Blasphemy (12 page)

Only Rae Chen didn’t seem to have anything untoward in her own background—just a first-generation Chinese-American whose family owned a restaurant. Dolby, also, seemed relatively normal, except that he’d grown up in one of the worst neighborhoods in Watts, and his brother had been paralyzed by a stray bullet in a gang shootout.

Kate’s dossier had been the most revealing of all. He read through it with a kind of sick, guilty fascination. Her father had committed suicide not long after they’d broken up—shot himself after failing in business. Her mother had then gone into a long physical decline, ending up in a nursing home at seventy, unable to recognize her own daughter. After her mother died, there was a two-year gap in the record. Kate had paid two years’ rent on her apartment in Texas and disappeared, returning two years later. It impressed the hell out of Ford that neither the FBI nor CIA could find out where she had gone or what she did. She refused to answer their questions—even at the risk of not gaining the security clearance she needed to be assistant director of the Isabella project. But Hazelius had stepped in, and the reason wasn’t hard to see—they had been having a relationship. It seemed to have been more a friendship than a passion, and it had ended amicably.

He packed away the files, disgusted at the violation of privacy, the gross intrusion of government into a person’s life, represented by the dossiers. He wondered how he could have stomached it all those years in the CIA. The monastery had changed him more than he’d realized.

He pulled out the dossier on Hazelius and opened it up. He had read it over quickly, and now he began going through it with more care. It was arranged chronologically, and Ford read it in order, visualizing the arc of the man’s life. Hazelius came from a surprisingly mundane background, an only child in a solid middle-class family of Scandinavian roots from Minnesota, father a storekeeper, mother a homemaker. They were sober, dull, churchgoing people. An unlikely environment to produce a transcendental genius. Hazelius had quickly shown himself to be a true prodigy: summa cum laude from Johns Hopkins at seventeen, doctorate from Caltech at twenty, full professor at Columbia at twenty-six, Nobel Prize at thirty.

Beyond his brilliance, the man was hard to pin down. He was not your typical narrow academic. At Columbia his students had adored him for his dry wit, playful temperament, and surprising mystical streak. He played boogiewoogie and stride piano in a band called the Quarksters at a dive on 110th Street, filling the place with worshipful undergrads. He took students to strip joints. He developed a “strange attractor” theory of the stock market and made millions before selling the system to a hedge fund.

After winning the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum entanglement, Hazelius moved easily into his role as the heir to physics superstar Richard Feynman. He published no fewer than thirty theoretical papers on the incompleteness of quantum theory, shaking the very foundations of the discipline. He won the Fields Medal in mathematics for proving Laplace’s third conjecture, the only person to have won both a Nobel and a Fields. He added a Pulitzer to his list of prizes for a book of poetry—strangely beautiful poems that mixed expressive language with mathematical equations and scientific theorems. He had set up a rescue program in India to provide medical help to girls in regions where it was customary to allow sick girls to die; the program also included subtle but intensive educational programs aimed at changing societal values about girls. He had contributed millions to a campaign to eradicate female genital mutilation in Africa. He had patented—and this Ford found comical—a better mousetrap, humane but effective.

He often appeared on Page Six of the
Post
, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, dressed in his trademark suits from the seventies with fat lapels and massive ties. He bragged he bought them at the Salvation Army, never paying more than five dollars. He was a regular guest on Letterman, where he could always be counted on to make outrageous un-PC pronouncements—he called them “unpleasant truths”—and wax eloquent about his utopian schemes.

At the age of thirty-two, he astonished everyone by marrying the supermodel and former
Playboy
bunny Astrid Gund, ten years his junior and legendary for her cheerful vacuity. She went everywhere with him, even on the television talk circuit, where he gazed at her adoringly while she chattered happily about her warm and fuzzy political opinions, once declaring famously, in a discussion of 9/11, “Gee, why can’t people just
get along
?”

That was bad enough. But during this period, Hazelius had said something that so outraged the zeitgeist that it became immortal, in the manner of the Beatles’ claim that they were more popular than Jesus. A reporter asked the physicist why he had married a woman “so far beneath you intellectually.” Hazelius had taken great offense. “Who would you have me marry?” he roared at the journalist. “Everyone’s beneath me intellectually! At least Astrid knows how to love, which is more than I can say for the rest of you moronic human beings.”

The smartest man in the world had dissed everyone else as morons. The uproar was enormous. The
Post
ran a classic headline:

The talk-radio mobocrats and their fellow travelers worked themselves into a self-righteous fury. Hazelius was condemned from every pulpit and soapbox in America, pilloried as anti-American, antireligious, unpatriotic, a misanthrope, and a member of that most despicable of species—a sherry-sipping, ivory-tower Eastern establishment elitist.

Ford laid the papers aside and poured another cup of coffee. So far the dossier didn’t fit the Hazelius he was getting to know, who weighed his every word and acted as peacemaker, diplomat, and team leader. He had yet to hear a single political opinion from the man.

Some years ago, Hazelius had experienced a tragedy. Perhaps that had changed him. Ford skipped ahead in the file until he found it.

Ten years ago, when Hazelius was thirty-six, Astrid had dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. The death devastated him. For several years he had retreated from the world into a Howard Hughes–like seclusion. Then, quite suddenly, he emerged with the plan for Isabella. He was indeed a changed man: no more talk shows, offensive statements, utopian schemes, or lost causes. He shed his society connections and dropped the ugly suits. Gregory North Hazelius had grown up.

With extraordinary skill, patience, and tact, Hazelius had pushed the Isabella project forward, enlisting allies in the science community, wooing big foundations, and courting those in power. He never missed an opportunity to remind Americans that the United States had fallen seriously behind the Europeans in nuclear physics research. He maintained that Isabella might lead to cheap solutions to the world’s energy needs—with all the patents and the know-how in American hands. With that, he had accomplished the impossible: cajoling forty billion dollars out of Congress during a time of budget deficits.

He was a consummate master at persuasion, it seemed, working quietly behind the scenes, a cautious visionary, yet willing to take a bold, calculated risk. This was the Hazelius that Ford was getting to know.

Isabella was Hazelius’s brainchild, his baby. He had traveled the country and handpicked a team from the elite ranks of physicists, engineers, and programmers. Everything had proceeded smoothly. Until now.

Ford closed the file and ruminated. He still felt he had not yet peeled back the inner layers to reveal the core human being. Genius, showman, musician, utopian dreamer, devoted husband, arrogant elitist, brilliant physicist, patient lobbyist. Which was the real man? Or was there a shadowy figure behind them all, manipulating the masks?

Parts of Hazelius’s life weren’t so different from his own. They had both lost their wives in horrifying ways. When Ford’s wife had died, the world as he knew it had blown up with her, leaving him wandering in the ruins. But Hazelius had reacted in the opposite way: his wife’s death seemed to have focused him. Ford had lost the meaning in his life; Hazelius found his.

He wondered how his own dossier would read. He had no doubt it existed—and that Lockwood had read it, just as he was reading theirs. How would it look?
Child of privilege, Choate, Harvard, MIT, CIA, marriage
. And then:
Bomb
.

After
Bomb
, what then?
Monastery
. And finally,
Advanced Security and Intelligence, Inc
., the name of his new investigation company. It suddenly seemed pretentious. Who was he kidding? He’d hung out his shingle four months ago and he’d gotten one assignment. Admittedly, it was a plum job, but then there were special reasons why he’d been chosen. And he couldn’t put it on his résumé.

He glanced at the clock: he was late for breakfast, and he was wasting time with self-pitying musings.

Shoving the dossier in the briefcase, he locked it and headed out toward the dining hall. The sun had just risen over the red bluffs, and the light was shooting through the leaves of the cottonwoods, setting them aglow like shards of green and yellow glass.

The dining hall was rich with the smell of cinnamon buns and bacon. Hazelius was seated in his accustomed place at the head of the table, deep in conversation with Innes. Kate sat at the other end, near Wardlaw, pouring herself coffee.

At the sight of her, Ford felt a twist in his gut.

He took the last empty seat next to Hazelius and helped himself to scrambled eggs and bacon off the platter.

“Morning,” said Hazelius. “Sleep well?”

“Never better.”

Everyone was there except Volkonsky.

“Say, where’s Peter?” Ford ventured. “I didn’t see his car in the driveway.”

Conversation trickled into silence.

“Dr. Volkonsky seems to have left us,” said Wardlaw.

“Left? Why?”

At first, no one spoke. Then, in an unnaturally loud voice, Innes said, “As the team psychologist, I can perhaps shed light on that question. Without violating any professional confidences, I think I can say without contradiction that Peter was never happy here. He had a hard time adjusting to the isolation and stressful schedule. He missed his wife and child back at Brookhaven. It’s no surprise he decided to go.”

“You said he
seems
to have left?”

Hazelius answered smoothly. “His car’s gone, his suitcase and most of his clothes are missing—that was our assumption.”

“He didn’t say anything to anyone?”

“You seem alarmed, Wyman,” said Hazelius, peering at him rather markedly.

Ford stopped. He was getting ahead of himself, and a man as observant as Hazelius wasn’t likely to miss it.

“Not alarmed,” said Ford. “Just surprised.”

“I could see this coming for some time, I’m afraid,” said Hazelius. “Peter wasn’t cut out for this kind of life. I’m sure we’ll hear from him when he gets home. Now Wyman, tell us how your visit went with Begay yesterday.”

Everyone turned to listen.

“Begay’s angry. He has a list of complaints against the Isabella project.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s just say that a lot of promises were made that weren’t kept.”

“We made no promises to anybody,” said Hazelius.

“It appears the DOE promised all kinds of jobs and economic benefits.”

Hazelius shook his head disgustedly. “I don’t control the DOE. Did you at least manage to talk him out of this protest ride?”

“No.”

Hazelius frowned. “I hope you can do something to head this off.”

“It may be better to let it happen.”

“Wyman, the slightest whiff of trouble could make national news,” said Hazelius. “We can’t afford bad publicity.”

Ford gazed steadily at Hazelius. “You’ve been holed up here on the mesa, engaged in a secret government project, avoiding all contact with the locals—naturally there would be rumors and suspicion. What in the world did you expect?” It came out a little sharper than he intended.

Everyone stared at him, as if he had just cursed the priest. But they relaxed as Hazelius slowly relaxed. “All right, I’d say I deserved that rebuke. Fair enough. Perhaps we haven’t handled this as well as we could have. So . . . what’s the next step?”

“I’m going to pay a friendly visit to the local Navajo chapter president at Blue Gap, see if I can set up a sort of town meeting with the locals. Which you will attend.”

“If I can spare the time.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to spare the time.”

Hazelius waved his hand. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“I’d like to take a scientist with me today, too.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Kate Mercer.”

Hazelius looked around. “Kate? You don’t have anything going today, do you?”

Kate’s face flushed. “I’m busy.”

“If Kate can’t, I’ll go,” said Melissa Corcoran, tossing her hair with a smile. “I’d love to get the hell off this godforsaken mesa for a few hours.”

Ford glanced at Kate and back at Corcoran. He felt reluctant to tell them he’d rather not show up at Blue Gap with a six-foot, blue-eyed, blond Anglo bombshell. At least Kate, with her black hair and half-Asian face, looked almost Indian.

“Are you really all that busy, Kate?” Hazelius asked. “You said you’d almost completed the new black hole calculations. This is important—and you are, after all, the assistant director.”

Kate glanced at Corcoran with an inscrutable expression. Corcoran returned the glance coldly.

“I suppose I could finish the black hole stuff later,” said Kate.

“Great,” Ford said. “I’ll swing by your place with the Jeep in an hour.” He headed for the door, feeling strangely elated.

As he passed Corcoran, she cast him a sideways smirk. “Next time,” she said.

BACK IN THE CASITA, FORD LOCKED the door, took the briefcase into the bedroom, drew the curtains, removed the sat phone, and dialed Lockwood.

“Hello, Wyman. Got any news?”

“You know the scientist, Peter Volkonsky, the software engineer?”

“Yes.”

“He disappeared last night. His car’s gone, and they say he packed up his clothes. Can you find out if he’s showed up or contacted anyone?”