raced back to the door and yanked it open.
Senders was replacing the cellular phone in his pocket. Tarnwell’s stomach sank when he saw Senders’ huge smile.
“Good news, Clay.”
CHAPTER 17
“Diamonds?” Erica said. She wanted to know exactly what Kevin was talking about before they went to the police. She pulled into a parking spot along University Drive five blocks from the bank. A Kinko’s copy center was in front of them. “As in ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’ diamonds?”
“Yes, this notebook tells you how to make real, honest-to-god diamonds. It also tells you how to coat any object with a diamond film.”
Erica shook her head. “How could you run an experiment for your professor without knowing you were making diamonds?”
“Because I wasn’t,” Kevin said. “The experiment we were working on the day I was fired was an investigation into high-temperature superconductors. The diamonds were made by mistake.”
She must have look as confused as she felt.
“Here,” Kevin said. “Let me read this to you.”
He opened the notebook to the first page and began reading aloud.
“‘Adamas — Greek for an impenetrably hard stone. To whom it may concern: Adamas is also the name of the process I’ve described in this notebook. Since you are reading this notebook, I have abandoned hope of claiming the Adamas process for myself. The Adamas Blueprint is my insurance, if you will. My lawyer, Herbert Stein, has been instructed to publish these notes on the Internet in the event of my death.’”
“Stein!” Erica said. “The guy who was murdered? The one in Ward’s email?“
“I know. Wait. It gets better. ‘To be fair, I should give credit to another person who helped me unwittingly in this project. Kevin Hamilton, a graduate student who worked for me, was assisting me with research into the superconductive properties of carbon 60.”
“Carbon 60? What’s that?”
“Have you ever heard of Buckyballs?”
“I’ve heard the word.”
“In 1985, some astrophysicists and chemists came across it by accident while trying to simulate processes that produce interstellar dust. It’s only the third pure form of carbon after graphite and diamond. Since then, it’s been in the newspapers a lot because whole new classes of chemicals can be made with it. The discoverers won the Nobel prize.”
“Buckyball is a goofy name for a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.”
“The official name is Buckminsterfullerene, but nobody liked saying it. The molecule looks just like a soccer ball, so Buckyball stuck.”
“And what were you doing with the Buckyballs?”
“Trying to make high-temperature superconductors. As Ward explains it here, ‘Metal-doped fullerene crystals have been shown to be isotropically superconductive above 30 degrees Kelvin.’ That’s a high temperature for a superconductor — about 240 degrees Celsius below zero.”
Erica just shook her head and gave Kevin the look that told him he was not making sense.
“Okay, I’ll back up. Superconductors are materials that have no electrical resistance and therefore no heat loss. The applications for them are endless. We could make 300-mile-an-hour trains that levitate above magnetic rails. Electricity could be sent from one end of the country to another if there was no resistance in the power lines. The main limiting factor in the size and speed of computers is the ability of the microprocessors to shed heat. With superconductors, there would be no heat, so microprocessors could be made 1000 times smaller than they are now.”
“So what’s the catch?”
“Right now, all superconductors have to be cooled down to a temperature near absolute zero using liquid helium. The cooling process requires a room about the size of a bus, and the whole setup costs over a million dollars. But if we could find a way to make a high-temperature superconductor, we could use liquid nitrogen as a coolant, which is cheap and requires only a small amount of equipment. We were just doing basic research. We didn’t really expect to find anything besides directions for future research.”
“But you did find something,” Erica said.
Kevin nodded. “And I never knew it.” He went on reading. “‘On April 21, Kevin and I were in the lab trying to introduce a variety of elements into the molecular matrix of carbon 60 when the laser overloaded and almost destroyed the lab. Once we got the situation under control, Kevin had to leave for class and therefore never realized what had truly happened.
“‘While I was assessing the damage, I noticed something strange about the experimental chamber. A fine glaze had formed over the exterior surface of the test stand. At first I had no idea what it was, although I was curious. When I attempted to remove the target material from the test stand, I couldn’t budge it. I thought perhaps it was fused in place by heat, but on further inspection I could see no signs of melting. I unscrewed the entire test stand and examined it with an infrared spectrometer. Only then did the implications of the glaze become apparent.
“‘A unique combination of events during the accident, the details of which are described in the body of this document, resulted in a new and relatively inexpensive method for producing diamond. In refining the process over the course of the next several months, I was able to confirm that not only could a diamond film be produced to coat any object, but also that this new process, which I call Adamas, could produce significant quantities of gem-quality stones.
“‘I will not go into the details of why I didn’t tell Kevin of the discovery.’”—Kevin muttered “Because you were an asshole” after reading the line—“‘Suffice it to say that he was not involved in any way with hiding it from the university.’” Kevin looked up from the book. “Typical of Ward. He takes responsibility only when it can’t hurt him any more.”
“You were a part of it from the beginning,” Erica said. “You’re a coinventor.”
“Which would have been cool if people weren’t trying to kill us.”
“Are you sure this isn’t about a diamond substitute?” Erica said. “Maybe this is all a mistake. Maybe Adamas is like cubic zirconia. It just looks like diamond.”
“No, Ward may have been a jerk,” Kevin said, leafing through the notebook, “but he was a damn good researcher. Look here. Ward talks about molecular fragmentation of C60 through a microwave discharge resulting in chemical vapor deposition of carbon. I thought about it only peripherally back in April, but I realize now that the method we were using to insert metallic ions into C60 molecules also forms the basis for chemical vapor deposition.”
Erica was completely lost. “What the hell did you just say?”
“Sorry.” Kevin flipped to another section. “I looked at this in the bank.” He pointed to a graph in the notebook. “See? Here’s what I mean. The infrared spectrometer data clearly shows a pure carbon matrix in the sample. Pure carbon. There’s no evidence of any other type of element, including zircon.”
“Which is in cubic zirconia?”
Kevin nodded. “Cubic zirconia only looks like diamond. It might be a good substitute for diamond in someone’s ring, but it doesn’t have the properties that make diamonds special.”
“Like its hardness?”
Kevin looked off in the distance, as if he were an awestruck farmer who was seeing a city skyline for the first time. “Right, but that’s only the start. Diamond is also transparent, it’s an almost perfect heat conductor, and it performs as a semiconductor at much higher temperatures than silicon. No other material in the world has that combination of properties.”
“So?”
He looked back at her, but the excitement was still there. “People have been trying to find a cheap way to
