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.

He wanted it so badly!

The library doors were closed, but they weren’t locked. He slipped inside and shut himself in.

Where was it? He was sure Schwartz had a complete or nearly complete copy of The Book of Torment. Denton had pictured the whole thing in a drawer, bound in blue ribbon, somewhere in this library. Or it might be on a shelf in a place of honor, like a trophy. And he, Denton, would help himself. Of course he would take it. Schwartz would never be able to prove it was him. It could be any student, for example, or one of the cult members stealing it for his own nefarious purposes. Why not? Schwartz would have other copies, just as Denton had had copies of what had been taken in Stuttgart. Tit for tat. Tat for tit. I tawght I taw a titty tat.

Denton giggled hysterically. He turned on his flashlight and swung it around the room.

Most of the bookshelves he could dismiss out of hand. They were full of standard-looking texts, and Kobinski’s work would not be in such lowly company. The long library tables were clean and shone in the beam of his flashlight. He was surprised to find that the library was different than he’d remembered it—smaller. The area he thought he’d remembered the men standing in was not some secret niche, as it turned out, or any kind of niche at all. On that side of the room there was only another long table by the window. Denton scanned the walls and furniture nearby.

There was an old-fashioned writing desk, the kind that had a fold-down lid. It was huge, as such things went. Dozens of drawers, small and large, surrounded the lid. Denton knew in his gut that if the Kobinski material was in the library, that was where it would be. He began to search the drawers, pausing every few moments to listen, head lifted, ears perked. He could picture Schwartz (in slippers and house robe now), silently approaching down the hall, gliding like Nosferatu. No, he wouldn’t think about that.

He wanted that moment, that exquisite moment, of laying his fingers on the manuscript. He wanted to get the hell out of here. The thought of being in his car, on the freeway to New York, with the manuscript in the passenger seat, made him continue no matter how badly he was quaking.

In the drawers he found: paper, ink, pens, twine, rubber bands, Post-its, staples, a Hebrew-English pocket dictionary. In one small drawer he found several pairs of long, flat-pronged tweezers and a magnifying glass. He did not find the manuscript or any fragments thereof.

He searched twice, growing more frantic and feeling a leaden knowing descend. When he was done, he wiped his face. There was sweat on his brow and Denton Wyle never sweated. He was sweating now all right, because he knew where it was. He knew exactly where! It was inside the desk, under that lid. And the closed lid’s most prominent feature was a large, ornate keyhole.

That, of course, didn’t mean it was locked.

But it is! You know it is, because that’s just freaking like him!

Denton put the flashlight down on a nearby shelf, beam pointed toward the desk, and tried the lid, pulling wherever he could grasp with gloved fingers. Yup. It was locked.

“Crap!”