by Mark Alpert
“Uh, yeah, I suppose,” David answered. “I mean, it’s a covert operation, so the FBI wouldn’t want to string wires all over the place.”
Gupta smiled again. “Then we can do something about it. Take me to room 407. The jamming equipment is in there. After that, we won’t need the Dumpster.”
“But how are we gonna get out of the building?” Monique asked. “Even if the cameras are down, they still have enough agents to cover the exits.”
“Don’t worry, I know a place we can go,” Gupta replied. “My students will help us. But we have to get Michael first.”
“Michael?”
“Yes, he sits at the desk in my reception area. He likes to play his computer games there.”
The handicapped boy, David thought. The one who stared at the computer screen instead of answering Monique. “I’m sorry, Professor, but why do you—”
“We can’t leave him behind, David. He’s my grandson.”
LUCILLE STUDIED THE PRINTOUT IN her hands. On the left side was an image from one of the surveillance cameras, a picture of a cleaning woman pushing a canvas Dumpster into Amil Gupta’s reception room. On the right was a page from the FBI’s dossier on Monique Reynolds, professor of physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The Bureau had collected quite a bit of information about Professor Reynolds in advance of the undercover operation at her home on 112 Mercer Street. The agents in New Jersey reported that she had no criminal record, although her mother had a long list of drug arrests and her sister was a prostitute working in Washington, D.C. More to the point, Professor Reynolds had no apparent connections to any of Einstein’s assistants; the Institute had granted her the honor of living at 112 Mercer Street simply because she was one of their most highly regarded physicists. The agents concluded that Reynolds was an innocent bystander and recommended that the Bureau disguise the search of her home, making it look like an act of vandalism. But now it seemed that this conclusion had been premature.
She’s pretty, Lucille thought. Full lips, high cheekbones, swooping eyebrows. And about the same age as David Swift. Both of them had been graduate students in physics in the late 1980s. And Princeton, of course, was one of the stops on the New Jersey Transit train that Swift had boarded last night. Although Lucille couldn’t possibly have guessed any of this beforehand, she nevertheless felt a twinge of humiliation as she stared at Monique’s picture. Skinny bitch, she muttered. You and Swift almost fooled me. But I’ve got you now.
A commotion at the other end of the command post interrupted her thoughts. Agent Crawford stood in front of the video monitors, shouting into his headset. “Affirmative, retreat to the ground floor and hold your positions there. Repeat, hold your positions on the ground floor. We need to maintain the perimeter.”
Lucille put down the printout and looked at Crawford. “What’s going on?”
“We got a report of radiation on the fourth floor. I’m withdrawing everyone until we can get the hazmat team up there.”
Lucille tensed. Radiation? Why didn’t they detect it before? “Who reported it? And how many rems are we talking about?”
She waited impatiently while Crawford shouted the questions into his headset. After several endless seconds he got an answer. “It was an alarm that went off. From a surveillance drone, a Dragon Runner.”
“What? We haven’t deployed any surveillance drones!”
“But Agent Walsh said he was certain it was a Dragon Runner.”
“Look, I don’t care…” Lucille paused. She remembered something she’d seen on one of the video monitors just a few minutes ago. The odd contraption that looked like a miniature tank, rolling across the floor of Gupta’s reception room. “Shit, that’s one of Gupta’s robots! It’s a trick!”
Crawford stood there, looking confused. “A trick? What do you—”
She didn’t have time to explain. Instead she ripped the headset off Crawford’s bewildered face and spoke into the microphone. “Everyone return to their previous positions! There’s no radiation danger in the building. Repeat, no radiation danger in—”
“Agent Parker!” one of the technicians called out. “Check out Monitor Five!”
Lucille looked at the screen just in time to see Monique Reynolds pushing her Dumpster down a corridor. She was straining against the thing, both hands gripping the edge of the cart and her torso bent almost horizontally. And jogging along beside her was the autistic teenager from Gupta’s reception room.
Monique quickly passed out of the surveillance camera’s range, but Lucille noted the device’s location. She spoke into the microphone again. “All teams head for the southwestern corner of the fourth floor. The target has been observed in this area. Repeat, the southwestern corner of the fourth floor.”
Lucille let out a long whoosh of breath and returned the radio headset to Crawford. All right, she thought, now it’s just a matter of time. She gazed at the bank of video monitors and saw her agents dashing up the stairways of Newell-Simon Hall. In less than a minute they would converge on Monique Reynolds’s position and pull Amil Gupta out of her Dumpster. And maybe David Swift, too, if he’d been stupid enough to enter the building with her. And then Lucille could forget about this whole lousy assignment and go back to her office at headquarters, where she wouldn’t have to worry about theoretical physics or fugitive historians or the SecDef ’s nutty Buck Rogers ideas.
But while she was contemplating this happy prospect, every screen in the bank of video monitors suddenly went black.
AFTER DRIVING THE FERRARI AS fast as he dared for four and a half hours, Simon reached Carnegie Mellon and headed straight for the Robotics Institute. As soon as he turned off Forbes Avenue, though, he feared he was too late. A dozen burly men in shorts and T-shirts guarded the building’s entrance; half of them were searching the backpacks and purses of the students trying to exit the lobby and half were warily surveying the crowd, their semiautomatics resting in barely concealed holsters.
Simon quickly parked the Ferrari and found a reconnaissance position behind a neighboring building. His intuition had been correct. David Swift and Monique Reynolds had traveled west to rendezvous with Amil Gupta. Simon was quite familiar with Gupta and his work with Dr. Einstein; in fact, when he’d first received his current assignment, he’d naturally assumed that Gupta would be one of his targets, along with Bouchet, MacDonald, and Kleinman. But his client, Henry Cobb, had told him early on that Gupta wasn’t worth pursuing. Although he’d been one of Einstein’s assistants in the fifties, Gupta had no knowledge of the unified theory. Cobb didn’t reveal how he’d discovered this intriguing fact, but he stated it with unequivocal certainty. So it was a bit amusing now to see the platoon of FBI agents surrounding the Robotics Institute, ready to pounce on a man who could unfortunately tell them nothing.
The problem, however, was that David Swift had also assumed that Gupta knew the theory, and now it looked like the federal agents had trapped him and his physicist girlfriend. Extracting them from the FBI’s custody wouldn’t be easy. The Bureau had beefed up the security of the operation; in addition to the agents in front of Newell-Simon Hall, there was another dozen at the service entrance and probably several more in the trailer that was serving as their command post. (He identified it right away from the profusion of antennas on its roof.) But Simon was undaunted. He knew that if he waited for the right moment, he could create a diversion. It was helpful that there were so many students in the area, gawking at the agents. He might need a human shield when he confronted the FBI men.
Simon pulled out a pair of tactical binoculars so he could observe the operation more closely. Outside the service entrance, a tall agent holding an M-16 stood next to a line of handcuffed women in pale blue smocks. Simon zoomed in on their faces: all five were black, but Monique Reynolds wasn’t among them. A few yards away, two more agents were rooting through a canvas Dumpster, madly tossing newspapers and crumpled bags and scraps of wood into the air. Within twenty seconds all the garbag
e was strewn across the parking lot, and the agents stared dejectedly at the bottom of the cart. Then a heavyset woman in a white blouse and a red skirt trotted over to the agents and began shouting. Simon focused on her face, which was creased around the eyes and contorted with frustration. He felt a shock of recognition: it was the babushka! The big-bosomed woman who’d nearly killed him the night before! She was in charge of the operation here as well, and from the look on her face Simon could see that something had gone wrong. At least one of their targets had slipped away.
Then Simon spotted another swarm of agents surrounding a very peculiar-looking car. The vehicle’s passenger compartment had been ripped off its chassis and in its place was a massive block of machinery topped by a large silver orb. Simon stared at the thing in wonder—he’d seen this vehicle before, in a magazine article about robotic cars. He remembered it clearly because the technology had fascinated him. The orb contained a rotating laser scanner designed to detect obstacles in the vehicle’s path. The FBI men were giving the car a thorough inspection, shining their flashlights into every nook and cranny. One agent interrogated the pair of Robotics Institute students who were testing the car, while another got down on all fours and peered beneath the vehicle, looking for stowaways clinging to the undercarriage. Finally, the agents allowed the test to continue, and the students walked behind the robotic car as it navigated its way out of the parking lot.
But as the vehicle made a right onto Forbes Avenue and slowly cruised away, Simon noticed something odd: the silver orb didn’t rotate as the vehicle made the turn. The laser scanner wasn’t functioning, and yet the car didn’t jump the curb or crash into the oncoming traffic. It executed a flawless turn, staying within its lane at all times. Simon knew this could mean only one of two things: either the vehicle was employing a different kind of obstacle-avoidance technology, or a driver was hidden somewhere inside the car.
Grinning, Simon put his binoculars away and rushed back to his Ferrari.
Chapter Seven
IN A DARK COMPARTMENT HIDDEN WITHIN THE HIGHLANDER vehicle, Amil Gupta hunched over the controls of the drive-by-wire panel. Four people were crammed inside the narrow space: David squeezed between Gupta and Monique, while Michael crouched at the other end of the compartment, playing with a Game Boy perched on his knees. Gupta had warned that his grandson would scream if he were touched, so David and Monique entwined in an uncomfortable embrace to keep a few inches between themselves and the teenager. Monique’s butt pinned David’s thigh to the floor and her elbows dug into his ribs. At one point, the back of her head smacked into David’s chin, slamming his teeth shut on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t make a sound. He knew the FBI agents were right outside the vehicle. He could see them on the screen at the center of the drive-by-wire panel, which showed a live video feed from one of the Highlander’s cameras.
The panel looked a bit like an aircraft’s steering wheel, with black handgrips to the left and right of the central screen. Gupta twisted the right grip to accelerate the vehicle and squeezed the left one to brake it. In fits and starts, he maneuvered the Highlander out of the parking lot and away from the federal agents. As he turned onto Forbes Avenue he let out a whistle of relief. “I think we’re safe now,” he said. “None of the agents seem to be following us.”
Gupta stayed in the right lane of the busy street, driving at a snail’s pace so his students could keep up with the Highlander on foot. David noticed that the compass reading above the screen said EAST. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“No particular direction,” Gupta replied. “I’m just trying to put some distance between us and those gentlemen from the FBI.”
“Head for the East Campus Lot,” Monique grunted. “That’s where my car’s parked. I can’t stay cooped up like this much longer.”
Gupta nodded. “All right, but it’s going to take a few minutes to get there. I can drive the Highlander faster than this, but it would look very suspicious if I left my students behind.”
The old man seemed quite adept at the drive-by-wire controls. He’d obviously done this before. “I don’t understand something, Professor,” David said. “Why did you put a driver-control system in a robotic vehicle?”
“The Highlander is an army contract,” Gupta explained, “and the army wanted a robotic vehicle that could also be driven by soldiers if necessary. The Pentagon doesn’t really trust the technology, you see. I argued against the idea, but they were insistent. So we designed the drive-by-wire system and the two-man cockpit. We put the cockpit in the dead center of the vehicle to maximize the amount of armor that could be layered around it.”
“But why didn’t the FBI agents realize there could be people inside? Don’t they know about the army’s projects?”
The professor chuckled. “Obviously you’ve never done any work for the government. All these research-and-development contracts are classified. The army won’t tell the navy what it’s doing, and the navy won’t tell the Marines. Perfectly ridiculous, the whole thing.”
David’s right foot was growing numb from Monique’s weight on his thigh. He tried to shift his leg a bit, being careful not to brush against Michael. The teenager’s fingers were dancing over the buttons of the Game Boy but the rest of his body was motionless, locked in a rigid fetal curl. On the Game Boy’s screen, a cartoon soldier fired his rifle at a squat yellow building. David watched the action for a few seconds, then leaned toward Gupta. “Your grandson seems a lot calmer now,” he whispered. “The computer game has quite an effect on him.”
“That’s one of the symptoms of autism,” Gupta said. “A preoccupation with certain activities to the exclusion of all else. It’s his way of shutting out the world.”
Gupta’s tone was matter-of-fact. He spoke as if he were the boy’s doctor, without a hint of regret or despair. To David, this seemed an amazing feat of emotional control. He could’ve never done the same if Jonah had been born with autism. “Where are his parents?”
The professor shook his head. “My daughter is a drug addict, and she’s never told me who Michael’s father is. The boy’s lived with me for the past five years.”
Gupta kept his eyes on the drive-by-wire screen, but his hands seemed to tighten around the panel. So much for emotional control, David thought. Even the most rational men have their weak spots. Rather than torment him further, David pointed at Michael’s Game Boy. “Is that the same game that was running on the computer in your reception room?”
The professor nodded vigorously, eager to change the subject. “Yes, it’s a program called Warfighter. The army uses it for combat training. The Robotics Institute had a contract to develop a new interface for the program, and Michael came into the computer lab one day while we were working on it. He took one look at the screen and he’s been hooked ever since. I’ve tried to interest him in other computer games—Major League Baseball, that kind of thing—but all he wants to play is Warfighter.”
Now Monique shifted her weight, moving her butt off David’s thigh but mashing his kneecap. Her ass was firm and muscular. Despite the pain in his leg, David felt a surge of arousal. He hadn’t been this close to a woman in a while. He wanted to lock his arms around her waist and drink in her clean scent, but this was obviously not the right moment. He turned back to Gupta. “Your institute does a lot of military work, doesn’t it? The Dragon Runner, the Highlander, the Warfighter?”
Gupta shrugged. “That’s where the money is. My foundation has substantial resources, but only the Pentagon has enough to fund these long-term research projects. But I’ve never worked on weaponry, mind you. Reconnaissance, yes, combat simulation, yes. But weaponry, never.”
“Why do you think the military is so interested in the unified field theory? What kind of weapon could possibly come out of it?”
“I told you, I don’t know the details of the Einheitliche Feldtheorie. But any unification theory must describe what happens to particles and forces at very high energies. Energies comparable to th
ose in a black hole, for example. And it’s conceivable that unexpected phenomena can occur in that realm.”
Monique squirmed on top of David again. Her body felt tense, agitated. “But how could you build a weapon around those phenomena?” she asked. “There’s no practical way to generate such high energies. You’d need a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way galaxy.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Gupta responded. “It’s impossible to predict the consequences of a new discovery in physics. Look at Herr Doctor’s special theory of relativity. After he wrote the paper in 1905, it took him several months to realize that his equations led to the E = mc2 formula. And forty more years passed before physicists learned how to use the formula to make an atomic bomb.”
David nodded. “At a press conference in the thirties, someone asked Einstein if it was possible to release energy by splitting atoms. And he completely dismissed the idea. His quote was, ‘It would be like shooting at birds in the dark in a country where there are few birds.’”
“Exactly so. Herr Doktor couldn’t have been more wrong. And he certainly didn’t want to repeat that error.” The professor shook his head. “Thankfully I never had to carry the burden of the unified theory, but I knew what was at stake. It’s not a physics problem, it’s a problem of human behavior. Humans are simply not intelligent enough to stop killing each other. They will use any tools at their disposal to annihilate their enemies.”
He fell silent just as the screen on the drive-by-wire panel showed the entrance to the vast East Campus Lot, which was several times larger than the parking lot they’d left five minutes ago. The professor guided the Highlander through the entrance and squeezed the left handgrip to bring the vehicle to a stop. Then he pressed a button that changed the image on the screen to a panoramic view of the whole lot. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Dr. Reynolds, could you please locate your car on the screen?”