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  “Scream?”

  “Yes. Scream.”

  “This makes no sense at all, Wu,” Cui said.

  “Who is screaming, and what is she screaming about? Is she in pain?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do they say about two wrongs?”

  “Two wrongs are better than three but worse than one?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Just do the best you can,” Cui said. “Much of this is not knowable. If the Boss questions you, I will tell him you are right and he is wrong.”

  Wu appreciated Cui’s offer of support, but he knew that if it came to where the Boss was going to be hard on them, Cui would capitulate instantly. He sat down at his computer screen and typed in the best translation he could come up with in the time given him.

  “You are not the person who I thought was once here pending the arrival of the white man. And anyway, he is gone,” Bruce Willis said.

  “And yet you very much resemble he who isn’t that person or any other,” Uma Thurman replied, “and he is not white. Surely your mother was forced to write a number upon you.”

  “If it were up to me, I would rather go away now,” Willis said.

  “They say when you are wrong twice, that is bad, and this you know,” the actress replied.

  “Even if you choose to say nothing, the thing you do not say will be loud. You may yell now.”

  “Did you finish?” Cui asked. Wu sighed.

  “I did my best. If I’m lucky, everyone will be too busy looking at Uma Thurman to read the subtitles,”Wu Xiake said, adding, in English, “Why soitenly—nyuk nyuk nyuk…”

  “I wish my wife had breasts like hers,” Cui said. “They were like that when my wife was nursing our daughter, but she wouldn’t let me touch them. Like Hong Kong. Very appealing, but what difference does it make if you’re not allowed to go there?”

  Wu Xiake had just moved on to the next scene when he heard a noise, a low rumbling that sounded like a locomotive was crashing through the building. The noise grew louder and the building shook, until he was certain that an earthquake had struck. He crawled under his desk, where Cui joined him as the power went out in the building and they were engulfed in darkness and dust. He coughed. It was hard to breathe. “Cui?” he called out. He was fortunate in that he still had the headlamp his wife had bought him for his birthday, to wear when he had to ride his bicycle home in the darkness, and the light was strong and the batteries were fresh. He turned it on, but the room was full of dust and smoke. Cui was crying, so Wu did what he could to comfort his friend. The noise lasted for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, and then the building was still again. Cui was shaking. Wu held his friend.

  “We must get out,” Wu said. “There could be aftershocks. Are you hurt?”

  “No, I think I’m okay.”

  “Follow me, Cui.”

  Wu put his headlamp on his head and made his way through the darkness, crawling over fallen file cabinets and shelves. In the hall, they found Ji Jiabao, the cleaning lady, trapped under her cart, so they lifted it off her and helped her to her feet. She seemed to be okay. As far as they knew, they were the only ones in their part of the building. A night watchman was supposed to make the rounds, but he was usually in the warehouse, watching movies.

  When they got to the end of the corridor, Wu Xiake opened the double doors and stopped, because that was where the building stopped. He saw only flame and smoke and the stars in the open sky above, and below, a pile of rubble where the warehouse had once been, a part of the old converted factory once the size of several soccer fields now simply gone, and with it, millions of yuan worth of copied DVDs waiting for shipment. The earthquake had destroyed Shijingshan Entertainment, and yet, when Wu looked across the river, he saw that the old two-hundred-foot-tall brick chimney from the coal-burning power plant was still belching smoke—how could the earthquake demolish the warehouse but not knock down the chimney?

  By the time Wu reached his bicycle, the building was surrounded by fire trucks and policemen and people manning manual pumps to bring water from the river to pour onto the smoldering rubble. He probably should have stayed to help, Wu thought, but he was just tired and wanted to go home. Yet looking back at the building, he couldn’t help noting how odd it was—it was as if somebody had taken a large knife and sliced the building neatly in half in a straight line. Perhaps that was where the fault line of the earthquake lay, and yet, none of the other buildings in the neighborhood had been touched or damaged in any way. The night watchman was the only casualty.

  “You don’t think the Boss is going to blame us for this, do you, Wu?” Cui asked.

  “I don’t know,” Wu said, worried. “He might.”

  “You have to tell him that I was working at my desk when it happened,” Cui said. “You have to tell him we are innocent.”

  “Don’t worry,” Wu said, “I’ll tell him,” though he didn’t plan on going back to work any time soon.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS 370 MILES FROM COLORADO SPRINGS TO Albuquerque, but DeLuca didn’t like to fly, and the point was moot because a snowstorm dumping twelve to eighteen inches in Colorado along the eastern slope of the Rockies had closed the airport anyway, so he drove, sometimes in near white-out conditions, following Interstate 25 south through towns like Pueblo and Walsenburg and Trinidad, the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe freight trains on the tracks parallel to the freeway reminding him of the Polar Express from the classic children’s book. The way he saw it, if he could drive thousands of miles across the back country of Iraq, getting shot at by Hadjis wielding Kalishnikovs and RPGs, and come through safely on the other side, then a little snow wasn’t going to deter him. He checked in with the other members of Team Red as he drove, calling Sgts. Colleen MacKenzie, Dan Sykes, and Julio Vasquez on his mobile but getting through to none of them, so he left messages, telling them to enjoy their vacations and to check their voice mail—it was possible, he said, that he was going to need them. He called Walter Ford and Sami Jambazian as well, both former partners of his on the Boston P.D. and both working for him in their retirements, and left similar messages, noting again how, now that everyone had cell phones and voice mail, you never actually talked to people anymore. He called his wife from the road and learned his son Scott would be coming home from Iraq on extended leave, which was good news. DeLuca told Bonnie he’d check in with her when he found a motel. She said it was late (he’d forgotten he was in the Mountain time zone) and to call in the morning.

  He told her he missed her.

  She said she missed him, too.

  He was having dinner in a truck stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when his telephone rang. He’d just watched an obese four-hundred-pound trucker polish off four pancakes, each the equivalent of a loaf of bread, in a room full of giant truckers eating giant pancakes, and he idly wondered how much extra diesel fuel was consumed, hauling their fat asses up and over the Rockies—it was a thought he kept to himself.

  “Mr. David?” the voice said, the accent thick but not impenetrable.

  “Theresa, how are you?” he asked.

  “You said I would call you if I thought anything,” she said.

  “What’s happened? Are you okay?”

  “I am fine,” she said. “I wanted to tell you a man called, for Cheryl. I don’t know what.”

  “What man?”

  “I will play it for you if you will wait,” Theresa Davidova said. He heard some fumbling with buttons, and then a man’s voice, saying: “This is Brother Antonionus calling for Cheryl Escavedo, returning your call. I’m sorry I missed you, but feel free to call me back at the same number you called before, and I look forward to speaking with you.”

  “Is that good?” she asked. “You heard?”

  “Thank you, I did,” he told her. “I’m heading for Albuquerque now, so maybe tomorrow I can stop by and listen to it in person—are you going to be around?”

  “Yes, I will be here,” she said. “I also
found a note. Just two words. Sometimes Cheryl would make notes to write down telephone numbers on whatever she finds near the telephone. I found this on one of my notebooks this way, in her handwriting.”

  “What did she write?” DeLuca asked.

  “Tom never,” Theresa said.

  “Tom never what? Who’s Tom? And what didn’t he do?”

  “I don’t know this,” Theresa said. “This is all it says.”

  “I’ll have a look tomorrow,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know what time, but I’ll call first. So just sit tight until I see you tomorrow, how’s that?”

  “I will sit tight and hang loose,” she said.

  He found a motel near the airport in Albuquerque around midnight. The next morning, he went online at www.UNM.edu and learned that Dr. Penelope Burgess would be holding office hours between ten and noon.

  Burgess looked up when he knocked on her door, glancing over the wire-rimmed reading glasses that rested on the end of her upturned nose. She was around forty, attractive, petite, brunette, her hair in a kind of Martha Stewart cut, though the glasses gave her a sort of Mother Hubbardish look, which was also a thought he kept to himself. She was marking the paper she was reading with a red pen. She asked if she could help him.

  “Dr. Burgess?” DeLuca said. “I hope I’m not interrupting—I know these are office hours.”

  “I haven’t had a student visit me during office hours in five years,” she said. “I think they think if they do, I’m going to give them extra work. How can I help you?”

  “David DeLuca,” he said, extending his hand, “U.S. Army counterintelligence. I was hoping I could have about fifteen minutes of your time.”

  She shook his hand, exhibiting palpably less enthusiasm when she heard the words “U.S. Army.”

  “Sit down, Mr. DeLuca,” she said coolly. “Do you have a rank or do I just call you ‘Mr. DeLuca’?”

  “Chief warrant officer. You can call me David, or Mr. DeLuca, or Agent if you’d prefer,” he said.

  “You don’t wear uniforms?” she asked.

  “Counterintelligence is the one part of the Army where we’re allowed to go pretty much outside the box. Probably the best way to explain it is that what the FBI is to your local police, counterintelligence is to the military police. Who, I gather, have already questioned you.”

  “About that girl,” Dr. Burgess said. “The one who said she had information for me.”

  “Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “We found her Jeep abandoned about ten miles north of the Mexican border, in Arizona, but we still haven’t found her.”

  “I told the CID people I’d call them if I heard from her,” Dr. Burgess said. “And I haven’t. I don’t know what else I can tell you. I’m being honest with you and I’m trying to cooperate, but I’m not sure I appreciate all this attention. All I know is that someone I never met supposedly wrote me a letter I never received, and now everyone is acting like that’s enough to send me to Guantanamo with a bag over my head.”

  DeLuca took her to be a sensible woman, in which case he needed only to wait for her to realize what an extreme statement that was. She didn’t disappoint him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was out of line. I’ve been up since five o’clock grading papers and each one is worse than the next. Maybe if you told me what sort of information she was going to give me, we could make some sense out of this. But I suppose that’s going to be classified, right?”

  “I’m supposing that, too,” he said, “once we figure out what it was she took. I can tell you that she worked in the archives at Cheyenne Mountain, so she had access to pretty much everything that went through there. It could have been brand new or it could have been forty years old. We just don’t know.”

  “And she smuggled it out of Fort CMAFS?” she said, pronouncing it “sea-maffs.” “She must have been a very clever girl.”

  “You’re familiar with the facility?”

  “I used to know someone who worked there,” she said.

  “You work underground, too, do you not?” DeLuca asked. He’d had MacKenzie pull out what she could find on Dr. Penelope Burgess and e-mail it to him, but he’d only had time to skim the report.

  “Primarily,” she said. “That and other extreme environments. And in the lab.”

  “And this is for the Mars program? I’m asking because maybe she had something she thought you could use.”

  “It is for the Mars program,” she said. “My work is primarily designing toward a Mars mission in 2008.”

  “In what way?”

  “We go into places like the caves at Lechugilla or Carlsbad or the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean and look at the life forms we find there. Non-carbon based. Chemosynthetic. Things that don’t fit the usual definitions, so if they don’t fit our definition of life, then what definitions do they fit? How do we distinguish between life and nonlife, and how do you build a machine that can do that? We know that at one time, Mars had water, so if some of that water was trapped underground, in aquifers and in caves, where ultraviolet radiation can’t reach, then that’s where we might find life.”

  “I wonder if Cheryl Escavedo was interested in that,” DeLuca said. “Is there any overlap between what you’re working on and what they might be doing at Space Command?”

  “Overlap?” she asked. “Well, I’m sure there are people at Cheyenne or Kirtland who would love it if we did find life on Mars and they could turn it into a weapon of some kind. I just saw that little bow-tied White House Nazi, Carter Bowen, on Meet the Press the other day talking about plans to triple the defense budget. They spend money just to find other things to spend money on. But other than sharing the same launch platforms, we don’t have much to do with Defense. I’ve been thinking, since I last spoke with the military police, that your Miss Escavedo might have been trying to reach me in my capacity as a member of UCS.”

  “Union of Concerned Scientists,” DeLuca said.

  “I’ve given some talks and added my name to some petitions against the weaponization of space,” she said. “And since that’s all they do at Space Command, maybe she had something she thought we needed to know. All she would have had to do was Google and my name would have come up. Or my husband’s.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to say I know what he used to do, but that wouldn’t be true either. My husband was a physicist with the Directed Energy Lab at Kirtland. Dr. Gary Burgess. Ph.D. at sixteen. I haven’t seen or heard from him in over three years. And he couldn’t talk about his work when we were together, which was part of what…”

  “Part of what what?” DeLuca asked.

  “I was going to say part of what drove him crazy, but I was afraid you’d think of John Forbes Nash, and that wouldn’t be right.”

  “The guy from A Beautiful Mind?”

  She nodded.

  “There are no analogies to be drawn,” she said. “Beyond that they were equally brilliant. And lacking in certain social skills.”

  “The letter is addressed to simply ‘Dr. Burgess,’” DeLuca said. “Is it possible that Cheryl Escavedo was trying to contact your husband?”

  “It’s possible,” Penelope Burgess said.

  “Would I be able to find him at Kirtland then?” DeLuca asked. “At the Directed Energy Lab?”

  She shook her head.

  “My husband disappeared, Mr. DeLuca,” she said. “Quite intentionally—I didn’t mean to imply foul play. He disappeared himself.”

  It was evident that she didn’t want to talk about it, but the reasons why were less apparent.

  “I don’t want to press,” DeLuca said, “but the problem is that I never know exactly what’s relevant to my investigation and what isn’t until I fill my head with more than I need and let it all sift down. I realize this may be personally difficult for you…”

  “It’s not as difficult as you might think,” she said. “Our marriage had been over, or all over bu
t the shouting, for a long time before he left. And the reasons he left had little to do with me, I think. Do you know who Arthur Bartok was?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” DeLuca said.

  “Arthur Bartok was the boy genius of the Manhattan Project, sort of Oppenheimer’s protégé, until they had a falling out. At first, Bartok was completely caught up in the purely scientific quest and all jazzed up when he considered the huge amounts of energy he was controlling. Or releasing. It is apparently a thoroughly seductive experience, in many ways. Bartok’s work involved making the hydrogen bombs he was working with smaller and smaller. People are afraid of suitcase nukes these days, but Bartok essentially built one in 1960. Then in the mid-sixties, he had a conversion experience, when he realized that proliferation was unavoidable, and that his work making bombs smaller and simpler and easier to build had contributed to that. He was one of the founding fathers of the UCS. I think Gary’s circumstances were similar. At first he was caught up in the challenge and the romance, if you could call it that, just a twenty-year-old kid, walking around inside Cheyenne Mountain with all the bells and whistles and a security badge on his chest that let him go where other people weren’t allowed. It was a pretty heady experience.”

  “What was his area of expertise, specifically?” DeLuca wanted to know.

  “Electromagnetism,” she said. “Field generation. But that’s a general answer, not a specific one. We had an understanding, early on, that the work he was doing was top secret and that he couldn’t talk about it. I knew it was important, and that he had a huge budget and a lot of people working for him, and I started to sense, oh, God, six years ago, that something was bothering him. I mean, really worrying him. I knew the Clinton people were defunding space defense so I thought it might have had something to do with that. I could see the stress of keeping so many secrets start to destroy him. And us, probably. At any rate, something changed, after 9/11. I don’t know if he had a conversion experience, too, but he said after that, the handwriting was on the wall. He said 9/11 was going to do for space defense what Sputnik did for the space program in the fifties and sixties. We were ramping up, he said, and the only thing he could do, personally, to stop it, was to take himself out of it. So that’s what he did.”