by Stuart Gibbs
Then again, she was matching wits with Einstein.
Frustrated, Charlie tore her attention from the paper. She wasn’t sure how long she had been staring at it, but her eyes were getting bleary in the dim light of the church. She shifted her gaze toward the main doors, where bright sunlight flooded through.
Milana was over there, where cellular reception was stronger, silhouetted by the light.
Her back was to Charlie.
Which meant Charlie could slip away.
The thought just sprang into Charlie’s mind. Escape would take only a few seconds. There was an emergency exit close by. Charlie could slip out it and melt into the crowds. Milana, on her own, would never be able to find Charlie again. It was a rare lapse of judgment on her part, dropping her guard like this, although Charlie figured Milana wasn’t quite herself today. The fact that she was functioning at all after everything that had happened was a testament to her strength.
Still, Milana would realize her mistake soon enough. She would check to make sure Charlie was still there. If Charlie was going to go, she had to go now. . . .
Only, things had changed.
When Charlie had tried to escape from the safe house just a few hours before, all she needed to do was destroy Einstein’s clue and Pandora would have stayed hidden forever. Now the Furies had the clue. What if they—or John Russo—already knew how to solve it?
Charlie considered the possibility of leaving the clue behind for Milana if she ran, but she doubted that would work out. The clue would probably be whisked back to CIA headquarters for analysis. How long would that take? Days? Weeks? Whereas the Furies could be moving quickly toward Pandora. By the time the CIA even figured out which end was up, the enemy could have Einstein’s equation in their hands.
Therefore, Charlie was the only one who could stop them.
You have a chance to make a difference, Dante had told her.
Maybe Dante had been wrong to drag Charlie into this business by pointing a gun at her, but he had been right to bring her in. The worst-case scenario had unfolded. Now Charlie needed to meet the challenge. She had to solve Einstein’s clue. She had to make sure her brother hadn’t risked everything in vain.
Only . . . She was still drawing a blank. Einstein had her stumped.
She frowned at the clue in frustration, feeling overwhelmed.
“Any progress?” Milana asked.
Charlie looked up, surprised she hadn’t noticed the agent approaching. She had been too focused on the stupid clue. “What’s happening with the CIA?”
Milana held up the phone she had borrowed. “I’m on hold. Waiting for the head of my division. They’re pulling her out of a meeting.” She nodded to the clue. “How’s it going?”
“Lousy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why? Oh, I’m just trying to decipher a code created by the greatest genius of all time that no one else has been able to crack for nearly seventy years. And there’s incredible pressure on me because the fate of millions of people lies in the balance and the bad guys got away and I’m only a twelve-year-old girl. . . .”
“Don’t talk like that,” Milana said sternly.
“What? You don’t like my attitude?”
“I don’t like you saying ‘girl’ like it’s a character flaw.”
Charlie considered that, then frowned. “Sorry. I’m just frustrated.”
Milana sat on the bench next to Charlie. “I’ve seen your IQ tests. You’re just as smart as Einstein was. . . .”
“I don’t feel as smart as him.”
“And he probably didn’t feel like a genius when he was your age either. The guy barely spoke until he was five. But he was still scary smart. And you are too.” Milana sat back and took in the church around her. “Think about the most famous geniuses in history: Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Darwin, da Vinci, Mozart. What do they have in common?”
Charlie reflected on that for a moment. “They’re all men.”
“Exactly. But that’s not because men are smarter than women. It’s because men have had advantages that women haven’t. Throughout history, women have been denied education, prevented from having jobs, or simply been ignored. Families sent their sons to school and married off their daughters. Being a genius doesn’t mean much if no one will give you a chance to do anything with it. There are probably hundreds of thousands of geniuses who never got the chance to make their mark on the world because they were the wrong gender. Or the wrong color. Or from the wrong rung of the social ladder.
“But that’s not the case anymore. You have chances that other people like you didn’t, Charlie. The only thing preventing you from changing the world is you. So far you haven’t been doing much with that incredible brain of yours, but there’s still time to do great things. I believe in you. If anyone can figure out what Einstein meant, it’s you.”
A voice suddenly came through the phone in Milana’s hand. “Agent Moon? Are you still there?”
Milana put the phone to her ear. “I’m here,” she said, then snapped to her feet and walked away, leaving Charlie alone with the clue once more.
Charlie looked down at it again. It was still the same complicated code, but now she didn’t feel as daunted by it. Milana’s words had struck a chord in her.
If she wanted to solve this thing, she needed to stop telling herself that she wasn’t smart enough to solve it. She had to relax and let it all come to her, the same way the numbers came to her when she was skiing or skateboarding. She had to think the way Einstein would have, to see the patterns he would have.
Charlie took a deep, calming breath and closed her eyes, envisioning the code in her mind.
Chanting echoed through the church.
Charlie’s eyes snapped open once again. Several priests were filing past her on their way to the site of the crucifixion, dressed in ornate robes, swinging smoking pots of incense. The tourists stepped aside to let them pass—or to take selfies with them in the background. Charlie watched the priests go, clutching their rosaries and prayer books.
Books.
Charlie sat up, struck by a flash of insight. For the first time, she had an idea as to what Einstein might have been thinking. And if she was right, maybe she could actually solve his code and find Pandora once and for all.
THIRTY-THREE
What if there was more to the clue than just the equation? Charlie wondered. Of all the thousands of books in his possession, why had Einstein chosen a Sherlock Holmes anthology to hide the clue in? In fact, why hide it in a book at all? True, it could have been a random decision—the clue needed to be hidden somewhere—but Einstein had never been a fan of randomness. After all, this was the man who had famously declared that he didn’t believe God played dice with the universe. Why should he do so himself?
At first Einstein’s decision to hide his clue in a Sherlock Holmes anthology hadn’t seemed extraordinary. Charlie knew lots of people who had collections of Holmes mysteries. She had one herself, and had read all the stories multiple times. But now that she thought about it, the choice of book seemed odd. While Holmes’s devotion to solving crimes through the application of logic might have appealed to Einstein, Charlie guessed that Einstein wouldn’t have been a big fan of Holmes’s creator. By the time Einstein had developed Pandora, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made headlines by turning his back on Holmesian logic and becoming a vocal supporter of spiritualism, proclaiming that an occult influence connected the physical world to an invisible one. Even worse, Doyle’s devotion to these beliefs had made him ignore blatant physical evidence and give credence to an infamous hoax:
In 1917, two girls in Cottingley, England, had taken a picture of what appeared to be fairies. Although there had been ample evidence the fairies were merely paper dolls, Doyle had not only been duped by the photos, but had also written an article in a prominent magazine attesting to their authenticity. People who might have otherwise dismissed the photos had been drawn in by Doyle’s involvement, and when the f
airies were ultimately revealed to be a fraud, Doyle had stubbornly refused to believe the evidence. His reputation quickly changed from that of a brilliant author to a man who wasn’t nearly as intelligent as his own creation—if not a downright idiot. The whole event had been quite a scandal back in its day.
So why had Einstein picked Doyle’s work, rather than that of a more respected author? Why had Einstein chosen a work of fiction at all, rather than one of the thousands of scientific texts he owned by fellow geniuses like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, or Ernest Rutherford? The choice of the book couldn’t have just been a spur-of-the-moment decision. Einstein had taken great pains to hide Pandora; he wouldn’t have left anything to chance. As Charlie looked around the church, another of Einstein’s thoughts about God crept into her mind. Einstein had been a religious man, but he had claimed the God he favored was that of Baruch Spinoza, who had declared, “God is in the details, the beauty, the math of the world.”
God was in the details.
Charlie sat on her bench and watched the candles flicker throughout the church, trying to put herself in Einstein’s mind. Back when the great man had hidden Pandora, he must have still held a glimmer of hope for humanity. If this was indeed in 1931, the Nazis had yet to take over Germany. The concentration camps still lay in the future—as did the nuclear bombs the Allies would build, using Einstein’s own theory, and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Einstein knew there was good in Pandora, the tiny bit of hope, the promise that, if used properly, it could benefit every person in the world. Therefore, he didn’t want to make it impossible to find. So he had taken great pains to construct his clues to its location, hoping that whoever was clever enough to find Pandora would also be intelligent enough to use it wisely.
He had later changed his mind about this, of course, but originally, he had wanted someone to find the equation. Otherwise, why leave clues to its location at all? Every piece of the puzzle Einstein had constructed was designed to communicate something to the solver—and that included the book he had concealed the clue inside.
Charlie had been thinking about the clue mathematically, assuming that a legend of physics like Einstein would obviously construct a mathematical puzzle to hide his tracks. But Einstein wasn’t merely a scientist. He was a lover of words as well, the rare intellectual who could write for the masses, a linguist who could toss off clever bon mots such as “Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” In addition, Einstein, more than most other scientists, was notable for his sense of humor. This was a man who let his hair grow into a fright wig, regaled friends with jokes, and stuck his tongue out for photographers. Einstein had loved science and math, but he had revered love and laughter. Perhaps, in Einstein’s mind, being good at math wouldn’t have been enough to qualify you to find Pandora. You would need to be better rounded, someone who thought outside the box.
Charlie considered the Sherlock Holmes mysteries again, trying to discern what would have been attractive about them to Einstein. There were Holmes’s staggering powers of observation, his outsider status, the fact that Holmes, like Einstein, was a student of the violin. Was there a place something had been hidden in one of the stories that Einstein could have mimicked? Was there something about Holmes himself that was important: his wit, his trademark dress, the way in which he solved problems?
Charlie held that thought. What if Einstein had merely wanted whoever found the clue to think like Holmes? How would Holmes have gone about it? Holmes was always keen on all details, able to see the forest for the trees, encyclopedic in knowledge—and willing to draw conclusions only once he had eliminated all other possibilities. He was the first great fictitious practitioner of the idea that the simplest solution generally tended to be the best. “It’s elementary,” he had famously told Watson, although technically Doyle hadn’t even written that phrase. It had come from a stage adaptation of the books. . . .
“Oh,” Charlie said, struck by an epiphany.
She looked at Einstein’s clue once again and considered it in a new light.
Suddenly, it all made sense.
In her mind’s eye, the numbers vanished and were replaced by what they truly stood for. She had solved the code.
Charlie leapt to her feet, heading toward Milana, but then stopped herself. This time there was no point in risking that the clue might fall into enemy hands. She knew what the message said—and she had committed it to memory. It had translated perfectly. All other possibilities had been eliminated; there was no other solution.
She crossed to an altar and laid the scrap of paper on which she had written Einstein’s clue atop one of the candles. It caught fire instantly, curled up on itself, and dissolved into ash and smoke.
Then Charlie hurried back to Milana, who was by the entrance, returning the phone to the tourist she had borrowed it from. Charlie hooked a hand under Milana’s elbow and steered her out the door, weaving through a crowd of pilgrims pouring into the church. “I know where Pandora is,” she said. “We need to get back to the airport right away.”
Milana turned to her, astonished. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Milana beamed proudly. “I knew you could do it! What does it . . . ?”
Suddenly, three of the pilgrims pounced on her, knocking her to the ground. Charlie quickly realized they weren’t pilgrims at all, but young, athletic men who had merely used the swarm of tourists as cover—and then she, too, was hit from behind. Her legs were swept out from under her, her face was slammed into the cobblestones, and a gun was pressed against the back of her head.
“Charlotte Thorne,” someone snarled, “you’re under arrest.”
THIRTY-FOUR
John Russo eavesdropped on the Mossad’s transmissions as he drove out of Jerusalem, headed for Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. To do this John needed a specially encrypted radio, but there had been one at the CIA’s safe house and he had stolen it after the rest of the Furies had fled. He knew the proper settings and channels from his undercover days in Israel. Now he listened gleefully as everything came together, as the Mossad closed in on Milana Moon and Charlie Thorne, drew the net, and then . . .
Arrested them.
The smile faded from John’s face. Cursing, he swerved away from the entrance of the highway that would have taken him west toward Tel Aviv and veered onto a different road.
The Mossad didn’t arrest traitors. They killed them. Sure, they might go through the motions of arresting them in front of tourists, but the moment they were out of sight, they would exact the ultimate price for treason.
There was only one reason Charlie and Milana were still alive. The Mossad knew about Pandora and suspected the women had information about it.
John checked his watch. There was still time to initiate a new plan.
He pulled over in an alleyway and called Alexei. Originally, John had planned to leave Israel without even telling the Furies, to simply abandon those idiots. By the time they realized he had betrayed them, he would have been long gone, never to be seen again, and they would have had no way to ever track him down. But now he would need their help one last time.
Alexei answered after the first ring, sounding impatient. “Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for more than an hour!”
“I’ve been deciphering the clue. Where are you now?”
“Right where you left us. Waiting for you. What did the clue say?”
“Pandora is in London,” John lied.
“London!” Alexei exclaimed, concerned. “How are we supposed to get there?”
“Leave that to me. I’m working on it. In the meantime, there is something else you need to take care of. The Mossad has captured Agent Moon and the girl.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a chance that girl knows where Pandora is, Alexei. We can’t let her live.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then Alexei asked, “What do you expect us t
o do? We are only five men. The Mossad has thousands.”
“But they don’t know we can eavesdrop on them.” John stepped from his rental car into the heat of the alley. There was a dumpster against the side of a building. John slipped the encrypted radio underneath it, then gave Alexei very specific instructions as to where to find it. “How far are you from here?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“Once you get the radio, monitor the channel I have left it on. Find out where the Mossad is taking Thorne and what they plan to do with her. If you get a chance to take Thorne out—do it.”
“You aren’t going to help us?”
“I’m working on getting us to London as fast as I can. But I’ll stay in touch. Keep me apprised of what’s going on.” John hung up, not giving Alexei the chance to question him, letting him know who was in charge here.
He got back in the car, made a U-turn, and headed for the airport, expecting that he would never speak to Alexei again.
The Furies were useful foils to send after Thorne, but John didn’t need them to help him find Pandora anymore.
He had a plane to catch.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Old City of Jerusalem was deceptive. It looked as though it was built upon solid ground, but it really sat on top of the remnants of dozens of civilizations. They were piled like the layers of a cake beneath the streets. Sometimes the original bedrock was a hundred feet beneath the surface. In some parts of the city these places had been excavated. You could see the exposed remnants of ancient walls in the Jewish Quarter, or Roman baths in the Muslim Quarter. But more often than not the past remained hidden far underfoot.
Such was the case with the tunnel the Mossad was using to spirit Charlie and Milana out of the Old City. The descent into it had taken them far below street level, down a long shaft that had been chiseled through the layers of civilization. They had accessed it through the site of an archaeological dig only two blocks from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Security guards from the Israeli Department of Antiquities were posted around the dig, but they deferentially stepped aside when the Mossad arrived, as if it was common for the Mossad to use this route.
