of this company, or on her own?
From somewhere outside, a gunshot fired.
A few minutes later, Reggie appeared, soaked in blood and brains.
TWENTY NINE
Ruth parked her car in Kendall square, about a block away from Sylvan. Chances were that Keller wasn't far behind and she didn't want to stay outside the lab. She pulled her laptop out of the trunk. It was her personal computer, not a department asset. She walked to a nearby coffee shop and connected to the wireless.
The sergeant detective wasn't sure how this would work. In reality, there weren't many cops who smoked cigars and drove bad guys off the road with their 1970 Mercury Cougars. There weren't many Coolies either. The daughter of a detective, Ruth always thought of herself as the cop who fell off the left end of that scale that went from walking rule book to irredeemable scapegrace. Her boss was a corrupt cop. Her husband had wanted to be better, but he died another corrupt cop. Ruth didn't want that for herself. She didn't want her dad to see it and she didn't want her son to see it.
But she knew that her priorities lay deeper than those of the system that had imprisoned her.
Ruth would've liked to follow up on Reginald Binder, but she wasn't going near him now. She read the Polymath website and press releases. She found some of the other high ranking members of the Polymath group. As a private company, it wasn't required to release much about its corporate structure. This would do, however.
Binder had two partners, Kevin Nagel and Rosalind Munro. Nagel had posted a public curriculum vitae and it said that he'd once been a professor at MIT. He had worked in the computer science department, home of the Advanced Storage Laboratory. Nagel had worked in artificial intelligence, not storage systems, but the proximity was too close to deny. Emily at Sylvan had told Ruth to go talk to the university and now there was even more reason to do so.
Ruth went back to her car and retrieved a lock box from her trunk. Inside was her personal weapon. Unlike the standard sized 9 mm Glock service weapons carried by the Boston PD, this was a tiny Beretta Pico. It was small enough for her to conceal under her jacket, which is just what she did. Ruth wasn't sure why she choose this moment to rearm herself. She told herself that as she drew closer to the source of this mess, she was more likely to encounter people who wanted her out. Yet there was a part of her that had to admit that sooner or later the Christine Kerr act wasn't going to get her the answers she wanted and that a firearm might be more persuasive. It wasn't a thought she liked, but it was the sort of thought one had to entertain when the walls started closing in.
She went to the AI lab. It resided in an immodest building identified as MIT building 32, otherwise known at the Stata Center. The Center was a showpiece, composed of walls that looked like crumpled chunks of card board stuck together and painted orange, yellow and silver. The closer Ruth approached, the more she felt like some slanted bit of jagged concrete and aluminum would drop off and crush her. The place was the opposite of Sylvan's unassuming factory in a box. It wanted attention.
The interior was more conventional. It was upscale, but more in the sense of a swank hotel than a lunatic billionaire's space ark, as one might have guessed from the exterior. Ruth took an elevator to the AI lab and found herself walking a spare hallway.
“Can I help you?”
Ruth turned and saw a man in his forties wearing glasses and long, curly blond hair. He carried a tablet in one hand and a paper coffee cup in the other. Unlike with Emily, his suspicion of Ruth was immediate.
“I'm Christine Kerr.” said Ruth. “I work for Polymath. We're a technology company -”
“I know about Polymath.” said the curly haired man.
“You don't sound to happy about that.”
“I'm not. Why are you here?”
“I think we may have received a package that was intended for your lab.”
“Okay.” he said. “I'm Steven, the assistant department chair. Shall we talk in my office?”
Steven led Ruth into an office and closed the door. The room was filled with old computers shoved under the desk and more stacks of papers than one might expect from the assistant chair of a computer science department. Steven plugged his tablet into a docking station, bringing to life a battery of screens which lined one branch of his L-shaped desk.
Ruth noticed a photo of a girl next to the docking station. She was perhaps about nine. A pink stuffed dog holding a violin sat in front of the picture. When Steven set his tablet down, he bumped the dog and it played a few bars of Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto.
“It that your daughter?” said Ruth.
“Yes, and I need to go see her soon. She's in the hospital. Please make this quick.”
“Of course. Do you work with the Advanced Storage department or know how it operates?”
“ASL is a lab, not a department.” said Steven. “Since I help run the entire department, I am familiar with all the labs. What makes you think you have something for them?”
“We got a delivery of a hypoxic chamber from Sylvan Laboratory Solutions, just down the street from here. I talked to them and they said ASL had made the order. Do you have any way of finding out who from the lab had ordered it or what's inside?”
“I do, not that isn't any of your business.”
“I don't mean any harm.” said Ruth. “I just want to tell them I've got their box.”
“Right. First let's see if we were the ones who ordered it.”
Steven pulled up a web interface and scrolled through various entries.
Ruth said, “That's a nice looking tool you've got. Is that something you can buy?”
“No, it's custom.” said Steven. “We built a centralized system to handle all purchases. The entire university uses it to operate their supply chain. We make an order to them through their system and they purchase from suppliers. It allows us to get bulk discounts, screen vendors, and present a single purchasing entity to the outside world.”
“You sound like you used to work in supply chain yourself.”
He waved a dismissive hand, saying, “As an undergrad.”
“So anyone can use this system?”
Steven looked insulted. “Of course not. It's a multi-tiered system. First of all, supply chain doesn't control the money. You've got various sources of money, from department overhead to grants and the like. All of that goes through the finance people, who supply various charge numbers connected to the internal accounts. Each charge number has a primary signature authority – someone who owns the account – and that person can delegate to other people.”
“I get it.” said Ruth. “You're not a fly by night operation.”
“Unlike Polymath, as I understand.”
Ruth recognized Steven's disdain for the company and thought about how she might use it.
“There's some truth to that.” she said. “I can't tell you how frustrating it is to work with Reginald Binder. He runs the place like it's his personal property and treats the rest of us like house servants. Do you know he sent me to pick up dry cleaning and then told me to come over here? And it's not like I'm a secretary; I'm a paralegal!”
“That's my impression of Binder too.” said Steven. “Around here, there's more delegation. There are exceptions for certain pu
rposes and only certain people can authorize that.”
“Those exceptions would include Sylvan, of course.”
“Of course.”
Ruth said, “And who has the authority to make purchases at Sylvan?”
“You're funny.” said Steven. “It's like you're interrogating me or something. Why do you care about all this stuff? Let me find out if we made the order and then you can send it here. You don't have to know anything else.”
“I'm sorry.” said Ruth. “I'm actually kind of looking for a new job.”
“That's hardly the way to go about it. And I'm not interested in interviewing more people from Polymath.”
This comment was very interesting to Ruth. “Others have interviewed here? Who?”
“I can't tell you that. And I can't tell you who bought your hypoxic chamber or what's in it.”
“It's your hypoxic chamber.”
“Whatever, Miss Kerr. I can't give you that information. Just describe the package to me and I'll see if I can find it.”
Before she could answer, they heard a noise coming from another room. It sounded like a little girl singing “Over The Rainbow”. Her voice was quite stunning and it carried through the halls. Steven shot up as though rushing from a fire. Ruth went after him.
“Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.”
Ruth came into a large room and had a lot of trouble making sense of what she saw. In the center of the room there was a table and on that table sat a black box about a foot