by Bill DeSmedt
“J-jon, you’ve lost me.” There was a slight tremolo in her voice, as if she were trying to keep her teeth from chattering.
“I guess it all sounds pretty nebulous.” At least to anyone who hadn’t experienced that momentary rush of absolute certainty. “But I think Sasha must have picked up on his boss’s intentions, on some subconscious level. He was uneasy about something beyond just having to lie to us, and he was broadcasting the anxiety. When he mentioned the business on the bridge, everything else just sort of fell into place . . . .What? What is it?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad I didn’t ask you b-before. Might not have b-believed you. Then where’d we be?”
They drifted in silence a while, watching the moon set. Finally Marianna said, “C-come over here, Jon. P-please.”
Was she coming on to him again? After the way she’d jerked him around over the past two days, couldn’t she at least give the wounds time to scab over? Ah, well. The most maddening thing about her was he couldn’t stay mad at her.
“C-c-come on,” she repeated. “I won’t b-bite.”
“Judging by past history that’s not necessarily a valid assumption. Why, what did you have in mind?”
“J-just a little sharing of resources. I’d swim over to you, but the antenna might p-p-pull loose.”
“We wouldn’t want that.” Hampered by the lifevest, Knox dog-paddled awkwardly to her. “What resources did you have in mind?”
“B-body heat,” she gasped, throwing both arms around him and hugging him to her. “I’m f-f-freezing’.”
She was freezing. At sixty degrees Fahrenheit, the Portuguese Current wasn’t much colder than a swimming pool on Memorial Day. But that still left a forty-degree differential between water and body temperature. And cold water chills the body twenty-five times faster than ambient air at the same temperature. Prolonged exposure would suck all the warmth right out of them. Polypropylene wetsuits and outer garments could retard the process. They couldn’t halt it.
The effect hadn’t hit Knox as hard yet: his greater body mass made him a less efficient radiator. It was easy to forget just how small Marianna really was. Not right now, though—she was shuddering, and clutching him so tightly that his ribs creaked.
“P-primary heat loss is from head, chest, and groin,” she said through clenched teeth, as if reciting a lesson learned by rote, or a prayer. “But head and neck area are the worst—maybe f-forty percent of the loss in a f-free dive—and our heads are out of the water. That leaves the other two.” She pressed tight against him, shivering uncontrollably.
He withdrew his arm from around Marianna’s waist long enough to read the time. 11:37. They’d been in the water less than an hour. Still a good six hours till sunrise. If S&R didn’t find them soon, they weren’t going to make it.
Could be worse. Hypothermia was preferable to dying of thirst or sunstroke. After a while you just stopped shivering. Then, you just stopped breathing. It was supposed to be like going to sleep.
Knox tried to get his mind off it. Normally, that would have been easy, or at least doable, with a beautiful woman in his arms. But, as the saying goes, “if you’re not here with the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Marianna was definitely part of his problem.
They drifted, huddling together.
Knox tilted his head back as far as the lifevest allowed. Midnight on the North Atlantic. The Milky Way, the “backbone of night,” arched above them. He recalled hearing that the naked eye can only distinguish three thousand or so individual stars. The evidence of his own eyes said otherwise: there had to be millions of them up there, tiny points of light against the blackness . . .
Just for a moment, his perspective inverted. As if he were looking, not up into the night sky, but down, down into a well of stars. As though he might lose his tenuous grip on the Earth and fall downward, outward into the clear, cold beauty of the night.
The universe was so vast and indifferent, the stars so far apart, so far away.
“About that past history . . .” Marianna was speaking almost normally again; the body contact seemed to be helping. She pressed her mouth against his ear, “Jon, we need to t-talk.”
“No time like the present.” Anything to keep those other, those cosmic thoughts at bay.
“Okay.” Marianna took a breath. She trembled with more than the cold. The words came tumbling out in a rush: “I, I screwed up. Bigtime. I let—we got ahead of ourselves. My fault. I don’t know what happened back there. Or I do know, but it didn’t have anything to do with, with us.
“We j-just got ahead of ourselves, is all,” she repeated, trembling again, holding him tightly, her warm breath tickling his ear. “If we make it out of this, could we maybe please go back to the beginning and start over?”
Lifevests and wetsuits pretty much ruled out anything more ambitious than hugging. They made do. Long before the search-and-rescue chopper found them, the hug had become an embrace.
25 | West with the Night
THEY COULD NOT seem to stop touching.
Setting his Dewar’s down on the tray-table, Knox reached out to cup Marianna’s chin and draw her face, her perfect face, toward his. Smiling, she abandoned the draft of her final report yet again. Abandoned herself as well to a lingering kiss in the subdued light of the Airbus’s first-class cabin. Even when Marianna had turned her attention back to her CIA-loaner laptop, even when Knox had turned to look out at the sunset-tinged traceries of cirrus clouds off the portside wing, even then they were still holding hands.
They could not seem to stop touching one another.
In the twenty-odd hours since search-and-rescue had landed them on Faial Island, they hadn’t had a minute by themselves or a moment to rest till now. With the nearest CROM presence twenty-five hundred miles away, Aristos had pressed the CIA into service. A Company stringer working out of Terceira had shepherded Knox and Marianna as far as Lisbon on a five A.M. TAP Air feeder-flight. From there they’d connected through to Paris and CROM’s European headquarters.
Seven hours in the old stone building off the Quai D’Orsay had taught Knox more than he’d ever wanted to know about the art and science of debriefing. But in the end Pete Aristos had pronounced himself satisfied. An early CROM-chaperoned dinner at an outdoor cafe, then back out to Charles de Gaulle International for the evening flight to JFK.
Through the swirl of activity, despite all obstacles, they kept finding ways to maintain physical contact. An arm around a waist. Fingers brushing a face. A surreptitious pat on the derriere. They just couldn’t stop touching one another.
Between sleep deprivation, complimentary beverage service, and Marianna’s own intoxicating proximity, Knox was totally buzzed. Awash in a flood of fatigue-poison-induced free association. Even so, what he was feeling here, fading in and out, felt real to him—as though he and she had bonded indissolubly in those cold, dark hours before dawn. As if they were two complementary aspects of a single whole, like position and momentum in quantum theory.
He rubbed his eyes and looked down on the darkening, cloud-wracked Atlantic. Rusalka must be down there somewhere, well off to the southwest in the gathering dusk. What a difference twenty-four hours could make. For one thing, he was still alive. More alive than he’d felt in a long time.
Now if the damn plane would only stop bouncing around.
“You okay?” Marianna reached out to touch his cheek.
“Yeah, sure. It’s just I’m what they call a white-knuckle flier. Know too much chaos theory for my own good.”
“Listen, Jon, relax, try to get some rest.” Her lips brushed against his cheek. “Don’t worry, if the plane falls out of the sky, I’ll protect you.
“You know—” He stifled a yawn. “Excuse me. You know, I’m starting to believe you could, at that.” He smiled and closed his eyes.
“Got to bring you along on all my trips . . .” His voice trailed off.
Marianna studied Jon’s sleeping face in the muted cabin light. If only she
could just drift off like that. Either that, or unburden herself of the knowledge that was keeping her awake.
But she couldn’t. It was strictly need-to-know.
She’d thought the marathon debrief was over. They’d already escorted Jon out of the secure videoconference room when Pete asked her to hang back and told her CROM was green-lighting Tsunami. The air/sea build-up would have been set in motion by now, the clock already running on a thirty-six hour countdown to strike-readiness. It was out of her hands. Just this final, proforma report to finish.
And that would keep. Carefully, so as not to disturb Jon, she leaned over and stole a glance out the window. Through a spangling of frost-stars she saw the twilight sea. Pictured the gathering of forces that would greet tomorrow’s returning sun in the still-tranquil waters far away to the south.
It wasn’t just her data on Rusalka’s secret lab that had unleashed Tsunami. No, something big had gone down out in the North Atlantic the night they’d left the megayacht. Pete said the whole SOSUS hydrophone network had lit up like a Christmas tree shortly before midnight GMT. The cause: a major undersea disturbance, with its epicenter two miles down in the waters directly beneath Rusalka’s keel. The time: 2347 Zulu.
Move one time zone west to the Azores, and that made it—
2247 hours August 3rd. It couldn’t be coincidence: the time, to the minute, that Grishin’s mysterious message-cylinder had called for the “capture” of . . . something. Something, evidently very very large. Something Pete was determined to stop.
At the same time, Galina, who seemed so loving and sincere, was obviously in this up to her neck. What if it were something they were better off not stopping?
Assuming it was even stoppable.
In her dark mood, Marianna hardly noticed the piano solo playing over her headphones until it tinkled to a close. A brief pause, then a new selection started. She knew it from the opening chords: Andrea Bocelli and Eros Ramazzotti’s “Nel Cuore Lei.”
As the duet soared, her forebodings fell away into the dull sea below.
2247 hours August 3rd. The time, though hardly to the minute, that she and Jon had shared their first true embrace. She turned toward him, reliving last night—his calming presence, the unexpected strength of his arms, the warmth of him pressed tight against her in the frigid water.
She slipped off the headphones with Bocelli and company in midcrescendo. Reached over to touch his face again, then held back for fear of waking him.
What was it with her? She’d had lovers before. This was different. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. The sound of his voice, the feel of his hands on her, just the clean, masculine scent of him was enough to give her that warm, liquid feeling in the pit of her belly.
She knew next to nothing about him.
Without opening his eyes, he spoke: “Forty years old. Divorced, no children. And, no, not currently with anyone.”
“You’re awake!” Eleven years older. An eternity! What would they have in common? What would they even talk about?—No, knowing what to talk about never seemed to be a problem for Jon.
Then it struck her: again! He was doing it again, and to her this time!
“How did you do that?”
“Lucky guess. Like I keep telling you: it’s this trick I do. Sometimes things just click into place.” He yawned. “It’s why I became a consultant instead of learning an honest trade, I suppose.”
“What’s it supposed to be? Telepathy?”
“Nothing so mundane. Pattern apperception. Seeing the net. ‘Knox’s onboard pattern matcher.’ It comes and it goes,” he finished drowsily.
“How does it work? Where did it come from? Tell me!” She’d been preoccupied last night, but damned if she’d let him off the hook this time.
He opened one eye. “I’m not sure I can, exactly.”
“Come on, try. You’ve got me burning up with curiosity—here feel!” Marianna took his hand and pressed it to the warmth of her cheek. She briefly considered redirecting his answering caress a little lower, in through the folds of her blouse, up against her beating heart. No, best not to start something they couldn’t finish. Couldn’t finish here, that is.
She settled for just kissing his open palm, interspersing the touch of her lips with little flicks of her tongue. Then she bit the heel of his hand gently. Well, more or less gently.
Wincing at the nip, Knox had a fleeting vision of the fate awaiting him: Liebestod by hickey. Nothing daunted, he reached out for her again.
“Unh-uh,” she said, expertly fending him off. “Debriefing first, displays of affection later. Now talk!”
“You drive a hard bargain, woman. But, okay.” He sighed and leaned back in the seat. “To begin with, Marcus and Evelyn Knox’s little boy Jonathan was not always the paragon of personal and professional rectitude you see before you. There were times in my misspent youth when—”
He stopped. Marianna was staring at him. Knox had been shooting for levity, but it had come out sounding all wrong, not to mention unbelievably stilted. Tell it straight, Doc Friedman had always said. Don’t hide behind the words, Jon.
It occurred to him then that, apart from Charles Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., Marianna was the only person he’d ever told this to. Or tried telling it to, while the distancing words that were his natural defense mechanism did their best to get in the way. Taking a cue from his erstwhile shrink, he backed up and tried to tell it straight.
“I was never much into drugs back in college. I mean, I guess I maybe did enough pot to keep me off the Supreme Court. But nothing really heavy-duty. Until the spring of 1985, that is, on what was supposed to have been my last night in Moscow.”
He took a deep breath. “Sasha had these little pieces of, of mushroom, he said they were. Got them from some shaman on one of his treks into the wilds of the Tunguska Basin.” There it was again, that godforsaken piece of real estate. Hunh!
“Siberia?” Marianna asked. “Most likely fly agaric, then. Was it red with little white spots, kind of like the mushrooms in a Disney cartoon?”
“No, all brown and shriveled up.”
“Treated somehow, then. To reduce the toxicity.” Marianna seemed to have all manner of familiarity with this topic, though whether from the perspective of the perpetrator or the gendarme he couldn’t tell.
She looked at him sharply. “You don’t mean to say you tried it? Jon! I had you figured for more sense. That stuff’s not just hallucinogenic—it’s poisonous!”
Christ! He didn’t need this. Talking about the experience was stirring unwanted memories of the void, of a spiritual abyss infinitely deeper and colder than the physical one that yawned not five meters beneath his feet, just beyond the thin aluminum-alloy skin of the plane’s underbelly. Had it gotten warmer in here?
“Listen, Marianna, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
Her hand clasped his. “It’s okay, Jon. It’s just that—well, I get the sense this is something key for you, something core.”
“And unless I bare my soul to you, our—what? our relationship?—could end up like my marriage? Is that what you’re saying?”
“You see?” She shivered a little. “You’re doing it again. When you get like this, it’s like you can see right through me.”
“Yeah, I’ve got to learn to stop doing that on the job. It upsets people.”
“You’re not on the job now, Jon. And it doesn’t upset me, not really. But you’ve got to admit, it’s . . . well, it’s eerie.”
“ ‘What kind of a weirdo have I gotten myself hooked up with,’ huh?”
“Thank God, you do strike out sometimes. That wasn’t even close to what I was thinking.” She interlaced her fingers with his and squeezed gently. “I’m just trying to figure out what you’ve got going on, is all.”
“All right. I can’t promise you’re going to like it a whole lot, though.”
Marianna said nothing, just sat there waiting, holding his hand.
Still he hesita
ted. In a sense, Jonathan Knox made his living telling stories—parables and analogies intended to help people acknowledge their situations, realize their opportunities, confront their challenges. He was always telling stories, all kinds of stories.
All except this one.
This story, he suspected, was telling him.
26 | Bell’s Inequality
KNOX’S MOUTH FELT dry. His eyes swept over the plush appointments of the first-class cabin without seeing them. Or seeing them, but seeing through them too, as if they weren’t there.
Seeing down through the world of appearances to the chaos churning just beneath the surface.
He swallowed. How did he explain it, make it real, to someone who had never been there? How could he phrase it so he didn’t just sound crazy? Above all, how did he talk about it without conjuring it up, without losing himself to it again in the act of speaking its name?
He looked down to where his hand lay cradled in Marianna’s, then up again into her warm brown eyes. The world seemed to regain form and solidity, the wriggling flux retreated to the periphery of his vision. He could do this. All he needed was a place to start.
He took a deep breath. “How much do you know about quantum mechanics?”
“Quantum mechanics?” The stare that Marianna had given him at the outset paled by comparison with this long, piercing look. “As in the Uncertainty Principle?”
“That’s the place to start, all right.” Knox made a conscious effort to relax. “The Uncertainty Principle: tell me about it.”
“It’s got something to do with, um, subatomic measurements, doesn’t it? Like how you can’t tell where an electron is at the same time you’re measuring how fast it’s going?” Her expression bespoke her puzzlement at the turn this conversation was taking.
“Right, the position/momentum complementarity. Very good. And now for the real question: just why is that?”
“Why is what? Why you can’t determine the position and momentum at the same time?”
