movie starring me. And then I met Astrid.”
He paused as they reached the bottom of the ancient trail up the rock.
“Astrid was the only person on earth I ever truly loved, who took me out of myself. Then she died. Young and vital, struck down in my arms. After she was gone, I thought the world had ended.”
He stopped. “It’s hard to describe to someone who’s never been through it.”
“I have been through it,” Ford said, almost before meaning to. The awful coldness of loss wrapped itself again around his heart and squeezed.
Hazelius leaned an arm on the sandstone. “You lost your wife?”
Ford nodded. He wondered why he was talking about this with Hazelius when he wouldn’t even open up with his own shrink.
“How did you deal with it?”
“I didn’t. I ran away to a monastery.”
Hazelius drew closer. “Are you religious?”
“I . . . don’t know. Her death shook my faith. I needed to find out—where I stood. What I believed in.”
“And?”
“The more I tried, the less I was certain. It was good to discover that I never would be sure. That I wasn’t born a true believer.”
“Perhaps no rational, intelligent person can ever be absolutely sure of his faith,” said Hazelius. “Or in my case, sure of my lack of faith. Who knows, maybe Eddy’s God really is up there—vengeful, sadistic, genocidal, ready to burn everyone who doesn’t believe in him.”
“When your wife died . . . ,” Ford asked, “how did you deal with it?”
“I decided to give something back to the world. And so, being a physicist, I came up with the idea for Isabella. My wife used to say, ‘If the smartest person on earth can’t figure out how we got here, then who can?’ Isabella is my attempt to answer that question—and many others. It’s my statement of faith.”
In a small patch of sunlight, Ford noticed a baby lizard gripping the wall of stone. Somewhere overhead, the golden eagle still circled, its high-pitched cry echoing off the cliffs.
“Wyman,” Hazelius went on, “if this hacker business got out, it would destroy the Isabella project, ruin our careers, and set back American science by a generation. You know that, don’t you?”
Ford said nothing.
“I’m asking you with all my heart to please not divulge this problem until we have a chance to fix it. It would destroy all of us—Kate included.”
Ford looked at him sharply.
“Yes, I can see there’s something between you two,” Hazelius continued. “Something good. Something sacred, if I may use that word.”
“Give us forty-eight more hours to solve this problem and save the Isabella project. I beg you.”
Ford wondered if this intense little man knew, or had guessed, his real mission. It almost seemed as if he had.
“Forty-eight hours,” Hazelius repeated softly.
“All right,” Ford said.
“Thank you,” said Hazelius, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Now, let’s climb up.”
Ford put his hands in the steps above him and followed Hazelius slowly up the treacherous trail. Weather had worn and softened the steps, and it was hard for his fingers and feet to keep their grip.
When they reached the small ruin, they paused on the ledge in front of the doorway to catch their breath.
“Look.” Hazelius gestured to where an ancient inhabitant of the house had smoothed an outer layer of mud plaster across the stone wall. Most of this plaster had eroded away, but near the wooden lintel, handprints and streaks remained in the dried mud.
“If you look closely, you can see the whorls in the fingerprints,” said Hazelius. “They’re a thousand years old, but this is all of that person that remains.”
He turned his face toward the blue horizon. “That’s how it is with death. One day, bang. Everything’s gone. Memories, hopes, dreams, houses, loves, property, money. Our family and friends shed a tear, hold a ceremony, and go on with their lives. We become a few fading photographs in an album. And then those who loved us die, and those who loved them die, and soon even the memory of us is gone. You’ve seen those old photo albums in antique shops, filled with people in nineteenth-century dress—men, women, children. Nobody knows who they are anymore. Like the person who left this handprint. Gone and forgotten. To what purpose?”
“I wish I knew,” said Ford.
Despite the growing warmth of the day, Ford felt a shiver as they descended, touched to the core by a sense of his own mortality.
30
WHEN FORD REACHED THE CASITA, HE locked the door, drew the curtains, pulled his briefcase from the file cabinet, and dialed in the combination.
The code could be anything at all: a short computer program, a data file, a text file, a small picture, the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. It might even be an RSA private key—and useless, since the FBI had carried off Volkonsky’s personal computer.
Ford nodded off and slumped forward, knocking the laptop off his legs. He roused himself and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He hadn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours.
He was measuring the final scoop into the filter when he felt a stab in his belly and thought of all the coffee he’d been pumping into his system for days. He shoved the coffee machine aside and rummaged in the cupboard, finding a box of organic green tea way in the back. Two bags, steeped ten minutes—and he returned to the bedroom with a mug of the green liquid. As he typed in more code, he gulped the hot, bitter tea.
He wanted to finish quickly so he could nap before riding down to Blackhorse to talk to Begay one final time before the protest ride, but his eyes blurred as they moved back and forth from the screen to the paper, and he kept catching mistakes.
He forced himself to slow down.
By ten thirty he was finished. He sat back and checked the data file against the note. It looked clean. He saved the file and hit the hex-binary convert module.
Instantly the hex code showed up as a binary file—a large block of zeros and ones.
On a hunch, he activated the binary-ASCII convert module, and to his surprise, a plain-text message appeared on the screen.
Ford read the note twice and sat back. It had the rambling, manic tone of someone growing deranged. What madness had he meant? The malware? Isabella? The scientists themselves? Why did he conceal the message in code, instead of simply leaving a note?
And Joe Blitz?
Ford Googled the name and got back a million hits. He paged through the top ones, seeing no obvious connections.
He pulled the satellite phone out of the briefcase and stared at it. He’d misled Lockwood. No, he’d lied to him. And now he’d promised Hazelius he wouldn’t mention the malware.
Damn it to hell. Why had he imagined that after two years in the monastery, he could just slide back into the
