“Cool.”
“I’m on my way to you with his X-rays. There’s a lot of crap in the legs from the car accident. I need your help pinpointing which spot it might be.”
“I’ll need to bring in Epstein — she’s the physicist.”
“I expected as much.”
“And then?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens when we identify the piece of metal?”
“I go to the morgue and cut it out.”
“Nice. How’re you going to manage that?”
“I’ve already established myself as Wu’s ‘next of kin,’ and they’ve been waiting for me to claim the body. It’ll be a piece of cake.”
A long, low wheezy laugh sounded over the cell phone. “Jeez, Gideon, you’re a piece of work, you know that?”
“Just be ready. I don’t have any time to waste.”
He hung up and dialed Orchid’s number. He hoped she’d be happy to hear he’d almost worked through the “trouble” he was in and that he would see her, if not tomorrow, then surely the day after.
Orchid’s cell was turned off.
He settled back in the seat with the sour thought that she was probably with a customer.
53
Merry Christmas to you, too,” said O’Brien, watching Gideon let himself in without knocking, as usual.
“Is this the guy you told me about?” said Epstein, half sitting, half lying on a small sofa, cranky at having been roused from her bed at such a late hour. Her hair was askew and she was in a particularly foul mood because, O’Brien realized, she’d been expecting something quite different when he woke her up in the middle of the night. She was always ready for a good shagging, it had to be said.
“Gideon, meet Epstein. Epstein, Gideon.”
“O’Brien called you Sadie,” said Gideon, shaking her hand, which she proffered limply.
“Anyone who calls me Sadie,” she drawled sleepily, “gets a bang on the ear. This better be good.”
“It is good,” said O’Brien, hurriedly launching into the lie he’d prepared. “You remember those numbers I gave you? Well, we’ve got X-rays of this smuggler, see, he got in an accident but he was carrying some contraband substance embedded in his leg to get it through customs—”
Epstein cut him short with a wave of her hand. She turned to Gideon. “You tell me what it’s all about.”
Gideon glanced at her. He looked too flat-out exhausted to lie. “For your own safety, it’s better you not know anything.”
She waved her hand. “Whatever. Let’s just get on with it.”
Tom O’Brien rubbed his hands together with excitement. He loved intrigue. “Bring on those X-rays.”
Gideon pulled them out from beneath his shirt. O’Brien swept a light table clean of clutter, laid them on it, snapped on the light. After a moment, Epstein roused herself and leaned over the table from her sitting position, glanced at them, then sat back. “Yuck.”
“Let’s recap,” said O’Brien, rubbing his hands together again. “This guy’s carrying something stuck in his leg, a piece of metal or something, and he’s memorized the ratios of the various elements it’s made up of. That’s what Epstein here thinks about those numbers you gave us. Right?”
She nodded.
“Right. So now we’ve got some X-rays, and we’ve got to figure out which one of these blots or spots is what we’re looking for. Want to take a closer look, Epstein?”
“No.”
“Why not?” O’Brien was starting to get irritated.
“Because I’ve got no idea what you’re looking for. Is it an alloy? An oxide? Some other compound? Each would react differently to X-rays. It could be anything.”
“Well, what do you think it is? You’re the condensed matter physicist here.”
“If you two bullshitters gave me some idea of what’s going on, maybe I could take a guess.”
O’Brien sighed and looked at Gideon. “Should we tell her?”
Gideon was silent for a moment. “Fair enough. But this is classified information — and it would endanger your life if others found out you knew of it.”
“Spare me the spy-versus-spy crap. I’m not going to say anything — nobody would believe me, anyway. Just tell me.”
“For some years,” said Gideon, “the Chinese have been working on a top-secret project at one of their nuclear installations. The CIA thinks it’s some kind of new weapon, but what I’ve learned doesn’t jibe with that. Instead, it appears to be some kind of technological discovery that would, allegedly, allow China to dominate the rest of the world.”
“Sounds unlikely,” Epstein said. “But go on.”
“A Chinese scientist was bringing this secret into the United States — not to give it to us, but for other reasons.”
Epstein had finally sat up and was displaying a certain interest. “And is this secret the thing that’s embedded in his leg?”
“Exactly. The secret came in two parts: the thing in his leg and those numbers we gave you. As I guess you’ve surmised, the two go together: you can’t figure out one without the other. The scientist was killed in a car accident. Those are the X-rays from the emergency room.”
Epstein scrutinized the X-rays with fresh interest. “The numbers,” she said, “indicated to me that we’re dealing with a composite material made of a number of complex chemical compounds or alloys.” She turned to O’Brien. “Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“I’ve got a loupe.” O’Brien rummaged around in a drawer, finally fishing it out. Examining the lens, he grimaced and wiped it clean on his shirttail before handing it to her.
She put it in her eye and bent over the X-rays once again, examining the white spots one after the other. “He really got creamed. Look at all this shit inside his legs.”
“It was a bad accident,” said Gideon.
Slowly, she moved from spot to spot on the X-ray. The minutes ticked off. After what seemed forever, she moved to the second film, and then the third. Almost immediately she stopped, examining one small fleck in particular. She looked at it a long time, and then straightened up, letting the loupe drop from her eye. Her whole face was shining, a transformation so complete that O’Brien took an involuntary step backward.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Unbelievable,” she breathed. “I think I know what we’re dealing with. Everything suddenly makes sense.”
“What?” both men asked at the same time.
She smiled broadly. “You really want to know?”
“Come on, Epstein! Don’t play games.” O’Brien could see her eyes glittering. He’d never seen her so excited.
“This is only a guess,” she said, “but it’s a good guess. It’s the only thing I can think of that fits the facts you’ve told me — and the peculiar thing I see on the X-ray.”
“What?” O’Brien asked again, more urgently.
She handed him the loupe. “You see that thing, there — the one that looks like a short, bent piece of wire?”
O’Brien leaned over and looked at it. It was about nine millimeters long, a medium-gauge piece of wire, irregularly bent.
“Look at the tips of the wire.”
He looked at the tips. Two black shadows with diffused ends. “Yeah?”
“Those shadows? Those are X-rays leaking out the ends of the wire.”
“Which means—?”
“That the wire somehow absorbed the X-rays and channeled, or redirected, them out through its ends.”
“And?” O’Brien looked up, took out the loupe.
“That’s almost unbelievable. A material that can capture and channel or focus X-rays? There’s only one material I know of that could do that.”
O’Brien exchanged glances with Gideon.