by Fritz Galt
The president had arrived at the Bernese Oberland without incident the day before. Today, he was scheduled to enjoy the mountains.
But things would quickly turn manic once Everett snapped his briefcase shut and left for his two-day trip to Geneva.
What information did he need to bring with him on the trip?
Without Suzy, he would have to make his own printouts. He was fussing over telephone lists when Tobias called.
“Everett,” Tobias began at once. “We just deciphered O’Smythe’s scrambled telephone conversation.”
“Talk to me.”
“You won’t like this. O’Smythe was talking with a man named Robert in Washington.”
“Robert? Robert who?”
“He didn’t divulge his last name. But they did discuss Proteus. Shall I fax you the transcript?”
“At once. Will I see you in Geneva?”
“Yes. My superiors approved my travel.”
“Good. We’ll stay in contact.”
He hung up and immediately jogged to the fax machine, passing Mick’s empty office on the way.
The paper was already spitting out the back end of the machine, and he read it as it emerged.
What he saw didn’t please him.
When the fax machine stopped, he snatched the two-page transcript and returned to his office. Along the way, he read it over again in case he had missed anything the first time around.
It was incredible.
He found Eli Shaw’s unlisted residential number among his papers. He punched in all the digits and sat back.
“Eli, here,” a confused voice whispered.
“Good morning, sir. This is Everett Hoyle in Bern.”
“Oh, no. What is it?” Eli suddenly sounded more alert. “You can talk to me. This phone’s secure.”
“Well, as you may or may not know, we wiretapped a man named Sir Trevor O’Smythe.”
“Mick told me about him.”
“Do you need to whisper?” Everett asked. “Nobody’s listening.”
“My wife’s asleep right next to me.”
“Then I’ll make this brief. The Swiss bugged O’Smythe’s line and picked up a voice-scrambled conversation a few days back. They’ve finally de-scrambled it. To make a long story short, I have the transcript sitting right here in front of me.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s pretty much a smoking gun, sir. O’Smythe received a call from Washington, from a man named Robert. According to the transcript, Robert hired O’Smythe initially to help the Americans gain entry to CERN.”
“You mean to say that this whole thing was hatched from within the U.S. Government?” Eli said, incredulous.
“It looks that way, sir. Then the whole plan changed. Once O’Smythe told the Japanese about the research, it became a game of kicking the Americans out.”
“So that’s what this is all about,” Eli said.
“Right. Apparently, Proteus successfully infiltrated CERN and has been creating havoc ever since in an effort to thwart America’s bid for CERN membership.”
“Let me guess,” Eli said. “At some point, Proteus turned his sights on the president himself.”
“Right. He learned about the presidential visit through an accomplice who was dating my secretary. Then, he had her murdered to cover his tracks.”
Eli sucked in his breath. “So you’re saying that this Robert, whoever he is, did not want the president killed?”
“Well, at some point he signed on to the idea, until he changed his mind. During the conversation, they pretty much discussed the Proteus plot and decided that there was no way to stop Proteus.”
“Why was this Robert cavorting with some arms dealer like O’Smythe anyway?” Eli asked.
“I don’t have a clue.”
There was a long pause on Eli’s end.
“So what do we do now?” Everett asked.
“Send me the transcript at once.”
Paul Schroeder felt his small gondola swing in the wind and stared at the gondola creeping up the mountain ahead of him.
In it, President Charles Damon sat suspended over a nearly perpendicular snowfield that Mürren locals called “The Inferno.”
A team of Secret Service agents stood at the foot of each ski lift tower. They wore puffy down jackets, sunglasses and skis.
The president had spent the night in Mürren looking across the valley at the colossal trio of mountains, the crown jewels of the Bernese Oberland. Books, songs and movies had been created about the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. The shimmering white peaks seemed so close that Paul felt like he could have reached out and touched them.
Today, the president was off on a day full of sightseeing.
Ahead of the gondolas lay the Schilthorn, a peak almost three thousand meters high, with its circular observation deck and Piz Gloria restaurant where James Bond had pulled a few stunts On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
For a brief moment, the President of the United States seemed dwarfed by his surroundings.
What could killing one human being in such an awesome natural setting possibly accomplish?
The gondola rumbled past a tower and the car swung erratically. The two agents across from Paul twisted around to look for signs of trouble. They nervously scanned the trees, the grassy knolls and the shoulders of the snowy summit.
For them, the surroundings were an absolute nightmare.
Eli Shaw sped to his office at sunrise Monday morning and pulled up to the main gate at Langley.
A guard circled the car with a mirror, looking underneath for bombs.
“You’re an early bird,” the man said, and looked Eli over with mild curiosity.
“Today, I’m going to get that worm.”
The guard chuckled and let him pass.
But Eli was serious. He was looking for a worm somewhere in the government, and he would find him.
He walked into the office and turned on the lights.
The transcript had arrived from Bern Station and still sat in the fax machine.
He grabbed the two pages, flipped the coffee machine on and sat in the nearest chair. The stilted nature of the opening words caught his attention.
His eyes crossed momentarily as he tried to imagine the conversation.
The first letters to each sentence jumped out at him.
So, it’s you again. (O’Smythe)
As always. (Robert)
Too bad I was already asleep. (O’Smythe)
Out of bed, you. (Robert)
“S. A. T. O.,” he spelled out the first letters of each sentence.
Robert and O’Smythe must belong to SATO, and that was the organization’s secret handshake.
That had to be the key to finding the culprits.
Now he needed to find a motive that would put the pieces together and expose other members of SATO.
Nowhere in the transcript was the superconducting chip discussed.
That bothered him. He still didn’t know why the chip was so damned important to the late CIA employee Jeremy Watts and to SATO.
Eli reached for the phone on Dwight Goode’s desk and dialed his own number, the number of the mobile phone he had given Mick.
“This is Mick.”
“Wake up, sleepy head.”
“I am awake. I’m swimming in my motel pool.”
“Motel?” Eli heard water lapping and birds singing in the distance. “Are you on vacation?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then listen. We’ve had a break in the case. I need you to find and stop all members of the SATO organization that I was telling you about.”
“I don’t know the first thing about them.”
The coffee had stopped percolating, and Eli stretched the phone cord to pour a cup. “Start by interrogating your man O’Smythe. He seems to be coordinating things for them within Switzerland. At first he was working for the Americans, then he turned and started working against them.”
“That’s what
it seemed like to me.”
“If you can ascertain SATO’s role within CERN, we might be able to fill in some of the blanks.”
“That was today’s goal anyway.”
Eli was impressed. “You’re one step ahead of me.” He returned to his assistant’s swivel chair and set his coffee on the desk. “Where exactly are you?”
Mick hesitated. “Do you think I’m going to tell you that?”
“Fair enough. Just find out who’s in SATO, especially what other Americans are involved.” Eli leaned forward confidentially, as if someone like Jeremy Watts might be listening. “Remember, this case has shocked us all. We’ve already found a mole within our agency.”
“I know,” Mick said tiredly. “Nobody’s beyond suspicion.”
Chapter 52
The mountains of eastern Tennessee didn’t look smoky to Mick. A brilliant sun beat down on his rental car as he approached the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge facility from the east.
At first he saw only scrubby pines to the right and a high, forested Appalachian ridge to the left. As the end of the valley opened up, he came upon a concrete tower on the left and soon after that, a manmade lake named, innocently enough, Swan Lake.
Just beyond the sparkling water, Mick steered into a vast parking lot. Finding an opening in one of the most distant spaces, he parked and climbed out of the car. He folded his gray suit jacket over one arm and waded through the glaring sea of automobiles.
It seemed like nuclear waste from the Graphite Reactor, the world’s oldest nuclear reactor, was radiating heat through the asphalt parking lot.
Beyond the cars were buildings in a maze that resembled a printed circuit. The closest was named the “Pass Building.”
That looked promising. He entered what was a reception area. A woman was just leaving the building with a man. “We’re all getting our B degrees,” she was casually explaining.
“What’s that?” the man asked as he pulled the door open.
“Business degrees.”
From the rear exit, a tall, angular man approached him and stuck out his hand.
“You must be Mick Pierce.”
“And you must be Doug Mayfield.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you have your B degree?” Mick asked.
“You bet I do.”
They ambled through several courtyards to Doug’s office. Along the way, Doug studied him with curiosity. “Are you familiar with this facility?”
“Don’t know the first thing about it. Would you mind filling me in?”
Doug nodded and obliged.
“At first the Oak Ridge facility was born out of necessity,” he began. “Here the Manhattan Project took shape and we produced the first grams of plutonium. Recently, the other DOE National Laboratories and we have scrambled for relevance. We need to be profitable or we close down. Thus, we’ve moved from basic research to product development. And that means Business degrees.”
“What’s the lab working on these days?”
“You name it. We have over five thousand employees including eight hundred PhDs. We’re the largest energy lab in the country. We have particle accelerators, electron microscopes, lasers and supercomputers. What are we working on? New energy sources, global warming, toxic waste dumps, advanced materials, radioisotopes for medical treatment.”
They reached Doug’s office, a square room with a high ceiling and Venetian blinds. The place must have been built in the Forties and hadn’t been cleaned since. Doug may have graduated from business school, but definitely missed finishing school.
“I need to fill you in on what I need,” Mick said. “I’m not industry, and I’m not from a university. I work overseas for the U.S. Government. We need to head off a case of industrial espionage at CERN.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’m not only familiar with the project at CERN, I personally select the scientists we send over there.”
“That’s perfect,” Mick said. “I need to know what that project is all about.”
Doug squirmed in his seat. “What sort of credentials can you show me?”
Mick showed him his U.S. Embassy security card and his black diplomatic passport.
“Well, here goes,” Doug said, sitting back. “What’s the project all about? The goal is to introduce crystalline faults while creating thin film superconductors. When electric current flows through the superconductor, these faults become magnetic flux pins that improve superconductivity.”
He paused to see if Mick was following him. He was, barely.
“If we’re successful, industry and the military will etch circuitry out of these thin films, perhaps even on the molecular level such as using Josephson junctions for gateways. We’re working in conjunction with Sandia’s Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Lab in Livermore, California. They’re doing the micro heat pipes in the substrate and perfecting the circuitry, and we’re working the superconductivity problem.”
“Okay, I’m with you part way,” Mick said. “But, why do you use a particle accelerator to prepare the substrate?”
“Formerly, we bombarded the sample with a blast of neutrons or electrons that slightly displaced the atoms in the material. Now we use the sophisticated guidance magnets and a beam of heavy ions at CERN to produce pins at the exact coherence lengths necessary.”
Mick rubbed his forehead. “So this irradiation creates a blueprint of the magnetic flux pins?”
“Exactly. After creating the holes in the substrate, we remove the substrate from the particle accelerator. We use a laser to vaporize bits of the superconducting ceramic material that then crystallizes on the substrate. The ceramic material molds itself around the substrate’s faults. Then, when we run electricity through the superconducting ceramic, the flux pins trap the magnetic fields which otherwise would throw off the material’s superconductive properties.”
Something made Mick suspicious. He had read about microcircuit miniaturization from the introductory physics textbook, and Professor Kronz had spoken of the possibility of room temperature superconductors. “So the point of all this is to develop a superconducting computer chip?”
Doug looked him straight in the eye. “Yes, it is.”
“Do you know how many companies and countries would like to get their hands on such a chip?”
“I know very well.”
“Who gets all the spoils from your research?”
Doug blinked. “I suppose the Department of Defense gets first dibs.”
“And what if some company steals the substrate?”
“Then they get the spoils.”
Doug lurched forward in his seat and picked up a four-inch-square piece of metal that was sitting on a pile of papers on his desk.
“Here’s a sample of the substrate,” he said. “It’s a worthless piece of junk.”
“Has it been irradiated?”
“Yeah. We received it from Geneva yesterday. Unfortunately it’s defective.”
“Defective in what way?”
“Wrong coherence length. Otherwise, the process worked swell. We just have to refine the software for the focusing magnets.”
Mick stared at the shiny object as if he had found the Holy Grail. “Douglas Mayfield, your country needs that worthless piece of junk.”
“Why’s that?”
“It could save the president’s life.”
Mick unhooked his phone.
“Mind if I make a call?”
Doug Mayfield, still dazed, didn’t object.
Mick dialed the number on the business card that Sir Trevor O’Smythe had given him just before Mick left for Morocco.
“This is O’Smythe,” Trevor answered, his strong British accent coming over the line.
“This is Mick Pierce calling.”
“Mick, old chap. I know you aren’t in Rio. And I know you aren’t in Auckland.”
“Then where am I?”
“You had me going for a while, but now I know. You’re in
the Volunteer State.”
How the hell did O’Smythe know that he was in Tennessee?
“Listen,” Mick said. “I’ve been tracking down the substrate for you. I thought you might relax about the president now.”
“Do you have it?”
“Right here in my hot little hand. If you want it, you’ll have to take my word for it.”
“I want you to deliver the substrate to me personally.”
“I’ll deliver it under two conditions.”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to bargain. After all, I’ve still got Proteus out there with a contract on your president’s life.”
“Yeah, but how will you reach Proteus? You had to send me all the way to Morocco to find him.”
“Fine. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“First, you must put out the word that Proteus must stop. And second, prove to me that he won’t try to assassinate the president.”
“That isn’t a condition. That’s a demand.”
“You’re damned right it’s a demand. If you don’t find some way to reach Proteus and tell him to back off, you won’t get your substrate.”
Trevor paused. “Look, here’s the deal. You bring me the bloody substrate, and I’ll personally contact Proteus.”
“You contact him first, or I throw this substrate in the river.”
“You’re crazy,” Trevor said. Then he seemed to relent. “Okay, you win.”
“How will I know that you contacted Proteus?”
“He will release your wife as a sign of good faith. And your brother, too.”
“I didn’t know he had them.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Okay, you’ve got me. Where and when will he release them?”
“Tomorrow in Geneva.”
“Okay. Now, where do I hand this substrate over? I’m not going anywhere near Saas Fee again.”
“Being an Englishman, I have a certain affinity for the Jardin Anglais in Geneva. It’s on the Left Bank. You’ll meet my assistant there at nine a.m.”
Mick had to stop and think. Could a flight from Tennessee arrive there in time? He could probably make it.
“Well, that was simple,” O’Smythe said.
“Not so fast. I have one more condition.”