Free Dark Matter by Greg Iles

Always to protect me."
    He did the same for me, I thought. Suddenly, I remembered the words in Fielding's letter. "Did Andrew take his pocket watch to work with him today?"
    Lu Li didn't hesitate. "He take it every day. You no see it today?"
    "No. But I'm sure it will be returned to you with his personal effects."
    Her lower lip began to quiver, and I sensed another imminent wave of tears, but it didn't come. Watching Lu Li's stoicism, I felt a sharp pang of grief, familiar yet somehow new to me. I was no stranger to mourning, but what I felt now was different from what I'd felt after the loss of my wife and daughter.
    Andrew Fielding was one of the few men of his century who might have answered some of the fundamental questions of human existence. To know that such a mind had gone out of the world left me feeling hollow, as though my species were diminished in some profound and irrecoverable way.
    "What will happen to me now?" Lu Li asked quietly. "They send me back to China?"
    Not a chance, I thought. One reason Trinity was so secret was the belief held in some quarters that other countries might be at work on a similar device.
    With its history of aggressive technology theft, Communist China ranked high on that list. The NSA would never let a Chinese-born physicist who had been this close to the project return to her native land. In fact, I worried about her survival. But I could do little to protect her until I talked to the president.
    "They can't send you back," I assured her. "Don't worry about that."
    "Andy say the government do anything it want."
    I was about to answer when headlight beams shone through the foyer. A car was passing slowly by the house.
    "That's not true," I said. "Lu Li, I don't like saying this, but the best thing you can do right now is to cooperate with the NSA. The less trouble they see you making, the less they'll perceive you as a threat. Do you understand?"
    Her face tightened. "You say now I should let them kill my Andy and say nothing? Do nothing?"
    "We don't know that Andy was killed. And there's very little you can personally do right now. I want you to leave everything to me. I've called the president, and I could hear back from him at any time. He's in China now, of all places. Beijing."
    "I see on TV. Andy tell me you know this president."
    "I've met him. He was a friend of my brother's, and he appointed me to my job.
    And I promise you that one way or another I'll find the truth about Andrew's death. I owe him that. And more."
    Lu Li suddenly smiled through her anguish. "Andy was good man. Kind, funny man. And smart."
    "Very smart," I agreed, though words like smart meant little when applied to men like Andrew Fielding. Fielding had been a member of one of the smallest fraternities on the planet, those who truly understood the mysteries of quantum physics, a field reserved—as Fielding's Cambridge students often joked—for those students who were "too smart to be doctors."
    Rachel squeaked in surprise as a white ball of fur raced into the room and leapt into Lu Li's lap. The furball was a small dog, a bichon frise. Lu Li smiled and vigorously stroked the bichon's neck.
    "Maya, Maya," she cooed, then murmured softly in singsong Cantonese.
    The bichon seemed anxious at the presence of strangers, but it did not bark.
    Its little brown eyes locked on me.
    "You know Maya, Dr. David?"
    "Yes. We've met."
    "Andy buy her for me. Six weeks ago. Maya my baby. My baby until God blesses Andy and me with ..."

    As she lapsed into silence, I realized that my sixty-three-year-old friend had been trying to have child with his forty-year-old wife.
    "I'm sorry," I said uselessly. "I'm so sorry."
    Rachel looked as though she wanted to speak, but there were times when even a gifted psychiatrist found herself at a loss for words. As Lu Li stared into space, my anxiety grew. If Fielding had suspected that he might be murdered, and he had voiced that fear to his wife, then the NSA might know he had done