Unforgettable - eARC (5 page)

Chapter Six

I knew he could take the gun from me, so rather than try to keep it, I tossed it behind me as far as I could, then turned and pretended like I wanted to run toward it but that my handcuff link to Yelena was holding me up.

With a grunt, Jorge pushed past me.

“Come on,” I said to Yelena, yanking her to her feet.

We ran through the open door, and I clanged it shut behind us. Yelena turned the key to lock it, then pulled the key out and kept the keychain. Jorge pounded on the door behind us as we rushed down the corridor.

“Is the handcuff key on there?” I asked.

She looked at the keys as we ran. “No.”

Of course not—that would have been too easy.

“Elevator’s this way,” I said, pointing to the right as we approached an intersection.

“They trap us in elevator,” she said, pulling on the handcuffs toward the left.

Yelena was right—the guards might forget about me, but they wouldn’t forget about her. As long as I was attached to her, my usual methods of escaping wouldn’t work. I needed to get the handcuffs off.

And I still needed to go to the bathroom.

We headed down the hallway to the left. If I recalled the plans to the building correctly, a door near the end of the hall led to a stairwell. There would be an emergency exit on the ground floor, so we could bypass the lobby and escape.

Except I needed to find my clothes. Not because I minded fleeing into the dark in my underwear, although I did, but because the quantum key was in one of my pockets and the CIA wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t bring it back. The technogeek wouldn’t remember he’d given it to me, of course, but it would be listed in Edward’s notes.

We raced past a door with a sign that read
Laboratorio de Entrelazar
. I stopped running, forcing Yelena to stop as well. Did that mean laboratory of something-lasers?

“There might be lasers in that lab,” I said, “or something else we can use to get these handcuffs off.”

“Get out of building first,” she said. “Guard call someone.”

I had forgotten about Jorge’s conversation as he approached the storage room.

“I need to get…something in my pants before leaving. But it’s too hard with these,” I said, raising our handcuffed wrists.

After a moment, she nodded.

The lab door was locked, but one of the keys on Jorge’s keychain was a master key. We slipped quickly through the door and shut it behind us.

The room’s lights were off, but a half-dozen flat-panel monitors displayed scrolling lines of data. Violet light radiated from a long apparatus of glass and metal that dominated the center of the room. At the far end, a pencil-thick shaft of bright violet hit a prism and split into two weaker beams that extended into holes in the wall.

“That must be the
entrelazar
,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s see if it’s powerful enough to cut the chain on these handcuffs.”

We raised our handcuffed arms over the laser apparatus, one of us on each side, and walked to the far end of the room. We stopped just before reaching the prism.

A nod from Yelena signaled she was ready, and we lowered our wrists slowly. I held my breath as the handcuff chain entered the violet beam.

The reflection off the metal dazzled my eyes, and I blinked back tears. But I held my arm steady, and so did Yelena. But the laser seemed to have no effect.

“It was worth a try,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait,” she said. She walked to one of the workbenches along the side of the room, forcing me to lean over the laser with my arm stretched out, and she rummaged in some of the drawers.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Mirror.”

“Why?”

“I help you get pants,” she said. “Ah.” She held up a flat mirror about one foot square.

“How will that help?”

She walked to the prism and deftly leaned the mirror against it at a forty-five-degree angle. The violet beam reflected up into a ceiling tile, which burst into yellow flame.

“Fire,” she said. “We go now.”

I stared at the flames in horror. Without any time to prepare myself, I found myself flashing back to the fire when I was thirteen.

“Nat!” Yelena’s insistent voice wrenched my eyes away from the flames. We exited into the hallway and raced for the stairwell. A fire alarm blared from a loudspeaker on the wall, and strobe lights flashed.

“Security office on second floor,” she said, her mouth close to my ear so I could hear her over the alarm. “Handcuff key probably there.”

“Why did you start a fire?” I asked.

“Force evacuation, including security office.”

It had been a smart decision on her part, I conceded. She didn’t know my personal feelings about fire—and my feelings didn’t really matter. All that mattered was salvaging what I could of this mission.

Water sprayed from sprinklers in the stairwell as we ran up three flights to the ground floor. I expected her to try to take the exit, but she didn’t.

“Why are you helping me get my pants?” I said, squinting back at her through the strobe-lit spray of water.

“I need clothes, too.”

I couldn’t argue with that. A beautiful woman wandering around in the middle of the night, sopping wet, dressed only in her bra and panties, would attract attention.

On the second floor, I opened the door an inch and peeked out. A security guard I didn’t recognize was barreling down the hall toward us.

“Up,” I said.

We ran halfway up to the third floor and waited until the guard I’d seen was safely on his way down.

On entering the security office, I spotted a pile of black clothes on a table—and, just lying there for anybody to take, the prototype.

Yelena and I both lunged for it, but I had entered the office first and had longer arms, so I managed to grab it first.

“I stole it first anyway,” I said, “so it really should be mine.”

“No, I stole it first,” she said. Of course, she had forgotten taking it from me at gunpoint. “You came after.”

She searched through a drawer and pulled out a metal knob. “Here is key,” she said. She held it next to the handcuffs and they unlocked.

I sorted through the black clothes, extracting my pants and making sure Yelena’s gun wasn’t in the pile. “You don’t think that safe drilled itself and opened its door for you?”

She grabbed her clothes and began to dress. “Ah, you hide when I come in?”

“Something like that,” I said. The quantum key was still in my pants. I put the prototype in a pocket and then dressed quickly. Now all I had to do was get clear of the building, and I could chalk this one up as a victory.

“Then is fair,” she said. “You do hard work, so you get prototype.”

She seemed to give in a little too easily, but it might just be a combination of professional courtesy and gratitude for my help in escaping.

She pulled her ski mask on, and I did the same.

By the time we snuck out the emergency exit door, fire trucks had arrived. In all the confusion, no one noticed us as we ran away from the building. I decided to abandon my car in the parking lot. It was just a rental under a false identity, anyway.

After we climbed the fence, I said, “I suppose we should split up now.” I felt strangely reluctant to have Yelena forget me.

“Nat, wait.” Yelena pulled off her ski mask, then reached up and peeled mine back. “To remember me,” she said, and gave me a long, slow kiss.

It was the best kiss of my life. It was almost, but not quite, good enough to prevent me from noticing that she was taking the prototype out of my pocket.

I grabbed her wrist and pulled back from the kiss. “Let me guess: you simply wanted the prototype as a reminder of the good times we’ve shared?”

She smiled and relaxed her wrist. “Do you blame me for trying?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said.

Then she kneed me in the groin.

Chapter Seven

My usual motto on missions was: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But this time, the entire paradigm of the mission had changed. Instead of just trying different ways of breaking into the InterQuan headquarters in order to steal the prototype, I would have to track down a thief without even knowing who she really was.

Much as I hated to do it, I phoned Langley to report my failure. After the usual rigmarole of authentication using the manila file in Edward’s desk drawer, I brought him up to date on what had happened—including the embarrassing way in which I had lost the prototype.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose I could have you come in and look through pictures to see if you can identify this thief. Russian, you say?”

“She sounded Russian, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Hmmm.” His keyboard clicked. “I think I’ve got a better idea. There’s a quantum tech trade show thingy going on in Rome. Just the sort of place our thief might go to either sell what she’s stolen or steal something else. Why don’t you head over there and see if you can spot her? She won’t remember you, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Seems like a bit of a long-shot, though.” The CIA must really be desperate to get that prototype.

“You can kill two birds with one stone,” Edward said. “There’s an Iranian physicist named, uh, Parham Rezaei. Genius in quantum mechanics theory, apparently. Giving a lecture at the trade show tomorrow. First time he’s been outside Iran in several years. Have you ever heard of Kazem Jamshidi?”

“Yeah, I even met him. Look at your notes for my mission in London two weeks ago.”

Papers rustled. “Hmm. Interesting. So you’re the hush-hush original source on the supposed ‘quantum supercomputer.’ That’s caused quite a stir here.”

“Really?” As far as I knew, this was the first time I’d caused a stir at the CIA—other than by my simple existence.

“Yeah, especially after the vanishing act he pulled. He went back to Iran and then disappeared, and now someone upstairs is real worried. From what we can tell, Jamshidi’s trying to build a quantum supercomputer that can predict the future. Accurately. The implications are tremendous—he could take over the stock market, give our enemies warning of our military plans. We haven’t even thought of everything he could do.”

I thought about it. In the hands of an enemy, such a supercomputer would seriously compromise our national security. “So, Jamshidi’s connected to the physicist?”

“Maybe. This guy Rezaei’s whereabouts have been secret for a while. Some people think he might have been locked up as a dissident, while others think he’s been working at a secret government lab, and now some people think he might be the brain behind Jamshidi’s supercomputer. In any case, we want to track him, so your primary mission is to plant a tracer on one of Rezaei’s shoes. You have access to a tracer?”

“Several. Part of my standard kit.”

“Right. Meanwhile, if you see the thief, try to get the prototype, but that’s secondary.”

So, after about three hours of fitful sleep in an apartment owned by a CIA front company, I headed over to the airport. At the Alitalia counter, I bought a first-class ticket to Rome. That was enough to get me through security, although by the time I reached the gate, the airline’s computer system would have forgotten my ticket. I threw the ticket in the trash, waited until the flight was boarding and the line was getting short, then approached the young woman at the gate’s counter.

“I’m afraid I don’t have my ticket,” I said, pulling out a fake passport. “I need to get a new one.”

She frowned. “How did you get through security?” Her accent was more English than Spanish.

I grimaced. “It’s rather embarrassing. After we got through security, my girlfriend put both our tickets in her purse. Then we had an argument and she stormed off. But I still need to get to Rome for a business meeting.”

She tapped the keys on her computer. “I do not see your name here.”

I faked an exasperated sigh. “She must have canceled our reservations.” Pulling out my credit card, I said, “I need to catch this flight. Preferably first class.”

A few more taps, and she said, “That will be seven hundred and thirteen euros.”

I nodded. The credit card company would approve the charge, then both the airline and the credit card company would forget about it. Technically, my flight was not being paid for, but Edward had assured me the CIA bought plenty of tickets that they never used, so it was balanced out.

She printed out the ticket, and I hurried to the ticket scanner. The scanner beeped its validation, and I was on my way to Rome.

* * *

QuantumExpo Europe was at the Palazzo dei Congressi, a gigantic convention center near the heart of Rome. I took a cab there directly from Fiumicino airport. Because it would be a shabby trick on the cab driver to use a credit card to fake paying, I paid cash.

After registering, I wandered down the aisles of booths on the convention’s main floor. According to the printed schedule, Parham Rezaei’s lecture on “Macroscale Quantum Superposition” would be at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow, so I had time to get the lay of the land—and see if I could spot a certain auburn-haired thief.

There was no luck on that account, so when I got tired of listening to marketing hype at various booth displays, I went to check out the lecture hall where Rezaei would be speaking, to see if there would be a good opportunity to plant the adhesive tracer on his shoe. As I slipped into the back of the hall, I was surprised to see almost all the seats were filled. The scheduled topic had seemed rather mundane—a panel discussion on Postponing Decoherence—and I had figured most of the attendees would already be approaching decoherence in the local bars.

But this wasn’t a panel. There was only one man on stage, and after a moment I recognized him from the research I’d done for this mission: Parham Rezaei. His bio said he had studied at Oxford, and he spoke with a high-class English accent.

I pulled out my program and examined it. To my chagrin, I realized that the lecture was, in fact, today. When Edward had told me the lecture was tomorrow, it had still been Thursday for him, but already Friday for me.

Fortunately, no harm done. The lecture would last another half hour, so I settled in a seat on the back row and started scoping out ways to approach the stage.

I was sort of half-listening to the lecture when I caught him saying something about memory.

“…memory of observing the wave function to collapse at that point in time,” said Rezaei. “However, from the point of view of a second observer not privy to the original observation, the wave function does not collapse until the first observer has reported the observation. The question then becomes, was there a quantum superposition of the first observer’s memory? To use Schrödinger’s famous cat, did the first observer have both the memory of a live cat and the memory of a dead cat until he spoke with the second observer, at which point one of those memories disappeared?”

I felt a sudden thrill of hope. Rezaei was talking about memories disappearing. It wasn’t exactly the same as what happened with my talent, but it seemed like it might be related. If he really was a genius about this stuff, he might be able to explain why my talent worked, maybe even find a cure for it. In addition to planting the tracer on his shoe, I would have to figure out some way to talk with him for a bit.

Unfortunately, his lecture didn’t go into any more details about people forgetting stuff due to quantum mechanics. But I was able to follow the gist of what he was saying. Basically, it was that the probability wave functions that governed things at the atomic scale also governed things at the macroscale—the scale of objects we could see and touch. Even human beings. But since an average human being consisted of about seven billion billion billion atoms, each with its own probability wave function, calculating the probability wave function of an entire human being was far beyond the capacity of the most powerful supercomputer in existence.

The bit about seven billion billion billion atoms reminded me of the CIA technogeek explaining how the quantum key worked, but that had involved only eighteen billion billions, which was apparently not beyond today’s technology.

As the lecture wound to a close, I rose from my seat and walked down the side of the room until I was as close to the stage as I could get without actually clambering up onto it. I was hoping that when he was done he might come down to shake hands with people in the audience or something.

Rezaei got a standing ovation when he was done. But he didn’t come down off the stage. Instead, two men with dark suits and physiques that might as well have been neon signs saying “Bodyguard” joined him onstage and then escorted him through a curtain in the back.

I hoisted myself onto the stage and then followed at a brisk pace through the curtain and out into a backstage hallway in the bowels of the Palazzo dei Congressi. The three of them were twenty yards away, headed toward some elevators at the end of the hall, so I quickened my step, aiming to catch up about the time they reached the elevators.

When I was still ten yards back, one of the guards turned his head to look at me. He slowed, and I figured my plan of casually riding the elevator with them wasn’t going to happen.

“Dr. Rezaei,” I said. “I’m Brandon Andersen with
Quantum Tech Today
. Could I ask you a few questions?”

Rezaei stopped and turned to face me. The other bodyguard did likewise, saying something in Farsi.

I wished that Farsi was a language I had studied, but I only knew how to say I needed to use the bathroom. “If now’s not a good time, I could meet you at your hotel room.”

“It would be a pleasure, young man.” He had a thick headful of white hair. “Hotel Pulitzer, suite 603. Could you meet me at eight-thirty?”

“I am afraid that will not be possible,” said the guard on Rezaei’s right. His English was slow and accented, but clearly understandable. “Dr. Rezaei has a conference call.”

Rezaei shrugged as the guard took him by the elbow and turned him toward the elevators. “Sorry,” he said.

“No problem,” I said, backing away to show the other guard I wasn’t going to press the matter. I had what I wanted, anyway.

* * *

At nine o’clock that night, I knocked on the door of suite 603 in the Hotel Pulitzer. I had a Manila envelope containing a few papers that I had printed up in the hotel’s business center.

One of Rezaei’s bodyguards answered the door. He glared at me suspiciously through the two-inch gap he allowed between the door and its frame.

“Delivery for Dr. Rezaei,” I said. “From QuantumExpo management.” I thrust the envelope through the gap, and the bodyguard took it and then closed the door.

Mentally counting off the seconds, I walked down the hallway to where I had left a second envelope of papers. When the minute was up, I returned to the door of 603 and knocked.

The same guard answered the door the same way he had before.

“Hi there,” I said brightly. “My name is Alex Helps, from QuantumExpo. I’m here for my nine o’clock appointment with Dr. Rezaei?”

He frowned, then spoke Farsi to someone in the room before turning back to me. “There is no appointment.”

I gave him a nervous laugh. “Did you not get the revised schedule? It was sent your room earlier today.”

More conversation in Farsi ensued. Finally, the guard said, “Sorry, Dr. Rezaei is in a meeting. Come back in fifteen minutes.”

“Okay,” I said.

He closed the door.

Figuring it might be good to see just who Rezaei was meeting with, I hung out in the hall between his room and the elevators. About ten minutes later, his door opened and a fifty-something man with black hair, graying at the temples, walked out.

It took me a moment to recognize him as the mystery man who had chased me down from Jamshidi’s office—which pretty much confirmed the link between Jamshidi and Rezaei.

He didn’t even make eye contact as he passed me.

I approached Rezaei’s door and knocked, and was answered by the same guard. “Hi there,” I said. “My name is Alex Helps, from QuantumExpo. I’m here for my nine o’clock appointment with Dr. Rezaei? Sorry I’m a bit late.”

We went through a repeat of the earlier scene, but this time it ended with the guard opening the door wide and beckoning me in.

“My apologies for the mix-up,” Dr. Rezaei said, holding up one of the papers from the envelope I had dropped off. “We hadn’t noticed there was a new schedule.” He was sitting on an overstuffed couch in front of a coffee table. With a wave, he indicated one of the chairs across from him.

“Quite all right,” I said as I sat down. I opened the envelope I was carrying and pulled out several papers. “Your lecture earlier today was such a success that we’re hoping we can arrange to have you speak again tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s quite impossible. I must go to London to conduct business there, and then back to Iran. My father is in ill health.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But can I just say how much I enjoyed hearing your lecture today? I found it fascinating, especially the part about someone having two different possible memories of an event and then only one is chosen.”

“Oh, yes, superposition of memories. Quite an interesting topic philosophically. What makes an event truly real, the event itself or our memory of it? That’s not to say”—he chuckled—“that our memories of events are accurate, just that our memories are the results of events. But can an event with no results be said to have happened at all?”

I took a deep breath. “Dr. Rezaei, would it be possible for quantum mechanics to somehow make it so a person could not be remembered after he was gone? Kind of like there are two possible memories, that he was there and that he wasn’t there, and then even though he was there the memory that he wasn’t there is the one that gets remembered?”

He wrinkled his brow and stared at me. “You mean a causal event happens, but then is erased from the past so that its effects are not felt?”

As I was trying to parse through that to figure out what it meant, he went on, “Some of the quantum eraser experiments appear to do so, but so far not on a macroscopic scale.” He picked up a spiral-bound notebook off the table, scribbled on it a bit, then said, “It is an interesting concept. What on Earth made you even think of such a thing?”