Free Dark Target by David DeBatto Page B

the Manhattan Project, sort of Oppenheimer’s protégé, until they had a falling out. At
     first, Bartok was completely caught up in the purely scientific quest and all jazzed up when he considered the huge amounts
     of energy he was controlling. Or releasing. It is apparently a thoroughly seductive experience, in many ways. Bartok’s work
     involved making the hydrogen bombs he was working with smaller and smaller. People are afraid of suitcase nukes these days,
     but Bartok essentially built one in 1960. Then in the mid-sixties, he had a conversion experience, when he realized that proliferation
     was unavoidable, and that his work making bombs smaller and simpler and easier to build had contributed to that. He was one
     of the founding fathers of the UCS. I think Gary’s circumstances were similar. At first he was caught up in the challenge
     and the romance, if you could call it that, just a twenty-year-old kid, walking around inside Cheyenne Mountain with all the
     bells and whistles and a security badge on his chest that let him go where other people weren’t allowed. It was a pretty heady
     experience.”
    “What was his area of expertise, specifically?” DeLuca wanted to know.
    “Electromagnetism,” she said. “Field generation. But that’s a general answer, not a specific one. We had an understanding,
     early on, that the work he was doing was top secret and that he couldn’t talk about it. I knew it was important, and that
     he had a huge budget and a lot of people working for him, and I started to sense, oh, God, six years ago, that something was
     bothering him. I mean, really worrying him. I knew the Clinton people were defunding space defense so I thought it might have
     had something to do with that. I could see the stress of keeping so many secrets start to destroy him. And us, probably. At
     any rate, something changed, after 9/11. I don’t know if he had a conversion experience, too, but he said after that, the
     handwriting was on the wall. He said 9/11 was going to do for space defense what Sputnik did for the space program in the
     fifties and sixties. We were ramping up, he said, and the only thing he could do, personally, to stop it, was to take himself
     out of it. So that’s what he did.”
    “Ramping up?” DeLuca said.
    “He was a student of World War I. And II. He said the thing about world wars was that everybody could see them coming, for
     years, and nobody could stop them.”
    “So he saw one coming, and the only way to stop it was to disappear?” DeLuca said. “That sounds pretty self-dramatizing, if
     you ask me.”
    She nodded.
    “If you want my opinion, I think he’d been working for years on a particular problem, his team was, and then he solved it.
     But I don’t think he told anybody. I think he saw where it was going to lead and then he kept the solution to himself.”
    “Maybe those were the files Cheryl Escavedo had,” DeLuca said. “Do you think that’s possible?”
    Penelope Burgess shrugged.
    “He didn’t keep the important stuff in his computer,” she said. “He would have kept it all in his head. He had a tendency
     to internalize things. I know after he left, some of the people who’d worked for him tried to carry on without him, and they
     couldn’t, and they probably could have if there had been anything in his files they could use. He knew the Army wasn’t going
     to let him delete anything, so I’m guessing he never wrote down whatever it was he learned. That’s not to say other people
     wouldn’t have figured it out. I think he just thought that if he left, he could set his program back a few years, probably
     not that he could kill it altogether.”
    “So you have no idea where he is?”
    She reached behind her and took down a postcard that had been held to her bulletin board with a thumbtack. On one side was
     a picture of a twelve-foot-tall fiberglass kachina doll outside a convenience store, with the words WELCOME TO CHLORIDE, NEW