The quantum solution, p.33
The Quantum Solution, page 33
“And rightly so,” Ben pointed out. “You had no business being up there. You could’ve been killed—or worse.”
“What would be worse?” Tribe asked.
Ben ignored him, turned to Evan. “So that leaves—”
“I know.” Evan rose from her chair. “Brief me.”
Ben eyed her. “So you have a plan.”
“Always,” Evan said.
54
THREE-MASTER
The moon waning, clouds building over the water. Halfway across, a light rain began to fall. Lights blazed in the cabins of the custom three-masted schooner owned by Ayman Safra. A hundred feet if it was an inch, Evan estimated. Crew of four, plus a chef, this she was sure of. He must be one hell of a lawyer, she thought, to afford an eight-figure yacht of this size and workmanship.
Wrapped in shadow, she was on a tender, part of the crew bringing fresh meat, spices, and produce to the schooner. Evan was in charge of the lamb, Tribe having bribed ipar Et, Istanbul’s finest butcher shop, to substitute her as porter.
She was part of a trio of delivery people—the only woman, which she didn’t like. Standing out in any way was to be avoided in the field, but in this she had no choice. The driver sped on, the schooner rose above them, eventually blocking out much of the sky. What small slice of moon there had been was overrun by clouds by the time they made fast to the schooner’s leeward side.
A Turk with the build and glower of a professional wrestler guided them down to the galley, where the chef showed them where to store the provisions. The air was redolent of onions and turmeric. The chef—a small, mustachioed Lebanese—insisted on personally checking the provisions. When it came to the lamb, his hands, small, reddened, with neat nails, turned over the saddles, shoulders, and legs, all the while glancing up into Evan’s face.
“You’re new,” he said in an indifferent voice. And then more sharply, “I was not aware that ipar Et employed females.”
“We’re shorthanded,” Evan told him. The less interaction she had with him the better.
The chef grunted, turned over the last saddle of lamb, then waved at her dismissively. “Out.”
Obediently, she exited the kitchen. She was the only one from the tender left on board. She made her way up the gangway into the salons, all fitted out in gleaming wood—floors, walls, sconces, bookcases, nooks within which sat small sculptures of marble and stone. Everything built in, including tables, sideboards, tufted red velvet sofas. She passed through the dining room with its mahogany table affixed to the floor and its crystal chandelier depending like an upside-down mushroom from the cream-painted ceiling.
“What are you doing here?”
She turned, saw the wrestler type glowering at her.
“You should be back in the tender by now.”
Instead of turning tail, which he expected, she placed herself squarely in front of him. “I was taking a minute to admire the interior.”
He stalked up to her. “This is forbidden.”
“Okay, okay. I’m almost finished,” she said.
“You are finished.”
He straight-armed her, his palm impacting her chest. She did not move, even an inch. His eyes grew wide. She chopped down on his forearm with the edge of her hand. At the same time she slammed the heel of her other hand against his chest. He lurched and fell backward. At once, she was on her knees over him. A sharp jab to the side of his neck into the nerve bundle just beneath his ear rendered him unconscious. Dragging him to a locker was no easy task, but she managed to stuff him inside, close the door.
Rough hands on her shoulders tried to pull her away from the locker. Cocking her left leg, she smashed the heel of her boot into her assailant’s crotch. She heard the air go out of him, twisted her torso to the left, grabbed him around the neck, jammed his forehead into the locker. The crew member went down and stayed down.
The less time she spent on the schooner the better, so she left him lying there, stepped over him, and entered what looked to be Ayman Safra’s study. In fact, the lawyer was in residence. He sat bolt upright in a wooden swivel chair in front of his built-in desk, his back to the entry. On it were three cell phones, lined up like rank-and-file soldiers; a laptop; a pad; five pens, also perfectly aligned; a cut-crystal diamond decahedron paperweight, art glass with swirls of gray at the bottom. Open in front of him was what appeared to be a ledger, bound in buckram leather, its visible pages filled with lines of neat, precise handwriting. He was alone and undisturbed.
Stealing silently in, she crept up behind him, was about to slither an arm around his throat when she realized the man sitting in the chair was dead. Pulling his head back, she ascertained that he was indeed Ayman Safra. She also ascertained that he’d been strangled with what appeared from the mark to be a wire. A silent coup? she wondered. In that instant, she caught a glimmer of movement in two adjacent facets of the decahedron on the desk. Instead of whirling around, she waited until the last instant, until she caught the scent—a woman’s scent. She allowed the scent to come to her, then dropped to her knees. A metal belaying pin struck Safra’s shoulder, then the desktop, splintering it. He crashed out of the chair sideways, and now Evan whipped around. Balanced on one leg, she struck the woman on the ankle with the toe of her boot, then, rising, smashed down on her instep. The woman’s head came up and Evan recognized Zahra Planck from the photos Ben had shown her.
Showing no sign of pain, Zahra attacked her with the belaying pin, lunging, bringing the weapon down in an overhead smash. Extending her left leg and bending it at the knee, Evan swiveled to her left, bringing her fists together, burying them in Zahra’s stomach. Zahra had no reaction—none at all. Evan struck her, opening her top hand, slashed through fabric and skin with the tips of her fingers and her nails. Again nothing, not an iota of pain flashing across Zahra’s face, no flinching of her body, no contraction of her muscles. That’s when Evan realized that Zahra had CIPA, a rare congenital disease. Her pain-sensing nerves were disconnected from the part of the brain that would normally react to pain. No matter how hard Evan hit her, no matter the cuts she might inflict, Zahra would press her attack, oblivious. She would continue until her last breath was expelled.
She came at Evan then, the belaying pin slashing back and forth in a blur. Evan felt a heavy blow on her left forearm, then right biceps. She could feel her strength being replaced by numbness, then weakness. What kind of training had this physicist had? Evan wondered. The way she attacked with purpose but without discipline, with pure fury, surely must have come from back alleys and moldy basements.
Zahra came on, relentless, her eyes narrowed, the belaying pin switching from hand to hand so that Evan could not tell the direction of the next blow, let alone time it. There was a strange dislocation in fighting someone who couldn’t feel pain. It was as if they were superhuman, as if their body defied all the laws of hand-to-hand combat. It gave them an advantage she had never before faced. It was disquieting and illusory, as if she were fighting multiple foes or a shadow that could inflict a mortal wound. Evan feared that she was not up for this, not after everything she had been through—the tension, pressure, pain, guilt, and grief. With doubt creeping in, she thought, I’ve already lost.
But muscle memory was so ingrained in her that she allowed Zahra to get close—very close. She held the belaying pin in front of her like a knife, intending at the last instant to whip it around in a blow to Evan’s abdomen. Evan’s arms were still all but useless, but that was okay, she could deal with that, in fact the numbness made her more like Zahra.
Just as Zahra brought the head of the belaying pin back to gain momentum for her horizontal strike, Evan twisted her torso from the waist and, engaging the power in her lower belly, used her legs to drive forward. Now behind Zahra, she drove her elbow into the small of Zahra’s back. But there was minimal force behind the strike. Zahra whirled and, grabbing the cloth of Evan’s shirt, slammed her back against the desk so hard the entire desk shivered, pens flying every which way. A sharp pain ran down Evan’s back into her legs, and she sagged against the desktop. All the breath went out of her; her face was ashen, and Zahra grinned, seeing her victory rising up before her.
She jabbed the head of the belaying pin into the soft tissue just below Evan’s sternum. Evan grunted. For an instant her eyes rolled up. Zahra closed for the kill, her eyes burning like lamps in her skull. Evan could scarcely catch her breath. Her lungs seemed to have forgotten how to do their job. She gasped, on the verge of blacking out. Then her left hand, searching for a handhold to keep her from collapsing, closed around a jagged shard from the splintered corner of the desktop.
The belaying pin swept down, targeting the top of Evan’s head. Evan swung the wooden shard up and across the bridge of Zahra’s nose. The nose collapsed, blood gushed out, but that hardly mattered. Zahra only paused to wipe the blood off her face. The belaying pin bounced off Evan’s ear, onto her shoulder. Evan groaned. Her entire body was on fire. Only one chance now to stop this unfeeling killing machine, and she took it. She drove the sharp end of the shard into Zahra’s right eye, pulled it free, then buried it in Zahra’s left eye.
There was only so much a human body, even one afflicted as Zahra’s was, could take. She collapsed on top of the lawyer’s body. Evan drove the wooden shard home. Zahra arched up, bloody lips drawn back from bloody teeth in the rictus of death.
Thighs trembling, Evan sat down on the swivel chair, turning it away from the two bodies, one atop the other. That’s when she looked up to see the cook standing in the doorway, aiming a small .22 Browning pistol at her. They stared at each other for a moment.
“Goodbye,” he said.
Three shots pitched him forward flat on his face. She saw three bright flowers blooming in his back; heart, left lung, right lung.
“Perfect,” she said as Ben stepped over the dead chef. “But what the hell took you so long?” Her head hurt, her shoulder ached, and her body was still shuddering with excess adrenaline and the aftermath of terror at having gone hand-to-hand with what had seemed to her as something inhuman—a demon.
Ben, who had driven the tender, came over to her, cupped her head in his hands. “You look—”
“Don’t you say it.” They locked eyes. “You ever go up against anyone with CIPA?”
His eyes cut to Zahra. “Her?”
“Could feel no pain—none at all.”
“Like a machine.”
“Yes.”
“Anyway.” He sighed. “Thank God.”
“So, you…”
“Hey, listen. It was no piece of cake what I had to do. Tie up the delivery personnel, then take care of the two crew you didn’t take out.”
Evan gestured with her chin, winced at the pain. “Except him.”
“Yeah, I forgot about the chef. Who thought he’d be so loyal?”
“Lebanese like his boss. Wouldn’t be surprising if he was a family member.” Her head lolled on her neck.
“Evan…”
“Job’s not finished, Ben.”
He looked over her shoulder. “What have we here?”
She turned. “Ayman Safra’s ledger, I think.”
Ben picked it up, turned it in to the light. “Right you are.” His finger stabbed out. “And now we know who ordered Safra to make that bid on the weaponized time crystals.” He turned the ledger so Evan could see.
“Ludovico Aronovich Ferranov.”
Ben nodded. “Colonel in the GRU. According to our sources he was in charge of the Russian team experimenting with qubits and time crystals.” His finger poked the page again. “And here’s a scribble on the margin. This fucker never sent Ferranov the goods.”
Evan’s head fell again, her chin hitting her chest. Ben put the ledger down, knelt in front of her, took her hands.
“Listen, you’re nearly out on your feet. We’ve got to get you to a doctor—maybe even a hospital.”
At the last word her head snapped up. “The algorithmic formula is still here, Ben. We’ve got to find it.”
He looked at her. “You’re not going anywhere until we do, is that it.”
“In a nutshell.”
He sighed again. “You are the most stubborn human being I’ve ever met.”
“Give me the medal later. Let’s get to work.”
“Right.” He moved the laptop over so he could access it. He turned it on, waited, frowning. “Well, that’s out. The hard drive is fried.” He pressed keys, tried to get into the BIOS, the core of the computer. “No dice. I can’t get anything out of this. It looks like the hard drive was reformatted before it was fried.”
“So Zahra sabotaged it.”
Ben nodded. “Looks that way.”
“Then there must be a thumb drive.” Evan pointed. Slowly but surely feeling returned to her arms. “Check her person.”
Ben turned and knelt beside Zahra’s body, went through it like the true professional he was. He turned back to her. “No joy.”
“Well, it must be here somewhere.”
Ben looked around. “Not in plain sight it isn’t.” He stood, hands on hips, quartering the study with his gaze. “It could be anywhere on this schooner.”
“I don’t think so. She had just killed Safra and was waiting for me. She wouldn’t have had time—
“Hold on.” She swiveled the chair back around until she was facing the desk.
Ben stepped closer. “What is it?”
Evan’s eyes narrowed, her gaze falling on the crystal paperweight. “What if it is hiding in plain sight.”
The paperweight was engraved: TIFFANY & CO. Tiffany did not make art-glass paperweights, not in that shape anyway. So what were those gray swirls? She picked up the diamond decahedron and there, lying underneath, was a thumb drive.
55
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Overnight in the hospital was all Evan could tolerate. Over the advice of the surgeon who reset her shoulder she returned to Tribe’s house, accompanied by Ben, who filled her in. The thumb drive did indeed contain the algorithmic formula for weaponizing time crystals. The mechanism for deploying them was found on the schooner. Naturally, the US government claimed ownership of the mechanism, as Zahra had been their employee, but since it was based on stolen Parachute intellectual property it came into Tribe’s hands.
“He trashed it,” Ben told her. “I was witness to it.”
“Astonishing that it could send time crystals across thousands of miles within a matter of milliseconds.”
“According to Tribe time crystals are unimpeded by either distance or time.”
They were sitting in the courtyard under the shade of the fig tree. Beyond, the fountain splashed, and beyond that the lime tree rose. From their position they could see the very tips of the Blue Mosque’s delicate minarets. The sky was clear. The long afternoon lay ahead.
“He insisted on it,” Ben continued. “But still I don’t like him.”
Evan smiled. “You don’t like anyone you work for. Except for Isobel.”
“Yes.” Ben squinted into the sunshine. “She is different.”
The sound of the muezzin came to them, melodious and alien, floating like a sail above the sea.
“We caught Parachute’s ex-employee. He was on his way here supposedly to meet Zahra.”
“She entrapped them all, didn’t she?”
“You put an end to that.”
There was a small silence between them. They’d known each other a long time, had been through difficult, life-threatening times in the field. Once lovers, once friends, now perhaps only compatriots. But possibly, Evan reflected, that was enough.
“And Russia?” she asked.
“There’s a strong rumor going around that the Sovereign and his inner circle of advisors have been purged,” Ben said. “There’s even a photo of him dead circulating on social media but no one can come to a consensus as to whether it’s real or a deepfake. The White House still hasn’t been able to contact the Sovereign, so maybe there’s something to the rumors. As you know, with all the disinformation being floated it’s often difficult to get to the truth inside Russia. But Russian troops do appear to be pulling back from the Ukraine border, though there’s still fierce fighting in Odessa. As for a war all signs point to it being off the table. Thank God.”
The muezzin’s voice flowed and ebbed like the tide. The spice of cumin and chilis mixed with the rich scent of spit-roasting lamb. The fountain splashed, rippling the water in the hexagonal bowl.
“He likes you, you know,” Ben said seemingly out of nowhere.
“What?” Evan turned to him. “Who?”
“You know. Tribe.”
“You’re nuts.”
“On the contrary. Remember when he said that you don’t trust anyone?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I took that as a compliment.”
“He also said that lack of trust keeps you from knowing anyone.”
“So?”
“So that’s as close as Tribe is ever going to come to admitting he likes you.”
Ben might very well be right, but in truth Evan’s mind was elsewhere. Though she sat here with Ben, she was imagining a different scene, where she sat in this same spot beneath the fig tree with Lyudmila, Timur, and, strangest of all, Bobbi. They talked and laughed, about what she had no idea. It was only important to her that the four of them were together, that neither hatred nor death kept them apart.
Moments later, Ben stopped talking. She did not notice, not then, not when he rose and left her to her dreaming.
AND THEN …
On a night not very far in the future, Rodion Molchalin went out for a walk along the Moskva. In point of fact he did this every night sleep eluded him, which was almost always. He found a bench and sat for a while, the soft glow of the city washing the river clean. The air was frosty, the city unnaturally silent, as if covered in a blanket of snow. Far above, luminous clouds slid over the city like deep-sea creatures. To his right rose a semicircular pillared arcade in the center of which lived a bronze statue of a World War II general who died defending Stalingrad. The arcade was deserted; no one visiting the fallen hero. To his left, across the river, rose the twisted towers of Oligarch City. It might have been his imagination but it seemed to him there were more lights on there, as if slowly but surely new life was being breathed into the city within the city. And Rodion stuck between these two symbols, belonging to neither.
