BLAST
Avvakum scrolled down to the article and read about an attack on the professors’ lab that left Raphaele Paramo dead and Ted Sandstrom severely burned. Five unidentified men posing as a moving crew were responsible for the blaze and the theft of Sandstrom’s lab equipment and research. The article cited FBI sources in claiming that industrial espionage was the apparent motive for the attack.
Two other individuals, Nolan Kilkenny and physicist Kelsey Newton, were treated for minor injuries and released from the hospital. The article went on to describe how Sandstrom had recently signed with two consortia to develop commercial applications related to an undisclosed discovery.
Am I working for thieves and murderers? Avvakum thought fearfully as it all became painfully clear. No one just walks away from all this research; it was stolen, and the minds that created it trampled.
Avvakum pored over the other articles, searching for further information pertaining to the incident. She soon learned that once Sandstrom’s condition had stabilized, he had been transferred to the University of Michigan Hospital. The investigation lab was currently at a standstill because of a lack of evidence.
The more she read, the more the name Nolan Kilkenny kept cropping up. As a project director for the Michigan Applied Research Consortium, Kilkenny was noted as being involved with the commercial application of Sandstrom’s work – an effort she’d been hired by Orlov to pursue.
Avvakum continued to investigate and found herself at the MARC home page. She navigated through the site until she found a staff listing for Nolan Kilkenny, complete with his E-mail address. She clicked on the address and began typing her message. Is this file the work of Ted Sandstrom?
Avvakum then browsed through a directory of files and selected one that dealt specifically with the quantum energy device and attached it to her message.
She looked at the one-line message she’d written. If her suspicions were wrong, then she was about to violate the trust of her employer – a man who’d saved her from a life of scientific exile in Siberia. But what if her suspicions were right? If Orlov truly was responsible for the attack on Sandstrom, then by developing this research, she became Orlov’s accomplice.
Avvakum carefully weighed the options before her, balancing her need to know the truth against the fearful hope that ignorance could somehow protect her.
She sighed, then clicked the SEND button.
40
Langley, Virginia
Mosley’s knuckles rapped against the partially open door of Cooper’s seventh-floor office.
‘Bart, do you have a minute? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.’
‘Ah, sure, Cal,’ Cooper replied, surprised by the visit. ‘C’mon in.’
Mosley sat in one of the upholstered chairs opposite Cooper’s desk. ‘I’m working on an industrial-espionage case, something involving a radical new technology.’
Cooper leaned back in his chair, getting comfortable. ‘Tell me about it.’
Mosley quickly ran through the information Kilkenny had provided regarding the quantum power cell, the attack in South Bend, and his lines of inquiry.
‘So what you’re telling me is that you’ve got squat as far as any solid leads.’
‘The trail was getting pretty cold, until a couple of days ago. Two of the same men who hit South Bend led another team to Ann Arbor, where they struck a rare-books lab.’
‘How does that fit in with your technology case?’
‘They were after a set of notebooks, and it’s these notebooks, or rather their author, that led me to you. The man who wrote them was a German physicist named Johann Wolff. When I called down to Research for some information about this guy, they told me you’d recently made a similar request. That led me to wonder what your interest is and if there’s any overlap with what I’m working on.’
‘There might be,’ Cooper replied. ‘Have you gotten the report from Research?’
‘No, I spoke with them just before I came here. So far, these attacks have left eight people dead and one hospitalized with severe burns. I’d appreciate any help you can give me on this.’
Cooper leaned his head back and composed his thoughts.
‘As you probably know, I’ve been with the Agency for a long time. In fact, I’ve been in the intelligence business since the Second World War, when I worked for Bill Donovan in the OSS.’ Cooper pointed to a black-and- white photo of him with the legendary spymaster on the wall. ‘When the war in Europe began to wind down, the OSS launched an active campaign to capture as many German scientists as we could find – especially the ones working on rocketry, jets, and atomic research. Wolff was part of the group that was working on the German bomb project. I interviewed him and cleared him for entry into the U.S. When his body was found, the computer system matched his name with the keywords on his old OSS file and, since I’m still here, notified me.’
‘If it’s just an ancient case, why’d you request a full background check?’
‘Professional curiosity. When I checked out Wolff, I didn’t find anything that tied him to the nastier stuff the Third Reich was into. He looked like a bright young guy who spent the war doing math – exactly the kind of highly educated professional that the government wanted us to import. After his body was found, it made me wonder if I’d missed something. I requested a full check because there’s a lot more information available now than back in ’forty-six.’
‘Did you find any skeletons?’
‘Just a rumor that turned out to be false. I did learn one new thing about Wolff; he was a lot smarter than he let on.’
‘How so?’
‘Did you ever hear the story about how Einstein and a group of top physicists wrote a letter to Roosevelt explaining why the U.S. needed to build the bomb?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, in Germany, Wolff’s boss, a guy named Werner Heisenberg, did the opposite with Hitler. Heisenberg and his team ran the numbers and determined that even if it were possible, it would cost too much and take too long to build an atomic bomb.’
Cooper then explained how the Soviets and their captured scientists reconstructed the German nuclear research and discovered that Wolff had sabotaged the calculations, thus preventing the Nazis from pursuing development of atomic weapons.
‘So you’re telling me that Wolff kept the Nazis from building an A-bomb?’
‘That’s what his colleagues thought after they put all the pieces together. He was the best mathematician on Heisenberg’s staff, and they trusted his skills implicitly. If he said two plus two equaled five, they believed him. That’s pretty much it as far as background for Wolff. Now, you said that the teams that hit the two labs were apparently Russian?’
‘Yeah, that was the impression they left. Why?’
‘When our people asked the FSB in Moscow to check their archives for information about Wolff, we learned that I wasn’t the only one asking about him. I called a guy I know over there and asked him to see if he could find out who put in the other request.’
‘Did you get an answer?’
‘Yeah. The other interested party is a woman named Oksanna Zoshchenko. She’s a high-level apparatchik in the Russian Academy of Sciences. My contact is digging up some information on her. Whatever I get, I’ll pass along.’
‘Thanks.’ Mosley scribbled a few more notes on a legal pad. ‘So, just days after Wolff’s body is discovered, both you and this Zoshchenko put in a request for information about him.’
‘The timing’s a bit much for mere coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’
‘That and the guys hitting these labs have the look of Russian Special Forces.’
