Again, she did not speak.
“A little over a billion somethings, if my math is correct.”
Finally, she glanced back up. “You mean our stock in Wal-Mart and Cisco?”
“You presented yourselves as modestly prosperous academics,” I replied, “something we checked thoroughly before Jonah Markowitz hired you and provided the funding for this venture. It turns out you were multimillionaires all along. I believe you owe us an explanation.”
She hesitated for a few moments as she turned the screen back around to its regular position.
“When you found the basis of our wealth, I assume you checked the purchase dates?”
I nodded. “That was a puzzle. You were ten. He was fifteen.”
“How did you explain that? Rich uncles? Hidden trust funds? Ed McMahon showing up at our doorstep?”
“We couldn’t find anything.”
“No, you couldn’t, could you?”
“Then how did you do it?”
She smiled. “It was actually quite straightforward. We sent our orders back in time.”
Markowitz nodded as if that were the most logical thing in the world — for the few seconds it took his mind to fully register what she had just said.
Then his jaw fell. “You did
“We sent our purchase and sell orders back to the particular moments that would provide us with the highest possible returns, since we had the advantage of knowing how the investments would turn out.”
Markowitz considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I find this a bit hard to swallow.”
“That’s understandable, but nevertheless what I said is true.”
She turned once more to me. “Like you said, your first investigation of us was quite thorough. In your latest audits, you undoubtedly wondered how you could have overlooked something of this magnitude.”
“I’ve had my staff running in circles for days,” I replied.
“I’m sorry to have caused them so much trouble,” she answered.
“Three years ago, we had an idea but no funds to pursue it. MIT, as you know, is as open to backing new scientific concepts as any of our institutions, but we knew that we could never get anything like this through the grant review committees. Normal university channels were therefore closed to us.”
“So you went looking for suckers,” said Markowitz.
“I wouldn’t refer to your father in those terms, Mr. Markowitz. He wasn’t the only person on Wall Street to fall for that particular delusion.”
“Call me Ray.”
“OK, Ray. What happened was this: with his initial investment, we developed the technology to the point where the central processing unit was the size of a typical laptop. We found that we could use this to transmit a two dimensional object, such as a letter or a fax.”
“How did you know it worked?” I asked. “Surely you would have wanted to test it before you wired money.”
“We had some fun with Alicia up front. We’d send a seemingly urgent fax back to the previous hour, and then we’d ask why she hadn’t informed us immediately of its arrival. The poor girl became quite befuddled.”
Markowitz finally laughed. “So once you proved it up, you sent the order back for Wal-Mart?”
She nodded. “At that point, our biggest challenge was finding a bank that had stayed both solvent and in one location for the past 35 years. That took a couple of months.”
“How did you send back the initial investment?” I asked. “You started with $10,000 as I recall.”
“Henry remembered that his father had a savings account that he left untouched for years, so we sort of borrowed it for a while. We had a lawyer draw up all the documents; then we printed them on a font commonly used in the 1970s and sent them to the bank’s trust department. The documents contained specific instructions for the disposition of our account, as well as the return of his money, with interest and a substantial return for his trouble.”
“When did you know it worked?”
“Last fall, Henry sent the papers while I logged in to our account. A few seconds later, our bank’s web site showed the totals change. It was quite thrilling.”
Incredible.
“So you finished the rest of the project with your own money?” Markowitz asked.
“We didn’t feel like we could go back to your father for more funds without disclosing what we had achieved. Once we confirmed our initial hypothesis, it was merely a matter of expanding on our previous work.”
I laughed. “Merely?”
She smiled. “It may have been a bit more complicated than that. After a few more months of work, we eventually succeeded in transporting a three dimensional object, using the mechanism you saw below.”
“Nothing living could survive that level of cold,” said Markowitz.
“No. The transport facility is immediately above the quantum processor. I’ll show it to you later, when everyone has gone home. Only one other member of our staff knows that it exists.”
Markowitz closed his eyes as he stretched his hands over his head; then he turned to me. “I’m still not sure I believe this.”
I wasn’t sure what to believe, either. All I could muster in reply was that her explanation seemed to square with the facts as we knew them.
I did have a question, though. “You keep using the word ‘we.’ Can you tell us where your other half is now?”
Juliet didn’t answer. Instead, she flipped open her phone and tapped a quick text message before turning to a side door that I had not noticed earlier.
“Excuse me, gentlemen. I need to check on something in the lab. I’ll be right back.
Chapter 5
Juliet returned a few minutes later and beckoned us to follow her into the facility’s conference room. She had furnished it, like her office, with good quality second hand stuff, but that wasn’t what drew my attention.
I had thought the lab kept itself out of the public eye, but seated at one end of the long table were two other visitors. The man was dressed in jeans, old boots and a work shirt that would have fit in on any of the city’s burgeoning construction sites. Though not rugged, he clearly spent a fair amount of time outside.
I pegged his companion to be in her late 30s; a natural blonde who, a decade earlier, probably caused traffic accidents. Her face still retained its youthful luster, and from her fit, toned arms, I surmised that she didn’t sit on the couch all day gorging on potato chips and watching talk shows.
Juliet introduced the four of us. Our new acquaintances were Sharon Bergfeld and Dr. Robert Lavon — what type of doctor, she didn’t say.
Markowitz hadn’t expected company, either. Though polite, he was clearly unhappy.
“Dr. Bryson, I’ve always assumed that the work of this facility would remain confidential. Our contract specifies — ”
“I’m aware of the contract, Ray, but I also understood that you were interested in the whereabouts of my husband.”
“We are,” he replied.
“My guests found him. They arrived a couple of days ago. Since I knew you were coming, I asked them to stay.”
This was a surprising turn of events.
“OK,” I said. “Where is he?”
“Israel,” said Lavon. “I’m afraid Dr. Bryson is dead.”
I glanced over to Juliet, but I couldn’t think of anything to say except that I was very sorry. I found the news so unexpected that I failed to notice that her demeanor didn’t exactly match that of a woman suddenly
