“Simon, what is it?” Emily pressed him as his gaze shifted, off into space as some internal computations seized his thinking. “Simon.”
“They were already there when you arrived this time,” Simon told her. “So you were tracked the first time you came.”
“How could they have tracked me?”
There was no physical tracking device. No transmitter. Securing either to both her and the car would have been impossible. Meaning…
“There were only two of them,” Simon said, looking to Emily. “If they were sure you were here they would have sent more than two.”
He was right, Emily knew. Her gaze shifted out the open barn door, fearing that the remainder of those seeking Simon would be descending on them at any second.
“They’re spread out,” Simon said. “Because the method they used to track you to The Ranch the first time has degraded. That means it has to be…”
His brain shifted again, ceasing communication with the world outside as neurons fired rapidly, drawing upon all that he knew, and all that he’d absorbed, particularly in the more recent past.
“Three years ago,” he said, emerging from the focused state. “Decay parameters of nuclides based upon environmental factors and time differential.”
“What are you talking about?”
He stared at Emily, taking a step toward her now. “I was asked to verify the efficacy of a nuclide substance under varying conditions. Dr. Michaels said it was a medical question, but the variables they gave me included the effects of wind and rain.”
“Efficacy?” Emily repeated, her frustration growing. “Simon, we don’t—”
“It doesn’t rain inside the human body, Emily!” Simon shouted. “There’s no wind inside a person. It wasn’t doctors asking me questions then, it was someone else who wanted to use a nuclide substance for tracking purposes.”
“Tracking,” she said. “Tracking me?”
“Anybody,” Simon said. “But this time, yes, you. Someone put a nuclide marker on you. They tracked it, tracked you, the first time directly to The Ranch. Today, with the time since you were marked, the substance degraded. It only gave them a wide area to search.”
“That’s over a week, Simon,” Emily said. “You’re saying that stayed on me through showers and changes of clothes until now.”
He shook his head. “It didn’t have to. It was in the hood. They made you wear it both times. The first time the nuclides transferred to its fabric, and this time it transferred back to you with less efficacy.”
“Efficacy again,” Emily said, looking to Simon. Taking in the simple sight of him. A sight that told her so little about who he was, who he’d been, and what he was capable of. “How can you possibly know all this?”
“I don’t know everything,” he said, embarrassed by the answer he could give to her question. “But I know most things. The rest I can figure out.”
Like the code he’d broken, Emily thought. Bits of nonsense that meant nothing to anyone else. But to Simon Lynch, they were puzzle pieces that his brain shifted into place in miraculous ways.
“So it’s still on me,” Emily said. “Enough of it.”
Simon nodded. “And on me. And the car.”
“Can we wash it off?”
“Yes,” Simon answered.
Emily looked behind, to a space that had been a horse stall behind the covered minivan. Now it was filled with a collection of supplies, including plastic 5-gallon jugs of water. She went to the stall and retrieved two of the containers, struggling with one in each hand as she brought them back toward Simon.
“Shower time,” she said. “It’s going to be cold.”
Their breath was pulsing out in billowing white puffs, but there was no choice. And no time to reenter the house for a leisurely warm shower. Emily unscrewed the cap of one of the jugs and lifted its forty pounds onto her shoulder.
“Crouch down,” she instructed Simon.
He did as she said and she poured the freezing water over him, bits of ice raining down as he was doused, soaking him to the bone. When the jug was empty she tossed it aside.
“My turn,” she said.
“I don’t think I can lift it,” Simon said.
He wasn’t skin and bones, but there was little muscle mass about him, especially in his arms. Emily lifted the jug and placed it awkwardly atop the tarped minivan and unscrewed the lid.
“Just help me steady it,” she said.
Simon placed his hands on the container and helped Emily tip it toward her as she let the water spill over her from head to toe. When it was almost empty she stopped, reserving the remainder for something else. She carried the jug to the Taurus and poured the last of the water over the shotgun resting on its hood.
“I held that,” she said.
“Yes,” Simon agreed.
Finished, she discarded the second jug and grabbed the tarp covering the vehicle and pulled, revealing the minivan beneath. The hood was slightly up, a pair of wires running from the engine compartment beneath to a spot in the dim corner of the barn. Emily lifted the hood and removed clips from the battery terminals.
Over time, without charging, the voltage available from a lead-acid battery will decrease to the point that…
The factoid rattled through Simon’s thoughts as he watched Emily disconnect the trickle charger and close the hood. She came back around the car and grabbed the shotgun and opened the minivan’s driver’s door.
“Let’s go,” Emily said.
Shivering, Simon nodded and took his place in the passenger seat. Emily turned the heater up to high and pulled out of the barn, leaving the door wide open behind as she sped down the driveway toward the road.
Thirty Four
They drove east along the interstate, leaving Kansas behind as night fell. The dark farmlands of Missouri seemed to swallow all that the world had been in clear daylight.
“Do you know where we’re going?”
Emily glanced to the passenger seat. Simon sat there, eyeing her with earnest anticipation of the answer she would give. But she had none.
“Not yet.”
She had no collection of safe houses. Just the one had seemed a prudent precaution in the false life she’d led. In this life, though, the real life she’d returned to, it had not been enough.
But those preparations she’d made were still paying off. The minivan, which she’d envisioned as a method of transportation to carry her into the nearest town from her farm, had also been provisioned for a situation just as the one they faced now—a hasty flight from the very place she’d bought as a refuge. Under the rearmost seat a small stock of food and water had been placed, along with a few thousand dollars in twenties. Clothes she’d stashed there would, when a stop was possible, replace those which were slowly drying as she wore them. She had none to offer Simon, who had one of several blankets from the back drawn tight around him.
“We’ll get you some new clothes when it’s safe,” Emily told him.
Simon nodded and focused out the windshield again. On the road ahead taking them into the darkness. He wondered if Emily actually had some idea where they were going. She did not seem like the type of person to do what she had without some plan.
But that plan had been interrupted. As others had.
Dr. Michaels’ plan to expand his use of Simon’s mind had been interrupted. Both by Emily, and by the men who’d attacked The Ranch.
Why now?
That question rose in Simon’s thoughts not as it would for someone else. Someone who was not him. Like all unknowns, it came as something that needed to be solved. A void of understanding. That part of him which once had accepted those challenges as unremarkable existed now in a person who was troubled by this unknown.
“What’s wrong?”
Emily’s question took Simon by surprise.
“Why do you think something’s wrong?”
“I glanced over and the look on your face was almost like you were in pain,” Emily sai
d.
“I guess that’s how I look when I don’t have the answer.”
“The answer to what?”
He’d spent his entire life calculating on his own. Solving on his own. In his head, there were no distractions. But there was also no input from another. When he’d figured out the method that was almost certainly used to track Emily while they stood together in the barn, information she provided hastened the conclusion he’d come to. He would have come to it eventually without her help, but she had helped.
Maybe she could again.
“I’m trying to figure out why those people came after me now,” Simon said. “I know they tracked you to find where I was, but what made them want to take me?”
“You’re special,” Emily said.
“I’ve always been special,” he countered. “But they haven’t always wanted me. What made them want me now?”
Emily knew there was a piece of information she could offer. One more layer of detail to an event she’d already shared with Simon. But it would hurt him, she imagined. Or make the hurt he already felt even deeper.
“Simon, I want to tell you something about Art.”
“What about him?”
“I told you he killed himself,” Emily said. “I didn’t tell you why.”
Simon shifted in the passenger seat, angling himself more toward her.
“He took his own life to protect you,” Emily said.
“What do you mean?”
“The people who came after you at The Ranch also went after Art,” she explained. “It seems likely they thought they could get to you through him. He killed himself to prevent them from getting any information out of him.”
As she drove she glanced between Simon and the road, a skim of tears glistening suddenly in his eyes. He turned away, facing forward again.
“I’m sorry, Simon,” Emily said. “That shows how much he cared for you.”
It did. But it also pointed to something else—determination. Someone wanted him a great deal.
Why? What could he offer?
The logical answer rose quickly in his thoughts.
“I’m valuable,” Simon said aloud.
“Yes,” Emily agreed.
“No,” Simon said, shaking his head. “To someone I’m valuable. Maybe indispensable. Someone knows that I can do something for them. The only way that’s possible is if I’ve already done it.”
Emily mulled that for a few seconds, then she, too, came to the same conclusion Simon apparently had.
“It’s someone Michaels already had you in contact with,” she said.
“Yes,” Simon confirmed, though a hint of doubt trailed off the word as he spoke it. “Except that person wouldn’t need me if they’d already talked to me.”
“Maybe they needed more,” Emily suggested.
Simon didn’t answer her. He settled quickly into a state where his brain began running through every contact he’d had with the outside world while at The Ranch. Every scientist, doctor, and engineer. Every problem put to him. Every possible outcome of the research he’d aided or validated. Each contact became the center of a spreading web where he weighed likelihoods and certainties. And values.
I gave someone something…
Everything had been presented to him as innocuous. From the flow rate of water at certain depths over precise surfaces to the decay rate of nuclides in the environment, and hundreds of other solutions he’d provided. Somewhere among those many answers were some that people were willing to kill for.
Or just one.
‘My name is Dr. Stanislaw Venn…’
The man had spoken in heavily accented English. What made him, and this interaction remarkable, was that it was only one of two times that Simon had been face to face, via a video link, with a human being beyond the confines of The Ranch. Once had been with a woman who spoke with a British accent and asked him probing questions about a series of numbers and letters. He deduced from the exchange that she was trying to test a possible code sequence, and was doing so through direct interaction to determine if verbal passage of information had any effect on the speed of its decryption. It didn’t. Not in his case. Simon had almost instantly decoded what she said, and what had later been shown to him as printed cyphertext.
Venn, though, had not been interested in codes. He’d been interested in destruction.
“A man spoke to me directly at The Ranch,” Simon said. “It was over the video link that Audra usually operated. Dr. Michaels only let that happen twice.”
“Who was the man?” Emily asked.
“His name was Stanislaw Venn,” Simon told her. “He was Russian. He told me that as he tried to engage me in conversation. But I wasn’t verbally communicative at that point. Not when it was just small talk.”
“There was more than small talk, though,” Emily said. “Wasn’t there?”
“There was.”
Emily thought for a moment, then noted a sign ahead. She slowed the minivan and took the gentle exit, steering into a rest stop and taking an open parking spot just past the small structure which housed restrooms. She turned the engine off and swiveled in the seat to face her passenger.
“What did he want from you, Simon?”
“He had a theory he wanted to validate.”
“What kind of theory?”
‘Let us talk physicist to genius, shall we?’
That was how the man had segued into a detailed discussion of his proposal, and calculations necessary to make it whole. Simon remembered the exchange as if it were a fresh recollection from only moments ago. Venn had done almost all the talking, but he seemed to know enough to use terms which would stimulate a response. In a way, he had talked to that part of Simon that few could. Almost as an equal. He would offer a problem and hint at some calculus to solve it. Most of what he’d offered in that manner was wrong, purposely he now realized, and Simon had seized immediately upon the incorrect assumptions. That had been enough impetus to ignite an almost fevered push toward correctness.
Toward the success.
“It involved angular collisions of subatomic particles,” Simon told Emily. Beyond the windows of the car a wash of white lit up the nearly empty rest stop as an eighteen-wheeler blasted by on the interstate. “He wanted confirmation that his calculations were correct.”
“And were they?”
Simon nodded. “But I wish they weren’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“It would not go well if he attempted to prove it,” Simon said. “His theory involved a new way to create an uncontrolled release of energy.”
A memory flashed quickly in Emily’s head. Just a snippet of a news brief she’d absently seen while waiting in her hotel to meet with Schur in Minneapolis. It had been something about an explosion in the east of Russia. A massive explosion, one detected by satellites. A team of researchers and their leader had been killed. It hadn’t meant anything to her then, but now it did, for one simple reason—what sort of explosions did satellites look for?
“There was an explosion in Russia at some research facility,” she told him. “It was on the news. The person running some experiment was killed among others. It was big enough to be detected from space. Could that have been… Would Venn have…” She paused as she stumbled mentally through questions to pose. Finally, she decided upon the most direct query possible. “Simon, are you talking about a nuclear weapon?”
He didn’t nod. Didn’t shake his head. He simply let a breath escape, one that he seemed to have been holding since their conversation began.
“It’s more than that.”
“More than a nuclear weapon?” Emily pressed him, both curious and unnerved by what he was implying.
Simon looked away from her, to the stars in the black sky beyond the windshield.
“Venn thought that streams of particles meeting at a precise angle while passing through a fissile target would amplify any reaction.”
“Fissile,” Emily said, enough high sch
ool and college physics bubbling up to haunt her comprehension. “Bomb material.”
“Uranium two-thirty-five,” Simon confirmed. “A minute amount compared to what is needed for conventional nuclear weapons. There’d be virtually no radioactive contamination because the reaction is extremely efficient in converting the mass to energy.”
Emily let her head ease back against the headrest as she tried to piece together how Simon’s confirmation of Venn’s theory had made him vulnerable. Especially if Venn had demonstrated its validity in some uncontrolled detonation in the wastelands of Mother Russia.
“You can just ask me,” Simon said.
Emily turned and saw that he was staring at her.
“Whatever you’re trying to figure out, I already have.”
She straightened and angled her body awkwardly in the driver’s seat to face him.
“You’re talking about subatomic particles and streams,” Emily said. “That sort of thing requires some large hardware.”
“A particle accelerator,” Simon confirmed.
“Okay. And you’re suggesting that Venn conceived of some way to use a particle accelerator to initiate a nuclear explosion using only a minute amount of uranium, or plutonium, or whatever.”
“Weapons grade fissile material,” Simon said. “Five grams or less.”
“That’s not even an ounce,” Emily said, doing the rough conversion.
“Just over a sixth of an ounce,” Simon corrected her.
“So a very small amount,” Emily said. “So small a terrorist group, or a fourth-rate nation state, could get their hands on it from some rogue Pakistani scientist on the blackest of black markets.”
“But they would also have to have the angles,” Simon said.
“And a particle accelerator,” Emily added.
Now, though, Simon shook his head.
“The streams can be mimicked with precisely timed micro explosions,” Simon explained. “Not conventional compressive waves like you find in standard nuclear detonations, but waves that ricochet off each other as they interact with the fissile target. Venn knew this.”
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