The Einstein Papers (27 page)

“This bites,” Taft said to Martinez as they waited for the elevator.

Martinez nodded. He was angry, Taft could tell, but he said nothing. The elevator arrived and carried the men to the ground floor. The two men walked past the security desk silently.

“I’m going home. Give me a call later,” Martinez said as they walked into the parking lot.

“I have to return the rental car, then catch a ride over to Andrews to pick up my car. I’ll call you when I’m back at my house.”

A stiff wind was forming peaked whitecaps on the waters of Chesapeake Bay. Most of the boats on the bay today were work boats. Fishermen, crabbers, Coast Guard, and U.S. Navy vessels. The few birds aloft were buffeted by the winds like kites in a cyclone.

One of the few ships leaving port in Norfolk, Virginia, appeared to casual observation to be simply a rather large crabber. The ship was maintained but far from spotless. The bow paint was stained with rust near the anchor hawser. The diesel engines smoked a little more than necessary. A large crane in the center of the stern deck could be used to hoist the pots filled with crab onto the deck. The proliferation of radio antennas could be explained by the personal need of a captain who craved accurate navigation. The lack of fish smell was harder to explain, but you would have to be aboard to notice that. As to the mini-sub in the center of the crab pots covered in netting, there was no logical explanation why that would be aboard a crab boat.

The explanation was simple: the Carondelet was no crab boat.

Two hours later, Taft pulled his car into his garage and shut the door. Walking to his house, he unlocked the door then carried the pile of newspapers on his porch to his kitchen. He snapped off the rubber bands and glanced at the headlines. Finding little of interest, he returned to the front door and walked out to the mail box to retrieve his mail. As he walked back inside he removed the bills and stacked them in a pile on the kitchen table. Then he grubbed around in the refrigerator, and, finding nothing that was less than a few weeks old, took a frozen pizza from the freezer. After the oven had warmed, he slid the pizza onto die rack, set the timer, and walked upstairs to take a shower and shave. He was back downstairs in the kitchen again when the phone rang.

“It’s me,” Martinez said.

“What time should we meet tomorrow?”

“I’ll pick you up. Your house is on the way to Potomac Beach.”

That’s fine. What time?” Taft asked again.

The test doesn’t start until late afternoon. How about two P.M.?”

“I can hardly wait,” Taft said as he hung up the phone.

Taft thought about calling one of his girlfriends, then decided against it. He desperately needed sleep. Walking wearily up the stairs, he climbed into bed and slept for the next twelve hours. When he awoke his disposition had improved.

Tsing spent the night in a run-down boardinghouse above a Chinese restaurant on the edge of Chinatown. The boardinghouse wasn’t linked to a computer and the guests were not required to fill out any registration cards. He rose early and slipped out of the room without being seen. His breakfast was two plums that he bought from a street vendor, and he washed it down with a bottle of water purchased at a neighborhood store. Last night, after checking into the boardinghouse, he had trimmed his hair short. After buying clothes from a rack on the street and changing in a public restroom, his appearance resembled any of the thousands of Chinese who made their home in New York.

Making his way to the main bus terminal he scanned the outside for signs that it was being watched. Several marked police cars were parked in front, but he doubted that was unusual. Entering the terminal he made his way toward the ticket window. Several plainclothes detectives were checking the crowd, but they hardly glanced at Tsing as he purchased his ticket. He waited until his bus was called, then made his way aboard without incident. He sat nervously in his seat and didn’t relax until the bus was past Newark and motoring down Interstate 95.

Arriving in Baltimore in early afternoon, Tsing stole a car from the long-term parking lot at Baltimore’s airport using a plastic key that molded itself to the ignition tumblers, then drove south on Highway 301 to Lanham, Maryland. There he pulled into a gas station and used the pay phone to call the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., for instructions.

It was his only mistake so far.

It was six minutes past three in the morning when the truck carrying Chup ChoSing and his assistant pulled to its final stop, an oil pumping station deep inside Saudi Arabia. ChoSing walked among the tangled mess of piping until he found the spot he was looking for, then ordered his assistant to dig down into the soft sand.

Once the hole was sufficiently deep, he motioned for the assistant to help him carry one of the tanks from the back of the truck. Burying the tank in the hole, he connected a hose from the valve stem fitting directly to a pressure release valve, then stood back and admired his work.

“Wellhead number 6. That completes this operation,” he said to his assistant. “The light of day will soon be upon us. Do you want to sleep? I can handle the first leg of the drive back to the Gulf of Aqaba.”

The assistant nodded wearily. He raised a broom in his hand. “I will erase our footprints as before,” he said as he began sweeping.

ChoSing walked back to the truck and reached under the seat for a package. Removing the nylon pouch he removed the clip and checked to make sure it was loaded.

Cocking the weapon to load a round in the chamber, he placed it in his front pants pocket and walked back toward the wellhead. ChoSing felt no remorse for what he was about to do. He calmly waited until the man had finished sweeping.

The assistant’s head was bent over, sweeping the last spot of sand when the slug from the silenced pistol pierced the base of his skull, killing him instantly. ChoSing dragged the man off a short distance and tossed the body in a gully. Soon the sand crabs would come by land and the vultures by air. In less than a week, the bones would be picked clean. The assistant’s body would never be found.

“Well, that about does it,” George Butler said.

Though the murders Butler finally disclosed had been committed in Port Isabel, the chief of police, Anthony Hill, knew his small department was ill-equipped to handle the investigation. In the first place, Hill had no bodies. In the second place, he presided over a force of three, not including the dispatcher. He had been less than excited when the assistant district attorney in Brownsville explained the case. Hill decided to call his friend, who was the chief of police in McAllen, for advice.

“I heard about it,” the chief in McAllen said after Hill explained. “A deal was cut with the perp. He came clean for a deferred sentence. Your murder is supposedly tied to a theft that occurred here in McAllen. I’ll tell you what, Tony. I recommend you do what I did.”

“What’s that?” Hill asked.

“Turn it over to the Texas Rangers,” the chief in McAllen said easily. “One of the rangers is already here. Do you want me to send him down there?”

“Could you?” Hill asked.

“No problem,” the chief said as he hung up.

That afternoon, when the ranger filed his first report about the theft of the microbes, a computer copy was forwarded to the Special Security Service as required. The report from Texas ended up in the Terrorist Technology Division.

NIA Special Agent Sandra Miles began to read the report with interest.

Jeff McBride shook the rain off his camouflaged rain slicker before entering his hotel room. He hung the dripping coat on a hanger and began to towel off his sopping hair. When McBride had joined the CIA just out of college, he never thought his assignments would be so boring. He had watched the Carondelet patiently for three days as it sat in port in Norfolk. Now that the ship had steamed from port, his assignment was finished and he could return home. With a loud sneeze he added the last notations to the ongoing report on his laptop, then plugged it into the phone line and faxed it to the CIA headquarters in Langley.

The monitoring station for the western oil fields of Saudi Arabia sat baking in the desert sun. Clad in green smoked glass, the building seemed to undulate in the hot air. The area surrounding the building was bleak-acres of sand ringed by a chain-link fence. A few scruffy plants growing from the wasteland did little to alleviate the monotony of the endless expanse of desert. A scorpion peered from his hole atop a hill near the building then slid back inside out of the heat. The temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.

Inside the building the temperature was considerably cooler; the finest air conditioners money could buy were silently attacking the heat. On the second floor of the building Jackson Trumball slid a fishing magazine into his desk drawer, then looked over at his Saudi partner, Nazir Hametz.

“It’s my turn to do the readings,” he said, rising from his chair.

Hametz nodded and motioned to the clipboard on bis desk. “After that we can go to lunch.”

Trumball grabbed the clipboard and walked to the bank of gauges and flashing lights that covered the far wall. He began to enter the readings onto the sheet. Ten minutes later, after Trumball had finished, he entered the data into the computer, then brushed his hair in front of a mirror hanging on the wall.

“What’s the special today?” Trumball asked Hametz in a light Texas drawl.

Hametz glanced at the lunch menu hanging by the door. “Looks like Italian,” he said as he twisted the doorknob and opened the door.

“Has to beat lamb,” Trumball said as he followed Hametz to the cafeteria.

Seventy miles to the north of the monitoring building, at King Khalid Well No. 47, a drop in natural gas pressure automatically signaled to the well to cease pumping. As happened several times a day, some gas was expelled from the pressure release valve. As the valve released the gas, the Enviorco microbes were injected into the well pipe. The microbes began to multiply instantly. They continued downward, eating everything in their path. King Khalid Well No. 47 would soon be as dry as the surrounding land.

Returning from the cafeteria, Hametz burped lightly, then, because it was his turn, reached for the clipboard on TrumbaUs desk. He began to record the readings from the oil wells on the sheet of paper. Six minutes later he noticed the problem.

“Red light on Khalid number 47,” he said to Trumball.

“I noticed a low-pressure reading on that well on the last check. She’s been doing that a lot lately.”

Hametz tapped the light to see if it was jammed, but it remained glowing. “Call the service people to check it out.”

“Okay,” Trumball said. Reaching for the telephone, he dialed the field supervisor. “This is Jackson Trumball in monitoring. We have a red light on number 47, northeast King Khalid Field. Do you have a crew nearby that can check it out?”

The static over the phone line made the supervisor sound like he was in a shower. “Northeast Khalid 47?”

“That’s the one,” Trumball shouted.

“Hold on.”

Trumball could hear the man talking in Arabic in the background. “It’ll be about twenty minutes,” the supervisor said when he came back on the line. “My crew has to load some corrosion testing equipment in the truck. Then we’ll drive over. Give me your extension, I’ll call you back.”

Trumball gave him the extension number and the phone went dead.

“Make sure you note that number 47 is out when you fax that report,” he said to Hametz.

Hametz grunted in reply, then sat down at his desk and finished the report.

Twenty minutes later the service supervisor of the King Khalid field, Jake Long, slid his Ford truck to a stop in front of King Khalid Well No. 47.

Motioning to his workers for help, he hoisted a remote color camera assembly from the rear and dragged it toward the well. Removing the bolts securing the wellhead with a wrench, he dropped the tiny camera into the casing, then fed out some cable. Next, he switched on the television screen and adjusted the contrast.

“Feed the cable down slowly and stop when I tell you,” he said to one of the workers.

As the camera was fed downward, Long stared at the image on the screen. The camera shot a panoramic view, showing the pipe as a tube looking from above. Long stood in shock, trying to comprehend this image from deep inside the earth. The sides of the pipe, normally coated with oil, were devoid of all petroleum. In the place of oil was a gray-green substance that looked like mucus.

Returning to his truck, Long bought back a fishing tool with a scooped cup. Attaching the cup to the end of a flexible metal shaft, he slowly fed the instrument down the well opening. As the cup reached the level of the camera, Long watched the screen carefully.

Manipulating a joystick that moved the cup, he scooped up a sample of the gray-green liquid and then retracted the shaft. When it reached the top of the well, Long dipped his fingers into the liquid.

“Looks like baby shit,” he said to one of the workers standing nearby.

“Smells like it too,” the worker noted.

Long walked to the truck and picked up the phone.

Jeff Scaramelli glanced out the window of the laboratory at the Advanced Physics Center in Boulder, Colorado. A lone female robin was yanking a worm from the turf with its sharp beak. The robin slipped one end of the worm inside its mouth, then tilted her head back and swallowed. Bouncing a tennis ball against the glass and catching it in his hand, Scaramelli turned and glanced at Choi.

“Aurora Borealis,” Scaramelli stated.

“That’s right. High-vacuum, high-power electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere,” said Choi.

“The solar wind colliding with the earth’s magnetic field.”

“So you think that Einstein was trying to use the earth’s magnetic field to prove his theory?” Scaramelli asked.

“Maybe. What if the earths magnetic field altered gravity? It would be almost imperceptible at any given location, yet small variances could add up to big results,” Choi said, scratching his head with the eraser on a pencil.