Quantum

39

It was nearly midnight, but within the windowless lab the distinction between night and day wasn’t readily apparent. Lara Avvakum’s fascination with her work caused time to slip past more quickly than it ever had before. Her workdays grew long; spans of eighteen, even twenty, hours weren’t uncommon as the feverish passion of discovery consumed her.

She stared blankly at the screen, unable to get Ted Sandstrom out of her mind. The possibility that he might be the one who started this project whetted her desire to learn more about him.

But surely, Avvakum reasoned, Victor Orlov’s prohibition against contact with my predecessors on this project doesn’t extend to knowing something about them. After all, is it not wise to know all you can about the competition?

A moment later she accessed the Web search engine on her computer and keyed in a deliberately broad search for Ted Sandstrom. Within seconds there were seven responses to her query.

Avvakum selected an article from USA Today and waited while her computer connected with the newspaper’s Web site and downloaded the article. The peripheral elements of the Web page loaded first, then the story and accompanying photographs. In bold text, the headline appeared.

Avvakum scrolled down to the article and read about an attack on the professors’ lab that left Raphaele Paramo dead and Ted Sandstrom severely burned. Five unidentified men posing as a moving crew were responsible for the blaze and the theft of Sandstrom’s lab equipment and research. The article cited FBI sources in claiming that industrial espionage was the apparent motive for the attack.

Two other individuals, Nolan Kilkenny and physicist Kelsey Newton, were treated for minor injuries and released from the hospital. The article went on to describe how Sandstrom had recently signed with two consortia to develop commercial applications related to an undisclosed discovery.

Am I working for thieves and murderers? Avvakum thought fearfully as it all became painfully clear. No one just walks away from all this research; it was stolen, and the minds that created it trampled.

Avvakum pored over the other articles, searching for further information pertaining to the incident. She soon learned that once Sandstrom’s condition had stabilized, he had been transferred to the University of Michigan Hospital. The investigation lab was currently at a standstill because of a lack of evidence.

The more she read, the more the name Nolan Kilkenny kept cropping up. As a project director for the Michigan Applied Research Consortium, Kilkenny was noted as being involved with the commercial application of Sandstrom’s work — an effort she’d been hired by Orlov to pursue.

Avvakum continued to investigate and found herself at the MARC home page. She navigated through the site until she found a staff listing for Nolan Kilkenny, complete with his E-mail address. She clicked on the address and began typing her message.

Avvakum then browsed through a directory of files and selected one that dealt specifically with the quantum energy device and attached it to her message.

She looked at the one-line message she’d written. If her suspicions were wrong, then she was about to violate the trust of her employer — a man who’d saved her from a life of scientific exile in Siberia. But what if her suspicions were right? If Orlov truly was responsible for the attack on Sandstrom, then by developing this research, she became Orlov’s accomplice.

Avvakum carefully weighed the options before her, balancing her need to know the truth against the fearful hope that ignorance could somehow protect her.

She sighed, then clicked the SEND button.