Mercury Rises (27 page)

The door swung shut behind her and she sprinted up the stairs to the fifth floor. She had to get to Mercury before he got on the elevator with the Attaché Case.

The door opened to a nondescript hallway lined with doors marked only with numbers. She recalled from the intelligence dossier (which she had stuffed into her purse) that the case was supposed to be in room 501. She was at 521 now, and the numbers decreased down the hall. Rounding a corner, she came upon the elevators, and it occurred to her that she didn't know whether Izbazel and Gamaliel were simply waiting in the lobby for Mercury to return, or whether one or both of them were on their way up to intercept him. She hadn't had the time or the presence of mind to determine whether the elevator's UP button had been lit up.

515, 514, 513. She ran down the hall, on a quest for the door that read 501. A few yards past the elevators, she heard a sound that nearly made her forget how to walk again.

DING!

"Oh no," Christine gasped. The hall went on for another fifty feet: there was no way she could get out of sight before the cherubim emerged from the elevator.

She tried the nearest door. Locked. She tried the next door: also locked. Behind her, she heard the doors sliding open. Sweat was now pouring down her face, blurring her vision. Looking desperately down the hall, she spied a door that seemed to be asking, "SO?" She wiped the sweat from her eyes and looked again. The door's placard read: 507.

Launching herself at the door, she pulled down the door handle and shoved. It belatedly occurred to her that if the door had been locked, she probably would have knocked herself unconscious, but mercifully it opened. She fell inside and the door swung closed behind her.

For some time she lay facedown on the cold vinyl floor, breathing as quietly as she could without passing out from lack of oxygen. At last she got up and surveyed her surroundings.

She was in a supply closet, dimly lit by fluorescent light. Boxes of staples, Post-it notes and other office supplies filled the metal shelves that lined the walls. One shelf was taken up entirely by metallic briefcases that superficially resembled the Four Attaché Cases of the Apocalypse. Clearly these were not the actual Cases; they were slightly smaller and the corners were more rounded. To allay her suspicions, she opened one of them, finding only a molded foam insert that seemed to be designed to hold test tubes. Presumably the cases were intended for transporting scientific samples. The actual Case of Pestilence was probably still in room 501.

Taking a deep breath, Christine very slowly opened the supply room door and peeked out into the hallway. It appeared to be deserted.

She stepped into the hall, her heart pounding in her chest and her hands shaking with adrenaline, and walked to the last room on the floor, marked 501. As she reached to pull the handle, the door swung open and a tall figure stood before her, holding a silvery briefcase.

"Hey, Christine!" he said cheerfully. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't one of us going to wait downstairs?"

"Mercury!" she gasped breathlessly. "Gamaliel...Izbazel..."

Mercury's brow furrowed. "Wait, I know this one. List three cherubim, from smartest to dumbest."

"They're...here!" said Christine. "You...didn't see them?"

"Nope," said Mercury. "Nobody up here but us chickens. Seriously, this whole place is full of chickens. It's weird."

"They must still be downstairs," Christine said. "You can't go down there. I think Uzziel set us up."

"Uzziel working with Izbazel and Gamaliel? Seems unlikely. It would be like Sammy Hagar fronting for Van Halen."

"Sammy Hagar did front for Van Halen," Christine said.

"No shit?" replied Mercury. "Well, then we could be in serious trouble."

"What are we going to do, Mercury? If Uzziel has gone bad, you'll have no chance to redeem yourself. He's probably pinning more crimes on you as we speak."

"Hmmm," said Mercury. "Maybe. But we can always go over Uzziel's head. We just need some leverage."

"Leverage?"

"We can't just go to the Courts and charge Uzziel with treason. We need to give them a reason to listen to us."

"The Attaché Cases of the Apocalypse."

"Right. We stick to the plan. We've got Pestilence; now all we need is Famine. We bring those to Heaven and they'll have their matching set back. They'll have to listen to us. Of course, first we have to get out of here."

"Yeah, about that..." Christine said, peering down the hall. "I think I have an idea."

THIRTY-THREE

Eden Two was contained within a geodesic dome constructed of glass and steel, soaring at its zenith to the height of a thirteen-story building. Inside the dome was a rain forest that housed some ten thousand different species of plants and animals. Eden Two was, by all accounts, an impressive feat of engineering and zoology, a phenomenal waste of money, and almost certainly the most elaborate work of camouflage ever devised.

Finch's private jet landed on an airstrip that had been constructed about a mile south of the dome. Jacob was ushered by two armed men into a Lincoln Navigator that sped across an asphalt road toward the dome. The driver parked the Navigator in a garage nestled among several other plain concrete buildings a short distance from the edge of the dome, and the men escorted Jacob to an elevator that plunged more than twenty stories underground. Beneath the floor of the dome, a circular tunnel, some fifteen miles in circumference, had been constructed. The men left Jacob alone in the control room, without explanation.

Jacob experienced a sense of déjà vu. A bank of monitors displayed the views from cameras placed along the perimeter of the tunnels. Below the monitors was a vast array of complex controls. In place of vacuum tubes and reel-to-reel tape drives there were microprocessors and flat panel displays, but other than these superficial differences, the whole setup was eerily familiar. The only difference between this facility and the one under Anaheim was that the control room here was in the center of the collider. Four doors, one in each wall, led to hallways that branched out in opposite directions to the circular collider tunnel. The collider itself seemed to be identical to the one that had almost collapsed on him earlier in the day. "It's just like the one in Los Angeles," he murmured to himself.

"To the centimeter," said a high-pitched male voice behind him.

Jacob turned to see a small man with a thick head of silvery-gray hair. He recognized the man as Horace Finch, the twenty-sixth richest man in the world.

"Why?" asked Jacob.

"Why what?" replied Horace Finch.

"Take your pick," said Jacob. "Why build a particle accelerator under Los Angeles? Why build an identical one in a remote area of Africa? Why kidnap me and bring me here? Why weren't there any pretzels on the plane?"

"Excellent questions, all," replied Finch, taking a seat across from Jacob. "To adequately answer them, I need to go back about four thousand years."

"Oh," muttered Jacob bitterly. "And I was afraid it was going to be a long story."

"Do you know what a ziggurat is, Jacob?"

"Step pyramid," replied Jacob. "They built them in ancient Babylon. They were probably monuments to dead kings or places to worship the gods, like the pyramids in Egypt."

"Correct," said Finch. "Except for the last part. Do you know what the name
Babylon
means?"

"You know," said Jacob, "I don't mean to be overly critical of your storytelling, but this would probably go faster if you didn't stop to ask me leading questions all the time."

"
Babylon
means 'gateway to the gods," Finch went on. "The founders of Babylon chose that name because they intended to use the ziggurats to connect to a higher plane of existence. The idea was to focus a mysterious form of energy on a portal that would open to the higher plane.

"It was a sound idea, but they failed. Political instability, infighting among the ruling elites, natural disasters...all of these factors conspired to prevent them from finishing the array of ziggurats that would have allowed them to break through the veil of our reality. Some say that the gods themselves intervened to keep the Babylonians from succeeding. You can hear echoes of this notion in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis."

Finch quoted: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.' But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.' So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city."

He continued, "The Egyptians had better luck getting their pyramids completed, but unfortunately for them they were building in the wrong place. There are only a few places where our reality comes close to overlapping the one above us, and Egypt isn't one of them. The Babylonians knew how close they had come, though, and they handed down their knowledge through the generations, in the hopes that someday their quest would come to fruition. It was clear that building massive pyramids or ziggurats attracted too much attention, but it was hoped that a less conspicuous means would be found to tear open the veil.

"The Babylonian priests formed a secret order, known as the Order of the Pillars of Babylon, to guard their knowledge of the higher reality. The Order eventually became very wealthy and powerful, devoting vast resources to researching the mysteries of the occult---with no success. Three millennia passed by without any breakthrough.

"It was in the nineteenth century that the order finally gave up mysticism and redirected its efforts into scientific pursuits. But after a hundred years of fruitless scientific research, the OPB was about ready to give up science as well.

"In the end, the breakthrough came in the form of quantum physics applied to the work of a little known medieval philosopher called Saint Culain. I won't bore you with the details, but Culain realized that the secret of the higher reality was bound up with the secret of time itself. Culain believed that time was made up of particles he called chrotons. Culain was never particularly respected, and his ideas fell even more out of favor when Einstein demonstrated that time was relative. Before Einstein, people thought of space and time as being a sort of inert backdrop against which events occurred. But Einstein showed that time and space are interrelated, and that they can be affected by events. The idea that space was its own 'thing,' made up of ether or some other medium, went by the wayside, and the notion that time itself was made of particles became even more ridiculous. But I don't have to tell you this; you're a physicist."

Jacob shrugged. "I'm a practical scientist, not a theoretical physicist. But I know the basics. Niels Bohr and Heisenberg and the rest of them came along and pointed out some problems with Einstein's theories. Their ideas give rise to quantum physics, which teaches that at the smallest scale, the Einsteinian rules break down."

"Exactly," said Finch, excitedly. "Basically, everything in the Universe, whether it's energy or matter, is made up of quanta. Light is made up of quantum units called photons. Matter is made up of quantum units called fermions. But then the obvious question is: what is time? And that brings us back to Saint Culain and his chrotons."

Jacob shook his head. "There are no such things as chrotons. I'm aware of the idea of quantum time, but even the nuttiest proponents of it don't believe in your chrotons."

"Nuttiness isn't really a useful attribute for determining accuracy," Finch replied, undeterred. "And the fact is, proponents of quantum time
do
believe in chrotons. They just call them something else."

It took Jacob a moment to realize where Finch was headed. "Gravitons," he said.

Finch smiled. "Exactly. The theory is that space-time is made up of elementary particles called gravitons. But gravitons are simply chrotons by another name. Quantum physicists are obsessed with gravity and frightened by time, so they call them 'gravitons.' It's like pigeons and doves."

"Pigeons and doves?"

"There's no definitive biological distinction between a pigeon and a dove. But if you were walking down the street in Manhattan and you commented on all the lovely doves picking food out of the cracks of the sidewalk, people would think you were a little nutty. Conversely, if you released a hundred pigeons at a wedding, you'd be acting in very poor taste. And yet, from the biologist's perspective, they are the same animal."

"Aren't doves white?" asked Jacob.

"There's no firm rule," said Finch, "Although it's true that pigeons used in ceremonies tend to be albinos. So if you think about it, in addition to representing peace, the dove could double as a symbol for white supremacy. Anyway, the point is that it's all a matter of context. A pigeon is a pigeon, whether or not he's invited to your wedding. Culain came up with chrotons a thousand years before anybody had ever considered the notion of a graviton, so I'm sticking with his terminology. Not to mention that 'what is time?' is a more interesting question than 'what is gravity?'

"Think about it, Jacob! What if there really is something like a chroton, an elementary unit that makes up time itself? In that case, time, rather than being something mysterious and completely out of our control, is just another building block of reality. Time doesn't have to always move forward any more than ice always has to come in cubes. If we isolate the chroton, we control time itself. Hell, we control everything. Once we can step outside of time, we've broken through to the higher reality!"

"Holy shit," said Jacob.

"I know, right?" exclaimed Finch. "Isn't it
awesome
?"

"No," said Jacob. "I meant, 'holy shit, you're insane.' And you still haven't answered any of my questions. Particularly the one about the pretzels."