The Omega Theory (6 page)

“Who knows?” Monique threw her hands in the air. “We thought Michael was the only one who knew the equations. But maybe someone else has figured them out.”

Lucille thought about it for a moment. She pursed her lips and tapped the eraser end of her pencil against her chin. “Okay, but what does all this have to do with the kidnapping? If the Iranians already know the unified theory, why would they kidnap Michael?”

Monique opened her mouth to answer, but David spoke first. “Look, it can’t be a coincidence. We should talk to Jacob. I want to know what he’s working on.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Monique said. “There’s a connection here. The sooner we talk to Jacob, the faster we’ll find Michael.”

The room was silent for several seconds. Lucille leaned back in her chair, still tapping the pencil against her chin. Then, with a grunt, she rose to her feet. “All right. It couldn’t hurt to have a chat with the guy.” She headed for the door. “I’m gonna make some calls. You two sit tight.”

After she left, David sank into one of the chairs by the table. He was tired. All the stress of the past few hours had exhausted him. Monique sat down in the chair next to his. She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “This is good, David. I think we’re getting somewhere.”

He nodded, but he didn’t believe her. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Michael. Michael in his therapy room at the autism center. Michael crouching on the floor with his hands clamped over his ears. Michael screaming inside an ambulance. The pictures in David’s head were so terrible and he couldn’t shut them out.

They sat there without talking. David lowered his head and rubbed his eyes. Monique moved her hand to the back of his neck and kneaded the muscles there. Then she started scratching his back. The room became so quiet they could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.

After several minutes Monique began to talk again. She spoke in a calm, quiet, logical voice, the voice she always used when she talked to herself. “You know what I don’t get? Jacob’s specialty is building quantum computers, not investigating fundamental physics. He’s never written a single paper on the nature of spacetime. So why has he suddenly developed an interest? Doesn’t that seem a little strange?” She paused but didn’t wait for an answer. “And do you know who provides most of the funds for Jacob’s research? The good ol’ Defense Department. They awarded him a ten-million-dollar grant to develop his quantum computers. Everyone else in his field is jealous as hell.” She paused again. “And that name, the Caduceus Array. That’s odd, too. In astronomy, the caduceus is a symbol for the planet Mercury. But what’s the connection with spacetime disruptions?”

David finally raised his head and looked at Monique. “We’ve got to find him. We’ve got to find Michael.”

“Yes, baby, we’ll find him . . .”

“We have to be involved in this. We have to convince Parker to let us help.”

“We’ll talk to her, okay? I’m sure—”

“She won’t find him without us. Because this isn’t an ordinary kidnapping case. This is—”

The door to the interrogation room suddenly opened. Lucille appeared in the doorway but made no move to come inside. Her face was blank and her eyes showed nothing, but her jaw muscles quivered slightly. “We got problems,” she announced. “Two of them.”

Monique took her hand off David’s back. He stood up. “What do you mean?”

“I tried calling Steele’s office at the University of Maryland. I figured some lab assistant might be working late. But I got a message saying the whole university switchboard was down.” Lucille’s cheek twitched. “I got curious, so I checked with the local police. There was an explosion at the Advanced Quantum Institute an hour ago.”

“Jesus.” David gripped the edge of the table. “What’s the other problem?”

“After I hung up the phone, I saw an e-mail from one of my contacts in the New York Police Department. A Columbia University student found a body in Pupin Hall. In an old laboratory right next to the lecture hall. It’s Steele.”

5

THE PRESIDENT SAT ALONE IN THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM, STARING
at a stack of loose-leaf binders on the conference table. He’d spent most of the evening in a meeting with his defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At eight o’clock the Joint Chiefs had headed back to the Pentagon, giving the president a few precious minutes to think about what they’d just told him. The loose-leaf binders they’d left behind contained their plans for eliminating Iran’s nuclear facilities.

He leaned back in his chair. His head was splitting and he was desperate for a cigarette. Massaging his temples, he gazed at the flat-panel screen at the front of the room, which showed the positions of American strike forces in the Middle East—aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf, fighter-bomber wings at the air bases in Qatar and Kuwait. And as he stared at the map he thought of his wife and daughters, who’d already been escorted by the Secret Service to the relative safety of Camp David. He pictured his two little girls in the backseat of the presidential limousine, gazing at the Maryland woods through tinted, bulletproof windows.

The Iranian nuclear test was the biggest crisis of his administration. The mullahs in Teheran had rejected all his overtures and flouted all his warnings, and now he had to respond. It was too dangerous to let Iran become a nuclear power—there was too great a chance that they’d use the bomb against Israel, or that Israel would launch a preemptive strike against them. And if he acted quickly enough, he could obliterate their nuclear program, and the whole world could breathe a sigh of relief. According to military communications intercepted by the National Security Agency, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard possessed only two more nukes and had moved both to a secure facility near the town of Ashkhaneh, in the northern part of the country. Photos taken by U.S. reconnaissance satellites confirmed the reports, showing the Guard’s convoys traveling to the mountain range where the facility was hidden.

He turned in his chair so he could view another flat-panel screen. This one displayed a satellite image of the Ashkhaneh installation: a concrete entrance embedded at the foot of a mountain, leading to a network of tunnels and natural caverns that extended deep underground. Unfortunately, it was a hardened target. Readings from ground-penetrating radar had revealed that parts of the installation were more than a thousand feet below the surface. No conventional bunker-busting missile could reach that far. The only weapon that could destroy the facility in a single blow was the air force’s earth-penetrating nuclear warhead, which could collapse the whole underground network. That option was out of the question, of course—the president wasn’t going to start a nuclear war. But he wasn’t going to let Iran start one, either.

Turning away from the screen, he sifted through the pile of loose-leaf binders. Most of the Defense Department’s plans called for conventional bunker-buster strikes on the Ashkhaneh facility, followed by the deployment of commando units to enter the damaged installation and destroy the nukes stored deep inside. The problem was that the Iranians had anticipated this strategy and taken steps to counter it. The facility was located in an inaccessible part of the country, far from the U.S. carriers in the Gulf and the bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iranians also had a sophisticated air-defense system, with dozens of radar stations and missile batteries on their coast and most of their borders. Nearly all of the Pentagon’s battle plans predicted hundreds of casualties.

But one plan was different. The president picked up the binder marked
JSOC Operation Cobra.
It was written by Lieutenant General Sam McNair, who commanded the Special Operations forces in Afghanistan. McNair had an impressive record of success, which was a rare thing indeed in the war against the Taliban. He also had a penchant for bold moves. His plan was the only one that offered the advantage of tactical surprise. If the plan worked as promised, the Special Operations assault group would attack from an unexpected direction, and the Iranians would have no time to move their nukes to a different facility. But the best part, in the president’s opinion, was the casualty estimate: fewer than thirty men killed or wounded.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to return to the Oval Office. In twenty-nine minutes he was scheduled to give his televised address to the nation.

He stood up and left the Situation Room. As he walked down the hallway, a Secret Service agent and a staff assistant fell into step behind him. He looked over his shoulder at the assistant.

“Place a call to the defense secretary, please. Tell him to give the go-ahead to Cobra.”

6

THREE FIRE ENGINES, TWO HAZMAT TRUCKS, AND HALF A DOZEN POLICE
cars were parked in front of the University of Maryland’s computer science building. David, Monique, and Agent Parker arrived at the scene at 2
A.M.
, more than six hours after the explosion, but the place was still teeming with emergency personnel. Lucille, who’d spent the past four hours driving the government-issue Chevrolet Suburban from New York to the Maryland campus, parked the SUV behind one of the police cars. From the backseat David gazed at the massive brick building. It looked undamaged—no broken windows, no blackened brick—but a crowd of state troopers, fire marshals, and plain-clothes detectives stood in front of the floodlit entrance, just outside a barricade of yellow crime-scene tape.

Lucille turned to Monique, who sat in the SUV’s front passenger seat, and pointed at the building. “It doesn’t look so bad to me. Where’s Steele’s lab?”

“I think it’s in the basement.” She looked over her shoulder at David. “Isn’t that right?”

David had visited the Advanced Quantum Institute several years ago, before Jacob became its director, so he knew the layout. “Yeah, in the basement. That explains why the explosion didn’t damage the exterior.”

Lucille nodded. “Okay, here’s how we’re gonna do this. You two are my scientific consultants. And that means you don’t talk unless I consult you. Got that?”

She gave them a warning look. Although she’d agreed to bring them along, she clearly wasn’t happy about it. Normally, FBI agents didn’t invite civilians to a crime scene. But after hearing the news of Jacob Steele’s murder, Lucille had acknowledged that there might be a connection to Michael’s kidnapping. And the first step in investigating that connection, David and Monique had argued, was figuring out what Jacob had been working on. In the end, Lucille admitted that their expertise in quantum physics might prove useful. So when Karen Atwood arrived at the FBI office to pick up Jonah, Monique pleaded with her to take care of Baby Lisa, too. It was a big favor to ask, but Karen agreed. David’s first and second wives had forged a bond during their harrowing ordeal two years ago, and they’d gotten along well ever since.

Now Lucille opened the SUV’s door, and David and Monique followed her outside. A tall, red-haired man in a gray suit stepped away from the crowd in front of the computer science building and came toward them. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his FBI badge.

“Agent Parker?” he said. “I’m Dickinson from headquarters. I’ll be your liaison with the local field office.”

Lucille shook Dickinson’s hand. “What’s the situation? Can we get into the building?”

“The fire marshals gave the all clear about an hour ago. The explosion pulverized the lab, but there’s no major structural damage. Our crime-scene techs are in the basement right now.”

“What have they found?” Lucille asked. “Have they done the residue tests yet?”

“Yes, ma’am. Preliminary results indicate that the explosive was C-4. We’ve alerted the National Counterterrorism Center.”

“Who have you interviewed so far?”

Dickinson reached into his jacket again and pulled out a notebook. “Luckily, Steele’s lab was empty at the time of the explosion. There were some people still working elsewhere in the building, but none of them saw anything unusual before the blast.” He opened his notebook and leafed through the pages. “We contacted the university administration to get more information about Steele. And a few officials came down here to see the damage. One of them said he works with Steele.” He jerked his thumb at the computer science building. “His name’s Adam Bennett. He’s in the basement right now with one of my agents. I told Bennett to stick around because I thought you might want to talk to him. He doesn’t know yet that Steele is dead.”

David knew Adam Bennett. He was a director at DARPA, the Pentagon agency that funded defense-related research. Bennett was in charge of awarding grants to scientists and engineers in nearly every field, from robotics and aerospace to communications and computer science. Personally, he was a likable guy; David had met him a year ago at an academic conference, and he’d seemed charming and intelligent. He’d just finished reading David’s biography of Albert Einstein and had many perceptive things to say about the book. Nevertheless, David had felt uncomfortable talking to him. Although DARPA was most famous for funding the invention of the Internet, the agency was also responsible for the Stealth bomber and the Predator drone. Bennett regularly visited Iraq and Afghanistan to field-test new technologies such as surveillance robots and laser-guided bullets. David, as a peace activist, found all this a little disturbing.

“Bennett works for DARPA,” David told the FBI agents. “He’s director of the agency’s defense sciences office. He knows everyone in physics, and everyone knows him, because he’s the guy who doles out the cash.”

“Yeah, he’s Jacob’s sugar daddy,” Monique added. “DARPA’s been funding research on quantum computing for at least a decade.”

Agent Dickinson stared at them, obviously wondering who the hell they were. They looked nothing like law-enforcement officers—David still wore the khaki pants and tweed jacket he’d put on for the Physicists for Peace conference, and Monique was in her Bob Marley T-shirt. Dickinson turned to Lucille with a quizzical look on his face, but she ignored it. “Well, what the hell are we waiting for?” she said. “Let’s say hello to the guy.”