Critical Mass

I felt sick with disappointment. I sat on the edge of the trapdoor, my head in my hands.

 

When Davilats and Durdon broke into my office safe, they wouldn’t find the BREENIAC sketch; they would come back here to finish me off. If I sat here waiting, they’d finish me faster.

 

I braced my feet on either side of the door hole and pushed with all my might, but the top didn’t budge. I put spiders, rats, snakes, skeletons as far from my mind as I could and cautiously stepped my way back down the steep stairway. My throat was parched and my skin still burned. I put those as far away as I could, too.

 

When I stepped off at the bottom, I stood on one leg and traced a circle with the other foot, feeling for my tools, but I was still dizzy and couldn’t keep my balance. I went down on my hands and knees and moved slowly around. My left hand went into the hole I’d dug and connected with matted fabric. I pulled away quickly, but kept feeling the threads, spider feet, clinging to my hand.

 

At length I came on my burn phone. It didn’t get a signal down here, but in the light from the screen, I found my flashlight and my other tools. Flashlight under my armpit, ax and crowbar hugged to my chest, I hoisted myself to the top one painful step at a time. Ten steps. Ten years it seemed to take to reach the top.

 

I had to sit again. My arms were already weary.

 

“You have a lot of work in front of you, my friends,” I told them sternly. “No whining. Get to work.”

 

I placed the flashlight in a corner where I wouldn’t step on it. Pushed the remaining bags of birdseed down the trapdoor opening to make room for myself.

 

“Sorry,” I muttered to the skeleton at the bottom. “Didn’t mean to dump it on your head.”

 

I couldn’t stand upright in the crate; I had to swing the pick from the top step while bracing myself against the opening. My shoulders shook with involuntary tremors. Dehydration, electrocution, not good for physical labor. How desperate would I get before I opened the jars of gray mush in the basement?

 

Swing, thud, rest. The outer skin of the cabinet was metal, which was why it looked like a trunk. It bounced back at me every time I hit it.

 

“I hope you were dead before you were buried,” I said to my companion. “If you promise not to tell Davilats and Durdon when they come back, I’m a bit scared. Never show fear, of course: vermin like those two can smell it on you.”

 

I understood what had happened now, but not why. Swing, thud, rest. Max had said the equations on the BREENIAC sketch were written by someone who, like him, had been educated in Central Europe. Austria, say, although perhaps Germany or Czechoslovakia. Swing, thud, rest.

 

That meant that it was Martina Saginor, Gertrud Memler or Benjamin Dzornen who’d created the design, not Edward Breen. The little logo, the triangles in the bottom right corner, was the designer’s signature. Swing, thud, rest.

 

When Martin saw the triangles, he recognized them from the documents his mother had stolen from his grandmother. Swing, thud, rest.

 

He talked to Cordell, asked him about the triangles. That’s what didn’t add up for him: the same triangles on the BREENIAC design and on his family documents. That conversation put Breen on the alert, made him look for Martin, pretending to Jari Liu that he was worried Martin would take Metargon’s secrets public. Edward Breen had been an engineer, he was clever and saw the potential for the ferromagnetic memory, but he wasn’t brilliant: he didn’t work out the idea from the hysteresis equations the way the actual inventor had. Swing, thud, rest.

 

When King Derrick posted that nuclear secret document on the Virtual-Bidder website, he signed his death warrant. Cordell Breen couldn’t afford for the document to fall into public hands. He got Rory Durdon to sniff around Palfry County to find the deputy-most-likely-to-be-bribed. Swing, thud, rest.

 

Maybe Glenn Davilats was already taking kickbacks from other meth houses, so Durdon knew it would be easy to sell him on digging himself deeper into the pit on the far side of law and order. However the relationship was cemented, the two men arrived before dawn at the Schlafly house and killed Ricky. Maybe Cordell had sent them to kill Martin—he was the person connecting the dots, after all.

 

The Navigator that Judy had driven back to Chicago had been leased to Metargon. I’d double-check it if I ever—when I got out of here. Swing, thud, rest.

 

Poor Julius Dzornen. He’d been involved in the death of the woman in the cellar, and the secret so weighed on him that he’d lost the ability to function. It was as if the Breens had Tasered his spirit.

 

What really did him in was his father’s complicity. “Did Benjamin Dzornen kill you?” I asked my companion. “Or was it Edward Breen? Did the two men make Julius kill you, or bury you? You haunted him for many years.”