Monica smiled slyly. “We had you in mind for another project. We thought these would be . . . handy to have.”
“Darn,” Ivy said, standing right up in Monica’s face, focusing on her irises. “I think she might be telling the truth on that one.”
I stared at the picture. Sandra. It had been almost ten years now. It still hurt to think about how she’d left me. Left me, after showing me how to harness my mind’s abilities. I ran my fingers across the picture.
“We’ve got to do it,” J.C. said. “We’ve got to look into this, skinny.”
“If there’s a chance . . .” Tobias said, nodding.
“The camera was probably stolen by someone on the inside,” Ivy guessed. “Jobs like this one often are.”
“One of your own people took it, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Yes,” Monica said. “But we don’t have any idea where they went. We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last four days trying to track them. I always suggested you. Other . . . factions within our company were against bringing in someone they consider volatile.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“Excellent. Shall I bring you to our labs?”
“No,” I said. “Take me to the thief’s house.”
Four
“Mister Balubal Razon,” Tobias read from the sheet of facts as we climbed the stairs. I’d scanned that sheet on the drive over, but had been too deep in thought to give it much specific attention. “He’s ethnically Filipino, but second-generation American. Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maine. No honors. Lives alone.”
We reached the seventh floor of the apartment building. Monica was puffing. She kept walking too close to J.C., which made him scowl.
“I should add,” Tobias said, lowering the sheet of facts, “Stan informs me that the rain has cleared up before reaching us. We have only sunny weather to look forward to now.”
“Thank goodness,” I said, turning to the door, where two men in black suits stood on guard. “Yours?” I asked Monica, nodding to them.
“Yeah,” she said. She’d spent the ride over on the phone with some of her superiors.
Monica took out a key to the flat and turned it in the lock. The room inside was a complete disaster. Chinese takeout cartons stood on the windowsill in a row, as if planters intended to grow next year’s crop of General Tso’s. Books lay in piles everywhere, and the walls were hung with photographs. Not the time-traveling kind, just the ordinary photos a photography buff would take.
We had to shuffle around to get through the door and past the stacks of books. Inside, it was cramped quarters with all of us.
“Wait outside, if you will, Monica,” I said. “It’s kind of tight in here.”
“Tight?” she asked, frowning.
“You keep walking through the middle of J.C.,” I said. “It’s very disturbing for him; he hates being reminded he’s a hallucination.”
“I’m not a hallucination,” J.C. snapped. “I have state-of-the-art stealthing equipment.”
Monica regarded me for a moment, then walked to the doorway, standing between the two guards, hands on hips as she regarded us.
“All right, folks,” I said. “Have at it.”
“Nice locks,” J.C. said, flipping one of the chains on the door. “Thick wood, three deadbolts. Unless I miss my guess . . .” He poked at what appeared to be a letter box mounted on the wall by the door.
I opened it. There was a pristine handgun inside.
“Ruger Bisley, custom converted to large caliber,” J.C. said with a grunt. I opened the spinning thing that held the bullets and took one out. “Chambered in .500 Linebaugh,” J.C. continued. “This is a weapon for a man who knows what he’s doing.”
“He left it behind, though,” Ivy said. “Was he in too much of a hurry?”
“No,” J.C. said. “This was his door gun. He had a different regular sidearm.”
“Door gun,” Ivy said. “Is that really a thing for you people?”
“You need something with good penetration,” J.C. said, “that can shoot through the wood when people are trying to force your door. But the recoil of this weapon will do a number on your hand after not too many shots. He would have carried something with a smaller caliber on his person.”
J.C. inspected the gun. “Never been fired, though. Hmm . . . There’s a chance someone gave this to him. Perhaps he went to a friend, asked them how to protect himself? A true soldier knows each weapon he owns through repeated firing. No gun fires perfectly straight. Each has a personality.”
“He’s a scholar,” Tobias said, kneeling beside the rows of books. “Historian.”
“You sound surprised,” I said. “He does have a Ph.D. I’d expect him to be smart.”
“He has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, Stephen,” Tobias said. “But these are some very obscure historical and theological books. Deep reading. It’s difficult to be a widely read scholar in more than one area. No wonder he leads a solitary life.”
“Rosaries,” Ivy said; she picked one up from the top of a stack of books, inspecting it. “Worn, frequently counted. Open one of those books.”
I picked a book up off the floor.
“No, that one. The God Delusion.”
“Richard Dawkins?” I said, flipping through it.
“A leading atheist,” Ivy said, looking over my shoulder. “Annotated with counterarguments.”
“A devout Catholic among a sea of secular scientists,” Tobias said. “Yes . . . many of these works are religious or have religious connotations. Thomas Aquinas, Daniel W. Hardy, Francis Schaeffer, Pietro Alagona . . .”
“There’s his badge from work,” Ivy said, nodding to something hanging on the wall. It proclaimed, in large letters, Azari Laboratories, Inc. Monica’s company.
“Call for Monica,” Ivy said. “Repeat what I tell you.”
“Oh Monica,” I said.
“Am I allowed in now?”
“Depends,” I said, repeating the words Ivy whispered to me. “Are you going to tell me the truth?”
“About what?”
“About Razon having invented the camera on his own, bringing Azari in only after he had a working prototype.”
Monica narrowed her eyes at me.
“Badge is too new,” I said. “Not worn or scratched at all from being used or in his pocket. The picture on it can’t be more than two months old, judging by the beard he’s growing in the badge photo but not in the picture of him at Mount Vernon on his mantle.
“Furthermore, this is not the apartment of a high-paid engineer. With a broken elevator? In the northeast quarter of town? Not only is this a rough area, it’s too far from your offices. He didn’t steal your camera, Monica—though I’m tempted to guess that you’re trying to steal it from him. Is that why he ran?”
“He didn’t come to us with a prototype,” Monica said. “Not a working one, at least. He had one photo—the one of Washington—and a lot of promises. He needed money to get a stable machine working; apparently, the one he’d built had worked for a few days, then stopped.
“We funded him for eighteen months on a limited access pass to the labs. He received an official badge when he finally got the damn camera working. And he did steal it from us. The contract he signed required all equipment to remain at our laboratories. He used us as a convenient source of cash, then jumped with the prize—wiping all of his data and destroying all other prototypes—as soon as he could get away with it.”
“Truth?” I asked Ivy.
“Can’t tell,” she said. “Sorry. If I could hear a heartbeat . . . maybe you could put your ear to her chest.”
“I’m sure she’d love that,” I said.
J.C. smiled. “I’m pretty sure I’d love that.”
“Oh please,” Ivy said. “You’d only do it to peek inside her jacket and find out what kind of gun she’s carrying.”
“Beretta M9,” J.C. said. “Already peeked.”
Ivy gave me
a glare.
“What?” I said, trying to act innocent. “He’s the one who said it.”
“Skinny,” J.C. put in, “the M9 is boring, but effective. The way she carries herself says she knows her way around a gun. That puffing she did when climbing the steps? An act. She’s far more fit than that. She’s trying to pretend she’s some kind of manager or paper-pusher at the labs, but she’s obviously security of some sort.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
“You,” Monica said, “are a very strange man.”
I focused on her. She’d heard only my parts of the exchange, of course. “I thought you read my interviews.”
“I did. They don’t do you justice. I imagined you as a brilliant mode-shifter, slipping in and out of personalities.”
“That’s dissociative identity disorder,” I said. “It’s different.”
“Very good!” Ivy piped in. She’d been schooling me on psychological disorders.
“Regardless,” Monica said. “I guess I’m just surprised to find out what you really are.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“A middle manager,” she said, looking troubled. “Anyway, the question remains. Where is Razon?”
“Depends,” I said. “Does he need to be any place specific to use the camera? Meaning, did he have to go to Mount Vernon to take a picture of the past in that location, or can he somehow set the camera to take pictures there?”
“He has to go to the location,” Monica said. “The camera looks back through time at the exact place you are.”
There were problems with that, but I let them slide for now. Razon. Where would he go? I glanced at J.C., who shrugged.
“You look to him first?” Ivy said with a flat tone. “Really.”
I looked to her, and she blushed. “I . . . I actually don’t have anything either.”
J.C. chuckled at that.
Tobias stood up, slow and ponderous, like a distant cloud formation rising into the sky. “Jerusalem,” he said softly, resting his fingers on a book. “He’s gone to Jerusalem.”
We all looked at him. Well, those of us who could.
“Where else would a believer go, Stephen?” Tobias asked. “After years of arguments with his colleagues, years of being thought a fool for his faith? This was what it was about all along, this is why he developed the camera. He’s gone to answer a question. For us, for himself. A question that has been asked for two thousand years.
“He’s gone to take a picture of Jesus of Nazareth—dubbed Christ by his devout—following his resurrection.”
Five
I required five first-class seats. This did not sit well with Monica’s superiors, many of whom did not approve of me. I met one of those at the airport, a Mr. Davenport. He smelled of pipe smoke, and Ivy critiqued his poor taste in shoes. I thought better of asking him if we could use the corporate jet.
We now sat in the first-class cabin of the plane. I flipped lazily through a thick book on my seat’s foldout tray. Behind me, J.C. bragged to Tobias about the weapons he’d managed to slip past security.
Ivy dozed by the window, with an empty seat next to her. Monica sat beside me, staring at that empty seat. “So Ivy is by the window?”
“Yes,” I said, flipping a page.
“Tobias and the marine are behind us.”
“J.C.’s a Navy SEAL. He’d shoot you for making that mistake.”
“And the other seat?” she asked.
“Empty,” I said, flipping a page.
She waited for an explanation. I didn’t give one.
“So what are you going to do with this camera?” I asked. “Assuming the thing is real, a fact of which I’m not yet convinced.”
“There are hundreds of applications,” Monica said. “Law enforcement . . . Espionage . . . Creating a true account of historical events . . . Watching the early formation of the planet for scientific research . . .”
“Destroying ancient religions . . .”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you a religious man, then, Mister Leeds?”
“Part of me is.” That was the honest truth.
“Well,” she said. “Let us assume that Christianity is a sham. Or, perhaps, a movement started by well-meaning people but which has grown beyond proportion. Would it not serve the greater good to expose that?”
“That’s not really an argument I’m equipped to enter,” I said. “You’d need Tobias. He’s the philosopher. Of course, I think he’s dozing.”
“Actually, Stephen,” Tobias said, leaning between our two seats, “I’m quite curious about this conversation. Stan is watching our progress, by the way. He says there might be some bumpy weather up ahead.”
“You’re looking at something,” Monica said.
“I’m looking at Tobias,” I said. “He wants to continue the conversation.”
“Can I speak with him?”
“I suppose you can, through me. I’ll warn you, though. Ignore anything he says about Stan.”
“Who’s Stan?” Monica asked.
“An astronaut that Tobias hears, supposedly orbiting the world in a satellite.” I turned a page. “Stan is mostly harmless. He gives us weather forecasts, that sort of thing.”
“I . . . see,” she said. “Stan’s another one of your special friends?”
I chuckled. “No. Stan’s not real.”
“I thought you said none of them were.”
“Well, true. They’re my hallucinations. But Stan is something special. Only Tobias hears him. Tobias is a schizophrenic.”
She blinked in surprise. “Your hallucination . . .”
“Yes?”
“Your hallucination has hallucinations.”
“Yes.”
She settled back, looking disturbed.
“They all have their issues,” I said. “Ivy is a trypophobic, though she mostly has it under control. Just don’t come at her with a wasp’s nest. Armando is a megalomaniac. Adoline has OCD.”
“If you please, Stephen,” Tobias said. “Let her know that I find Razon to be a very brave man.”
I repeated the words.
“And why is that?” Monica asked.
“To be both a scientist and religious is to create an uneasy truce within a man,” Tobias said. “At the heart of science is accepting only that truth which can be proven. At the heart of faith is to define Truth, at its core, as being unprovable. Razon is a brave man because of what he is doing. Regardless of his discovery, one of two things he holds very dear will be upended.”
“He could be a zealot,” Monica replied. “Marching blindly forward, trying to find final validation that he has been right all along.”
“Perhaps,” Tobias said. “But the true zealot would not need validation. The Lord would provide validation. No, I see something else here. A man seeking to meld science and faith, the first person—perhaps in the history of mankind—to actually find a way to apply science to the ultimate truths of religion. I find that noble.”
Tobias settled back. I flipped the last few pages of the book as Monica sat in thought. Finished, I stuffed the book into the pocket of the seat in front of me.
Someone rustled the curtains, entering from economy class and coming into the first-class cabin. “Hello!” a friendly feminine voice said, walking up the aisle. “I could not help seeing that you had an extra seat up here, and I thought to myself, perhaps they would let me sit in it.”
The newcomer was a round-faced, pleasant young woman in her late twenties. She had tan Indian skin and a deep red dot on her forehead. She wore clothing of intricate make, red and gold, with an Indian shawl-thingy over one shoulder and wrapping around her. I don’t know what they’re called.
“What’s this?” J.C. said. “Hey, Achmed. You’re not going to blow the plane up, are you?”
“My name is Kalyani,” she said. “And I am most certainly not going to blow anything up.”
“Huh,” J.C. said. “That’s disappointing.” He settled back and closed
his eyes—or pretended to. He kept one eye cracked toward Kalyani.
“Why do we keep him around?” Ivy asked, stretching, coming out of her nap.
“Your head keeps going back and forth,” Monica said. “I feel like I’m missing entire conversations.”
“You are,” I said. “Monica, meet Kalyani. A new aspect, and the reason we needed that empty seat.”
Kalyani perkily held out her hand toward Monica, a big grin on her face.
“She can’t see you, Kalyani,” I said.
“Oh, right!” Kalyani raised both hands to her face. “I’m so sorry, Mister Steve. I am very new to this.”
“It’s okay. Monica, Kalyani will be our interpreter in Israel.”
“I am a linguist,” Kalyani said, bowing.
“Interpreter . . .” Monica said, glancing at the book I’d tucked away. A book of Hebrew syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. “You just learned Hebrew.”
“No,” I said. “I glanced through the pages enough to summon an aspect who speaks it. I’m useless with languages.” I yawned, wondering if there was time left in the flight to pick up Arabic for Kalyani as well.
“Prove it,” Monica said.
I raised an eyebrow toward her.
“I need to see,” Monica said. “Please.”
With a sigh, I turned to Kalyani. “How do you say: ‘I would like to practice speaking Hebrew. Would you speak to me in your language?’”
“Hm . . . ‘I would like to practice speaking Hebrew’ is somewhat awkward in the language. Perhaps, ‘I would like to improve my Hebrew’?”
“Sure.”
“Ani rotzeh leshapher et ha’ivrit sheli,” Kalyani said.
“Damn,” I said. “That’s a mouthful.”
“Language!” Ivy called.
“It is not so hard, Mister Steve. Here, try it. Ani rotzeh leshapher et ha’ivrit sheli.”
“Any rote zeele shaper hap . . . er hav . . .” I said.
“Oh my,” Kalyani said. “Tat is . . . that is very dreadful. Perhaps I will give you one word at a time.”
“Sounds good,” I said, waving over one of the flight attendants, the one who had spoken Hebrew to give the safety information at the start of our flight.
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