OVER SOUTH CAROLINA, EN ROUTE TO DULLES, VIRGINIA
Ana Thorne cursed and pushed redial on her secure satellite phone. The CIA was still working out the bugs in its dedicated worldwide phone network, which had been put in place after the embarrassing “outing” in Lebanon of several of its agents, whose commercial cell phones had been hacked. Of course, the fact that Thorne was now traveling at 480 knots at an altitude of 20,000 feet didn’t help, either. She pressed the phone to her ear and waited for Bill McCreary to pick up again.
“Yeah?” said McCreary after the first ring.
“Bill, it’s me again. The call dropped off. What were you saying about the names I gave you?” An hour earlier, she’d asked McCreary to research the people Reynolds had identified as Dr. Holzberg’s “acolytes” at Princeton in the late 1950s.
“As I was saying,” said McCreary, “Gary Freer worked for Bell Labs for thirty years and then Xerox. Retired in 1998. Died of colon cancer in 2005. He’s survived by his wife and two daughters, and seven grandchildren. I couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary about him. Irwin Michelson disappeared in 1959, just about the same time as Holzberg. Official report was a small plane crash near Portland, Oregon. But I suspect he was involved in Winter Solstice. I bet he was down in the Thurmond lab with Holzberg.”
“Makes sense. What about the woman, Opal?”
“Yeah, I wanted to ask you about her. Are you sure you got that name right? I couldn’t find anything about an ‘Opal’ that matches the information you gave me. No record of anyone with that name ever being at Princeton or in any way associated with the Institute of Advanced Studies. Is it possible you got the name wrong?”
“I don’t think so,” said Ana. “I wrote it down and double-checked the spelling with Reynolds. I’m almost positive that’s the name he gave me. Did you come up with any women at Princeton in the late 1950s who might have been part of Dr. Holzberg’s inner circle?”
“Nope.”
“That’s odd.” Ana’s voice trailed off as a new thought suddenly occurred to her. “Opie,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“One of the names Dr. Holzberg muttered before he died was Opie, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Could be a nickname for Opal, right?”
“Could be. But I still didn’t come up with any women matching the description you gave me.”
“That’s weird,” said Ana quietly. Opal the mystery woman. “Hey, can you check one more name for me?”
“Sure, who?”
“Benjamin Fulcher.”
“You mean Nobel Prize–winning, famous physicist Benjamin Fulcher? You want me to check him out?”
“Yeah, I do. Thanks.”
Ana hung up the phone and reclined in her seat, pondering the day’s events. Something just didn’t add up.