Adam said, “And something about that’s supposed to make the alpha particles quantum tunnel past the nuclear repulsion?”
“There’s a theory,” Kiri said slowly, “that a focused wave front at just the right wavelength and energy could exponentially increase tunneling.”
Morgan frowned at the implausibility of it. Wanting to be able to look the theory up, he asked, “Whose theory is that?”
Kiri shook her head, “A friend of his. It’s not published, but Dad looked it over and agreed the math worked.”
“Who’s this friend?”
She shook her head again, shooting a warning glance at Lindl, “Dad asked us not to tell anyone. Besides, what’s it matter? Obviously it works.”
Frustrated, Morgan clenched his teeth for a moment, then reluctantly nodded. “We’ll go up and look at his set up tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday. If it works, I guess the math must work too.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Do you have a copy of this theory that Daryn based everything on? I have a friend who’s a particle physicist. I’d love to have him look it over and see what he thinks of it.”
Kiri gave Morgan a dubious look, “What’s to keep your buddy from taking out a patent on Dad’s idea?”
Morgan opened his mouth to say that he trusted his friend, then remembered how he’d trusted the friends who’d built Matilda with him. Instead, he said, “Your dad didn’t submit a patent?”
Kiri shrugged, “Maybe? He said he was going to when he first succeeded in synthesizing tiny quantities. But, I don’t know if he actually did it.”
“I’ll look through the files he had stored on his computer. If he submitted a patent, presumably there’ll be some evidence of it.”
Tuesday morning
Morgan dropped Adam off at Jerry’s house so Adam could leave his suitcase at his friend’s place instead of trying to take it to school.
That done, he met Roger at the waffle shop for breakfast. Roger greeted him by saying, “I know you’ve had a lot of other things to think about, but have you been keeping up with what’s happening on Matilda?”
“No, not so far. Is anything going on?”
“Apparently they’ve been having a lot of trouble with her. She’s been down for a bunch of multi-hour periods over the weekend.” Roger leaned across the table and whispered, “Was that your doing?”
Morgan slowly shook his head, “No. I didn’t even know they’d had trouble. Do they know what the problem is?” Because he’d dealt with various kinds of Matilda problems for years, Morgan’s mind was already considering possible causes.
Roger shook his head and settled back into his seat. “Seems to me that whoever bought her might not have been as ready to take over as they thought.” He lifted an eyebrow, “I’ll bet somebody’ll be calling you for help pretty soon. I hope you don’t give them any assistance without insisting they change that damned contract back.”
Morgan pursed his lips in thought. “Whoever’s running it, surely they’ve got some really smart programmers who’ll figure out the problem pretty quickly.” He quirked a little smile, “But it’d be really great if they needed help so badly I could renegotiate our contract.”
After breakfast, Morgan took Roger’s $10,000 check to the credit union and established checking, savings, and credit card accounts. Since they’d have to mail him the credit card, he took out several hundred dollars in cash to buy gas and groceries while they waited for it to arrive.
He met with the manager of his retirement fund and signed papers that enabled him to be able to make early withdrawals.
He stopped by the house. To his great relief Arlette wasn’t home. Even better, she hadn’t changed the locks. He got out a large suitcase and packed it full. He was about to leave when he realized that he might not get another chance this good. He went back in the house and threw a sheet on the bed. He cleaned out his drawers and his side of the closet. Picking up the sheet by the corners, he took it out and put it in the trunk of the car. Getting another small suitcase, he wandered around the house grabbing other items that meant something to him, but nothing to Arlette.
He wondered whether he should take any more of Adam’s stuff, but decided that cleaning out Adam’s room would make it obvious Adam didn’t intend to return. That might cause more trouble than it was worth with Arlette.
Morgan got back on the road to Asheville at 1:30 in the afternoon, much later than Morgan had hoped. He sent Lindl and Kiri a text to tell them he’d be home later than expected.
Tuesday afternoon
When Kiri got in Lindl’s car for the drive home from school, she said, “I need you to take me to the police department.”
Lindl put the car back in park. “What’s happened?”
It took Kiri a second to realize Lindl thought Chatfield was after her again. “No, nothing’s happened. It turns out that, during the summer, they hold a women’s self-defense course on Tuesday afternoons. It starts today.” She gave him a wry grin, “Due to recent events, I thought I’d avail myself of it.”
Lindl snorted, “Okay. You got the message that Uncle Morgan wouldn’t be back until 5:30 or 6:00?”
Kiri nodded. “I can take an Uber if you can’t get me.”
“I’ll be there. When’s it over?”
Sgt. John O’Neill looked out over the gaggle of women who’d showed up for the self-defense course. As usual, they were all types. Fat, thin, tall, short, timid, intense and everything in between. After making his introductory remarks he launched into a description of common sense ways to avoid the need to defend themselves by being safe. He talked to them about common household items and objects which might be used as weapons to equalize an unequal fight. He finished with suggestions about what they might wear to the next class when they’d be practicing combat techniques.
When he asked for questions, one of the intense ones, a slender young girl with blue eyes and short black hair, raised her hand. She wore all black except for a bright pink belt. When he called on her, she said, “Sorry, but could you at least teach us one thing today? Some technique we could use in a fight?”
O’Neill chuckled, “You meetin’ another kid behind the schoolhouse at five?”
She didn’t smile, “No, but on Thursday a man attacked me and killed my father. I couldn’t do anything to prevent it.”
O’Neill felt his smile crash, I’ve managed to forget again that some of these women have absolutely awful reasons for being in this class—not just paranoia. “I’m so sorry…” he began, then stumbled when he couldn’t think of what else to say.
She said, “So am I. But I’d ask you not to worry about how I’m feeling. Instead, please teach me something about fighting today. I’d like to feel like I’m already just a little more prepared to face something like that if it happens again.”
O’Neill swallowed, “Okay. I find that sometimes discussing an actual event provides the best learning experience. Would you be able to describe what happened with this guy? Maybe I could make some suggestions about what you could do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation?”
Unhesitatingly, she got up and walked up to him. Standing just in front and to his left, she faced away from him and said, “He caught me by surprise, throwing his left arm around my neck. Then he immobilized my arms by wrapping his right arm around me.”
“Would it be okay if I held you in a similar fashion? I’d immediately let go if you asked me to.”
She nodded.
Concerned about reactivating some kind of psychic trauma, he cautiously put his left arm around her neck. She seemed okay with that, so he put his right arm around her body, grabbing her left elbow and immobilizing her right arm beneath his own elbow. “Is this okay?” he asked, still worrying that being similarly trapped might frighten her.
“Yeah. This guy was bigger than you and holding me a lot tighter, but otherwise this was my situation.”
“Okay, one of the things you’ve got to consider’s whether you actually do want to
try to hurt him. You’ve got to consider the possibility that if you do it might make him angrier and more likely to hurt you. Assuming you make the decision to fight, there are a number of things you might have been able to do, even with your arms trapped. First, you might stomp down onto the tops of his feet.”
“I tried kicking back at his legs,” she said, “but I couldn’t seem to land the kicks with enough impact to stop him.”
“Another possibility would be to pull your chin down and try to bite a piece out of his forearm where it was wrapped around you.”
She turned her head into the corner of his elbow, then lowered her chin and turned back, placing her mouth against the inside of his forearm. She lifted her head and said thoughtfully, “That might’ve worked.”
“If you do it, bite hard. Bite like your life depends on it and you really want to take a chunk out.”
“At one point, he let go with his right arm. I hit him in the crotch. That made him let me go, but it didn’t incapacitate him. Was there something I could have done that would’ve stopped him completely?”
“Without a weapon, disabling a really big guy that’s got a grip on you like that would be very difficult. You might’ve tried to drive your right elbow back into his solar plexus…” O’Neill used his right arm to bend her right elbow into position and show her how she could punch back with it to strike him in the gut. “Or, if you’re flexible, you might’ve been able to twist and strike back with your elbow into his face…” Again, he took her arm through a possible motion.
He let go of her neck and stepped back. “I think that’s enough for today. I’ll see you guys next Tuesday.”
Kiri got home at 4:30. Wanting to check her dad’s project rooms, before her Uncle Morgan got back, she dropped off her backpack and trotted up the hill to the mine. Unlocking the entrance gate, she got out her phone as she started down the tunnel. She clicked an icon that linked through the mine’s Wi-Fi. It let her control the modified railcar that carried the slab of rock that closed off the hidden side tunnel. By the time she got to the side tunnel, the railcar had backed up three feet, pulling away the section of the wall that plugged the hidden opening.
She slipped through the narrow opening and double tapped the icon to close the wall. She ignored the first room and stepped into the second room—the one where her dad had built the alpha capture setup. She immediately saw he’d had been making a transmutation run the day he’d died. All the equipment was still turned on, though it had gone into standby mode. The computer that controlled everything was still booted up. Stepping over to it, she saw he’d been making iridium when he’d been interrupted.
She paused for a moment, wondering whether she should try to back up any important files onto her jump drive. She decided to only backup the settings for the current run. The computer itself was encrypted so no one else should be able to get any information out of it. Even if someone did steal or destroy the computer, she already had her own copies of all the files concerning the basic principles. She also had all her dad’s design files. Once she’d copied the settings, she moused to the shutdown icon and clicked it. While the computer was shutting down, she went around the room turning off all the equipment. She paused at the condenser when she realized how much iridium it contained. It was set up to solidify the molten iridium into a three-centimeter by three-centimeter bar that had a cross-section of nine square centimeters.
The bar was 6.77 centimeters long which would mean—at 22.65 grams per cubic centimeter—it’d weigh about 1380 grams. A tiny bit more than three pounds. That’d be about $61,000, she thought. Wow!
Movement caught her eye. She looked up at the monitor that displayed the intake from the security cameras.
A chill came over her as Kiri recognized the guy who’d killed her dad.
She tensed, thinking about how helpless she’d felt when the man had grabbed her last week. How she’d lost her sense of competence. Instead of feeling like she could handle any crisis, she’d felt like her mind had gone off the rails.
She’d felt helpless and she’d hated it.
Now she was feeling the same way again.
With a curse, she forcefully told herself to snap out of it.
Lifting the iridium bar, she took it with her as she went into the first room. She laid the bar on a shelf with some other metal bar stock, hoping it’d look unimportant. Looking over the other supplies on the shelf, she picked up a two-foot length of one-inch steel pipe and a drum of three-conductor wire. As she left the room, she grabbed a combo plier/wire-cutter out of the tool chest. Then she pulled out her phone and hit the icon that’d open the door into the tunnel.
Out in the tunnel, she made sure the hidden door closed tightly and that she couldn’t see the crack around it. Turning right to go deeper into the mine she dialed 9-1-1. Am I crazy to leave the research rooms? she wondered. She’d have been safe in those rooms, but when the cops arrived they’d want to know where she was and she didn’t want anyone to find out about her dad’s special rooms.
A voice spoke on her phone, “Hello, what’s your emergency?”
***
Dan avoided the road up to the mine by coming in through the woods like Argo had. He was glad Argo’d mentioned all the poison ivy. He wasn’t in the habit of looking for it, so he’d probably have cruised right through it without the warning.
When he came within sight of the mine entrance, he stopped and watched for a bit. If the cops still had someone there watching the entrance, he didn’t want to amble right in. Dan couldn’t actually see the entire entrance area from his location on the side of the hill. Some of it was hidden by the cut in the rocks. He gave it a few minutes in hopes anyone who might be hanging around the entrance would move enough to come into view.
He was just about to stand up and start walking down the side of the hill to the entrance when a girl came walking up the road. He immediately wondered if she was the same one he’d grabbed that night in the tunnel—Djai’s daughter. She was thin, which fit. This one’s hair was really short, but in the dark, and with a lot of other things on his mind, he hadn’t noticed the length of Djai’s daughter’s hair.
The girl walked right up to the entrance and a moment later Dan heard the big metal door creak open.
Deciding that it’d be best to wait until she left, Dan settled in to wait. However, as he sat waiting he began to have second thoughts. He remembered the huge padlock that’d been hanging on the hasp when he’d first got there with Rob. If the mine was normally locked up, now might be the only time he could get in the door for a look-see.
Besides, depending on how extensive the tunnels were, it might not be that easy to figure out where Djai’d been getting the platinum. But if the girl was his daughter and she was going in to check on Djai’s project, Dan could follow her right to the thing he was looking for. Of course, he thought with some frustration, she might already be so deep inside that I won’t be able to see her light.
He got up and started down the hill anyway.
When he came around the face wall to the mine entrance, he was happy to see the door stood ajar. The opening was big enough for him to squeeze through without moving the door and thereby making a lot of noise. He stepped up close and peered through the opening. He could see the little lights on the ceiling of the mine, but didn’t see any moving or bobbing lights to suggest someone walking with a flashlight.
Dan stepped through the opening and walked about twenty feet deeper into the mine. He didn’t turn on his flashlight, trying to preserve his night vision so he’d see the girl more easily. He stood quietly for a bit, then started moving deeper into the mine. He tried to walk quietly, but the crunching of the rocks under his boots seemed like it probably carried.
When he got past the first gentle curve, Dan saw a light bobbing in the tunnel, just like he had the first time he’d entered and gotten past that point. The first time, the light had been Djai coming towards him. This time the light, hopefully the girl, seemed to be mov
ing away. He felt a little surprised because he’d thought she’d be much deeper in the mine by now. Maybe she came back out for something, he thought. Or maybe she stopped to work on something?
He paused to let her get a little further away before he resumed walking. She disappeared around another bend about the time he went beyond the lights on the ceiling of the tunnel. He resisted the strong temptation to turn on his flashlight. Remembering the down-shaft Rob had been shoved into along the left side of the tunnel, Dan put out a hand to follow the right wall.
He felt like he’d walked a long way without seeing even a faint flash of light from the girl’s flashlight. If I come to a side tunnel, I’ll stop in it and wait to catch the girl when she leaves.
As he continued walking he recognized the problem with that plan. If she slips past me and actually leaves, I could get locked in this hellhole! He’d brought a jacket this time, but he’d still hate to be locked in. What if I’ve already missed a tunnel that she turned into on the left? She could’ve come back out of that tunnel and be on her way back out to the entrance right now. I wouldn’t even know it. Thinking back to all those uncomfortable hours in the mine the first time, Dan started to have serious misgivings. He was just about to turn around and start back to the entrance when he realized he could see a faint light ahead.
He kept walking. As he got closer to the light he realized it was stationary and the same color as the girl’s flashlight. He felt a tremendous sense of relief that she hadn’t gotten past him toward the entrance. She’s stopped to do something, he thought. Could that be the spot where Djai got the platinum? he wondered, picturing the girl up there on her hands and knees, scraping platinum nuggets out of some kind of mother lode.
Dan slowed way down, hoping to reduce the crunching sound of his boots. He wondered if he could mark this location so he could find it again if he returned to the mine to get his own platinum.
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