“Nate!”
He grinned. “Besides, in a moment of weakness you promised to marry me. In three days you’re going to meet the entire Andros clan, and once that happens you’re trapped for life. My mother thinks she’s Hera, the goddess of marital bliss. Cross her and you’re doomed.”
Jill was showing Nate how much she dreaded that prospect when the phone rang. She started to move for it, but Nate wouldn’t let her go. “Let the answering machine pick up.”
The machine clicked and gave her brief greeting. Then a voice came on, a male voice with a heavy Asian accent.
“Ms. Talcott? Hey, this bag of yours been sitting here for four weeks! You never show up again! Please come pick it up. Oh, this is Teriyaki Madness. Thank you.”
Jill and Nate, still entwined, pulled back and stared at each other with a mix of shock and horror. A second later they were racing for his keys and her shoes and anything else they might need before charging out the door.
Teriyaki Madness was five minutes from Jill’s house and Nate, driving Jill’s car, took the distance with the aplomb of an expectant father. As soon as he pulled into the parking lot, Jill was out of the passenger seat and running. The older man who owned the small restaurant blinked up at her in surprise as she assaulted the counter.
“My briefcase?” she managed to gulp out.
“Oh! Yes, I just call you.”
“I know. Is it—”
He brought it out from under the counter. And, yes, it was her trusty beat-up brown leather satchel, bulging with papers like a frog with its throat stuck out.
“Oh my god!”
“You shouldn’t leave it here,” the man lectured sternly. “Four weeks, it take up all the space under my counter. I keep waiting for you to show up.”
“I’m sorry. Just—thanks!”
When she turned around Nate was right behind her. He looked at the bag and looked at her and they both started laughing.
Back in Jill’s living room the bag sat between them on the couch like a prodigal child while Jill carefully cataloged the contents.
“The Excel spreads of our experiments on disk… a diagram of the way we hooked up our generator… the power chart… all of my notes about the equation… It’s all here!”
“Man!” Nate smiled dazedly. “Think of how the DoD stripped this place and went over the university with a fine-tooth comb, and all the time your briefcase was sitting under the counter at a take-out restaurant.”
“Calder said they’d never found it. God, I thought for sure it must have burnt up in the lab. I remember now. The last time I came home I was feeling so sick. I stopped to get a bowl of plain rice because I thought it might help my stomach. I must have been so completely out of it.”
“What did you say once about the energy pool theory?” Nate mused. “ ‘The smallest movement, no matter how unintentional, can have the most profound impact on the pattern.’ ”
Jill sobered. She looked down at a cluster of pages in her hands, deadly pages. The sequences of events and coincidences that had led to their not being in the hands of the DoD suddenly seemed so very tenuous, the fate of the world hanging on a gossamer thread… and on her absentmindedness.
“You know what kind of sucks, though,” Nate groused. “We put ourselves in mortal danger in Poland to keep the Mossad from getting their hands on what the U.S. had, and it turns out they had diddly.”
“No, they had the sim and my notes on the one-minus-one. Given what the Mossad knew about Kobinski, I wouldn’t have wanted them to have even that much. Plus there was Anatoli.”
Anatoli was currently in a retirement home in Tennessee under yet another new name. Not that the most brilliant interrogator in the world could get anything useful out of the old man, but she was glad he was safe all the same.
“Plus, if we hadn’t returned to Earth and proven ourselves of no consequence,” Jill pointed out, “you could bet that either the U.S. or the Mossad or both would still have a tap on that phone. Which means they would have turned up at Teriyaki Madness within an hour after Mr. Lee placed that phone call.”
Nate paled. They both looked at the briefcase on the couch between them; then she looked at the phone and he at the front door.
“Jill…?”
“I’ll get my jacket and the briefcase. You get your keys.”
Epilogue
“I don’t understand what you want from me,” protested Dr. Ernest Namore. He made an effort to sound stern, but he was more than a little flustered.
“I’m trying to be very clear about that.” Calder Farris used a low, threatening tone, a tone that promised a world of hurt should it not be obeyed. “Your government wants your research. We’re not asking for charity, Dr. Namore. Depending on how valuable we deem your work, there might well be a place for you at the DoD. But first, we need to know specifically what you’ve got.”
Dr. Namore looked down at some papers on his desktop, pushed them around a bit, face worried. He cleared his throat. “I’ve told you again and again—I’ve dabbled with some wave mechanics. Routine stuff. I don’t know why you keep bothering me.”
Farris made a noncommittal sound.
“It’s really nowhere near coherent form yet, and I doubt it’ll be of any interest to you once it is. I can’t be any more straightforward with you than that.”
Namore met his eyes boldly. His were lying eyes.
Farris smiled. “Well, then… I must have been mistaken.”
Outside in his car, Farris used his cell phone to dial the University of Tennessee. Jill was in her office.
“I have one,” he said.
“Oh?” He could hear her scrambling for pen and paper.
He gave her the rundown, how he’d overheard Namore talking to a colleague at a conference. The colleague hadn’t found Namore’s ideas of interest, but Farris had.
“How close do you think he is?”
“His equation is off, but it’s in the ballpark.”
“Damn. What’s he like?”
“Well, he wouldn’t give me the time of day,” Farris laughed. “Especially when I put on the screws.”
“Good for him.”
“Let me give you his address.” Farris rambled off the numbers.
“Calder?” Jill said when she had taken it down. “Thank you. And… be careful, okay?”
“Absolutely. Say hello to that husband of yours for me.”
“Ditto.” Jill laughed. “Your wife, that is. Take care.”
Calder hung up the phone and felt the knot of fear in his stomach dissipate a little. It seemed some days he was more conscious of the danger than others. Some nights he had nightmares about the apocalypse Jill had enabled him to visualize so well. Some nights he lay awake running over in his mind what more he could do, how to structure his work in the DoD to make sure he would always be there when it cropped up, to make sure that it could never get away from him. And some nights he held Cherry as tightly as he could and willed himself to forget.
He remembered Mark Avery saying something about looking at your child and questioning the rightfulness of what they did. Now when Calder held Jason in his arms the fear of what might be tightened its hand around his heart so hard it hurt. Jason was so young. And life was so long and so chaotic. Anything could happen, in time.
He sensed that, of all of them, he was the one who was the most haunted by it. He supposed that penance was his due.
Dr. Namore lived alone, a confirmed bachelor, completely absorbed in his work at UC Davis. When the knock came on the door of his condo, one quiet Tuesday night, he could not imagine who it might be. He opened it to find a blond woman and a dark-haired young man on the stoop.
The woman smiled nervously and held out her hand.
“Good evening, Dr. Namore. I’m Dr. Talcott and this is my husband, Dr. Andros. May we come in?”