by Mark Alpert
After a few seconds, the black agent returned to give his report to the blond one, who seemed to be in charge. “No one else is here,” he said. “And the old man doesn’t fit the description.”
The blond agent stepped away from her, moving into the foyer to confer with his partners. He put his gun back in its holster. Karen sat up, clutching Jonah to her chest, and shuddered with relief. Amory lay on his stomach a few feet away, his hands tied behind his back with some kind of plastic cord. “You’re going to be sorry about this, gentlemen!” he yelled. “I’m on close terms with the U.S. attorney!”
The blond agent scowled at him. “Shut up, Grandpa,” he said. Then he turned to Karen. “Where’s your ex-husband, Mrs. Swift?”
Amazingly, Karen wasn’t afraid anymore. Now that the agent had put his gun away, she felt nothing but contempt for him. “Is that why you burst in here? To look for David?”
“Just answer the—”
“You fucking bastard! You pulled a gun on a seven-year-old boy!”
While Karen glared at the FBI man, Jonah tugged the front of her shirt. His face was damp and splotchy. “Where’s Daddy?” he cried. “I want Daddy!”
For a moment the agent seemed to falter. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he gazed at Karen and Jonah huddled in the doorway. But soon his features hardened again. “David Swift is wanted for murder. We had to take the necessary precautions.”
Karen raised her hand to her mouth. No, she thought. It’s impossible. David had plenty of faults, but violence wasn’t one of them. The most violent thing she’d ever seen him do was punch the inside of his softball glove after his team lost a game. He never let his feelings get out of control. He’d learned from his father what could happen otherwise. “That’s a lie!” she said. “Who told you that?”
The agent narrowed his eyes. “I knew some of the men he killed, Mrs. Swift. Two of them were my friends.” He stared at her for another second, cold and unflinching. Then he spoke into the microphone hidden inside the sleeve of his jacket. “This is Agent Brock. We got three to bring in. Contact headquarters and tell ’em we have a woman and a minor.”
Karen tightened her hold on Jonah. “No! You can’t do this!”
The agent shook his head. “It’s for your own safety. Till we find your ex-husband.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and removed a couple of strips of plastic cord.
“HERE’S TO PHIL! You the man, Phil! You the fucking MAN!”
Around the table at the Station Break, the members of Pete’s bachelor party raised their glasses of Jagermeister to toast David’s alter ego, the generous Phil from New Brunswick. This was the third round of drinks that David had bought, and their spirits were now fully revived. Larry held a glass in each hand and chanted, “Phil! Phil! Phil!” before downing the two shots in quick succession. Even Pete, the drunken bridegroom, briefly lifted his head from the table to mutter, “You the man!” David responded in kind, throwing his arm around Pete and shouting, “No, YOU the man! You the MAN, you crazy fuck!” But though David bellowed and guffawed with the rest of them, he never let a drop of alcohol touch his lips. He surreptitiously slid his shot glasses toward Larry, who was only too happy to empty them.
After the chorus of You-the-Man’s had died down, Larry staggered to his feet. “And don’t forget Vinnie!” he yelled. “Here’s to Vinnie, that pussy-whipped fuck, who couldn’t be here tonight because his girlfriend thinks we’re a bad fucking influence!”
Everyone shouted variations on “Fuck that bitch!” Meanwhile, Larry opened a plastic bag that lay on the table and took out a neatly folded blue shirt. It was one of the custom-made T-shirts that everyone else was wearing, with the words PETE’S BACHELOR PARTY printed on the front. “Look at this!” Larry boomed. “Because Vinnie couldn’t make it, I got this extra fucking T-shirt on my hands!” He shook his head in disgust. “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna make his fucking girlfriend pay for it!”
The partiers shouted, “Yeah, make the bitch pay!” and similar sentiments, but David just stared at the T-shirt. After some thought, he slammed his fist on the table to get everyone’s attention. “I’ll buy the T-shirt from you, Larry!” he announced. “How much is it?”
Larry seemed taken aback. “Aw, Phil, you don’t have to. I mean, you already bought all these drinks and—”
“No, no, I insist! I want to buy it! I want to be an official member of Pete’s fucking bachelor party!” He stood up and shoved a twenty-dollar bill into Larry’s open hand. Then he grabbed the T-shirt and put it on, slipping it over his softball-team shirt.
Everyone cheered, of course. “Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil!” Then someone yelled, “Hey, it’s almost one-thirty, we’re gonna miss the fucking train again!” and the bachelor partiers stumbled out of their seats. “Let’s go!” Larry ordered. “We gotta get to the Lucky Lounge before it closes! Someone help Pete!”
While two of the partiers grabbed Pete by the elbows, David saw his chance. He shouted, “Wait for me!” in a slurred voice and then toppled to the floor, carefully breaking his fall with his outstretched palms.
Larry bent over him, stinking of Jagermeister. “Hey, Phil, you all right?”
“I’m a little…fucked up,” David replied, trying to sound as drunk as possible. “Could you…gimme a hand?”
“Sure, buddy, no problem!” Larry grasped David’s arm, picked him up, and steered him toward the door of the Station Break. David leaned against the big man’s shoulder as they lurched out of the bar. Although David hadn’t gotten drunk in nearly twenty years, he could easily imitate the swaying gait, the stooped posture. The memory of it was in his bones.
The station’s concourse was nearly empty of commuters now but still teemed with police officers. Half a dozen cops stood in front of the entrance to Track 10, which was where the bachelor partiers were converging. Larry pumped his fist in the air as they approached the officers. “All right, NYPD!” he boomed. “We’re behind you, man! Go get those fucking terrorists!”
“Yeah, go get the fuckers!” someone else shouted. “KILL ’EM ALL!”
A gaunt police sergeant held out his hands as if stopping traffic. “Okay, fellas, settle down,” he said. “Just take out your driver’s licenses.”
David’s stomach churned as the others pulled out their wallets. Okay, he thought. Here goes. He made a big show of patting his jeans pockets, first the front, then the back. “Shit!” he yelled. “Oh shit!” He fell to his hands and knees and began a dim-witted, drunken search of the floor.
Larry bent over him again. “What’s wrong, Phil?”
“My wallet,” David gasped, clutching Larry’s shoulder. “Can’t find…my fucking wallet.”
“Did you leave it in the bar?”
David shook his head. “Shit…don’t know…it could be…anywhere.”
The police sergeant noticed the commotion and came over. “What’s the matter here?”
“Phil lost his wallet,” Larry told him.
With his mouth hanging open and his head lolling to the side, David looked up at the sergeant. “I don’t…understand…it was…right here…a second ago.”
The cop furrowed his brow. His mouth was a tight, grim line. Uh-oh, David thought. This one is a hard-ass. “You don’t have any ID on you?”
“He’s Phil,” Larry explained. “From New Brunswick.” He pointed at the “Pete’s Bachelor Party” T-shirt. “He’s with us.”
The sergeant frowned. “You need ID to get on the train.”
As if on cue, a high-pitched chime sounded from the station’s speaker system. “Attention,” a prerecorded voice announced. “Last call for the Northeast Corridor Line train boarding on Track Ten, with service to Newark, Elizabeth, Rahway, Metuchen, New Brunswick, and Princeton Junction. All aboard on Track Ten.”
“We gotta get on that train!” Larry shouted. He frantically dug into the pocket of his pants and pulled out his own wallet, opening it for the police sergeant. “Look, I’m with the Metuchen PD.
My badge is right here. I’m telling you, Phil’s with us. He’s my bud.”
The sergeant looked at the badge, still frowning, still reluctant to give them a break. And at that moment David heard a dog barking. He turned his head and saw a National Guardsman and his German shepherd passing under the arrivals/departures board, about fifty feet away. The dog was heading straight toward them, pulling at his leash with such enthusiasm that the Guardsman had to lean backward to keep his balance. Oh Christ, David thought. The fucking animal can smell something on me.
He closed his eyes and a wave of nausea hit him. It’s hopeless, he thought. They’re going to arrest me and hand me over to the FBI and take me back to one of their interrogation rooms. He could see it in his mind’s eye, the bare windowless room with the fluorescent lights overhead and the gray-suited FBI agents standing around the metal table. Another wave of nausea surged through him, and this one was so strong that David suddenly bent over double and let out a dry heave. A thin rope of saliva spilled from his mouth to the linoleum floor.
“Watch out!” Larry warned. “Phil’s gonna hurl!”
The police sergeant quickly stepped back. “Ah, shit!” he cried. “Get him away from me!”
David lifted his head and looked up at the sergeant. The man was curling his lip, visibly repelled. On impulse, David stumbled closer to the officer and made a gagging noise, a wet guttural “Uhhhhhhhh!”
The sergeant pushed David away, shoving him toward Larry. “Fuck, get this guy out of here!” he yelled. “Go on, get him on the train!”
“Yes, sir!” Larry replied, grabbing David under the armpits. And together they rushed down the staircase to Track 10 and onto the one-thirty train to Metuchen.
SIMON SAT AT AN ANTIQUE desk in one of the preposterously overpriced suites at the Waldorf-Astoria. The hotel charged $2,000 a night for a stuffy parlor facing Park Avenue and a bedroom decorated like a czarist bordello. Simon was successful enough to afford the rate, but out of principle he refused to pay it; instead, he’d filched a credit-card number from one of the Internet’s leaky conduits. An unsuspecting Oregonian named Neil Davison was paying for Simon’s stay at the Waldorf, as well as for the rack of lamb and the half liter of Stolichnaya he’d ordered from room service.
As Simon knocked back another glass of vodka he stared at his laptop’s screen, which displayed the Web page of Columbia University’s physics department. Conveniently, the list of the department’s faculty members included a color photograph of each professor, lecturer, and postdoctoral fellow. Simon slowly scrolled down the page, studying each face. It seemed logical to assume that Kleinman’s accomplice would be a physics professor. The Einheitliche Feldtheorie would surely be too intricate for a layman to understand; one probably needed a thorough grounding in relativity theory and quantum mechanics just to recognize the mathematical terms in the revised field equations. And yet Simon didn’t see the man in sneakers anywhere on the physics department’s Web page. He proceeded to check the faculty listings of twenty other universities with prominent physics departments—Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and so on—but still found no sign of his quarry among the photo galleries of smiling scientists. After an hour he slammed the laptop shut and tossed the empty bottle of Stoli into the trash. It was infuriating. All he needed was the man’s name.
To calm himself, Simon went to the window and stared at the lights of Park Avenue. Even at two o’clock in the morning, the taxis were still streaming down the street. As he watched the cabs jockey for position, Simon wondered whether he’d missed something, some crucial biographical detail from Professor Kleinman’s life that would reveal the identity of his associate. Perhaps the man was Kleinman’s nephew or godson, or maybe the bastard child from some long-ago affair. Simon went to the closet, opened his duffel bag, and removed the book he’d used to track down Kleinman. It was a long book, more than five hundred pages, packed with useful information about all the physicists who’d assisted Albert Einstein in the last years of his life. On the Shoulders of Giants, it was called.
As Simon opened the book he caught a glimpse of something familiar. He turned to the inside flap of the back cover. There, just below a lavish blurb from Library Journal, was a photograph of the author.
Simon smiled. “Hello, David Swift,” he said out loud. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Chapter Five
DESPITE THE PLEADING OF LARRY, PETE, AND THE OTHER bachelor partiers, David declined to get off the train at the Metuchen stop. He said his wife would kill him if he didn’t go straight home to New Brunswick, but he promised to join his new friends at the Lucky Lounge some other night. The whole drunken crew gave him high fives as they exited the train and chanted, “Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil!” as they stood on the platform. David acknowledged their cheers with a thumbs-up, then slumped back in his seat, exhausted.
As the train pulled away from the station, David began to shiver. The air-conditioning seemed unbearably cold. He folded his arms across his chest and rubbed his shoulders to warm himself, but he couldn’t stop trembling. He recognized what was happening: it was a post-traumatic stress reaction, his body’s delayed response to all the terrifying events of the past four hours. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. It’s all right, he told himself. You’re speeding away from New York now. You’re leaving them all behind.
He opened his eyes when the train pulled into the New Brunswick station. He’d stopped shivering by now and he could think a little more clearly. He decided to stay on the train until it reached Trenton. Then he’d get on a Greyhound bus heading for Toronto. But as the doors closed and the train continued westward, David began to see the flaws in this plan. What if they were checking ID at the bus stations, too? He couldn’t exactly count on finding another bachelor party. And by the time the bus reached the Canadian border, the police would probably be looking for him there as well. No, taking a bus was too risky, unless he could get his hands on a fake driver’s license. And how the hell was he going to manage that?
Too agitated to sit, David started pacing the aisle of the nearly empty train car. There were only three other passengers: a pair of teenage girls in short skirts and an elderly man in an argyle sweater, speaking quietly into his cell phone. For a moment David considered calling Karen and Jonah on his own phone, but he knew that as soon as he turned on the device, it would send a signal to the closest cellular tower and the FBI would know where he was. What made it so frustrating was that David was getting worried about his ex-wife. He had a feeling that the men in gray suits might try to question her.
Soon the conductor announced, “Now arriving at Princeton Junction. Service here to Princeton via the Princeton Branch Line.” It was the repetition that did it, the three Princetons in a row. David immediately thought of someone who could help him. He hadn’t seen this person in almost twenty years but he knew she still lived in Princeton. There was little chance that the FBI would be waiting for him at her house; although the Bureau had obviously done a thorough investigation of his past, he doubted that they’d uncovered anything about her. Best of all, she was a physicist, one of the pioneers of string theory. David suspected that only a physicist could make any sense of the story he had to tell.
The train came to a stop and the doors opened. David stepped onto the platform and walked toward the branch-line track that led to Princeton University.
BACK IN 1989, WHILE DAVID was still a graduate student in physics, he attended a conference at Princeton on string theory. At the time, the scientific community was abuzz with the new idea because it promised to resolve a long-standing problem. Although Einstein’s theory of relativity explained gravity to perfection, and quantum mechanics could account for every nuance of the subatomic world, the two theories were mathematically incompatible. For thirty years Einstein had tried to unify the two sets of physical laws, with the aim of creating a single overarching theory that could explain all the forces in nature. But all of Einstein’s published solutions turned out
to be flawed, and after his death many physicists concluded that his quest had been misguided. The universe, they said, was just too complex to be described by a single set of equations.
Starting in the 1970s, though, some physicists revived the idea of a unified theory by hypothesizing that all the fundamental particles were actually minuscule strings of energy, each less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a millimeter long. By the 1980s, the string theorists had refined their model by claiming that the strings vibrated in ten dimensions, six of which were curled into manifolds too small to see. The theory was indefinite, incomplete, and incredibly unwieldy, and yet it fired the imaginations of researchers all over the world. One of them was Monique Reynolds, a twenty-four-year-old grad student in Princeton’s physics department.
David saw her for the first time at the closing session of the conference, which was held in a large auditorium in Jadwin Hall. Monique stood on the stage, getting ready to deliver a presentation on multidimensional manifolds. What he noticed first was how tall she was, a full head taller than the wizened chairman of the physics department, who introduced Monique as “the brightest young student I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.” David wondered if perhaps the old man had grown overly fond of her, because in addition to being tall, this woman was beautiful. Her face was like one of the ancient portraits of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, but instead of a helmet she wore a crown of intricately woven cornrows, and her skin was the color of a Kahlúa and cream. A long dress made from yellow-and-red Kente cloth draped her shoulders, and several gold bracelets hung from each of her brown arms. In the drabness of Jadwin Hall she blazed like a particle shower.