“Yes? And?”
I face him again. “Dr. Turnisen, how many people keep a photo of their friend and their friend’s friend on their desk?” I shake my head. “No. People keep pictures of family members on their desks. And that’s why you kept a picture of your son there, where you could see him every day.”
He stares at me for a long time. “Close the door.”
I do.
“How did you know? Just the photo?”
“No. The codes. You erased the original ones. Only yesterday’s set was in pen.”
“There has to be more.”
“There were RixoTray USB drives in your drawer at work. And you allowed yourself to be tortured all day even though you knew the codes. You could have told them to Akinsanya at any time, but you held back. I was thinking about that, about how hard it would be.”
He glances down at the hand that’s missing three fingers.
“I did a show here yesterday, and the hospital administrator mentioned that a sizable anonymous donation was going to be made for the progeria research. How much were you going to get from the drug cartel for delivering the drone?”
He hesitates. “Twenty million.”
“So you were the one. And you were going to donate it to RixoTray’s transdifferentiation research with Dr. Schatzing…” I’m thinking aloud, tying the threads together. “But you didn’t want Emilio dead… Is that when you changed the codes in your notebook? After Emilio was killed? Is that when you decided you didn’t want the drone to get into the hands of these people after all?”
He looks at me curiously. “How do you know all this?”
“We were looking into Emilio’s death. We stumbled across a few things. When I met Tim yesterday he told me his parents were divorced, that his dad wasn’t allowed to see him.”
“It’s a long story. It wasn’t my choice.” He waits for me to say something, but I have no idea what to say, and at last he goes on, “I’m no saint, Mr. Banks. But I love my son.”
“Yes.” I’m not sure what else to say and finally ask, “How did you contact Akinsanya and the drug cartel?”
“Someone named Solomon. He has connections.”
Solomon.
Why doesn’t that surprise me.
Tim’s dad looks at me concernedly. “Are you going to tell Agent Ratchford?”
I consider the wounds he suffered while holding out so that he could find a way to do the right thing. To both protect innocent people and help his son. He changed his mind about the drone when he realized what the consequences of turning it over would be.
Free will.
We are broken gods, fallen princes, with animal instincts and divine desires.
Incongruous. Able to go along with our convictions, or go against them.
Finally I answer, “How would it help Tim if I told anyone?”
He’s silent.
It’s hard to know where to take things from here. I hold up the Coke. “I should be going.”
“Thank you.”
When I’m halfway to the door I have an idea. “When you’re feeling better, I’ll get you some tickets to my show. Seat D4. Remember that.” It’s inadequate, but it’s all I can think of at the moment and I go with it.
“D4. Sure. Thanks.”
“There’ll be a mutual acquaintance of ours in D5,” I tell him. “If you ask him, I’m sure he’ll do a French Drop for you. He’s really very good.”
Part IX
Lovelock
“I think I got it.” Lonnie is at my kitchen table, leaning over a pad of paper filled with algorithms and permutations.
Xavier peers over his shoulder. “So what are we looking at?”
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Like what?”
Donnie stands near the window texting a friend. Upstairs, Fionna is helping the girls get ready for today’s drive across the state. Charlene, who can’t tackle stairs yet because of the gunshot wound to her leg, has found a lounge chair in the library and is answering some get-well-soon emails on her laptop.
“Well,” Lonnie says, “let’s see… Think of space/time as a fabric. You’ve heard of the book A Wrinkle in Time?”
“Sure,” Xavier replies. “It’s a classic. That one’s definitely stood the test of time.”
“Yeah. Hmm. I think it has. Well—”
Donnie stops texting long enough to interrupt. “It’s not that far-fetched. To travel through space, I mean, really through space, to the far reaches of space, you need a way to warp time to allow you to move faster, to travel light-years in an instant. Otherwise the prospect of interstellar travel is just science fiction or wishful thinking.”
He and Lonnie share a look.
I sense I can see where they’re going with this. “And you’re saying that these algorithms, what? Prove that time travel is real?”
Lonnie answers, “Not time travel, no, but a way to take a shortcut through space, like you might slice through a three-dimensional object.” He backpedals a little. “Or at least they seem to point in that direction.”
The algorithms he’s been working on come from the chalkboards in the classrooms of Building A-13 at Groom Lake.
“So it’s true,” Xavier mutters.
“What’s true?” Lonnie asks.
“The space/time continuum. They’ve got a ship there. At Area 51.” He nods knowingly. “It might even be where they’re getting some of their thought-controlled technology from.”
Donnie lowers his phone. “You’re saying that our unmanned aerial vehicles were created from reverse engineering a spaceship?”
“If you believe the stories.”
“And do you?”
“You know me.”
“Yeah.” He smiles. “Wicked.”
Fionna calls down that they’re ready to go, the boys head into the other room, and Xavier comes over and holds up a knapsack.
“I got something for Fionna,” he whispers.
“Something memorable?”
“I believe it is.”
“What’s that?”
He fumbles through the pack and pulls out a bottle.
“Mango perfume.”
“Yup. Think she’ll like it?”
“What gave you the idea to buy Fionna mango perfume?”
“It’s fruity.”
“Fruity.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And it was on special. Two for one. This way, I’ve got next year covered as well.”
“I hope you’re joking.”
He looks slightly concerned. “You think I should take one back?”
“Xav, I’m… You know, I think Fionna would actually love a bottle of mango perfume coming from you two years in a row.”
“Yeah.” He puts it away. “I figured that too.” He places one hand on my shoulder. “Listen, what you told me last night, about the truck, I mean, I’ve been thinking and—”
“No. It’s okay. I was serious.”
“I can’t take your new pickup truck.”
“Really, you need something to get around town in.”
“Well… the RV is a little tough to parallel park,” he admits. “But—”
“Besides, this way, if the opportunity ever presents itself, you can maybe visit Fred at work — by the way, any word on those photos being released?”
“Nothing so far. We’re crossing our fingers. Hopefully that’s all in the past.”
When the girls come downstairs, Charlene joins us in the kitchen, and Mandie and Maddie hand around Valentine’s Day cards to everyone.
I find a prominent place on my fridge to hang mine up.
We’ve taken a lot of pictures this week, and I have to remove one of the extra magnets from a photo of my dad and me fishing off the Oregon coast to put the cards up.