“Could be a scientist or engineer who turned,” Carl said.
“Could be. But anyone with those capabilities would be highly valued by society. They would be well paid, well respected. Those people don’t usually feel compelled to turn on the system that is rewarding them so well.”
“Unless it’s someone who feels like the system isn’t rewarding them enough,” Carl pointed out.
“Always a possibility. But I feel like it’s more likely we’re looking at some kind of situation where our expert is being forced against his or her will to help the terrorists. I think we’re looking for a kidnapping.”
Carl took a sip of his coffee, wincing at the beverage’s temperature. “I don’t know. Anyone who worked on a cutting-edge weapons project would need to have a pretty high security clearance. When I was at the bureau, one of the duties of the local field office was to keep an eye on people like that. If someone with a high clearance went missing, his or her boss would have made a big stink about it.”
“So maybe it’s not a kidnapping,” Derrick said. “Maybe it’s some form of blackmail. Or a member of the expert’s family has been taken and is being held as collateral.”
“I like that better as a theory. So how do we find the expert in trouble?”
Derrick stared into his coffee cup, as if the answer was floating somewhere in the black liquid. “We’re looking at a fairly specialized field of study. There are probably no more than a few dozen people in the country who would have this kind of knowledge, if that. I bet as soon as we start looking, we’ll see the same names, over and over. Let’s dive into the literature, the academic journals and whatnot, and make a list of the possibilities, then start quietly checking in on them.”
“Sounds good,” Carl said.
Quietly, diligently, the Storm boys bent their heads over their respective devices. Carl Storm had joined the FBI before it went upscale, before movies and television made it trendy. He had gone off to work every day in thick-soled shoes and cheap suits. He believed in working a case from the ground up — no shortcuts, no slacking — and had raised Derrick to have the same investigative sensibilities.
As the hours passed, there were small bits of dialogue between them. Would you check out…? Don’t bother with…Have you bumped across…? I’m e-mailing you a pdf from…
The sentences didn’t even need to be completed. It was almost as if the men had joined brains, and it had not merely doubled their capacity. It had quadrupled it.
They worked steadily, without break. Carl was the keeper of the list, which he inscribed in careful block letters on his legal pad. There didn’t turn out to be as many names as Derrick thought there would be. Once they reached twenty, they just kept bumping into scientists they had already identified.
It was around 2 A.M. when Derrick said, “Okay. I feel like we’ve got a good start here. Let’s divvy this up, start looking into these guys, and see if anything shakes out.”
They did not have access to the kind of databases that Jedediah Jones’s techs would be able to hack into. But as an ex–private investigator, Derrick knew his way around a public records search. And Carl was not so long-retired that he had lost his acuity.
Another hour went by. Carl made another pot of coffee, then heated up some frozen sticky buns, typical of the bachelor-inspired gourmet cooking Derrick had grown up with. Even though he had since become something of an epicurean, Derrick still had a certain nostalgia for the frozen/canned/prepackaged gruel of his youth. It was his own odd version of comfort food.
Neither man made a noise about sleeping, or even being tired. The Storm stamina — willed from father to son — was legendary.
It was closing in on four o’clock when Derrick announced, “I got something. William McRae.”
“The guy who had that piece in Applied Physics Letters?” Carl asked, as if he had a subscription to that publication coming to his mailbox for years.
“Yeah. Check this out.”
Derrick spun his tablet around so his father could see it. The headline was from a weekly paper in Northern California called the Hercules Express: LOCAL SCIENTIST MISSING, WIFE SEEKS ANSWERS, it read.
“He disappeared three weeks ago,” Derrick said. “He went out for a jog one day and didn’t come back. You can read between the lines and tell the police did some stuff then, but basically treated him like a walk-away. Here’s another piece.”
Derrick tapped his tablet and another piece from the Hercules Express appeared: PUBLIC HELP SOUGHT TO FIND MISSING SCIENTIST.
As Carl’s eyes scanned the piece, Derrick continued: “McRae fits. He went to MIT undergrad, Berkeley for his master’s degree and doctorate in physics. He started working on solid state lasers in the seventies at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which has contracts to provide research to a variety of government agencies. McRae eventually became the director of the laser program, and while I’m sure a lot of his practical work was classified, his theoretical stuff was published all over. Three of the people he frequently coauthored with are on our list as well. The difference is they still work there. McRae had started his own consulting business and continued tinkering with this, but it looks like it was a hobby. He officially retired from Lawrence Livermore three years ago.”
Carl snapped his fingers.
“That’s why no one noticed him missing,” he said. “Once he was retired, he lost his security clearance. Amazing how the world forgets about you when you get put out to pasture.”
Derrick ignored the commentary. “So we’re agreed that if you were a terrorist who wanted to kidnap someone who knew enough to help you build a big, scary laser beam — and you wanted it to be someone who was off the radar — this would be the guy. It seems the locals were at least somewhat thorough in their efforts to find the guy. Think they missed something?”
“I bet there’s an anxious wife out in California who would love to tell you,” Carl said.
“Yeah, there’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Commercial flights are grounded.”
“Can you take a train? Drive?”
“No time,” Derrick said. “I have to call Jones. I’m sure the air force is still flying. He can get me on a military jet.”
“You know how I feel about that snake.”
“I know,” Derrick said. “But right now I have no choice.”
Carl grunted. He had made his displeasure with Jedediah Jones known many times. But even the most loving, protective father realizes he eventually needs to let his child make his — or her — own decisions. All the father can do is hope he has instilled enough of the right values in the child that those decisions are the right ones.
Derrick had gone back to his notes. “The only article William McRae published since his retirement was extolling the virtues of a promethium laser beam. It was an update of work he had done during the eighties and had come back to.”
“Promethium? Sounds like something out of a comic book.”
“No, it’s a real element. I looked it up. Number sixty-one on your periodic table. Named after the titan in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.”
“At times like this, I wish we could give it back,” Carl said, then hoisted his coffee mug in the air. “To Lieutenant Marlowe, wherever he is. We’re doing our best, buddy.”
Carl drank, then set down his mug. And Derrick knew that his father’s mind was once again wandering back to a little girl burned by napalm and the memory of her gasping for her final breaths.
CHAPTER 9
WEST OF LUXOR, Egypt
arble wasn’t supposed to sound hollow.