Page 41 of The Presidents Shadow

“Tapper!” yells Margo. “Dear God, don’t you know the proper order in which to relay information?”

I reach out, covering her hand with mine. “He’s not married,” I remind her. “He hasn’t had that kind of training.”

“Well,getmarried,” Margo snaps at Tapper.

“Or,” Burbank suggests, “just go ahead and share the good news.”

CHAPTER 57

“HER NAME IS Langi Singh,” Tapper says. “She is originally from Pakistan. Now she is a professor of physics at the Technical University of Denmark. That’s the good news.” He looks carefully at Margo, as if checking if he can continue. She waves him on.

“She’s currently in the intensive care unit of Rigshospitalet, the most respected hospital in Copenhagen.”

Tapper tells us that her survival was miraculous. Thousands died in the tsunami at the awards ceremony, but for reasons that no one can discern, Ms. Singh, a thirty-five-year-old woman who had never even learned to swim, made it through. She was found unconscious on the penthouse roof of an apartment building in Nyhavn, a fashionable section of the city. The woman was alive, but both her legs had been broken, and she had lost total hearing in her right ear. Equally serious, her right lung was filled to near capacity with water, dirt, and grit.

Burbank joins Margo, Tapper, and me in the smallintensive care room where Langi Singh lies, hooked up to two IV drips as well as an oxygen nose clasp. Her legs are swaddled in large casts and suspended by wires from above her.

Ms. Singh’s eyes are closed when we enter, but she must feel our very presence, because as we approach her bed, her eyes open.

Margo, with a gentle voice and authentic concern, speaks. “Good morning, Ms. Singh. Are you feeling well enough to talk?”

The injured woman replies with her own question, her voice surprisingly strong.

“Are you doctors?” she asks.

“No,” Margo says. “We are here to investigate the great tsunami, the one that you managed to survive.”

“If you call this survival,” Ms. Singh says, nodding slightly toward her bound and bandaged body.

“We understand, but if you could, we are hoping you might answer a few questions,” says Margo.

The woman in the bed asks simply, “Danish?”

“No, we’re American,” I say. “Why do you ask?”

“Can yougetme a Danish, I mean,” Langi says, a smile curling the edge of her mouth as she nods toward a side table. “My arms work, so I can feed myself,” she says. “Just can’t reach them.”

We all laugh along with her as Margo hands over the pastry. This woman clearly will be able to survive.

Carefully, in between bites, she begins to tell us her story.

CHAPTER 58

ALMOST A YEAR ago, Langi Singh received a research proposal from a man who told her that he was constructing the largest and most powerful microwave radiation generator the world had ever seen.

She pauses, a pastry halfway to her mouth, to side-eye us all. “Do not imagine a huge microwave for one of your midwestern potlucks. No. This man was constructing a weapon of mass destruction.”

The writer was submitting parts of his plan and proposal to Professor Singh anonymously. This was, of course, for reasons of confidentiality and self-protection, but also because when he had previously shared his idea with a few colleagues, they had mocked him. Because of Singh’s successes in the same field and her reputation as a forward-thinker, the anonymous writer thought she might be interested but still wanted to be very cautious. He worried that his idea was so great, his blueprints so perfect, that others would steal it.

“Frankly, I was intrigued,” Langi Singh tells us. “Not that a male academic would be worried that his idea was so brilliant someone would steal it. No, that’s pretty standard,” she says. Then she holds up her index finger, biting another pastry in half before she continues to speak.

“It was,” she says, “an outlandish idea. At that moment, I was working on a molecular research project designed to modify and access the benign atomic particles in simple coal, and I simply did not have time to deal with a new project. I emailed back to him and said as much.”

Langi then tells us that this refusal caused a flood of dramatic and frightening communications from the passionate inventor. They were so unnerving that she can recite them even now—and they are identical to the threats that Dr. Nakashima was sent in Kyoto, holding promises of destruction and annihilation.

She answers, unprompted, the question that I am about to ask.

“He always signed the communications with the letterh,” she says. “Until he began signing them ‘Hephaestus.’”

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