Diablo Mesa(63)

“He was a tough guy. Square-jawed, buzz cut, blue suits. Clipped way of speaking. He was hard on Morwood, treated him roughly. To be honest, I didn’t like him.” He paused to cough. “Don’t know what’s happened to Starr. Is he still around?”

“He passed away a few years ago,” Corrie said. She had established that from older agents in the office.

Eastchester nodded.

“I understand Agent Morwood brought a device to you for identification.”

Hearing this, Eastchester hesitated.

“I know it’s classified,” said Corrie. “Don’t be concerned—you can speak freely. I have clearance.”

“Very well.” Still, the man—obviously habituated to secrecy—waited a moment longer to answer. “As I explained to Hale, it’s a device used to adjust the strength of a thermonuclear bomb by feeding more or less tritium fuel into the fusion chamber. Nicknamed the ‘dial-a-yield.’ At least one wag has joked the device set a bomb to either regular or extra crispy.” He gave a quick, weak smile. “Are you familiar with the basic principles behind the hydrogen bomb?”

Corrie wasn’t, but didn’t want to admit it. “Somewhat.”

“The fusion bomb is initiated by a fission bomb. That device determined the yield. I wasn’t part of the development—it was years before my time, and in any case it’s no longer in use.”

Corrie jotted some notes. “Dr. Eastchester, what can you tell me about the case Agents Starr and Morwood were working on back then?”

“Quite a lot, actually. But doesn’t the FBI have files on it?”

“We do. Some twenty feet of them. If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear about it in your own words—since you were Agent Morwood’s direct contact within Los Alamos.”

“I don’t mind at all. It was strange. Have you ever read The Hollow Man, by John Dickson Carr?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“A chapter in the book deals with the many ways a person can commit the perfect murder in an apparently locked room. The case was like that—a locked-room mystery. But…if I may ask, what does this have to do with the current case?”

“Probably nothing. I’m just trying to create some context.” Corrie actually had wondered if the two cases might be connected. After all, despite the time factor, there was some overlap. But she knew not to say anything until she had hard evidence.

“It’s quite an easily described crime. That’s one of the things that makes it so baffling—its simplicity.”

Corrie waited while he took a deep breath, his eyes looking over her shoulder and into his own memory. “The victim was a senior scientist, a group leader. Name of Arvesen. Henrik Arvesen. One morning, in January of 1999, his body was discovered in a high-security clean room within a secret area. The room was locked. It had a computerized device that recorded anyone who came in or out, not just by key code but also by photograph and right index fingerprint. Arvesen had been shot in the head at point-blank range. No one else was there. No gun was found in the room—so it could not have been suicide—and yet the computerized record of ingress and egress showed he had entered the room alone at nine the night before and never left—nobody else entered or left the room until the staff arrived the next morning.”

“Could the security system have been hacked in some way?”

“That’s what was initially supposed. But the most sophisticated analysis by computer security experts brought in from outside could find no trace of hacking. Believe me, the security of that room was—and still is, actually—considered unhackable.”

“Who among the staff discovered the body?”

“Arvesen’s lab director, who also had a very high-level clearance. He saw from the record that Arvesen had gone in at nine and never came out, which was odd, so he went in…and found the body.”

“Could the lab director have killed him when he went in?”

Another faint smile crossed the old man’s face. He seemed to admire her doggedness. “Even if he’d managed to evade the security camera, Arvesen’s body temperature had declined too much. The M.E. placed the time of death around midnight.”

“Could you please tell me what Arvesen did here?”

“He was group leader of the H-bomb nuclear chemistry department. The original H-bombs used pure tritium as a fuel, until it was discovered that tritium could be combined with lithium to make a compound called lithium-6 deuteride. When bombarded with neutrons by a triggering explosion, it creates a vast amount of tritium, which in turn becomes fuel for the second stage of the explosion. Lithium-7 proved even more effective under certain conditions.” He paused. “That’s probably as much detail as I should get into. Let’s just say that Arvesen’s team was always looking for better fuels for the H-bomb. This was extremely classified work. Eventually, it rendered the dial-a-yield device Morwood showed me obsolete. That only worked with compressed tritium gas, dating from the ‘Super’ program of the Greenhouse tests in, let’s see, 1951. The later H-bomb fuels were all solids.”

“I see.” Corrie hesitated, then asked: “Ah, can you think of any reason why someone might want to kill Agent Morwood?”

At this, Eastchester’s eyebrows shot up. “There’s a possibility he was murdered?”