Threshold (27 page)

Then he realized a connection. “He was able to follow me, too. He took Fiona and killed the others. Controls the golems.”

“You know who’s doing this?” Duncan asked.

“Richard Ridley.”

“Son of a bitch…” Duncan was silent for a moment. “I’ll have every law enforcement agency in the country on the lookout for him in case he returns to the U.S., and I’ll have Boucher coordinate with any foreign agencies still willing to talk to us.”

King was about to ask what had happened, but came to his own conclusions. If several countries had been tipped off that U.S. soldiers were kidnapping their citizens, provable or not, an international drama would be unfolding. That, combined with the post-attack-on-U.S.-soil madness that must be consuming the country, Duncan had his presidential hands full. He decided not to press the issue. “If I find anything in Haifa, I’ll let you know.”

“Ditto on Ridley,” Duncan said. The statement was followed by a click and a dial tone. The man was busy.

King hung up the phone and dialed a second number. Aleman answered it almost immediately. “Aleman here.”

“Lew, it’s King. I just wanted to check in on my parents.”

“Dropped them off at the hotel. Your father seemed pretty excited about the continental breakfast. They asked a lot of questions about you.
Lots
of questions. If they weren’t your parents I’d think they were digging for intel.”

For a moment, King worried that it could be true, and then decided it was. His parents now knew his job was a lot more interesting than they had previously believed. They probably wanted to know everything about him. “So what did you tell them?”

“The truth. That you’re on the Special Ops Galley Team—and let’s face it, that’s about as threatening sounding as ‘the Chess Team’—and your current mission has you scouring the globe for truffles.”

King grinned. The humor felt good. “Uh huh.”

“But once we got to the hotel they wanted nothing to do with me. Asked me not to come back. Said they’d be fine.”

“That’s odd,” King said.

“What’s odd about it? They’ve been apart for what, ten years? And now they have a few days in a hotel. I’m telling you, they’re going to get a lot of use of the ‘Do not disturb’ sign.”

King let out a laugh. “Thank you, Lew. You have just managed to overshadow all the awful things I’ve seen with something worse.”

“Any leads on Fiona?”

“We just missed her in Rome.”

“You’ll get her back.”

King had no reply. His confidence waned with every new discovery.

“Take care, King.”

“Copy that.”

King hung up the phone and thought about his family. He was eager to see his parents again. To catch up. To re-form lost bonds and heal old wounds. More than anything, he wanted his parents to meet Fiona. Together again, they could use a grandchild to dote on, and Fiona, missing her grandmother deeply, could use a pair of caring grandparents in her life. It would do them all good, even King.

But first he had to find Fiona and bring her home.

He turned toward the window. The blue waves below grew larger as the plane descended for a landing at Ben Gurion International Airport.

FORTY

Haifa, Israel

THE HOUR AND
a half drive from the Tel Aviv airport to Technion was quiet and uneventful. Views of the Mediterranean were spectacular during the long coastal trip. And Haifa turned out to be the kind of quiet, café-filled town that college students adored. The only hiccup was that King had to leave his weapon behind; even the mighty Hercules had to submit to customs when leaving the ultra-secure airport. Alexander drove a black Mercedes that had been waiting for him in an airport garage. He maneuvered through the streets and highways like a local. King remembered the ancient man’s tale of meeting Jesus and realized he had likely made this trip several times in the past, perhaps on horseback, or even in sandals. The man might be just as comfortable anywhere in the world.

As King began to think about what he would do with twenty-five hundred years of life, they pulled into a campus parking spot and stopped. The campus was a sea of white buildings and green trees. But there wasn’t a student in sight. Like zombies to a shopping mall, most of the student body had been drawn to a science symposium being hosted on the other side of campus.

King noted Alexander’s familiarity with the campus and commented, “You’ve been here before?”

“I’ve taken classes actually,” he replied.

“With Davidson?”

“He would have been a child when I attended.” He opened the front door of the tall white building that had five long windows stretching the full length of its facade. He held the door for King, allowing him to enter first. A receptionist greeted the pair as they entered.

Alexander approached her with a smile, showing her a faculty I.D. card that had been waiting for him in the Mercedes’s glove compartment. She read the card, which identified him as a professor from the medical department. “I’m looking for Professor Davidson,” he said in Hebrew.

She returned his smile and pointed him toward the elevator. “Fifth floor. Turn right off the elevator. Second door on the left.”

“Thank you,” he replied.

Thirty seconds later they exited onto the fifth floor and headed for Davidson’s open door. The man’s voice filtered out as he spoke on the phone, his back to the door. King knocked twice and then entered, followed by Alexander, who closed the door behind him.

Amzi Davidson, who wore a bright yellow button-down shirt rolled to his elbows, held up a finger indicating he’d be right with them. The office was sparse. A small desk, a bookcase on either side of the door, and two metal-framed chairs were the only furniture. A large window looked out over the campus and provided a clear view of a modern art sculpture that looked like a metallic obelisk. The two other walls in the room held giant whiteboards. Multicolored notes in Hebrew, equations, and drawings filled both boards, which were stained gray from being erased over and over without actually being washed.

Davidson hung up the phone and spun around with a smile. His gray eyes, shrunk by the thick, black-rimmed glasses he wore, were excited. But the genuine smile on his face fell when he saw them. He squinted at them. “You’re not from the medical department,” he said in Hebrew.

“No, we’re not,” Alexander replied, also in Hebrew. “May we continue in English for my friend?”

Davidson glanced at King. “Sure,” he said in perfect English, his face brightening. “Are you with the press?”

“Afraid not,” King said.

The man soured. “Then what’s this about?”

Alexander took a seat and cut right to the heart of the matter. “Golems.”

Davidson leaned back slowly. A pen appeared in his hand and went to his mouth. “What’s the application? Is this for a theory?”

“Real-world application,” Alexander replied.

Davidson plucked the pen from his mouth. “Well, I’m afraid that while the written word is powerful, it is not that powerful. It cannot grant life.”

“What about the spoken word?” King asked.

A grin came to Davidson’s face. “So you are seeking the opinion of a physicist
and
an ex-rabbi?”

King’s and Alexander’s silence answered the question. Davidson looked at his watch. “Very well. I have a few minutes. I must warn you, however, to not expect two diverging theories. My research in religion and science have come to the same conclusion.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Alexander said.

“Then let’s start at the beginning. The big-bang theory attempts to answer
how
the universe was first formed, but it doesn’t answer the bigger question:
Why
does the universe exist? Because of this, it’s a hollow mathematical model. It assumes everything came from nothing, ex nihilo, and states that the universe had a beginning. But there is another option: the universe has
always
existed.”

He stood and erased a portion of the whiteboard, marring his yellow sleeve. He wrote out an equation: 0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 …

“This is the mathematical statement that shows the big bang is impossible. The sum of nothing, is nothing!”

He erased some of the plus signs and added minus: 0 = 0 − 0 + 0 − 0 + 0 − 0. “This is the Null Axiom, developed by Terence Witt, which states that the difference of nothing is nothing, meaning everything is made of nothing. Thus, the universe never had a beginning because it is nothing, which is also limitless and timeless.”

Davidson checked his watch. “Limitless also describes my thoughts on the matter and I need to speak at the symposium in an hour, so rather than blather on about nonexpansion, cosmic microwaves, decaying photons, or eternal equilibrium, I’ll cut right to the theological meat of the matter.

“Null physics mathematically describes the
speaking
of the reality into existence. In the same way the press spins a story by changing the context of facts, the nonreal is made real by the words of a creator spinning the context of limitless nothingness and telling a story.”

King rolled his head from side to side. “So … if God”—he made air quotations with his fingers—“spoke existence into being, what language did He speak?”

Davidson burst into laughter. When he saw neither of his guests sharing in the moment, he stopped. “You’re serious? The language of God?”

“Quite,” Alexander said.

The pen reentered Davidson’s mouth. “Some have speculated that DNA is the language of God. It has a coding system—an alphabet if you will—rules of spelling and grammar as well as meaning and purpose. In many ways it resembles computer code. And ninety-seven percent of it is considered junk, meaning we have yet to figure out what it says. It also obeys Zipf’s law, which simply shows that when words from a document, say a novel, are graphed by the number of times they appear in a book, from most popular to least popular, you get a straight line. DNA broken up into words and listed by popularity align perfectly with Zipf’s law. Shazam, it’s a language!”

“But we can’t speak the language of DNA,” King said. “We can’t verbalize it.”

“In your case, you don’t have to. It’s already present, but if your speech spins the context…” His eyes brightened. “Researchers at the Hado Institute Australia have shown how words can affect the physical world. Spoken words create vibrations. Each word has its own unique resonance—its own pattern of vibration. They spoke different words, both positive and negative, to water before freezing it, transforming it into its crystalline state. Water exposed to the words ‘angel,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘life’ formed dazzling, symmetrical crystals. Water exposed to words such as ‘dirty,’ ‘devil,’ and ‘death’ became malformed, cracked, and burst, almost like something had exploded from within.

“A sound wave is, in essence, a disturbance moving through a medium, shifting energy from a starting point to an ending point. And where there is energy, there is information. We detect sound waves through our ears, which transfers the information to our brain, where it is translated into sound. But there is more information in sound than our brains can decipher.”

“If sounds are affecting the physical world around us, why are we not noticing?” King asked.

“We are limited by what we can sense. In the same way that our ears cannot hear the information conveyed in every sound, our other senses might miss the results. Take steganography for instance.”

King nodded. He was familiar with the use of steganography in military applications. World War II microdots, Morse code in fabric patterns, and sign language hidden in photographs had all been used in military history. In more modern applications, terrorists had used the technology to communicate through coded message board avatars.

Davidson opened his laptop, tapped the keys, and brought up a Web site. He showed them a photo on the screen.