“It’s because of some papers I found in the house downstate where Martin’s mother had been living. I only found a few documents—I think there were others which Martin took. The ones I found were stolen from me before I could get them to a lab for analysis. Homeland Security doesn’t believe me. They think Martin and his mother had a file of nuclear secrets that I’m hiding. Do you know anything about this?”
“Be reasonable, cookie,” Mr. Contreras said. “How could she, when she don’t even know what you found.”
“It’s possible Martin confided in Ms. Breen,” I said. “He was a lonely guy; he had to talk to someone.”
Alison shook her head. “He never claimed he knew anything about weapons. And he didn’t talk to me about his mom, not like that, anyway.”
“But when he went to that party at your folks’ house, Martin saw something that rattled him. What?”
Alison’s face scrunched up in misery. “I don’t know. He was always pretty quiet, and even quieter when the rest of the group was around. All I can tell you is it’s something he saw when I took the group up to my granddad’s workshop.”
“What, your grandfather designed his computers in your house?”
“Granddad always had a workshop at home, even when he got to be famous. All the kids wanted to see it. They probably thought if they saw where Granddad came up with his brilliant ideas, some of his brains and his luck would rub off on them if they looked at the workshop. It’s on the third floor of our Lake Forest house. Even though he designed the core for Metargon-I in his first workshop, behind the garage in his Hyde Park house, all his scale models and papers and stuff are in Lake Forest.”
I nodded. “So everyone went up there. Who suggested it first?”
“I honestly don’t think it was Martin,” she said defensively. “Not because I’m shielding him, like Dad says, but because, oh, the chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t going to admit he cared about something a rich and powerful man did. Anyway, everyone was playing with the scale-models, and admiring the letters—Granddad had framed letters from all these incredible people, Nobel laureates, President Eisenhower, you knew he’d done something special, just seeing who wrote him.”
“And one of those letters or papers or something upset Martin. Think! What was he looking at?” I demanded.
“I told you, I don’t know!” she cried. “Tad, that’s one of the guys in the summer group, he didn’t like Martin because Martin rewrote some of his code without consulting him. Anyway, he was standing next to me. Actually, he had an arm around me.”
Tears spilled over the edges of her eyes. “Martin came over to me. He said, ‘Something doesn’t add up. How much do you know about your grandfather’s work?’ I asked him what he meant, but Tad made this snide comment about how the human calculator was always right, and that if Martin said the Metargon-I didn’t add up it must have been an illusion that it worked so well all those years.”
She fished in her backpack for a tissue, but Mr. Contreras was ready with a napkin, dabbing her cheeks for her.
Alison thanked him with a watery smile. “So then Martin took off. I ran after him, but he said, ‘I need to think this through. I hope you haven’t been making a fool out of me.’
“I said, ‘What, you mean with Tad?’ and he said, ‘With Tad or any other way.’
“That was the last I heard from him. I tried calling him later and he didn’t answer, he wouldn’t answer my texts or my e-mails, so I wrote a pretty nasty message.”
“Oh?” I prompted.
“‘To hell with you, mister, my dad was right, you are just a blue-collar boy with a chip on your shoulder.’” She mumbled the words so quickly I barely made them out.
“Of course I didn’t mean it,” she added, “but why wouldn’t he write back? Why didn’t he tell me he was going dark? All these weeks in Mexico, I thought he was avoiding me, until I got the message from Jari. Jari said he’d gone into Martin’s ISP servers, he’d tracked Martin’s e-mails and his cell phone. Martin hadn’t sent any messages since the day he disappeared, and he hasn’t been in his in box, either on his cell phone or his e-mails—Jari found five addresses for him. They’re all untouched.”
I drummed my fingers on the couch arm. “I’d like to see your grandfather’s workshop: I want to know what Martin saw.”
“I can’t take you up there! I don’t want Dad to know I’m here. Besides, if it was the Metargon-I design he was looking at, like Tad said, anyone can see it: it’s in every beginning computer engineering textbook, where they step you through the history. What von Neumann and Bigelow did at Princeton, what Rajchman did at RCA, and what Edward Breen did in his old coach house.” Despite her distress, she couldn’t help ending on a note of pride.
“If we looked at the drawings, would I be able to follow them?” I asked.
“I could step you through them, but I don’t know what the model or the drawings would tell you,” she said. “I don’t know what they told Martin, or even if that is what he was looking at.”