by Stuart Gibbs
THIRTY
In the marble shower of his suite at the King David Hotel, John Russo scrubbed two weeks’ worth of dirt off his body.
The King David was one of the finest hotels in Jerusalem, where presidents, kings, and sheikhs had stayed for decades. It perched on the edge of a ravine directly across from the Old City, which John had a view of from his balcony.
He had just come from there, after meeting with Alexei in a nondescript falafel shop. That had been part of their plan all along, to reconvene after the ambush at the safe house. What hadn’t been part of the plan was that three CIA agents would still be alive. They should have all been dead; John had practically gift wrapped them for the Furies, but those idiots had still screwed things up. First, they had somehow allowed the agents to escape the safe house—and then three Furies had gotten their butts kicked by two women in the market, one of whom was only a child.
And yet the operation had been a success. John still had plans in place to neutralize the CIA—and more important, he now had what Einstein had hidden in the book. Alexei, aware that he was too stupid to comprehend it, had handed it right over to John.
The Furies had no idea he was in this hotel, splurging on this high-end room. They thought he had merely gone somewhere quiet to study Einstein’s code. Alexei certainly would have been upset to know he was here. He would have considered checking into such a decadent place simply for a decent shower and some air-conditioning to be an unnecessary luxury. But John had spent enough of his life paying his dues, living in roach-infested hovels while he did his undercover work; he deserved a little luxury.
Originally, John hadn’t minded the hardship. He had always wanted to be an undercover agent, and hardship was part of the package. So he was prepared for the rigors of pretending to be someone else for months at a time. But what had surprised him was that sometimes after the mission was over it was hard to go back to being himself. Every time John returned from an operation, he felt as though he had lost a piece of who he was. Undercover agents were supposed to have long gaps between assignments to recover and build themselves back up emotionally—but because the CIA was strapped for agents with his skill set, John kept rotating back into play. He had told his superiors he could handle it, that it wasn’t taking a toll on him, but it was, slowly and surely. So slowly he didn’t notice it was happening himself.
Then, one day in Bern, after more than a month undercover, he had realized he felt more comfortable as Maxim than he did as John. He could remember his fake background more readily than his real one: fake birth date, fake parents, fake memories. Even worse, he began to fear returning to life as John. This didn’t mean he agreed with the Furies; on the contrary, he still considered them fanatical morons. But he no longer wanted to bring the Furies down the CIA’s way, because once he did, his mission would be over and he would have to go back to being himself. Which meant he would soon have to pretend to be yet another person, and another after that, and another, and so on—a prospect John wanted to avoid at all costs.
He had kept all this to himself, knowing that if he spoke a word of it to the CIA, the Agency would pull the plug on the whole operation and he would have to return to real life again that much faster. So he kept grinding away, acting like a good soldier, looking for a way out.
And then, one day, he found it. The key to everything. The discovery that would solve his problems and provide him with the means to never have to work again.
There was a trove of Einstein’s papers in Bern: Thousands of pages were stored in the archives at the city’s historic museum, as well as at the museum in Einstein’s old home. The public had access to many of them, so long as they were handled with extreme care. The Furies were combing through it all, pretending to be graduate students, hunting for the book Alexei suspected contained Pandora—or any clue to its location.
Most of the papers were useless. It sometimes seemed as if every single thing Einstein had ever written down had been preserved, no matter how mundane. The archives held his journals from elementary school, textbooks he had never opened, even shopping lists from the early years of his marriage. To make matters worse, John was sure that over the past decades, the CIA, MI6, and various other covert organizations had swiped anything of value anyhow, so all he was left with were the meaningless scraps. But he helped sift through it all, because everyone—the CIA and the Furies—wanted him to.
One day, he had been idly flipping through one of Einstein’s high school texts when he noticed something was hidden inside the back cover. A single piece of paper, tucked into a hairline slit. John carefully removed and examined it. At first it merely appeared to be a jumble of numbers; John would have dismissed it as idle doodling had it not been so carefully concealed. Upon closer examination he realized what it was: Teenage Einstein, probably sitting bored in the back of a classroom, was devising a secret code. And John held the key to it in his hands.
What Einstein wanted to say at the time wasn’t particularly important. The future scientist’s mind wasn’t on mass, energy, or the space-time continuum. Instead, he was concerned with what any teenage boy generally was: girls. The greatest genius of the twentieth century was passing notes in class. Only, he had created a cipher to do it.
John pounced on a pile of journals from Einstein’s college years that he had already examined. Every now and then he had seen a notation in Einstein’s writing on the pages, something which he and decades of snoops before him had dismissed as mere scribbling. Armed with the key, however, John could now see the notations were much more.
Einstein was writing notes to himself.
There was rarely much to them, but they were always about something that Einstein wanted to keep private: new thought experiments, ideas on wave-particle theory and Brownian motion, the genesis of special relativity.
But while Einstein’s fields of interest changed often throughout his life, his coding system remained exactly the same.
John suddenly felt as if destiny had smiled upon him. He alone had stumbled upon the secret to Einstein’s innermost thoughts. John couldn’t guarantee that Pandora would be encoded, but given the great lengths Einstein had taken to hide it, he guessed it would be—and he was now the only person alive who would know how to read it.
Meanwhile, the Furies had a very good idea where Pandora was hidden. The KGB agent who had first tipped them off had also suggested the archives in Jerusalem. Since Israel was harder to get to, they Furies had targeted Bern first. But now that Bern had turned out to be a bust, they were laying plans to move on.
The CIA didn’t have John wired constantly. Doing so was far too risky for an undercover man. Therefore, it wasn’t hard for John to abuse their trust and find a time to come clean to Alexei. Of course, Alexei had been livid at the betrayal, threatening to kill him, but once John explained his plan, Alexei had quickly seen the light. Soon afterward the rest of the Furies were let in on it as well.
As far as the CIA could tell, nothing had changed. John still appeared to be a dutiful undercover agent, meeting with the Furies more and more often, until the time came to put his plans into action.
Late one night Fez found a homeless man the same size and build as John, killed him, and dragged him into the Furies’ apartment. The next morning, the Furies dressed the still-warm body in John’s clothes. Knowing the CIA was listening in, John faked his linguistic screwup. The Furies pretended to realize he was a spy and then obliterated anything that could be used to ID the corpse.
While the CIA was dealing with the loss of an undercover agent, John was slipping out of Switzerland with the Furies. He had amassed enough passports over the years, courtesy of the Agency, so that getting into Israel wasn’t a problem. If an agent died, that didn’t mean his alter egos did; it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone at the CIA to declare someone dead who hadn’t existed in the first place.
John had spent the last two weeks working his way to Jerusalem with the Furies, keeping off the grid, sleeping on buses and ferries, avoiding p
hone calls and ATM withdrawals, scrounging for scraps of food. It had been an ordeal, but they had finally made it into Israel and headed directly for Einstein’s archives.
And then Dante Garcia had shown up with a young girl in tow and ruined everything. John knew who Dante was. Dante had been two years ahead of him at the academy. And he knew Milana Moon via her reputation. But the girl was a curveball. According to Alexei, her name was Charlie, and she was even younger than she looked. More important, she had unusual mental abilities. John wasn’t sure whether to believe that, but the fact remained that with Charlie along, the CIA had certainly caused him a great deal of trouble.
However, John still had Einstein’s clue. And the CIA didn’t.
John stepped from the shower, toweled himself off, and slipped into a plush bathrobe. It felt wonderful against his skin, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down on the bed in it and take a nap.
But there was no time for that. The few minutes he had spent in the shower and the new clothes he had bought for himself were all the luxury he could afford.
When John had reserved the hotel room that morning, he had expected his day to go far differently. He had assumed the CIA had no idea where Einstein’s book was hidden and that he could recover it easily. John had imagined he would have plenty of time to celebrate—to eat a gourmet meal and sleep in a nice, soft bed for the first time in months. But so much had gone wrong. He could no longer stay here tonight. He had to get to work right away.
John unfolded Einstein’s clue on the desk in his hotel room. It was amazing to think that the great genius himself had written this and that it had been hidden for decades, protected from the world until just this morning. The once pristine paper was now crumpled and torn. But the numbers on it were still legible.
John laid out a fresh sheet of hotel stationery and began translating. In the months since he had learned Einstein’s cipher, he no longer needed the key and was able to quickly convert the numbers to words.
Only, the results threw him.
It wasn’t only Charlie Thorne who was tossing a wrench into the works today. Now Einstein himself had done it. The code hadn’t revealed Pandora. It had simply revealed another clue.
John considered it carefully. He was an intelligent man and he had studied Einstein’s life in detail over the last few months. After a few minutes of thought, everything began to make sense. A smile spread across his face.
In addition to renting the hotel room, John had splurged on brand-new clothes. His old ones reeked and were crusted with two weeks’ worth of dirt and grime. John tossed the old clothes into the garbage and dressed quickly in the new ones. It was time to move again.
He was now the only man on earth who knew precisely where Pandora was hidden.
THIRTY-ONE
Isaac Semel called Jamilla Carter from the Jerusalem safe house.
Semel was an agent with Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. He had served for forty years, ever since joining directly from the Israeli army, and he had seen more than his fair share of adventure. At the age of sixty-one, he was as fit and trim as a twenty-year-old, although years in the Middle Eastern sun had baked his skin into leather. He had known Jamilla Carter for a long time, but they were business associates, not friends. Semel didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“You have a real bad situation here,” he said.
“How many dead?” Carter asked.
“Your whole Jerusalem team, except for Agent Bendavid.”
Carter didn’t ask how Semel knew who the people on her Jerusalem team were, even though their identities were supposed to be secret. He had simply known. The same way he had known exactly where the CIA safe house was, even though that was supposed to be a secret too. The Mossad had probably had the place under surveillance for years.
Carter asked, “Where is Agent Bendavid right now?”
“In the bathroom. Throwing up. She’s awfully upset about this whole thing.”
Carter considered keeping the presence of Agents Garcia and Moon in Israel a secret, then decided there was no point. The Mossad had probably known they were there from the moment their plane touched down. “I had two other agents in Jerusalem today. . . .”
“Don’t you mean three?”
“Only two were agents. The third was an asset. A young girl. Are any of them . . . ?” Carter couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
“No,” Semel answered. “None of them are here. The only bodies are those of the agents on your Jerusalem team.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Your safe house was compromised. Looks like a double agent was involved. There’s no sign of forced entry. Whoever came in knew the access codes. And they knew exactly where all your security cameras were.”
“Do you think Bendavid could be the turncoat?”
“That’s doubtful. She seems genuinely surprised by what happened here.”
“She could be faking.”
“I’ve seen people fake being upset plenty of times. It doesn’t look like this. My guess is the mole is one of your agents who showed up here today. Quite likely both. Otherwise, one of them would probably be dead here too.”
Carter lapsed into silence, thinking this through. The idea that Dante Garcia or Milana Moon could be a double agent seemed impossible—but then, that was generally the case with all double agents. The CIA carefully vetted every employee, submitting them to batteries of psychological tests to determine who was the most trustworthy—and yet people still turned. All the time.
Garcia had come to Carter with the proposal to go after Pandora—and he had asked for Moon specifically. Had the two of them been plotting this all along? And if so, how did Charlie Thorne fit into everything? Was the kid involved—or was she just a pawn Garcia had suggested playing so he could get into the game? Either scenario seemed plausible. The kid was already a proven criminal, so maybe she had cooked the whole plan up herself. And she wouldn’t have had trouble tracking Dante down; after all, she was his half sister.
Pandora would be worth millions on the black market. Enough money to turn even the most stalwart agents. Garcia and Moon—and perhaps Thorne—must have made a play for it, and the Jerusalem office got wise. So they took the whole team out and fled. Which would explain why she hadn’t heard from any of them yet.
It occurred to her that Semel was speaking to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What was that again?”
“I asked what this new team was doing here in Jerusalem. Were they investigating anything I ought to be concerned about?”
“No,” Carter lied. “It was merely a training mission.”
“Training?” Semel repeated, obviously suspicious.
Carter spent the next few minutes spinning a tale of what the training mission had been. It was a total fabrication, but she sold it well enough. She knew she couldn’t tell Semel the truth about Pandora, because then Semel would want to obtain Pandora for Israel. But with her Jerusalem team dead, Carter needed Semel’s help.
“All right,” Semel said finally, sounding convinced. “I’m guessing you want to track down these rogue agents right away?”
“Yes,” Carter admitted. “Agent Bendavid has all the information you need on them. It was sent to her team this morning.”
“I’ve already seen it.”
Carter’s secretary suddenly spoke over the intercom. “Ma’am, I know you told me not to interrupt you, but Agent Moon is calling from Jerusalem.”
Carter sat up, surprised. “On her cellular?”
“No, ma’am. Someone else’s. I don’t know whose.”
“Well, find out where she is.”
“Already done.” This was an easy task nowadays. Cellular phones constantly marked their exact location. People might as well have been carrying homing beacons on their backs. Most CIA agents had phones that blocked these signals, but if Moon was on a regular person’s cell—for whatever reason—they could triangulate her posi
tion within seconds. “She’s at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City.”
“Good work.” Carter got back on the phone with Semel. “Moon is at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Do you have any men close to there?”
“I have men everywhere,” the Mossad agent replied. “We’ll bring her in.”
THIRTY-TWO
Charlie visualized Einstein’s clue in her mind.
The moment she had first laid her eyes on the clue, she had willed herself to commit it to memory—and then reviewed it again and again. She hadn’t expected the Furies to ambush the CIA in their own safe house, but she had still feared something might go wrong. Anything as dangerous and powerful as Pandora was bound to be trouble.
Milana had gone off to call the CIA, so she could report what they had figured out about John Russo. Charlie could see her in the crowd, using a phone borrowed from a tourist.
In the meantime, the sooner Charlie could figure out what Einstein’s clue meant, the better.
Another tourist had been kind enough to lend her a pen and some scratch paper. Now she wrote Einstein’s clue down so she could look at it:
She considered what she had already deduced:
π = Pandora
MCMXXXI = 1931
Then she set about solving the rest of it.
Only, she couldn’t.
She stared at the clue for a long time, searching for patterns she might have missed, manipulating the numbers in her mind, waiting for inspiration to strike. But it didn’t.
She was stuck.
This was an unusual experience for Charlie. She had been stymied by problems before, of course, but it didn’t happen often. Like when she was teaching herself calculus at age five. She had eventually figured it out, but it had taken time and patience, two things she didn’t have much of now.
Charlie realized it had been a long time since she had challenged herself. She had been goofing off all through school, doing the least amount of work necessary to get by. Now it seemed as if her brain had gotten rusty. As she futilely scanned the clue over and over, she wondered if she had slipped a bit. Perhaps, by not pushing her limits, she had let her mind grow fallow.
