‘What do you think, Oksanna?’ Orlov asked, handing the first folder over to her.
Zoshchenko studied the document, mentally translating from German to Russian. She spent ten silent minutes reading before she looked up from the page.
‘Victor, I have to admit I don’t understand this.’
‘Then this is a fraud?’
‘No, not necessarily,’ she replied. ‘It looks genuine, but the science is well beyond my ability. We need an expert in this field to make any meaningful determination.’
‘Avvakum?’
‘Da.’
Orlov thought for a moment. ‘Dmitri, have Avvakum brought here.’
Leskov nodded and issued the order into his lip mike. A few minutes later Leskov opened the door. A woman with long, wavy black hair entered Orlov’s office. Her clothes were rumpled, as if she’d slept in them. The dark circles beneath her eyes implied that, in recent days, she probably hadn’t slept at all.
‘Come here, Doctor,’ Orlov demanded.
Avvakum walked toward Orlov numbly. When she drew near, Orlov indicated that she was to sit in the chair to his right. Avvakum complied.
‘I would like your opinion on something, Doctor,’ Orlov said.
Orlov then handed Avvakum one of the folders. She opened it and looked at the first page.
‘This is a page from the notebooks,’ she said.
‘Da. Look at the next page and tell me what you think.’
Avvakum turned to the next page and began to read. She said nothing, but Kilkenny read her body language. Her eyes widened slightly, as if the larger aperture would somehow allow more of what she saw to enter her mind more quickly.
‘Boja moi,’ Avvakum said softly. ‘Is there more?’
‘Yes, there is,’ Orlov replied. ‘What do you think? Do you believe it to be the true text of the notebooks?’
‘Da,’ Avvakum replied.
To Kilkenny, it was clear that reading the decoded page had brought some of the life back to this defeated woman.
‘Would you like to see how I did it?’ Kilkenny asked her directly.
‘Please,’ Avvakum replied.
Kilkenny showed her the original equation string, then briefly described how he and Grin reworked Wolff’s quantum algorithm so it could be run on a conventional computer.
‘How did you simulate the principle of superposition in your program?’ Avvakum asked.
‘We didn’t,’ Kilkenny admitted. ‘We avoided it altogether. We translated Wolff’s equation from a quantum language into something we could work with. It’s certainly not as pretty as his code, and probably not as fast, but it gets the job done.’
‘Can I see the rest?’ she asked.
Orlov handed her the remaining files, which she eagerly pored over.
‘Each page takes about half an hour to forty-five minutes to decode,’ Kilkenny explained, ‘depending on how much text there is on it.’
Orlov waited until Avvakum closed the sixth folder. ‘What is your opinion, Lara?’
‘These men can decode the notebooks.’
‘Thank you. That will be all,’ Orlov said. Then he looked over at Leskov. ‘Dmitri, please have the doctor escorted back to her lab.’
After Avvakum was gone, Cooper leaned back and crossed his legs. ‘Satisfied?’ he asked.
‘I am, Victor,’ Zoshchenko offered.
‘So am I.’ Orlov leaned to the side and pressed the REDIAL button on the phone. This time the deep-voiced man answered after only one ring. ‘Josef, release our guests.’
‘Da, Victor Ivanovich,’ the man replied.
Orlov pressed the button that ended the call. ‘The women will be dropped off at a very public location within the hour.’
‘Good,’ Cooper replied. ‘Now, let’s work out the rest of this. In exchange for Kilkenny’s decoding program, we want not only the release of the two women but your word that this is where all this ends.’
‘What do you mean?’ Orlov asked.
‘I mean that your attacks are over. This shouldn’t be a tough point for you to agree to; you’ve already got everything you want.’
‘If your people watching Sandstrom have kept you up to date,’ Kilkenny added, ‘then you know that even if he survives, it’ll be a long time before he’ll be well enough to return to a laboratory again. There’s nobody else in the world right now even close to catching up with you.’
Orlov smiled with satisfaction at Cooper and Kilkenny’s appraisal of the situation.
‘When Kilkenny and I walk out of here, that’s the end of this whole affair. Agreed?’
Orlov thought about it for a moment, weighing it as he would any other decision. ‘Agreed.’
‘Great. Now, as a further sign of our good faith while we wait for the women to be released, I would like to offer Kilkenny’s services in decoding more of Wolff’s journal. If you like, he can instruct Doctor’ — Cooper hesitated, as if trying to recall a name — ‘Avvakum in how to use the program.’
‘That is acceptable,’ Orlov said. ‘Dmitri, have Kilkenny taken to Avvakum’s lab.’
58
Kilkenny followed the lean, muscular man into the deeper recesses of the building. Temporary walls of unfinished gypsum board blocked off large portions of the facility that were still under renovation, and mirrored half domes covering security cameras appeared in the corridors at regular intervals.
The security man led Kilkenny upstairs to an interior suite that was divided into a large laboratory space — which currently stood empty — and a row of offices. Several of the boxes stored along one side of the future lab space still bore the packing labels Sandstrom had placed on them back in June.
Kilkenny’s escort pointed to the first door, then turned and departed. Avvakum’s guard opened the office door, motioning for Kilkenny to step inside. Avvakum all but ignored his arrival.
‘Hello,’ Kilkenny said in a friendly voice as he entered the office. The guard closed the door behind him. ‘We weren’t introduced earlier. My name is Nolan Kilkenny.’
‘Kilkenny?’ she questioned, looking up from the papers on her desk. ‘You are the one I sent the message to?’
‘Yes, and I wanted to thank you for that.’
‘Why? It did no good, and now I am a prisoner here.’
‘It helped me discover who was responsible for the attack on Sandstrom and, more recently, the kidnapping of two women, one of whom is very special to me.’
Avvakum smiled weakly at the thought that Kilkenny would travel halfway around the world in order to free the woman he loved. All her years of isolation had left Avvakum with no one to do the same for her.
‘Why did Orlov send you here?’
‘I’m supposed to teach you how to decode the notebooks his men stole from us.’
‘I don’t want to give him what’s in those notebooks,’ Avvakum said with a sigh. ‘He doesn’t deserve it.’
‘I couldn’t agree more, but I don’t think either of us really has much choice in the matter.’
‘Let me clear off some of this mess for you.’
Kilkenny gave Avvakum a hand in moving several piles of computer printouts onto the floor, then he moved a second chair around so that they both could sit on the same side of her long desk. He unzipped his briefcase, set his laptop on the desk near Avvakum’s computer, and connected the two machines together with a gray cable. He then pressed the power switch and booted up the laptop.
‘Are the image files from the notebooks on your computer?’
‘No, they’re kept on one of the network servers in the company’s main building in Moscow.’
‘Do you still have access?’