Carte Blanche

thousands of sheets of paper, blueprints and other documents on which were words, graphs and diagrams, many of them incomprehensible to Hydt.
    The atmosphere was eerie, to say the least, both because of the dimness and the clutter . . . and because of what decorated the walls.
    Images of eyes.
    Eyes of all sorts—human, fish, canine, feline and insect—photos, computerized three-dimensional renderings, medical drawings from the 1800s. Particularly unsettling was a fanciful, detailed blueprint of a human eye, as if a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein had used current engineering techniques to construct his monster.
    In front of one of the dozens of large computer monitors sat an attractive woman, a brunette, in her late twenties. She stood up, strode to Hydt and shook his hand vigorously. “Stella Kirkpatrick. I’m Mahdi’s research assistant.” She greeted Dunne too.
    Hydt had been to Dubai several times but had not met her before. The woman’s accent was American. Hydt supposed she was clever, hardheaded and typical of a common phenomenon in this part of the world, one that went back hundreds of years: the Westerner in love with Arab culture.
    Al-Fulan said, “Stella worked up most of the algorithms.”
    “Did you now?” Hydt asked, with a smile.
    She blushed, the ruddy color stemming from her affection for her mentor, whom she glanced at quickly, a supplication for approval, which al-Fulan provided in the form of a seductive smile; Hydt was not a participant in this exchange.
    As the decorations on the walls suggested, al-Fulan’s specialty was optics. His goal in life was to invent an artificial eye for the blind that would work as well as those “Allah—praise be to Him—created for us.” But until that happened he would make a great deal of money designing industrial machinery. He had come up with most of the specialized safety, control and inspection systems for Green Way’s sorters and document-destruction devices.
    Hydt had recently commissioned him to create yet another device for the company and had come here today with Dunne to see the prototype.
    “A demonstration?” the Arab said.
    “Please,” Hydt replied.
    They all walked back into the garden of machines. Al-Fulan led them to a complicated device, weighing several tons, sitting in the loading bay beside two large industrial refuse compactors.
    The Arab hit some buttons and, with a growl, the machine slowly warmed up. It was about twenty feet long, six high and five wide. At the front end a metal conveyor belt led into a mouth about a yard square. Inside, all was blackness, although Hydt could just make out horizontal cylinders, covered with spikes, like a combine harvester. At the rear, half a dozen chutes led to bins, each containing a thick gray plastic liner, open at the top to catch whatever the machine disgorged.
    Hydt studied it carefully. He and Green Way made a lot of money from destroying documents securely but the world was changing. Most data resided on computer and flash drives nowadays and this would be increasingly the case in the future. Hydt had decided to expand his empire by offering a new approach to destroying computer data storage devices.
    A number of companies did this, as did Green Way, but the new approach would be different, thanks to al-Fulan’s invention. At the moment, to destroy data effectively, computers had to be dismantled by hand and hard drives had to be wiped of data with magnetic degaussing units, then crushed. Other steps were required to separate the other components of the old computer—many of them dangerous e-waste.
    This machine, however, did everything automatically. You simply tossed the old computer onto the belt and the device did the rest, breaking it apart while al-Fulan’s optical systems identified the components and sent them to appropriate bins. Hydt’s salespeople could assure his customers that this machine would make certain not only that the sensitive information on the hard drive was destroyed but that all the other components were identified and disposed of according to local environmental regulations.
    At a nod from her boss, Stella picked up an old laptop and set it on the ribbed conveyor belt. It vanished into the dim recesses of the device.
    They heard a series of sharp cracks and thuds and finally a loud grinding noise. Al-Fulan directed his guests to the rear, where, after five or so minutes, they watched the machine spit the various sorted bits of scrap into