“Gateway Project, experiment number one eighty-three. Carroll, Donaldson, and Gabaldon.”

I set a travel magazine in the center of the triangle formed by the three books. I turned to a story about street food in Hanoi, drawing fragments of description into the glass. If this worked, the smells of bun rieu cua thit nuong and hien luon xao should fill the room.

“Isaac?”

I jumped hard enough I almost dropped the mirror. None of the stories about implanted communicators warned how damned startling they could be. Once my breathing slowed, I got up and switched off the camera. “What’s up, Vince?”

“I finished that inventory check. I didn’t find anything suspicious.”

“All right, thanks.”

“There’s more. I was up last night thinking. If someone’s infiltrated New Millennium, maybe it’s not about stealing our work. Maybe it’s subtler than that. What if they’re guiding our research instead?”

“How do you mean?”

“I built a database of all the proposals and projects we’ve worked on, then went through to categorize and score the delays. For the most part, it was pretty random. We’ve all had our work put on hold. There were more roadblocks in the beginning, and a spike when the NIH moved in, but I figure that’s normal. For the past three months, about fifty percent of the roadblocks came from NIH, with another thirty percent from DHS, and the rest split between the Porter Council, the New Millennium board, and other governmental groups. Plus a few projects you personally shot down.”

“I’m not hearing anything earth-shattering here, Vince.”

“The thing is, you can’t just graph the number of delays, right? You’ve got to include other factors in your analysis. I played around with a bunch of other variables, including potential public risk. You’d expect the most dangerous projects to have the biggest hurdles. Nobody wants this to turn into Chernobyl.”

I used a small screwdriver and needle-nose pliers to remove the pin from the compact’s hinge. With proper targeting, you could open a portal to Washington D.C. and assassinate the president from two thousand miles away. DHS should have been all over that from day one. Instead, they’d essentially rubber-stamped it. “Let me guess. DHS has been pushing some of those dangerous projects, the ones with potential military applications.”

“That’s part of it. No shock there, right? We know Potts is a bloodthirsty bastard. But the graphs weren’t lining up right, not until I added a second variable. For lack of a better term, I went back and scored everything based on their altruistic applications.”

I’d known we were being pressured to produce potential weapons, but I wouldn’t have thought to look at our purely philanthropic work. “What did you find?”

“They’re not just pushing for potential weapons. It looks like someone’s actively stalling our most altruistic projects.”