Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  “Actually,” Dante said, “that’s not quite true.”

  Charlie’s pulse grew even faster. “What do you have?”

  “Proof that Pandora existed. And a clue to where it might be hidden.”

  “From where?”

  “Einstein himself. The night he died.”

  Charlie frowned. “The CIA has had a clue to Pandora’s location for all this time and has never been able to find it?”

  “Apparently we don’t understand the clue.”

  “And you think I can figure it out? When all those other thousands of people couldn’t?”

  “Why not? You’re as smart as Einstein. . . .”

  “No one has ever been as smart as Einstein!”

  “Well, we need you to be.”

  Charlie stared at Dante, struck by the harsh tone of his voice. Suddenly she understood the urgency of the mission. She knew why the CIA had sent a jet for her, why they couldn’t even wait for her to finish her day of skiing before apprehending her.

  “Someone bad has found Pandora?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Dante said. “But they will soon. Because unlike us, they already know where it is.”

  SEVEN

  Limassol ferry port

  The Isle of Cyprus

  The people on the docks never saw it coming.

  The nuclear bomb detonated without warning. Although it was barely the size of a suitcase, easy to smuggle aboard a passenger ferry, it created a staggering amount of devastation.

  Everything within a mile radius was vaporized. In the three miles beyond that, buildings shattered, cars were tossed like leaves, and people were killed in an instant by the shock wave. Those were the lucky ones. The people farther from the explosion found their world destroyed, their cities devastated by blast winds, their bodies scorched by heat and poisoned by radiation. As the mushroom cloud rose into the sky, they all saw that the End of Days had come.

  Alexei Kolyenko blinked, and the fire and carnage vanished. Before his eyes, reality returned. Life continued on the docks as before, thousands of people unloading cargo, shuttling between ferries, lined up at customs. They went about their lives in blissful ignorance, assuming they were safe, thinking that the punishment Alexei had imagined would never come.

  But it would. Alexei would bring it to them soon.

  Not to these people, of course. Limassol was too small, a mere maritime crossroads. No, when Alexei and his men set off the real bombs, they would target much larger cities, places teeming with people of inferior races. Cairo. Tehran. Karachi. Tel Aviv. Bombay.

  He would destroy them all.

  The day was close. Alexei knew it. God had willed it. Pandora hadn’t been in Bern, but now, thanks to a fortuitous twist of fate, he knew where Einstein’s equation was really hidden. After ten days of arduous travel, Alexei and his team were almost there.

  They filed through the crowded docks, passing from one ferry to the next, two of them pretending to be friends on holiday, the others going solo, acting like businessmen anxious to get home. All were respectful and courteous at customs, cautious not to arouse suspicion.

  After Bern, Interpol would be hunting for them—and the CIA, too. But Interpol and the CIA were like blind men fumbling in the dark. They had no idea where Alexei and his men were. The manhunt was probably still focused on Switzerland, the authorities assuming his team couldn’t possibly get this far. But it wasn’t hard to pass from one European country to another if you put a little effort into it.

  Even in these days of heightened security, there were still giant holes on the borders of most countries. And even if they were patrolled, the guards were far more worried about refugees funneling into the west than white men heading east.

  Refugees, Alexei thought hatefully. Europe was teeming with them these days. They were streaming in by the millions, leaving their own wretched countries behind to ruin others. They were disgusting, foul, uneducated people who brought nothing but trouble. Their customs were abominable, their languages shrill—and when they assimilated, they were even worse. Then they stole jobs that should have gone to real people.

  Alexei had seen it happen time and time again. In Germany, his home country, he had lost many jobs to immigrants, as had his friends. The cities of Berlin and Munich and Nuremberg, which had once been beautiful and respectable, were now cesspits. Everywhere you looked, there were people of inferior races: working in stores, repairing appliances, driving cabs. Restaurants filled with immigrants served repugnant food from far-off lands instead of the food Alexei had grown up with. And unless someone did something about it, the surge would never stop. These people bred like rats, overpopulating their own countries. There were now millions of them with no place to go except Europe.

  But Alexei knew how to deal with rats. You couldn’t merely kill the ones who had invaded your home. More would keep coming. But if you found their nests and wiped them out there, then your rat problem would be done.

  Alexei knew he was the one who would do this. God had chosen him to do it. How else could you explain how fate had pointed him to Pandora?

  It had happened twice in his life.

  The first time had been two years earlier. He had been at a bar in his hometown, grumbling with his friends about how they couldn’t find work, about how the immigrants had taken all the good jobs. The bar was crowded, even though it was the middle of the day. There were many men like him in Europe these days, idle and angry. Alexei was at the bar most days, and most days were like one another. Until the day fate changed everything.

  An old man sat beside him at the bar. A man Alexei had never seen before. The old man was angry too.

  Alexei was complaining about the immigrants, as usual, when the old man suddenly interrupted him. “Do you really want to do something about these people?” the man demanded. “Or do you want to just sit on a barstool all day, wasting your life away?”

  “I want to do something!” Alexei told him.

  “Then I have a job for you,” the old man said, and proceeded to tell Alexei an incredible story. He had been drinking too, and at first Alexei thought the story might be the ravings of an alcoholic. It seemed the man had tried to tell the story to many people in the bar that day, only to be shunned. But Alexei didn’t turn the man away. He listened. And the more he listened, the more excited he became.

  The old man had been a KGB spy in Eastern Europe for many years, undermining the Americans. Somewhere along the line, he and his team had captured an American spy. The penalty for espionage in their country was death, and the American was a man of weak nature. He cowardly offered secrets in return for his life. The old man and his fellow agents listened as the American spilled his guts—and then they killed him anyhow.

  One of the secrets the American had told was about the night the great scientist Albert Einstein had died. The American had been a junior agent back then, on an assignment he considered pointless, monitoring Einstein’s house. For months it had been dull and boring. It was almost as if Einstein knew he was being listened to. But on the night he died, Einstein was given morphine—and with his defenses down, he had finally said something of interest. He had spoken of an equation called Pandora. The most dangerous equation of all time. And what was more, he had given a clue to its whereabouts.

  The CIA hadn’t been able to make sense of the clue—and, as it turned out, neither had he and his fellow spies in the KGB, although they had followed dead ends for years. However, the old man now had one more idea as to where the clue might lead . . . but he was too elderly to follow through with it. He was looking for a younger man, or really a team of younger men, to complete what he had been unable to.

  He believed Pandora was in Bern, Switzerland.

  Alexei was intrigued, and he had friends who were interested in Pandora as well, but they didn’t have the money to go to Switzerland at the time, even though the country was right next door to Germany. It had taken months to scrape the funds together, working the few lousy part
-time jobs they could get, thanks to the refugees. The old man had died in the meantime.

  Alexei and his team called themselves Das Furii. And they eventually made their way to Bern to see if Pandora was where the old man had said it was.

  It wasn’t.

  But then the second twist of fate occurred, when the next clue to Pandora’s location presented itself. Which was why Alexei and the rest of Das Furii were now here, in Limassol, crossing the Mediterranean.

  It had been difficult to get here from Bern. He and his friends had to make it over the Alps, in winter. But they were all strong men of the superior race, built for survival and devoted to their cause. They had made it over the mountains into Italy, then taken a train to the coast, where they boarded the ferry to Limassol.

  Technically, they weren’t even entering Limassol; they were merely passing from one ferry to another at the ship terminal. Alexei was the first to reach the boat that would take them to their final destination. The customs agent gave him little scrutiny. He merely checked Alexei’s boarding pass and passport, then stamped both and waved him toward the gangplank.

  As Alexei headed up it, a great commotion grabbed his attention. A fishing boat had arrived at the dock, filled with Arab refugees. Alexei had learned much Arabic over the years, from the people who had flooded his homeland. He wasn’t fluent, but he could piece together their story. In desperation, they had tried crossing the Mediterranean in a boat that was too small for all of them, with no training for the sea. The boat had sunk, of course. Many had drowned, and those who had survived had floundered in the water for days until the fishermen had rescued them. Now they were barely alive, their bodies shrunken, their skin blistered, begging for help.

  Alexei turned his back on them in disgust, angry at the fishermen for taking mercy on them. They should have been left to drown. The world would have been a better place without them.

  Alexei would make the world a better place once he found Pandora. A much better place.

  Behind him, the final member of Das Furii ascended the gangplank, the last passenger to board the ferry. The others were already aboard. There had been no troubles. None of the customs agents had given them a second glance.

  The ferry pulled out of the harbor, leaving Europe behind and heading into the Mediterranean, taking Alexei toward the place where Einstein’s last equation was hidden.

  Soon, the power of God would be in his possession, and he would no longer have to imagine what Armageddon would look like. He would make the whole world see for itself.

  EIGHT

  On the CIA jet, five miles above the eastern United States, Charlie asked, “Who are we up against?”

  “They call themselves Das Furii,” answered Dante.

  “The Furies,” Charlie translated.

  “Correct. They’re a small terrorist sect from Eastern Europe. White supremacists, anti-immigration. The members are from a few different countries: Poland, Austria, Germany—but they’re based in Germany and communicate primarily in German. Until recently they were working on a small scale, attacking immigrants: smashing windows, throwing Molotov cocktails into refugee camps, a few cases of assault.”

  “Quality people,” Charlie said sarcastically.

  “Sadly, there are plenty of groups like that in the world. We can’t even keep track of them all. But then, a few months ago, the Furies shifted their behavior. They stopped their usual attacks and headed for Bern, Switzerland.”

  “Where Einstein lived when he developed the theory of relativity. There’s a museum about him there, in his old house.”

  “Exactly. In fact, the Furies were paying a lot of attention to that museum. They rented an apartment close by and started making visits to the museum archives.”

  “Surely if the CIA has been looking for Pandora all these years, they’ve searched that museum.”

  “Dozens of times. Hundreds maybe. And they’ve always come up dry.”

  “Then why was it a big deal if the Furies were visiting the place? It’s a dead end.”

  “It’s a big deal because they were the first terrorist cell to ever show an interest in the archives. So Interpol started paying attention, which made us start paying attention. We alerted our agents in the area. And they reported back that the Furies weren’t merely interested in Einstein. They seemed to know about Pandora.”

  “Which was also a first?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “We eavesdropped on their conversations. Not only did we hear them discussing Pandora, but it became evident that they had”—Dante paused, choosing his words carefully—“sensitive information about the equation. Information they shouldn’t have had.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Knowledge of some recordings that, until that point, the CIA thought they had kept secret.”

  “How’d they get the recordings?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Charlie polished off her sandwich, considering all this. “These guys are chasing a dead end, and they did such a lousy job of it that they tipped off Interpol and the CIA and then blabbed about their top-secret information. They don’t sound like a very effective terrorist cell. They sound like a bunch of stupid thugs.”

  “Most terrorist cells aren’t exactly full of Einsteins. They tend to be mostly angry young men who just want to lash out at the world. . . .”

  “Men,” Charlie repeated pointedly.

  “Yes,” Dante agreed. “And their methods tend to be blunt and primitive. They use pipe bombs and other rudimentary explosives. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, was carried out with box cutters. But just because these people aren’t brilliant doesn’t make them any less dangerous. In fact, you could argue that it makes them more dangerous, because they don’t realize the full consequences of their actions. And if they get ahold of Pandora, then they’ll be really dangerous.”

  “Are they still in Bern?”

  “No.” Dante broke eye contact with Charlie as he answered, indicating he was hiding something.

  Charlie didn’t call him on it—for the moment. “Where are they now?”

  Dante’s gaze returned to hers. “We don’t know. They vanished from the city ten days ago. Interpol set up a dragnet, but somehow they slipped through.”

  “Why did they leave so suddenly? Did they figure out you guys were watching them?”

  Dante’s eyes flicked away again. “Of course not.”

  Charlie looked toward the cockpit, checking to see what Agent Moon’s response to all this was. Moon didn’t appear to be paying attention to the conversation at all, and seemed completely focused on flying the plane. Charlie suspected that Moon was listening to everything she said, however. She got the idea that Moon was the type who observed far more than she spoke and who didn’t miss much.

  Beyond Moon, on the ancient tech of the jet’s instrument panel, Charlie could see they were closing in on eastern Virginia, where the CIA was headquartered.

  Charlie returned her attention to Dante and asked, “So now you want me to help you figure out where the Furies went?”

  Dante said, “I want you to help me figure out where they’re going. So we can beat them there and keep Pandora out of our enemies’ hands once and for all.”

  “I have a demand first.”

  “You’re in no position to make demands.”

  “Actually, I’m in a great position to make demands. You’re in no position to deny them.”

  “We’re talking about the safety of the free world here,” Dante snapped. “You’d put your own interests before that?”

  “I would prefer not to go to jail,” Charlie said. “Or juvenile hall or wherever else you’re thinking of sending me.”

  “I thought you said you were innocent.”

  “I am innocent, but the CIA doesn’t seem to agree with that. So, if I’m going to do you a solid here, I want a guarantee that you’ll get off m
y back and let me be. Forever. I want a signed letter from the director of the CIA claiming there’s no evidence for any government agency to convict me of any crime. There will be no attempt to punish me in any way. After I locate Pandora for you, I’m a free person, legally entitled to all my assets.”

  Dante chewed on that for a while before admitting, “I suppose we could manage that.”

  “Can you manage it now?”

  Dante sighed, then picked up the briefcase by his seat, unlocked it, removed a letter, and handed it to Charlie.

  Charlie read it over. It was exactly what she had just asked for. “You weren’t going to give this to me unless I demanded it?”

  “CIA policy is to not make offers like that right away. If the criminals in question don’t think to protect themselves, that’s their fault.”

  “I’m not a criminal,” Charlie said heatedly.

  “Well, if you can find Pandora, then the CIA will agree with you.”

  Charlie stuck her tongue out at Dante.

  He laughed at her. The kid might have put up a mature front, but behind it all she was still twelve.

  Charlie folded the letter and put it in her pocket. Then she looked back at Dante and said, “So, are you ever going to tell me what this ‘sensitive information’ the Furies has is?”

  Dante opened his briefcase again. “What I’m about to show you is classified. I can’t tell you how many strings I had to pull to get you clearance to see it. As far as the CIA is concerned, it doesn’t exist.” He took out some papers and passed them to Charlie.

  Charlie took a look at them and gasped in surprise.

  NINE

  The pages Charlie held were photocopies of photocopies, so many generations down the line, the paper was gray and the print was barely legible. It was a typed transcript of a conversation, although it began halfway through:

  MIC#5—MASTER BEDROOM (CONT’D)

  DOCTOR: I doubt he’ll make it through the night. He’s beyond anything I can do . . . although I could ease his pain with some morphine. . . .