The Einstein Equation

17 And the Yoke is Fixed

“My God, Sam, I thought you had been killed in action. Where in God’s name have you been?” Purdue raved when he saw the tall, rugged journalist standing in his door. Purdue was still under the influence of his recent sedation, but he was cogent enough. He sat up in bed. “Did you bring the Lost City footage? I have to get to work on the equation.”

“Christ, calm down, will you?” Sam scowled. “I went through hell and back because of this fucking equation of yours, so a polite ‘hello’ is the least you can do.”

If Charles had a more colorful personality, he would have rolled his eyes by now. Instead, he stood stiff and disciplined, while fascinated at the two usually jovial men. They had both magically gone sour! Purdue had been a frantic maniac since he came home and Sam Cleave had turned into a bombastic jerk. Charles reckoned correctly, that both men had been through a great deal of emotional trauma and neither exhibited signs of good health or sleep.

“Do you need anything else, sir?” he dared ask his employer, but surprisingly, Purdue was mellow.

“No, thank you, Charles. Will you please close the door behind you?” Purdue requested politely.

“Certainly, sir,” Charles replied.

After the door clicked shut, Purdue and Sam stared intensely at one another. All they heard in the privacy of Purdue’s bedroom was the song of the finches that occupied the large pine tree outside and Charles discussing fresh sheets with Lillian a few doors down the hallway.

“So, how have you been?” Purdue asked, performing the first obligatory display of courtesy. Sam laughed. He opened his camera case and removed an external hard drive from behind his Canon. He tossed it on Purdue’s lap and said, “Let us not bullshit ourselves with pleasantries. This is all you want from me and frankly, I am goddamn happy to be rid of the bloody footage once and for all.”

Purdue smirked, shaking his head. “Thanks Sam,” he smiled at his friend. “In all seriousness, though, why are you this happy to get rid of it? I recall you saying that you wanted to edit it into a documentary for the Wildlife Society or something.”

“That was the plan at first,” Sam admitted, “but I am just tired of it all. I was kidnapped by a crazed madman, trashed my car, and ended up losing a dear old colleague, all in the stretch of three days, mate. According to his last entry — I hacked his e-mail,” Sam explained, “according to that, he was onto something big.”

“Big?” Purdue asked, slowly getting dressed behind his antique rosewood screen.

“End-of-the-world big,” Sam confessed.

Purdue peeked over the top of the ornate carvings. He looked like a sophisticated meerkat at attention. “And? What did he say? And what is this about a madman?”

“Oh, it is a long story,” Sam sighed, still reeling from the ordeal. “The coppers will be looking for me, since I wrote off my car in broad daylight… in a car chase through Old Town, endangering people and such.”

“My God, Sam, what is his problem? Did you elude him?” Purdue inquired, groaning his way into his clothing.

“Like I said, it is a long story, but first I have to follow up on the assignment my former colleague at the Post was working on,” Sam said. His eyes looked moist, but he kept talking. “Have you ever heard of Aidan Glaston?”

Purdue shook his head. He had probably seen the name somewhere but it did not ring any bells for him. Sam shrugged, “They murdered him. Two days ago, he was found in the room where his editor had him checked in on a sting operation in Castlemilk. With him was some bloke he probably knew, shot execution style. Aidan was strung up like a fucking pig, Purdue.”

“Oh my God, Sam. I am so sorry to hear that,” Purdue sympathized. “Are you taking his place on assignment?”

As Sam had hoped, Purdue was so obsessed with starting work on the equation as soon as possible, that he forgot to ask about the madman who chased Sam. It would have been too much to explain in such short time, and ran the risk of alienating Purdue. He would not want to know that the work he had been dying to start on was reputed to be a tool of destruction. Surely, he would have written it off on paranoia or deliberate interference from Sam, so the journalist left it at that.

“I have spoken to his editor and she is sending me to Belgium for that clandestine summit, masquerading as a renewable energy address. Aidan thought it was a front for something sinister, and the mayor of Oban is one of them,” Sam elucidated concisely. He knew that Purdue paid little attention anyway. Sam got up and closed his camera case, glancing at the drive he left for Purdue. His stomach gave a twinge when he looked at it lying there, silently menacing, but his gut feeling had no integrity without facts to back it up. All he could do was to hope that George Masters was deluded, and that he, Sam, had not just delivered the extinction of mankind into the hands of a physics wizard.

Sam was relieved to leave Wrichtishousis. This was odd, because it was like his second home. Something about the equation on the footage he gave Purdue made him feel sick. Only a few times in his life, did he feel like this and it was usually after he had committed misdemeanors or when he lied to his late fiancé, Patricia. This time it had a darker, final feel to it, but he chalked it up to his own guilty conscience.

Purdue was gracious enough to lend Sam his 4x4 until he could get a new set of wheels. His old car had not been insured, because Sam preferred to keep under the radar of public records and low security servers, for fear that the Black Sun might get curious. After all, the police would probably lock him up if they traced him. It was a godsend that his car, inherited from a deceased high school pal, was not registered in his name.

It was late afternoon. Sam marched proudly up to the big Nissan and gave it a wolf whistle, pressing the immobilizer button. The lights flashed on and off twice before he heard the central locking disengage. A pretty woman came out from under the trees, heading for the front door of the mansion. She was carrying a medical bag, but she was dressed in plain clothes. In passing, she smiled at him, “Was that whistle for me?”

Sam had no idea how to respond. If he said yes, she could slap him, and he would be lying. If he denied it, he would be a weirdo caking with a car. Quick thinker that Sam was, he stood there like a fool with his hand in the air.

“Are you Sam Cleave?” she asked.

Bingo!

“Aye, that would be me,” he beamed. “And you are?”

The young woman strolled up to Sam and wiped the smile off her face. “Have you brought him the footage he asked, Mr. Cleave? Have you? I hope so, because his health had been spiraling downward while you took your sweet bloody time delivering it to him.”

Her sudden cattiness was out of line, in his opinion. Where he would usually appreciate feisty women as a fun challenge, the toils of late left him slightly less docile.

“Excuse me, doll, but who are you to chastise me?” Sam returned the favor. “From what I observe here with your little bag, is that you are a home care giver, a nurse at best, and certainly not one of Purdue’s long standing associations.” He opened the driver side door. “Now why don’t you skip along and do what you are paid to do, hey? Or do you wear a nurse’s outfit for those special call-outs?”

“How dare you?” she hissed, but Sam could not hear the rest. The lavish comforts of the 4x4’s cab was especially good at soundproofing and it reduced her rant to a muffled babbling. He started the vehicle’s engine and relished the luxury before reversing dangerously close to the upset stranger with the medical bag.

Laughing like a naughty child, Sam waved at the security guards at the gate as he left Wrichtishousis in his wake. On his way down the snaking road toward Edinburgh, his phone rang. It was Janice Noble, editor of the Edinburgh Post, notifying him of the rendezvous point in Belgium, where he was to meet her local correspondent. From there, they would sneak him into one of the private boxes in the gallery of the La Monnaie, to enable him to gather as much intelligence as possible.

“Please be careful, Mr. Cleave,” she said finally. “Your airline ticket has been e-mailed to you.”

“Thank you, Ms. Noble,” Sam replied. “I will be there within the next day. We will get to the bottom of this.”

As soon as Sam hanged up, he got a call from Nina. For the first time in a few days he was happy to hear from someone. “Hello, Gorgeous!” he cheered.

“Sam, are you still drunk?” was her first response.

“Um, no,” he answered with dampened enthusiasm. “Just happy to hear from you. That is all.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “Listen, I have to talk to you. Can you maybe meet me somewhere?”

“In Oban? I am actually on my way out of the country,” Sam explained.

“No, I left Oban last night. That is what I want to talk to you about, actually. I am at the Radisson Blu on the Royal Mile,” she said, sounding a little frazzled. By Nina Gould’s standards, frazzled meant something huge went down. She was not easy to rattle.

“Alright, check out. I am coming to pick you up and then we can talk at my place while I pack. How does that sound?” he suggested.

“ETA?” she asked. Sam knew something had to have hounded Nina, when she did not even bother to interrogate him on the finer details. If she came right out and asked for his estimated time of arrival, she had already made up her mind to accept his offer.

“I will be there in thirty minutes, give or take, for traffic,” he confirmed, checking the digital clock on the dashboard.

“Thanks Sam,” she said in a waning tone that alarmed him. Then, she was gone. All the way to her hotel, Sam felt as if a colossal yoke was put on him. Poor Aidan’s horrible fate, along with his theories about McFadden, Purdue’s moody altering and George Masters’ disturbing way of apprehending Sam only added to the worry he now had for Nina as well. He was so preoccupied with her well-being that he hardly noticed that he had traversed the busy roadways of Edinburgh. A few minutes later, he arrived at Nina’s hotel.

He recognized her immediately. Her boots and jeans made her look more like a rock star than a historian, but her tapered suede blazer and pashmina scarf tamed the look somewhat — enough to make her look as sophisticated as she was. Stylish as she was dressed, it did not redeem her fatigued face. Usually beautiful even by natural standards, the historian’s big dark eyes had lost their luster.

She had a lot to tell Sam and very little time to do it in. She wasted no time in getting into the truck, and cut right to the chase. “Hey Sam. Can I crash at your house while you are God knows where?”

“Sure,” he replied. “Good to see you too.”

It was uncanny how, in one day, Sam had been reunited with both his best friends and they both greeted him with indifference and world-weary misery.