“What?”
“Give me the letter,” he said. “Did you get through the passwords?”
“Passwords, plural?” I said.
Brian used his finger to scribble “137.036” on the page, and the letter reappeared. “I told you to ‘say goodbye to Cathie,’” Brian said. “The second password is the date they shut our program down.” He traced some more numbers.
“And I was supposed to figure that out?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to go look in the bunker.”
Brian showed me the paper. It was now filled with tiny programming circuits, connected with a tangle of colored lines. I knew if I touched any one of the circuits, it would expand to show me more circuitry inside. The paper was humming. I could feel a strange internal tugging sensation, just as I had felt when Brian had made the gyroscope spin.
“You programmed all this?” I asked.
“Most of it.”
“What it doing?”
“It’s a Higgs projector,” he said. “It’s locally altering the Higgs field.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“I’m serious.”
“What, you figured out how to isolate the Higgs field in your office, with an Erector set and some Play-Doh? A project like that would be a billion-dollar operation, if it were even possible.”
“I didn’t. They did. They gave me the equations for the core modules; I just wrote wrappers to interface with them.”
“What’s a Higgs field?” Marek asked.
“It’s an invisible field, uniform throughout the universe, that gives our universe its physical qualities, including the idea of matter itself,” I said. “The theory is that the big bang produced not just one universe, but countless, frothing up out of the early expansion like so many bubbles. Each universe could have a different Higgs field, stronger or weaker than ours, and thus have a different set of basic constants. That means it could have a different set of fundamental particles, and thus a different periodic table, and, obviously, an entirely different structure,” I said.
“So, the varcolac told you all this?” Marek asked.
“The quantum intelligences,” Brian said. “I think maybe they are the Higgs field, or it’s part of them somehow. They…” He trailed off, his eyes wide, staring at something behind me.
I turned. Through the windshield, I could see it coming. The varcolac strode through the trees as if they weren’t there, heading right toward us.
I yanked the gearshift into reverse and hit the accelerator. The car lunged backward and smashed into a tree. I turned the wheel and shifted into drive, but the rear wheels just spun, throwing up loose dirt. I revved the engine frantically, but it was no good. “Out of the car!” I shouted. Marek was already out his side and running. I pushed my door open and ran the other way, not much caring if Brian followed or not.
I was fast and in shape; Brian was not. I heard him scream, and, despite my desire to put as much distance between myself and the varcolac as possible, I turned around. He was frantically doing something on the smartpaper as the varcolac bore down on him.
I heard a deep thrum, like a bass woofer turned up loud, and the varcolac disintegrated. Brian dropped to his knees, breathing hard. “That was close.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“It’s tied to the collider,” Brian said. “It feeds off the exotic particles the collider produces, and it draws a tremendous amount of power from it to maintain its physical manifestation. I altered the Higgs field locally to eliminate those particles.”
Brian touched a few spots on the paper. The thrum stopped and the tugging sensation in my chest subsided.
“Shouldn’t you leave that on?” I asked.
“It’s gone now,” Brian said. “It won’t come back unless…” He stopped with a strangled choke as the varcolac reappeared less than a foot in front of him. Brian shrieked and dropped to his knees. He held the letter out in a shaking hand. “Take it!” he said. “Just take it!”
The varcolac bent and touched Brian. Brian’s eyes unfocused, and his body glowed. Tiny particles lifted from his body, like sand in a windstorm, flowing from him into the varcolac. As we watched, Brian disintegrated completely and flowed into the varcolac itself. Horribly, the varcolac’s jumbled features took on a little of Brian’s appearance. The varcolac now held the smartpaper in its hand. A moment later, the paper burst into violent flame and was gone.
The varcolac turned toward us. We stood frozen, watching it. It took a step forward, then turned on its heel and disappeared. It didn’t just vanish: it turned, like it was walking around a corner, only into some other dimension of space that I couldn’t see. It might still have been quite close, for all I knew, invisible, watching us and getting ready to pounce, but if so, there was nothing I could do about it. For now, as far as I could tell, the varcolac was gone.
Marek ran up to me. “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. I ran to the car and climbed in.
Marek climbed in next to me, but I had the car in gear and was pulling out before he had the door closed.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
I stomped on the accelerator, pulling us into a tight U-turn. “There are two of those letters,” I said.
“What?”
“There were two Brians,” I said. I squealed the tires pulling onto the road and did a U-turn, heading away from the NJSC, back toward home. “Two Brians, two letters. I don’t know exactly how, but it’s true. The Brian we found dead was the one who visited my house and left the letter in his jacket pocket. The Brian we just saw sent the same letter to me via FedEx.”
“Which means…?” Marek asked.
“It looked to me like the varcolac was after that letter,” I said. “It killed Brian for it. The other version of the letter, however—the one that went out via FedEx was probably delivered today.”
I heard Marek’s quick intake of breath. “So if it wants the other letter, too, and knows how to find it, that would lead the varcolac…”
I leaned my weight on the accelerator, rocketing the car through a red light. “…straight to my house.”
CHAPTER 12
David Haviland was apparently a morning person. He greeted the judge and the jury with a cheerful smile. I had barely slept, and, next to me, Terry didn’t look much better. He was clutching a paper cup of coffee like it was a life raft.
“The People call Officer Brandon McBride to the stand,” Haviland said.
McBride was a big man gone to fat, with thinning gray hair and the hint of jowls forming in his cheeks. He was wearing a tie that seemed too tight for the folds of his neck.
“Officer McBride,” Haviland said. “How long have you been with the Media police force?”
“Thirty-seven years.” McBride emphasized each word, apparently proud of his length of service.
“And what is your current title?”
“I’m a senior evidence technician.”
“And what does that role entail?”
“We receive thousands of items ranging in size from hair samples to vehicles, and we track and store the items and release them as appropriate. Mostly my job is to ensure that the integrity of the chain of evidence is preserved. We store the items and make sure that nothing is tampered with and there is a clear chain of custody for any item from the place where it was confiscated to its appearance in trial.”
“On December third, did your office receive into custody a weapon taken from Jacob Kelley when he was arrested?”
“Yes, we did,” McBride said.
“How can you be sure?” Haviland asked.
“I reviewed the record this morning in preparation for this trial.”