Chapter Two
Tuesday
NanoWare Corporation
Cupertino, California
Dressed in casual but no-nonsense uniforms—dark suit, deep-red tie—Craig Kreident and the four field agents stepped through the mirrored doors of NanoWare Corporation. They wore brittle smiles on their faces.
As soon as he was out of the bright California sun, Craig snapped off his dark sunglasses and blinked to adjust his eyes to the indoor lighting of the lobby. He pushed the sunglasses into his suit breast pocket and reached in to take out the folded piece of paper inside the white envelope. Unconsciously, he used a palm to slick down the sides of his short, chestnut-colored hair, straightening the premature wings of distinguished gray. Always neat, always presentable. A professional.
At the faux marble front desk the security guard sat up and greeted them with a cautious smile. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” the guard said, moving his glance like machine-gun fire down the line of agents. “What can I—”
Craig slid the folded leather badge case from inside his jacket and flipped it open. His companions did the same. The guard reeled back at the barrage of IDs.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ll be visiting some of your facilities this afternoon,” Craig said. “Thanks in advance for your cooperation.”
The security guard gaped like a stranded fish and reached for the telephone. Craig intercepted him by slapping the search warrant on the gleaming marble surface in front of the guard.
“You’ll see here that we have a search warrant duly signed by a magistrate of the U.S. District Court. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that phone, sir.”
His smile inched up a fraction of a degree—cool, cordial, uncompromising. He scanned up and down the corridors of NanoWare. Apart from the neutral carpeting—charcoal gray and sterling silver tweed—everything gleamed with white and chrome, high-tech with a vengeance. The curved halls had no sharp angles, like a 1960s science-fiction vision of the year 2000.
“I believe the IC processing labs are down there,” Craig pointed. “Is that right? We can find them ourselves.”
“But wait,” the security guard said. “You can’t do that. Mr. Skraling is out of town until tomorrow and I don’t have the authorization to—“
Craig tapped the paper again with his forefinger and gave a Mount Rushmore smile. “I have all the authorization the law requires, sir. After we’ve secured the clean room, you’re welcome to call …” Craig searched his memory trying to recall the name of the senior VP of NanoWare. “Ms. Ompadhe. And by all means, send her down.”
“Daniel,” Craig nodded to one of the men, “would you keep our friend company while we gain access to the clean room? Then please see that he makes the right phone calls.”
“Yes, sir,” Daniel said. He pulled up a chair and sat next to the security guard. He nodded at the fidgeting man. “So, do you watch baseball?”
Craig motioned for the other three agents to follow him down the slick hall. Their shoes scuffed like muffled gunfire on the carpet. When they were out of earshot, one of the other field agents, Ben Goldfarb, lowered his voice and spoke to Craig. “I thought we couldn’t legally forbid them from using the telephone. That’s not kosher is it?”
Craig stared in feigned surprise at Goldfarb, pointing to himself innocently as if saying Moi? “I didn’t forbid him to use the telephone. I just said I’d appreciate it if he didn’t, and I didn’t tell Daniel to forbid him either. I just told him to stay there.”
Goldfarb grinned, making small wrinkles around his dark eyes. “Yeah, but your meaning was implicit.”
“Implicit doesn’t carry the law, Ben,” He sighed, then let his demeanor soften now that he didn’t have to keep up the “tough agent” facade. “Look, I’ve been investigating these high-tech crimes long enough to know how little time it takes the bad guy to wipe the slate clean. Five minutes worth of warning, and people can delete all sorts of incriminating files. A diskette or two tossed into an incinerator will cause us months of reconstruction work, if not irreparable harm to our case. A surprise inspection means just that—surprise. Once we’re in position and babysitting them, they can do whatever they want.”
True, before his time several blunders had been made during overzealous investigations against supposed computer crimes. Most infamous was the Secret Service raid on a gaming company in Texas. That had been botched every way imaginable, from bogus charges to incorrectly filed paperwork, and had generated a lot of bad press. That sort of thing happened when technologically illiterate agents tried to investigate a high-tech case.
Craig specialized in that kind of work, though. It took a smart agent to catch a smart bad guy. Like in this case. And NanoWare was no innocent bystander.
Operatives in Malaysia and Singapore had traced bootleg microprocessor chips that had been flooding the market. The path led through several sham corporations, directly back to the Silicon Valley company NanoWare.
“Here, sir,” Jackson, ahead, pointed to a double airlock door with a flashing light mounted outside. Through large, thick observation windows in the hall Craig could watch people in white garments, masks, and hair nets moving around cabinets of glittering microchip fabrication apparatus.
“Okay, let’s go inside,” Craig said, stepping up to the airlock door that led into the changing room. “I want you to suit up for the clean room. Everything by the book. Do minimal damage. Our primary objective is to secure this facility, not to damage it.”
They stepped to the door to the outer clean room, walking across a gray mat of stickum to pull away all the loose dust from the soles of their shoes. They passed into the changing area and rummaged in the cubicles for spare outfits. A bin of dirty uniforms sat beside a sink. Wooden benches lined the walls near blue metal lockers. Racks of folded white jumpsuits stood next to a box full of nylon hair nets and bins of thin plastic booties marked SMALL, MEDIUM, and LARGE.
“Let’s make it quick. They may have seen us.”
Craig put on facemask, adjusting the elastic at the back of his head and snugged on a hairnet. He stepped into a white Tyvek jumpsuit and grabbed flimsy booties that billowed around his black street shoes. He smelled clean, new fabric and flat filtered air, cold from the increased air conditioning.
Before sealing the Velcro straps on the jumpsuit, Craig took out his badge wallet and small camera and stuck them into one of the deep external pockets. He pulled on rubber surgical gloves from an open box, snapping the thin membrane against his wrist. Once finished, the four FBI agents gave each other a cursory checkover. “Good enough,” Craig said. “Let’s move.”
They passed through the second airlock door together. Craig took the point; Goldfarb and Jackson fanned out. Holding his badge high, Craig raised his voice—firm, businesslike, no-nonsense.
“May I have your attention please? We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All operations must cease immediately. Do not touch anything. Do not shut down any processes or equipment. We want everything nice and clean, just the way it is.”
A storm of voices swirled around him in several different languages. He noticed for the first time the dark almond eyes behind many of the face masks, saw Korean and Vietnamese workers, probably at minimum wage, doing sophisticated high-tech labor.
“Goldfarb and DeLong, secure the lab. Jackson, round all those people up by the desk. I’m going to start taking pictures, get an inventory.”
As confusion bubble around him, Craig snapped a series of quick shots with the small camera, fumbling with the button through the rubber gloves. Then he set to work on the part that most interested him, the large x-ray lithographic chip-imprinting apparatus. The three-foot by three-foot negatives were used to burn patterns upon the coated sapphire wafers—thin circular disks that looked like CDs. The process exposed incredibly reduced and intricate electronic circuits that would then be etched. Once imprinted, the thin wafers were chopped into small rectangles as individual chips.
Craig spread out the set of four overlarge negatives on a light table rigged next to a high-resolution x-ray camera. He flicked on the table and picked up a loop the size of a postage stamp. As the white fluorescent light flooded beneath the negative, he squinted and scanned down the complex labyrinth of millions of circuit paths.
He ran his pen along one edge, counting grid lines over, searching for the spot the original PanTech designer had told him to look for, the small signature of his own design: a tiny circuit loop connecting nothing, difficult to find and impossible to deny. Like the tiny intentional mistakes on copyrighted maps, this signature proved the identity of the original designer.
Craig found it without much difficulty, proving that this set of masks had been stolen from NanoWare’s primary competitor. Then the negatives had been altered—sabotaged—to make the bootleg chips malfunction frequently.
“Dead to rights,” Craig said, snapped off the light table, and rolled up the negatives. He raised his voice, calling attention to himself.
“Goldfarb, Jackson, DeLong, you all saw me take this set of negatives out of their apparatus.” Craig rolled up the large dark sheets, placing an IMPOUNDED sticker on the side.
The inner door of the clean room burst open. A dark powerhouse of a woman barged in without bothering to put on the entire clean-room outfit. Craig paused only a moment, noting to himself that with all of NanoWare’s difficulties, a contaminated clean-room environment was one of the most minor things the company had to worry about right now.
The woman was short, stocky, and filled with an energy born from contained fury. She had dark Indian skin and bright flashing eyes under glossy black hair cut short like a man’s. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Craig refused to be intimidated, though, standing up and meeting the brunt of her anger. “Are you Ms. Ompadhe?” Craig said and removed all the appropriate documentation one piece at a time. “I’m Craig Kreident from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These are my agents. This is my search warrant. I think you’ll find everything is in order.” He narrowed his gray eyes and tapped his finger against the rolled up lithographic negatives.
“What—” she started to say, but Craig decided he didn’t want to let her finish a sentence.
“Alleged bootlegged chips, stolen circuit design, industrial sabotage, market fixing. I could go on.” He held up his hand again before she could say anything. “I know you’re probably going to say you don’t know anything about this, Ms. Ompadhe. For your sake, I hope that’s true. But for the moment I would advise you not to say anything at all. Unless you’d care for us to read you your Miranda rights here and now?” He stared her down. Finally Ompadhe succumbed and followed his advice, saying nothing.
“When is Mr. Skraling supposed to be back?” Craig asked. “We have a subpoena for him.”
Ompadhe flinched, stared at the floor, then looked up to meet the eyes of all of the non-English-speaking line workers herded into an open area beside one of the workstations.
She looked squarely at Craig. “He should be on a plane right now, flying back from Bermuda. We expect him to come in to San Francisco International late tonight, and he plans to be back at work tomorrow. When I see him, I’ll tell him you’re expecting him.”
“Thank you,” Craig said with false levity, “but I think I’d rather you gave me his flight number. We’d prefer to meet him at the airport directly. Saves time.”
Ompadhe’s shoulders slumped just enough to let Craig know she realized she was defeated. “Come back to my office,” she said.
Craig motioned for Goldfarb to stay and watch over the facility. He and the two others followed Ompadhe out of the clean room, shucking their white Tyvek suits and returning to their own FBI uniforms of a suit and tie.
As they followed the stout woman down the carpeted NanoWare halls, Craig had to fight to keep the springy bounce from his step. This entire investigation had gone well.