seat.
Leskov zipped open a leather binder and handed a folder to Zoshchenko. ‘I guessed you might want to take a look. Newton has been reading one or two letters each visit, and the rest of the time is spent discussing what she’s read. Both of them seem very excited by the material. I don’t know how many letters there are, but we’re getting them one at a time.’
‘This is very interesting,’ Zoshchenko said, thinking aloud as she skimmed over the first letter.
‘Could you elaborate, Oksanna?’
‘Oh, of course, Victor Ivanovich.’ Zoshchenko gathered her thoughts. ‘If the first letter I read is any indication of the rest, then I would concur with Sandstrom’s assessment that the author is a very gifted individual. He writes about physics like a poet. I freely admit my grasp of the nondeterministic nature of quantum mechanics is weak at best, but even I can see the fog lifting as I read his words. This person’s thinking is coherent. It is focused like a laser. I’ve never read anything quite like this – if I had, I would surely have remembered it. Who is the author?’
‘A physicist named Johann Wolff,’ Leskov informed them.
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Zoshchenko admitted quizzically.
‘Nobody has. Kilkenny and Newton have been looking for some record of this Wolff’s work and have apparently found nothing. Sandstrom is convinced that Wolff’s research may provide the key that unlocks the mystery behind his discovery.’
‘How could a brilliant mind such as this go unnoticed?’ Zoshchenko couldn’t comprehend it.
‘That’s where this gets interesting. A few weeks ago Kilkenny and Newton gave up their search for Wolff.’
‘Why?’ Orlov asked.
‘We weren’t sure at first, but we eventually learned that Wolff disappeared in December of 1948 and was never heard from again. According to university records, Wolff was a relatively young man – late twenties – when he disappeared. Interest in Wolff was rekindled a few days ago when his body was discovered near the building where he worked at the university.’
Zoshchenko nodded thoughtfully. ‘That explains why he never published his work.’
‘Wolff was murdered,’ Leskov continued. ‘Someone practically cut his head off. We intercepted a conference call between Kilkenny, Sandstrom, and Newton yesterday when Kilkenny explained this to his associates.’
‘What do we know about this Wolff?’ Orlov demanded.
‘According to a newspaper article, Wolff was from Dresden and studied physics in Berlin. During the war he worked with a physicist named Heisenberg.’
‘Werner Heisenberg?’ Zoshchenko mulled over the name. ‘He won the Nobel Prize for inventing quantum mechanics and the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the pantheon of great theoretical physicists, Heisenberg is a titan. The main reason the Americans spent so much time and money to build an atomic bomb during the Great Patriotic War was because Heisenberg was working for the Germans. Every physicist in the world believed that if anyone could successfully build such a weapon, it would be Heisenberg.’
‘So Wolff was suckled on the tit of the great Heisenberg,’ Leskov continued, perturbed at Zoshchenko’s minilecture. ‘After the war, he went to America and took a job teaching physics at a university. A couple of years later, he was killed.’
‘Is that all?’
Leskov looked over his notes regarding Wolff. ‘There is one more thing. The reason for the renewed interest is not so much the body, but what was found with it. In that phone intercept, Kilkenny mentioned that Wolff’s briefcase contained a letter and six notebooks. There’s a problem with the books that Kilkenny didn’t elaborate on.’
‘If they were buried in the ground with Wolff,’ Zoshchenko offered, ‘they are probably in very poor condition.’
‘Perhaps, but our competitors still believe they are of some value.’
‘Then so should we. Good work, Dmitri. Follow up on the notebooks; we’ll acquire them if necessary. Oksanna, I would like you to do a little research on Johann Wolff. I believe the Red Army confiscated most of the Third Reich’s scientific records. See what you can dig out of the archives. Let’s meet on Friday to discuss this matter more fully.’
25
Langley, Virginia
Bart Cooper arrived at the CIA’s George Bush Center for Intelligence a little after ten o’clock having avoided the daily rush-hour traffic. Setting his own work hours was one of his perks as a consultant to the Agency, the latest in a long line of titles he’d held in an intelligence career that started when he became an OSS field operative during the Second World War. He’d risen in rank as the Agency grew, and fought on the front lines of America’s Cold War. Cooper had survived scandals, various downsizing programs, and micromanaging congressional oversight. And now, he seemed to have survived retirement in his role as adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence. At a robust seventy-seven, he served as counselor emeritus to Jackson Barnett, the current DCI, who valued Cooper for his broad perspective.
After parking in the same spot he’d been assigned back in the sixties, Cooper cleared the main building’s security and took the elevator up to the executive level. The place was filled with its usual buzz of activity as information from around the world was gathered, sifted, analyzed, processed, digested, and eventually regurgitated for the elected officials who would decide what it meant. Some things never changed.
‘Morning, Bart,’ Sally Kirsch, Jackson Barnett’s executive secretary, said as Cooper stepped into the office pantry to get himself a cup of coffee.
‘Hi, Sally. How are things in the Far East today?’
‘No better than yesterday, and Africa is heating up again.’
Cooper sighed at the thought of another military coup in some sub-Saharan country launching yet another round of intertribal genocide. ‘There are times when I yearn for the old days, when we would just send a team out and pop these guys.’
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’
Cooper just smiled and left with a mug of black coffee.
When he reached his office, he set the mug down on the desk and hung his blazer on the rack. His in-basket contained the files that Barnett wanted him to peruse. Most of them dealt with operational concepts – Cooper’s forte – while the remainder were a mixed bag of analysis that somebody, somewhere, wanted a seasoned eye to give the once-over. He wasn’t on the front lines anymore, but Cooper was thankful that Barnett valued his insights enough to let him keep his hand in the game. He was the last of the old guard, a cold warrior whose tenure ran back as far as the days of Wild Bill Donovan and Allen Dulles.
He sat down and wiggled the mouse on his desk, awakening his computer from its electronic slumber. The black screen flickered back to life, rendering the CIA logo against a field of light blue. A small box on the bottom center of the screen waited for him to type in his password. Cooper keyed in the thirteen random characters and pressed
ENTER.
‘ Ohayo gozamasu, Cooper-san,’ the computer announced in a voice that sounded a lot like Toshiro Mifune.
‘ Ohayo, computer-san,’ Cooper replied.
Every day, the computer greeted Cooper in the language of one of the countries he’d worked in during his years as a field agent, never voicing the same greeting twice in a month.
Cooper clicked on his calendar and saw that he had a meeting with the Deputy Director in Charge of Operations at 1:30. He then checked his E-mail: a few general-broadcast announcements, a response from Barnett regarding the China-Korea situation, and something generated by the central computer regarding a flagged
