Rift (17 page)

When Lee doesn't answer, Crystal continues.

“He's doing a book on string theory, origin of the universe, stuff like that. I read the first draft a few months ago, and it was actually pretty good.”

Lee grunts but doesn't turn around.

“So you must know a lot about quantum teleportation,” I say to Lee, “since you teach physics and all.”

“You could say that.”

“I've been having some problems,” I admit. “Little things, like balance and coordination. Oh, and I blacked out.”

“You what?” Crystal asks. “When did this happen?”

For some reason I decide to leave out my visit to the convenience store. “When I crawled out of the river. I lay down on the concrete and didn't wake up again for eighteen hours.”

“Jesus Christ, Cameron.”

“I was wondering,” I say to Lee, “if you might have any idea what could be wrong with me.”

“I don't think I would.”

“Why?”

“Because your company's machine doesn't employ quantum teleportation. At least not any way I understand it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Physicists have been struggling for years to make even the tiniest steps forward using entanglement to transfer the properties of one particle to another. Charles Bennett first proposed quantum teleportation in 1993, and Zeilinger in Austria confirmed his work by teleporting single photons. There just isn't any way that your company has taken one of the most complex disciplines in theoretical physics and moved the technology forward a hundred years.

“NeuroStor,” Lee goes on to say, “has tapped into something we do not have science to explain.”

“Apparently it works, whatever it is. I'm here, aren't I?”

“Yes, but in what sense are you here? Quantum teleportation assures us an exact replica of the original. Is that what you are?”

Which is the question I was asking in the first place, about my blackout and coordination problems and my seizure at the convenience store. In what sense am I here, indeed?

“If not quantum teleportation, then what?”

“I wish I knew. The information transmission alone is mind-boggling. If you forget about recognizing atoms and measuring their velocities and just scan to a resolution of one atomic length in each direction, you're talking about 10
³²
bits. Transmitting this much information using today's technology would take around ten billion years, so obviously they must have overcome this problem using a new information transmission system with nearly unfathomable speed and bandwidth. The next two problems are examining an infinitely complex molecular structure and reassembling it on the other side. Besides EPR correlation, which invokes the quantum mechanics we ruled out, there is no known way to measure something so precisely without damaging or destroying it. And it's possible, in theory, to reorganize particles and atoms in whatever form you choose, but present-day physics, as far as I know, is a long way from being able to do so.

“And finally,” he adds, “what would become of the original?”

These ideas are beyond my understanding and concern. “Can you even guess what their machine does, if not quantum teleportation?”

“I already told you we have no idea.”

I want to throttle him. How can he be such a jackass when we're talking about my health? My
life
?

Crystal stands beside me, smiling compassionately, and for a moment I hate her as well. They pity me, for Christ's sake.

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

“We've got to get your story on the news,” Crystal says. “But first we need some evidence, and that's what we're hoping to find in their computer systems.”

Lee has turned back toward his monitor again, typing more commands onto the keyboard. Crystal still stands there, hands joined at her waist, eyes open and inviting. Waiting to answer more of my questions. Prepared for everything.

“I don't understand something,” I say to her.

“What is it?”

“I don't mean to be insensitive, but you're just some random woman I met in a strip club. Tom is the one who told me to find you, so when I sent you that e-mail, I didn't know what to expect. Maybe some Internet assistance, or maybe for you to help me decide whether I should go to the police or call a television station. Then, when you asked me to meet you in Flagstaff, I figured ‘What the hell do I have to lose?' But this . . . this is more than that.”

I gesture to Lee and the computers and the house in general.

“This is like you've been waiting for me.”

Lee stops typing and moves to turn around, but Crystal doesn't let him.

“Keep after it, Lee,” she says. “Cameron and I are going for a drive.”

“Why?” I ask. “Where to?”

“This is going to take Lee a while, so we don't need to stand here and bother him.”

“Did Batista get to you? Are you taking me to him?”

“Of course not.”

She takes me by the shoulder, intent on leading me out of the room, but this time I jerk free of her grasp.

“I'm not going anywhere with you until you give me some answers.”

“I'll answer anything I can in the car, Cameron. But there's a chance that someone might trace Lee's work back to this house. Do you want to be here if that happens?”

“But doesn't he need me to stay? My network log-in and password? Something?”

“They would have locked you out days ago,” Lee says over his shoulder. “I'm trying for a back door, something I can use that won't immediately alert them to my presence. But they may sniff me anyway. Probably better if you take off for a while.”

Crystal looks at me impatiently.

I stand there for a minute, trying to be obstinate. But in the end I agree to leave with her.

         

The air is cool now, nearly cold. Crystal takes us out of Lee's neighborhood, and soon we're heading through the main part of town again.

Questions swell in my head. I cannot understand how these people can possibly know so much about my company, know so much more about this situation than I do. They have answers to almost every question I pose, have developed theories and concepts that never even occurred to me. How is that possible? The odds against me meeting these two people must have been fantastically long.

Unless someone planned it that way.

“So what do you want to know?” Crystal asks me.

“What do I want to know? How do you know so much about NeuroStor? Why was Tom so sure I should contact you? How did you get my e-mail so damn quickly?”

“Well—”

“Hold on. Let me back up. When you were telling me about the AFA you kept saying ‘we think this' and ‘we haven't figured out that.' Who, exactly, is ‘we'?”

“Lee explained this. When the government can't or won't fix something, regular people have to organize and do something themselves.”

“I heard all that. But who
are
they? You two can't be the whole thing.”

Instead of answering, she looks out her side window at the sky. “I heard it was going to snow again tomorrow, but it doesn't look like it now.” When she looks back at me, her eyes have turned darker somehow. “Never does.”

I wait silently for her to answer my question. When she doesn't, I press on.

“It's not like you picked me out of a crowd at The Wildcat after all. I could have just as easily gone to the stage when another girl had been dancing. And you didn't offer the table dance to me.
I
asked
you
.”

“Hell of a coincidence,” she says. “Maybe it was fate.”

I try to ignore the fear welling cold in my stomach, but it's already too late.

“You don't seem like the kind of person who would believe in fate, Crystal.”

“Not really. I mean, I don't go to church or anything, but I've always thought there might be some kind of smart energy built into the fabric of the universe. Something that makes sure everything runs smoothly. For some reason I don't think many things are left to chance.”

“So if this isn't chance, what is it?”

Crystal begins to say something and then stops herself.

And something in the way she's looking at me makes me think of Tom, how concerned he was that we were being followed, how sure that we should run.

“Cameron,” Crystal says. “I haven't been entirely truthful with you.”

“Not entirely truthful? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

It appears she is taking me out of town again, toward the Peaks.

“What did you think, Cameron? That some blond exotic dancer just happened to be interested in your story? That she would just happen to know more about transmitting than you did and give you her e-mail address so the two of you could discuss it later?”

I don't say anything because, until just now, this is exactly what I thought.

“My hair is dyed and my tan is fake. I'm no more an exotic dancer than you are.”

My mind roars, the fear returning yet again, and though danger is not immediate this time, even though my life does not depend on the speed of my feet or the strength of my arms, the uncertainty, the deception, somehow seems worse. As if the Herculean effort that brought me this far has been wasted by the possibility that I was manipulated into doing so.

“What do you mean,” I ask again, “when you say ‘not entirely truthful'?”

She almost says something and again stops, as if measuring her words. A moment passes, then another. The snow-covered peaks fill the windshield.

“This was sort of arranged, Cameron.”

“Arranged?”

“You want to know? I'm telling you. We arranged to meet you, to bring you here, for us to help you and you to help us.”

Now we're traveling in a different direction than I've gone before, east and then north on Highway 89. My hands shake. The pads of my fingers seem to have gone numb, although that may just be my imagination.

After a few miles she turns off the highway onto a narrow, uneven road that disappears quickly into the forest. We pass driveways, marked only by mailboxes and newspaper drops, that must lead to houses hidden in the trees. Some of these private roads are covered by fresher pavement than others, and a few are not paved at all. Affinity for seclusion apparently crosses all income groups.

“Wait a minute. Are you saying that Tom knew about this all along? That he brought me there to see you?”

Crystal finally slows down and turns onto one of the unpaved roads. The Buick has no easy time navigating the rain-carved ruts or the overgrown grassy hump between the tire tracks, but she manages to push us up a gentle grade until the road settles into a clearing. An outline of mountains stands in silhouette behind a horizon of pine treetops, and beneath it all sits a small, well-kept cabin on a plot of overgrown grass. The road forks, sending one branch into a semicircular driveway in front of the cabin and another into what must pass for the backyard. The skeleton of a half-built deck stands in front of a single door.

“You seemed so honest and sincere at The Wildcat,” I say to Crystal. “I didn't think you'd turn out to be such a smug bitch.”

Crystal drives around back and parks beneath the framework of what will eventually be a carport.

“That's a cruel thing to say.”

“What am I supposed to think? You won't tell me anything!”

“I'm trying to figure out the best way to break this to you, Cameron. You're so damn naive. At first I thought it was sweet, but you're really going to paralyze us if you don't learn to think and act a little more broadly.”

“Now who's being cruel?”

She leans close to me, her sky blue eyes shining and lovely. Here I am trying to be mad, and still I can't ignore her dazzling beauty. What kind of person am I?

“Let's think about it, Cameron. If you wanted to hook up with a transmission volunteer, how would you do it? You couldn't just sit around and hope for one to call you up on the telephone, could you?”

“Of course not.”

“So first you'd have to figure out who the volunteers were. How do you do something like that? Well, since you haven't yet been able to hack into NeuroStor's computer system, you'd have to get a contact on the inside to help you. So maybe someone you know knows someone else who may have risked his life to get you a list. And with a stroke of luck it happens that one of the people on this list is transmitting to your part of the country. Your own
state,
for that matter. So now you investigate this person a little to make sure he isn't someone who might fuck up everything. And then you do a little more digging to find out if the volunteer is coming to visit anyone. What kind of person is he? Might he be of any use? What do you know, the friend is a thirty-five-year-old ladies' man. Turns out he can be bought. So now the transmission volunteer can be manipulated any number of ways. We can send the guy anywhere we want because his friend is going to help us do it. You get the picture? Not easy, but not exactly impossible either.”

My mind whirls, a kaleidoscope of images. Tom's nervous, waiting face when I first saw him in Phoenix. Crystal and her velvety, voluptuous body at The Wildcat. Ivan and Ed chasing us through a hurricane-like rainstorm at the Sandy Canyon golf course, the gunshot, Tom going down, imploring me to find Crystal. . . .

“So what you're saying is that your stupid, covert plan got my best friend killed! I should kill
you
!
For involving him—”

“Cameron—”

“—for involving
me
in your brainless crusade that no one on earth gives a shit about! So what if the people who run NeuroStor are psychopathic racists? How are you any better?”

“Cameron, I am so sorry about Tom. We had people at the golf course; we were going to help you, but that rain . . .”