My meddling ways had brought me problems before this, but nothing that left me homeless. “And a Laundromat,” I said, returning his smile.
I was grateful for Matt’s presence; I knew I wouldn’t have found humor in the situation if I’d been facing it alone.
I took my cell phone from my purse and laid it on the metal table.
“In case she calls before we get to that point.”
We’d agreed to read the faxes and then make a decision about where we’d sleep.
Matt took Rose’s fax, relieving my feelings of guilt over not paying much attention to her plight in the last couple of days. If he was stunned that I didn’t quickly grab at an official police report, he didn’t show it.
“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with whatever information is on that report,” I said. “It’s not as if we could investigate, even if we were home.”
Matt kindly did not point out that nothing so trivial ever stopped me before. “I think Rose just misses us,” he said.
“Maybe we should go back where we’re welcome,” I said, close to tears.
Matt took my hand. “It’ll work out, Gloria. You and Elaine have been friends too long for it to end like this.”
I wondered if Elaine would agree. I tried to imagine what she was going through, whether she felt betrayed or angry, or both. I couldn’t guess.
I straightened the pages from Andrea and retreated to a safe nitrogen-rich environment, free of human miscommunication.
Phil Chambers and Lokesh Patel had collaborated on a number of weapons-related papers. The unclassified versions Andrea had sent were more or less status reports, as opposed to detailed technical documents, and I longed to see an equation. There’s nothing like a reaction expressed in symbols to bring home the essence of a piece of theory or experiment. The distinction between what can be distributed broadly and what is designated one of the many classified levels is generally a question of quantification—equations and numbers. Even the composition of a high explosive may be spelled out in open literature, but the specific amounts and arrangements of each chemical in the mix make all the difference.
“Like a recipe,” Matt said after I briefed him on my faxes. “It’s okay if the competition knows you use tomatoes, garlic, and basil in your gravy, but the amounts and how you cook them are held back.”
I had a flash-forward to a time when I’d be wearing a flowered apron, making spaghetti for Matt, waiting for him to come home from work. How desperate was I for a crisis-free life? I recovered quickly. “And in the case of explosives, the specific amounts play a big part in whether you have a Fourth of July firecracker or a nuclear fission bomb. The firecracker travels only a few hundred meters per second. The explosion could reach a million meters per second.”
Matt waved Rose’s fax at me. I saw the familiar Revere Police Department letterhead. “I guess what blew up O’Neal’s hearse would fall somewhere between the firecracker and the atomic bomb. At those speeds you don’t need to translate the meters into miles per hour for me,” Matt said. “Well over the speed limit. And I’m no longer surprised that you’d know these numbers off the top of your head.”
“Just ballpark guesses,” I said, with a modest shrug.
This must be the silver lining, I thought—Matt and I with another opportunity to learn from each other. I loved sharing the elements of science with him, and when the occasion arose, he introduced me to the intricacies of human behavior, police procedure, and the administration of justice.
To prolong our pleasant interaction and avoid our current predicament, I was inspired to write my own version of what a nitrogen-containing high-explosives equation might look like. I knew I couldn’t write an exact, balanced equation, but I did remember the general energy reaction for one of the most commonly known explosives, trinitrotoluene—TNT. I took out my notebook and pen and enjoyed trying to figure out reasonable—that is, scientific—behavior. Unlike the human sphere.
I played with the left-hand side of the equation, knowing only that the reaction involved a combination of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Then it dawned on me that I was surrounded by the resources of the UC Berkeley library.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Matt, and headed for the science section.
It felt good to be up and moving, and researching, if only in a basic chemistry book. I found the formula for TNT: C7H5N3O6—a benzene ring with a methyl group attached, and three nitro groups in the form of nitrogen dioxide. I read more than I needed to, of course, indulging myself in pages on the structure of the molecule and the dynamics of an explosion—essentially a regrouping of all the elements, as with any chemical or physical reaction. Another marvel of science. No new atomic particles added or subtracted, just a reorganization that converted a benign configuration into a lethal one.