It was Quent's suggestion that I case the location of the Ras Ormara itself, herself, whatever. Meanwhile he made initial inquiries across the bay alone in his natural camouflage, in the area everyone calls Chinatown though it was home to several Asiatic colonies. It was my idea to bring my StudyGirl to record a look at this shipshape ship we'd heard so much about, and Quent suggested I do it without making any personal contacts that required I.D.
StudyGirls were new then, cleverly named so that kids who wanted the spendy toys—meaning all kids—would have leverage with Dad and Mom. Even the early versions were pocket-sized and would take a two-inch Britannica floppy, but they would also put TV broadcasts on the rollout screen or play mini-CDs and action games, and make video recordings as well. It was already common practice to paint over the indicator lights so nobody knew when you were videorecording. I'll bet a few kids actually used them for schoolwork, too.
I took the freeway as far as Richmond, got off at Carlson Boulevard, and puzzled my way through the waterfront's industrial montage. Blank-fronted metal buildings with ramped loading docks meant warehousing of imports and exports, and somewhere in there were a few boxcarloads of Peruvian balsa logs. Composite panels of carbon fiber and balsa sandwich were much in demand at that time among builders of off-road racers for their light weight and stiffness. I enjoyed a moment of déjà future vu at the thought that I might be using some of the Ras Ormara's balsa for my project in a few months.
Unless my woolgathering got me squashed like a bug underfoot. I had to dodge thrumming diesel-electric rigs that outclamored the cries of gulls and ignored my pickup as unworthy of notice. Hey, they were making a buck, and this was their turf.
In a few blocks-long stretches, the warehouses gave way to fencing topped with razor wire, enforced isolation for the kind of small-time chemical processing plants that looked like brightly painted guts of the biggest dinosaurs ever. Now and then I could spot the distant San Rafael Bridge through the tanks, reactor vessels, piping, and catwalks that loomed like little skeletal skyscrapers, throwing early shadows across the street. You knew without a glance when you were passing warehouses because of the echoes and the sour, last-week's-fast-food odor that drew those scavenging gulls. The chemical production plants no longer stank so much since the City of Richmond got serious about its air. And beyond all this at an isolated wharf, berthed next to a container ship like a racehorse beside a Clydesdale, the Ras Ormara gleamed in morning light. I wondered why a ship like that was called a "she" when it had such racy muscular lines, overlaid by spidery cargo cranes and punctuated by the gleam of glass. I pointedly focused on the nearby container vessel, walking past an untended gate onto the dock, avoiding flatbed trucks that galumphed in and out. I had my StudyGirl in hand for videotaping, neither flourishing nor hiding it. In semishorts, argyle socks, and short sleeves, I hoped I looked like a typical Midwestern tourist agog over, golly gee, these great big boats. If challenged I could always choose whether to brazen it out with my I.D.
I strolled back, paying casual attention to the Ras Ormara, listening to the sounds of engine-driven pressure washers and recording the logos on two trucks with hoses that snaked up and back to big tanks mounted behind the truck cabs. I could see men operating the chassis-mounted truck consoles, wearing headsets. Somehow I'd expected more noise and melodrama in cleaning the ship's big cargo tanks.
Words like "big" and "little" are inadequate where a cargo vessel, even one considered small, is concerned. I guess that's what numbers are for. The Ras Ormara was almost three hundred feet stem to stern, the length of a football field, and where bare metal showed it appeared to be stainless steel. All that cleaning was concentrated ahead of the ship's glassed bridge, where a half dozen metal domes, each five yards across, stood in ranks well above the deck level. Two rows of three each; and the truck hoses entered the domes through open access ports big enough to drop a truck tire through. Or a man. Welded ladders implied that men might do just that.
I suppose I could have climbed one of the gangways up to the ship's deck. It was tempting, but Quent had told me—couched as a suggestion—not to. It is simply amazing how obedient I can be to a boss who is not overbearing. I moseyed along, hoping I stayed mostly out of sight behind those servicing trucks without seeming to try. From an open window behind the Ras Ormara's bridge came faint strains of someone's music, probably from a CD. It sounded like hootchie-kootchie scored for three tambourines and a parrot, and I thought it might be Egyptian or some such.
Meanwhile, a bulky yellow extraterrestrial climbed from one of those domes trailing smaller hoses, and made his way carefully down the service ladder. When he levered back his helmet and left it with its hoses on deck, I could see it was just a guy with hair sweat-plastered to his forehead, wearing a protective suit you couldn't miss on a moonless midnight. My luck was holding; he continued down the gangway to the nearest truck. Meanwhile I ambled back in his direction, stowing away my StudyGirl.
The space-suited guy, his suit smeared with fluid, was talking with the truck's console operator, both standing next to the chassis as they shared a cigarette. Even then smoking was illegal in public, but give a guy a break. . . .
They broke off their conversation as I drew near, and the console man nodded. "Help you?"
I shrugged pleasantly and remembered to talk high in my throat because guys my size are evidently less threatening as tenors. "Just sightseeing. Never see anything like this in Omaha." I grinned.
"Don't see much of this anywhere, thank God," said the sweaty one, and they laughed together. "Thirsty work. Not for the claustrophobe, either."
"Is this how you fill 'er up?" I hoped this was naive enough without being idiotic. I think I flunked because they laughed again. The sweaty one said, "Would I be smoking?" When I looked abashed, he relented. "We're scouring those stainless tanks. Got to be pharmaceutically free of a vegetable slurry before they pump in the next cargo."
"Those domes sitting on deck," I guessed.
"Hell, that's just the hemispherical closures," said the console man.
"The tanks go clear down into the hold," said his sweaty friend.
I blinked. "Twenty feet down?"
"More like forty," he said.
The console man glanced at his wristwatch, gave a meaningful look to his friend; took the cigarette back. "And we got a special eco-directive on flushing these after this phase. We have to double soak and agitate with filterable solvent, right to the brim, fifty-two thousand gallons apiece. Pain in the ass."
"Must take a lot of time," I said, thinking about Dana Martin's ability to make people jump through additional hoops on short notice, without showing her hand.
"Twice what we'd figured," said Consoleman. "I thought the charter-service rep would scream bloody murder, but he didn't even haggle. Offered a bonus for early completion, in fact. Speaking of which," he said, and fixed Sweatman with a wry smile.
"Yeah, yeah," said his colleague, and turned toward the Ras Ormara. "For us, time really is money. But that ten-minute break is in the standard contract. Anyhow, without my support hoses it's getting hot as hell in this outfit."
"Hold still, it's gonna dribble," I said. I found an old Kleenex in my pocket, and used it to wipe around the chin plate of Sweatman's suit, then put it back in my pocket.
"Guess I'm lucky to be in the wrought-iron biz," I said. With a smithy for a hobby, I could fake my way through that if necessary.
"My regards to Omaha," said Consoleman. "And by the way, you really shouldn't be here without authorization. Those guys are an antsy lot," he said, jerking his head toward the bridge. It was as nice a "buzz off, pal" request as I'd ever had.
I didn't look up. I'd seen faces staring down in our direction, some with their heads swathed in white. "Okay, thanks. Just seeing this has been an education," I said.
"If the skipper unlimbers his tongue on you, I hope your education isn't in languages," Consoleman joked.
I laughed, waved, and took my time walking back to the gate, stopping on the way to gaze at the much larger container ship as if my attention span played no favorites.
When I got back to my Toyota I rummaged in the glove box and found my stash of quart-sized evidence baggies. Then I carefully sealed that soggy old Kleenex inside one and scribbled the date and the specimen's provenance. I'd seen Sweatman climb out of a cargo tank of the Ras Ormara and that fluid had come out with him. Quent might not do handsprings, but the Feebs got off on stuff like that.
I took a brief cell call from Quent shortly before noon, while I was stoking up at one of the better restaurants off Jack London Square. The maître d' had sighed when he saw my tourist getup. Quent sighed, too, when I told him where I was. "Look, the Feds are paying, and I keep receipts," I reminded him.
He said he was striking out in Chinatown, just as he had in hospitals and clinics, but the Oakland side had its own ethnic neighborhoods. "I thought you might want to ride with me this afternoon," he said.
"Where do we meet? I have something off the ship you might want Dana to have analyzed," I said.
"You went aboard? Harve—oh well. Just eat slowly. It's not that far across the Bay Bridge," he replied.
"Gotcha. And I didn't go aboard, bossman, but I think I have a sample of what was actually in the Ras Ormara's tanks, whatever the records might say. You'll be proud of your humble apprentice, but right now my rack of lamb calls. Don't hurry," I said, and put away my phone.
Quent arrived in time for my coffee and ordered tea. I let him play back my StudyGirl video recording as far as it went, and took the evidence baggie from my shirt pocket as I reported the rest. "We have the name of the pressure-washing firm. No doubt they can tell some curious Fed what cleaning chemicals they use. What's left should be traces of what those tanks really carried," I said.
Quent said Dana's people had already analyzed samples of the stuff provided by Customs. "But they'll be glad to have it confirmed this way. Nice going." He pocketed the baggie and pretended not to notice that I made a proper notation on my lunch receipt. We walked out into what was rapidly becoming a furry overcast, and I took the passenger's seat in his Volvo.
Quent said we'd try an Oakland rooming house run by a Korean family. From the list we had, he knew a pair of the Ras Ormara's crew were staying there. "You, uh, might want to draft your report while I go in," he said as he turned off the Embarcadero. "Shouldn't be long."
"I thought you wanted me with you."
"I did. Then I saw how you're dressed."
"I'm a tourist!"
"You're a joke with pale shins. I can't do a serious interview with a foreign national if you're visible; how can I have his full attention when he's wondering whether Bluto is going to start juggling plates behind me?"
I saw his point and promised to bring a change of clothes next time. Quent found the place, in a row of transient quarters an Oakland beat cop would call flophouses. Without a place to park, he turned the Volvo over to me. "I'll call when I'm done," he said, and disappeared into the three-story stucco place.
I did find a parking spot eventually. My printer was at home, but I stored my morning's case report on StudyBint. Quent called not long afterward and, because he wore a frown only when puzzling things out, I hardly gave him time to take the wheel. "Something already?"
He thought about it a moment before replying. "Not on Park. Not directly, at any rate. But I'm starting to understand why our missing engineer was uneasy." When giving Park's name he had mentioned the ship to the rooming-house proprietor, who said she hadn't heard of Park but named the two crew members who were there. The Korean, Hong Chee, she described as taller than average, late thirties. The second man, one Ali Ghaffar, was older; perhaps Indian. Pretending surprise at this lucky accident, Quent asked to speak with them.
Hong Chee was out, but Quent found his roommate Ghaffar in the room, preternaturally quiet and alert. Ghaffar, a middle-aged Paki, was a studious-looking sort wearing one of those white cloth doodads wound around his head, who had evidently been reading one of two well-thumbed leather-bound books. Quent couldn't read even the titles though he got the impression they might be religious tomes.
Ghaffar spoke fair English. He showed some interest in the fact that an Asian speaking perfect American English was hoping to trace the movements of an engineer off the Ras Ormara. Quent explained that Park's family was concerned enough to hire private investigators, blah-blah, merely wanted assurance that Park hadn't met with foul play, et cetera.
Ghaffar said he had only a nodding acquaintance with Park. He couldn't, or more likely wouldn't, say whether Park had made any friends aboard ship, and had no idea whether Park had friends in the Bay Area. Ghaffar and Hong Chee had seen the engineer, he thought, the day before in some Richmond bar, and Park was looking fit, but they hadn't talked. That's when Quent noticed the wastebasket's contents. He began pacing around, stroking his chin, trying to scan everything in the room without being obvious while doing it.
Personal articles were aligned on lamp tables as if neatness counted, beds made, nothing out of place. Quent took his nail clippers out and began idly tossing them in one hand as he dreamed up more questions, and he just happened to drop his clippers into the wastebasket, apologizing as he fished them out with slow gropes of bogus clumsiness.
Quent realized that Ghaffar was waiting with endless calm for this ten-thumbed gumshoe to go away, volunteering little, responding carefully. Quent said he'd like to talk with Hong Chee sometime if possible and passed his cell-phone card to Ghaffar, who accepted it solemnly, and then Quent left and called me to be picked up.
"So I ask you," Quent said rhetorically: "What would a devout Moslem, who adheres to correct practices alone in his room, have been doing in a gin mill, with or without his buddy? Not likely. I don't think he saw Park, I think he wanted me to think Park was healthy. And you haven't asked me about the trash basket."
"Didn't want to interrupt. What'd you see?"
"Candy wrappers and an empty plastic pop bottle. Oh, yes," he added with studied neglect, "and an airline ticket. I didn't have time to read it closely, but I caught an Asian name—not Hong Chee's—Oakland International, and a departure date." He paused before he specified it.
"Christ, that's tomorrow," I said.
"I'm not through. Ghaffar is on the crew list as the ship's machinist. You ever see a machinist's hands?"
"Sure, like a blacksmith's. Like he force-feeds cactus to Rottweilers for kicks."
"Well, at the least they're callused and scarred. Not Ali Ghaffar. He may know how to use a lathe, but I'd bet against it."
"Then who's the real machinist? Ships have to have one."
"Do they? From what Medler and you tell me, and from what I saw on your video, the Ras Ormara might go a year without needing that kind of attention."
He checked some notes and drove silently across town like he knew where he was going. Presently he said, as if to himself: "So Hong Chee has dumped what looks like a perfectly good airline ticket for somebody out of Oakland. Wish I'd seen where to. More particularly, I wish I knew how he could afford to junk it. And why he knows to junk it the day before the flight."
"Me, teacher," I said, putting up a hand and waving it. "Call on me."
"Tell the class, Master Rackham," he said, going along with it.
"Somebody else is funding him better than most, and he's changed his departure plans because La Martin and company have put the brakes on whatever he had in mind."
"Take your seat, you've left the heart of my question untouched. Is he worried for the same reasons as Park?"
"Suppose we give him a chance to tell us," I said.
"Maybe we'll do that. But I'm not sure he's making plans for his own departure. Another Asian?"
"At a guess, I'd say the name is unimportant. How many sets of I.D. might he have, Quent?"
After a long pause, he exhaled for what seemed like forever. "Harve, you are definitely paranoid—I'm happy to say. Now you've torn the lid off this little box with a missing engineer in it, and I find a much bigger box inside, so to speak. And there wasn't a second ticket there—so Ghaffar may still intend to go back aboard. Or not. But I'll tell you this: Our machinist is no machinist, and he certainly isn't spending his time ashore as if he had the usual things in mind."
I couldn't fault his reasoning. "So where are we headed?"
"Korean social club. Maybe we'll find Hong Chee there."
"And not Park Soon?" All I got was a shrug and a glance, and I didn't like the glance. Quent found a slot for the Volvo in a neighborhood of shops with signs in English and the odd squiggles that weren't quite Chinese characters; Hangul has a script all its own. "You might try calling Dana while I'm inside," Quent said. "Let her know we've got a gooey Kleenex for her."
So I did, and was told she was in the field, and I tried her cell phone. She sounded like she was in a salt mine and none too pleased about it. She perked up slightly at my offer of the evidence. "I'll pick it up when we're through here," she said, and sneezed. "I thought the incoming cargo might be dirty, but the spectral analyzer says no. A few pallets are too heavy, though. My God, but wood dust is pervasive!"
"You're in a warehouse," I said, glad that she couldn't see me grinning. Climbing around on pallets of logs probably hadn't been high on her list of adventures when she joined up. "I haven't seen the stuff, but if it's that dusty maybe it's not plain logs. Probably rough-sawn, right?"
She said it was. "What would you know about it?"
"I've seen how balsa is used in high-tech panels. The stuff is graded by weight per cubic meter and it varies from featherweight, which is highly prized, to the density of pine. In other words, pallets could vary by a factor of three or so."
"Well, damn it to hell," she said. "Excuse me. Scratch one criterion. What's the significance of its being sawn?"
"Just that it may make it easier for you to see whether some of it's been cut lengthwise with a very fine kerf and glued back."
"What's a kerf?"
"The slot made by a saw. Balsa can be slitted with a very thin saw-blade. It occurs to me that it might be the lighter timbers you should be checking for hollowed interiors. Bags of white powder aren't that heavy, Dana."
I think she cussed again before she sneezed. She said, "Thanks," as if it were squeezed out of her.
"But I don't think you'll find anything," I said.
She demanded, "Why not?" the way a kid says it when told she can't ride behind the nice stranger on his Superninja bike.
"I just feel like whatever's being delivered, if anything, hasn't been. The monkey wrench your people threw into their schedule didn't delay those pallets—gesundheit—but they're behaving as if you did delay something. They're waiting, apparently with patience."
She said she'd get back to me and snapped off. To kill time, I played back our conversation on StudyBabe. Dana had a spectral analyzer with her? I had thought they were big lab gadgets. Right, and computers were room-sized—once upon a time.
While I was still muttering "Duhh" and thinking about possible uses of Dana's gadgetry, Quent came down out of a stairwell in a hurry. He motioned for me to drive, pocketing his phone. "You love to drive like there's no tomorrow, and I don't. Please don't bend the Volvo," he begged. "Just get us across the bridge to Jackson and Taylor."
While I drove, he filled me in on his fresh lead. He'd struck out again upstairs, but had just taken a call on his cell phone from Ali Ghaffar. His buddy Hong, said the Paki, had returned. Ghaffar had asked about Park. Oh, said Hong, that was easy; back at the gin mill, Park Soon had said he was considering a move to a nice room in San Francisco for the rest of his time ashore. Corner of Jackson and Taylor.
"Smack-dab middle of Chinatown. Didn't say which corner, I suppose," I said, overtaking a taxi on the right.
"No such luck. But there can't be more than a half dozen places with upscale rooms on or near that corner. We can canvass them all in twenty minutes."
I tossed a look at Quent. "You speak directly to Hong?"
"Watch the road, for Christ's sweet sake," he gritted. "I asked, but Ali said he was gone again. Very handy."
"That's what I was thinking," I said, swerving to miss a pothole on the way to the Bay Bridge on-ramp.
Quent closed his eyes. "Just tell me when we get there."
To calm him down I played my conversation with Dana. It pacified him somewhat, and I turned down the Volvo's wick nearing Chinatown, which was a traffic nightmare long before the twenty-first century.
I chose a pricey parking lot near Broadway, and we jostled our way through the sidewalk chaos together. By agreement, Quent peeled off to take the two west corners of the intersection. Because some of the nicer little Chinatown hotels aren't obvious, I had to ask a restaurant cashier. When she hesitated, I said I had a job offer for an Asian gent and knew only that he'd taken a nice room thereabouts. I said I hadn't understood him very well.
Evidently, Asiatics have their own privately printed local phone books, but she didn't hand it over and I couldn't have read what I saw anyhow. She gave me five addresses, and three of them were on Quent's side. I tipped her, hoping I'd remember to jot it down, and found the first address almost next door.
If there's a small Chinatown hotel on a street floor, it's one I never saw. I climbed three narrow flights before I saw what proved to be a tiny lobby through a bead curtain. A young Asiatic greeted me, very courteously, his speech and dress yuppily American. He heard my brief tale sympathetically. Sorry, he said, but no young person of either gender had registered in several days. Would I mind describing the employment I had to offer?
I said it was a marine engineer's job, and I swear he said, "Aw shit, and me a journalism major," before he wished me good day, no longer interested in my problems.
I crossed the street and began to search for the second address when my phone clucked. "Bingo," Quent said with no preliminaries. "But no joy. Meet me at the car in ten. Until then you don't know me." No way I could mistake the implication.
He didn't sound happy, and when I saw him on the street he had turned away, heading down Jackson. It's a one-way street, and he walked counter to the traffic flow, something you do when you suspect someone may be trying to tail you in a car.
So I did the same on Taylor, which is also one-way, doubling back after a long block to approach Quent's car on Jones—again counter to one-way traffic. If anyone followed me on foot, he was too good for me to make him.
I had paid the lot's fee and was waiting in the Volvo when Quent appeared. "Oakland it is," he said, racking his seat back to disappear below the windowsill. As I sought an on-ramp he said, "A man calling himself Park Soon rented a room for a week, not two hours ago; one flight up, quiet, expensive. Told the concierge he might be staying with a friend for a night or so but please to hold his messages and take names."
"He's not hard up for cash," I said.
"He's also about my height and age," said Quent, who was five-eight, pushing forty.
I'd had Park's description. "The hell he is," I said.
"The man who rented that room with a cash advance is," Quent said. "Unless the lady was pulling my leg. And why would she if she wanted me to think it was Park? Park Soon is five-three. What's wrong with this picture, Harve?"
"I might know if I got a look inside that room."
"That was my thought, but it's a risky tactic in a subculture that's understandably wary, so I didn't even try. The Feds can do it if they want to. They know how to lean on people to, ah, I think the phrase is, 'compel acquiescence.'"
"Our own little Ministry of Fear," I observed.
"Everybody's got 'em, Harve. I even have one," he said with a half smile, and pointed a finger at my breast. "And if I had to choose between Uncle's and the ones run by people who call him the Great Satan, I choose Uncle.
"Meanwhile, we don't know who's pushing our buttons, waiting for us to show up, and watching us flail around all over hell. But I'd bet someone is, and I'd just as soon they didn't pin a tail on us."
I nodded, pointing the Volvo onto the Bay Bridge. "You don't think Park could somehow be in on this," I suggested.
"Not in any way he'd like. I don't think Park is where anyone will find him anytime soon," Quent replied grimly. "Whoever tried to create a fresh trail for him would probably be pretty confident he's not leaving his own trail of crumbs. I really don't like that idea, Harve. Well, maybe I'm wrong. I hope so."
"When are we gonna drop that one on Dana?"
He levered himself and his seat erect; opened his phone. "Right away. She's probably still in the field. I will bet you a day's expenses Mr. Ghaffar knows who took that room for Park; the description fits Hong, of course."
I nodded. "Should we go back and have a talk with him now?"
"Not yet, I want to be very calm for that, and at the moment I am peeved. I am provoked."
"You are royally pissed," I supplied. He nodded. "Me too," I added, as he punched Dana's number.
It was nearing rush hour by that time, but with a few extra twists and turns, I managed to satisfy myself that we weren't tailed while Quent spoke with our pet Feeb. She said she'd meet us in twenty at the boathouse on Lake Merritt, in residential Oakland.
She was as good as her word, looking as frazzled as she'd sounded earlier but even more interesting, which irked me. No Feeb had the right to look that good. She took the perimeter footpath and we caught up to her, two visitors hitting on a cutie. When we found a park bench, she plopped her shoulder bag next to me. "If that specimen's bagged, stuff it in here," she said.
"And if not, where do I stuff it?"
She simply looked toward my partner. "While he figures out the answer to his own question, Quent: We've still drawn blanks at every bus terminal, airport and rail connection between Vallejo and Santa Clara. What's your best guess on Park?"
Quent told her while I put my evidence in her bag. At his bidding I let her review the video I'd made. He described the timing of the connections we'd made and blunted the conclusions he and I had reached together. "Wherever Park is, and for whatever reason, I just have a suspicion he won't surface again in the Bay Area," he said. Then he described the Chinatown lead and told her flatly why he believed it was fugazi, a false trail.
She turned to me. "You're uncharacteristically silent. What do you think?"
"Much the same. And I think Quent ought to borrow your spectral analyzer, if it's small enough to put in a Bianchi rig."
"Mine won't fit in any shoulder holster I've seen," she said, "but some will. The covert units are slower, though. Encryption-linked to a lab in Sunnyvale, which is why they can be so small. I've seen one implanted in a LOC-8. And they are very, very expensive," she added. A LOC-8 was one of the second-generation GPS units with two-way comm and a memory just in case you wondered where you'd been. Combined with a linked-up analyzer it would be worth a new Volvo.
"You want me to ship out on the Ras Ormara or something," Quent said to me, amused.
Dana turned to him again. "Better you than King Kong here. You look the part, and you could talk with the crew more easily."
Quent: "You're not serious."
Dana: "Not actually shipping out, but you might try getting aboard while the new cargo is being loaded. A spectral analyzer needs no more than a whiff to do its job, and I'd hate to try to guess all the ways a cargo can be falsified."
Quent was silent for a time. Then, "I'd never get aboard without the rep's authorization, or the captain's. There goes one layer of our deniability but yes, I could try it. Or Harve could, in a pinch."
We kicked the idea around a bit, and then she excused herself and walked off a ways to use her phone while Quent and I watched boats slice the lake's surface under psychedelic bubbles of sail. When she turned back, she was nodding. "You'll need to learn how to use it," she said.
Quent said if it was anything like the one she carried, she could show us using the specimen I'd collected. She simpered for him and said she should've thought of that herself. We found a picnic table and, sandwiched between me and Quent, Dana pulled a grey, keyboard-faced polymer brick from her bag and opened my evidence baggie next to it.
She stuck her forefinger into a depression labeled CRUCIBLE in the brick and pressed the CRU key. When she withdrew her finger its tip was covered by a filmy shroud, which she quickly stuck into my soggy tissue. Then she pushed the fingertip into another depression and pressed SAMPLE, and the brick whirred very faintly for an instant. Dana withdrew her finger, stripped the film off, and let it drop to the tabletop, an insubstantial wisp. Then after a silence, the brick's little screen began to print gibberish at a rate too fast to follow.
"Essentially, a carbon ribbon wipes a bit of the specimen off the film—don't ask me why it's called a crucible—and analyzes it," Dana murmured.
"What if you're testing the air," Quent asked.
"Wave your finger around for a moment. They say the crucible has microscopic pores on its surface," she explained.
"And how many of those little mouse condoms are inside," I asked, unrolling the discarded wisp for a better look.
"Rackham, you are a piece of work," she said under her breath. Then more loudly, "A hundred or so. By that time the battery needs replacing." When the little screen quit printing Martian, it showed a line with several numbered pips of varied height. She showed us how to query each number, which could be shown as chemical symbols or in words.
The biggest pip was for water, the next was for a ketone solvent, then cellulose, then something called Biopol.
I put my finger out and touched the screen. "Bad actor?"
"No. A polymer from genetically altered canola," she said.
"How in the hell would you know that," I demanded.
She let me stew for a moment. Then, "Customs. Biopol was the plant extract on the manifest. Quent would've figured that out and told you anyway," she added grudgingly.
The trace of C10H18O, according to the screen, was eucalyptol. Dana pointed out that the heavily aromatic tree hanging over us was a eucalyptus. "So you see it's pretty accurate."
I said no it wasn't, or it would've told us what the little condom was made of. She said yes it was and positively beamed, explaining that the analyzer knew to ignore the crucible's signature. I gave up. The damned thing was pretty smart at that.
"At least we know the cargo was as advertised," Quent said.
Dana nodded. "Including those pallets of wood. We 'scoped enough of it. So now we focus on the next cargo because no one has come ashore with sizable contraband, and the incoming cargo was clean."
"Unless they'd already pumped it out into those trucks I saw," I said.
"They didn't," said Dana. "One of the cleanout crew is one of ours. You don't need to know which one. The Ras Ormara crew are watching him carefully enough to make us even more suspicious."
"I wasted my time then," I said.
"You proved the wharf isn't all that secure," Quent mused, and checked his wrist. "If you're going to spring for a couple of those analyzers, ma'am, we should get to it."
She reminded him that it was a loan, and there'd be only one. Thinking ahead as usual, he said as long as we were going to show our hand overtly as a P.I. team, he'd feel better going aboard if I went along. That meant I could contact the Sonmiani rep myself for the authorization and save some time.
"If you drop me off at my Toyota right away," I said, "I might catch this Goldman guy before he leaves his office."
We quick-marched back to the Volvo and Dana agreed to meet Quent back at the Sunnyvale lab in the South Bay.
I knew I was cutting it close for normal working hours but StudyBimbo found the Sonmiani number while Quent drove me to my pickup. I was in luck; better luck than Quent would find. One Mike Kaplan answered for Sonmiani Shipping, and put me through without rigamarole. That's how my brief platonic fling began with my friend, Norman Goldman.