by Eric Bernt
Fenton struggled to hide his surprise. This was the last thing he was expecting. The newest member of the committee, Denise Claybourne, a proud tree-hugging Democrat from Maine who also happened to be one of the committee’s two females and one of the three dissenters, quickly chimed in. “Doctor, if you don’t mind, I have a few questions.” She flipped through some of the classified Harmony House research materials. “What, for example, is acoustic archeology?”
Fenton smiled. “Think back to some of the most sensitive conversations you’ve ever had. Now imagine that someone could walk into the space where you had one of those conversations, and use a device to re-create the exact dialogue from the degenerated, but still identifiable, waves of energy that were first created when you were having that private dialogue.” He used the analogy of paleontologists re-creating an entire dinosaur from a fossilized bone fragment.
Claybourne’s expression was a mixture of amazement and concern, just like that of every politician who first heard about the possibility. “I would say it’s a good thing my divorce is final.” It got a good laugh—nervous, but good. “Are you telling me that it’s possible?”
“Not only is it possible, it’s on the verge of becoming reality.” The others around the room knew that this had been true for over a decade, but no one made comment. There were clearly bigger agendas at work, and if you didn’t know who you were fighting, it was best not to fight.
Fenton continued. “A more academic variety of acoustic archeology has already been featured in several investigative television shows.”
“What do you mean, ‘more academic’?”
“If this room were being painted as we had this conversation, our words would be etched into the wet paint the same way music was originally recorded onto vinyl records. Once the paint dries, it’s fairly easy to use lasers to measure the microscopic scratches in the paint, which could then be translated back into sound.
“It’s useful if you want to hear what Michelangelo was saying as he painted the Sistine Chapel, or what Anasazi were saying to each other while decorating their caves, but its contemporary relevance is limited.” Dr. Fenton leaned forward. “Senator, what would you like to hear?”
“Everything that happened on the fifth floor of the School Book Depository next to the grassy knoll on November 22, 1963.”
The doctor smiled. “I would go to the Oval Office and listen to every word ever spoken for the last seventy-five years.”
Senator Claybourne now realized the true potential of the science. “It would change law enforcement as we know it. And intelligence.”
Fenton put it simply. “There would be no more secrets.”
The Democratic senator’s mind was racing. “Any lie ever told . . . any crime ever committed . . . my God.”
“Exactly.” Fenton’s eyes were penetrating.
The chairman gritted his teeth like a prizefighter taking a dive. It was only now that it dawned on him why Bob Stenson and the American Heritage Foundation had asked him to approve funding for Harmony House: They know something. They have to. Jesus Christ, what if the echo box finally works?
Dr. Marcus Fenton smiled ever so slightly. “Now imagine another government got it first.”
Denise Claybourne’s voice was low and steady. “We can never let that happen.”
Senator Davis took a moment to congratulate himself. “Thanks to this committee, it won’t.”
Watching the capital disappear from view as he rode an Amtrak Acela Express out of Union Station, Fenton had no idea how hollow and predetermined his victory was. He knew something seemed off about the whole thing, but after getting his entire operating budget approved, he was not about to start asking questions now.
He checked emails, including the daily security report from Michael Barnes, then went to the café car to see what kind of scotch they were serving. He settled for twelve-year-old Dewar’s. It would have to do. Those around him had no idea they were in the presence of a legend whose reputation remained securely intact.
At least, for another year.
CHAPTER 17
Harmony House, Woodbury, New Jersey, May 22, 6:37 p.m.
Michael Barnes sat at his desk in his office, which was located in a secure area of the basement and looked like a smaller version of the Homeland Security critical-response center. The man had electronic snooping devices tapped into eighty different telephones and inside the residences of several dozen people who worked for the facility. Listening to them all, and ferreting out the rare but potentially important nuggets from the massive amounts of chaff, required vigilant organization, serious discipline, and considerable experience. He had all these qualities in spades, and he delegated the work to no one. He didn’t trust anyone to do as thorough a job as he did. The only way he managed to sleep was to know with certainty that nothing had slipped through the cracks. Completing the job often required superhuman effort, and often resulted in the kind of punishing headaches he suffered from now.
He massaged his temples as he listened to transmissions originating in Manhattan, specifically from the newly installed antenna atop Jacob Hendrix’s apartment building. Barnes popped two Excedrin, which he kept in a desk drawer next to a box of hollow points, then continued listening. The professor’s residence was quiet. The only sounds came from the city surrounding it. This didn’t surprise Barnes, because he had already heard an earlier phone conversation between Skylar and Jacob in which they’d decided to eat dinner at a neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Mostly, he was listening to the Manhattan ambience as a sound check.
He could, quite literally, hear a pin drop.
Barnes decided to move on to their email accounts. Skylar had three: a Gmail account, where she received personal email and which she used to log in to social media like Instagram and Snapchat; one for Harvard alumni; and the third was her new Harmony House account, which she hadn’t used yet. Jacob also had three. His main account was at nyu.edu. He sent and received over sixty emails a day. His iCloud account was for personal use. He regularly communicated with his parents, as well as several friends from high school and college.
It was his third account, which was no longer active, that Barnes found the most interesting: [email protected]. It hadn’t been used in over six months. All mail sent and received by the account had been deleted. A quick search of Yahoo’s backup servers revealed why. One of Jacob’s students had begun pursuing a relationship with him when Skylar was still at Harvard. The student, Celine Markowitz, had come all the way to NYU from Redondo Beach, California. Her email address was [email protected].
If the young lady was half as seductive in person as she was in her emails, it was no wonder the professor had succumbed to her charms. Barnes figured they probably only slept together a few times, because Jacob quickly cut it off. She apparently didn’t take it well, and her pleadings grew increasingly desperate. Her last email threatened suicide. A quick check of the university-hospital records that same day revealed she was admitted for observation. She did not return to school the following semester. Like so many other gems he had in his possession, Barnes pocketed this one for safekeeping. If necessary, it could be used to keep Jacob Hendrix in line, or to get him out of the picture entirely.
If that didn’t work, there were always more drastic measures Barnes was prepared to take.
CHAPTER 18
Shu Han Ju Chinese Restaurant, Greenwich Village, New York City, May 22, 8:22 p.m.
Shu Han Ju was the kind of little-known Chinese restaurant that makes New York the city it is. The eatery was small, the seating was cramped, and the windows hadn’t been cleaned in years. The cantankerous proprietor, who was in his sixties and bore a constant scowl, almost seemed to have gone out of his way to make the place look dingy. The unkempt plainness kept the tourists away, and that was just fine, because tourists kept away the locals, and those were the patrons he wanted. Repeat business. Like the handsome young university professor who was one of his best customers.
&n
bsp; Jacob Hendrix loved Chinese food, and this restaurant in particular, which was only three blocks from his apartment. It was also surprisingly reasonable. This confluence of factors explained why he’d eaten there 137 times over the last three years.
That, and Jacob didn’t know how to cook.
Skylar could take it or leave it. Chinese food just didn’t do it for her. No shrimp fried rice or boiled dumplings or lemon chicken would ever come close to well-chosen tuna sashimi or a great bone-in rib eye, but it made Jacob happy, so she was fine with eating here more than she cared to. Because she had to eat somewhere.
Skylar couldn’t cook, either.
Both had brought work-related reading with them, but Jacob quickly grew bored with his student scripts and put them down. He watched her closely across the table as she read through a thick file on one of her patients and jotted down notes.
“Stop staring.” She didn’t look up.
“Stop working.”
“You should have invited somebody else to dinner if it bothers you.”
“Eat with somebody else if you don’t want to be stared at.”
She kept right on putting down her thoughts. “I thought you had reading?”
“I do.” He savored the last bite of his crispy coconut shrimp.
She kept writing, so he kept staring. Until she finally put down her pen. “Okay, what?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. What?”
He paused, clearing his throat, trying to find just the right way to say what he had to say.
And then it hit her. The only time Jacob fumbled around like this was when he started thinking about the future. Their future. “On second thought, don’t.”
“God, you can be frustrating.”
“You want to talk about the future, and I don’t.”
He hated that she always knew what was on his mind. “We have to talk about it sometime.”
“Not right now, we don’t.”
“When?”
She closed her composition book and clasped her hands on top of it. “How about after I settle in to my new job? Would that be all right?”
His timing was admittedly terrible. “Fine. Whatever.”
She studied him incredulously. “What’s the sudden rush?”
“It isn’t sudden, and you know it.” He shook his head, mostly mad at himself. He returned to his reading as she returned to hers. They barely spoke the rest of the meal.
Skylar took a long, hot shower as soon as they got back to the apartment. Jacob turned again to his laptop, where he was on number nine of the twenty-two student scripts he had to get through. He glanced at Skylar’s composition book, which she had plopped onto her pillow before getting in the shower. He looked over toward the bathroom. He turned back to the composition book and considered what he was about to do. Invading her privacy would be wrong. He expected her to respect his boundaries. He should respect hers. If she caught him, it would seriously damage or possibly even end their relationship.
Jacob glanced again toward the bathroom, then quickly opened the composition book. He read as fast as he could. The patient’s name was Edward Parks. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of four. Jacob was moderately familiar with the disorder from their earlier conversations, but had never heard of acoustic archeology.
The more he read, the more his eyes widened with amazement. He actually mouthed the words echo box the first time he read them. This truly was astonishing stuff. No wonder she was so eager to learn more. He was, too.
That’s when he realized the water had turned off. He quickly tossed Skylar’s composition book onto her pillow and resumed reading a student’s work just as she came dripping wet out of the shower. She stood next to the bed, staring at him. “I’m sorry about dinner.”
“Me, too.” He admired her body because he couldn’t help himself, and because he knew she wanted him to.
“How much more reading do you have?”
He smiled slightly. “A ton.” It would take him all night.
She walked around the bed. “Not anymore.” She removed the laptop from his hands and climbed on top of him.
CHAPTER 19
Harmony House, Woodbury, New Jersey, May 22, 10:43 p.m.
The facility had a lights-out policy at nine thirty in the evening, and tonight was no exception. The lights in every patient’s room had already been off for over an hour. The night air was cold and still. The only sounds were the leaves crunching beneath the feet of the perimeter guard on his rounds, and those could barely be heard. You could see the man had training simply by the way he moved. His gait was rhythmic and determined. An intruder would be unfortunate to come upon him or his associates. The night security staff consisted of four personnel: one outside, one inside, one at the driveway gate, and one at the front entrance, who checked in with the other three at exactly twenty-minute intervals. “Baker, do you copy?”
The outside man answered quietly through his headset. “Baker clear, over.”
The front-desk guard tracked the locations of his two men on patrol with transmitters in their radios, which appeared on an electronic map of the facility. Surveillance cameras provided views of every inch of the grounds, both inside and out. “Copy that, Baker. Charlie, status?”
“Charlie’s clear, over.” He continued patrolling the hallways.
“Copy that, Charlie. Danger, do you copy?”
“Danger clear, over.” He continued watching the driveway-gate monitors.
“Copy that, Danger. Able out.” Able, Baker, Charlie, and Danger signified military, confirming the training evident in the gait of the outside man, Baker. Each was considerably overqualified for the job he now held. They had each taken the lives of no fewer than three people. One had killed eleven. These were men capable of becoming death machines, but only if the circumstances required it and they were ordered to do so.
Over the years, they had been required to make adjustments for Eddie. The boots initially provided to security personnel made a particular clicking sound on the linoleum floors, which disturbed Eddie’s sleep, even after the installation of the acoustic panels in his room, so he developed a composite rubber for new soles that made the boots practically silent. It turned out this new composite also lasted three times as long as the previous one, so Eddie’s composite soon became part of standard-issue US military footwear.
For someone who didn’t understand the concept of money, he was certainly doing a nice job making the government quite a bit of it.
It was exactly 10:47 p.m. when Eddie’s eyes opened. He sucked in a deep breath as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Or hit by a lightning bolt. And maybe this time, he had been. Maybe, finally, this was it. The answer. The fix. The conclusion to his equations, Eddie’s Theorems, which had eluded him for all these years. Could this really be it? Could it?
He raced to the light switch by the door, then over to his desk, where he grabbed the most recently filled book of equations and a number-two pencil. He had a cup full of them—twenty-four, to be exact, because the number was the product of two cubed times three, and Eddie liked that. Each pencil was properly sharpened and awaiting its turn.
The math was a blur, simply flying out of him at stunning speed. Lost in a torrent of thoughts, he went through one pencil quickly, maintaining its sharpness with an electric sharpener that was over ten years old. Having filled the remaining pages of the current notebook, he readily went through another. And two more pencils in the process.
Like a composer lost in his own world, the incomprehensible equations were pouring out of him so rapidly that his writing hand struggled to keep up with his brain. It was frenzied and spontaneous moments of revelation like this that had made him wonder, earlier in life, if he should learn to write with both hands simultaneously, thereby doubling his already tremendous output. But his left hand proved to be less adept at writing, and although he had two eyes, the two hemispheres of his brain refu
sed to act independently of each other, forever condemning him to the one-handed pace of the rest of us.
Whatever he was hearing in his head, he was not hearing anything else. Nothing in his room or outside the windows. Nothing down the hall. It was as if his remarkable sense of hearing had shut down to focus all his considerable processing power on the singular task at hand. When a person experiences extreme cold, frostbite results from the body trying to survive by withdrawing blood circulation from the extremities to protect the critical organ, the heart. That same principle seemed to be at work as Eddie continued writing wildly. Two hours passed. Then three. He showed no signs of slowing down.
Eddie didn’t notice that five thirty, his usual wake-up time, had already come and gone. So did dawn’s first light. So did his would-be morning singing companions, a red-necked grebe and a northern gannet. The birds left the branches outside his window quickly, as if the light through the window of Eddie’s room told them there would be no chorus today. He was visible at his desk, still writing away furiously.
Occasionally he would pause, looking up from his notebook, staring at the wall, not looking at anything in particular. Nothing tangible, anyway. What he was seeing was anybody’s guess. His pencil would remain motionless. He wouldn’t blink, and barely seemed to breathe. A human mannequin. Just as quickly as these frozen moments would start, they would stop again, and the graphite in Eddie’s number-two pencil would resume its frenzied trail across page after page.
