The Einstein Equation

11 The Marrow of the Matter

Sam’s captor took the off-ramp east onward the A68, heading toward the unknown.

“Where are you taking me?” Sam asked, keeping his voice even and amicable.

“Vogrie,” the man answered.

“Vogrie Country Park?” Sam responded without a second thought.

“Aye, Sam,” the man replied.

Sam gave the swift answer some thought, assessing the level of threat connected to the venue. It was quite the pleasant place, actually, not the kind of area where he would necessarily get gutted or hanged from a tree. In fact, the park was frequented continually, being laid out by woodlands where people came to play golf, hike or entertain their children at the resident play area. He instantly felt better. One thing prompted him to ask again. “By the way, what is your name, mate? You look very familiar, but I doubt I actually know you.”

“My name is George Masters, Sam. You know me from ugly black and white photographs courtesy of our mutual friend, Aidan, at the Edinburgh Post,” he elucidated.

“When referring to Aidan as a friend, are you sarcastic or is he genuinely your friend?” Sam pried.

“No, we are friends in the old fashioned sense,” George answered, his eyes sternly on the road. “I am taking you to Vogrie so that we can talk and then I will let you go.” He slowly turned his head to bless Sam with his countenance and added, “I did not intend to chase you, but you have a tendency to react with extreme prejudice before you even know what is going on. How you compose yourself during sting operations are above my comprehension.”

“I was drunk when you cornered me in the men’s room, George,” Sam tried to explain, but it had no corrective effect. “What was I supposed to think?”

George Masters chuckled. “I suppose you did not expect to see someone as pretty as I am in that bar. I could have done things better… or you could spend more time sober.”

“Hey, it was my fucking birthday,” Sam defended. “I was entitled to get pissed.”

“Maybe so, but that is irrelevant now,” George retorted. “You ran then and you ran again, without even giving me a chance to explain what I want with you.”

“I suppose you are right,” Sam sighed, as they turned off into the route leading to Vogrie’s beautiful environment. The Victorian house from which the name of the park came, appeared through the trees as the car slowed considerably.

“The river will obscure our discussion,” George mentioned, “just in case they are following or listening.”

“They?” Sam frowned, fascinated by the paranoia of his kidnapper, the same man who criticized Sam’s own paranoid reactions not a moment ago. “You mean, anyone who did not see the carnival of high speed fuckwittery we engaged in through the neighborhood?”

“You know who they are, Sam. They have been disturbingly patient, watching you and the pretty historian… watching David Purdue…,” he said as they walked to the bank of the River Tyne that ran through the estate.

“Wait, you know Nina and Purdue?” Sam gasped. “What do they have to do with why you are after me?”

George sighed. It was time to get to the marrow of the matter. He stopped without saying another word, combed the horizon with eyes hidden under mutilated brows. The water gave Sam a sense of peace, eve under the drizzle of the gray clouds. His hair whipped about his face as he waited for George to clarify his purpose.

“I will keep it short, Sam,” George said. “I cannot explain now, how I know all this, but just trust me that I do.” Noting that the journalist was just staring at him without expression, he continued. “Do you still have the footage of the Dire Serpent, Sam? The footage that you recorded while you were all in the Lost City, do you have it on you?”

Sam thought quickly. He elected to keep his answers blurred until he was certain of George Masters’ intent. “No, I left the footage with Dr. Gould, but she is abroad.”

“Really?” George replied nonchalantly. “You should read the papers, Mr. Renowned Journalist. Yesterday she saved the life of a prominent member of her hometown, so either you are lying to me or she is capable of bilocation.”

“Listen, just tell me what you have to tell me, for fuck’s sake. Your shitty approach had me writing off my car and I still have that shit to deal with when you are done playing games in the play park,” Sam barked.

“Do you have the footage of the Dire Serpent on you?” George reiterated with his own brand of intimidation. Each word was like a hammer on anvil blow to Sam’s ears. He had no way out of the conversation, and no way out of the park without George.

“The… Dire Serpent?” Sam persisted. He knew little about the things Purdue asked him to film in the gut of the mountain in New Zealand, and he preferred it that way. His curiosity was usually restrained to that which interested him, and physics and numbers was not his thing.

“Jesus Christ!” George raged in his slow, slurry speech. “The Dire Serpent, a pictogram made up of a succession of variables and symbols, Cleave! Also known as an equation! Where is that footage?”

Sam threw up his hands in surrender. People under umbrellas noticed the raised voices of the two men, peering out from their shelters, and hikers turned to see what the commotion was about. “Alright, God! Relax,” Sam whispered hard. “I do not have the footage on me, George. Not here and now. Why?”

“David Purdue must never get his hands on those pictures, do you understand?” George warned in a raspy quiver. “Never! I don’t care what you have to tell him, Sam. Just delete it. Corrupt the files, whatever.”

“That is all he cares about, chum,” Sam informed him. “I would go as far as saying that he is obsessed with it.”

“I am aware of that, pal,” George hissed back at Sam. “That is precisely the goddamn problem. He is being used by a puppet master much, much bigger than him.”

“They?” Sam asked sarcastically, referring to George’s paranoid theory.

The man with the molten skin had had it with Sam Cleave’s juvenile display and he lunged out, grasping Sam by the collar and shaking him with terrifying power. For a moment, Sam felt like a small child being flung around by a St. Bernard, forcing him to remember that George’s physical strength was almost inhuman.

“Now you listen and you listen well, mate,” he hissed in Sam’s face, his breath smelling like tobacco and mint. “If David Purdue gets hold of that equation, the Order of the Black Sun will triumph!”

Sam tried in vain to pry the burned man’s hands apart, only pissing him off eve more. George shook him again, and then let him go so abruptly that he staggered backwards. As Sam struggled to find his footing, George stepped closer. “Do you even realize what you are causing? Purdue must not work on the Dire Serpent. He is the genius they have been waiting for to solve that fucking math problem since their previous golden boy designed it. Unfortunately, said golden boy grew a conscience and destroyed his paper, but not before a chambermaid copied it down while cleaning his room. Needless to tell you that she was an operative, working for the Gestapo.”

“Who was their golden boy, then?” Sam asked.

Astonished, George looked at Sam. “You don’t know? Ever heard of a bloke called Einstein, my friend? Einstein, the ‘Theory of Relativity’-guy, worked on something a little more destructive than the atom bomb, but with similar traits. Look, I am a scientist, but I am no genius. Nobody could complete that equation, thank God, and that is why the late Dr. Kenneth Wilhelm jotted it down inside the Lost City. Nobody was supposed to survive that fucking snake pit.”

Sam recalled Dr. Wilhelm, who owned the farm in New Zealand where the Lost City was located. He was a Nazi scientist, unbeknownst to most, having gone by the name of Williams for many years.

“Alright, alright. Suppose I bought all this,” Sam implored with his hands raised again. “What are the repercussions of this equation? I will need a really concrete excuse to deliver to Purdue, who, by the way, must be planning my demise about now. Your mad pursuit cost me a meeting with him. Christ, he must be livid.”

George shrugged. “You shouldn’t have run.”

Sam knew he was right. Had Sam simply confronted George at his front door and asked, it would have saved him a lot of trouble. Above all, he would still have had a car. Then again, grieving over shit that already transpired was of no benefit to Sam.

“I am not clear on the fine details, Sam, but between me and Aidan Glaston, the general consensus is that this equation will facilitate a monumental shift in the current paradigm of physics,” George conceded. “From what Aidan managed to find out from his sources, this calculation will cause havoc on a global scale. It will enable an object to punch through a veil between dimensions, causing our own physics to clash with what is on the other side. The Nazi’s were experimenting with it, similar to the Unified Field Theory claims that could not be proven.”

“And how would the Black Sun benefit from this, Masters?” Sam asked, putting to use his journalistic talent for sifting through bullshit. “They live in the same time and space as the rest of the world. It is ludicrous to think they would experiment with shit that would destroy them with everything else.”

“Maybe so, but have you tapped in on even half the weird, twisted shit they actually enforced during the Second World War?” George retorted. “Most of what they tried to do had absolutely no use in general, yet they still carried out atrocious experiments just to cross that barrier, believing it would advance their knowledge of the working of other sciences — those sciences we cannot grasp yet. Who is to say that this is not another preposterous attempt at perpetuating their insanity and control?”

“I get what you say, George, but I sincerely do not think even they are this insane. If anything, there has to be some tangible reason for them to wish to achieve this, but what could it be?” Sam argued. He wanted to believe George Masters, but his theories had too many holes. On the other hand, by the man’s desperation, his story was worth checking out, at least.

“Listen, Sam, whether you believe me or not, just do me a favor, and look into it before you allow David Purdue to get his hands on this equation,” George begged.

Sam nodded in agreement. “He is a good man. If these claims have any gravity, he would destroy it himself, trust me.”

“I know he is a philanthropist. I know how he fucked the Black Sun six ways to Sunday when he realized what they were planning for the world, Sam,” the slurring scientist explained impatiently. “But what I cannot seem to get through to you, is that Purdue is unaware of his role in the destruction. He is blissfully oblivious to the fact that they are using his genius and his innate curiosity to steer him right into the abyss. It is not about whether he agrees or not. He is better off having no idea where the equation is, otherwise they will kill him… and you and the lady from Oban.”

Finally, Sam caught the hint. He decided to stall a bit before giving the footage to Purdue, if only to give George Masters the benefit of the doubt. It would be difficult to get clarity on the suspicion without leaking vital information to random sources. Apart from Purdue, there were few people who could advise him on the danger held within this calculation, and even those who could… he would never know if they could be trusted.

“Take me home, please,” Sam requested of his abductor. “I will look into it before I do anything, alright?”

“I am trusting you, Sam,” George said. It sounded more like an ultimatum than an oath of confidence. “If you do not destroy that footage, you will regret it for the short stretch of what would be left of your life.”