Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

  She looked as if she’d been hit by an electrical bolt. “That is bullshit. I don’t have anything to do with that. That’s what you meant by me being guilty of something? That’s his fucking deal.”

  “It’s not what I meant,” Willy said blandly, in fact not knowing precisely what she was talking about. “But you have direct knowledge of an ongoing criminal act, plus, you benefit from it.”

  “What?”

  “Accessory to grand theft,” he intoned on the fly. “They could throw the book at you, ’specially since the best you’ll be able to swing’ll be a public defender.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No fucking way. I don’t get enough out of this deal for that.”

  “What can you give me, then?” he asked. “Like I said, you’re low-hanging fruit right now—a lot easier to grab than he is. Only you can change that.”

  She stabbed her unfinished cigarette out directly on the counter. “This is not fair.”

  “It is what it is,” he said, introducing a new angle for her to consider. “You gonna go back on the Oklahoma alibi?”

  “I would in a heartbeat,” she promised. “But there were others there, too. It was a goddamn convention, for Christ’s sake. There were hundreds of people.”

  “What about him and the business, then? What you told me before?”

  “What about it?”

  His voice hardened slightly. “Don’t get cute, or I’ll use the damn phone and this conversation’ll stop. You do not want that to happen, trust me.”

  “Shit,” she muttered, and fumbled around for a second cigarette.

  After lighting up and exhaling, she asked, “All right. What do you want to know?”

  “What’s he doing crooked?”

  “Well,” she sneered, “he’s cheating on his wife, for one.”

  He dismissed that impatiently. “Old news, kiddo. You implied he was dipping into the till.”

  She scowled at him again, clearly feeling boxed in. “I don’t know the details,” she said quietly.

  He slid forward in his chair, as if preparing to leave. “So you jerked me around,” he said flatly. “That’s cool. I gotta tell you, though, we already know he’s dirty, and we know you benefit, so we’re back where we started: It’ll take us longer, but we’ll toss him in the can, and we’ll toss you in, too, for obstructing justice and being a pain in the ass.”

  “You can’t do that,” she shouted at him.

  He stood up. “Watch me.”

  She stubbed out the second cigarette, slid off her stool, and blocked his exit. “Wait. Sit down. He’s got a scam going.”

  Willy stayed standing. “What kind?”

  “He steals stuff. He runs a trucking company, duh. Things get lost, insurance kicks in, and he sells what ends up in his garage.”

  “That sounds pretty piddly.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean his real garage, stupid. We’re not talking a flat screen now and then. He’s got a system.”

  “And you know this because you cook his books?”

  She looked disgusted. “I know this because I’m his fast fuck. He talks on the phone—doesn’t even know I’m in the room. I’m like invisible.”

  Willy smiled. Not anymore, he thought. “You know who he talks to on that phone?”

  She hesitated, studying his expression, and finally smiled back, at last back on familiar ground. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The trip to Long Island, and along much of its length, was a numbing succession of highways and interstates—traffic-clotted, featureless, and flat, punctuated for the most part by either commercial structures dedicated to servicing travelers, or blighted residential buildings made grimy by the spewing of so many nearby vehicles.

  By the time Joe and Lester reached the Brookhaven lab signs and entered its long, curving, tree-lined access road, their eyes took time adjusting to what seemed like an estate or a huge park, until the guardhouse came into view.

  There again, as with everything associated with Brookhaven so far, it seemed more like a formality. The guards were armed and watchful, but the glance at credentials was cursory, the names of the two Vermonters on the guest list being the real lock opener.

  Thereafter, however, the world around them took an unexpected historical slant.

  Lester acknowledged it first. “Damn, this is like a used parts warehouse for old movies—for whole buildings.”

  Joe understood what he meant. Most of the surrounding architecture reflected the history he’d mentioned to Lyn—BNL, barring face lifts and a few modern additions, was an old army camp. And looked it.

  “I like it,” he said.

  Spinney stared at him. “You fond of the Los Alamos look?”

  Joe laughed. “It ain’t pretty, but it’s practical and useful. Why throw out perfectly good buildings just because they don’t have ‘designer architect’ stamped all over them? Drives me nuts to pass by colleges with huge tuitions and see that most of the money’s been wasted on ugly, billion-dollar buildings. It offends my Yankee spirit.”

  Lester watched the buildings slip by. “Well, you should be in hog heaven.”

  Eric Marine had directed them by e-mail to one of a row of what might have been military admin buildings decades earlier—low, long, and plain. The word “biological” appeared somewhere on the small plaque marking the entrance.

  “You want me to stay with the loot or come with you?” Lester asked as Joe swung out by the curb.

  Joe held up the keys. “We’ll button her up. I’m not worried at this point. We better both meet the cast of characters.”

  They’d come down in a rented SUV in order to hold all the bundles Hawke had given them, some of them bulky, others secured in protective packaging.

  The building’s interior was a perfect match to its shell, built to withstand being washed down with a fire hose, although not looking as if it had been thoroughly cleaned in decades. But it was clutter only, as Joe saw it, which again appealed to his vision of an environment filled with people more interested in learning than in sitting on Color-Me-Beautiful office furniture.

  Joe knocked on the properly numbered door, heard a grunt, and twisted the knob, revealing two men, heads together and bent over like gardeners admiring a plant, peering at a computer screen.

  The grunt had not been in response to Joe’s knock, which clearly had gone unheard.

  “Dr. Marine?” Joe asked quietly.

  The white-haired biologist looked up, his eyes wide.

  He blinked a couple of times, transparently shifting gears, and then issued a wide smile. “Ah, my police officers. How wonderful. Wayne. These are the people I told you about.”

  The other man turned away from the screen and took them in. Bald with a close-cropped fringe, he was trim and athletic, with a sportsman’s aggressive zeal in his eyes. He crossed the small room and extended his hand. “Wayne Shepard. Glad to meet you.”

  Joe responded with his own formalities, introducing himself and Lester, while Eric filled in with, “Wayne’s the one I thought might help us the most with your various problems. He’s my contact at the light source—the one I go to when I need access—and he’s said he’d be happy to help with this, too.”

  “I really appreciate it,” Joe told him.

  “Not a problem,” Shepard responded in a clipped voice. “Happy to help out law enforcement whenever I can. The more the light source can be used for people like you, the better the rest of the world will understand its benefits. Funding comes with popularity; simple as that. Look what happened with the early CT scanners—every hospital I know lined up for one, even if they were only three blocks apart and could have shared with no problem. Dumbest thing I ever saw, especially since, in no time flat, advances in technology antiquated most of the first generation machines. You want to see the device?”

  “The light source?” Joe asked. “Yes, I’d be delighted.”

  They all four piled into the r
ented SUV, Wayne Shepard acting as tour guide from the front passenger seat. No remnants of snow here. Only brown grass extended between the buildings, adding to the drabness of the passing scenery of chain-link fences, metal buildings, a dominating and ominously cheerful, candy-striped smokestack, and an even more suggestive dome-topped building that hinted of long-discontinued nuclear experimentation.

  But to Joe, the impression of pragmatic functionality held true. Drabness didn’t go to depressing, and several of the newer buildings were even quite upbeat, with expanses of window glass and soothing, if modest, architecture. As Shepard described building after building, and how several had once been used for one reason, and then either remodeled or discarded later on, there grew in Joe a sense that this vast, hyperactive place was a shrine for the pursuit of knowledge on a passionate level. It was as if the clichéd image of the absentminded professor with chalk-dusted trousers, a four-day beard, and a disregard for self-image had been superimposed over an entire region. Appearances counted for little in contrast with results—it was in many ways a place where minds were mastering matter.

  Shepard ordered them to stop in front of a white, sleek, two-story building whose modernity struck a discordant note with all around it. With its tinted windows and bland, rounded appearance, it reminded Joe of Gort, the robot in the 1950s sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Gort had also been capable of throwing a mean beam of light.

  “This is it,” Shepard announced, climbing out of the vehicle. “The National Synchrotron Light Source, or NSLS, came online in the early eighties; already old hat.”

  “All anyone can talk about here,” added Marine, joining them on the sidewalk, “is how the next generation, the so-called NSLS-II, will produce X-rays ten thousand times brighter than this one’s.” He pointed to a huge field across the way. “It’ll go in there, where the old railway tracks used to deliver recruits during World War I.”

  “That was less than a hundred years ago,” Shepard commented, heading toward the building’s entrance. “When a simple flashlight was considered fancy technology, and didn’t work half the time.”

  Eric patted Joe on the shoulder as they entered the lobby. “Not to worry. This one works.”

  Joe caught Spinney’s eye, wondering if he, too, was beginning to feel trapped on the edge of a parallel universe, where everything looked familiar, but where less and less made sense.

  And that was moments before their hosts led them to an observation window overlooking the equivalent of a vast factory floor—cluttered, harshly lighted, and to any lay person’s eye utterly chaotic.

  Now even the familiar slipped from Joe’s frame of reference. Below them, under a cavernous ceiling lined with air conduits, sound-absorbent batting, and multi-ton, load-bearing I-beams, was what appeared to be a gigantic jumble of machines, workstations, electrical cabling, and shiny steel tubing, much of the latter wrapped in crinkled aluminum foil to look like some strung-up alien fridge food.

  It was a tightly packed mechanical maze, eight feet in height, but it appeared free of any recognizable form or function, and inaccessible to even the smallest human being.

  “That’s the NSLS,” Wayne Shepard said with pride. “Over two thousand researchers use it every year, coming from all over the world. It runs like this twenty-four hours a day.”

  Joe kept his eyes glued to the acreage before him, watching for even the slightest movement among all the gleaming steel. Finally, like a ladybug scurrying through grass, a single person in a red shirt moved hurriedly in the distance, half obscured by the crisscross of cables, wires, and piping.

  Lester seemed to be reading his mind. “There’s one,” he murmured, in a tone half suggesting he might now pull out a bird book and record a sighting.

  “Would you like a quick tour?” Marine suggested.

  They all four descended a staircase to a massive electronically controlled door, which Shepard unlocked with a wave from his pass card. As he pulled on the handle, a fog of mechanical noise swept over them, explaining the quilted batting Joe had seen hanging from the ceiling. It was not the kind of noise requiring ear protection, but it was vibrational and ubiquitous—a dull steady thrumming that spoke of extraordinary energy being continually expended. Joe didn’t want to know what kind of electricity bills were called for to rival the sun’s brightness.

  He felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Eric Marine proffering a folded slip of paper.

  “I thought this might help explain things a bit. It’s a haiku I wrote to explain all this.”

  Joe studied him for a moment, suddenly seeing an aspect of the man he hadn’t glimpsed before.

  He took the paper and opened it up. “A haiku?”

  The scientist smiled up at him guilelessly. “Read it. It may not be as goofy as you think.”

  Joe did as he was told, and read:

  Synchrotron Radiation

  A sun factory

  One eight six K electrons

  delta momenta

  “Ah,” he commented politely.

  Marine was openly laughing by now. “Translation?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “In a nutshell,” Marine explained, “synchrotron radiation is, I think, actually brighter than the sun’s. I used the word ‘factory’ because light is manufactured at a synchrotron. One eight six K is the speed of light in a vacuum, one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second, which is about the speed here. Delta is the math symbol that signifies ‘change in’ and momenta is the Latin plural of momentum. Meaning, all told, that synchrotron radiation is only produced where there is a change in momentum of the electrons. In this case, movement in a straight line will not produce synchrotron radiation, but movement in a circle will.”

  Wayne was becoming impatient with his more artistic partner’s antics. “Magnets speed up the electrons around and around in a tube,” he said loudly and quickly, “until they get fast enough to throw synchrotron radiation down a number of straight tangents to hit whatever targets we’ve put there to be analyzed. People have compared all this to a car speeding around a circular track. The headlamps give off light, and the tubes tangential to the track carry that light to the targets. That’s it. Let’s take a look.”

  And with that, he turned his back and began the tour.

  That took place in a moving huddle, so that they could all hear what Shepard and Marine had to say. It was a more detailed version of what Joe had heard in the hotel lobby in Burlington, and therefore even less comprehensible. But he did end up with the basic understanding—correct or not—of several dozen workstations using X-rays, ultraviolet, or infrared light to peer into the tiniest inner workings of things physical, chemical, and/or organic, from land, sea, and outer space. Marine’s earlier metaphor of the ultimate reading light being applied to the world’s smallest newsprint seemed remarkably apt, at least to Joe’s mind.

  They did meet other people, of course, if not many, including some working within the entrails of all the tubing, wiring, and supporting architecture. It made for a tight fit, to be sure, but not quite as impenetrable as Joe had thought from above. And there were scattered mementoes of a quaintly human flavor sprinkled about—laptop-equipped desks decorated with family photos, calendar art, personal trinkets, and political cartoons. They evoked a slightly warped, sci-fi equivalent of prehistoric cave drawings—faint scratchings of Homo sapiens in a technological universe.

  The most curious thing for Joe, however, was the paradoxical nature of the whole thing—a vast building dedicated to producing a beam of light, which, in the end, remained nowhere to be seen. Indeed, this famous light was so concentrated, and so rigorously controlled, that in the long run, it wasn’t like a flashlight in the dark at all, but rather a space-age contraption so high tech and valuable that nary a drop of its prized product was allowed to leak into the surrounding space. It may have been a form of man-made sunshine, but it wasn’t to be wasted.

  Back outside in the quiet of the lobby, Lester gave
voice to one of Joe’s growing concerns, “I guess I can see how you can take a grain of space dust and figure out what it’s made of,” he said. “But how’re you going to study our stuff? We brought a sawed-off part of a truck bumper.”

  Wayne laughed at his wonderment. “Not to worry. We get strange materials all the time. We just adapt the stations accordingly. We’ve analyzed plastics to be used in artificial knees, human bones to study arthritis. We even once took a close-up look at the sludge from New York harbor to see what pollutants were in it.”

  “We can take a piece of metal or wood,” Eric added, “that’s been hit by a bullet, and find out not only that it was a bullet, but potentially what kind and from what box on its owner’s shelf, assuming we have access to that.”

  “If you study an object closely enough,” Shepard added, “you can usually discover its unique qualities—just like matching a print to a finger.”

  “The difference,” Marine picked up, “is that a fingerprint is hardwired biology. What we’re talking about is the ability to fingerprint a sample’s environment.” He pointed at Spinney’s head. “Today, you woke up, presumably washed your hair, and set out to come here. All during that trip, your hair was exposed to a series of changing environments, each of which probably deposited samplars, however tiny. All of those, as well as the nature of the hair shaft itself, could conceivably be identified and charted from infrared spectroscopy.”

  Joe had already grasped as much. What was nagging him now was more practical.

  “How fast can it be done?” he asked.

  “Depends,” Shepard admitted. “And of course, we’re dividing to conquer here, with both Eric and me working simultaneously. Still, none of this should take more than a couple of days to process, even if we have to crunch the data for a bit longer afterward. But by then, you’ll be back home catching crooks, right?”

  Everyone laughed politely, but certainly the two cops had no idea what they’d be doing in the interim, especially given their baffling surroundings.

  They returned to Eric’s office, made a couple of phone calls to gain access to the lab’s high security vault, and then laboriously transferred the samples from the Vermont truck to there, documenting the move carefully. Joe made clear that nothing was to be removed from the vault without either him or Lester being notified, so that samples could be escorted to whatever testing environment was called for. The two scientists smiled condescendingly a couple of times during this lecture, but Joe could tell that they were mostly posturing. It was clear they understood the need to maintain a chain of evidence, to the point where Joe was left wondering if his reason for being here had less to do with security, and more with curiosity, impatience, and anticipation.