There were some small details to be cleaned up, so I drove off the freeway at the Old Santa Fe Trail exit and eased the Benz down the twisty old trail, now a two-lane highway, into downtown Santa Fe toward the plaza or one block park at the very center of the capital area. The park was a stark but lush reminder of what most small American towns and villages had at their very center, without, over the years, realizing that with their ‘improvement’ or other use, the community lost most of their quietly beating hearts.

The hotel at the very southeastern corner of the plaza was called the La Fonda. I knew the place and loved it, although it was an ever-expanding mess of poorly designed and assembled rooms and meeting places, not to mention the usual collection of semi-authentic stores selling everything from knives, Indian jewelry, and mixed Spanish and cowboy and girl attire. The hotel offered an indoor parking garage, but I chose instead to circle the block and park in the most conspicuous open space I could find on the street, which was also the one closest to the corner of the square.

Nguyen in the Rover had been right behind the Benz for the whole trip, somehow knowing how to follow one vehicle with another vehicle almost automatically. Following and leading other cars or trucks was much more difficult than most people conceived, as the distance, speed, and ever-changing nature of unpatterned other collections of vehicles on the road made for a complexity hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t followed or been followed by someone and then losing them in the mess or because of the slightest error in judgement, direction or attention.

The Rover pulled up, and the passenger window went down, but Nguyen didn’t lean over to show himself on the passenger side.

“Pull into the hotel’s interior parking lot entrance, grab a ticket, and then meet us in the lobby,” I said, projecting my voice up and through the open window as best I could before rolling my window up and turning to Kingsley.

“You expect him to figure that out and appear in the lobby, just like that? Kingsley asked, more surprise in his tone rather than doubt.

I sighed before responding, shutting the diesel down and turning slightly to face him.

“You had to be there,” I said, not knowing how else to continue.

We were not in a place and didn’t have the time for me to explain just how I had truly come to know the nearly magical Montagnard warrior, nor why my confidence was so high in his ability to get things done with little instruction or explanation.

“I was there,” Kingsley replied, his voice emphasizing the word ‘was’ but also revealing just a small edge of hurt.

“Then you know what I mean,” I answered, knowing it wasn’t a good enough answer but not wanting to get involved in side issues as we were truly about to begin the most hazardous part of the mission. I tossed the keys to him.

“I’ll meet Nguyen in the lobby to plan the second part of this, as I’ve got to reach out to Herbert again. I’m not comfortable with how we put this all together, and the details of accomplishment are mine alone, as well as the responsibility and potential mental and physical price.”

I opened the door and stepped out, but not before catching Kingsley’s last hard-bitten comment.

“The price isn’t yours alone to bear.”

I stopped and turned back, re-opening the door.

“The Geiger Counter plugs into the cigarette lighter, so check it out. Let’s see what we’ve got so I can run it against time and intensity, if there’s anything at all.”

I likened the measuring of such exposure to using the SCUBA diving tables for time and depth underwater to forestall or at least foretell the potential onset of getting the bends from going either too deep underwater or being less deep but staying down for too long. I had never had the opportunity or the money to go SCUBA diving, so I’d studied the sport, gathering in as many books on the subject as I could find at the library.

I closed the door once more, as I observed Kingsley reaching around to the backseat for the old Chivas Regal velvet bag I kept it stored in. I walked across the street and entered the hotel’s side door, which opened right into not only the lobby but the entrance to first first-floor restaurant as well as the broad open bar. I realized immediately that I might have picked the wrong place to try to make a semi-secure phone call. Nguyen came from the hall leading in from the garage, just as I’d imagined he would, but faster than I thought possible. I glanced at him and caught the edge of a shop door entry to the back of one of the retail stores. I remembered it from my last time walking the streets and shopping with Mary. It was called Tom Taylor’s, and the belt buckles, a few of them, were almost beyond belief in beauty and quality…and well beyond what I wanted to spend for a mere belt and buckle set. I decided right there that if the mission went smoothly that one of those sets would be my reward, somehow.

“I need to call Herbert, but there’s no phone booth or privacy here,” I murmured to Nguyen, not expecting an answer.

“Get a room,” the man replied, astounding me into a short, shocked silence.

 I looked him in the eyes. Neither of us blinked or showed expression, but once again we communicated. My impressiveness and thanks to him and his loyalty and honor back at me.

The counter was staffed by one Hispanic looking young Hispanic-looking lady with no name tag. I approached and inquired about the availability of a room, one that might be ready so early in the day. I wanted to ask her lineage, but stopped short of that as I’d been burned pretty badly at the office in Albuquerque by doing so. Very painfully, I’d learned that there was a big difference between being Spanish and being Mexican, and the Spanish did not take being asked or labeled about it lightly.

“Only suites left,” she replied, after checking her computer. Her smile was about as genuine as a cap pistol was to the real thing.

I looked around briefly, noting that the lobby was almost empty and that there had been parking spaces on the street all over the place.

I produced the American Express card and laid it down along with my license.

“Please book it,” I said, not phrasing the statement as a question.

“Don’t you want to know the price?” she asked, her sweetness now tinged with a decently sized shot of bitters.

‘I need a key and a room number,” I replied, keeping all emotion out of the tone and expression on my face. I stared unblinkingly into her eyes as Nguyen stepped to my side, doing the same thing.

The woman looked back and forth from one of us to the other and back before I caught the change in her expression and immediately felt bad. I could see that the white evil snake of evil had climbed right up her spine into her brain. She’d become not only afraid but very afraid. I softened immediately and smiled.

“Yes, please tell me the price,” I said, nodding gently to Nguyen, who immediately caught my tone and motion, as he took a step back and then walked a good distance away to then disappear like only he could do.

“I found a regular room with one queen-sized bed, if that’s okay,” she asked, having made no move to check anything. “It’s only seventy dollars a night.”

“That will do fine,” I said, regretting the intensity of emotion I’d not only felt but delivered across the counter into the very center of her being.

I was a spy, a spook, and supposedly not to be recognized that way. Revealing the real me was a mistake under any circumstances, I knew. I would now be remembered because of my emotional error, and that could be a problem even if it might never crop up.

She ran the card and wrote a few things down before handing my license, Amex, and room key over. The key was a big old brass thing with the hotel’s crest on one side and a big double-digit number on the other. I wanted to take a twenty out of my pocket to make up for my mistake, but I also knew that it would just make Nguyen and me more memorable. Most people never tipped front desk employees, even though it was that employee who probably could do the most for them.

I took the key from the counter, turned, and then walked away. I looked back as I made my way past Tom Taylor’s toward the middle of the hall where the elevators were. My room was on the third floor. I saw the front desk clerk leaning outward over the counter, her eyes following me until she noticed me noticing her. She pulled back out of view. I got on the elevator just and pushed the number three, just as Nguyen slipped out of nowhere and stepped silently between the closing doors.

“I was too hard on the woman, “I said more to myself than to him. “She looked out because I made her afraid.”

“She looked out for another reason,” Nguyen replied, mystifying me.

I waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t as the elevator dinged, indicating that we were passing the second floor. When the doors opened on the third floor, I stepped out but had to turn and confront him

“Okay, oh wise one of the forest, why did she look out at me then?”

“Wise one of the jungle,” Nguyen corrected, “and she looked out to see if you were carrying any luggage.”

I turned and walked down the hall before him toward the room, more disappointed than before. The woman was long experienced, and I was a novice, acting like a novice. Since Nguyen had stepped into the room and fallen flat onto the only bed, I sat in the desk chair, the phone nearby, but I didn’t grab the receiver right away. I reconstructed the events occurring right after I entered the hotel. I should have smiled sweetly and paid whatever freight was asked for any room. Cost was not an object. I should have smiled innocently at her delivered nastiness. I should have turned away with the key and gone straight over to the bar until I was out of her sphere of attention. The rebuilding of the scene in such an immediate and graphic way made me smile. I was a better teacher of field intelligence operations than I was as an active agent. I just hoped I was teachable enough to be a truly effective agent. I picked up the receiver and dialed in the number for AT&T long distance, read in my Amex card number to the woman who answered, and then waited.

Herbert answered without any ringing sound at all coming from my phone.

“Talk to me,” he said, before I could even say hello. How he knew it was me calling, even though the mask of AT&T was between us, I had no clue.

“I’m not happy with using the underpowered vehicle for climbing up into the mountains. I’d like to make a change and switch things to the Rover,” I replied, and then stopped talking to wait. Although I knew the mission details were mine to decide, this was no ordinary mission, and the ‘package,’ as it was, was no ordinary bit of normal matter.

“Use your equational ability and figure it out,” Herbert replied. You’re on a trip up in altitude, and this is a numbers problem. I won’t say anything, but I will tell you to call the area where you spent time with the artifact and the man who worked with you there. Call him. He’ll be waiting to receive the call.”

“What’s the number?” I asked, impatience in my voice, wondering if the word equational even existed. Maybe I was being too careful, but after ‘misdealing the deck’ at the front desk, I was unsettled.

“I’m asking you to sit and think,” Herbert replied. “You have this memory, and we both know it. Access it and call the number that’s in there.”

I understood the message. He would not give me the number because I was not only using an insecure phone, I was using one that was no doubt going through some sort of switchboard. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t remember the number but the phone clicked and he was gone.

I hung up the phone and tried to relax. I wanted to either go to the bar or go for a run, but I had no exercise gear, and the bar would mean a lessening of every skill I might need to call on to survive if I had a drink or two, or maybe three or four.

The number to Tech Area Fifty Five, Legacy, Doctor Hans Bethe appeared in my mind. I couldn’t see it, like some people with photographic memories might be able to. It was just there, waiting in the darkness, but ready to be called back into existence.

I dialed the number and waited. It wasn’t a long-distance call, but the same problem of a lack of security was still there, as it had been with Herbert.

“Doctor Hans Bethe,” came from the receiver.

The man didn’t like me, as he’d indicated a ways back, but I liked him, and he liked my wife, which had to count for something. Richard Marcinko and Hans Bethe…her collection of men was way too exotic and wide for me to ever understand.

“I have a problem,” I said, giving no details.

“Yes, I have that brief,” Bethe replied. “A problem of numbers, yes, and a bit of physics comprehension. Our experience together so far has allowed me to understand that you understand.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I said, with a small smile at the way the man used his construct of sentences with English as his second, or maybe even third or fourth language.

“It was not meant as a compliment,” Bethe said, his tone completely flat, like always, except when he’d been talking to Mary that one day at the lab. “The number to be derived from the equations is an equalization conclusion based upon an ionization effect.”

I mentally reviewed every word the man said, pulling them apart and putting them back together, like one of those wooden puzzles of the United States my daughter was so capable of working in only seconds, to the chagrin of many of my friends who came to our home, drank alcoholic drinks and then responded to her challenges to race her in building the puzzle.

Ionization was, I knew, the stimulation of gases or liquids and some other things, of the atoms making up their collection of atoms or molecules. Radiation penetrating one of those mediums, a lot of it, like we found with exposure to highly enriched uranium or plutonium, caused a substance like air, in proximity, to break down into minute amounts of liquid-like mist. Invisible, yet, at close range, very deadly. The radiating source might be high, but that wasn’t what would harm or even kill a human. Humans breathe. Air comes in and goes out. If the mist is breathed in and out, then that’s it, in a very short period. The shielding it would take to prevent ionization would be significant, probably requiring a device of a megaton to weigh half a ton instead of a couple of hundred pounds in total. Enriched uranium or plutonium didn’t take very much to go from ignition on into full fusion conversion.

“You are thinking it through. Ionization inside the trunk of car, buffering the proper shielding, would contain the mist and be completely removed later with proper fumigation,” Bethe said.

My mind lit up like a fluorescent tube, sending signals back and forth across my brain. Not only was it impossible to lift and transfer something weighing half a ton out of the trunk and get it into the back of the Rover, but the shielding that Amos and likely installed when changing the springs in the Benz would be lost. The Rover didn’t even have a real trunk.

“When might we expect a visit from you? You are an unlikely man to be able to accommodate so much with seemingly little,” Bethe said, before hanging up his receiver.

I stared at the receiver in my hand. Had the man insulted me or complimented me, or both? I’d understood the physics, but I still couldn’t understand the man.

I called Herbert back. He once again answered without any ringer coming back through to me.

“Alright,” I said, a bit of exasperation in my voice. “What is it that I should do here. What decision? You tell me.” I waited for almost a full minute.

“Ever see the movie Hondo with John Wayne?” Herbert asked.

“Yes, many years ago,” I answered, rows of wrinkles building up on my forehead.

“The scene with the bad lieutenant, or whatever he was, inside the cavalry leader’s tent?”

“Kind of, I replied, trying to picture it.

“The lieutenant is angry with Hondo, John Wayne, who’s standing near the entrance to the tent, his pet wolf lying across the canvas opening. The lieutenant stops as the wolf rises, bares his teeth, and growls.”

“Yes, I recall,” I said, the full memory coming back to me and the chilling line John Wayne delivered so brilliantly.

“The lieutenant threatened to charge right through the wolf, which made Wayne smile and step aside before he said the words.”

“A man’s gotta do what he thinks is best,” I whispered, as Herbert hung up his phone again.

There was no decision to make. We were not going to charge through that wolf, and I shook my head in thinking about it, hoping that neither Herbert nor Bethe would consider me an idiot for even thinking about it.

I stood up and looked at my watch. We’d been in the room for only half an hour but it seemed longer. Noon was almost upon us. The drive to Los Alamos was about an hour in length, so we had plenty of time.

Nguyen got up as I passed the bed, and we headed out.

“Far side of the building and using stairs?” Nguyen offered, asking the questions but advising me about how to avoid ever seeing the front desk clerk again.

I nodded as he turned to go back down the hall and headed for the stairs down to the parking lot.

I walked all around the building, the high, dry altitude working to clear my head, the sun beating down too hot, but for some reason not making me uncomfortable. Kingsley sat in the car as I’d left him. I got in behind the wheel and looked over at the slim yellow detector he was holding.

“What’s the reading?” I asked, having less fear than I’d had when we’d begun the mission, thanks to Bethe’s very intensive but oblique delivery over the phone.
“It’s showing about fifty-five rems,” Kingsley said, “the needle wavers very little and is pretty steady.”
I quickly calculated the exposure. We were getting about half a chest X-ray nearly constantly, and that would last for about an hour and a half. No ionization, not that we had the equipment to measure that. I was taking Bethe at his unspoken word, as weird as that thought was.

The parking spot behind the Benz had cleared, so Nguyen moved the Rover right in behind us.

“We’re heading to the pharmacy a couple of blocks away before we climb the mountain,” I said. The dosage of rems was not high, and there’d be no injections of ionized air, but still, taking some iodine tablets, as I’d learned the last time Mary and I were both irradiated, had taught me how to be very cautious around such potentially deadly materials. A couple of Potassium Iodine tablets were not uncalled for, given the fact that we were running on our research, and once again, just like before, not fully informed or warned by the people in charge who should know better, but then they did, but for reasons unexplainable, could not give us.

We got to the pharmacy in minutes, and it took only minutes more to come back out with a bottle of distilled water and another of 65mg Iodine tablets.

Having taken them before, I knew they gave no feelings from usage, but they did taste bad. The movie The Right Stuff had come out only weeks earlier, and I’d been entranced by not only the writing but the seeming reality of the writing, so I produced a pack of the Beemans chewing gum to offer as a taste modifier after taking the Iodine. Neither Nguyen nor Kingsley had seen the movie, however, so the comparison was lost, although the Beemans did indeed help with the bitter taste of the tablets, which had to be chewed.

I stood between our two vehicles and let both men know that I’d drive to San Ildefonso Pueblo and then on up into Los Alamos myself, with them following in the Rover, but they’d have none of it. Kingsley and Nguyen had already worked out the schedule while I was in the pharmacy. We would each drive the Benz for one-third of the distance, thereby giving each of us about twenty minutes of exposure beyond what we’d already experienced from being close to the emitting substance in the trunk. There was no escaping their logic, so I didn’t attempt it. It wasn’t heroism, nor was it anything other than the right mathematical way to handle the situation.

“You already, although probably not consciously, assumed the correct action here, or you wouldn’t have had all three of us take the tablets,” Kingsley said, with a laugh.

That I had no conscious thought of such a simple but logical way to minimize our exposure surprised me as I thought about it. I was reminded of Jimmy Carter’s being the head of the recovery and reclamation project at Three Mile Island after the reactor’s core burned out. He’d worked with 22 other scientists to get in and out of the chamber, stabilizing it by sending in each man for only two and a half minutes each day until the meltdown was cleared. Of course, the men accumulated quite a bit of radiation anyway because of the ionization inside the chamber.

The first two legs of the drive proved nothing but boring. The roads were fairly level, Sand the Benz could move along at the speed limit, thereby not sticking out or delaying any traffic. Once near the bridge just beyond San Ildefonso Pueblo, Kingsley pulled the vehicle over to the side of the highway, just short of the bridge crossing the river, before the steep climb up into Los Alamos. In a matter of only a few miles, the climb was substantially more than fifteen hundred feet.

I got behind the wheel and reflected on the statistics I’d read about the little diesel engine I was about to use to power up the incline. The torque of the diesel engine, putting out only about 110 foot pounds, reached its maximum at 2400 RPM.

I moved onto the highway and ran the car up to thirty miles per hour in first gear and then forty-one in second. The tachometer told me that I was at 2400, so I stayed in second and wound my way up the mountain for the entire distance, with traffic so light that not once did I have a vehicle behind me that wasn’t the Rover, and nothing behind it.

The target drop wasn’t to be at any tech area but in the basement of the base hospital, for undisclosed reasons. I pulled up to the giant steel door once I drove the Benz down a long, wide ramp to arrive under the huge building. The door slowly but silently opened. I drove in and immediately spotted a forklift and some other equipment ahead. There were no cars or other vehicles parked anywhere inside the giant parking portion of the enclosure, which seemed strange.

I stopped the car near the forklift, but there was no one there. I looked back to see that the big door had come back down. The Rover hadn’t made it through, so it had to be parked and was waiting outside.

A nearly invisible door opened in the side of a nearby concrete wall. A man in a suit stepped out and walked to the Benz. I opened the window before turning off the ignition key, but I did not get out to greet him. The man, either too old or young, looking every bit like the former captain James Kirk from my previous visit, smiled and leaned down.

“Welcome to the complex. You are the one,” he said, with what seemed like an impressed but also sympathetic smile.

“What one?” I asked, feeling like I was on the set of some Hitchcock movie.

“The artifact. This. Amazing. An honor to meet you. Uncommon.”

I didn’t know what to say. Once again, I wasn’t being very successful at trying to remain a secret agent, but at least this new recognition wasn’t a product of my misreading the situation or acting like a novice.

“Please exit the vehicle, move toward the main entrance, and then join your other gentlemen friends at the top of the ramp. Return with them to the hotel that you let and from which you came. The Mercedes will be converted and returned to you by the early morning hours on the morrow.”

The man reached for the exterior door handle and pulled.

I stepped out to join him and held out my hand.

The man didn’t move to take my hand, so I slowly lowered it back to my side, my wonder at the manner of my arrival and everything happening since growing at high speed.

“You and your companions will be guided to decontamination and then released immediately. We are done here. It was my great pleasure. I hope you have a most pleasant visit to the island of Oahu.”

With that, the man turned and walked back to the door he’d come through and left open. When that door closed behind him, I was left alone with the Benz and the equipment strewn around that would be used to unload the package from the trunk.

I walked back toward the big door, which once again began to rise from the floor, its silent but huge rising presence adding to the eeriness of the place I was in and the experience I was immersed in.

“Oahu?” I whispered toward the growing crack of the outside open air being revealed by the reside mass of metal.