The Kafir Project

by Lee Burvine

  Rees felt the relief hit him like a tranquilizing drug. "We're not leaving you anywhere, Kerry. Don't worry."

  Danni looked into Morgan's eyes. "How do you feel?"

  Morgan glanced around the utility closet, obviously confused. "What is ... where the hell are we?" She tried to sit up. Her face contorted in pain. "Ahhh. Ow, ow. Shit, my head."

  Danni reached over and supported Morgan's head, lowering it gently back down to the coat beneath her. "Take it easy. You got knocked out. We think you have a concussion."

  An unfamiliar spark of fear flashed in Morgan's eyes. "Knocked out? How long?"

  "About eight hours," Rees said. "What's the very last thing you remember?"

  Morgan stared up at the closet ceiling, eyes searching. "I remember ... we were going to Lawrence Livermore, to try and find Fischer. Fischer's work, I mean. And ... are we still there?"

  "Yes, we're still there." Rees could see the alarm on Danni's face and tried to reassure her. "She has some retrograde amnesia. It's normal from what I understand."

  Danni didn't look very reassured. "Kerry, you remember the men that came here looking for us? You said they were DCIS agents. Remember that? And one of them, the older guy, he shot the other one. You remember?"

  Morgan frowned. "No. No. I don't."

  "It's all right," Rees said. "We'll take you through what happened."

  For the next few minutes, he and Danni helped Morgan piece together the missing hours. How Danni had found the original proposal for the Kafir Project in the offline computer. The two DCIS agents showing up. The shooting. All of them escaping through the Core.

  Eventually they walked her up mentally to where they were now. In the lower reaches of Livermore's new accelerator complex, hiding in an electronics storage closet.

  "So, are we outside of the security perimeter?" Morgan asked.

  Danni shook her head. "Not yet. But the accelerator tunnel will take us way beyond the main campus. Then we should be in good shape."

  "Yes, but we still have the what then problem," Rees said. "Our goal in coming here was to find the data from the Kafir Project. We get that out publically, they have no reason to keep coming after us. Boom, game over."

  "We hope," Danni added.

  "Right. We hope," Rees agreed. "But we don't have the data. We don't even have the project proposal now. That's on a hard drive back in the control room outside the Core. If it wasn't destroyed in the explosion. Anyway we can't get there. Not now."

  Morgan touched her fingers lightly to her head, just above the front hair line. "Man, that's a hell of a lump." She looked up at Rees. "Kafir Project. I do remember that much. Time-viewing. So why was DARPA funding Fischer's work? Did we find that out?"

  "Yeah," Danni said. "The Kafir Project was supposed to counter violent Islamic extremism. On a sort of foundational level. By attacking the historicity of their beliefs."

  "Historicity. Basically, whether it's all true," Morgan said.

  Danni nodded. "Yep, whether it really happened. Islam is a historical religion. If the story's bogus, the whole religion is trashed. It's a psy-op, basically. Could be a knockout one too."

  Morgan looked doubtful about that. "They wouldn't believe it, the Muslim world. What were we going to do anyway? Show them movies of Mohammed drinking wine and eating bacon? They'd just say it was actors. Christ, there are idiots out there who still think the moon landings were staged."

  "There were two parts to the proposed program," Danni explained. "The time-recordings were just for starters. They could also sort of lock onto physical objects from the past. Important historical artifacts. And trace them through time. Rees gets this part better than I do."

  Using Fischer's notebook and what Danni had told him from the proposal, Rees had worked out how the technology probably functioned.

  "Time viewing-or spacetime viewing we should really say-involves capturing information at an atomic level," he said. "That's partly why they needed the quantum computer. Insane amounts of data. You can trace your target forward through time too, to get a kind of arrow pointing at where it might be now. Then, when you dig up the artifact, you can test it, show that it exactly matches the time recording, virtually atom for atom."

  "Provenance," Morgan said.

  Rees nodded. "Exactly. Irrefutable proof of authenticity. But you need both the recordings and the artifacts to do that. They corroborate and reinforce each other."

  Morgan massaged her temples. "Yeah, I still think they wouldn't buy it. They'd say you doctored the evidence somehow."

  Danni jumped back in. "Fischer thought so too. That's why he wanted to make the technology open source. Give it all away. Let the Islamists confirm everything for themselves. It all was part of the proposal."

  Morgan laughed, then winced. "Ow. I'll bet that went over great with the Pentagon. If you can look anywhere in space and time, you keep the technology secret. Use it to spy on your enemies making battle plans."

  Rees had worked that bit out too. "Except that's not possible. It's all about power. I mean literally, physical energy. I'm just inferring this from Fischer's notes, but I think they were using the high energy proton-antiproton beam collisions at Fermilab to disturb the Higgs field. In a way that wasn't previously imaginable before Fischer's breakthrough, I mean."

  Morgan had her hand raised, like a student in class. "Um, let's pretend that I don't have a degree in advanced physics, and that you're a nice TV science man who can explain it all anyway."

  As exhausted as he felt, Rees still smiled at that. "Right. Okay, they were bending spacetime. That's the stuff history is made of. They were bending it back to touch itself. Making closed loops. That's how this all works. A particular place and time in the past actually comes into physical contact..." he pantomimed bending two ends of an elongated object around to touch each other, "...direct physical contact with detectors. Right here in the present. But spacetime is actually pretty stiff stuff."

  "Ah, so it's not easy to bend," Morgan said. "See, I'm getting all this."

  Rees made a little bow. "That's because I'm very good at this. It's my job. So, imagine a length of plastic tubing, like six inch diameter PVC pipe. It's stiff stuff too. But if you lay out two miles of it, you could bend it, very gently, just with your hands even. Eventually you could make a loop. A very big loop, but a loop."

  Morgan nodded. "Still with you. Keep going."

  "Now try that with two feet of six inch diameter PVC pipe. Try to bend that into a loop with your bare hands. No one's that strong. It turns out you can bend spacetime into a closed loop and actually touch the past, if the extension along the time axis is long enough."

  "So how much time elapsed do you need? How far back?" Morgan asked.

  Rees shrugged. "I'm not sure, but I roughed it out. I think you'd want to have at least a thousand years or more to work with, given the energies they could generate with the Tevatron. The longer the better."

  "So the dinosaur stuff was probably the first thing they recorded," Danni suggested.

  Rees had entertained the same thought. "Yep. Easier to capture. You'd have to convert the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy to record something like the Kennedy Assassination. And forget about anything that happened yesterday, or a week or a month ago."

  They sat quietly a moment. Rees became aware again of the faint background hum of the facility's electronics.

  Morgan broke the silence. "So, what is it?"

  "What is what?" Danni asked.

  "What is it they're looking for?" Morgan replied. "You said they needed the time-recording and a historical artifact of some kind. To prove it was all real. So what artifact was going to totally undermine Islam? Did Mohammad write a tell-all book? 'How I Just Made Up the Qur'an?'"

  A recorded image flashed into Rees's mind. An image of a book and a Christian ceremony. It had been coming back to him throughout the morning. But he couldn't work out any connection to the Kafir Project's pur
pose. Until that moment.

  The revelation must have shown on his face.

  "You just figured something out," Danni said. "I know that look. I've seen researchers get that look. It's always good."

  Rees felt the excitement driving out his fatigue. "It's just that I think Kerry isn't far off. I think it is a book. And I've seen it. In one of the videos on Fischer's flash drive."

  Morgan squinted at him. "With the dinosaur? You sure you didn't hit your head, Rees?"

  "No, there was another video file on there. I didn't play it back for you, because it didn't seem to mean anything at the time. But it does now. I think it means something huge."

  Danni looked like she would reach out and start shaking him in a second. "Well for Chrissake, Rees, what does it mean?"

  "It means I know who Herodotus is. And where tofind him."

  CHAPTER 37

  IT AMAZED THE surgeon they didn't have to put Sabel under to remove the screwdriver, clean the wound, and sew it all back up. He told them he had allergies, that he'd experienced terrible reactions to general anesthesia in the past.

  "Could you guys try it first with a local?" he asked the doctors.

  They were skeptical, but they did it. That was good. He wouldn't have to lose time while recovering from a general anesthetic.

  He'd only asked for the local because they would have freaked the hell out if they'd seen what he could really tolerate. They'd want to write a goddamn paper on him.

  He didn't need the attention.

  When it was all over, Sabel told them this was bound to happen one day. "'Cause people are always telling me to go screw myself."

  Everyone had a good laugh over that. Har, har.

  The surgery took less than thirty minutes. They told him he could be discharged in about forty-eight hours if everything looked good by then.

  He slipped out less than an hour after he got his final unit of blood. On the way out, he stole a new pair of pants. Also a week's worth of antibiotics from the hospital's dispensary.

  As he hiked out to the stolen Toyota, Sabel thought his limp must look pretty damn obvious. Could make him stand out. He practiced walking without it, in case he needed to later.

  Not a problem. Just a shitload more pain.

  When he reached the car, Sabel dialed the Office. After a coded exchange with the operator, they redirected the call through a scrambler, then on to an untraceable relay set-up that bounced it all around creation.

  A minute later he was talking to Singleton. Bit of a surprise there. Sabel didn't ask why Doubleman wasn't on the job. He didn't really give a shit which one of them chose to run this op. He got paid just the same. And Singleton wouldn't have told him dick anyway.

  "I'm back online," Sabel said.

  "Understood. Gevin Rees may be dead."

  "May be? Okay. I thought we wanted some intel from him."

  "He was about to wind up in a scenario where he might have compromised the client's private information," Singleton said. "Per my recommendation, the client opted to eliminate that possibility."

  "So, that's it then?"

  "No. The operative assigned to terminate Rees may have failed to complete his mission."

  And that probably means one of your boys got taken out. See, the TV guy's not so damn easy is he? "Okay. What now?" Sabel asked.

  "First, we need to confirm that Rees truly is out of the picture. There was an explosion. We need a visual on the body."

  Sabel laughed at that. "Another explosion? You guys running out of ideas over there?"

  "Your current cover will get you close enough for verification."

  "That ID's only meant to fool civilians." It had been a bit of a rush job, and Sabel didn't think the Office's people had hacked the online records that would back it up.

  "It's a chaotic scene there. No one's going to be doing checks."

  "So where am I going, then?"

  "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You're not too far from it now, I believe."

  "What about Danielle Harris and the bodyguard?" Sabel asked.

  "Also killed in the explosion. Again, that's only as far as we know. We need confirmation there too. And we have tentative ID on the bodyguard now. The chatter we're picking up is that her name is Kerry Morgan. A DCIS agent."

  DCIS? Doesn't sound like your ordinary type bodyguard there. Something going on you guys aren't telling me? "Okay, then," Sabel said. "Let's recap. You want confirmation of death on Gevin Rees, Danielle Harris, and Kerry Morgan."

  "Yes."

  "And if any of them survived the explosion?"

  "Then you finish the job," Singleton said. "Continue on the assumption that we're right about Herodotus. He should be at least as useful as Rees would have been. Take him alive and contact us for further directions."

  And that was the end of it.

  Singleton signed off without asking how badly Sabel had been injured, or how he was doing. Typical. The Office didn't do employee picnics or company Christmas cards either.

  Sabel's feelings weren't hurt. They couldn't be. He didn't really have any in the normal sense.

  Part of his special gift.

  He set his smartphone navigator for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and drove out of the parking lot. Rees and his companions weren't going to be hard to find now.

  They're either dead, or they're about to be dead.

  Sabel smiled at the thought. When it came right down to it, that description fairly covered most of the folks he'd ever worked with.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE QUEST TO reach the mysterious Herodotus was underway. Danni noted that in this little drama she'd somehow gotten herself cast in the role of Dante's Virgil.

  She wasn't leading Morgan and Rees down into hell, but she was taking them back underground, through the new particle accelerator's tunnel. And the collision temps here would be hotter than any inferno the Florentine poet could ever have imagined.

  Their game plan hinged now on the hopes they wouldn't get shot or arrested the second they poked their heads up on the far end of the accelerator complex. No one had ventured a guess what the odds there were.

  There was no point. They had no other option.

  The three of them trudged along the tunnel's cement floor by the beams of two LED emergency flashlights they found in the utility closet. The liquid helium had long since evaporated. Rees and Danni walked together in front. Morgan kept an eye on the rear.

  Rees was explaining his theory on Herodotus's real identity. "When I saw the breaking of the bread, I realized it had to be a Christian ceremony. The Eucharist."

  "But the Kafir Project was supposed to be about the history of Islam," Morgan countered. "Or the non-history. Why record a Christian church service? Do we even know what time period it was?"

  Rees answered over his shoulder. "Well, it would have to be from before the seventh century. It would need to predate Islam, if they're doing what I think they're doing."

  "Which is?" Danni asked.

  "Okay, based on what you read in the original proposal, we have a good idea about the Kafir Project's agenda."

  "Obtain historical evidence to refute key elements of Islamic belief," Danni recited. "I think that's verbatim."

  "And that included real, historical artifacts." Rees's voice sounded ragged from fatigue, but edged with excitement too. "When Kerry joked about a tell-all book, it came to me. The liturgical book the priest read from, in the time recording-that was literally the focal point. Why would a book of Christian writings be so important to Islamic history? And as soon as I asked that question, I knew the answer. Because it's a Syriac Christian lectionary."

  "Rees, can we slow down some?" Morgan sounded exhausted.

  Rees glanced back at her. "Of course. I guess I should explain what a lectionary is."

  "No, I mean physically. Walking. Can we slow it down? Every step is like somebody's whacking my head with a hammer."
r />   Rees slacked his pace. "I'm sorry. Is this better?"

  "Yes it is. Thanks. And yeah, please explain about the lectionary thing. I'm not exactly at the top of my game right now."

  Rees nodded. "All right. So a lectionary is a kind of calendar for what the priest reads to the congregation. Which verses on what days. The one in the time-recording would've contained passages from the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures. And of course there'd be some version of the gospel story in there too."

  "How do you know all this stuff?" Danni asked. "Aren't you an astrophysicist?"

  Rees gave a modest shrug. "I started investigating the history of my childhood religion. And then I just got curious, I suppose. I still keep up with biblical archaeology and textual criticism."

  Morgan played her flashlight beam over some unopened crates of equipment they were passing. Shadows marched backwards across the tunnel wall. "You said it was a Syriac Christian lectionary, Rees. Why is that important?"

  "Well, a few years ago a certain Aramaic scholar noticed something interesting about the Qur'an. There are a number of words and verses that are virtually incomprehensible-even to educated Qur'anic scholars. But they make perfect sense if you strip away the diacritical marks and assume the text was written in Syro-Aramaic, not Arabic."

  Morgan chimed in again. "You're losing me, Rees. Did I mention I just got my clock cleaned pretty good?"

  "Okay, in the seventh century," Rees said, "the Arabic language was written without vowels, like Hebrew. And a number of the consonants looked exactly alike. The same four characters could spell eight or ten different words."

  A dim memory struggled to surface in Danni's mind, but didn't quite make it. Something to do with martyrs.

  Rees continued. "Marks were added, dots and dashes, above, below and beside these consonants, or what's called the rasm. But the early scribes who had to decide what possible word each clump of ambiguous letters represented in the Qur'an were all working under the assumption it was written entirely in Arabic. And it might not have been."

  Danni remembered now. "White grapes."