Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  He would have the highest bidder wire the money to a Swiss bank account, and then he would be free to be whomever he wanted. The last trace of John Russo would vanish from existence, and a very wealthy and satisfied man would take his place. With the money, he could go anywhere he wanted and become anyone he wished.

  John needed only one thing from the suitcase. The clothes were mere window dressing, to make it look as though he were a normal traveler. Tucked among them was his gun.

  Rather than wait for the shuttle to the rental car company lot, John took a cab there, then picked up an SUV with four-wheel drive. Even though it was sunny at the airport, which sat by the beach, it was winter where John was going.

  According to the SUV’s GPS system, it was fifty-six miles to the Mount Wilson Observatory.

  It had been thirty-five minutes since John’s plane had landed. If Charlie Thorne was heading to Los Angeles, her plane wouldn’t have even landed yet.

  John still had a big head start—and Pandora was less than an hour away.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Dante woke to the smell of frying bacon.

  He snapped upright on the couch, startled to find Charlie was cooking breakfast. Dante couldn’t believe he had slept through it; he couldn’t remember another time he had slept so hard.

  Milana was still asleep as well. The bedroom door was open a tiny bit, and Dante could see her on the bed.

  “Good morning!” Charlie said cheerfully. “Sorry to disturb you, but I was starving. In my defense, though, I did tell you to take the bedroom.”

  Dante had set his watch for Pacific Standard Time before going to bed. He checked it now to see that it was six fifteen in the morning. They were getting close. He lifted the window shade and saw it was still dark outside. There were few lights in the land below, indicating they were over a sparsely populated area. Central Utah or Nevada, or the Mojave Desert in California.

  Every muscle in Dante’s body ached. He had taken a beating the day before, and his muscles had all tensed up while he had slept on the couch. “Any chance you could make some breakfast for me while you’re at it?”

  “Already done.” Charlie slid bacon and eggs onto plates. “You like yours scrambled with chilies and blue cheese, right?”

  “Right,” Dante said, surprised the kid had remembered that. They had eaten breakfast together only once, and that had been years ago. But then, the kid didn’t forget anything.

  “Well, I didn’t make them that way,” Charlie replied. “There’s no chilies or blue cheese on this plane, and besides, that combination is disgusting.” She laid out bacon and eggs for herself.

  Dante was surprised that Charlie didn’t seem to be in the tiniest bit of pain, even though she had been banged around as much as he had. But then he remembered that back when he was twelve, his own body had been far more resilient. There were advantages to being young.

  Charlie sat at the table and dug into her breakfast. “There’s been a slight change of plans,” she said.

  Dante took the seat beside her. “What’s up?”

  “We lost a little time in the air. Nasty headwinds over the arctic. They wouldn’t have slowed a jumbo jet much, but they were rough on us, so we’re trying to cut some corners. According to the pilots, there’s a small airport in a town called El Monte. It’s a lot closer to Mount Wilson than LAX.”

  “I assume there’s no customs or immigration at El Monte, either.”

  “As it happens, no.”

  “So we’re breaking the law.”

  “It’s for a good cause.”

  “The FAA might notice.”

  “They probably won’t.” Charlie placed a flight map of Southern California that she had gotten from the pilots on the table. “Turns out, the Los Angeles Basin has the largest concentration of small airports in the country. Twenty-four in all. The FAA can barely keep tabs on them—and if they do, Homeland Security and the DEA probably prefer them to concentrate on planes coming north from Central and South America.”

  “Still, if they tag us, we could have a real mess on our hands.”

  “That’s why we’re going to move fast on the ground. Deplane, grab the car, and get moving.”

  “What car?”

  “My friends at the bank are having a rental delivered.”

  “What’s that costing you?”

  “They threw it in for free. I’ve been a good client.” Charlie grinned.

  Dante took another bite of his breakfast. Outside, the sky was beginning to brighten. Dante could see the dark shapes of mountains looming in the distance. The San Gabriel Mountains to the north of Los Angeles. The home of Mount Wilson—and Pandora. They were so close—and yet still so far away.

  “I tried to call the CIA last night,” Dante said.

  “I know,” Charlie replied. “The pilots told me.”

  “You’re making a mistake. We need to contact the Agency. . . .”

  “The same Agency that assumed we were traitors and sent the Mossad after us?”

  “That was understandable, given the circumstances. We need support now. There’s an office in LA. They can have a team at Mount Wilson before we land.”

  “No way.”

  “Don’t be stupid, kid. . . .”

  “If there’s one thing I’m not, Dante, it’s stupid.”

  “You don’t know what we’re going to come up against today.”

  “John Russo is the only one left—and odds are he’s not even here. Maybe he hasn’t solved Einstein’s clue yet. Or maybe he got it wrong. . . .”

  “And if he didn’t? What if he finds Pandora before us? Do you realize how bad that would be?”

  “Yes. Almost as bad as the US government finding it before us.”

  Dante grew angry, just as Charlie had expected. “You’re aware that I work for the US government, right?”

  “So did John Russo.”

  “He’s the exception, not the rule. Most government employees are like me. They’re good people, trying to do the right thing. To help others, keep them safe, make their lives better. With Pandora, we could solve all our energy problems. The world’s energy problems. Climate change could become a thing of the past.”

  “If you could guarantee that would happen, I’d be happy to hand Pandora right over. But you can’t. And you know it. No matter how well you try to protect Pandora, sooner or later some jerk like John Russo or Alexei Kolyenko is going to get ahold of it. And then we’re screwed.”

  “The kid has a point,” Milana said.

  Charlie and Dante turned to see her standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She was wide-awake and ready for action.

  “Right now our priority is beating John Russo to Pandora,” Milana continued. “Once we have it and we’re safe, then we can discuss what to do with it.”

  Dante grimaced at this statement, as though Milana had betrayed him. But Charlie was pleased. “So you agree turning Pandora over to our government could be a mistake?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Milana said. “You’ve been right about everything else so far. All I know for sure is if John Russo ends up with Pandora, we have a serious problem.”

  Despite the heaviness of the statement, Charlie found herself smiling anyhow, pleased that at least one of the CIA agents was starting to see things her way. “Then let’s get to Pandora first,” she said.

  FORTY-SIX

  Beverly Hills, California

  Benny West’s phone had rung at five a.m.

  Benny West wasn’t his real name. In his previous life, he had served twelve years in the Mossad under Isaac Semel. He would have still been active, but he had ended up on Hezbollah’s hit list and then an informant had blown his cover. So Benny had been sent on the lam. The Mossad had helped his whole family—his wife and two little girls—slip out of Israel in the middle of the night and set up in Los Angeles. There were a couple of ex-Mossad guys out there, brothers who had made a lot of money running weapons, then started a film production company and made even more
money. Half their employees were Mossad agents who’d had to flee the country. Benny had changed his name, gotten a job in the accounting department, and formed friendships with all the other families who worked there. It was a good life, but they all still stayed in shape and went to the firing range every week, because even though they were out of Israel, they weren’t out of the Mossad. You were never out of the Mossad.

  Isaac Semel gave Benny his orders personally. By this point, he had been tracking Charlie’s jet for hours and now could tell it was headed toward LA. As the plane got closer, he would get a better idea of which airport it would land at. In the meantime, the Mossad was going to hedge its bets and cover as many as possible.

  Benny didn’t question anything and didn’t complain that he’d been out of the game for a long time. Instead, he got right to work. He called his office and told them he wasn’t coming in for the day. Then he called six other Mossad agents one by one and explained the situation. Meanwhile, Semel was activating other teams all over LA. Within half an hour, they were all fanning out across the city.

  So when the private jet touched down in El Monte, a Mossad agent named Leo Kolodny was there. He was fifty-five, but still built like a linebacker, one of Benny’s crew. Leo watched Charlie, Dante, and Milana deplane, then called Semel and described them. Semel confirmed Leo had the right people and gave his next orders: Tail the targets to wherever they were going, then take whatever they found by force.

  Then Semel called Benny and told him to coordinate with Leo. Wherever Charlie Thorne ended up, he wanted the whole team there.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Los Angeles

  The Mount Wilson Observatory had been founded in 1904. At the time, the San Gabriel Mountains were regarded as one of the best sites for viewing the heavens in the United States. The desert skies were dry and clear. Light pollution was nonexistent. No one could imagine that in less than a century, the tiny city of Los Angeles at the mountains’ base would balloon to more than eighteen million people, or that the newly invented automobile would clog the roads in numbers so great that the sky would turn brown from their exhaust.

  Even with the massive metropolis sprawling below it, the modern observatory still remained useful, due to the height of the mountains. While the San Gabriels weren’t the tallest range in the United States, they were the steepest. They rose almost straight out of the desert floor, thrust upward in the blink of an eye in geological time due to the action of the San Andreas Fault. In fact, the mountains were still growing; during the Northridge earthquake of 1994, parts of the range had lifted as much as fifteen inches.

  The peak of Mount Wilson was nearly five thousand feet above Los Angeles, high enough to have a radically different climate. While the city below was parched for much of the year, with summer temperatures that could hit 110 degrees, the upper flanks of the San Gabriels were covered with forests of towering pines, firs, and redwoods. They could receive several feet of snow in the winter—and in the spring this would melt and churn through dozens of precipitous ravines, some so steep and inaccessible they had still never been explored. The observatory was the only occupied spot in a large, untamed wilderness; black bears, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions commonly roamed the grounds.

  When the observatory had been built, it was as close to the frontier as was left in the United States. The only way to reach it was up a harrowing miner’s trail, nine miles of dirt track hacked into the edges of sheer mountainsides. The components of the original telescopes all had to be hauled up by mules, several of which turned gray from the effort. The observatory had been serviced this way for more than thirty years; in 1931, Einstein himself had arrived by mule for his visit.

  In 1935, the Angeles Crest Highway was completed, allowing automobiles access to the observatory via a sinuous two-lane road, but even decades later, getting there wasn’t always easy. Winter snows often closed the highway for days, and the rumblings of the San Andreas fault regularly caused landslides or fractured the road itself. The observatory staff was always prepared to be cut off from civilization for at least a week.

  It had been an unusually wet winter for Los Angeles, and the snowpack was heavy as Charlie, Dante, and Milana wound their way up the Angeles Crest in their rented SUV. Signs at the base of the mountain had warned of treacherous conditions. Much of the road was slick with ice, whereas other portions had crumbled into the ravines, leaving deadly gaps that had merely been marked with strands of plastic yellow police tape.

  Thankfully, Charlie had thought to prepare for bad weather. Along with the SUV, she had asked her bank for winter clothes for herself, Dante, and Milana, seeing as their old ski clothes had been left back in Israel. They were wearing the new clothes now.

  However, Charlie hadn’t thought to request extra ammunition for their guns, and there was no time to wait for the sporting goods stores to open. She could only hope they would have no need for weapons.

  Surprisingly, they weren’t alone on the road. The mountains’ proximity to such a large city guaranteed there would always be people visiting them, even that early in the day; families with saucer sleds, cross-country skiers, and teenagers with snowboards were heading up to the snow. Since there was only one road, there was no way to tell if any of the other cars were following them or merely heading into the mountains. Therefore, Leo Kolodny’s SUV didn’t stand out as it tailed them, five cars back.

  The turnoff to Mount Wilson was a narrow road, poorly marked with a small, rusted sign. They followed it until a mile from the observatory, where they encountered a substantial roadblock. A cliff had partially collapsed, spilling boulders the size of armchairs across the road. Charlie, Dante, and Milana had no choice but to park and continue on foot. There was no place to hide their SUV. If anyone else arrived looking for Pandora, they would know someone was ahead of them.

  At this altitude, they were as high as the clouds, and it was misty and cool. The road beyond the landslide was covered with five feet of snow. Charlie, Dante, and Milana trudged through it, bundled up against the cold, until they arrived at the observatory complex.

  With the paved roads hidden beneath the snow, the complex didn’t look much different than it would have when Einstein had visited. Gleaming white telescope domes were interspersed through the woods, as were a few support buildings: employee housing, maintenance sheds, and a small museum. The structures were scattered randomly on the steep slopes, built wherever there was suitably flat space. As clouds scuttled across the peak, buildings materialized out of the fog and then vanished back into it again: a solar telescope perched atop a 150-foot tower, several prefab buildings, and the CHARA Array—the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy—a series of six domed telescopes spread out over a quarter mile, linked by computers to create the same image that a single, enormous telescope would. Each of the six domes was the size of a small house, with a large propane tank that provided power and heat. Beyond everything, at the far end of the complex, the biggest dome of all loomed above the trees, six stories tall, home of the Hooker telescope itself.

  “The house of Hubble,” Charlie said, with awe in her voice. “I’ve always wanted to come here.”

  “To use the telescope?” Milana asked.

  “No,” Charlie replied. “For the same reason Einstein visited. To pay my respects. Almost everything we know about the universe—like astrophysics and the big bang theory—we know because of this observatory. It makes more and more sense that this is where Einstein hid Pandora. A big idea like that would be in good company up here.”

  Dante peered uneasily through the shifting haze of clouds. “Speaking of company, where is everyone? Is this place closed for the winter?”

  “No. It runs year-round,” Charlie replied. “But since the stars are only out at night, most telescope operators sleep during the day. Only the guys working the solar scopes would be up. And even then, they’re probably not at their posts today. No one’s going to see anything through
this.” Charlie waved at the clouds around them.

  The most direct path to the Hooker dome was a narrow footbridge, which crossed a shallow, snow-choked gully. As Charlie, Dante, and Milana crossed over it, they passed a small reservoir and pump house.

  “What’s this for?” Milana asked.

  “Firefighting, I’ll bet,” Dante observed. “In the summer, after a dry winter, this whole place is probably a tinderbox.”

  Halfway across the bridge was a commemorative plaque with a faded photograph of Einstein and Hubble standing in that very spot in 1931.

  “Looks like we’re in the right place,” Dante said.

  As they stepped off the bridge, Milana came along Charlie’s side. “I have something for you,” she said, then opened her hand to reveal a small, black elastic ring.

  “A hair band?” Charlie asked.

  “I’ve noticed your hair keeps getting in your eyes,” Milana said. “Hopefully, we’re not going to end up in danger here, but if we do, this might be helpful. And even if we don’t . . . being able to see the world clearly is generally a good thing.”

  Charlie knew the hair band had cost maybe three cents, but she was surprised to find how touched she was that Milana was looking out for her. “Thanks,” she said, then pulled her hair back into a ponytail and wrapped the band around it.

  “It’s one of the tools of the trade they never teach you about in the academy,” Milana said. “Probably because most of the instructors there are men.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Dante asked suspiciously.

  “Girl stuff,” Charlie told him, then shared a smile with Milana. Dante sighed and rolled his eyes.