by Tom Grace
‘Spasíba, Oksanna,’ Orlov chided, politely ending her lecture before she riled Leskov even more.
Zoshchenko bristled but said nothing further. Orlov knew that she and Leskov barely tolerated each other, and did so only because Orlov demanded it. She despised Leskov as a hulking Neanderthal – an unfortunate necessity of Victor Orlov’s business. Conversely, Leskov viewed her as an arrogant, self-centered intellectual bitch who could easily be replaced by any of the high-priced whores servicing Moscow executives.
‘Dmitri, what do you have to report?’ Orlov asked, looking to get the meeting back on track.
‘The notebooks found with Johann Wolff have been taken to a laboratory on the campus of the University of Michigan for analysis and preservation. Our electronics team has infiltrated the university’s computer network and located information, what they call image files, linked to these notebooks. The files are secured, but they believe they can hack their way in. They have also monitored someone outside the laboratory accessing some of these files, someone named Grin from MARC. We are working to identify this individual.’
‘Have you discovered what is in Wolff’s notebooks?’
‘No, and neither have they.’
‘What do you mean?’ Zoshchenko was confused. ‘If they are interested in these books, then it must be Wolff’s research.’
‘I have no doubt that that is exactly what it is, but apparently the notebooks are somehow encrypted. Wolff didn’t want people to know what he was working on.’
‘That’s very interesting.’ Orlov rubbed his chin as he considered Leskov’s report. ‘Oksanna, based on Wolff’s letters, do you think his work might be of value to our competitors?’
‘Absolutely. Wolff’s thinking is highly unconventional, and his insights into quantum reality could provide the keys to understanding how Sandstrom’s device works.’
‘Then we must acquire these notebooks, even if only to deprive our competitors of them. Dmitri, make the necessary arrangements.’
‘Da, Victor Ivanovich.’
28
JULY 21
Langley, Virginia
When Bart Cooper entered his office, he found a thick manila envelope resting on his desk. He sat down, undid the clasp tie, and extracted the contents; it was the information he’d requested from Connie. The first few pages laid out a chronology of Johann Wolff’s abbreviated life, starting with his birth in Dresden and ending with the discovery of his remains a few days ago.
After the chronology, Cooper found a synopsis of the information about Wolff dredged from a classified report regarding the wartime activities of German scientists issued in September of 1948.
10/1947: Workmen clearing rubble in West Berlin uncover a cache of files in the basement of a collapsed building. The building was used by the Reichsforschungsrat – the Reich Science Council.
The files identified research projects on which prisoners from German concentration camps were used as slave labor and test subjects – projects that included Wernher von Braun’s V-2 ballistic missile program at Peenemünde. Johann Wolff’s name was listed among those responsible for conducting a horrific series of experiments on prisoners.
Investigators were able to confirm, through witnesses and secondary documentation, most of the war crimes alleged in the files.
Since several of the more prominent German scientists named in the recovered files were working on classified U.S. military projects, no action was taken to prosecute them for war crimes.
9/1948: The recovered files and investigative reports were reviewed by the congressional oversight committee and classified.
‘And three months after the files were suppressed, Johann Wolff was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan,’ Cooper said with a sigh.
Cooper recalled hearing rumors about the recovered files, but only the most senior intelligence officers were assigned to work with them. He also remembered the anxiety he felt over the possibility that a war criminal might have entered the United States because of something he missed on the background check.
Review of the still-classified report reveals that investigators were unable to confirm the allegation that physicist Johann Wolff participated in any scientific experimentation on prisoners. Further, other sources deemed reliable contradict the allegations.
The evidence found appears to support information provided by Johann Wolff during his interviews with the OSS. Wolff spent the entirety of the war in Berlin, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, where he was a junior member of the Uranverein – the Uranium Club. The Uranverein was responsible for the German nuclear-research program for both civilian and military applications. This group’s work was primarily theoretical, and there is no evidence that Wolff, or any other member of the Uranverein, was involved in human experimentation of any kind.
Further investigation into the discrepancy regarding Wolff reveals that the Reichsforschungsrat files were intentionally altered by a Nazi scientist named Gerhard Strauss. Strauss essentially traded professional identities with Wolff to cover up his wartime activities. Strauss was killed during the Red Army attack on Berlin.
‘My God, he was innocent,’ Cooper said, his doubts vanishing as he read on.
As the war in Europe came to an end, Soviet and U.S. forces aggressively sought to acquire German scientists and technology. A few members of the Uranverein were captured by the Soviets, along with a significant amount of research documentation.
Interrogation of the German scientists revealed the truth about their failure to build an atomic bomb. None of the scientists wanted to construct an atomic bomb for the Fürhrer, but they also truly believed that the job was impossible. When the Uranverein presented their nuclear-research proposal to the Reich, they said that building an atomic bomb was at best impractical and, at worst, impossible. Their conclusion was based on hard numbers that had been painstakingly calculated by hand. These scientists stated that their data had been checked and double-checked by the best mathematician on their staff – Johann Wolff.
Following the successful detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, NKVD transcripts indicate that the German scientists were dumbfounded as to the reason for their failure. Using the files captured by the Red Army, the scientists reconstructed the mathematics on which they based their claim that an atomic bomb was theoretically unfeasible.
After careful review of several years’ worth of original calculations, it was the opinion of the German scientists and their Russian counterparts that a number of subtle errors had been introduced into the equations – errors that doomed the German research effort to failure.
Cooper reread the last section and came to an inescapable conclusion. ‘They were sabotaged.’
The review uncovered a deliberate pattern of miscalculation on the part of Johann Wolff. After correcting for Wolff’s subtle errors, the Germans realized how close they had come to determining that the atomic bomb was feasible. They also realized that in order for Wolff to have undermined their research efforts so perfectly, he must have known the truth. It was the opinion of the German and Russian scientists that Johann Wolff single-handedly prevented the Germans from building an atomic bomb.
Cooper slumped back in his chair, his face now ashen. He felt a tightness in his chest and, for a moment, wondered if he was having a heart attack. He vividly remembered the day he learned that Wolff, a man he’d cleared to immigrate into the United States, might have been a war criminal. Germany was swarming with rumors then – secret projects, hidden Nazi gold – and it was often hard to separate truth from lies. Rivers of disinformation flowed out of Western and Soviet intelligence services as the Cold War began to set in.
He remembered hearing rumors about a secret cache of files, about records of who did what, and further rumors about how those files were suppressed for reasons of the highest national security. Cooper saw the death camps firsthand and could not fathom how a nation could find any security in harboring men capable of inflicting such horror.
Then there were those who would not tolerate such an injustice, men and women bent on seeking retribution – the Nokmim. Cooper sympathized with them, exchanged information, and occasionally turned a blind eye when the Nokmim became a court of last resort for war criminals who found refuge under the Cold War umbrella of political necessity. Some of the more radical members of the Nokmim were less interested in due process and reasonable doubt than in vengeance.
‘I am responsible for the death of an innocent man,’ Cooper admitted, acknowledging something he’d feared since his first contact with the Nokmim regarding Wolff. ‘Not just an innocent man, but a hero who prevented Hitler from building an atomic bomb.’
The information he’d had back then was incomplete, but both he and the Nokmim knew that Wolff’s name was in the files. At the time, that seemed enough, but now the enormity of that error in judgment bore down upon him.
Clipped to the last page of the report, Cooper found a note from Connie.
FYI. It appears you aren’t the only one interested in Johann Wolff. According to the Russians, two search requests were made for information regarding Wolff. That’s the reason they responded to my inquiry so quickly; they’d just finished the same search for someone else.
‘What the hell?’ Cooper’s mind raced as he reread the note. He then checked his watch. ‘Well, I guess it won’t hurt to ask.’
He pulled a tattered address book from the top drawer of his desk and flipped through the pages until he found the entry he was looking for. There was a gray smudge beneath Fydorov’s name where the initials KGB had been written. In keeping with the new order in Russia, the former Committee for State Security had been rechris-tened the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service), and the initials FSB were now scrawled above the smudge.
Cooper picked up the phone and keyed in the long string of numbers.
‘Fydorov,’ a voice growled into Cooper’s ear.
‘Dóbry viécher, Igor Sergeevich,’ Cooper replied in lightly accented Russian. ‘You’re working late. It’s Bart Cooper.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘Bartholomew Georgievich? It’s been quite a long time. Are you in Moscow?’
‘No, Iggy, I’m calling from the States. How are things with the FSB?’
Fydorov sighed. ‘There is a saying in your country that fits perfectly: The more things change, the more they stay the same.’
‘Ain’t it the truth. I’ve got a little business I’d like to discuss with you, if you’ve got a minute.’
‘As always, I’ll help you any way I can. Go ahead.’
‘A few days ago the body of a German physicist was found here in the States. He’d been murdered back in ’forty-eight, and the body had remained hidden until now. This physicist worked on the German bomb project, and I was the intel officer who cleared him to immigrate into the U.S. When his body surfaced, I asked our research department to put together a full package on him, more for my own curiosity than anything else.’
‘Did you learn anything interesting?’
‘A little, but what stuck out was how quickly we got the information. Your archives turned our request around in a day.’
‘A day? What are you bribing them with? I’ve had requests go weeks before receiving a report.’
‘The quick turnaround surprised us, too. The reason your people responded so promptly was that they’d just completed an identical search for someone else, so the information had already been culled.’
‘That’s quite a coincidence.’
‘My old instincts tell me it’s more than a coincidence. What I want to know is who was asking for information? As far as I know, the story was strictly local and didn’t get picked up by the wire services.’
‘And our archives are not exactly as accessible for research as your Library of Congress. What is the name of your dead German physicist?’
‘Johann Wolff,’ Cooper replied.
‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’
‘I’d appreciate it, Iggy.’
29
JULY 25
Moscow, Russia
It was late when Lara Avvakum decided to make a few notes in the project log before quitting for the night. She reveled in the excitement of this exploration and, for the first time in years, lost track of the hours as she worked.
She clicked on the word-processing icon, and her computer immediately began loading the program. The American-made Gateway that Orlov had provided was by far the most powerful computer she’d ever used, and it was so small compared with the ancient colossus that occupied an entire building at Sverdlovsk 23.
In the corner of the screen, a small window appeared containing an animated representation of Albert Einstein. The figure emptied his coffee cup, tossed it aside with a crash, then waved hello.
‘Zdrávstvuytye, Albert,’ she said.
As always, the words started slowly, but eventually the flow became steady and strong. It all began to come together for Avvakum, how even in a total vacuum there could not be complete emptiness. Mathematically it was one of those odd points that equations reach when they crash into zero or spiral off into infinity, where matter or energy becomes immeasurable and therefore unknowable. As a physicist, she knew that infinities were nonsensical answers that pointed to a flaw in the method of mathematically describing complex phenomena.
Yet, through the work of her unnamed predecessors, Avvakum found herself standing at the threshold of a new awareness, of a dramatic change in her perception of the universe. She was seeing the effects of something beyond the theoretical barriers of infinity, the first cracks in that seemingly impenetrable wall.
It bothered Avvakum that she found no mention of her predecessors in any of the project documentation. Zoshchenko explained that the names had been expunged as per the terms of dissolution of the original research partnership. As a scientist, Avvakum knew the importance of properly documenting her sources to provide a pedigree for her work. She felt a nagging sense of guilt that she would not be permitted to honor those whose work she was building on.
Two paragraphs into the night’s entry, she accidentally keyed in a pair of ws. In anticipation of her next stroke, the program offered her a string of underscored, blue text.
www.cse.nd.edu/~sand/
Even though she’d only just begun exploring the Internet after her arrival in Moscow, Avvakum recognized this as the address of a Web page. Curious, she clicked on the text, and a large window appeared as her computer connected to the Internet.
A dedicated line tied Avvakum’s computer to a remote network-administration complex inside VIO FinProm’s main office. Her request was quickly routed through the FinProm server and out onto the Net.
Seconds later a photograph of a man, possibly in his early forties, with blond hair and a red beard appeared, smiling at her.
‘Ted Sandstrom,’ she read from the text beside the photo. ‘Professor. Ph.D. physics, University of Notre Dame.’
Below the photograph, she read through a long page that described Sandstrom’s background and research interests. Avvakum gasped as she read that Sandstrom’s current work was a study of the quantum boundary between matter and energy. The page also listed Sandstrom as being on sabbatical from his teaching duties at Notre Dame for the current term.
I wonder, Professor Sandstrom, if you are the one whom I am following.
30
JULY 26
Ann Arbor, Michigan
‘That ought to about do it,’ Grin said hopefully as he saved the program file he was working on. ‘Now maybe I can get a clearer picture of how Lobo works.’
Shortly after diving into Kilkenny’s decryption project, Grin decided that a mathematical algorithm as intricate as Wolff’s cipher deserved a name, so he christened it Lobo. The program he had just created was designed to test his assumptions on how Wolff’s cipher operated.
Once he finished loading his program into Stan, he switched machines to see how many new pages the Preserv
ation Lab had scanned into their computer. As soon as the window containing the page icons appeared, the individual icons began vanishing. The files were disappearing at a rate of one every three seconds. No doubt, someone was moving the files off the server. But who, and why?
Grin moved to the Wolff directory – which held the six separate subdirectories for each of the notebooks – and selected everything to be downloaded to his machine.
FILE ACCESS DENIED
He stared at the monitor in disbelief. ‘What the hell is going on!’
Grin grabbed the phone. ‘Please, somebody, still be there,’ he pleaded as the line rang.
He got a fast busy signal and slammed the handset in the cradle. Seven more files were now gone.
Suddenly, the window displaying his link to the Preservation Lab server closed – the connection cut.
‘Red alert! Red alert! All hands to battle stations!’ a voice clip of Patrick Stewart from Star Trek shouted out from Grin’s workstation. Whoever was erasing files down on campus was now attacking Grin’s machines.
Grin swiveled to view the large monitor just as the screen went blank and a new window appeared. In the upper-left corner was a white square that held a black spider graphic.
‘All right, Spyder, sic ’em,’ Grin commanded, as if the computer were listening to him.
Nested deep within the MARC network was a Spyder, a black chunk of artificial intelligence that a year earlier had nearly cost Nolan and Kelsey their lives. The device was the offspring of a similar piece of computer hardware designed by Moy Electronics to defend computer networks against hacker attacks. The Spyder carried all the tools of its parent, the Gatekeeper, and several offensive weapons designed by the CIA for use in gathering intelligence. Following the Spyder incident, Nolan and Grin worked out a deal with the CIA that allowed them to retain the device and work with Moy on improvements.