“I went by the motel tonight. The coupe was still there. Now it’s here and I see you have been following my instructions after all.”

“It’s not like that, sir.”

“I don’t want the sordid details of how you do it, but I do want every personal detail of Dr. Weiss’ life, her connections to the Party and her connections to Dr. Oppenheimer.”

“She won’t tell me that stuff.”

“She will. I think you have a talent with women, Sergeant. By the time you’re done, I’ll bet she tells you everything.”

The lighted road seemed to shift like snow as Joe walked from the shed. He swung into the car, put it into gear and closed the door. He didn’t dare look at Anna.

Horses coughed and shuffled from the beams as the Plymouth moved forward. MPs twisted in the saddle, staring. Al and Billy stood, one on each side of the car, as it rolled past the shed.

“You never gave me an answer,” Anna said. “Which do you think I am, insane or a tramp?”

“Do you want to see me again?” Joe asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you must be insane.”

17

In the Explosive Assembly Building on Two Mile Mesa, Joe held a 20-inch model of the Trinity bomb steady on a wrestling mat. It was a sphere of steel plates bolted together at the edges. It looked like a large steel spore—or a steel seed pot with a jagged rim, because Foote and a private named Eberly were still adding the last lenses of high explosive. The temperature inside the green sheetrock building was 120 degrees; all three men were stripped to the waist and wore a second, fluid skin of sweat. Foote was a baronet, the lowest of British titles and affected the greatest number of eccentricities found on the Hill. In the sun, he wore a Mexican sombrero; in the assembly building, he wore a chain rattling with religious medals. Eberly was a graduate student who had first come to the Hill as an easygoing civilian scientist, then been drafted and sent right back to the Hill at a quarter of his previous pay. He was gawky and crew-cut, with as much neck as head. Now his Adam’s apple pumped with incessant outrage.

The lenses were cast wedges of Baratol and Composition B, both TNT-based explosives but with different speeds of detonation. Just as glass lenses bent and focused light, so the sooty-gray lenses of high explosive focused their shock waves from the outer circumference of the bomb toward the center, creating an implosion. Of course, this was merely a model to be detonated on the mesa, so there was a Spalding baseball in place of a plutonium core.