The Zero Game

by Brad Meltzer

  “What about the magnet?”

  “What magnet?”

  “There was this narrow hallway with a huge magnet and these long metal pipes that ran the entire length of the room.”

  “They had an accelerator down there?” Minsky asks, confused.

  “No idea—the only other thing was this big crate labeled Tungsten.”

  “A tungsten block. That definitely sounds like an accelerator, but—” He cuts himself off, falling unusually silent.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing—it’s just, if you have a detector, you don’t usually have an accelerator. The noise from one . . . it’d interfere with the other.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “When it comes to neutrinos . . . it’s such a developing field . . . no one’s sure of anything. But up until now, you either study the existence of neutrinos or you study their movement.”

  “So what happens if you put a detector and an accelerator together?”

  “I don’t know,” Minsky says. “I’ve never heard of anyone doing it.”

  “But if they did . . . what’s the potential application?”

  “Intellectually, or—”

  “Why would the government or military want it?” Viv asks, getting to the point. Sometimes, it takes a kid to cut through the nonsense. Minsky’s not the least bit thrown. He knows what happens when the government digs its nails into science.

  “There are certainly some potential defense applications,” he begins. “This doesn’t require an accelerator, but if you want to know if a particular country has nuclear weapons, you can fly a drone over the country, get an air sample, and then use the ‘quiet’ of the mine to measure the radioactivity in the air sample.”

  It’s a fine theory, but if it were that simple, Wendell—or whoever they are—would’ve just requested the mine from the Defense subcommittee. By trying to sneak it though Matthew and the Interior subcommittee, they’re playing dirty—which means they’ve got their hands on something they don’t want public.

  “What about weaponry . . . or making money?” I ask.

  Lost in thought, Minsky twirls the tip of his paperclip through the edge of his beard. “Weaponry’s certainly possible . . . but what you said about making money . . . you mean literally or figuratively?”

  “Say again?”

  “It goes back to the nature of neutrinos. You can’t just see a neutrino like you see an electron. It doesn’t show up under the microscope—it’s like a ghost. The only way to see them is to watch their interactions with other atomic particles. For example, when a neutrino hits the nucleus of an atom, it generates a certain type of radiation like an optical sonic boom. All we can see is the boom, which tells us that the neutrino was just there.”

  “So you measure the reaction when the two things collide,” Viv says.

  “Exactly—the difficulty is, when a neutrino hits you, it also changes you. Some say it’s because the neutrino is constantly shifting identities. Others hypothesize that it’s the atom that gets changed when there’s a collision. No one knows the answer—at least, not yet.”

  “What does this have to do with making money?” I ask.

  To our surprise, Minsky grins. His salty beard shifts with the movement. “Ever hear of transmutation?”

  Viv and I barely move.

  “Like King Midas?” I ask.

  “Midas . . . Everyone always says Midas,” Minsky laughs. “Don’t you love when fiction is science’s first step?”

  “So you can use neutrinos to do alchemy?” I ask.

  “Alchemy?” Minsky replies. “Alchemy is a medieval philosophy. Transmutation is a science—transforming one element into another through a subatomic reaction.”

  “I don’t understand. How do neutrinos . . . ?”

  “Think back. Jekyll and Hyde. Neutrinos start as one flavor, then become another. That’s why they tell us about the nature of matter. Here . . .” he adds, opening the top left-hand drawer on his desk. He rummages for a moment, then slams it shut and opens the drawer below it. “Okay, here . . .”

  Pulling out a laminated sheet of paper, he slaps it against his desk, revealing a grid of familiar square boxes. The periodic table. “I assume you’ve seen this before,” he says, pointing to the numbered elements. “One—hydrogen; two—helium; three—lithium . . .”

  “The periodic table. I know how it works,” I insist.

  “Oh, you do?” He looks down again, hiding his smile. “Find chlorine,” he finally adds.

  Viv and I lean forward in our seats, searching the chart. Viv’s closer to tenth-grade science. She jabs her finger at the letters Cl. Chlorine.

  17

  Cl

  “Atomic number seventeen,” Minsky says. “Atomic weight 35.453(2) . . . nonmetallic classification . . . yellowish-green color . . . halogen group. You’ve heard of it, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, years back, in one of the original neutrino detectors, they filled a hundred-thousand-gallon tank with it. The smell was horrific.”

  “Like a dry cleaner’s,” Viv says.

  “Exactly,” Minsky says, pleasantly surprised. “Now remember, you only see neutrinos when they collide with other atoms—that’s the magic moment. So when the neutrinos plowed into a chlorine atom just right, the physicists suddenly started finding . . .” Minsky points down to the periodic table, pressing his paperclip against the box next to chlorine. Atomic number eighteen.

  17 18

  Cl Ar

  “Argon,” Viv says.

  “Argon,” he repeats. “Atomic symbol Ar. Seventeen to eighteen. One additional proton. One box to the right on the periodic table.”

  “Wait, so you’re saying when the neutrino collided with the chlorine atoms, they all changed to argon?” I ask.

  “All? We should be so lucky . . . No, no, no—this was one little argon atom. One. Every four days. It’s an amazing moment—and completely random, God bless chaos. The neutrino hits, and right there, seventeen becomes eighteen . . . Jekyll becomes Hyde.”

  “And this is happening right now in the air around us?” Viv asks. “I mean, didn’t you say neutrinos are everywhere?”

  “You couldn’t possibly see the reactions with all the current interference. But when it’s isolated in an accelerator . . . and the accelerator is shielded deep enough below the ground . . . and you aim a beam of neutrinos just right . . . well, no one’s come close yet, but think about what would happen if you could control it. You pick the element you want to work with; you bump it one box to the right on the periodic table. If you could do that . . .”

  My stomach twists. “. . . you could turn lead to gold.”

  Minsky shakes his head—and then again starts laughing. “Gold?” he asks. “Why would you ever make gold?”

  “I thought Midas . . .”

  “Midas is a children’s story. Think of reality. Gold costs what? Three hundred . . . four hundred dollars an ounce? Go buy a necklace and a charm bracelet, I’m sure it’ll be very nice—nice and shortsighted.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Forget the mythology. If you truly had the power to transmute, you’d be a fool to make gold. In today’s world, there are far more valuable elements out there. For instance . . .” Minsky again stabs the periodic table with his paperclip. Atomic symbol Np.

  93

  Np

  “That’s not nitrogen, is it?” I ask.

  “Neptunium.”

  “Neptunium?”

  “Named after the planet Neptune,” Minsky explains, forever the teacher.

  “What is it?” I ask, cutting him off.

  “Ah, but you’re missing the point,” Minsky says. “The concern isn’t what is it? The concern is what it could be . . .” With one final jab, Minsky moves his paperclip to the nearest element on the right.

  93 94

  Np Pu

  “Pu?”

  “Plutonium,” Minsky says, his laugh lo
ng gone. “In today’s world, it’s arguably the most valuable element on the chart.” He looks up at us to make sure we get it. “Say hello to the new Midas touch.”

  67

  SCRUBBING HIS HANDS in the fourth-floor men’s room, Lowell stared diagonally down at the front page of the Washington Post Style section that lay flat across the tile floor and peeked out from the side of the closest stall. It was nothing new—every morning, a still-unidentified coworker started the day with the Style section, then left it behind for everyone else to share.

  For Lowell, who usually never read anything but the newspaper clips his staff prepared, it was a ritual that stumbled headfirst across the fine line that separated convenience from bad hygiene. That’s why, even though the paper was right there, he never reached down to pick it up. Not once. He knew what others were doing when they read it. And where their hands had been. Disgusting, he’d long ago decided.

  Of course, some things took precedence. Like checking the Post’s infamous gossip column, The Reliable Source, to make sure his name wasn’t in it. He’d meant to look this morning, but time got away from him. It had been barely three days since he last saw Harris. He’d counted at least four reporters in the restaurant that night. So far, everything was quiet, but any one of them could’ve tattled about the meeting between him and Harris. For that alone, it was worth taking a peek.

  Using the tip of his shoe to pin down the top corner of the paper, Lowell slid the section out from under the stall. The back page was wet, making it stick slightly as he tried to pull it toward him. Lowell tried not to think about it, focusing instead on using the side of his foot to wedge open the front page. But just as he nudged his foot inside, the door to the bathroom swung open, smashing into the wall. Lowell spun around, pretending to be busy by the hand dryer. Behind him, his assistant darted inside, barely able to catch his breath.

  “William, what’s—?”

  “You need to read this,” he insisted, shoving the red file folder toward Lowell.

  Watching his assistant carefully, Lowell wiped his hands against his slacks, reached for the folder, and flipped it open. It took a moment to scan the official cover sheet. Lowell’s eyes went wide—and within thirty seconds, the gossip column didn’t matter anymore.

  68

  HOLD ON,” I SAY. “You’re telling me people could smash some neutrinos against some . . .”

  “Neptunium . . .” Minsky says.

  “. . . neptunium, and suddenly create a batch of plutonium?”

  “I’m not saying they’ve done it—at least not yet—but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was working along those lines . . . at least on paper.”

  He’s speaking with the calmness of someone who thinks it’s still theoretical. Viv and I know better. We saw it with our own eyes. The sphere . . . the accelerator . . . even the tetrachloroethylene . . . That’s what Wendell’s building down there—that’s why they wanted to keep it so quiet. If word got out they were trying to create plutonium . . . there’s no way it’d make it through the process.

  “But no one can do that yet, right?” Viv asks, trying to convince herself. “It’s not possible . . .”

  “Don’t say that in these halls,” Minsky teases. “Theoretically, anything’s possible.”

  “Forget whether it’s possible,” I say. “Assuming you could do it, how feasible is it to pull it off? Is neptunium even accessible, or is it just as hard to find?”

  “Now that’s the vital question,” Minsky says, knighting me with his paperclip. “For the most part, it’s a rare earth metal, but neptunium-237 is a by-product from nuclear reactors. Here in the U.S., since we don’t reprocess our spent nuclear fuel, it’s hard to get your hands on. But in Europe and Asia, they reprocess massive amounts.”

  “And that’s bad?” Viv asks.

  “No, what’s bad is that global monitoring of neptunium only began in 1999. That leaves decades of neptunium unaccounted for. Who knows what happened during those years? Anybody could have it by now.”

  “So it’s out there?”

  “Absolutely,” Minsky says. “If you know where to look, there’s lots of unaccounted-for neptunium that’s there for the taking.”

  As the consequences hit, I squirm in my seat, wiping my sweaty hands against the sides of the seat cushion. Minutes ago, I was pretending to be uncomfortable. I’m no longer faking it. Whatever branch of the government Wendell Mining really is, the news isn’t gonna be good.

  “Can I just ask one question?” Viv says. “I heard what you said—I know it’s possible, and I realize you can get neptunium—but for one second, can we just talk about the likelihood? I mean, studying neutrinos—that’s a small field, right? There can only be a handful of people who are even capable of putting something like this together . . . So when you add that all up, and you look around the neutrino community, wouldn’t . . . wouldn’t you know if something like this were going on?”

  Minsky again scratches at his beard. His social skills are too off to read Viv’s panic, but he understands the question. “Have you ever heard of Dr. James A. Yorke?” he finally asks. We both shake our heads. I can barely sit still. “He’s the father of chaos theory—even coined the term,” Minsky continues. “You’ve heard the metaphor, correct?—that a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong can cause a hurricane in Florida? Well, as Yorke puts it, that means if there’s even one butterfly you don’t know about, it’s impossible to predict the weather on a long-term basis. One tiny butterfly. And, as the man says, there’ll always be one butterfly.”

  The words collide like a sack of doorknobs. I talked Matthew into flapping his wings . . . and now Viv and I are swirling through the hurricane.

  “It’s a big world out there,” Minsky adds, staying with Viv. “I can’t possibly account for everyone in my field. Does that make sense, Miss— I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

  “We should get going,” I say, hopping to my feet.

  “I thought the Congressman was on his way?” Minsky asks as we head for the door.

  “We’ve already got what we needed.”

  “But the briefing . . .”

  It’s amazing, really. We just dropped poorly hid hints about a government project that could create plutonium, and he’s still worried about face time. God, what’s wrong with this town? “I’ll be sure to tell him how helpful you were,” I add, whipping the door open and motioning Viv outside.

  “Please send him my best,” Minsky calls out.

  He says something else, but we’re already up the hallway, running for the elevators.

  “So where’re we going?” Viv asks.

  The one place Janos thinks we’ll never go. “The Capitol.”

  69

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” William said as he raced down the circular stairwell. “Where’re we going?”

  “Where do you think?” Lowell asked, leading them past the sign for the first floor and continuing toward the basement.

  “No, I mean beyond the parking garage. Where we going after that? Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  “Tell them what? That we know who really owns Wendell? That they’re not who they say they are? Sure, they’re linked to Janos, but until we get the rest, it doesn’t do us any good. There’s nothing to tell.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “Not us,” Lowell said. “Me.” Leaping down the last few steps and shoving open the door to the basement, Lowell plowed into the parking garage. He didn’t have to go far. Deputy Attorney General gets a spot right in front. If he wanted, he could’ve been in his car within four seconds. But he still paused, searching to make sure Janos wasn’t waiting for him.

  The silver Audi was empty.

  With the push of a button, Lowell unlocked the car and slid inside.

  “What’re you doing?” William asked as Lowell tried to shut the driver’s door.

  “I’m going to see a friend,” Lowell said, starting the engine.

  It wasn’t
a lie. He’d known Harris for over ten years—since they both worked in Senator Stevens’s office. That was why Janos came to him in the first place.

  He’d already tried Harris at work, at home, and on both his cell phones. If Harris was in hiding, there was only one place he’d be—the one place he knew best. And right now, finding Harris was the only way to get the rest of the story.

  “Why don’t you at least bring some backup?” William asked.

  “For what? So they can interrogate my friend? Trust me, I know how Harris thinks. We want him to talk, not panic.”

  “But, sir . . .”

  “Good-bye, William.” With a hard tug, Lowell slammed the door and punched the gas. The car peeled out of the spot. Refusing to overthink it, Lowell reminded himself who he was dealing with. If he showed up with armed agents at the Capitol—even forgetting the scene it would make—there’s no way Harris would ever go for that.

  Switching on the radio, Lowell lost himself in the mental massage of talk radio. His grandmother used to love talk radio, and to this day, Lowell still used it to, in his grandmother’s words, catch his calm. As the car was filled with the top news stories, Lowell finally took a breath. For one full minute, he forgot about Harris, and Wendell, and the rest of the chaos circling through his head. But as a result, he missed the black sedan that was trailing a few hundred feet behind him as he pulled out of the parking garage and into the daylight.

  70

  TRUST ME, I know how Harris thinks. We want him to talk, not panic.”

  “But, sir . . .”

  “Good-bye, William.”

  Tucked back among the rows of cars and hidden by nothing more than a nearby parking spot, Janos watched the exchange from the front seat of his black sedan. The crinkle in Lowell’s forehead . . . the desperation on his face . . . even the slant on his assistant’s shoulders. Lowell asked William to stay quiet, but he was still protesting. Janos narrowed his eyes, focusing intensely on William’s slouched shoulders. From this distance it was hard to get a read. The creases in his white, wrinkled button-down said he was still wearing his shirts twice to save cash. But his brand-new belt . . . Gucci . . . Mom and Dad bought that. The kid’s from cash—which means he’ll follow his boss’s directions.