“Think of it this way. What we’re building here is a secret weapon, right? You’re my secret weapon. Your other choice is the stockade, if you want to go back there.”

“You’re a lunatic, Captain.”

“What can you do about it?”

Heart shot? At this range, a round would punch out the captain’s heart, aorta, half a lung. Joe let the gun hang straight down and fired. The elk’s legs jerked once, like a spasm in a dream. It stretched its neck across his feet and its eye faded as it died.

“I’ll expect a report later on anything Oppenheimer says—conversations with Groves especially, anything political in particular.” Augustino hadn’t flinched. He took the deep, satisfied breath of a man turning for home. “The usual.”

5

The car was a blue Buick sedan with a V-8 engine and gray plush interior. In back were Brigadier General Leslie Groves and Oppy; in front, Klaus Fuchs, a field radio and, at the wheel, Joe. The inside of the windows beaded with condensation. Outside, all of New Mexico seemed to tip from Los Alamos, mesa turning to foothills of black piñons on white snow.

The general’s whole body looked tucked, badly, into his uniform. Groves was a tall man; his gray hair was vigorous and wavy, his mustache bristled and his eyes were bright as steel, but below the collar, starched khaki and overcoat bulged everywhere under the pressure of soft fat. He was fond of Los Alamos. His domain extended from the giant production plants in Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the original labs in Chicago, but they were run by Union Carbide and Du Pont or the pain-in-the-ass Europeans in Chicago, whereas Los Alamos was his personal duchy, run by his inspired choice, Oppenheimer, and was the real heart and soul of the project, the greatest scientific effort in the history of mankind. The Buick, the best car in the motor pool, was always set aside for him when he came, and he was always driven by Joe. Other brass and VIPs who had come from Washington with the general referred to Joe as “Groves’ Indian.” The story got around that even the President had asked Groves about his “Indian companion.”

Oppy wore an old Army greatcoat that could have been wrapped two times around him and a porkpie hat that emphasized the narrowness of his skull. His hands fidgeted because the general allowed no smoking in the car. Klaus Fuchs sat practically at attention in an overcoat, fedora and rimless glasses that seemed to flatten his eyes.

Groves hadn’t wanted anyone from the British mission—they thought Los Alamos was Oxford—but as Oppy said when he picked the general up, Fuchs wasn’t really British.