The elderly nasrani who sat in the back of the grande taxi had improbably black hair and tortoiseshell shades which reflected Moz back on himself. A skinny punk in a torn Ramones T-shirt, his hair cut with kitchen scissors and held erect by a mix of sugar water and Vaseline.
“He doesn’t look like an Arab.”
The stress the old man placed on this last word was both ugly and contemptuous. On the other hand, he was speaking fluent Arabic, which was impressive in itself.
“Half Turkish,” said the Major. “Quarter English, quarter German.”
“Merde,” said Claude de Greuze, one-time advisor to the old Pasha and still on retainer from Paris. “What a fucking mix.” A mirrored gaze slid over Moz’s thin face and the boy shifted uneasily in his seat. “Maybe he’s got something to be worried about…”
“No. The plastic’s hot, that’s all.” Patting the cracked red vinyl, Moz mimicked snatching his fingers away. “Much too hot.”
“You speak French.”
“Yeah,” said Moz, “and Arabic. You want a guide to the souk I’m the best. I can show you around all the best places. Get you good prices.”
Slowly, very casually, Claude de Greuze produced a Browning from the inside of his jacket, pulled back the slide and put the muzzle against the side of Moz’s head.
It felt warm.
“You think this is a joke?”
Moz stared back. Not defiant, just puzzled. He was good at doing puzzled. “No,” he said finally, when the seconds had stretched too thin. “I don’t think this is a joke at all. I was just offering to help.”
There followed a rapid-fire discussion between Major Abbas and the stranger, which switched between languages almost every other sentence. This was the first time Moz realized the Major had been learning English and now spoke it better than he did.
Moz understood about a quarter of what was said and this was a quarter more than the Frenchman intended him to understand as the words “Malika,” “necessity” and “school” tumbled between the two men.
“If you say so,” said the stranger, lowering his gun. He glanced again at Moz. “Maybe I’ll take him up on that offer,” he said to Major Abbas. “Let him show me round the souk.” Claude de Greuze’s smile revealed a whole mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth. “He could show me some of his favourite cafés, while he’s at it. He’d do that for me, wouldn’t he?”
Moz thought about those words on his walk back to Riad al-Razor. Not so much what the Frenchman said as the way he said it. And Moz thought about the man’s smell. Garlic, tobacco, sweat and ginger were common in a city where water was rare and most washing was ritual, at least for the people he knew.
The foreigner’s smell was different. A sour reek which so completely filled the grande taxi that it was a wonder someone as fastidious as Major Abbas could stand it. That was when Moz realized something which was to change the way he looked at the world.
Major Abbas, the most feared police officer in the whole of the Medina, had no choice but to sit with the windows shut, while trying to breathe through his mouth because, for reasons Moz could barely comprehend, he could not afford to offend the old Frenchman.
It was a terrifying thought.
CHAPTER 33
Washington, Saturday 7 July
Five things you need to know about Zero Point Energy. A selection of tabloids lay open on Gene Newman’s rosewood desk. A New York Post, a copy of the Sun from England, half a dozen others. The President hadn’t bothered to check which contained the list, it could have been any or all.
The five points had been posted the previous morning on alt.sf.science by a top-end theorist from NASA, a man with a disgustingly cynical sense of humour. The tabloids had printed them straight.
1. Zero Point Energy is named after its inventor (the soon to be late Prisoner Zero).
2. ZPE uses Quantum Foam, which is so small you can’t even see the bubbles.
3. A cup of Quantum Foam would be enough to boil all the seas on Earth.
4. An SUV running on ZPE would run from now until the end of time without ever needing to fill up.
5. With ZPE a spaceship will cost no more to fill than a lawnmower, but go much faster…
Gene Newman had no idea if a practical application for the Casimir force equations really had been scratched into the shit blasted off the mesh of Prisoner Zero’s cage. It was impossible to tell, since some idiot had apparently decided to wash the shit, the equations and the scratched sketches away.
Whatever, serious scientists were talking about the possibility that Prisoner Zero had successfully tied a big pink bow around gravity, inertia, heat and electricity, with some throw-in about the shape of time which Gene Newman had given up trying to understand.
All he knew was that Prisoner Zero had gone from Arab terrorist, through psycho killer and ex-punk junkie to tortured American genius in a matter of hours. Which didn’t stop the New York Post featuring a tasteful countdown chart to the man’s execution.
Draining the last of his coffee, Gene Newman turned back to the tabloids. EINSTEIN ASSASSIN DISCOVERS ULTIMATE POWER—FORMULA FEARED LOST FOREVER. Actually, that was one of the broadsheets.
“You got the answers yet?”
Across the Oval Office Isabel Gorst shook her head. “I’ll get on to it,” she said. “Meanwhile here’s the list of people who’ve called.” She walked round the eagle on the carpet, as she always walked round the eagle, and put the list into his hand. Neither of them mentioned that his in-tray was bigger than ever.
“Petra Mayer?”
“Oh yes,” Isabel Gorst said. “She’s going to call in an hour.”
“Okay,” said the President. “Have Paula remind the Secretary of Defense that I’m still waiting for some answers.”
Colonel Borgenicht was going to have to explain exactly what had happened at five a.m. yesterday morning at Camp Freedom and who thought using a fire hose to blast the twenty-first century’s very own version of Newton’s Principia off the mesh would be a good idea.
Rage had put most of the medals on Sergeant Saez’s chest and the ribbons went right over the place where the rage hid. It formed a fist-sized chunk where his heart should be and had carried him out of the Philadelphia projects and into a life where he had two kids, a nu-school BMW complete with tinted windows, and a bunch of men who trusted him not to throw away their lives.
His kids lived with his ex-wife in a house he’d more or less built by himself, after buying a pull-down on the edge of Belleville. It was a good house and he tried not to be angry about living somewhere else these days.
Michael Saez knew why he was angry and his ex-wife knew why he was angry. So Sergeant Saez couldn’t fault her logic in leaving. He didn’t want the boys to turn into him either.
All the same, he resented being stuck on a desolate little island in the middle of nowhere. And resentment made him drink more of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s than was decent and wake before the birds, still drunk and with a filthy headache, not to mention a marked reluctance to spend his morning guarding a cage covered in shit.
There were other things that made Sergeant Saez furious and these came out in the days following, when the damage was already done and most of the questions were more about filling in gaps for Colonel Borgenicht’s paperwork than building a true picture of anyone’s state of mind.
Not all of these made it into Dr. Petrov’s rider to the Borgenicht Report, but the ones which did included the fact the Italians had been printing lies about how the marines were treating the Arab, the fact that the weights room had apparently begun to smell worse than a brick shithouse and Sergeant Saez’s fury when the so-called Arab turned out to be American. Strangely enough, Saez never mentioned the fact his cousin had been piloting the helicopter brought down in Marrakech. Although Dr. Petrov included it anyway.
After the shit had been blasted from the mesh with fire hoses and the original blanket and mattress had been removed to dry in the sun, new bedding was brought i
n and Sergeant Saez woke the two embedded cameramen so they could photograph the newly clean cage. (One of them was from Fox News, the other had an uncle in the Pentagon Press Office.)
Sergeant Saez then climbed into the cage himself and made sure the two men photographed him as he knelt on the floor, pulling and twisting at the plastic-coated mesh until his hands hurt. Then he showed the cameras his own fingers, which were now raw from the effort and beginning very slightly to blister.
“You see?” he said. “The prisoner damaged his own hands trying to dig his way out.” Even the man from Fox News looked doubtful.
While Master Sergeant Saez was busy bringing Colonel Borgenicht to the attention of the President, Prisoner Zero was having an early morning appointment with Katie Petrov, who was too busy taking a call on a hotel phone to notice that her patient was drawing a spaceship in the dust on the floor with his foot.
“Lower the blind.”
“Why?”
Turning on her office’s portable television, Katie zapped to the channel mentioned by Bill Logan, still on loan to the marines from CavourCohen Media and currently CCM’s most famous VP.
“Shit.” It was true. The helicopter off the edge of the cliff really had been hired by Amnesty and a long lens was focused on her window. She could watch herself staring out of a window at the very helicopter taking the photograph of her staring out of the window at the very helicopter…
It was recursive to the point of insanity.
And to make matters worse the channel was busy broadcasting the verbal warnings it received as it received them. So now the whole world knew that the marine Colonel in charge of Camp Freedom had just threatened to blow an Italian helicopter out of the sky.
As Dr. Katie Petrov walked back to her desk, she inadvertently scuffed out a sketch of a needle-like racing yacht which would have told her more about Prisoner Zero’s grasp on reality than carefully logging his reactions to a hundred unanswered questions.
The prisoner was quite obviously aware of what went on around him and every CT scan suggested he understood exactly what was being said. And if even half the medical data Katie had on file proved accurate, then the man was actually busy answering her questions inside his head. She’d spent the last few days coming out of their sessions only to discover that Prisoner Zero’s silence had been the shell to an entire world’s worth of hidden speech.
“You do know,” said Katie, “that you have only six days left to live?”
Dark eyes watched her and, to make matters worse, Katie could swear that her attempt to focus Prisoner Zero’s mind on his fate only left the man amused.
“It doesn’t worry you?”
Again those eyes. That blankness.
Not only was he waiting for death. He was unafraid of it. As Katie wrote this on her notepad she realized it was probably the first thing she’d written in over a week that struck her as unquestionably true. Yet little in his daily ritual suggested he was certifiably religious. Maybe it was a variation on suicide by cop.
One of Katie’s earliest clients had opened fire on a police car from his wheelchair and been killed in the answering fire. It had been his fifth attempt in three years.
Possible, but unlikely.
She had, Katie was forced to admit, almost no real handle on Prisoner Zero, which made her no better or worse than the psychiatrist originally brought in by the Pentagon. And if Colonel Borgenicht was getting increasingly upset by Katie’s inability to reach a verdict then she could only repeat what she’d already told him.
She’d rather be late than wrong.
Of course, she wasn’t the one with helicopters buzzing round her head like flies. Well, actually she was but they weren’t after her. They were after the men who ripped fingernails from a world-class mathematician; because, apparently, that’s who Prisoner Zero was…
Katie put her head in her hands.
It got worse.
Her mentor, the renowned Harvard academic Petra Mayer, had taken a single glance at the Vice Questore’s photograph, ignored the prisoner altogether and speed-dialled the NASA theoretician with the cynical sense of humour. After that she called a Chinese refugee teaching quantum physics at Padua University and Dr. Natalia Aziz in Cairo, who specialized in the mathematics of low probability/high impact events.
Each one agreed to report their first findings to her within the hour.
Authenticating the half code, proofs, theorems, fractured formulae and incomplete sketches visible in the background of Pier Angelo’s photograph took a joint effort rare in academia and rarer than kindness in the paranoid world of high mathematics and quantum research.
And only when Petra Mayer had taken one shocked call after another did she pick up her own phone and speed-dial the President direct. A lot was made of this point. And though it wasn’t so surprising to discover that half a dozen of Harvard’s finest had Gene Newman’s direct line only Petra Mayer had the number for his cell phone.
Petra Mayer had spent her mid-twenties in prison for hammering nails into a Montana redwood. Few states send people to prison for harming a tree, Montana included. Only the girl hadn’t been trying to damage the tree, she’d been there to halt a lumber firm busy taking down five-hundred-year-old redwoods to sell as specialist timber.
The nail caught the chain of a power saw and stripped off its links, exploding the cutting belt like chain shot and taking off the fingers of a foreman overseeing the lumberjack.
The court case made headline news across America and Petra Mayer used her time inside to write a best-selling polemic on ecology, biodiversity and sustainable growth. Simplicity of style was one of the things which helped Tao and the Way of Global Maintenance to become a New York Times bestseller. The other was the fact she stuck all the biology, physics and economics at the back in an appendix called “Other Stuff,” where it could be safely ignored by the bulk of her readers.
The President was one of the few who actually bothered to check her sums. So when his old Professor finally dialled the direct number, Gene Newman opened his cell phone, saw who it was and promptly stood up, setting off a chain reaction that had chairs scraping the floor all around the Situation Room.
“Thank you. That will be all.”
Around the table half a dozen advisors, department heads and military chiefs nodded. “Thank you, Mr. President.”
“Petra,” he said, watching the door close.
“Mr. President?”
“You just saved me from my Defense Secretary.”
The slightly disbelieving snort from the other end made it clear that Petra Mayer found this unlikely.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
“That’s why I called,” said the Professor. Only her age and the weight of her news excused the impatience in her voice. “You’ve got a problem.”
“I’ve got dozens,” said the President. “Where do you want me to start?”
“No,” said the voice on the other end of his phone. “I mean you’ve got a problem.”
“Tell me…”
“So you see, what you and I think of as physical laws our friend considers the cosmological equivalent of local weather conditions…”
At the end of the conversation Gene Newman was not entirely sure he’d understood everything his old tutor had told him. The President imagined Petra Mayer knew this and it was only respect for Gene’s office that made her refrain from firing questions at him as if they were both still in a seminar.
“It’s important?”
“Gene…If this is for real then it changes everything. Think about it. We’re surrounded by a high-energy field…No,” the Professor corrected herself, “we exist inside a high-energy field, one we barely notice because it runs through us and through everything else and suddenly there’s a chance we can tap into this field.”
“That is good, right?”
“It’s terrifying,” said Petra Mayer. “How do you think China will react if her oilfields become worthless overnight? What’s a b
ankrupt Saudi Arabia going to do to the balance of power in the Gulf? Shit, imagine al Qaeda with this technology. Gene, I wouldn’t dream of telling you your job but—”
“Okay,” said the President, “I can see the problem.”
Silence came from the other end.
“What?” Gene Newman said.
“That’s not it…Natalia Aziz thinks that one of the equations might relate to time. You’re not going to like this.” Gene Newman was Catholic, although not so Catholic that he had more than two children.
“Tell me.”
“You need to know that Natalia Aziz believes in God.”
“Of course she does. The woman’s a Moslem.”
“No, I mean as a scientist Aziz thinks God exists. It looks like Prisoner Zero thinks the same. Only one of his theorems seems to suggest that God will die.”
“When?”
“At the end of time. When the universe comes to an end.”
“What happens then?”
“God’s born again.”
“Along with a new universe?”
“You’ve got it, but he’s probably not talking about God in the sense you’re talking about God.”
“You know,” Gene Newman said, “we’re not even going to go there.”
“Okay,” said Professor Mayer. “You’ve got your own people examining the photographs, right?”
Here the President was on firmer ground. “Of course I’ve got people looking,” he said. “The best brains in the CIA and the Pentagon are examining them as we talk.”
“That should be impressive.” Petra Mayer’s view on both was well known. As was the thickness of a file she’d eventually prized out of the CIA under section 552 of the Freedom of Information Act, having argued successfully that her file could no longer be regarded as operational.
There was an age when most Western scientists distinguished between space and time. This period lasted roughly from the Dark Ages to the beginning of quantum physics. A period during which the West caught up with and finally overtook the laws of science the Arab world had taken for granted for centuries.
Stamping Butterflies Page 25