found the entry he was looking for. There was a gray smudge beneath Fydorov’s name where the initials KGB had been written. In keeping with the new order in Russia, the former Committee for State Security had been rechris- tened the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service), and the initials FSB were now scrawled above the smudge.
Cooper picked up the phone and keyed in the long string of numbers.
‘Fydorov,’ a voice growled into Cooper’s ear.
‘ Dobry viecher, Igor Sergeevich,’ Cooper replied in lightly accented Russian. ‘You’re working late. It’s Bart Cooper.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘Bartholomew Georgievich? It’s been quite a long time. Are you in Moscow?’
‘No, Iggy, I’m calling from the States. How are things with the FSB?’
Fydorov sighed. ‘There is a saying in your country that fits perfectly: The more things change, the more they stay the same.’
‘Ain’t it the truth. I’ve got a little business I’d like to discuss with you, if you’ve got a minute.’
‘As always, I’ll help you any way I can. Go ahead.’
‘A few days ago the body of a German physicist was found here in the States. He’d been murdered back in ’forty-eight, and the body had remained hidden until now. This physicist worked on the German bomb project, and I was the intel officer who cleared him to immigrate into the U.S. When his body surfaced, I asked our research department to put together a full package on him, more for my own curiosity than anything else.’
‘Did you learn anything interesting?’
‘A little, but what stuck out was how quickly we got the information. Your archives turned our request around in a day.’
‘A day? What are you bribing them with? I’ve had requests go weeks before receiving a report.’
‘The quick turnaround surprised us, too. The reason your people responded so promptly was that they’d just completed an identical search for someone else, so the information had already been culled.’
‘That’s quite a coincidence.’
‘My old instincts tell me it’s more than a coincidence. What I want to know is who was asking for information? As far as I know, the story was strictly local and didn’t get picked up by the wire services.’
‘And our archives are not exactly as accessible for research as your Library of Congress. What is the name of your dead German physicist?’
‘Johann Wolff,’ Cooper replied.
‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’
‘I’d appreciate it, Iggy.’
29
Moscow, Russia
It was late when Lara Avvakum decided to make a few notes in the project log before quitting for the night. She reveled in the excitement of this exploration and, for the first time in years, lost track of the hours as she worked.
She clicked on the word-processing icon, and her computer immediately began loading the program. The American-made Gateway that Orlov had provided was by far the most powerful computer she’d ever used, and it was so small compared with the ancient colossus that occupied an entire building at Sverdlovsk 23.
In the corner of the screen, a small window appeared containing an animated representation of Albert Einstein. The figure emptied his coffee cup, tossed it aside with a crash, then waved hello.
‘ Zdravstvuytye, Albert,’ she said.
As always, the words started slowly, but eventually the flow became steady and strong. It all began to come together for Avvakum, how even in a total vacuum there could not be complete emptiness. Mathematically it was one of those odd points that equations reach when they crash into zero or spiral off into infinity, where matter or energy becomes immeasurable and therefore unknowable. As a physicist, she knew that infinities were nonsensical answers that pointed to a flaw in the method of mathematically describing complex phenomena.
Yet, through the work of her unnamed predecessors, Avvakum found herself standing at the threshold of a new awareness, of a dramatic change in her perception of the universe. She was seeing the effects of something beyond the theoretical barriers of infinity, the first cracks in that seemingly impenetrable wall.
It bothered Avvakum that she found no mention of her predecessors in any of the project documentation. Zoshchenko explained that the names had been expunged as per the terms of dissolution of the original research partnership. As a scientist, Avvakum knew the importance of properly documenting her sources to provide a pedigree for her work. She felt a nagging sense of guilt that she would not be permitted to honor those whose work she was building on.
Two paragraphs into the night’s entry, she accidentally keyed in a pair of ws. In anticipation of her next stroke, the program offered her a string of underscored, blue text. www.cse.nd.edu/~sand/
Even though she’d only just begun exploring the Internet after her arrival in Moscow, Avvakum recognized this as the address of a Web page. Curious, she clicked on the text, and a large window appeared as her computer connected to the Internet.
A dedicated line tied Avvakum’s computer to a remote network-administration complex inside VIO FinProm’s main office. Her request was quickly routed through the FinProm server and out onto the Net.
Seconds later a photograph of a man, possibly in his early forties, with blond hair and a red beard appeared, smiling at her.
‘Ted Sandstrom,’ she read from the text beside the photo. ‘Professor. Ph. D. physics, University of Notre Dame.’
Below the photograph, she read through a long page that described Sandstrom’s background and research interests. Avvakum gasped as she read that Sandstrom’s current work was a study of the quantum boundary between matter and energy. The page also listed Sandstrom as being on sabbatical from his teaching duties at Notre Dame for the current term.
I wonder, Professor Sandstrom, if you are the one whom I am following.
30
Ann Arbor, Michigan
‘That ought to about do it,’ Grin said hopefully as he saved the program file he was working on. ‘Now maybe I can get a clearer picture of how Lobo works.’
Shortly after diving into Kilkenny’s decryption project, Grin decided that a mathematical algorithm as intricate as Wolff’s cipher deserved a name, so he christened it Lobo. The program he had just created was designed to test his assumptions on how Wolff’s cipher operated.
Once he finished loading his program into Stan, he switched machines to see how many new pages the Preservation Lab had scanned into their computer. As soon as the window containing the page icons appeared, the individual icons began vanishing. The files were disappearing at a rate of one every three seconds. No doubt, someone was moving the files off the server. But who, and why?
Grin moved to the Wolff directory – which held the six separate subdirectories for each of the notebooks – and selected everything to be downloaded to his machine. FILE ACCESS DENIED
He stared at the monitor in disbelief. ‘What the hell is going on!’
