The battle would begin in minutes, after a few hollow words of regret over Fielding’s “untimely passing.” Perspiration filmed my face as I walked toward the conference room door.
The room was empty.
I had never arrived first at a meeting. The other principals were compulsively punctual. I poured coffee from the urn on the credenza, then sat at the far end of the table and tried to stay calm.
Where the hell was everybody? Watching me from the security room? Where would they hide the camera? Behind a picture? Hanging to my right was a rare black-and-white photograph of the core physicists of the Manhattan Project: Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Wigner, Edward Teller. They stood in a friendly knot before the Oscura mountains of New Mexico, giants of science, each destined for fame or infamy, depending on one’s point of view. Some, like the hawkish Teller, had wound up wreathed in glory and the flag; others were not so fortunate. Oppy was stripped by lesser men of the security clearance he needed to work, and lived but a shadow of the life he might have had. But in 1944 they stood together, wearing dark European suits in the stark white sand of the desert. They gazed over the Trinity conference table like patron saints, their eyes communicating an inscrutable combination of humor, humility, and hard-won wisdom. The only Trinity scientist who displayed those qualities had died yesterday on his office floor.
Voices filtered from the hallway into the conference room. I straightened in my chair as my colleagues began to trickle in with an air of forced casualness. I had a feeling they had just adjourned a private meeting whose only order of business had been “handling” me.
First in line was Jutta Klein, the team’s sole woman. Chief research scientist for the Siemens Corporation in Germany, the gray-haired Klein—also a Nobel laureate, in physics—had been loaned to Trinity for the duration of the project. With assistance from Fielding and a team of engineers from General Electric, she had designed and built the fourth-generation Super-MRI machine. Now she oversaw the smooth operation of the temperamental behemoth.
“Guten Morgen,” she said stiffly, and sat at my right, her matronly face impossible to read.
“Morgen,” I replied.
Ravi Nara followed Klein through the door. He sat three chairs away from me, emphasizing the distance that had recently marked our relationship. The young Indian neurologist held a chocolate doughnut in one brown hand, but his right protruded from a cast. I suppressed a smile. Four days ago, he had taken a coffee mug partly made of lead into the Super-MRI room and set it on a counter. When Klein activated the machine for a test on a chimpanzee, the mug had flown across the room and smashed Nara’s arm against the machine’s housing, shattering his ulna. Klein told him to consider himself lucky. On the day the Super-MRI went operational, a technician on loan from Siemens had been killed by a metallic EKG cart that slammed her against the machine and crushed her skull.
“Good morning, David.”
I looked up to see the trim, Brooks Brothers-clad figure of John Skow take the chair at the head of the table. A deputy director of the NSA, Skow was America’s foremost authority on information warfare, and the titular director of Project Trinity. Yet it was Peter Godin who determined the direction and pace of Trinity research. The relationship between Skow and Godin mirrored that of General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Groves had been a ruthless taskmaster, but without Oppenheimer’s cooperation, he could never have delivered the atomic bomb. So, the ultimate power had lain with the civilian scientist, not the soldier.
“Skow,” I said, not even attempting a smile.
“Yesterday was a terrible blow to all of us,” he intoned in his aristocratic Boston accent, his thin lips barely moving. “But I know it’s a particular loss for you, David.”
I searched for genuine grief in his voice. The NSA man was a practiced bureaucrat, and his sincerity was hard to gauge.
“Peter will be here in a moment,” he said. “I guess he’ll be the tardy boy from now on.”
I smiled inside. In the past, Fielding had always been last to arrive, when he bothered to show up at all. Some days he went AWOL, and I would be sent in search of him. I usually found him poring over equations in his office.
A faint curse drifted through the open door, announcing Peter Godin’s approach. Trinity’s lead scientist suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and merely walking was a burden to him on some days. At seventy-one years old, Godin was by far the senior scientist on the project. Vacuum-tube computing machines had not even existed when he was born, yet for the past forty years, the “old man” of Trinity had pushed the envelope of digital computing further and faster than any CRT-dazed savant who ever skateboarded out of Silicon Valley.
Like Seymour Cray—the father of the supercomputer—Godin had been one of the original engineers at Control Data Systems in the early 1950s. In 1957, he left the company with Seymour to help found Cray Research. Godin had been part of the teams that built the famed 6600 and the Cray 1, but when Cray began to lose control of the bloated Cray 2 project, Godin decided the time had come to step out of his mentor’s shadow. He quietly made the rounds of investment bankers, raised $6 million, and sixty days later opened the doors of Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View, California. While Seymour struggled to bring the revolutionary Cray 2 into being, Godin and a tiny team built an elegant and reliable four-processor machine that outperformed the Cray 1 by a speed factor of six. It wasn’t a revolutionary advance, but it was one government weapons labs were willing to pay for. At $8 million per machine, Godin quickly paid off his debts and began designing his dream supercomputer.
Competing against national governments and Seymour Cray himself, Peter Godin had gained a foothold in the supercomputing market, and he never looked back. When the end of the Cold War virtually wiped out the supercomputing business, Godin switched to parallel-processing technology, and by the midnineties his computers had augmented or supplanted the Cray machines at NORAD, the NSA, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and in missile silos across the country. In his day, Peter Godin had been both pioneer and follower, but he was first and foremost a survivor.
Everyone looked up as the old man entered the conference room, but I nearly got to my feet. When I joined the team two years ago, Godin had looked scarcely older than Andrew Fielding, who was sixty-one at the time. But two years leading the Trinity team had aged Godin at a shocking rate. His face sometimes had the swollen look of a cancer patient on steroids. At other times, it was thinned to skeletal hollowness, and his hair almost disappeared. Today he looked as though he might collapse before reaching the table. He’d told me that during times of creative stress, his body always underwent physical changes. Godin often worked without sleep for fifty or sixty consecutive hours, and though he knew this was taking years off his life, he felt that was a fair price to pay for what he had achieved during his years on earth.
His light blue eyes scanned the room, resting longer on me than on the others. Then he gave a general nod and settled into the empty chair beside Skow.
“Now that we’re all here,” Skow said with an air of ceremony, “I would be remiss if I didn’t begin this meeting with a few words about the terrible loss that we—and this project—suffered yesterday. After a complete autopsy, the pathologist has confirmed that Dr. Fielding died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He—”
“Pathologist?” I cut in. “The state medical examiner?”
Skow gave me a look of forbearance. “David, you know we’re not in a conventional security situation. We can’t involve local authorities. Dr. Fielding’s cause of death was certified by an NSA pathologist at Fort Meade.”
“The NSA has a pathologist?” I understood why the agency might need psychiatrists. Code-breaking was a high-stress profession. But a pathologist?
“The agency has access to a full complement of medical specialists,” Skow said in the voice of a government tour guide. “Some directly on the payroll, others fully vetted consultants.” He glanced at Godin,