The Last Rational Man Page 28

me a month just to regain the power of speech.

  I did understand what he was saying.

  "You may as well come out. There is no reason for you to stay here anymore."

  I looked at him. I looked past him, out the open door. It was night. The streets were lit, and I could hear the background hum of the machines that kept civilization going.

  My guest stared at me for a moment, and then abruptly left. I reached the door just as all the lights went out. I stared out at the silent city, lit only by moonlight, and wondered if flint tools would be allowed.

  A Clean Kill

  I walked into Bo-Sung Kim's office completely exhausted. I had spent most of a twenty-four hour day traveling to South Korea, and had only allowed myself an hour in the hotel to shave, shower, and change into clean clothes before meeting him.

  He rose from behind his desk and bowed slightly. I bowed back, as expected. When he visited my office in Chicago he had shaken my hand. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I would venture a guess that in the days of the Roman Empire, everybody did as the Romans did, and the Romans did as they pleased.

  In any case, I was in Bucheon, and would do as the Bucheons do. Bo-Sung dismissed my driver, and invited me to sit in his guest chair. To Westerners, Oriental people tend to look the same. I fear that Westerners look pretty much alike to Koreans as well. In any case, I had been trained to notice details, and would never confuse one Korean with another. Certainly not Bo-Sung, who was my colleague in many ways.

  He was tall, with a mop of dark hair just starting to go gray at the temples. His face was distinctly triangular, wide at eye level, narrowing down to a small chin. His eyes were unusually narrow slits, "sharp", as I later heard other Koreans describe them.

  We both served as ranking detectives in municipal police forces. Our techniques were very similar, despite the distance between our countries. As it turned out, the differences in culture were not as great as one would expect. Normally, the two of us would never have met. But normal times were over, and municipal police forces were being drafted to help battle international terrorism. Municipal forces now had an international importance, and more importantly, we now had funding for travel.

  I expected some niceties, a little tea and chit-chat, before we started discussing issues of airport and stadium security, but I was wrong.

  "Well, Michael, you have caught me at an interesting point."

  "Interesting? In what way?"

  "I was informed of an unusual case a few minutes ago. If you had not been on your way, I would have left the office by now."

  There was usually only one kind of "unusual case" in our language. Murder.

  "Well, I will join you. Maybe I will learn something."

  "I would be pleased."

  I found myself immediately more wide awake. I was used to working strange hours, and the excitement of the chase brought a rush of adrenalin. I knew that I eventually would pay the price and collapse completely when the case was solved, but in the meantime I was ready for battle. Bo-Sung's driver was already waiting in his unmarked Daewoo, and in a few seconds we were on our way.

  "So, what is unusual about this case?"

  "It has taken place in an unusual location."

  "Unusual location?"

  "Yes."

  My friend interrupted our conversation to speak to someone on his mobile phone. Since my knowledge of Korean was complete only in its nonexistence, I was still in the dark. I wondered how unusual the murder location could possible be. My colleague had decades of experience behind him, as I myself did. I found it hard to believe that a murder location could create such interest in a senior detective.

  When he was done with his call, Bo-Sung did not apologize for the interruption. Neither would I have under similar circumstances.

  "The murder has taken place in a clean room."

  "A clean room?"

  "Yes, in an electronic manufacturing plant. Dong-Bu's Fab 1"

  I vaguely recalled that computer chips and the like were manufactured in special clean environments, but had never heard of murders taking place there. We didn't have any chip manufacturing in Chicago, so I did not know much about the facilities, and why it made a case unusual.

  "Well, most murders do not take place in a factory, but it does occasionally happen."

  Song-Bu turned to me.

  "Ah, you are not familiar with these factories. They present a special challenge in a murder investigation. This is, unfortunately, the second time I have had to deal with such a case. The first was ten months ago. The file on that case is still open.

  "The problem in these clean room environments is that there are very few clues. Our usual forensics, even the most modern DNA analysis, are nearly useless. To a large extent, so are eye witnesses. There will not be much to work with."

  He returned to his phone, and left me wondering. Could the case really be that difficult? A murder in a presumably well-lit workplace, with dozens of potential witnesses, should not be that difficult to solve. A drop of blood here, a bit of hair there, and DNA analysis would provide most of the solution. If there were witnesses, even circumstantial ones, the case would be solved. Most large scale factories also have some security cameras as well.

  Bo-Sung knew all of this, of course. So there still must be something really unusual here. I had to curb my curiosity as best as I could, until we arrived at the plant, and Bo-Sung got off the phone.

  "I am sure that your curiosity has been awakened. If you follow me into the fab, you will quickly understand what makes this unusual."

  We drove through a crowded parking lot, past a few squatting gardeners who were weeding the lawn, and pulled up in front of a large building. Squad cars were scattered around the entrance, and a handful of uniformed policemen loitered near the door. They recognized Bo-Sung immediately, and bowed as we entered the building.

  "Please follow me. There are very strict dress codes here, and the rules must be obeyed, even if it is a crime scene."

  There was a foyer just past the automatic glass doors. To our left was a set of numbered cubby-holes with slippers and shoes. We removed our shoes, placed them in a cubbyhole, and put on slippers instead.

  "Don't worry about the fit. You will be taking them off in about two minutes."

  He went on to answer the unasked question:

  "It is a combination of Korean tradition, and the need for cleanliness in the fab."

  One of the plant managers, obviously distraught, met us at a second set of glass doors and led us to the elevator. Bo-Sung continued his brief explanation as we walked down a narrow corridor and found the elevator. He started explaining the difficulty of the case as we waited for the elevator.

  "The electronic chips that are used in today's consumer products: computers, cell phones, MP3 players and the like are manufactured in plants or 'fabs' like this. Some are owned by well known companies like Intel or Samsung, others by more obscure firms. Even a small plant like this represents a huge investment, in the range of a billion US dollars.

  "The chips that they make have millions of electronic components packed into tiny packages. The only way to accomplish this is to make the components, transistors and the like, very small. The net result is that the features on the chips are microscopic. Actually, they are sub-microscopic. You can't see them in a regular microscope."

  The elevator arrived, we stepped in, and Bo-Sung continued with his brief explanation

  "The details of the manufacturing process are not that important, though we may need to learn some details later. The critical point is that dust of any kind, even tiny particles, will ruin the 'wafers' that these electronic chips are manufactured on. An hair or a bit of dandruff are disasters here. There is an elaborate system in place to prevent dust or particles from interfering with the manufacturing process. It is this system that makes the usual forensics nearly useless here."

  The elevator door opened. We walked down a short hallway, only to find another set of cubbyholes. We le
ft our slippers in cubbyholes, and entered a small room.

  "The lockers are for objects that are not allowed into the clean room, regular paper notebooks, cloth laptop cases and the like. I see that they have assigned a Dong-Bu technician to help us dress."

  Bo-Sung translated the instructions as we went along. I had to clean my eyeglasses in an ultrasonic cleaner, then dry them with a special lint-free cloth. Bo-Sung had to wipe his cell phone down with a special cloth. Cell phones in general were not allowed in the clean room, but an exception was being made for the chief detective.

  We washed our hands with ultra pure water in automatic sinks. When the washing cycle was over, the sink blew warm air on our hands to dry them.

  The next room was the 'smock room'. I have no idea if this is what they were called in Western countries, but those were the few English words that were on the sign that I saw. We put on white face masks, attached to our ears with elastic cords. The masks covered our faces from nose to chin. The 'smocks', as it turned out, were commonly called "bunny-suits". These were one-piece suits that covered us from head to ankle. A complicated set of ties, flaps and Velcro straps secured the hood around our faces. The technician helped us with this – it was not something that you would figure out on your own.

  The suits were in two colors, pink and blue. I though that it was a boy - girl thing, but as it turned out, blue was for company employees, while pink was for outside suppliers. We were pink bunnies.

  To complete the suit, we put on