Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation
Page 11
But none of that would get her out of this mess. If the CIA didn’t know where she was, she would have to take care of herself.
Even though Charlie apparently hadn’t learned enough about defending herself in her martial arts classes, she had learned how to be calm and to focus. That had been one of the first lessons. So she willed herself to take deep, slow breaths. Her heartbeat slowed. She focused on her surroundings and used logic to figure out her situation.
Given the gap in time between the shots, she could assume there was only one shooter. She hadn’t heard the gun, so it must have had a silencer. And given the angle with which the bullets had struck the cars, she could guess the shooter’s location. This portion of the campus was built onto the slope of a relatively steep canyon. On the other side was the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, thick with trees and shrubs. The shooter was probably in there somewhere, positioned to cover Marko’s escape.
Charlie lay on her belly, looking under the car beside her. Einstein’s book was still in the parking lot, only a few feet away from her, and yet there was no way she could get to it without exposing herself to another gunshot. In fact, she couldn’t go anywhere without exposing herself to danger.
She was away from the heart of campus now, far from the crowds, and it was surprisingly quiet. She could hear birds chirping, insects buzzing—and, in the distance, footsteps moving across the asphalt.
Looking beneath the cars, she saw feet coming her way. Decent shoes and pant cuffs. A professor. Someone who had arrived too late to witness her fight with Marko or hear the gunshots. The professor was walking without any concern at all.
The feet stopped by a car and climbed in. The car started and backed out of its spot.
Charlie realized this was her chance.
She got to her hands and knees and turned around, so she was now facing the way she’d come, looking toward the book. Not far away, the skateboard lay upside down where it had landed after Marko slipped on it. Charlie ran the numbers in her head, figuring out exactly how fast she had to move to make this work.
The professor’s car was coming her way, moving slowly through the parking lot. The professor apparently didn’t see the unconscious terrorist hidden in the landscaping; he didn’t brake at all.
As the professor’s car passed the line of vehicles Charlie was crouched in, shielding her from the sniper, Charlie sprang from her hiding place. Staying low, she grabbed the book with her right hand while flipping the skateboard onto its wheels with her left. Then she belly flopped onto the skateboard while grasping the underside of the car, directly below the passenger door. Her timing was just right. She didn’t reveal so much as a glimpse of her body to the sniper.
The professor, unaware she was hitching a ride, slowly drove out of the parking lot, towing her to safety.
Beyond the lot, on the campus road, the professor picked up speed. Charlie did her best to hang on, but the skateboard wasn’t in great shape and started to wobble wildly. The last thing Charlie wanted was to escape a sniper and then get run over in a dumb skateboarding accident, so once she felt she was well out of the sniper’s range, she let go of the car and veered away from it, cruising to a stop behind the cover of a building.
A sign over the door announced what was studied in the building: THEORETICAL PHYSICS. Charlie took that as a good sign.
If the sniper was at the botanical gardens, they would have to come through campus security to get anywhere close to her now, which she doubted would happen. She hopped off the skateboard, sprang to her feet, and turned her attention to the book.
It was old and weathered, though it had probably been in that shape before being sent to the archives. Due to the perfect climate control of the vault, even after being in storage for more than seven decades, it didn’t have a hint of mustiness or mold.
Charlie flipped open the cover and gasped with excitement. There, on the front page, in faded pencil, were the handwritten words “Property of A. Einstein.”
When the book had fallen from Marko’s hands, the cover had pulled loose from the binding, revealing a small tear in it. It looked as though a slit had been made in the inside of the cover, then painstakingly patched up again. It might have escaped even Charlie’s notice if the damage to the book hadn’t reopened it.
She jammed a fingernail into the slit and pulled backward, tearing away the inside of the cover, revealing a piece of paper hidden beneath it.
Before Charlie had a chance to look at it, someone grabbed her from behind.
Charlie twirled, breaking free from her attacker’s grasp and bringing her elbow up high, intending to break their nose.
Her attacker anticipated the move, sidestepping her and wrenching the book from her grasp as she spun.
Dante.
Milana and Bendavid were with him.
“Why didn’t you bring this to me?” Dante asked, annoyed.
Charlie felt annoyance blossom in herself as well. “I think the phrase you’re looking for is ‘Good job, Charlie. Thanks for doing our work for us.’ ” She pointed at the book in Dante’s hands. “I nearly got killed for that!”
“Because you were reckless and impulsive,” Dante said angrily. “Instead of waiting for us, you ran off after Marko yourself. You take a couple self-defense classes and you think you can fight a terrorist?”
“I wouldn’t have had to fight him if you’d done your job!” Charlie yelled, louder than she’d expected to. “If it weren’t for me, the Furies would have Pandora right now.”
“We’d have recovered it,” Bendavid said.
“Yeah, right,” Charlie muttered. “By the way, there’s a sniper in the botanical gardens. And I left Marko unconscious in the bushes. You guys might want to round them up.”
Dante was examining the book, noticing what Charlie had found. “The sniper’s probably long gone,” he said. “And he took care of Marko before he left.”
Charlie felt her anger instantly change to fear. “He shot his own man?”
“So he wouldn’t talk when we got him,” Milana said coldly.
Charlie felt like she would have thrown up again if her stomach hadn’t been empty.
Rats came running down the road, flushed and out of breath, sweat soaking through his shirt.
“Where’s Alexei?” Bendavid asked him.
Rats could only shrug. “He had too big a head start on me. I lost him in the crowd.”
Bendavid frowned in a way that indicated Rats had failed where she wouldn’t have. Rats noticed this and simmered in response.
Dante brutally tore the cover off the Holmes anthology. The piece of paper Einstein had concealed there fluttered out.
Milana caught it before it hit the ground. Everyone leaned in to look.
It was a piece of notebook paper, decades old, veined with parallel blue lines. There was a sprawl of numbers on it:
Despite her exhaustion and her nausea, Charlie’s heart raced with excitement. She was staring at something Einstein himself had written down and hidden, something that no one else had ever seen except the great man. Something that would change the world.
Her next thought caused her considerably more concern.
“My God,” Bendavid whispered. “We found it. We found Pandora.”
“No, we haven’t,” Charlie said.
The others all turned to her, confused.
“What are you talking about?” Rats demanded.
“That isn’t an equation,” Charlie told him. “It’s a clue.”
• • •
“I could kill them all,” Oleg told Alexei.
They stood on the slope of a hill on the opposite side of the canyon, in the botanical garden, under the cover of a grove of eucalyptus trees. Alexei was winded after shaking the CIA agent who had chased him across the campus. The remaining five Furies had gathered here, which had been the plan if anything went wrong. And things had definitely gone wrong.
“They’re all behind that building,” Oleg went on, pointing to th
e Department of Theoretical Physics. “I just need to find the right angle, and I can take them all out. It will only take a few minutes.”
“We don’t have a few minutes,” Alexei said. “We need to get out of here before the police arrive. Or worse, the Mossad.” He didn’t add that he doubted Oleg would be able to pick off one of the CIA agents if he was lucky, and that wouldn’t solve anything. The CIA would just take cover and fire back, the Mossad would swarm the botanical gardens, and the Furies would be captured while the CIA ended up with Pandora for good.
Alexei started to lead the way up the hill, toward where they had parked their car.
The other Furies followed him, except for Oleg, who stood his ground.
“Your plan is to run?” Oleg asked angrily. “But they have Pandora!”
Alexei paused and turned back to his men. “Running is not my plan at all. We have a contingency.”
He quickly explained to his men what he intended to do.
Oleg’s anger instantly dissipated. And then he began to laugh. All the Furies joined in.
Those idiots in the CIA, Alexei thought. They had no idea what was about to hit them.
TWENTY
It sure looks like an equation,” said Milana Moon.
She was back in the SUV with Charlie, Dante, and Rats, heading through Jerusalem. They had left the campus as quickly as they could, while Agent Bendavid had stayed behind to deal with the police. Rats was driving; Dante had graduated to the passenger seat, while Milana sat in the back with Charlie, looking over the piece of paper they had found in Einstein’s book.
Charlie no longer felt like she was going to pass out, but her body still ached from her fight with Marko. She had bruises the size and color of plums all over her. The SUV had an emergency kit, in which she had found ice packs and ibuprofen, but the pain hadn’t fully gone away and that was making her grumpy.
“It’s not an equation,” Charlie told Milana for the second time.
“How do you know? You barely even looked at it.”
“For starters, it’s way too complex.”
Charlie caught Rats looking at her in the rearview mirror. There was derision in his gaze—as if he was thinking that maybe Charlie wasn’t as smart as he’d heard she was. It was a look Charlie had received a great deal throughout her life.
Milana was staring at her too, although she seemed intrigued rather than disappointed. “Of course it’s complex,” she said. “It’s the most important equation in history.”
“So was special relativity. And look at it.” Charlie had a notebook open in her lap. It took her all of three seconds to write out the equation:
E = MC2
“Only three variables and no numbers,” Charlie explained. “The two doesn’t count, because you’re really just multiplying C by itself. Or consider the most significant equation in physics before that, Newton’s law of gravitation.” Charlie wrote that down too.
“Five variables and no numbers. Not very complicated either. The history of physics has been the search for simplicity. Because the laws of the universe, for the most part, are simple: Newton’s laws of thermodynamics, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, the theory of relativity—you name it. Whenever Einstein—or any physicist—devised an equation they felt was too complex, they were generally sure they didn’t have it right.”
Milana met Dante’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Both seemed impressed by what Charlie was saying—and possibly a bit annoyed with themselves that they hadn’t thought of this.
“Now look at this,” Charlie said, and pointed to Einstein’s scrap of paper:
“Twenty-seven numbers but only seven variables. Plus a dozen separate mathematical functions. It doesn’t look like any law of physics I’ve ever seen.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t be a real equation,” Rats argued.
Dante added, “Physics is getting far more complex as we delve to the subatomic level. Quantum physics isn’t as easy to describe as gravitation.”
“That’s true,” Charlie agreed. “And yet that was always Einstein’s problem with it. He hated the randomness and uncertainty of quantum physics. While he admitted it was successful at describing the subatomic world, he always felt it was only a temporary solution. He believed there had to be a more concise formula for explaining everything, which put him at odds with virtually everyone in physics. By the end of his life, the general population might have revered Einstein, but in the scientific world, he had become a crotchety old stick-in-the-mud who refused to be open to new ideas.”
“Most people get stuck in their ways as they age,” Milana said. “Even geniuses, maybe.”
“But Einstein wasn’t like most people,” Charlie argued. “So maybe the reason he was so reluctant to change his mind was because he’d already found the equation that proved he was right.”
Milana and Dante shared a look. “Makes sense,” Milana said.
Rats still wasn’t convinced. “That’s your theory,” he said to Charlie. “Here’s mine: That equation isn’t a clue. It’s Pandora. It’s just too complicated for you to understand.”
Charlie sighed. “There are other things wrong with it besides the complexity. Like the variables. Einstein hasn’t left any sort of key as to what they stand for—and without knowing that, an equation is useless. If this really was Pandora, why would Einstein go through all the trouble to hide it and then not leave a key?”
“Maybe he thought anyone smart enough to find it would know what he meant,” Rats said.
“I do know what he meant,” Charlie snapped. “This is not Pandora. It’s a clue to finding Pandora.”
“So it’s a clue,” Dante said, before Rats could argue any more. “What’s it mean?”
“I have no idea.”
Rats snorted with disdain. “Great.”
“Look,” Charlie said testily. “The man who created this clue had an IQ of 230. Mine’s 220 at best, so it’s going to take me a little while to figure this thing out.”
“Why would Einstein go through all the trouble to just hide a clue?” Rats asked.
“It’s what we do at the CIA all the time,” Dante said. “It’s basic security. Adding layers of protection. Creating firewalls.” He pointed to Einstein’s clue. “If this was Pandora and we’d been five minutes later, the Furies would have it now. But that wouldn’t be the case if they faced a code they couldn’t crack. So if Charlie says this isn’t an equation, it’s not an equation.”
Rats didn’t say anything in response. It looked like he wanted to, but he kept it to himself, staring out the window ahead. Charlie noticed that his knuckles had grown white on the steering wheel, meaning he was gripping it hard, probably in anger.
The SUV rounded a corner, and suddenly the ancient walls of the Old City of Jerusalem loomed ahead, the weathered, rough-hewn stone a stark contrast to the shining, modern city around them.
“We’re not heading to the airport?” Charlie asked.
“Why would we do that?” Dante replied.
“The Furies are here,” Charlie said. “Now that we have this clue, I figured we’d want to get as far away from them as possible. . . .”
“We are getting away from them. They won’t be able to find us where we’re heading.”
“Where’s that?”
“Someplace safe,” Dante assured her. “I promise.” When Charlie started to repeat her question, he cut her off. “I have this under control. So you handle that.” He pointed to Einstein’s clue. “I need to know where that leads. Immediately.”
“Immediately?” Charlie asked. “This isn’t a word search on the kids menu at a restaurant. It’s a clue devised by the smartest person who ever lived. For all I know, it could take weeks to figure it out. Or months maybe.”
“We don’t have weeks,” Dante told her. “And we certainly don’t have months.”
“What do we have?”
“Hours would be nice. Though I’d prefer minutes.”
Charlie shot him a l
ook of astonishment. “I can’t promise you that. Heck, there’s a chance I’ll never figure it out.”
“That’s not acceptable,” Dante said coldly. “Our deal wasn’t for you to find a clue. It’s for you to find Pandora.”
“And what if I can’t?”
“That wouldn’t be in your best interests.”
“What are you going to do? Turn me over to the FBI for Barracuda?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“You’d do that to me?” Charlie asked, stunned. “You might be the worst brother of all time.”
“Just solve the clue,” Dante said. “And find Pandora.”
TWENTY-ONE
The Old City of Jerusalem was a dramatic collision of cultures. Brand-new cars and broken-down pushcarts shared roads that had first been laid five thousand years before. Men in three-piece suits strolled alongside women in traditional burkas. Market stall vendors sold fresh fruit, ancient artifacts, gummy bears, and DVDs of pirated American movies side by side. Newly built pizza parlors and falafel joints stood across from ancient Roman ruins. Walled off from the rest of Jerusalem, the Old City was a labyrinth of well-traveled tourist routes, meandering alleys, and secret passages known only to locals. It had been built and rebuilt so many times that street level had risen fifty feet over the centuries and now sat atop the detritus of a hundred civilizations.
The Old City was only 220 acres, about a quarter the size of Central Park in New York City, and it was divided into four uneven quarters: Muslim, Christian, Armenian, and Jewish. The walls around the city had been built in 1535 by the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. And there were only six gates. The CIA’s SUV entered the city through the Zion Gate, in the southern wall, passing into the Jewish Quarter. Because the old, narrow roads hadn’t been built for cars, they were driving so slowly the pedestrians were moving faster than they were.
Normally, Charlie would have been staring out the window. She was usually fascinated by new places. There were always a million things to see.