by Layton Green
Just like Werner—perhaps even more so—the German officer had an undeniable charisma that drew Ettore like a moth to a flame.
He had to admit he was curious. The thought of hidden knowledge had always intrigued him. In any event, what could it hurt to see?
“Where do I find you?” Ettore asked.
Stefan stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat as he backed away, his parting smile as mysterious as the Sphinx. “I’ll let you know.”
PART TWO
London, England
10
The heavy Boeing jet roared away from Raleigh-Durham International Airport, soaring high above the geometric loop and tangle of roadway, the emerald pastures and office parks, the spiderweb of creeks and rivers.
The higher the plane rose, the more a pattern materialized out of the chaos below, reminding Andie of zoomed-out shots of Earth, the solar system, and the Milky Way. She suspected the whole universe was like that, a pattern made of patterns, mimesis on a cosmic scale, everything a matter of perspective.
Turtles all the way up, down, and in between. Turtles hurtling through space and time.
She had a layover in Toronto, descending into the Canadian city as the horizon drew a line of fire above shadowed earth. Despite her frayed nerves and her promise to stay awake, she fell asleep during the red-eye to England.
As soon as the plane landed at Heathrow, she squeezed past her German seatmate without a word and hurried to customs. The line was horrendous. By the time she made it through, still blinking the sleep away, jet lag making everything fuzzy, it was 3 p.m. London time. She grabbed a cappuccino and an egg sandwich at Costa, hunkered down at a table, and debated what to do. Just to be safe, she kept her phone off and purchased a burner with a prepaid internet plan at the airport.
The crush of people passing through Heathrow was dizzying. Andie had been to London before and loved it, but this time, the incessant flow of bodies and babble of foreign languages made her feel vulnerable.
Had someone watched her deplane? Followed her through customs?
A quick search told her the Victoria and Albert Museum closed at a quarter to six. By the time she could get there, it would be well after five. She didn’t want to rush her visit, and decided to wait until morning.
A year ago, after a presentation by Dr. Corwin at Imperial College, she had accompanied him on a visit to Professor Rickman’s third-floor flat near the Thames in Central London. She still remembered how to get there. As she finished her sandwich and tossed the wrapper into a futuristic recycling bin, she decided not to call him beforehand, and to do her absolute best to make sure she wasn’t followed.
The Temple station was the closest tube stop to the professor’s flat. A straight shot east from Heathrow on the Piccadilly line to Earl’s Court, then a change to the District line. Yet as the underground train bulleted past the rows of granite chimneys squatting grimly among the forests of glass and steel, she studied the wall map of the subway lines and made a snap decision to take a detour. Professor Rickman might not even be home yet, and she could further cover her tracks.
At Leicester Square, she changed for the Northern line, taking it five stops north to Camden Town. She exited with a pack of Londoners and tourists into a cauldron of grungy humanity. The smell of leather and incense and street kebabs. Tattoos of every type imaginable. Ripped clothing, piercings, hair dyes across the visible spectrum.
Andie felt right at home.
She knew CCTV was omnipresent in London. The question was whether the people pursuing her had access. Either way, she felt better as she ducked in and out of the maze of shops and crowded street stalls, winding her way toward the canal. She stopped to buy a British flag T-shirt, a lightweight green field jacket, a pocketknife, and a pair of sunglasses, then changed into the new outfit. She stuffed the knife in her pocket, and her other clothes in the backpack.
After grabbing a Cornish pasty for fuel, she decided it was time to get going. On the way to Professor Rickman’s flat, she changed tube lines three more times, hopping onto trains at the last second. Maybe she was being overcautious, but by the time she emerged into the city at the Temple station, she was reasonably certain she had managed to arrive unobserved.
The mercurial weather, which seemed to change block to block, had turned cooler, and the twilight sky began to spit rain. The gray sweep of the Thames was just across the street. Following her phone, she walked a block up to Fleet Street, where tall, handsome residential buildings with ground-floor commerce lined both sides of the avenue, punctuated here and there by a massive stone landmark. The crowd was whiter and far more conservative than in Camden Town. She walked a few blocks down Fleet, to a cobblestone lane squeezed between the buildings. Directly ahead loomed the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
After passing beneath an overpass and winding alongside an ancient pub, the little byway opened into a courtyard ringed by three and four-story brick flats. A tree with white blossoms twisted out of the ground in the center of the courtyard. She approached the first building on the left, unlatched a waist-high iron gate, and pressed the buzzer for Dr. Rickman’s apartment.
As she waited, she recalled what she knew about him. A tenured professor in Imperial College’s prestigious theoretical physics department, specializing in black holes and other condensed matter, Dr. Philip Rickman was a Welshman who had studied and taught in the United States for much of his career. He had been at Princeton at the same time as Dr. Corwin and Andie’s mother. In addition to his love of cricket, she knew him to be a cellist and an accomplished chef who dabbled in molecular gastronomy.
She wasn’t sure how well he would remember her, if at all, but when he opened the door, he blinked and then greeted her with a hug.
“Andie Robertson? What in the devil are you doing here?”
She gave the courtyard a quick, nervous glance. “Can I come in?”
He blinked a few more times, perplexed, then ushered her up a flight of stairs and into his sitting room. The flat was small but well appointed, with a view of Saint Paul’s through the window.
A portly man an inch or two shorter than Andie, the professor had an owlish face and a trimmed beard that had grayed considerably since their last meeting. “I didn’t realize you were in London. I figured you would be . . .”
“Attending a funeral?” she said quietly.
“Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s right.” His face crumbled as he sank into a leather armchair facing a wall of bookshelves. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”
“Me either.”
“I’m sorry—may I offer you a drink? When did you arrive? Why didn’t you call?”
She took a seat in another armchair. “A glass of water would be nice.”
When she failed to explain further, he walked to the kitchen, returning with a glass of cold water.
“Is everything all right?” he asked gently. “I assume grief alone did not bring you across the Atlantic.”
Andie drank half the glass in one swallow and closed her eyes. “I’m not sure where to begin.”
“Begin with what, dear?”
After setting the glass down, she steepled her fingers against her mouth and summarized the events of the last few days, leaving out the discovery of the Star Phone, Dr. Corwin’s journal, and the bizarre items she had found in his desk.
Professor Rickman’s pasty face turned even whiter, his blinking now incessant. When she finished, he rose to pour himself a Laphroaig single malt. “Would you care for one?”
“I think I will.”
He splashed more Scotch into a cut-glass tumbler. “I can’t believe someone tried to kill you.”
“Just so you know, I have no reason to think anyone followed me to London, and I took every precaution coming here.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you came. But isn’t it time to involve the authorities?”
“Dr. Corwin said not to trust anyone,” she said, leveling her stare at him.
After a moment, he s
aid quietly, “Then why me?”
“You’re his closest friend. I need answers, or at least some insight.”
Instead of taking a seat again, he moved to stand by the window, pensive as he sipped his Scotch. “I’m afraid I don’t know what to say. Do you have any idea what he might have gotten himself into?”
“I came here to ask you the same question.”
“This project with Quasar Labs . . . he never mentioned it?”
“Never.”
“Nor to me. I suppose we didn’t know James as well as we thought we did.”
Her gaze slipped downward, stung by the truth of his words and frustrated by his lack of knowledge.
“If you’re not going to the authorities with this,” he said, “what are you planning to do?”
She looked up, eyes flashing. “I’m going to find out who killed him. Then I’ll go to the police.”
“Andie, I don’t think that’s—”
“I didn’t come to ask permission. I came for information. Promise me you’ll keep this between us for now, until I figure out what’s going on.”
He gave a slow nod. “If that’s your wish. Though I’m not sure what to say, or how I can help.”
“You have no idea about a secret project he might have been working on?”
“My guess is you would know before I would.”
That surprised her. “Why would you say that?”
“Because he thought very, very highly of you, my dear.”
Andie buried her face in her glass, breathing in the peat, until she had control of her emotions. “But you knew him on a different level. You were peers.”
He hesitated, gently clinking his ice cubes.
“Dr. Rickman?”
“It’s probably nothing, just a strange conversation we had recently. I’m not sure I should break confidence and bring it up, but given the circumstances . . .”
“Please. Anything could help.”
“Well . . . you’re familiar with his pet project, the mathematical universe theory?”
She gave a soft smile. “He called it MUT.”
“That’s right. Quite frankly, I don’t give it much credence.”
“I think he saw it as a way to tie all the other theories together.”
“Of course, of course. I understand James’s mind-set. The theory of quantum physics, as we know it, is either incomplete or inconsistent. How can the observable universe consist of underlying particles that cannot even be measured until observed? Who did the initial observing? Where is the line drawn? And yet while we don’t understand why quantum theory functions as it does, we know the wave functions that describe these particles do work.”
“Wave functions are just math,” Andie said, “but if they work, then they must be real on some fundamental level.”
He rubbed his thumb against the glass. “In our last conversation, James postulated that reality, at the most basic level, might not just be described by mathematics—it might be mathematics.”
“He mentioned that to me before.”
“Maybe he was being metaphorical. But I don’t think he was that concerned with the answer.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“We know our basic reality consists of four-dimensional space-time and the subatomic particles that underlie it. Setting aside the theoretical multiple dimensions of superstring theory, mainstream science acknowledges a deeper level, the place where the wave functions defining these quantum particles live.”
“Hilbert space,” she said.
“That’s right. An infinite-dimensional geometric construct that, again, we don’t really understand, but we use to describe the spaces in between. Just like with quantum physics, James thought there might be a way to utilize the infinite-dimensional formulas without really understanding them.”
“Hilbert space has been extensively studied.”
“Of course, my dear. Yet as far as I know”—he tipped his head and chuckled, as if whatever he was about to say did not bear much weight—“no one has tried to reach it.”
It was Andie’s turn to blink. “I don’t understand.”
“In our last conversation, James asked me quite earnestly what I thought would happen if we found a way to access Hilbert space.”
“Access it how? With a microscopy device? We’re nowhere close.”
Dr. Rickman returned to his seat and finished his Scotch with one swallow. “With our minds.”
“With our—that sounds like nonsense.”
“I thought the same,” he said quietly.
“And if it isn’t?” she said, taking a moment to digest his words. “What would that even mean?”
“Quite frankly, I’ve no idea.”
“Did he tell you more about it? Why he thought this was possible? What he thought it would accomplish?”
“I asked the same questions, and he laughed them off, saying it was just a wild theory, and wouldn’t it be neat if we could peer behind the curtain?”
“Yeah, sure,” Andie said. “That would be neat.”
They both fell silent, and when Dr. Rickman rose to refill their glasses, Andie waved him off. She had to think clearly.
“Does the name Zawadi mean anything to you?” she asked. To her surprise, his eyes glanced quickly to the side, and she saw him swallow ever so slightly.
“I’m afraid not. Why?”
“The Unknown Nine? LYS? The Ascendants?”
“I’ve never heard of any of those.”
Why is he lying about Zawadi? Or isn’t he?
“I found a drawer in Dr. Corwin’s desk,” she said, thinking furiously about how much she was prepared to reveal. “It contained research on unexplained phenomena. Things like astral travel, ESP, and near-death experiences. I also saw the names I just mentioned.”
“I’ve never heard him talk about these things.”
“Me either. What about a Majorana Tower?”
“As in Ettore Majorana?”
She held a palm up.
He continued shaking his head. “The only field of speculative research I knew to interest James was electromagnetism. He’d go out on a limb there.”
“I know he revered Tesla and Faraday.”
“He was also intrigued by the mathematical concepts involved in consciousness, and their relation to the electromagnetic field surrounding the human body.” He rose and started to pace. “I’m shooting in the dark here, but what if he was working on a way to tap into the body’s energy field with a device of some kind? The establishment would laugh, which is why he’d keep it secret.”
Andie began to gnaw on a thumbnail. She wanted to ask him about the Enneagon and the Star Phone but knew she couldn’t trust him completely.
“If James broke new ground in the quantum arena,” he said, “then you must understand how important this could be. We’ve all been waiting for the next leap. Whatever it is, the value to science—and commercial interests—will be incalculable. If someone even thinks Dr. Corwin developed something groundbreaking . . .”
“A man with a gun just chased me five miles through the woods in the middle of the night. I think I’m aware of the seriousness of the situation.”
“Yes, yes, of course you are.” The professor’s eyes flicked nervously to the window, and he stood in the center of the room, looking very lost. “What can I do, Andie? How can I help?”
“If you think of anything else that might be relevant, shoot me an email.”
“That’s it?”
“For now, yeah. I can’t put anyone else in danger.” As she rose to leave, she kept thinking about that glimmer of recognition when she had mentioned Zawadi. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but there was too much at stake to let it go, too many unanswered questions.
“Who’s Zawadi?” she said, staring right at him.
“What? I already told you—”
“That folder I mentioned, in Dr. Corwin’s desk? Your name was listed right beside hers.”
Her lie made an impact. Dr. Rickman started to say something in response, thought better of it, then walked to the window and turned his back to her. The long silence spoke for itself. Still facing the window, he said, “Come back tomorrow night, at eight p.m. I have a function after work but will come home straightaway.”
“Why can’t you tell me now?”
“Eight p.m. And I can’t make any promises.”
“Promises about what?”
“I have to . . . talk to someone. I won’t mention your name. I promise.”
“Talk to who?”
“You’ll have to trust me.”
“Why should I?”
When he turned back around, a strange light had entered his eyes, shrewd and troubled. Somehow, he seemed taller than before, his posture more erect, his demeanor more confident.
“Because James did,” he said.
That caused her to pause, torn between her desire for answers and her wariness at his sudden change in behavior.
“I’ll meet you,” she said, reasoning she could always change her mind. “But not here.”
“Where?”
She thought for a moment. “The pub outside the courtyard. Come alone.”
“Fair enough. You don’t have to worry, Andie. At least not about coming here.”
“I hope not.”
Her face tucked inside the hood of her green field jacket, Andie hurried away from the professor’s flat, keeping to the shadows. Night had fallen, and she had to make a decision about where to sleep. Reaching into her memories of the city, the best option she could think of was Victoria Station, which had plenty of cheap hotels and access to transportation. It was also close to the V&A Museum.
Just to be safe, she took another circuitous route on the tube, thinking through all that had happened. She had never felt so out of her depth.
It was obvious Professor Rickman knew more than he had told her—but how much?
And who was this Zawadi person?
Despite his caginess, Andie felt like the professor was on her side. Still, not trusting the situation—which might be out of his control—she was relieved he had agreed to meet in a public place. She also reasoned, should her instincts about him be wrong, that he would be less willing to cause a scene in a pub right outside his flat. And it was a busy part of London, easy to get away if needed.