Chapter 1
Jenna Morrison kissed her sister, Amber, goodbye. She ignored the shrieks of tiny Sophia, who was swaddled so completely in a baby blanket that her actual presence could not be confirmed by eye, as though she had fallen into a cottony-soft, mint green black hole. The swaddling did nothing, however, to lessen Sophia’s eardrum-searing screams, honed by evolution to be exceedingly irritating and impossible to ignore.
Amber patted Sophia’s back gently, holding her close, hoping that the need for a burp was causing this unholy racket and shooting her sister a look of apology and helplessness. The baby’s timing couldn’t have been worse.
“Thanks for coming, Jen,” said Amber. “You’re a life saver.”
“Are you kidding?” said Jenna, a little louder than usual to be heard over her niece’s shrieks. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. I got to see you. Bond with Sophia. Not to mention getting a baby fix. I should thank you.”
“You truly are the best,” said Amber, unable to keep the sadness at her sister’s departure, and the mounting panic Jenna knew she was feeling, from her expression.
But who could blame her for feeling panicked? Becoming a mother at twenty was one thing, but having the father disappear within two months of the birth was another, and would freak out just about anyone, regardless of their intestinal fortitude.
Jenna had flown out from San Diego as soon as possible after Amber had learned she would be raising a baby on her own, to help with Sophia and give Amber moral support, at least for a week. The visit had been a good one, and she was convinced her sister was beginning to regain her emotional stability, although regaining it fully could well take months or even years.
But it was extremely encouraging that not only did Amber not show any signs of postpartum depression, she was one of those moms who seemed to glow from within, basking in motherhood and drowning in the soothing oxytocin that was released by the infant’s tireless efforts to suck the nipples right from her body.
Jenna would have liked to stay longer, but she was in the middle of a relentlessly challenging PhD program in genetics and needed to get back to her life. And also back to her fiancé, Nathan Wexler.
“You take care of yourself,” said Jenna earnestly. “And remember, don’t let anything keep you down. Everyone has bad days. But you have a great life ahead of you. I know it. Sophia has no idea just how lucky she is.”
Amber nodded as a tear formed in the corner of one eye. Jenna kissed the mint-green blanket, pressing her lips into the material so the screaming baby could feel the weight of them on the back of her head, and then let herself into the back of the waiting cab without saying another word.
As the cab made its way to O’Hare, Jenna reflected on life. She wouldn’t wish what had happened to her sister on anyone, but babies were undeniably adorable, and many women had thrived as single mothers. And Jenna had been surprised to learn that she had a strong motherhood instinct as well, just waiting for the sight of a baby to reveal itself.
When would she and Nathan begin having a family? she wondered. And how many children would they have?
Nathan Wexler was a brilliant physicist and mathematician, and while she wasn’t nearly at his level—who was?—she was considered gifted herself. Both of their lives were sure to be demanding, and fulfilling, for as far into the future as they could imagine.
They had agreed they wanted to have kids at some point, but they had only discussed parenthood in the vaguest of generalities. True, they had plenty of time. After all, Nathan might be twenty-nine, but she was only twenty-six. But would they ever decide the time was right? In between careers and intellectual pursuits that might change the world—a possibility that was especially likely for Nathan.
After all, they hadn’t even managed to get around to making their unofficial marriage official. They had been living together now for eighteen months and already thought of themselves as husband and wife, but Jenna’s interest in stealing time from other passions to make this happen was vanishingly small. And a quickie Vegas wedding was out, as well, since Nathan’s family would never forgive them.
So they needed to find a venue. Plan out a ceremony. Invite guests.
She shuddered. She would rather sit on a mound of fire ants.
Jenna wondered how long it would take for her and Nathan to get around to tying the knot. And if they couldn’t seem to find the time to plan a wedding, would they ever get around to having kids? Maybe not.
Just a year earlier, she and Nathan had watched an old movie called Idiocracy, which they found quite humorous and often bitingly brilliant, but which had also struck a nerve. The movie’s premise was that humanity was on course, not to evolve toward greatness, but to devolve into idiocy.
And this point was made quite effectively. A narrator pointed out that the process of natural selection once ensured that the strongest, smartest, or fastest reproduced in the greatest numbers. But now, in the case of human society, with no natural predators to thin the herd, evolution didn’t reward those with the most intelligence, but simply those who reproduced the most.
The movie then demonstrated this premise by showing scenes of illiterate slobs who would screw anything that moved, including various relatives, and who seemed to think chucking chairs at each other at the slightest provocation was the height of good sport. The film showed these people reproducing with total abandon, like rabbits with a sex addiction.
Why? For lack of anything else to do with their time. Because they were impulsive and not bright enough to even understand the importance of birth control. And because the more kids they had, the bigger the welfare checks and food stamp handouts they received.
This was contrasted with a scene in which two prissy, high-IQ professionals were discussing having children. They both agreed that having children was an important decision and that they needed to wait for the right time, since child bearing wasn’t something that should be rushed into. Ultimately, they died childless.
The moral: the dimwitted and impulsive might not be able to hold a job or learn algebra, but they sure knew how to screw each other—and reproduce like crazy.
The movie took place many generations in the future, after which this reverse evolution had run its inevitable course, resulting in a society largely composed of morons.
A comedy, yes, and while the accuracy of this premise was still being debated in scientific circles, it was hard for Jenna to fault its logic.
She was brilliant, while her sister was far less so, and far more impulsive. She wondered how many children Amber would have. And if she and her super-genius husband would ever have any.
Jenna was greeted at Lindbergh Field in San Diego by a beaming but bleary-eyed Nathan Wexler, who looked the same as he had looked during their Skype calls all week—as though he were allergic to sleep.
After a long embrace, and when her luggage finally arrived at the carousel in an airport known for the slowness of its luggage retrieval, Wexler began the drive back to their small rental home in La Jolla, where he was by far the youngest full professor in the physics department of the University of California, San Diego, having already produced groundbreaking work in several areas of physics and mathematics.
Wexler peppered Jenna with questions about her visit with her sister and her view of Amber’s mental health on the way home, even though they had discussed this during their daily calls. When they arrived, he produced a bottle of expensive red wine and two elegant, oversized crystal glass goblets, and filled them up with a sparkle in his eye.
“Welcome back,” he said as he poured.
Jenna was impressed. It took a special occasion for them to use anything other than plastic cups. She and Nathan were both wearing old jeans and T-shirts, of like mind that comfort was more important than style, and fine wine in a fine crystal goblet seemed too fancy for their current attire.
It was nearing midnight and she was exhausted. In just minutes Sunday night would officially change into Monday morning, although this had occurred hours earlier in Chicago and her body was still on this time. Nathan appeared to be even more exhausted than she was, but he also had a triumphant glow about him, like he had recently won a lottery.
They had never been apart for this long since they had moved in together, so maybe this separation had affected him more than either had expected. “You know you don’t have to get me drunk to have your way with me, right?” she said, the corners of her mouth turning up into a wry smile.
What was he waiting for? They should be tearing each other’s clothes off by now. Sometimes exhaustion, especially mental exhaustion, led to epic sex. The more the brain was taken out of the equation, allowing primitive, primal instinct to run the show, the better.
“Good to know,” he replied, returning her smile. “But this isn’t about getting you drunk. If it was, I would have poured the usual. You know. From the giant carton of wine in the fridge.”
“Yeah. Last week was a good year for wine,” she replied with a grin.
“I trust you noticed that this came from an actual bottle. With an actual cork, made from, you know, cork.”
“Impressive,” she said. She raised her eyebrows. “Miss me that much?”
“Of course I missed you,” said Wexler. “But I have to admit, this is for something else.” He paused. “You’ll never guess.”
“You got a huge raise?” said Jenna.
“No, I wasn’t asking you to guess. I was saying that, literally, you could live to be a thousand and would never guess.”
Jenna laughed. He was a bit quirky, but given his intellect, far less than one might expect. And he was funny and loving and so fast on the uptake that it was dizzying.
She had always hated dumb guys. When she met Nathan, despite having been the valedictorian of her high school and earning a near perfect SAT score, she had suddenly become the slow one. Discussions with him were exhilarating.
But it had to be difficult for him. To be so far ahead of everyone else. Even the best brains in the physics department couldn’t measure up. And if brilliant people were slow by comparison, how much patience did he need to bear people who were average?
Jenna had no doubt that having the chance to be stimulated intellectually by a mental giant was worth putting up with some quirks. And this was, after all, par for the course. She had seen a movie about Stephen Hawking and how his wife had not only put up with the quirks of the super intelligent, but with a man whose entire body was paralyzed. Well, all except for his penis, which enabled them to have three children, although the thought picture of how this was accomplished wasn’t something on which she liked to dwell.
The Hawking situation had been a thousand times more difficult than anything she had to deal with. Nathan was just fashion-impaired, absentminded, and too literal sometimes. He talked to himself under his breath fairly frequently, and often couldn’t remember where he had left stuff, as though his mind was too powerful to dwell on the mundane. All traits she now found endearing.
“Okay, so if I’ll never guess, how about you telling me,” she said, raising her glass.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he replied with a grin. “I had an epiphany the day you left and have been working on it around the clock. Astonishing really. I stumbled across some esoteric mathematics that had never been found to have any real-world applications, and suddenly I had an insight that allowed me to come up with something truly remarkable.”
“How remarkable?”
“You’re about to drink wine that didn’t come out of a box, remarkable. Possible Nobel Prize remarkable. I haven’t begun to determine if there are any real-world applications, but on theoretical grounds this could be a huge breakthrough. Immense. I’m not saying it’s on the level of general relativity, but once it’s fleshed out, you never know. And even if it doesn’t quite reach the level of importance of relativity, I think it will be just as surprising to the world as this was when Einstein first presented it. And maybe as revolutionary.”
“And you’ve been working on this the entire week?”
He nodded.
This explained his lack of sleep, she realized. When he was in the throes of a major idea, he would work on it around the clock until he collapsed from exhaustion. “How is it that you never said a word about this when we Skyped?”
“Well, you were dealing with a crisis, and I wanted to make this week about you and your sister. Besides, I was never sure I wasn’t hallucinating the entire thing. I’m still not.”
“You’re killing me. Are you going to tell me what you’ve found?”
Wexler smiled. “I don’t know,” he said, teasing her. “Maybe I should wait until I’m absolutely certain. I still need to finish triple checking the calculations and logic, and have this vetted by the best minds I know, just to be sure I don’t embarrass myself. It’s possible that I’ve missed something big.”
“We both know that’s unlikely.”
“I appreciate your faith,” said Wexler sheepishly. “But in this case, the complexities of the math and logic dwarf anything I’ve ever done. This makes string theory look as simple as addition. I’ve already written Dan Walsh, telling him what I think I’ve discovered, and asking him to clear the decks for a bit so he can be a second set of eyes on it, to check for accuracy.”
Dan Walsh was a physicist at nearby UCLA and had been a close friend of Nathan Wexler for years.
“Okay,” said Jenna. “This is very cute and all, Nathan. I like how you’re trying to build the suspense. But enough already. I’m at the edge of my seat. Really.”
She set the goblet of wine down on a nearby end table. “So out with it. Spill. I’m not going to drink to a breakthrough discovery until I at least know the gist of what it is.”
Wexler tapped the screen of his cell phone and a drum roll issued from the speaker.
“Really?” said Jenna, laughing. Apparently, the wine wasn’t the only thing he had prepared for this moment. “I had no idea you were this theatrical.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he replied with a broad smile as the drum roll continued to loop in a repeating pattern.
The front door shot open and three men burst through the threshold and into their small home, as though cued by the drum roll.
For just a moment Jenna thought they might be part of the show, but something about their look, their seriousness, squelched this notion, and gave her an unmistakable sense that these men were highly dangerous. And Nathan’s reaction—his mouth dropping open and his eyes almost exploding from their sockets—made their uninvited status a certainty.
She didn’t know who these men were, or why they had stormed into their home, but one thing was certain—they were highly skilled. Not only had they managed to unlock the door without a sound, but had somehow deactivated the alarm that Nathan had set as well.
What in the hell was going on?
The men stood their ground, silently, waiting for the two scientists to digest their presence.
“Who are you?” whispered Nathan Wexler in alarm to the trio of intruders. “And what are you doing here?”
Chapter 2
Jenna knew immediately the men were not there to rob them. A team this good would have set their sights on a far more valuable prize. A mansion or an art museum. But certainly not the small house they were renting.
“Dr. Wexler,” said the tallest of the three, nodding at Nathan. “Miss Morrison. Sorry about the intrusion. But I’m afraid you need to come with us. If you cooperate,” he continued, “I can promise that you won’t be harmed.”
The man’s two companions, a short, stocky black man, and a pale blond who looked to be of German ancestry, remained silent and alert.
“Who are you?” repeated Wexler. “And what is this about?”
“This is about the discovery you just made. I need to bring you to someone who wants to discuss it with you.”
“How do you have any idea of what discoveries I might have just made?”
“Look, my mission parameters are very tight. I’ve already disclosed more than I should have. My job is to bring you in, gently, but ask you to put off all questions until you meet with my boss. Apparently, any discussion I might have with you is above my pay grade.”
“And if we refuse?” said Jenna.
The man shook his head while his two colleagues maintained a calm but hardened look. “I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer.”
Jenna’s mind raced. The man hadn’t made an explicit threat, nor had he drawn a gun. But then again, he didn’t have to. She had no doubt that just one of these men, unarmed, could probably best her and Nathan if they both had machine guns in their hands.
What had Nathan discovered? How did they know about it so quickly? And Nathan had said his discovery was largely theoretical, with unclear real-world applications, so why the intense interest?
“We’ll be leaving in a moment,” said the gang’s spokesman. “Apologies again, but we first need to take care of a few things.”
He nodded toward his two companions who began to carry out what were obviously pre-planned tasks. The blond made his way to Wexler’s desktop computer and produced a small screwdriver, expertly dismantling the computer and removing the hard drive in less than a minute.
His colleague searched the house for several minutes and returned holding Wexler’s laptop. “I’ve confirmed that he only has the one desktop and one laptop, as per our intel,” he reported. “I’ve also removed all of our bugs.”
The tall man nodded while Jenna’s heart leaped to her throat. They had been bugged? For how long? And why?
But if this was about Nathan’s recent discovery, she reasoned, he had only spoken of it out loud minutes earlier. They couldn’t possibly have carried out an operation with this little notice. The conclusion was inescapable. Along with the bugs, they must have been monitoring Nathan’s phone and computers as well. Nathan had told her that he had sent an e-mail about his discovery to Dan Walsh recently. This must have set the wheels of this raid on their home in motion.
The tall man lifted a phone to his face. No 3D image hovered in the space before him, which meant he had purposely kept the call audio-only. “I trust you’ve copied everything in Wexler’s cloud storage account, correct?” he said into the phone.
He listened to the response, which must have been an affirmative. “Great. Go ahead and wipe the account, then,” he ordered, and then ended the call.
He turned to the two scientists. “I’m afraid I need you to give me your phones,” he said, holding out his hand.
Jenna glanced at Nathan. He blew out a long breath and nodded, handing the tall spokesman his phone, and Jenna followed suit. Once this was done, the man gestured toward the front door, ignoring Jenna’s laptop that was still packed in her carry-on luggage. She was somehow certain that these men knew her laptop was there, but had no interest in any of her work.
“I’d love to be civilized,” said the tall intruder, clearly the group’s leader and spokesman. “So can I count on the two of you not to scream or attract attention? These actions won’t change a thing, and I’m sure you’d prefer not to be gagged. We’ll be gone before anyone can intervene or call the cops.” He shrugged. “And to be honest, even if they do, it won’t matter.”
He said it with such a total air of certainty that it was impossible for Jenna not to believe him.
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