“At least we’d have the chain of custody, my skull to their gloved hands and a petri dish, along with government scientists testifying that the defendant, Russell Thornton, had a crazy-sophisticated eavesdropping device in his head on the night of Catherine Peretti’s murder. Maybe we can still extract audio that proves that my decision to go to Au Bon Pain was spontaneous.”
“Maybe. But you’ll lose the chance to find out who’s responsible for her death. And possibly for Sokolov’s death too, the repercussions of which I hate to even guess at — that guy was an electronic weapons pioneer in Russia; I doubt the Pentagon brought him here so he could teach physics.”
Thornton decided that his friend was right. “The thing is, I already know the killers are killers, and if that’s not enough, they have unheard-of tech.”
“But they’re human.”
“So?”
“So they’ll make mistakes. They already have.”
“Like what?”
“They bugged the wrong guy.”
9
“It’s simple,” Sokolova told the two DARPA scientists assigned to her. “So simple, in fact, that I’m afraid if I teach it to you, the Department of Defense will no longer have need for me.”
“I very much doubt that,” laughed one of the two new members of her team, a middle-aged electrophysicist named Daley.
“Dr. Sokolova is just being modest,” said Hank Hughes, her DARPA handler. “Please proceed, Bella.”
“Yes, please,” added Canning, at the South Atlantic office 800 miles away, eating take-out pad thai while listening to the recording. He had a feeling that the 550-plus hours of Bella audio he’d endured was about to become worth every minute.
“You’ll need to excuse my drawing skills,” she said.
“Done,” said Hughes.
Canning heard squeaks of a marker against a dryerase board.
“This is a simple twelve-volt lead-acid battery,” she began. “We place it at one end of our explosively pumped flux compression generator, which, basically, is a steel tube the size of a wastepaper basket that houses a copper cylinder packed with plastic explosive — we use a mix of Compositions C and PBX-9501. The solenoid coiled around the copper cylinder is made of Nomex-sleeved tinsel-copper wire, the same type used in aerospace conduits.”
Although the audio was a recording and already backed up, Canning raced to write down everything Sokolova said. It felt like directions to a buried treasure.
“The current from the battery generates a magnetic field,” she continued. “The solenoid then acts like a magnet. When we detonate the plastic explosive, the blast thrusts the inner cylinder against the outer tube, squashing the magnetic field between them, generating our ten thousand lightning bolts worth of electromagnetic energy.”
“Where’s the virtual cathode thing?” Hughes asked.
“That virtual cathode oscillator — or vircator — enters the equation after the energy produced by the flux compression generator goes through an inductor,” Sokolova said over more squeaking of the marker. “The vircator is like a lens that magnifies the pulse, exponentially.”
“Pardon me, Dr. Sokolova,” asked twentysome-thing nuclear scientist Brooke Claiborne. “What is the relative size of the vircator here?”
“I’m drawing it to scale, dear,” Sokolova told her. “It’s about the same size as the flux compression generator; unscrew the antenna from the vircator and you can fit the whole system in the back of a car.”
The younger woman gasped. “In all the time I was at Princeton, we weren’t able to design — let alone assemble — a decent E-bomb that could even fit into this lab.”
“Miniaturization was critical for the weapon to be deployable,” said Sokolova. “Leonid reinvented the vircator as a tiny vacuum chamber. Within it, the high-current electrons pass through a polyester mesh anode, turning the other side into a virtual cathode, which causes oscillations that produce microwaves with peak power of one hundred milliwatts. A pulse of just one one-thousandth of a nanosecond and this system can take out everything within a fifty-mile radius.”
The range was news to Canning. The best news, he reflected, that he’d ever heard.
10
Sitting back at his desk at the NYO — the FBI’s New York City field office — Warren “Corky” Lamont reflected that, on big cases like this, the office is like your oxygen source. The next witness, the next phone call, the next classified document a courier shows up with: Any one of these could be the key. So any length of time away from your desk is an eternity, even as little as hitting the head, because you have this nagging sense that the case is going to take that crucial turn and that the information you had when you stepped out will be obsolete by the time you get back. The mentality in the office, meanwhile, is bunker. Pizzas are ordered, ties are loosened, sleep is rare. And it’s not about pay or promotions. As the old saying goes, the FBI is a company of 10,000 agents all struggling to stay at the bottom. Just out of Quantico, Lamont would tell friends that the buzz was comparable to the thrill of the hunt, but he came to realize that that trivialized it. What kind of hunt expended human capital, prevented the quarry from claiming additional victims, and concluded with justice done? And the best part of all came when the case was closed. He would go home at the end of that day, just like any other New Yorker piling into the subway, except — having kept the rest of them safe — he felt like a superhero.
He longed for just a drop of that feeling now. Seven days and twice as many pizzas into the Peretti case, the exhilaration had burned off. Lead after lead had led to dead ends. He spent yet another night hunched over his computer in the cube farm on 26 Federal Plaza’s twenty-third floor, eyes glued to his monitor. He scrolled through the Au Bon Pain’s security camera videos for maybe the hundredth time. The problem was that when positioning security cameras, fast-food managers were concerned with petty larceny, not homicide. As it happened, ten minutes prior to the Au Bon Pain shooting, one of the two cashiers whisked a dollar bill from her register drawer and into her blouse.
Lamont hoped to see the shooter arrive, Peretti and Thornton enter, or the crime itself. But all of that took place off camera. He slowed the video now in search of mere light fluctuations. What he wouldn’t give for a shadow he hadn’t already noticed.
His eye was drawn away from the computer by the bank of fluorescents sputtering on. The cube farm transformed from a dawn-speckled gold to its true office-drab gray. At this time of day, the twenty-third floor could pass for the offices of any accounting firm or insurance agency. In a couple of hours, though, it would be more like the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, a microcosm of the city, packed with colorful characters such as his partner, Musseridge, who liked to share his opinions, often at the same time others were sharing theirs, making the place way, way more entertaining than the three field offices Lamont had rotated through during his rookie year. A cold, formal atmosphere was the norm.
He checked for e-mail, finding one from Musseridge, who had finally gone home late last night to have “a beer or six,” as he put it, in hope of getting some shut-eye. Lamont clicked open the message, sent at 3:41 A.M.: