Dark Target (16 page)

“I would think any aggression on our part would also invite retaliation,”
Ed Clark said.

“Well,”
Bartleby said,
“you might be right, though that’s a pretty terrestrial mindset you’re talking about. Even supposing that were true, we’d
have to pose a much more significant threat than we do, at least at present. MIRACL just can’t generate enough power to be
much more than annoying. Though maybe that posits a terrestrial mindset too.”

“How does it work?”
Ed Clark asked.
“The MIRACL laser?”

“Well,”
the caller said,
“it’s basically a megawatt laser with a continuous wavelength between 3.8 and 4.2 microns. You burn C
₂
H
₄
ethylene and NF
nitrogen fluoride in something like a rocket engine and then catch the excited fluorine atoms and mix them with deuterium
in the exhaust cavity to make deuterium-fluoride, stabilized and cooled with helium. The resounder mirrors extract energy
in the exhaust cavity and reroute it into a fourteen-square-centimeter beam, which is a nice little bit of directed energy,
but the drawbacks are multiple. It takes tons and tons of fuel, it’s slow to power, hard to retarget, and it’s a sitting duck
on the ground. It’s just not the weapon of the future that some people say it is.”

“Would that future weapon involve antimatter technologies, then?”
Ed Clark asked.

“It would,”
the caller said. DeLuca felt a bit disappointed. Up to that point, the caller had sounded rather reasonable and informed,
but now he was venturing into pure woo-woo land. Antimatter? He thought of the episode of the old
Star Trek,
where the good Captain Kirk somehow slipped into the parallel universe where everyone including Spock was immoral and scheming—was
that a sly dig at the Nixon White House at the time?

“Do you know the history of antimatter research?”
Ed Clark asked.

“I do,”
Bartleby said.
“We probably can’t really limn it here, but you go back to a colleague of Einstein’s named Paul Dirac, who theorized in 1929
that electrons and protons had mirrored counterparts with reversed charges, which he called antielectrons, or positrons, and
antiprotons. Those theories were confirmed in 1936 when a Caltech scientist named Carl Anderson saw a positron fly through
his lab, and then antiprotons were detected at Berkeley in the fifties, the point being that this is stuff that has been with
us and studied for a long time.”

“And the energy potential of antimatter is phenomenal, as I understand it,”
Clark said.

“Oh yeah,”
Bartleby said.
“It’s maybe ten billion times the power of dynamite. One gram, which is about a fifth of a teaspoon, would equal twenty-three
space shuttle fuel tanks as a propellant. As an explosive, fifty millionths of a gram would have been enough to take down
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—colliding positrons and antielectrons is probably the ultimate energy
source in the universe. It’s kind of hard to imagine another, but then our imaginations have always limited us, so who knows.”

“And this is a fairly rare substance?”
Ed Clark said.

“Antimatter?”
Bartleby said.
“Well, it is in this universe, by definition, but in the larger cosmos, there’s just as much antimatter as matter, so I guess
I’d have to say no, it’s not rare. One of the concerns scientists working with this stuff have had has been that a man-made
collision of significant size might create a cataclysmic chain reaction in which all the matter in this universe would collide
with all the antimatter in the mirrored universe, which would mean the largest energy release since the original big bang.”

“And me with only four more payments to go on my dinning-room table set,” DeLuca said, but now Yutahay really was asleep,
snoring softly with his head against the window.

“But that’s what they said about splitting the atom,”
Ed Clark said.

“That’s true,”
Bartleby agreed.
“And thank goodness we didn’t listen, or we wouldn’t be blessed with the ten-thousand-plus nuclear bombs we have today. They’re
talking about suitcase nukes today, but tomorrow, we could have antimatter superbombs a thousand times more powerful, the
size of maybe a small transistor radio. And the scientists are big on the idea of antimatter bombs because after the initial
burst of gamma radiation, there wouldn’t be any residual contaminants, so they’re thinking of them as ‘clean’ bombs. It’s
sort of insane.”

“And what exactly is stopping this technology, at present?”
Ed Clark asked.
“I’m assuming, because all indications suggest an alien invasion by the Lizaurian Second Wave some time before 2011, that
DARPA and some of the other agencies are proceeding apace… ?”

“Well,”
Bartleby said,
“DARPA is certainly involved, but most of the research, the black-budget stuff, is going on at the DEL at Kirtland, the Directed
Energy Lab, and at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts
in Virginia, and various programs at places like the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, and Livermore, MIT, Cornell,
Nellis, Wright-Patterson…”

“Area 51?”
Clark interrupted.

“Except that Area 51 is like cyberspace,”
Bartleby said.
“I had a friend that somebody years ago wanted to hire to be their Los Angeles presence on the Internet, and he had to explain
to them, there is no Los Angeles in cyberspace. There’s no California and no United States either—it’s one world now. As for
your question as to what’s stopping it, the technology always stopped before at creating a perfect penning field, because
you obviously can’t grab a bit of antimatter and stick it in a glass jar like catching a ladybug. You have to store it in
something it can’t collide with, which means you have to trap and pen it in an electromagnetic field, but that field has to
be perfect or the particles escape, and once you generate it, you have to maintain 100 percent integrity or you lose containment,
which means at least a nuclear power source, and maybe something else.”

“And this is being developed to power warp-drives, munitions?”
Ed Clark asked.
“Where’s the priority right now?”

“Right now, I couldn’t tell you,”
Bartleby said.
“There was a guy working on an antimatter drive for a trip to Alpha Centauri, a few years ago anyway, but he’s a complete
idiot. And weapons, yeah, but I think the most attractive application is as a power source for a space-based laser system.
And that actually just might work as a weapon to use against alien craft, but as we said earlier, once we become an actual
threat, we invite retaliation or more likely preemptive strikes. The Israelis blew up an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1984 to
stop Saddam from developing his nuclear weapons program. My point is that power invites power. Power begets power. Power assimilates
and corrupts and coopts the people who deploy it. Power protects itself. Where it ends is anybody’s guess, but the handwriting
is on the wall.”

“So what you’re saying is that the invasion of the Lizaurian Second Wave could come much earlier than 2011 as a preemptive
strike?”
Ed Clark asked.

“I’m saying the handwriting is on the wall,”
Bartleby replied.
“I’d personally be more worried about us accidentally shooting ourselves in the foot than any sort of external threat. I’m
sure the government encourages people to focus on things like alien invasions instead of what’s really going on. When a program
reaches a certain size, the only way to conceal it is with disinformation. No offense to your listeners. The problem is that
with this kind of power, you can’t just shoot yourself in the foot. You’ll blow your whole leg off. Metaphorically speaking.”

“Interesting interesting stuff,”
the host said mellifluously. “
This is Ed Clark,
Sea to Shining Sea,
WROZ 1190 AM from Roswell, New Mexico. When we come back, was Frank Sinatra a Traveler? With that kind of charisma, it’s
hard to deny, but what does your intuition tell you? But first, is your mattress too firm? Too soft… ?”

DeLuca turned the radio off.

It was crazy, of course, to pay any attention whatsoever to such nonsense. Yet there was something about the way the caller
identifying himself as Bartleby spoke that was undeniably credible. He was obviously educated, or at least well read. He wasn’t
defensive, he didn’t name the people who were doubting or persecuting him for his ideas, and he hadn’t felt the need to reinforce
his statements by naming authorities who believed him or friends who supported him, either, which was how DeLuca usually knew
somebody was bullshitting or lying to him.

He made a mental note to have somebody get Ed Clark’s call list for him. As strange as it was going to sound, he kept coming
back to a single question—where was Cheryl Escavedo going when she vanished, and why was she going there—what did she want?
He knew enough now to know she was running from somebody, frightened, smoking cigarettes and watching with binoculars focused
at infinity, but at the same time, as far as he could tell, she hadn’t left a note for anybody, either in the trailer or in
the Jeep. People who thought they were going to die left notes. She believed she was going to be all right. Did she believe
in UFOs? If she did, did she believe she was going to meet one? In which case, it didn’t matter what DeLuca believed. It only
mattered what Cheryl Escavedo might have been thinking. So far, he couldn’t tell if she was running away from something or
toward something. Or both. Why Shijingshan? Why Qadzi Deh, whatever that was? And why Bob Fowler?

DELUCA SENT THE RUBBER BAND WITH THE hair on it and the piece of lightning glass that Marvin Yutahay had found at the site
where Cheryl Escavedo disappeared to a pathologist in Boston he knew, a man named Mitchell Pasternak who’d been an assistant
to DeLuca’s old friend Gillian O’Doherty, who’d served Suffolk County, Boston, as chief coroner and medical examiner for years.
Pasternak had taken her place. He was young and cocky, but he could usually back up the claims he made. Gillian had taught
him well before she died, killing herself in her lab late one night after discovering she’d accidentally infected herself
with weaponized smallpox and realizing that without Biosafety Level 4 protocols and apparatus in place, self-annihilation
was the only way to stop the plague that was sure to follow. It was a heroic act of self-sacrifice, though she would have
argued that it was just common sense. Pasternak was the one who discovered the body, or what was left of it, a pile of brittle
bones inside the alkaline-bath tissue digester her lab used to dispose of animal carcasses. She never liked to leave a mess,
even at the weekly poker games she’d been part of, always clearing the bread crumbs from her chip tray and tidying up after
everybody else when the game was over. The Army had pathologists and forensic labs at Fort Gillem in Georgia, but they were
too slow and tended to get bogged down in paperwork. DeLuca asked Pasternak for a full workup on both pieces of evidence.
Before she died, Gillian had left instructions for her assistant telling him that he was to cooperate fully with any requests
from her old friend David. She was a thorough woman. DeLuca missed her.

He e-mailed Walter Ford and asked him to find out what he could about Shijingshan, Qadzi Deh, and Bob Fowler—what they might
have in common.

Dan Sykes showed up in the Ms. Kitty the next morning with a bruise on his cheek. DeLuca took one look at him and said, “I
hope the other guy looks worse.”

“Unfortunately, the other guy is a bar stool,” Sykes reported. He’d spent the night asking questions at the bar where Theresa
Davidova worked, a strip club called Foxies on Central Ave that was a popular hangout for military personnel from Kirtland.
A fight had broken out between a group of intoxicated Air Force PJs and a group of Army Rangers who’d made a bet about who
could do more pushups with a naked girl on his back. A volunteer from each group had taken the stage, where, each with an
accommodating dancer mounted on his shoulders, the competition commenced. The rescue jumper was up to thirty and still going
strong when the Ranger collapsed, which didn’t surprise Sykes, because the PJs were the guys who trained to fly in and rescue
the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers and Green Berets who were too exhausted to rescue themselves. PJs were arguably the fittest
people in the military and perhaps the craziest. When the Rangers insisted on weighing the girls to arrive at a figure for
most-total-pounds-lifted before paying up, even though the girl riding the PJ was clearly larger, the fight broke out, starting
in the bar and spilling into the parking lot.

“I thought you were a black belt in karate,” DeLuca said.

“I am,” Sykes said. “Opponents, I can take. Bar stools flying through the air that I don’t see coming, I’m less effective
against.”

“Did you learn anything useful?” DeLuca asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sykes said. “A couple of the girls who worked there were Russian and none of them had heard anything. There’s
kind of a sex workers’ pipeline running from Russia through Juarez and then El Paso and then here. They knew who Leon Lev
is, either personally or by reputation, and they all said he’s a nasty piece of shit, but nobody had seen him or any of the
goons who work for him in the bar any time lately. I also went over the apartment again and found this,” he said, laying a
medicine bottle on the table.

“Which is?”

“Prescription allergy medicine,” Sykes said. “Theresa’s. She didn’t take it with her, wherever she went.”

“What was she allergic to?” DeLuca asked. “She lived with cats.”

“The boyfriend said cats didn’t bother her, but most tree and flower pollens did, which was why I thought this was a little
odd.”