Dark Matter. Greg Iles

      I pulled Rachel into the foyer of the Fielding house. The door closed quickly behind us, and we turned to face an Asian woman just under five feet tall. Lu Li Fielding had lived most of her forty years in Communist China. She understood English well enough, but she didn’t speak it well at all.

      “Who this woman?” she asked, pointing at Rachel. “You not married, are you, Dr. David?”

      “This is Rachel Weiss. “She’s a good friend of mine. She’s a physician, too.”

      Suspicion filled Lu Li’s eyes. “She work for the company?”

      “You mean Argus Optical?”

      “Tlinity,” she said, substituting an l for the r.

      “Absolutely not. She’s a professor at the Duke University Medical School.”

      Lu Li studied Rachel for several moments. “You come in, too, then. Please. Hurry, please.”

      Lu Li bowed and led us into the den, which opened to the kitchen. I smiled sadly. When Fielding had occupied this house alone, it always looked as though a tornado had just blown through it. Books and papers strewn about, dozens of coffee cups, beer bottles, and overflowing ashtrays littering every flat surface. After Lu Li arrived, the house had become a Zen-like space of cleanliness and order. Tonight it smelled of wax and lemon instead of cigarettes and stale beer.

      “Sit, please,” Lu Li said.

      Rachel and I sat beside each other on a pillowy sofa. Lu Li perched on the edge of an old club chair opposite us. She focused on Rachel, who was staring at a plaque hanging on the wall behind Lu Li’s chair.

      “Is that the Nobel Prize?” Rachel asked softly.

      Lu Li nodded, not without pride. “Andy win the Nobel in 1998. I was in China then, but still we knew his work. All physicists amazed.”

      “You must be very proud of him.” Rachel spoke with a calm that her wide eyes belied. “How did you two meet?”

      As Lu Li responded in broken English, I marveled at the union of this woman and my dead friend. Fielding had met Lu Li while lecturing in Beijing as part of a Sino-British diplomatic initiative. She taught physics at Beijing University, and she’d sat in the first row during each of Fielding’s nine lectures. Party bureaucrats held several receptions during the series, and Lu Li attended them all. She and Fielding had quickly become inseparable, and by the time the day arrived for him to leave China, they were deeply in love. Two and a half years of separation followed, with Fielding trying desperately to arrange an exit visa for her. Even with the supposed help of the NSA brass, he made no progress. Fielding eventually reached a point where he was considering paying illegal brokers to have Lu Li smuggled out of the country, but I convinced him this was too risky.

      Everything changed when Fielding began delaying Project Trinity with his suspicions about the side effects we were all suffering. As if by magic, the red tape was cut, and Lu Li was on a plane bound for Washington. Fielding knew his fiancée had only been brought to America to distract him, but he didn’t care. Nor did her arrival have its desired effect. The Englishman continued to painstakingly investigate every negative event at the Trinity lab, and the other scientists grew to hate him for it.

      “Lu Li,” I said during a pause, “first let me express my great sadness over Andrew’s passing.”

      The physicist shook her head. “That not why I ask you here. I want to know about this morning. What really happen to my Andy?”

      I hesitated to speak frankly in the house. Seeing my anxious expression, she went to the fireplace, knelt, and reached up into the flue. She brought out a sooty cardboard box, which she set on the coffee table. I’d seen the box before. It contained several pieces of homemade electronic equipment that reminded me of the Heathkit projects my father and I had worked on when I was a boy. Lu Li withdrew an object that looked like a metal wand.

      “Andy sweep house this morning before work,” she said. “Plugged all the mikes. Okay to talk now.”

      I glanced at Rachel. The subtext was clear. Lu Li knew the score on Trinity, or at least she knew about the NSA’s security tactics. Geli Bauer would probably have this house torn apart as soon as Lu Li left for the cleaner’s or the grocery store. I was surprised she had waited even this long.

      “Have you left the house at all today?” I asked.

      “No,” Lu Li said. “They won’t tell me what hospital they take Andy to.”

      I doubted Fielding had been taken to a hospital. He’d probably been flown to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, probably to some special medical unit for an autopsy, or worse. The British might complain later, but that would be the State Department’s problem, not the NSA’s. And the British—framers of the Official Secrets Act and the “D” notice—had a way of falling into line with the United States where national security was concerned.

      “I still think we should whisper,” I said softly, pointing at the wand. “And I think I should take that box with me when I go. I’m afraid the N”— I stopped myself—“the company security people might search this house the first time you leave. You don’t want anybody to find it.”

      Lu Li had been raised in a Communist country with ruthless security police. Her willingness to believe the worst was deeply ingrained. “Did they kill my Andy?” she whispered.

      “I hope not. Given Andrew’s health, age, and habits, a stroke was possible. But … I don’t think it was a stroke. What makes you think he might have been murdered?”

      Lu Li closed her eyes, squeezing tears out of them. “Andy knew something might happen to him. He tell me so.”

      “Did he say this once? Or often?”

      “Last two weeks, many times.”

      I exhaled long and slowly. “Do you know why Andrew wanted to see me at Nags Head?”

      “He want to talk to you. That all I know. Andy very scared about work. About Trinity. About …”

      “What?”

      “Godin.”

      Somehow I had known it would be Godin. John Skow was easy to hate—an arrogant technocrat with no moral center—but he did not generate much fear. Godin, on the other hand, was easy to like—a genius, a patriot in the best sense of the word, a man of conviction—yet after you worked with him awhile, you sensed a disturbing vibration radiating from him, a Faustian hunger to know that disdained all limits, disregarded all boundaries. One thing was plain: anyone or anything that stood between Godin and his goal would not remain there long.

      Godin and Fielding had got along well in the beginning. They were from roughly the same generation, and Godin possessed Robert Oppenheimer’s gift for motivating talented scientists: a combination of flattery and provocative insight. But the honeymoon had not lasted. For Godin, Trinity was a mission, and he pursued it with missionary zeal. Fielding was different. The Englishman did not believe that just because something was possible, it should be done. Nor did he believe that even a noble end justified all means to attain it.

      “Did Andy have papers to show me?” I asked hopefully.

      “I don’t think so. Every evening he make notes, but every night before bed”—she pointed to the fireplace—“he always burn them. Andy very secret. He always try to protect me. Always to protect me.”

      He did the same for me, I thought. Suddenly, I remembered the words in Fielding’s letter. “Did Andrew take his pocket watch to work with him today?”

      Lu Li didn’t hesitate. “He take it every day. You no see it today?”

      “No. But I’m sure it will be returned to you with his personal effects.”

      Her lower lip began to quiver, and I sensed another imminent wave of tears, but it didn’t