Quantum

58

Kilkenny followed the lean, muscular man into the deeper recesses of the building. Temporary walls of unfinished gypsum board blocked off large portions of the facility that were still under renovation, and mirrored half domes covering security cameras appeared in the corridors at regular intervals.

The security man led Kilkenny upstairs to an interior suite that was divided into a large laboratory space — which currently stood empty — and a row of offices. Several of the boxes stored along one side of the future lab space still bore the packing labels Sandstrom had placed on them back in June.

Kilkenny’s escort pointed to the first door, then turned and departed. Avvakum’s guard opened the office door, motioning for Kilkenny to step inside. Avvakum all but ignored his arrival.

‘Hello,’ Kilkenny said in a friendly voice as he entered the office. The guard closed the door behind him. ‘We weren’t introduced earlier. My name is Nolan Kilkenny.’

‘Kilkenny?’ she questioned, looking up from the papers on her desk. ‘You are the one I sent the message to?’

‘Yes, and I wanted to thank you for that.’

‘Why? It did no good, and now I am a prisoner here.’

‘It helped me discover who was responsible for the attack on Sandstrom and, more recently, the kidnapping of two women, one of whom is very special to me.’

Avvakum smiled weakly at the thought that Kilkenny would travel halfway around the world in order to free the woman he loved. All her years of isolation had left Avvakum with no one to do the same for her.

‘Why did Orlov send you here?’

‘I’m supposed to teach you how to decode the notebooks his men stole from us.’

‘I don’t want to give him what’s in those notebooks,’ Avvakum said with a sigh. ‘He doesn’t deserve it.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, but I don’t think either of us really has much choice in the matter.’

‘Let me clear off some of this mess for you.’

Kilkenny gave Avvakum a hand in moving several piles of computer printouts onto the floor, then he moved a second chair around so that they both could sit on the same side of her long desk. He unzipped his briefcase, set his laptop on the desk near Avvakum’s computer, and connected the two machines together with a gray cable. He then pressed the power switch and booted up the laptop.

‘Are the image files from the notebooks on your computer?’

‘No, they’re kept on one of the network servers in the company’s main building in Moscow.’

‘Do you still have access?’

‘Some. I’m restricted to areas specifically related to my project and have no outside access at all.’

‘We won’t need it. Are you logged in to the network?’

‘Da.’

‘Good, then I’ll go to work.’

Using a mix of mouse clicks and keyed-in commands, Kilkenny opened up a window on the laptop’s color active-matrix screen. The faint sound of a telephone being dialed pulsed out of the laptop’s speakers before Kilkenny turned off the sound.

‘What was that?’ Avvakum asked.

‘Nothing much, just a little communications program.’

In silence, the laptop completed dialing the preprogrammed sequence that Kilkenny had requested, initiating a satellite phone call from its internal modem to the network switchboard at MARC in Ann Arbor.

The MARC network answered, and the two machines electronically shook hands — exchanged communications protocols — verifying that they could trade information without difficulty. Once the two machines synchronized themselves, the window filled with the MARC network logo and requested Kilkenny’s user name and password. He typed in both and logged on to the MARC network.

A message appeared across the top of the window.

Kilkenny smiled. YOU BET, he typed in reply.

Kilkenny knew that on the other side of the world, Grin had the Spyder primed and ready to attack Orlov’s computer network. The window went blank. Kilkenny minimized it, making all but a small icon disappear from the screen. Now that the Spyder controlled the connection between the two computers, there was no reason to waste time displaying what it was doing.

‘Well, now that our computers are all talking to one another, I guess we could try and decode some more of Johann Wolff’s notebooks.’

From a new window, Kilkenny tapped into Avvakum’s computer and downloaded one of the scanned image files from Wolff’s notebooks that had been stolen five days earlier. He brought up the decoding program and selected the image file for processing.

‘That’s all there is to it; you just pick the encrypted file and tell my program to translate it.’

Avvakum watched eagerly as the computer slowly, character by character, transformed the blocks of unintelligible characters back into the thoughts of the long-dead physicist.

Kilkenny sat back in his chair. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Back in Orlov’s office, when you read the pages I’d already decoded, what did you find?’

‘You haven’t read them?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Not really. I don’t speak much German, and even less quantum physics. I assume you’re fluent in both.’

Avvakum smiled and turned her head, embarrassed by the compliment and the attention.

‘The work of your colleague, Ted Sandstrom, is brilliant. He has made remarkable strides with his experiments, and his discovery may well change how many things are done. From what little I’ve seen of the work of Johann Wolff, I believe he was developing theories that promise to open a new way of thinking about the physical universe.’