“People get to be called by the highest rank they ever achieve,” I explained, “even if they’ve retired. Like, right now, Petra could be called ‘pest’ by anyone who’d like to know why she couldn’t pick up a landline.”
“Oh, Vic, don’t be such a crab cake! Your phone numbers, they’re in my cell-phone memory, which is as dead as my poor old car. You cannot believe how much they’re going to charge, although, of course, I have insurance. At least, I’m on my mom’s policy.” She stopped, sticking her lower lip out as she always did when she was thinking seriously. “Maybe I shouldn’t allow her to pay for it. But, gosh, with all my bills, and only this temp job for you—”
“I think your mother would be pleased to know you still rely on her,” I interrupted. “But I’m the one who wrecked your car, so I’ll take care of the repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover.”
“Vic, you’re an angel. I’m sorry I called you names last night.”
She launched back into a high-octane account of her day’s adventures: Destroyed cell phone! Towed car! Spilled soup on new jacket! Although the stain on the cuff maybe was the pizza they’d had at Plotzky’s last night—what a cool bar!
The avalanche of information was making me reel. I went to my back room, where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for emergencies. I don’t approve of drinking on the job, but responding to Petra right after my painful meeting with the Guamans felt like a medical emergency to me. I offered the bottle to Petra and Marty, but neither liked whisky.
“It’s like drinking gasoline, Vic” was the fetching way my cousin put it. “Don’t you have any beer?”
The whisky washed through me, and I felt warm for the first time since I’d left Mexico City at New Year’s. I sat at my desk and smiled sweetly at Petra. “You’ll have to buy your own beer. You towed the Pathfinder . . . Then what?”
“Oh, well,” she said, “then we came here to see if you, like, needed anything done. And there was a message from Cheviot labs. Mr. Rieff, he called to say they’d found something really amazing when he ran his tests for you. Guess what they found?”
“The codes for the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” I suggested.
“Oh, Vic, nothing that amazing. Just—the stuff that was supposed to be in the body armor—the, uh, ceramic or whatever it is—someone took it out and replaced it with ordinary beach sand. Can you believe that?”
I put my whisky down.
“Did he say . . . Could he prove that it was inside the shield to begin with? I mean, Chad had poked a bunch of holes in the shield. How do we know what was in it first?”
Petra hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know.”
“Uh, ma’am . . . Uh, Vic . . . We did get the report. Since we didn’t know where you were or what you needed, we drove up to Northbrook and picked it up from Mr. Rieff.”
Marty handed me a sealed envelope with the familiar crest of the Cheviot rams in the corner. I slit it open and scanned the pages, which bristled with “moieties,” “van der Waals forces,” “carbon 60,” and other arcane phrases that I should have paid more attention to in Professor Turkevich’s chemistry lectures when I was an undergraduate, but it was too late to fret about that now.
I called up Cheviot labs. Sandy Rieff was working late. That was one good thing.
“This ratio you have in the report,” I asked, “seventy-five percent sand mixed with twenty-five percent fullerene, how is that different from what it should be?”
“It should be a hundred percent gallium arsenide fullerenes,” said Rieff.
“And how sure are you that this diluted mix was in Chad’s shield from the get-go?”
“My best materials engineer, Genny Winne, did the analysis. Winne says that she’s prepared to testify on both those points. And she doesn’t say that unless she thinks her results are unimpeachable.”
I thought back to the Fortune article, to Tintrey’s rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. “So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn’t stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to analyze the content?”