by Layton Green
Reasoning that anyone following her would guess she was aiming for the tube station, she hurried down the shorter tunnel and made the turn for the Science Museum. So far, no one had exited the V&A behind her.
Once inside the Science Museum—another gigantic and free exhibit—she hurried to the restroom and locked herself inside a stall. Excited, she took out the Star Phone and input the nine-digit code.
Instead of disappearing, the code locked into place, backlit by a sapphire light. The image of Democritus dematerialized, and a new image appeared: a gray scroll with a white ribbon tied around it. Displayed below the scroll was a short sequence of numbers and letters.
stt38
Andie frowned. She had no idea what to do with that.
The nine-digit code disappeared, reverting to a single blank cursor.
For the rest of the day, she avoided the outside world by wandering through the comforting exhibits of the Science Museum, pretending to study the displays while she chewed on her nails and pondered the new clue.
By 7 p.m., Andie was tucked into a secluded table at the Gryphon’s Beak, the pub outside Professor Rickman’s flat. According to a plaque by the door, the establishment was the former guesthouse of a monastery, converted to a tavern in 1538, and rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. Frequented by Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, it was one of those atmospheric English pubs that fulfilled the fantasy of every weary traveler: a mahogany-walled common room lit by wall sconces, scuffed wooden floors, cozy booths with red upholstery, taps stocked with real English ale, the aroma of bitters and shepherd’s pie, a stone hearth ready to warm the patrons in colder months.
Yet the pub had hidden depths. A set of creaky wooden steps, with a ceiling so low Andie had to duck as she descended, led past a warren of alcoves tucked behind iron-barred posterns, as if the place had once been a dungeon. All the posterns were open, and candlelit tables for two occupied the recesses of the alcoves. It could have been 1712, she thought, as a passage at the bottom of the stairs spilled into a basement bar with plaster peeling off the brick walls and dusty casks of sherry along the perimeter. Besides the bartender, she was the only person down there. The quietude both relieved and unnerved her.
After padding across the sticky cement floor, she ordered a pub burger and took a seat at a secluded wooden table in one of the alcoves. As she ate, she pondered the new image unveiled by the Laughing Philosopher.
If the Star Phone led to the Enneagon in some way, as Dr. Corwin’s journal had intimated, then the bust of Democritus was a bit of a gimme. Though not obvious at first glance—and, granted, it did require travel to London—it was not that difficult to research the location of that particular piece, find it in the V&A, and point the Star Phone at the crystal cube.
She remembered the note in the journal on the first step of the staircase. Arche. The beginning.
There were nine steps on the staircase. What if the journey had just begun? The thought made her queasy, though it did seem like the sort of intellectual puzzle Dr. Corwin would devise.
But why?
A waiter brought her food. She devoured her burger and fries but made no progress with the string of letters and numbers displayed on the Star Phone. Google didn’t help. Neither did her training in mathematics and astronomy. The figures must be a cipher of some kind, but if so, she had no idea how to go about solving it.
She focused on the scroll icon. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other depiction of rolled parchment. She assumed the scroll and the alphanumeric code tied together in some way, but again, she was at a loss.
Eight o’clock came and went with no sign of Professor Rickman. That was fine; he had said he might be late. Just in case, she ordered a half pint of Samuel Smith and took it upstairs, to an upholstered pew that overlooked the alley and the courtyard. If she leaned far enough to her left, she could see the entrance to Professor Rickman’s flat.
At eight thirty, she noticed movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning to the window, she saw a tall and athletic black woman, taller even than herself, closing the door to Professor Rickman’s flat. The woman’s face was smooth and sculpted, as if carved from obsidian, and she moved with intent, stepping lightly through the gate and hurrying down the alleyway toward Fleet Street.
The woman looked too young and statuesque to be Professor’s Rickman’s mistress. She could be a friend or colleague, though how many casual acquaintances had access to his flat? And why had she hurried away so quickly?
A name came to mind, based on her ethnicity. A name with Swahili origins written in Dr. Corwin’s journal, and which had caused Professor Rickman to pause when Andie had mentioned it.
Zawadi.
By the time nine o’clock rolled around, Andie decided she had to check on the professor. After closing out the tab, she slipped on her backpack and left the pub. The faint smell of diesel laced the air, with a trace of wild roses. Except for a shout or two drifting over from Fleet Street, the courtyard was silent and empty.
She buzzed the door to Professor Rickman’s flat, then buzzed again when there was no response. All the curtains were drawn.
Glancing over her shoulder, nervous the woman might return, Andie tried the front door. Unlocked. That was strange. She stepped inside, closed the door, and stared down a dark hallway with jackets and umbrellas hanging on the wall to her left.
“Professor Rickman?” she called out.
No answer.
Not liking the situation one bit, she opened her knife before creeping up the stairs to the second story, where a landing opened onto a short hallway with a pair of closed doors. After calling his name again, she eased the door to the sitting room open and saw him lying on his back in a pool of blood on the polished wood floor. His arms were akimbo, wrists slashed vertically halfway to his elbow. Sightless eyes stared in mute accusation at the ceiling.
The visceral, metallic odor of fresh blood cut the air as she rushed over to check his pulse. No trace of a heartbeat. Fear coursed through her, and then anger, and then guilt at waiting so long to knock on the door. She was certain he was dead, but in case there was a chance of saving him, she called emergency services on her way out.
A voice in the back of her mind implored her to search his flat, but she couldn’t risk explaining her presence to the police, and she worried someone else might wander in.
Or maybe the killer was watching her right now.
It seemed clear the tall woman had killed the professor. Andie envisioned her breaking into his flat earlier in the day and waiting for him to return. Maybe the professor had stopped by home to use the restroom, or for some other reason, on his way to meet Andie. The woman had constrained him and slit his wrists, arranged the body to look like a suicide, and probably searched his flat before leaving.
What if he had met with me first? Would we both be dead?
As Andie hurried into the courtyard, trying to appear calm but clenching her hands in rage and fear, she wasn’t sure which scenario was more disturbing: another murder of a scientist connected to whatever madness she was involved in, or Professor Rickman committing suicide on the very night he was supposed to meet her.
The sight of his pale corpse stained with blood made her think of Dr. Corwin, crowding her mind’s eye as she retraced her steps through the alley. Feeling sick to her stomach, blinking away tears, she emerged on Fleet and turned toward the tube station—then stopped as if jerked by a rope.
A hundred feet away, clearly illuminated on the well-lit street, was the dark-haired man who had chased her through the woods in Durham. He was passing a flower seller and walking right toward her.
They noticed each other almost at the same time. He stilled, just as surprised as she was, then began sprinting in her direction.
For a split second, Andie felt rooted to the ground, too terrified to move. Then her adrenaline kicked in, and she fled back down the cobblestone lane, worried the tall woman might be waiting for her if she ran down Fleet. She re
membered that the alley continued on the far side of the courtyard, and she would have to take her chances.
As she ran past the pub, drawing stares from the patrons by the window, she yearned with all of her being to return inside and shout for help. But she didn’t trust that would save her. Maybe her pursuer wouldn’t kill her in front of a dozen witnesses—and maybe he would—but he could easily create chaos by shooting out a window or pulling a fire alarm, then drag her away during the confusion.
No. She couldn’t put herself at his mercy. She was better off running.
The cobblestone alley led to a deserted cul-de-sac. After a moment of panic, thinking it was a dead end, she saw a couple emerge arm in arm from a footpath between two of the flats. Andie put a finger to her lips as she sped past them, hoping they would get the hint and stay quiet. The footpath led to another courtyard ringed by buildings. A vine-covered trellis gave access to a cement-walled corridor that wound through a web of modern glass buildings. A commuter byway of some sort. Surely, she thought, it had to lead to a road, where she could flag a police officer or jump into a cab.
Except for the ominous sound of footsteps pounding the pavement behind her, it was eerily quiet as she sprinted through the corridor. When she entered an office park with no apparent exit and glass and brick soaring above her on both sides, an urban Greek labyrinth, she began to wish she had taken her chances with Fleet Street.
She tried a few of the doors. All rear entrances, and all locked. She scampered among the buildings until she stumbled onto a landscaped terrace facing a building with living walls, fronted by a brick walkway exiting the park in both directions.
The footsteps drew closer. She had to choose. Gasping for breath from the sprint, noticing more light to her right, she ran across the brick walkway, finally emerging on the sidewalk of a busy street. Relief poured through her as she ran forward, scanning for a taxi, but the predominance of residential apartments made her curse. She had ended up in one of the least touristy sections of Central London.
Several taxis passed by, but no one stopped when she waved. At the edge of a neighborhood park, she glanced back and saw the dark-haired man exiting from the same corridor as she had. They locked eyes again, and he ran straight for her as she cut into the park.
A gravel path meandered through the gnarled trees. She raced right through the middle of the park, leaping over rocks and benches, debating whether to hide in one of the dense copses of bamboo. Too obvious, she decided.
A rock in the middle of the path caused her to trip. She fell hard, scraping her arms on the gravel. Swallowing her cry of pain, she picked herself up and kept running, thankful not to have sprained an ankle and wondering how much longer she could last at this pace.
On the other side of the park, she scrambled over a fence and noticed, not too far away, a castle-like structure with high stone walls and a parapet rising above the other buildings. After looking to both sides—still quiet and residential—she dashed across the street and down a lane that tunneled between the buildings. Her heart dropped when it dead-ended at an eight-foot brick wall with a gated entrance and a card swipe for property owners. To her left was a Thai restaurant with a sign overhanging the street. Without pause, she stepped up on the ground-floor windowsill, clambered from there to the sign, jumped, and clung to the top of the wall. Her pursuer entered the narrow lane just before she dropped to the other side and sprinted into the residential complex.
Running beside a high brick wall, she made her way to a lush courtyard on the other side of the gated community. She slammed into the iron door granting access to the street, furiously twisting the knob. As she burst through to the sidewalk, she saw the fortress she had noticed, looming just across the street and protected by a high stone wall topped by spikes, like something out of Harry Potter. A thought came to her, based on where she had started, that it was probably one of the Inns of Court, a collection of ancient buildings housing London’s legal society.
When she looked to her left, she saw a blue sedan whipping onto the street, threatening to hem her in. Her heart pounding with terror, Andie ran straight for the nearest entrance to the castle, looking frantically for a way inside. The walls and iron gate were too high for her to climb. A camera overlooked the entrance, and she waved and shouted for help, in case someone was watching in real time.
A shuttered, flat-topped guard tower extended three feet above the wall. She dashed around to the other side and noticed a terra-cotta drainpipe reinforced with circular notches. Breathing heavily, she grabbed the pipe and started climbing, praying it would hold. The notches, set a foot apart and just wide enough for a toe, held fast as she climbed to the edge of the roof. She scrambled atop the guardhouse and risked a quick glance back. The blue sedan had come to a stop near the gate, disgorging a short-haired blond woman and the heavyset Indian man from the museum. Andie caught a glimpse of a handgun holster inside the woman’s coat. The dark-haired man caught up to them, and they all noticed Andie perched atop the guardhouse.
“We just want to talk!” the dark-haired man called out, right before Andie dropped down on the other side of the wall and kept running.
Talk, my ass.
Her only question was why they hadn’t shot her, and she had to assume they wanted to take her alive and interrogate her. Or maybe the cameras had stayed their hand.
All around her, fortresses of stone rose from the darkness, stentorian guardians lit by the occasional glow from a lamppost. There was no one in sight, and the sounds of pursuit—scrabbling on the drainpipe—faded as she ran. The solitude bore weight, suffocating, and she pushed herself to the limit as she wound through the ageless buildings, racing through parking lots and courtyards and jumping over hedges. Her new fear was that the stone wall encircled the entire complex and she wouldn’t be able to escape.
That worry faded when she found a green space that backed onto a public street. Another iron fence separated the park from the road, but the overhanging branch of an old yew provided an easy escape route. Unable to sprint any longer, Andie cleared the fence and continued as fast as she could down a quiet side street, following the noise and lights until she emerged onto a busy thoroughfare. Her lungs burned as she raced, waving her arms, for a red double-decker bus just as it was pulling away. Tires screeched in the distance. She knew she had moments before her pursuers saw her.
The bus didn’t slow.
Andie dug deep. Chest heaving, she caught up to the front of the bus and paced alongside it, holding up her bloodied arms as she mouthed for help. Still the driver refused to turn his head.
She wanted to scream and beat on the door in anger. Instead, as the bus started to accelerate, she swallowed her pride and put her hands together in a praying motion, keeping up with the bus for as long as she could, pleading with her eyes until the driver finally looked over.
Just as she began to fall back, the bus decelerated a fraction and the door popped open. Andie used the last of her reserves to catch up and leap onto the steps. She gave the driver a five-pound note and collapsed in an open seat in the rear, soaking in sweat, not daring to look out the window but saddled with the stabbing fear that the people chasing her had seen her board.
Copenhagen, Denmark
1933
During the Easter break, Ettore’s grant took him to Copenhagen to conduct research at the Niels Bohr Institute. He would soon return to Leipzig, but for a month he would work alongside Bohr himself, a Nobel Prize winner as well as a friend and mentor to Werner Heisenberg.
Ettore had mixed feelings about the trip. It was good for his career, true. And Germany had become a political pressure cooker. Yet he was sad to part ways with Werner, even for a short time, and the trip also drew him away from Stefan.
Though Ettore had met with the charismatic sergeant major half a dozen more times in Leipzig, always on a walk in the city that ended up outside Ettore’s apartment, Stefan had not yet introduced him to the mysterious Leap Year Society.
Wa
s it all a farce? Was Ettore the butt of some cruel joke, as had been the case throughout his schooling?
He wanted to believe the Society was real. He wanted to believe there was more to the world than meets the eye, to join the secret club. In the past, he would never have believed there were people in the world who possessed more knowledge or performed more cutting-edge work than Ettore and his colleagues. Now he wasn’t so sure. Stefan’s range of knowledge, including his scientific acumen, was astounding. And it was true that governmental institutions were limited by funds, ethical considerations, the political climate, and the visions of their founders. Even if the Leap Year Society was just a collection of like-minded people searching for greater truths, if they were as smart and engaging as Stefan, then Ettore wanted to be a part.
But he had come to doubt their existence. As far as he could tell, there was not a single mention of this organization in the historical record. He had come to suspect it might be a covert group of Nazis who wanted to subvert Ettore to their cause. That, or Stefan was a paranoid schizophrenic who had drawn Ettore into his web of self-delusion and lies.
Oh well, he thought with a sigh as he sipped his coffee in the flagstone courtyard of his hotel on a quiet Saturday morning, enjoying a rare bout of Scandinavian sunshine. I must forget about Stefan and concentrate on my work. New breakthroughs are occurring in the quantum world on a daily basis. This is where I must focus, not on some ridiculous covert society that is likely a figment of a troubled imagination.
The temperature was surprisingly mild for March in Copenhagen. Frost still clung to the bushes and windows, but Ettore was able to sit outside in his peacoat without a frigid wind cutting him to the bone. He had seen nothing but gray clouds and gloom since his arrival, but today a hint of spring was in the air. To celebrate, he decided to walk to the royal observatory, which he had been meaning to visit since his arrival.