“That’s good,” he said. “Otherwise it would’ve been awkward when I heard the recording.”
“Recording?”
“We got a warrant for audio surveillance before your first visit,” he said. I must have looked startled. “Leonard Novak was once a high-level atomic scientist,” he explained, “and somebody killed him with an intense radioactive source. The director considered this case a high priority. He’d be very disappointed if I didn’t investigate every angle thoroughly. And I’d be very disappointed if you held back the truth.” He hesitated. “But I guess I’d also be disappointed if you hadn’t given some thought to an elderly woman’s reputation. Even if the old gal was an under-handed, soulless Commie spy.”
I laughed and sighed and shook my head all at the same time. “How’d you end up as a cop instead of a diplomat?”
“Didn’t want to end up huddled in an embassy compound in some plague-infested, two-bit, Third World shithole,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said. “With that silver tongue, you’d have made one hell of an ambassador.”
“Damn skippy,” he said. “By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we wanted this kept fairly quiet. The Bureau and the NSA are still trying to track down quite a few Cold War spies. We might not want to let on that we’re wise to Beatrice.”
The logic seemed flimsy, but then I had another thought. “Agent Thornton, is it possible? Is there a bleeding heart somewhere behind that FBI badge?”
“Not a chance,” he said. But I thought I saw a hint of a smile as he called for an ambulance to ferry Beatrice to the afterworld.
CHAPTER 42
I spent all the next morning and most of the afternoon at the hospital with Miranda and Carmen. A hand surgeon cut three fingers from Garcia’s right hand and amputated the left hand entirely, because everything below the wrist had died. There was a good chance, the surgeon assured Carmen, that Garcia could resume his work someday, with the help of sophisticated prosthetics and extensive rehabilitation. What the surgeon didn’t say was that there was also a chance Garcia might yet die from a runaway infection or internal bleeding.
Miranda’s fingertips, thank god, had begun to show signs of healing. She’d lost some tissue from the tips of her thumb and first two fingers, but Sorensen predicted she’d be left with little or no permanent scarring. She was getting off far more easily than she might have. Miranda had driven Carmen to the hospital, and once Garcia was back in his isolation room, still sedated, Miranda drove her home.
The light was fading and a cold, pitiless rain had begun to fall as I parked at the library in Oak Ridge. Thornton had left a message on voice mail while I was out of signal range inside the hospital. They’d identified a suspect in the radiography-camera theft — a Japanese-American immigrant named Arakawa — but he had died just as the agents were about to question him. He died, said the message, of radiation poisoning.
Opening my briefcase, I removed the large, padded envelope Miranda had handed me just before my drive to Oak Ridge and stared at it again. A yellow Post-it note on the outside, in Miranda’s handwriting, said, “Only grad student named Isabella who’s done a thesis on Oak Ridge.” The envelope itself was from UT’s Interlibrary Loan service; inside was a bound copy of a master’s-degree thesis, sent from the History Department at Tulane University. “The Role of National Myth in Legitimizing Mass Murder,” read the title. “From Oak Ridge to Nagasaki,” the subtitle added. The author of the thesis was listed as Isabella Arakawa, M.A.
My mind was careening and ricocheting in directions I didn’t want it to go. One by one, the billiard balls of fate seemed to be dropping into corner pockets and side pockets that were dark and bottomless. But I saw Isabella’s Prius tucked into the far corner of the parking lot, and that gave me a shred of hope as I pulled in beside it and parked.
I ducked, dripping, beneath the protective overhang of the library entrance just as one of the staff was locking the door. It was the gray-haired woman who’d seemed suspicious of me the other day. “You must have heard the news,” she said, with a sympathetic smile. “She’s very sad. I gather she and her father were very close.” The woman held the door for me and patted my shoulder as I went in. The library’s interior, usually filled with light and people, was silent and dim, lit only by a few of the fluorescent fixtures.
She wasn’t at her desk. I turned to the left and checked the Oak Ridge Room, but it was dark. Water dripped from my coat and pants onto the blue carpet as I tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together some other way, any other way.
A slight movement caught my eye. Something — someone — was within the darkened glass of the history room. It was Isabella; she was fumbling with a bag on the table. “Isabella,” I called. I ran to the door and pulled, but it was locked. She whirled and faced me, and even in the dimness of the unlit room I could see the wildness in her eyes.
“Isabella, open the door,” I said, rapping on the glass with a knuckle, then beating on it with the heel of my fist. She was looking at me, but also looking through me, beyond me. I’d seen versions of that distant look before. I’d seen one version in the haunted eyes of Robert Oppenheimer; I’d seen another in the vacant stare of Jonah Jamison. Without taking her eyes off me, she reached into her bag and pulled out a gun. She raised it, the barrel pointing at me, and then she turned it toward herself. “No!” I tore at the door handle with both hands. The glass door rattled and strained against the lock, and then the handle broke off in my hands, sending me staggering backward. She closed her eyes and pressed the barrel against her temple.
“No!” I shouted again. I had fallen against a table, one hand clutching at the back of a square-cornered wooden chair. I seized the chair, lifted it over my head, and hurled it at the glass. The air itself seemed to explode as the glass curtain shattered and sheeted down. I heard a scream; I didn’t know if it came from her or from me or from both of us. When the cascade of glass subsided, I expected to find her down and shattered, too — bloody fragments on the floor, a bullet in her head — but still she stood, frozen, dazed. Her arms were crossed in front of her face; shards of glass glinted in her dark hair.
I sprang forward, through a wall that no longer existed. I grabbed the gun with one hand, her wrist with the other. She cried out when I pried her fingers open and wrested the gun from her. There was dismay in the cry, but there was pain, too — physical, primal, wounded-animal pain. I looked at her hand, and it was as if I were seeing a far worse version of Miranda’s hand. Her fingertips were raw, oozing sores. “Oh dear God, Isabella,” I groaned, staring at her hands and all the terrible things they confirmed. “What have you done?”
Tears began to roll down her face, as if shards of shattered glass and shattered lives were pouring out of her. “I never meant to hurt so many,” she said. “Not Dr. Garcia. Not Miranda. Least of all you. Please believe that. Only Novak: his life for my grandmother’s life. My grandmother and all the other grandmothers and grandfathers and parents and children of Nagasaki. He was the only one I meant. I thought I could keep it pure.”
“Pure? What on earth does that word mean to you?” I tried to reconcile what she’d just said with what she’d done. How could grief for an unknown grandmother move her to murder an old man who had once been a cog — a crucial cog, but a cog nonetheless — in the machinery of the Manhattan Project? How could the loss of an ancestor so unhinge this bright, sensitive woman?