Final Theory

by Mark Alpert

  Reynolds said nothing. Too lost in despair, most likely. But Simon turned away from the treacherous road for a moment and stared at the professor. “What are you saying? Was the old Jew your father?”

  Gupta chuckled again. “Please, don’t be ridiculous. Do I look like Herr Doktor? No, the relation was on my wife’s side.”

  Simon had no time to inquire further. In the next instant he rounded a bend in the road and saw Brock’s vehicle up ahead, the old Dodge van that had formerly belonged to Dr. Milo Jenkins. Simon pulled up alongside and saw that the driver’s seat was empty; Brock had obviously gotten out of the van here to pursue Swift and the teenager on foot. When Simon rolled down his window he could hear the teenager’s shrieks quite clearly, coming from a ravine just east of the road.

  DAVID COULDN’T STOP MICHAEL FROM SCREAMING. He’d started when the FBI agents had opened fire, and he’d continued wailing in long, agonized gusts as he and David ran through the forest. The boy took a frantic gulp of air after every shriek and tore through the undergrowth in a path as straight as a bullet’s. David struggled to catch up, his lungs burning. After a few minutes the sound of gunfire ceased and Michael slackened his pace, but the screams kept erupting from the teenager’s throat, each just as long and powerful as the last.

  Judging from the position of the sun, David guessed they were moving northwest. He’d lost sight of Monique but he couldn’t stop to look for her. He was worried that Michael’s screams would make it easy for the FBI to find them; although the agents had evidently halted at the edge of the woods, sooner or later they were sure to advance. In a desperate burst of speed, David caught up to the boy and grasped his elbow.

  “Michael,” he panted. “You have to…stop screaming. Everyone…can hear you.”

  The teenager shook his arm free and let out another shriek. David clapped his hand over Michael’s mouth, but the boy pushed him away and dashed over a ridge. He descended into a narrow ravine with rocky cliffs on both sides and a clear brook trickling down the middle. The cliffs echoed Michael’s screams, making them even louder. Although David was at the limits of his endurance, he flung himself down the slope and grabbed Michael from behind. He covered the boy’s mouth, trying to muzzle him, but the kid jammed an elbow into his ribs. David stumbled backward, landing in the mud at the edge of the brook. Christ, he thought, what the hell am I going to do? And as he shook his head in exasperation he looked downstream and saw a man in a gray suit.

  David’s skin went cold. This wasn’t one of the agents from the assault team. Although the man stood a hundred yards to the south, David recognized him right away because his face was still mottled with big purple bruises. It was the renegade agent, the man who’d tried to abduct them two days ago in West Virginia. Except now he carried an Uzi instead of a Glock.

  David snatched Michael’s hand and began running in the opposite direction. At first Michael resisted, but when they heard a burst from the Uzi the teenager sprinted ahead. They charged through a thicket that gave them some cover, but after a while David realized he’d made a mistake. As they moved north the cliffs on either side grew higher, and after a few hundred yards the ravine dead-ended. They were in a hollow, a box canyon, closed on three sides; ahead of them was another fractured cliff, too steep to climb.

  In a frenzy David scanned the wall of rock. Just above the base he saw a horizontal crevice that looked like a giant mouth. The opening was about the size of car’s windshield, but the fissure was dark and seemed to go deep into the cliff. A limestone cavern, he thought. Graddick had said there were plenty in the area. David clambered to the crevice as fast as he could, then pulled Michael up. While the boy scurried back to the deepest part of the fissure, David lay on his stomach and looked out the opening. He reached into the back of his pants and removed his pistol, the one he’d taken from the agent who was hunting them now.

  Michael was still screaming, and although the cavern muffled the noise, some of it leaked outside. After a minute or so David saw the agent approach the cliff, trying to figure out where the screams were coming from. He was about twenty feet below, so he couldn’t see into the fissure yet, but he was getting closer. David steadied the Glock on the lip of the crevice, aiming at the ground in front of the agent. Then he fired.

  The man whirled around and ran back to the thicket. In a few seconds he started firing his Uzi at the cliff, but the bullets whanged harmlessly against the rock. David was inside a natural bunker, an ideal defensive position. He could hold off this bastard for hours. The real FBI agents would eventually flood the area, along with several regiments of soldiers; when they came near, David would fire again to get their attention. Then he and Michael would surrender to the government men. It was a grim prospect, but a hundred times better than surrendering to the terrorists.

  After a while Michael’s screams began to ebb. David peered over the lip of the crevice and saw the agent still crouching in the thicket. And then he spotted another man, a bald man, standing by the brook in the middle of the ravine. He wore camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. With his right hand he wielded a Bowie knife and with his left he clutched a squirming boy by the scruff of his neck. The tableau was so strange that it took David several seconds to recognize the youngster. When he did, the pain in his chest was so sharp he dropped his pistol and clawed at his heart.

  “Dr. Swift?” the bald man shouted. “Your son wants to see you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THE ODDEST THING ABOUT THE VICE PRESIDENT, LUCILLE thought, was that he looked like a goddamn Communist. He had the barrel chest and balding pate and ill-fitting blue suit of a Soviet commissar. She’d never noticed this similarity when she’d seen the man on television, but it was hard to miss now that she sat in his office in the West Wing. His mouth was set in an asymmetrical sneer as he surveyed the papers on his desk. “So, Agent Parker,” he started, “I heard you had a little trouble this morning.”

  Lucille nodded. By this point she was past caring. She’d already written her letter of resignation. “I take full responsibility, sir. In the rush to apprehend the suspects, we failed to properly coordinate with the Defense Department.”

  “What went wrong, exactly? How did they get away?”

  “They probably escaped on one of the dirt roads heading west. The army was supposed to secure the perimeter but they didn’t deploy fast enough.”

  “And where does this leave us?”

  “Back at square one, unfortunately. We need more resources, sir, more boots on the ground. We have to catch these sons of bitches before they share their information with anyone else.”

  The vice president frowned, pulling back his bloodless lips. “The Delta Force will take care of it. The defense secretary and I have decided that the mission no longer requires the FBI’s assistance. The operation will be strictly military from now on.”

  Although she fully expected it, the dismissal still hurt. “And is that why I’m here? So you could kick me off the case?”

  He tried to smile but it didn’t quite work. His grin went askew, sliding to the right side of his face. “No, not at all. I have a new assignment for you.” He picked up a copy of the New York Times and pointed to a headline on the front page: REPORTER SHOT TO DEATH IN BROOKLYN. “We have a containment problem. The Times is accusing the FBI of killing one of their reporters, the one who was sheltering Swift’s wife. Apparently they found some witnesses who said the shooter looked like an agent. It’s an absurd claim but it’s getting some attention.”

  “I’m afraid there might be some truth to it. One of our agents is missing, and there’s evidence that he’s working for the other side. He may have shot the reporter to get to Swift’s wife.”

  Lucille had assumed the vice president would have a fit when he heard this news, but he brushed it aside. “That’s irrelevant. I’ve already scheduled a press conference. I want you to deny this story in the strongest terms. Stick with the drug angle. Say that your team is investigating the possibility that Sw
ift’s partners in the drug business kidnapped his wife and killed the reporter.”

  Lucille shook her head. She was sick to death of this bullshit. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do that.”

  The veep leaned across his desk. His face had reverted to its characteristic sneer. “This is just as important as finding the suspects, Parker. We need tools to fight the terrorists. And Congress is already trying to take those tools away. The last thing we need is a disclosure of this magnitude.”

  She sighed and got to her feet. It was time to head back to Texas. “I better get going. I gotta clean out my desk.”

  The vice president stood up, too. “Well, I have to admit, this is a disappointment. The director of the Bureau assured me that you were a woman with balls.”

  Lucille glared at him. “Believe me, the disappointment is mutual.”

  THE VAN CAME TO A STOP. Because Karen’s hands were tied behind her back, she couldn’t look at her watch, but she guessed that it had been about six hours since they’d left the pine forest. Shivering, she squirmed closer to Jonah. Jesus, please Jesus, she whispered, don’t let the bastards take him away again. The last time they took her son, Karen had nearly gone out of her mind, and although Brock had brought Jonah back to the van only twenty minutes later, the boy cried for hours afterward.

  Brock stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked around the van. When he opened the rear doors Karen got a whiff of dank air and saw a large dark garage with broken windows and crumbling walls. They were in some kind of decrepit warehouse, some old building that had been abandoned years ago. Three white delivery trucks were parked nearby and a dozen young men stood next to the vehicles. They had the unmistakable look of graduate students: skinny, pale, and poorly dressed. Their eyes widened as they stared at Jonah and Karen and the two other women prisoners, all of them bound and gagged and lying on the van’s floor. Then Brock yelled, “What the hell are you waiting for?” and the students leaped forward.

  Jonah contorted wildly as a pair of them climbed into the van and picked him up. Karen screamed “No!” behind her gag and then another pair of students came for her. She jackknifed her body but they held on tight, carrying her out of the van and across the garage.

  They approached one of the delivery trucks. The words FERMI NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY had been stenciled on the side panel. A lanky student who seemed particularly disheveled—he wore a ratty T-shirt displaying the periodic table—rolled up the door to the truck’s cargo hold. The pair of students holding Jonah put the boy in the truck, and then the pair holding Karen did the same. She sobbed in relief as they set her down beside her son. For the moment, at least, they were still together.

  From the floor of the cargo hold she saw their two fellow prisoners, the calm black woman and her jittery companion, being transferred to another truck. This place must be a rendezvous point, Karen guessed, where the bastards could pick up new vehicles and supplies. She scanned the room for identifying signs, any clues that could reveal where on earth they were, but she saw none. And then she noticed a commotion at the other end of the garage. Two more students stood beside a pickup truck, struggling to carry yet another bound prisoner. Karen’s throat tightened—it was David. He was bucking and twisting so violently that the students lost their grip and he dropped to the floor. Karen screamed behind her gag again. Then a third student joined the others and together they lifted David and bore him toward the last delivery truck.

  IT WAS LATE, WELL PAST MIDNIGHT. The trucks were moving slowly down a winding road. Although Monique couldn’t see outside, she could hear the rumble of the wheels and feel the turns in her stomach. They were probably taking the back roads to avoid any checkpoints on the interstate.

  To her left, Professor Gupta and his students stood around a computer that had been set up in the far corner of the cargo hold. Just a few feet away Michael sat on the floor, playing Warfighter on his Game Boy again. (Someone had recharged the batteries for him.) Gupta had been huddled with his grandson for the past several hours, asking whispered questions about the Einheitliche Feldtheorie while his students entered Michael’s answers into the computer, but now the professor had apparently gotten everything he needed. He grinned in triumph at the computer screen, then broke away from the group and came over to where Monique lay. Her first instinct was to reach for the bastard’s throat, but unfortunately she was still bound and gagged.

  “I want you to see this, Dr. Reynolds,” he said. “For a physicist, this is a dream come true.” He turned to a pair of pale, gangly students with thick glasses. “Scott, Richard, would you please escort Dr. Reynolds to the terminal?”

  Grabbing her by the shoulders and ankles, the students carried her across the cargo hold and deposited her on a folding chair in front of the computer screen. Gupta leaned over her shoulder. “We’ve developed a program that simulates the creation of the extra-dimensional neutrino beam. Thanks to the information we gleaned from Jacques Bouchet and Alastair MacDonald, we already knew we could use the Tevatron to generate the beam. And once Michael told us the field equations, we were able to calculate the necessary adjustments to the collider. Now we can do trial runs on the computer, so we’ll know how to proceed once we get to Fermilab.” He reached for the keyboard, tapped the enter key, and pointed at the screen. “Watch carefully. The first thing you’ll see is a simulation of the particle collisions inside the Tevatron.”

  She had no choice but to look. The screen displayed a three-dimensional lattice, a rectilinear grid drawn with faint white lines that wavered ever so slightly. This was obviously a representation of a vacuum, a region of empty spacetime with small quantum fluctuations. But it didn’t stay empty for long. After a few seconds she saw swarms of particles streaming from the left and right sides of the screen.

  “Those are simulations of the proton and antiproton beams that travel through the Tevatron,” Gupta noted. “We’re going to pulse them in convex waves so the particles will collide in a perfectly spherical pattern. Watch!”

  As Monique squinted at the particles she saw that they were actually tiny folded clusters, each sliding through the spacetime lattice like a slipknot on a string. At the moment of impact, the collisions lit up the center of the screen and all the knots simultaneously unraveled, violently twisting the surrounding lattice. Then the grid of white lines ruptured and a barrage of new particles shot through the breach. The sterile neutrinos.

  Gupta pointed excitedly at the particles. “See how they escape? The collisions will warp the spacetime enough to propel a beam of sterile neutrinos out of our brane and into the extra dimensions. Here, let me switch to a wider view.”

  He tapped the keyboard again and the screen showed a wrinkled, undulating sheet of spacetime against a black background. It was the brane of our universe embedded within the ten-dimensional bulk. The swarm of neutrinos erupted from a sharp twist in the sheet. “We’ll have to configure the experiment very precisely,” he said. “The beam has to be aimed so that it returns to our brane, preferably at a point about five thousand kilometers above North America. That way everyone on the continent will be able to see the burst.”

  The particles traced a straight path through the bulk, brightening and accelerating as they plowed through the extra dimensions. The beam crossed the empty space between two folds in the brane and then reentered the spacetime sheet, which writhed and shook and glowed white-hot at the point of impact. This was obviously the burst that Gupta had referred to. He tapped one of his long fingernails against the computer screen. “If we do everything right, the reentry should release several thousand terajoules of energy into our brane. That’s roughly the equivalent of a one-megaton nuclear blast. Because the beam will be targeted so far above the atmosphere, it won’t cause any damage on the ground. But it’ll make a spectacular sight. For several minutes it’ll blaze like a new sun!”

  Monique stared at the glowing section of the brane, which gradually dimmed as the energy dissipated across spacetime. Jesus, she th
ought, why the hell is Gupta doing this? Unable to pose the question aloud, she turned to the professor and narrowed her eyes.

  He read her look and nodded. “We need to make a public demonstration, Dr. Reynolds. If we simply tried to publish the unified theory, the authorities would suppress the information. The government wants the theory for itself, so it can build its weapons in secret. But the Einheitliche Feldtheorie doesn’t belong to any government. And it’s much more than just a blueprint for making new weapons.”

  Gupta bent over the keyboard and with a few strokes he switched the computer screen to an architectural drawing of a power plant. “By exploiting the extra-dimensional phenomena, we could produce limitless amounts of electricity. No more need for coal-burning generators or nuclear reactors. But that’s just the beginning. We could apply the technology to medicine, precisely targeting the neutrino beams to kill cancer cells. We could use the beams to launch rockets and propel them across the solar system. We could even accelerate a spacecraft to nearly the speed of light!” He turned away from the screen and gazed at Monique. There were tears in his eyes. “Don’t you understand, Dr. Reynolds? When humankind wakes up tomorrow morning, they’ll see the full splendor of the unified theory. No one will be able to hide it anymore!”

  Monique had heard enough. She didn’t doubt the truth of what Gupta was saying. The unified theory was so all-encompassing, it could certainly lead to many wonderful inventions. But there was a price, a terrible price. She couldn’t stop thinking of the white-hot burst at the center of the computer screen. The professor had said it would be a demonstration, a grand announcement written across the sky, but Monique wondered exactly what the people below would take away from it. Hiroshima had been a demonstration, too.