Interference

by Brad Parks

  OTHER TITLES BY BRAD PARKS

  Stand-Alone Novels

  Say Nothing

  Closer Than You Know

  The Last Act

  The Carter Ross Series

  Faces of the Gone

  Eyes of the Innocent

  The Girl Next Door

  The Good Cop

  The Player

  The Fraud

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by MAC Enterprises Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542023399 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542023394 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542020374 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542020379 (paperback)

  Cover design by Anna Laytham

  First Edition

  For Melissa. Again and again.

  Because when you marry a dazzling woman—and she also turns out to be the best mother imaginable—you really ought to dedicate more books to her.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREFACE

  When Albert Einstein first theorized what is now known as quantum entanglement, it was only to highlight the absurdity of it.

  Entanglement is this seeming impossibility, predicted by the equations of quantum mechanics, that every now and then, two particles can be born with an intrinsic connection to one another. Once that happens, they are never again truly apart. You can separate them across galaxies, and the relationship remains: poke one, and the other feels it.

  Immediately. With no delay. No matter how far they may have traveled.

  To Einstein, this meant quantum mechanics was fundamentally broken, offensive both to the laws of nature and common sense. He derided entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” Surely, there could be no hidden interaction that travels faster than light, which he believed to be the universe’s ultimate speed limit.

  And yet, in recent years, quantum entanglement has been verified in laboratories many times, in experiments of increasing elegance and certainty, using both particles and entire systems of particles. Scientists have demonstrated that once you determine certain properties of one member of an entangled pair, you instantaneously and irrevocably change the other. And this mysterious coordination remains intact at every distance yet measured.

  In other words, Einstein was wrong. Quantum entanglement really does exist, even if no one understands how it’s possible. It raises all kinds of disquieting questions about the true nature of our universe and about the secrets it may be hiding, not the least of which is:

  If this could happen with particles, or even systems of particles . . .

  . . . what about human beings?

  CHAPTER 1

  Had I known about the phone call I would receive at 11:09 a.m., I would have wrapped myself around Matt so tight he never could have left the bed that morning.

  Or begged him to take the day off.

  Or contrived some clever, wifely way to guarantee he was in a different area code from his laboratory.

  But that’s the thing about those 11:09 a.m. phone calls that capsize your existence: life’s biggest waves clobber you when you’re not looking.

  So, blithely unaware, I let him slip away before the sun rose, as he so often did. In addition to being a physicist, Professor Matt Bronik was an unreformed nerd, if that’s not too much of a redundancy. At age thirty-nine, he was still so excited by his research he bounded out of bed every morning like a schoolboy—a strapping, six-foot-tall, balding, bearded schoolboy—eager to get off to his lab at Dartmouth College because he just couldn’t wait to find out what happened next.

  His area of expertise was quantum mechanics, which I had a hard time describing without making it sound like magic. All those tiny particles, many of them too small to have ever been seen, leaping around willy-nilly, acting in ways that disregarded human logic.

  Matt spoke about his work in generalities, knowing the specifics were far too obscure for me—and nearly everyone else. He liked to joke that only twelve people in the world actually understood what he did. “And,” he was always quick to add in his self-deprecating way, “only five of them actually care.”

  This, naturally, didn’t make him any less enthusiastic about it.

  Being as I didn’t suffer from quite the same level of internal motivation, I lingered in bed for as long as possible, at which point I needed to be shaken out of it.

  Quite literally. I have hearing loss. It started in my early thirties, and now, in my midforties, it was profound enough that no alarm clock could break through the bubble of quiet that surrounded me when I slept without my earpieces in. What I had instead was a contraption that began vibrating my bed. The pulses grew stronger until I finally succumbed to its demands.

  On the rare mornings when he actually did linger in bed, Matt still whispered in my ear, giving me the pleasure of feeling his breath and the low vibration of his voice. I could no longer hear his gentle North Carolina twang or make out the actual words, but I always told him it was better that way.

  What woman wouldn’t like a husband who always says the perfect thing?

  Still, I had to admit: Matt did pretty well for himself even when I wasn’t imagining the script. I was five years older than him and was really st
arting to feel, well, forty-four. My once-lustrous brown hair had become dull and gray streaked. My hourglass figure was sliding south such that it now more resembled a spoon. And I hated what was happening to my neck.

  Matt earnestly insisted I was only becoming more beautiful as I aged, which just meant that in addition to his other talents, he was also a gifted liar.

  Alas, there was no whispering this morning. Matt’s side of the bed was cold by the time my half began shaking at six thirty. I resisted it as long as I dared, then put in my hearing aids and began focusing on Morgan, our irrepressible nine-year-old.

  Matt and I had always planned on having more children until we actually had one. Then we decided that was enough. Being a family of three seemed to fit us. Matt was always reminding me the triangle is the strongest shape in nature.

  Once I got myself ready and Morgan off to the bus, I reported to my job at Baker Library, Dartmouth College’s stately main branch. I work in cataloguing and acquisitions, the perfect position for someone with hearing loss, because it doesn’t require a lot of conversation.

  It was the first Monday of February—another cold gray day in Hanover, New Hampshire, a place where winter only feels like it lasts forever. A little after ten, I got a text from Matt. He was just getting out of a meeting with Sean Plottner, a rich alum who was considering making a substantial gift to Dartmouth. The meeting had gone a little too well, apparently, because Plottner had taken up nearly an hour of Matt’s day.

  Otherwise, I was just sitting at my desk, typing an email, when my phone began flashing, which I saw before the faint ringing sound managed to penetrate my hearing aid.

  And because my phone had a digital clock on it, I could tell you with precision:

  It was 11:09 a.m.

  The call was coming from the main number at the Dartmouth College Department of Physics and Astronomy, which was how Matt’s work number appeared on my caller ID.

  Matt didn’t bother calling most of the time. He knew that even though my phone was equipped with captioning, I preferred text or email. He only called when he wanted to say something lovely and endearing.

  Or naughty. Which was why I answered with, “Hey, sexy.”

  And then I both listened and watched as the screen spit out, “Hello, Brigid, it’s Beppe Valentino.”

  I blushed. Beppe was Matt’s department chair, a theoretical physicist whose Italian accent sometimes challenged my phone’s voice recognition software.

  “Oh, Beppe, I thought you were—”

  “I know. Look, I’m sorry, but something’s wrong with Matt. He’s having some kind of seizure.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Sean Plottner had never been sure when the boredom set in.

  Definitely not during the first billion. He was all in during the first billion.

  The second billion had kept his attention as well. He loved the chase, the deal, having his investing talents more widely acknowledged.

  Even the third billion had been mildly stimulating, what with how he made it during a recession, when everyone else was recovering from mortgage-backed stupidity.

  But at a certain point—perhaps by the fourth billion, definitely by the fifth—the boredom had descended and solidified around him, like something gelatinous he could never fully slough off.

  Now forty-six years old, Plottner had bought everything he could think to buy, visited everywhere he felt like going, done the requisite rich-guy things: fast cars, fast people, golfing in Antarctica, flying in zero gravity, shuffling through various extravagant hobbies, all while continuing to amass a fortune that grew faster than he could spend it.

  The boredom remained.

  Take these visits to his alma mater. Plottner was always a little uncertain who the dog was in the dog-and-pony show the Dartmouth development people put on whenever he came to campus.

  He was pretty sure the staff member—or the student, or the gymnasium, or whatever it was he had come to visit—was supposed to be the dog.

  But half the time, he was the dog. Like they were actually showing him off.

  Check out this loaded alum we’ve got, Professor! See how he follows us like he’s on a leash?

  Hey, kids, this is what a multibillionaire looks like! Wanna hear him bark when we ask for money?

  Most of the time he just went along with it, nodding and smiling—because that was appropriate behavior, because his family’s name was on a dorm, and because it beat just sitting around one of his six houses.

  None of it was actually interesting.

  Until, suddenly, on the first Monday morning in February, it was.

  He felt like it had been a long time since he had heard something new, seen something truly exciting, or met someone who shifted his eyes away from the mundanity of his billions and prodded his thoughts toward something more profound.

  And it happened in the most unlikely place:

  A physics professor’s lab.

  Matt Bronik was the guy’s name. Plottner didn’t know physics, but he did know people. And Bronik had that rogue brilliance, that spark, that ineffable quality that Plottner had made his billions by being able to sniff out.

  The professor had grown up in, of all places, Clinton, North Carolina, a podunk town that revolved around hogs—both the rearing and rendering of them. Bronik had told the story of how his elementary school was downwind from the hog-processing plant. On hot days, the stench was so overpowering they had to let school out early.

  Local farmers said it smelled like money. Bronik insisted it smelled like dead pigs.

  The Bronik family owned a diner, and Matt had spent his childhood helping out in the kitchen. Except where everyone else was slinging hash or making sweet tea, young Bronik was seeing Fibonacci sequences every time he cut an onion.

  Plottner got the rest of the tale from the development people: Bronik won his first national mathematics competition when he was eleven. Then he won a bunch more. That, in turn, led to a full scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a PhD in physics from Princeton; and a postdoctoral fellowship at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands; and, ultimately, his current appointment, a tenured professorship at Dartmouth College.

  It was the kind of quirky backstory that, in Plottner’s experience, evinced true genius. Not the run-of-the-mill kind. The once-in-a-generation kind.

  This was what he had been waiting for—and who he had been waiting for—without even realizing it.

  It went to something he had been thinking about a lot lately: legacy. It was one thing to be rich. It was quite another thing to be someone the world would keep talking about long after you were dead.

  Like Carnegie. Or Rockefeller. Someone whose vision and future-focused pioneering drove the country forward and defined an age.

  Philanthropy was part of that, of course. How many libraries had Carnegie given? How many buildings carried Rockefeller’s name? Etch yourself into the stone, and they can never forget you.

  But generosity alone wasn’t enough. Anyone could stroke a check.

  Plottner wanted to be part of something that was bigger than money or fame, something that would make him a part of a larger narrative.

  The story of humanity itself.

  Matt Bronik just might be able to do that for him.

  And so even now, with the dog-and-pony show over, Plottner couldn’t stop thinking about what he had seen and heard in that lab. For the first time in ages, he was feeling that old restlessness, the way he used to get when he wasn’t sure whether a deal was going to come together.

  It was unsettling.

  And invigorating.

  “Theresa,” he called out.

  Theresa D’Orsi, his omnipresent personal assistant, who had been with him earlier that day for Professor Bronik’s presentation, appeared.

  “Theresa, what do you say we get into the physics business?”

  “Sir, before you dive in headfirst with Professor Bronik, why don’t we reach out to someone who knows p
hysics—someone not connected to Dartmouth—who can tell us a little more about this?”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Plottner said.

  He said it like this was an unusual occurrence. It wasn’t.

  Theresa disappeared. Plottner felt himself bubbling over like newly opened champagne.

  The boredom was definitely gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  I knew it was bad when they wouldn’t let me in to see him.

  Everything I learned came from a series of updates, delivered to me in the intensive care unit waiting area at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center by a succession of harried health care providers.

  With all of them, I gestured to my hearing aids, so they knew about my condition, then stared hard at their mouths so I wouldn’t miss a word.

  Even still, each update begged more questions than the last.

  It started with the emergency room doctor, the first to see Matt when he was admitted. According to her, Matt’s eyes had been alternating between open and closed, and he was “agitated”—enough that the EMTs had strapped him down, to keep him from hurting himself.

  He was rambling (all nonsense) but wasn’t responding to commands. She couldn’t determine whether he was in some minimally conscious state or a coma, nor could she say when he’d come out of it.

  My next update came from a cardiologist, who said the most immediate issues were Matt’s heart rate and blood pressure, both of which were dangerously low.

  I asked whether he had suffered a heart attack. The cardiologist said Matt’s initial enzyme levels suggested no, but it was something they were still considering. Both the cardiologist and the neurologist wanted to give him a CT scan, but they couldn’t do that while he was moving around so much—and they didn’t dare give him something to settle him down while his blood pressure was so low.

  The update after that came from the neurologist. His name was Dr. Reiner, and he seemed just as baffled as everyone else. Matt had finally responded to the fluids and norepinephrine he had been given, but he still wasn’t snapping out of whatever spell he was under.

  “What are you thinking happened?” I asked. “Did he have a stroke?”

  “We don’t think so,” Dr. Reiner said.