Another shot. Weston called out, “Enough, Mr. Pearce, it’s over.”
März was smiling. “You two. Come with me.”
Weston called out, “März, when you are finished, come to the bridge.”
72
Nearing Inverness
6:00 p.m.
They ate crusty French bread and soft cheese and grapes, and washed it down with tart lemon-flavored Pellegrino.
Mike wiped up a last bit of cheese with a fingertip. “Isn’t it nice the PM keeps his plane so well stocked?”
Nicholas grabbed the last grape. “Maybe next time, more cheddar.” He cleared the tray off the table, then opened Adam Pearce’s laptop. “Now, Mike, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to read aloud about Marie Curie and her polonium according to Adam’s files from the Order. It’s easier that way.”
“Read away. I can’t believe you ate the last grape.”
“I’m a right pig.” He tapped the screen. “Adam left an encrypted note inside two other files with my name on it. When I decoded it, it sent a message to my server. What Adam wrote isn’t complete, but it’s enough.
If you’re reading this, Drummond, this is my take on what has happened. This I know for sure. Everything has gone wrong. Havelock is trying to get his hands on Marie Curie’s weapon.
Madame Curie was a member of the Highest Order. The Order funded a great deal of her research. When it became clear Britain was struggling in the war Curie set out to develop a weapon that would prove so chilling in its consequences that it would prevent countries from ever going to war, or in this case, stop World War I in its tracks. (I see Curie evaluating this weapon like the scientists on the Manhattan Project doubtless did—they were both committed to creating something incredibly deadly in order to bring about peace—to me this reasoning is flawed. In Curie’s situation, though, I think she really believed she could put a stop to the war with an über-weapon without ever using it, and create a world peace keeper. She obviously had too high an opinion of her fellow humans.
She herself was committed to peace and so she worked on it day and night. She discovered another variant of the radiological element polonium-210. (Of course, all of this is far too technical for me to understand completely.)
Curie somehow managed to enhance the short half-life of polonium-210, to retain its efficacy. She believed it would grow stronger over time, and she was pleased because if she could determine how to deliver it, the threat of it would stop the war. Then she discovered her new super-enhanced polonium meant death to all who even chanced to touch it and she quickly realized there would be no controlling it and she’d made a big mistake. She didn’t want to open Pandora’s box. She knew now that she couldn’t allow anything this powerful to be in England’s hands, in any country’s hands, for that matter, and so she went to the head of the Order at the time, William Pearce, 7th Viscount Chambers, and told him the weapon she’d developed didn’t work, and she couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
Though Pearce suspected she was lying, she didn’t change her story.
No doubt in my mind that Curie both hated and was in awe of what she’d created, otherwise how to account for the fact that she didn’t destroy the weapon, destroy all her notes, destroy her secret lab? But she didn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Why? Perhaps because the monster she’d created was so magnificent she simply couldn’t bear to destroy it. I think she was obsessed with what she’d found, amazed, really, and couldn’t let it go. Perhaps she was already ill from radiation poisoning, and wasn’t thinking clearly, but whatever the reason, she didn’t destroy her discovery.
Curie did the next best thing—she locked everything up, including the weapon itself and her notes on how to manufacture it. Perhaps she believed that if her lab was ever found in the distant future, her weapon could be used for good. (Not very logical reasoning, given mankind’s endless violent history. We will all suffer for her decision if Havelock finds it.)
Curie walked away from the Order and continued her research into radium. The war went on.
But Curie was betrayed. (I can only imagine what she must have felt—questioning her own decisions, so much remorse, dread, because she’d be the cause of Armageddon.) A young colleague of hers was a German sympathizer. He stole her notebook and the key to her secret lab and made his way to Germany. He gave the key to Kaiser Wilhelm and told him for the right price, he’d tell him the location of Curie’s secret lab, and the kaiser would be able to have the weapon.
Pearce found out through his spies in Berlin and immediately notified Curie. She realized she’d been betrayed. She couldn’t allow the kaiser to get his hands on the weapon, (probably she decided better the devil you know), and so she told Pearce the truth about the what she’d created and why she’d lied to him. She told him the weapon wouldn’t kill a few people, it had the capacity to kill them all.
Even though Curie no longer had the key to her secret lab, she could have figured out how to destroy it, but evidently before she could act, Pearce told her he’d arranged for a spy to steal the key and the notebook from the kaiser. All he ever told her was that the sub with her key and notebook on board sunk, and they didn’t know its location. She must have been very relieved to learn this, and thus, why destroy her lab? No point.
—
NICHOLAS LOOKED UP, his voice quiet. “That’s it. That’s all he had time to write.”
Mike said, “Mini-nukes with a new radioactive element. Here we’ve been worried about suitcase nukes. But, Nicholas, if Havelock gets his hands on the über-polonium Madame Curie developed, and makes a nano-nuke with the bigger load, creating a massive fallout, we don’t know what the results will be.”
Nicholas nodded. “And unlike dirty bombs that can be detected, these nano-nukes could go anywhere, no one the wiser. And since we don’t know the makeup of Curie’s extreme polonium, we don’t know how big a payload it can deliver.” He paused. “Über-polonium, extreme polonium, enhanced polonium—hard to know what to call it. Like Adam, I don’t understand how it would work, either, only that it does.”
“Deadly will do the job since all we really understand is the consequences would be bad.”
The pilot of the Hawker came over the intercom. “We will be on the ground in five minutes. The chopper is waiting to take you to Loch Eriboll. The Dover is l
ooking for the Gravitania now.”
Mike fastened her seat belt. “Clearly something went wrong along the way if the Order lost the key and Madame Curie’s notes. And now Havelock is close to having it.”