A brief silence fell.
“How magnetic?” Nora asked.
“Follow me.” Tappan walked down into the hole and held out the compass. The needle swung wildly around, spinning until it broke away from its spindle and battered against the plastic housing.
“Holy shit,” said Nora.
Tappan turned to Toth. “Can you recalibrate that machine to measure stronger magnetic fields?”
“I can turn the sensitivity gain down to the lowest level and see what happens.” She fiddled with the dials a moment. “Ready.”
“Bring it back into the hole.”
She wheeled it back down. “Okay, it’s not acting crazy,” she said as she began wheeling it across the excavation floor. She stopped. “Wait. I spoke too soon. It’s just gone off the charts.”
She reached down to adjust some dials, and there was a sudden popping sound from the machine as the screen shattered, scattering glass shards. Toth jumped back.
At the same time, Nora saw her own excavation trowel, sitting on the ground near the magnetometer, start wriggling—and then it swung around and sank into the sand with a twisting motion, quickly followed by two palette knives and a metal-handled brush. A shovel standing against the excavation wall fell over and began to drag itself across the sand, as if by an unseen force.
“What the fuck!” Emilio cried. “Are you guys seeing this?”
“Cecilia, get out of the hole,” said Tappan. “Now. Everyone get back.”
His warning was unnecessary, as everyone was already scrambling away as fast as they could, abandoning the expensive magnetometer along with the rest of the equipment. The magnetometer was now starting to vibrate, making a creaking noise, its wheels sinking into the sand as if being pulled down. Nora saw her tablet, which was sitting on the edge of the hole, jiggle and slide, before flipping into the hole and being sucked out of sight.
And then suddenly all was quiet.
“What the hell just happened?” Vigil said, venturing a step forward.
Tappan released his breath. He turned to Nora and the rest. “There’s something down…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
“What do we do now?” said Toth.
“What do we do?” Tappan’s voice was incredulous. “We dig it up.”
48
CORRIE HUNG UP the phone and sat, allowing herself to savor the moment. The FBI analyst she’d just spoken with confirmed it: she’d made a breakthrough in the case. Her “shot in the dark” trip to Santa Fe had paid off in spades. But self-congratulation could wait: she had to collect her thoughts and go see Lime. It was already quite late, almost seven. He sometimes worked late, and she hoped to hell he would still be in.
He was. Lime was sitting at the desk in Morwood’s old office, door open. She knocked and he looked up, his face breaking into a smile. “Corrie! Come in and sit down. How did your trip to Santa Fe go?”
Corrie perched in the chair opposite his desk. “It went very well.”
Lime raised his eyebrows. “Tell me about it.”
“I discovered the identity of the homicide victims.”
Now Lime looked genuinely surprised—and a little dubious. “Really?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “They were Soviet spies masquerading as French refugees. Fran?ois and Marie Abadie. They arrived in Santa Fe in 1944, allegedly from France, at the beginning of the Manhattan Project, and continued spying on the nuclear program at Los Alamos as the hydrogen bomb began development. They disappeared in 1947. Word went out that they’d moved to L.A. But in fact, they were murdered at the Roswell site.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Lime. “Remarkable, in fact. How can you be sure of these details?”
“I found the old dental X-rays I was searching for—in a storage unit in Santa Fe. I had an analyst look into the couple’s history, such as it was. Nothing prior to 1944, and nothing after 1947. Their cover story was work as substitute teachers, husband and wife—but they had to have been spies, given their possession of that top-secret dial-a-yield device. It must have been an early prototype, the precursor to the one used in the first H-bomb test. Which was code-named ‘Greenhouse Item,’ detonated at Eniwetok Atoll—but not until 1951. Remember the piece of paper in Morwood’s pocket? It said ‘Item.’ We all thought that was just the heading for some list or other, but I found out Morwood was specifically researching the Item nuclear test right before his death and had made a note of it. I’m pretty sure that’s why he went into the lab—not just to return the dial-a-yield device, but for a much more important reason. ” Here she hesitated. She didn’t want to admit that some of her conclusions stemmed from breaking into Morwood’s house.