The God Machine (15 page)

T
HE
C
ITATION
X
BANKED AND WAS SUDDENLY DOWN ON THE
ground before Koster had even prepared himself. Moments later they taxied off the main runway and came to a stop by the terminal. Robinson had told him that Sajan was to meet him in town. But as Koster made his way down the cabin stairs, the flight attendant plucked at his sleeve and informed him that there had been a change in itinerary. Ms. Sajan, it turned out, was not in San Francisco after all. She was staying at her Morgan Hill ranch. A Cimbian plane was en route to fetch him for the twenty-minute flight to the south. But, unfortunately, it was running a little bit late.

Koster ended up in the General Aviation terminal, where he made himself as comfortable as he could in the lounge. Half an hour later, a slight Indian man in a dark blue uniform with the Cimbian logo on his breast pocket, sidled up to him. His name was Ravindra. He was the pilot, he told him, assigned to take Koster to Mineta, the San Jose International Airport. Koster followed him out of the terminal and they made their way
to another private plane, a Hawker 400XP, also featuring the Cimbian logo—bright gold and blue, with the
C
so much larger than the rest, it appeared to be amplifying the name.

“I thought Ms. Sajan was going to meet me in town,” Koster said as they climbed up the steps to the jet.

“Engine trouble,” replied the pilot. “That's why I was late.”

The Hawker was slightly smaller than the Citation X but equally opulent. Koster buckled himself up in one of the creamy white seats. The side panels were cloth instead of walnut, he noticed. There were only seven passenger seats, and slightly less headroom. As soon as they took off, the copilot came back and handed Koster an LCD tablet and a small metal tie pin with the Cimbian logo. “What's this for?” asked Koster.

“Just enter your preferences. Once you're done, it will Bluetooth to the pin. Ms. Sajan has a smart home.”

Koster looked at the tablet. There were a whole bunch of questions about preferred temperatures and colors and music and artwork and food, plus a series comparing physical textures. He found it all fascinating. When he had finished, Koster tapped the tablet and the data was passed to the tie pin. Then he attached the pin to his blazer.

The flight was over in minutes. The plane landed and Koster transferred to a black stretch limousine that drove him out toward Morgan Hill, at the foot of the El Toro Mountain, twelve miles south of San Jose in the southern Santa Clara Valley. It was a beautiful drive. They passed orchards and vineyards, and winsome bedroom communities that serviced nearby Silicon Valley, where Cimbian was headquartered. The Valley itself was surrounded by the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west, and the Diablo mountain range to the east. Large
homes of mostly Spanish architecture dotted the hillsides.

After they left the highway, the road started climbing toward El Toro and Koster found himself surrounded by horse farms. The driver turned off down a dirt road sided by tall eucalyptus trees. They came to a gate with a guardhouse and the limousine crawled to a stop. A moment later, they entered the property.

The gravel driveway was at least half a mile long, wandering through pastures and meadows, by outbuildings and stables, circumscribed by long stretches of fencing to the ranch house itself. The layout of the property seemed perfectly attuned to the hilly terrain. The main house was perched on top of a hill, three stories, made of cedar, with a long wooden porch and a stone chimney that looked like it had been crafted from freestones plucked out of some river nearby. A couple of guest cottages ran up the hill to the rear, enclosed by a stand of green olive trees. On the other side were a stable, an expansive corral and what appeared to be some kind of chapel.

Koster was greeted at the door to the ranch by the housekeeper, Flora, a gregarious Mexican woman. She told him Señora Doña Sajan was outside in the gardens. As she escorted him to his room, Koster finally determined the reason for the tie pin he'd stuck in his jacket. He stepped through the door and the fan started purring, the lights slightly dimmed, and a sonata by Mozart started playing from invisible speakers. He dropped his small suitcase and computer bag on the bed when he noticed the paintings—of distant blue mountains—grow suddenly dark. They weren't paintings at all; they were gas plasma displays. In an instant they were replaced by impressionist landscapes, drawings by Escher and the abstract expressions of Rothko.

The room itself was tastefully decorated with simple
bleached wooden furniture, a desk of contemporary Danish design, wide cedar plank walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on El Toro. They seemed to tint automatically as the sun struck them. Koster unpacked and settled in. When he had finished washing up in the stone sink in the bathroom, he made his way out to the hall. He tried to find Flora, the housekeeper, but she was nowhere about. So he slipped out the front door and strolled through the gardens.

Koster walked about for a good ten minutes looking for Sajan, and was about to give up, when he again noticed the chapel on the far side of the barn. It was a small wooden building, with blue lancet windows. A plain wooden cross stood over on the lintel. He traversed the courtyard and tested the door. It was unlocked. He opened it carefully. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. The chapel was tiny, with only eight pews—four on either side of the aisle. There was a diminutive rose window with an abstract design in the wall above the altar. A woman knelt in prayer at the front, near the aisle. As soon as she heard the door swing open behind her, she looked up.

Savita Sajan was a small woman, in her mid to late thirties, with large almond-shaped eyes, black on black. Her features were delicate. She had full lips, the color of berries, and impeccable teeth—surprisingly white against the rich brown complexion of her native south India—and her long shiny black hair hung loosely about her narrow shoulders. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans, he noticed, a black T-shirt and cowboy boots, and a simple gold charm on a chain round her neck. It was hard to believe he was looking at the founder of Cimbian, one of the most successful Telco chip manufacturers in Silicon Valley, whose C4 chip was present in almost fifty percent of all cell phones worldwide. In the end, though, he realized, what she wore was irrelevant.
There was something hypnotic about the way that she moved. She seemed to glide down the aisle, seemed to hover before him, her hand out, and that smile—it was luminous. “Hello,” Koster said.

She kept smiling at him.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Koster, clasping her hand and shaking it. “I'm Joseph Koster.”

“Welcome,” she answered. “I'm Savita Sajan.” She had a sing-song tone to her voice with some undefined accent.

“I didn't mean to disturb you—”

“Yes, you did. Why deny it? This is no way to begin.”

“Excuse me?”

Sajan wrinkled her nose. She examined him closely. In her gaze, he felt suddenly exposed, like an exhibit in some sort of collection, a beetle or butterfly pinned to the wall of a glass-fronted display. She tilted her head. Then she laughed. “It's okay, Mr. Koster. I was finished. Aren't you coming?” She moved toward the entrance.

Once outside, they made their way down a path that cut toward the stable. The light was painfully bright after the cool of the chapel.

“I trust your flight was comfortable,” Sajan said as they walked. “I'm sorry I didn't make it up to San Francisco. I have a house near California and Powell, not far from the University Club. You would like it, I think. Lots of good food nearby.”

“No problem,” said Koster, somehow cheered by her breezy apology. “This is beautiful here.”

And she smiled once again. Sajan entered the stable and moved toward a magnificent Arabian, midnight black, in the very last stall. She patted his cheeks and pulled at his nose. His eyes rolled. He whinnied, then began to munch on some hay at his hooves. “So tell me, Mr. Koster. How do you and Nick know one another?”

“We met at school years ago. In New York. At Friends
Elementary, in the Village. We were both interested in mathematics. Of course, he was also a three-letter man, the school's most successful debater, chess champion, the number one stroke and valedictorian—you know Nick. We took some classes together at Columbia. Then I moved up to Boston, to attend MIT. But we kept in touch through the years. It's hard not to keep track of the Robinsons when they're in the papers so much. I have a feeling Nick likes to keep a few mortals around just to remind him what it's like for the rest of the planet.”

Sajan tipped her head to the side. “That's not the Nick I know,” she retorted. “He's far more than his family name.”

“I was kidding,” said Koster, trying to bring up a smile.

“No. You weren't.”

Koster sighed. “What about you?” he asked. His fingers started to dance on his trouser legs. “How did you meet Nick?”

Sajan reached into the front pocket of her blue jeans, pulled out a sweet and fed it to the stallion. The horse nuzzled her chest. She pushed the Arabian away. “I was finishing up my thesis at Princeton,” she said, “and I got sidetracked on another project, an article I was writing for some popular science journal. I doubt it exists anymore. Anyway, Nick read it. He must have been trapped in some dentist's office between root canals. It wasn't that good. For some reason, he contacted me through the magazine's publisher.”

“What was it about?”

“You might think it a little bit strange. Some people consider my pastimes… eccentric. I theorized how the Ark of the Covenant may have been crafted as a kind of capacitor. I'm an electrical engineer, as you know. The specifications of the Ark are defined in the Bible. I believe it was designed to build up and store static
electrical charge as the Israelites carried it about through the desert. That's why there are legends about the enemies of Israel being struck down by lightning whenever they got too close to the Ark.”

Koster smiled.

“It's not as farfetched as you might think,” Sajan said. “The design of the Ark, the position of the cherubim on either side, the materials—all these things were engineered to help trap and preserve electricity. The charge would build up over the interior surfaces and when the charge became strong enough, it would jump the gap between the wings of the cherubim and discharge—a corona, a glow at the point of the wing tips. Other people believe the Ark was a kind of communications device, allowing the Israelites to talk directly to God. As it says in Exodus twenty-five,
‘Between the two cherubim, on the Ark of the Testimony, I will meet with thee, and I will give thee my commands for the children of Israel.’
Anyway, Nick thought it was interesting.”

“Yeah, he would. He loves all that stuff.” Koster reached out and made an attempt to pat the stallion's left cheek, but the animal turned as if to bite him, and he snatched his fingers away.

Sajan laughed. It was a gentle laugh, not unkind. “Be careful, Mr. Koster. Pi nibbles.”

“Pi?”

“The horse.”

What was wrong with him? He was acting like an idiot. “You know, that reminds me—”

“Do you play the piano?”

“Excuse me?” Koster took a step back. “Why, yes. I do, actually. Why?”

“Your hands. You looked like you were practicing scales with your fingers.”

“It's a nervous habit. Like a tic, I guess.”

“What do you know about the Gospel of Judas and
the Gnostics?” Sajan asked, abruptly changing the subject. “Nick told me you were involved in a search for the Gospel of Thomas a few years ago. How did that come about?”

“I was working on a book about the Notre Dame cathedrals of France when I discovered a legend about how an early version of the Gospel of Thomas might be hidden under the cathedral in Chartres. I wasn't the only one. You may recall that—some years ago—the head of Italy's largest private bank, a fellow named Pontevecchio, was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge.” “In the nineties. I remember the newspaper stories.” “Turns out he had been using the Vatican Bank as a financial conduit to make illicit investments overseas. It was a huge scandal. The head of the Vatican Bank at the time was—of all people—a cousin of mine, a guy named Archbishop Grabowski. Apparently, before Pontevecchio was hanged, the banker tried to get his hands on this early copy of the Gospel of Thomas as a kind of lever to force the Church to honor his debts. I eventually found clues leading me to the gospel's location. Mathematical clues, hidden in the labyrinths of the cathedrals. My cousin, Archbishop Grabowski, assisted by a gangster named Scarcella, came upon the cathedral just as we were about to dig up the gospel. I was being helped by a British policeman named Nigel Lyman, and a local tour guide named Guy. He had a sister. Mariane was her name. Anyway, when all was said and done, we never did recover the gospel. And Scarcella and Mariane… She was killed.”