The Kafir Project

by Lee Burvine

  Drawn out, unbearable pain and horror on the other hand-that was a whole other thing.

  That shit was just sick.

  When Sabel reached his car, he popped a couple of Provigil pills. He leaned back, closed his eyes ... and twenty minutes later felt like he'd slept for twelve hours.

  He drove out of Livermore and headed for the City.

  The current objective was to reacquire Rees and avoid the Specialist while he was at it. And the only real lead he had now was this Herodotus guy. Who happened to be next on the list to round up anyway.

  The Office's research division said there was a high probability that the man taught at San Francisco State. One of five historians on the Kafir Project. Rees would have to hook up with him sooner or later.

  So that would be the most effective line of action. Use Herodotus to relocate Rees.

  Sabel merged onto the 280, then dialed the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

  He assumed Rees's choice of accommodations hadn't been random. Fischer and his conspirators would want a hub out here. The hotel could be it. Worth making a quick call to see if any messages came in for Rees overnight.

  "Thank you for calling the International Mark Hopkins, how may I assist you?" a bright, female voice said.

  "Yes, this is Dr. Gevin Rees. I stayed with you last night. I was expecting a message that never came, and I'm a little worried now. My friend who was supposed to call, well, I can't reach him." He injected the sound of fear into his voice, but with some control. "No one knows where he is. Are there any messages I might have missed?"

  "One moment, Dr. Rees." Soft music came on for about ten seconds. "No, sir. The only message I have, it shows here you picked that up last night. Nothing else after that."

  "Yes, which message is that again? Can you reread it to me?"

  "Certainly. Just one name here. Last name, maybe? Hero-doh-tus. I don't know if I'm saying that right. It says, 'If you know my history, you know where to find me at work. Look for me in the JPL library tomorrow afternoon.' And that's it."

  "Yes, I did get that one." Sabel kept the worried tone alive in his voice. "And you're absolutely sure there's nothing else?"

  "No, sir. That's the only message we have. I'm sorry."

  He thanked her, disconnected and made a quick call to the Office. They'd want to know about the Specialist freelancing on this job. Plus they might be able to nail down Herodotus's identity now. He was betting on Herodotus being a smart scientist. And a lousy field agent.

  The bet paid off.

  In less than ten minutes the Office's SIGINT department called back. Someone had placed a payphone call to the Mark Hopkins hotel switchboard yesterday.

  Who calls a luxury hotel from a payphone?

  An amateur who thinks that's playing it safe, that's who. The call came from a street corner near San Francisco State University.

  So the Office had it right all along. Herodotus was that historian at SFSU. Professor Burhan Kazemi.

  Look for me in the JPL library tomorrow afternoon.

  He would run with the whole amateur angle there and guess Kazemi had no chance to arrange a code with Rees. So, this was literally a library they were talking about.

  And the JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory thing? Probably a red herring. Might throw off someone who intercepted the message. Send them down to SoCal.

  Not a bad little trick for an amateur.

  Off to the SFSU library, then. But which one? The campus would have several, probably.

  Assuming Rees didn't know that either, it would just be the most natural choice. Otherwise Kazemi would've been more specific. So maybe this is the library he usually hung out at. Which, of course, Sabel still had no clue about.

  No big deal there either.

  One of Kazemi's students or colleagues would know that. Your friendly neighborhood sociopath could pick up that kind of info for the price of a smile.

  And Sabel had smiles to spare.

  CHAPTER 41

  A HALF HOUR after they called Danni's co-worker Louis Tyminski from one of the trailers, Rees watched the man drive up to the construction site in their new getaway car. A little, sky blue Fiat 500.

  Rees eyed the subcompact skeptically. "Are we all going to fit in there?"

  Louis spoke to him through the rolled down driver's window. "Actually, it seats four adults quite comfortably."

  Morgan peered in the back. "Yeah, if two of them are hobbits."

  Rees and Morgan took the rear seats, which appeared to be designed specifically to induce deep vein thrombosis. Rees had to set Fischer's pouch on his lap. No room on the floor for even a small bag.

  After they'd cruised far enough out of Livermore to feel safe doing so, they hit a drive-thru. Louis bought everyone breakfast. Rees kept his face turned away from the cashier the whole time. A precaution against being recognized.

  Using Louis's phone, they had confirmed that Rees's picture now flooded the internet. Presumably it was all over the TV news as well. Out there in connection with the "disaster" at Livermore, as they were calling it. And with the dead DCIS agents.

  Agents, plural. Three of them now.

  Morgan and Danni were also identified by name in the stories. Their faces wouldn't be familiar to the general public, though. Not for a while at least.

  So, all in all, they were in pretty good shape. Fortified with coffee and breakfast burritos, they were on their way to meet Professor Burhan Kazemi, the man Fischer had called Herodotus. From that point on, they should be more less back in line with Fischer's original plan. Rees didn't know exactly what that was, but it had to be better than the scratching around in the dark they'd been doing so far.

  Louis, for his part, had taken in the whole bizarre story with what Rees judged to be an amazing amount of sangfroid. He didn't even ask a lot of questions. What had him most intrigued, as it turned out, was Morgan's and Danni's relationship.

  He came right out with it too. Which Rees was beginning to see was just Louis's style.

  "So, are you two an item or what?" he asked Danni.

  Danni laughed. "Uh, we dated and, you know, we did the long distance thing for a while..." She looked back at Morgan.

  Awkward silence then.

  "It's a moot point, Louis," Morgan finally said. "I don't play for both teams."

  Louis nodded. "Too bad. I was hoping you were bi and available."

  Danni laughed again. "Well, so much for tact."

  "Yeah, it's overrated." Louis took the freeway fork toward the Bay Bridge. "Hey, I have a question for you Dr. Rees."

  Rees saw Louis's eyes focused on him in the rear view. "I'm neither bi nor available, Louis. Sorry."

  Morgan and Danni both laughed at that.

  "That's funny," Louis said. "No, it is. You should bring more of that to your shows. But no, seriously, my question is why did anyone think this whole thing would work? Muslim fanatics will just deny it all. They'll say the lectionary and the recordings are fakes. Even if you give 'em the technology to validate it, you can't make them pursue it."

  "Probably yes, the radicals will deny the evidence," Rees agreed. "But what about mainstream Islam? There's a long tradition of rationality there. Islam kept Aristotle's works alive through the Dark Ages. Imagine if all of this new evidence ushered in something like the Enlightenment for them. If you change the median here, you just might change the extremes as a consequence."

  Morgan was eying Rees. "And what if you're just projecting? Because of your own experience with Mormonism. People are not all scientists out there."

  Louis glanced back at Rees in the mirror. "You're a Mormon?"

  Rees had to smile. "It sounds like you're asking me if I'm a Martian, Louis. Yes, I was a Mormon. Past tense. I examined the history. It didn't stand up. End of story. It's a lot like what Fischer's trying to do with Islam. So maybe I am biased." He turned to Morgan. "I do realize not everyone will react to historical evidence the way I did. But a lot o
f them might."

  Rees let it go at that, and thankfully no one pressed him.

  In truth there was a lot more to his Mormon apostasy than just encountering the historical evidence. It had taken a big push to initiate Rees's explorations in the first place. A push that came in the form of a terrible personal loss.

  Almost thirty years ago now. Hard for him to believe.

  It had been an unusually hot summer in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. A seventeen year old Gevin Rees arrived home to an empty house and the light on the phone machine flashing. He pressed the button and listened to the desperate message from his sister, Anna.

  He immediately dialed her apartment. She didn't answer.

  They hadn't spoken since her excommunication from the Mormon Church. Shunning wasn't official Mormon practice, but when Anna came out as a lesbian the Rees family chose the most extreme response. They disowned her, and forbade any further communication.

  That didn't stop him thinking about her all the time. Outside of the immediate family, Rees preferred to remain in his own shell. A loner and fine with it. In part because Anna had always been his best friend anyway. Then suddenly she was gone. And he knew what it meant to be truly lonely.

  But he couldn't bring himself to defy his parents.

  The phone machine message she left was difficult to decipher. Anna had sobbed through it, and she sounded drunk or drugged.

  Rees called 911 then grabbed the keys to the Olds Cutlass off the hook in the kitchen.

  Two minutes later he rocketed onto the freeway to the blast of someone's car horn. Driving way too fast and he knew it. Twelve more minutes and he was flying down the freeway exit for the neighborhood Anna had moved to.

  So close. She had stayed so close.

  He skidded to a stop outside her apartment building.

  The lobby's glass doors burst open before he'd even gotten out of the car. Anna had a clear mask pressed over her face. One of the paramedics squeezed a large bulb connected to it.

  They wouldn't let him ride in the ambulance with her. It would've saved everyone a lot of trouble. He crashed while driving to the hospital.

  Rees only knew from being told later that he'd hit a tree on the roadside. He never even saw it coming. Everything just went away.

  And then he was sitting very still.

  He smelled antifreeze and gasoline mixed with fresh air. The front windshield had vanished. Clouds of steam hissed from the exposed engine. Rees kept blinking, over and over, but his vision remained blurry. Something wet and hot running into his eyes.

  He drifted in and out. A Good Samaritan stopped and pulled him from the car.

  He eventually woke up in ICU. The doctor explained about the emergency lobectomy. To stop the hemorrhaging in his lung.

  Rees was on a ventilator, but he managed to communicate that he needed a pad and pen. He wrote down the question. It didn't take long to get an answer.

  Anna was gone.

  He wept silently through that first night, and many other nights down through the years. He lay awake in the ICU listening to the medical devices beep and chime, and wishing hopelessly that he'd gotten home earlier. Taken her call. He was sure that he could have saved her.

  He was furious with himself. And even more troubling ... he was furious with Anna.

  Mad at himself for not defying his parents' authority. In the future he would serve no authority except the truth.

  Mad at Anna for killing his best friend in the world. At the time, he couldn't see how he would ever forgive her for that.

  And in fact he never really did.

  * * *

  LOUIS MADE A right onto Valencia from Cesar Chavez Street. Maybe ten minutes from SFSU now.

  "Where'd you go?" Morgan was watching Rees again.

  He gave her a dismissive shrug and smiled. "Just absent minded. You know us academic types."

  "Hey, I got another question, Dr. Rees," Louis announced from the front seat.

  Morgan continued to eyeball Rees, like she wasn't buying the absent minded professor line.

  Rees gladly transitioned away from the whole subject. "Yes, Louis?"

  "Who do you think's behind this? Trying to keep it all quiet?"

  Danni spoke over her shoulder. "Are we still going on the assumption that it's not the Islamists? Because they really do have the clearest motivation here."

  Morgan squinted and shook her head. "I just can't believe some terrorist group achieved that kind of penetration. All the way into the DCIS, and beyond. Someone knew we were at Livermore Labs. Probably from when Danni passed through security. But if a terror organization had cracked the Defense Department's servers, they'd be doing a lot more with it than that. No, this is an inside job."

  Rees agreed, but that presented its own problems. "If it's something like a rogue group within the Defense Department, then why fight one of your own projects?"

  Louis jumped in. "Three words. Military, industrial, complex."

  Rees's usual anti-conspiracy skepticism began to rise, and just as quickly sat down and shut up. That's not an entirely ridiculous idea.

  The quiet in the car suggested Morgan and Danni were thinking along the same lines.

  Louis apparently read the silence as a cue to keep going. "Think about the trillions spent in the war on terror. Trillions, man. I mean, in addition to the actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That money doesn't just get spent, it gets made too. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Kellogg Brown and Root."

  "Fifty percent of the annual defense budget goes directly to contractors," Danni added. "I know that from researching our own budget requests at LLNL. And most of the time they're kinda their own government oversight committee, believe it or not."

  "Exactamundo," Louis said. "So what happens to all that money if radical Islam really does get kicked in the nuts by all this? That hurts some powerful pocketbooks, man. There's your motivation."

  As much as it sounded like the paranoid plotline for a Hollywood movie, Rees had to admit it made sense.

  Louis, meanwhile, had just executed a left on Twenty-Sixth and was now quickly making another left. This time onto an alley behind a row of businesses. He was doubling back.

  Morgan leaned forward. "Louis, what are you doing?"

  "Testing a theory. What are the odds that a silver BMW X3 got onto the freeway a few cars behind us in Livermore and a different one just followed us into an alley in San Francisco?"

  Rees and Morgan both turned to look through the rear window.

  A big BMW X3 was cruising back there. No cars between it and the Fiat. If the X3's driver was tailing them, then no attempt was being made to conceal the fact. That couldn't be good.

  Morgan turned forward again. "Louis, get us back to a street with some traffic." She pointed up ahead. "Cut up between those buildings there."

  Louis slowed down to make the turn.

  Rees kept his eye on the X3. It didn't slow down. It accelerated. He managed to get out, "Hang on!" just before the impact.

  CHAPTER 42

  One day earlier-Jerusalem

  AMSEL WOKE EARLY to the sound of his cell phone chiming a text.

  Outside the hotel room window, a band of light pinked the rim of the blue-black sky. The sun hadn't quite risen.

  Normally the chime wouldn't have woken him, but Amsel had been sleeping fitfully ever since the room safe had been robbed. The money and passports hadn't been hard to replace. The journal was the greater loss. But the suspicion that it had been more than just an ordinary robbery disturbed him most of all.

  The text had come from a professor of paleontology back at Oxford.

  Do you know anyone at Fermilab? Big explosion there.

  BTW still waiting to hear about your carbon 14 work.

  When he'd flown out to be briefed on the Kafir Project, Amsel didn't apprise his colleagues of the details, of course. But he didn't try to hide that his destination was Fermilab either. He'd
be seen there. Word gets around the academic world. So, he casually put it out that the trip had to do with new carbon dating technology.

  That simple act might have changed everything. By triggering this text. Otherwise he would not have heard the news for hours yet.

  The internet soon provided more details. The blast involved the Tevatron. Numerous injuries and probably deaths. And the lead story still developing: the world's most famous scientist, Edward Fischer, may have been killed in the accident.

  Amsel immediately called Randy Osborn.

  Osborn's groggy voice croaked out of the receiver. "Yes, hello?"

  "Meet me in the lobby, quickly as you're able. And bring Robert."

  Those last words had been agreed upon much earlier. A coded message. It told Osborn to collect what the military people called a B.O.B., a bug-out-bag, and be prepared to leave in an instant.

  After the call, Amsel gathered up his own go-bag from the closet. He doubted he'd need it now, though.

  He rode the elevator to the lobby. As he waited there, he thought back to the beginning of all this. His first face to face meeting with Edward Fischer at Fermilab.

  Three military men and two gentlemen in dark suits who did not introduce themselves briefed Amsel in a boardroom in Wilson Hall.

  Fischer sat in the corner, reading a novel-Dickens, Amsel recalled-and remained silent throughout the briefing. He didn't even look up.

  Amsel listened intently without saying a word himself.

  No one read from or handed out any materials. No PowerPoint images were used. Amsel was not allowed to take notes.

  When it ended, the military men and the two Amsel assumed were US intelligence officers asked him if he had any questions.

  He had one. For Fischer. He turned to the great scientist and looked him squarely in the eye. "Are you as crazy as they say you are, sir?"

  Fischer answered without pause. "Easily. But the boldest ideas always seem crazy. Exempli gratia: everything is made of bits so small that twenty million, million, millions of them make up a single grain of sand. Clocks slow down as we speed up. Stars can swallow themselves whole. It takes something like a lunatic to imagine such things. The trick lies in distinguishing the useful madness from the genuinely insane ideas. And that I can do quite well."