All Cry Chaos (31 page)

    "And if the facts suggest otherwise?" asked Poincaré.

    "Then you had better check your facts."

    Somewhere over St. Louis, Poincaré attempted to sleep. Wedged into a window seat, he tried maneuvering into a comfortable position but could find none. The woman ahead of him had reclined her seat; the young man to Poincaré's right dozed with his mouth open, snoring softly, his book—Ho
w You Can Profit from the Rapture—
open on his lap. The lad had body piercings to rival St. Sebastian's: tiny steel swords in both ears, a safety pin in one nostril, and rings in his eyebrows, lower lip, and who knew where else beneath a ripped T-shirt and jeans. All he needed was a good cause and an untimely death: someone might have named a chapel after him.

    The plane tracked south, following the Mississippi before making a hard right to Los Angeles. Several rows ahead, a young woman extricated herself from a middle seat and made her way to a restroom. Poincaré had noticed her while boarding—confident, with her hair tied back and a shoulder bag brimming with books. He saw her and mourned the adult Chloe would never be; the pearls he would never buy her; the bottle they would never share in a café, late into the evening, in Paris, as she—lost in the enthusiasm of new studies or a new young man or her first job—would talk without realizing he listened not so much to her words as to the music of her voice. Was she truly gone? Was it not possible she would greet him when his plane landed in Los Angeles? Poincaré ached with an ache that would not mend. Had he the skill of prayer, and had he read his Bible, he might have asked for the strength to accept what the Psalmist long ago had accepted: that the child would never again come to him but rather he, howsoever long it took, must wait and one day go to her.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked to Poincaré like an aging industrial park spread across seventy scrubby acres—at first glance, hardly a place one would expect cosmologists to be analyzing the structure of solar wind or searching for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars. But among JPL's dozens of buildings could be found a spacecraft assembly plant and a mission control center. In the late 1930s when a Cal Tech professor used the site to test early rocket designs, the area was relatively remote. Over time, the expansion of Pasadena gradually bumped homes and then a freeway up against the sprawling campus, leaving Poincaré to wonder at the weird proximity of hamburger joints to clean rooms where errant flecks of dust could doom $80 million space missions.

    The grounds were pleasant, with mature trees and, oddly, small herds of deer that wandered down from the San Gabriel Mountains. Poincaré had arranged to meet Dr. Alfonse Meyer, who worked on propulsion systems for each of the unmanned space vehicles NASA had launched in the previous decade, including the Mars Rovers and the long-range bullet, Deep Impact, shot into the heart of a comet 268 million miles from Earth. Escorted from Visitor Control by an officer through a maze of numbered buildings, Poincaré was shown into a nondescript mid-rise office complex and up a stairwell into a large laboratory.

    Just inside an open double door sat Meyer with his high-topped sneakers propped on a chaotic desk, blue-jeaned, bearded, and with a ponytail that barely corralled his graying brown hair. He was holding a phone the way cartoon bullies do victims, by the scruff of the neck, yelling: "And another thing, you Bozo—It'll be your ass if you don't get me a sample of that new ceramic by Friday!" He ended the call making arrangements for beer and something called a "canyon run" later that week. Turning at the security officer's polite knock, Meyer took one look at Poincaré and another at his watch: "As I live and breathe—an actual Interpol agent! My official position, Inspector, is that murder by rocket fuel has got to be a first."

    He rose to shake Poincaré's hand vigorously, opened a refrigerator stacked with soft drinks, and offered his visitor his pick of six different diet colas. On his desk sat an empty pint of ice cream.

    "Any relation to Jules Henri?"

    "Slightly. Yes," said Poincaré.

    "Really, now! Do you know the last problem he was working on? The stability of the universe—using nothing but a pencil, paper and that remarkable brain of his. . . . The news is good, by the way." Meyer laughed his belly laugh. "Is that your business, too—proving the universe won't unravel while we're eating dinner?"

    Poincaré hadn't been sure what to expect from someone who held doctorates in chemical and mechanical engineering, owned a pilot's license, and sang in a Methodist choir. At the very least, he could now see, Meyer would make an excellent drinking companion. The tables in his lab were chockablock with motor parts, containers with long chemical names, centrifuges, and mixing chambers. At three separate stations, large ventilation hoods rose through the ceiling. Poincaré counted eight computers and four refrigerators, one marked with a radiation warning. At the rear of the lab, a technician worked beneath a large red and yellow sign that read: "DANGER: Discharge Static Electricity Before Entering Area."

    Poincaré had known scientists who wanted nothing more in life than to buy expensive toys and be left alone. Meyer looked to be one of them. His lab was a slice of adolescent heaven in which aging boys got to build things that went
boom
. He insisted on giving Poincaré a tour and a brief lecture on the evolution of propulsion systems. As they edged around burn chambers and simulators, Poincaré saw miniature thrusters and solar arrays, lasers and at one station hydroponic grass growing beneath heat lamps—for a study of energy gain, he learned. Twenty minutes later, he found himself contemplating a poster-sized photo at Meyer's desk.

   "That's a good one. My personal favorite."

    Poincaré considered the image from different angles. "I'm at a NASA facility, which means that whatever I'm looking at has got to be far away. But if you told me it was a slice of pancreas under a microscope, I wouldn't be surprised."

    Meyer laughed. "It's further away than your pancreas."

    "How far?"

    "Eight billion light years, more or less. It's a computer simulation of galaxy clusters in a particularly dense part of the universe. The inset is an x-ray image of an actual cluster. What's interesting is that large clusters look essentially the same as small ones, and distant ones look essentially the same as near ones—provided you make an allowance for red shift. That is, galaxy clusters scale just like nested Russian dolls. Take a smaller one and a larger one, resize them: you can't tell the difference. The inset image was taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. I worked on the thrusters for that. . . . But you didn't come to talk about scaling phenomena in the cosmos. Tell me, Inspector. Who died?"

    Poincaré made sure he had heard correctly. "Galaxies scale, too?"

    "That's right—in size and distance. What do you mean by
too?
"

    "Forgive me," he said. "A mathematician, James Fenster. Perhaps you knew him, or of him?"

    "Mathematical modeling?"

    "That's right. He was killed for something he knew—exactly what, I'm not sure. So your answers here matter, Dr. Meyer. I read your report. Very thorough on the additives to the rocket fuel. I would have come earlier, but there were . . . some developments at home."

    Poincaré's host shifted uncomfortably.

    "When they start coming for mathematicians, Inspector, no one's safe. The Dutch chemists largely got it right in naming the propellant, but you were smart to send post-burn samples. What you're dealing with is a more powerful, less stable cousin of ammonium perchlorate—double base ammonium perchlorate cyclotetramethylene tetranitramine aluminum, to be exact. Your bomber mixed in nitroglycerine and solid crystals of the explosive HMX. Which is good for you because if this were your grandma's rocket fuel, you'd be shit out of luck. Every space program, every military ordnance program, and every amateur rocket jock and fireworks manufacturer in the world uses straight-up APCP. You'd be hunting for a needle in an impossibly large haystack. But your Amsterdam propellant has these two distinctive signatures. That's a thread to hang onto, anyway."

    "Some questions, then, if you don't mind."

    Meyer kicked back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. "Take your time, Inspector. The meter's running."

    "Excuse me?"

    "Lost in translation. Continue."

    Poincaré opened a notebook. "First, I know nitroglycerin is difficult to handle. What about HMX crystals?"

    "Also difficult. It's a delicate substance that has to be grown under strictly controlled conditions—not an easy material to handle, even for us. It's also expensive."

    "Why use HMX?"

    "Because it makes regular APCP a higher energy composite, with a shock propagation of about 9,000 meters per second. HMX is used with TNT in high explosives and shaped charges in the military. Second point: the problem with DB/HMX is that it has a pressure exponent of only .49 and burns at a rate of only one centimeter per second, more or less, so it's not as unstable as the bomber might have liked. The tests I ran indicate the addition of TNT to the mix, which brings the pressure exponent above one. The double base APCP would slow down the shock wave from the HMX considerably, but would also provide very hot gases for an intense burn."

    "Suggesting?"

    "Suggesting that your bomber was a damned fine chemist and an equally good rocket jock."

    Poincaré followed Meyer into the lab and stopped before a bin labeled A
mmonium Perchlorate (AP)
. He opened the lid and scooped a white granular substance into Poincaré's open palm. "Notice that AP is whiter than table salt. It's an oxidizer—it supports combustion. You add powdered aluminum for fuel and bind it with hydroxyl- terminated polybutadiene, and in an hour or so you've got solid rocket fuel—which feels rubbery, like a bicycle tire. The HTPB binder also acts as a stabilizing agent, burn-rate inhibitor, and fuel for the APCP. NASA uses approximately two-and-a-half million pounds of APCP for each shuttle launch."

    Poincaré brushed the ammonium perchlorate back into its container and rolled a few grains between his fingers. "Could the bomber have purchased this anywhere—in Europe?"

    "Absolutely—or made it himself. In my report, I wrote that your guy worked or used to work for us or for an equivalent lab in France, Russia, or possibly China. The mix is simply too unstable in production to achieve anywhere but in a lab, under controlled conditions. Just about all the academic labs capable of this work are affiliated with space programs."

    "So you could have made this explosive?" said Poincaré.

    "That's right."

    "And where were you the first two weeks of April?"

    Meyer hesitated, then caught the edges of Poincaré's grin. "OK, so the French have a sense of humor."

    "But I will be checking your alibi. I'll have to."

    Meyer grabbed a pencil and a slip of paper off a shelf. "I knew someone would be the moment I found HMX in the mix. My wife's family owns a cabin on a trout stream in Idaho. The town store and local gas station will have credit card receipts, with dates— a trail about as long as my stomach is round. No problem establishing that."

    "I don't doubt you," said Poincaré.

    "But you should, Inspector."

    "Because?"

    "Because your bomber looks a lot like me. Minus the ponytail and high-tops, maybe. But I'm the type you're looking for."

    "More about that in a minute," said Poincaré. "Why did the bomber go to the trouble? Why use nitroglycerin and HMX crystals when ready-made plastic explosives or TNT would have killed Fenster just as thoroughly? For that matter, a bullet would have done the job."

    Meyer walked Poincaré back to his desk. "The remains," he said. "I imagine they were fairly crisp?"

    "Burnt beyond recognition. That's right."

    "Your bomber didn't want the body identified. Not visually, anyway."

    Poincaré had long thought so. His only remaining business was to determine who at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, beside Meyer, had the knowledge to grow HMX crystals of exceptional quality, smuggle them out of the lab, and mix a batch of enhanced APCP in Europe. That had to be the scenario, Poincaré reasoned. The eight or ten pounds of composite fuel needed to blow apart a hotel room could not have passed through airport baggage screening undetected. But a container of table salt might have. Meyer offered the information without hesitating.

    "Anyone in this lab could have grown the HMX. But all four of my guys stay here when I'm on vacation. Again, you'll have no trouble verifying this." Meyer reached into his mini-fridge in search of another drink. "This must be a rotten business. You have to catch the guy who did this and possibly dodge bullets in the process." He pulled a tab and took a long swallow. "You couldn't pay me enough."

    Poincaré checked his notes. "What about Randal Young? I reviewed the bios of more than a hundred people at this facility, and he stands out."

    Meyer sat on the corner of his desk. "I figured this would get around to him."

    "Because?"

    "Because he was a damned fine chemist and rocket jock with a degree from the Colorado School of Mines. Look, Inspector. A bomber can't be driving around with an HMX plus nitroglycerin mix in the trunk of his car. It's simply too volatile, which means whoever grew the crystals also mixed the fuel either onsite or close to onsite just prior to detonation. Your Dutch analysts were right to observe that the bomber used reflectors of some sort to concentrate and focus the blast. That would have been key. There's only one person I ever knew who fit the profile—Randy Young, and I thought of him immediately. But A, he died sometime in March; and B, he was a sweetheart of a man. Not a malicious bone in his body. So my considered opinion is that you'll have to look elsewhere."