The God Machine (14 page)

“Nancy,” moaned Wilson, but the word seemed to have lost all its meaning.

The nun loosened her grip. His wife slid to the floor. She flopped forward, lifeless, landing inches from Trevor's left foot.

“Where is the copy, Mr. Wilson?” the nun asked.

Trevor began to scream. The nun slapped him. He quieted for a moment, then he started again. She reached out, slipped her rosary beads round his neck. She yanked until she cut off his shrieking. “I'm growing impatient,” she said. “And, soon, your son and daughter will grow cold. Like their mother. The copy, Mr. Wilson.”

With a desperate shiver, Wilson pointed his chin at the sofa. “In the springs. Underneath the right cushion.”

The nun released Trevor. One of the masked men ambled over to the sofa. He pulled up the seat pillows. There was a pen, and two coins, and a small plastic dinosaur … and a slit in the dark green upholstery. The man reached in and pulled out a small stack of papers. They were bound by a clip at the corner.

“There, you see,” said the nun as she picked up the candle again. The man gave her the papers and she examined them closely. Then she smiled. “We could have avoided all of this awkwardness, Mr. Wilson. There is a delicious release, is there not, in the embrace of every confession?”

“You have what you came for,” said Wilson. “Now go. Leave my children alone.”

The nun frowned, shook her head. “If only it were that easy, Mr. Wilson. But I give you my word; I will pray for you and your family. And I will never forget what you've done.”

The nun walked over to the window behind the TV. She lifted the candle until the flame touched the base of the curtains. Seconds later, they burst into flames. Fire licked up the wall. The men in the ski masks stepped back.

“You can't leave us like this,” Wilson pleaded. “What kind of a monster are you?”

The men retied Kathleen to her chair. Wilson could see his daughter. Her face was bloody. Her blouse was torn. And Trevor still whimpered beside him. The flames
billowed and roared. The curtains had fallen to the floor and the carpet was melting. Then the TV caught fire, and the table it sat on. Then the bookcase against the far wall. A smoke alarm started to wail. No, it wasn't a smoke alarm. It was him.

The nun paused in the hallway. The men in the ski masks were gone. Wilson could scarcely see through the smoke. “Consider this a kind of rehearsal, Mr. Wilson,” she said. “A prelude to eternal damnation.”

Wilson struggled but his bonds would not yield. He yanked at the ropes until his wrists bled. He yanked and he heaved but he couldn't pull free. Trevor was the first to catch fire. Wilson watched as his son's khakis burst into flames, then his dinosaur T-shirt and his hair and his skin. Nancy was next. In a flash, she exploded in a great ball of fire. The flames danced on the carpet, a bright chemical blue. They licked at his feet. They wicked up his pants. He could smell the scent of his own bubbling flesh. He could feel his skin cooking. As he screamed, the flames blistered the roof of his mouth. The pain was unfathomable. Every nerve in his body was sizzling. He yanked at his bonds. He pulled and he wrestled, but there was nothing at all he could do … except die.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil
, he thought. But he knew in his heart of hearts, as the darkness descended, even that was a lie.

“Y
OUR SEAT BELT, PLEASE
, M
R.
K
OSTER.”
T
HE
P
RETTY
A
SIAN
flight attendant pointed down at his lap. “We'll be landing in San Francisco in just a few minutes.”

Joseph Koster slipped the leather-bound volume he'd been reading on the padded seat next to him and buckled his belt. He'd been studying Franklin's journal intently and had failed to notice the little red light in the carved walnut bulkhead flash on. The flight attendant picked up his tray of green figs and yogurt and the crystal decanter, and made her way back to the galley.

When Robinson had told Koster he had booked him on the morning flight to the Coast, Koster hadn't realized he was traveling on Robinson's own Citation X, the fastest business jet on the market, with a top speed of over 590 mph. He'd assumed he was flying commercial, until the driver had turned down the side road at the airport marked General Aviation, and there she was—smooth-lined and predatory, parked right on the edge of the tarmac.

The X was the most luxurious plane Koster had ever
seen, and yet, despite the plush seats and impeccable appointments, he had found it virtually impossible to sit still during the flight. The cabin was almost twenty-four feet long, with room for eight to stretch out in comfort, but other than the flight attendant and two pilots, he was the only passenger aboard. It all seemed, well… just too much for one person.

Robinson's faith in him had been greatly misplaced, Koster feared. Despite his skills as a mathematician, he had failed to make any progress in deciphering Franklin's journal. He had started, as always, with a simple substitution cipher, replacing true letters—plain text—with different characters—cipher text.

One of the simplest substitution ciphers was the Caesar Cipher, named after its Roman origins. This required writing two alphabets or numeric sequences, one on top of the other. The lower sequence was shifted by one or more characters to the right or left using the cipher text to represent the plain text in the line above:

Plain Text

Cipher Text

Koster usually tried to identify a cipher text message from other cipher text or from plain text. Then he counted the different cipher text characters or combinations to determine their frequency of usage. He looked for patterns, series and common combinations. Finally, he replaced the cipher text characters with possible plain text equivalents, using specific language characteristics.

For example, although the English language features
a total of twenty-six letters, nine letters
—E, T, A, O, N, I, R, S
and
H—
constitute seventy percent of plain text.
EN
is the most frequently used two-letter combination, followed by
RE, ER
and
NT
. The letter
A
is often located at the beginning of a word, or second from last. The letter
I
is often third from last. And vowels, which constitute forty percent of plain text, are often separated by consonants.

Koster had worked on the journal the entire flight from New York but he had nothing to show for it. He looked out the porthole as the plane slowly descended through clouds. Then a hole opened up and the ground became visible, a great swath of green, and a lake—Lake Tahoe, perhaps—before it vanished again, and for some reason, Koster thought back to Switzerland, and that first time he had flown to Lausanne, on his way to the École Polytechnique Fédérale.

Becoming an architect had been his mother's idea. She'd seen it as a respite from the end of his mathematical career, a replacement for his aborted work on the Goldbach conjecture.

Born in New York, the only child of concert oboist Peter Koster and Katrina Östergård, a high-school physics teacher, Koster had excelled at mathematics from a very young age. At twelve, he had published his very first paper—on group theory, with an emphasis on algebraic topology—and soon the young Koster was being hustled off from one conference to the next. He had entered MIT at fifteen. There his fascination with the Goldbach conjecture, one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory, first took hold. The conjecture states that every even integer greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes. Koster had spent years developing a theorem based on statistical considerations focusing on
the probabilistic distribution of prime numbers. His work was featured on the cover of academic journals. He became a minor international celebrity, speaking at universities and mathematics symposia from Bangkok to Berlin. He was even nominated for the prestigious Fields Medal, awarded to but a handful of mathematicians at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union only once every four years. At twenty, Koster was at the top of his game.

But his heuristic argument proved nonrigorous. Though asymptotically valid for
c
≥ 3, in the end, a true proof eluded him. He had sat there in his brand-new tuxedo that night at the Congress in Nice, on the French Mediterranean, as the waves pounded the shore, listening as they announced first one name, then the next—but none of them his.

For small values of
n
, the Goldbach conjecture could be verified directly. Since that day on the Côte d'Azur, he had run a distributed computer search that had confirmed the conjecture up to
n
≤ 4 × 10
¹⁷
. The search was still going on. He was becoming increasingly right every day, with each cycle of the distributed network. He just couldn't prove it.

Still in his twenties, rather than becoming a math teacher, Koster had taken up architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Switzerland. In truth, he wondered who had suffered more from the demise of his mathematical career—he or his mother, Katrina. She had often accompanied him on his lecture tours, basking in the glow of his genius. Then, when it had finally collapsed, she had simply sent him away. As always. Unless he were debating mathematics or science with her, she seemed deaf to his voice, blind to his very existence. And his father was always performing, or locked away in his study rehearsing.

Koster had done reasonably well at the university in
Lausanne, and after a few years apprenticing at various architectural firms throughout Europe, he'd landed a job—with no small help from Nick Robinson—at McKenzie & Voight, New York—Paris—Dubai. Based at their headquarters in Manhattan, Koster had ascended the corporate ladder with remarkable ease. Starting with small projects—school auditoriums, conference rooms, bits and pieces—he was soon renovating major estates, or assisting in the development of large corporate pavilions. He got married to Priscilla, although that didn't last very long. Then, during a slow period in the early nineties, he had taken a break from it all. At Nick Robinson's request, he had traveled to France to write a book on the Notre Dame cathedrals. He had become embroiled in a hunt for the Gospel of Thomas, allegedly hidden beneath the cathedral at Chartres. He had met Mariane. And then lost her.

The clouds burst open and the west slope of the Sierra Nevadas slipped down toward the ocean. There was a price to be paid for his love of mathematics, Koster realized. Numbers were an addiction to him, with their own demands and sacrifices, their own aesthetics, their own logic and truth. Sometimes they responded, they let go, made you privy to their inscrutable patterns. And other times—Koster looked at the volume beside him—they just didn't.