Einstein's Secret

by Irving Belateche

  How the hell does he know anything about me?

  He shoved Eddie forward. “Now, I’ve got a problem. Two more loose ends. You obviously know way too much.” He aimed the gun at my chest, ready to fire—

  “Clavin did give us a lead,” I blurted out.

  He hesitated.

  I pulled out my iPhone. “It’s recorded right here.”

  That gave Van Doran just enough pause for me to tap the iPhone a couple of times. “And now five of my friends have a copy of that lead. In case something happens to us.”

  Van Doran kept the gun trained on me. “You’re stupid. You’re not saving yourself. You’re putting more people in jeopardy.”

  “And giving you more loose ends,” Eddie said.

  Van Doran looked at Eddie. “I can take care of—”

  I hurled my iPhone at Van Doran and he instinctively jerked out of the way, which threw off his aim as he fired the gun. I lunged at him, and we both hit the floor and wrestled for control of the gun. Eddie kicked the gun out of Van Doran’s hand, sending it sailing across the room.

  I was about to chase after it, when Eddie yelled, “Let’s go!” He took off into the hallway and I followed.

  “You’re a brave man,” he said.

  “Fear of dying does that to you.”

  We raced down the hallway, past a deserted study, where I caught a glimpse of a desk and a couple of dusty easy chairs, then down another hallway, when I heard a gunshot—a warm breeze blew by my cheek—the bullet—and I sprinted as fast as I could into the kitchen.

  Eddie slammed the door shut behind us, but there was no lock. Another shot rang out, hitting the door with a thick thud. Eddie ran over to the kitchen table. “Help me!”

  We pushed the table over, slamming it up against the door just in time. Van Doran pushed on the door from the other side, but we leaned into the table, barricading ourselves in.

  “We’re going over there,” Eddie barked out, craning his head toward the back of the kitchen.

  Across the worn, yellowed linoleum floor, between grimy cupboards, I saw an open door leading into darkness. “If it’s the basement, we’ll be trapped.”

  Van Doran slammed against the door.

  “You bailed us out the first time,” Eddie said. “Let me return the favor. Trust me on this. Go on.”

  I let go of the table and raced toward the darkness. Eddie let go, and Van Doran’s next shove edged the table forward and left the door ajar. He fired a shot through the opening.

  Eddie sprinted my way as the table shrieked forward. Van Doran was barreling in—

  I bolted down the stairs and saw pure black ahead of me. But I didn’t stop running. There was no time to think about what was up ahead. So this is what I do with my career opportunity at UVA was my only thought as I sprinted farther into the dark. I glanced back to see if Eddie was behind me, when another shot rang out—

  I saw Eddie stumble at the bottom of the stairs, and just then, before I could react, everything around me went white and undulating, as if I were running through an ocean of pure, white, glowing energy.

  It felt hot and prickly, and went on into infinity in every direction.

  Had I been shot and not Eddie?

  There was nothing around me but this atmosphere of thick white sea. I kept running, even more panicked than before.

  Am I having a seizure?

  I was sweating hard, and the white ocean was getting even hotter. I couldn’t breathe—the oxygen around me was suddenly depleted.

  I doubled over, trying to suck in air, choking, surrounded by what felt like raging white flames. I was sure this pure white sea would burn me alive. But before it did, I passed out.

  Chapter Ten

  “Jacob.”

  Someone was shaking my shoulder.

  “Jacob, let’s go.”

  I opened my eyes, and the memory of what had just happened flooded into my consciousness. I was already plenty confused and mighty groggy, and the fact that an anomaly was staring me right in the face didn’t help my condition—

  Alex was looking down at me. What the hell was he doing here?

  “We have to get out. Now,” he said.

  I slowly sat up and saw that I was in a small room equipped with a desk and bookshelves. Then I noticed the stone wall to my left. Was I in a carrel in the Caves? Impossible. This had to be Weldon’s basement. But his basement had seemed much bigger than this. And where was the staircase?

  “We’ve got to go,” Alex said.

  I wobbled as I tried to stand up, so Alex helped me to my feet. “What happened?” I asked.

  Alex moved to the door and opened it. “Come on.” He stepped out into a tunnel. One of those tunnels. The stone tunnels under the Lawn at UVA. The Caves.

  But I’m at Harold Weldon’s estate.

  I made my way out of the carrel and into the tunnel, and Alex locked up. He then started down the tunnel at a good clip. I tried to keep up, dragging a little. If there was any doubt left as to where I was, it dissipated when I saw the battery-powered lights and dead pipes.

  Was I hallucinating? Maybe I was lying on the floor in Weldon’s basement, dying from a gunshot wound. That made sense. The alternative didn’t: that I’d passed out in Weldon’s basement and awakened in the Caves.

  “Alex, what the hell is going on?”

  “Let’s just get out of here, first.”

  “What are you running from?”

  “It’s a ‘who’—not a ‘what.’”

  Van Doran, I thought. But why would Alex be running from Van Doran? He knew nothing about him. I was the one who was running from Van Doran.

  As we moved through the tunnels, I looked for signs that this was a dream. Unfortunately, my steps struck hard against the ground, and there was nothing dreamlike about that.

  The same with Alex. There was nothing dreamlike about him. I hadn’t seen him since last winter, when he’d picked me up from Dulles for my interview with McKenzie, but nothing had changed about him. He was true to his character: focused. And right now that focus was on getting out of here.

  We had talked many times since our college days, and had even visited each other at grad school a couple of times. But even though we were good friends, I’d been totally surprised by his offer to recommend me at UVA.

  And grateful.

  During the three days I’d stayed with him in Charlottesville, I’d found him to be just as focused as he’d been in college and grad school. Getting the appointment at UVA hadn’t changed him. He was still up at five a.m., writing and researching.

  He’d always been a great student, but even so, when I read the acclaimed biography he’d written, it was hard to believe that my college buddy had created such a detailed and entertaining work. He had the ability to make historical figures come to life. It was a great payoff for his hours of hard work.

  During my visit, he’d been working on his newest biography and I’d hoped to get a peek at it. But he wouldn’t say a word about it. He thought it’d be a jinx if he talked about it before he finished the first draft. The only thing I found out was that it was the reason for his sabbatical next year, and, therefore, the reason I was getting this interview at UVA.

  His reticence was probably due more to his upbringing than to superstition. One night during our sophomore year in college, over Christmas break, when neither of us had gone home for the holidays, he’d opened up about his family.

  I’d already known that his parents were upper-class WASPs from Connecticut who hadn’t been involved in his life, nor in the lives of their other kids. What I hadn’t known, until that night, was that as soon as Alex had left for Deerfield, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, his parents had as much as abandoned him.

  He said that they saw it as a way to teach him that he could live on his own, but for a fourteen-year-old to learn that his parents didn’t expect him home for Thanksgiving or Christmas anymore… That was a bad blow. A blow that hurt. He’d been the only kid at De
erfield to stay at the school over Christmas.

  And when he went home that first summer, he found that his parents had already left for a brownstone they owned in Paris. He was left alone, with two housekeepers. His older brothers weren’t there. They had long ago learned not to come home.

  He returned to Deerfield without seeing his parents at all that summer. They didn’t return from Paris until after school had started. From that point on, he made every decision about his life and his studies on his own. His parents gave him a monthly allowance and paid his tuition, but otherwise, they weren’t involved in his life at all.

  His opening up to me that night had bonded us for the rest of our college years and beyond. Not just because we were both kids without parents, but because we both had stories we wanted to keep buried.

  *

  Alex scaled the slots in the wall, pushed the trap door open, then hoisted himself up into Grace Hall. He motioned for me to hurry up. I kept my curiosity in check, which wasn’t easy, and climbed the wall.

  We headed to the first floor, exited the building, and just as I was ready to pepper him with questions, a bone-chilling wind hit me full throttle. That was a shock. And more shocking was the sight of the barren trees against a sky thick with gray clouds.

  The August heat was long gone. It was winter.

  How long had I been unconscious?

  Students were walking briskly along the brick paths, bundled up in coats, and, for the first time, I registered that Alex was wearing a thick sweater. New questions were piling up before I’d even started with my original ones.

  “Alex, what’s going—?”

  “It’s December, six months ago for you, and you’re back in Charlottesville. When you were visiting me from L.A.”

  “Time travel.”

  I said it, but I wasn’t buying it. Not yet anyway. I reached into my pocket for my iPhone, to check the date, then remembered that I’d used it as a weapon.

  Alex checked behind us, still on the lookout for whoever was after him, or us. We made it to the Corner and started down University Avenue, passing the small shops. Alex was hyper-aware of his surroundings, glancing in all directions.

  I veered into a coffee shop and grabbed a copy of the campus newspaper from a stack by the door—and the date confirmed Alex’s story. I spotted a copy of the New York Times on a table. Its owner was gabbing on a cell phone, so I lunged forward and snatched the paper up.

  “Hey, I’m still reading that!”

  I checked the date, and the New York Times, the paper of record, confirmed Alex’s story. My eyes quickly ticked over the news items to see if I recognized the stories as belonging to this past December.

  I did.

  “Hey, asshole, I haven’t finished with that.”

  I dropped the paper back onto the table, and my mind wanted to process this, it really did, but my body was interfering. I suddenly felt queasy and unbearably exhausted. My body wanted to go to sleep and wake up healthy and ready to look for that new job.

  I forced myself to go back outside.

  “Satisfied?” Alex said.

  “Satisfied probably isn’t the right word.”

  Alex started down the sidewalk, expecting me to keep up. I barely did.

  We passed Greenley’s, where Eddie had first reeled me into this nightmare, and that brought back a more recent memory. It hadn’t been me who’d been shot in the basement. At least, I didn’t remember it that way. It had been Eddie who had stumbled after the gunshot rang out.

  “What happened to Eddie? He was with me at Weldon’s.”

  “This is his fault.”

  “What?

  “Well, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Alex turned the corner and hurried to his car. “We can’t go back to my place. It’s too risky.”

  “Too risky because someone is after you or too risky because there’s another one of me already there, waiting for his job interview?”

  “Both.”

  Finding out there were two of me running around didn’t do much to convince me that this was really happening. Two of me seemed like a time-travel trope. And that was a problem. Because the part of me that was beginning to accept time travel desperately wanted to discover that time travel wasn’t at all like it’d been depicted in science fiction. For some reason, that would’ve made it easier to accept.

  What I didn’t know then was that I’d get my wish. Time travel wasn’t like science fiction had depicted it. But there’d be no joy in discovering that. There’d be just the opposite. I’d be desperate to have some time-travel tropes as my guide.

  *

  I climbed into Alex’s car, and he immediately pulled out and headed away from campus. He still hadn’t explained much—as in nothing—but I was starting to accept this new reality. So much so that I realized Alex had been hiding something from me, and he must’ve been hiding it for a while.

  “You knew that Einstein’s secret had to do with time travel.” How else could he have known about the time machine? “That’s why you recommended me for the job.”

  “Yeah.”

  I felt betrayed, and if my stomach hadn’t already roiled with queasiness, my anger would’ve had room to grow. “You knew getting Einstein’s secret was basically my life’s work and you didn’t say anything?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Then why don’t you get started?”

  “I will, but first you need to understand one thing. I don’t know what the secret is.”

  “You know it’s about time travel.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Give me a break.” Was he trying to cover up that he’d stabbed me in the back?

  “Listen, I’m not denying the time travel. I’m just saying I don’t know what the confession is about.”

  “I’m not following you at all.”

  “I’ll walk you through the short version.”

  “Okay…”

  “You connected Clavin to Einstein.”

  I nodded.

  “And you ended up at Harold Weldon’s estate?”

  “Yeah.” Wow. He was hiding way more than I thought.

  “But that doesn’t mean that Einstein’s confession has anything to do with time travel. All you know is that time travel has to do with Weldon.”

  “It all starts with Einstein.”

  He glanced at me with a knowing smile. “Do you have proof?”

  “Of course.” I had that photo, which connected the two. Of course, that same photo used to connect Van Doran to Einstein, too, and I knew damn well what had happened to that connection.

  “Is your proof online?”

  I nodded, and he handed me his iPhone. I searched for the photo, feeling doomed, and when it came up, my queasiness grew tenfold, overwhelming my incipient anger. I magnified the image, just to make sure. There was no doubt about it.

  Weldon was no longer part of the photo.

  The only familiar member of the group was Einstein. This photo was no longer evidence of any connection between Weldon and Einstein.

  That fact was now gone.

  Einstein is the key. I had to hold on to that. But I could already feel the doubts creeping in, reconstructing my memory. Of all people, I latched on to Eddie for help. He’d thought that Einstein’s secret had to do with time travel. And he’d been right. Hadn’t he?

  “How did you find the time machine if it wasn’t through Einstein?” I blurted out.

  “The Caves. I was assigned that carrel. At first, I didn’t notice anything. Then in the middle of one long night—I’d been researching for forty-eight hours straight—I thought I saw someone appear and then quickly disappear. Into the wall. I was in kind of study daze, so at first I thought maybe I’d fallen asleep. But then it happened again a week later.” He took a breath. “Here’s the thing: I was there a lot. So I’m sure that whoever had been using it was surprised that the damn place was never empty anymore.”<
br />
  I believed the part about him studying down there all the time. But the rest of his story… “So it was all random? You get this carrel and it just happens to turn out to be a time-travel machine? You were never looking for it?”

  “First of all, it’s not a time-travel ‘machine.’ It’s some kind of portal. And, yes, it was random. No one in The Cabal has ever said anything like, ‘Hey, we’ve assigned you a carrel that doubles as a time-travel portal.’ And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.”

  Alex was now on the outskirts of Charlottesville.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’re going to stay in a motel, and I’m going to see if anything else goes wrong. If we’re in the clear, you’re going back.”

  “What do you mean ‘go wrong’?”

  Alex turned into the parking lot of the Valley View Motel, a rustic motel on Route 29. “Shit—that’s what I mean.” He nodded over to the only other car in the parking lot and instantly started to swing our car around, accelerating into the turn, setting the tires squealing.

  As I lurched to the side, I caught a glimpse of the driver behind the wheel of the other car, a broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair.

  Van Doran.

  Alex rocketed out of the parking lot. “I don’t know who he is. The first time I saw him, I thought he was following me, but I wasn’t sure. The second time I was sure.”

  Alex didn’t know it was Van Doran. But I didn’t understand how that could be if he knew about Weldon. Because this isn’t connected to Einstein. That was his point. Wasn’t it? The facts in my head were jumbled and I couldn’t sort them out.

  But I didn’t pipe up. I didn’t tell Alex that I knew the man behind the wheel of that car. I was withholding information from him as he’d done from me. Except that my information was beginning to seem faulty. Not facts, but conjecture.

  Alex checked the rearview mirror and I looked back.

  Van Doran was pulling out of the parking lot.

  “Why are you running from him?” I asked.

  “Because the second time I saw him, he threatened to kill me if I didn’t go back.”