The Omega Theory (14 page)

David approached the table and stood next to Monique. She was examining a small mirror set on a metal stand in front of one of the lasers. The mirror was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle from the laser; if the device were turned on, the mirror would deflect the beam of laser light toward another small mirror on the opposite side of the table. David had seen this kind of setup in other tabletop experiments—physicists used the mirrors to guide the laser beams to their intended targets. The lasers on this particular table were turned off now, but the mirrors were still in their proper positions, so it was possible to trace the paths the beams were supposed to take. And that was exactly what Monique was doing. Her eyes darted from mirror to mirror, following the path to its end. Then she smiled and stepped around the corner of the table.

“There it is!” she said. She pointed at a pair of steel clamps that supported a glass tube, just three inches long. “That’s the vacuum chamber.”

“What?” David said. “That little tube?”

She nodded. “It’s like the chamber that Lucille found in Jacob Steele’s office. First you pump the air out of it, then you inject the ions into the vacuum and use electromagnetic fields to line up the charged particles. When everything’s ready, you fire the laser beams at the ions.”

David craned his neck to get a closer look at the tube, which was propped horizontally between the clamps. Inside were two needlelike electrodes, one at each end of the tube, positioned so that their sharp tips pointed at the exact center of the cylinder. “But this chamber looks different from the one Lucille found,” he noted. “This one has just two electrodes. The other one had two parallel rows of electrodes and a gap between them for the ions.”

Monique nodded again. “I didn’t say they were exactly the same. This chamber is a single-ion trap.” She pointed at the tips of the needles. “If both of these electrodes carry a positive charge, they can suspend a positive ion between them through the force of repulsion. But this trap can hold only one ion at a time.”

David was still confused. “I thought a quantum computer needed more than one ion. Doesn’t the computer perform calculations by getting the ions to interact with each other? If this chamber can’t hold more than one ion, how can it calculate anything?”

She nodded a third time. “You’re right. It’s not a quantum computer. It’s something else. But I haven’t figured it out yet. Give me a minute, okay?”

While Monique continued to stare at the equipment, David stepped away from the table. He felt exhilarated by their discovery but still anxious. He turned to Rav Kavner. “Are you sure this is a computer?” he asked. “Is that what Olam said?”

The rabbi flung his hands in the air. “I have no idea what it is! I told you, I didn’t understand anything Olam said about this crazy business.”

“Just think for a second. Did he ever refer to it as a computer?”

“No, he just called it the Caduceus Array. And sometimes he called it his ion clock, but I have no idea what that means either.”

David stared at the old man, who was still holding his hands up like a prisoner of war. “He said ion clock?”

“Yes, more nonsense! Does this look like a clock to you?”

David hustled back to the table. Standing beside Monique, he gazed at the electrodes inside the glass tube. He knew, of course, that an ion was far too small to be seen, but in his mind’s eye he pictured one of the particles in the space between the electrodes, a charged atom shining within a beam of laser light.

“It
is
a clock,” Monique whispered, pointing at the chamber. “If the laser is tuned to the right frequency, the ion will start to oscillate. It’ll absorb and release energy hundreds of trillions of times per second. And because the ion acts like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between two energy levels, it can be used as a timepiece.” Without taking her eyes off the tube, she grabbed the shoulder of David’s jacket and bunched it in her fist. “I read about a similar experiment in
Physical Review
. A team of researchers in Colorado built an atomic clock using a single ion of mercury. It was much more accurate than a conventional atomic clock. Even if it ran for a billion years, the single-ion clock wouldn’t fall more than a second behind.”

As she spoke, David raised his head. Above the welter of equipment on the table, he saw a black cable running up to the ceiling, where it disappeared into a neatly drilled hole. This was the fiber-optic line they’d followed across the Old City. He realized now why Olam had installed it. “Olam’s clock was linked to Jacob’s lab in Maryland,” he said. “Where there was probably another clock just like it. But we didn’t see Jacob’s clock because it was destroyed in the explosion.”

“And that’s why they called it the Caduceus Array! It was an array of clocks containing mercury ions, and the caduceus is a symbol of the god Mercury!” Monique tightened her grip on David’s jacket. “Both Olam and Jacob were taking precise measurements of time and sending the data through the fiber-optic line so they could compare their measurements.”

“But why go to all that trouble? What were they investigating?”

“Don’t you see? An array of very accurate atomic clocks could detect tiny differences in the passage of time. If a clock in one location runs a bit faster than an identical clock in another location, and you know the difference isn’t caused by mechanical errors or relativistic effects, then it might be evidence of subtle variations in the fabric of spacetime. And the pattern of those variations would be like a map, revealing clues to the fundamental nature of the universe.” She looked David in the eye, trying to make him understand. “That’s what Jacob and Olam were looking for, those small but very significant variations. They located their clocks on opposite sides of the globe to improve the odds of detecting the tiny differences. But last Tuesday they detected something bigger, something that scared the hell out of them. A fundamental disruption of time that occurred at the same moment as the Iranian nuclear test.”

David shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. How could a nuke alter the flow of time?”

“It wasn’t just a nuke. The warhead must’ve triggered a completely different phenomenon. It’s like a hammer came down and smashed the hell out of spacetime and got everything vibrating. And who knows what’ll happen if it comes down again? It could—”

She was interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the spiral stairway. As she and David turned in that direction, a muffled burst echoed down the shaft, followed quickly by another. After the second shot, the footsteps ceased and something heavy tumbled down the stairs. The body of one of the yeshiva students thudded to the basement floor, his jeans and T-shirt soaked with blood. Then David heard more footsteps on the stairs, clanging rapid and loud.

NICO AND HIS MEN PUT SILENCERS ON THEIR PISTOLS. WHEN THEY RUSHED
into the study hall on the yeshiva’s second floor, the commandos spread out and fired at the twelve bearded students sitting around the long table. Nico killed two of the Jews and Bashir killed three. Within seconds, eleven students were dead, most of them still seated in their chairs. But a pale, skinny student at the far end of the table had stumbled backward in the confusion and managed to crawl through a doorway on the other side of the room. Nico and Bashir sprinted after him, both cursing. They needed to kill this Jew before he shouted a warning to the Americans. They followed him into a small office littered with books, but before Nico could line up his shot, the student yelled,
“Rav Kavner!”
and slipped through another doorway.

“Ibnil kelb!”
Nico shouted, enraged. He charged forward and found himself at the top of a spiral stairway. It was dark, but when he leaned over the stairway’s railing, he could see the Jew running down the steps, going round and round the central pole. Pointing his nine-millimeter at a lower turn of the stairway, he waited for the
kelb
to appear in his sights, then fired twice. The Jew collapsed and fell the rest of the way down the stairs. Nico ran after him, with Bashir close behind.

They stayed close to the central pole of the stairway so that no one below could get a clear shot at them. Although the Americans had been unarmed before, it was possible that the Jews had loaned them a handgun or an Uzi. When Nico was about four meters from the bottom of the staircase, he crouched on the steps and peered down into the basement. An old bearded Jew was running hysterically across the room while the Americans knelt beside the corpse of the student. The Jew must be the yeshiva’s rabbi, Nico thought, the “Rav Kavner” that the student had tried to warn. The Americans must’ve sought out the rabbi because he had a connection to Olam ben Z’man. Now Nico would interrogate the Jew to determine Olam’s whereabouts. But there was no need to keep the Americans alive. They’d served their purpose.

Creeping a bit closer to the edge of the stairway, he aimed his Heckler & Koch at the black woman’s forehead. It was a shame, he thought—she was quite beautiful. Then he pulled the trigger.

AT THE LAST SECOND MONIQUE MUST’VE SEEN SOMETHING MOVE ON THE
stairway because she yelled, “Get down!” and shoved David to the floor. Then he heard another muffled gunshot and Monique fell on top of him, her body shuddering. She let out a gasp of pain and David felt a spray of warm liquid on his face. At the same instant, he saw Rav Kavner speed across the room, moving insanely fast for a man his age. The rabbi dove for the light switch on the wall, and then the basement went dark and David couldn’t see a thing.

Several more shots roared in the darkness. The bullets chipped the cement floor and smashed into the equipment on the lab table. There were at least two gunmen on the stairway, and although they were firing blindly now, David knew they would hit him soon enough if he didn’t find cover. Monique lay on top of him, unmoving, but he managed to slide free and drag her under the steel table. Bending over her, he reached for her neck and tried to check for a pulse, but his fingers were already slick with her blood and he couldn’t feel anything. His chest tightened and his eyes stung, and before he could stop himself, he moaned, “No, God, no!” Then he felt something smash against his lips and heard Monique hoarsely whisper, “Shut up!” She’d slammed her palm over his mouth. It hurt like hell, but David didn’t care. He was so relieved that she was alive.

Another fusillade of bullets smacked into the lab table, ricocheting just inches above David’s head. Then the gunfire stopped and he heard something worse, the sound of feet descending the final turns of the spiral stairway. David knew that hiding under the lab table would become pointless once the gunmen reached the basement floor and found the light switch. Desperate, he crawled away from Monique and reached up to the tabletop, snaking his hand around the lab instruments until he found one of the laser mirrors. The mirror’s stand was fairly heavy, and for a moment he considered throwing the thing at the gunmen. Then he heard a shuffling noise, just a few feet away. David raised the heavy mirror to bash whoever was approaching, but before he could swing it down, he felt the bristles of Rav Kavner’s beard in his face. The old man crashed into him headfirst and they rolled under the table. More bullets ricocheted against the lasers and oscilloscopes.

“This way!” the Rav hissed. “Into the tunnel!”

“Tunnel? What do—”

“I told you, the smugglers’ tunnel! This way!”

The old man scrabbled forward on his hands and knees. David reached for Monique, but she was already dragging herself in the same direction. Behind him, the sound of the footsteps had changed—now the gunmen were off the iron stairway and on the cement floor, closing in fast. Whirling around, David flung the laser mirror at them. It didn’t hit either one, but it made a loud crash against the wall behind them, and the gunmen turned around and fired at the noise. A fountain of sparks lit the air as some of the bullets struck the stairway, and in that flash David saw the Rav in the opposite corner of the room, lifting a metal grate from a manhole.

The sparks died and the room plunged back into darkness, but David remembered where the manhole was. He dashed toward the corner and careened into Rav Kavner and Monique, who’d already lowered her legs into the hole. His momentum knocked her off the edge and she slid into the shaft, gasping in pain again as she hit the bottom. David fell into the manhole just behind her, dropping about six feet and landing in a puddle that smelled strongly of sewage. He scrambled to his feet and stretched his hands up to the rabbi, whose legs dangled over the edge. “Come on!” he cried. “I’ll help . . .”

The lights in the basement suddenly came on and David saw the Rav’s terrified face above him. He grabbed the old man’s hips and started to lower him into the shaft, but the basement immediately echoed with gunfire. One of the bullets struck the back of the rabbi’s head. It plowed through his brain and burst out of his skull just above his left eyebrow.

The old man hung at the edge of the manhole for a moment, his mouth gaping as the blood pumped out of his forehead. Then he slumped forward and fell on top of David.

The Rav wasn’t heavy but David’s knees buckled. He landed on his back and the corpse rolled off him, splashing in the puddle at the bottom of the shaft. David lay in the fetid water, too terrified to move. All he could do was look up at the manhole and wait for the bullets to come raining down.

Then Monique grabbed his arm. She locked her fingers around his wrist and pulled him through a gap in the rocky wall of the shaft. It was a rough oval opening, just big enough to roll a wine cask through, and it led to a tunnel that was about three feet wide and five feet high.

In the dim light David saw Monique bending over him. Her right arm hung limply at her side, blood dripping from the sleeve of her jacket, but her left arm was strong enough to yank him to his feet. “Follow me,” she whispered, letting go of his wrist. Then, hunching low, she started running down the tunnel.

David followed her into the darkness.

WHEN NICO REACHED THE MANHOLE HE SAW ONLY THE OLD JEW, LYING
faceup at the bottom of the shaft. The left side of his forehead was a bloody mess, but his eyes were open and his lips had curved into a grotesque smile. Nico was furious—his own soldiers had killed the man he’d wanted to interrogate! He took out his anger on the Jew’s corpse, shooting it in the head three more times. When the gunshots ceased echoing, another noise arose from the shaft—a rapid scratching, like the sound of rats scurrying behind a wall. The Americans were trying to escape through an old smugglers’ tunnel beneath the floor, whose entrance Nico could dimly see beside the dead Jew.