Soter’s smile broadened and then he started to laugh. “Those are some remarkable conclusions, my dear. Unfortunately, they are largely incorrect conclusions.”
Jenna felt her face reddening. She was rarely wrong about anything, and to have this man laughing at her…teasing her with the promise of information, like the candy in a piñata at a child’s birthday party, and then laughing when, blind and disoriented, she struck only air…
“Then fucking help me fill in the gaps,” she said in a tight cold voice.
The man’s smile faded some. “To begin with, I have never worked for the Russian government.”
Jenna wasn’t sure she believed him, but she had only Cort’s statements as evidence against him. Noah hadn’t written exactly where the facility was located. Cuba made sense, though it wasn’t the only island in Hurricane Alley. “Then who do you work for?”
Soter’s smile softened into a more thoughtful expression. “What a marvelous question. My research is funded by the US government, but the work I do is for the benefit of all humankind.”
Jenna considered this boast in the light of what Cort had told her. “From what I’ve heard, your genetically modified clones are about to start World War III. Is that part of the plan to benefit humankind?”
Soter winced. She had struck a nerve. When he spoke again however, he did not answer her directly. “I fear I may have given you the wrong impression of me. You see, I don’t actually know anything about genetic modifications. I’m not that kind of scientist.”
“Then what kind of scientist are you?”
“I dabble in this and that, but my formal training is in the field of mathematics.”
Mathematics? That didn’t make any sense. Despite some serious disagreements, Cort and Soter were in agreement on one point: Jenna and the others were the result of a genetic experiment, and Soter had already claimed to be the genius behind it all. “Why is a mathematician involved in a cloning experiment?”
“That, my dear, is the long story that I will tell you now.”
SIGNAL
42
It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone. He dropped his burden, a thick sheaf of accordion-folded computer paper, on his desktop and glanced over his shoulder at the man seated in the chair by the door.
The glance told him what the man was not.
Not a member of the mathematics department or even, to the best of his knowledge, a faculty member.
Not a student — he was too old and too well dressed.
Not a visiting professor — too young and too well dressed. The man’s clothes and bearing marked him as an outsider, not merely a stranger in the physical sense, but someone completely unfamiliar with the environment and culture in which he now found himself, unaware of just how out of place he was.
A lawyer.
The man stood and extended a hand. “Are you Dr. Helio Soter?”
Soter was a little surprised to hear the correct pronunciation of his name. Most people meeting him for the first time mangled it—Heel-ee-oh Saw-ter being the most common. Sometimes he would patiently explain: “The ‘h’ is silent and the ‘e’ sounds like a long ‘a’. Ay-lee-oh. And Soter rhymes with ‘motor’ not ‘water.’”
He wondered if it was a bad sign that this stranger, who looked an awful lot like a lawyer, already knew how to say his name correctly, but the man had offered his hand. Soter took it. “I am. What’s this about?”
“You are needed for an estimate, sir.”
It took Soter a few seconds to grasp that the man was not asking for him to perform a mathematical task. “You’re from ONE?”
The man’s cheek twitched a little, as if Soter had spoken out of turn, but he nodded. “Please, come with me.”
“I’m giving a lecture in ten minutes. You’ll have to—”
“Cancel it.” The man’s tone indicated that further debate would be futile.
Ten minutes later, when he should have been introducing himself to a hall full of graduate students, Soter found himself in the passenger seat of a Ford Granada, the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shrinking in the rear view mirror. He made no inquiries about where they were going or what was expected of him. The driver seemed a very tight-lipped sort of fellow, and someone would answer Sotor’s questions soon enough. After all, he couldn’t very well give them an estimate if they didn’t provide data.
An estimate. He found the euphemism rather amusing. He routinely used estimation in the course of his mathematical and statistical research, so it was almost ironic that the men from ONE — the Office of National Estimates — would utilize his expertise in formulating their predictions about world affairs. Indeed, the process of correlating intelligence and drawing probable conclusions was highly mathematical in nature, so all other things being equal, it was probably an appropriate term. Unfortunately, there were factors that always remained elusive in any equation — human variables — and that made all the difference between a well-founded estimate and a best guess.
ONE, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been founded in the aftermath of the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor — the Communist invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1950. It had resulted in a two-year long open conflict, and an ongoing state of war that persisted nearly thirty years later. The problem had not been a failure of intelligence, but rather a failure to draw accurate conclusions — estimates — based on available information. In the three decades that had followed, ONE had broadened their scope of influence somewhat to include operations, which Soter supposed, was a way of making sure that inaccurate estimations could be steered back on track. But that didn’t concern the mathematician. His job was simply to deal with the numbers.
The Granada pulled up at the Hotel Eliot, and the driver let Soter out. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. “Room 237.”
Soter nodded and headed inside. Clandestine meetings in hotel rooms were standard for ONE, even when the subject of the estimate did not seem to warrant extraordinary secrecy. The meetings weren’t that much of an inconvenience, and they paid him well.
He took the stairs to the second floor. A short walk down the hall brought him to the door, which opened before he could knock. A man he did not recognize — older than the driver, and wearing an even better suit — stood aside and motioned for him to enter.
The room was heavy with cigarette smoke, but Soter saw three more men seated at a small table. One of them stood up and gestured for Soter to take his chair. He did not recognize any of the men, and while that wasn’t unusual — he had never dealt with the same person twice — it was strange to see so many representatives of ONE in the same place.
A single sheet of paper lay on the tabletop in front of him. A cursory glance revealed numbers, or more precisely typed digits. There were a lot of 1s, but a few 3s and 4s. The arrangement looked like a scatter plot of statistical data, but without a context, Soter couldn’t begin to guess at their significance. Someone had drawn a circle around a vertical column of six digits…no, not just digits. There were letters as well, but only in the circle.
6 E Q U J 5
The same pen had also drawn circles around a 6 and a 7, and then to the left of the numbers scrawled a single word: Wow!
Soter studied the characters in the circle a moment longer, then took another look at the paper itself. There were no indentations on the page from the ballpoint pen that had drawn the circles and written the exclamation. It was, he realized, a copy made on a Xerox machine.