Unknown 9 Read online

  Laura sipped her drink and watched the crowd stroll by. “Fascinating, darling.”

  With a shy smile, Ettore retook his seat and shook the last cigarette from his pack. “You must give me a preview,” Fermi said. “Right now, on this beautiful afternoon.”

  With a shrug, Ettore held his unlit cigarette between his fingers and obliged. He launched into a brief, excited description of the content of his paper, including a set of complex equations scribbled on a napkin.

  “I do say,” Fermi said with a chuckle to his wife, stroking his chin as Ettore finished, “that’s the most words I’ve ever heard Ettore utter in one day.”

  Laura ignored him.

  “What do you think?” Ettore asked Fermi.

  After taking the napkin and studying it for a long moment, Fermi gave his colleague a paternalistic clap on the back. “Dirac might not be pleased.”

  Ettore smirked. “I would think not.”

  “I’ll have to study it further, but it’s a great start, one which I’m sure will spark much debate. Most of all, I’m happy you’ve decided to share it with the world. Let’s hope it’s the dawn of a new era.”

  Slowly, Ettore reached for his lighter and lit his cigarette, hiding his emotions behind a cloud of smoke. His superior’s reaction had made him feel hurt and confused and sad.

  Fermi had not understood his theory, he realized. That or he did not find it persuasive. Perhaps both.

  That was okay, he thought. When I’m given the Nobel Prize, perhaps he’ll understand his mistake.

  Ettore was not a vain man, saddled by visions of glory. He just believed in his new theory that much.

  Yet he wanted Fermi to understand. Despite their fundamental difference in personality—Fermi didn’t understand failure, and Ettore didn’t understand success—Fermi was the most gifted physicist in Italy, after Ettore.

  “I have to go,” Ettore said, pushing to his feet.

  “But we just arrived!” Fermi said.

  “I’d like to read over my paper again,” he said coldly.

  Like many geniuses, in order to compensate for a lifelong failure to fit in, Ettore had learned to erect a shield of superiority at a moment’s notice.

  Before he left the table, Ettore crumpled his pack of cigarettes and left it in the ashtray. After a hesitation, Fermi reached for it and brushed off the ashes.

  “What are you doing?” his wife asked.

  “Ettore sometimes leaves theories on his cigarette packs that could win an international prize,” Fermi said with a sheepish smile.

  Laura gave a soft laugh in reply.

  Ettore walked away and didn’t deny it.

  Later that year, Ettore’s fortunes continued to improve, culminating with the news that he had been awarded a grant from the National Research Council to study in Leipzig. He was to help the great Werner Heisenberg himself expand his theory of the nucleus.

  For once, Ettore’s cloud of depression seemed to lift. His health was good. The upcoming trip to Germany was exciting. The world’s greatest physicists had read his paper, and it had been well received. While no one was sure whether Dirac or Ettore had gotten it right, they were all paying attention. Ettore’s old professors were now quoting him.

  It looked to be a period of great promise. A new country, a new era. Perhaps he would unlock the mysteries of the nucleus itself.

  As he prepared for his journey, never one for politics, he ignored the nationalistic ranting of Adolf Hitler. How could anyone with a rational mind listen to such drivel, let alone give it a platform?

  Ettore left for Leipzig in January of 1933.

  A week after he arrived, Adolf Hitler was declared chancellor of Germany.

  While the elevation of the future führer would affect Ettore in many ways in the days to come, it was but a portent of the terrible darkness that would soon befall the young physicist.

  Durham

  7

  Angling her back toward the library hallway to shield her actions from view, Andie peered inside the open wall safe concealed behind the framed photo of the Ishango bone. Inside were two objects: a cell phone and a thick Moleskine journal.

  The sleek phone appeared to be a newer-generation smartphone, with the deep-silver sheen of an aluminum or titanium alloy. Curious but wary, she touched the surface lightly with a finger, as if it might shock her. When nothing happened, she pulled it out, along with the journal.

  The phone had no brand name or other identifying marker, except for a small black star on the back. Puzzled, she flipped through the journal and saw that it was filled with notes in Dr. Corwin’s handwriting.

  For a moment, she stood there staring dumbly at the empty safe. Was it coincidence that she knew the password? Maybe Dr. Corwin had been pressed for time to write the note, and the password to the MUT folder was the best thing that came to mind.

  Or maybe he had wanted her to know.

  After a final glance down the hallway, she pocketed the phone and stuck the Moleskine journal in the folder she had taken from Dr. Corwin’s office. She closed the safe and replaced the framed photo. On her way out, she slipped through the back door of the library and angled behind Duke Chapel, keeping to the heavy darkness at the base of its walls as she hurried toward the lot where she had parked.

  Sweat was trickling down her neck by the time she reached her car. Her hands shook as she locked the doors and she set the bulging manila folder in the passenger seat. Assuming the cell phone and the journal were important, she understood why Dr. Corwin had stashed them somewhere outside his office or his home.

  Yet how had he installed a safe in the library without anyone knowing? Had it been there for years, for a different purpose? Covered by a different piece of art?

  She logged on to the Duke faculty website and navigated to the home page of the library. To her surprise—he had never told her about this—she discovered Dr. Corwin was the current chair of the Library Council.

  He was also an ex officio member with an unlimited term.

  She scanned the names of the other members, but no one jumped out at her. Dean Varen was not listed.

  On impulse, she called information and asked for the number for Dr. Lars Friedman in the Raleigh-Durham area. Surprisingly, there was a home listing, and Andie chose the automatic connection.

  “Yes?” A woman with a pleasant voice answered, on the third ring.

  “Is Dr. Friedman home?”

  A long silence. “Who is this?”

  “A colleague.”

  “What’s your name?”

  As Andie hesitated, unwilling to give out her information and trying to decide if she should use another false name, the woman’s voice turned desperate. “I haven’t seen my husband in two days. Please, if you know where he is, if you know anything at all, you have to tell me. Please.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you with him right now?”

  “What? No, of course not.” She wanted to say she was a friend of Dr. Corwin’s, but that was information she was unwilling to divulge.

  “Then who are you? How did you get this number? Why did you call?” The woman’s voice choked off into a sob. “Do you know if he survived the fire?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Andie whispered again, and ended the call.

  By the time Andie returned home, darkness had sealed the surrounding forest like the closing of a tomb. A large animal of some kind, a fox or a bobcat, slunk into the trees as her headlights illuminated the long gravel drive.

  She parked her car and stepped out, feeling dazed. Her entire world had just turned on a new axis, spinning in a completely different direction. Needing to calm her nerves, she poured a whiskey and sat on her secondhand sofa with the folder she had taken from Dr. Corwin’s office.

  She emptied the contents beside her. A cell phone, the black Moleskine journal, the drawings of her visions, and the photo of her mother.

  The ink drawings pulled in her gaze like the
bottom of a whirlpool, dark and hypnotic. She still couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Who had drawn these? Dr. Corwin? A sudden, terrifying thought occurred to her. Had she and her mother been subjected to some kind of experiment? If so, had that contributed to her mother’s decision to leave? What if Dr. Corwin had been trying to help her?

  Andie set the drawings aside. She wanted so very much to buy into that line of reasoning. But she would need far more proof than this.

  Next, she picked up the cell phone. There was an old-school camera eye, but no battery access she could find. Nor did she see an outlet jack, a microphone, or volume control. There was a single long button on the underside of the phone. When she pressed it, the LCD display lit up, revealing an image that materialized to fill the center of the screen: a bust of Democritus, the ancient Greek philosopher who had first conceived of the atom. She recognized him at once.

  Just below the image of Democritus was a line of nine cursor spaces. A flashing prompt appeared on the first space, as if awaiting an entry.

  Below that, at the bottom of the screen, was the symbol of a keyboard. She touched the image of Democritus, but nothing happened. There seemed to be no way to manipulate the image. When she pressed the symbol of the keyboard, however, the image switched to a screen containing numbers, letters, and symbols. The nine cursor spaces remained, as did the keyboard symbol, which allowed her to toggle back and forth.

  Besides the typical array of numbers and letters on the keyboard, she found mathematical symbols, astronomical figures, characters in foreign languages, periodic table symbols, and a few icons she didn’t recognize. There were no emojis, apps, or even a text or call button.

  What the hell was this thing?

  Setting it aside for the moment, she turned to the Moleskine journal. A quote from Nikola Tesla graced the inside cover:

  “My brain is only a receiver, in the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

  Due to his interest in electromagnetism, Dr. Corwin had studied Tesla’s work extensively. Andie wondered at the meaning behind the quote as she flipped through the beginning pages of the journal and found a host of complicated theorems and proofs. Musings on string theory and quantum gravity. The effects of electromagnetic radiation near black holes. Nothing too unusual for Dr. Corwin.

  Then it got weird.

  Speculation on whether a human being can be converted into living energy and back again. Quantum time calculations she had never seen before. Musings on what sort of theoretical super weapons a solution to MUT might unleash. An outline of the major theories debating the existence of other dimensions and universes, and what sort of formula might unlock a door to them.

  Where was all this coming from?

  Near the middle of the journal, she found a series of sketches of the nine-sided plastic model she had found in his office. In the journal, Dr. Corwin referred to the device as the Enneagon. Just after that, over the next twenty pages or so, were lines and lines of theorems that made no sense to her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle the math; the symbols and formulas were nonsensical.

  As if they had been encoded.

  Was this a real device, that Dr. Corwin had collaborated with Dr. Friedman of Quasar Labs to build? If so, what did it do?

  Every now and then, she spied a mysterious reference in the margin that caught her eye. Who are the Unknown Nine? She wondered. The Leap Year Society? Someone named Zawadi? The Ascendants? And what in the world is a Majorana Tower?

  The only Majorana she knew of was an Italian physicist who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the early twentieth century. Dr. Corwin had mentioned him in his lectures, and she knew of his work on the neutrino. But he was a minor figure, and she didn’t remember a tower of any sort.

  Further along in the journal, she found a sketch of the device with the strange keyboard that was sitting right beside her. It was neatly labeled Star Phone. A drawing of a staircase with nine steps filled the opposite page. Just beneath the staircase, Dr. Corwin had written Star Phone. Across the top, with similar care, he had written Enneagon. Beside the staircase, an arrow pointed from top to bottom, from the Star Phone to the Enneagon, along with a string of nonsensical symbols along the arrow.

  The only other notes on either page were on the first step of the staircase, where two words were written, in capital letters: DEMO-CRITUS ARCHE.

  The second word was unfamiliar to her, but it only took a moment of searching to uncover the language—Greek—and the translation.

  Arche. The beginning.

  Most of the rest of the journal was filled with encoded text. She set it down, picked up the Star Phone, and let it rest in her hand, studying the image of Democritus. The beginning of what?

  Nine steps on the staircase. Nine cursor spaces. The implication, she supposed, was that the Star Phone led to the Enneagon in some way.

  It was late. Her head was starting to pound. Feeling the need for some fresh air, she stepped into a pair of sneakers and wrapped herself in a light shawl she had picked up on a research trip to the APEX Observatory in Santiago. Carrying the journal, she walked through a set of French doors to a crumbling flagstone patio open to the night sky.

  After turning off the outdoor light, she sat cross-legged in the center of the patio. Those stares she had garnered at Quasar Labs, along with everything else that had happened, made her feel nervous and exposed. She was only a PhD student, but she was Dr. Corwin’s mentee.

  What if they came for her next? It seemed absurd to consider, but maybe she should leave town for a while.

  In an effort to relax, she leaned back and let the vastness of the night sky absorb her. It was a delicious evening. The smell of honeysuckle and pine, the soothing drone of crickets. Andie had always been a city girl—still was—but the view of the stars and the cheap rent had swayed her. The trails behind her house, which extended for miles and miles, were a boon as well. Andie was an avid, borderline obsessive runner. She’d completed a dozen marathons and was training for a fifty-mile ultra in the fall. Vigorous exercise, exhausting herself to the bone, was the one thing that calmed her mind.

  God, the sky was beautiful. Those inky depths that went on forever. A trillion suns and their planets waiting to be discovered, supernovae that outshone galaxies, the glow of nanodiamond dust around newly formed stars. On another night, she would have wheeled out her home telescope, a Celestron NexStar she had scrimped over the years to buy, and which on a dark night could spot the mesmeric cloud bands on Jupiter, Martian ice caps, and the unearthly blue of Neptune.

  To Andie, her chosen field was not just about cataloguing the galaxies and studying the mechanics of interstellar physics. Her job was to imagine other worlds, to peer into the hidden corners of space and time. She felt as if she and her colleagues were participants in the greatest detective story of all time, the quest to unlock the secrets of the universe.

  As her thoughts turned yet again to the circumstances of Dr. Corwin’s death—she couldn’t shake the image of him lying in a pool of blood on some anonymous Italian street—the hum of an engine in the distance broke the silence.

  A flash of light appeared. Andie flinched as she realized that headlights were cutting through the trees. Tires crunched on loose stone as they turned onto her gravel drive.

  She jumped to her feet and rushed inside. Out the kitchen window, she watched a gray Nissan Armada park right behind her Buick, as if wedging it in. A dark-haired man in a lightweight green jacket stepped out. The vehicle’s dome light revealed a strikingly handsome face with a fine-boned, almost aristocratic structure. Only the missing pinky on his right hand—an image frozen in her mind as the door snapped shut—marred his appearance.

  The property was too remote for uninvited visitors, especially at night.

  She was getting the hell out of there.

  Inside a ceramic jar in the kitchen mar
ked FLOUR, she kept a tiny canister of mace, as well as a few valuables. She scooped up the mace, her passport, and a wad of emergency cash from the jar, then dashed to the couch and grabbed the Moleskine journal, the Star Phone, the photo of her mother, and the ink drawings.

  As the man knocked on the door, she grabbed a backpack off a chair and stuffed everything except the mace inside, then raced through the open French doors to the patio. Trying to move as quietly as she could, she fled across her muddy backyard to where the path in the woods began. She got twenty feet into the trees before stopping, afraid to move any farther after spotting the man creeping around the side of the house, erasing any doubt as to the purpose of his visit.

  The man stepped onto the patio, peering inside windows as he went. Though composed and unhurried, his eyes were active, sweeping the house and the property. Feeling his gaze pass over her raised the gooseflesh on her arms.

  He tried the patio door and found it unlocked—thank God she had closed it behind her. Expecting him to go inside, allowing her to get away, she tensed when he turned to scan the backyard again. There was no chance he could see her. She was too deep inside the darkened woods, concealed behind a tree.

  Yet instead of turning back to the house, he flicked on a tiny flashlight and aimed it at the ground. After studying the backyard, he began walking right in her direction, with the light trained at his feet.

  Oh my God, she thought as fear flooded through her. He sees my footprints in the mud.

  Los Angeles

  8

  LA’s Industrial District passed by in a sun-drenched haze of abandoned buildings, barbed-wire fencing, tent cities for the homeless, and graffiti-covered brick walls. Home to Skid Row, the treeless streets stood out like a scar on the city’s otherwise verdant topography.

  Ever since his firing, over two years before, Cal had often experienced the feeling of being watched. Eyes on his back in a public square, a car following him for too long on the freeway.