Dante's Equation Part 27

She should have gone back to the hospital; she could see that now. She should have told Farris about Kobinski's ma.n.u.script and let the DoD track it down. But she'd seen the pages and just . . . well, she hadn't made the best decisions.

Kobinski had her equation.It hadn't been in the pages Handalman had shown her, not in its exact form, but the principle of it had been clearly used in other equations that were there, equations even Jill didn't completely comprehend. n.o.body understood what that meant. Nate certainly didn't understand. To know that not only was her equation not original, but that it had been formulated in the 1940s! How could she have gone to Farris and admitted that someone else had gotten there way ahead of her, that everything he wanted was in somebody else's work?

No. No way. She wasn't ready to concede defeat yet, not as long as there was a chance to get that ma.n.u.script for herself. It wasn't that she intended tobury Kobinski's work. That would be unconscionable. No, but she couldadapt it. Aharon had translated several pages for them on the plane and, however good the man's math, some of his ideas-for example, the microscopic black hole thing-were clearly looney tunes. That was a good thing. That meant she could still be the one to place the equation in a rational, twenty-first-century framework. After all, shehad rediscovered the equation after it had been lost for decades, confirmed it, really, using Quey. This didn't have to be a complete catastrophe.

If only she could be alone with Nate so she could explain. She needed his support now, more than ever, when everything they'd worked for was balanced on the head of a pin.

Anatoli Nikiel lived outside of town, down a country road. It was a tiny place surrounded by empty land and woods. The porch light was on. They parked in the long dirt driveway and got out, s.h.i.+vering in the frigid temperatures. The front door opened as they drew near.

Anatoli was impossibly old and fragile. He wore a sweater that looked like the vestigial tatters on a skeleton thanks to its age and his emaciation. He welcomed them inside and took their coats, hardly seeming strong enough for the task. He disappeared to take the garments into a back room.

Jill glanced at Nate. She was so nervous her stomach was quivering. She wanted to slip her hand into his but didn't because that would be incredibly childish, not to mention unwelcome, the way he'd been acting. Then he turned to look at her. There was a new excitement in his eyes now that they were finally here, and a smile of rea.s.surance on his lips. For the first time in a long while, she felt as though they were in this thing together.

"Please, this way," Anatoli said.

He motioned a hand to a short, narrow archway. It looked like something from a gnome's dwelling. They bowed their way through it and on the other side was a miniature parlor and a man standing in the middle of the room. The stranger was blond, tan, preppyish, and someone had beaten the c.r.a.p out of him. His nose was swollen and there were deep purple bruises on his face.

"Hi. I'm Denton Wyle." He smiled. The smile looked odd on someone who'd been used as a punching bag.

Introductions went all around. There was something a little too smooth about Wyle that Jill disliked immediately. He was friendly enough, but she didn't trust him. Still, it wasn't her house and she couldn't very well ask him to leave. They took chairs that Anatoli dragged into place, including a shaky wooden one brought in from another room.

As soon as they were seated, Jill began. "Rabbi Handalman says you have copies of Yosef Kobsinski's ma.n.u.script. I'd like to see it."

Anatoli motioned to Wyle. "One.There is only one copy. There it is. Look all you want."

Wyle hesitated. He had a paperbound ma.n.u.script about two inches thick in his lap, which he seemed reluctant to give up. After a moment he held it out. She met his eyes as she took it.

"The Book of Torment,"he said, with an awe that made her uncomfortable.

Whatwas this? Was there a cult around this thing or what? Wyle didn't look like a man who'd be up on his physics. As if reading her mind, he said, "I'm a reporter. I was tracking down the Kobinski ma.n.u.script when I met Anatoli."

"You're working on an article about the Holocaust?"

"No, about disappearances."

"I don't understand."

Wyle and Anatoli looked at each other, but neither answered. Jill didn't really care. The ma.n.u.script was in her hands and that was the important thing. She didn't care what the rest of these wackos were into. She had problems of her own.

She flipped past the notations she'd already seen in Seattle, past pages of text in Hebrew. She came across two sheets of mathematical equations in a sure, cramped hand and her breath caught in her throat. She got absorbed in it. After a while, she was aware that people around her began talking. She didn't follow the conversation. She got a notepad and pen from a satchel she'd bought at the airport and dived into the math. Nate scooted his chair closer and watched her work.

She was dumbfounded. She became more so as she went along. There was her full equation, right there, and there it was again, embedded in longer sequences she didn't recognize. There were cosines and functions that she remember vaguely from . . . astronomy? She thought she saw glimpses of relativity and theoretical time constructs.

After a while she stopped trying to decipher it and just let herself absorb it like another person might absorb a painting or music. Finally she put the ma.n.u.script down carefully on the floor beside her chair, along with her paper and pen. Her hands were shaking so badly she could no longer hold them. Her throat was constricted with emotion.

She'd always known that she was no genius, no child prodigy. But what she had just witnessed was a brain so much greater than her own that it provoked a stabbing pain, a kind of martyr's wound.

The voices of the others buzzed in her ears. Nate placed his hand on the back of her arm, cupping her. The contact brought her down to earth. With some effort she got a grip. It was going to be okay. She might not be in Kobinski's league, but shehad worked the equation and discovered the one-minus-one all on her own, d.a.m.n it. She'd fight all the demons of h.e.l.l before she'd give up her rights to this thing. Fortunately, these people couldn't have a clue what it was they had. She straightened in her chair, pulling away from Nate.

Wyle was talking to Anatoli. The rabbi had the ma.n.u.script on his lap and was studying it, frowning, fingers stroking his beard.

"So," said Handalman, closing the pages carefully. "What do we discuss? Should we discuss, maybe, the weapon?"

13.3. Denton Wyle

"I think a little background is in order first," Anatoli said in his frail, wavering voice. "I was captured close to the Russian border. I was nineteen. The funny thing is, I was born a Jew, but my family was not religious. I even changed my name, but I got picked up anyway, as a Marxist.

"I arrived there a few months after Kobinski, at the end of 1942. It was so cold, you wouldn't believe . . ."

Denton had already heard Anatoli's story. It faded into the background as his mind wandered. He'd arrived only that morning and was in a fugue state: tired, buzzed from painkillers, barely mobile, and giddily excited.Anatoli had the complete ma.n.u.script of The Book of Torment. He had the Schwartz sections, which, apparently, Schwartz had been happy to send him when Anatoli wrote requesting them. (That stung a little, though of course Schwartzwould kiss Anatoli's b.u.t.t. Big-time.) And he had the Kroll ma.n.u.script and the Yad Vashem section and lots of other pages no one had ever seen. Unfortunately, it wasn't translated from the Hebrew, so Denton couldn't just chug it down, but he'd managed to get the old man to translate some of it for him verbally. Better still, Anatoli had told him what happened the night Kobinski and his group had made their escape. It was everything he'd hoped for and more-and from a living eyewitness, too.He had his story!

Of course, he couldn't publish it. Wouldn't publish it. Anatoli didn't want it published, and if Denton did publish he'd get another visit from Mr. Edwards. But . . . he wasn't going to think about that. Life was long. He had money. He would think of something. The real fly in the ointment was that Anatoli, his lone eyewitness, was more than a few cards shy of a full deck. Heck, the deck was gone and the old man had been left holding the joker.

What Denton hadn't figured out yet was how the others were involved. There was the rabbi-whom Denton couldn't help but take an immediate dislike to vis-a-vis Schwartz. And the other two . . . Nate seemed cool, the sort of guy Denton would get along with usually, but he was protective of the woman. Obviously, he had a big thing for her. For her part (Denton sized her up, since no one was paying attention), she wasn't bad. She had the librarian thing going, could use a serious salon day, but she had a cute figure and s.e.xy freckles. Of course, she was snotty as h.e.l.l, but that was standard in the brainy type. Ice queen. Nate was nuts if he thought he was getting anything off her.

"Kobinski opened my eyes," Anatoli was saying. "I had been fervent about Marx. Now I became fervent about Yosef Kobinski. I made him teach me; I wouldn't leave him alone." Anatoli's eyes were hazy with memory and more than a little unhinged. "I had some science, you see. It was a favorite of mine in school. But whathe knew . . . He could have moved Heaven and Earth."

"Whatwere his ideas-can you give us a summary?" Dr. Talcott asked.

Anatoli sighed. "A summary. . . . First, he founded everything on the kabbalistic Tree of Life, on thesephirot . Kobinski believed that the highest spiritual path was tobalance yoursephirot , to come into perfect alignment right down the center of the tree. It is like a stick, he said, which is all crooked. It cannot go through a narrow hole. In the case of the soul, there is also a narrow opening, at the navel, and the soul must be perfectly straight and smooth-without a bend or a b.u.mp-to pa.s.s through."

"To pa.s.s through into what?" Denton asked, his interest picking up.

"To escape the lower five dimensions-the dimensions of good and evil."

"You mean, to escape the cycle of reincarnation? Like achieving nirvana?" Denton had once written an article forMysterious World on past lives.

Anatoli shrugged enigmatically. "In kabbalah it is calledtikkun , the reclaiming of the sparks."

"Can we get back to the physics part of it?" Dr. Talcott asked impatiently.Binah , definitely.

"It isall physics." Anatoli's voice trembled.

"Maybe what we've discovered will help," Nate suggested.

He ran the group through an account of their experiments. Denton couldn't follow everything, despite the fact that Nate was obviously simplifying quite a bit. But he followed enough. The physics side of Kobinski's work came into focus with the force of an explosion. It wasn't kabbalah magic at all. . . . Jeez, how could he have been so stupid? It wasmath .

"Yes," Anatoli agreed, excited. "Thatis the law of good and evil. The law of good and evil states that there is a force that influences everything. It tempers both the bad and the good. And the fifth dimension is where these energies interplay. The fifth dimension is vast; it stretches acrossall the multiverse."

"What about the potential for a weapon?" the rabbi asked Anatoli. "Did Kobinski discuss that with you?"

Anatoli opened his mouth to speak and then sat still for several minutes, staring into s.p.a.ce. Denton saw the two scientists glance at each other. Dr. Talcott rose to her feet, but Denton had seen Anatoli do this before and motioned her back.

Anatoli began, suddenly, like a skipped record finding a groove. "He did recognize the danger, but only at the end. At first he wanted to makecertainthe work would be saved. We spent months-him writing and us burying it for the future. But after Isaac . . . the rebbe was so brokenhearted, he no longer trusted humanity to have it. The night he left he made me promise to dig up the ma.n.u.script and destroy it. For many years I couldn't bring myself to come back here. But twenty years ago I arrived and I have been here ever since. Many, many nights I broke into the grounds of the camp, trying to remember where we put the pages. Most nights I would dig and find nothing. But slowly, as you see, the whole thing has been recovered."

"It's all there," Denton commented, looking jealously at the pages in Aharon's lap. Trust the rabbi in the group to end up with his grubby hands all over it.

Anatoli nodded, lip quivery. "The last of it was in the hands of a n.a.z.i family. Denton bought that for me."

That wasn't quite how it happened, but Denton didn't sweat it.

"But how did Kobinski come up with his equation and the . . . the 'law of good and evil'?" Dr. Talcott asked. "He didn't have access to the technology necessary to evenbegin to-"

"Meditation," Anatoli interrupted. "He used to say meditation provides the insight and physics enables you to make sense of it."

Dr. Talcott was looking at Anatoli like he'd just sprouted horns. "You said the fifth dimension stretches acrossthe multiverse . Did Kobinski have proof that ours was not the only universe? Mathematical proof?"

Denton thought he knew. "Kobinski mentions a vision in the ma.n.u.script. He saw a whole continuum of universes, which he called Jacob's ladder, and our universe was in the middle."

"There have been theories that there are other universes," Nate said, leaning forward eagerly.

"Pure speculation," Dr. Talcott tsked.

Anatoli's voice rose, upset. "Thereare other universes, and they havedifferent balances of good and evil. The rebbe said this is where the religious traditions got the idea of 'heavens' and 'h.e.l.ls.' Mystics get visions of these other universes, or maybe we remember having lived there, down deep in our soul."

Dr. Talcott opened her mouth to protest, but Nate spoke up, his face alight. "Cool! Think about it, Jill. The one-minus-one we discovered is exactly matched, crest and trough. But why couldn't there be universes that had different one-minus-one waves, different balances of crests and troughs, creative and destructive urges?"

Dr. Talcott actually considered it. She spoke slowly, thoughtfully. "Even if thereare other universes, any other balance of the one-minus-one may be physically impossible. Or such a universe might exist, but it might never have experienced a big bang. Or it may have expanded but not have stars or planets." One eyebrow peaked with interest. "The fifty-fifty balance might benecessary to create any meaningful universe."

"No," Anatoli said simply. "Thereare universes with other balances of good and evil. And they have stars and planetsand intelligent life. Kobinski worked all of that out in his book."

Dr. Talcott glanced at the ma.n.u.script. She looked, Denton could swear to G.o.d, intimidated! That look told him all he needed to know about the legitimacy of Kobinski's physics. But the rabbi was still h.o.a.rding the ma.n.u.script in his lap like a freaking Pekingese.

"This is all fascinating," Rabbi Handalman said. "An inexhaustible mine of wisdom, no doubt. But for one moment, if it's not too much trouble, can we get back tothisuniverse? Did Reb Kobinski work out the implications of a weapon using this technology? Because the Mossad has some of the ma.n.u.script."

Nate nodded, looking worried. "I think I can answer that. At least, I have an idea what could be done withour work-"

"Nate!"Jill warned.

Nate put a hand on hers in the vee of her lap, which, Denton noticed with a smirk, shut her up quite nicely, since it sent her absolutely rigid.

"Basically, you can use a wave pulse to increase the destructive power of the one-minus-one. If you did that with sufficient energy in an enemy's country it would cause all kinds of terrible things to occur. And the thing is, they wouldn't even know you were doing it. If they didn't know about the technology it would probably just look like they were having a series of unrelated problems and natural disasters."

"Could it be as dangerous as atomics?" the rabbi insisted, eyes piercing.

"I have no idea what the technology could do at really high levels," Nate admitted. "But we're talking about doubling or tripling or quadrupling the destructive tendency inall matter ."

The rabbi's mouth tightened into a grimace. Anatoli's eyes were lost in La La Land. Denton himself was intrigued by the concept. It had great scare potential, journalistically speaking. But he wasn't particularly frightened himself. Who would make a weapon like that? How stupid would that be?

"We don't know that it could do anything of the sort," Jill protested, yanking her hand from Nate's with fire in her eyes. "We've onlybegun to examine the potential of the wave."

Everyone ignored her.

"Unfortunately, it might be too late," Nate said. "The Department of Defense knows about the technology, though we're not sure they have the actual equation. And as Rabbi Handalman just mentioned, the Mossad has a few pages of the ma.n.u.script, too. All they need are the basic principles, and they could build machines to manipulate the one-minus-one quite easily."

"Um . . . wouldn't the U.S. and Mossad share information?" Denton said, rubbing a bruise on his face. "They're allies, aren't they?"

Aharon snorted. "Ha! The Americans want to remain the big guns on the block. How can they do that if their allies know all their secrets? No, the Americans, if they find this, won't share it in a hurry, and the Mossad, if I know the Mossad, will do whatever they have to do to get a piece of the pie.Especially since Kobinski was a Polish Jew. If this technology belongs to anyone, it belongs to Israel."

"Now just one minute," Dr. Talcott said, her face getting very stern. "Let's all give the paranoia a rest for a moment, shall we? Just because-"

From outside came the unmistakable sound of cars pulling into the driveway. They were going fast, with brakes squealing and the sputtering of gravel. Before the rest of them could move, Anatoli was on his feet.

"This way!" he hissed, "Hurry!Schnell! Schnell! "

His panic was infectious. He shoved and pushed, and before Denton could even get his head around the danger, they were out the back door. A flight of steps led down to a bare yard and the yard opened onto a forest. Anatoli picked up a broom from the side of the house and whacked at the porch light, putting it out with a crunch of gla.s.s."Kommen sie!"

He raced away. The rest of them glanced around at one another in confusion.

"Nate, this is silly," Dr. Talcott said. Her eyes darted toward the front of the house.

Nate grabbed her hand. "We don't knowwho it is. It might be the guys who tried to kidnap you, and there's no time to hang around and find out!"

Denton agreed wholeheartedly but found he was frozen solid. Rabbi Handalman, his face drawn and white as a sheet, ran after Anatoli without a word. There was the sound of car doors slamming, and Denton got a visceral flash of fists pounding into him.

That got him moving. He lurched from the porch in a shuddering start. Once he was in motion he recovered some semblance of grace and found himself running h.e.l.l-for-high-leather-directly into the woods.

He heard Nate and Dr. Talcott coming behind him.

13.4. Aharon Handalman

It was freezing, absolutely freezing. None of them had coats. The ground was crunchy with frost and ice, but there was, thank G.o.d, a moon to light the way.

Aharon was not doing well. His heart was thumping dangerously-not so much from the exercise of sprinting through the woods but from terror. And he was still clutching Kobinski's ma.n.u.script-a smoking gun if ever there was one. What could he do with it? He couldn't throw it away-Anatoli had been clear that "they" must never find it.

He pa.s.sed a chain-link fence. The wire had been cut through and was slightly bent. Aharon reeled backward, shaking his head. He knew what it was-it was the camp. That's why Anatoli lived out here, so he could be close to the grounds. And this, this must be where he went through at night for his digging. There was no way;nothing on earth, was going to get Aharon through that fence. Lord G.o.d!

But Anatoli hadn't gone through the fence; he was continuing along the perimeter and now he was out of sight. Aharon heaved himself forward. If anything could be worse than being chased through the dark woods in Auschwitz by armed men, it would be being chasedalone! How had a devout, quiet-loving man like himself ended up in this situation?

He sprinted, his breath rasping in his ears. Anatoli had stopped to wait and Aharon soon caught up with him. Wyle, too. The woman and Nate jogged up last.

"What's the point of this?" Dr. Talcott asked no one in particular. Her breathing was labored.

"Let's keep moving, for G.o.d's sake," Aharon urged, through clenched teeth.

Anatoli said nothing, just slipped away with the stealth of a shadow. The rest of them followed.

Calder Farris was livid. Talcott and her little boy toy had made him chase them all the way toPoland . What the h.e.l.l was she doing here? If she thought she could get away from him by the mere act of leaving the country, she had no idea who she was dealing with. Even Rickman had agreed they should follow her-discreetly, of course, which meant him and three other guys with bogus ID. The United States was not here "officially." But he'd still insisted it was an XL3 and so . . . they were here.

But Calder's superiors were not happy. They were running out of patience. And neither was Calder happy to be running through the woods in f.u.c.king Auschwitz!