The Kubota Effect

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

“Eureka!” Hiro “Jack” Kubota shouted and a thousand echoes answered from the empty halls of the deserted underground lab. He jumped, maybe half a meter off the ground—there was no one to watch him. With a trembling hand he selected “print” from the menu of his Granny Smith. Eight years in this surplus would-be superconducting supercollider tunnel, and, finally, he had done it.

The equipment sat there just like it had five minutes ago. But then it had just been an experiment. Now it was a compact antiproton factory, a prototype for something that could change the course of history.

It’s going to belong to the Smithsonian someday, he thought dizzily; I’d better be careful with it. The power could go down, the data could be lost, he might be unable to replicate the experiment and there would be only his word—the nightmare of being the participant in another cold fusion fiasco paralyzed his hand. Print it! Now! he told himself, and shaking himself willfully out of that train of morbid thoughts, he tapped the key.

In moments, the pictures of the particle paths slipped into his printer tray. Hard copy. Permanent. Real. With trembling hands he picked up the sheets—it was beautiful, elegant, as something of such significance should be. The particle traces looked like a perfect symmetrical flower, positive pions curling left, negative pions right, protons curving left, a thin trace of fluorescence down the center where the neutral particles accidentally disturbed an electron or two, and of antiprotons. Antimatter. Electricity in, antimatter out. He’d done it!

“Banzai!” Jack jumped high again, feeling for a moment he could sail through the dozen meters of rock and prairie above him like a neutrino. The old tunnels could not contain his joy. Still shaking, he sat down. He should make more measurements, file an e-mail note, tell Dr. Grimski. Take radiation readings—he hadn’t really expected it to work so well and that stream of antiprotons represented several joules of hard radiation. He’d have to be careful not to endanger his and Gina’s future children!

A tear of joy dropped on the printout-careful, that’s going to the Smithsonian, too. The pion traces were thin, delicate. They were the noise—careful tuning should eliminate them, and the neutrons and antineutrons as well. The protons couldn’t be helped—but, he chuckled—so what! He had proof of principle that antiprotons could be made at efficiencies approaching 50 percent of their energy cost. That was revolutionary; antihydrogen made by solar power satellites could replace uranium and plutonium in power plants. Antihydrogen-powered rockets could fly to orbit like airliners, with airliner payloads. Doctors could attack cancer with a tenth of the normal radiation side effects…

At least it ought to get him his doctorate!

Gina! He had to call Gina. He looked at his watch; she should be at the neutrino observatory, three kilometers down the curved tunnel.

“Artoo,” he told his computer, “call—”

“Hold it!” a loud voice announced. It sounded as cold and solid as the concrete walls from which it echoed, and dripped with condensed authority.

Jack spun around in his ancient surplus swivel chair. “Who the…” The sight of the gun in the man’s hand shocked Jack into silence; he knew next to nothing about guns. This was large, smooth and squarish—nothing like a cowboy revolver, and no gadgets on it that he could see. The mean-looking hole in the end of it might have been a centimeter across. With the light from his desk lamp behind him, he could almost see into the barrel. “Who a re you?”

“Don’t even think of trying to find out, if you want to live.” The speaker was wearing a black trench coat, as if out of a spy novel.

The face was very ordinary, though a little hard. Jack studied the face, trying to note details, but he knew he probably wouldn’t recognize it in another context. He even had problems with Japanese faces, and he was raised there. Nonetheless, he noted that the hair was straight and black, with a touch of gray at the temples. The man was big, just under two meters and probably over a hundred kilos—twice Jack’s mass. He could have been anywhere from forty to seventy.

The gunman carried himself as if he were used to moving quickly. Jack saw no sign of softness or flab—but no sign of malnourishment either. The hand that held the gun was very steady.

“Sit down and keep your hands on your lap where I can see them.”

As he backed into the ancient swivel chair, Jack’s life passed in front of him—not the life he’d lived, but the one he hoped to have with Gina. A small college somewhere, a low pressure place where they could teach and do research. A child or two, a book written the way a textbook ought to be written. It could all be gone in the next millisecond. It wasn’t fair.

“What… what do you want?”

“That.” The gun pointed briefly to the apparatus, then returned to a boresight that must have been aimed between Jack’s eyes. “I’ve been waiting. Thought you might make it last week. That’s what I’m after.”

“But, but it’s big. It’s all over the place. It would take days to take it out, especially if you ever wanted it to work again. And it only produces a few picograms—nothing of any practical use. Unless you have a brain tumor?”

Was that it? They’d been treating people experimentally at Fermilab for years, shooting antiprotons into brain tumors that couldn’t be touched otherwise. It worked, but it was very expensive. Jack felt a moment of pity—a desperate man, his thinking perhaps already impaired, taking a wild risk when he had nothing else to lose.

“I’m not a doctor,” Jack continued, calming now that he imagined he had a handle on the situation. “But it’s not out of the question that we could try something like that. It would take a couple of weeks to get ready, but if you’re really hurting I’m sure there are people who—”

A brief smile cracked the hard face. “I’m sure the people I work for will find ways of making money off this. Now, do you have some electrical tape?”

Jack nodded to a workbench across the tunnel from his desk. It was covered by a mass of miscellaneous equipment; flanges, meters, pliers, strangely shaped pieces of metal and plastic, and yes, no less than three rolls of colored electrical tape. Jack color-tagged his wiring, whenever he thought of it.

“Good. I want you to take a piece and cover up the infrared phone port before either of us says anything more. Don’t even think of trying to do anything else.” He motioned with his gun to the workbench.

Jack got up slowly, went to the bench and cut off a piece of tape. The phone box was on the utility pole next to the light switch a few meters down the tunnel. He walked to it slowly, thinking furiously. If he could leave just a little part of the dime-sized infrared pickup uncovered, he might get through by pointing his computer’s transmitter window directly at the light box.

“Don’t even think about it, or you’ll lose everything,” the man with the gun said, as if he were reading Jack’s mind.

He was right. As long as Jack got out of this alive, they could put it all back together again. All he had to do was to keep cool and do exactly what this thug told him to do. He put the tape over the infrared window. No calls, no Internet. He was suddenly aware of the utter isolation of this section of tunnel. The cleaning staff came by weekly and Gina occasionally, but other than that, he could—and had—spent weeks without a visitor. The gunman could have been watching him for days, and no one would have noticed.

Gina! With the phone out of order, she might come looking for him. And it came to him how important it was to have, in the world, at least one other person who cared about you on a daily basis.

“I—I should call my fiancee. She might come to find out what’s wrong.”

“Hah! Nice try, but I’ll take that chance. Now, I have no intention of trying to cart the device itself away. You are going to explain how it works, give me copies of your equipment lists, layout plans, progress reports and anything else my clients might be able to use to duplicate your results.”

Jack lowered his head, shut his eyes, and bit his lip. As he walked back to his desk, the gunman walked over to the phone box to check his work. He never came within two meters of Jack. Very careful, confident. As if he had been doing this successfully for a while. Jack’s grandfather had been a policeman and often entertained the family with stories about how stupid most criminals were. But this man did not seem stupid.

“Come on. I know it makes antiprotons and I know it makes them more efficiently than anything else. What’s the theory and how do you make it work?”

Commercial espionage? Who was he working for?

“Now!” the voice commanded.

“Do… do you know about the Benton-Kubota effect?” Gina Benton had given him the idea. Her graduate student neutrino observations of Supernova SN 2012A, ten years ago, indicated that the insides of white dwarf stars behaved as if they had more particles than were accounted for by standard theory. He had done a brute-force numerical simulation as a senior that supported the idea.

“Nano-scale quasi-singularities? You pinch a field to a point where it can scatter things like it was a particle?”

Jack nodded his head slowly. The gunman had given him a crude description that bypassed volumes of controversy. He and Gina had finally published in 2017, when some of his early experimental data had come out of the noise level.

“I… I see it like this. The collision between a proton and a quasi-singularity momentarily dissects the proton and blows it up into a quark-gluon plasma bubble, we call it quagma—” Jack looked at the gunman, who nodded, indicating, Jack supposed, that he understood and that Jack should goon.

“But my quagma bubbles are constrained, predictable. Each—”

“Keep your hands down!”

Jack froze—he had started to gesture as if he were talking to a graduate student, forgetting the situation. He was notorious for his one track mind—his ability, or disability—to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Gina called it the Kubota effect. Slowly he lowered his hands and continued his lecture, concentrating this time on the gun barrel.

“Uh, the, each of the three quarks in the proton hits the maximum field gradient in turn and produces a quark-antiquark pair, which are separated inside the quagma by the imposed fields—the six positive quarks one way, the six negative the other. A field twist affecting the one-third-charge quarks more than the ones with two-thirds charge mixes the up and down quark beams of opposite sign.

“As the quagma bubble collapses, the six quarks glue together to form two protons and the three antiquarks form an antiproton. That’s the tricky part—the triplets are energetically more stable, but if the bubble collapses too fast, they don’t all have time to form and you get a lot of mesons, too. Each collision is as exactly the same as I can make it, except for a small time uncertainty, so they emerge in controlled directions. Instead of spraying a variety of particles all over the place, I get pure beams of protons and antiprotons. That’s the idea.”

The gunman nodded again. “I surmised something like that. Your incident protons hit an electromagnetic wall and split—viewed in the proton’s frame of reference, it’s just high energy gamma scattering. How can you control it?”

“I, uh, prefer to think of the pinch nexus as a very special captive virtual particle, but the electrodynamic description is equivalent. Anyway, I get a big long quagma bubble.”

“OK, the net result is that you control what happens on a subnuclear level deterministicaUy so you make an antiproton for five times its annihilation energy instead of five hundred.

How?”

“Well, almost deterministicary.” Jack winced at his own accent as he wondered, who was this? What could a man in a trench coat and a gun know about twenty-first century sub-nuclear physics? “I need control over the quantum numbers for 1.3 picoseconds. The main innovation is a Bell-effect probability filter. It, uh, cheats the uncertainty principle by defining the spin phase of the incident proton in exchange for a tolerable momentum spread. The theoretical basis for the experiment is in my proposal.”

“That’s classified. Do you have a copy here?”

Jack shook his head. What was his responsibility here? Would anyone punish him for giving up the document at gunpoint? There were people who thought antimatter bombs were a possibility. That was nonsense, but you almost had to be a weapons physicist to understand why it was nonsense—and some professional technophobe-baiters took advantage of that to bask in a phony world-saving glory at the expense of researchers’ livelihoods.

Was that what he was up to? Was he going to try to create a scandal that would convince the world that Jack’s research was too dangerous to be allowed—and free up Jack’s measly thirty grand a year for something else?

“Come, on, come on.” The gunman waved the gun at Jack’s filing cabinets. “You must have at least a draft here.”

Jack trembled but didn’t move.

The shot was the loudest thing he ever heard in his life. In the closed space, the shock wave rattling off the curved concrete sounded, incongruously, like a ping-pong game. When the echoes died down, Jack opened his eyes. The gunman waved the gun toward the filing cabinets again.

There was a slightly burnt odor about, with a sharpness to it. Gunpowder? Jack had never smelled it before.

“I… I’ll look.”

He found himself in front of the file cabinet without remembering how he’d gotten himself out of the chair and over to it. There was a bullet hole in the bottom drawer of the first cabinet. Jack did a quick mental inventory—his diploma probably had a hole in it now. There was a picture of Gina in there—maybe too far back. His late father’s Ph D thesis might have protected it. His college physics department chairman’s “Retter of Recommendation,” as the kindly but mischievous old man had called it in good natured mimicry of Jack’s accent, was in front of the thesis. So that had a hole in it too, now.

This was a lesson to him for something. Of course. His display of pride at his success had been immediately punished, a load of karma to teach him the humility he had not shown before the powers of the Universe. He frowned deeply. Did he really believe that?

The proposal was in the top drawer. Jack’s thumb print released the lock, he pulled the drawer open, found the section, and put his hand on the document.

Why stretch it out, he thought? Just give him what he wants now. Maybe he’ll choke on it. Jack pulled out three thick file folders.

“The proposal, eight years of progress reports, and three journal articles. There are other copies.”

The gunman gave him that quizzical smile again. “That’s nice.” He waved the gun barrel again, toward the experiment bench.

It was like the gun was a “mouse” and Jack was the little arrow on a computer screen. He had to go where the hand willed. He felt powerless, like a woman in the hands of a rapist.

“Now let’s see the business end.”

“It’s… in this vacuum chamber. I just finished a run. Perhaps you could look just through the observation window?”

Now the gunman laughed. “You may have thirty seconds left to live, but you don’t want to waste a good pump-down. Ha! Fine. I want to see this mother work and I don’t have time for another pump-down either. So, talk me through a diagram.”

Jack did so, with the gun so close to his head that he could still smell the shot. But the picture of his tormentor was filling in. The man had to have worked in a lab at some time—it was in his language. He knew things.

“Finally,” Jack concluded, “the three beams emerge into the mass spectrometer separated by about a microradian. That’s tunable—the momentum detector port is fixed and I change the magnetic field until the beam I want to measure is bent by the correct angle.”

“Yeah, that’s basic. OK, now, show me how you do this. Every step. You won’t be around to help when I… when my clients do this again.”

That sounded pretty final. Of course, Jack’s usefulness would end when the gunman had what he wanted. But the gunman wanted cooperation, and so allowed hope.

If one had to die, Jack thought, one should do it with dignity. That was the way it had been in the land of his ancestors.

Gina, I love you, I don’t want to go. Not now, not this way.

“Let’s get on with it.” The man waved the gun back to the control station. “Boot it up.”

Jack nodded quickly. “The software is still on. Artoo, activate program… no, just a minute.”

If one had to die, one might as well see what one’s apparatus could really do first. Radiation was beside the point, now. Gammas, neutrons, pions shooting right through the chamber walls, the pions decaying into the tightest beam of neutrinos this world had ever seen. He chuckled, inanely, to himself about seeing neutrinos—then stopped.

There were places where you could see neutrinos, and one of them was just a few kilometers around the bend of this tunnel—where Gina worked.

“Please excuse me,” Jack said in a trembling voice. “I should not run that program again because of the radiation. We would both be sterile, I think. I need to be more careful.”

“No shit! OK, you have ten minutes—after which you’ll be trying to do this on one leg. Understand?” The gunman grinned frostily at him again. But there was something eager in the grin, something beneath that hardened exterior that understood. The man must have been a physicist at one time, or at least a physics student. Where?

Here? Before they canceled the supercollider? It would explain how he’d gotten in and out, and been able to hide in the tunnels until Jack’s experiment had succeeded. The gunman would have been a very young man then, Jack’s age—full of dreams. Then they’d let everyone go.

Jack nodded and fumbled through the papers on the desk beneath the computer. There it was! The main evacuation diagram. It showed the neutrino observatory around the curve of the tunnel—sixteen kilometers of solid Texas rock. Sixteen kilometers of near vacuum, to a neutrino. He had to eyeball the angle and be very careful to disguise his purpose—the man watching him would know about the neutrinos.

He brought up the mass spectrometer control simulator and adjusted the magnetic field controls until the negative pion beam was headed in about the right direction.

“We’re just about ready. I’m going to up the output a bit, enough to get some secondary fluorescence out of the annihilation gammas. That way you can see that it’s really working.”

“OK.” The gunman was staring at the computer screen instead of Jack. Maybe if he was distracted enough… “You know we… they were going to make antiprotons here back before…”

Jack snuck a look at him; the man’s eyes seemed to glisten for a moment. Then the moment had passed and the gun was leveled at Jack’s head again. “Let’s get on with it.”

Jack nodded. Would just a steady neutrino signal be enough, he wondered? They might not look at their data for days. He should modulate it.

“Pulse mode,” he said as he made the changes. Explain everything correctly, he told himself, but disguise purpose. “Keyed to the mouse, OK? Less radiation that way. I’m ready to start. If we turn the lights down, you should see flashes at the window.”

“I’ll take my chances with this light.”

“OK. Artoo, activate program nine point three.”

There was a slight snap, and the screen display showed only a slight signal. That was because the beam wasn’t hitting the detector, deliberately.

“I didn’t get the… the beam aligned quite right, so we’re not seeing it on the screen as much as it should—”

“You’re misaligned a bit for the detector, but I saw the flash! Hit it again. Enough antimatter to make a reaction I can see! That will show them. Thirty bloody years, damnit! And they told us it wasn’t worth anything. You didn’t hear that, kid.”

Jack barely had heard him. He was thinking furiously, trying to imagine a message, oblivious to everything outside his own head. What kind of signal would Gina recognize? Jack didn’t know any code—was “SOS” three dashes and three dots or three dots and three dashes? His finger was poised over the mouse key when he spotted a cheat sheet with the physical constants he’d taped to the shelf next to the computer.

Ah—so. He started tapping the key. Six times, wait, six times more, wait, two, wait, six, wait, one, wait, seven, wait, six. That was “h,” Planck’s constant.

“I see it, I see it,” The gunman said, his voice excited, not threatening. “Not too efficient, yet—you’re getting some glow from the positron beam too, aren’t you—on the left?”

Actually, it was the positive pion beam, but Jack didn’t feel like correcting him. “Yes, but only a few. This is just an experiment; it—”

“I understand. Let’s see some more. This is interesting, if it’s this reliable already. You lucky son of a… Hit the key again.”

Trembling, his finger tapped twice, then seven, then once, then eight, two, eight again. That was enough for “e,” the base of natural logarithms. There was no “L” on his cheat sheet, but Jack had an answer to that, one that Gina would be sure to get. The universal gas constant: eight, three, one, six… finally, P? Ah, standard atmosphere pressure, in Pascals.

Then back to Planck’s constant. He tapped slowly, as if at random, looking at the flashes of annihilation energy. He did not have to fake worry about the radiation.

“That’s enough,” the gunman said by the time Jack had tapped his way back to “e” again. “Now, the most critical part of this setup has to be the collision chip, right?”

Jack nodded. “Yes, that was the hardest to make.” Except for the software. There were eight months of work—trial and error nanolithography—in that millimeter-thin, square centimeter chip. It was unique in the Universe—the first and only one that had worked.

“Not hot, is it?”

Jack thought about saying yes, but he’d explained the beam line too carefully. The gunman knew that the meson and baryon beams emerged into the steering magnets without hitting anything.

“No. But it will take a few minutes to dump the vacuum—non-destruc-tively.”

The gunman smiled wryly and waved at him again. “Get with it. You’ve got a briefcase here? With a security tag.”

The bastard had thought of everything, Jack realized. With a cleared case, he could take anything he wanted out of the lab, provided it would fit. Who the hell was he?

Jack told the computer to open the pressure valve, and found his briefcase for the gunman. Brown, pseudoleather, D.O.E. issue—at least that had no sentimental value.

It took ten minutes for the pressure to equalize in the collider chamber, and another ten to unbolt the flange. The liquid helium had already drained and evaporated, but the gold-plated box with the nano-channel chip and the field effect needles was still burning cold to the touch.

Jack ignored the pain, taking a perverse pride in his ability to do so. His ancestors would approve. Pain meant nothing now. He handed the precious device to the gunman and allowed himself a momentary pleasure in the scowl on his tormentor’s face as his fingers closed on his frozen booty. They would both leave skin on it.

“Be careful,” Jack said, with cold irony, “It has not warmed to room temperature yet.”

“Ouch! Now you tell me!”

It was like giving away a child. He’d used the scanning tunneling microscope needle as his waldo to place the last ten thousand atoms on the chip with a precision that he could not yet be sure a machine would match. There were no little bumps and clusters in those final layers—it was a perfect geometric arrangement—a continuous superconducting layer with deliberately asynchronous flux pins to prevent resonant quenching. He had bound it against its titanic magnetic pressure with a monomolecular fullerene belt. That had taken him six months to get right.

The man produced a small paper bag and dropped the device in it.

Jack shut his eyes. An end, he told himself, came to all things.

The man put the bag in the briefcase, with all of Jack’s documents.

“There is no way I can talk you out of this?” Jack ventured.

The man shook his head and gestured with the gun again. “Move over there and face the wall.”

There was about a meter of unused wall between the vacuum pump and the computer rack. Two-centimeter aluminum utility conduit tubes ran along it in a bundle at about waist level. Otherwise it was bare concrete. The last thing, Jack thought, that I will see in my life. “May I leave a note for my fiancee?”

“We’ve been at this for three hours. If you haven’t figured out how to do that, it’s too late now. I let you play with your apparatus longer than I should. Once upon a time, I…” The man shook his head. “You’ve already done more than most people in a lifetime. Take that thought with you—but it’s reality time now. Face the wall!”

“I could do more,” Jack said, with as much dignity as he could muster as he turned. “If this science once meant something to you, let me live. Let me continue my research.” There were a million undignified things he could do to try to rush the man and struggle with him. But they would all be ineffective—the man was at least twice his size and armed. Jack would not give him the excuse of self-defense.

He stared at the wall for what must have been a minute. Get it over with, he thought. Finally, he started to turn back.

“Don’t! I don’t owe this idiot world and its idiot people a goddamn thing!”

The man was so close, Jack could smell his breath and thought he could feel the cold of the gun. What was taking him so long? He almost felt like shouting “get it over with.” But no. The man was clearly troubled—Jack’s words must have had an effect. He was an intelligent man, who once had thought to dedicate his life to acquiring knowledge instead of money. The thing to do, Jack thought, was to let the gunman’s conscience work for him, a kind of psychological jujitsu.

If Jack gave him no excuse, perhaps he would not shoot. He had to take his mind away—to do nothing as hard as he could. He sought refuge in “the Kubota effect” and concentrated on the wall. He tried to imagine himself so small that he could climb inside the block, between the grains of concrete, and win his way through, then up through the soil into the bright sunshine above. The smell of the gunman faded from his mind.

He imagined doing this hand in hand with Gina—exploring the inside of the concrete block the way they were going to explore the Universe together, cataloging passages like neutron stars, doing papers on the stochastic properties of molecular bonding in Portland cement and the topological similarities between cement and the large scale structure of the Universe.

The bullet, when it came, would interrupt some very important work.

Sounds made their way to him. Somewhere, in the distance, or above him, he heard the whine of one of the electric carts they used to traverse the unused tunnel. Perhaps he and Gina could lay tracks for such carts through the pores of their concrete block.

An interesting endeavor, he thought. On the microscopic level there was a universe of passages in this one block—it would take a lifetime. Perhaps the way to approach it was with many machines, Von Neumann machines could do it, but they would have to be very tiny. Like his chip. He could use the same apparatus, with some modifications.

“Jack! Jack!”

“Gina?” For a crazy confused moment, Jack thought the voice came from the cement, but no, no. He snapped back to reality. How had Gina come so soon? She’d get shot! He yelled right at the block, sure that it would reflect the sound, and heedless of the consequences. “Gina! Get away! He’s got a gun!”

Then Jack spun around, hoping to draw the gunman’s fire to himself. But there was no one there.

Dark-haired Gina drove into his laboratory’s light pool from around the bend of the tunnel, left her cart in the center, and threw herself into his waiting arms. “Oh, thank God you’re all right! What happened?”

“Oh. Oh, Gina. Oh Gina.” That was all Jack could say. “Someone stole my plans and my chip, and our papers. I thought he would shoot me.”

“It’s OK, Jack. Whoever it was is gone. There’s no one here. It’s been half an hour since you signaled me.”

They held each other for long minutes. Finally Jack let out a long sigh and caressed her arms as he released his embrace. “He knew what he was doing. There was something about him, as if he were, for a moment, involved again in something he cared about. He was one of us once, I think, a scientist or an engineer, on the supercollider. But he’d fallen to this. And he was bitter about it. I made him wrestle with his conscience. I didn’t give him any more reason to shoot. But he stood there forever—it was like he couldn’t make up his mind about which world should live. Mine or his.”

“You’d never fall that far.”

“I think he was supposed to kill me.” Jack shook his head. Entropy was gaining on the world above tunnels, these relics of an era when people could do things collectively. Now, the dogs were eating dogs, and people had to carefully avoid dogfights. Finally, he managed a smile. “When I am too old to fall in such a way, then I will judge him. What took you so long?”

“When we realized those were physical constants coming through, one of the grad students grabbed a C.R.C. and sat down with it for what seemed like forever.” Gina giggled. “Finally he turns around an asks why would anyone send h… e… R… P?”

“It must have taken me a minute to figure it out. But then I knew it was you, where you were, and that you needed help! I called security and headed for your lab.”

There were other footsteps in the tunnel. Uniformed security guards appeared around the bend.

Gina put up a hand. “It’s all right now—he’s gone.”

A lean, dark-haired security officer nodded. He was carrying Jack’s briefcase. “We took this off of someone without a valid badge; he had a thirty-year-old key that still worked. Unauthorized, of course. Yours?”

With a trembling hand, Jack reached for the briefcase and thumbed the combination lock. Inside was the paper bag with the small, gold-plated box that contained his life’s work. He shut his eyes and bowed his head briefly. He knew now that he could leave that life with dignity. But, fortunately, not just yet.

Jack nodded to the officer. “The man who was carrying this?” he asked.

“He surrendered and asked for protective custody. Says he’s doing research’ for the Myanmar government and wants to quit.” The guard looked Jack in the eye. “He had a Berretta nine millimeter on him—fired recently.”

Jack gestured to the punctured file cabinet. Then the tension of the last hours escaped him and he collapsed into his chair with an audible groan. Gina rushed to help him.

“Mr. Kubota, are you all right?” the security officer asked.

“Just tired.” Jack put his right arm around Gina and gave the man a big grin. “As rong… long as this lady loves me, I am just fine.”