The Devil's Interval

by Kevin Tumlinson

  “So basically, the premise of your whole project,” Kotler said, disgusted.

  Patel said nothing.

  “Could this guy reconstruct what you built with that book?”

  “I do not believe he could personally,” Patel said. “Even with the data he stole, the complete research isn’t there. It’s fragmented.”

  “But it could be a start,” Kotler said.

  Patel agreed. “Yes. I fear it could.”

  “The loose pages?” Kotler asked.

  “Mostly printouts of some of my notes,” Patel said. “And a few things I didn’t recognize. Possibly notes from Lawny.”

  “Are you able to recall everything you saw?” Denzel asked. “Could you fill us in on what this guy may have? And what it means?”

  “I’ll give you everything I can,” Patel said. “I didn’t see everything, but I can tell you what I saw.”

  “I’ll have them provide with a means of giving a full statement,” Denzel said. Patel nodded, silent and sullen.

  Kotler leaned forward and gave Patel a hard look. “What you did—hiding that chamber and everything in it, claiming that research as your own—you realize what that means?”

  Patel slumped, falling back in his chair. “I do,” he said. “I’ve lost all credibility now. My career is over.”

  “More than that,” Denzel said. “Because of what you did, at least one person was murdered, and his killer is still out there. And as if that weren’t enough, this technology of yours could be the most dangerous thing on the planet, and it’s clear someone knows all about it. So, you need to tell us everything you know, Dr. Patel. No more secrets. Because as of now, you’re looking pretty good as an accomplice in all of this.”

  Patel looked as if he were going to implode with grief and fear.

  He nodded, and for the next two hours he answered every question Denzel and Kotler could think to ask.

  It was a grueling interview, and at the end of it Denzel had Patel moved to a cell, to await transport back to the US.

  They were leaving the building, walking back through the parking garage to where the rental was parked.

  “We don’t have enough to convict him of anything,” Denzel said. “Not yet, anyway. And I think I’m with you now. He doesn’t feel right for the murder. But I’m still not sure about his role in stealing that data. Someone had to know that Ashton Mink had that memory card.”

  “You think Dr. Patel knew? That he leaked it?”

  Denzel shook his head. “Too soon to tell.”

  Kotler nodded. “One thing’s for sure,“ he said, feeling disappointed and disgusted. “He’s definitely a part of covering up that chamber.”

  “And Scotland Yard may pursue something about that,” Denzel replied. “If it comes to it. They have their own version of historic crimes, so I’m sure they’ll have a strong interest.”

  Kotler nodded. He was feeling out of sorts now, but there was one thing that might cheer him up. “So, when do we get to explore that chamber?”

  “Funny you should ask that. The locals are sifting through surveillance footage, tracking where the gunman disappeared to. While they do that, I’ve gotten us clearance to get back down into that chamber and have a look around.”

  “Why Agent Denzel! For lil’ ol’ me?” Kotler said, smiling.

  Denzel rolled his eyes. “No. Patel and the gunman were trying to reconstruct the missing data for Devil’s Interval. There may be some clue down there that will tell us how to track this guy. They’ve had a forensic sweep of the place and turned up nothing useful, but I’ve convinced them to give you a go at it. You bring special skills to the table.”

  “I’m flattered,” Kotler said, smiling.

  “Don’t get a big head about it, Kotler,” Denzel said, as the two of them climbed back into the rental car.

  Chapter 8

  The Newton Chamber, as Kotler and Denzel had started to refer to it, was lit by modern work lights, strung along the walls and powered by lines tapped into a main circuit of the Westminster Research Library. Denzel mused that Patel must have figured no one would notice a small bump in power usage, since people could be found in the library day and night. And, from what Kotler was finding, the power needs of this space were slight. A few lights, a few small pieces of equipment, a laptop or smart tablet here and there.

  The forensics team had tagged everything in the space by now, and left most of it exactly where it had been found. Kotler was impressed by how thorough they’d been. And how respectful—even the most minor-seeming object was labeled with special care, ensuring no damage.

  Kotler had a strong urge to peruse the entire space, to examine everything he could find, but he limited himself to the area where Patel and the gunman had been working, for now. Here, presumably, was everything Patel and Lawny Bristol had studied as part of Devil’s Interval. Kotler could look over the manifest later, to see if anything that had been cataloged in this space might be pertinent to the case.

  “Anything?” Denzel asked, not for the first time.

  “Roland, if you’re going to keep pestering me, the least you could do is go find some place to buy me a decent cup of coffee.”

  “I’m not your personal assistant, Kotler,” Denzel groused.

  “I’m not sure what the gunman made off with,” Kotler replied, bending to look closer at a small, wooden box with a brass horn mounted to it. “I know he took the card, and the reader. He also grabbed the journal from this table.”

  “We should have Patel’s statement about the contents of that soon,” Denzel said. “The tech guys at Scotland Yard are also going over Patel’s laptop to see if they can pull up anything, though it’s apparently tough going with a bullet hole through the hard drive. They have tech that can pull some of the data, and Patel is cooperating, so they should be able to reconstruct at least a portion of it.”

  Kotler nodded, straightening. He looked up from the workbench he’d been scrutinizing for the past couple of hours, and nodded to the expanse of the chamber. “This is just stunning, isn’t it? You know, Newton wasn’t really known for his work in acoustics. It was essentially a side pursuit. We have him to thank for a lot of early research into the wave and particle properties of light, though. Foundations of quantum physics. Ironic, considering Newtonian physics has ruled for so long.”

  “Yeah,” Denzel said. “Stunning.”

  Kotler grinned. “I know. Geek talk. But look at this place, Roland! Buried here for a couple of centuries, and it looks like it was just in use yesterday!”

  “That’s because it was just in use today,” Denzel said. “Are you finding anything useful?”

  Kotler shook his head. “Not really. It would take weeks to comb through everything here, to see how all the pieces fit. Patel’s data may be the only real clue we have.”

  Denzel rubbed his eyes. “Ok,” he said. “Let’s go over what we do know. Patel and his partner …”

  “Dr. Bristol,” Kotler supplied.

  “Right. Bristol. Patel finds this chamber, and brings in Bristol to help him go through this place. The two of them decide to keep it quiet. Why is that?”

  “Patel wanted to introduce new discoveries one at a time,” Kotler said. “He was going to sit on this until he’d mined it for everything he could.” Kotler looked around, feeling the disgust return. Mining history for profit wasn’t something he could just ignore. Too much history had been lost to the world forever, thanks to that sort of greed.

  “So how is that any different than what he was telling people? Miller and Chandler were praising him for being able to repurpose forgotten research.”

  Kotler nodded. “True. But they were working from the same assumption I was. Patel was writing papers and filing patents based on having discovered lost principles, and then exploring them on his own, connecting them to modern day science and technology. He admitted to finding some research intact, and simply carrying it to it’s natural conclusion. What he wasn’t telling anyone was that
a lot of his patents and papers were based on complete research. He wasn’t just finishing work someone else started, he was lifting their work in its entirety, and claiming it as his own. This,” Kotler said, waving a hand to indicate the Newton Chamber, “was the source of a lot of his revolutionary patents. Whoever maintained this chamber was clearly a genius, but must have died sometime in the late 70s. Patel found this place, and exploited it. He was claiming work that wasn’t his own.”

  Kotler found that he was getting agitated, and he took a deep breath to calm himself, sighing into the cavernous chamber, as if he might breathe life back into it.

  “I get it,” Denzel said.

  Kotler looked at him, and felt a bit embarrassed. “I’m sorry. This kind of thing gets to me.”

  “What I don’t get,” Denzel said, “Is why Patel would even have to do it. He’s clearly smart. He’d already set up the idea that he was uncovering historic research, and putting it to new use. Why claim someone else’s work? He could have revealed it, and still used it, right? He could have innovated from it.”

  Kotler shook his head. “It was his mindset. Basically, there are two types of mindsets—a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. If you have a growth mindset, you tend to think in possibilities and options. You believe everything has a solution, and all you have to do is find it. A fixed mindset believes that limitations are built in. You’re only as smart as you were born to be. And if being smart is your identity, then any time you aren’t smart, you’re lost. I think Patel has a fixed mindset. I think he believes that he’s only as good as his latest patent, and so, to protect his own self identity, he stole someone’s research and released it as his own. He cheated, even though he never needed to.”

  “You’re telling me this was self-preservation?” Denzel asked.

  Kotler nodded. “For Patel, it was.”

  Denzel thought about this for a moment, then shook his head. “Ok,” he said. “So Patel kept no record of this place. But Bristol may have. And when she died, her records were secured and archived, except for anything linked to ongoing research.”

  “And she may have kept a separate log, not linked directly to the Devil’s Interval project,” Kotler said.

  “So, whoever has access to her data could have found a log entry about this chamber. If they had that kind of access, they might have known about the Devil’s Interval project from the start. They could have been waiting for Patel to finish what he was doing, so they could steal the data.”

  “Then why would they need the data from Ashton Mink?” Kotler asked.

  Denzel shook his head. “Maybe they couldn’t get to the data before it was deleted,” he said. “Or they hadn’t expected the reaction from the executive team.”

  “Or maybe …” Kotler said, drifting, thinking.

  “What?”

  Kotler looked up at him. “Maybe they had counted on Ashton getting to that data. Or, at the very least, they had set it up so that only Ashton could get to it.”

  “I don’t follow,” Denzel said.

  “Nick Peters is former CIA. He has security measures in place that would make some small nations salivate with envy. Nothing gets in or out of that place without him knowing. Except …”

  “Except Ashton not only made copies of that data, he put it on a memory card and carried it out of there without so much as a burp from security.”

  “And he would be the only one in the company capable of doing that,” Kotler said. “He owned fifty-one percent of that place. There was no public offering. His shareholders are venture capitalists. So out of everyone in the company, Ashton was the one guy who could move around with complete autonomy. There was no need to monitor him. He had access to literally everything.”

  “And no one would have considered him a security threat,” Denzel said, “because … well, mostly because he was Ashton Mink. Most people wouldn’t think he’d have either the interest or the ability to steal data from his own company.” Denzel looked at Kotler. “Someone set him up.”

  Kotler nodded. “Makes sense. Now, we just need to know who.”

  “My money’s on someone in security.”

  “Peters?” Kotler asked.

  Denzel hesitated, and Kotler knew exactly what he was struggling with. Just as Kotler had felt a kinship with Dr. Patel, Denzel related to the ex-CIA security head. They had both served their country in similar ways. They had both taken oaths. If Peters was dirty somehow, Denzel would take it personally. “I’m not ready to rule anyone out yet,” he said.

  “Ok,” Kotler said. “So, we need to talk to everyone who had access to Dr. Bristol’s files. We should also look into her death.”

  “You think it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Do you?”

  Denzel shook his head. “I think the timing is suspicious. But this case has more loose pieces than this chamber has, at the moment.”

  Kotler looked around. “I need to do a more thorough sweep. But it’ll take time. Do you have the manifest?”

  “I had it sent to our phones,” Denzel said.

  “Phones? Not paper? You?” Kotler grinned.

  “I’m not a luddite, Kotler. What am I going to do, carry a file cabinet everywhere?”

  Kotler chuckled as he searched and found the file in his email. He opened it, and downloaded a secured PDF, requiring his ‘badge’ number to open. He used the number for his FBI consultant ID, and he was in.

  To his delight and relief, the document was searchable by keyword. He could quickly sift through the thousands of entries by searching for anything sound related. The forensics team had been savvy and meticulous, and they had done an excellent job of sussing out the general purpose of nearly everything. That took some creative thought, in many cases. Even Kotler didn’t recognize most of the bits and pieces down here.

  One entry stood out for him, as he searched.

  “Theremin,” Kotler said.

  “What now?” Denzel asked.

  Kotler looked up. “This is interesting,” he said.

  “What’s a thermonim?”

  “Theremin,” Kotler corrected. “Originally known as an aetherphone. It’s a musical instrument. Kind of a weird one. You play it by moving your hands in and out of proximity to two antennae. The movements control pitch and volume, and the sound it produces can be kind of eerie.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Denzel said. “What’s it got to do with anything? Sounds like you’ve seen one before.”

  “I have. It’s been used for years in film and television, mostly in the 60s. They used it in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’”

  “The Keanu Reeves movie?”

  Kotler rolled his eyes. “I would have thought you, of all people, would have an appreciation for classic film.”

  “Noir, maybe,” Denzel said. “So, get to the point.”

  “The Theremin was invented by Léon Theremin, a Russian inventor. It was patented in the late 1920s. Theremin himself wasn’t born until well after Newton had died.” Kotler walked way then, looking from the manifest to the numbered stations left by the forensics team.

  Denzel followed. “So, there’s no way that Newton could have had access to this thing.”

  “None,” Kotler said.

  “Did he maybe invent it before this Theremin guy?”

  “No chance,” Kotler said. “The technology this is dependent on would have seemed advanced to the point of being magic to Newton.”

  “So, what does this mean, Kotler? What are you thinking?”

  “We already know that Patel wasn’t the first person to discover this place,” Kotler said. “There’s technology in here spanning decades as recent as the 70s. Someone else knew about this chamber. That journal the gunman took may have belonged to whoever was keeping this place going.”

  “This Theremin guy?”

  “Not likely,” Kotler said. “But someone who knew Theremin’s work.” He finally came to the station where the Theremin had been cataloged, and looked at the objec
t on the table.

  It was a box, standing around three feet high, with a sloped front. There was an antenna made from wire, sticking up from the right-hand side of the box, protruding from the top. On its left side was a wire loop. There were a couple of ancient looking knobs mounted to a front panel.

  Kotler looked at it, and then back to Denzel, grinning. “This is an original. No manufacturer markings. It’s in pristine condition, too.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the case?”

  Kotler smiled and took out his phone. He took a moment to register just a bit of surprise that he had signal down here, and opened the YouTube app. He typed in simply ‘Theremin,’ and played the first result.

  The sound of the device echoed in the chamber, and after just a few seconds Denzel waved his arms, “Enough! Shit! That is the eeriest damn sound I have ever heard! They think that’s music?”

  Kotler laughed. “That eerie effect you’re feeling is exactly why this is relevant to the case. Newton was studying the Devil’s Interval. Patel found that research and expanded on it. But someone else used this place first, and was likely exploring the same phenomenon.”

  “How recently do you think that happened?” Denzel asked, wary.

  Kotler shrugged. “This thing is old. Probably built in the 30s. Maybe a bit later. There’s other equipment here from various decades, right up to the 70s, at which point I suspect this chamber was sealed and left abandoned. No way to know when any of this was brought down here.”

  “Kotler,” Denzel said, exasperated. “Seriously, what does this have to do with the case?”

  “If someone else knew about this place, the journal may have belonged to them. Maybe Bristol found it when Patel brought her down here, and she kept it secret.”