Epstein smiled mischievously. “I would direct your attention to the fact that it’s a wire.”
“Jesus, Epstein,” O’Brien cried. “You’re giving us a nervous breakdown! So what if it’s a wire?”
“What do wires do?” she asked.
O’Brien took a deep breath and glanced again at Gideon. He looked as impatient as O’Brien felt.
“Wires conduct electricity,” Gideon said.
“Exactly.”
“So?”
“So this is a special kind of wire. It conducts electricity — but in a different sort of way.”
“You’ve completely lost me,” O’Brien said.
“What we’re dealing with here,” she said, triumphantly, “is a room-temperature superconductor.”
A silence.
“Is that all?” O’Brien asked.
“Is that all?” She rounded on him incredulously. “It’s only the Holy Grail of energy technology!”
“I was expecting something that would…change the world,” O’Brien said lamely.
“This would transform the world, you dolt! Look. Ninety-nine percent of all electricity generated in the world is lost to resistance as it flows from source to use. Ninety-nine percent! But electricity flows through a superconducting wire without any resistance. Without any loss of energy. If you replaced all the transmission lines in America with wires made out of this stuff, you’d reduce electrical energy usage by ninety-nine percent.”
“Oh my God,” mumbled O’Brien as the impact sank in.
“Yeah. You could supply all US energy needs with just one percent of what it takes now. And that one percent could easily be supplied by existing solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear installations. No more coal and oil generating plants. Transportation and manufacturing costs would drop enormously. Electricity would be virtually free. Cars that ran on electricity would cost almost nothing to operate — they’d sweep away the gas-powered vehicle industry. The oil and coal industries would fold. We’re essentially talking the end of fossil fuels. No more greenhouse emissions, no more OPEC holding the world by the short hairs.”
“In other words,” Gideon said, “the country that controls this discovery would blow everyone else out of the water economically.”
Epstein laughed harshly. “Worse than that. The country that controls this material would control the world’s economy. It would rule the world.”
“And everyone else would be fucked,” O’Brien said.
She looked at him. “That is the technical term for it, yes.”
54
LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING.
It was two o’clock in the morning and Gideon Crew was getting tired of reading that same motto above the door into the morgue, over and over again. It irritated him; it managed to be macabre and smug at the same time. As far as he could see, there wasn’t anything delightful about this grim and noisome place — or about death, for that matter.
He’d been waiting for forty-five minutes, and his impatience had almost reached its limit. The receptionist seemed to be moving as if underwater, shifting a piece of paper here, another there, taking a call, murmuring in a low voice, her long red fingernails clicking and clacking as she shuffled her paperwork.
This was ridiculous. He stood up, walked over. “Excuse me? I’ve been waiting almost an hour.”
She looked up. The nails ceased clacking. Black roots showed through the bleached-blond tease. She was a hard New Yorker of the old school. “We had a homicide come in. Tied up our personnel.”
“Homicide? Wow, that must be a rarity in New York City.” Gideon wondered, through the fog of irritation, if that was the one he’d seen at Saint Bart’s earlier. “Look, my…partner is in some cold drawer in there, and I just want a few minutes alone with him.” He put an aggrieved whine into his voice. “Just a few minutes.”
“Mr. Crew,” she said, unfazed, “you realize, don’t you, that the remains of your partner have been sitting here for five days, awaiting your instructions? You could have come in at any time. The file here says we’ve tried to contact you at least—” She checked her computer. “—half a dozen times.”
“I lost my cell phone,” he said. “And I’ve been traveling.”
“Okay. But you can’t expect to drop in at one in the morning and have everything ready and waiting, now, can you?” She gave him an uncompromising look.
Gideon felt sheepish and defeated. She was right, of course. But the box cutter was burning a hole in his pocket; the X-rays were doing the same in his shopping bag; and he couldn’t stop thinking of Nodding Crane and what he might be doing right now, whether he was around, whether he had staked out the morgue. The longer he had to wait, the more time he was giving Nodding Crane.
“How much longer?” Gideon asked.
The red nails went back to clacking and moving paper. “I’ll let you know when someone’s free.”
He sat back down and stared moodily at the motto again. He could hear faint sounds coming from behind the stainless-steel double doors, well dented by the incessant pounding of stretchers. Something was going on in there — the homicide, no doubt. Now he felt sure it was the one at Saint Bart’s. That would be big: someone murdered in one of the oldest and most venerable churches in New York, with one of the wealthiest congregations, to boot.
“What’s through those doors?” Gideon asked.
The woman looked up again. “Autopsy, coolers, offices.”
There was more noise from beyond the double doors, a vague murmur of excitement and activity. He glanced at the clock. Almost two thirty now.
The intercom on the receptionist’s desk squawked. She answered it in a hushed voice, then looked over at him. “Someone’s coming to help you now.”
“Thank you.”
A man, dressed in none-too-clean whites, bumped out through the doors. He was badly shaven, little dots and pimples of blood on his neck. He raised a clipboard, read from it. “George Crew?”
“That’s Gideon. Gideon Crew.”
Without another word he turned, and Gideon followed him through the doors. “I’d like to have a moment with him — alone,” he said to the man’s back.
No reply.
They walked down a long, bright, linoleum corridor that ended in another set of doors leading, it seemed, into the autopsy room itself. Through the door windows he had a glimpse of a row of stainless-steel and porcelain tables, several orange medical-waste bins, stacks of Tupperware containers. He could see a group around one of the tables, including detectives and cops. Must be the murder victim.
“This way, please.”
Gideon turned to follow the man through another door, down another corridor, and finally into a long room, lined on either side with metal drawers. A company logo identified them as SO-LOW, INC. equipment. The “coolers.”
The aide consulted his clipboard, his lips moving silently, and then, lips still moving, looked down the rows of drawers until he found the right one. He unlocked it with a key on a spiral cord held around his waist and slid the drawer out. A gray plastic body bag appeared, zipped up tight. The bitter-cherry smell of formaldehyde bit into Gideon’s nostrils, not even coming close to covering the smell of dead human meat.
“Um. You sure this is Mark Wu?” Gideon found himself unaccountably nervous.
“What it says here.” The man compared his clipboard with a number on a tag clipped to the bag.
Gideon could feel the hard plastic handle of the box cutter in his pocket. Despite the chill air of the morgue, the handle was slick from his sweaty hand. This was going to be an ordeal. He swallowed, tried to steel himself for it.