Critical Mass (30 page)

The downtown streets were empty. I didn’t think anyone was tailing the cab, but I was too tired to pay close attention. And really, what difference did it make? The important question was how Homeland Security knew I’d found the bureau drawers, but didn’t know they’d been stolen from me soon after. Either the right hand didn’t know what the right fingers were doing, or a second party cared about the papers Martin Binder might have dropped in the meth pit.

I dozed in the cab. When the driver pulled up in front of my building on Racine, I woke with a jolt. “They read my e-mail,” I said out loud. “That’s why Martin went dark.”

“It’s eighteen dollars, Miss, whether you e-mail it or text it, and whether it’s dark or light.”

I fished in my pocket for my wallet before I remembered it, too, had been in my briefcase. I hoped it was Mr. Contreras who’d found my case, not Moe or Curly, or the angry second-floor tenant.

At least my keys were in my pocket. The cabdriver cursed me, but he had to wait while I went inside for some money. My first piece of good luck: Mr. Contreras had left a note saying that he had my briefcase. I found it inside his own front door, with my wallet and laptop still inside. By the time I got back to the cab, the meter was at twenty-one dollars. Homeland Security is not cheap, but then, what worth having is?

Back in my own apartment, it wasn’t just the damage Homeland Security had done that got me down, but the sense of vulnerability, that they had let themselves into my home, touched my things, touched my mother’s music, even her concert gown. I took the keys to Jake’s apartment from a dish in my kitchen cupboard.

Jake’s place looked as tidy as when he’d left. I rinsed off federal agent dirt in his bathroom and crawled thankfully into his bed.

My dreams were turbulent, but I slept deeply and didn’t waken until almost noon on Monday. I remade the bed, tidily, the way my mother had taught me, corners squared off. My own bed I usually don’t bother with, but the squalor in my place had given me an urge to be neat.

I’d gotten a five-figure bonus from a case I’d worked in the summer. Part of it had gone to a high-end home cappuccino machine. While the boilers heated, I cleaned up my kitchen. Why had Moe and Curly been so destructive? Usually when the law sneaks in without a warrant, they’re careful not to leave a trace behind, so why had this pair been so wanton? Were they hoping I’d think street punks had broken in?

I fussed around with the machine, discarding shots until I pulled a couple of perfect ones. I couldn’t bear to have anything second-rate right now. I took my cappuccino with me while I worked on my home: folding my mother’s concert gown back into its protective tissue paper, replacing the score to
Don Giovanni
, putting books back on shelves.

If Moe and Curly knew I’d e-mailed Cheviot Labs, announcing the arrival of the dresser drawers, they had hacked into my server and were helping themselves to my correspondence. That meant the confidential report I’d sent Darraugh Graham yesterday was government property.

My temper was rising again. I wanted to act, to sue the government or blow away Moe and Curly, or—don’t do it, I counseled myself. Anger is the surest route to making terrible mistakes. Calm down, think it through.

Question one. Why was Homeland Security reading my e-mail? We all know that various government agencies, from local up through the National Security Agency, troll through e-mail looking for some set of dangerous words. Which ones had I been using that made them care about the meth house in Palfry?

I sat at my dining room table, a copy of Sciascia’s
Il Contesto
that I’d
been about to reshelve in one hand. It wasn’t the meth house. It was Martin Binder that they wanted. Homeland Security had learned I was looking for him, probably from Cordell Breen: he’d told me he was going to sic the FBI on finding out if his daughter was hiding Martin down in Mexico City.

Roberta had spread the story of our inspecting Agnes Schlafly’s bureau drawers far and wide at the football game. Anyone could have passed the news on. Homeland Security knew I’d found the drawers because they were monitoring my e-mail—they’d read my message to Cheviot Labs.

Since Homeland Security didn’t have the news that the drawers had been stolen, that meant two sets of people were looking for Martin. Set One broke into the Mustang while the Feds were waiting to intercept the drawers when I got back to Chicago. So Set One were drug dealers. In that case, the sheriff’s deputies who’d come to the motel at four yesterday morning were right—meth heads thought I’d dug up treasure and they wanted it.

If Cordell Breen was tracking Martin, he could have bribed anyone to let him know whether they found anything at the meth house. My head ached from chasing my ideas in circles. I could see drug dealers murdering Ricky, I could see them thinking that Judy had run from Palfry with a chunk of Ricky Schlafly’s money. And then imagining that I’d found gold in the meth pit when the stories began circulating at the football game.

“DTs,” I printed in block capitals, short for Drug Thugs. “DTs killed Schlafly and Kitty (probably). HSTs—Homeland Security Thugs—are monitoring my e-mail because Cordell Breen has asked FBI to find Martin Binder. Cordell thinks Martin is selling Metargon secrets, but there’s been no whiff of buyer or seller.”

The DTs probably would just trash the bits of paper on the dresser drawers. In fact, they’d trash the drawers, too, when they realized that the only treasure there was fool’s gold.

What did the HSTs imagine I’d found? Not the bank account. The document from the Department of Commerce about Innsbruck? But that was something obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; anyone could read it.

I pulled my laptop out of my briefcase and started to power it up, but stopped. If the HSTs were monitoring my e-mail they could be embedded right in my accounts, looking at every search I made. They’d see the laptop’s ISP and come trundling along looking for me and my machine. I needed a computer where someone wouldn’t be tracking me. I put
Il Contesto
away, but left the rest of the books on the table.

27

DERRICK, KING OF THE DAMNED

A
GOOD FRIEND OF
mine had died in a bad fall earlier this summer. I’d put her private documents into my safe while she lay unconscious in the ICU. When she died a few days later, trauma and grief put any thought of her papers out of my mind. I came on them when I was checking my safe, to make sure Homeland Security hadn’t been inside it.

Leydon Ashford had been not just a loving and energetic friend, but a risk-taker who enjoyed thumbing her nose at authority. I figured she would applaud my borrowing her identity for a few days.

I took public transportation down to the South Side so I could use the University of Chicago library. Before I went, I checked in with Mr. Contreras. He started to ask me what had happened to me last night, but I put a finger over his mouth and took him outside with the dogs. While we stood on the beach throwing balls for them, I told him what had happened last night with the federal magistrate. I asked him not to discuss any aspect of this current case when we were at home or in my car.

“Those Homeland Security guys have got me nervous. If they’ve hacked into my e-mail account, they might easily be bugging my phone, or the car or our building.”

The warning made my neighbor angry: this wasn’t what he’d risked
his life for at Anzio all those years ago. Far as that went, it wasn’t why he’d worked hard at Diamond Machining for forty years, creating struts for B-52s.

I couldn’t offer him any consolation. It wasn’t what I’d worked all my life for, either. “The trouble is, they seem to think I know something about our nuclear policy, or weapons or something, and until I figure that out, I don’t have a way of getting them to leave me alone.”

Back at home, I took the battery out of my phone so that its GPS signal wouldn’t betray me. I left my iPad and laptop with Mr. Contreras so I wouldn’t be tempted to check my e-mails.

I wasn’t going to drive, in case someone had bugged my car. On my way to the L, I stopped a couple of times, to tie my shoes, to buy a paper, but I didn’t see any obvious signs of tails. Either the HSTs were too subtle for me or I was exaggerating my importance to them. Still, it would reduce my carbon footprint to ride the L: I felt virtuous as the train made its languid afternoon run into the center city.

That was about the one positive in the day. Until I knew for sure why Homeland Security was focusing on me, I wasn’t going to be a very happy detective. A government audit had shown that Homeland Security monitors e-mails and phone calls from Americans without even trying to connect us to terrorism. They don’t have a budget, they just do what they want. The problem is that once the government starts monitoring you, they invade all aspects of your life, not just the little bit they think they need.

I needed to talk to Judy Binder. She surely told her son about the bank account Benjamin Dzornen had set up, but I bet Martin didn’t care about that—it would have been ancient history to him. He’d gone to his mother because he thought Judy had some documents about the significance of Martina’s work, something neither Judy nor Kitty had recognized or cared about.

I liked that, because it meant that was why Ricky Schlafly was
murdered. Ricky overheard mother and son arguing. He figured Judy was sitting on valuable documents. For any dopehead, something was valuable if it could be sold or bartered for drugs.

Ricky tried to sell the documents. I’d never met him alive, but I assumed he was as lazy and greedy as the addicts I used to represent. He wouldn’t have done anything subtle, like gone to archivists with offers of important papers. He’d have gone straight to eBay or Craigslist, and then anyone would have known about the documents: Julius Dzornen, some other drug dealer or even Homeland Security, come to think of it.

Downtown, I left the L to ride a bus down to Hyde Park. If Chicago really had rapid transit, I wouldn’t drive so much: the fifteen-mile run from my home down to the university took eighty minutes.

At the library, they let me inside with Leydon’s driver’s license. I couldn’t borrow books, but I could use the collection, including the computers.

I logged on first to the online auction site Virtual-Bidder. I tried to imagine how Schlafly might have thought. He probably hadn’t known Martina Saginor’s name, but I started with her, anyway, tried Benjamin Dzornen, moved to physics in Vienna, and finally hit pay dirt, so to speak, with “Nuclear Weapons,” where there were hundreds of thousands of hits: manuals from the Nevada Proving Grounds, photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, videos of old movies with names like
Atomic Bomb
.

A seller named King Derrick had been offering “Authentic Nazi Nuclear Secrets.” King Derrick, ruler of the Empire of the Damned. I saw his decimated body again, the eyeballs gone, the crows circling, and shivered.

Starting bid for his authentic secrets was suggested at a hundred dollars, but the auction had been shut down. A large red-and-black banner covered most of the page, announcing that the auction had been in violation of Virtual-Bidder rules. Behind the banner, parts of a screen shot
that King Derrick had called “Proof of real Nazi weapons secrets” were visible.

If k
_eff
= 1, then . . . is critical. If neutrons . . . added . . . by . . . external . . . and if the system is not quenched by a strong . . . absorber, they can trigger an explosion. An external Ra-Be neutron . . . at Innsbruck emitted S
₀
= 10
⁶
neutrons/second . . . know the neutron-mul . . .

At the bottom of the page was a small circle with a kind of design in it. It seemed to be interlocking triangles with another symbol that was too blurry on the screen image to make out. I wondered if it might be some symbol of authentication that collectors of Nazi memorabilia looked for.

The part of the text visible behind the banner meant nothing to me, except that it concerned the weapons facility where Martina had spent part of the war. A weapons expert would know whether it proved they’d been building the bomb in Innsbruck. Was this why Homeland Security was on my case? Not because of Martin and the Metargon code, but because they thought I knew something about nuclear weapons?

I stopped looking at auction sites and began searching the Web. Homeland Security had access to all my log-in information, which meant if they were in fact monitoring me, they’d know when I went to one of my subscription databases. That limited me to the standard search engines, Yahoo, Dogpile, Metar-Quest. Once again, I started with my Viennese scientists.

I got too many hits on Benjamin Dzornen to bother with them. There was nothing for Martina Saginor, except for a mention in tandem with Memler in a book on women at the Radium Institute in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. The library had a copy. I closed my search: the library periodically wipes the buffers clean, but I didn’t want to leave any of my pages open.

The book was in the science library. I was curious enough to trudge across the campus to the science quad. Arthur Harriman, my young science librarian, was working the desk when I stopped to get permission to go into the stacks.

“Nora! I wondered when you’d come back,” Harriman said. “Have you found the missing warheads?”

“Like the purloined letter, they were right out in the nuclear stockpile where anyone could see them.” I tried to get into the spirit of the joke.

“You know, I told you I’d ask this friend of mine who’s writing her dissertation on Dzornen about whether he’d stolen your lady’s work, and she pooh-poohed that. Dzornen’s prize was for work he did before your Ms. Saginor became his student.”

Another blind alley, then. I thanked him for remembering to ask, and got a day pass from him. After a few more tedious Nick-and-Nora jokes, I went into the stacks to read about women in Viennese physics.