The Omega Theory (7 page)

She marched toward the computer science building, clearing a path through the crowd of police officers and ducking under the crime-scene tape. David and Monique followed her through the entrance, with Dickinson close behind.

In the lobby they made a quick right and headed down a stairway that smelled of burned plastic. But they saw no tangible evidence of the explosion until they left the stairwell and walked a hundred feet down the basement corridor. Above a gray steel door was a sign that said
ADVANCED QUANTUM INSTITUTE: HOME OF THE TRAPPED IONS
. Lucille pushed the door open and they stepped into the ruined laboratory.

The room was cavernous and dark, illuminated only by the emergency lights brought in by the fire department and the roving flashlight beams of the FBI crime-scene investigators. The air was warm and acrid and the cinderblock walls were caked with soot. A layer of wet ash carpeted the floor, and thick clods of it stuck to David’s shoes. The building’s sprinklers had apparently quenched the blaze, but not before it had blackened the lab benches and gutted the storage cabinets and melted every computer and monitor. Chunks of twisted metal were everywhere, thrown across the room by the force of the blast. David looked up and saw that the explosion had pitted the plaster ceiling and smashed the overhead pipes and wiring. Severed fiber-optic cables hung from the ceiling like dead snakes, their glassy fibers bursting through the charred insulation.

Agent Dickinson led them across the room, walking past the jagged hole in the floor that had obviously been the epicenter of the blast. They headed down another corridor, following the string of emergency lights, and as they moved away from the lab the acrid stench lessened. Then they turned a corner and entered an office that the FBI had converted to a temporary command post. The agents had set up their equipment on the office desk: a radio, a couple of laptops, and a portable spectrometer for analyzing explosives residue. An agent with a blond crew cut was fiddling with the radio, while an older man in a black herringbone suit sat in the office chair. David recognized him immediately. It was Adam Bennett.

The blond agent snapped to attention when Lucille walked into the room. Bennett also rose to his feet, glancing first at Agent Parker and then at David and Monique. His eyes widened. “Dr. Swift? And Dr. Reynolds? What are you doing here?”

Bennett was in his mid-sixties. He had thinning white hair and a serious, square-jawed face, with gray eyes and a pinkish complexion, the kind that sunburned easily. He seemed agitated, which was understandable. Several million dollars’ worth of DARPA-financed laboratory equipment had just been blown to bits.

Lucille marched right up to him and held out her hand. “Mr. Bennett, I’m Special Agent Lucille Parker of the—”

“What took you so long?” he demanded, ignoring her proffered hand. “I’ve been waiting in this office for two hours.”

She said nothing in response but cocked her head ever so slightly. The agent with the crew cut got the message and left the office with Dickinson.

Bennett scowled at her. David thought it was odd to see them standing face-to-face, because they looked so similar. Bennett was about the same age as Lucille and just as stocky. Even his hair was the same color as Lucille’s, although she had considerably more of it. “Where’s Jacob Steele?” he asked. “Is he still in New York?”

“Sit down, Mr. Bennett.”

He remained standing. His face turned a little pinker. “You’re not the only federal official here. This is a DARPA project and I have every right to know what’s going on!”

Lucille frowned. Her brow furrowed and dozens of creases fanned from the corners of her eyes. “All right. I’ll tell you what’s going on. Jacob Steele came to New York this afternoon to see these two.” She pointed at David and Monique. “He wanted to talk about a scientific instrument he was working on, something called the Caduceus Array. That name ring a bell?”

“No, I never heard of it.”

“I’m not surprised. No one’s heard of the damn thing. And unfortunately, Jacob didn’t get a chance to describe it either. While he was visiting Columbia University’s physics building this evening, someone with a nine-millimeter pistol put a bullet in his head.”

Bennett stood there silently for a moment, staring at Lucille, as if waiting for her to say something else. Then he let out a sigh and stepped backward. He sank into the office chair from which he’d risen just a minute ago.

“At approximately the same time, someone blew up Jacob’s lab,” Lucille continued. “We’re obviously dealing with a sophisticated organization, with multiple teams of operatives carrying out synchronized missions. Most likely a terrorist organization. Now you see why we’re taking this so seriously?”

Bennett closed his eyes and raised a hand to his forehead. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he muttered something under his breath.

Lucille stepped closer. “To pursue this investigation, I need to know exactly what Jacob was working on. That’s why I’m here. And that’s why you need to stop bitching and start telling me about Jacob’s research.” She leaned over his chair. “You think you can do that?”

Several seconds passed. Bennett shrank from Lucille’s implacable gaze. Then he opened his eyes and gripped the armrests of his chair. Slowly and unsteadily, he stood up. All the bluster had drained out of him. “Excuse me. I need to go to the men’s room.”

Lucille pointed at him. “Go ahead. Just don’t take too long.” She went to the office door and threw it open for Bennett. As he passed through the doorway, she gave another signal to the two agents who were waiting in the hall. Both of them followed Bennett down the corridor. Then she slammed the door shut.

David was surprised. “Why’d you let him go?”

“He’ll talk once he gets back.” She went to the chair that Bennett had vacated and sat down with a grunt. “He’s worried about something. Why else would he come down here in the middle of the night? It’s something embarrassing, and because the guy’s a mucky-muck in the federal bureaucracy, he knows he has to tell us about it before we find out from someone else. But he’s also a chickenshit, see? So he has to go to the bathroom and look in the mirror for a few minutes and work up his courage. It’s standard chickenshit behavior. I’ve seen it a million times.”

Shaking her head, she reached into her bright red jacket and pulled out a pair of latex gloves from the inside pocket. Then she rolled her chair closer to the desk and started inspecting the contents of its drawers. She rummaged through a file cabinet and a drawer containing circuit boards and miscellaneous bits of hardware. David watched her, fascinated. She gave everything a quick look, her eyes keen and darting.

After a while she opened another drawer and pulled out a shiny metal canister about the size of a soup can. It had wires coming out of the bottom and a circular pane of glass at the top. Through the glass top David could see two parallel rows of electrodes inside the device. A dark groove ran between the rows, about three inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. Lucille grabbed the reading glasses that hung from her beaded necklace and peered into the device. “Okay, here’s your first chance to do some consulting. What the hell is this thing?”

Monique went to the desk and looked over Lucille’s shoulder. It took her less than three seconds to identify the object. “That’s an ion trap. It’s the heart of the quantum computers that Jacob was building. Remember what I said in the car? About what makes quantum computers different from ordinary PCs?”

During the long drive from New York to Maryland, Monique had started to explain the basics of quantum computing. Luckily, Agent Parker was a quick study. “Yeah, I remember,” she said. “Quantum computers use atoms to do the calculating. Unlike ordinary computers, which use electrical currents. But what’s with the ions?”

“An ion is an atom with an electrical charge. If you add an extra electron to an atom, you make a negatively charged ion. If you strip away an electron, you make it positively charged. The advantage of using ions is that you can move them around easily. You can put positive ions in a vacuum chamber and keep them suspended between positively charged electrodes.” Monique took the container out of Lucille’s hands and pointed at the dark groove inside. “The positive ion goes here, into the gap between the positive electrodes. Positive repels positive, right? So the repulsion on both sides traps the ion, keeps it in a stationary position. Then you can trap more ions in the gap and arrange them in a line, perfectly spaced. Like a row of beads in an abacus.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Each ion has a magnetic orientation that can point up or down, like a switch. So it’s similar to a bit in an ordinary computer. You know what a bit is, right? As in megabit, gigabit?”

Lucille nodded. “Of course. That’s how much data you can put in your computer.”

Monique smiled. She loved to explain these kinds of things. “That’s right. A bit is a single unit of data, and it has two possible values, zero or one. Putting eight bits together makes a byte, and each byte represents one of the characters on a computer’s keyboard.” She pointed at one of the laptops sitting on the desk in front of Lucille. “This computer has a microprocessor with four gigabytes of RAM, so it can perform calculations on four billion bytes of data. That’s more than enough memory to run a spreadsheet program or display a YouTube video. But a quantum computer could do much more.”

“How so?”

“Remember how I said that each ion can point up or down? Well, imagine that the up orientation is zero, and down is one. If you look at it that way, each ion contains one bit of information, because it can be either one or zero. A string of eight ions, some up and some down, contains a byte of information. And we can change the information contained in the string by firing a laser beam at the ions, which flips their orientation. But here’s the best part.” Monique paused to take a breath. “When you’re dealing with individual ions, all the crazy rules of quantum theory apply. Particles are waves and waves are particles, and nothing is completely precise or predictable. And one of the crazy consequences of quantum theory is that we can put an ion into something called a superposition state. In this state, the ion is pointing up and down at the same time.”

Lucille made a face. “What? That’s impossible.”

“It sounds impossible, but it’s true. An ion in superposition is like a schizophrenic—it’s one
and
zero. It holds two values simultaneously. Now imagine putting two ions into that state. They hold four values at the same time—one/one, zero/zero, one/zero, and zero/one. And a string of three ions in superposition holds eight values simultaneously. You see the pattern?”

Lucille thought about it for a moment. Then she nodded. “Yeah, I do. Every time you add another ion to the string, you double the amount of data the string can hold.”

“Right again. The capacity increases exponentially, so a quantum computer with a relatively modest number of ions can hold an extraordinary amount of data. And when those ions interact and start exchanging their data, they’re actually performing an enormous number of calculations simultaneously. If you could build a quantum computer with just a hundred trapped ions—and that’s definitely feasible within the next decade—it could perform trillions upon trillions of calculations at once. It could accomplish certain tasks billions of times faster than the best conventional computers in the world.”

“What kinds of tasks? Anything that DARPA might be interested in?”

“Oh yeah, plenty. A quantum computer would be ideal for searching through large databases, looking for patterns hidden inside gigabytes of noise. Or creating computer simulations of extremely complex phenomena, such as the shock wave that triggers a nuclear explosion. But the thing that DARPA’s most interested in is code breaking. A quantum computer could break public-key codes, which are now considered unbreakable. Those are the codes used on the Internet for encrypting credit-card numbers. And the military uses the same encryption scheme on some of its classified data networks.”

Lucille nodded again. She retrieved the shiny, glass-topped ion trap from Monique and studied it for a while, holding it up to the light.

David stared at it, too, wondering what the hell Jacob had been doing. Even back in the days when they were in grad school together, Jacob had been unusually secretive about his research projects. It was an extreme case of professional caution: Jacob had been deathly afraid that another grad student or postdoc would steal his ideas. Although he’d freely shared all the details of his personal life, often regaling David with elaborate descriptions of his sexual adventures—he’d been a real Don Juan in those days—Jacob never talked about his research. When it came to his work, he trusted no one.

David stepped toward the desk, intending to tell Lucille about this. Just then, however, the office door opened and the FBI agent with the blond crew cut ushered Adam Bennett back into the room. His face looked even pinker than before and his eyes were bloodshot. David got the feeling that he might’ve been crying in the men’s room. Or throwing up. There were wet spots on the front of his jacket.

Lucille leaned back in her chair and swiveled to face Bennett. “Feeling better?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. It seemed that Agent Parker’s prediction had been correct. The man was ready to talk now.

She held up the ion trap for Bennett to see. “While you were gone, we found one of Jacob’s toys. And Dr. Reynolds was kind enough to explain how it works.” She glanced at Monique, who’d folded her arms across her chest and propped her butt on the edge of the desk. “So how close was Jacob to building his quantum computer?”

Bennett stared at the ion trap for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Then he shook his head. “He wasn’t close.” His voice was low and ragged. “That was the trouble.”

“Really?” She placed the device on the desk and tapped her fingernail on its glass top. “Even after you gave him all those millions of dollars?”

He kept shaking his head. David had never seen anyone look so defeated. “The last prototype he built for us could perform calculations with a string of sixteen ions. That was a record, better than anything built by other research teams. But it was still light-years away from a practical machine.”