The Return

  Lyle walked off, and Rachel turned to Shawn.

  “There a problem?” she asked.

  “No problem,” he answered.

  “This isn’t Schrödinger’s Crap dot-com. You know what’s at stake here. This is bigger than all of us, and no one’s going to put up with anyone’s bullshit. Egos have to be checked at the door.”

  “Or what? You guys will throw me out of here? I bet I couldn’t even leave if I wanted to. I ‘know too much.’ Which is ironic considering I know next to nothing.”

  “You know as much as we can tell you at this point. And that’s better for you.”

  “Better for me how? You want me to help you save the whole planet, and you won’t even tell me who we’re saving it from.”

  Rachel sighed. “I know you’re frustrated, Shawn. I was frustrated, too, when I first came on board, but like I’ve told you from the beginning, for right now, you need to trust me.”

  “Trust you. Trust you when I don’t even know who you are. You spent months stalking me, and I don’t know anything about you, where you come from, how you got recruited, not even your last name, probably not even your real first name. But me, I’m supposed to give you everything freely. Lie to my father about where I am, stay in this prison working my fucking ass off, whoring out everything I am for some faceless shadow group that might not even exist and just ‘trust’ you. Sounds like a great deal.”

  Rachel took a step toward him. “If you want to leave, leave. No one will stop you. I promise.”

  He stared back at her. “I need sleep.”

  Back at his room, Shawn couldn’t actually sleep, so he reread some of Andrew Leland’s first book, The Order of Chaos, in bed. It couldn’t shed any light on the issues Shawn was wrestling with now, but he didn’t expect it to. What he hoped was that somehow the act of engaging with Leland’s mind might spark an epiphany that would open everything up for him. After forty-five minutes of nothing happening, he shut the book and flipped it around. A thirtysomething Leland smiled at him from the back cover. If pictures could speak, Leland could just tell him everything right then and there, explain how the various theories reconciled with one another—and then leave all that boring technobabble behind and tell him where he was taken to from Bernasconi Hills that night and who took him and how he helped them and why he eventually came back.

  Since pictures don’t speak, Andrew Leland just continued to smile that cocksure grin, as though his happiness was in fact directly rooted in knowing so much that Shawn didn’t.

  “Fuck you, too,” Shawn muttered.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “It’s open,” he called out.

  The handle turned, and the door opened to reveal Rachel, standing there in a light windbreaker.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Interested in going for a walk?”

  Under a crescent moon, they made their way through the darkness of the woods that surrounded the campus, neither saying much. Rachel led Shawn along a narrow gravelly path. In addition to animal noises and the crushing of leaves and thistles underfoot, he could hear rushing water in the distance. Soon, they had exited the woods and were standing at the edge of a canyon carved by a wide, swiftly moving river some seventy or eighty feet below. The stars above had to be some of the largest and most luminescent Shawn had ever seen. The river glistened in the moonlight, and Shawn wondered what would happen if he jumped, whether the current would just carry him along or whether the rocks in the water would break him into dozens of pieces.

  Rachel rested her elbows on the small wire railing that had been erected at the edge of the cliff and stared out at the nighttime view.

  “I can’t tell you what you don’t absolutely need to know,” she said. “After six weeks, you don’t get that kind of clearance, and if that sucks, I’m sorry. But I will tell you something no one else here knows. Not because it’s a secret but just because it’s none of anyone’s damn business. Rachel is my real name. But when I was growing up, people called me Roach.”

  She didn’t need to tell him her last name. At the word Roach, everything clicked. The tiny trace of an Australian accent. The way she had seemed vaguely familiar from the start.

  “No shit,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I watched you on Brain Freeze every day.”

  “You and ten million others.”

  Shawn had been just nine when the twelve-year-old wunderkind known as Roach Chalmers, a charming and lively transplant from Down Under, had wowed audiences across the United States with her scientific prowess. She had lasted fourteen weeks on the popular quiz show, at that time a record, before being eventually displaced by a librarian from Brooklyn. For a kid like Shawn, whose intelligence had often made him an outcast, seeing this confident young Aussie use her giant brain as a source of empowerment, rather than alienation, was nothing short of a revelation.

  “It’s a pretty big high to be a TV star when you’re still in your training bra,” she said, her eyes following the current below. “Not so much fun to be an ex-TV star forever after. When I got to high school, I rebelled against what everyone expected from me. I knew I couldn’t live up to it, anyway, so why bother being looked at like a freak? I stopped wearing tweed skirts, dropped my Rocko’s Modern Life accent. Stopped reading books about nanochemistry and Galileo and started doing what other girls my age did, spending Sundays at the mall or the movies instead of the library, trying to be just like them. And what do you know, it worked. I eventually stopped being smart. People don’t think that can happen, but they’re wrong. When I got to college, I took a physics course just to fill a requirement. My professor saw something in me and brought something out in me. Something I thought was dead because it mostly was. And then, after the monster had been fully reawakened, he told me about a little extra work he did on the side.”

  Rachel turned away from the river and looked at Shawn.

  “I didn’t want to be special anymore, Shawn. But I am special, and so are you. I said before that we have to check our egos at the door, that what we’re doing here is not about us, that it’s about something much bigger. That’s bullshit. At the end of the day, we were called upon to do this because we are the only ones who can. And you know what that makes us?”

  He shook his head.

  “Fucking badass.”

  Shawn smiled, but Rachel’s expression remained dead serious.

  Later, when he returned to his room, the Leland book was still resting on his pillow. Shawn placed it on the night table and got into bed. The industrial ceiling fan whirred away above him. As usual, he watched it spin for several rotations until eventually his eyes closed. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was thinking about someone other than Andrew Leland as he drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  Father Arroyo’s fingers tapped nervously on his armrest as the train pulled away from the station in Madrid and on toward Villena, the last stop before Alicante. He had been tapping like this on and off throughout the journey. From time to time, the irritated mustachioed man sitting across the aisle would glance at him, then quickly look away, unwilling to reproach a priest. The padre would stop, then resume a little while later without even realizing.

  He tried to distract himself by staring out the window at the green meadows and wheat fields rolling by, the lush Valencian countryside, but it was no use. He had been antsy the entire trip, but especially so since his phone call to America two days prior, and now that he was only moments away from returning to Alicante, his anxiety had reached fever pitch.

  Father Arroyo hadn’t originally intended on calling the American school where Father Reese claimed to have worked. The idea had occurred to him sometime during dinner, while Father Bayarri was pontificating about art history or classical composers; had he not been so preoccupied with thoughts of Father Reese throughout the meal and the whole trip, in fact, he might have remembered the topic. He dismisse
d the notion of calling the school at first, worried that his inquiries might somehow get back to Reese, but later, sitting in his hotel room in downtown Burgos, he changed his mind. It took only minutes of Googling in the downstairs business suite to track down the number.

  “Who did you say you were again?” a man identifying himself as the school’s vice principal had asked, after Father Arroyo inquired about Reese’s time at the school.

  “My name is Father Alberto Arroyo.”

  “Yeah, but, I mean, who are you?”

  “I’m the head of Anglada Parish in Alicante, Spain.”

  A brief pause.

  “Leon Reese never worked at this school.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I remember who he is. He interviewed here about six years ago, maybe seven, but we didn’t take him.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s your connection to him, if I might ask?”

  Father Arroyo cleared his throat. “He’s one of my assistant priests at the parish.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Fairly well.”

  Another pause.

  “I’m going to level with you, Father,” the vice principal said. “Mr. Reese gave a fine interview, charming, smart guy. Then we did a background check and found out he had a record.”

  “You mean … an arrest record?”

  “Yep.”

  “My God. For what?”

  “No idea. We never reviewed the file. Frankly, we didn’t care.”

  “You mean you weren’t going to hire him once you knew he’d been arrested.”

  “No, Father, I didn’t say that. That would be discriminatory and illegal. Let’s just say we found a more qualified candidate sometime afterward.”

  “I see. Thank you for your time.”

  “Bless you, Father.”

  The call had shaken Father Arroyo up, though he wasn’t sure what it all meant or what to do next. He wasn’t certain he could investigate further without rattling cages and didn’t know where to begin, anyway. But now that he’d confirmed Father Reese had lied about his past and in fact had a criminal record, he realized the chances of Father McCord coaxing any useful information out of him, let alone reassuring information, were nil. He also wondered if he might not have put Father McCord in grave danger by getting him involved in all this.

  However, if Father Reese had been arrested for anything to do with being a wanted and dangerous terrorist, why would he have been let out of prison? And once released, would he have then applied for a job at a school and, later on, fled to Spain and entered the seminary without ever bothering to change his name?

  Something didn’t add up, and Father Arroyo, being no great sleuth, wondered whether he should just call the detective from the confession booth already. However, that still seemed premature. Yes, it turned out Father Reese had an arrest record, and yes, he had lied about his work history, but what did that really amount to? After all, it wasn’t like he thought Father Reese was a saint to begin with. He already knew he was at the very least a gambler and a thief, both of which might very well tie in neatly to his having a criminal record in America.

  When Father Arroyo’s train arrived at the Alicante terminal, Josep picked him up in an old, beat-up Lincoln and drove him back to the parish.

  “Would you know if Father McCord happens to be in his room?” the padre asked as Josep helped carry his bags into his quarters in the rectory. “I must speak with him rather urgently.”

  Josep gave a confused look.

  “Padre McCord is more likely sitting in a hotel room, enjoying a view of the Sierra Nevada, I should think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s at a conference in Granada. You didn’t know?”

  “Not at all. He told you he was going to a conference in Granada?”

  “No, the fat one told me, after Father McCord had already gone.”

  Father Arroyo tried to hide his panic. “Father Reese told you?”

  Josep nodded, and Father Arroyo pulled out his cell phone and dialed McCord’s number, which went straight to voice mail. This wasn’t surprising given that cell phone usage at the parish was virtually nonexistent, thanks in large part to policies the padre himself had put in place. He turned to Josep.

  “I know of no papal conference taking place in Granada or anywhere else in the country this week. Where is Father Reese right now?”

  “He’s usually in the greenhouse right about now. Padre, what’s going on?”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  Father Arroyo’s heart raced along with his feet as he made his way to the greenhouse. Why, he asked himself, had he ever involved Father McCord? Ostensibly, it was for help in determining the truth about Father Reese, but in reality, he always knew Father McCord wouldn’t be able to find anything out. The real reason why he had gotten McCord involved, if he was being honest with himself, was because he needed to unload, to share the burden. How, he wondered now, could he ever have been so selfish and so stupid?

  Upon arriving at the greenhouse, a short and wide structure built from tempered glass and wood, he stepped inside and was momentarily stunned by its transformation. Father Reese had outdone himself. The spruced-up greenhouse was now fully functioning, with new exhaust fans and sprinklers and was lined, wall to wall, with blossoming vegetation. The American priest stood in the corner, spraying some noxious chemical onto a batch of ripening Spanish bluebells. He looked up with surprise and smiled.

  “Padre, this is most unexpected! I trust you had a pleasant time in Burgos. Do you like what I’ve done with the place?”

  Father Arroyo just stared, and Father Reese continued, “Now the children can have someplace else to visit on holidays besides the Benidorm Zoo. Plants can provide a good model for children, I think. While it’s our human nature to occasionally stray, a plant moves unfailingly toward the light.”

  Occasionally stray. Some of us on more occasions than others, thought Father Arroyo.

  “Where is our friend Father McCord?” he asked, an unmistakable iciness in his voice.

  Reese blinked in confusion, a gesture that struck the padre as a bit too obvious.

  “Where is Father McCord?” Father Arroyo repeated, this time a demand more than a question.

  “In Granada, as far as I know. Said he was attending a conference on the writings of Thomas à Kempis.”

  “When did he tell you this?”

  “Yesterday evening. Right here in the greenhouse, as a matter of fact.”

  “Father Reese, you and I both know very well there is no conference on Thomas à Kempis taking place in Granada.”

  “Padre, with all due respect, I know this fact not well or unwell. And I have no idea what you mean to suggest, but this tone is very unlike you. If there’s something else you wish to say, by all means, say it straight out.”

  Father Arroyo wanted to just let Reese have it, to tell him he knew he was a liar and a criminal, knew he had stolen the sacrament money from the parish, knew he had a criminal record in America, and then to demand the whereabouts of Father McCord at once.

  Instead, he smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Father Reese. I’ve had a rough go of traveling and was a little concerned that Father McCord would leave for a conference without discussing the matter with me first.”

  “I can understand that, Padre. I can certainly understand, and I accept your apology. I don’t think there’s any cause for concern, however. He probably meant to tell you and forgot.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re correct. Happy planting, Father Reese. You’ve done a most terrific job here, despite my early skepticism. Magnificent.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  Father Arroyo left the greenhouse. Father Reese stared after him for a moment, then returned his attention to his bluebells.

  Back at the rectory, Father Arroyo went up to his room and closed the door behind himself. He approached his spare wooden dresser and stopped and stared for a moment
. His heart pounding, he opened up the top drawer and removed the black-and-white photograph of Father Reese and Father McCord that he had received from the police detective in the confession booth days before. He turned the paper over, where the detective’s phone number had been scrawled. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed.

  CHAPTER 10

  There’s an old idea that great theorists make for terrible experimentalists. When Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli was a young professor in Switzerland, his colleagues took note of a mysterious phenomenon. It seemed to them that every time Pauli would enter a laboratory, experiments being conducted therein would suddenly self-destruct. Lab instruments or machinery, witnesses insisted, would either spontaneously fall apart or else just plain stop working. While there were those who laughed at the suggestion that Pauli’s mere presence could bring about such mishaps, others, such as German physicist James Franck, lent the “Pauli effect” serious credence. When Franck was working on an experiment at the University of Göttingen and a sophisticated device suddenly and inexplicably exploded, he wrote to Pauli telling him he wished he had been there so he could have blamed him for the mess. Pauli subsequently informed Franck that he had actually been changing trains in Göttingen at the time the incident took place, en route from Zurich to Copenhagen.

  The belief in Pauli’s magical tendency to wreak havoc was so pervasive that one time, a group of his colleagues decided to parody the phenomenon by rigging a chandelier to crash from the ceiling as soon as he entered a conference room. When he entered the room, the rigging mechanism malfunctioned.

  Shawn, at his core, was definitely more theorist than experimentalist, and so these old stories about Wolfgang Pauli were very much on his mind as he and Rachel, standing before two suspended aluminum plates and a basin of ethanol, attempted to simulate the Casimir effect in Dellwood College’s Laboratory B. This famous experiment, in which two uncharged objects in a vacuum appear to attract one another, involves what may be the only real-world example of negative energy, a kind of “exotic matter” that was to be the essential building block of Leland’s planned cosmic shield. It was only through vast amounts of exotic matter, the belief went, that the negative energy density required for warping space-time could be achieved. It was only through exotic matter that the cosmic shield would be able to send any object that tried to penetrate it back thousands of years into the past.