by Layton Green
She glanced at her phone—no signal—before taking off at full speed down the path. The darkness and the woods were her allies, and Andie had all of the major obstacles memorized on this part of the trail. Twice she heard him grunting behind her, no doubt tripping on one of the many rocks and roots that littered the path.
When she reached the fork, a powerful beam from a flashlight sliced through the foliage to her left. She hesitated for the briefest of moments at the split, wanting more than anything to head toward the main road and flag down a car. Yet the half-mile stretch of trail to the highway was straight and level. The dark-haired man looked very athletic. She might be able to outlast him, but there was a good chance he would beat her in a sprint.
Flooded with adrenaline, she headed for the river instead, pumping out a swift but steady pace, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth to keep the oxygen flowing. There was just enough moonlight to view the path.
A hundred yards farther, she paused to listen, wondering if he had turned back. The forest seemed to swallow her whole, suffocating, pregnant with danger.
Footsteps in the distance. He was still coming. A fresh wave of fear washed over her. Should she leave the trail and hide? Find a log or a boulder, or just crouch somewhere off the path?
No.
She already knew he had tracking skills. The risk of discovery was too great. Her best bet was to use her knowledge of the forest and run for her life.
She summoned a mental image of the trails as she ran. The Eno River was another quarter mile away, and the path paralleled it for some time. That would be a bad place to run, too straight and exposed. On the other side of the river, the trail system was much more built-out.
Soon the gurgle of the river rose above the crickets, giving her a surge of energy. As the trail curved to the left, running alongside the river, she followed it for another fifty yards, glanced back to make sure the dark-haired man was not in sight, then left the trail and stepped into the water.
She stifled a gasp as the cold shocked her legs. The Eno was not a large river, maybe fifty feet across at this point. Would the water rise over her head? She doubted it, but didn’t know for sure. She rarely dipped into the water.
Either way, she had chosen her path. She waded through the thigh-high river, losing her balance again and again on the smooth rocks underfoot, each time managing to right herself before she fell. Every few feet she glanced back at the woods. As the water reached her waist, she grew nervous he would catch her exposed in the middle. She debated sinking to eye level in the river, then ducking underwater until she caught a glimpse of him, with the hope he would pass by.
Too risky. Stick to the plan and get across.
The water level kept rising, forcing her to remove her backpack and hold it above her head. Halfway across, she heard him running hard in the woods behind her and saw the beam from his flashlight strobing through the trees.
As she neared the far shore, her foot slipped off a rock again, and this time she plunged into the river. Gasping from the cold, she managed to hold the backpack out of the water, yet when she righted herself, she heard a soft splash and saw the Moleskine journal floating away. She made a grab for it, but the current carried it out of her grasp.
Her pursuer emerged from the woods, spotting her at once. He raced for the riverbank as Andie stumbled onshore and dove into the underbrush. She scrabbled through the thick weeds, pushing through thorns and vines and God knew what else, until she reached the wide trail she knew ran along that side of the shore.
A splash came from behind. He must have entered the water. Andie took off, this time at a dead sprint, knowing this was her chance. As she ran, she checked the backpack, realizing she had not fully closed the zipper in her haste to flee the house. The Star Phone and the other items were safe, but the journal was a grave loss.
A few hundred feet in, the trail split again. She could still hear him splashing through the river. She turned inland, legs churning, her breath coming in labored gasps. A quarter of a mile later, there were no sounds of pursuit, and the path split again, and again, and again. Andie slowed to a fast jog to conserve her energy, her skin crawling with fear as the trees loomed thick and silent all around.
Behind the canopy of trees, the stars were hidden from view, as if they had abandoned her to her fate.
Andie slowed and held her sides as she emerged at West Point on the Eno, a Durham city park near her house. Sometime during the nightmarish run, she had doubled back to the path by the river and followed it south.
The sight of a streetlamp in the distance, glowing like the birth of a universe, gave her a shudder of relief. Wet and shivering, her arms covered in scratches, she exited the park on North Roxboro Street, a few miles from downtown Durham.
Everything felt surreal. As if these terrible events were happening to someone else. She debated going to the police, but that line in Dr. Corwin’s email kept repeating in her mind.
Trust no one.
Even if she went to the authorities, she knew they wouldn’t provide around-the-clock protection from whoever was chasing her.
She tried to think things through. Someone must know she had opened the safe and had taken the Star Phone. Judging by what she had read in the journal, the phone led to some kind of secret technology, this thing called the Enneagon. That had to be the reason Dr. Corwin was murdered. Even if she turned over the Star Phone—and she wasn’t about to give something that belonged to Dr. Corwin to these people—she doubted they would just let her go.
How many people had they killed already?
She needed time to think. A safe place.
Her own phone still worked, despite her plunge into the river. She had two hundred in cash. After Googling the address of a nearby motel, she changed her mind. Too obvious.
She brought up the Uber app, then paused again. What if they had bugged her email or phone?
At some point, she knew she had to take a chance. For now, just in case, she walked down Roxboro and hailed a cab by hand.
The driver was an Indian man with graying temples. His eyes widened at her bedraggled appearance, and she gave him a lopsided smile. “I was on a night run and fell in the river.”
He hesitated, looking her up and down as if searching for a weapon.
“I’m a student,” she said, flashing her Duke ID just long enough for him to glimpse it.
“Okay,” he said. “Where to?”
She jumped in the cab before he could change his mind. “Hillsborough.”
“What address?”
“Do you know a hotel there?”
He gave her a suspicious look in the rearview mirror.
“My phone got wet,” she said. “Can you find one for me?”
After another pause, he said, “There’s a Holiday Inn Express.”
“Perfect. And I need to use the nearest ATM.”
“Okay.”
When he reached to start the meter, she added, “And fifty bucks extra if you keep this off the books.”
Nestled among rolling green hills, filled with quaint local shops, Hillsborough was a small town twenty minutes northwest of Durham. On the cab ride over, Andie had withdrawn the maximum daily amount from her bank card. She paid up front for her ground-floor hotel room and left a cash deposit for incidentals. After taking a long hot shower, she collapsed into bed.
The next morning, she set her shoes outside to dry, closed the blinds and brewed a cup of coffee, then sat cross-legged in a chair. She set the Star Phone on the table beside her, pushing away her grief and fear and anger. Succumbing to her emotions would get her nowhere.
Below the image of Democritus, the first cursor space was still flashing.
Arche. The beginning.
Was there a code she was supposed to enter?
Democritus was one of Dr. Corwin’s favorite historical figures. At the last department Christmas party, a white elephant affair, Dr. Corwin had given her a paperweight replica of the same bust. U
nfortunately, she had dropped it, cracked the porcelain, and thrown the pieces away.
Some quick research told her the depiction of the ancient philosopher on both the Star Phone and the paperweight replica was a specific one: an original bust that sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The coincidences kept mounting, and she could only assume that her Christmas gift had possessed a greater significance.
She spent half the day trying to enter every combination of numbers and symbols she could think of into the nine cursor spaces on the device. As before, she racked her brain for mathematical formulas, theorems, and information personal to Dr. Corwin. Every time, after she entered the ninth number or symbol, all of the cursor spaces would empty, leaving the first one winking at her again, as if laughing at a silent joke. She kept expecting the screen to lock from her repeated attempts, but it never did.
All of these insane developments, the enigmas and encoded messages, made her think some type of cult or secret society was involved. She wanted to scoff it away. Except for being a genius, Dr. Corwin was a regular guy. He loved English pubs, Indian food, solving puzzles of all sorts, and watching hours of golf and cricket on the television to wind down. As vanilla as they come.
Or so she had thought.
Finally she had to admit defeat. A nine-digit code was impossible to crack by guesswork. After ordering a pizza to her room, she turned her attention to the actual murder. Andie spoke almost no Italian, but she finally got someone on the phone in the Bologna police station who spoke English, only to be told they couldn’t give out details about the crime. She realized she would have to hire a lawyer in Italy or, at the very least, plead her case in person. Even then, she wondered how much that would accomplish—and she would be revealing her identity in the same city where the murder took place.
Frustrated, she poured a cup of coffee and paced the room.
What were her choices?
She knew very little, almost nothing, about what was really going on. Impossibly, it seemed as if her strange visions and even her mother might be involved in some way.
No matter what she chose to do, if her pursuers found her, she had to assume they would kidnap and then kill her. That alone was enough for her to put her mind to solving the mysteries gathering around her like a cloud of dangerous radiation.
But it went beyond that.
Someone had been taken from her, murdered, who she loved very much. Someone irreplaceable.
And Andie wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing.
She owed Dr. Corwin more than that, so much more, but it was a start. She couldn’t believe she had lost the journal, but she did have the Star Phone. It was up to her to figure out how to use that to her benefit. Maybe she could get her hands on the Enneagon itself, and use it to lure Dr. Corwin’s murderer out of the shadows.
The idea of putting an ocean between herself and her pursuers appealed to her, as did laying eyes on the original bust of Democritus. Despite Dr. Corwin’s warning, she needed information more than anything, and there was someone in London, an Oxford classmate of Dr. Corwin’s named Philip Rickman, whom she thought she could trust. Dr. Rickman was also a physicist and a former cricket player, and the two men had stayed extremely close over the years.
Maybe, just maybe, Dr. Rickman could fill in some of the blanks about her mentor.
As she made the decision to go to England, she realized she was not just trying to solve a murder, but the enigma of Dr. Corwin himself.
What sort of research was her mentor involved in?
Who was he, really?
Yet she knew the answer to that final question, while vexing, had no effect on her decision. She didn’t care who Dr. Corwin had been to anyone else, not even to her own mother.
Because Andie knew exactly who he had been to her.
Deep into the night, Andie dreamed of walking alone through the halls of Duke Chapel, her footsteps echoing in the gloom of the Gothic cathedral, feeling as if an ominous presence lurked amid the shadows of the alcoves. Then she was trapped alone at the bottom of a crater on the moon, choking on the lack of oxygen, the stars glittering like diamonds on a tyrant queen’s tiara far above, haughty, unreachable, mocking. Then she was racing through the forest again, only this time the woods belonged to the eerie world of her visions. Lost souls roamed the spaces between the trees, the branches reached out to grasp her, and always there was a dark-haired man running behind her, pressing closer—
When she woke midmorning, her back damp with sweat, she downed a glass of water and hovered over the coffee maker as it brewed. Feeling unsteady, knowing she had to keep moving, she took a shower and grabbed her backpack. On the way to the Raleigh-Durham airport, Andie paid the cabdriver to stop at a Marshalls off the interstate. She picked up a pair of lightweight stretch jeans, a gray baseball cap, socks and underwear, a pair of long-sleeve T-shirts, and a thin black windbreaker. The weather would be cooler in London. She also bought basic toiletries and a green nylon daypack, then threw the old one in a dumpster.
At the airport, thankful beyond words she had grabbed her passport, she bought a changeable round-trip ticket to London. The flight left that evening, and the price was eye-popping. Forced to use her credit card, she reasoned she had already displayed her passport. If her pursuers could hack an airline’s computer system, so be it. Or maybe they were watching the airport and had already spotted her. She probably should have driven to Charlotte or DC for her flight.
She put a hand to her temple. All of the subterfuge was exhausting.
Yet if these people caught her, she didn’t want to think about what might happen. For now, she had to stay focused and do the best she could to resolve the mounting questions.
Would the nine-digit cipher on the Star Phone lead to the Enneagon?
What was the Enneagon? Did it have anything to do with the ink drawings of her visions, her mother, or the reams of research on occult and metaphysical speculations she had found in Dr. Corwin’s desk?
Most important of all, who had killed Dr. Corwin and was chasing her?
Was it someone at Quasar Labs? A rival corporation? A foreign government?
The wait for her 6 p.m. flight felt interminable. She managed to choke down a bacon-and- avocado sandwich, then hunkered down in a corner until the time came to board. Andie took her seat at the rear of the plane and studied the face of every single passenger she could. No sign of the dark-haired man, but that was little relief, since she doubted he was acting alone.
Her seat was situated between an elderly British woman and a trim blond man wearing horn-rimmed glassed and a pin-striped suit. Andie thought his palms looked too calloused for a businessman’s.
After she sat, he turned to her and said, in a mild German accent, “I guess we’re stuck together for a while.”
“I guess so.”
“Flying to London, or on to somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else.”
“Ah.”
“Rome,” she added, so it wouldn’t look suspicious.
“Been there before?”
“Yeah.”
“Business or pleasure this time?”
“Both.”
Maybe he was fishing for information, or maybe he was just chatty. Either way, she had to cut it off. Before he could ask another question, she pulled the airline magazine out of the seat pocket and began reading it. He got the hint and fell silent, though she felt like he was watching her out of the corner of his eye.
They taxied for almost an hour. When the plane lurched into the air, triumphing over gravity with a mighty roar, she gripped the armrest and vowed not to let her guard down.
Leipzig, Germany
1933
Germany was a breath of fresh air to Ettore.
Maybe Italy itself had b a contributor to his lifelong depression. As he strolled the streets of Leipzig, he decided a creeping aura of decay had beset the psyche of his home country ever since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Just like Ettore, Italy n
eeded a new start. Something to be proud of. And not the petty nationalism trotted out by that buffoon Mussolini.
After a month in Leipzig, despite the troubling political events unfolding in Germany—particularly the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor—everything about the new city felt invigorating.
The cold weather and the heaps of pristine snow. The handsome, refined populace who had emerged from their postwar shell. The wide boulevards and grand display of Gründerzeit and art nouveau architecture that sparkled in comparison to Italy’s clogged streets and grime.
One evening, after a long day at the research foundation where Ettore worked, Werner Heisenberg invited him to a beer hall with a few colleagues. Still in his early thirties, Werner was already famous for his uncertainty principle, which held that observation itself has an effect on the behavior of particles at the quantum level. This made them inherently uncertain, and impossible to precisely measure.
Like it or not, it appeared that chaos reigned in the quantum world.
Ettore readily accepted Werner’s invitation. He rather idolized the leader of the physics institute, who along with being a brilliant scientist, was also a hard-drinking ladies’ man who could play the piano, dance, and ski.
Like most extreme introverts, Ettore was able to relax whenever Werner’s larger-than-life presence filled the room. Werner even seemed to genuinely enjoy his company, and they shared a fierce mutual respect for each other’s intellect.
The beer hall was a raucous place, full of stein-pounding Germans squeezed side by side on long wooden benches. As the strapping Werner waded into the crowd, Ettore scurried in his wake like a foal clinging to its mother. They found some seats and ordered foaming mugs of the local pilsner.
“Did you hear about the decree?” Werner shouted to Ettore, once they had beers in hand. Two of their colleagues had taken seats across the table and could not be heard above the din.
“What decree?”