by Mark Alpert
Aryeh waited a few seconds, unperturbed. “Ah, that’s good,” he finally said. “Because Shin Bet is curious, too. They’d like to know how Loebner waltzed through the gate of an IDF installation, considering that his security credentials were revoked four years ago.”
“And why is Shin Bet so curious?” Rahm asked. “This is military security, not a police matter.”
“You know how it is.” Aryeh shrugged. “Some big shot in the Justice Ministry gets interested and starts shouting orders at his deputies. Typical government bullshit, eh?”
“You’re right, it’s bullshit. You and your American friends have no business being here.”
Aryeh smiled again and held out his hands in a placating gesture. “Look, Rahm, we don’t want to cause you any trouble. We just want Loebner. We can’t let him run around like a madman. He has too many nasty secrets in his head. So maybe you can tell us what he was doing at Soreq, yes? And maybe, please God, where he went afterward?”
Rahm said nothing at first. He just sat behind his desk, glaring at them, demonstrating his displeasure. Then he reached into one of the drawers and pulled out a folder. “Loebner didn’t waltz through the gate. He cut through the fence.” He handed the folder to Aryeh. “We believe he infiltrated the base at approximately ten o’clock on Tuesday evening. Unfortunately, we didn’t discover the breach until midnight.”
Aryeh opened the folder and leafed through it. “That’s a bit slow, eh? Don’t you have intrusion detectors on the perimeter?”
“We have motion sensors, infrared cameras, and closed-circuit video. But Loebner disabled the equipment in Sector 34. It’s all in the report.”
Lucille, who sat in the chair next to Aryeh’s, craned her neck to see the folder. Then she turned to Rahm. “I guess Loebner remembered his training, huh? From Sayeret Matkal?”
Rahm kept his eyes on Aryeh, refusing to look at Agent Parker. “Matkal is our Special Forces unit assigned to counterterrorism. They’re very good at infiltration.”
“How do you know it was Loebner who cut through the fence if all your cameras were down?”
“Only the cameras in Sector 34 were disabled. Once Loebner was on the base, he appeared on other surveillance videos. He wore his old IDF uniform, so he didn’t look suspicious to the security personnel who were monitoring the video feeds. But after we detected the perimeter breach, we reviewed the tapes and identified Loebner.” Rahm reached into his desk drawer again and pulled out a computer disk. “This holds the video taken by our cameras in Building 203. That’s Soreq’s supply warehouse. The camera at the front door shows Loebner entering the building at ten-seventeen P.M. on Tuesday. A minute later, the camera in the basement shows him walking toward the Long-Term Storage Room and punching in the room’s access code on the security panel. At ten fifty-two the cameras show Loebner coming out of the room and exiting the building. Then he left the base, presumably through the same breach in the fence.”
He handed the disk to Aryeh. Lucille stared at the thing, craning her neck again. “What’s in the Long-Term Storage Room?” she asked.
Rahm still wouldn’t look at her. “Miscellaneous items. From projects that have been discontinued and declassified. Our classified material is stored at a more secure location in Building 101. Most of the items in the Long-Term Storage Room are at least twenty years old.”
“What about Loebner’s research?” David interjected. “Does the room contain any materials related to his work on warhead designs?”
Very slowly, Rahm turned his head and fixed his eyes on David. Mentioning the word “warhead” had been a mistake. The expression on Rahm’s face shifted from cold to murderous. “I can’t comment on Loebner’s research. But I’ll repeat what I said before: classified material is stored at a different location. We wouldn’t keep it in the Long-Term Storage Room.”
“Well, is there anything missing from the room?” Monique asked. “Have you done an inventory yet?”
“Nothing’s missing,” Rahm replied. “But there’s been some damage.”
“What kind of damage?”
With a grunt, the security chief rose to his feet. “No more questions. I’ll take you to the storage room and show you. And then I very much hope that we’ll be finished with this business.”
NICODEMUS CROUCHED IN THE BUSHES OUTSIDE THE FENCE, ADJUSTING HIS binoculars to sharpen the focus on Soreq’s administration building. He’d known in advance where the meeting would take place. Thanks to Brother Cyrus’s informants in Shin Bet and the FBI, Nico had also learned Olam ben Z’man’s real name. Cyrus had devised a new plan for eliminating the Jew, and Nico’s job now was to shadow the Americans. He wasn’t very happy with this assignment; it was infuriating to do nothing but observe these kilab when every cell in his body was crying out for vengeance. But Cyrus had counseled him to be patient and Nico had obeyed. They were doing the Lord’s work and their reward would be in heaven.
The Americans and the Shin Bet agent came out of the administration building about fifteen minutes after they’d gone inside. Soreq’s security chief, another filthy kelb, led them across the parking lot toward a boxy gray structure that looked like a warehouse. David Swift and Monique Reynolds walked beside the FBI agent, a fat hag with silver hair. Nico clamped his lips together as he stared through the binoculars, feeling an excruciating mix of anger and anticipation. It won’t be long now, he whispered at his targets. The True Believers will pay you a visit very soon.
17
THEY SPOTTED THE DAMAGE AS SOON AS RAHM ESCORTED THEM INTO THE Long-Term Storage Room. It was a huge, well-lit, windowless space, filled with dozens of wooden crates arranged in neat rows. The crates were quite large, each big enough to hold a sofa, and they’d been stenciled with red Hebrew letters. The room’s walls were an unblemished white and the linoleum floor was immaculately clean. The place was so orderly, in fact, that David was a little startled when he saw the mangled aluminum object on the floor. It lay in an aisle between two of the rows, just in front of an opened crate. The area was marked off with yellow crime-scene tape, as if the wreckage were a corpse.
He and Monique moved closer, stepping in front of Aryeh and Lucille. They reached the strip of tape that stretched across the aisle and leaned over it so they could get a better look at the object. It was a big silver cylinder, about three feet in diameter and ten feet long. Oscar Loebner had apparently wrenched open its crate, pulled the thing out, and pummeled it with a hammer. The pounding blows had crumpled the cylinder and punched a gaping hole in its midsection. Through this gap David glimpsed smaller pieces of metallic debris: shattered struts and brackets, broken rods with jagged ends. Judging from its shape, he guessed that the object might be a missile casing. Aryeh had mentioned that the IDF launched missiles and satellites from Palmachim Air Base. Perhaps this broken cylinder had once been part of an experimental rocket. Maybe one that had been designed to carry a warhead.
It looked like Lucille was thinking the same thing. After inspecting the wreckage for several seconds, she stepped back from the crime-scene tape. Aryeh also backed away from the cylinder. “Tell me something, Rahm,” he said, turning to the security chief. “There’s nothing radioactive in that mess, is there?”
Rahm frowned. “I already told you, we don’t store any sensitive material here. Most of the items in this room are one step away from junk. Old and declassified and good for nothing.” He pointed at the Hebrew letters on the opened crate that had held the cylinder. “That shows the date when the crate was sealed—August fifth, 1989. Almost twenty-two years ago.”
“Well, what is it?” Monique asked, pointing at the wreckage. “If it’s declassified, you can tell us, right?”
Rahm reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook. He was still frowning, but now his expression seemed more perplexed than annoyed. “This item is so old, we had trouble identifying it. It came from a project called Cherev. That’s the Hebrew word for ‘sword.’” He opened his notebook and started reading fro
m one of the pages. “The project ran from 1984 to 1989. Researchers from Soreq’s Laser Science Laboratory and Satellite Development Group were involved.”
“Was Oscar Loebner working on the project, too?” David asked.
Rahm shook his head. “No, he worked in the Supercomputer Laboratory during those years. But researchers from the various labs at Soreq often meet at seminars and social events, so there’s a good chance that Loebner knew about Cherev.”
Monique continued to stare at the cylinder. “So is this thing a laser?” she asked. “Or a satellite?”
“It’s both.” Rahm turned to another page in his notebook. “It’s a laser that was supposed to be launched into orbit. But it never left the ground, obviously. The project was canceled in 1989, and the item has been sitting here ever since.”
“What was it supposed to do in orbit?”
“Unfortunately, our records don’t provide a complete description. Some of the documents were lost when Soreq digitized its archives in the nineties. We’ve tried getting in touch with the scientists who were in charge of Cherev, but two are dead now and the third has Alzheimer’s.”
Shit, David thought. Not another dead end. “Were there any younger people working on the project? Maybe research assistants?”
“We’re trying to locate them. And we’ve requested information from the American researchers who know about Cherev.”
This got Lucille’s attention. She stepped toward Rahm, narrowing her eyes. “American researchers?”
“Yes, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This was a joint project between Livermore and Soreq. The laboratories shared their results.”
Lucille grimaced, evidently irked that Rahm hadn’t mentioned this earlier. Livermore was one of the main nuclear-weapons labs in the United States. “Who are the American scientists?” she asked. “The Bureau can help you get in touch with them.”
“I have a list of the researchers involved.” Rahm flipped through his notebook until he found the page he wanted. “Yes, here it is. Livermore’s code name for the project was Excalibur. Which is also the name of a sword, correct?”
David felt a burst of hope. He’d heard of Excalibur. “Wait a second. Was this part of the Star Wars program? You know, Ronald Reagan’s missile-defense plan?”
Rahm shrugged. “The records don’t say. But it’s a good guess. The Americans and Israelis cooperated on missile-defense research during the eighties. For obvious reasons, Israel is very interested in the technology.”
David looked again at the wreckage on the floor, gazing in particular at the broken rods inside the cylinder. Yes, he recognized it now. He’d seen sketches of the device in books and articles. It was a relic of the cold war, forgotten by the general public but familiar to historians. He turned to Lucille. “I know about Excalibur,” he said. “It’s a special kind of laser, one that can shoot beams of X-rays. It was Dr. Strangelove’s last invention.”
Lucille raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Strangelove?”
“Edward Teller, I mean. The father of the H-bomb. Officially, he was retired by the 1980s, but he was still running the Livermore lab. He’s the guy who dreamed up Star Wars and convinced President Reagan that it could work.”
“Whoa, slow down,” Lucille said. “I’ve heard of Star Wars. But what the hell was Excalibur?”
“Excalibur was the showpiece for the whole program. Teller’s idea was to combine his X-ray laser with a nuclear warhead and launch the package into orbit. In the event of a missile attack from the Soviet Union, the U.S. Air Force would send a signal to detonate the warhead in space. Excalibur would channel the bomb’s energy into laser beams that would shoot down the Soviet missiles while they were arcing above the atmosphere.”
Monique gripped his elbow. She was nodding vigorously. “I’ve heard of this, too. The device had laser rods that could absorb the X-ray radiation from the nuclear blast, right? And each rod could be pointed at a different target, so the laser beams could shoot down a whole wave of missiles at once?”
“Yeah, it was a crazy strategy, insanely ambitious. The government spent hundreds of millions on it.” David leaned over the crime-scene tape and pointed at the debris inside the cylinder. “You see those jagged bits? Those are pieces of the laser rods. Each rod was about a meter long and made up of hundreds of metallic strands, all bundled together like the wires in a cable.” He shifted his hand and pointed at the broken struts. “That’s where the warhead would go. Just before launch, the nuke would be placed inside the cylinder, next to the laser rods. In the event of a detonation, the atoms in the metallic strands would absorb the radiation from the blast and release it in a laser beam that would travel down the length of the rod. The nuclear explosion would destroy the whole assembly, of course, but the laser beams would shoot from the ends of the rods just before the device vaporized. And because the beams would have a frequency in the X-ray range, they’d deliver much more energy than an ordinary laser, enough to bring down a Soviet missile.”
Monique let out a whistle. She stared at the cylinder for a few more seconds, then turned back to David. “It might’ve been a crazy strategy,” she said. “But as a piece of technology, it’s pretty amazing.”
“It was groundbreaking,” he conceded. “The Livermore researchers were trying to do something that had never been attempted. And they had some success in the initial tests. They built prototypes of Excalibur and positioned the X-ray lasers next to nuclear bombs at the Nevada test site. When the bombs exploded, the researchers detected laser beams coming from the prototypes. Teller predicted that Excalibur would be ready for deployment in a few years. But the project ran into technical problems and the government cut its funding. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended and the U.S. banned all nuclear tests. So Excalibur was canceled.” He nodded grimly. “And believe me, that was a damn good thing. We should be trying to eliminate nukes, not put them into space.”
To David’s surprise, no one argued with him. The room was silent. Then Aryeh stepped forward. “Okay, now we know what the thing is, yes? Livermore was sharing its information with Soreq, so the Israeli researchers must’ve built their own prototype laser. But why, after all these years, did Loebner come here to destroy it? Where’s the sense in that?”
“Maybe Loebner’s a traitor,” Lucille suggested. “Maybe he’s working with the Iranians. So he sabotages a defense system that could shoot down Iranian missiles.”
“But Excalibur wasn’t operational,” Aryeh pointed out. “The IDF put it in storage and forgot about it. And Israel has other missile-defense systems that are already in place—the Patriot rockets, the Arrow interceptors. If Loebner was interested in sabotage, why didn’t he go after those?”
“Because the operational systems have better security,” Lucille answered. “Loebner destroyed what he could, then disappeared.”
Aryeh flashed a skeptical half smile. He didn’t say anything, but he clearly disagreed.
David shook his head. “No, Loebner’s not the bad guy. We know he was working on an experiment with Jacob Steele. And at the moment of the Iranian nuclear test, they detected something that alarmed them. Some anomaly in the flow of time, some disruption in the workings of the—”
“You’re just speculating,” Lucille interrupted. “What we need is more information. We need to—”
“Loebner perceived the danger and took action.” David pointed once more at the broken cylinder. “Within hours of the nuclear test, he rushed over here and demolished this prototype. So Excalibur must be related to the danger. The X-ray laser is part of the threat.”
Resting her hands on her hips, Lucille gave him an incredulous look. “Excalibur is a defensive weapon, designed to shoot down missiles. How the hell could it be a threat?”
David shook his head again. He thought of what Monique had told him about It From Bit and the computational universe. He thought of the Caduceus Array, the pair of single-ion clocks hidden at Beit Shalom Yeshiva
and the University of Maryland. And he remembered the last time he’d seen Jacob Steele, in the corridor outside the lecture hall at Columbia. There’s something else, David thought. I’m missing something. It fluttered at the edge of his memory, just out of reach.
“I can’t explain it,” he said. “But I know I’m right.”
THE SUN WAS SINKING TOWARD THE MEDITERRANEAN BY THE TIME THEY left Soreq. Aryeh and Lucille sat in the front of the limo, as before, and David and Monique sat in the back, but no one talked or turned on the radio. They were no closer to finding Oscar Loebner. They’d discovered a new piece of evidence, but no clues to the man’s whereabouts. With enough time, perhaps, they could interview all of Loebner’s colleagues and retrace his movements and unravel the mystery of his disappearance—what he detected with the Caduceus Array, why he smashed the X-ray laser, and how he was connected to Michael’s kidnapping. But David knew they didn’t have enough time. Time was running out.
He looked out the window as they drove back to Jerusalem. The telephone poles beside the highway cast long shadows in the late-afternoon light, which gilded the neighboring fields. His greatest fear now was that Lucille would decide to go back to America. Given their lack of progress so far, she might want to return to New York and rethink the investigation. David knew this would be a mistake, but he had little hope of changing Lucille’s mind if she made that decision. Although he’d built up a good relationship with Agent Parker, in the end he was still just a civilian.
At the halfway point in the drive, where the highway climbed into the Judean Hills, Aryeh stopped for gas at a roadside station. Luckily, traffic was light and the station wasn’t busy. While Aryeh went to the gas pumps, Lucille opened her enormous black purse and pulled out a tube of lipstick. David glanced nervously at Monique, then turned to Lucille, leaning forward into the gap between the car’s bucket seats.
“So what happens now?” he asked. His voice was tense. “Do we stay in Israel or go back to the States?”
