He was on the verge of losing it. He tried to slow his breathing using a technique he’d learned from his psychoanalyst. Slow inhale, one-two-three-four, exhale in a ha ha ha ha pattern, jerking his lungs like fish on a line. Repeat. Again. Repeat. Again.

Now. Key. Where would the key be kept? Schwartz’s office at best, on the man himself at worst. Denton knew where the office was, though it meant possible exposure. Still, the school was asleep, right? And he would be very, very careful. He turned off his flashlight, tucked it into his belt, and went back into the hall.

The door to Schwartz’s office was easy to recognize. It was at the end of the hall and had a sunken curved arch. It was closed. It was locked.

Denton pounded the stone wall impotently, sobbing under his breath. There was no point in breaking in here. The key might not even be in the office, and the whole point of the key was to avoid breaking into something. Why the hell were they buttoned down so tight? Didn’t that paranoid bastard trust his own people?

“Of course not,” Denton said hatefully. “Not that megalomaniac.”

None of this got him anywhere. Even while he indulged in a momentary pity party, in his gut he knew what he had to do. He would have to break the damn desk. No choice. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be quiet. He’d need tools. He hadn’t brought a crowbar or anything, hadn’t wanted to admit to himself that it might come to that.

In the hall he listened. It was absolutely quiet and dark. He went back to the coat closet.

Predictably, he did not find a crowbar in there, or even a screwdriver. What he did find was a massive old umbrella, of the kind built before World War Two. It was large, with a narrow tip, and it looked like a steamroller couldn’t bend it.

Umbrella in hand like Mary-freaking-Poppins, Denton crept back to the library. He checked his watch: 12:45.

He began to work at the desk lid. By 1:00 he had pushed, pried, and prodded enough of a gap in the wood near the lock to fully insert the umbrella’s tip. He knew what came next. He paused, shaking out his aching hands and doing the ha-ha breath again, rolled his neck, considered strategy. Strategy, however, was not his thing.

He inserted the umbrella into the divot and pulled back hard. For a long suspended moment, nothing happened. Then he felt something give, ever so slightly, and with an enormous crack the desk lid opened about an inch and then stopped. Denton grabbed his flashlight and examined it quickly. The wood that held the lock had splintered but not completely. He shoved the flashlight between his legs and rammed the umbrella in deeper, pulled back with all his might. There was another groaning, splintery sound and the desk lid flew open. Denton went reeling. The flashlight slipped from between his thighs and rolled away. He dived after it. The noise from the breakage was still loud in his ears, but he thought he heard other sounds as well, footsteps upstairs. Frantic, he trained the light on the open desk.

There were loose papers in Hebrew, a few books, and a large black binder. He flipped the binder open. Inside, he recognized Xerox copies of Kobinski pages. There were several hundred pages in there. He grabbed the binder and ran for the library doors.

Now there were definite footsteps overhead, at least two sets, and deep voices. He sprinted down the hall and into the foyer, seeing no one, heart tripping like a jackhammer. He hit the front doors at full tilt, only realizing now that they might be locked. He had a flash of himself banging at the doors while Schwartz entered the foyer with his clan of side-locked, black-garbed cultists, all of them stumbling toward him, arms out in front of them, eyes glassy, like a bunch of Jewish zombies and…

But the doors were institutional doors, with a large horizontal push bar at waist level. As he hit the bar, the heavy door swung open and the night air was on his face. He barely had time to feel relief when an alarm bell blared. He fled across the wide driveway, across the lawn, onto the main road. He opted for the trees, sure they were right behind him. He crashed through the woods, heading north toward his parked car. He hazarded a glance back.

Lights were blazing from one downstairs window and—now—the lights in the foyer went on. But no one was after him, not yet.

Denton ran. He had done it! He had the manuscript!

9.3. Jill Talcott

Jill Talcott was home with the flu. She’d been up twice in the night vomiting. Between heaves, she’d thought about Nate’s warning. They were at 75 percent power on the negative one pulse. Was it making her ill? But no, a lot of people were down with the flu—most of the people in their department. It didn’t necessarily mean anything.

She had planned to call the lab, let Nate know she wasn’t coming in, but she had finally fallen asleep around seven. The phone jarred her awake an hour later.

“Hello?” she answered groggily.

“Are you okay?”

Nate’s voice. With her head raised off the pillow to answer the phone, Jill felt a wave of dizziness that nearly undid her. “Flu. I was going to call—”

“Oh god.”

“ ’s all right.”

“No, it’s not. Someone broke into the lab.”

Jill dragged on a pair of sweats and drove over to the university. She was feeling a little better by the time she got there, if only because she was so panicked that it distracted her from what her body was feeling. When she got to the basement, Nate was busy on the computer. Her eyes swept around the room but didn’t see any signs of disturbance.

“The door,” he said grimly.

He followed her back out into the hall and they examined the dead bolt together. They’d had it installed when they first moved down here—it had been bright and shiny new. Now there were scratch marks on the surface of it, near the key slot, and there were heavy marks, too, on the wooden doorjamb, where the dead bolt went in.

“Are you sure they actually got in?”

“Stuff’s been moved around.”

“Show me.”

Back in the room, Jill turned the lock behind her, feeling violated. Nate went to his chair. “I had a bunch of papers near my keyboard. Someone moved them into a stack. I think there might be some missing.”

“What! What’s missing? What was in them?”

“Just my notes. I’m not sure.” He rubbed his forehead with two fingers. The circles under his eyes were grape-colored. She realized he was muddled and that pissed her off.

“Nate! This is important!”

“I’m not sure what pages!”

“Well, what else did they get?” She looked around the room anxiously and went over to their lab subjects. It didn’t appear as though any of the cages or specimens had been touched. The white board was intact, but the sight of it, the realization that someone—and she thought she knew who—knew all that, had seen it…

“And maybe stuff on the computer,” Nate said dourly.

“The computer!” She stomped over to the machine.

“I think the papers were moved around so that they could get at the keyboard.”

“Nate!”

His face darkened with anger. “How exactly is this my fault?”

She moved around the desk and looked at the screen. It was running Windows, and right at the bottom of the shortcut list was the little happy-face icon Nate used for their wave simulator. She moaned. “Someone could have gotten the sim? Doesn’t it have all the Quey data in it? And the differential routine, the one that discovered the one-minus-one wave?”

Nate clenched his jaw. “Yes.”

“Could they have copied the program?”

“The directory’s too big to fit on disk, but they could have downloaded it to the university network and copied it anywhere they liked.”