Jezebel's Ladder (22 page)

“The list of books?” PJ prompted.

“
Leaves of Grass
,
Bridge
of Ashes
, Einstein’s
Ideas and Opinions
. I forget the rest, it’s
been so long. He only took ten.” Did ten books mean ten Reuter equations? Doris kept meandering. “Not much to remember a man’s life by, but Nick seemed very excited
and grateful. He said he would dedicate his PhD dissertation to George,
although I never got a copy. The office won’t send out his transcripts or his
dissertation because of that overdue book. He left school mid-semester. Such a
nice boy, I don’t know how it happened. He did all his writing on napkins, just
like George.” She sounded like she was misting up. He didn’t want to push her
too much.

“What book does he still have out?”

“Goodness, is this a biography or a
bibliography, Mr. Smith? It was the latest book on Superstrings and unified
field theory. George dabbled in it a little toward the end, but he said that
all physicists chase that dream the way that mathematicians chase Fermat’s Last
Theorem,” she said.

But Fermat’s theorem has been
proven
, he thought, as a tingle went up his spine. Did ten equations equate
to the ten dimensions of a Superstring? That was about right, if he remembered
the last
Scientific American
article he’d read on the subject.

“Thank you so much for your time,
Mrs. Reuter. You’ve been a big help.”

After PJ hung up, he swore at Nick.
The more he found out, the more dangerous it got. Somehow, Nick had found a key
to unified field theory, one important enough that the US government had become a permanent part of his life. It explained why he never finished his
degree. They must have pulled him out of school mid-semester, squashed his
dissertation under a National Security seal, and moved him to New Mexico to
work for them.

****

Trina called PJ back at his home
and work numbers, but had to leave messages. She entered the name, time, and
‘Atlantis’ into the daily call summary. Corporate security in New York dealt
with Homeland Security’s request to search the Brazilian mail servers. No one
connected the two events.

****

When he reached the DC area, it was
almost rush hour. Since he hated sitting in traffic, he pulled off and made
another call. “Ms. Reese, please. I’m calling about a defense contractor who is
violating environmental laws. Yes, I know it’s late, but she’ll talk to me.
Mention the name Cassavettis.”

A minute later, Ms. Reese was on
the line. She had a sultry telephone voice. “Mr. Cassavettis, after you missed
our appointment Wednesday, I was starting to worry.”

“You were right to worry. Didn’t
you get the e-mail this morning?”

“What e-mail?” she asked.

“The Feds must have suppressed it
already,” PJ muttered.

“You’re not Nick. Who are you?”

“A friend. He sent me a message
today with the entire sordid story on Icarus…”

She cut me off. “
Not
over
this phone line! Are you
insane
?”

“Funny, a lot of people called Nick
crazy until he disappeared.”

“We’ve got to meet in person,” she
said.

PJ pulled out his map, one with the
location of every BoxMart in the US. He gave her the location of one roughly
halfway between them. “What kind of car do you have?”

“I drive a red Miata. It will take
me at least twenty minutes to get to it and another thirty or so to reach you,”
she estimated.

“Great. Wait there at the far edge
of the parking lot with your hood up, and I’ll be there within an hour.”

“How will I know it’s you?” Ms.
Reese asked.

“I’ll have a white hybrid with Jersey plates, and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt with taco stains on it.”

She still seemed skittish. “How do
I know you’re not someone who killed him and is just trying to get rid of the
rest of the evidence?”

“You suggested the meeting. How do
I know I can trust you? Besides, professional killers rarely go around in
Disney paraphernalia.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” she
concluded.

Ms. Reese was alone and very nervous when PJ arrived. She
didn’t have the hood up, but she did have the obligatory white, lace-bordered
hanky around the antenna. He parked behind her, and she rolled down the drivers’
window a few inches.

The first thing he noticed was the
custom, metallic paint job on the sports car. He wanted to run his hand over
the well-polished curves. She was about twenty-five years old, small, mousy,
and extremely competent looking. Her huge, owl-like glasses had thin, blue
frames that picked up the color of her eyes. The formal, pinstriped jacket was
impeccable and unwrinkled.

She had no ring on her left hand,
so he assumed the senator’s aide was still single. Her right hand was buried
inside her purse, no doubt holding mace.

PJ asked, “Do you ever get this
thing over 90?” He just wanted to break the ice, but she glared at him like he
was discussing public flatulence. “I’m Nick’s friend. Call me PJ.”

“Amy,” she volunteered,
reluctantly. “Do you have a last name?”

“Smith,” he said, watching the area
for signs of law-enforcement activity.

She arched an eyebrow. “Fine, don’t
trust me.”

He whipped out his driver’s license
and proved it to her.

“What’s the ‘P’ stand for?” she
asked.

“Pissed off. Can we talk now?”

“Here?”

He rubbed his forehead. “Okay, hop
in my car and we’ll go somewhere private.”

“I’m not leaving my car out here,”
she said, indignant.

He was inches from scrapping the
whole meeting. If she had been a guy, he’d have been gone by now. However, he
liked her eyes and wanted an excuse to see more of them. “Have it your way. We’ll
meet somewhere and grab a bite to eat. Are there any decent food places around
here?”

“How would I know? I live in Virginia,” she said.

Eight, nine, ten. Breathe. “I saw a
steak place two blocks that way. We’ll meet under the plastic bull.”

She huffed, “I refuse to eat beef
to protest the way cattle ranchers on Federal land are abusing the buffalo.”

He threw his hands in the air. “Jumping
Jehosephat, lady, no wonder you’re not married yet! Lighten up. Nobody asked
you to chug a cow and wear the hide as a trophy. Order the fish, order the
salad. Hell, I don’t care what you eat, but you’re the one who wanted someplace
safe yet private to meet.” He paused for a moment, suddenly embarrassed. “Ah
shit, I said ‘hell’ in front of a lady. Damn! I said ‘shit,’ too.” Then, he
clamped his mouth shut.

She took her hand off the mace to
cover her mouth. The laughter stung him. He said, “If you’re not interested in
Nick’s warning, I’ll just call the media.”

“I’m sorry. The steak place will
do.” She beat him there by at least a minute because he stuck to the speed
limit the whole way. In the parking lot, PJ put on his jacket, not so much
because of the growing chill in the air, but because he had an irrational fear
that the entire city was on the lookout for his Mickey shirt by now.

Out in front of the restaurant, to
help smooth his feathers, Amy offered to pay for the meal. “It is an official
meeting on Senate Oversight business.”

“Fine, it’ll help me conserve cash,”
he admitted.

“Besides, I wouldn’t want you
getting any ideas,” she said with a twinkle in her eyes, almost daring him to
get mad again.

He held the door for her. As she
walked through, he noticed that she was a little shorter than he had originally
estimated. However, everything was proportioned just fine from his point of
view.

They managed to get a table
immediately, and Amy ordered a chicken platter and a salad. PJ went with the
best steak they had and French fries. When they were alone, she asked in a
conspiratorial whisper, “So how much do you know?”

Evidently, a lot of this business
was classified. PJ decided to bluff his way through. “I know about the Reuter
equations, ten of them that make up a new Superstring model of the universe,
which combine to describe the fabric of light, gravity, and matter as we know
them. Nick found them at Stanford, and it took him about three years to distill
them down into something usable. As soon as he derived the Icarus
transformation, the Feds hauled him off to work for them.”

Amy looked interested in the
history, as if she hadn’t heard it all. He tried a gambit to get information
out of her. “So how much do you know about the math behind Icarus?”

“I’m only an MBA, but I’ve had
basic science. Each of the letters in the equation stood for a key component.
The ‘c’ stood for the speed of light, obviously. The ‘a’ meant acceleration.
The ‘r’ was radius and the ‘s’ had to do with hydrogen at the atomic level. I
forget what ‘i’ stood for.” He liked watching her lips move, but her eyes were
still the most captivating.

“The ‘s’ orbital is the first
electron valence shell,” he said, to impress her with what he remembered from
his one chemistry class. “The ‘i’ is an imaginary number, the square root of
negative one. Electrical engineers use it to help explain where all the energy
goes in alternating current, when the voltage oscillates but produces constant
power.” He drew an S-like sinusoidal wave on a napkin for her, with a second
one intersecting it at each zero. “When the real component drops, the imaginary
component increases, and vice versa.”

She nodded. “Yes. That was the crux
of his theory. He believed that a point mass could oscillate as its Superstring
rotated, and that imaginary mass would repel hydrogen and smaller atomic
particles.”

PJ took a bite of a roll to cover
his reaction. The Trekkie had done it! He had invented the force field. “He
built a prototype at Sandia Labs,” he deduced.

“Yes. He wasn’t even on the project
slated to investigate the theory. Nevertheless, Cassavettis convinced a few of
his co-workers to implement it while their manager was away at budget hearings
on the Hill. How do you know all this?” she asked.

PJ could see Nick bridling at his
work being handed over to older, less-inspired scientists, knowing he could
make it work and using the pursuit of science to justify a little midnight
requisitioning. He shut up when the salad came and stayed quiet till the waiter
was out of earshot. “I told you. He had an ace in the hole, an e-mail message
that he sent out to everyone he could trust to warn the world.”

“Did you bring a copy?” asked Amy.

“In a minute. There are still a few
things I need to clear up first. I know about the mess where Nick hurt that guy
in New Mexico, and I don’t think it was entirely his fault. Is he going to be
in trouble for that?”

“Hurt, hell. There wasn’t enough
left of the poor man to put in a Dixie cup. It took out the whole building.”

Seeing PJ’s obvious surprise, she
added “If you discuss this with anyone, we will deny it, and you can be tried
for treason—the death penalty sort.”

“Save the buffalo, but shoot the
people. What kind of moral code is that?”

“Buffalo can’t blow up the planet
even if you tell them how.”

After the entrées arrived, he
asked, “So that’s why Nick moved back east?”

Amy seemed disgusted. “You don’t
understand the military mind. Some people at the Pentagon took personal control
of the Icarus project. Funding and staff were no longer an issue. The Icarus
field went from a mild curiosity to a potential super-weapon.”

“In the middle of Maryland?” he
exclaimed loudly. She shushed him, and he calmed down before asking, “And
Braithwaite was the only member of the oversight committee who objected?”

Amy came alive with her passion for
the injustice and idiocy displayed in Washington. “He’s not on the committee,
but he has friends who hear things. Our above-ground nuclear testing in the
1950s probably did more damage to our health, weather, and ecosystem than any
foreign power ever has. Senator Braithwaite wanted adequate safeguards to make
certain that this type of damage never happened again, but the people in charge
of the project assured him that all precautions were being taken. When Mr.
Cassavettis called us, we knew something wasn’t right.”

Just then, PJ’s cell phone rang. “Excuse
me,” he said, and made his way to the men’s room.

“PJ?” His mother was on the other
end. “Are you okay?”

“Sure, Mom. I’m just out to dinner
with a young lady,” he said, hinting that she should keep the call brief.

“A date?” His mom had almost given
up hope of this ever happening. “Some nice girl from work?”

“No one you know, Mom. What did you
call for? You never use this number.”

Mom huffed. “When you weren’t at
home, and those men came asking about you, I didn’t know what to think.”

“FBI?”

“Then it’s true,” Mom decided.

His father grabbed the phone. “What
the dickens is going on here, PJ? They say you’re wanted for questioning on
computer-fraud charges.” PJ knew by the way he said it that Dad was more upset
at the Feds than him. “They confiscated everything from your room, grilled your
mother about her grandparents, and took our darn trash. Does that sound like a
computer-crime case to you? Besides, I know that if you ever broke the law
again, you wouldn’t leave a trail.”

 “I didn’t do anything wrong, Dad.
It was Nick Cassavettis. He’s a witness in a Federal case. I can’t say any
more.” When you mentioned an Italian name and Federal Witness in the same
sentence, people didn’t ask for details.

“I remember the wedding. He was the
quiet boy who got mononucleosis and passed out on the plane,” Dad said.

When PJ had asked Nick about the
incident, all he would say about his illness was that he had seen a Kansas lake from the air and recognized it as a perfect Mandelbrot set. Nick described it
like a religious experience. The effects of erosion on minerals in the soil,
the magnetic currents, and the pull of the moon on the water all conspired in
perfect, computational harmony. Everything in nature was math, and hydrogen was
one. PJ understood now why he had been so excited; that moment on the plane had
probably given him the keys to the secrets of the universe. The programmer felt
less than safe now knowing that the keeper of those keys was a few sandwiches
short of a picnic.

He almost missed what his father
told him next. “They mentioned Nick, but they also asked about all your other
friends.” Great, now nowhere was safe.

****

When PJ got back, Amy’s plates had
been cleared, and a tip was sitting on the table. She seemed a little put out
that he had kept her waiting so long. “Sorry, it was my parents.”

He needed to find some place to
hide while they got this sorted out. “I’m not so hungry any more. We can leave
as soon as the check is paid.”

“Done,” she said, waving a yellow,
credit-card receipt.

“Please tell me you didn’t charge
it.”

Amy put her hands on her hips. “I
told you when we came in here that I was going to charge it to my expense
account. That’s how these things work.”

He pulled her close as if to
whisper something personal in her ear. “They’re already monitoring my calls, my
mail, my friends, my family, and my family’s garbage. The only reason the FBI
doesn’t have me in a cell already is that I haven’t used my credit cards. How
long do you think it’s going to take for them to track us here?”

“You’re paranoid,” she laughed.

Then he showed her the e-mail
print-out.

He watched her expression change to
shock as she scanned it. “No. They can’t. They’re not allowed to.” She ran out
to the lobby, but someone was already on the pay phone. Stepping out into the
parking lot, she said, “PJ, lend me your phone.”

He handed the unit over. She
flipped through a list of numbers in her purse.

“The senator is in Wyoming this weekend,” she said as she dialed. “Cameron, sorry to call you at home. This is
Amy from Braithwaite’s office. Yes. We need to meet. It’s an emergency.”

She listened patiently and cut
through all the objections with a single word. “Icarus. We had an agreement.”
She listened for a few moments more. “I’ll meet you there.”

“You can ride with me,” Amy said,
quite businesslike. She got efficient when she was terrified.

As he grabbed his bag and climbed
into her car, PJ asked, “Was that somebody from the Pentagon who can resolve
this?”

She shook her head. “That was the
special projects’ coordinator for NASA. If they’re sending one of these devices
into orbit, a lot of heads are going to roll.”

Atlantis must fall. He meant the
space-shuttle launch tomorrow morning! Things just kept getting worse.

****

Amy wove between cars going 85. “Cameron
has an estate out in Potomac, Maryland. He’ll look at your e-mail and can scrub
the launch if it’s authentic.”

PJ had to concentrate on her face
or he would’ve shouted every time they got close to someone else’s bumper. “I
don’t have it. Someone deleted my copy. All I got was the envelope. That’s why
I called you.” Amy almost locked her brakes, the tires squealing and dust
flying as she pulled off onto the berm.

“You what?”

“Maybe we’d better start back at
the point where I say ‘You got a message’ and you say ‘What message?’ Your
address is right at the top of that thing. It had to have gotten there,” he
reasoned.

She read the message again. “No. It
never reached us because he combined the addresses! He has a period between us
and Butterfly. We have to contact these other people and see if they have a
copy. I can’t go to Congress without proof.”

He shook his head. “Feds got to all
of them. The data disappeared as neatly as Nick did, but Nick kept records of
everything, even passwords. His apartment is in Maryland. Delay your meeting
for a few hours. We can search his place, find the name of the machine he used
to send his mail, download the evidence onto my laptop, and still stop the
launch in plenty of time.”