An Armageddon Duology (46 page)

A
fine dust
circled the room. Part chalk from the nearby blackboard, part disintegration of the rows of cardboard boxes lining the walls and filled with decaying books, the floating remains testified that the Princeton study room was evaporating like so much of an older world.

Lightfoote and Houston sat together beside a laptop plugged into a nearby outlet. Both were disheveled, their clothes matted and filthy, Houston’s dyed-brown hair showing her natural blond at the roots. Several of Lightfoote’s many piercings showed inflammation around the holes.

“Let me get this straight,” said Lightfoote, her green eyes intense. “You two chased down this lunatic to the VP’s house, where he’d basically taken on a legion of secret service agents, blown a hole in a fortified bunker, rappelled down and taken on more agents, killing them all, and then killed the VP? This guy superman?”

“I got this all second hand. I was basically bleeding to death outside from the shrapnel from said lunatic’s bombing of the CIA safe house. And he didn’t directly kill the VP. Heart attack.” Houston took a sip from a bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Thought you’d dumped Jack.”

“I always forgive him.” She laughed and drank from the bottle again. “But can you believe it? Ten years of revenge planned out and executed like James Bond and he’s about to kill the VP, but the fuck drops over from a heart attack. Irony’s a bitch.”

“You realize that story is not remotely believable.”

“I suppose not,” said Houston nodding. “But if you’d told me back in 2000 that a bunch of Arabs trained in caves in Afghanistan by a diabetic Saudi prince would sneak unnoticed into America, train on small engine aircraft, hijack planes with fucking box-cutters and steer two goddamned jumbo jets precisely enough to hit each of the World Trade Towers and bring them both down—I’d have said you were full of shit, too.”

“Point taken.”

Houston offered the bottle to Lightfoote, but the FBI agent shook her head.

“I know my limits. Besides, tastes awful.”

“Really? Old Jack ain’t half bad, though I’m not a bourbon woman myself. Texas whiskey, now
that
’s another story.”

“So the priest kills the wraith.”

“Sort of.” Houston pulled up from her slouch and placed the bottle on the table. “More like suicide by fugitive. Guy was fucked up good. All his targets were dead. Mission accomplished, but the demons were still inside or whatever. Basically begged Francisco to shoot him. I’m glad it was so easy. The wraith would have killed him under different circumstances.”

“Your man seems a hell of a fighter.”

“He is. But he’s been trained up good. Five years ago, he was just a priest with a lot of untapped potential.” Houston grabbed the bottle and took another swig. “We were toxic waste by then. Fingered for the veep attack and ten other things. If Savas and Simon—poor bastard—hadn’t pulled us out of that war zone in Virginia, we’d be on death row or worse. Instead, we got a pretty little cabin in the mountains. Far from everything. I trained him there.”

“Yeah, bet it would be fun
training
him,” said Lightfoote. “You must have hated every minute of it.”

“Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.” Houston closed her eyes. “Little stir crazy. Fucking cold as hell in the winter. And we kept switching cabins on different peaks. But better than this shit we’re swimming in now.”

“How’d you end up in the CIA?”

“Oh, that’s a random one. I was looking at law enforcement. Never thought to be a spook, but the Agency’s got eyes in a lot of places. Learned all this later. They identify possible recruits early, track them over a few months, few years. You’ve got to do well enough in school, show the right kinds of interest, have a clean security history—your family, too. A man came up to me at an ROTC session in college. Said he had a job proposition. Handed me a card. Happened pretty fast.”

“How’d your dad handle it?”

“Same as with everything. Quiet. Supportive. Mom was something else. Hippy-firebrand-alcoholic on her fifth husband by then. She was in and out of rehab and other men’s trailers.” She swished the whiskey around in the bottle and looked between it and Lightfoote. “I like to live on the edge.”

“She disapproved?”

“Said I was going to work for the empire and all that. Baby killers and hegemony. ’Bout sealed the deal for me. Everything that bitch said I did the opposite. And flipped her the bird.” Houston sighed and stared at Lightfoote. “I’m tired of me. Your turn. Who were these monsters that killed your dad?”

Lightfoote held her gaze for a moment and turned away. “Not worth telling.”

“Come on, that’s not how this works, girl. My cards are on the table. Let’s see your hand.”

Heavy footsteps tromped outside the cramped room. Houston placed a finger over her lips, grabbed her Browning, and moved quickly to the side of the door. Lightfoote drew her gun from a hip holster and crouched behind an overturned study cubical. The footsteps grew louder.

“It’s Francisco,” came a deep baritone from outside the door.

Houston twisted a knob on the bolt lock and opened the door. Lopez shuffled inside and placed a gun on the top of a filing cabinet. Sighing, he dropped a large plastic garbage bag to the floor.

“No sign of the soldiers or our burglar friends. No sign of anyone.” He motioned to the bag. “I raided several pantries and a few functioning refrigerators. Anything that could spoil has. What’s left is mummified bread and a lot of cans.”

He glanced across the study room, his eyes lingering on a blackboard full of incomprehensible physics equations.

“I wish the graduate students were still here. Maybe one of them could figure this out.” He bent toward the computer screen. “Anything?”

Houston sat down in front of the laptop.

“This is it,” she said, scrolling through pages of text and figures on Lightfoote’s computer. “This is the entire paper, but we’re no closer to understanding what the hell Fawkes was trying to tell us.”

“Fawkes? We’re not even sure what Nash is trying to tell us,” said Lightfoote. “Five hours of decoding and transcription and we have a Nobel Laureate economics paper we can’t understand.”

Lopez stared at the pages. “I recognize some of the math, but I don’t know the theory, why it’s being used. And a lot of the math I’ve never seen before. Way beyond my pay grade.”

“We do have this note,” said Lightfoote. She zoomed in on an image with scrawled text.

“What’s this?” Lopez asked.

“We found it while you were out,” said Houston. “I’m still not sure it’s part of the encoded message.

Lightfoote shook her head. “Has to be, Sara. It’s the last sequence of Pi on the board. The econ paper ends, one more piece of Pi sitting over this little note. Read it for Francisco.”

Houston sighed. “
This is why we are not free. The puppet masters pull the strings.
There’s this smudged part. Unreadable. Next,
their fingerprints are in the global numbers. Once the criterion is reached, they pull the trigger
.”

“Very different than the rational content of the paper,” said Lopez. “It sounds like mad ramblings. Angel said he oscillated between lucid and insane states over the years.”

“He did,” said Lightfoote, “although everything claims that in his later years he was more stable than not. Got better and better at
classifying
and ignoring his crazy thoughts.”

“But we don’t know when this was written?” he asked.

“Well,” said Lightfoote, “some of the clippings are over fifty years old. It’s really old.”

“He never published this? You’re sure?”

“Yes, Francisco,” said Houston. “Angel’s gone through all the online databases. Enough are up again. We can be pretty sure this paper never saw the light of day.”

He turned his palms upward. “But why? Okay, so it’s old, from a time before he went nuts, right?”

“Right.”

“But why not publish it later, when he recovered?”

Houston shrugged. “Maybe he’d forgotten about it. The illness and treatments erased it from his mind.”

“Is that likely?” Lopez asked.

“No,” Lightfoote responded. “He didn’t lose the knowledge of his field in the later years. Continued to publish. I don’t know why he shelved this one.”

Lopez exhaled slowly. “How about this—he didn’t just file it away. He
buried
it in this encoded crazy. Here is a work discussing something about the global economy, with analysis of multiple nations we can’t understand. Written at the height of his productivity, the height of his powers. He never publishes it. Instead, right around the time he goes insane, he builds this Crazy Wall where he embeds the entire paper in a geometrical and numerical code. Why would he do that?”

Houston shook her head. “Like you said, Francisco, he was crazy.”

“I’m starting to doubt my conclusions. I think Angel may be right—there’s something important here. He was trying to tell the world something, but he couldn’t do it openly. He was
afraid.
”

“Afraid of what?” asked Houston.

“And what was he afraid to say?” said Lightfoote.

Lopez stood up. “Back in New York, you said his student set up this museum. Maybe he knows something.”

“Maybe it’s no accident this poster board ended up where it did,” said Houston.

Lopez paced, gesturing. “We decoded it and hoped we’d be able to get to the root of this message. But we can’t. We need to outsource—speak to this guy if he’s still here. Still alive. If he’ll even help us.”

Lightfoote closed the laptop and stuffed it into a backpack. “
Agreed.
Sara, you still have the last address?”

Houston nodded. “It’s about ten minutes from here.”

Lightfoote walked to the door. “Let’s move the stuff to the car. If this doesn’t give us an answer, we might as well ride out and meet John and Rebecca and the fucking Presidential Caravan. Nash’s student is our last hope.”

N
o one spoke
during the drive through the deserted township in New Jersey. Lightfoote piloted the car through tree-lined streets with the lights off. The night weighed heavily on them, each quiet and introspective, exhausted from the unending tension. Lost in thought, the address seemed to appear before them instantaneously, the time traveled like a vanishing dream. They exited the vehicle and walked up the short steps to a porch.

Lopez knocked on the creaking wood of an old door. No one answered. Houston and Lightfoote faced away from the house, weapons at the ready, scanning the dark street. He knocked again, each series of strikes against the wood harder. Frustration mounting, he struck vigorously, the knob vibrating and dancing back and forth past the frame.

“Any harder Conan and you might as well just knock the thing down,” whispered Lightfoote.

“I know I saw some movement in the curtains,” said Houston. “Someone’s there. With everything that’s happened, I can’t blame them for laying low.”

Lopez grasped the handle and set his shoulder against the panel. “There isn’t time for norms. Angel’s right—this old thing is ready to fall over.”

“Got you,” said Houston, pivoting and pointing her pistol at the door. “Angel, eyes on the road.”

One try was enough. With a lunge his thick frame crashed into the door near the lock. The wood splintered and burst into shards, a cloud of dust following it inward.

Houston and Lopez moved in, followed quickly by Lightfoote. Creaking under their weight, a wooden floor extended down a dark corridor.

“We know you’re in here!” shouted Houston. “There are three of us. We’re armed. Don’t do anything stupid. We’re not here to hurt you. We need information.”

They could hear their own breathing in the silence.

Lightfoote called out. “We’re here to talk to Avi Kaplan. It’s a matter of national security! Don’t make us dig you out.”

A muffled thump shook a doorway near the end of the hall. The three trained their weapons on the sound. The door creaked open and a trembling voice called out.

“Please, don’t shoot. I’m unarmed.”

As the door opened further a gaunt man in worn pajamas shuffled out with his hands in the air. He looked like an old image of Albert Einstein, complete with a shock of unruly hair and a mustache.

“Who else is here?” Lopez asked.

“No one. I live alone.”

Houston walked toward the man cautiously. “I’ll check him. Sweep the house.”

“It’s the truth,” he said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

Houston turned him against the wall and padded him down, glancing inside the closet and closing the door.

“Where is Avi Kaplan?”

“I’m Avi Kaplan.”

“Nash’s former student? The one who set up the museum and worked with him?”

“Yes, I cared for him for many years, off and on, since his, well, health problems.”

“Health problems?” asked Houston.

He smiled wanly, his voice hoarse. “Who are you?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute,” said Houston, looking down the hallway. “That’s a living room?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, in there.” She motioned with her Browning.

Kaplan’s face tightened. “Yes, of course.”

He walked in front of her, trembling. They entered a crowded room of chairs, a sofa, and boxes of papers. Houston had Kaplan take a seat on the couch, a cloud of dust rising as he sank into it. Lopez and Lightfoote returned.

“No sign of anyone,” said Lopez.

“I closed the door and tied it shut with some wire,” Lightfoote said. “It’s busted all to hell. Won’t slow anyone, but at least it’s unlikely to attract the attention of an open door.”

Houston turned to the old man. “Nash used to live here with you. Under nursing care.”

“Yes.” The old man hesitated. “That’s what everyone was supposed to believe.”

“Supposed to believe?” asked Lopez, holstering his weapon.

Kaplan nodded. “You said you were here for a national security concern. Regarding John Nash?”

“Yes,” answered Lightfoote.

“Then surely you won’t be surprised to learn that there have been forces interested in keeping John Nash under firm control.”

Lopez loomed over the skeletal form on the couch. “What do you mean? The truth, and quickly.”

He smiled and stared up at Lopez. “You don’t scare me. I’m sure you could torture the information out of me, but this old heart would pop before you got enough pain going to open my mouth. I’m ancient, my friends. Had a long life. Seen a lot of things. Always John was with me. My last act in this world won’t be to betray him. You’ll have to find another way to persuade me to divulge his secrets.”

“And what would that be?”

“You could start with your names. Tell me what important matter concerns my old friend. Convince me there’s some reason I should trust you.”

Lightfoote opened her backpack. “What if I told you we have a sixty-year-old, unpublished paper by John Nash?” She removed the laptop and opened it. “One that was encoded on the poster board in the Nash Museum.”

“The fire in the news? That was
you?
”

Lightfoote marched across the room and sat down beside the old man.

“What if we told you we were pointed in this direction by a terrorist who nearly brought down the world financial system last month?”

She held the screen up to him. He squinted and read aloud.

“
This is why we are not free. The puppet masters pull the strings.
”

The three stared intensely at him as he met their gazes, one by one.

“This is supposed to impress me? He saw conspiracies everywhere. Left delusional messages in code everywhere. He was a schizophrenic, you know.”

“This isn’t the paper. It’s only a last comment he made at the end of it.” She scrolled on the trackpad. “
This
is the paper.”

“External Equilibration in Non-cooperative Games?” he read slowly.

Lopez rumbled. “Look carefully. The world outside is going to hell. Somehow, the terrorist who trigged this disaster knew about this paper, this coded message from six decades ago. It’s never been published. Isn’t available anywhere.”

“Can you increase the font size? An old man’s eyes,” said Kaplan. Lightfoote obliged. He scanned the text and spoke in a distracted tone. “So, you’re chasing after the work of one madman on the words of another?”

“Both geniuses,” said Houston. “Something’s going on. This may be a key to understanding it.”

The old man slowly scrolled on the trackpad, furrowing his brow. He didn’t speak for several minutes.

“Yes,” he nodded his head at last. “Dear God, yes.”

“Yes, what?” asked Lightfoote.

Kaplan leaned back against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. “
Tanquam ex ungue leonem
.”

Lightfoote cocked her head. “Sorry?”

“The lion is known by his claw,” said Lopez.

“Indeed,” said Kaplan. “You have found something remarkable. It can be no one else. The wording, the logic. This is John Nash.”

“Can you explain it to us?” asked Lopez.

“Probably. But not right away. I would need days to digest this. He was the genius, not me.”

Houston exhaled. “We don’t have days. We have a nation falling down around us.”

“And the note?” asked Lightfoote. “
Their fingerprints are in the global numbers; once the criterion is reached, they pull the trigger
. What does this mean?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like too much that came from his paranoia over the years.”

Lightfoote put a hand on his shoulder. “What if it’s not? What if he was on to something and this paper reveals something we just can’t understand?”

“Then you’d need to speak with John.”

Lopez growled. “No longer an option. As you know.”

The old man nodded. “Inconvenient, isn’t it? As soon as I set up that museum, which contained this encoded paper, poor John met with a strange death.”

“What are you implying?” asked Houston, her eyes narrowed.

“I was planning the museum for a number of years. John had become quite the celebrity. Recovery from madness, like it was some sort of twelve step program. Nobel Prize. Hollywood film and Oscar. The money flowed in from it all. We hardly had to break a sweat fundraising.” He coughed, the sound ragged and ominous. “Sorry. Bad lungs. We all used to smoke in those days. Now, John begged me to include this poster in the exhibit, you know? So strange. Not the most flattering of displays. But of course I said yes. Who was I to deny him something so small at this stage?” He shook his head. “Governmental delegation swept the museum several times. Removed several items citing national security. Always passed by the poster board.”

“Governmental delegation?” said Houston.

He smiled. “It wasn’t the first time they had micromanaged our lives. Always so interested in John, since his consulting years. Took him away to special retreats many times. A pact with the devil. Money and support during his illness. Some kind of favors I was never privy to.”

Lopez sat on the coffee table in front of Kaplan. “You sound paranoid.”

“Do I? What if I told you I could help you after all?”

Lopez growled. “Then help us!”

“First—who are you? Don’t lie to me. Tell me who you are.”

Lopez leaned forward and looked the old man in eyes. “Here is the truth. No lies. We’re fugitives: Falsely accused and judged because we uncovered something dirty in the heart of Washington. We helped stop the digital worm that has brought so much destruction. We captured the man behind it. Before he was murdered, he claimed his actions were to stop something even worse. He pointed us here, to Nash, to this encoded paper. We’re trying to discover what he was talking about, and we’ve been targeted for death for doing so. We need your help.”

Kaplan held Lopez’s gaze for several seconds. He nodded and closed his eyes again.

“Truth is always in the eyes. Let me change. We’ll need my car.”

Houston blinked. “Why? Where are we going?”

Kaplan laughed softly. “The car accident?
A lie.
Staged. Someone felt John Nash needed to disappear. But they still needed his mind.”

“Wait,” said Lightfoote, her eyes widening, “you mean—”

“John Nash is very much alive.”

“Where?” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

“A care facility, nearly an hour away. But you won’t find it on any maps or in any directories.”

“John Nash, alive,” repeated Houston, her eyes locking with Lopez.

Kaplan nodded, appraising each of them in turn. His eyes lingered on their weapons.

“And you may want to bring those guns along.”