Dante's Equation Part 25

Of course, that wasn'tnecessarily weird. They could have come for her, sometime in the past, oh, twenty seconds. They could have taken her away to be questioned or for a medical test or something.

He picked up the tray, still loaded with untouched food, and went back into the hall. The FBI guys watched him, standing now, not liking all this traffic at all. Nate kept going, pretending not to notice. At the elevator, the lab tech was just getting in with his cart.

"Hold it." Nate dodged inside.

To avoid the cart, he pushed his way to the back of the car. The door closed. As the car started to move Nate heard something, realized it was the lab tech mumbling. The guy was in front of Nate, white coat, thick dark hair, Caucasian skin. He said something again, low, cleared his throat, glanced back at Nate, a quick, inspecting-a-bug kind of look. He faced the doors again.

Nate's brain almost let it go out of sheer distraction-almost. But something about it stuck in his craw. The guy hadn't been speaking to Nate, which meant he was talking to no one at all, and Nate was pretty sure the words hadn't been English. Neither one of those things made sense.

Nate moved his head a little to one side and studied the lab tech. The guy was wearing something in his ear. It was practically invisible, but the thin flesh-colored wire from it trailed down and disappeared inside his collar. He was talking to someone through a hidden microphone.

Nate's eyes moved to the cart.

It was stainless steel, vaguely resembling a street vendor's cart, about four feet long and three feet high. It was a square bin with a door in the side, presumably leading to shelves and supplies. Nate looked at the elevator b.u.t.tons. The guy had pressed the b.u.t.ton for level C, the third level of the underground parking garage.

s.h.i.t.

Nate had about five seconds to think. It was amazing how you can make huge decisions in a window like that when you have no other choice. Because here they were going past floor 2 and their ride would be over in a few seconds, QED.

Nate had brief mental images of himself diving for the emergency b.u.t.ton or head-b.u.t.ting the guy in the back. He then had a flash of himself primly setting down the tray on the floor and taking the dull table knife in hand while the guy, who could very well be an expert in every type of combat known to man, watched and wondered what the h.e.l.l he was doing.

But none of these things would work and Nate's body knew it. While his mind still debated a plan, his hands were already acting on instinct, turning the tray sideways. Dishes, silverware, and food went flying, and in the next instant, while the lab tech's head was in the process of coming around to see what all that noise was, Nate's hands brought the tray up and smashed it, hard, into that dark head of hair.

The sound it made on contact, a substantialboink , was embarra.s.singly loud. The lab tech stood there, upper body turned, staring at Nate with a perturbed, disbelieving look, as though he had done something incredibly inane. Nate stared back. He was aware of the ongoing ringing of the silver dish cover as it spun like a top on the elevator floor. He was aware that he was dead meat. This time he mentallyordered his hands to bring the tray back up and conk the man again, and again and again, as many times as necessary, but, paradoxically, they now refused to budge. His arms, and the hands attached to them that still held the tray, had turned as rigid as a GI Joe stuck in the karate chop position.

It felt to him as though the moment stretched out nearly to the point of hysteria, but it couldn't have really because the elevator still hadn't reached the parking garage. Then Nate noticed a growing red stain on the white lapel of the lab tech's jacket, a stain coming from a trickle that originated under that thick, dark hair. Nate looked up to meet the lab tech's eyes, guiltily, but the guy's eyes had rolled up into his head. He crumbled to the floor like a deflating Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.

The elevator doors opened to level B of the parking garage. It looked quiet. Nate pushed out the blood cart and went running with it down a ramp to his left. As he cleared the roof of the garage he could see the exit up ahead where a driver was paying the attendant in the booth. He made himself slow down. Jesus, the cart was heavy. He had to push hard when the ramp ran out. He rolled it past the booth, earning a brief puzzled look, and out onto the sidewalk.

There was a moment of panic as he tried to orient himself. He was on Madison Street. It was afternoon and there were pedestrians, mostly elderly going in for their doctors' visits or people in surgical greens crossing from one medical building to another. He tried to look like it was perfectly normal for him to be wheeling a cart full of blood vials out here, just taking it next door, la-di-da-dida.

He turned into a side street and saw the employee parking lot two blocks away. He was shaking. He expected at any moment for the long arm of the law-or whoever might have been with that lab tech guy-to descend, but after what felt like miles he made it to the parking lot unchecked.

Rabbi Handalman was there, waiting in his rental car. Manny's employee parking permit was on the dash. He was napping, head thrown back on the seat, but he woke up when Nate accidentally b.u.mped the car with the cart. He got out, yawning.

"So what? You saw Dr. Talcott? You talked with her?"

"You have to help me." Nate was trying to catch his breath. "And then we have to get out of herefast . Where're the keys?" Handalman handed them over, eyeing the cart. "I don't have to give blood, I hope?" Nate opened the trunk. "Help me get Jill into the car." The rabbi made a gesture with his hands,And that makes sense how ? Nate motioned, hardly able to believe it himself. "She's in the cart." *** Jill woke up to find herself lying on an itchy sofa in a stranger's living room with Nate hovering over her. She blinked up at him from behind a fuzzy headache. There was a smell in her nostrils like

rubbing alcohol. "Are you all right?" Nate asked. Over his shoulder peeked the face of a man with slicked-back brown hair, a yarmulke, and an enormous beard.

Jill sat up. Her head throbbed as she moved, but when she sat still and put her head in her hands, the pain went away. "What's going on?" "Someone tried to kidnap you from the hospital." "The Mossad," said the stranger, with a slight accent.

Jill raised her head, moving it ver-r-ry slowly, to give Nate a look. "It could have been the Mossad," Nate agreed. "Or some other foreigners. I'm not sure what language they were speaking, but it sure as h.e.l.l wasn't English-or Greek, either, for that matter."

"What. Are. You. Talking about?"

"The lab guy, the one who came to draw your blood. He must have drugged you. He put you in his cart and . . ." A story followed, one that hit the limits of her imagination and then sailed over like a fly ball. Jill gingerly moved her head as Nate talked, rolling it on her neck. But the pain seemed to be gone and the smell in her nostrils was fading. Funnily enough, the last thing she rememberedwas the lab tech sticking a needle in her arm.

She looked around sharply. The only windows were small and high and overlooked the bottom of a fence. They were in a bas.e.m.e.nt apartment. "Nate, where are we?" "A friend of mine's place."

The bearded man pa.s.sed her a gla.s.s of water. She took a sip. It was all coming back.

Was there reallyanothergovernment onto the one-minus-one? It wasn't possible . . . was it?

She felt a thrill, shoved the gla.s.s at Nate, and stood up. "We have to go back to the hospital. Nate, I can't believe you did this! What were you thinkingstealing me like that? What am I, a sack of potatoes? What will theythink!"

"Jill," Nate said quietly, "will you sit down and listen, please?"

The other guy, the stranger, was watching them both, eyes intelligent and patronizing as h.e.l.l. Jill couldn't for the life of her see how some third party fit into all this, particularly not a Jewish third party. What was he doing sitting there listening to her and Nate's private conversation? Was he the owner of the house or what?

She sank down slowly, because the look on Nate's face was hard to refuse and because her legs didn't want to hold her up anyway. She had to admit that part of her was secretly relieved to be out of Lieutenant Farris's grasp, even though that didn't make sense. She would have to think this through carefully.

"Jill, this is Rabbi Aharon Handalman."

The man studied her warily, as if she were dangerous. "I wish I could say it was nice to meet you. But I have the feeling none of us has much to be glad about at the moment."

12.2. Aharon Handalman

Aharon had been in worse places. The apartment Nate had brought them to was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a large old home in a residential neighborhood. The apartment, Aharon could tell right away, wastrayf , not kosher, probably not even Jewish. He touched nothing. He longed for a cup of tea.

He brought out his briefcase and his heavy binder. The woman, the scientist, kept eyeing him with distaste, as if he were lugging samples, like maybe he was going to sell her new carpeting or life insurance. He knew what it was-he was a religious. Nothing he had to say was anything she wanted to hear. To be honest, he felt the same. But his curiosity, his desire to know more about the weapon, went a long way toward making peace.

He arranged his things on a coffee table the size of a small car and opened the code binder. To prepare himself he closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer over the Scripture. He felt, as he had been feeling lately, like the words had changed into a language he didn't understand. When he opened his eyes, Dr. Talcott was making a face.

"What is this?" she asked Nate. "You don't want me talking to the government, yet you get mixed up with some religious cult?"

"Judaism," Aharon said curtly, "has not been a religious cult for three or four thousand years."

"I ran into Rabbi Handalman at your place."

"My place?"

"I was looking for you," Aharon said.

"Just hear him out, please."

The woman settled back reluctantly and looked at Aharon with a dull challenge in her eyes. As if he couldn't handle that. As if he hadn't run into a hundred like her at theAish HaTorah seminars, people who refuse to believe anything.

"I teach yeshiva in Jerusalem and I study Torah code." The woman groaned. "You know something about Torah code?" "Only that it's silly, and it's been thoroughly disproved." A flame of irritation burned in his stomach, but Aharon only made a "we'll see" gesture. "Odd that your name should turn up in it then." He turned the binder to a marked page. "I found your name in a

group of arrays I've been studying about a man named Yosef Kobinski." "Kobinski was a Polish physicist," Nate explained. "He wrote a ma.n.u.script before he died during the Holocaust. The Mossad is looking for it."

The boy glanced at Aharon for confirmation. Aharon nodded.Go on.He'd seen something in Dr.

Talcott's face change when the wordphysicist was mentioned. "Rabbi Handalman showed me some of Kobinski's work. It has mathematical notations in it that-well, it looks to me like he might have been on to your equation."

The woman's forehead knotted with skepticism. "But that's . . . The Holocaust was sixty years ago. That's just not possible!" "Kobinski was a genius," Aharon told her. "And you got this fromBible code ? Really, Nate!"

The boy gave Aharon an apologetic look. "I think you need to see this for yourself. Rabbi?" On the plane ride over here, thank G.o.d, he had thought to copy out the meaningful keywords in English, antic.i.p.ating just such an encounter. He pushed the list across the coffee table to Dr. Talcott. She leaned forward reluctantly. One fingernail went into her mouth to be chewed as she scanned the list. Her other hand worked at the nub of the sofa. The woman had so much bottled up it could only come out through her hands, Aharon thought.

kobinski-400 auschwitz-200 quantum physics-30 weapon-200 law of good and evil-8 heaven-40 h.e.l.l-40 equation-26 weapon of obliteration-5 from him the weapon-3 book of torment-30 weapon of torment-5 weapon of terror-4 weapon of evil-4 the great weapon-5 demons-20 weapon loosing demons-4 angels-20 weapon loosing angels-4 Talcott-40 Dr. Jill Talcott-25 If he was not mistaken, he saw a flush of fear on that freckled little face. But-typical!-she went into denial immediately. "This is ridiculous! Nate, we don't know who this man is orwhat he's trying to do. What ifhe's the Mossad? What if thereis no Mossad in all this? Who's to say this list of words isn't completely fabricated?" "You think I'm inventing this?" Aharon huffed. The boy held up his hand to stop the argument. He was a good boy for a non-Jew; Aharon liked him.

It was true, he looked very strange with his hair so weird and that earring in his ear. But he had a

good heart. He listened at least, had a brain in his head, maybe. Nate took the list from the woman, sighed. "Doesn't this strike you as being . . . well, awfully relevant to our research? And how would anyone besides usknow these phrases were relevant?"

"Those phrases have nothing to do with our research."

" 'Dr. Jill Talcott'? 'Weapon of obliteration'? 'Quantum physics,' 'law of good and evil,' 'equation' . . ." " 'Angels,' 'demons'? Gee, Nate, I must have missed it the day angels and demons showed up in our lab!" "I think you're being too literal." " 'Law of good and evil'? What doesthatmean?"

Nate took a deep breath, looked nervous about what he was going to say. "The one-minus-one. Itisthe law of good and evil."

Dr. Talcott stared at him, her brow troubled but in her eyes . . . something knowing, something shocked. The boy stared right back. There was a profundity in the moment that Aharon didn't really understand, but he leaned forward, his pulse quickening.

"Yes,"Nate urged her quietly. "The one-minus-one is in the very fabric of s.p.a.ce-time. And we discovered, through our trials, that when we pushed it more toward the 'one' side, there were positive results-life prospered. And when we pushed it toward the 'negative one' side, bad things happened; our virus died; systems broke down."

Dr. Talcott shot an unfriendly look at Aharon, as if she didn't like him listening to their secrets. She was right not to like. He was eating up every word. He was a sponge.

"So let's take the admittedly wild leap of wondering if the crest in the one-minus-one represents thecreative urge in the universe, the impulse for life and growth. And the trough represents thedestructive urge , the tendency to decay and chaos."

Dr. Talcott opened her mouth to protest, shut it again. "The law of good and evil." Her voice was ironic, but there was something not quite so mocking in it, too.

"That's right." Nate's young face was serious. "What if . . .what if we've discovered aphysical lawof creation and destruction? Remember the mice, how eager they were to procreate under the one pulse? And the virus, too?"

Dr. Talcott nodded tersely.

"What if we've discovered the underlying physical law of life itself, Jill? Nothow two parents biologically create an offspring, Darwin's law, butwhy -why our universe creates things at all, and why everything must decay back to dust. It's not just abouttime , about the momentum from order to chaos. It's the nature of s.p.a.ce-time itself, creation and destruction. And it's not just about life and death, but everything-every little thing-is influenced by either a creative or destructive impulse, good or evil, crest or trough. And they're exactly paired, fifty-fifty."

So blithely a boy could say such a thing, Aharon thought with a stab of pain. That the world could be capable of as much evil as good-it was blasphemous to even suggest it. Yet having been immersed in Kobinski's world, Aharon could no longer deny the strength of evil. And that alone was enough to make his faith tremble like a branch in a heavy wind.

For a moment there was a thick silence, but Dr. Talcott was clearly chewing things over in her head and also, as it happened, was literally chewing on her fingernails again. Such a habit!

"Let's justsay ," heavy doubt in her voice made it clear she didn't reallybelieve this, "that was the case. The crest in the one-minus-one is a creative impulse and the trough a destructive impulse. How does it actually impact us . . .things ? It seems to me that the impact the one-minus-one has on all matter is to pull everything more toward fifty-fifty."

"That's right!" Nate leaned forward intently. "It's like a moderator. I've been trying to think of examples. . . . For instance, it's not just matter that's affected-not just bananas or even our physical bodies, which are obviously governed by growth and decay. When an event happens in the world- say the signing of a peace treaty-that event has to have a wave pattern, too, doesn't it? After all, it takes place in s.p.a.ce-time, whereeverything is energy waves."

"Yeesss . . ." Dr. Talcott agreed reluctantly. "Though an event is probably more like an entire group of waves."

"Fine. So let's see how the one-minus-one would affect an event. Let's take something simple: say you give a homeless person on the street five dollars. That action has a wave pattern and that wave pattern is made up of crests and troughs. So let's say giving the money to a homeless person is eighty-twenty-eighty percent crest or 'good' and twenty percent trough or 'bad.' The good part is obvious-you're doing a kind deed. The bad twenty percent may be because at some level the act is done out of ego or a fear of retribution from G.o.d or social guilt."

"Hmmm . . ." Dr. Talcott said, a deep frown between her brow.

"Now that act doesn'tstayeighty-twenty because it interacts with the one-minus-one. Basically, there are a lot more troughs in the one-minus-one than there are in our eighty-twenty act, right? So the net result would be to 'tame down' the goodness of our act. The resultant interference pattern would be more like seventy-thirty."

"But what, exactly, would that additional ten percent troughbe ?"

"Some negative side effect that we can't predict. Maybe the homeless person uses the money to buy alcohol that further deteriorates his liver, or maybe it keeps him from going to a shelter that night and he winds up getting mugged. Butsomething negative will come of it, even if it's minor. We all instinctively know this is how life works. That's why we say 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' or 'there's always a catch,' right?"

The woman smiled despite her face, as Rosa would put it. But she said, "Very philosophical, Nate," and the way she said it, it wasn't a compliment. The boy went on, excitedly talking with his hands.

"On the other hand, take a mostlynegative act such as a young girl being murdered by a serial killer. The act itself might be ninety-five percent evil or trough. But under the influence of the one-minusone, it's neutralized a bit. Maybe it brings the victim's family closer together, or maybe the mother of the dead girl starts a support group.Something positive comes of it. You know: 'in every cloud there's a silver lining.' "

Dr. Talcott arched an eyebrow. "But-"

"And that's just considering how the event and the one-minus-one interact. In reality, the event also interacts with a billionotherwaves, the waves of all the people involved, of the locations where the action occurred, of the police, and so on. Any of those waves has the power to influence the wave of the original event toward being slightly more negative or more positive. But underlying absolutely everything like . . . like a heartbeat there's the one-minus-one, always operating to moderate it all, to generalize the gross effect of everything back toward fifty-fifty. The law of good and evil. And the metaphysical concept of 'angel' or 'demon' could be just another way of representing the basic idea of crest and trough, the positive and destructive forces."

The woman waited to see if the boy was done or what, her mouth drawn in a line that reminded Aharon of Hannah. He waited, too. Personally, he thought Nate was leaving something large out of the picture-like G.o.d. But as the sages say, "if you keep your mouth shut, even a bird can teach you something."

"Your brainstorming is very creative, Nate," Dr. Talcott said slowly. "But wedon't know that events per se have waves, or that the crests and troughs of the waves would represent what you're implying they do. We've only begun to test the one-minus-one, and we have to be careful not to get carried away."

The boy sank back, looking unfazed by this censure. Aharon supposed he had heard it all before.

"So!" Aharon said. "I think perhaps we should hear whatKobinski has to say on the subject, nu?"

"You have that material here? The ma.n.u.script Nate was talking about?"

She had definitely heard that part. Aharon gave her what he had, the six notebook pages from Yad Vashem. She went over them, ignoring the Hebrew and turning each page this way and that to examine the mathematical scribbles. Nate peered over her shoulders and several times they pointed things out to each other. She made notes, getting more absorbed. Aharon held his breath, anxious to see what a scientist, especiallythisscientist, would make of Kobinski's work.

He could see the woman's interest regenerating itself along with the color in her cheeks and brightness in her eyes. So angels she didn't get, but numbers, that she understood.

"Is there more?" Dr. Talcott demanded when she'd a.s.similated all there was. "He mentions two pages of equations. Do you have those?"

Aharon stroked his beard. "As a matter of fact, yes."

"Can I see them?"

"Naturally you may see. But first we have to fly to Poland."

They said to Moshe:Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us out to die in the wilderness? What is this that you have done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very word that we spoke to you in Egypt, saying: Let us alone, that we may serve Egypt! Indeed, better for us serving Egypt than our dying in the wilderness! -Exodus 14:1112, Everett Fox Translation,The Five Books of Moses, 1983