The quantum solution, p.32
The Quantum Solution, page 32
Evan was of course unaware of any of this, nor in her present state would she have been all that interested if she were aware. She had deliberately kept him in the dark about her friendship with Lyudmila. But then Ben was under the misapprehension that he was her mentor, when actually it was Lyudmila from whom she had learned every trick in fieldwork. Now here she was sunk in the pit of the moment when she left Lyudmila in the wreckage. Why hadn’t she checked to make sure Bugrov was indeed dead? She had been too busy trying to defend the immediate vicinity around the helo. She knew that was why—of course she knew, but still her guilt got the better of her. It was difficult, drowning as she was, to consider this rationally and to forgive herself. The loss of her friend had punched a hole through her in precisely the same way Bobbi’s loss had. Bobbi had been recruited during the trip on which Evan had taken her for her seventeenth birthday. Unaccountably, Bobbi had been restless in the laid-back tropics of Sumatra, which Evan loved so deeply and dearly. She had been desperate to get to Copenhagen, their next stop, and for good reason. Unbeknownst to Evan, Bobbi would meet with an SVR recruiter code-named Leda; a formal deal would be struck. From that moment until her violent death five years ago at the hands, both Evan and Ben believed, of the FSB itself, Bobbi was an SVR agent embedded in the center of American political life. What had Bobbi done to deserve her death? Had she turned against Russia? Had she inadvertently leaked some of their secrets to her late husband? Had her use run its course? Had she been found wanting? No answers, not even an educated guess.
Lying back on the bed, one of the stack of ice packs by her bedside against her swollen cheeks, she closed her eyes. No sleep approached her on little cat feet, dwelling stubbornly on a distant shore to which Evan had no access. The strange energy of insomnia worked inside her, engendering in stark detail a recurring dream …
… of being in the stream near their house. Bobbi is with her. They are children, prepubescent. Bobbi is laughing at her, repeating over and over, I have the power, not you. Never you, but in the manner of dreams, she doesn’t understand what that means. Anxiety builds in her to unbearable heights.
That’s when Bobbi reaches out, places both hands on the crown of Evan’s head—You want power? Here’s power—and pushes her down under the water. When Evan struggles, Bobbi wraps her legs over her sister’s shoulders, and keeps her down …
Evan’s eyes snapped open. Her chest was rising and falling as if her mouth and throat were full of water. Instinctively, she turned on her side, gasping air into her lungs. She knew she was hyperventilating but she couldn’t seem to stop. Her limbs moved spastically, scarcely under her control. The back of her left hand smacked the side table, unsettling the water jug and the plastic glasses nesting one inside the other. Her cell phone slipped off the corner of the table and dropped to the rug. As she struggled to lean down far enough to fetch it, her hand struck the corner of the drawer, which had partially slid out. She scooped up her phone. Up on one elbow, she started to close the drawer and paused, her hand in midair. There, resting inside, was the SD card Lyudmila had pressed into her hand at the last moment. The sides were caked, black with her friend’s dried blood. She was about to push the drawer closed but something stopped her. Afterward, she will think of this moment and wonder what caused her to pluck out the SD card instead of shoving the drawer home. After a time she will realize that there is no answer, and anyway the question is irrelevant. It’s the SD card—or rather what is on it—that matters.
Slowly and carefully she rotated the SD card, then using a bit of water cleaned it off, mindful of keeping the flat copper pins free of moisture. Reopening the drawer, she found a paper clip in a far corner, opened it, used the end to pop open the tiny tray on the right side of her phone. She swapped out the SD card she used for extra space with the one Lyudmila had given her, slid the tray home. Then she turned on her phone, navigated to the SD card. Though it could hold 1 GB of data, there were only two files. One was a JPG image, the other was a PDF text file.
She brought up the JPG first. It was a color photo, a portrait of sorts with the subject in three-quarter view: blond hair, blunt-cut down to her earlobes, a lupine aspect to her heart-shaped face. No makeup, no earrings. At first glance Evan found herself wondering who this might be and why Lyudmila wanted her to see the photo.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Then she caught something in the face she thought might be familiar. She turned the photo this way and that in order to see it in different light. Then, as if magnetized, her head lifted up and she saw her own reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite her bed, saw past her skin mottled by bruises, small bandages, her flesh distended here and there:
A lupine aspect to her heart-shaped face.
Her heart skipped a beat and she looked again at the photo.
No, she thought. It can’t be. It’s not even remotely possible.
But there she was, staring at her sister. Bobbi. Older. Not dead. A blonde. Not dead.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Lyudmila’s voice and the photo of Bobbi seemed to collide in some strange space inside her head—some fantasyland where wishes were flying horses. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, stared again at the photo, which was indeed her sister, Bobbi Ryder. And yet something about her face, the expression, the new lines, even the set of her head, was subtly different.
To stop her heart colliding with her rib cage she turned to the PDF file. At once, a rapid pulse started up behind her eyes and she gasped for breath. What had come up was unmistakably an SVR eyes-only file. How in the world Lyudmila had hacked it she had no idea. There was a name on the file but it wasn’t Bobbi Ryder.
Kata Romanovna Hemakova.
Who the hell is she? Evan asked herself.
Then she began to read, and everything else in the world ceased to exist. Bobbi Ryder exfiltrated out of DC, out of the country, her “death” staged by her SVR handlers. Bobbi Ryder, who was given the operational name of Kobalt, and when Kobalt was officially retired, she became Kata Romanovna Hemakova by—and here Evan had to stop to keep her vertigo at bay. When it became unbearable not to go on, she did and discovered that Bobbi became Kata Romanovna Hemakova by murdering the real Kata Romanovna Hemakova, an FSB assassin. Breathlessly, Evan read the list of the original Kata’s assignments, kills, honors kept secret among a small cadre of high-level FSB officials including Minister Darko Vladimirovich Kusnetsov, director of the FSB.
Evan read on as if in a stupor. The more she read about her sister the more unreal the whole thing became, the more she questioned Lyudmila’s sanity—and her own.
At length, after she had run through the file three times—three times!—to make sure she’d read everything correctly, that she wasn’t hallucinating—although she knew she wasn’t; the SVR watermarks on every page were real—she switched back to Bobbi’s photo, stared more deeply at it. This was Bobbi’s face, all right. Not only older but harder, more determined. Also, she had developed the muscled shoulders of a swimmer.
Abruptly, she slammed the phone facedown on the bed. She lay back, slowly willing her tightly bunched muscles to relax. She closed her eyes, let the tidal water of memory close over her.
“Bobbi,” she whispered. “What have you become?”
But with an icy shiver down her spine that terrified her, that tensed her muscles all over again, she knew the reality was even worse. Kata Hemakova wasn’t what Bobbi Ryder had become. It was what she had been all along.
* * *
Night arrived. She could tell even through the drawn curtains, but once again sleep was out of the question. Was it only now after years in the field that she was aware that exhaustion and sleep were not synonymous, did not even live in the same house?
Rising, she padded to the bathroom, took a shower to wash the sweat off her, not caring if the needles of water peeled away a couple of the bandages that had been so diligently applied as well.
Wrapped in a thick white bath sheet, she stepped to the window, pulled aside the curtain, then stood stunned, rooted to the spot. She stared, dumbfounded. No boats, no harbor leading to the Atlantic Ocean. She overlooked a courtyard with a fig tree on one side and a lime tree on the other. In its center a beautiful, tiled fountain. Her gaze was drawn to the sky above the courtyard’s far wall, into which, some distance away, rose the slender minarets of the Sultan Ahmed Cami, the Blue Mosque. As if in a dream she watched her hand float out to unlatch the window, allowing the sounds of the people setting up dinner in the courtyard to wash over her. Turkish. She heard Turkish voices, querulous, singing, speaking of politics—always politics.
She wasn’t in La Palma. She wasn’t in the Canary Islands at all. She was in Istanbul.
53
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
It was time to see Ben. Notes had been slipped under her door several times following his arrival. She’d ignored them as she had ignored all the other notes Tribe had sent her. To his credit she had to admit that he hadn’t invaded her privacy when he so easily could have. After all, she assumed like the one in La Palma he owned this villa—the color scheme was similar, as were the décor and the room dimensions. Only the rugs were different, a detail she’d been too preoccupied to notice until now.
But before she arranged to see Ben she removed the SD card, put the original back into her phone, and sealed the tray. She slipped out of bed, dropped the SD card on the bare floor outside the circumference of the carpet, crushed it with the leg of a chair. Then she took the residue and flushed it down the toilet, along with any tiny bits left on the floor. She carefully placed the chair back in its original position. She got dressed, crossed to the door, opened it, called for one of Tribe’s security people to fetch Ben Butler.
* * *
Ben’s frown was so deep it gouged new furrows into his face. Evan sat in the chair she had moved, watching him like a hawk. She expected a dressing-down for keeping him and Isobel out of the loop. But then she’d been with Tribe all the time and he was their boss, even Isobel’s.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself.”
There might have been more in this vein had Tribe not followed Ben through the door. Quietly, he closed the door behind them. The black stitches set diagonally across his forehead attested to the damage he had suffered in the helo crash. The skin around the stitches was swollen, pulled unnaturally taut.
“I imagine you’ve worked out where you are,” Tribe said. She wondered if he was angry with her, but his voice and his expression were neutral, calm if not entirely relaxed. Something was up. Something they knew and she didn’t. She hated being in this position.
“Do you own this whole city yet?” she said.
Tribe laughed. “Just the important parts.” He had an easy laugh, inviting you to join him, so she did. Ben didn’t even crack a smile, but then Ben was all business, all the time.
“I suppose you’re wondering how Mr. Tribe and the boy managed to escape the fiasco on the volcano,” Ben ventured.
“That’s okay, Mr. Butler.” Tribe made a sweeping motion with his hand. “I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself.”
“I never doubted it,” Ben said trying to recover. “I just thought we might cut to the chase.”
“Admirable,” Tribe said without trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “But wrongheaded.”
Ben swung toward Tribe. “Are you saying you know Evan better than I do?”
“I’m saying I’ve spent more time with her recently than you have.” Tribe’s voice was mild but there was no mistaking the underlayer of steel. “Surely that counts for something. Especially now. In this situation.”
Evan looked from one to another, wondering how to short-circuit a pissing match Ben could never win. “What situation?” she said sharply. “Will one of you and for the record I don’t care which tell me what the hell has been going on while I’ve been out of it? I mean I don’t even remember being flown here.”
“You wouldn’t,” Tribe told her. “You were unconscious. We saw to that.”
“You what? Drugged me?”
“It was the only way. You needed to heal. You still do, from what the doctor tells me.”
“What do doctors know?” she spat.
That stopped everyone in their tracks. As the silence beat on, Evan glowered at both of them. “Okay, will one of you read me in?”
“That’s—” Ben began, but before he could say another word, Tribe said, “I know what ‘read me in’ means.” Tribe opened his hands in a gesture of truce if not yet rapprochement. “Briefly, what happened was this: I contacted my people just after the helo was hit.” Evan nodded, remembering seeing him on his cell phone. “They came in a speedboat—a cigarette—which is faster than any other power boat. Anyway, the boy was out cold. I picked him up and made my way down the slope with him in my arms. I made it to the beach, where we were picked up. I turned to go back for you and Lyudmila but my security people wouldn’t allow it. They had to physically restrain me.”
“Bully for you.” Evan looked at Ben. “Haven’t you told him?”
“I’ve told him everything, Evan,” he replied.
“Of course he denied everything.”
“Hey,” Tribe protested, “I’m standing right here.”
“You,” she said, “I don’t trust.”
“You don’t trust anyone,” he replied curtly.
“That’s what keeps me alive.”
“It also,” he said, “keeps you from knowing anyone.”
Another tension-filled silence, into which Ben interjected his voice. “Evan, Mr. Tribe did not authorize Ayman Safra, his lawyer, to make that preemptive bid for the weaponized time crystals.”
When Evan’s gaze switched back to Tribe, he said, “I’ve been working with time crystals for over two years. I happened across the theoretical process to weaponize them a while ago, but I kept it in-house, strictly a secret. I recognized the extreme danger immediately, turned my research to other more productive aspects of the crystals.”
“If that’s so,” Evan said, “if you’re telling the truth, how did the algorithmic formula escape Parachute?”
“There never was a formula,” Tribe said. “Not as such. As I said, it was just a theoretical construct.”
“Could someone else have stumbled on it?” Evan asked.
“Anything’s possible, especially when it comes to qubits and time crystals,” Tribe replied. “But I doubt it.”
“Well, then the most likely explanation is that someone inside Parachute stole it.”
“But how did Zahra Planck get—” Ben snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute. Mr. Tribe, someone inside Parachute must have had a relationship with her. Can you—?”
“Done,” Tribe said and made a call on his cell.
Evan took a breath, let it out. “Ben, why don’t you back that up to the beginning?”
So he told her everything he and An Binh had discovered through Wes Connerly and Zahra Planck, the lead physicist on the US government’s quantum project. “Connerly and Zahra had a falling-out. Now Connerly’s dead—which means the entire golf foursome has been killed, by the weaponized time crystals, it turns out. A second autopsy was performed on Bill Fineman and the cause of death changed.”
“So, what, you expect me to believe Tribe’s attorney bought the process? On his own?”
“Again,” Tribe said, spreading his hands. “Still here.”
“No,” Ben said. “We believe he had help.” He paused a moment, before sighing. “Also Zahra Planck has vanished. She’s much cleverer and more resourceful than we imagined.”
“She didn’t vanish. She’s on Ayman Safra’s boat,” Tribe said. “And I have the answer to your question. There is someone—or there was. He quit last month.” He gave Ben all the details.
Ben called Isobel, relayed the information. “We’ll find him,” he said as he disconnected.
Evan nodded. “So Ayman Safra and Zahra Planck,” she said. “Who else?”
Ben shrugged, and Evan made a disgusted sound.
“The boat is currently here in Istanbul, taking on supplies,” Tribe said. “It’s due to depart at midnight.”
“Which gives us—” Ben glanced at his wristwatch. “—a bit less than four hours.
“Once it leaves Istanbul, once it reaches international waters,” Ben continued, “we’ll have to involve INTERPOL and a fistful of other intercountry services. We’ll be drowning in red tape while they’re off to God only knows where.”
“There are so many ways to track them,” Evan pointed out.
“True,” Ben said, “but while you were recovering two more deaths have been reported—our secretary of the treasury and the Russian foreign minister.”
“They want to go beyond a proxy war,” Evan said. “They want to start an actual war between us and the Russians.”
“Exactly.” Ben nodded. “As of now the deaths are unexplained, but it’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out, causing a worldwide panic.”
“War and panic,” Tribe said.
“And it may already have started,” Ben said. “Russia has gone media silent. Ditto the Kremlin.”
“As for social media, it’s a shit show,” Tribe said. “And I ought to know since I’m a big part of that particular shit show. I like seeding chaos into disorder.”
Ben cut his boss a disgusted look. “Bottom line, no one knows anything, and if they claim they do you can be damn sure they’re making it up.”
Ben took a step toward her. “Look, Evan, I hate to ask this of you after what you’ve just been through, but I can’t take point in the field. Zahra knows me.”
“And after what happened up on the volcano,” Tribe said, “I’m more or less a prisoner of my own security forces.”
