Forcing his way back out of the crowd, ignoring angry expostulations, Gideon emerged on the far side and ran down Park Avenue. He glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had leapt the barrier or forced his way through the crowd. But no one had. He turned right, darted across the avenue against the light, and there—perfectly placed—was a cab disgorging its customer. He jumped in.
“West Hundred and Twentieth between Broadway and Amsterdam,” he said. “Go!”
The cabbie pulled out and Gideon watched the crowd as they sped away, but again no one appeared to be following or trying to hail another cab.
He glanced at his watch. Almost midnight. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Tom O’Brien’s number.
“Yo,” came the sarcastic voice. “Finally you’re calling at a decent hour, my man. Whassup?”
“I found out the secret Wu was carrying. It’s some special compound or alloy. And it’s embedded in his leg.”
“Cool.”
“I’m on my way to you with his X-rays. There’s a lot of crap in the legs from the car accident. I need your help pinpointing which spot it might be.”
“I’ll need to bring in Epstein—she’s the physicist.”
“I expected as much.”
“And then?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens when we identify the piece of metal?”
“I go to the morgue and cut it out.”
“Nice. How’re you going to manage that?”
“I’ve already established myself as Wu’s ‘next of kin,’ and they’ve been waiting for me to claim the body. It’ll be a piece of cake.”
A long, low wheezy laugh sounded over the cell phone. “Jeez, Gideon, you’re a piece of work, you know that?”
“Just be ready. I don’t have any time to waste.”
He hung up and dialed Orchid’s number. He hoped she’d be happy to hear he’d almost worked through the “trouble” he was in and that he would see her, if not tomorrow, then surely the day after.
Orchid’s cell was turned off.
He settled back in the seat with the sour thought that she was probably with a customer.
53
Merry Christmas to you, too,” said O’Brien, watching Gideon let himself in without knocking, as usual.
“Is this the guy you told me about?” said Epstein, half sitting, half lying on a small sofa, cranky at having been roused from her bed at such a late hour. Her hair was askew and she was in a particularly foul mood because, O’Brien realized, she’d been expecting something quite different when he woke her up in the middle of the night. She was always ready for a good shagging, it had to be said.
“Gideon, meet Epstein. Epstein, Gideon.”
“O’Brien called you Sadie,” said Gideon, shaking her hand, which she proffered limply.
“Anyone who calls me Sadie,” she drawled sleepily, “gets a bang on the ear. This better be good.”
“It is good,” said O’Brien, hurriedly launching into the lie he’d prepared. “You remember those numbers I gave you? Well, we’ve got X-rays of this smuggler, see, he got in an accident but he was carrying some contraband substance embedded in his leg to get it through customs—”
Epstein cut him short with a wave of her hand. She turned to Gideon. “You tell me what it’s all about.”
Gideon glanced at her. He looked too flat-out exhausted to lie. “For your own safety, it’s better you not know anything.”
She waved her hand. “Whatever. Let’s just get on with it.”
Tom O’Brien rubbed his hands together with excitement. He loved intrigue. “Bring on those X-rays.”
Gideon pulled them out from beneath his shirt. O’Brien swept a light table clean of clutter, laid them on it, snapped on the light. After a moment, Epstein roused herself and leaned over the table from her sitting position, glanced at them, then sat back. “Yuck.”
“Let’s recap,” said O’Brien, rubbing his hands together again. “This guy’s carrying something stuck in his leg, a piece of metal or something, and he’s memorized the ratios of the various elements it’s made up of. That’s what Epstein here thinks about those numbers you gave us. Right?”
She nodded.
“Right. So now we’ve got some X-rays, and we’ve got to figure out which one of these blots or spots is what we’re looking for. Want to take a closer look, Epstein?”
“No.”
“Why not?” O’Brien was starting to get irritated.
“Because I’ve got no idea what you’re looking for. Is it an alloy? An oxide? Some other compound? Each would react differently to X-rays. It could be anything.”
“Well, what do you think it is? You’re the condensed matter physicist here.”
“If you two bullshitters gave me some idea of what’s going on, maybe I could take a guess.”
O’Brien sighed and looked at Gideon. “Should we tell her?”
Gideon was silent for a moment. “Fair enough. But this is classified information—and it would endanger your life if others found out you knew of it.”
“Spare me the spy-versus-spy crap. I’m not going to say anything—nobody would believe me, anyway. Just tell me.”
“For some years,” said Gideon, “the Chinese have been working on a top-secret project at one of their nuclear installations. The CIA thinks it’s some kind of new weapon, but what I’ve learned doesn’t jibe with that. Instead, it appears to be some kind of technological discovery that would, allegedly, allow China to dominate the rest of the world.”
“Sounds unlikely,” Epstein said. “But go on.”
“A Chinese scientist was bringing this secret into the United States—not to give it to us, but for other reasons.”
Epstein had finally sat up and was displaying a certain interest. “And is this secret the thing that’s embedded in his leg?”
“Exactly. The secret came in two parts: the thing in his leg and those numbers we gave you. As I guess you’ve surmised, the two go together: you can’t figure out one without the other. The scientist was killed in a car accident. Those are the X-rays from the emergency room.”
Epstein scrutinized the X-rays with fresh interest. “The numbers,” she said, “indicated to me that we’re dealing with a composite material made of a number of complex chemical compounds or alloys.” She turned to O’Brien. “Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“I’ve got a loupe.” O’Brien rummaged around in a drawer, finally fishing it out. Examining the lens, he grimaced and wiped it clean on his shirttail before handing it to her.
She put it in her eye and bent over the X-rays once again, examining the white spots one after the other. “He really got creamed. Look at all this shit inside his legs.”
“It was a bad accident,” said Gideon.
Slowly, she moved from spot to spot on the X-ray. The minutes ticked off. After what seemed forever, she moved to the second film, and then the third. Almost immediately she stopped, examining one small fleck in particular. She looked at it a long time, and then straightened up, letting the loupe drop from her eye. Her whole face was shining, a transformation so complete that O’Brien took an involuntary step backward.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Unbelievable,” she breathed. “I think I know what we’re dealing with. Everything suddenly makes sense.”
“What?” both men asked at the same time.
She smiled broadly. “You really want to know?”
“Come on, Epstein! Don’t play games.” O’Brien could see her eyes glittering. He’d never seen her so excited.
“This is only a guess,” she said, “but it’s a good guess. It’s the only thing I can think of that fits the facts you’ve told me—and the peculiar thing I see on the X-ray.”
“What?” O’Brien asked again, more urgently.
She handed him the loupe. “You see that thing, there—the one that looks like a short, bent piece of wire?”
O’Brien leaned over and looke
d at it. It was about nine millimeters long, a medium-gauge piece of wire, irregularly bent.
“Look at the tips of the wire.”
He looked at the tips. Two black shadows with diffused ends. “Yeah?”
“Those shadows? Those are X-rays leaking out the ends of the wire.”
“Which means—?”
“That the wire somehow absorbed the X-rays and channeled, or redirected, them out through its ends.”
“And?” O’Brien looked up, took out the loupe.
“That’s almost unbelievable. A material that can capture and channel or focus X-rays? There’s only one material I know of that could do that.”
O’Brien exchanged glances with Gideon.
Epstein smiled mischievously. “I would direct your attention to the fact that it’s a wire.”
“Jesus, Epstein,” O’Brien cried. “You’re giving us a nervous breakdown! So what if it’s a wire?”
“What do wires do?” she asked.
O’Brien took a deep breath and glanced again at Gideon. He looked as impatient as O’Brien felt.
“Wires conduct electricity,” Gideon said.
“Exactly.”
“So?”
“So this is a special kind of wire. It conducts electricity—but in a different sort of way.”
“You’ve completely lost me,” O’Brien said.
“What we’re dealing with here,” she said, triumphantly, “is a room-temperature superconductor.”
A silence.
“Is that all?” O’Brien asked.
“Is that all?” She rounded on him incredulously. “It’s only the Holy Grail of energy technology!”
“I was expecting something that would…change the world,” O’Brien said lamely.
“This would transform the world, you dolt! Look. Ninety-nine percent of all electricity generated in the world is lost to resistance as it flows from source to use. Ninety-nine percent! But electricity flows through a superconducting wire without any resistance. Without any loss of energy. If you replaced all the transmission lines in America with wires made out of this stuff, you’d reduce electrical energy usage by ninety-nine percent.”
“Oh my God,” mumbled O’Brien as the impact sank in.
“Yeah. You could supply all US energy needs with just one percent of what it takes now. And that one percent could easily be supplied by existing solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear installations. No more coal and oil generating plants. Transportation and manufacturing costs would drop enormously. Electricity would be virtually free. Cars that ran on electricity would cost almost nothing to operate—they’d sweep away the gas-powered vehicle industry. The oil and coal industries would fold. We’re essentially talking the end of fossil fuels. No more greenhouse emissions, no more OPEC holding the world by the short hairs.”
“In other words,” Gideon said, “the country that controls this discovery would blow everyone else out of the water economically.”
Epstein laughed harshly. “Worse than that. The country that controls this material would control the world’s economy. It would rule the world.”
“And everyone else would be fucked,” O’Brien said.
She looked at him. “That is the technical term for it, yes.”
54
LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING.
It was two o’clock in the morning and Gideon Crew was getting tired of reading that same motto above the door into the morgue, over and over again. It irritated him; it managed to be macabre and smug at the same time. As far as he could see, there wasn’t anything delightful about this grim and noisome place—or about death, for that matter.
He’d been waiting for forty-five minutes, and his impatience had almost reached its limit. The receptionist seemed to be moving as if underwater, shifting a piece of paper here, another there, taking a call, murmuring in a low voice, her long red fingernails clicking and clacking as she shuffled her paperwork.
This was ridiculous. He stood up, walked over. “Excuse me? I’ve been waiting almost an hour.”
She looked up. The nails ceased clacking. Black roots showed through the bleached-blond tease. She was a hard New Yorker of the old school. “We had a homicide come in. Tied up our personnel.”
“Homicide? Wow, that must be a rarity in New York City.” Gideon wondered, through the fog of irritation, if that was the one he’d seen at Saint Bart’s earlier. “Look, my…partner is in some cold drawer in there, and I just want a few minutes alone with him.” He put an aggrieved whine into his voice. “Just a few minutes.”
“Mr. Crew,” she said, unfazed, “you realize, don’t you, that the remains of your partner have been sitting here for five days, awaiting your instructions? You could have come in at any time. The file here says we’ve tried to contact you at least—” She checked her computer. “—half a dozen times.”
“I lost my cell phone,” he said. “And I’ve been traveling.”
“Okay. But you can’t expect to drop in at one in the morning and have everything ready and waiting, now, can you?” She gave him an uncompromising look.
Gideon felt sheepish and defeated. She was right, of course. But the box cutter was burning a hole in his pocket; the X-rays were doing the same in his shopping bag; and he couldn’t stop thinking of Nodding Crane and what he might be doing right now, whether he was around, whether he had staked out the morgue. The longer he had to wait, the more time he was giving Nodding Crane.
“How much longer?” Gideon asked.
The red nails went back to clacking and moving paper. “I’ll let you know when someone’s free.”
He sat back down and stared moodily at the motto again. He could hear faint sounds coming from behind the stainless-steel double doors, well dented by the incessant pounding of stretchers. Something was going on in there—the homicide, no doubt. Now he felt sure it was the one at Saint Bart’s. That would be big: someone murdered in one of the oldest and most venerable churches in New York, with one of the wealthiest congregations, to boot.
“What’s through those doors?” Gideon asked.
The woman looked up again. “Autopsy, coolers, offices.”
There was more noise from beyond the double doors, a vague murmur of excitement and activity. He glanced at the clock. Almost two thirty now.
The intercom on the receptionist’s desk squawked. She answered it in a hushed voice, then looked over at him. “Someone’s coming to help you now.”
“Thank you.”
A man, dressed in none-too-clean whites, bumped out through the doors. He was badly shaven, little dots and pimples of blood on his neck. He raised a clipboard, read from it. “George Crew?”
“That’s Gideon. Gideon Crew.”
Without another word he turned, and Gideon followed him through the doors. “I’d like to have a moment with him—alone,” he said to the man’s back.
No reply.
They walked down a long, bright, linoleum corridor that ended in another set of doors leading, it seemed, into the autopsy room itself. Through the door windows he had a glimpse of a row of stainless-steel and porcelain tables, several orange medical-waste bins, stacks of Tupperware containers. He could see a group around one of the tables, including detectives and cops. Must be the murder victim.
“This way, please.”
Gideon turned to follow the man through another door, down another corridor, and finally into a long room, lined on either side with metal drawers. A company logo identified them as SO-LOW, INC. equipment. The “coolers.”
The aide consulted his clipboard, his lips moving silently, and then, lips still moving, looked down the rows of drawers until he found the right one. He unlocked it with a key on a spiral cord held around his waist and slid the drawer out. A gray plastic body bag appeared, zipped up tight. The bitter-cherry smell of formaldehyde bit into Gideon’s nostrils, not even coming close to covering the smell of dead human meat.
> “Um. You sure this is Mark Wu?” Gideon found himself unaccountably nervous.
“What it says here.” The man compared his clipboard with a number on a tag clipped to the bag.
Gideon could feel the hard plastic handle of the box cutter in his pocket. Despite the chill air of the morgue, the handle was slick from his sweaty hand. This was going to be an ordeal. He swallowed, tried to steel himself for it.
“I want a moment alone with him,” Gideon said, ending the request with a quick little fake sob. It didn’t come off well, sounding more like a hiccup.
This time, a nod. It seemed the aide was no more eager to stay in here than Gideon was. “Five minutes?”
“Um, how about ten?” Another sob, this one better.
A grunt of approval. “I’ll wait in the hall.”
“Thank you.”
The man went out and the door swung shut behind him. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly; the forced-air system hissed; the smell in the room was so strong, Gideon felt like it was coating him.
Ten minutes. He’d better get his ass moving. Pulling out the X-rays, he rechecked the location of the wire. It was on the inside of the left thigh, where Wu could have gotten to it readily. For the same reason, it wouldn’t be deep. With luck, the mark or scab of its insertion would still show—assuming the skin hadn’t deteriorated that badly over the last five days. He took a deep breath, then reached over and grabbed the zipper. It felt like a little cold worm between his thumb and finger. He hesitated, took another breath. And then he drew down the zipper, exposing the face, the naked hairless chest, its Y-incision crudely sewn back together after the autopsy. The body had been sponged off badly, leaving behind streaks and bits of clotted blood, various strings of one thing or another. There were numerous cuts and lacerations that had been sewn up more carefully, obviously during the time Wu was still alive.
The smell was overpowering.
With his left hand he pulled the box cutter from his pocket, wiped it dry, thumbed open the blade. It was time. With a final jerk he pulled the zipper all the way down—and stared. Shocked. Speechless.
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