Supersymmetry (30 page)

“That's it. Dismissed,” Nicole said. She began flicking her eyes at something they couldn't see, presumably shuffling through files in her private eyejack space.

“I just have one more question,” Alex said. “Is my brother Sean on one of the Special Ops teams that went behind enemy lines?”

Nicole's eyes refocused. “Those teams don't officially exist. I can't tell you who's on them.”

“Come on,” Alex said. “I gave up something for you. Return the favor. This is my brother; I just want to know where he is.”

Nicole sighed. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Yes,” she said. “Sean Kelley is on one of the advance parties. I couldn't tell you which, because I don't know. He'll be back here tomorrow night.”

“Do you know the target locations?”

“What, so you can follow them? I'm not an idiot.” Nicole pointed toward the door. “Get out of here. Report to Vijay Bhargava and ask him how you can help.”

When Alex stepped out of the office, Tequila was there waiting for her. “You look like you could use a drink,” she said.

“Aren't you working?” Alex asked.

Tequila laughed. “It's nine o'clock at night,” she said. “We've been working for twelve hours. Time to hit the pub.”

Alex shook her head. “It's night? Seriously? My internal clock is so scrambled.”

They had walked less than a block from the elementary school when Tequila turned and climbed down a set of stairs into what appeared to be the cellar under a row house.

“This is a pub?” Alex asked.

“Welcome to Krakow,” Tequila said. “Highest density of alcoholic establishments in the world. You're always either in a pub or walking past one.”

The rest of the team was already there, all of them drinking bottles of Zywiec beer, except for Lisa, who clutched a glass of clear liquid. She held it up like she was giving a toast. “Wódka! Why come to Poland and drink beer?” she said in an attempt at a Polish accent that came out sounding Transylvanian.

Alex ordered a beer despite Lisa's protests, and felt some of the tension start to drain away. She was among friends. It wasn't much, given the threat to the people she loved, and to all of humanity, but at that moment it felt like the most important thing in the world.

For a time, they chatted about Polish drinks and food. Vijay had sampled a lime mead that he said was truly dreadful, and the team related a disastrous attempt to order pizza at a Polish restaurant that had resulted in being served a cheese-covered crust and a pitcher full of ketchup. A nearby Polish bookstore had a bigger section for books about the Pope than it did for novels, and one of the ten TV channels they could get from their hotel was entirely devoted to the Vatican.

“And don't get me started about the toilet paper,” Rod said.

Alex laughed with them, but eventually the conversation slowed to a halt. She hesitated, not wanting to break the spell, but knowing she had to. “There are some things I have to explain to you guys,” she said.

She told them everything. About the varcolac and its attacks, about Sandra, about Jean Massey and why she and Ryan had really come.

“So . . . you're heading behind enemy lines?” Tequila asked. “Turkey's a big place. How will you even know where to go?”

“I don't know,” Alex said. “I didn't really think that far. I guess I thought it would be making itself obvious.”

“Once it makes itself obvious, it'll be too late,” Vijay said. “It's probably too late anyway.”

“Thanks, that's a big help, Mr. Cheerful,” Tequila said. She touched some beer to her fingers and spritzed it in his face. “I bet you're a miserable drunk.”

“It sounds like the best thing we can do is to incorporate the teleportation and invisibility modules into our training,” Rod said. “Put it in the hands of as many of our troops as possible, and educate the officers and general staff, so they'll figure out how to use them effectively. There's nothing you can do by heading off into Turkey alone. You'll just get yourself killed.”

“I'm afraid the advance teams are walking into a trap right now,” Alex said. “If the Turks already have the technology—worse, if the varcolac is there—then they may not get out alive. But I don't know where they are, and Nicole wouldn't tell me.”

“I know where they are,” Lisa said softly.

Everyone looked at her. She blushed. “I got on a bit with one of the guys on your brother's squad,” she said. “He let slip where they were headed. One of the targets, anyway.”

“Where?” Alex asked.

“I don't understand it. It was why he mentioned it; it was so strange a target.”

“Spit it out!”

“The Jozef Stefan Institute. It's a scientific facility in Slovenia.”

There was silence at the table. Alex had been expecting military targets near the front lines—radar installations or fuel depots or anti-aircraft weapons. They were only a few miles from Slovenia, but what was the importance of this institute? Were they stockpiling weapons there? Or developing them? The name rang a bell, but Alex couldn't figure out where she had heard it. Jozef Stefan Institute. “Of course!” Alex's mouth hung open as a rush of adrenaline hit her. “That's it. That's where Jean will be.”

“Wait, how do you know?” Tequila asked. “What's there?”

“They have a particle accelerator. It's a small one, relatively low energies, nothing like the NJSC or CERN. But it's probably the only accelerator in all of Turkish-controlled territory. If they want to make more Higgs projectors, enough for their whole army, then that's where they'll do it.”

“You're going, aren't you?” Tequila said.

Alex realized she was on her feet. “I have to. Sean and his team don't know what they're heading toward. The varcolac will tear them apart.”

“How will you get there?”

Alex started pacing, two steps one way, three steps the next. “I don't know. I need the coordinates. The exact coordinates.”

“I can help you with that,” Rod said.

“How?”

“I have access to the bombing dictionary.”

That got everyone's attention. “Why on Shiva's third eye would they give you access to that?” Vijay asked.

“They didn't exactly
give
it to me,” Rod said with an impish grin. “I was helping the major get his laptop on the network, and, well . . .”

“You devious little hacker,” Tequila said.

“Anyway, I can get the coordinates. Some of them they have down to less than a meter.”

The whole group stood, pulling euro notes out of their wallets and leaving them on the table.

“You can stay,” Alex said. “You've had a long day; I'm sure Rod can get me what I need without the rest of your help.”

“You don't understand,” Tequila said. “We're coming with you.”

“To Slovenia? Don't be stupid.”

Tequila raised an eyebrow.

“You're not soldiers. There's no reason for you to come.”

“If you fail, we all die anyway, right?” Lisa said.

“Well . . . yes.”

“So, if there's any chance we can help, we might as well come.”

Alex smiled. “I guess you're right.” These were true friends, willing to follow her behind enemy lines, purely on the strength of her word that it was important. She hoped she didn't get them all killed.

“I knew it,” Vijay said. “Somehow I always knew I wouldn't live past forty-five.”

CHAPTER 23

S
andra's headache was in full force now, like a tide of pain washing through her scalp. She tried to ignore it, concentrating on the graphs in front of her. An empty pizza box and cups of soda were scattered around her, the remains of a dinner now long finished. She was getting hungry again, though she knew her body probably needed sleep more than it needed food.

Her father's phone had been crammed with data, so much so that it was difficult to determine what was important and what wasn't. She had sorted by date modified, to start out with, and immediately found the data that Angel had sent her the day after the stadium explosion, showing the pattern of the blast. She located her father's analysis of it, too, the ten-dimensional look that turned all the crazy lines into simple, coherent curves. But what had been so sensitive and important that he felt the need to hide his phone in the toaster?

She gradually pushed backward in time. He had obviously been using the phone for a great deal of analysis and study of quantum effects, far more than she would have expected from a retired scientist. He still taught some courses locally, at Swarthmore College, but this was high-level stuff, a personal project of some kind that seemed to have been going on for years.

It took her a long time before she figured out that the target of the study was herself.

“He's been monitoring me,” she said. “Me and Alex both. For years. Since the beginning.” By the beginning, she meant the split, the point at which she and Alex had ceased to be Alessandra and had taken different paths. “He's been gathering data at a quantum level.” She stared at it further. “I think it's in our phones. He hid some kind of device into our phones that monitors us and sends the data back to him.” She looked up at her mother. “Did you know about this?”

She shook her head. “No. He didn't say anything.”

“What was he looking for?” Angel asked.

She knew. The math was beyond her, but she knew what he must have been studying. She and Alex were a quantum fluke, a probability wave that refused to collapse. Every other probability wave in their crazy lives had collapsed, a single path taking precedence. Even her father's own experience, both in prison and out of it at the same time, had eventually come back together. But she and Alex hadn't. For fifteen years.

Of course he was curious. Of course he wanted to study them, noninvasively. He was their father. Beyond the simple scientific interest, he cared about them as his children. He wanted to understand why the wave held for so long and whether it would ever collapse again.

Sandra wanted to know, too. She brought up graph after graph, trying to make sense of it. The notes were terse, cryptic, not meant for anyone besides her father to read. But finally, she thought she understood. The strength of the probability wave field, constant for many years, had started to deteriorate over the course of the last three months. At last measurement, it was less than a third of its original strength. She thought of the recent occasions when Alex's thoughts had mixed with her own, when their minds had seemed to almost collide. Was it happening? Was there anything they could do?

But there was something more. She discovered a text file with some scribbled notes. It read, “NJSC funding increase, new parking garage, November 5th. Coincidence?”

The date coincided, roughly, with the time the probability wave field had started to diminish. Her father had been suggesting a causal relationship—that something going on at the NJSC was weakening the field, making it more likely that she and Alex would collapse into one person again. The note was followed by a bewildering array of mathematical notations and equations.

Sandra looked up at the universe simulated in flashing colors behind the glass. Her head pounded. She felt so angry. She glared at her mother, who had been looking over her shoulder. “Did he tell you about this?”

Her mother shrugged helplessly and shook her head.

“I bet he told Alex. He was always telling her things, things he thought I was too stupid to understand. Maybe he was hoping to nudge things somehow so that, when the wave collapsed, it was Alex's mind that came out on top.”

“Don't think that,” her mother said. “It's not true. He loved you.”

“Did he? He never liked me much before the varcolac came, and then afterward, he had Alex. She was like this brand new daughter who had saved the world with him, who liked quantum physics, who risked her life to save us all. Not even Claire could compete with that.” She stood up and clenched her fists. “I'm tired of these riddles! I'm not smart enough to solve them. I never have been.”

Her mother wrapped her arms around her, and Sandra sobbed. “I miss him so much,” Sandra said finally. “I don't know what to do. Why didn't he just tell us what to do?”

Angel put an arm on her shoulder and wiped a tear off her face with his thumb. He acted as if crying were a normal thing, not a sign of weakness or frailty, not something to be uncomfortable about. It made her feel safe. She wiped her face on the hospital sheet she was using as a dress. “You should look at this,” he said.

Her phone pinged as it attached to his feed, and suddenly she could see what he saw. It was a video feed of sorts, though he was viewing it in non-immersive mode, like looking down into a glass box instead of standing in the scene itself.

The display was strange: granular and oddly colored, with some data missing. It was like the image was made of a constantly-moving fuzz, which kept shifting around. Even so, she could make out five people on a roof of some kind, though she couldn't see the background or anything more than a few feet away. The people's faces were gray and indistinct.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It's the quantum data your father was collecting from Alex's phone,” he said. “I used the location references to put together a 3D image.”

“So . . . this is live? One of these people is Alex?”

“The closest one, I think. I don't think it was meant to be used to spy on her, exactly, but the data is there.”

“Where is she? What's she doing?”

He shook his head. “It's all locally referenced. There's no global locator data, or anything like that. You can just call her, if you want to know where she is.”

But Sandra could hardly hear him anymore. Her awareness of the room was fading, the colors shifting. She could see what Alex was doing. No, more than that. She was sliding into Alex's viewpoint, falling into her mind. And she couldn't stop.