Taylor Smith - Guilt By Silence

One of the Russians, at Bowker’s left, grinned and put an arm around his shoulders, squeezing good-naturedly. “Larry is right. Enjoy! We are allies now—comrades in a common struggle. The Cold War is finished and we, my serious friend, have all won. Now,” he added, “we work on the same side.” The Russian raised his glass and nodded above the brim before taking another swallow of beer. The others echoed his nod. Scott Bowker looked pointedly at his watch, then at Kingman.

“Yup,” Kingman acknowledged. “It’s getting late. We should be going, boys. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

The five men drained their glasses, then stood and gathered up their briefcases. Kingman shifted uncomfortably, stretching out knees that were stiff and swollen after three days of playing guide for the Russian visitors. He trailed the others to the door, offering a nod and a warm smile as he limped past the blond waitress.

“’Bye now,” she said, giving him a wistful wave. “You come again, okay?”

They walked out of the beer-and-smoke fog of the tavern and into the cold night air of the New Mexico desert. The parking lot was full: pickups and old beaters, a few motorcycles, gaudy yellow license plates proclaiming New Mexico—Land of Enchantment. Kingman tossed a set of keys to Bowker as the men approached a minivan. Bowker unlocked the doors and the Russians slipped into the back seats. Kingman shut the sliding rear door and climbed into the front passenger seat.

They pulled out of the parking lot and turned south on NM 68, the main highway linking Taos and Los Alamos. The men fell silent, contemplating the landscape eerily lit by a cloud-draped moon over the Sangre de Cristo—the Blood of Christ—Mountains. A powdery snow had been falling while they were inside and it muffled the sound of the tires on the road. The Pueblo Indians believe that the spirits of the dead linger on the mesas of New Mexico, guarding the land. In this spectral glow and eerie silence, it was easy enough to believe that ghosts were hovering nearby. Watching and waiting.

The highway curved along the banks of the Rio Grande, hugging the line of the rushing river. It was past midnight and the road was virtually deserted. As the van sped along toward Española and the Los Alamos turnoff, a single pair of lights could be seen approaching from far off, flashing between the hills.

Kingman rolled down his window, the wispy white strings of his breath escaping into the night. He inhaled deeply, drinking in the cold, fresh air—infinitely preferable to the hops-and nicotine-soaked atmosphere of the Trinity Bar. Then he rolled the window up again and glanced back at the men in the rear of the van. The two Russians on the rear-most bench were heavy-eyed, their heads lolling with the motion of the vehicle, on the edge of dropping off to sleep. But Yuri Sokolov, sitting on the center bank of seats, had his gaze fixed on the road ahead, his thoughts impenetrable but obviously stone-cold sober, despite his consumption at the Trinity Bar.

At fifty-two, Sokolov was acknowledged in the arcane world of nuclear physics as the most brilliant mind in the field. Until recently, of course, his reputation in the West had been based entirely on the discoveries of meticulous spycraft, since he had never before stepped outside the Soviet weapons community, nor knowingly circulated a paper in the West.

Sokolov glanced briefly at Kingman, then focused again on the road ahead, watching the snow spinning through the van’s headlights—remembering Moscow nights, perhaps. They were intellectual brothers, Kingman reflected, forced to live their lives as enemies until suddenly, one day, someone had decided to change the rules. Now they had a common purpose—always had, maybe. The vagaries of politics irritated him. There was neither method nor reason to human behavior, and politicians were more irrational than most. Only science was constant, sane.

The single set of headlights rolling north on NM 68 toward the van belonged to a tanker truck making a night run to Taos. Diamond-shaped plaques on the tanker noted the contents as gasoline—hazardous material, highly flammable. The rig was hauling over eight thousand gallons of unleaded fuel and doing sixty on the open road.

When the two vehicles collided, the explosion could be heard all the way to Taos. The fireball rose eighty feet into the air, lighting up the night sky, although the only immediate witnesses to the event were jackrabbits and owls. The heat generated by the fire was enough to twist steel into Silly Putty and incinerate anything else unfortunate enough to be caught in the vicinity. Within a matter of seconds, even the asphalt road was ablaze.

Another car traveling south on NM 68 came upon the accident six minutes after the collision. After realizing that nothing could have survived the inferno, the driver turned back toward Taos to telephone for help from the Trinity Bar. When the emergency vehicles arrived, there was nothing they could do but try to keep the blaze from spreading to the surrounding juniper and piñon trees. It took three hours for the fire to burn itself out. Fire fighters doused the site with foam to guard against another flare-up, but this only served to seal the tomb.

The next day, curiosity seekers from both sides of the closed highway swarmed over the hills for a look, but nothing was left at the scene except a surreal metal sculpture, smoldering ash and the stench of burnt rubber.

A piece of evidence that had miraculously survived the impact of the crash and resulting blaze—the van’s rear license plate—allowed state police to trace the ownership and determine that it had been signed out to Dr. Lawrence Kingman, deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who had been squiring around some scientists visiting New Mexico under the Russia/U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Pact. Someone at Los Alamos remembered that Kingman and a few others attending a dinner at the Hilltop House Hotel earlier that evening had headed down the mesa for drinks afterward.

The police spoke to a waitress at the Trinity Bar who clearly remembered the group and was able to confirm that there had been three Russians and two Americans. The Russkies had been obvious, she’d said, rolling her eyes at the memory of the new cowboy getups they had worn. The table had ordered several drinks over a couple of hours, although they hadn’t been staggering or anything when they left. She was really sad to hear about the accident—the older American had seemed like a good guy.

The federal government took a close interest in the follow-up investigation and insisted that the van and the remains of its occupants be returned. The coroner explained that anything they scraped off the melted highway would consist primarily of American automotive technology and very little by way of identifiable human remains. Investigators were sifting through the rubble, but the blaze appeared to have made as effective a funeral pyre as any crematorium could boast, if a little less tidy.

All the same, the federal men were insistent, and around northern New Mexico everyone knew that you didn’t argue with the feds. They had played a mysterious role in the area ever since World War II, when Manhattan Project scientists working at Los Alamos had conducted a top-secret test—code-named Trinity—of the world’s first atomic bomb. The Trinity test had led directly to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war with Japan.

If the feds wanted a bulldozed pile of ashes and twisted steel, the coroner decided, they were welcome to it.

His secretary hadn’t arrived yet when Mariah entered her chief’s office the next morning to go over the report on the terrorist arms connection. Frank Tucker was there, though, standing at the window and talking on the phone. She hesitated in the doorway, but he spotted her and waved her in, raising a finger to indicate he would be done in a minute.