Dark Matter

“Shit.” Geli routed the signal from the Fielding house microphones to her headset. She heard only silence. “Something’s going down,” she murmured. “What do you have with you?”

“I’ve got a parabolic, but it’s no good through walls and next to useless with a window. I need the laser rig.”

“That’s here.” She mentally cataloged her resources. “I’ll have it to you in twelve minutes.”

“They could be gone in twelve minutes.”

“What about night vision?”

“I wasn’t expecting anything tactical.”

Goddamn it. “It’s all on the way. Check Tennant’s car for that FedEx envelope. And give me the address of the driveway where you’re parked.”

Geli wrote it down, then pressed a button that sounded a tone in a room at the back of the basement complex. There were beds there, for times when her teams needed to work around the clock. Thirty seconds later, a tall man with long blond hair shuffled sleepily into the control center.

“Was ist this?” he asked.

“We’re going on alert,” Geli said, pointing to a coffee machine against the wall. “Drink.”

Ritter Bock was German, and the only member of her team handpicked by Peter Godin. A former GSG-9 commando, Ritter had worked for an elite private security service that provided bodyguards for Godin when he traveled in Europe and the Far East. Godin had hired Ritter permanently after the former commando averted a kidnapping attempt on the billionaire. Ruthless, nerveless, and skilled in areas beyond his counterterror specialty, the twenty-nine-year-old had turned out to be Geli’s best operative. And since she had spent her early summers in Germany, there was no language problem.

Ritter sipped from a steaming mug and looked at Geli over its rim. He had the gray machine-gunner’s eyes of the boys who had attracted her as a teenager, while her father was stationed in Germany.

“I need you to deliver the laser rig to Corelli,” she said. “He’s parked in a driveway near the UNC campus.”

She tore off the top sheet of her notepad and laid it on the desktop beside her.

Ritter sniffed and nodded. He hated gofer jobs like this one, but he never complained. He did the scut work and waited patiently for the jobs he was born to do.

“Is the laser in the ordnance room?” he asked.

“Yes. Take four night-vision rigs with you.”

He drained the steaming coffee, then picked up the address off the desk and left the room without a word. Geli liked that. Americans felt they had to fill every silence, as though silence were something to be feared. Ritter wasted no effort, either in conversation or in action. This made him valuable. Sometimes they worked together, other times she slept with him. It hadn’t caused problems yet. She’d been that way in the army, too, taking her pleasure where she could find it. Just as she had at boarding school in Switzerland. There was always risk. You just had to be able to handle aggressive men—or women—and the fallout after you’d finished with them. She had always been up to both tasks.

“Corelli?” she said. “What are you hearing now?”

“Still nothing. Faint spillover. Unintelligible.”

“I’m calling an alert. Ritter’s on the way.”

There was only static and silence. Geli smiled. Ritter made the others uncomfortable. “Did you hear me?”

“Affirmative. I’m at Tennant’s car now.”

“What do you see?”

“No FedEx envelope. He must have taken it inside with him.”

“Okay.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go back to your car and wait for Ritter.”

“Right.”

Geli clicked off and thought again about Fielding’s personal effects in the storeroom. She had a feeling something was missing, and her instincts were usually dead-on. But she didn’t want to leave the control center now. Once Ritter reached the scene, things could happen fast.

SIX (#ulink_51946002-3421-53e2-88f0-d97b4073cf02)

I pulled Rachel into the foyer of the Fielding house. The door closed quickly behind us, and we turned to face an Asian woman just under five feet tall. Lu Li Fielding had lived most of her forty years in Communist China. She understood English well enough, but she didn’t speak it well at all.

“Who this woman?” she asked, pointing at Rachel. “You not married, are you, Dr. David?”

“This is Rachel Weiss. “She’s a good friend of mine. She’s a physician, too.”

Suspicion filled Lu Li’s eyes. “She work for the company?”

“You mean Argus Optical?”

“Tlinity,” she said, substituting an l for the r.

“Absolutely not. She’s a professor at the Duke University Medical School.”

Lu Li studied Rachel for several moments. “You come in, too, then. Please. Hurry, please.”

Lu Li bowed and led us into the den, which opened to the kitchen. I smiled sadly. When Fielding had occupied this house alone, it always looked as though a tornado had just blown through it. Books and papers strewn about, dozens of coffee cups, beer bottles, and overflowing ashtrays littering every flat surface. After Lu Li arrived, the house had become a Zen-like space of cleanliness and order. Tonight it smelled of wax and lemon instead of cigarettes and stale beer.

“Sit, please,” Lu Li said.

Rachel and I sat beside each other on a pillowy sofa. Lu Li perched on the edge of an old club chair opposite us. She focused on Rachel, who was staring at a plaque hanging on the wall behind Lu Li’s chair.

“Is that the Nobel Prize?” Rachel asked softly.

Lu Li nodded, not without pride. “Andy win the Nobel in 1998. I was in China then, but still we knew his work. All physicists amazed.”

“You must be very proud of him.” Rachel spoke with a calm that her wide eyes belied. “How did you two meet?”

As Lu Li responded in broken English, I marveled at the union of this woman and my dead friend. Fielding had met Lu Li while lecturing in Beijing as part of a Sino-British diplomatic initiative. She taught physics at Beijing University, and she’d sat in the first row during each of Fielding’s nine lectures. Party bureaucrats held several receptions during the series, and Lu Li attended them all. She and Fielding had quickly become inseparable, and by the time the day arrived for him to leave China, they were deeply in love. Two and a half years of separation followed, with Fielding trying desperately to arrange an exit visa for her. Even with the supposed help of the NSA brass, he made no progress. Fielding eventually reached a point where he was considering paying illegal brokers to have Lu Li smuggled out of the country, but I convinced him this was too risky.

Everything changed when Fielding began delaying Project Trinity with his suspicions about the side effects we were all suffering. As if by magic, the red tape was cut, and Lu Li was on a plane bound for Washington. Fielding knew his fiancée had only been brought to America to distract him, but he didn’t care. Nor did her arrival have its desired effect. The Englishman continued to painstakingly investigate every negative event at the Trinity lab, and the other scientists grew to hate him for it.

“Lu Li,” I said during a pause, “first let me express my great sadness over Andrew’s passing.”

The physicist shook her head. “That not why I ask you here. I want to know about this morning. What really happen to my Andy?”

I hesitated to speak frankly in the house. Seeing my anxious expression, she went to the fireplace, knelt, and reached up into the flue. She brought out a sooty cardboard box, which she set on the coffee table. I’d seen the box before. It contained several pieces of homemade electronic equipment that reminded me of the Heathkit projects my father and I had worked on when I was a boy. Lu Li withdrew an object that looked like a metal wand.