Excerpt from Trinity by Louisa Hall, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That's what it seemed like at the time: that because I couldn't understand Opp, I couldn't trust myself to understand anyone or anything else. Because for reasons I couldn't comprehend in that moment, Opp wasn't content to stay where he was supposed to, at that camp in the desert, sleeping in the house we gave him to share with his wife, waking up early to look after those weapons.

Because he set off on that reckless escape from the mesa, and fled back to the city, where he took that girl to the Mexican restaurant.

I couldn't understand why he did it. Or why he thought he could do it. He had agents on him at all times. There was a childishness to the whole thing, as though he thought that if he couldn't see us, we couldn't see him and catch what he was doing.

I just didn't get it. It contributed to my sense that we were sliding into a new kind of chaos. As if Opp himself—coming back to the city, spending the night with that girl—had knocked the whole world off its axis.

Now, of course, I can see there were other factors at work. Youth, for example. And stupidity. The fact that we were at war, and the general randomness of existence.

Some planes stay up, some planes go down. Some secrets come out right away, and some of them stay secret forever. I know that as well as I know the back of my own hand, but even now, all these years later, if I step into that restaurant I can start to feel dizzy.

It's as if things might start falling to pieces again, now that the door's been reopened. Then it's as tempting as ever to line up all the facts as they happened.


FOR A MOMENT, FOR INSTANCE, WHEN OPP STEPPED OUT THE BACK door of the Radiation Lab, he stood still and stared out at the bay.

He didn't move. He had the unfocused stare of a blind man, and for a moment I wondered if he needed glasses.

All day, he'd proceeded crisply through his appointments. I assumed he knew that we were behind him. He seemed to be checking off all his preapproved duties, acting in the exaggeratedly purposeful way a person would act if he knew he'd been followed.

From the airport, he headed straight for the Rad Lab, as he'd promised to do. The whole point of the trip, as he'd explained it to Security at Los Alamos, was to go back to Berkeley to interview potential assistants. He spoke only to the graduate students he'd listed. Everything went according to plan. The whole trip was running perfectly smoothly until that strange moment when he stepped out the back door and peered off into the distance, as if he'd been blinded.

Then, abruptly, he headed off toward the station. I followed behind him. He was walking fast, heading down University Avenue. That hadn't been preapproved. I wondered if he thought that he'd lost us, simply by stepping out the back door of the Rad Lab.

It was a sunny afternoon. He was wearing that porkpie hat. One of his hands was stuffed in his pocket. The other hand was curled in a fist, and he refused to look over his shoulder.

Not once, the whole time, did he look back to see me. That's how I knew he was on his way to do something we would have refused. He wouldn't look back. He stayed on the shady side of the street and shifted his weight side to side if he ever had to stop at a streetlight.

Even when he got to the station, he didn't stop moving. He charged through the front doors and through the main hall as if he planned to sail straight on out again through the opposite exit.

He was still sailing when he glanced up at the departures list. Overhead, on the board, the slats clacked away briskly, like dominoes falling. Then, for the first time since he left the Rad Lab, he pulled up short. He must have realized his gate wasn't open.


FOR A MINUTE, HE STAYED WHERE HE WAS, LOOKING UP AT THE board. Even then, he refused to glance back.

Excerpted from Trinity by Louisa Hall. Copyright © 2018 by Louisa Hall. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.