“They weren’t dating, were they?” That surprised me—I pictured Breen’s daughter as too sleek and sophisticated to be attracted to an awkward nerd. I remembered Nadja Hahne’s description of Martin—those brooding good looks, his aloofness—perhaps a sleek and sophisticated young woman would see that as a challenge.
Breen paused. “Alison seems to have some romantic ideas about Binder, as if he might be a Horatio Alger hero. While my wife and I were at our place in Bar Harbor, Alison held a picnic for all the fellows in the summer program. She included Martin, even though he wasn’t one of the college crew, because he was their age, worked on the same project. And she felt she could do something for him.”
He made a face that was part sour, part proud. “I love my girl, but she’s always been the kind that brings stray kittens home with her. Anyway, she let the kids explore my dad’s workshop. Edward used to do a lot of his drawings or build his prototypes in his third-floor workroom; he liked the view of Lake Michigan. Sunny let Martin and the others wander around in there. No telling what he might have made off with.”
The first sour taste on my palate. “I would imagine all your father’s inventions would be here, in the Metargon labs, not lying around the house for your daughter’s stray friends to pick up.” I poured more coffee and leaned back in the chair to look at him over the cup rim.
“Yes, yes,” Breen said. “You’re right, up to a point.”
He fidgeted with his own cup, then said, “My father was involved in some top-secret work after the war. Defense work, you understand. He was proud of his signed letters from presidents and Nobel Prize winners. He also had things on his desk that ought to be in a vault.
“I never got around to putting them away after he died; frankly, I never thought about them; they were just part of the background of my life. It was only when Alison told me she’d let the kids explore the workroom that I remembered the letters. Metargon’s code, coupled with any of those letters—well, just say that my father played a part in thermonuclear weapons development, and you’ll see that it would be better that we didn’t let outsiders read some of those letters.”
“Without seeing them, I can’t judge, but surely all that history is in the public domain by now,” I said.
“Not all of it,” Breen said sharply. “That’s my point.”
I didn’t believe him: there was something in his father’s workshop that he was ashamed of an outsider seeing, but I didn’t have any hunch of how to probe for it. I changed the subject.
“Your father knew Benjamin Dzornen, didn’t he?”
“How did you know that?” Breen sat up straight, his voice still sharp.
I widened my eyes, naive detective. “You said he liked to display his signed letters from Nobel laureates. Dzornen worked on the Manhattan Project; your father did defense work. It’s not a stretch.”
Breen relaxed again. I obviously hadn’t found the danger spot.
Something didn’t add up, Martin had said. Had he seen a letter in Edward Breen’s old workshop that told him something about his family history? Or that suggested my own theory about the stolen Nobel Prize?
Breen and I spoke, or fenced, a little longer; we were both feeling rumpled when I got up to leave.
“Martin left his home to talk to someone the morning he disappeared. Was that your daughter?”
“Unlikely,” Breen said. “She flew out to Mexico City right after the summer fellows left. She’s been there almost six weeks now.”
“Mexico City?” I echoed. “What, is she doing a junior year abroad?”
“It’s a gap year, or semester,” Breen said sourly. “She’s helping build a tech lab for some high schools in Mexico City. Metargon is supplying computers and Metar-Genie game boxes. It’s all well and good to want ‘to give back to the community,’ but not when you’re an heiress who’s connected to a firm like Metargon. You don’t go to kidnap central. Her mother and I couldn’t talk her out of it, though.”
“Any chance Martin is down there with her?” I asked.
That did startle Cordell. He started to rap out a denial, but then he sat back, fingers steepled together.
“Someone is supposed to be keeping an eye on her for me, but I suppose Alison could have worked her way around that; she has a trust fund. I’m going to get the FBI to start hunting Martin. If he is in Mexico with my girl, they’ll sort that out pretty fast. In the meantime, if you get any whiff of where he is, I want to know at once.”
“Are you proposing to hire me, Mr. Breen?” I asked. “If you become my client, I’ll certainly report my findings to you—as long as working for you doesn’t conflict with my existing client.”