“Yes, yes, of course. Pray to God it stays that way. We must find Anatoli Nikiel. We must get our hands on the rest of the manuscript before they do.” Then the men got up and began to stroll.

Hannah’s heart was in her throat, but she didn’t dare follow. She went back to the apartment, wrote her note, and waited. Devorah went to bed. The men returned. One more cup of tea, then Binyamin rose to leave. His coat was threadbare and old—like, perhaps, something that had belonged to his grandfather or someone else’s grandfather, salvaged from a bargain bin in the marketplace. His parents, who were not poor, must tear their hair out, god help them.

Hannah followed the men to the door and when Binyamin mumbled good-bye he stuck his hand in his coat pocket. Hannah held her breath for a moment, fearing in his simplicity he would give her away, would pull out the note and say, What is this?

But he didn’t. He frowned at her, clenching something tightly in his pocket, and said good night.

Ever since the moment Aharon had decided he didn’t want to communicate with Shimon Norowitz anymore, Shimon Norowitz had become his best friend. “What else have you found in the arrays? What have you learned in your research? Have you spoken to anyone? Who?” And always, like clockwork, “Of course, you’ll keep in touch?”

Whenever Norowitz called, Aharon’s lips felt pressed shut, too heavy to move, as though an angel were putting a finger there—shhhhh. He did not tell Norowitz about his interview with Biederer. He did not tell him about Anatoli Nikiel. And he certainly did not mention the disappearance of two men outside of Auschwitz in a flash of light.

On a Monday after Binyamin had taken Shabbes with them, the boy was already in Aharon’s office when he arrived. Binyamin rose with an odd expression, his Kobinski binder in his hands. He looked like a dog that had dug something up and wasn’t sure whether to look pleased or guilty about it.

“What? What did you find?”

“I found something,” Binyamin mumbled. His cheeks were spotted with red.

“Yes, I know that. I know because I can read minds, Binyamin, and because you’re standing there holding the binder with such a look. What is it?”

Binyamin held it out. “Here.”

Aharon was disappointed when he saw what Binyamin had circled. “That? That’s not a word!”

Binyamin’s tapered hands with their chipped fingernails reached for the binder hesitatingly. “Okay, but…”

“Don’t say ‘okay.’ ‘Okay’—what does that mean?”

Binyamin put the binder down on the desk, poked his glasses higher on his nose, and turned pages. Now Aharon could see that there were new Post-it notes adhered to the pages, fresh pink-colored ones showing brightly against all the dull, fading yellows. Binyamin turned to one of the flagged pages, holding the binder open for Aharon expectantly.

“These?” Aharon asked, pointing to the pink flags.

Binyamin nodded. Aharon bent over the binder and looked. The same five-letter sequence, חלקחח, was on this page again, and on the next pink-flagged page, and the next.

“How many?” Aharon asked, his voice small.

“Forty-five occurrences.”

Forty-five! “But… ‘TLCTT’—it doesn’t mean anything.” But this time Aharon wasn’t so sure.

“Maybe… um… could it be a name? With the vowels, I mean?”

“How did you find this?”

Binyamin shrugged. “Just saw it,” he muttered, looking down at the page.

“Hmmm.” Aharon stroked his beard. “It might be a name. What else? Acronym? Something scientific? A chemical ingredient? A formula?” He rocked back and forth on his toes.

“Could be,” Binyamin said doubtfully. “Or it could be a name.”

Aharon had a Jewish encyclopedia CD-ROM—something Hannah had gotten him for a birthday. He tried several combinations of vowels added to the Hebrew consonants but found no matches. He did a search for the letters in the Torah and Talmud also, but that sequence of letters did not appear in plaintext of either one.

He sat back, stroking his beard. “At the university, I can find someone in physics. Maybe they’ll recognize it. Some kind of scientific term? Roman numerals? Dates?”

“Maybe,” said Binyamin. “But it could be a name.”

9

I became obsessed with good and evil. When we act or speak or even think, we create energy. In the brain, synapses fire; in speech, we create sound waves; with physical action the impact on matter is even more obvious.

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.