“I’m a little busy, Juan,” Mark said, and killed the connection.

Rather than wait for the eccentric genius, Cabrillo went down to the forward hold, a vast open space they used for storage when they were running legitimate cargoes as part of their cover or, when it was empty like now, for repacking chutes. He found Soleil alone. When he asked about Eric, she told him he followed Mark almost as soon as he could.

“Looked like quite the joyride,” he said.

“Not quite the rush I got jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but it was fun.” She had the parachute laid flat on the wooden deck and was tracing the riser lines. It was clear she knew exactly what she was doing.

“How many jumps have you made?”

“BASE or from an airplane? I’ve made dozens of the first and hundreds of the second.”

He saw the haunted look that had dimmed her eyes and sallowed her complexion was almost gone. There were still traces of it when she tried to smile, as if she felt she didn’t deserve a moment’s happiness. Cabrillo remembered those same feelings after his wife was killed. He thought he was dishonoring her memory by laughing at a joke or enjoying a movie. It was nothing more than a way of punishing himself for something that wasn’t his fault, and in time it faded.

“Ever jump the New River Gorge Bridge?” It was an 876-foot span in West Virginia and considered one of the best spots for jumping in the world.

“Of course,” she replied as if he’d asked if she breathed. “You?”

“Back when I was in training for an organization I once worked for, a bunch of us went over and did it.”

“Linda tells me you were in the CIA.” Juan nodded. “Was it exciting?”

“Most days, it’s as boring as any office job. Others, you’re so scared that no matter what you do you can’t dry your palms.”

“I think that is real danger,” she said. “What I do, it’s only pretend.”

“I don’t know. Getting shot by a border guard or having your chute fail at eleven thousand feet has pretty much the same results.”

Her eyes lit up a little. “Ah, but I have a reserve parachute.”

“You know what I mean.”

Her smile said that she did. “I guess what I am saying is that I place myself at risk for my own needs. You do it for others. I am very selfish, while you are generous.”

Juan broke eye contact and thrust his hands in his pockets. “Listen, ah,” he stammered for just a second and changed subjects. “I hate to bring this up, but we could use your help. I’m convinced that your father was targeted for a specific reason. There is something he has that Bahar wanted.”

He used the present tense when mentioning her father, though he knew in all likelihood Croissard was dead.

“We’ve snooped through his electronic files for everything he’s been working on for the past year,” he continued. “So far, nothing jumps out at us. I was wondering if you would take a look and see if anything grabs your attention.”

She caught his eye again, her beautiful face somber. “He is dead, isn’t he?”

“I can’t confirm it, but I believe so. I am sorry.”

“My helping you will punish those men?”

“That’s the plan.”

Soleil nodded slowly. “I will try, but I think I mentioned that we weren’t close and I know hardly anything about his business dealings.”

“Just do the best you can. That’s all I ask of anyone.”

CABRILLO WAS IN HIS CABIN later that night when there was a knock on the door.

“It’s me and Eric,” Mark Murphy said.

“Come on in.”

The two entered the cabin with the eagerness of puppies.

“We figured it out when Soleil was parasailing, and I think we confirmed it,” Mark said excitedly. “The computers on the oil rig were the alpha test for why Bahar needed those crystals.”

“The beta machine uses optical lasers,” Eric put in before Mark could.

“Alpha? Beta?” Juan asked. “What are you two talking about?”

“Bahar built a massive parallel processor, perhaps one of the top-five most powerful computer systems in the world, and then casually threw it away, right?” Murph said.

“Yeah,” Juan agreed cautiously.

“Why?”

“Why build it or why throw it away?”

“Two questions, one answer. It was built to design its replacement. When he succeeded, Bahar chucked the old one. It was the firewall that went up two days ago that tipped me off. There’s no commercially available privacy program that we can’t hack. We tried every trick we knew and got nothing. This is something we’ve never seen before, and it isn’t software.”

“A new computer?” Cabrillo asked.

“A new type of computer,” Murph countered.

“A quantum computer,” Eric added.

Juan said, “Refresh me on quantum computers.”

“It’s a machine that thinks in ones and zeros, like a regular computer, but also uses the quantum effects of superposition and entanglement so that it can read data as both one and zero or neither of them at the same time. Since it has more options to represent information and to process it, it is fast. Blindingly fast.”

Mark said, “Because he was after those crystals, we think Bahar’s machine is also an optical computer, which means that there is no electronic resistance for the messaging system. It is one hundred percent efficient and probably a billion times more powerful than any computer on the planet.”

“I thought these things were still years away.”

“Ten years ago they were fifty years away,” Mark stated matter-of-factly. “Eight years ago they were thirty. Five years ago they were twenty. Today the best minds in the field say ten. But I think Bahar did it sooner.”

“What can he do with a quantum computer?” Cabrillo asked.

“There isn’t a network in the world he couldn’t get into and ultimately control. Bank records and stock transfers become open books. The best NSA encryption would be broken a few picoseconds after an initial attack. Secret military communications could be read in plaintext instantly. A Q-puter can analyze every piece of data hitting the net at the same time it arrives. Nothing’s off-limits. Every e-mail, every broadcast. Hell, everything.”

Eric’s next words chilled the room. “This capability gives Bahar unlimited power, and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it.”

“How sure are you about this?” Cabrillo asked, his mind racing.

“Positive, boss man. We had good access to Bahar’s business files and now we don’t. They’re still archived, we can tell that. We just can’t get at them. Something dramatic changed two days ago, and the only thing that makes sense is that he developed a computer so advanced as to make the superserver farm on the J-61 platform obsolete: a quantum.”

“We need to tell Langston Overholt about this. The CIA has no idea what’s coming their way.”

“Bad idea,” both young men said simultaneously.

“Why?”

“For whatever reason, Bahar considers us a danger to him,” Mark replied. “If we contact anyone about this, he’s going to hear about it. Any transmission we make, no matter how encrypted, will be listened to. We shouldn’t tip our hand that we know what he’s done.”

“Besides, a quantum computer would ace the Touring Test,” Eric said.

“I’ve heard of that,” Juan said. “It’s something about a computer being able to mimic a human being.”

“Give the man a cigar. He does listen to our technobabble on occasion. The test is designed to see if the machine can fool someone into thinking they’re interacting with a real person. Mark and I discussed the possibility that a quantum computer could actually mimic an individual, not just a generic person. We think it can.”

Cabrillo thought he understood what they were getting at, and it was a scary prospect. “You’re saying I could be on the phone with Overholt when in fact I’m talking to the computer?”

“And the only way you’d be able to tell is if you asked it something only you and Mr. Overholt know. Anything on the public record, however, the machine would have already digested and be able to spit back at you.”