Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  While this served Charlie well with her peers, winning her plenty of friends, it was intensely frustrating for her parents. When they trotted Charlie out before other adults and tried to make her do tricks, like she was a trained monkey, Charlie refused to play along. When they convinced psychologists to give her new IQ tests, Charlie purposefully answered every question wrong. When they finally managed to get a TV network interested in a show about a young genius, Charlie played dumb in front of the executives. The pattern repeated itself throughout Charlie’s childhood: While Charlie was perfectly happy to feed her enormous intellect everything from calculus to Mandarin in private, she stubbornly pretended to be normal in public.

  This was infuriating to Charlie’s parents, who retaliated with punishment. They grounded her. They took away her toys and her books. They refused to get her the puppy she longed for. And when that didn’t work, they berated her and said things no parent should ever say to their children. None of this encouraged Charlie to show her true genius; it only made her more determined to get away from her parents as soon as she could.

  Going to college early was only part of that plan; Charlie also hoped to be independently rich by the time she left home, so she would never have to ask her parents for anything.

  She had never set out to do anything illegal. It was the Lightning Corporation that really behaved badly, by taking advantage of a child.

  Charlie’s original plan was to make her money through computer programming. She was naturally gifted at it, and it was something she could do at home, alone, which was just about her only option for a hobby, as her parents kept grounding her and were refusing to let her do any extracurricular activities as further punishment. At the age of eight, Charlie created her own security program and upon hearing that Lightning, one of the biggest software companies on earth, was looking to get into the security business, decided to send it to them.

  Unfortunately, for all Charlie’s smarts, she was still young and naive where people—or at least corporations—were concerned. She simply sent the entire program on a flash drive, with a handwritten note asking that Lightning pay her a fair price for the program if they liked it. (Charlie added that she estimated a fair price would be at least ten million dollars.) She did not approach a lawyer or any other business professional to aid in the deal.

  Charlie never heard back from Lightning, which was upsetting to her—although she was considerably more upset a year later when Lightning announced it had developed a new security system called Barracuda. The release had a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. The reviews for Barracuda were stellar, and Lightning’s stock skyrocketed.

  Barracuda was Charlie’s program.

  She knew this for sure, because when she had developed it, she had built a back door into the code, a way to let her circumvent the security system. She hadn’t done this for any nefarious reasons; she had simply thought it would be fun. Barracuda had the exact same back door—which was ample evidence that it had been stolen—but it also gave Charlie access to Lightning’s entire computer network. Charlie hacked in, examined the code, and determined that Lightning had made almost no changes at all to what she had sent them. They had blatantly swiped it and were now making millions of dollars from something that belonged to her.

  Charlie didn’t want to tell her parents about this, because they would doubtlessly try to gain access to all the money themselves. She did approach lots of law firms, but none took her seriously. They all thought it was laughable (if somewhat adorable) that an elementary school girl wanted to sue the world’s most powerful computer software company. Worse, Charlie didn’t have any evidence to back up her story. Since Lightning had never responded to her letter, there wasn’t even a paper trail of correspondence.

  So Charlie decided to take back what rightfully belonged to her. She was no longer as naive as she had once been. She learned everything she could about banking and finance and figured out how to establish a secure Swiss bank account. After that, through Barracuda, she hacked into Lightning’s corporate bank accounts, siphoned out a considerable amount of money, and deposited it in her own account. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she enacted a little more vengeance on Lightning.

  On the company’s homepage, she altered the slogan to “Committing Evil for 120 years” and animated their lightning logo so that it struck a kennel and set several cartoon dogs on fire. She also removed all the software products for sale on their website, replacing them with particularly horrible items like elephant tusks, rhino horns, and giant panda skins. Finally, she wiped out all of Lightning’s access codes.

  It was a massive black eye for Lightning. First, the news that Barracuda could be hacked killed the product, costing the company millions. But it was also incredibly embarrassing when one of the world’s preeminent tech companies couldn’t get into its own system to fix its own website. It took them six days to repair the damage, during which their stock price tanked. It never fully recovered.

  The mischief Charlie had caused cost Lightning far more than what she had actually stolen. In fact, the company was so worked up about the mischief that several days went by before they even realized they had been robbed as well. After the horrible publicity of the hack, Lightning covered up the story of the theft, but they did reach out to the FBI.

  At the time, Dante was still a young CIA agent, struggling to prove himself. There were plenty of leaks between the FBI and the CIA, so word got through about the Barracuda case. The moment Dante heard about it, he had a pretty good idea who was behind it because Charlie had once told him about sending a security program to Lightning and never hearing back from them. But Dante kept it to himself for several reasons:

  1) He couldn’t prove it.

  2) It wouldn’t look good for him to reveal that his own half sister was behind one of the most public crimes of recent years.

  3) It wasn’t his jurisdiction.

  4) The Lightning Corporation probably deserved what Charlie had done to them anyhow.

  The first time Dante had even met Charlie, she was four. He had been in college and had come to see Larry, thinking maybe there was a way to have his father in his life. Within minutes, he had realized that was a mistake, but he had been intrigued by his half sister, sensing that she was a lot smarter than her parents realized. The next time he had seen Charlie was when she was eight, at a family wedding, and then when she was ten, at the funeral of their uncle. (Their father might have been a tool, but his brother had always been a decent guy.)

  By then Dante had used his CIA access to uncover Charlie’s IQ tests for himself and confirm how brilliant she was—although he didn’t tell Charlie he knew. Their next two encounters were prickly and uncomfortable. Charlie had a bad attitude and problems with authority, most likely stemming from the fact that the main authority figures in her life—her parents—deserved contempt. And yet Dante had always suspected that deep down Charlie was a good kid who had simply been dealt a bad hand. True, her incredible intelligence was a gift, but her despicable parents had been an even bigger burden. Even after the Barracuda incident, Dante didn’t have the heart to bust Charlie—and he was quite sure that she wouldn’t end up getting arrested anyhow. Instead, the FBI would get angry at him for overstepping his bounds and the CIA wouldn’t look kindly on the family connection.

  So Dante kept his theories to himself, hoping the time would never come when he needed to take advantage of them.

  And then he heard about Pandora.

  Pandora wasn’t his case. He wasn’t anywhere near Bern when everything went wrong and John Russo got killed. But the CIA’s failure worried him. So Dante had gone to Jamilla Carter and told her almost everything about Charlie, showing her the IQ tests and the other data he had dug up, revealing Charlie’s crime against Lightning and how it could be used to force Charlie to help the CIA. He hadn’t told the truth about how he knew about Charlie, keeping the family connection a secret, although he figured Carter would piece that together
sooner or later—if she hadn’t already. It was a risk, but if there was any time to take a risk, it was now. Pandora needed to be kept out of the hands of the Furies—or any terrorist group—and Dante felt obligated to suggest his own plan, no matter how unorthodox it was.

  Now he just had to hope it worked.

  PART TWO

  THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD

  The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  FOURTEEN

  Israel

  Halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

  I want a code name,” Charlie said.

  They were in a black SUV, heading along Israel’s Highway 1 to Jerusalem. It was ten minutes past one in the afternoon. The CIA had lost eight hours flying east.

  After Greenland, Charlie had spent her time on the jet boning up on Einstein—Dante had brought three books on the scientist and his work from the CIA’s private library—until exhaustion overcame her. Then she had curled into a ball on the couch and slept until they touched down at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Dante had done the same, slumped in the chair across from her. And even though Milana was technically flying the plane, she had set the autopilot again and dozed herself en route. When you were CIA, you learned to get your sleep when you could.

  There was a separate terminal at Ben Gurion Airport for private jets. Two agents from the Jerusalem office had met them there when they landed. They were parked right on the tarmac and facilitated a fast transit through customs. The Israeli team had also provided Charlie with new clothes, seeing as ski gear would have looked ridiculous in Jerusalem, where the closest snow was a hundred miles away. The clothes were tourist-casual, designed to blend in: shorts and a T-shirt for Charlie. All the adults were already wearing khaki pants and neutral button-down shirts. Charlie had changed in the bathroom at customs. The clothes fit perfectly. Someone had guessed her measurements to a tee, probably Milana, as Dante didn’t seem like the type who would know anything about girl’s clothing sizes.

  One of the Jerusalem agents was a short, stocky guy with a crew cut who looked like he could have been Israeli but was really Sri Lankan. The woman actually was Israeli by birth, but looked stereotypically Californian, with blond hair, a dark tan, and a lithe, limber body. The guy was driving. His name was Agent Ratsimanohatra, but that was a mouthful, so everyone called him Rats. The woman sat in the passenger seat. Her name was Agent Bendavid, but since she looked like a Barbie doll, everyone called her Barbie.

  As Charlie had learned, Garcia was Dagger, and he had revealed that Agent Moon was called Coyote. The three of them were all crammed into the back seat of the SUV, which was big, but not quite big enough to share with someone as bulked up as Garcia. Garcia and Milana were at the doors, intently staring out the windows, like they were expecting trouble at any moment. Charlie was wedged between them.

  “Those aren’t code names,” Barbie said curtly. “We don’t use them on missions. They’re just nicknames.”

  “Fine,” Charlie said. “Then I want a nickname.”

  Rats gave her a hard look in the rearview mirror.

  It was clear that neither Rats nor Barbie liked anything that was going on here. Charlie had expected a certain amount of humorless, down-to-business attitude, but these two had been cold and brusque since the jet had landed. Charlie wasn’t sure if they were upset about the mission itself, Charlie, or something else altogether, but they were definitely being jerks.

  “I’ve come up with a good name for myself,” Charlie said.

  “I’m sure you have,” Barbie grumbled.

  “Prometheus,” Charlie announced.

  Milana Moon turned from the window to look at her. “That’s a man’s name.”

  “So? You’re named after an animal. Dagger’s named after a weapon. There’s no rule that says I can’t have a masculine code name.”

  “All I meant was there are a lot of cool women’s names,” Milana said. “If you wanted to go mythological, I would have thought you’d want one of those. Like Athena. Or Artemis.”

  It struck Charlie that this was the first thing Milana had said to her that could count as a conversation rather than discussion about the mission. She smiled in response. “I like Prometheus just the same. And besides, he wasn’t really a man. He was a Titan.”

  “He was also a thief,” Dante said. He kept staring out the window, looking away from Charlie as he spoke. “He stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. Prometheus thought what he was doing was a selfless act, but the gods didn’t agree. As punishment, they condemned him to have an eagle rip out his liver for eternity. Is that what you think is going on here, Charlie? That you’re being punished unfairly? Because your theft wasn’t exactly selfless.”

  “I donated a lot of that money to charity,” Charlie replied.

  “But not all of it, I’m sure.”

  “I want to be Prometheus,” Charlie said flatly.

  “If you want to be mythological,” Dante said, “I think ‘Eris’ would be more fitting for you. She was the goddess of chaos.”

  “Maybe we should change your code name to Hemorrhoid,” Charlie shot back. “Because you’re being a real pain in my rear end.”

  Charlie noticed Milana crack a smile at this for a split second before catching herself. Dante noticed too and reddened around his ears. Charlie couldn’t tell if this was due to embarrassment or anger. Probably both. “We’re done with this conversation,” he said, and then turned his attention to responding to e-mails on his phone.

  Charlie looked past her brother to the scenery outside the window. She had never been to Israel before and was fascinated by what she saw. The highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem wasn’t long—Israel was a very narrow country—but it was choked with traffic the entire way. The highway slowly gained elevation as it went east from the coast, passing through hills that were green from recent winter rains, covered with grass that would be brown in only a few weeks. Even from the highway, Charlie could see a bizarre clash of time periods from Israel’s fifty centuries of civilization: brand-new bridges arced over ancient Roman ruins; Bedouin families grazed their goats outside recently built suburbs; decades-old military vehicles sat rusting next to modern convenience stores. Although it was winter, the desert sun was beating down from a cloudless sky.

  While Charlie was at once excited and frightened to have joined the hunt for Pandora, being in Israel brought another emotion to her, one that surprised her. She felt like she was suddenly part of history in a way that she never had been before. Her hometown in Vermont was only a few hundred years old. Boulder, Colorado, where her university was, was only one hundred and fifty, while Snowmass, where she had started the day, had been founded only five decades earlier. But people had been living in Israel for thousands of years, since even before biblical times. They had cultivated this land, built civilizations, razed them, and built new ones. Too many wars to count had been fought over it. Charlie wondered if there was a single hill within sight that someone hadn’t died on.

  The SUV crested a rise, and the city of Jerusalem came into view. Thousands of buildings perched at the top of a mountain, each built from the same white limestone, glistening in the sunlight.

  Charlie’s sense of anticipation grew stronger. Jerusalem was the city that had been luring people to the region ever since its founding, five thousand years before. Pilgrims, crusaders, prophets, and tourists. Charlie had once heard that the city was known as the navel of the world, since all life seemed to spring from it. At the time that had seemed silly to her, but now she felt it might be true.

  Dante checked his watch impatiently. “Call the archives again,” he told Agent Bendavid. “It shouldn’t take this long to find one stupid book.”

  Agent Bendavid didn’t follow the order. Instead, she said, “From what I understand, there are a lot of books in those archives.”

  “There are sixteen millio
n books in the Library of Congress,” Dante replied. “And the librarians there can find anything you need in minutes. Did you explain to them that this is a priority?”

  Bendavid turned around in the front seat, not even bothering to hide her annoyance. “I’m trying to walk a fine line here. I know you don’t want me telling them the real reasons that we want that book. I haven’t even told them that we’re CIA. But I’ve already pressed them as much as I can. If I push harder, they’re going to suspect something is up. And when Israelis get suspicious, you know who they call?”

  “The Mossad,” Charlie said. Which was the national intelligence agency of Israel. Their equivalent of the CIA. Except with a tougher reputation.

  Barbie looked at her, like she might have been the tiniest bit impressed that Charlie knew this. “Exactly. And I’m guessing we don’t want the Mossad to know about Pandora.”

  “Of course not,” Dante confirmed.

  “Then we need to be cool,” Barbie said. “We’ll be at the university soon. As far as the archivists know, you’re a visiting literature professor working on a book about how Sherlock Holmes influenced the thoughts of great scientists throughout the twentieth century. I told them you want to examine the book to see if Einstein made any notations in it. They’re already bending over backward to carve out time for us on short notice. I don’t think I should push any harder than that.”

  Charlie watched her brother think that through. A bad leader would have bristled at an underling questioning his orders—especially in the cocksure tone Bendavid was using—and doubled down, getting angry and insisting on his way. But Dante wasn’t like that. He obviously didn’t like Bendavid’s attitude, but he still graciously conceded she was right. “Good point. I’m obviously just concerned about the Furies getting to this book before we do.”