The quantum solution, p.22
The Quantum Solution, page 22
Tribe stirred, sighed. “That’s what’s so pleasing about physics. Everything in its assigned place all the time.”
“Except in the quantum universe.”
He smiled. “Well, but there too. You must know how to look and where.”
“It’s not easy.”
He laughed now, a soft, subtle sound. “Far from it. You must learn to put all your lessons aside, everything you were sure was true and immutable, then search the world through Alice’s looking glass.”
“In a way it’s like human nature, isn’t it.” She put her spoon aside. She nodded toward the bottle of vodka luxuriating in its icy bath. He raised an eyebrow but poured her some, watched her while she drank, put down the glass. “Neither abide by the hard-and-fast rules science has set down for centuries.”
“Science is always evolving. You only have to look at the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, so many others to know that. But I don’t think human nature evolves at all.” He pushed his plate away; it didn’t seem as if he was hungry either. “Humans keep clinging to the roots of their baser instincts: sects, factions. Tribes. The more the world spins out of control, the more fear climbs, the more fiercely they hold onto those instincts.”
He gestured. “Inessa is a perfect example. She’s not going to do what you ask. She hates your guts.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Evan finished off the vodka, the warmth sanding the spiky edges off her pain. “She respects me, and for someone like her respect means everything.”
“She’s got a whiplash tongue with you.”
“And me with her. It’s the only way we can communicate.” She held up her glass for more vodka. “Anyway, whether or not she likes me or hates me is entirely irrelevant.”
Tribe filled her glass. Months ago, he had intuited her penchant for good Russian vodka and her prodigious ability to hold it. And while she had gleaned a great deal about him as well over the past year, there was still so much that remained an enigma to her. Despite that, she found it difficult to believe he was behind Thompson’s murder. For one thing, she didn’t believe he was that good an actor. For another, she had had to deal with murderers of every stripe. She was familiar with their psyches. Tribe didn’t exhibit any of the microexpressions—what the murderer knows and what they want to conceal—that she had mentally catalogued.
“I believe you,” he said, “but I don’t understand it.”
“Ha, that’s how I feel about your quantum world.”
His eyes narrowed. “I can teach you.”
“We don’t have time.”
“You underestimate my ability to turn you on to the quantum world. But I haven’t underestimated your ability to absorb complex ideas.” When she looked skeptical, he said, “Think about it. You’re doing it all the time when you’re in the field, calculating, vectoring on the fly. That’s something I admire greatly.” He shrugged. “I mean, I can’t do it.”
It was a rare admission that he wasn’t indomitable. He certainly would never do that in public, which led her to believe that he had allowed her into his inner circle. At that moment, he took her glass out of her hand, drained the remaining vodka. Looking steadily at her over the rim while he did so.
* * *
A half hour later they stood in the room the doctor had assigned for Inessa, the one nearest the surgery, where she had popped Inessa’s shoulder back in place and packed it in an ice wrap while she worked on the other odd and assorted wounds, scrapes, contusions, and the like.
“Well, aren’t you a sight.” Inessa was lying propped in a hospital bed. Her injured shoulder was encased in a hard cast that went down to the elbow. The rest of her looked like raw meat.
Do I look much better? Evan wondered. “How’s your crotch?” she said.
A smile thin as a nail. “I can scarcely feel it, thank you.”
Their private formalities out of the way, Evan took a step closer. “Tell me about Juliet Danilovna Korokova.”
“She’s a major in the GRU.”
“And your boss.”
“Yes.”
“This I know. I want more.”
Inessa blinked. “How much more?”
“All the up-to-the minute more.”
Inessa blinked. “And if I don’t?”
Evan shook her head. “Don’t make me say it.”
“No, no.” Inessa had never lost that smile, like an evil Mona Lisa. “Go ahead. I won’t be offended. Promise.”
Evan leaned in. “I’ll feed you to the sharks offshore.”
Inessa’s expression went dreamy. “What a lovely way to go. I like sharks.” Her eyes focused on Evan. “So misunderstood, sharks. Don’t you think?”
“Enough procrastination. Major Korokova. Now.”
“You won’t kill me,” Inessa said. “I know you now.”
She was right, of course. Evan had injured her enough. “We’ll set you up on a beautiful island, maybe in the Seychelles. Someplace the Russians won’t find you.”
Inessa’s expression hardened. “Don’t play me for a fool. They’ll find me, all right.”
“Not Korokova,” Evan told her. “That’s a promise.”
“Even if you can keep that promise. Someone else.” A tinge of bitterness. “There’s always someone else.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Tribe said.
She looked at Tribe as if seeing him for the first time. A long silence ensued where their eyes locked. Then, she nodded. “All right.” She returned her gaze to Evan. “Let’s get this over with.” She tried to turn in to a less painful position. “Okay, but, tell me you have my cell phone.”
Tribe’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because there are texts between me and Major Korokova in the sandboxed section you should read.”
Evan looked at Tribe and he nodded. He’d kept Inessa’s cell, but his forensic person on the island hadn’t been able to break into the sandboxed section. Inessa letting them in was a big deal.
Inessa spoke for twenty minutes or more, her voice rising and falling with her pain and growing need for morphine. Evan was careful not to interrupt, not to ask questions; Inessa’s confession was like a fine silken thread that could be broken at the least likely sound.
When she was done, Tribe handed over her phone. It had lost its power, so they plugged it into a nearby outlet, waited several minutes until there was enough battery power to turn it on.
“Here, look,” Inessa said, showing them a short text conversation. “After Istanbul, you’re Major Korokova’s only hope.” Inessa gripped the phone, her knuckles white, standing out like a skeleton’s. She presented them with one text after another. “She knows you can lead her to Lyudmila Shokova.”
“Wait.” Tribe turned to Evan, his eyes wide with shock. “You know Lyudmila Shokova?”
Inessa looked from one to the other. Her silent laughter seemed to fill the space between Evan and Tribe, as if to drive them apart.
“You two remind me of an old Russian proverb,” Inessa said. “Lozh’, kotoruyu ty khranish’, ub’yet tebya.”
She handed back the phone, and Evan immediately unplugged it, took out the SIM chip, ground it to grit under the heel of her boot. Even so, she was unable to keep the Russian proverb from pinballing through her mind like a circus tumbler: The lies you keep will kill you.
* * *
Sadly, the old Russian proverb was not wrong. Approximately four thousand miles away, Juliet Korokova’s phone buzzed in the breast pocket of her black-and-gold uniform in a specific pattern to alert her to the fact that Inessa had activated her cell, specifically the sandboxed section. At once, she handed it to an adjutant.
“Find me the location of the phone at the other end of this signal.”
Six minutes later she was handed the location along with her phone: La Palma, Canary Islands. Quickly, she chose her cadre of four soldiers under her command, trusted. Seventy-five minutes later, their gear securely stowed, they were helicoptered to the Kubinka military air base, where a jet was waiting for them on the tarmac. She was the last to board, checking that everything was as she had ordered. The moment she was seated, her bags stowed, the pilot took off the brakes, the plane raced down the runway, lifted off into clouds thick as whipped cream.
Somewhere nearby a rumble of thunder chased itself across the sky. Major Korokova closed her eyes. Smiling slightly, she drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
37
WASHINGTON, DC
All government buildings were in lockdown following the sudden, shocking death of George Wilson within the walls of the Pentagon. The room where he’d died, and the adjacent corridors, had been cordoned off and were humming with FBI activity. The entire Defense Threat Reaction Agency was in shock, while still going about their assigned tasks, though in an unthinking, robotic manner.
The administration’s spin doctors could no longer contain the story. An explanation for the deaths of two of a golf foursome made up of some of the highest-ranking members of the government could be delivered to the media in a logical, though completely false, format, and all ongoing questions stifled. But glossing over three out of the four dying suddenly was an impossible task, even for the veteran spin-meisters employed by the president. Questions were being asked by conspiracy theorists on both fringes of the political spectrum, which meant, inevitably, that a Senate subcommittee was being formed to look into the matter. That the subcommittee would spend months bickering as to its constituents and, after that, might, per usual, get nowhere, did not matter to Ben. At least, not at the moment. The slow grind of events on Capitol Hill was light-years away from the world he inhabited.
What did matter to him—mattered very much—was that following news of Wilson’s demise, Zahra Planck had not returned his calls, texts, or emails. It was as if she had dropped off the face of the earth or, more accurately, dropped him off the face of the earth.
What the media didn’t know, would never know, was that the victim was also part of the small group General Reade had put together to delve into the murder of Brady Thompson, also a member of the golf foursome. Did that mean whoever was responsible was targeting those four men? All were highly placed in the federal government, all had jobs that required them to handle top secret projects.
These were questions he wanted to ask Zahra, but she was nowhere to be found. The same for General Reade, who was and had been in meetings with the president at Camp David ever since news of Wilson’s death made its way to the White House. Ben had, however, been able to contact Wes Connerly; they were to have dinner tonight, at which time Ben hoped for some answers, especially concerning Zahra’s mysterious disappearance. Sitting in his car, down the block and across the street from the building in which she lived, he wondered whether she could be the one behind the murders. She was a manipulator and a liar but those traits didn’t necessarily make her capable of killing someone. Another thing: so far as he had been able to determine she had no motive. She had of course been thoroughly vetted before she began work in the quantum directorate of the government’s misunderstood and criminally underfunded physics program, but in these days hackers and criminals invading intranets had devalued the usefulness of old-school vetting. Zahra could be anyone, really, could be working for any one of a number of state-sponsored bad actors, and those were very bad indeed. Short of pulling her in and interrogating her there was no way to tell—white hat, black hat, something in between, though he could not imagine what that might be.
His phone buzzed with an incoming text. He glanced at the screen. Wes Connerly canceling dinner. Unsurprising but annoying nonetheless. He sent a middle-finger emoji as a reply—not the most diplomatic of choices but right now he didn’t give a crap. He hadn’t liked Connerly from the get-go, and his opinion of him had gone downhill ever since their first meeting.
Outside, night had fallen even if the temperature had not. He had rolled down the windows to gain the evening’s hydrocarbonized breeze, not wanting to keep the engine and air-conditioning running. The streetlights were on here in Georgetown, quaint things that they were. It was unsettling to think that Zahra lived six blocks from his own home. Though he hadn’t been there in almost a year, the knowledge of how close Zahra was to his home gave him the creeps.
The sidewalks were nearly deserted. What pedestrians appeared scurried like rats fleeing a burning ship, their eyes wide and staring blindly, as if they had been electrocuted by the air of existential menace.
Ben sat very still behind the wheel. He turned neither his head nor his body. He could not hear her, he could not see her, but her scent invaded the interior of the car several seconds before she pulled the off-side door open and slid into the shotgun seat.
Now he turned, saw her in a dark raincoat, matching her eyes and hair. Her face had been imprinted on his mind a year ago. “An Binh,” he said softly, “what are you doing here?”
“This surveillance is useless,” she said. “Zahra is not home.” She turned her eyes on him, liquid charcoal. “She’s not coming home.”
He laughed, wondering if she was in some way joking. “Ever?”
She possessed the gravest of smiles. “Drive. I’ll take you to her.”
He did not doubt her for an instant. This was how she was; how their relationship worked. He trusted her; she had given him no reason not to. He started the car and she gave him directions. As he drove she spoke:
“Two nights ago, Zahra met George Wilson at a late-night bar. I was seated at the other end, having shadowed her. I listened to the entire conversation by lip-reading.”
He knew he should ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, since he specifically told her to hang tight at the mansion, but good sense prevailed. What was the point? What was done was done. Besides, he had a sneaking suspicion he’d be happy she had disobeyed him.
She had pushed out her lower lip, a sure sign of her displeasure. “It’s amazing what people will say in a bar. It’s as if they have their head on a pillow dampened by sex.”
She told him about the side hustle Zahra had going on with George Wilson, how Wilson was gaga over her, how she saw Zahra exquisitely twist him around her little finger. She gave him a look. “She’s quite the operator.”
Ben understood her meaning immediately. An Binh had ventured into the field because she was worried that Zahra was doing to him what she’d already done to Wilson—fractured his brain so he’d think with his dick. Sadly, he thought, she wasn’t altogether off base. Though Ben had doubts about Zahra’s motives, the erotic pull she had on him was strong and getting stronger, despite his misgivings. Zahra had indeed been twisting him around her little finger, even while he’d set his mind against it. The trouble was she hadn’t been targeting his mind. Quite the operator, indeed.
“So you’ve stashed her somewhere,” he said as she directed him down toward the Southwest Waterfront, an evolving area along the Potomac.
“Where no one but us will find her,” An Binh said. “And in this lockdown no one’s looking for her. They have bigger worries, don’t they.”
For several moments now her attention had been fixed on the water as they headed toward a ratty marina—the polar opposite of the ones to the northeast where the luxury boats were docked. Ben had never been down here, where lines of houseboats rocked gently at permanent slips.
She directed him to pull the car over several blocks away from the marina. “We’ll walk from here,” she said.
“A houseboat,” Ben said as they approached the marina on foot. “That’s where you lived?”
“I still do,” she said. “It’s been home ever since I moved here.”
“Hold on.”
She paused, turning to him. The soft slosh of the water carried clearly to them. Lights shone in the small windows of the houseboats. Folk music—Bob Dylan perhaps—spread itself like mist from someone’s radio, adding to the retro feel of the marina. It was as if they had stepped into the final years of the sixties, when Flower Power was breathing its last before the coming storm of war, student protests, full-blown racial violence, the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont.
“When we get inside, when we confront her,” Ben told her, “I’ll do the talking.”
“Of course.” An Binh’s eyes seemed to grow large. “I am only the arrow.”
“I should know this.”
She stood immobile in front of him, not a hint of judgment in her expression or, he surmised, in her mind. “To be an arrow—and only an arrow—is to not care about the target or a need for revenge or a fulfillment of a mission. That is when the arrow is unerring, that is when it will always find its mark. That is freedom.”
“I seem to remember your mission of revenge a year ago.”
“That was your interpretation,” she said. “Events, people arrive—that is life. But it is only ten percent of life. The other ninety percent is how your mind perceives and reacts to those events, those people. You have more control over your life than you think.”
She gave him a wry look. “But, Ben, you already know all this.”
A half-laugh from him. “In Buddhism I’m a rookie. I know it but I haven’t yet incorporated it.”
She nodded. “The farang Chaucer famously wrote ‘Time and tide wait for no man.’”
Ben thought it interesting she chose the Thai word for “barbarian” rather than the Chinese “Yěmán rén.” But with everything she said or did it was a clue for him and him alone. She let him know that she spoke Thai as well as Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese.
“You understand his mistake?”
Ben considered. “Chaucer had it the wrong way around. It’s the mistake of all Western culture. Time and tide serve at the bidding of the Buddhist.”
A genuine smile broke out across An Binh’s face. “So well learned, Ben. Patience. All is patience.”
