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  So he knew for a fact there were links out there, behind the scenes. Unexplained events. Hidden connections. Conspiracies to keep it all quiet that stretched back an untold number of years. Most of the hard-core stuff he couldn’t talk about on the show. Not until he found the face behind the mask, a puppet master he suspected of pulling a fistful of strings.

  Cal wanted his job back. His life. Right now, no employer would touch him, and the only way out of the maze was to prove his source was not false. That was the purpose of the show: to disguise his search for truth behind the guise of a conspiracy theorist, which allowed him to probe touchy angles without raising red flags.

  The more followers he had, the more weapons of information he would wield.

  Buried within every show was a personal research angle he wanted to crowdsource, a money trail or a face in a photo or conflicting accounts of a news story that didn’t add up. Whoever these people were, he knew they were out there.

  And he wanted them. Bad.

  Focus, Cal. Three minutes until you’re live.

  He cast a final glance out the kitchen window, then carried a fresh thermos of coffee to the breakfast nook. Leon followed him in. The nook still had the original chrome Formica table, vinyl chairs, and black-and-white tiled floor. Not because Cal was retro-hip, but because he was too house-poor to renovate.

  These days, after he was forced to go freelance, he was just poor in general.

  Cal opened his laptop and plugged his Blue Yeti condenser microphone into the USB port. He logged on to an internet broadcasting app, Twitch, which allowed him to run a live online show with audience participation.

  Again, some people might think he was tech-savvy, but he just used the stuff. He likened it to a rat using electronic sensors to open gates in a maze to reach its food.

  Ten seconds . . . five . . . the soothing aroma of fresh coffee . . . God, he loved coffee . . . he was live.

  “Welcome to another episode of Seeker’s Corner, the live show formed in the spirit of legendary Hyde Park Corner in London. Everyone has a voice here, and our goal is to crowdsource the truth out of modern conspiracies. This is Doc Woodburn, coming to you from a kitchen table someplace in the known universe. You, my friends and listeners, are part of the revolution. Help me crack the codes and expose the world’s darkest secrets to the light of day.”

  After the initial spiel he always gave, Cal took a sip of coffee, cracked his knuckles, and continued.

  “Last time, we made some headway on Project Blue Beam and Malaysia Air. I heard from a couple of sources this week that turned those theories on their heads. I’ll update you at the end of the episode, but before that, we’ll talk about the main topic. How does a link between the Las Vegas shooter, a gorgeous Russian spy, and North Korea sound? Juicy, right?”

  The comments started rolling in:

  Hey Doc, is it the Phantom Time Hypothesis?

  Planet Nibiru?

  The Homo Capensis conspiracy?

  He also saw the sort of random assertions that always cropped up during the show.

  Did you know Stephen Hawking was a robot controlled by aliens who live in the hollow core of the moon?

  Dinosaurs built the pyramids.

  Stranger Things is based on fact, because my uncle worked at Hawkins Lab and saw everything.

  There was even the requisite come-on squeezed into the responses:

  I’m not wearing any panties under my sundress. Tell me where you’re at and I’ll fly to meet you. I promise I’m hot. You won’t regret it.

  “I see some responses already, but hang on. We’ll get there. I need your help with something first, and I don’t want to sit on this one.” Cal rubbed Leon behind the ears as he let the tension build. “It’s a modern-day secret society,” he said finally, “and I think it’s a deep one. Let’s work through this together. Who out there tonight has heard of the Leap Year Society?”

  He switched to some mood music and gave people time to respond. During the pause, someone wrote in:

  Hi Doc, are you a sexy bald Latino midget? That would check all my boxes.

  After chuckling, Cal thought maybe he should encourage that persona. It would be a good cover. Though his skin had darkened a shade or two from living in LA, Cal was a corn-fed white boy from Indiana who couldn’t dance and loved Tom Petty and A-Ha. He was also six foot one with perpetual stubble and a full head of short dark hair. Sorry to disappoint you, lady. Or guy. Or whoever you are.

  Strangely, the chat line was quiet. Oh, the nutjobs were chiming in—as they always did—but during the half-minute break, which was usually all it took, no one had offered a serious response.

  “The Leap Year Society,” he repeated. “Anyone? I can’t discuss how I learned of it yet, but I’m putting the call out to anyone who might be listening: if you have anything on the Leap Year Society, hit me up. Who knows, maybe they’ll even be one of the good guys. You know, back in the day when the church and the state controlled everything—as opposed to big business and the state—the lodges of the secret societies, from Freemasons to the Oculists, were the tech incubators of their day. Those mumbo-jumbo handshakes and rituals were used to keep the identities of their members secret as they advanced democracy, science, and philosophy behind closed doors.”

  Toward the end of the show, he noticed a shadow at the edge of his vision, a vehicle passing across the kitchen window. It disappeared and returned less than a minute later, approaching from the other direction. He looked up to see a black van coming to rest on the curb outside his house.

  What the hell?

  Cal did not have commercial sponsors, because he did not want anyone to have access to his true identity. If the freelance gig ever dried up completely—which it often threatened to do—he might have to reconsider, but for now, he kept the show as anonymous as possible.

  Which meant there were no true breaks on his live show. If he had a bad hangover or an urgent restroom need or, say, a mysterious black van parked outside his house, he played a little music or suffered through.

  The van still hadn’t moved. No one had exited.

  Surely something he had just mentioned on the show couldn’t lead to a personal visit this fast—could it?

  It had to be unrelated.

  Either way, he didn’t like it one damn bit.

  As he rehashed a story in the news about how philologists were using algorithms to crack ancient manuscripts, buying himself time to think, Cal picked up his computer and microphone and moved to the window. He eased back a corner of the frilly brown curtain he detested but had never bothered to replace.

  The vehicle was standard SKV—serial-killer van. No distinguishing marks. If he wanted to see the plate, he would have to go outside.

  It was probably just a neighbor. Or a teenage rock band smoking up before a show. He lived in South Hollywood, after all.

  Except Cal’s particular block was a residential neighborhood, bands had bumper stickers and window graphics, and he had never seen a van of any sort parked on his street before.

  As he kept talking and glancing outside the window, he realized there was a distinct advantage to a live show that he had never had reason to consider.

  “Slight change in programming, folks.” After another pause for emphasis, he said quietly, “Things just got a little real over here.”

  Wondering if this was a very bad idea, Cal opened his front door and felt the cool night breeze caress his skin. He strode down his sidewalk until he could see the license plate on the van, half expecting the rear doors to burst open to expose a posse of men in ski masks who would shoot him up with a black-market barbiturate and stuff him in an underground bunker beneath the Arctic ice.

  “Right this very moment—live on the air—there is an unmarked black van parked in front of my house. And I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

  As Cal drew closer and closer to the street, unsure how far he was prepared to go, the engine on the van revved up.

  “If t
he people inside the van are listening,” Cal said, “they know a few thousand of you are too. I’m going to walk right up to their door, knock on it, and broadcast the conversation live on the air.”

  He glanced down at his computer. The chat line was exploding.

  None of his neighbors were outside. The street was quiet and dark and smelled of mimosa. It felt incredibly strange to be connected to thousands of listeners, yet physically alone as he approached the van. The disconnect of modern life played out in real time.

  The heavy tint on the windows obstructed his vision. As he approached the driver’s side to get a closer look, the van pulled away slowly, as if making a statement, before turning left at the end of the street and disappearing.

  Swallowing a few times before he spoke, Cal told his listeners what had happened as he walked back to his house, glancing over his shoulder with every step.

  Rome, Italy

  1932

  For once, life felt good to Ettore Majorana.

  The sentiment had nothing to do with his surroundings, despite the immense charms of the Via del Corso, a narrow little street in the heart of Rome.

  Nor did it have to do with the fact that Ettore had snagged the gelateria’s lone sidewalk table, or the creamy perfection of his cappuccino, or the aroma of his beloved Macedonia cigarettes, or the soft breeze caressing his skin on a sunny afternoon in late fall.

  Though Ettore was not immune to sensory delights such as these, his mind, as often, was elsewhere. He knew the tragedy of his life was that he could not turn off his thoughts and simply live in the moment.

  Oh, how he wished to cruise the streets of Rome without a care, perhaps in one of the new Alfa Romeo models with an open top his countrymen had a flair for designing. To stroll with a partner on a cobblestone lane, discovering a new fountain or statue along the way, stopping to hold hands and admire. To have the simple confidence to ask to join a game of football in the park.

  But no.

  Ettore’s passion in life, theoretical physics, was also his prison. He could not turn off the equations, theorems, and speculations on the nature of the universe that danced in his mind. Even worse, he often felt as if he were the only inmate in this prison, since so few people could understand the places his mind could go.

  When Ettore was a child, his mother liked to impress her visitors by asking him to multiply three-digit numbers in his head. Terrified of both public attention and disobeying his mother, Ettore would dart underneath a piece of furniture and shyly call out the answer, to the delight and astonishment of the crowd.

  Ettore did not play marbles with the other children. He met with tutors, and explored the limits of calculus, and annihilated grown men at the chessboard in public squares.

  Born into a wealthy family, Ettore was pushed toward the profitable field of engineering. Yet once he discovered the higher mysteries of physics, he never looked back. In 1928, at the age of twenty-two, he officially switched his field of study to physics at Sapienza University of Rome. A year later, he earned his doctorate.

  It was a heady time to be a physicist. After shocking the world with special relativity, Einstein had given the world general relativity in 1916, explaining that gravity was not a purely intellectual concept but in fact arises from the actual curvature of space-time, like a warm body sinking into a cloth chair. Outer space itself has substance! And it bends!

  At the opposite end of the spectrum, the study of subatomic particles, the bedrock of quantum mechanics had been formed by a number of prominent physicists, including Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Erwin Schrödinger. Never before had such advancements been made so quickly and the secrets of the universe so exposed. Theoretical physics was no less than magic made real, Ettore knew. The codification into science of Mother Nature herself, or the mind of God, or whatever one wanted to call it.

  A portion of the curtain had been pulled back. And what lay behind it was far more bizarre than anyone could have ever imagined.

  Yet it was beautiful too. So beautiful that Ettore was spellbound. As much as he longed to live in the moment and experience the world around him, he yearned to solve the biggest questions of science even more.

  At least with science he had a chance.

  But the reason life felt so good at the moment was because Ettore had made a discovery. Something worthy of his own impossible standards. A few years earlier, Paul Dirac had published a paper on quantum theory. Barely older than Ettore and even more socially awkward and withdrawn, Dirac was already considered one of the world’s foremost authorities in the field—if not the foremost.

  Einstein’s theory of special relativity had proved that when the speed of light is reached or even approached, strange things happen.

  Time slows down.

  Mass increases exponentially.

  Acceleration becomes almost impossible.

  Yet, maddeningly, otherwise universal truths did not seem to apply to objects smaller than an atom. So what exactly happens, Ettore and everyone else wanted to know, when the movement of quantum objects approaches the speed of light?

  Dirac’s paper sought to answer this very question and marry quantum theory with special relativity. Yet when he found an equation that worked, he was surprised to find the number of particles had doubled. A field of identical electrons with the same mass and spin but with negative energy.

  The world of antimatter had been born.

  The math behind Dirac’s theory was beautiful, but so complicated that only a handful of people in the world could understand it. Ettore was one of these people—and he didn’t like what Dirac had proposed one bit.

  In fact, he thought it was dead wrong.

  So Ettore developed a new theory. One that did not involve an ocean of fanciful new particles and negative energy that shouldn’t exist.

  Instead of matter and this theoretical antimatter, Ettore devised an equation describing the behavior of all particles in a single quantum-mechanical wave. The way he saw it, the behavior of these particles at vastly different levels of energy, such as when an electron approaches the speed of light, was simply two sides of the same coin.

  No new particles popped into existence. The old particles just presented a new face.

  Another magic trick.

  Ettore knew it was his best work. It felt right, a universal quantum equation that satisfied the infinite-dimensional space requirements. And for once, he was ready for the world to bear witness.

  “Ettore!”

  He turned to find Enrico Fermi, the leader of the Via Panisperna boys, approaching the café with his wife, Laura.

  Formed by a powerful senator in the late 1920s, the Physics Institute on Via Panisperna was a collection of Italy’s brightest scientific minds, tasked with exploring the emerging field of atomic theory. The group’s achievements had led to worldwide acclaim and national pride.

  “Tsk, tsk,” Fermi chided. “A cappuccino in the afternoon? Is Sicily no longer part of Italy?”

  Ettore stubbed out his cigarette in response. Sheeplike adherence to cultural norms was a mark of unoriginal thought.

  “Still, you have no idea how much it pleases me to see you enjoying the beautiful sunshine!” Fermi said. A lean man with a piercing gaze and a high receding hairline, he reminded Ettore of a talking bullet.

  Fermi turned to his wife. “Ettore never stops to enjoy la vita bella, you know. He is always too busy making world-changing discoveries and correcting the feeble ideas of our group.”

  As usual, Fermi delivered his praise of the younger physicist with a dose of bitter sarcasm. Ettore said nothing, his gaze slipping to the bottom of his empty cappuccino. Laura’s presence annoyed him. He had asked Fermi to meet him, not Laura. She would have no idea of the import of his discovery.

  “Oh, I think he’s doing just fine,” Laura said. “Look at what he’s reading—Schopenhauer!”

  Fermi rolled his eyes. “Oh, Ettore’s a philosophical man. Maybe even a metaphysical
one.”

  “You see?” his wife said. “I’ve never seen you reading anything other than science.”

  “Bah. That’s because everything else is a waste of time.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  Fermi disappeared, returning with an espresso for himself and a sambuca corretto for his wife. “Have you two officially met?” he asked. “By that, I mean has Ettore ever actually spoken to you?”

  Laura laughed away the comment and stuck out a delicate hand. “It’s a pleasure to formally make your acquaintance again, signore.”

  Ettore briefly touched her hand.

  “My dear Enrico speaks of you often. He tells me how you win races to solve a difficult math problem using only your mind, when the rest of the group works together on a chalkboard! And how you refuse to perform experiments to prove your theories, though they are always right. You even correct Enrico’s own theories, don’t you?”

  The cutting remarks had the intended chilling effect on Fermi. Ettore mumbled a reply, aware of how much his casual accomplishments chipped away at the confidence of their group’s hypercompetitive leader.

  “Most of all,” she continued, “Enrico tells me how you care nothing about publishing your discoveries, though you could be famous the world over. Is this true?”

  “If the man exists who gazes not at his own reflection,” Fermi said, “it’s our Ettore.”

  “But that’s why I’ve asked you here,” Ettore said. “I’ve decided to publish a paper.”

  The older physicist carefully set his espresso down. “Don’t fool with me, Ettore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re serious?”

  Ettore blinked. “Of course.”

  With a whoop, the tension between them forgotten, Fermi pulled Ettore to his feet and embraced him. “Buono, my good man! Buono! I couldn’t have heard better news. Did you know, dear Laura, that our Ettore deduced the structural forces of the nuclei before even Heisenberg? Yet wouldn’t let me discuss it in Paris? And the discovery of the neutron—don’t even get me started! What kind of deranged person keeps such things to himself?”