Authors: David DeBatto
“What man?”
“I will play it for you if you will wait,” Theresa Davidova said. He heard some fumbling with buttons, and then a man’s voice,
saying:
“This is Brother Antonionus calling for Cheryl Escavedo, returning your call. I’m sorry I missed you, but feel free to call
me back at the same number you called before, and I look forward to speaking with you.”
“Is that good?” she asked. “You heard?”
“Thank you, I did,” he told her. “I’m heading for Albuquerque now, so maybe tomorrow I can stop by and listen to it in person—are
you going to be around?”
“Yes, I will be here,” she said. “I also found a note. Just two words. Sometimes Cheryl would make notes to write down telephone
numbers on whatever she finds near the telephone. I found this on one of my notebooks this way, in her handwriting.”
“What did she write?” DeLuca asked.
“Tom never,” Theresa said.
“Tom never what? Who’s Tom? And what didn’t he do?”
“I don’t know this,” Theresa said. “This is all it says.”
“I’ll have a look tomorrow,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know what time, but I’ll call first. So just sit tight until I see you
tomorrow, how’s that?”
“I will sit tight and hang loose,” she said.
He found a motel near the airport in Albuquerque around midnight. The next morning, he went online at www.UNM.edu and learned
that Dr. Penelope Burgess would be holding office hours between ten and noon.
Burgess looked up when he knocked on her door, glancing over the wire-rimmed reading glasses that rested on the end of her
upturned nose. She was around forty, attractive, petite, brunette, her hair in a kind of Martha Stewart cut, though the glasses
gave her a sort of Mother Hubbardish look, which was also a thought he kept to himself. She was marking the paper she was
reading with a red pen. She asked if she could help him.
“Dr. Burgess?” DeLuca said. “I hope I’m not interrupting—I know these are office hours.”
“I haven’t had a student visit me during office hours in five years,” she said. “I think they think if they do, I’m going
to give them extra work. How can I help you?”
“David DeLuca,” he said, extending his hand, “U.S. Army counterintelligence. I was hoping I could have about fifteen minutes
of your time.”
She shook his hand, exhibiting palpably less enthusiasm when she heard the words “U.S. Army.”
“Sit down, Mr. DeLuca,” she said coolly. “Do you have a rank or do I just call you ‘Mr. DeLuca’?”
“Chief warrant officer. You can call me David, or Mr. DeLuca, or Agent if you’d prefer,” he said.
“You don’t wear uniforms?” she asked.
“Counterintelligence is the one part of the Army where we’re allowed to go pretty much outside the box. Probably the best
way to explain it is that what the FBI is to your local police, counterintelligence is to the military police. Who, I gather,
have already questioned you.”
“About that girl,” Dr. Burgess said. “The one who said she had information for me.”
“Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “We found her Jeep abandoned about ten miles north of the Mexican border, in Arizona, but
we still haven’t found her.”
“I told the CID people I’d call them if I heard from her,” Dr. Burgess said. “And I haven’t. I don’t know what else I can
tell you. I’m being honest with you and I’m trying to cooperate, but I’m not sure I appreciate all this attention. All I know
is that someone I never met supposedly wrote me a letter I never received, and now everyone is acting like that’s enough to
send me to Guantanamo with a bag over my head.”
DeLuca took her to be a sensible woman, in which case he needed only to wait for her to realize what an extreme statement
that was. She didn’t disappoint him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was out of line. I’ve been up since five o’clock grading papers and each one is worse than the
next. Maybe if you told me what sort of information she was going to give me, we could make some sense out of this. But I
suppose that’s going to be classified, right?”
“I’m supposing that, too,” he said, “once we figure out what it was she took. I can tell you that she worked in the archives
at Cheyenne Mountain, so she had access to pretty much everything that went through there. It could have been brand new or
it could have been forty years old. We just don’t know.”
“And she smuggled it out of Fort CMAFS?” she said, pronouncing it “sea-maffs.” “She must have been a very clever girl.”
“You’re familiar with the facility?”
“I used to know someone who worked there,” she said.
“You work underground, too, do you not?” DeLuca asked. He’d had MacKenzie pull out what she could find on Dr. Penelope Burgess
and e-mail it to him, but he’d only had time to skim the report.
“Primarily,” she said. “That and other extreme environments. And in the lab.”
“And this is for the Mars program? I’m asking because maybe she had something she thought you could use.”
“It is for the Mars program,” she said. “My work is primarily designing toward a Mars mission in 2008.”
“In what way?”
“We go into places like the caves at Lechugilla or Carlsbad or the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean and look at the
life forms we find there. Non-carbon based. Chemosynthetic. Things that don’t fit the usual definitions, so if they don’t
fit our definition of life, then what definitions do they fit? How do we distinguish between life and nonlife, and how do
you build a machine that can do that? We know that at one time, Mars had water, so if some of that water was trapped underground,
in aquifers and in caves, where ultraviolet radiation can’t reach, then that’s where we might find life.”
“I wonder if Cheryl Escavedo was interested in that,” DeLuca said. “Is there any overlap between what you’re working on and
what they might be doing at Space Command?”
“Overlap?” she asked. “Well, I’m sure there are people at Cheyenne or Kirtland who would love it if we did find life on Mars
and they could turn it into a weapon of some kind. I just saw that little bow-tied White House Nazi, Carter Bowen, on
Meet the Press
the other day talking about plans to triple the defense budget. They spend money just to find other things to spend money
on. But other than sharing the same launch platforms, we don’t have much to do with Defense. I’ve been thinking, since I last
spoke with the military police, that your Miss Escavedo might have been trying to reach me in my capacity as a member of UCS.”
“Union of Concerned Scientists,” DeLuca said.
“I’ve given some talks and added my name to some petitions against the weaponization of space,” she said. “And since that’s
all they do at Space Command, maybe she had something she thought we needed to know. All she would have had to do was Google
and my name would have come up. Or my husband’s.”
“What does he do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to say I know what he used to do, but that wouldn’t be true either. My husband was
a physicist with the Directed Energy Lab at Kirtland. Dr. Gary Burgess. Ph.D. at sixteen. I haven’t seen or heard from him
in over three years. And he couldn’t talk about his work when we were together, which was part of what…”
“Part of what what?” DeLuca asked.
“I was going to say part of what drove him crazy, but I was afraid you’d think of John Forbes Nash, and that wouldn’t be right.”
“The guy from
A Beautiful Mind
?”
She nodded.
“There are no analogies to be drawn,” she said. “Beyond that they were equally brilliant. And lacking in certain social skills.”
“The letter is addressed to simply ‘Dr. Burgess,’” DeLuca said. “Is it possible that Cheryl Escavedo was trying to contact
your husband?”
“It’s possible,” Penelope Burgess said.
“Would I be able to find him at Kirtland then?” DeLuca asked. “At the Directed Energy Lab?”
She shook her head.
“My husband disappeared, Mr. DeLuca,” she said. “Quite intentionally—I didn’t mean to imply foul play. He disappeared himself.”
It was evident that she didn’t want to talk about it, but the reasons why were less apparent.
“I don’t want to press,” DeLuca said, “but the problem is that I never know exactly what’s relevant to my investigation and
what isn’t until I fill my head with more than I need and let it all sift down. I realize this may be personally difficult
for you…”
“It’s not as difficult as you might think,” she said. “Our marriage had been over, or all over but the shouting, for a long
time before he left. And the reasons he left had little to do with me, I think. Do you know who Arthur Bartok was?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” DeLuca said.
“Arthur Bartok was the boy genius of the Manhattan Project, sort of Oppenheimer’s protégé, until they had a falling out. At
first, Bartok was completely caught up in the purely scientific quest and all jazzed up when he considered the huge amounts
of energy he was controlling. Or releasing. It is apparently a thoroughly seductive experience, in many ways. Bartok’s work
involved making the hydrogen bombs he was working with smaller and smaller. People are afraid of suitcase nukes these days,
but Bartok essentially built one in 1960. Then in the mid-sixties, he had a conversion experience, when he realized that proliferation
was unavoidable, and that his work making bombs smaller and simpler and easier to build had contributed to that. He was one
of the founding fathers of the UCS. I think Gary’s circumstances were similar. At first he was caught up in the challenge
and the romance, if you could call it that, just a twenty-year-old kid, walking around inside Cheyenne Mountain with all the
bells and whistles and a security badge on his chest that let him go where other people weren’t allowed. It was a pretty heady
experience.”
“What was his area of expertise, specifically?” DeLuca wanted to know.
“Electromagnetism,” she said. “Field generation. But that’s a general answer, not a specific one. We had an understanding,
early on, that the work he was doing was top secret and that he couldn’t talk about it. I knew it was important, and that
he had a huge budget and a lot of people working for him, and I started to sense, oh, God, six years ago, that something was
bothering him. I mean, really worrying him. I knew the Clinton people were defunding space defense so I thought it might have
had something to do with that. I could see the stress of keeping so many secrets start to destroy him. And us, probably. At
any rate, something changed, after 9/11. I don’t know if he had a conversion experience, too, but he said after that, the
handwriting was on the wall. He said 9/11 was going to do for space defense what Sputnik did for the space program in the
fifties and sixties. We were ramping up, he said, and the only thing he could do, personally, to stop it, was to take himself
out of it. So that’s what he did.”
“Ramping up?” DeLuca said.
“He was a student of World War I. And II. He said the thing about world wars was that everybody could see them coming, for
years, and nobody could stop them.”
“So he saw one coming, and the only way to stop it was to disappear?” DeLuca said. “That sounds pretty self-dramatizing, if
you ask me.”
She nodded.
“If you want my opinion, I think he’d been working for years on a particular problem, his team was, and then he solved it.
But I don’t think he told anybody. I think he saw where it was going to lead and then he kept the solution to himself.”
“Maybe those were the files Cheryl Escavedo had,” DeLuca said. “Do you think that’s possible?”
Penelope Burgess shrugged.
“He didn’t keep the important stuff in his computer,” she said. “He would have kept it all in his head. He had a tendency
to internalize things. I know after he left, some of the people who’d worked for him tried to carry on without him, and they
couldn’t, and they probably could have if there had been anything in his files they could use. He knew the Army wasn’t going
to let him delete anything, so I’m guessing he never wrote down whatever it was he learned. That’s not to say other people
wouldn’t have figured it out. I think he just thought that if he left, he could set his program back a few years, probably
not that he could kill it altogether.”
“So you have no idea where he is?”
She reached behind her and took down a postcard that had been held to her bulletin board with a thumbtack. On one side was
a picture of a twelve-foot-tall fiberglass kachina doll outside a convenience store, with the words
WELCOME TO CHLORIDE, NEW MEXICO
in yellow. On the reverse side, handwritten, were the words:
“There’s only 10 kinds of people in this world, and I’m not going to be either. Be good. Gary.”
It was postmarked from Chloride, New Mexico, October 12, 2001.
“That’s all I’ve gotten from him,” she said, “about a week after he left. He could be anywhere, really. Though it’s hard to
picture him sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping piña coladas.”
“I don’t get it,” DeLuca said, reading the card.
“It’s an old math joke. There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand base two and those who don’t.
A one and a zero is how the number two is described in base two.”
“Good one,” DeLuca said. “Do you think Space Command would have let him walk away from his job like that?”
“You tell me,” she said. “Do you think they would have?”
“Not unless he had something to use for leverage,” DeLuca said. “He’s the friend you said you knew who’d worked at Cheyenne?”
She nodded.
“Do you think he might have met Cheryl Escavedo there?”
Again she shrugged.
“It’s possible,” she said. “Though if you’re thinking they might have been having an affair, I suppose that’s also possible,
but Gary was never a very sexual person. At least not with me. Are you married, Mr. DeLuca?”
“I am,” he said.
“Then I imagine in your line of work, you probably understand the sort of toll it takes when you can’t talk to your spouse
about what you do.”
“More than I wish I did,” DeLuca said. “I suspect your reasons for speaking out against space defense are more than just the
personal.”