The Sinai Secret (16 page)
"Sure 'preciate that, Mr. Reilly."
Lang put the phone down and looked up. The mayor had left.
The day showed signs of improvement.
As Lang entered the lecture hall at the Bar Association, the first person he saw was Alicia Warner.
"Hi," he said, too surprised to come up with something more original.
"Hi, yourself," she replied.
"Thought the feds had their own CLE."
She treated him to a smile that could have served as an ad for toothpaste. "We do. If you'd checked the program, you'd have seen I'm on it, too."
He did, and she was.
" 'Mechanics of a Federal Prosecution?" Lang asked. "You're giving secrets away?"
She tossed shoulder-length red hair that Lang suspected was as real as the faint freckles makeup didn't cover. "No more than you are."
"I'd say the attendees are in for a pretty dull session."
Green eyes sparkled merrily. "And this is news?"
Lang was becoming increasingly aware that the seminar audience of thirty or so people was watching. He moved toward the podium. "I've been out of town the last few days or I would have called you."
She said nothing, watching in amusement.
"I, er, I figure I owe you a nice, quiet dinner after... after our lunch date."
Several attending lawyers made no effort to hide the fact that they were listening to the conversation.
Screw 'em.
Lang plunged ahead. "I'd love the pleasure this evening."
She cocked her head as though to view him from a different angle. "My Kevlar vest's at the laundry. How 'bout you just come by my house rather than we go out in public? I'll throw something together. Not only less expensive but safer."
Alicia nodded to where the program's moderator was watching, shifting his weight. She dug into a purse that could have served as a suitcase and handed him a business card. "Call me and I'll give you directions."
She turned and headed for the door.
Along with every male in the room, Lang watched her departure.
There was the clearing of a throat behind him. "Now that Lang Reilly has his social plans in place, perhaps we could entice him to speak."
Lang was not sure what a blush felt like, but suspected he was experiencing one.
School of Chemical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia
Two Days Later
Like students receiving remedial instruction, Lang and Detective Morse sat in folding chairs across the desk from Hilman Werbel, Ph.D., professor of advanced chemical engineering. The man's credentials were displayed in a series of gold-framed degrees that shared the white plaster walls with photographs of the professor embracing, shaking hands with, or simply smiling beside people Lang guessed were luminaries of the scientific world. A window air-conditioning unit provided more noise than cooling, and Lang was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm as well as annoyed with himself for letting the policeman convince him to come along.
"I can't explain it," Werbel said, eyes downcast as though the admission were one of guilt. "Frankly, until yesterday I'd never heard of anything with these properties."
Morse leaned forward. Lang had noticed that the policeman's street jargon and accent had not followed him onto campus. "Doctor, had anything beyond the most basic science courses been required for graduation, I'd still be in high school. Reckon you could reduce all this technical stuff to something I can understand'?"
He had echoed Lang's thoughts.
Werbel regarded both men over half-moon glasses while his hand went to a perfectly adjusted bow tie, a gesture that he had repeated so often as to seem unconscious of it. "I'll try. First, of course, we weighed a portion of the material, the powder, to the nearest thousandth of a gram, recording that weight on the outline of the experiment you have before you." He pointed to the papers in the other men's hands. "We began with emission spectroscopy, placing the material in a carbon electrode cup and using another to create an arc. The elements in the sample ionize, revealing the specific light frequencies of the elements involved...."
Lang held up a hand. "Doctor, neither Detective Morse nor I has the background to appreciate the various protocols of your experiments. Could you dumb it down a little, make it understandable to two nonscientists?"
The professor's pudgy face contracted into a quick frown, the sort of expression he might have used had been asked to actually teach undergraduate students. "But without explaining the process, the results, and my conclusions..."
Morse put his elbows on his knees. "The results and your conclusions, Doctor, are what Mr. Reilly and I came for." He smiled innocently. "We are far too chemically unsophisticated to understand your thorough scientific process."
The professor considered this a second and nodded. "I'll try to put all this in layman's terms. In the first few seconds, silica, iron, and aluminum were indicated, with traces of calcium, sodium, and titanium. Then, as the temperature increased, we saw what appeared to be... Well, without going into exotica such as iridium and rhodium, let's say the material seemed to be composed entirely of platinum group metals."
Lang's interest picked up at the words. Whatever they were, platinum group metals seemed to be a recurring theme.
"I thought you said it contained iron and aluminum," Morse interrupted.
Werbel sat back in his chair. "That's just it, Mr.—Detective Morse. The very composition seemed to change, and that isn't even the strange part."
As one, both the policeman and Lang crossed their arms expectantly.
"As the subject material heated in a separate test, it
increased
its weight by one hundred two percent. As it cooled, the mass reduced itself to fifty-six percent of its original weight. In other words, it levitated."
"Levitated?" Lang asked. "As in it rose into the air?"
"We couldn't see it actually rise," the professor said, "and there was no indication that it dissolved into the atmosphere of the chamber we used."
"But it had to go somewhere, didn't it?" Morse.
"One of physics' and chemistry's basic theorems is that matter is not created nor destroyed, so, yes, it had to go somewhere."
One of the few things Lang remembered from his brief and unpleasant exposure to the sciences. "Okay, so where did it go?"
The professor came forward in his swivel chair so suddenly, Lang thought he might be catapulted into a wall. "I'm no theoretical physicist, you understand," he said, as though apologizing for the oversight, "but my colleagues in that area speculate that the material must have gone into a different dimension."
Lang and Morse looked at each other, their expressions saying what manners prohibited: The professor was nuts!
Werbel saw the glances. "No, no, I'm not crazy—at least, no more so than anyone else who works here. Einstein as well as lesser-known physicists have long speculated that there are one or more parallel dimensions."
"Like in
Star Trek?"
Morse asked.
"We don't know—not yet, anyway. Stranger still, not only did the sample levitate, but so did its container. Further heating to over a thousand degrees Celsius transformed the subject powder into a clear, glasslike substance, which, when cool, returned to one hundred percent of its original weight."
The professor paused long enough to open a desk drawer and produce an envelope. He opened it carefully, emptying it on the desk's blotter.
Both Lang and Morse leaned forward to see what, at first glance, resembled a contact lens.
Werbel prodded it with the tip of a ballpoint, in his element of academic lecturing. Lang felt he should be taking notes. "You'll note it's flat. Unlike the glass it resembles, it is impervious to any number of acids, sulfuric, hydrochloric, et cetera. Also, you'll note the substance itself seems to magnify light." He took a pen-size flashlight from a pocket. "You'll see the size of the beam increases as it passes through and turns a richer color, yet we could ascertain no prism effect."
"What's the significance of that?" Lang asked, mesmerized by the light passing through the tiny glass disk. It had an inner iridescence he had never seen before.
The professor shook his head. "Like everything else about whatever this substance is, I don't have a clue. The only thing further I can tell you is that we reversed the testing process with another one of these bits of glass or whatever it is."
"And?"
The chemist produced another envelope and nudged its contents out with the same pen. A tiny mound of shiny yellow metal slid onto the blotter beside the glass. "Looks like gold," Morse commented. "It is," Werbel said, still perplexed. "Of the highest purity."
The Varsity
North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia
Twenty Minutes Later
The Varsity, just across I-85/75 from the Tech campus, had been an Atlanta institution for over seventy years. It boasted—truthfully, Lang guessed—the world's largest drive-in eatery, the world's best hot dogs, and the world's highest volume of Coca-Cola sales. It chose not to brag about its equally artery-clogging onion rings, milk shakes, and unique fried apple and peach pies. Its aroma reached for blocks and was a siren song luring the unwary onto the rocks of congestive heart failure.
Lang did not entirely dismiss the urban legend of a tunnel under the place leading directly to the nearest cardiovascular surgery center. Still, he hadn't been there for years. He rationalized that the cholesterol bomb he was consuming would do little harm as long as it was infrequent.
Besides, the earth had no better chili dog or Varsity Orange, a combination of Orange Crush and ice cream.
He and Morse had elected to leave their cars and were seated in one of several rooms featuring student lecture hall desks and a ceiling-mounted TV tuned to a local station. Lang had pulled his desk against a wall, where he could see anyone entering.
Morse's street dialect had returned like a sweater worn so often its owner never noticed it draped around his shoulders. He was heavily salting a grease-stained paper carton of french fries when he looked around to make sure no one was in hearing range. "Gold! No wonder somebody offed th' professor. Probably stole all but th' little bit we found. Least we got a motive."
Lang noted the plural first person and dismissed it as merely figurative. Unlikely that the cop was going to include him in an investigation if he could help it. He spread chopped onions more evenly along the brown carpet of chili surmounting his hot dog. "Wouldn't do a lot of good to steal the powder unless you had equipment that could raise it to... What did the man say, over a thousand degrees Celsius?"
"Sump'n like that," Morse agreed through a mouthful of his chili steak. He swallowed, then added, "Don' mean somebody with sophisticated equipment didn't kill the professor for it. Where he get that stuff, anyway?"
Lang shrugged. "I assume it was a product of his work."
Product of
their
work. Lang was certain it was the same powder that had been in Yadish's laboratory, too.
Morse was unsuccessfully using a paper napkin to wipe a brownish stain from his shirtfront. "Oh, well, jacket'll cover most of it," he observed before looking into Lang's face. "You thinkin' somethin', Mr. Reilly, like maybe somethin' you'd like to share with me?"