Page 59 of The Presidents Shadow

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 letter h, ” she says. “Until he began signing them ‘Hephaestus.’”

“Hephaestus,” repeats Tapper. “That’s a Roman god.”

“Not quite,” Professor Singh corrects him. “A Greek god. The god of fire and volcanoes, among other things. Hephaestus was also incredibly ugly, so I found it to be an odd choice.”

None of us needs further interpretation to make the connection between the recent natural disasters and the power of Hephaestus. The similarity is obvious, maybe too obvious.

Now Langi Singh begins the most astonishing part of her story.

She says that on the morning of the Copenhagen awards ceremony she received a text message that has haunted her ever since the tsunami, the words never leaving her mind.

Ignore me today and you will never ignore me again

My plan will succeed today. You will see and suffer

At the award service all attendees will be awarded with pain

As we all confront the content of the message, the hospital room becomes silent except for the soft whirring buzz of the medical machinery.

Finally, Margo asks, “So you avoided the award ceremony because of the message you received?”

“Perhaps that text was the reason,” she says, shrugging.

“I am a woman in a competitive field. Threats are not unknown to me. I hated the idea of bowing to him, or even giving this madman enough credit to take him seriously. I had my own studies to concern me, and so I chose to skip the ceremony and proceed with my work instead.”

“A wise choice,” I say. “And one I am glad you made.”