The car is out in front of the casino. Whether it’s been there the whole time, waiting, or has returned, Adam doesn’t know. Soon all four of them are in it, speeding North. Nobody says anything. Adam likes the silence, but he can tell it’s bothering Sol, who keeps breathing in like he’s going to say something, then letting his breath out again in silence. Out the window it’s pitch black, though even if it were light, Adam thinks, there would be nothing to see. They’re barely out of the riotous light and noise of Las Vegas, but this is nothingness.
In about an hour, they arrive at a gate, where the driver rolls down his window; they are waved inside. The car stops outside a cluster of temporary-looking buildings. “We’ve got about two hours,” Stan says. “Get some rest.” He leads them into one of the buildings. There are bunks. Adam climbs onto one and stretches out on top of the blanket. It’s cold—difficult to believe, given the heat of the day, but then, this is the desert. He barely has time to straighten himself out, witness the slight turning out of his right leg as he relaxes into the thin mattress, before he is asleep.
A voice comes over the loudspeaker. “H minus one minute.” He slides the dark glasses on, dimly aware of Stan beside him, doing the same. Thirty seconds later, another warning. The first test they did of the Super, in the Pacific a couple of years ago, went off a few seconds early. Adam knows this, though he was still in school at the time, the men doing the building and testing still just names.
When the ten-second warning sounds, he turns his back, though he keeps his shaded eyes open. His mind is blank.
There is no sound. Everything goes bright and silent. Brighter than daylight. Then, there is a painful click in his ears, not a sound, but a physical impact. The shock wave, he thinks, though it is difficult to connect this new sensation with the familiar term. He gives his head a hard shake. It feels as though a tiny insect with pointed hooks has crawled into his ear, and is boring a hole in his eardrum.
Then comes the sound, a big rolling boom. He turns around to see the fireball. It is enormous, covering the whole horizon. The fire is on fire. He is on fire.
He stares and stares through the glasses. He wants to take them off, but he doesn’t dare. This is not what he has seen in photographs of previous explosions. This is not what he has heard described, not what Larry saw the last time, not what Adam has calculated in his ever-growing series of equations describing the possibilities for the release of energy from uranium isotopes.
Later, he will learn that this was the largest explosion ever set off, forty-four kilotons. But now, here, what he sees is the sky, the air turning impossibly bright and dark at the same time, then all that brightness, all the brightness in the world, being sucked into that cloud as it spreads over the desert just before dawn.
He clinks two silver dollars together in his pocket. He could have held one up, right in front of his eye, measuring the size of the blast as he knows observers before him have done, but it wouldn’t have blocked this out. His mind is still empty, all the numbers that could describe this now out of his reach. It still feels bright and silent. He can feel Stan beside him, looking at him, waiting to share a reaction, but he can’t turn.
Defense
It’s only about an hour’s drive to Santa Fe. Charlotte Katz notes the odometer reading in her log. The morning air is cool, the roads clear, and she is in the parking lot at the train station—the designated meeting place—at quarter to eleven. These are the sorts of days she likes best in her work, freed from the desk and screen, out on the road. She sits in her car and quiets her anxiety as best she can by reminding herself what she is doing. She had fallen asleep thinking of her client, Diego Salerno, and awakened with thoughts of his wife, who is also his co-defendant. He has been accused of trying to sell restricted information on America’s nuclear program to a foreign nation. A twenty-two count indictment names him and his wife in a conspiracy. But after seeing all the documents and hearing his story, Charlotte is inclined to believe that his motives were neither financial nor political. He had a theory for how to create nuclear energy more efficiently, and no one at Los Alamos was interested in implementing it, and more than anything, he just wanted to see it built, somewhere, anywhere. She wants desperately to get the evidence to make her case. If she can prove that he did not have information that was truly vital, they might stand a chance. And maybe, just maybe, this witness can do it.
When she enters the station, Dr. Brooks marches right up to her, sticks out a hand and introduces himself. He wears a checked flannel shirt tucked into faded jeans. His hair is white and in need of a trim. He is clean-shaven. He looks just how she imagined a great scientist would look. “Let’s go,” he says. “You can buy me a cup of coffee.” Without waiting for a reply, he starts for the door. She gathers her things and follows him, catching up just as they reach the street.
“I appreciate your taking the time,” she says. He turns right. Ahead is a café with a brightly painted sign that reads “Good Coffee.”
“I don’t have science training,” she says. “But I understand that Dr. Salerno was involved more in the generation of energy than in weapons design, and that he had a particular method that he felt—”
“Hydrogen flouride lasers,” Adam Brooks says. They reach the café and he holds the door open for her. It’s a small space, six tables, five of them empty, the last occupied by a middle-aged man in jeans, engrossed in a newspaper.
“What would you like?” Charlotte asks. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Coffee. Cream and sugar.” He takes a seat at a table in the back.
There are names she has heard before. Oppenheimer, obviously. Feynman. Bradbury. Brooks is not one of them. She googled him, when she’d finally managed to convince Diego to give her a list of people she could talk to. His name was out there; he had certainly been an important figure at the lab, not during the war, but right when Diego was there, in the 60’s and 70’s. He had made the bombs bigger, and later, he had worked on the nonproliferation treaty, always behind the scenes. She has a good feeling about him as a witness. She brings the two cups and takes her place across from him.
“So,” he says, not waiting even for her to get her notepad ready. “Salerno has finally gotten himself into trouble. I guess we all end up somewhere.”
“I’m hoping there’s no ‘ending up’ involved in this,” she says. Something about his demeanor, his brazen grab of authority, has made her own tone sharper, more certain. She clicks open her retractable pen with more force than is necessary.
“You have to wonder if this is what he wanted. He had choices, that man. Still has his health. Still has his wife.” She senses a judgment in Adam Brooks’s tone, a superiority. No, she wants to say. It’s not what he wanted.
“How did you know about the charges?” she asks.
“It was in the paper.” He takes a sip of coffee. There is a bitterness in his expression, a slight downturn of the mouth, eyes cast to the side.
“I’m hoping you can tell me a little bit about what kind of person he was. What kind of scientist, what kind of employee.”
“I didn’t know he was doing this, if that’s what you’re after. Arranging this sale, or transfer, or however it ended up.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” He doesn’t seem frightened, like a witness who fears he, too, will be accused, but he is ill at ease. “I’m more interested in how he worked, in what kind of guy he was, in what kinds of things motivated him. Did he work for you?”
“Not directly.”
“But you had some say in his supervision?”
“I had some say in most things. Including hiring Diego. And firing him.” He dips his little finger in the coffee, then puts it in his mouth. Something in his tone tells her that despite what google has told her—that he was not among the very top leadership, not in the most exclusive meetings—that it is very important to him that she believe this. He looks back toward her, though he keeps his eyes focused slightly above hers. “I
always thought it may have been a mistake,” he says, more softly than she has yet heard him speak. She leans down, trying to catch his gaze from below.
“Which? Hiring or firing?”
“Both, I suppose.”
“Say more.”
“Well, now, I don’t know. You aren’t going to try to bring me down there to testify or anything like that, are you?”
“It depends on what you have to say.”
“I won’t get on a stand and say all this to a room full of reporters. I’m too old to have some self-righteous journalist going back through all the decisions I made and picking them apart with the benefit of hindsight. If someone wants to do that they’ll have to wait until I’m dead.” His voice is rising steadily.
“Let’s not worry about testimony right now,” she says. “I’m just trying to put together my strategy and if you can help me understand him, understand what was true and what was possible.” She waits for a reply, but he just grunts, a sound so noncommittal that it might have been nothing more than an unhappy exhale. He looks down at the table. Then, he begins to speak.
“Diego’s idea involved an entirely different kind of laser from what we were using.”
“You mentioned hydrogen flouride.”
“So you were paying attention. He thought it was cheaper and more effective than the system we had.”
“And?”
“It was.” She feels these words in her fingertips, an almost-pain like static electricity. She can see Dr. Salerno’s small eyes, the way they bore into her when he talks about his work. In an instant, all has become clear: this was his plan all along. Prison was, if not a part of it, a known possibility he’d been willing to endure. What he had not anticipated was that they would take his wife. Charlotte wonders if the wife really did play a part, or if this is the government’s way of building leverage. But she isn’t leverage enough; Diego will press on, and it is that fact that seems to torture him. Her pen rests in her hand, useless.
The case is precarious. A week ago, she visited Diego, prepared to do her utmost to win him over to her strategy for the case. She’d been hassled by the guards on the way in, and she was rattled. Diego lifted his head when the guard unlocked the door, and though he didn’t smile—he never smiled—she detected a hint of pleasure near the corners of his mouth. She had caught him on a good day.
“How’ve you been?” she asked, reaching out to shake his hand as the door swung shut behind her.
“It is terrible in here,” he said.
“Is it getting worse? Did something happen?”
“Every day it is all the same. These boys here, they are saying the rudest things, and there is nothing to eat.”
“I’m still trying to get you transferred,” she said. “At least until your trial. But they seem to be concerned that you’ll try to leave the country.”
“I will not. I promise you I will not if I can just sleep in a bed and eat food that has some, some, what, taste to it. Spice,” he said.
“I know you won’t. But I’m having trouble convincing the government.” She has spent hours on the phone, without much hope.
“Tell me about it,” he grumbled. “The government cannot be convinced.”
She smiled, hoping that this was a small joke at his own expense. She has two dozen bankers boxes in her office, photocopies of the treatises he has composed over the years and Fed-Exed to people in various government agencies.
“We need to discuss our strategy,” she said. Diego squinted at her, as though she were a bird high in a tree. He looked even older than when they last met a week before, his eyes sunken, his skin sagging. “Remember the day when we went through the indictment together and looked at every count and what they all meant?”
“It is all wrong,” he said. “I am not trying to hurt this country. It is a good country. But they won’t listen.” His gray-tinged skin began to flush. She had heard this speech four times already. She wanted to cut him off, to get on with it. She hates it when clients do this, repeat ad nauseam that they’ve done nothing wrong, refuse to be realistic about their choices, their situations, refuse to believe that she might actually know what’s best. Diego was still talking, little droplets of saliva flying from his mouth. “And then they throw me in jail when I try to tell anybody else about it. I don’t know what kind of country you people think you are running here where you throw people in jail for having good ideas.”
“I know.” She took a deep breath and tried to conjure back the words she had practiced, to calm her frustration. She could see the little window in her office, the mirror where she tried to get the worry out of her brow as she rehearsed. “But I can’t go in there and tell a jury that you didn’t send information to this Luis person, this agent. They’ve got the documents you sent him. They’ve got photos of you meeting him. You had plane tickets. I don’t know how you think I’m going to explain away two tickets to Venezuela.”
“How can they say I gave it to Venezuela when the only person I ever talked to was not actually from Venezuela?”
“We’ve been through this,” she said. “They just have to show that you meant to.” This part, in particular, frustrates her. Diego is too smart to have honestly believed that the phone calls he was making would get him transferred to real-life high level officials in the Venezuelan government, their nuclear program. The agent who had been corresponding with him had testified about how easy it was to fool him, as though there were some extra professional pride attached to duping a man with a Ph.D.
“I’m not a traitor. They’re the traitors. The government people make me do this and then they throw me in prison for doing it. You know this.” It was all she could do to keep from rolling her eyes. She has more contempt for Diego Salerno than she ever has for her more run-of-the-mill clients, men who lost their tempers, drunk drivers, addicts. Diego Salerno is privileged, and intelligent, and could easily have prevented all this. He is fully capable of understanding what is happening, what needs to be done, and still, he fights her.
“That’s not going to get you anywhere,” she said. He slumped in his chair. He was listening, but she could tell that he didn’t like listening to her, thirty-two years old, five foot three. She rifled through her file and slid out the indictment. “Remember this? How we talked about each of these individual charges, and the pieces they have to prove for each one?”
“It had my name on it forty-seven times. In that dark print. And Carol’s name thirty-three times. I don’t see why they had to get Carol. I don’t see why they can’t let me explain and send her home.”
“They might do just that,” Charlotte said. Diego’s face softened then, the anger tinged with sadness.
“It isn’t right,” he said, shaking his head.
“That’s beside the point. We need to think in terms of what they can prove.” Diego extended his hand and wrapped his thumb and forefinger around Charlotte’s forearm. She stiffened; he had never touched her before, except for the handshake at the beginning of each visit. His hands were large, her arms thin. Her eyes tracked involuntarily toward the door. She could see the back of the guard’s head through the little window.
“Some things are true even if I can’t prove them, Miss Katz,” he said. He released her arm.
“We can’t very well argue that you didn’t make the drops,” she said, following her script, her voice higher and faster than she wanted it to be. “They have photos. We can’t argue that you didn’t take money for information. But they may not be able to prove that you actually had any information that was valuable. If you weren’t a true insider, then they can’t establish half their case, and even if they got all the rest, you could be looking at as little as—”
“I knew everything that went on in that lab,” he said. He sat up straighter in his chair. She had expected anger at the suggestion, a roar of animal rage. Instead, his voice was barely audible. “I knew every last secret about the laser program, and if you gave me a lab and a modest budget, I could get
you a small nuclear arsenal in two years just out of what’s in here.” He gave his left temple two slow taps with a broad finger.
“Look,” she said. “I know you think you didn’t do anything wrong. But I’ve got this figured out. It’s the best way to try to knock out some of those charges and keep you out of prison. It’s the only part of this with any give.”
“You want to tell them I was…” He paused, searching for the word. “Expendable.” He locked her eyes. She felt a trickle of sweat begin in the middle of her spine and drip toward her waistline. “Yes?”
“It’s not that I think you were expendable.” Her heart was racing. “But we’re just going to have to tell the twelve people on your jury that you didn’t know quite as much as you have suggested you did. Maybe if we can get some other people from the lab who might be willing to say that you might have tried to make it seem like you—”
“Make it seem like what, Miss Katz?” The taste of blood filled her mouth. She had bitten the inside of her cheek. “Like I was just some vain, self-important fool?” Her throat stung with acid. She was in fourth grade again, caught outside the fence during recess, made not just to serve her punishment, but to personally call her father at work from the principal’s office while three teachers stood over her, listening. She swallowed.
“Look,” she said. “This is about keeping you out of prison.”
“I’d rather stay in prison.”
“No, you wouldn’t. If the jury thought you were a fool rather than a traitor, then they might—”
“Get out,” he said.
“You have to listen.”
“I said get out.” She looked at the door, at the blue jumpsuit.
“I’m the only attorney they’re going to give you,” she said. “I’m trying to keep you out of prison, not win you a Nobel Prize.” He crossed his arms and stared into the far corner of the room, as if there were some insect crawling there in the corner, digging itself into the wall. His chest expanded slowly and shrank again. It rose and fell four times, five, six, seven.
Lost, Almost Page 13