Three Envelopes

by Nir Hezroni

  Shariri is the common thread that connects everything.

  Perhaps he knows the location.

  Perhaps he held it back during his interrogation.

  Perhaps they never asked him at all.

  He pressed on the Speak button of the intercom at the table. “Set up a meeting in Toronto for the entire group for the day after tomorrow. I want them all here in person.”

  He leaned back in his black leather chair and cast his eyes over the rows of books along the walls of his room and the snow swirling in the freezing cold outside. “Es gibt noch Hoffnung,” he said to himself. “There is still hope.”

  His personal assistant entered the room, her shoes clicking across the hardwood floor.

  “Your tea, Herr Schmidt.”

  Today, December 4th 2016, 11:20, UK time zone

  She woke up and stretched, letting out a loud sigh. It was one of those days. She felt like just staying in bed and not going anywhere. A strange sense of déjà vu overcame her, a tickling sensation at the back of her head, something inexplicable.

  She got out of bed. It was Wednesday. There was no way she was going to miss another cognitive psychology lecture—not if she ever wanted to complete her degree.

  A quick shower got her going; and after a few spoons of rice from a pot in the refrigerator and a cup of strong coffee, she was behind the wheel of her Fiat and on her way to the Mount Scopus campus. The roads were relatively traffic free, and she arrived at the university a little over an hour before the start of the lecture—an excellent opportunity to review the list of available student experiments and possibly earn a little money.

  She’d participated two weeks earlier in an experiment in which not only did she earn thirty shekels for participation, but she also received an additional fifty shekels as a reward for exhibiting a certain behavior during the experiment itself. With any luck, she’d find something interesting and profitable today, too.

  This time, the board only listed two active experiments. “No need for additional subjects today (Wednesday),” said a hand-written note in red ink over one item on the list, which left only one relevant option. It read: “The Physics Department in collaboration with the Computer Science Faculty needs subjects for an experiment relating to the discovery of a segment of the source code of the universe.” Strange, she thought to herself, the geeks from the Givat Ram campus don’t usually come to Mount Scopus to conduct experiments. The title of the experiment sounded odd, too. But it also read: “Fifty shekels for a fifteen-minute session.”

  She found the office noted in the ad and knocked on the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “A volunteer for the experiment.”

  “Come in, please.”

  She entered the room. There was a young man with red hair and a smile on his face.

  “Hi, I’m Michael. Did you see our ad?”

  “Yes. What’s this about? The source code of the Universe?”

  Michael smiled. “It sounds a little weird but it’s exactly that. Are you familiar with CERN?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so CERN is the international research institute in Geneva that houses the world’s largest particle accelerator. Our team is working with them and we have access to the computer database with the results of all the collisions that have taken place in the particle accelerator. We’ve been running mathematical models not on the mass or direction of the particles but on their derivatives. We thought initially that nothing would come of it, but we suddenly realized that we were coming up with segments of binary code—machine language that wasn’t written by a human hand and is actually the engine behind all the laws of physics that we currently know.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, we didn’t believe it either at first, but we started playing with it and now we’ve discovered all kinds of interesting things. We’re now running a test on a segment of code that we believe is responsible for the time dimension. We’re actually quite similar to neuroscientists—we don’t understand how it all works, but we’re trying to touch on random things and see the results.”

  “So what’s the experiment all about?”

  “We’ll try to send you two and a half hours back in time.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. And it’s not all that complicated either. There’s no need for a time machine or any of that crap you see in the movies because we work on the source code directly. All that will happen is that I’ll read out a series of one hundred and twenty-eight numbers to you, in groups of eight, and you’ll repeat them after me. I won’t read the last group out aloud and will only show you the last eight numbers on a note, but you will speak them out loud. That’s it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Great. Let’s begin then. Zero, zero, one, zero, one, zero, one, one.”

  She repeated the numbers in groups of eight, one group after the next, and finally read out the last eight from the note Michael handed to her.

  She woke up and stretched, letting out a loud sigh. It was one of those days. She felt like just staying in bed and not going anywhere. A strange sense of déjà vu overcame her, a tickling sensation at the back of her head, something inexplicable.

  She got out of bed. It was Wednesday. There was no way she was going to miss another cognitive psychology lecture—not if she ever wanted to complete her degree.

  #Loud ring#

  A quick shower got her going; and after a few spoons of rice from a pot in the refrigerator and a cup of strong coffee, she was behind the wheel of her Fiat and on her way to the Mount Scopus campus.

  #Loud ring#

  The roads were relatively traffic free, and she arrived at the university a little over an hour before the start of the lecture—an excellent opportunity to review the list of available student experiments and possibly earn a little money.

  #Loud ring#

  Carmit woke. She could still picture the corkboard displaying the list of experiments, but it began to fade gradually. She could remember every detail of the dream and the fact that it had repeated itself in a loop a few dozen times during the night. She glanced at the bedside clock. The glowing green digits indicated that it was already 11:20 in the morning. Nice of Guy to get the kids organized and off to kindergarten and school and let her sleep in.

  These transformations are killing her. She slept for sixteen hours yet still felt tired, as if she’d been up all night. It could be frequency interference from the headphones, or maybe the orange filter on the sunglasses only offers partial protection, but she was fully aware of the fact that content from the transformation was seeping into her brain, too. The Japanese from the last two subjects she’d worked on for the Chinese government, information about the CERN institute that must have spilled over during the treatments she carried out on that agent in Geneva ten years ago, corporate transformations she’d conducted in Europe in recent years—they were all mixing together and creating a mess in her brain.

  She turned off the alarm that Guy must have set to prevent her from sleeping the entire day away. And she resolved to quit. From now on, she was only going to sell books. She’d dismantle the lab and use the space to enlarge the bookstore’s warehouse. She’d release the mice in Hyde Park, where they could compete for food with the squirrels.

  She showered, feeling completely satisfied with the decision she’d just made. Then she got dressed, left the house, and rode the Underground to Westminster. As she left the station, she retrieved a battery from her purse, inserted it into her cell phone and turned on the device. The phone rang five minutes later.

  “Rachel speaking, at your service,” Carmit said into phone.

  “It’s been ten years,” said a familiar voice on the other end of the line. “We need you.”

  “Forget it.”

  Carmit hung up, threw the cell phone into a small trash can and continued walking.

  Without realizing she was talking to herself out loud, she repeated two sentences over and over again as
she walked:

  “A big wave is approaching.”

  “It’ll get here soon.”

  11:08

  Still at the Ganei Yehuda satellite branch, Rotem was sitting at the computer and compiling a Word document entitled “Study Unit 6: Spheres of interest, with an emphasis on two dimensions—the individual versus society, and legal versus illegal/criminal.” She needed a bit of a break from thinking about the material she had read that night.

  “Benny, you’re the man!” she gratefully exclaimed when the branch’s guard showed up with two cups of espresso. “Is the team of reinforcements on the way?”

  “They’re already here. That’s why I’m allowing myself a break. Someone’s replaced me at the camera station. Look, I found you a packet of cookies too.”

  “You’re the best!” Rotem was starving. She opened the packet of butter cookies. “Got anything to spread on them?”

  “Don’t get carried away. Do you know what the fuss is all about? This branch is usually dead.”

  “Yes. But you know…”

  “Okay, I figured no one would tell me. Are you going to be here for much longer? If so, I can order you a pizza.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Looks like I’m going to be stuck here all day. Thanks, Benny.”

  They sat together for a minute or so in silence, drinking their coffee. The phone in the room rang and Rotem lifted the receiver.

  “Rotem?”

  Rotem signaled to Benny that she was sorry but that he had to leave the room. He turned to her, bowed slightly, smiled, and left the room with his coffee, closing the door behind him.

  “Avner? What’s going on? I heard about the explosion in the building. Are you okay?”

  “He got her. That piece of shit took Efrat!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He left me a page he tore from the notebook on the kitchen table. It’s him.”

  “Take a picture and send it to me.”

  Rotem waited a few seconds and then opened the image Avner sent to her phone.

  “Come here,” she said. “There’s no point in you hanging around there. He’s gone. I don’t know where he’s taken her but he’s had ten years to plan things, Avner. Come here and we’ll sit down together and figure out what to do. He’s a whole lot of steps ahead of us. We need to sit down and think about this. As much as I hate saying this to you, you’ve read the notebook, too. You also know that he’s not going to kill her now. He likes to take his time. Come back here.”

  “On my way.”

  “And one more thing. There is no way on earth that this guy passed the tests. No matter what he writes in this notebook. Someone wanted him in and by ‘him’ I mean someone with his qualities, with his personality. We need to think. We need to understand why someone ignored his recruiting tests and let him into The Organization. I won’t even bother to trace those tests in the Orion HR files. I’m sure that I will find a copy of a perfect test result that is not the original. I want to catch this son of a bitch. I want him sitting handcuffed in a chair in front of me while I inject sodium pentothal into his blood and then have a lovely honest conversation about everything that he neglected to write in his notebook.”

  “Rotem, we have to catch him.”

  “We will.”

  Rotem hung up and continued to devour the packet of cookies in front of her as she arranged the thoughts running through her head. First she would need to catch him, but this is clearly just the beginning of something bigger. He’s the tail of the dragon and when she pulled that tail the dragon would wake up angry. Someone sought him out and recruited him, tested his ability in Holland and then gave him those three missions from the Bernoulli project ON PURPOSE. Why? She feels like this is a two-thousand-piece puzzle and she’s been able to put together just a few sections. She loves puzzles. When she was just three years old, she was playing at her room and then came back to the living room to see what her parents were doing. Toys and kid’s games were getting her bored so quickly. Her parents were sitting on the living room floor, building a picture from many small pieces of different shapes. That’s when it happened to her for the first time. She looked at the picture on the puzzle box. Three kittens playing in a back yard full of flowers. So many details! It was beautiful. Then she looked at the floor where all the pieces of the puzzle were spread. The small picture on the box was broken to a thousand small pieces on the floor. At first, it was almost painful for her to look at. Her mind worked so hard that her head started aching. So she closed her eyes and then it started. She could see the links. She could see how each part connects to the next. In front of her closed eyes the 2D matrix on the floor rose in the air and she started moving her hands quickly in the air placing in her mind the right pieces in the right place, her mother signaled her father to look at their kid sitting eyes shut rapidly moving her hands in the air in front of her face. They were worried but they did not touch her and waited. It took a minute till she opened her eyes and when she looked down the puzzle below her was solved in her head. Now she just needed to put the pieces in the right place. She went at it connecting the pieces together at an unbelievable speed. Five minutes and the puzzle was done and the pain in her head stopped and turned into bliss. She started laughing “This is fun!” That minute they understood she was way more than just a smart kid that could read the ABC when she was two. For her parents, this puzzle was a wake-up call. That puzzle changed her life course.

  Tomorrow she would speak with Grandpa and try to squeeze some more information out of him.

  She turned back to the open Word document and continued typing:

  Before starting to analyze spheres of influence and spheres of control we should have a look first at the foundation, which is spheres of interests. If we sum it up in a few simple words before drilling down to equations and graphs, the question we should ask is, “what is the interest of an individual or a group to perform or not to perform a specific action.” Note that eventually this is ALWAYS a choice between action and nonaction.

  19:45

  Amiram woke. His lips were dry. He sat up on the concrete floor and tried to figure out where he was. The room was dark except for a few small lights on the ceiling that cast a yellowish glow on the iron cage in which he was enclosed. A shiver went down his spine. He remembered vividly what he had read in the notebook just the day before, along with the sketches he’d seen in it before passing it on to Avner. It was an almost exact replica of the cage 10483 had built in his basement ten years before. He realized immediately what was going on. He had ten years, Amiram thought to himself. It’s not going to end well.

  The cage looked to be about 3 × 3 meters in width, depth and height. Thick iron bars, welded together, ran both vertically and horizontally on all sides. There’s no way to break out of this thing, Amiram thought, though he did notice something different about the cage he was in. First, this cage contained a metal toilet fixed to the floor. Agent 10483 must have tired of cleaning the original cage all the time. In addition, half of one of the sides of the cage was made instead of a smooth sheet of metal at the bottom of which, about half a meter up off the floor, was a small rectangular opening, and under that a metal bowl was welded to the large sheet of metal.

  A buzzing sound and series of clicks from the direction of the sheet of metal startled Amiram. He stood up and backed away from the source of the noise, which was coming from somewhere behind the metal sheet.

  Something fell through the opening into the metal bowl, followed by two one-and-a-half liter bottles of mineral water. The buzzing stopped and the basement fell dead quiet again.

  Amiram approached the metal bowl, which was now illuminated by a spotlight fixed to the concrete ceiling above the cage. He removed the two bottles of water, opened one and took a few sips. He wasn’t afraid to drink the water. Truthfully, he was even hoping that the bottle contained crushed sleeping tablets—it would go faster that way. He examined the hard chunks that had fallen into the bottom of the bowl just moment
s before, picking one up and sniffing it. He immediately recognized the smell. It was dry dog food. He spotted a pile of familiar looking bags against one of the basement walls. The writing on the bags read: Bonzo Meat—Adults. 20kg.

  Amiram looked again at the sheet of metal in front of him and noticed a short piece of neatly engraved text at its center:

  Welcome. You will each

  receive a kilo of food and 1 1/2 liters

  of water every evening at 8. Please

  make sure to eat well and keep the cage clean.

  A movement on the floor on the far side of the cage caused Amiram to jump. Something he hadn’t noticed before in the darkness was moving and groaning on the floor.

  “Where am I? What’s going on here?”

  Amiram recognized the voice and his shoulders slumped in despair.

  “Efrat?”

  Lunch. 2015. 1 year ago.

  The icy wind blew up dust clouds of fine white salt, and the seemingly endless salt flats shimmered in the sun like a huge mirror. Clouds swirled in a harmonious dance above the entire expanse of the dry lake.

  Close to the salt flats, on the outskirts of the city of Uyuni in Bolivia, there’s an ancient train cemetery.

  The trains were used in the past primarily by the mining companies that worked in the area. In the 1940s the mining industry collapsed, and many engines and coaches were abandoned there to rust and crumble.

  The train cemetery is quiet and peaceful, aside from lone tourists who show up every now and then to survey the surrealistic scene—the abandoned trains slowly fall apart from the effects of the dry climate and frequent salt storms.

  If someone were to wander around there with a Geiger counter, he’d be surprised by the radiation levels beneath the disintegrating train skeletons; levels way higher than humans can safely be exposed to.

  Buried under a pile of salt on one of the ancient train cars is a black barrel. Only its tip can be seen peeking out from under the pile of salt that has amassed atop it over time.