Dark Matter (11 page)

One new computer technology perfected by the Trinity team was holographic memory storage. Rather than storing data in microchips, Trinity engineers stored it as holograms within the molecules of stable crystals. Using lasers to read and write data, they could store enormous amounts of information within the crystal's symmetrically arranged atoms. The crystals I had seen in the Trinity holography lab were the size of NFL footballs, but I saw no reason that a smaller one could not be used. Like the one on Fielding's watch chain.

Somehow, the Englishman had been downloading Trinity data into his crystal watch fob. And because no one outside Trinity's inner circle of scientists and engineers knew this was even possible, Fielding could walk it in and out of the building every day without anyone suspecting a thing.

But why would he steal information? To sell to the highest bidder? Fielding was old school. Even if he were desperate for money, he was the last person I would suspect of corporate espionage. Had he secretly embraced some ideology?

Or abandoned one? Was he a politically naive scientist who believed all nations should share access to the latest technology? Possibly. But I didn't think he would want a rogue nation to possess something as powerful as a Trinity computer. To hear Fielding talk sometimes, you would think he didn't want any country to possess one.

Was that it? Had he been working to prevent Trinity from becoming a reality?

That scenario seemed the most likely, but I didn't have enough information to make an accurate guess. And without the watch, I couldn't prove anything.

I showered in near-scalding water, then dressed in chinos and a sport jacket and walked quickly to my car, trying not to think too much about what I was doing. My primary goal in returning to Trinity was to find Fielding's pocket watch, but in truth I saw little choice. Staying home would only invite closer NSA scrutiny, and running— as I hoped Lu Li had done—would bring the full resources of the agency down upon me. But if I could preserve the illusion of normalcy a little longer—until the president got back to me—I might be able to avenge Fielding's death.

On a good traffic day, the Trinity complex was a twenty-minute drive from my house in suburban Chapel Hill. Research Triangle Park, the manicured haven of corporate research known locally as the RTP, lay between Raleigh and Durham and was named for the triangle formed by Duke University, UNC at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State. Its quiet lanes led through expansive lawns that suggested an exclusive country club, but instead of golf links, the seven-thousand-acre RTP boasted labs owned by DuPont, 3M, Merck, Biogen, Lockheed, and dozens of other blue-chip names. Forty-five thousand people reported to work within its borders every day, but less than three hundred knew what lay behind the walls of the Trinity building. I drove slowly, hoping in some juvenile way that I would never arrive at my destination.

The Trinity lab stood two hundred yards back from an understated sign that read ARGUS OPTICAL. A forbidding five-story block of steel and black glass, it sat on sixty wooded acres with extensive sub-basements and a heliport. The steel and glass was just a shell constructed for show. Behind it, high-tech copper cladding code-named Tempest encased the inner building, preventing electromagnetic radiation from passing in or out of Trinity. The same stuff protected the NSA operations buildings at Fort Meade.

Because the building had been sited in a sort of bowl, its first two floors lay out of sight. The main entrance was on the third floor. To reach it, staff had to cross a roofed catwalk forty yards long. Inside a fortified archway at the far end, they confronted a narrow passage guarded by a security officer and lined with sensitive metal detectors, electronic bomb-sniffers, and fluoroscope machines. Authorized entry required photo ID, a fingerprint scan, and a mandatory search of all bags.

A sentry buzzed open the archway door, and I walked up to the security desk, my face revealing none of the anxiety I felt.

"Morning, Doc," said a middle-aged guard named Henry.

I sometimes thought Henry had been hired through central casting. The other security personnel were all in their late twenties, lean young men and women with smooth faces, avian eyes, and zero body fat. Only Henry, the gate man, ever said a word of greeting.

"Good morning, Henry," I said.

"There's a meeting in the conference room at nine."

"Thanks."

"You got four minutes."

I looked at my watch and nodded.

"Still can't get over Professor Fielding," Henry said. "They say he was dead before the ambulance got here."

I took a careful breath. This exchange was being recorded by hidden cameras.

"That's the way it goes sometimes with strokes."

"Not a bad way to go out. Quick, I mean."

I forced a smile, then laid the pad of my right forefinger on a small scanner.

After the unit beeped for a match, I passed through the gauntlet of threat-detection equipment and took the stairs to the fifth floor, which housed the administrative offices and conference room.

Yellow police tape stretched across the closed door to Fielding's office. Who had put it there? Surely the NSA hadn't allowed local or state police to enter this facility. Glancing up and down the empty corridor, I quickly tried the knob. Locked. And not with some lightweight mechanism from a hardware store.

If Fielding's pocket watch was inside his office, I couldn't get it.

I walked a few doors down to my own office, closed the door, and sat down at my primary computer. Part of a closed network that served only the Trinity scientists, it had no connection to the outside world. To access the Internet, I had to use a second computer that had no ports or drives through which files could be exported from the building.

My primary screen showed one interoffice e-mail: a reminder of the meeting scheduled to begin in the conference room in two minutes. With a macabre chill I realized that I'd half-expected a humorous e-mail from Fielding. He often sent me little jokes or ironic quotes from dead scientists or philosophers: Scientists over 60 do more harm than good! —T. H. Huxley— like that. But today there was no message. And there would never be another. I looked blankly around my office. Fielding was gone, and I was profoundly disoriented.

Together, we had stopped Project Trinity for six tense weeks, angering our colleagues while we tried in vain to discover the cause of the MRI side effects experienced by the six Trinity principals. Today that issue remained unresolved.

I hadn't volunteered to be scanned by the Super-MRI unit out of stupidity. The theory was simple: since Homo sapiens had evolved in the earth's magnetic field, an MRI's magnetic energy did not pose a health risk. This had been proved countless times by conventional MRI machines, which generated fields thirty thousand times more powerful than that of the earth. But the Super-MRI developed at Trinity—using superconductivity and colossal magnets—generated fields up to eight hundred thousand times greater than that of the earth.

Gross side effects such as tissue-heating had been solved in animal tests, but within days after undergoing our "superscans," all of us had begun experiencing disturbing neurological symptoms.

Jutta Klein, the designer of the Super-MRI, suffered short-term memory loss.

Ravi Nara endured extreme sexual compulsions (he had several times been caught masturbating in his office and in the rest room). John Skow developed hand tremors, and Godin himself had suffered epileptic seizures. Fielding had developed, of all things, a form of Tourette's syndrome and frequently blurted out inappropriate words or phrases. And I had narcolepsy.

Ravi Nara, our Nobel-winning neurologist, could find no medical explanation for this sudden flurry of symptoms, so all Super-MRI scanning had temporarily been halted. Work on the Trinity computer continued, but with the Super-MRI removed from the chain, Godin's engineers had only the six original scans to work from, and no one knew whether those were of sufficient resolution to

"make the leap" into the prototype computer. With Nara at a loss, Fielding began investigating the side effects in his spare time. Six weeks later, he suggested that they had been caused by a disruption of quantum processes in our brains—and backed up his theory with twenty pages of complex mathematics.

Nara argued that nothing in the history of neuroscience suggested that the human brain carried out quantum processes. Only a few physicists subscribed to this "New Age" theory of consciousness—Roger Penrose among them—yet Fielding toiled on, trying to prove his theory.

Peter Godin initially supported Fielding, but before long he resumed MRI testing on primates. Chimps and orangutans suffered no ill effects. Fielding argued that primates weren't conscious in the human sense, and thus their brains had no quantum processes to be disrupted. Godin ignored him. I then reported Fielding's suspicions to the president, who officially suspended the project pending an exhaustive investigation of the side effects.

That was six weeks ago. Since then, Fielding and I had worked almost around the clock to prove his theory of quantum disturbance. I felt like an assistant to Albert Einstein, sharpening pencils and taking notes while the genius worked beside me. Yet despite Fielding's formidable intellect, he could not prove his theory. Too much remained unknown about the brain. Now he was dead, and without a demonstrable link between the MRI unit and our "side effects," I couldn't hope to hold back the collective tide of wills set on resuming the project. Without proof of foul play, Trinity would continue.

The battle would begin in minutes, after a few hollow words of regret over Fielding's "untimely passing." Perspiration filmed my face as I walked toward the conference room door.

The room was empty.

I had never arrived first at a meeting. The other principals were compulsively punctual. I poured coffee from the urn on the credenza, then sat at the far end of the table and tried to stay calm.

Where the hell was everybody? Watching me from the security room? Where would they hide the camera? Behind a picture? Hanging to my right was a rare black-and-white photograph of the core physicists of the Manhattan Project: Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Wigner, Edward Teller. They stood in a friendly knot before the Oscura mountains of New Mexico, giants of science, each destined for fame or infamy, depending on one's point of view. Some, like the hawkish Teller, had wound up wreathed in glory and the flag; others were not so fortunate. Oppy was stripped by lesser men of the security clearance he needed to work, and lived but a shadow of the life he might have had. But in 1944 they stood together, wearing dark European suits in the stark white sand of the desert. They gazed over the Trinity conference table like patron saints, their eyes communicating an inscrutable combination of humor, humility, and hard-won wisdom. The only Trinity scientist who displayed those qualities had died yesterday on his office floor.

Voices filtered from the hallway into the conference room. I straightened in my chair as my colleagues began to trickle in with an air of forced casualness. I had a feeling they had just adjourned a private meeting whose only order of business had been "handling" me.

First in line was Jutta Klein, the team's sole woman.. Chief research scientist for the Siemens Corporation in Germany, the gray-haired Klein—also a Nobel laureate, in physics—had been loaned to Trinity for the duration of the project. With assistance from Fielding and a team of engineers from General Electric, she had designed and built the fourth-generation Super-MRI machine.

Now she oversaw the smooth operation of the temperamental behemoth.

"Guten Morgen," she said stiffly, and sat at my right, her matronly face impossible to read.

"Morgen," I replied.

Ravi Nara followed Klein through the door. He sat three chairs away from me, emphasizing the distance that had recently marked our relationship. The young Indian neurologist held a chocolate doughnut in one brown hand, but his right protruded from a cast. I suppressed a smile. Four days ago, he had taken a coffee mug partly made of lead into the Super-MRI room and set it on a counter. When Klein activated the machine for a test on a chimpanzee, the mug had flown across the room and smashed Nara's arm against the machine's housing, shattering his ulna. Klein told him to consider himself lucky. On the day the Super-MRI went operational, a technician on loan from Siemens had been killed by a metallic EKG cart that slammed her against the machine and crushed her skull.

"Good morning, David."

I looked up to see the trim, Brooks Brothers-clad figure of John Skow take the chair at the head of the table. A deputy director of the NSA, Skow was America's foremost authority on information warfare, and the titular director of Project Trinity. Yet it was Peter Godin who determined the direction and pace of Trinity research. The relationship between Skow and Godin mirrored that of General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Groves had been a ruthless taskmaster, but without Oppenheimer's cooperation, he could never have delivered the atomic bomb. So, the ultimate power had lain with the civilian scientist, not the soldier.

"Skow," I said, not even attempting a smile.

"Yesterday was a terrible blow to all of us," he intoned in his aristocratic Boston accent, his thin lips barely moving. "But I know it's a particular loss for you, David."

I searched for genuine grief in his voice. The NSA man was a practiced bureaucrat, and his sincerity was hard to gauge.

"Peter will be here in a moment," he said. "I guess he'll be the tardy boy from now on."

I smiled inside. In the past, Fielding had always been last to arrive, when he bothered to show up at all. Some days he went AWOL, and I would be sent in search of him. I usually found him poring over equations in his office.

A faint curse drifted through the open door, announcing Peter Godin's approach. Trinity's lead scientist suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and merely walking was a burden to him on some days. At seventy-one years old, Godin was by far the senior scientist on the project. Vacuum-tube computing machines had not even existed when he was born, yet for the past forty years, the "old man" of Trinity had pushed the envelope of digital computing further and faster than any CRT-dazed savant who ever skateboarded out of Silicon Valley.