Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  The keypad code wouldn’t have disabled the surveillance parts of the security system, which were backed up to the cloud and therefore did not exist on tapes or hard drives I could steal to erase my presence. Checker would know I’d been there. I just hoped taking all of Martinez’s notes would make him and Arthur thoroughly confused as to what I was actually after, considering they could use that same security footage to rewind and watch Arthur and me looking through them.

  Maybe Checker would just think this was my way of being messed up in the head about my broken mathematical ability, swiping math notes to chew through on my own.

  I’d taken my laptop with me, and instead of driving back to the apartment I’d been using, I zipped over to a new bolt hole this time, one Arthur and Checker didn’t know about. My housing was all interchangeable anyway. Once there, I opened the booklet with Martinez’s one-time pads in it and started getting to work on my message, a message only she would be able to read.

  One-time pads provided theoretically perfect security. Any message could potentially be decoded to mean anything, so even if you had the original text, there was no way to verify its correctness. Which meant even in the new world that might pivot off Dr. Martinez’s discovery, a one-time pad was uncrackable.

  Theoretically.

  This one wasn’t, of course. Too many people had seen the key—too many meaning Arthur and Checker’s surveillance system and who knew who else. But I didn’t think it likely it was compromised enough for the Lancer to be able to gain access and read the contents.

  You’re gambling that with the life of a seventy-year-old woman. I stopped for a moment, my pen poised over the sheet of paper I was composing on. But come on, chances were next to nothing the Lancer could have seen this booklet, weren’t they? A much lower probability, I estimated, than that he would come after Rita Martinez anyway just because of her connection to Sonya Halliday.

  It was worth the risk. Martinez wasn’t innocent, I reminded myself again—she’d stolen from Halliday twice, the second time compounding it with a crime against the U.S. government that still had the potential to get other people in deep trouble. More importantly, she’d run off with a proof that should, by all rights, belong to the world. I didn’t care if she’d discovered it; she shouldn’t be allowed that level of selfishness.

  I repeated those thoughts to myself until I couldn’t hear the doubts gnawing away at the back of them, and finished my message. Then I tore out the first page of the booklet and burned it, and sent the already-coded text to the Lancer, with instructions.

  My plan was simple. We knew from the second theft that Rita Martinez was keeping tabs on Halliday and her work with the government—and it made sense anyway, considering Halliday’s well-being seemed to be the one thing Martinez actually cared about. I’d directed the Lancer to make it look as if Halliday had been kidnapped again, this time out of government custody. And I’d told him to plant a “ransom demand” that would actually be my coded letter—a code he wouldn’t himself know the contents of, one I’d designed for only Martinez to understand.

  It wasn’t a foolproof plan. First of all, I’d been skeptical the Lancer could even pull off the electronic kidnapping ruse, but he had scoffed at me—as much as one could scoff online—and told me it would be done. Even if he came through, however, I didn’t know how Martinez was keeping track of what was going on with the Feds—if Zhang had been her inside man, maybe she wouldn’t even see my planted note. Or maybe she’d see it and not have brought her own matching one-time pad booklet with her to decode it. Maybe what I had was supposed to be her copy and someone else had the other end of it.

  But hell, it’d be worth a try. And I didn’t dare tell the Lancer who we were looking for or how I was directing her to contact me. If I did, there’d be nothing to stop him from cutting me out entirely and going after Martinez himself, and that would be disastrous. All I’d divulged was that there was a mathematician who’d solved P versus NP, that I wanted the proof and knew he did too, and that the one place I knew this mathematician was watching was the Halliday investigation. That last bit of intel would make sense even if Martinez and Halliday weren’t friends, given the subject matter.

  If this worked, I planned to get my hands on Martinez myself and then set up a fake meeting with the Lancer—ostensibly to bring her to him. But instead, I’d use the meet to give him that smashed-up face I owed him. Halliday would be safe, the DHS would be happy, and this whole case would be wrapped up in a nice, neat bow.

  And I’d have Martinez.

  I got a reply from the Lancer almost immediately in the same curt, suspicious style, telling me he’d send confirmation when he’d done what I asked. I didn’t think he liked my plan, but I’d threatened to cut in a different computer expert if he hadn’t agreed to it, and I knew he wanted this proof too much to let that happen.

  All I had to do now was wait. Wait for the Lancer to plant the evidence, wait for Martinez to see it…and then wait for her to surrender herself in order to save her friend Sonya. In the coded note, I’d told her Halliday had given up the factoring proof to me already, and I’d dropped enough mathematical specifics to prove it. And then I’d announced Halliday was of no more use to us, and if Martinez contacted me and offered herself in exchange we’d let dear Sonya go—and if not, her friend would die.

  I wasn’t very good with human psychology, but I was pretty sure that would work.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I didn’t bother trying to sleep again; I needed to set up two traps. First I needed a place where I could grab Martinez and make sure she hadn’t brought any law enforcement with her—not that I thought she would; she’d be too concerned about Halliday. And then I had to plan a solid ambush for the Lancer, somewhere I’d tell him I’d join up with him but where I’d take him down instead.

  I started Martinez off with a burner phone taped to the back of a dumpster behind a concert hall in Hollywood. I’d be able to blend in with the copious crowds and watch remotely as I gave her instructions, and I could send her through a series of cars to increasingly deserted areas and make sure no one was following her. But I also had to prepare a place to bring her—somewhere she couldn’t escape from.

  My conscience tried to bray at me again, but I firmly shut it up.

  Most buildings in Southern California don’t have basements. The lack of freezing weather means they aren’t needed to plant a house firmly in the ground below a frost line, and combine that with our nice collection of earthquake activity, and it’s cheaper and safer to build everything on slabs. It’s a shame, really, considering most above-ground places aren’t built to imprison people in, so a basement is a perfect place to keep someone captive without chaining her to a wall.

  But just because most buildings didn’t have basements didn’t mean they all didn’t, and I thought I knew of just the place: a collection of buildings that used to be a staging ground for a drug cartel. I’d pulled a girl out of a basement there two years before; it seemed only fitting I should get use out of the place now.

  The compound was indeed still abandoned, with the musty smell of the long-disused. I spent a day stocking up supplies and making my basement prison as comfortable as possible. And then I reinforced the door and added a new lock.

  By the time I got back to Los Angeles I had an encrypted message from Martinez:

  Let Sonya go. I will come.

  I noticed she hadn’t said anything about the proof. She probably intended to gain Halliday’s freedom and then never let me pry it out of her. I’d have to find a good way of making her talk.

  I shied away from that thought. Bridges, crossing them, whatever. I could wait and see how this played out first.

  I returned her message, telling her to pick up the burner in Hollywood at ten p.m. the following night. Then I sent a message to the Lancer:

  Everything is in motion. How soon can you be in Los Angeles?

  Now it was time to booby-trap my own building to catch him in.
/>   Chapter 31

  I returned from a full night of making preparations to find two messages waiting for me.

  En route, was all Martinez’s said. The Lancer’s was a lot more suspicious, quizzing me about my plans and making it clear he wanted to be with me at the pickup from the beginning.

  Do not double-cross me. I know who your associates are. With the click of a button, I could ruin you.

  Damn the fact that I’d had to use my real name. Real name? You know it’s not your real—

  I slammed away that line of thought. The Lancer was implicitly threatening Tegan, and probably also Arthur; it wouldn’t take much asking around to find out we worked together on occasion. Fucker.

  I’d just have to make sure he never got a chance to take revenge on me.

  I tried to reassure him—meaning I made it clear he had no other choice but to trust me, so fuck what he wanted—and we went back and forth a few more times. The Lancer’s emails got longer and longer each time, vituperative rants shot through with narcissism. Christ, this guy was an asshole. I started skimming instead of reading.

  We are dealing with a result of grave importance you couldn’t possibly understand…if this mathematician has genuinely made progress on proving what you say then I am the only one who will be able to interpret and complete this essential work…you wouldn’t know this, not being in the mathematical field yourself, but my knowledge of this problem is unparalleled, and it is an exceedingly lucky thing that you brought this to me and no one else. So don’t fuck it up now…you must know my experience in this matter will be extremely vital in dealing with this mathematician, but I still require some tangible guarantee you’ll be bringing her directly to me. My own writing in this area is unmatched and I will be the only one who can bring this proof to fruition…

  I snorted. His own writing was only unmatched in quantity because he’d written so many fallacious “proofs.” What a dick.

  I started to reply by copying and pasting my previous email, which had given him instructions on where to meet me the next day after Martinez was safely tucked away—in other words, where I would put him down for good—when I suddenly felt like I’d plowed face-first into a brick wall.

  I scrolled up, the blood rushing in my ears.

  You must know my experience in this matter will be extremely vital in dealing with this mathematician, but I still require some sort of tangible guarantee you’ll be bringing her directly to me…

  Her. He’d said “her.”

  Fuck. Oh, Jesus, fuck.

  Women in mathematics were the minority, and I’d been careful never to use a pronoun so as not to give him any clue. The Lancer knew we were going after Rita Martinez.

  How had he figured it out? Only Arthur, Checker, Halliday, and I knew Martinez was involved at all. And Zhang, but he wouldn’t have told anyone.

  Could the Lancer have made a wild guess based on Martinez’s and Halliday’s friendship, and the fact that they were both in the same subfield? No, that was ridiculous; this problem had a one-in-infinity chance of being solved by anyone, and he would know that. Absent other information, it would be far more likely someone halfway around the world had solved it and was simply keeping an eye on how the U.S. government was responding to a similar proof here in California.

  The Lancer must have used his computer skills somehow. Maybe he’d hacked into communications between Halliday and Martinez, or between Martinez and Zhang, and read between the lines—maybe he’d been convinced by Martinez’s sudden disappearance from Pasadena—hell, maybe he’d hacked Checker’s security system, found the one-time pad, and been reading my encoded messages to Martinez all along. Or maybe he just did know the field that well, and knew Martinez was one of the few people who had any chance of solving this.

  Why was it only now that these possibilities all felt so likely, so dangerous? Why had I brushed them off yesterday as remote and implausible?

  I remembered how easily the Lancer’s men had found me on the strip mall’s security cameras. Probably the only thing that had kept Halliday and me safe since then was Halliday had been in the Feds’ custody and the investigation for the Lancer here in the States had gotten hot enough for him to be forced to disappear. But he wouldn’t care about that anymore. P versus NP was too big a coup—he’d come back to Los Angeles and play cat-and-mouse with the NSA and DHS if he had even the slightest chance of grabbing the proof for himself.

  And now he knew Martinez was coming here.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I jolted up from my chair and started pacing around the room. If the Lancer got his hands on Martinez…Christ, there was no telling what he’d do to her to get the proof. The lengths she’d already gone to in order to hide it meant she wasn’t going to give it up easily, and maybe she’d be able to pretend to give him information for a while, but the Lancer knew enough mathematics to see through that. She wouldn’t be able to keep up the charade for long.

  Calm down. Think. What would the Lancer’s play be?

  If Checker’s search of Eastern Europe was anywhere close to correct, the Lancer had been continents away yesterday. It would have taken him time to figure out who I was going after. It would have taken time for him to get here. He might even still be on the way.

  It would take him time to locate Martinez. Even if he’d caught a glimpse of her somewhere already—an airline terminal, an ATM camera—she was on the move. He didn’t gain much by going after wherever she’d been, not when he knew where she was going.

  Fuck, it was how I would play it. Go straight to Los Angeles, and then scoop her up at the earliest possible moment, before someone else had a chance to get to her.

  Though if the Lancer could find her here stepping off a train or bus or plane or driving into the city, I was willing to bet Checker could, too. Especially if I gave him a heads up to be on the lookout. And once he found her, Arthur would run immediately to pick her up.

  I wouldn’t have banked on them helping me out of my screwup, but they would come for Martinez. All I had to do was pick up the phone and call, they would come help save her from the danger I had put her in. They’d probably never speak to me again afterward, but they would come.

  And walk right into the Lancer’s sights themselves.

  I imagined how it would play out if Arthur went to grab Martinez at the same time the Lancer did. Arthur getting trapped in a firefight and stubbornly protecting an elderly mathematician with his own life. Arthur getting shot or captured as a pawn. And all because I’d dragged him in to clean up my mess.

  Maybe I could warn him to take the whole fucking DHS with him.

  Or, fuck that, maybe I could still clean up my own mess. Martinez had been hiding effectively from the NSA, and she’d be continuing to do so, but I knew where she was going to be, so I had a leg up on everyone else. I didn’t have to call in Arthur and Checker. Which was good, because I would’ve preferred shivving myself in the eye to phoning them.

  And I should be able to beat the Lancer, too, for the same reasons. Unless he’d been decoding our messages somehow…

  Of course, even if I got to Martinez first, my original plan was shot. The Lancer would be watching for her face on every camera. If I tried to spirit her away to my basement prison, with each block I told her to travel, I’d be putting her in more and more likelihood of being in the middle of a firefight or being snatched by a mathematical zealot who had no moral compunction at all about prying her proof from her.

  In other words, exactly what you’ve been planning on doing?

  I slumped in my chair and dug the heels of my hands against my eyes.

  Kidnapping an old woman—I’d been able to rationalize it. The cause was too great. Too important. But putting that same woman into the crosshairs of someone else, somebody this violent…

  The Lancer won’t want to kill her. He’ll just want to take her, like you wanted to, and get the proof out of her, and then publish it.

  Would it really be such a bad thing,
to let him do the dirty work? He wouldn’t be squeamish about it. You’d probably get it faster.

  Jesus Christ.

  When had I started thinking things like that? When had I become that person?

  Or had I always been that person, and I was only hating myself now because I had Arthur to compare myself to? Checker’s words echoed in my head: You don’t know who you are, and that scares the ever-living shit out of me.

  Suddenly it was scaring me, too. I felt lost, rudderless, my compass swinging wildly with no indication of which way was the right one.

  My hands slapped down onto the table. Fuck my past. I didn’t need it. I didn’t want it. I could decide who I wanted to be all on my own.

  And I wasn’t going to be the type of person who let a homicidal fanatic get his hands on an old woman. No matter what she had. I could find her again later myself, but this plan had to be called off.

  I tried emailing Martinez to abort, but after thirty minutes with no response I had to assume she was traveling and wouldn’t get the message. She’d show up smack dab in the middle of Hollywood, where there were plenty of people and plenty of cameras. The Lancer wouldn’t be far behind her.

  I needed to get Martinez back off the grid as fast as possible. And then I needed to get the Lancer off her trail before he could catch up with her. Which meant…

  Oh, fuck. The best way to get the Lancer off Martinez’s trail would be to put him on mine.

  What kind of person did you say you wanted to be? The voice echoed in my head, taunting and cackling.

  If I really wanted to get Martinez off the hook, the best way to do it would be to martyr myself.

  Chapter 32

  Martyrdom wasn’t of interest to me. It was more Arthur’s bag. But I needed a distraction for the Lancer, and stealing Martinez’s identity and running the opposite way she was going, using credit cards and dropping clues, was the best one I could think of.