Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  In doing so he exposed himself to the Mossad, but that was no longer his concern. All he could think about was saving Charlie.

  When the Mossad spotted him, they didn’t give him the same respect he had shown them. They just started shooting.

  • • •

  The explosion had been larger than Charlie had expected. She found herself sprawled in the snow uphill from Milana. Tim Ralston was still upright, having been thrown against the pump house. Quark was unharmed, but whimpering in fear.

  The blast had snapped Einstein’s envelope from Milana’s hand and tossed it into the air. It wafted through the mist now, slowly floating back to earth.

  As Charlie sat up, she heard the woods erupt with gunfire. Muzzle flashes flared in the fog.

  Charlie turned back toward the envelope.

  Tim Ralston was clambering out of the gully with it in his hand.

  Charlie went after him.

  • • •

  Milana came to, seeing stars. She had hit her head on a rock and lost consciousness for a few seconds.

  Above her, Charlie was scrambling over the lip of the gully.

  Milana rolled over and dug her gun from the snow. But before she could do anything, gunfire peppered the ground around her, forcing her to duck behind the pump house for cover.

  She spotted John Russo, running and shooting at the same time—and then the Mossad materializing out of the fog, firing indiscriminately at both of them.

  Bullets rattled the opposite side of the pump house. Milana wanted to go after Charlie, to get to her before John, but she had no safe route. She would have to loop around the Hooker dome instead.

  Just below the pump house, the gully narrowed, tilting steeply toward the astronomer housing. Milana launched herself onto the slope and slid through the snow. Bullets stitched the earth around her, and she felt a sting as one caught her thigh. She tumbled into the cover of the gully, rolled to her feet, and checked her leg. The bullet had only nicked her, although it still hurt like heck. It certainly needed to be tended to, but there was no time for that now.

  Milana raced around the homes and into the woods, circling the peak topped by the Hooker dome, hoping to cut Charlie off before the kid got her hands on Pandora.

  • • •

  Charlie knew Tim Ralston was running the wrong way. He was heading toward the Hooker dome, probably thinking he could lock himself inside and be safe, but a locked door wouldn’t mean diddly-squat to a bunch of men with guns.

  The door to the dome still hung open. Just before Tim reached it, Charlie barreled into him, dragging him around the curve of the building, out of the line of gunfire.

  “Leave me alone!” Tim cried. “Those people are after you!”

  “They’re after Pandora,” Charlie said. “And if they catch you with it, they’ll kill you.”

  On the far side of the dome were the control centers for CHARA Array, two long, low-slung buildings. Charlie hustled Tim into the small space between them. “I need the equation,” she said.

  Tim regarded her suspiciously.

  “Please,” Charlie said. “I’m the good guy here.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because I’m the only one besides you up here without a gun.”

  Tim reluctantly took the envelope from his pocket.

  “Lock yourself and Quark inside,” Charlie instructed. “If anyone breaks in and aims a gun at you, don’t try to protect me. Tell them I have this—and then show them the way I’ve gone.” Charlie took Einstein’s envelope and raced into the woods in the opposite direction of the gunfire.

  Tim did exactly as Charlie had instructed. It was only after he was cowering under a desk with Quark that he realized Charlie was heading straight toward a cliff.

  FIFTY

  Dante had seen Charlie run into the forest, but he couldn’t get to her: The Mossad was cutting him off. He was pinned down behind a redwood tree while they closed in on him.

  “You’re making a mistake!” he yelled to them. “We’re on the same side here!”

  “I doubt it,” Benny West replied.

  So Dante did the only thing he could think of. “I’m dropping my weapon!” he announced, and threw his gun into the snow, where Benny could see it. Then he came around the tree with his arms raised above his head, hoping the Mossad wouldn’t shoot him.

  Benny West held him at gunpoint from fifty feet away.

  “If you want Pandora, I’ll let you have it,” Dante said. “Just help me save the girl.” He wasn’t sure until the moment he said it, but he wasn’t lying. Little more than a day earlier, when he had first dragged Charlie into all this, he had been thinking about Pandora, not her. But things had changed. Dante had come to care for his half sister in a way that surprised him. He realized he would do anything to protect Charlie, even if it meant sacrificing his career.

  Benny didn’t lower his gun. He kept it trained on Dante, deciding what to do.

  • • •

  John Russo was running full tilt. He had left the Mossad behind for now, but that was only because they were moving slowly to ensure no one escaped. They would keep coming and they would do whatever it took to get Pandora.

  John swore. How had it come to this? He had prepared so carefully. He had done everything right. Pandora should have been his. And yet everything was coming apart at the seams because of . . .

  Charlie Thorne dashed through the woods ahead, an envelope in her hand.

  Pandora.

  John charged after her.

  They were leaving the central complex behind now, heading deeper into the woods. Charlie’s tracks were the only ones in the snow. John followed her easily, catching an occasional glimpse of his quarry ahead. The Mossad had stopped shooting for now, and the peak was eerily quiet in the aftermath. The crunch of Charlie’s footsteps rang out in the thin air.

  Charlie’s tracks led toward the final dome in the CHARA Array, a short distance ahead through the trees. Beyond that there was nothing but blue sky.

  John grinned cruelly. Charlie was running out of room.

  • • •

  Milana scrambled up a snowy slope to the top of the ridge behind the Hooker dome and found Charlie’s and John’s footprints leading into the woods to the east, away from the observatory complex. To the west, she could hear the men with guns steadily approaching.

  Milana followed the footprints.

  • • •

  Charlie raced past the last dome of the CHARA Array and the world ended.

  The dome sat on a thin peninsula of rock, fifty feet wide with sheer cliffs on either side. Charlie skidded to a stop and cautiously peered over the edge. The earth dropped away below her vertiginously, a granite wall plummeting ninety feet into a snow-choked ravine.

  Charlie crossed to the opposite side of the peninsula to examine the cliff there. It was even steeper, disappearing into a cloud bank hundreds of feet below.

  There was no place to go and almost no time to act. Through the woods, Charlie could see John Russo closing in on her—and she knew he would kill her the moment he had a clear shot.

  There was only one thing to do.

  • • •

  John rounded the final dome a second later and saw her. She was only twenty feet away, right in plain sight. She was holding on to the branch of a pine tree and leaning out over the edge of a cliff, teetering above certain death.

  In her free hand, stretched out over the void, she held the envelope with Pandora. It was pinched between her fingers.

  “You see what the situation is here, don’t you?” Charlie asked. “If you shoot me, I fall—and Pandora goes with me.”

  John considered his options, then reluctantly lowered his gun.

  “Drop it,” Charlie said.

  “Or else what? You’ll let go?”

  “Just drop it. You’ll need both hands to pull me back up.”

  John slid the gun back in his holster instead; Charlie was in no position to quibble. Then Joh
n came to the edge of the cliff, grabbed Charlie with both hands, and pulled her to safety.

  When he glanced back toward the envelope, Charlie’s hand was now a fist. And it was racing toward his face.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Charlie hit John with everything she had. By now she knew she wasn’t a good fighter, but she was out of options. All she had was the element of surprise.

  Unfortunately, John was well trained in hand-to-hand combat. The punch caught him off guard, but he rolled with it and then came in low. He drove his fist into Charlie’s solar plexus, then caught her with another blow that floored her.

  Charlie landed heavily on the rocky ground. It was like getting punched all over her body at once. Still, she knew she had to fight. She searched the ground for anything she could use as a weapon.

  Forty yards behind them, Milana emerged from the woods and saw John standing over Charlie. She was too late and too far to do anything but yell. “John! No!”

  John ignored her. Instead, he snapped the gun from his holster.

  Charlie grabbed a rock, rolled over, and flung it as hard as she could, striking John in the head just as he was about to shoot her.

  John staggered backward as he pulled the trigger. The shot went well above Charlie and struck the propane tank by the telescope dome, piercing its shell.

  All five hundred gallons of propane ignited at once.

  Charlie rolled over and hugged the ground.

  The explosion roared over her and blasted John off his feet, slamming him into a tree with such force that his bones snapped.

  Charlie stayed prone until the heat dissipated. When she finally raised her head, she found the world had changed. Seconds before it had been snow-capped and frigid. Now it was an inferno.

  All around her was smoke and fire. Only half the telescope dome remained, a charred and groaning hulk. Fragments of it rained from the sky. Charlie hurt everywhere, but she had more pressing problems. A curtain of flame now crossed the peninsula, cutting her off from the rest of the world.

  Milana was on the other side of the fire. Charlie could barely make out her silhouette through the flickering, heat-warped air. While Charlie was stuck on this side with nothing but John Russo and . . .

  Pandora.

  To her horror Charlie realized she no longer had the equation. At some point during the fight, she had lost it. She spun around, searching wildly. . . .

  And there it was. Buffeted by the waves of heat, tumbling toward the edge of the cliff.

  Charlie struggled to her feet and staggered after it.

  Behind her, there was a bone-rattling screech of metal. The twenty-foot-tall telescope toppled, taking the rest of the dome with it. A smoking piece of steel cartwheeled over Charlie’s head and embedded itself in a tree.

  The collapse created a gust of wind that caught the envelope and whipped it toward the void.

  Charlie lunged for it.

  • • •

  Dante was running now, Benny West and the other Mossad following. They had found Tim Ralston and Tim had done just as Charlie had instructed, pointing the way she had gone and saying she had Pandora. Then they had all heard the explosion, and they knew that couldn’t be good.

  So Dante raced down the narrow peninsula toward the flame and the smoke, the Mossad on his heels. They found Milana staring helplessly into the wall of fire. She turned to them, her hands in the air, showing that she had laid her gun down, that she had no intention of turning this into a fight.

  “Where’s Charlie?” Dante asked, unable to keep the fear out of his voice.

  Milana pointed through the flames.

  Dante felt his breath catch in his throat. Before he even knew what he was doing, he was running straight toward the fire, intending to dive right through it.

  But Milana blocked his path and locked him in a bear hug, stopping him. “Are you crazy?” she yelled over the roar of the fire. “You’ll die in there!”

  Dante struggled against her, but as he did, he realized she was right. The fire was raging. He was still several yards away from it, and it was so hot that it was scalding his skin. He couldn’t save Charlie; she would have to save herself.

  Benny West kept his gun aimed at the agents. “Where’s Pandora?” he demanded.

  Milana pointed through the flames once again. “Over there,” she said. “Feel free to go get it if you want.”

  Benny considered the blaze, then sighed heavily. There were times when it was worth risking one’s life for one’s country, but this wasn’t one of them. If Pandora was gone, it was gone. Everyone came out even.

  He would need to frisk Milana, of course, make sure she wasn’t lying to him and holding on to the equation somewhere.

  But right now they all needed to get to safety, away from the fire, before it consumed them.

  They retreated from the flames. The Mossad moved quickly, while Dante was reluctant, staring back into the fire, tears in his eyes.

  Milana stayed by his side. She took his hand in hers and held it tightly. “She’s a smart kid,” she said. “If anyone can figure out a way to survive this, it’s her.”

  Dante could only watch the flames helplessly and hope she was right.

  • • •

  John Russo lay in a crumpled heap, battered, but still alive.

  His spine had broken when he had been thrown into the tree. The only part of his body he could move was his neck. He rolled his head slightly and saw Charlie Thorne through the haze of smoke. Charlie had Pandora again; John had watched her grab it a second before it blew over the edge of the cliff. For all John’s hard work, for all his intricate planning, he had lost. And to a girl, no less.

  John felt a sudden rush of heat and smelled something burning close by. He rolled his head back and saw that the fire had surged closer, igniting the carpet of dead leaves under the tree where he lay. Within seconds, the flames leapt up all around him.

  John screamed, but no one heard.

  • • •

  Fire closed in on Charlie from all sides.

  The air was filled with the crackle of burning wood and the roar of the blaze. Charlie needed to find a way out, and every second counted.

  But there was something she had to do first.

  If she was going to die because of Pandora, she wasn’t going to die curious.

  Einstein’s envelope was now crumpled, bloodied, and damp, but it was still sealed tightly. Charlie tore it open.

  There was a single piece of paper inside.

  On the paper was an equation. Pandora.

  It was like a lightning bolt in Charlie’s brain. Vintage Einstein. The way special relativity must have seemed to his fellow scientists when he had first unveiled it. Perfection. Genius. A feat of divine inspiration—and yet the moment Charlie laid eyes on it, she couldn’t believe she had never thought of it before.

  With a gunshot crack, a flaming tree toppled toward Charlie. She dove away, barely escaping the branches, but was showered with burning embers. The heat was now almost unbearable. It was difficult to breathe, the fire sucking all the oxygen from the air. The world was orange and black all around Charlie, save for one spot of blue sky to the north—and that was where the cliff was.

  Wait.

  A section of the telescope dome lay before Charlie, a sheet of metal five feet long with a slight curve to it. Not a perfect snowboard by any means, but just maybe it could work. The northern side of the peninsula was a ninety-foot drop into the ravine—thirty feet higher than Deadman’s Gap at Snowmass. . . .

  Charlie grabbed the sheet of metal—and Pandora slipped from her grasp again. The piece of paper Einstein had taken such pains to hide, to protect until the world was ready for it, was whipped away by an updraft. The flames caught it, and in an instant it was gone.

  Now the only copy left in existence was in Charlie’s mind.

  And the chances of that surviving much longer were very small.

  Charlie looked toward the small spot of blue sky through the
fire. She would have to time her leap perfectly to avoid the flames, then drop nine stories onto a steep slope and nail the landing on a makeshift snowboard. God only knew what would await her in the ravine after that.

  But there were no other options. The fire was closing in. Charlie had only a few seconds left.

  She focused on the sky.

  And the numbers came to her.

  EPILOGUE

  Mount Wilson Observatory, San Gabriel Mountains

  By four o’clock that afternoon, the slopes were crawling with CIA agents.

  They would have been there earlier, but they’d had to wait for the forest service to douse the fire.

  They had managed to save most of the observatory complex, but everything on the peninsula was reduced to charcoal, scorched metal, and ash. The forensics specialists picked through it all anyhow, hoping to miraculously find a trace of Pandora.

  Jamila Carter oversaw them, having flown in directly on her own jet, a frown etched on her face. None of this had gone the way she had hoped, partly due to her own mistakes.

  Dante Garcia emerged from astronomer housing. His fellow agents had been grilling him all day, trying to learn every last detail about what had happened. He had told them everything, from Snowmass to Greenland to Jerusalem to here, right up to when the Mossad agents had frisked him and Milana down to their underwear to make sure neither of them was hiding Pandora on them and then headed back to their lives in Los Angeles without another word.

  Dante saw Milana standing on the top of a cliff on the opposite side of the ravine from the charred peninsula, far from the other CIA agents. She seemed to sense his presence, turned his way, and beckoned him toward her.

  When he got close, she could see that his eyes were rimmed with red, as though he’d been crying.

  “Did the techs find anything?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “But they weren’t expecting to. A hot enough fire can reduce even human bone to ash.”

  Dante warily looked over the edge of the cliff into the ravine. “Any chance she could have jumped?”

  “The techs don’t think so. They say that if she had, they’d have found her remains on the rocks below. As far as they’re concerned, she died in the fire.”