ELIZABETH WASN’T SURE HE UNDERSTOOD HER, or that he was even listening.
“Walt, did you hear what I just said? Someone stole my laptop. It had to be the same person who turned off the emergency generator. It happened at the same time.”
Elizabeth Holleran had gone to Walt Jacobs’ partitioned workspace after catching several hours of sleep in the equipment room. This time she’d kept the door locked. The sun had just come up. She’d found Jacobs sitting at his desk, staring at printouts of seismograms from aftershocks that continued to occur along the new Caruthersville Fault. The activity hadn’t slowed.
Jacobs looked up as if hearing her for the first time.
“Someone… stole your computer?” He sounded incredulous.
“In the equipment room. When the power was out.”
Elizabeth spoke softly. They were in the library annex. Across a hallway, Guy Thompson and some of his people were feverishly working at an array of computer terminals, trying to calculate the seismic effects of underground nuclear explosions. They’d worked right through the night. Thanks to the president, Thompson had four new high-speed computers to help them crunch numbers. He’d brought the machines back from Washington. Fortunately, they hadn’t sustained any irreparable harm when the generator went out. They’d lost some real-time seismic data on the aftershocks but had arranged to have it retransmitted.
Anger had replaced Elizabeth’s shock. She regretted she hadn’t gotten a good look at the thief. She couldn’t even guess his size or weight and was upset with herself for not reacting more quickly. She’d let him get away.
Elizabeth had already told Thompson, someone she knew she could trust completely. Then she’d gone to Jacobs, who listened quietly as she described what had happened. He seemed distracted.
Before leaving for Texas, Atkins had told Elizabeth about Jacobs’ wife and daughter.
She wanted to respect the man’s need for privacy to deal with his grief and would have preferred not bothering him at all. That’s why she’d initially gone to Thompson, but Jacobs was in charge of the lab. He had to know.
She wished Atkins were back. She needed to talk to him, to be close to him. She admitted to herself for the first time that she was falling in love with him. It was a strong, warm feeling and one she didn’t want to lose.
A single fact haunted her. The man who’d entered her room had to be someone who worked at the annex and knew she slept alone, someone she’d seen before. One of the scientists. Someone who knew her movements and was probably still in the building, keeping an eye on her.
Guy Thompson was sure that it was deliberate sabotage by the same person who’d turned off the generators. In his opinion, someone wanted to shut down or steal as many computers as possible to create confusion.
“It’s got to be someone who doesn’t want us to set off that bomb,” he’d said. “What other motive could there be?”
Elizabeth wasn’t convinced, if only because she found it almost impossible to believe any of the scientists at the center would go to such lengths. And even if they had, most of them, Jacobs included, had expressed serious doubts about setting off a nuclear bomb underground. So who was it?
She repeated Thompson’s comments to Jacobs, who kept staring through her. It was creepy. As if she weren’t there.
Finally, he seemed to snap out of it. But when he spoke, it wasn’t about what she’d just told him.
“We can’t do it,” he said, fixing his deep-set eyes on her. “We can’t set off a nuclear bomb near an active fault.”