Chapter 6 The Secret in the Soundstage
Mina liked it for the roof.
It was a clear-span steel truss roof, seventy meters by forty, put up by Japanese engineers in a decade when nobody was cutting corners on steel, and it sat five meters above the highest recorded water in the Marikina valley on a concrete slab that had been poured to take camera dollies.
It had two vehicle doors, a scene dock, four personnel exits, a working three-phase supply that ran off a substation nobody had audited since the nineties, and no windows at all.
Hal stood in the middle of the floor with a duffel on his shoulder and looked up at the bell tower for a long time.
“There is a fake town in here,” he said.
“There is a fake town in here.”
“Baby, that is a whole church.”
“It is a third of a church.” Mina was locking the personnel door behind them, one-handed, badly. “The rest of it was a mirror.”
The medic came at half past three and her name was Tita Baby, which was not her name, and she had been doing this for the Taskforce for six years and had strong opinions about Mina’s field dressing.
“Sino ang gumawa nito?”
“Siya.”
Tita Baby looked at Hal. Then she looked back at the bandage. Then, for the first time in the entire visit, she looked mildly pleased.
“Ito ay maayos,” she said, and cut it off.
Hal was sent to the far end of the stage on the grounds that he did not need to see this, and he went, and he did not go far enough.
Mina could see him the whole time. He stood in the dark by the fake church with his back to them and his hands in his pockets for twenty-eight minutes, and he did not turn around once, and he did not leave, and every time she made a joke about it, which she did in three languages because it was easier than not, she watched his shoulders come up half an inch.
He came back at four with his jaw set. He did not say anything about it then and he did not say anything about it later, which she filed, because a man who does not say a thing is carrying it somewhere.
Eight stitches on the deep run. Nine more on a second tear she had not mentioned in the car.
“Fourteen days,” Tita Baby said, packing up. “No load bearing on that arm. No pulling, no climbing, no hanging.”
“Fourteen days.”
“Fourteen.” The medic zipped the case. “Mina. Look at me. That is not advice, that is the tendon sheath. You pull on that arm in the next two weeks and the arm stops being a negotiation and starts being a fact.”
“Opo.”
“You are saying opo at me.”
“I am saying opo at you with my whole heart,” Mina said, and Tita Baby said something short and vulgar and left.
Simone came up on the wall at six.
Somebody in 1971 had built a projection screen into the north end of the soundstage, and somebody in the Taskforce had, at some point in the last four years, quietly hung a modern display in front of it, and so Agent Simone arrived in the abandoned Marikina studio at four meters wide, sitting in a shipping container in the Manila International Container Terminal with a cup of instant coffee and the exhausted expression of a woman who had been awake since Tuesday.
“You must be Harold,” she said.
“Hal.”
“Harold, I am going to be direct with you because I have not slept and because Mina has clearly decided you are staying, and Mina is never wrong about people, which is her single most irritating quality.” Simone drank the coffee. “How much do you actually understand about where you are?”
Hal thought about it.
“I understand about eleven percent,” he said, “and I am aware that the eleven percent is not the important part.”
Simone looked at him for a second.
Then she looked at Mina, and something passed between the two women that Hal did not catch and did not need to.
“Fine,” Simone said. “Sit down. Both of you. I have three things and the third one is bad.”
The first thing was the money.
She put it on the wall in the form Hal understood best, which was a flow diagram, and he leaned forward with his forearms on his knees and read it the way he read a shipping manifest, which is to say backward, starting at the destination.
Four hundred and eleven thousand pesos from the Department of Public Works and Highways to Bantay Serbisyo Solutions, for three change orders, in January.
That was the visible part. That was the part a Philippine auditor would eventually find, in about four years, and it would look like a small procurement irregularity, because that is what it was.
Above it, invisible from the Philippine side, sat the rest.
Forty-two million United States dollars, moving in eleven tranches over fourteen months, out of a Singapore-registered entity called HelixCompute APAC Limited, through a Cyprus holding company, into a Vanuatu nominee structure whose named beneficial owner was a retired schoolteacher in Port Vila who had never heard of any of this in her life.
And out the other side, in amounts under the reporting threshold, into fifteen accounts controlled by the family of Undersecretary Vicente Calderon.
“Forty-two million,” Hal said.
“Forty-two million and change.”
“For what? What does that buy? He changed three numbers on a controller.”
“It does not buy the numbers, Harold.” Simone put another slide up. “It buys eighty hectares.”
It was a land parcel map of the North Harbor waterfront in Tondo. On it, outlined in red, was a shape that Hal recognized after a second as a coastline, and inside the shape were about four hundred small irregular rectangles, which were houses.
“There are forty thousand people inside that red line,” Simone said.
“They have been there in some cases for three generations and in most cases they have no title, because nobody in this country has ever had the political appetite to give them title, and that is the whole vulnerability and everybody involved knows it.”
“And if the area floods.”
“If the area floods badly enough, often enough, and is documented as flooding, then it can be declared a permanent ecological hazard zone.” Simone’s voice did not change. “At which point clearance is not an eviction. It is a public safety measure. It gets emergency funding. There is a ceremony.”
Hal sat back.
“That is why January,” he said.
“That is why January.”
The second thing was Dieter Wolffe.
He came up on the wall as a passport photograph, fifty-eight, silver hair, wire-rimmed glasses, the mild face of a man who reads.
“Doctor Dieter Wolffe. Heidelberg. Computational oncologist, and before you decide that is a strange thing to find in this file, he is the reason the file exists.” Simone changed the slide.
“He founded a company called DeepKite Therapeutics seventeen years ago after his sister died of a lymphoma. They have built something called OncoMorph, and if half of what I have read this week is true it is the most important thing anybody has made in medicine in twenty years.”
“What does it do?” Mina said.
“It takes a whole-genome sequence of a specific person’s specific tumor and designs a therapy for that tumor and no other.
Not a drug. A therapy per patient.” Simone drank her coffee.
“It works. It has worked in two trials. And it requires so much continuous computing power to run one patient that it is currently, per treatment, the most expensive object in the world.”
Hal frowned.
“So they need a data center.”
“They need a great deal more than a data center. They need power and they need water and they need it uninterrupted, and they need it somewhere with an undersea fiber landing and a government that will not ask hard questions.” Simone put up an aerial photograph. “They are building it here.”
It was the same coastline. It was the same eighty hectares.
The red line was now a building.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Somewhere up in the trusses a bird moved.
“Wait,” Hal said. “Wait. Say that again.”
“Say what again.”
“The cancer thing.” He was staring at the wall. “The thing that saves people. It goes on top of the houses.”
“Yes.”
“The houses with the forty thousand people in them.”
“Yes, Harold.”
Hal sat with that.
“That is obscene,” he said.
“It is,” Simone agreed, “and I want you to hold on to how obscene you find it, because in about a minute I am going to tell you the third thing, and after that you are going to have to decide what you are, and it is easier to decide that while you are angry.”
Mina had gone very still in the next chair.
“Where is Wolffe now,” she said.
“That is the point.” Simone put up a hotel lobby still, timestamped Tuesday, 23:40.
A tall stooped man in a rumpled linen suit crossing a marble floor with two men behind him who were not carrying his bags.
“He landed on Sunday. He went to the site on Tuesday. He had a two-hour meeting with his own chief operating officer on Tuesday night at the HelixCompute offices in Pasay, and at eleven forty on Tuesday night he walked out of the Peninsula through the lobby with those two, and he has not used a phone, a card, or a passport since.”
“His own COO,” Mina said.
“A man named Hansel Brand. Thirty-eight. German and British. He is not a scientist, he is the money, and he owns nineteen percent of DeepKite, and he cannot deploy a single model without a cryptographic key that Doctor Wolffe carries physically on his person.” Simone’s mouth did something unpleasant.
“So Doctor Wolffe is not dead. That is the good news and it is the only good news. He is not dead because he is not finished being useful.”
“Before the third thing,” Mina said. “I have something for you.”
She put the ziplock bag on the table under the wall and the camera picked it up, and Simone leaned toward her own lens.
“Those are theirs.”
“Four handsets, all wiped or locked, all of which you are going to tell me are useless.” Mina put the second thing down beside the bag. “And that.”
It was a strip of black woven strap about nine inches long, cut at one end, with a snap swivel at the other.
Simone was quiet for a second.
“Is that what I think it is.”