by Mark Alpert
As he chewed his tasteless chicken he heard a knock on the door. Swallowing with difficulty, he answered, “Yes?” and a moment later his chief of staff stepped into the office. But before the man could say a word, the secretary of defense charged past him, rushing into the room with his square head lowered like a battering ram. “We need to talk,” he declared.
The veep signaled his chief of staff to leave the office and close the door behind him. The SecDef strode past the cluster of upholstered chairs in the center of the room, nearly knocking over a Tiffany lamp on the end table. The man was brash, irascible, and supremely overconfident, but he was one of the few people in the administration whom the vice president could trust. They’d worked together since the Nixon days. “What is it this time?” the veep asked. “Another blast in Baghdad?”
He shook his head. “We have a problem with Operation Shortcut.”
The vice president pushed his dinner plate aside. He felt a twinge in the center of his chest. “I thought you said everything was under control.”
“It’s the goddamn FBI’s fault. They’ve screwed up twice now.” The secretary removed his rimless glasses and jabbed the air with them. “First they lost a detainee because they brought him to a poorly defended installation, and then they let another target slip away because they botched the surveillance. Now both of them are on the run and the Bureau has no idea where they are!”
The twinge in the Vice President’s chest sharpened. It felt like a thumbtack under his breastbone. “Who are these targets?”
“They’re professors, probably ultraliberal Looney Tunes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re working with Al Qaeda. Or maybe the Iranians are paying them off. Of course the Bureau doesn’t have a clue. The director put a woman in charge of the operation, that’s part of the problem.”
“What’s her name?”
“Parker, Lucille Parker. I don’t know much about her except that she’s from Texas. But that explains everything. She’s probably got some connection with the Cowboy-in-Chief.” He jerked his head to the left, in the direction of the Oval Office.
The vice president took a sip from his glass of water, hoping it would tamp the ache in his chest. Operation Shortcut had started about two weeks ago after the National Security Agency picked up something odd during its surveillance of the Internet. It was an e-mail full of cryptic language and strange equations, traced to a computer at a mental institution in Glasgow, Scotland. At first the NSA dismissed it as the work of an inventive lunatic, but out of curiosity one of the agency’s analysts began studying the thing. It turned out that the author of the message was a former physicist who’d once worked with Albert Einstein. The equations were just a fragment of a larger theory, but enough was there to convince the NSA to set up a task force to find the rest. The word from the experts was that this theory could give the United States a powerful new weapon in the war on terrorism.
But if there was one thing the vice president had learned during his forty years in government, it was that civil servants are incapable of doing anything quickly. By the time the NSA task force got its act together, three of its four intelligence targets were dead. Some foreign government or terrorist group was also pursuing the theory, and now the counterterrorism experts were saying that if it fell into the wrong hands the results could be disastrous. According to the memo from the NSA director, it could make 9/11 look like a skirmish. “So what’s your plan?” the veep asked. “I assume you had a reason for coming to my office?”
The secretary nodded. “I need an executive order. I want to deploy the Delta Force in the Homeland sector. I want them patrolling the borders and actively pursuing the targets. It’s time for the Pentagon to take over.”
The vice president thought about it for a moment. Technically, the Posse Comitatus Act barred army units from taking part in law enforcement operations on U.S. soil. But exceptions could be made in national emergencies. “Consider it done,” he said. “How fast can you get the troops to the States?”
“The force is in western Iraq now. I can have them airlifted Stateside in less than twelve hours.”
AT EXACTLY 6 P.M., WHILE they were driving down Route 19 through the corrugated hills of West Virginia, the sound of simulated gunfire coming from Michael’s Game Boy abruptly ceased. The device emitted a high-pitched ping and then a synthesized voice announced, “It’s time for dinner.” David looked over his shoulder at the backseat and saw Michael raise his head and turn to Professor Gupta, who was dozing next to his grandson. “It’s time for dinner, Grandpa,” the boy said.
These were the first words David had heard him say. His voice was as crisp and emotionless as the Game Boy’s. Although David could clearly see the resemblance between Michael and his grandfather—they had the same thick eyebrows, the same unruly hair—the teenager’s eyes were glassy and his face was blank. “It’s time for dinner, Grandpa,” he repeated.
Gupta blinked a few times and scratched his head. He leaned forward, looking first at Monique, who was driving the Hyundai, and then at David. “Excuse me,” he said. “You don’t happen to have any food in the car, do you?”
David nodded. “We bought some stuff this morning.” He picked up the plastic bag of supplies Monique had purchased at the rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “Let me see what’s left.”
While he rummaged through the bag, Monique took her eyes off the road for a moment and glanced at the rearview mirror. She’d been nervously scanning the highway for patrol cars for the past three hours, but now she focused on Gupta and his grandson. “The computer game tells him when to eat?” she asked.
“Yes, yes,” Gupta replied, “we programmed Warfighter to automatically stop play for half an hour at mealtimes. And it shuts down overnight, of course. Otherwise, Michael would keep playing until he collapsed.”
David found a prepackaged turkey sandwich at the bottom of the bag. “Does your grandson like turkey?”
Gupta shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. Do you have anything else?”
“Not much. Just a bag of potato chips and a few SnackWell’s.”
“Oh, he likes potato chips! But only with ketchup. He won’t eat a potato chip unless it has exactly two dabs of ketchup on it.”
Looking under the turkey sandwich, David found a few ketchup packets that Monique had luckily thrown into the bag. He passed them to Professor Gupta along with the potato chips.
“Yes, this is perfect,” the professor said. “You see, Michael is very particular about what he eats. It’s another symptom of autism.”
While Gupta opened the bag of chips, Monique glanced again at the rearview mirror. Her lips were pressed into a thin line of disapproval. Potato chips and ketchup wasn’t much of a dinner. “Do you and Michael live alone, Professor?” she asked.
Gupta took a chip out of the bag and squeezed a drop of ketchup onto it. “Oh yes, it’s just the two of us. My wife died twenty-six years ago, unfortunately.”
“Do you have anyone to help you care for your grandson? Like a babysitter, a nurse’s aide?”
“No, we manage by ourselves. He really isn’t much trouble. You just have to get used to his routines.” Gupta squeezed another drop of ketchup onto the chip and handed it to his grandson. “Of course things would’ve been easier if my wife were still alive. Hannah had a wonderful way with children. She would’ve loved Michael with all her heart.”
David felt a pang of sympathy for the old man. During his interview for On the Shoulders of Giants, Gupta had told David about the long string of personal tragedies that had befallen him in the years after he worked with Einstein. His first child, a son, died of leukemia when he was twelve years old. A few years later Hannah Gupta gave birth to a daughter, but the girl was badly injured in a car accident. And in 1982, just after the professor abandoned physics and started the software company that would make him rich, a stroke killed his wife at the age of forty-nine. At one point in the interview, Amil had shown David her picture, and now he remem
bered it clearly—a dark-haired Eastern European beauty, slender and unsmiling.
Gupta had mentioned something else about his wife during that interview, something vaguely disquieting, but David couldn’t recall the details. He turned to the professor, twisting around in his seat. “Your wife, she was also a student at Princeton, wasn’t she?”
The old man looked up from squeezing ketchup onto another potato chip. “No, not exactly. She attended some of the graduate seminars in the physics department but she never actually enrolled. Although she had a brilliant mind for science, the war interrupted her education, so she lacked the proper academic credentials.”
Now David remembered. Hannah Gupta was a Holocaust survivor. She was one of the Jewish refugees that Einstein had helped to bring to Princeton after World War II. Einstein had tried to save as many European Jews as he could, sponsoring their immigration to the United States and finding them jobs at the university’s laboratories. This was the connection that had brought Amil and Hannah together.
“Yes, I have some very fond memories of those seminars,” Gupta continued. “Hannah sat in the back and every man in the room was sneaking looks at her. There was quite a competition among us to get her attention. Both Jacques and Hans were interested, too.”
“Really?” David was intrigued. Gupta hadn’t said anything in their previous interview about a romantic rivalry among Einstein’s assistants. “How heated did it get?”
“Oh, not very. I was engaged to Hannah before Jacques or Hans could get up the nerve to speak to her.” The professor smiled wistfully. “We all remained friends, thank goodness. Hans became the godfather to both my children. He was especially kind to my daughter after Hannah died.”
Fascinating, David thought. He wished he’d known about this story earlier, so he could’ve included it in his book. As soon as the thought occurred to him, though, he realized how foolish it was. Einstein’s discovery of the unified field theory was a much more glaring omission in On the Shoulder of Giants and every other biography of the physicist.
After a few more miles they turned west at County Highway 33, a one-lane road that snaked through the hills. Although there was still more than an hour of daylight left, the steep wooded hillsides kept the road in shadow. Occasionally they passed a weathered trailer home or an abandoned car rusting under the trees, but those were the only signs of civilization. The road was empty now except for the Hyundai and a yellow sports car about a quarter mile behind them.
Monique glanced yet again at the rearview mirror. In the backseat Professor Gupta was giving Michael another ketchup-spotted potato chip, slipping it right into the teenager’s mouth as if he were feeding a baby bird. David thought it was an oddly touching sight, but Monique shook her head as she stared at them. “Where’s your daughter now, Professor?” she asked.
He grimaced. “In Columbus, Georgia. It’s a good town for drug addicts because Fort Benning is nearby. Plenty of methamphetamine available for the soldiers.”
“Have you tried sending her to a treatment program?”
“Oh yes, I’ve tried. Many times.” He lowered his head and frowned at the ketchup packet in his hand, wrinkling his noise as if he’d just smelled something rotten. “Elizabeth is a very stubborn woman. She was just as brilliant as her mother but she never finished high school. She ran away from home at fifteen and she’s been living in squalor ever since. I won’t even tell you what she does for a living, it’s too abhorrent. Even if Michael weren’t autistic, I would’ve taken custody of him.”
Monique’s eyebrows tilted downward and a vertical crease appeared between them. Over the past twenty-four hours David had learned what this meant. Her anger was a little surprising, actually—her own mother was a heroin addict, and he would’ve thought this experience would make her more sympathetic to Professor Gupta’s troubles. But this wasn’t the case at all. It looked like she wanted to reach into the backseat and grab the professor by his collar. “Your daughter won’t go into treatment if you’re the one who’s suggesting it,” she said. “There’s too much bitterness between you. You need someone else to do the intervention.”
Gupta leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. Now he looked angry, too. “I already tried that. I asked Hans to go down to Georgia and talk some sense into her. He went to the hovel where Elizabeth was living and threw away all her drugs and got her enrolled in an outpatient treatment center. He even found a decent job for her, doing secretarial work for one of the generals at Fort Benning.” He pointed a finger at Monique’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “And do you know how long that lasted? Two and a half months. She went on a binge and lost her job and stopped going to the treatment clinic. That’s when Michael came to live with me for good.”
Breathing hard, the old man slumped back in his seat. Michael sat next to him, oblivious, patiently waiting for his next potato chip. The professor pulled one out of the bag, but his hands were trembling so much now that he couldn’t squeeze the ketchup packet. David was just about to ask him if he needed any help when the yellow sports car he’d seen a minute ago zoomed ahead of them. It raced at least eighty miles an hour down the curving road, veering into the opposite lane even though they were in a no-passing zone.
“Jesus!” he yelled, startled. “What the hell was that?”
Monique leaned forward to get a better look. “It’s not a patrol car. Not unless the cops in West Virginia are driving Ferraris now.”
“A Ferrari?”
She nodded. “A nice one, too: 575 Maranello coupé. There’s only fifty of them in the whole country. Costs about three times as much as my Corvette.”
“How do you know about it?”
“The dean of the engineering school at Princeton has one. I see him all the time at Keith’s auto shop. It’s an amazing car but it breaks down pretty regularly.”
The Ferrari crossed the double yellow line, moving back into its proper lane. But instead of racing off, the car began to slow. Its speed dropped to seventy, then sixty, then fifty miles an hour. Within a few seconds it was creeping along at thirty miles per hour just a dozen yards ahead of them, and Monique couldn’t pass because of all the blind curves in the road.
“What’s with this guy?” David said. “First he blows by us and now he’s sightseeing.”
Monique didn’t respond. She craned her neck over the steering wheel and squinted at the Ferrari as it crawled downhill. After a few seconds her cheek twitched. “It’s got New Jersey plates,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
At the bottom of the hill the Ferrari leaped forward, racing about a hundred yards ahead. Then the driver hit the brakes and the car stopped in front of a single-lane bridge, blocking their way.
IT WAS A TRICKY SITUATION. Simon needed to capture four targets in a moving vehicle without seriously injuring them or drawing any unwanted attention. First he considered ramming the subcompact off the road, but there were thick woods on both sides of the highway and he knew that their car would crumple like an accordion if it hit one of the trees. He’d have a hard time extracting his targets from the wreck, much less interrogating them. No, he needed to slow them down first.
Simon saw his opportunity when he came upon a one-lane bridge over a shallow stream. He swiftly positioned the Ferrari across the road, picked up his Uzi, and jumped out of the car. Resting the barrel of the gun on the Ferrari’s hood, he aimed at the approaching subcompact. As soon as the car slowed enough to turn around, he would shoot its tires, and the rest would be simple. The vehicle was already so close that he could make out all four figures inside, including the gangly teenager in the backseat. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that they’d brought the youngster along. To make his targets more cooperative, he planned to start with the boy.
DAVID SPOTTED SOME MOVEMENT ON the far side of the Ferrari. A big, bald man in a black T-shirt and camouflage pants crouched behind the car. His head was cocked to the side with one eye open, gazing down the barrel of a stubby black machine gun. A cold
wash of terror flooded David’s chest. It was as if he could already feel the bullet entering his heart. His back went rigid against the bucket seat and his right hand squeezed the armrest on the door. But his eyes stayed fixed on the gunman behind the Ferrari, and in that fraction of a second he noticed that the muzzle of the man’s weapon wasn’t pointed directly at them. It was aimed a little lower, at the Hyundai’s tires.
Monique saw the man, too. “Shit!” she yelled. “I’m turning around!”
Her foot came off the gas pedal, but before she could step on the brake, David reached over and grabbed her knee. “No, don’t slow down! He’s gonna shoot the tires!”
“What are you doing? Let go of me!”
“Head over there!” He pointed at a gap in the trees on the left side of the road, a rocky, overgrown path leading down to the stream. “Just hit the gas! Punch it!”
“Are you crazy? We can’t—”
Three loud metallic clanks shook the Hyundai as a burst from the machine gun hit the front fender. Without any more argument, Monique stepped on the gas and jerked the car toward the side of the road.
Another round of bullets struck the back end of the Hyundai as it careened over a hummock and down the narrow path. Monique clung to the steering wheel and shouted, “Holy shit!” while David and Amil and Michael bounced in their seats and the whole car rattled like a suitcase full of silverware. Much too fast, they thudded over the clumps of weeds and loose stones and within a second they were sliding across the shallow stream, their momentum alone carrying them over the rocky streambed. The Hyundai’s wheels churned up great rooster tails of water and then they were on the opposite bank and Monique floored it. The engine roared in protest, but the car climbed up the bank like a billy goat and found the path leading back to the highway. David looked in the side-view mirror as their tires hit the asphalt and saw the bald man standing on the bridge with the stock of the Uzi still braced against his shoulder. But he didn’t fire at them. Instead he rushed back to the Ferrari and got in the driver’s seat.