Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  “Would that be such a bad thing?” Dante demanded. “Pandora could solve all the world’s energy problems. . . .”

  “Yeah. I’m sure that’s why the government wants it. It has nothing to do with making weapons at all.”

  “You don’t have the slightest idea what our government plans to do with it.”

  “I can make a pretty good guess. The weapons budget at the Pentagon is twenty times what the entire budget at the Department of Energy is. America’s priorities are pretty darn clear: The first thing we do with any major discovery is try to kill people with it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s what we did with relativity. What did the government build first? Bombs or power plants?”

  “That was different. We were at war. Einstein himself pressured President Roosevelt to build weapons.”

  “And he later regretted it, but the US didn’t listen to him then. They kept on making bigger and bigger bombs. So imagine what they’ll do when they have Pandora. . . .”

  “Our government doesn’t want to destroy the world, Charlie. We want to make it safer.”

  “Then prove me wrong.” Charlie nodded toward the clue in Dante’s hand. “Destroy that.”

  “Why? So that no one will be able to find Pandora except you?”

  Charlie looked at him, surprised.

  “I may not be a genius,” Dante told her, “but I’m not an idiot, either. I know you’ve memorized this.”

  “And you’d rather run the risk of letting Pandora fall into someone else’s hands than letting only me have it?”

  “No one else is going to get it—as long as you don’t try anything stupid again.”

  “I’m not the one being stupid here, Dante.”

  “Shut up.” They were back at the safe house. Dante shoved Charlie up against the door, then typed in the entry code. When the door clicked open, he yanked her into the foyer.

  Charlie tried to hold her ground, grabbing the banister so Dante couldn’t get her up the stairs. “You can’t make me do this!”

  “We’ll see about that.” Dante wrapped his arms around her from behind, pinioning her arms to her sides, and carried her up the steps while she kicked and writhed.

  “You’re going to have to drag me back to America and throw me in jail,” Charlie threatened. “I don’t care! I’m not helping you find Pandora!”

  “Of course not. Because you don’t do anything that isn’t selfish.”

  “I am not selfish!”

  “Really?” Dante set Charlie down on the landing outside the second security door and spun her around so he could look her in the eye. “What’s your plan for the rest of your life?”

  “I’m just a kid, Dante. I’m not supposed to have a plan.”

  “All kids have plans. They want to be doctors or firemen or astronauts or spies. But not you. You’ve got all that incredible intelligence and you’re not doing anything with it.”

  “I got into college!”

  “So you could get away from your parents! If you really cared about your education, you’d show up to class once in a while!”

  Charlie’s jaw dropped slightly in surprise.

  “Yeah, I know about that,” Dante told her. “I’ve been keeping tabs on you. So I know everything you’ve been doing. Or, really, everything you haven’t been doing. You don’t know everything, Charlie. There are teachers at that university you could learn from. There are classes that could challenge you. But you’re not interested in them. Because all you want to do is goof off until you’re old enough to have access to all that money you stole—and then you’re just going to goof off even more and waste your life away.”

  “I tried to do something good once,” Charlie argued. “I created a code that could have helped protect our financial systems. And it got stolen from me.”

  “So you decided to never try to do anything ever again?” Dante asked. “You have a gift, damn it! Maybe one person in a generation comes along with the intellect you have. You could cure cancer someday. Or design a rocket that gets us to the stars. Or revolutionize science like Einstein did. You could make the world a better place.”

  “I don’t owe the world anything,” Charlie said bitterly. “All Mom and Dad ever tried to do with my talents was get rich from them. And now you and the CIA are using me as well, without any care for my safety at all!”

  “We’re not . . . ,” Dante began, but then caught himself, realizing that perhaps Charlie had a point. He took a breath, calming himself, and his angry gaze became softer and sadder as he tried again. “I do care about your safety. And I promise I’ll protect you. But I’m not upset that I brought you in. And someday maybe you’ll even thank me for doing it.”

  “Thank you? For kidnapping me, blackmailing me, and putting my life in danger?”

  “All the talent in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you squander it,” Dante said. “But now you can make a difference.”

  With that he opened the door to the safe house and forced her inside.

  The moment they were through the door, someone attacked them. One person grabbed Charlie, slamming the door shut behind her, while two others ambushed Dante. Charlie tried to fight the man holding her, but he was far too strong. Dante tried to come to her aid, but he was outnumbered and had been caught by surprise. Charlie watched in horror as he was overpowered and beaten down. Then she was held tightly from behind and a gun was pressed against her head.

  Now that she was subdued, Charlie had a chance to look around the room to see the trap she had stumbled into. Dante was held facedown on the floor by two men, who were stripping him of his weapons and his phone. The third was holding Charlie, while a fourth had Milana Moon pinned to the far wall with a gun to her head. Charlie recognized them all from the photos in the dossier she had seen. The Furies had somehow infiltrated the CIA’s safe house.

  And their leader, Alexei Kolyenko, stood in the center of it all, smiling cruelly at them.

  “Welcome home,” he said menacingly. “Now hand over Pandora.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The scrap of paper with Einstein’s clue on it was in Dante’s pocket. Instead of handing it over, Dante looked at Alexei and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Alexei nodded to Fez, who was holding Dante on the floor with Hans. Fez smiled in a way that made Charlie cringe; she knew from Fez’s file that he was a psycho who liked causing pain.

  Fez got to his feet and kicked Dante in the stomach so hard it made Dante curl into a ball.

  Charlie winced just watching it, knowing it had to have been even more painful than Dante was letting on. Vladimir, the one holding the gun to her head, tightened his grip on her.

  “Let’s try this again,” Alexei said. “Hand over the equation.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean,” Dante said.

  Alexei grinned, like he had been hoping things might come to this. “You want to be tough? Maybe this will jog your memory.” He nodded to Oleg, the terrorist who was holding Milana.

  Oleg placed the barrel of his gun in Milana’s mouth.

  “All right!” Dante shouted. “Don’t hurt her! Pandora is in my pocket!”

  Alexei signaled Oleg to wait, then nodded to Fez, who knelt by Dante’s side and rifled through his pockets.

  Charlie was terrified. Everything had gone so wrong so fast. She could feel panic start to grip her, the same way it had back in the parking lot at the university, when one of the Furies had been shooting at her. So she willed herself to remain calm, the same way she had then. She breathed deeply and focused on her surroundings, trying to piece together what had happened, looking for anything that would give her an edge over the Furies.

  She cased the room. It had once been a living room, but the CIA had modified it into a workspace. It was sterile and official in design. Where a real home would have had couches and maybe a coffee table, here the walls were ringed with desks, each with a computer perched atop it.

&n
bsp; The safe house was narrow. The room they were in took up the entire front of the building, with a large window onto the street. There was only one exit besides the door Charlie had just come through. An open arch led back toward the rear of the house. Charlie could see a hallway beyond Alexei, leading back toward what was probably the kitchen, and a staircase leading upstairs.

  Charlie couldn’t see any sign of Rats, which she feared was probably bad news for Rats.

  Somehow, the Furies had known about the safe house. So they had raced here from the botanical gardens and gotten the jump on the CIA. There had been no sign of forced entry, so they must have known the entry codes. Charlie assumed they hadn’t broken in through a back door, because the safe house would have been alarmed; Rats would have certainly been alerted to something like that.

  Fez gave a cry of triumph as he discovered Einstein’s clue in Dante’s pocket. He held it up reverently, as though it were a holy object. The other Furies stared at it with awe. Only Alexei maintained a sense of calm, staring curiously at Charlie.

  Charlie did her best to avoid his wolfish gaze, continuing to case the room, seeing what she could use to her advantage. There wasn’t much, though. The desks didn’t appear to belong to anyone in particular. They were there for whoever was using the safe house at the time. Therefore, the desktops were free from clutter. If there was anything that could be used as a makeshift weapon—scissors, staplers, thumbtacks—it was tucked away in the drawers, inaccessible. There were only computers and keyboards and a single mug full of pens. . . .

  But wait . . .

  The front window was behind Charlie, facing the street. The blinds were open and the room faced south, so the midday winter sun slanted through them. A slash of light blazed across the desk along the wall farthest from Charlie, slowly edging toward the computer.

  The computer wasn’t on, but that didn’t matter to Charlie. What mattered was the monitor.

  The moment Charlie’s eyes fell upon it, the numbers came to her.

  They flashed through her mind in an instant. Adjusting for certain factors, in three minutes and forty-two seconds Charlie would have a very slight edge over the Furies. An edge she could exploit. It would be risky, but as far as Charlie could tell, it would be the only chance she, Milana, and Dante would have to escape.

  Now they just had to stay alive until then.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Fez handed Einstein’s clue to Alexei. To the surprise of his own men, Alexei didn’t even look at it. Instead, he kept his gaze locked on Charlie and asked, “Why don’t you believe this is Pandora?”

  It took a moment for Charlie to realize how Alexei knew this. Then she noticed the security monitor mounted on the wall by the door. Alexei had eavesdropped on everything in the stairwell. Charlie had told Dante she wouldn’t help him find Pandora.

  Charlie met Alexei’s gaze. She was already terrified, and now the predatory look in his eyes unnerved her. She fought to stay calm. According to her watch, she needed to stall him for another three and a half minutes until she could put her plan into action.

  She knew from the CIA’s dossier that Alexei wasn’t that smart, but he was proud. She decided to play to that. “How well do you know physics?” she asked.

  “Very well,” Alexei replied, in a way that indicated he actually believed it.

  Charlie said, “Then it should be obvious to you that what’s on that paper isn’t an equation.”

  Alexei looked at Einstein’s clue. His brow furrowed in confusion. But he didn’t want to admit that what was obvious to a twelve-year-old wasn’t obvious to him. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “I’ll tell you—if your friends here stop acting like animals.” Charlie nodded toward Dante. “Let him up off the floor.” Then she nodded toward Milana. “And take the gun out of her mouth.”

  Alexei acted as if he hadn’t even heard the request. “You can’t be CIA. You’re only a little girl. So what are you doing here with them?”

  “Please,” Charlie said, doing her best to sound weaker now. The way she thought Alexei would like to hear someone like her speak. “If you just do what I asked, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Alexei considered Charlie a second longer, then gave his men orders in German.

  The Furies were confused. None spoke English well enough to follow what was going on. But they listened to Alexei’s orders. Hans and Fez let Dante get to his feet, but kept their guns trained on him. Oleg took the gun from Milana’s mouth—but kept it aimed at her chest.

  “Better?” Alexei asked.

  “Not much,” Charlie replied.

  “Now tell us—or we’ll kill these pigs. Who are you?”

  Charlie considered lying to Alexei, but decided it was too risky. If he realized she wasn’t being honest, he might get angry, and that was the last thing she wanted. So she told the truth. “I’m a criminal. A couple years ago, I hacked into some computers and stole a couple million dollars. Unfortunately, I didn’t cover my tracks as well as I thought. The CIA found me and blackmailed me into helping them look for Pandora.”

  “The CIA needs the help of a girl to find this?”

  “Apparently so.”

  Alexei broke into laughter. “The CIA must be full of idiots.”

  “No,” Charlie said. “I’m just really freaking smart.”

  “No girl can be that smart.” Alexei turned to his men and spoke in German. “The CIA are such fools they need this little girl to help them!”

  Now Alexei’s men broke into laughter.

  “I’m smart enough to speak German as well as you do,” Charlie said. In German.

  The men stopped laughing and looked at her, surprised.

  “I can speak lots of other languages as well,” Charlie continued, then shifted into each as she said the name. “French. Spanish. Chinese. Do you know Chinese?”

  Alexei now looked at her, confused. “That’s not even a language.”

  Given their reactions, Charlie was now sure that none of the Furies spoke Chinese. But she knew that Dante did. And so did Milana, according to her file.

  So Charlie glanced at her watch and then continued speaking Mandarin Chinese in a casual, conversational tone to disguise the gravity of what she was saying. “In exactly a hundred and eighty-six seconds, be ready to kill these guys.” She didn’t even glance at Dante or Milana for fear of letting the Furies know she was speaking to them.

  “Enough!” Alexei snapped. “We will speak English from now on!” It probably would have made more sense for him to speak in German, so the other Furies could understand, but he seemed to want to prove his intelligence to Charlie. To show that he was multilingual as well.

  “All right,” Charlie said.

  Alexei held up Einstein’s code. “If this is not Pandora, then what is it?”

  “A clue to finding Pandora.”

  “And have you solved it?”

  Charlie hesitated, pretending as though she wasn’t sure what to say. She glanced at the other Furies. They were all confused by what was happening; Alexei was no longer showing disdain for her, but was now actually listening to what she had to say. Their guard was beginning to drop. Although Vladimir was still holding her with an iron grip, keeping his gun to her head.

  Charlie looked back to Alexei. “Yes. I know how to solve it.”

  “What does it say? Where is Pandora?”

  “I still need a little time to work that out.”

  Alexei fixed Charlie with a suspicious stare. “You just said you’d solved it.”

  “No, I said I know how to solve it. This isn’t a simple cipher. Figuring it out involves a chain of mathematical processes that I don’t think anyone—except maybe Einstein—could do in their head. Now, if you’d like, I can explain it to you.”

  Alexei looked back at Einstein’s clue. He didn’t want to admit that he needed Charlie’s help, but he obviously had no idea how to decode the message himself. “I’m sure I would figure it out soon enough,”
he said pompously. “But for the sake of time, I’ll let you do it.”

  “I need some paper and a pen. Can you tell your gorilla here to let me go for a minute?” Charlie nodded backward toward Vladimir.

  Alexei frowned at this.

  “What? Are you afraid of a little girl?” Charlie asked. In German, so all the Furies could hear her.

  Alexei bristled. “Of course not.” Then he ordered Vladimir, “Let her go.”

  “Let her go?” Vladimir repeated, surprised.

  “Let her go!” Alexei shouted, angry to have his authority questioned.

  Vladimir let go of Charlie.

  Charlie quickly stepped away from him, toward the desk with the mug full of pens. “What happened to Agent Ratsimanohatra?” she asked.

  “The brown man?” Alexei asked. “He’s dead. We tossed him in the bathroom.”

  Charlie swallowed hard. She had expected this, but it was still unnerving to hear the truth. Especially given the psychopathic lack of remorse in Alexei’s voice.

  “If I tell you where Pandora is, will you let the rest of us live?” Charlie asked.

  “Of course,” Alexei said, but it was an obvious lie. So obvious, Charlie couldn’t tell if Alexei wanted her to think he was toying with her, or if he was simply a bad liar.

  By Charlie’s count, she had exactly eighty seconds left to stall.

  “To figure out that clue, I had to make a few assumptions,” she said. “The first is that this wouldn’t be a substitution cipher. It’s too difficult to transfer numbers into letters without leaving an easily detectable pattern. . . .”

  “I don’t care how you solved this,” Alexei snapped. “I just want to know what it says.”

  Sixty-five seconds.

  “I’m just telling you this clue isn’t going to translate into words. It won’t say ‘Pandora’s box is hidden in such and such a place.’ It’s going to translate into more numbers. That would have made sense to Einstein, because numbers are a universal language. However, what these numbers will mean is anybody’s guess. Theoretically, they’ll be coordinates like latitude and longitude, but I can’t guarantee that.”