I wondered: Could the energy of these events, in and of itself, be positive or negative, good or evil? Does a hateful thought have a different kind of energy than a benevolent one? Are there laws that govern such energy? How far can evil go—how strong is it at its limit? Does “good” travel at the speed of light?
9.1. Calder Farris
Calder had been in Alaska for four days. They’d been running the HAARP facility through frequency tests when the birds fell, so he’d had them run those same frequency tests again—and again and again, much to the perturbation of Dr. Serin. Calder was delaying their research, Serin said; ten Ph.D.’s were sitting on their hands. Fucking whining little shit. Calder gave him a look, said, “This has priority,” and nothing more. Serin wasn’t stupid. He started to be curious about what Calder was looking for. Calder responded, or didn’t respond, to all of it with the same steady chill.
So they ran the tests. And nothing happened.
Serin asked Calder, “What are you looking for? What’s all this about?”
Calder said, “Standard procedure.”
Serin reminded Calder a lot of the scientists who worked for the DoD. Over the years, he’d developed a particular hatred for the type—liberal science geeks who worked for the government but were so goddamn privileged they forgot who held the silver spoon in their mouths. Sure, Serin was happy to lap up the money Uncle Sam offered, the free housing, early retirement, and great benefits. But when he got home at night, he’d have dinner parties with his liberal geek friends where he’d make fun of the military personnel who ran the facility. He’d make a big deal of the fact that HAARP was not, technically, a weapon. As if he didn’t owe every single one of his privileges, not to mention his life and that of his entire liberal geek family, to the A-bomb. At the very least, he’d be speaking Russian and scribbling math equations for fifty cents an hour if that bad boy had not come along when it had. And then there were the stealth bombs and smart bombs and all the other things that kept the man hip deep in opera tickets and Nordstrom’s instead of wallowing in a third-world hellhole like the other 80 percent of the world’s population who had the sole misfortune of being born in a country without bad-ass technology.
But… Serin was not Calder’s problem. The man had no clue what had caused those birds to drop from the sky, and he couldn’t reproduce it.
Since the death of Dr. Henry Ansel, Calder had gathered every scrap of information he could find, had interviewed Ansel’s colleagues at the University of Tennessee and talked to his students. He’d picked up some tidbits, pieces of a puzzle that still had no definite shape in Calder’s mind. What he did know with certainty was that Ansel had been working on something that was extremely relevant to Calder and that he’d been closed-lipped about it.
Except, perhaps, with the dean of his physics department. The man had known something. But he’d denied it, and he’d been a little too well connected for Calder to sit on him. Though he reserved it as an option for a future date.
The thing that Ansel and Avery had agreed upon was that matter equals waves and that therefore, ergo, and consequently it followed that waves of some specific type, intensity, structure, et cetera, et cetera, ought to be able to affect matter. The trick was: what kind of waves? Calder had gone through boatloads of documentation, old journal articles, anything he could find on experiments conducted with waves, but so far he’d not found the red marker: physical matter majorly screwed up by wave transmission.
Until the birds. The autopsies showed nothing. Nothing. The birds hadn’t died of poisoning or radiation, diabetes or depression. It was as if suddenly, in mid-flight, their impulse for life, some vital spark in their brain, had simply been turned off. Crash and burn.
Calder’s biggest fear—and it was coming true—was that it had been a fluke, some rare conflux of random factors he’d never be able to trace, not without knowing… something.
Had Ansel known? Had he held the power of life and death in his hands? If he hadn’t, he’d killed himself for no good reason, and Calder found that extremely unlikely. Serin sure as shit didn’t know. But according to Serin, there was someone else out there who might.
On Thursday, Calder asked, “Did you ever hear back from the University of Washington? About that phone call you had from a Dr. Alkin?”
“Not yet,” Serin replied, with zero interest. “I told you it’s nothing. I don’t know why I even remembered it except the person had been asking about unusual effects of our wave transmission and the birds reminded me—”
“Maybe you should call them back.”
Serin gave him an exasperated look. “I spoke to the department head. He would have called if he’d learned anything.”
Calder removed his glasses and fixed Serin with those cold blue eyes.
“I’ll call him now,” Serin said.
9.2. Denton Wyle
Denton sat watching the yeshiva from a group of tangled honeysuckle bushes behind the building. In the woods. In the dark. With the freaking maple trees. Schwartz had made a bad mistake. Denton Wyle no longer had anything to lose.
He might have bartered with the rabbi, if he’d had the Kroll manuscript. But Denton didn’t have the Kroll manuscript. It had been stolen right out of his hands. Then there were those two thugs who’d taken a copy of every other scrap of material he’d had in his hotel room in Stuttgart—without asking, despite his furious protest. So Schwartz had everything Denton had anyway. So it was Schwartz, really, who’d chosen this path. Denton was not responsible. Furious, yes, petrified, yes, but not responsible.
The lights in the large dining room were on. He saw the boys filing in at last. He waited until they were all seated, until the blessing had been said. Then he made his way through the woods to the front door.
He remembered seeing a coat closet in the foyer on his first visit to the yeshiva. He hoped it might serve his purposes. He tried the main door: open. He smiled nervously to himself. As he thought, the place was not guarded. Schwartz might be the head of some secret Jewish cult, but he’d never expect trouble here, on his home turf. Not with this elaborate facade he’d created, this innocent “boys’ school” act. Huh-uh.
The foyer, as Denton slipped inside, was dimly lit and empty. It was tempting to go to the library now—it was just down the hall, and no one was around. But he needed time, plenty of time. He opened the closet door and scoped it out. It was long and deep. The back was nested with boxes. It couldn’t be more ideal; luck was smiling on Denton Wyle. He made his way through the coats, nudged a place among the cartons, hidden from view. His watch had a lighted face and he read it: 6:30.
He slept a little. By midnight he could no longer wait. His legs were cramped and he had to pee, plus the dark was getting to him. He was starting to imagine Schwartz (in the chef outfit, his butcher knife raised) creeping toward the closet door. With a bit more haste than was called for, Denton worked his way out of the boxes and into the foyer.
The foyer was dark but not nearly as dark as the closet. He listened, heart pounding, for distant chanting from some underground temple, like something from Indiana Jones. The school was completely silent. Freed from the constricted space, his limbs tingled from disuse and his nerves threatened to fail him. He could still back out. It wasn’t too late to run. But… no. It would be simple and painless, and no one would ever know it had been him.