Free Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon Page A

when so often—Well. I sometimes think there isn’t any moral quality to it at all. A purely neutral act. Like the insects. But then, who are we to say? Don’t you often wonder what you would do to survive? I don’t know how Bruner got through it, all those terrible things, but it didn’t make him any nicer. I know it’s unkind of me, after all that suffering, but he always struck me as something of a shit.”
    The drive down from the mesa was spectacular. The morning was beautiful, and under the cloudless blue sky the land stretched out for miles, waves of pink and brown earth dotted with clumps of piñons rolling all the way to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the far distance. After the busy claustrophobia of the base, the country felt even larger, and Connolly’s spirits rose to meet it the minute he passed through the gate. The fences and sentry boxes were behind, ahead only the bright freedom of the high desert. Mills had told him that Oppenheimer had selected the site—he’d had a vacation ranch in the area, about sixty miles away—and Connolly wondered if this was another of those paradoxes he relished, working with the smallest particles of matter in one of the most open landscapes in the world.
    The Rio Grande was swollen and brown, muddy with spring runoff, and Connolly could see in its long valley the cottonwood groves and new green fields that had drawn the first settlers in from the desert. He had never been to the West before, and the sheer size of it overwhelmed him. But it was exhilarating, not lonely—you expanded to its scale. His mind had been cluttered with a hundred questions, but the sight of the country emptied it. There was no brooding in this clearheaded sky.
    The road was no better than the day before, however, and he lurched and bounced, afraid for his new tires, all the way to the outskirts of Santa Fe. He drove around the cathedral, lost in the unfamiliar streets, until he found the police station in a large adobe building that resembled a Western movie jail. Inside, however, everything was up-to-date and all business.
    “You can call me Doc,” Holliday said. “Everyone does, sooner or later, and I’ve got no time for the suspense. Now if you’re going to start by dumping all over us and telling us how top secret and important you all are, you can save your breath, ‘cause I’ve heard it all before. I don’t suppose you’ve come to tell me just who our John Doe is.”
    “His name is—was—Karl Bruner.”
    “Well, I’ll be damned. First time a liaison man ever told me anything. Usually the way we liaise around here is kind of one-way—you don’t tell me anything and I get to like it. A German?”
    “By birth. American citizen. Army. Also a cop.”
    Holliday stared at him. “You don’t say. What kind of cop?”
    “Security officer.”
    Holliday continued staring at him, as if he needed time to take this in. Finally he said, “Do I keep going, or is this where you cut me off with all the classified horse-shit?”
    “I’m new. They usually give you a hard time?”
    “They don’t tell me much.”
    “They don’t tell me much either. Maybe there’s not much to tell. But that’s who he was. And now that you know, you’ll have to forget it again. Officially, he’s still a John Doe. Now you know most of what I know. What’s important to me is what you know.”
    “You’re not trying to flatter me by any chance, are you?”
    “Would it work?”
    Holliday grinned. “Never fails. I don’t suppose while you’re in the mood you’d like to tell me what you boys are doing up there?”
    “Doc.”
    “Well, a try. Actually, I don’t give a good goddamn. The only reason anybody wants to know is you won’t tell him. You got explosions going off up there at five o’clock in the morning you can hear clear across the valley, but nobody’s supposed to hear them. The smart money says it’s rockets, some kind of new V-2. I just hope you don’t aim them over here. One