She should have gone back to the hospital; she could see that now. She should have told Farris about Kobinski’s manuscript and let the DoD track it down. But she’d seen the pages and just… well, she hadn’t made the best decisions.

Kobinski had her equation. It hadn’t been in the pages Handalman had shown her, not in its exact form, but the principle of it had been clearly used in other equations that were there, equations even Jill didn’t completely comprehend. Nobody understood what that meant. Nate certainly didn’t understand. To know that not only was her equation not original, but that it had been formulated in the 1940s! How could she have gone to Farris and admitted that someone else had gotten there way ahead of her, that everything he wanted was in somebody else’s work?

No. No way. She wasn’t ready to concede defeat yet, not as long as there was a chance to get that manuscript for herself. It wasn’t that she intended to bury Kobinski’s work. That would be unconscionable. No, but she could adapt it. Aharon had translated several pages for them on the plane and, however good the man’s math, some of his ideas—for example, the microscopic black hole thing—were clearly looney tunes. That was a good thing. That meant she could still be the one to place the equation in a rational, twenty-first-century framework. After all, she had rediscovered the equation after it had been lost for decades, confirmed it, really, using Quey. This didn’t have to be a complete catastrophe.

If only she could be alone with Nate so she could explain. She needed his support now, more than ever, when everything they’d worked for was balanced on the head of a pin.

Anatoli Nikiel lived outside of town, down a country road. It was a tiny place surrounded by empty land and woods. The porch light was on. They parked in the long dirt driveway and got out, shivering in the frigid temperatures. The front door opened as they drew near.

Anatoli was impossibly old and fragile. He wore a sweater that looked like the vestigial tatters on a skeleton thanks to its age and his emaciation. He welcomed them inside and took their coats, hardly seeming strong enough for the task. He disappeared to take the garments into a back room.

Jill glanced at Nate. She was so nervous her stomach was quivering. She wanted to slip her hand into his but didn’t because that would be incredibly childish, not to mention unwelcome, the way he’d been acting. Then he turned to look at her. There was a new excitement in his eyes now that they were finally here, and a smile of reassurance on his lips. For the first time in a long while, she felt as though they were in this thing together.

“Please, this way,” Anatoli said.

He motioned a hand to a short, narrow archway. It looked like something from a gnome’s dwelling. They bowed their way through it and on the other side was a miniature parlor and a man standing in the middle of the room. The stranger was blond, tan, preppyish, and someone had beaten the crap out of him. His nose was swollen and there were deep purple bruises on his face.

“Hi. I’m Denton Wyle.” He smiled. The smile looked odd on someone who’d been used as a punching bag.

Introductions went all around. There was something a little too smooth about Wyle that Jill disliked immediately. He was friendly enough, but she didn’t trust him. Still, it wasn’t her house and she couldn’t very well ask him to leave. They took chairs that Anatoli dragged into place, including a shaky wooden one brought in from another room.

As soon as they were seated, Jill began. “Rabbi Handalman says you have copies of Yosef Kobsinski’s manuscript. I’d like to see it.”

Anatoli motioned to Wyle. “One. There is only one copy. There it is. Look all you want.”

Wyle hesitated. He had a paperbound manuscript about two inches thick in his lap, which he seemed reluctant to give up. After a moment he held it out. She met his eyes as she took it.

“The Book of Torment,” he said, with an awe that made her uncomfortable.

What was this? Was there a cult around this thing or what? Wyle didn’t look like a man who’d be up on his physics. As if reading her mind, he said, “I’m a reporter. I was tracking down the Kobinski manuscript when I met Anatoli.”

“You’re working on an article about the Holocaust?”

“No, about disappearances.”

“I don’t understand.”

Wyle and Anatoli looked at each other, but neither answered. Jill didn’t really care. The manuscript was in her hands and that was the important thing. She didn’t care what the rest of these wackos were into. She had problems of her own.

She flipped past the notations she’d already seen in Seattle, past pages of text in Hebrew. She came across two sheets of mathematical equations in a sure, cramped hand and her breath caught in her throat. She got absorbed in it. After a while, she was aware that people around her began talking. She didn’t follow the conversation. She got a notepad and pen from a satchel she’d bought at the airport and dived into the math. Nate scooted his chair closer and watched her work.

She was dumbfounded. She became more so as she went along. There was her full equation, right there, and there it was again, embedded in longer sequences she didn’t recognize. There were cosines and functions that she remember vaguely from… astronomy? She thought she saw glimpses of relativity and theoretical time constructs.

After a while she stopped trying to decipher it and just let herself absorb it like another person might absorb a painting or music. Finally she put the manuscript down carefully on the floor beside her chair, along with her paper and pen. Her hands were shaking so badly she could no longer hold them. Her throat was constricted with emotion.

She’d always known that she was no genius, no child prodigy. But what she had just witnessed was a brain so much greater than her own that it provoked a stabbing pain, a kind of martyr’s wound.

The voices of the others buzzed in her ears. Nate placed his hand on the back of her arm, cupping her. The contact brought her down to earth. With some effort she got a grip. It was going to be okay. She might not be in Kobinski’s league, but she had worked the equation and discovered the one-minus-one all on her own, damn it. She’d fight all the demons of Hell before she’d give up her rights to this thing. Fortunately, these people couldn’t have a clue what it was they had. She straightened in her chair, pulling away from Nate.

Wyle was talking to Anatoli. The rabbi had the manuscript on his lap and was studying it, frowning, fingers stroking his beard.

“So,” said Handalman, closing the pages carefully. “What do we discuss? Should we discuss, maybe, the weapon?”

13.3. Denton Wyle

“I think a little background is in order first,” Anatoli said in his frail, wavering voice. “I was captured close to the Russian border. I was nineteen. The funny thing is, I was born a Jew, but my family was not religious. I even changed my name, but I got picked up anyway, as a Marxist.

“I arrived there a few months after Kobinski, at the end of 1942. It was so cold, you wouldn’t believe…”

Denton had already heard Anatoli’s story. It faded into the background as his mind wandered. He’d arrived only that morning and was in a fugue state: tired, buzzed from painkillers, barely mobile, and giddily excited. Anatoli had the complete manuscript of The Book of Torment. He had the Schwartz sections, which, apparently, Schwartz had been happy to send him when Anatoli wrote requesting them. (That stung a little, though of course Schwartz would kiss Anatoli’s butt. Big-time.) And he had the Kroll manuscript and the Yad Vashem section and lots of other pages no one had ever seen. Unfortunately, it wasn’t translated from the Hebrew, so Denton couldn’t just chug it down, but he’d managed to get the old man to translate some of it for him verbally. Better still, Anatoli had told him what happened the night Kobinski and his group had made their escape. It was everything he’d hoped for and more—and from a living eyewitness, too. He had his story!