Dante’s Equation Read online

  An hour later, Aharon was in his office at Aish HaTorah. Aish HaTorah was a “master of the return” school, designed to teach Unorthodox Jews the ways of Orthodoxy. The Jews in question were usually young Americans whose parents were nonpracticing or (which was maybe worse) Conservative or Reformed. Aharon taught Talmud and Midrash. It wasn’t much money, but it placed him across from the wall all day, and his class schedule left him plenty of time to pursue his real passion—Torah code.

  The code was the flame in Aharon’s heart. The greatest rabbis had always known there were messages hidden in the Torah, but the sages, may they rest in peace, didn’t have microchips. Now you could run a program, give it a keyword like heaven, and the search routine would scan the Hebrew letters of the Torah looking for the keyword hidden in the text. A “hidden” word appeared via Equidistant Letter Spacing—the ELS or skip. For example, the plaintext phrase “The Rabbis hoped and prayed for God to lead the people over land and over sea to the kingdom of their being, Eretz Yisrael” contained the hidden word heaven at a skip of eleven: “The Rabbis hoped and prayed for God to lead the people over land and over sea to the kingdom of their being, Eretz Yisrael.”

  What had really stunned the world was the presence of arrays of related words and phrases in the Hebrew Bible. Arrays were arrangements of the plaintext letters into columns the width of the skip. These arrays made it easier to find related words or phrases near the original keyword.

  The fact that such arrays were sought in the Hebrew version of the text made the task both easier and harder.

  But… the scientific community was outraged, naturally. What good could atheists have to say about divinely implanted messages? Their most damning rebuttal showed that similar “themed word arrays” could be found in any text—War and Peace, for example. Hence Aharon’s current line of research.

  He was still puzzling over the latest stack of printouts when Binyamin Yoriv came in.

  “Good!” Aharon grunted. “I have a riddle for you.”

  “Is that from last night’s test?” Binyamin crossed to the desk.

  Aharon shrank back. The boy had halitosis and a skin problem that left scales in his wake. It was written that God gave everyone a mix of assets and flaws, but Binyamin’s assets, like the Torah code itself, were extremely well hidden.

  “What happened?” Binyamin asked. “Was there a bug in the program?”

  “No.”

  “But there are too many pages.”

  “Nothing is lost on you, Binyamin.”

  Aharon waited for the boy to catch on as he scanned the three-inch stack. His scaly eyebrows went up. “Hey, one of our search phrases, ‘Yosef Kobinski,’ is really in all these arrays. That’s strange.”

  “Strange? Three hundred arrays for one little rabbi. As usual, you understate the case.”

  Aharon wheeled his chair to the left, not only to get away from Binyamin’s exhalation zone but also to pick up Chachik’s Encyclopedia—a Who’s Who of Jewish scholars. “I would say my theory has been disproven, wouldn’t you?”

  “What was your theory?”

  Aharon felt a spark of aggravation. He had explained this three or four times already. “Witzum, Rips, and Rosenberg, in their Statistical Science article, took the names of the thirty greatest rabbis from this very encyclopedia. They found code arrays for each rabbi where his name appeared close to his birth and death dates, nu?”

  “I know.”

  “That’s good that you know. I know, too.”

  “So—”

  “So they took the rabbis with the longest entries in this encyclopedia. I took the shortest.”

  “What for?”

  “Think!”

  Binyamin appeared to give it a legitimate effort. He shrugged.

  “Someday you’re going to learn how to use that brain of yours. Then again, someday the dead will rise, so it is written.”

  “Rabbi—”

  “So we run the same test they did with a new set of data; that is point one. If we find arrays for all these rabbis also, it is further proof of the code. As for my own theory, I had a little idea that the ‘lesser’ rabbis would appear in the code less often than the ‘greater’ rabbis. If we could show that it would be very difficult to explain with War and Peace!”

  Binyamin pointed to the open encyclopedia. “But Rabbi Kobinski has only one paragraph, yet he appears in three hundred arrays. That’s even more than the Ba’al Shem Tov, the most famous rabbi ever.”

  Aharon tapped his temple, looking pained. “Didn’t I say it disproved my theory?”

  “So how come—”

  “That’s the question, Binyamin, how come, as you so eloquently put it.”

  “Must be a characteristic of the name—common letters or something.”

  Aharon stroked his beard. “Yosef—perhaps. But the phrase we searched for was ‘Yosef Kobinski.’ How common could it be?” Aharon picked up Chachik’s and began reading the Kobinski entry out loud: “ ‘Yosef Kobinski, Brezeziny, Poland. Born, Tish’ah b’Av 5660.’ ”

  “Nineteen hundred,” Binyamin calculated quickly.

  “ ‘Died Kislev 5704.’ ”

  “November 1943.”

  Aharon rolled his eyes. The boy had failed a test on dates last month. As usual, he had learned it only after the rest of the class had moved on.

  “ ‘Rabbi Kobinski was a student of Rabbi Eleazar Zaks, the famous kabbalist of Brezeziny. He studied physics at the University of Warsaw and later taught there before leaving to pursue kabbalah. Rabbi Kobinski was considered by many to be a genius of kabbalah. His first and only book, The Book of Mercy, was a prelude to great things. Unfortunately, he was lost in the Holocaust when he died at Auschwitz.’ ”

  Aharon leaned back, the chair groaning with his weight. Yes, this certainly killed his theory. Who had even heard of Kobinski-of-the-300-arrays? Nobody. A burning in his chest bothered him enough that he popped antacids from his linty pocket. He noticed that his fingers were puffy. (Salt, Hannah would say, heart, she’d remind him, and he’d ignore her.)

  “Maybe he is important. Or will be.” Binyamin poked his glasses up with an extended middle finger.

  “He’s dead. Somehow I don’t think he has any more tricks up his sleeve.”

  “So whaddya wanna do?”

  Aharon frowned at the boy from under bushy eyebrows. “What do I want to do? Is that what you’re trying to ask, with your fine language? I’ll tell you. We’re going to see if there’s something special about our new friend. We’ll take a few other words from the biography. Let’s see.” He scrabbled for a pencil and notepad. “Brezeziny. Eleazar Zaks. The Book of Mercy. Auschwitz.” He tore off the page and handed it to Binyamin.

  “All together?” Binyamin regarded the list with a squint.

  “No,” Aharon said, with a martyr’s sigh. “No, no, no. Run each of them separately as keywords. See if you can find any of those words in these three hundred arrays.” He fanned the stack on the desk.

  Binyamin shoved up his glasses again, his mouth open in an “oh.” “That will take a while.”

  “Nu? You have better things to do?”

  Aharon went to the hook on the back of the door and took up his prayer shawl. It was time for his first class of the day. He opened the door, waited. Binyamin just stood there lumpishly.

  “After class?” Aharon reminded him.

  As they walked down the hall, Aharon felt a new lift in his step. He had the distinct feeling he had just had a stroke of luck. That in itself was not so amazing. The sages say, “Even a fool has luck.” What you did with the luck, that was the tricky part.

  Fortunately for him, and perhaps for the cause of Torah code also, Rabbi Aharon Handalman was no fool.

  1.3. Calder Farris

  Orlando, Florida

  The Doubletree hotel where the convention was being held was large and generic and smelled of suntan oil. Calder Farris made his way to the registration desk, where he would use his own name but not h
is rank. No one would take him for a soldier in his civvies.

  He kept his sunglasses on.

  He didn’t expect a lot from the convention. Its title, Holism and the New Physics, was typically lame. Still, it was his job and he had other reasons to visit Orlando. Dear old Dad.

  The woman at Registration had long gray hair and a gauzy skirt-and-top ensemble. People like her were into ESP or auras or some such shit, but she obviously couldn’t have read vibes with a manual, because she made the mistake of flirting with him. She tittered on about the sessions, laying her pink hand on Calder’s black-sweatered arm.

  “My goodness!” she gasped, squeezing the unyielding muscle. She gave him a predatory gleam, her eyes telling him that she liked the iron hardness of his arm and that she’d love to explore other hard things of his as well.

  Calder had an overpowered urge to smack her. Instead, he removed his dark sunglasses and inspected them casually.

  The woman’s hand fell to her side. For a second he got the satisfaction of her queasy face as she stared into his eyes, mesmerized; then she busied herself with someone else. He put the glasses back on and walked away, registration packet in hand.

  There was nothing wrong with Calder Farris’s face—it was a tad lumpy, a result of teenage acne, but it had improved with age. At thirty-two it looked more rugged than pockmarked. He was six-foot-three and he ran and pumped weights obsessively. With his sunglasses on he could be mistaken for the tall, dark, and handsome type. But sooner or later he had to take them off.

  It was his eyes. His irises were a blue so light they were nearly white. People didn’t like that. It was as if they made a window where the cold inside him seeped through. He couldn’t hide his essential nature when people looked into his eyes. The demon peered out. It was fucking inconvenient.

  But, like everything else, it had its uses.

  He sat down in the hotel bar and ordered a coffee. He went through the list of sessions, slashing with a felt-tipped pen.

  Healing and Synchronicity. Slash.

  Wormholes and Frank Herbert’s Folding Space. Slash.

  Quantum Leaps: Leapfrogging the Laws of Physics.

  He’d been to so many of these things, he could practically give the lectures himself. But there was always the remote possibility something useful would turn up someday, the proverbial pearl among the swine. This topic had potential. He flipped to the credentials of the speaker. He recognized the name; the guy was a hack. He slashed out the session.

  The bartender refilled his coffee. A few stools away sat two young men engaged in casual conversation. They were obviously a couple. That was nothing out of the ordinary for Florida or for weird science conventions like this one, wherever they might be. That was the fucking state of the fucking country he’d vowed his life to serve and protect.

  Calder’s body tightened. A feral smile bared his teeth.

  He wished the faggots would approach him. He’d take them out to the parking lot and teach them the true meaning of male–male penetration—his fist down their throats.

  The rage inside him flared momentarily, like a black sun. He tamped it down. Of course, he wouldn’t really do anything, not even if provoked. He wouldn’t touch the young men if they stuck their hands down his pants and said howdy-do. Beating up civilians of whatever proclivity did not look good on a service record, and Calder cared very much about his service record.

  Besides, he was a trained professional. He didn’t kick ass pro bono.

  A flicker of humor assuaged his anger. He refocused on the schedule of events.

  A Symphony of Strings and the Theory of Everything.

  Calder glanced at his watch. It had started ten minutes ago. He gathered up his papers and went to find the room. He didn’t leave a tip.

  * * *

  The conference room held about sixty chairs and most of them were full. Calder settled down in the back and looked up the lecturer’s bio. Dr. Larch was a young professor at Florida State. Probably half the listeners were his students, brownnosing. Calder sized him up. Intelligent-looking. Showy. The guy had the style of a talk show host. Calder hated that. He folded his arms over his chest and settled in to listen.

  Forty-five minutes later, Calder watched the rabble stream out and kept his seat. As usual, there were three or four supergeeks hanging around the lecturer chatting him up. Calder doodled on his pad—guns, stark faces, dark slashes on white paper. Once or twice Larch glanced at him curiously.

  The professor finally walked by, heading for the exit. Calder unfolded himself from the chair with a deliberate display of strength.

  “Dr. Larch? I’m Calder Farris.”

  Calder held out his hand. Larch shook it. His grip was damp but not completely mealy.

  “Hello.” Larch’s greeting had the lilt of a question. And you want…?

  “I’d like to speak with you about your lecture. Can I buy you lunch?”

  “I’m… rather busy.”

  Calder smiled. “How about a drink then? And it’s Lieutenant Calder Farris. United States Marines.”

  Half an hour later, Calder sat across from Larch at an Italian restaurant down the street. Getting out of the hotel had been Farris’s idea. The Italian place, Larch’s. He’d decided to get a free meal for his trouble after all. The Marines bit had done it. Larch probably didn’t meet a lot of Marines. Not a lot of Marines would be caught dead anywhere in his orbit.

  “So, Lieutenant Farris, what exactly do you do for the military?”

  Farris poked at his salad. “I’m in Intelligence.”

  “Oh?”

  “I really can’t say anything more than that.”

  Larch smirked, so Calder pulled out his wallet and showed him ID. The identification was official United States Marine Corps, had “Intelligence Division” written on it and a tough-looking picture of himself in uniform.

  “So what does the Intelligence Division of the Marines do exactly?” Larch asked, leaning forward. “Reconnaissance mostly? Isn’t that what you guys do? What’s your interest in physics?”

  “Dr. Larch.” Calder had been perfectly civil so far. He’d even kept on his glasses, though he’d switched to a darkly tinted pair that was not prescription but looked it. Now he let a thread of something heavier enter his voice. “We have limited time. I’d like to discuss your work, if you don’t mind.”

  Larch studied him. “Can I ask in exactly what capacity you’re conducting this interview?”

  “It’s not an interview; it’s lunch,” Calder explained in a reasonable tone. “And you could ask, but, well, you know…”

  “Then you’d have to kill me.” Larch snorted. Calder didn’t. He sat and looked at Larch from behind those glasses, cold as stone. Larch’s amusement faded into an awkward uncertainty with just a touch—yes, Calder could smell it—just the smallest trace of fear.

  It was the perfect moment and Calder didn’t waste it. He began firing questions, calmly but insistently. The lecture had been on string theory and there were a couple of points he wanted to explore, a few unexpected threads that had interested him. He pressed in those directions, one by one.

  Larch talked. Calder was pretty sure he held nothing back. There was no reason that he should. This stuff was probably regurgitated in front of several hundred students every day, most of them too brain-dead to pay the slightest fucking attention. And here was a golden opportunity—a guy who actually wanted to hear him yak.

  There was nothing earth-shattering, but there were a few ideas that were new to Calder, and he stored them in his memory mechanically.

  When he was done with the conversation he let the waiter clear their plates. Calder was ready to leave, but Larch ordered spumoni. Calder watched him poison his body with sugar and saturated fat and felt his muscles flex in response as if itching to work out. In ten years, Larch was going to look like a sack of potatoes and have the use of about 30 percent of his arterial capacity. Fucking desk jockey.

  Calder glanced at his watch.
He felt as if he’d just gotten laid. He had gotten what he wanted from Larch. The man no longer interested him.

  “So,” Larch said, “maybe now you can tell me about your work. Nothing classified, just… what’s it like? Do you travel a lot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Married?” Larch eyed Calder’s bare hands speculatively.

  “No.”

  Larch licked his spoon. “You’re good at physics. Did the Marines train you for that?”

  Larch was only making conversation. It was what normal people did, Calder knew that, but still the demon inside him reached out its hand and squeezed his heart until it was full and tight. Larch wanted to poke behind the shutters, lay his soul bare. Calder was tempted to let him.

  Then he realized that he was done with Larch; he didn’t have to play nice anymore. Slowly, he removed his glasses and smiled.

  “Check?” Larch called, signaling the waiter.

  * * *

  Lt. Calder Farris’s ID was a lie. He was, in fact, not with the Intelligence Division of the Marines. He had been a Marine, still was, but when he got his break into Intelligence it had not been a position in the MCIA. His particular skill set, most particularly his aptitude in science, had him on permanent loan to the Department of Defense.

  But not officially. If you ran your finger down all but the most classified versions of the DoD org chart, you would not find him there. You would find DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. One of the branches of DARPA was the DSO—the Defense Sciences Office. You would find the director of the DSO, Dr. Alan Rickman, one of the men Calder reported to. You would not find Calder Farris.

  The DSO’s mission was “to identify and pursue the most promising technologies within the science and engineering research community and develop them into new DoD capabilities.” In other words, to find Shit to confiscate, rework, and adapt into Big Bad Shit that could make the enemies of the United States turn green, shed their skin, or otherwise go away in a hurry.