by Fritz Galt
Mick sat reclined on a dental chair and listened to the evacuation horn blaring in the CIA hallway.
“It’s a bomb,” someone shouted. “Evacuate the building.”
Meanwhile a dental hygienist, a hearty-looking woman, puttered about the dental office, pushing Eli Shaw out of the way.
Mick’s eyes shifted to a man in a white uniform who quickly scrubbed his hands in the corner sink.
“Sorry to put you through this,” Mick apologized.
The dental hygienist handed the man a towel.
“You must be mistaken,” the man said. “I won’t be your dentist today.”
The man eased out of the office and joined the panicked horde stampeding out of the building.
A three-man bomb removal squad appeared in the doorway.
“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind an iron mask. “Are you the patient?”
Mick looked at the asbestos suit protected by a three-inch shield of Kevlar. “Are you my dentist?”
“I’m not exactly a dentist. Open up.” The man’s heavily gloved fingers inserted a dental pick into his mouth.
Mick closed his eyes.
“Yep. It’s plastique, all right,” the man said.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Eli Shaw said, and left the room.
All Mick could do was grunt a good-bye.
“Pliers, please,” the man said.
Mick heard a toolkit open.
“And get me a nine-volt battery.”
He listened to a zapping sound as men tested the battery.
“Now this should be a simple operation,” the man said. “We’ll use the battery as heat and your tongue as ground. Can you suck on this?”
Mick’s wrists were taped to the chair, so he turned away and used his tongue to force the man’s glove out of his mouth. “I don’t want my saliva to dry up.”
“It’s okay. This little lozenge will stimulate your salivary glands.”
He sucked on the pill. It tasted like a hundred Vitamin C pills packed into one.
“Okay, we’re moving in,” the man said.
He heard a group of shoes shuffle out the doorway.
“May I go now, sir?” the hygienist asked with some anxiety in her voice.
“Sure. Just leave me a few towels and a mop.”
Several towels landed on Mick’s lap, and Mick heard the woman hurry out of the room.
“Do you feel this?” the man asked, and pushed something against his tongue.
It burned like hell, and Mick let out a yelp.
“Good. That’s the battery. Now I’ll use this set of dental gizmos to pry up the C-4 and the triggering device. Hold on tight.”
He didn’t need to hold on. He was already taped to the chair.
He felt the molded plastique detach from his molars.
“Got it,” the voice said behind his iron mask. “Now to dispose of the C4 safely. May I have your coat?”
Mick couldn’t talk with the fist, the plastique, the triggering device, the knife, the battery and all the saliva in his mouth. He rolled his eyes to the back of his chair where Eli had set his suit jacket.
“Nice suit. I’ll take your coat with the transmitter, the C-4 and the battery out of this room, and you’ll be okay,” the man said, and lifted the wires clear out of Mick’s mouth.
The room was silent.
The man placed the bomb, still attached to the battery, and the suit jacket with the transmitter in a cylindrical metal box.
“Do you want the suit back?”
“Why not.”
“I’ll leave it with the receptionist.”
“Do you suggest a follow-up visit, doc?” Mick asked, his mouth suddenly dry.
“No. Might try some mouthwash, though,” the man said over his shoulder as he headed down the empty hallway.
As the footsteps receded, Mick took a deep breath. He tried to reach for the empty place in his mouth where the plastique had been attached, but his arms wouldn’t move.
“Would someone please release me?”
Chapter 45
With an hour and a half to kill before Ben picked her up, Natalie slipped into the tub of warm water mixed with bath oil. That much water seemed an extravagance in the middle of a desert.
After a soothing soak, she dried off, wrapped up in a huge bath towel and relaxed on the silk sheets of her four-poster bed.
Her feet were blistered, but when it came time to dress, she barely felt the cushioned Gucci sandals.
The strapless dress gave her precious little coverage and no room to stash the letter that she was saving to read with Mick. She looked around. There was no purse to match her outfit.
Forget it. She shoved the letter down her cleavage and against her belly. She studied her profile in the mirror. The envelope didn’t show through, and there was plenty more to distract the eye.
At six o’clock, she heard a single knock on the door.
Ben’s eyes told her that she had prepared herself well.
He led her up carpeted stairs to the third floor where she noticed that the doors were spaced further apart. She assumed it meant bigger rooms.
“Khalid wanted me to introduce you to a friend,” Ben said. He rang the bell. “By the way, this was Winston Churchill’s suite.”
Clad in a red fez and white steward’s jacket, a valet opened the door. Beyond him, Natalie saw a wood-paneled entryway. “Good evening,” he said with a low bow.
A whiff of roses floated through the air. The valet escorted her through an anteroom into what appeared to be a gentleman’s club with stuffed leather chairs and watercolors of various landscapes. Perhaps they were Churchill’s own work.
Straight lines of evening light pierced through the blinds and illuminated an elegantly garbed form. He was a sheik with an embroidered white robe, a dab of a beard and a height of four feet.
With a waddle, the man crossed to Ben and pressed a fistful of cash into his palm.
Ben bowed as deeply as the valet had done earlier and backed out of the room. And with that, Natalie’s last link to Khalid disappeared.
She turned to the sheik.
An intimate gleam sparkled in his dark-rimmed eyes. He approached her and took her hands in his.
“Tonight will be wonderful,” he said. “First we’ll dine. Then—” He bent down to the bed and pressed a button on a remote control.
The motorized blinds plunged the room into darkness. A second button cued Rachmaninoff’s lush second piano concerto. A third button started a multi-colored disco light spinning overhead.
She couldn’t believe it. When Khalid said he had something to sell, something that was once very valuable to him, she had no idea that she was the object for sale. And the whole point of lunch was for the businessmen to evaluate her suitability and price.
Khalid had sold her to the sheik.
She kicked out in the dark. The toe of her sandal struck the man in the groin. The lecher doubled over in pain, unable to speak. As he fell, he struck the button that opened the blinds.
Rays of the setting sun illuminated the room.
The valet hadn’t seen her attack, nor had he heard the sheik’s groans. But he stepped into the room just in time to see the sheik fall to the carpet.
In the swirling lights, Natalie aimed for the valet’s face and thrust her knuckles straight into his nose.
He reeled back into his anteroom.
“No. Wait,” the fat sheik cried.
She grappled with the chain lock and whipped the door open.
“Bitch,” the sheik cried.
Her pulse pounding, she fled down the corridor and stairs.
In the first stairwell landing, she leaped over an inert body.
She took a second look at the man. It was Ben lying unconscious on his back.
Somehow, she felt no sympathy for him.
Then she heard footsteps on the carpet behind her.
“Wait!” a man called.
She didn’t recognize the voice.
She turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs. Couldn’t these creeps take a hint?
She flew into the lobby, her sandals sliding on the polished marble. A concierge and several bellboys paused to gape.
Catching a reflection in the glass door, she saw a dark-haired man in an expensive white suit spinning into the lobby.
She leaned hard against the glass door and thrust it back directly into her pursuer’s face.
Her Gucci sandals carried her into the broad avenue.
Behind her, the man emerged from the hotel crying out in pain.
She plunged through the moving stream of dusty white cars.
On the other side of the traffic, she paused for a moment. There she was, trapped inside the walled city, the Kasbah, with no idea where to find a gate.
The central mosque, an enormous pointed tower, appeared directly ahead. She had passed there earlier that day. But as she started running toward it, the landmark disappeared behind a shamble of buildings.
She threw herself into the crowd, glancing off shoulders and prying her way through what seemed to be a sea of indifference.
She looked over her shoulder. Holding his bleeding nose, the man in the suit matched her reckless pace several steps behind.
The wild throb of a drumbeat rumbled through her bones. The rhythm grew louder, delirious, faster.
She was lost. People seemed to converge on her from all directions.
Alec and Anaïs sat on a rooftop restaurant and watched Marrakesh’s famous square known as Djama al Fna, the Bazaar of the Dead, come to life.
The food was cheap and good. They clinked their bottles of beer, a drink that was nominally illegal in Morocco. Despite the disappointing results of their search for Natalie and Brahim, Alec was captivated by the evening.
Below them, the square had been transformed from a car-strewn parking lot into a three-ring circus of performers from all over Africa.
Several men had formed a dancing circle. With bent sticks, they whacked single-skinned drums above their heads. Devotees of the gnaoua brotherhood, they used wild rhythms to induce a trance.
In the crowd, people spun in circles to placate the spirits, good or evil, that inhabited them. The drums evoked sub-Saharan tones and rhythms.
It was the pulse of Africa.
Alec’s eyes swept over the gorgeous landscape beyond the walled city. The snow-capped High Atlas Mountains surrounded drylands to the south and east. During winter months, fashion-conscious skiers would streak down the slopes. Year-round melting snow fed Marrakesh’s vast palm gardens and tree-lined avenues.
From the forbidding royal palace to the two-story restaurants and cheap hotels surrounding Djama al Fna, every building had a crimson tinge to it, evidently from the color of the area’s iron-rich soil.
Angry cries suddenly erupted from the square below.
Alec looked down.
“That’s Natalie,” Anaïs cried. She jumped to her feet and her metal chair tipped over.
The spectral figure of a pale, auburn-haired goddess in a flowing white gown glided through the milling, dancing, hawking horde.
A man in a white tuxedo pursued her, just steps behind.
Alec bolted downstairs through the cloud of hashish that filled the café. He hit the ground running.
He estimated Natalie’s trajectory and aimed for the far corner of the square, where all heads had turned. He could see swords frozen mid-swallow and snakes wondering why the double reed pipes had stopped.
Panting hard, he intercepted her by a well-lit row of food stalls.
“Natalie!”
Her face was ghostly white.
“It’s me, Alec!”
She didn’t seem to recognize him or know where she was.
Gasping, she held a hand over her chest and pointed behind her.
He tried to see through a cloud of blue smoke that billowed from a vat of frying fat.
As the man in the white tuxedo jumped out of the crowd, Alec grabbed the vat by its wooden handles and hurled the scalding, fatty mixture into his face.
A cry ripped from the man’s throat, and he fell back against a wall of unfriendly brown djellabahs. He might never see again.
Anaïs squeezed into view and rushed forward to attend to Natalie.
Natalie was bent over and out of breath. The smoke from frying sausages was intense. The smell of burnt human hair and charred skin choked the air. The hushed crowd pressed closer, suffocating her.
“Back up, everybody,” Alec cried, and turned to his exhausted sister-in-law.
But it wasn’t her lungs that she was holding. It was her belly.
Chapter 46
Mick slipped into the National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, DC.
He would have enjoyed the spacious and luminous East Wing, if he wasn’t trying to avoid public places. And he wouldn’t breathe easy until he disposed of the transmitters he had just picked up at the CIA.
But Christopher McNulty at IBM had recommended this visit with his college professor to help Mick figure out the physics behind the CERN experiments, and Mick kept the appointment.
With a Calder mobile drifting overhead and Winslow Homer memorabilia for sale on the side, Mick climbed downstairs to where Professor Kronz would be waiting.
He found a man in crumpled clothing seated across from a matrix of oversized Campbell Soup cans.
“Professor Kronz?”
The man turned toward him. Magnified by glasses, his eyes flashed around without seeing him.
“I’m here, sir,” Mick said.
The old professor laughed and stuck his hand out to shake.
Mick grabbed it and shook it warmly.
“You’ll have to excuse my eyesight,” the professor said. “You’re looking at a man with astigmatism, myopia, glaucoma, night blindness and retinitis pigmentosa. I practically have a glass eye in one eye socket and a patch over the other.”
Mick wanted to keep moving. “May I help you through the exhibit?”
“Know it by heart.”
They shuffled together into the hall that featured more oversized paintings.
“I can step right into a large work of art,” the professor said.
“You probably have,” Mick said.
“What I mean to say is, art expands the conventional way of thinking. It gives me creative insights into vexing problems that I’m trying to tackle. It’s a surefire method. I can sit here for hours on these soft, gray benches.”
“They’re blue,” Mick said.
He guided the professor to a room where he could watch the exits. Now, how to phrase his question.
“Dr. Kronz, I talked with Christopher McNulty at IBM about the state of the art in superconductors and I find they’ll have mind-blowing new uses. However, one barrier to their practicality is the critical temperatures at which the materials become superconductive. They still have to be too cold for practical, everyday use. I wondered whether you thought room temperature superconductors are possible.”
The professor raised his eyebrows. “Possible? We already have such superconductors, at least in theory. But we can’t use them in machines.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the magnetic interference created by the appliances themselves. It throws off the Cooper pair electrons.”
“I’m no physicist,” Mick said. “Can you explain that problem in simple terms?”
“Take a look at this Pollock,” the professor said. “See the black and white lines flying over the rest of the colors? That’s the magnetic field surrounding the superconductor. The magnetism smears the processes below. In the case of a material in a superconductive state, the magnetic field may inhibit the electrons’ spin which, I believe, is crucial to inducing superconductivity.”
“So how far away are we from doing that?”
“I’m saying that first you have to find a way to kill the magnetic interference.”
“Do we know how to do that?”
&
nbsp; “In theory. You shoot particles into the superconductor to pin the fluxes.”
“Pin the fluxes?”
“Yes. This would create faults that attract the magnetic fields.”
“But say the Defense Department is performing this experiment. Why would they use CERN?” Mick asked.
“I have no idea,” Professor Kronz said. “That’s a question for materials science, not theory.”
“Who do I ask about that?”
“I guess you go online and ask.”
Mick didn’t want to leave the professor stuck in the corner of the basement, but he needed to get the laptop set up. Fast.
An hour later, Mick closed the curtains of his Dupont Circle hotel room and turned on Eli Shaw’s laptop.
He sat at a writing table, squeezed his elbows together and composed a message. It was more of a plea than a message, to the superconducting newsgroup monitored at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“What ongoing experiments pin the magnetic flux over thin film superconductors?” he typed.
He found a telephone wire in Eli’s laptop case and connected the laptop’s modem to the hotel’s phone jack. Then he configured the computer’s dial-up networking to call his internet service provider in Switzerland. The hard part was recalling the provider’s phone number. Then he sat back and listened to the modem dial the long distance number.
He typed in his account ID and password and was connected to the internet. He uploaded his message and checked that it appeared in the newsgroup, then subscribed to the newsgroup.
In the next few hours, he hoped that the message would elicit an e-mail reply somewhere in the world.
Chapter 47
Natalie awoke in a hotel room in Marrakesh.
She shot up in bed. “Khalid needs his luggage.”
Alec and Anaïs, who occupied a bed across the room, stirred under their sheets. Finally, Alec groaned and turned on the light.
“I know how we can find Khalid,” Natalie explained. “He checked a piece of luggage on the plane. Since he didn’t have much time to pack before leaving, it must be important to him. It didn’t arrive on our flight from Geneva, so I’m thinking he might try to claim it.”