Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon

  “This make any sense to you,” Groves said to Oppenheimer, “or am I the only one who still doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”

  “Let him finish,” Oppenheimer said, interested.

  “What exactly am I not supposed to tell the President?” Groves said.

  “Well, what exactly do you tell him?” Connolly answered. “We can’t prove anything. I made a lucky guess and Eisler confessed. Maybe he was crazy. This is a guy who kills himself with radiation, so how reliable is he? Maybe I’m crazy. You’ve only got my word that he said anything.”

  “He talked to me too,” Oppenheimer said, playing devil’s advocate.

  “And maybe he was lying. For whatever reason. Who knows why? Maybe none of it happened. Can we prove it did?”

  “He wasn’t lying,” Oppenheimer said.

  “No. He wasn’t. But we’re the only ones who know that. Look around,” Connolly said, sweeping his hand toward the sunny mesa. “Anything seem wrong to you? Any reason to think—any proof—that something’s wrong? What do you believe, General? Do you believe me? Do you think I was taken in by a crazy man telling stories? Maybe I’m telling stories—that’s what I get paid to do. All you’ve got is my word. Do you trust me that much?”

  “You’re wasting time,” Groves said. “I don’t have to trust you. If Dr. Oppenheimer says it’s true, then it is. We have to do something.”

  “Then let me finish what I started. You know as well as I do that once they get hold of this, we’ll have a Chinese fire drill around here. Everybody’ll want to do something. I can hear them already. ‘Why didn’t you tighten security? How could it happen?’ You’ve got a new President. Do you know him? Is he going to back you up when everybody starts jumping up and down? He’d have to do something. Maybe he’d start at the top.”

  Groves frowned, not saying anything.

  “The point is, we don’t know. But the odds are they won’t be able to fix anything and they’ll make one hell of a mess trying.”

  Oppenheimer looked over at Groves, waiting.

  Groves stared at the ground, moving his foot in thought. “You’re a good talker,” he said to Connolly, “but you don’t know what you’re asking. I can’t do it. I have to tell him.”

  “Maybe. But not quite yet. All I’ve raised is a suspicion. You’d have to investigate to find out if there’s anything to it. You’re not putting the project itself in danger. This isn’t about sabotage. And you don’t want to send out any false alarms. If there’s the possibility of a security leak, you’d have to try and plug it. It’s your project—you’d have to decide the best way to go about that.”

  “And that’s you.”

  “It’s not them. It’s a chance, I know. But we’ll never get it if this goes beyond the three of us. I could delay telling you,” he said, looking directly at Groves. “I’m independent. Maybe I didn’t want to come to you until I had more to go on. I should have, but—”

  “It would be your head,” Groves said.

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t have any choice.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I’m not in the army. It’s easier for me. I just—wanted to close the case.”

  Groves looked around, glancing over toward the Jemez Mountains. “But you weren’t the only one there. That leaves you, Robert.”

  Oppenheimer took a drag on his cigarette, then looked at Groves. “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Connolly. We wouldn’t know any of it. Under the circumstances—” He paused. “I think he might be given a little more rope.”

  Groves was silent. “You hang yourself with it,” he said finally. “Dr. Oppenheimer’s out of it. That understood?”

  Connolly nodded. “You’ll have everything you need for the record. If you need it. I just delayed telling you. Both of you.”

  “I don’t like this,” Oppenheimer said.

  “No, he’s right,” Connolly said. “You can’t have anything to do with this. You know, it could have happened this way,” he said, turning to Groves. “You wouldn’t know anything about it if I hadn’t told you.”

  “Why did you?” Groves said.

  “I need your help.”

  He had been looking at Groves, but it was Oppenheimer who said, “What do you have in mind?”

  “First, some classified papers, something to hook him. Something Eisler’s already handed over, so they know it’s real, but that somebody else might have access to. Bait. Could you do that?”

  Oppenheimer nodded.

  “Wait a minute,” Groves said. “You want to pass classified documents?”

  “Something they already have,” Connolly said. “Or Eisler said they have. If we believe him. But we do believe him, don’t we?”

  “I can’t allow this. Do you know what it means if—”

  “Yes, but I won’t get caught. I’m not planning to go to jail.”

  “How about first telling me what in God’s name is going on?” Groves said irritably, wiping his forehead. “And do we have to stand out here in the sun?”

  Connolly nodded and began leading them toward the shade of the water tower. “There’s only one way to do this. We have to give him another Eisler. We don’t know how they put people here. Maybe there isn’t anybody else. But either way, they’re going to need a new source. It’s late. They’re hungry.”

  “Just who did you have in mind?” Oppenheimer said.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Ideally, a scientist, of course, but it’s too tricky and there isn’t enough time. We have to assume they’ve got a list of the scientists working on the project—that would be the first thing they’d ask for.”

  Groves groaned out loud.

  “So it’s too easy to check,” Connolly continued. “They’d spot a marker right away, just from the list. Who’s the new guy? Never heard of him. And of course if they do have somebody else up here, he’d spot it as a ghost. Then there’s the background. We say our man’s from Berkeley, they check Berkeley. It’s a fairly small community, isn’t it? It’s unlikely you’d have a spare physicist up here nobody’s ever heard of.”

  “Quite,” Oppenheimer said. “Are you proposing to use a real person?”

  “No. You’ve got four thousand people up here. Technical support comes and goes. We make up a dummy file in one of these areas. Maybe the Special Engineering Detachment. There are always new SEDs coming in. But someone who could put his hands on the papers. An idealist,” he said to Groves, who was watching him with growing discomfort. “You could set up some army records, couldn’t you? I’ll make up a project folder—bio, clearance, the usual. Just put it in the files. If we’ve got a leak up here, he’ll know where to go and we’ll have it all ready for him.” He looked up at the giant tower, crisscrossed wooden slats rising to support the broad tank, Los Alamos’s Empire State Building. “Maybe we’ll call him Waterman.”

  “There’s a Waterman in metallurgy,” Oppenheimer said.

  “Okay, Waters, then. Steve, I think. That sounds about right. Corporal Steve Waters, SED. The rat.”

  “You think this is funny?” Groves said impatiently. “I fail to see anything funny about it. I don’t know what we’re playing at here. This isn’t some petty crime anymore.”

  Connolly reddened at the schoolboy reprimand. “What makes a crime petty—the amount you steal?”

  “Don’t start with me.”

  “It’s the same,” Connolly said. “Same people who knock over a liquor store. Calling them agents doesn’t make them smarter. Who do you think does this, anyway? Masterminds? I’m not trying to break up the rackets, I’m just looking for a guy who got jumpy with a tire iron.”

  Groves snorted and looked away, his eyes following a coal delivery truck rumbling toward Boiler No. 1.

  “There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” Oppenheimer said, as if nothing had happened. “Your phantom Corporal Waters has some valuable papers to offer. How do you let the
m know? Put an ad in the papers?”

  “I assume there’s a network. Our rent collector may be only one link, but no one works alone on that end. You know, like the numbers,” he said, looking at Groves. “I need to get access to the network, someone to pass on the invitation. If they’re as efficient as we think they are, they’ll come calling.”

  “You know someone like that?” Groves said. “Why don’t we just haul him in?”

  “Anyone can pass a message. I thought of your brother,” he said to Oppenheimer, then turned to Groves. “But I suspect you’re already having him watched. That would complicate things.”

  No one said a word. Groves, already red and sweating, flushed and looked away.

  “Frank left the party,” Oppenheimer said quietly. “Some time ago.”

  “And they’d probably think it was all a little too good to be true,” Connolly continued. “They’d want to be very careful with anyone close to you, and we don’t have time for that. There’s someone else. I don’t know if he’s involved in the party’s extracurricular activities or not. I doubt it. But he’d know someone who is, or someone who knows someone. We just need to get the ball started and hope they pick it up and run with it. It may not work. It’s only a chance.”

  “He’d be taking a chance too, your friend,” Oppenheimer said thoughtfully. “He’d have to trust you. Would he?”

  Connolly met his gaze. “Yes, he would.”

  “He’s here?” Oppenheimer said tentatively.

  “No. That’s where I need your help, General,” Connolly said, drawing the still sulking Groves back to the conversation. “I assume you could get a Section 1042 file without raising any eyebrows? That’s alien registration.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “I need an address. Current.”

  “Name?”

  Connolly looked at him. “Are we on with this or not?”

  Groves hesitated for another minute, then sighed. “Name?”

  “Matthew Lawson,” Connolly said. “Brit. Here since before the war. New York, maybe. Can you get it?”

  Groves nodded. “If they’ve got him on file, I can get it. Who is he?”

  “You don’t want to know that. In fact, from now on you don’t want to know anything. You don’t want to know what I’m doing. You’d need to be able to say that. Honestly. I’m just—late telling you about Eisler. That’s all.”

  Groves nodded again, then folded his arms across his chest. “One thing. If I don’t know, I won’t be able to say anything to Army Intelligence. If they should get the idea to put you under surveillance. I can’t call them off.”

  “I know.”

  “The minute you take those papers out of here you’re breaking the law.”

  “Let’s see how good they are. It’ll be a test for them.”

  “Test,” Groves said grumpily. “I don’t like any of this. Any of it. This place. It was easier building the Pentagon.”

  But Oppenheimer was looking at Connolly with amusement. “Mr. Connolly has a flair for the clandestine. Have you done this before?”

  Connolly thought of motel rooms and glances avoided in Fuller Lodge. “Just lately.”

  “Are we finished here? Can we go back and cool off before I change my mind?” Groves said.

  “We’re finished,” Connolly said. “I’m going over to the hospital to get Eisler’s things. I’ll go through his place one more time. You never know. When you get the address,” he said to Groves, “maybe you’d better send it through the telex line. The code’s safer.”

  “One more thing,” Groves said, putting his damp jacket on. “You want me to go out on a limb for you. No questions. So just tell me one thing: what do you think the odds are this can actually work?”

  Connolly shook his head. “The odds are always good when it’s the only hand you’ve got.”

  His bravado evaporated as he walked toward the infirmary. How many times did a long shot come in? Except this time it wasn’t just the bet, it was what he’d have to use to make it. Everything would depend on her. It wasn’t right. But it had sat there, his only idea, and he’d had to pick it up. He wondered, in that moment, why he’d jumped at it, excited by something he knew was wrong, then caught in a tangle of inevitability, deaf now even to himself. Could he lose her? No, he’d stop if it came to that. He thought of Eisler in his lab, those desperate seconds lowering the cube before it went critical. The trick was to stop in time, before the dragon turned. But what if it took on a life of its own? What if simply starting the process demanded its only conclusion? He looked around the Hill—clothes near the McKee units flapping on lines in the bright, dry air; a repairman high up on one of the overhead transformers; soldiers in jeeps—and it seemed to him utterly ordinary. Everyone was just getting on with the day, making a bomb.

  In the infirmary, someone was sitting on Eisler’s bed. He took in the bruised side of the face, the bandage over the forehead cut, before he recognized Corporal Batchelor.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I walked into a door,” Batchelor said, his voice flat. Next to the neat pile of Eisler’s effects, his battered face was jarring, the disorder of violence. “How did you hear?” he asked, embarrassed.

  “I didn’t. I came for these. Are you all right?”

  The boy nodded.

  “That must have been some door,” Connolly said, moving toward Eisler’s things. “You going to let him get away with it?”

  The soldier shrugged. “It was just a door. I’ll live.”

  “The unfriendly kind.”

  The boy smiled weakly, wincing a little from the cut at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, the big unfriendly kind. I’ll have to be more careful at the PX.”

  “Maybe next time you should just stay away,” Connolly said. Then, hearing the tone of his voice, “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “It’s all right,” the soldier said, his face weary. “I had it coming.”

  “Nobody has it coming,” Connolly said, suddenly angry for him, then aware that he didn’t know anything about it. What was it like living this way? Was every meeting a risk? He thought again of the ordinary world outside, so bright that it made any other invisible. And then it occurred to him that it might have been a different kind of misstep, the wrong question. Connolly’s fault.

  “This didn’t have anything to do with—I mean, I hope you weren’t—”

  “Snooping?” The boy shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. Just a door. I never heard a word, by the way. Since you ask.”

  “I know. He wasn’t—we made a mistake.”

  The boy looked at him. “So what was it?”

  “We know it wasn’t that. Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to bother anybody.”

  He nodded his head again. “Good. I’m glad about that, anyway.”

  “So don’t go banging into any more doors. Not because of that.”

  The soldier shrugged. “I’m just a bad judge of character, that’s all. I never was good at that. How about you?”

  The question caught Connolly off-guard, as if it had come from another conversation. “Not very. Sometimes.” He moved to gather up Eisler’s things. “I still think you’ve got a lot of guts, though.”

  The smile this time was fuller, a wry grimace. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “I also think you’re a damned fool to let him get away with it. You ought to turn the bastard in.”

  When Batchelor looked up at him, his eyes seemed almost pleading. “I can’t. Don’t you know that? That’s the way it works. I can’t.”

  Connolly thought about him as he walked toward Eisler’s apartment, carrying the valise. It shouldn’t be that easy to get hurt. He wondered what would happen to Batchelor after the war, when he would drift off the Hill to some other life, hidden from Connolly and everyone else until it showed up again on his face.

  At least his mystery had its bits of visible evidence. Eisler’s had receded with him. Here were the clothes, the books, the old pict
ures. Connolly sat smoking for a while in Eisler’s living room, peering at the walls as if some idea lurked there, waiting to be found. Then he started going through the books. He took them down from the shelves, flipped through, then made piles on the floor. Nothing. He remembered that first night in Karl’s room, the presence in those few neat possessions, someone who was still living there and had been delayed on his way back. But Eisler was gone, perhaps had never been here at all. All these objects, rooms full of them, pared away until finally there was only one idea. Those last weeks with Connolly had been his one brief contact. And then he had gone back into hiding. What was it like to believe so completely, to let everything go but one thing? What was it like not to care who got hurt? Standing there with a meaningless German book in his hand, Connolly felt the room go empty. An entire life for a single idea. And it had been wrong.

  15

  “I WON’T BLOODY do it,” she said, sitting up.

  “You’ve got to.”

  “I don’t.”

  She had gathered the crumpled sheet around her as if she had been surprised by an intruder. The room was warm, closed against the afternoon light.

  “You’re the only way it can work,” he said calmly.

  She stared at him, then jumped out of bed and grabbed the clothes off the floor. She held them in front of her, then turned to the bathroom door, tripping in the dimness. “Bugger,” she said, stumbling toward the window. When she jerked the cord of the shade, the light of the room, amber and erotic, flashed harsh white. A cheap rug and Formica table, Connolly sitting up in the messy bed. He watched her try to pull on her slip, turning it around to find the opening, anxious to be covered.