Interference Read online

  CHAPTER 18

  I drove to Beppe’s house, even though it was within walking distance of campus.

  Anything to keep moving forward quickly.

  Two cars were parked in the short driveway of the Valentino residence. One was the practical salt-stained all-wheel-drive Subaru Outback that so many Dartmouth professors drove you’d think the college handed them out at convocation.

  The other, hiding under a canvas cover, was a Maserati GranTurismo convertible that always struck me as an odd choice for a mild-mannered theoretical physicist.

  Then there was the third car, the one that stayed in the garage all winter. It was driven by Beppe’s wife, whom I only barely knew. She departed Hanover in roughly mid-October, when the first snowflakes began to fly, and was not seen again until mid-April. She spent the time in Italy, in a villa in Calabria, down at the tip of the boot.

  I was never sure how that worked—a marriage where you spent half the year apart. It seemed very European.

  Being as this was not Mrs. Valentino’s season, I thought her husband would be home alone. So when I rang the doorbell of his four-bedroom Cape, I expected an appearance from Beppe, who was short, lithe, and fair skinned—northern Italian, not southern—with thinning brown hair swept back from a widow’s peak.

  Instead, I was met by a handsome man of medium height and heavier build, with thick, dark curly hair and a complexion that was swarthy even at the end of winter.

  David Dafashy. He had gotten tenure a year before Matt and had informally mentored him through the process. David and his wife, Mariangela, had a daughter who was maybe five or six.

  As one of the few younger families in the department, we had spent time together socially. Though only sporadically. It seemed like we had dinner together every six to eight months, swore we would do it more often, then let another six or eight months pass before we did it again.

  Dafashy always had a bit of an exotic air about him. I had heard him speak of his father, an Egyptian immigrant who hailed from the small Nile River city of Dafash, which accounted for both the family name and David’s olive skin. The Dafashys seemed to be very British Empire Egyptian, so while David was born and raised in Virginia, his accent skewed slightly English. He came off as refined, cultured, and perhaps a tad pedantic—all of which fit in very well with the Dartmouth faculty.

  He opened the door wearing an appropriately grim expression.

  “Hi, Brigid,” he said in a hushed, funereal voice. “Come on in. Beppe was just making some more coffee.”

  I followed him into an eat-in kitchen, where I was immediately enveloped in a hug by Beppe Valentino.

  “Brigid,” he purred.

  I’m pretty sure he had never hugged me before.

  Then again, my husband had never been abducted before.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked when he released me. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you.”

  “About how you would expect,” I said.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a high-top table that was set in a small nook surrounded by windows. Two coffee mugs sat atop it already. Beppe was soon placing a third in front of me.

  “David and I were just discussing the Wilder situation,” Beppe said.

  “Yeah. What happened? Were you just working and they came in and ordered you out?”

  “No. It was already sealed when we got there. They must have come in the middle of the night. David and I arrived at the same time, around seven thirty. They wouldn’t even let us go into our offices to grab a few things.”

  “Can they do that? Kick you out of your own space?”

  “I just put in a call to the college’s lawyers to see if we have any options, but the short answer is yes,” Beppe said. “As soon as the government decides something is a matter of national security, it has a great deal of authority to do whatever it wants, however it pleases.”

  “And this is . . . I mean, I know what Matt was doing was dangerous to him personally. But is it really a matter of national security?”

  Beppe and David exchanged uneasy glances.

  “She deserves to know,” David said.

  Beppe turned to me. “This is all . . . confidential, I guess you might say. Ever since the Manhattan Project, the military and the physics department have been what you might call forced bedfellows. The things we’re doing, even things that seem strictly theoretical at times, can have applications that go far beyond the lab table, sometimes far more quickly than anyone realizes.”

  “Especially Matt’s area,” David said. “Quantum physics has become the new space race. It’s us against the Chinese, and in certain areas they’re winning, which absolutely terrifies Uncle Sam.”

  “You know what Matt was attempting to do, yes?” Beppe asked.

  “Interfere a virus.”

  “Right. But what about how he was going about it?”

  “I know it had to do with a laser . . . and he said something about accidentally mutating the virus, but . . .”

  Beppe breathed in deeply and turned to David. “You want to take this? I feel like this is more your area.”

  David, who had been taking a sip of coffee, put down his mug.

  “Of course,” he said. “How much has Matt told you?”

  “Assume I know nothing,” I said.

  “Okay, then. The conventional way we get things to demonstrate quantum interference is to make what’s called a Bose-Einstein condensate. It chills the particles down to near absolute zero, at which point they line up and dance with each other like good quantum particles should. A number of very prominent teams have tried to do the same thing with viruses and bacteria, hoping they could find one that could withstand the extreme cold of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The problem is, life doesn’t like things cold and orderly. It prefers them warm and messy. Even the hardiest viruses were getting killed.

  “Matt felt like those teams were going about things all wrong. He wanted to work with the virus on its own terms, to see if he could manipulate something about the virus itself that would allow him to coax it into a quantum state at room temperature.”

  “Which may have been simply impossible,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” Beppe cautioned. “We are just starting to discover that there are all kinds of natural quantum processes happening within organisms. As just one example, consider photosynthesis. It’s far more efficient than classical theory suggests it should be. How? We suspect it’s quantum tunneling. The electrons are essentially taking shortcuts. Now, like I said, that’s within an organism. We’re still not talking about the whole organism. But it at least gives us hope that quantum biology does not necessarily need to happen in the deep freeze.”

  “But what made Matt’s approach different also might be what makes it dangerous,” David said. “The other teams were essentially looking for a tiny little unicorn—that rare, rare virus that might be able to survive the rigors of a Bose-Einstein condensate. Matt, on the other hand, was working with a very common virus. If his technique worked on that virus, it could potentially work with any virus.”

  “Like, what, the flu? Ebola?” I asked.

  “Take your pick,” David said. “Frankly, it’s far more troubling that Matt’s illness may have been caused by a virus not known to infect humans. No one thought the tobacco mosaic virus was any kind of threat. That’s why Matt’s lab was only biosafety level two and was allowed to exist quite happily on the third floor of Wilder Hall. But if he’s managed to make the tobacco mosaic virus pathogenic? What if merely putting a virus into a quantum state makes it capable of eluding our immune systems? The implications for the battlefield—or for life in general, really—are deeply, deeply disturbing.

  “You have to understand, the vast majority of viruses crawling around this earth aren’t dangerous to us. They’ve evolved to attack other organisms. But that also means they’re completely foreign to us. Our bodies would be utterly defenseless. And even if you could quickly come up wit
h a vaccine against one, another one could come along. If this got into the wrong hands . . .”

  He didn’t need to describe the nightmare for me.

  I was already having it.

  “And so you think the fact that he was getting sick means . . . well, it means he must have succeeded, right?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” David said. “Matt always kept his cards close to the vest. He didn’t want to be the scientist who constantly ran around shouting ‘eureka’ when he wasn’t a thousand percent sure of what he had.”

  Beppe cut back in: “There’s one person who would know.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Sheena Aiyagari,” he said, pulling out his phone. “Let me call her.”

  CHAPTER 19

  It was likely no accident that the Dartmouth College Office of Safety and Security was located just past frat row.

  If nothing else, Emmett thought, it saved them a lot of gas on Friday and Saturday nights.

  Shortly after showing his badge, Emmett was escorted into the office of Steve Dahan, where the most prominent decoration was a large picture of a much younger Steve Dahan, wearing desert camouflage and the campaign hat of the United States Marine Corps.

  Dahan still had a marine-inspired flattop, though he had gained some thickness around the middle since his oorah days. Emmett could guess it was because the man spent most of his day doing exactly what he was right now: sitting behind a desk.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” Dahan said, rising to greet Emmett.

  “You’re the one doing me a favor,” Emmett replied. “So thank you.”

  “I was on a student-life committee with Matt Bronik a few years back,” Dahan said. “He was a great guy. Down to earth. Not full of himself like some of these professors. Still very smart, obviously. But also very thoughtful. Those two things don’t always go together, as you know.”

  Emmett nodded. He was no grammarian, but he nevertheless noted Dahan’s use of the past tense to describe Bronik.

  Dahan tilted his twenty-seven-inch flat-screen computer monitor so Emmett could see it. Dahan talked as he clicked.

  “Anyway, let’s get cracking. We have a hundred and fifty cameras spread across campus, all of them networked. I have an application that lets me look at any camera, anytime, from anywhere. I love it. I can’t tell you how many times it’s saved me from coming in on a day off.”

  Emmett was sure it had. He also remembered a time, not too long ago, when a day off was actually a day off.

  “Now, a hundred and fifty cameras sounds like a lot. But the main campus is two hundred and seventy acres, so it’s actually not as much coverage as you might think. Some of our cameras are designed to be very obvious. We place them to be a deterrent to anyone who might be thinking about doing something they shouldn’t. Some are not so obvious. We’re sensitive about not placing any in or near the dorms. We don’t want students to think we’re spying on them.”

  “Security and privacy do tend to compete with each other,” Emmett noted.

  Now appearing on the screen was a side view of the front of Wilder Hall, shot from several stories up.

  “Exactly,” Dahan said. “I think I told you we didn’t have anything in Wilder, either internal or external. That’s such an old building it’s very difficult to retrofit anything modern onto it in a way that’s unobtrusive. The Admissions Department blows a lid if we do anything that makes this place look like anything other than a stately two-hundred-fifty-year-old college worth every penny of the seventy-five grand we want parents to pay for it. The closest thing we have is from the top of Fairchild, which is next door. Luckily, this is one of our better high-resolution cameras.”

  “Great,” Emmett said.

  “Okay, here we go. I’ve put all this on a thumb drive for you, but I wanted to preview it for you in case you had any questions. As you can see, this was yesterday afternoon, a little before two o’clock,” Dahan said, jabbing his finger on the time stamp at the bottom of the screen, which read 13:49—what civilians referred to as 1:49.

  Emmett watched as an ambulance, lights flashing, cruised up to the front of Wilder Hall. Its markings were generic—it just said AMBULANCE, without any reference to Hanover—but who would think to question that?

  Moments after it stopped, three men jumped out: one from the driver’s door, one from the passenger door, and one from the back.

  They were wearing dark-blue EMT uniforms, but something was definitely off about them. Emmett had seen more than enough EMTs in his time. They typically owned a small number of uniforms—three, four, five, whatever—and cycled through them regularly, wearing each one so frequently it soon melded to the body it was intended for. The patches warped, the pocket flaps curled, the colors faded.

  These uniforms were all crisp. The patches were like boards. The pockets were straight. The colors sharp.

  Like they had never been worn before.

  And there was something else: their heads were covered in blue scrub caps, their eyes with clear-plastic safety glasses, their mouths with white masks.

  Like they were about to enter a surgical theater.

  Or were the medical equivalent of bank robbers.

  “Can you pause it?” Emmett asked.

  “I could,” Dahan said. “But I’ve been over this a bunch of times now, and you’ll get your best look at them when they come back out.”

  “Okay,” Emmett said.

  “Nothing happens for the next little while,” Dahan said, clicking the fast-forward button.

  The image sprang to life. Students streamed in and out, walking four times faster, then eight times faster, as Dahan clicked and reclicked. When the clock reached 13:56, he slowed it back to regular speed.

  “Okay, they’re about to come back out,” he said.

  Sure enough, the three men reemerged. This time the stretcher had a human form strapped to it.

  A human form with a nearly bald head, a beard, and a light-blue long-sleeve T-shirt.

  “That’s Bronik, all right,” Emmett said.

  “Yeah,” Dahan said. “And you’re going to get your best view of the perpetrators right about . . . here.”

  He clicked pause, then zoomed in.

  “I’ve given you the best stills of all three of these guys on your thumb drive,” Dahan said. “But this is basically what you’ll see.”

  Emmett peered hard at the screen. Between the scrub caps and the masks, very little of the men’s faces were exposed. Just a narrow strip around the eyes. And even that was covered in the safety glasses.

  But there were two noticeable features about the men’s eyes. Their lids did not have a crease in them. And their shape was distinctly almond.

  Matt Bronik’s abductors had East Asian ancestry. And there was something about the way they moved—a foreign feel to their gait—that made Emmett think they weren’t American.

  “You making of this what I’m making of this?” Dahan asked.

  “Sure am,” Emmett said. “Looks to me like Professor Bronik was kidnapped by three Chinese nationals.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Sheena didn’t answer her phone.

  I just sat there, feigning patience, as Beppe left a message to please call, then sent a text saying the same thing.

  Ten minutes passed. Twenty.

  Nothing from Sheena.

  Beppe served more coffee. David was telling stories about Matt. They were heartwarming—all about how Matt was beloved by everyone from the students to the janitors—but I wished he would stop.

  It felt like he was rehearsing anecdotes for Matt’s funeral.

  As the minutes continued to pass, I quickly grew impatient.

  “Why isn’t she answering?” I finally asked. “Don’t people her age treat their phones like another appendage?”

  “She probably did what David and I did: went to Wilder, found it closed, then returned home,” Beppe said. “Then she put her phone down. She doesn’t know we’re trying
to reach her.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “I certainly don’t know,” David said, throwing his hands up with perhaps a bit too much flair.

  “Hang on, I can get her address from the department roster,” Beppe volunteered and was soon thumbing his phone. “She’s in Sachem Village.”

  “That’s the graduate-student housing off Route 10, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Great, let’s go,” I said, already standing.

  David was still seated. “What, and just knock on her door?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  He stirred uneasily, shooting an urgent glance at Beppe that seemed to be laden with meaning.

  “I’m just not comfortable intruding on her personal space like that,” David said. “It feels . . . inappropriate, especially for men who are in a supervisory role over her.”

  Then I finally got it. Mariangela had been a doctoral candidate when David first met and began wooing her. He was an assistant professor ten years her senior at the time, so it set off some tongue clucking around the department. Then she got pregnant. There was talk it would cost David a chance at tenure.

  He survived the scandal. Barely. This was ultimately pre-#MeToo and before college policies regarding professors and their underlings were quite as zero tolerance. The relationship was clearly consensual. There wasn’t exactly anyone lodging a complaint.

  Once they got married and had the baby, everyone more or less moved on, and the cloud that hovered over Dafashy’s career cleared. Or so I thought.

  “Under the circumstances, I’m sure she’d be fine with it,” I pressed.

  We were both now looking toward Beppe, who as a college department chair had long experience brokering peace agreements between squabbling grown-ups.