Gideon’s Sword

in his leg?”

“Exactly. The secret came in two parts: the thing in his leg and those numbers we gave you. As I guess you’ve surmised, the two go together: you can’t figure out one without the other. The scientist was killed in a car accident. Those are the X-rays from the emergency room.”

Epstein scrutinized the X-rays with fresh interest. “The numbers,” she said, “indicated to me that we’re dealing with a composite material made of a number of complex chemical compounds or alloys.” She turned to O’Brien. “Do you have a magnifying glass?”

“I’ve got a loupe.” O’Brien rummaged around in a drawer, finally fishing it out. Examining the lens, he grimaced and wiped it clean on his shirttail before handing it to her.

She put it in her eye and bent over the X-rays once again, examining the white spots one after the other. “He really got creamed. Look at all this shit inside his legs.”

“It was a bad accident,” said Gideon.

Slowly, she moved from spot to spot on the X-ray. The minutes ticked off. After what seemed forever, she moved to the second film, and then the third. Almost immediately she stopped, examining one small fleck in particular. She looked at it a long time, and then straightened up, letting the loupe drop from her eye. Her whole face was shining, a transformation so complete that O’Brien took an involuntary step backward.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Unbelievable,” she breathed. “I think I know what we’re dealing with. Everything suddenly makes sense.”

“What?” both men asked at the same time.

She smiled broadly. “You really want to know?”

“Come on, Epstein! Don’t play games.” O’Brien could see her eyes glittering. He’d never seen her so excited.

“This is only a guess,” she said, “but it’s a good guess. It’s the only thing I can think of that fits the facts you’ve told me — and the peculiar thing I see on the X-ray.”

“What?” O’Brien asked again, more urgently.

She handed him the loupe. “You see that thing, there — the one that looks like a short, bent piece of wire?”

O’Brien leaned over and looked at it. It was about nine millimeters long, a medium-gauge piece of wire, irregularly bent.

“Look at the tips of the wire.”

He looked at the tips. Two black shadows with diffused ends. “Yeah?”

“Those shadows? Those are X-rays leaking out the ends of the wire.”

“Which means—?”

“That the wire somehow absorbed the X-rays and channeled, or redirected, them out through its ends.”

“And?” O’Brien looked up, took out the loupe.

“That’s almost unbelievable. A material that can capture and channel or focus X-rays? There’s only one material I know of that could do that.”

O’Brien exchanged glances with Gideon.

Epstein smiled mischievously. “I would direct your attention to the fact that it’s a wire.”

“Jesus, Epstein,” O’Brien cried. “You’re giving us a nervous breakdown! So what if it’s a wire?”

“What do wires do?” she asked.

O’Brien took a deep breath and glanced again at Gideon. He looked as impatient as O’Brien felt.

“Wires conduct electricity,” Gideon said.

“Exactly.”

“So?”

“So this is a special kind of wire. It conducts electricity — but in a different sort of way.”

“You’ve completely lost me,” O’Brien said.

“What we’re dealing with here,” she said, triumphantly, “is a room-temperature superconductor.”

A silence.

“Is that all?” O’Brien asked.

“Is that all?” She rounded on him incredulously. “It’s only the Holy Grail of energy technology!”

“I was expecting something that would…?change the world,” O’Brien said lamely.

“This would transform the world, you dolt! Look. Ninety-nine percent of all electricity generated in the world is lost to resistance as it flows from source to use. Ninety-nine percent! But electricity flows through a superconducting wire without any resistance. Without any loss of energy. If you replaced all the transmission lines in America with wires made out of this stuff, you’d reduce electrical energy usage by ninety-nine percent.”

“Oh my God,” mumbled O’Brien as the impact sank in.

“Yeah. You could supply all US energy needs with just one percent of what it takes now. And that one percent could easily be supplied by existing solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear installations. No more coal and oil generating plants. Transportation and manufacturing costs would drop enormously. Electricity would be virtually free. Cars that ran on electricity would cost almost nothing to operate — they’d sweep away the gas-powered vehicle industry. The oil and coal industries would fold. We’re essentially talking the end of fossil fuels. No more greenhouse emissions, no more OPEC holding the world by the short hairs.”

“In other words,” Gideon said, “the country that controls this discovery would blow everyone else out of the water economically.”

Epstein laughed harshly. “Worse than that. The country that controls this material would control the world’s economy. It would rule the world.”

“And everyone else would be fucked,” O’Brien said.

She looked at him. “That is the technical term for it, yes.”

54

LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING.

It was two o’clock in the morning and Gideon Crew was getting tired of reading that same motto above the door into the morgue, over and over again. It irritated him; it managed to be macabre and smug at the same time. As far as he could see, there wasn’t anything delightful about this grim and noisome place — or about death, for that matter.

He’d been waiting for forty-five minutes, and his impatience had almost reached its limit. The receptionist seemed to be moving as if underwater, shifting a piece of paper here, another there, taking a call, murmuring in a low voice, her long red fingernails clicking and clacking as she shuffled her paperwork.

This was ridiculous. He stood up, walked over. “Excuse me? I’ve been waiting almost an hour.”

She looked up. The nails ceased clacking. Black roots showed through the bleached-blond tease. She was a hard New Yorker of the old school. “We had a homicide come in. Tied up our personnel.”

“Homicide? Wow, that must be a rarity in New York City.” Gideon wondered, through the fog of irritation, if that was the one he’d seen at Saint Bart’s earlier. “Look, my…partner is in some cold drawer in there, and I just want a few minutes alone with him.” He put an aggrieved whine into his voice. “Just a few minutes.”

“Mr. Crew,” she said, unfazed, “you realize, don’t you, that the remains of your partner have been sitting here for five days, awaiting your instructions? You could have come in at any time. The file here says we’ve tried to contact you at least—” She checked her computer. “—half a dozen times.”

“I lost my cell phone,” he said. “And I’ve been traveling.”

“Okay. But you can’t expect to drop in at one in the morning and have everything ready and waiting, now,