by Blake Banner
“I’m with you so far.”
“Good, now, atoms are made of particles, right?”
“Electrons, protons and neutrons.”
“That is a really old way of looking at it. Basically all particles are of one of two types, fermions or bosons. Fermions, which have spins with half-integer multiples, and bosons, which have spins in integer multiples like plus or minus one, two, three and so on…”
“You already lost me.”
“OK, forget that…” She sat and thought for a moment, looking out at the glittering path the sun was laying across the Atlantic.
“Let’s approach this from another angle. We have these particles, never mind what they are called or what group they belong to. The important point is that all atoms are made up of these tiny, indivisible particles. OK?”
“Yup.”
“These particles come together to form atoms, atoms cluster into molecules and molecules cluster into either cells or inorganic structures like crystals. Still with me?”
I nodded. “So far.”
“So, logically, all matter is made of these subatomic particles. Yes?”
I thought about it a second and said, “Yeah, obviously.”
“So what are they made of?”
I stared at her a moment, shrugged again. “I don’t know. Energy?”
She laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. “What, thrust? Traction? Momentum? And if you’re thinking of electricity, electricity is made of electrons, not the other way around. So come on, what are these things made of?” She thumped the steel walls of the cockpit with her fist. “This solid, steel door is made of these things. So what are they made of?”
I shook my head. She went on.
“Heisenberg tells us that these particles, the building blocks of reality, these tiny things that make up Mount Everest, and I quote, cannot be said to ‘be’ in any meaningful sense of the word! Do you get that? They cannot be said to be in any meaningful sense of the word. Rather, he says, they are the possibility of being!”
I shook my head again. “I can’t process that. That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
“Well, Mr. John, Peter Ethelbaum, if you want to have any remote idea of what the NPP does, you had better start bending your mind around the idea that everything in this universe is made up of the possibility of being. And what the NPP does is to program those possibilities. How? Well, because quantum particle-waves are pretty much waves of information about what might be, we can input information that collapses those waves into actual, concrete matter.”
“You are saying they made a machine that can make something out of nothing?”
She laughed like a crazy parrot for fifteen seconds, tossing her red hair, pulling up her knees and tucking in her elbows. Then she stopped and stared at me for a moment longer and started laughing again. She did that a couple more times and then relaxed and said, “I guess it would look that way to you. Basically, it takes wave-particles that are in superposition, or potential superposition, and collapses them…” She stopped. “But then there are interference patterns.” She sighed, shook her head and flopped it back against the headrest. “Simplest explanation. The NPP programs quantum particles so that they cluster together to form atoms and molecules, i.e. matter.”
“Jesus Christ…”
“Right?”
I stared out at the sun, climbing through space toward the midheaven. I stared at the storm of photons it was raining down on the vast blackness of the North Atlantic, at the glittering golden path it laid across the cold, dark depths, where a billion life forms crawled and slithered and slipped through the ocean. My mind ached and I shook my head.
“It’s not possible. We are nowhere near that level of technology yet. I don’t believe it’s even possible.”
“You’d know, right.” I turned to look at her. The sarcasm wasn’t just in her voice. It was mocking me from her face. “You’re the expert in physics…”
And I knew that, unlike Heisenberg’s particles, the NPP was not just the possibility of being. It was a horrible, monstrous reality.
Eleven
It was an exhausting, back-breaking flight: another six and a half hours after we had passed Newfoundland. Diana slept most of the time, but when she didn’t I put the plane on automatic pilot and told her to wake me if anything happened. Nothing much happens in the sky, aside from clouds and occasional UFOs, so I was able to snatch about four hours. Day waned and night crept in, and at eleven PM the tiny lights of Flores began to glitter ahead in the midst of an ocean of blackness. The radio crackled and I began our descent toward Santa Cruz.
I skirted the island and came in from the south, touched down just past the cliffs to the west of the town. The runway was a full mile. And only slightly longer than the main town on the island. I slowed and, following the instructions over the radio, I taxied to the hangars north of the terminal building. Most of the buildings were dark. Only the runway and one of the hangars had any lights.
There, I stuffed two grand in my pocket and we climbed out of the sliding bay doors and were met by a truck. Two guys wearing masks climbed out, nodded at us and started filling up the Albatross. I looked around, wondering if we should go to customs and ask for Paolo. I was preparing to ask in rusty Spanish where I could find him, and hoping that my Spanish was sufficiently like Portuguese to be understood. But as it turned out it wasn’t necessary. A couple of bright headlamps appeared in the open hangar doors and accelerated toward us. Thirty seconds later a military Jeep pulled up beside the bird and a small man with beige chinos and a pencil moustache climbed out. He had a mask hanging like a cup under his chin.
“Mr. and Mrs. Ethelbaum?”
“Mr. Santos?”
“Paolo, please. Any friend of Colonel Gilbert is my friend also. And I have received calls also from your friends in Washington. Please! I am so delighted to have you here on our lovely island. I am just so sorry that you must move on so soon.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, except that I would not say no to four hours in a bed. But he was already reaching into the back of his Jeep, where he pulled out a black attaché case and handed it to me.
“Mr. John Milton of the Pentagon asked me to hand this to you personally. It was delivered by special courier just a few hours ago. Here are the keys and you can see that the Pentagon seal is intact.”
I took the case and the keys. “Will you excuse me just a moment?”
I carried them to the hood of the Jeep and opened the case. In it there was a large manila envelope from which I shook out two passports, one for Diana and one for me, in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Ethelbaum. There was also a black AMEX and a Visa and a driving permit valid for Europe as well as the USA.
I stuffed the two grand in the envelope and put it in my pocket, then returned to Paolo Santos and handed him the envelope.
“A small token of Uncle Sam’s gratitude. I wonder if there is any way somebody could arrange some food and coffee for us. We still have another six hours flying ahead of us, and we stupidly left our supplies back in Canada.”
He nodded, smiling. “I understand. Actually, I have brought you two Happy Meals with extra big burgers. You see, we have a jet from Virginia landing in just a couple of hours. One of those…” He hesitated just long enough to give it extra meaning. “Hush, hush official diplomatic flights. I don’t know what they want here, but they especially requested that we stop any flights from taking off until they arrive.”
I felt Diana go very still and I wondered for a fraction of a second if I would need to kill him. But he smiled.
“I don’t know what authority they think they have to make such a request, but sometimes it is best to play along with such people. However, it is I think advisable that you are gone when they arrive. You are, I believe, headed for Senegal?”
I smiled at him. “Guinea-Bissau, then on to Monrovia. Listen.” I put my hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the Albatross. “I do a lot of traveling back and forth
, and good friends are sometimes hard to come by…”
He nodded, then shook his head. “That is so true, for my part I try to be a good friend to those people who are good and honest with me.”
“That is the impression I got from you, Paolo. So, if you will allow me, quite aside from Uncle Sam, I would like to express my own personal gratitude to you. And maybe if we are this way again, with a little more time, we could have dinner and catch up.”
“That would be a great pleasure for me. A great pleasure.”
We had come to the plane and I hopped in and grabbed the sports bag. I opened it so he could see it. Diana was standing next to him, smiling at him. I pulled out twenty thousand dollars, counted it out and handed it to him. His eyes were wide as he took it.
“This is very important to me,” I said. “I hope we can continue to do each other favors in the future.”
He glanced over his shoulders and stuffed the money into his various pockets.
“I will certainly do everything in my power to ensure that it is so. Ah!” He raised a finger. “Your Happy Meals!”
He hurried back to the Jeep and I looked down at Diana.
“What are they tracking?”
Her gaze drifted from my face. “There are only two possibilities left.”
“Name them.”
“I have a chip in my body, or they are tracking the NPP.”
I grunted. It was what I had feared. Paolo returned with two paper bags. As he handed them over I said, “I need one last favor from you, Paolo.”
“Name it, my friend.”
“Magnets. At least four. From the speakers in a plane, or a car…”
“Yes, of course, we have them, in maintenance.” He turned to the boys at the pump and rattled something at them in Portuguese. One of them shrugged, climbed in the Jeep and headed back toward the hangar.
“Jose will bring you the magnets. If there is nothing else, I shall leave you to carry on your way. I advise you to take off just as soon as Jose and Matias have finished.” He became grave and shook his head. “It is not safe for you.”
I offered him my hand but he raised both of his, laughed and said, “Ah! Elbows! Elbows!”
So we touched elbows, but as he turned to Diana she shook her head and said, “Nós todos vamos morrer…cedo ou tarde.”
He gave a small shrug, with his head on one side. “Melhor depois, não?”
She shrugged and turned toward the plane. We watched her climb in and I offered him an apologetic smile. He said, “She told me we all have to die sooner or later. I said, better late, no?”
“I guess that’s women: late for everything except somebody else’s funeral.”
“Dames!” he said, and laughed.
I nodded. “Yeah, dames.”
The headlamps emerged from the hangar again and sped toward us. Paolo turned and we both watched the Jeep arrive and come to a halt a few feet from us. Jose handed me a bunch of magnets wrapped in newspaper and returned to help his pal, Matias, who was up on the wing filling the bird and checking the oil.
Paolo nodded at me and slapped my shoulder. “I hope to see you again, my friend. Take care.”
I watched him drive away and climbed into the plane after Diana. She was sitting on a wooden bench that ran along the side of the fuselage, looking at her thumbs. I stood looking down at her and said, “They’ll follow us to Cadiz, they’ll find you at the hotel or at the restaurant, and if they don’t they’ll follow us to DC, or New York or Timbuktu. And there is an endless supply of them. They breed like cockroaches. For every one you kill, ten more crawl out of the gutter, and they just keep coming.”
“I know.”
“We can’t outrun them.”
“I know!”
“Where is it?”
She looked up at me. “You can’t take it away from me.”
“I’m not going to…”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“I’m not going to take it away from you, Diana. There is just an outside chance that if we surround it with magnets it will disrupt whatever system they’re using to track it.”
She thought a moment. “I guess so.”
I waited. She stared at me. “Where is it, Diana?” She didn’t answer. She just stared at me with her expressionless face. “Are you scared the magnets will damage it?”
A small shake. “No.”
“So?”
“You mustn’t destroy it, or take it away from me.”
I frowned. “I won’t.”
“I think you’re a man of your word. Will you promise?”
“Yes, I promise. But we have to do this, or they will find us.” I gave my head a shake. “How come you didn’t think of this?”
She sighed and her shoulders sagged. “It was all kind of spur of the moment. The opportunity presented itself and I took it. I thought your boss would be quicker. Course,” she shrugged, “he didn’t know I was being tracked.”
“Where is it, Diana? You can hang on to it. Keep it wherever you want. But we need to disrupt the signal.”
She reached inside her blouse, inside her bra, and pulled out a sleek, black object that looked like an iPhone, only slightly fatter. I stared at it.
“That’s it? That’s the reason thirteen men have died?” I pointed at it. “That?”
“Don’t be fooled by its size. A virus can be a lot more deadly than an elephant.”
I grunted and made a perfunctory search of the fuselage until I found the tool kit. It was contained, as I expected, in a large metal box. I made a space in the middle, placed one of the magnets there, laid the NPP on top and placed the remaining magnets around it.
“Most of these tools will become magnetized,” I said. “It should do the trick.”
She gave a listless nod, then rose and took the tool kit into the cockpit, and slid it under her seat. Shortly after that, Jose and Matias gave us the all-clear, and we taxied to the runway, picked up speed and thundered back, up into the black night.
Once we were airborne I switched on the automatic pilot, stretched my arms and legs and yawned.
At one point I opened my eyes and saw bright lights below, peppering the black ocean. Diana glanced at me and smiled. “Angra, Sao Jorge and the neighboring islands.”
I nodded, closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
When I opened them again there was nothing on the horizon but a blood-red sun leeching into a pale sky, flecking the ocean with gold and fire. There was no land, no islands, no boats. Nothing but blood and fire. I had a pain in my neck, my back hurt and I was hungry. I looked at the clock on my phone and saw it was seven AM. It would be nine AM local time when we got to Cadiz. I stretched. All my joints crunched. I looked at Diana. She had her eyes closed. The toolkit was in the same place under her seat.
“We’ll be there in an hour or so,” she said. “Then what?”
I rubbed my face with my hands. “Where are those disgusting Happy Meals?”
She reached down beside her seat and pulled out the two paper bags, handed me one. The coffee was black, weak and cold. I drank half of it and bit into the huge burger, which was also cold. Through a full mouth I said, “We check in to the Occidental as Mr. and Mrs. Ethelbaum. You watch TV while I arrange a meeting with Frank Mendez. When I’m done we fly to DC.”
“That simple.”
“The plan is not complicated. The execution might be.”
“Yeah,” she said and opened the paper bag. “The execution might be.”
“Who else knows about this, aside from Frank Mendez?”
She pulled out the coffee and sat staring out of the side window for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But suddenly she took the top off the drink and said, “A couple of people. I doubt you’d know them, unless you’re interested in nano-technology or medicine. Dr. Sandra Orceda, of the Quiron Hospital in Malaga, and Professor Omar Arian, who is the director of the foundation. I doubt very much that the loss of the NPP has gone beyond those two. In
fact I am pretty sure Sandra doesn’t even know the NPP exists yet.”
She hesitated a moment, frowning at her drink.
“A lot of people have died. I never intended this massacre to happen. I just wanted to get this technology into hands that I trusted a little more than the ones it was in.”
I scowled. “What’s your point? If I hadn’t killed those men they would have killed us.”
“I know that.” Her tone was placating. “I know that and, though I may not always seem it, I am grateful to you. It is hard for me to express my feelings most of the time. What I am saying is, I know you have to terminate Frank, but Sandra knows nothing of this, and Omar, once we are in DC and the stone is in the right hands, he will negotiate and sue for peace. There is no need to kill them.”
“You seem pretty sure of that.”
She shrugged. “They won’t have much choice, will they?”
I didn’t answer straight away. When I did I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them. From the very start I have been kept in the dark at every turn. Maybe we can take out Mendez and they won’t know anything about it until it’s too late. Or maybe they have Mendez under a twenty-four-hour watch. For all we know the first thing Paolo did when he got back to his office was call Professor Omar Arian and tell him we were on our way. Or maybe he called Frank. I don’t know a damned thing except that there are people who want to abduct and torture you to get the NPP, and kill me while they’re at it.”
She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “OK,” and sighed. “OK, I am going to trust you. I want to help.”
I studied her for a long moment, then nodded. “Good.”
Twelve
The port authority in Cadiz were very interested in why we were there, who owned the plane and why we were flying it. I explained at length that we were friends of Colonel Gilbert and we had thought it would be a gas to fly the old crate from Canada to Flores and then Cadiz, but we most certainly would not be flying it back. They checked the plane from top to bottom and from nose to tail, and found nothing that incriminated us in any way, as we had ditched most of the drug money—everything we couldn’t stuff into our pockets—a hundred miles out to sea.