Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  “That’s not going to happen,” Rats assured him. “If Pandora’s in that book, then it’ll be in our hands in less than thirty minutes.”

  Dante frowned, not ready to be optimistic about this yet.

  “We’ll get it,” Milana told him, then gave him a reassuring smile.

  Dante looked back out the window at the approaching city, wishing they were already at the archives, the equation in their hands. As much as he wanted to believe Milana, he had a nagging feeling that this wasn’t going to be that easy.

  FIFTEEN

  Safra Campus

  Hebrew University, Jerusalem

  Despite Charlie’s genius, since she was only twelve, there were still large gaps in her knowledge. She was surprised to discover that while the Old City of Jerusalem had been continuously inhabited for more than five thousand years, the part of the city outside the ancient walls was less than a hundred years old—far younger than London or Paris. Younger than New York or Philadelphia. Even younger than Albert Einstein himself.

  The Old City had been built atop a mountain peak, designed to impress pilgrims and repel invaders, and the surrounding landscape was filled with steep hills and deep valleys. The Safra Campus of Hebrew University, where Einstein’s archives were located, sat on one such hill, facing another upon which Israel’s main government buildings were arrayed.

  The center of the campus was at the crest of the hill, a wide lawn flanked by 1950s buildings and abutted by what had once been the National Library of Israel but was now just the library for the university. After driving through two separate security checkpoints manned by armed guards, they were directed to a parking lot just outside the library.

  It was one thirty in the afternoon.

  As Rats steered into the lot, Bendavid told Dante, “You’ll have to leave your weapons in the car.”

  Dante cocked an eyebrow at her. “With Pandora at stake?”

  “You’re supposed to be a visiting professor, not a CIA agent,” Bendavid reminded him. “And there are metal detectors at almost every building here. You don’t want to make waves, remember?”

  Dante reluctantly removed not just his gun, but the entire shoulder holster from underneath his jacket, and handed it to Bendavid in the front seat.

  Milana did the same thing.

  Bendavid took off her weapon as well, then placed everything in the glove compartment.

  Rats pulled into a parking space. The library sat directly in front of them, a dull, squat rectangle built into the hillside. The main entrance, and the central lawn, lay up an outdoor flight of stairs.

  Dante and Milana barely even waited for the SUV to stop moving before they leapt out, eager to get the book.

  Charlie started to follow her brother out of the SUV, but Dante held up an open palm. “Sorry, kid. I need you to wait in the car with Rats.”

  “You have to be kidding,” Charlie said.

  “Barbie was right,” Dante told her. “We don’t want to do anything that will raise suspicion. It’s a hard enough sell that I’m a visiting professor. We don’t want to have to explain what a twelve-year-old is doing here too.”

  “Tell them I’m your niece!” Charlie argued. “I’m a fellow book fanatic, tagging along with you. If anything, my presence will probably make them less suspicious. You guys look so much like CIA agents you might as well just have it tattooed on your foreheads.”

  The agents looked from one to the other, sizing themselves up, wondering if Charlie was right.

  “I promised you I’d keep you safe,” Dante told her. “So that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Can I at least wait in the library?” Charlie asked. “So I can find a book to read?”

  “No,” Dante said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “It’s a library,” Charlie said petulantly. “The worst that can happen in there is I’ll get a paper cut.”

  Dante simply shut the door.

  Before Charlie could open it again, Rats engaged the automatic locks, trapping her inside the vehicle. Charlie jiggled the handle angrily, then banged on the window. “Dante!” she yelled. “This isn’t cool!”

  If Dante heard her, he didn’t show it. Instead, he, Milana, and Bendavid headed up the library steps without so much as a glance back at the SUV.

  Charlie turned to Rats. “Seriously? You’re okay with them leaving us like this?”

  “I’m not okay with any of this,” Rats replied grumpily. “But orders are orders.”

  Charlie sullenly slumped in her seat. “I flew halfway around the world to get here and now I’m supposed to just wait in the car? This sucks.”

  Rats didn’t respond. He remained facing forward, staring alertly out the front windshield at the library.

  Charlie watched Dante, Milana, and Bendavid disappear over the top of the stairs, hoping she was right that Pandora was actually here.

  • • •

  The headquarters for Einstein’s archives were in a tiny, unassuming office on the second floor of a building just off the main lawn. The door was flanked by two glass cases, one of which held replicas of awards that had been given to Einstein, while the other held a toy Einstein doll. Dante regarded them curiously, wondering if any other Nobel Prize winners had children’s plush toys modeled after them. He doubted it.

  A prim middle-aged woman answered the door within seconds of their knocking on it, as though she had been eagerly awaiting their arrival. “Hello!” she said cheerfully. “I’m Golda Solomon, director of the archives.” Like most Israelis, she spoke English fluently, even though Hebrew was the official language of the country. She looked to the women. “I must have spoken to one of you on the phone . . . ?”

  “That was me,” Bendavid replied. “I’m Leah Bendavid. And this is my good friend Professor Dante Garcia, from Georgetown University.”

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me,” Dante said graciously. There was no point to creating an alias for something like this. His passport and all his other ID had his real name on them. The CIA could provide any fake academic credentials he needed, not that a library or archive would even ask for them. “This is my associate Milana Moon.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet both of you,” Golda said. Although she was conservatively dressed in a suit, Dante got the sense that she, like most Israelis, could handle herself in battle if needed. Almost everyone in Israel had to do at least two years of mandatory service in the army, and it made everyone tough and capable, even years afterward. Golda stepped into the hallway and locked the office door behind her.

  “We’re not going into the archives?” Dante asked.

  “These are only the administrative offices,” Golda explained. “Professor Einstein left far more to the university than we could store in this little space.” She started back toward the staircase.

  “So, where are the books?” Bendavid asked.

  “In the library, of course.” Golda grinned over her shoulder as she led the way down the stairs. “Including the one you’re looking for.”

  “You found it?” Dante asked excitedly.

  “Yes,” Golda said proudly. “I must admit, this was an unusual request. I don’t think anyone has ever asked to see this particular book before. I’m a little surprised we could find it on such short notice.”

  “Really?” Milana asked. “I’d have thought that all of Einstein’s belongings would have been cataloged long ago.”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” Golda explained. “The book arrived long ago.” They reached the bottom of the stairs and passed out the door back onto the main lawn. “Over his lifetime Einstein willed hundreds of thousands of items to the archives. To be honest, we’re still not done going through them.”

  “Still?” Bendavid repeated. “It’s been nearly seventy years since he died.”

  Golda said, “There are a staggering number of items that need to be conserved in this country, and to be honest, these haven’t been the highest priority. The Dead Sea Scrolls have a full-time staff
of conservators working five days a week, with the government footing the bill. We don’t have that luxury.”

  The lawn was crowded with students, like that of any other university on a warm winter day. They were eating lunch, sipping coffee, lazing on the grass while they read or did homework or simply basked in the sun. At the far end of the lawn, a game of Ultimate Frisbee was underway, while closer by, a group of students strummed guitars in the shade of an enormous oak tree.

  “We have to make do with volunteers,” Golda continued. “Working when they can, on a very small budget. Priority was given to Einstein’s personal documents. His notebooks, his manuscripts, his letters. But his books . . . Well, to be honest, while it’s nice to have them, they’ve been a bit of a burden.”

  “Why is that?” Dante asked.

  At the end of the lawn, there was a medium-size cement plaza in front of the library entrance. Half the plaza was given to a fountain. Five college boys were doing tricks on their skateboards along the edge of it.

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you to hear that Einstein was a voracious reader,” Golda said. “He owned more than fifteen thousand books during his lifetime. Not every one of them was an important work, but they all ended up here. Normally, if someone wills books to a library, the idea is to share them with the readers. We go through them, pick the ones we think people will want to read, and throw the rest away.”

  “Throw them away?” Milana gasped, horrified by the thought.

  “Sadly, we can’t take every book people donate,” Golda said.

  As they crossed the plaza in front of the library, Dante could see their SUV parked in the lot below, Rats still at the wheel, keeping an eye on Charlie. Dante held the main doors of the library open for the women, and they passed inside.

  There was a security station with a metal scanner. It wasn’t nearly as advanced as what they had passed through to enter the campus—only a metal detector, an X-ray machine for bags, and a bored security guard watching over it all—but Dante still realized they had made the right call leaving their weapons in the car.

  Golda set her keys and phone in a plastic bowl, then passed through the scanner. “The library even purges its own stacks every few years. If a book hasn’t been checked out in a decade, it gets tossed to make room for books that people do want to read. But that wasn’t the case with Einstein’s. It didn’t seem right to throw anything of his away. But his books were all deemed too precious to loan out as well. So they’ve just ended up sitting in a vault in the basement here, taking up space.”

  Dante also placed his keys and phone in the bowl and then passed through the scanner. “So that’s where the book I’m looking for has been?”

  “Yes,” Golda answered. “It came to us in 1947, eight years before Einstein died, along with a thousand other books from his youth. They were all cataloged once, then put aside and basically forgotten. The records for them haven’t been updated since, although they were computerized back in the 1990s.”

  Milana and Bendavid passed through the scanner without incident. While the main stacks of the library lay directly ahead, Golda led them toward a door marked LIBRARY STAFF ONLY.

  Dante noticed there was no security system on the door. No keypad entry or card reader. There were no cameras in the halls either. The library appeared to have been built in the 1950s and had little modification ever since.

  Golda led them through the staff door, to yet another staircase, this one descending into the basement level of the library. “I expect you’re very excited to see this book,” she said.

  “Extremely,” Dante agreed. “I promise, I’ll take very good care of it while it’s in my possession.”

  Golda stopped in the middle of the stairs, surprised. “Oh. The book can’t leave the archives. That was Einstein’s stipulation for all of his donations.”

  Dante frowned. “Yes, but this is an unusual case. . . .”

  “There can be no exceptions,” Golda said firmly. “Books are extremely delicate. Our vault has a specifically designed climate to protect them from mildew, mold, and pests. If they were removed from there, even for a minute, the effects could be devastating.”

  Dante wasn’t surprised by this, but he had hoped exceptions might be made for a lesser-known book like Einstein’s Holmes collection. However, he still didn’t want to play his hand by revealing where he was really from. Reviewing the book inside the vault might be time-consuming, but he could still keep it safe there.

  He told Golda, “If that’s the case, I need to call in another analyst.” He turned to Bendavid and said, “Phone Rats. Tell him to bring in Charlie.”

  SIXTEEN

  Sitting in the SUV outside, Charlie said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “No, you don’t,” Rats replied. “You’re only saying that so I’ll let you out of the car.”

  “No, I’m saying it because I have to go to the bathroom,” Charlie told him, although this was in fact a lie. She was going stir crazy in the car. Rats had guessed correctly, but she wasn’t about to let him know that. “I had a bunch of water on the plane, and I’ve been sitting in this car ever since the airport. My bladder is so full it hurts.”

  “I’m sure you can hold it.”

  “I’ve been holding it for more than an hour! Maybe all you CIA guys have some sort of advanced bladder control training, but I’m just a kid. I need to pee like forty times a day. If you don’t let me go, I’m going to ruin all the nice upholstery you have back here.”

  “Go ahead,” Rats said, calling her bluff. “This isn’t my car anyhow.”

  Charlie flopped back in her seat, annoyed. She briefly considered urinating all over the SUV, just to teach Rats and everyone else at the CIA a lesson about how to treat kids, but decided it wasn’t worth the embarrassment and the wet pants. In truth, she didn’t really have to go at all. She had even been carefully monitoring her water intake so that, in case there was an emergency, she wouldn’t have to pee.

  She stared back out the windows again, looking at the campus she wasn’t being allowed to set foot on.

  As it was the afternoon, there were plenty of people around. The parking lot was nearly full, but most people were coming and going from the campus by foot or bicycle. Students and professors were moving up and down the stairs to the library at a steady rate.

  The students looked pretty much the same as Charlie’s fellow students had at the University of Colorado; fashion all over the world had conformed. The students wore the same style of clothes and sweatshirts with the university name on them. They carried the same style of backpacks. They had all gone to Starbucks.

  Up at the top of the stairs, she could see the kids on their skateboards, attempting their tricks along the fountain, despite the NO SKATEBOARDS sign clearly posted nearby. There were skateboard guys at Colorado who did exactly the same thing and would have fit right in there. And just like the Colorado guys, these guys were failing at every trick they attempted, their boards clattering on the plaza.

  Charlie was a much better skateboarder than these idiots. Or the ones back in Colorado. It had to do with seeing the numbers and then being skilled enough to put them to use. Skateboarding was how Charlie had first realized she could see the numbers in the first place. When she was seven, she had received a hand-me-down skateboard and used it all the time. (Even when her parents grounded her, she would often sneak out and practice tricks in the neighborhood.) She had honed her gift over the years, getting better and better at putting the numbers into practice, and thus, better and better at sports as well. She still boarded a lot. Mostly, she kept to herself, although sometimes at her university she would stop by the skateboard guys and pull off a few tricks to put them to shame.

  She wanted to do that with these guys now. She wanted to be with Dante looking for Pandora. She wanted to be anywhere but held prisoner in this stupid SUV.

  Rats’s phone rang. He answered it, then listened for fifteen seconds. “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll
bring her in.” He hung up and turned to Charlie. “They need you inside.”

  Charlie sat up, excited. “Why?”

  “They’ve got the book, but it can’t leave the vault.” Rats locked everyone else’s gun in the glove compartment but kept his own tucked in his holster.

  “They’re not going to let you take that in,” Charlie warned.

  “I’m not bringing you in. I’m only walking you to the door. Then I’m going to keep an eye out for trouble. Let’s go.” Rats climbed out of the SUV.

  Charlie quickly leapt out herself, excited to finally have something to do. She ran up the steps, forcing Rats to chase after her, then turned toward the door of the library . . .

  And froze in her tracks.

  She turned back toward the plaza, knowing that something had triggered a reaction in her subconscious. Even in her haste, her mind had been working furiously, taking in everything about her surroundings. Now she looked closer, taking the time to really focus.

  By the fountain, the skateboarders were still attempting their tricks and failing. Other students were crossing back and forth through the plaza on their way to class or the library, while others sat on benches in the sun.

  Rats came huffing up the stairs behind Charlie. “What’s the matter?” he asked, sounding even more annoyed than usual. “I thought you were all excited to get moving. So move.”

  “Something’s wrong.” Charlie kept staring at the plaza, analyzing everything. One of the skateboard guys was attempting an ollie off the edge of the fountain and making a mess of it. Two college employees, most likely professors, given their manner and dress, were glaring at the skateboarders disdainfully as they passed, but not actually saying anything, as though their harsh glares alone would be enough to get the point across. . . .

  There.

  At the edge of the lawn, a man sat on a bench. He had a newspaper in his hands, but he wasn’t reading it. He was looking past the newspaper, unable to keep his focus on it, as if it were merely a prop. Unlike everyone else, he was sitting in the shade, where it would have been chilly, when there was a perfectly good vacant bench in the warm sun across the plaza. However, the bench in the sun faced the opposite direction. So it seemed that the guy hadn’t chosen the bench for comfort but for what it gave him a view of—which was the entrance to the library.