The Omega Theory (16 page)

The woman frowned. “Keep your hands up, Colonel,” she said. “I’m not going to warn you again.”

Ramsey shook his head. One of the Rangers must’ve brought his goddamn girlfriend along with him. Some horny idiot had snuck this bitch onto last night’s convoy and found her a hiding spot near the base. It was the only explanation that made any sense. The colonel strode toward her. “Goddamn it! I said put down that—”

She adjusted her aim and fired the nine-millimeter. Ramsey heard a muffled burst and saw his right hand explode. The bullet tore through his knuckles, nearly severing his index and middle fingers. Belatedly, Ramsey’s Special Forces training kicked in. Ignoring the pain that shot up his right arm, he reached with his left hand for the M-9 pistol in his holster. But the woman shifted her aim again and fired at his left hand, tearing a ragged hole in his palm. It was goddamn fucking HUMILIATING—the bitch had disabled him in less than two seconds! Enraged, Ramsey charged at her through the undergrowth, fully expecting her to shoot him again and put him out of his misery, but the bitch just stood there, smiling. Then another soldier came out of nowhere and shoved him to the ground.

The second soldier was a man at least. Ramsey opened his mouth to curse the bastard, folding his lower lip behind his teeth to shout, “Fuck you!” But then he looked up and saw the bastard’s face. It was McNair. The general loomed over him, tall and gaunt, his bright blue eyes radiating fury.

Ramsey was confused as hell, and the pain in his hands wasn’t helping any. “General?” he croaked. “I thought you went back to—”

“My orders were clear, Ramsey.” McNair glowered at him. His mouth was like a minus sign. The bitch with the Heckler & Koch stood to his left. “No one was to leave the cave.”

“I . . . I’m sorry, sir!” He didn’t know what else to say. “I think I need to go to the field hospital!”

“No, I’m afraid not.” The general stepped forward. “The Lord has different plans for you now.”

Then McNair kicked him in the head and Ramsey blacked out.

13

IT WAS A PUZZLE, AND MICHAEL LIKED TO SOLVE PUZZLES. AFTER TAMARA
showed him the program on the Ultra 27 workstation, he sat in front of the computer the whole night and the following morning, staring at the lines of code for sixteen hours. Then he took a nap. Tamara woke him in the evening and gave him another snack. She said she had to go away for a while to do an important job, but another of Brother Cyrus’s soldiers—Angel, the man with the curved scar on his neck—would take care of him until she got back. An hour later, when the sky was fully dark, Angel led him outside and put him into the cargo hold of a big green truck, along with his computer and desk and the bare mattress.

For the next ten hours Michael sat in the cargo hold with Angel while the truck bounced on the bumpy roads. But he wasn’t bored. He was still working on the puzzle, which he could do even when the workstation was turned off. The software code was in his mind now, arranged in long lines and vertiginous blocks that he could scroll up and down on the black screen of his eyelids. He wanted to spend every waking second with those lines of instructions, because when he worked on the puzzle he didn’t have to think about Tamara or Brother Cyrus or Dr. Parsons. He could forget where he was and what was going to happen to him and think of nothing but the program.

At dawn the truck stopped in the middle of a desert. When Angel opened the truck’s rear door, Michael saw sand dunes in every direction, rippling in great beige waves to the horizon. Angel said they were in the Karakum Desert, which stretched for hundreds of miles across the country of Turkmenistan. He helped Michael out of the truck and led him to an encampment that Cyrus’s soldiers had set up amid the dunes. Thirteen round huts were arranged in a loose cluster, and several pickup trucks and Land Cruisers were parked on the sand nearby. The huts looked like giant soup bowls turned upside down. Each was about twelve feet across and eight feet high, with a circular wall made of wooden slats and a domed roof made of felt. Angel called them yurts. He went to one of them and opened the door and led Michael inside. There was no furniture, just a big Turkish carpet spread across the floor. Two other soldiers carried Michael’s mattress and desk into the yurt and began hooking up the Ultra 27 workstation, connecting its power cord to a diesel generator outside.

After Angel and the other men left, Michael sat on the folding chair in front of the computer screen and resumed working on the puzzle. He stared again at the dense blocks of code, checking each line to make sure he’d memorized it correctly. The keys to understanding the program, he’d discovered, were the equations of the unified field theory. By carefully reading the step-by-step instructions in the code, he’d found that the program performed the same tasks as the laws of physics. One part of the code determined the masses of the elementary particles—the electron, the quark, the neutrino, and so on. Another part calculated the strength of the forces between the particles. Yet another part generated the spacetime manifold, specifying the curvature and topology of the spatial dimensions as well as the direction of time. The program was radically different from conventional software because the data it handled was quantum, not binary; instead of being restricted to either zero or one, each bit could take a tremendous number of values. But the program followed the standard rules of logic, which meant that Michael could make sense of it.

The code on the screen was incomplete, though. The people who’d written it hadn’t known all the equations of the
Einheitliche Feldtheorie,
so they couldn’t finish the program. Michael, on the other hand, knew the entire theory, so he was able to fill in the gaps. He didn’t do this work on the screen—his fingers never touched the keyboard. Instead, he extended the memorized code in his head, adding new lines of quantum variables and operators. The process involved some tricky rearrangements, but Michael was good at this. It was no more difficult than piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, and he’d spent many hours doing that when he was younger. By midmorning he could glimpse the outlines of the solution, and by noon he’d filled in the last gaps. He scrolled the finished program in his mind, seeing the blocks of code flash against his eyelids. Now they were all arranged in the correct order.

He was still double-checking the program when he heard a noise behind him. Someone had unlatched the door to the yurt. Michael expected to see Angel come inside, bringing another bag of potato chips. But when he turned around he saw it was Tamara. She still wore her desert-camouflage uniform, but now there were wet patches under her armpits. Her pistol rested in the holster on her hip, and in her right hand she held a bottle half filled with brown liquid. “Michael!” she shouted, coming toward his desk. “I’m back!”

He covered his ears. Her voice was too loud.

“Oh, sorry!” She raised her hand to her mouth and backed away. “That was stupid. Let me start over.” She went to the other side of the yurt and sat down on his mattress. She set the half-full bottle on the Turkish carpet. “I got carried away. I’m just so glad to see you.”

Michael waited a few seconds, then lowered his hands. “Where were you?”

“In the mountains. Southwest of here.” She started fanning her hand in front of her face to cool herself. David Swift had told Michael many times that this was a dumb thing to do. Waving your hand back and forth like that just made you hotter. “I’ve been driving all morning. Took me five hours to go a hundred and fifty miles. The roads in this country are awful.”

“You have a car?”

She nodded. “It’s one of Brother Cyrus’s cars. A Land Cruiser. Pretty good for off-road driving in the dunes. When I was younger I used to love to go off-roading.”

“If you have a car, I want you to take me back to David Swift. I already told you his telephone number. It’s 212-555-3988.”

Tamara said nothing at first. Then she stood up and approached Michael’s desk again. She pointed at the computer screen. “Still working on the puzzle? Have you made any progress?”

Michael sank lower in his chair. Tamara bent over him, but he refused to look at her.

“Don’t be afraid, Michael.” Her voice was quiet now. “You’re doing a good thing, a wonderful thing. Remember what I told you? About the Kingdom of Heaven?”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing in the code about heaven. It’s just a simulation. The program simulates the laws of physics.”

“It also shows the path to Redemption. Once we have the completed code, we’ll know how to change the program.”

He shook his head again, harder this time. “No one can change the laws of physics.”

Tamara bent lower. Michael could feel her breath on his ear. “I bet you finished it, didn’t you? You completed the program? And it’s in your head now?”

He didn’t answer. But when he closed his eyes he saw the code again, scrolling swiftly upward.

To Michael’s great relief, Tamara stood up straight and left his side. But she returned just four seconds later and placed the half-full bottle on the desk in front of him. “We should celebrate,” she said. “Let’s drink a toast.” Bending over again, she opened one of the desk drawers and rummaged inside until she found a couple of glasses. “It’s no sin to drink if our hearts are pure, right?”

She put the glasses on the desk. Then she unscrewed the cap from the bottle and poured some of the brown liquid into each glass. Michael smelled something harsh and sweet. “What is that?”

“Jägermeister. I used to drink this stuff all the time.” She picked up one of the glasses and handed it to Michael. “Brother Cyrus was right about you. He said you’d give us everything we needed.” She picked up the other glass and lifted it high in the air. “You’re a gift from the Almighty, Michael. The Lord has provided!” She threw her head back and drank the brown liquid in one swallow.

Michael put his own glass back on the desk. He disliked the smell. And he didn’t want to celebrate anyway. Solving the puzzle hadn’t made him happy. In fact, it had made him very unhappy, because now he had nothing to distract himself from the things he didn’t want to think about.

“What’s wrong?” Tamara asked. “You don’t like Jägermeister?”

Avoiding her gaze, Michael stared at the curved wall of the hut, which was almost perfectly circular. He tried to estimate its diameter and circumference, but he couldn’t focus on the problem. He kept thinking of what lay beyond the wall—the sand dunes, the trucks, the soldiers in brown uniforms.

Tamara came toward him. She stretched her arm, reaching for his shoulder, but at the last second she stopped herself. Instead, she withdrew her hand and took a step back. “Oh, Michael.” She shook her head. “My brother Jack used to get that same look on his face when he was sad. And nothing I said could cheer him up.”

Michael stared at her. She hadn’t touched him. She’d kept her promise.

Tamara was silent for several seconds. Then she set her empty glass on the desk. “All right, enough fun and games.” She reached for the computer’s keyboard. “Now it’s time for you to show us the solution. Go ahead, start writing the code.”

She rested the keyboard in his lap. It felt very light. He looked down at the keys but didn’t touch them.

“You can’t keep this to yourself, Michael. It’s too important. The Lord is giving us a chance to redeem the world. Don’t you want to help us do that?”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you. David Swift made me promise.”

“Look, I know something about David Swift. He believes in world peace, right? What’s the name of his organization? The Physicists for Peace?”

Michael had seen that name on some of the papers in David Swift’s apartment. Also on the front of his envelopes. One night six months ago Michael had helped David put stamps on six hundred envelopes. “It’s ‘Physicists for Peace.’ No ‘the’ in front of it.”

“Yes, yes, whatever. The point is, he believes in peace. And once we open the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven, all of mankind will live in peace forever. If David Swift knew that we were—”

“There’s nothing in the program about heaven.”

“No, that’s not true! The program will tell us how to open heaven’s gates.” She moved a step closer. “Brother Cyrus has prepared everything. Once you give him the code, he’ll take care of the rest. No more pain, no more suffering. And you’ll see your mother, remember?”

“My mother is dead.”

“Michael, I explained all this already! There’ll be a resurrection of the dead, just as God promised. That’s the task He gave Brother Cyrus, to prepare—”

“I don’t believe Brother Cyrus. He wants to use the theory to make weapons.”

Tamara let out a cry that made Michael cover his ears again. At the same time, she fell to her knees on the carpet. “I swear to you, Michael! I swear on everything that’s holy!” She clasped her hands together. “Brother Cyrus is a man of peace! All he wants is the Redemption!”

He still didn’t believe her. She was his enemy, not his friend. She’d killed Dr. Parsons. “I can’t tell you!” he shouted back at her. “David Swift made me promise!”

She stopped arguing with him. Lowering her head, she pressed her hands to her face. For a long time she rocked back and forth, swaying on her knees. She made a wet, choking, groaning noise that Michael could hear even though he was still covering his ears. She was crying. He understood that much.

Finally, after about two minutes, she rose to her feet. She went to the door of the yurt and opened it. Before she stepped outside, she looked over her shoulder. “If you don’t tell us the code by seven o’clock this evening, Brother Cyrus will have to speak to you. And he won’t be as patient as I’ve been.”

Then she closed the door behind her and threw the latch.

14

AFTER TREATING MONIQUE’S GUNSHOT WOUND, THE EMERGENCY-ROOM DOC
tors at Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital decided to keep her overnight. It wasn’t a life-threatening injury—the bullet had missed the bone and the major artery in her upper arm—but she’d lost a fair amount of blood, so the doctors hooked her up to an IV line and gave her a mild sedative. She fell asleep just as Lucille arrived at the hospital, along with a unit of Israeli Army commandos who took up positions at the building’s entrances just in case there was another attack. David gave Lucille a rundown of everything that had happened at Beit Shalom Yeshiva, including what he’d learned about Olam ben Z’man, whose real name was Loebman or Loehmann or something similar. Then Lucille returned to the Shin Bet headquarters to relay the information to her Israeli counterparts so they could track down the former computer scientist. Meanwhile, David went to Monique’s room on the hospital’s fifth floor and fell asleep in a comfortable chair by the window, getting his first good night’s rest in three days.