Root of Unity (24 page)

I hung up, dragged my sleeve across my tongue—it didn’t help—and slammed out of the apartment.

Dr. Zhang lived in a very nice two-story colonial in suburbia—or, well, Burbank, which was as close as LA got to suburbia. Well-groomed rose bushes lined the walk, and a few kids’ toys were scattered on the lawn. The place even had a freaking white picket fence.

I skidded askew against the curb and raced up to pound on his door. When nobody answered, I kicked it in.

The back door was just closing as I burst into the kitchen. Zhang stood next to the table, the same dotty look of absent-minded professor about him he had always had, his sweater vest and bow tie slightly askew.

“What did you do!” I demanded.

“This is too important,” he said. “The world has to know.”

I dashed to the back door and pulled it open. The acrid scents of smoke and lighter fluid hit my nostrils immediately.

“What!” Zhang sprang to life and pushed past me out into the backyard, where flames were whooshing up from a small fire on the patio. The wind whipped the heat against our faces. An empty silver briefcase was open next to the fire, the lining already charring.

“No!” cried Zhang. “She told me—no!”

He elbowed me aside to run back into the kitchen, then bulldozed back through a moment later with a fire extinguisher. He pulled the chain and let it loose, white powder dousing the flames and blowing back onto his disarrayed academic look.

I stood watching.

Zhang was digging through the powdered remains like a crazed man. He came up with a blackened bit of paper in trembling fingers; it crumbled into ash in his hand. “No…
no…”
he cried, and started to weep.

I came up behind him and crossed my arms. “I think you need to start talking.”

“It’s gone,” he sniffed, wiping a sleeve across his face. White powder stuck to his glasses, coated his collar and hair. “It’s gone…”

“The proof?” I said.

He nodded.

“And what the hell were you trying to do with it? Sell it to the highest bidder?”

Shock exploded on his features. “Never!”

“Then what?”

“Do you not understand what this is? This is—the magnitude of this result—I couldn’t keep it for us. And the way she did it—this could lead to such advancements; the mathematical world—”

Arthur raced out through the back door. “What’s going on?”

“Dr. Zhang was trying to be altruistic,” I said. “He wanted to share the proof with the world, but apparently someone didn’t agree. Who double-crossed you?”

He crumpled, head in his hands. “She said she was a friend of Sonya’s. She said she’d keep the proof safe until encryption protocols were all adjusted, told me my name could be kept out of it—that she’d talk to Sonya and we’d all say it had been stolen—she burned it; why would she burn it? She wanted the result out there as much as I did. More. She believed as I did. She
believed.”

A horrible certainty was flooding me. “She
who?”

“Rita Martinez. She’s a theoretician—she’s quite well-known—why would she, why would she tell me…?”

“Shit, the Lancer didn’t steal Professor Halliday’s work,” I said. “Martinez did. It was her all along.”

“But why?” Arthur sounded lost.

I was, too, to be honest. “I have no idea, but I think we need to find out.”

“We need to find Sonya,” said Arthur, pulling out his phone.

“What am I going to do?” Zhang raised his powder-coated face to us, his voice barely above a whisper. “What have I done?”

Arthur considered. “Your bosses, where they think you at?”

“At work—I left myself swiped in—”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re on their way,” I said. “We just happened to be closer. I’m guessing this place will be overrun with federal agents in about, oh, three minutes or so.”

Zhang blinked rapidly, and a few more tears squeezed out of his eyes behind his glasses. “I thought I was—I was trying to do a good thing—the best thing—”

“Shit,” Arthur said softly. I knew what he was thinking: Zhang would be ruined for this. Not just fired—arrested. Thrown in prison for a long, long time.

I wasn’t sure that should bother us, frankly.

Except…I knew it would bother Halliday. And the way Arthur was looking down at Zhang with an intense, arresting sort of expression said he was about to go into full-on savior mode.

Fuck me.

“Whatever we’re doing, it’s got to be now,” I said.

Arthur nodded decisively and grabbed Zhang’s elbow, hurrying him back toward the house. “You’re coming with us until we get this sorted. You might still go down for it, you follow? But we gotta figure this out.”

“I—I don’t understand—”

Arthur stopped and stared him in the eyes. “You’re a dad, right?”

“Yes—my oldest is thirteen—”

“Then we ain’t letting the Feds bury you before we get to the bottom of this thing first, and maybe not even then, you hear? You did a boneheaded stupid thing while trying to do right, and that ain’t enough for me to leave three kids without their father.”

“Arthur, now meant
now,”
I said.

“I—uh—thank you?” managed Zhang. His expression was more hapless fear than gratitude, but Arthur just pressed his lips together and hustled the man off with us.

Chapter 24

We drove
together; I took the wheel in Arthur’s rental car. He didn’t bring up his and Checker’s conversation with me, for which I was grateful. I’d shoved all of it—my discoveries, Checker’s stupid accusations, our fight, everything—into a box in the back of my head to deal with later, neatly compartmentalizing. I was back on the job, and I had to be able to focus.

I swallowed back against my hangover and drove.

The first thing we did was button up Dr. Zhang in one of my bolt holes with Pilar watching him. Then we drove to the safe house.

Arthur hadn’t given Halliday any details over the phone—our assumption that the NSA was a third party to her calls meant any details about Martinez would have sent them after her in a heartbeat. Arthur probably wanted to sort everything out first, make sure he was giving the right target to the right people.
If
we could sort it out.

Halliday was waiting for us, practically vibrating with tension. A few DHS agents I didn’t know were in the house with her. “Let’s take a walk,” Arthur said shortly.

One of the agents stood up. “Mr. Tresting. The situation is—”

“Handled,” said Arthur. “The proof’s contained. I’ll give you a full debriefing, but I want to speak to my friend in private first. It won’t take long.”

“Anything you want to say to her—”

“I’m sorry,” said Arthur. “I really ain’t going to speak to you until I break a few things to Sonya privately first. Faster we do that, faster I tell you everything.”

They looked at each other, clearly disapproving, but then nodded and let us go. Fucking Arthur and his good relationships with people. If I’d tried to say something that aggressively authoritative to them, they would have brought out the handcuffs.

We walked out the back of the house, down through the woods where they surrounded a lake. The Feds’ perimeter wasn’t visible yet, and the house just barely so, through the trees behind us.

“We found out what happened,” said Arthur, when we’d reached the lake. “Most of it.”

“What’s going on?” Halliday’s words had the sound of someone who was back to controlling herself very tightly—and on the edge of not being able to manage it. “Is Xiaohu all right?”

“He’s fine,” Arthur answered. “Well, till the Feds catch him. Don’t think he understands the magnitude of what he did here, stealing a proof from them.”

Halliday stopped walking. “So he did…he stole…” She didn’t seem able to finish.

“Think he thought he was doing something good,” Arthur said gently. “Wanted to release it to the public. Something about the math world needing to know.” He exchanged a glance with me, clearly uneasy about how to bring up Martinez. “Went wrong, though.”

“What happened? Is he all right?”

“Till his bosses catch on, yeah,” said Arthur.

Halliday pressed a hand to her mouth. “He has a family,” she said softly.

“Well, he should’ve thought of that before he stole from the freakin’ NSA,” I said. “Or at least planned his theft a little better.” Bad tradecraft. I didn’t have any sympathy for that.

Arthur shot me a look.

“Do they know?” Halliday asked. “The government, do they know yet?”

“Don’t know what they know,” said Arthur. “But they gonna find out. What did you tell them so far?”

“Not much—just that he took it to give them. But when they said he wasn’t supposed to be the courier, I stopped talking immediately. Arthur, we must be able to do something. Tell them he never made the pick up after all, or that someone stole it from us—I don’t know. But we have to. Arthur, I know his children.”

I’d predicted this would be her reaction, but it was still aggravating. “Why on earth do you want to protect him?” I said. “He betrayed you.”

“He’s such an idealist.” Something like hollow laughter threaded Halliday’s voice. “In retrospect, it makes so much sense, what you say about him wanting to release it. Wanting to do a good thing. Whatever they’ll do to him for this, he doesn’t deserve it.”

“Most people don’t deserve the bad things that happen to them,” I said. “So what? At least in this case he actually did what he’ll be punished for.”

Halliday turned to me with an expression so profoundly tragic I felt like a heel.

“Sonya,” said Arthur. “There’s something else. Might not be able to worry about Zhang right now.”

“Why not? What happened?”

“He tried to give it to someone else. Someone who was gonna release it, she said, after a little time for the crypto geeks to put safeguards in place. That person burned it instead.”

Halliday wasn’t quick on the uptake—or maybe she knew, deep down, but didn’t want to believe. “Who?” she said. “Who did he give it to?”

Arthur rolled his lips together, hesitating. “Your friend. Rita Martinez. She’s in the wind now.”

One of Halliday’s knees buckled. She reached out and caught herself against a tree.

“We think she’s the one stole your work in the first place,” said Arthur, very gently.

“No,” said Halliday. Not as if she was in denial, simply as if she was stating a fact. “It’s not true.”

“Maybe Zhang’s lying,” Arthur allowed.

“Oh, come on, why would he?” I said. “Plus it makes sense from the beginning; Martinez knew she was working on it and—”

Arthur glared daggers at me, and I shut up. Ah. He was trying to make her feel better.

Halliday lowered herself to the ground and sat back against the tree. The dirt and grass were still wet from the recent rain; it soaked through her slacks, but she didn’t seem to notice. Arthur crouched down next to her. “Sonya. You okay? Take a minute.”

“And then talk,” I said. “You hired us to get the proof back, and now we know who stole it. Where would she go?”

“But she burned it.” Halliday didn’t sound like she was hearing me. “You said she burned it.”

“Our version, yeah. Because she has her own version already,” I pointed out. “She clearly doesn’t want anyone else with their hands on it. Now
where would she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does she have any family? Other close friends?” I pressed her.

“All the family she has left are still back on the reservation. In New Mexico.”

“Huh,” said Arthur. “Indian reservation, is that outside NSA jurisdiction? Might be a good place for her to run.”

“I’m pretty sure the NSA’s jurisdiction is wherever the NSA says their jurisdiction is,” I said. “They’re assholes that way. Same with the DHS and whatever secret black ops branch they have on this.”

“She wouldn’t go back anyway.” Halliday spoke in a monotone, not making eye contact with us. “Her parents are gone now. There’s no one left she’s close to. But…why? Why would she do this?”

“I’m more interested in the ‘where’ than the ‘why,’” I said.

“But the why might tell us where,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “Sonya, was she in any financial trouble? Professional trouble? Any sort of motive?”

“No. None. She had tenure; we both did. She’d just gotten two groundbreaking papers accepted for publication. She was still going strong.” She huffed out a breath. “I confess to some envy—the last two papers weren’t even in her field, and she’d had no collaborators. Just put them out, one after the other. She was that smart. She didn’t need my work.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. Did she still not see it? “Or she stole both of those proofs, too.”

“What?” Halliday’s head jerked up to look at me. “No, then why wouldn’t the authors come forward? If other people wrote them, they’d notice. This isn’t a large world.”

“Or maybe she bought them,” said Arthur.

Halliday opened her mouth, but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

“Could be plenty of reasons the authors never came forward,” Arthur added. He didn’t enumerate the others.

“Besides,” I said. “Your proof was the big one. It was going to change the world. This was a major breakthrough—you’d go down in history for it. For some people, that’s worth stealing for.”

Halliday sat for a minute, squinting into the distance. I wasn’t sure if she was considering what we’d said or ignoring us until she shook her head. “You’re still not making sense, either of you. If Rita was buying proofs, or, God forbid, something worse—she didn’t do that in this case.”

“Well, she probably knew you well enough that—” I started.

“Let me finish,” Halliday said, very firmly. “You’re right, she knew me well enough to be certain I never would have agreed. So what was her plan, then? If she released it, I would have spoken out. She had to know that.”

“Well, then maybe she was planning something else,” said Arthur, his voice heavy.

“What—to kill me?” Halliday pushed away from him. “That’s ridiculous. Rita’s intelligent, and she had every opportunity to do something despicable. If she’d wanted to dispose of me there are many ways she could have done it that would have left everyone unsuspicious, without ever giving other people the chance to be involved or interested. What you’re saying
does not make sense.”