Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

Miller agreed, but didn’t say so. The man didn’t need more weight added to his already hefty burden. But he could help ease Miller’s burden. “Actually, there is something you can do.”

“Name it.”

“Arwen.”

“The girl from Miami.”

“If they’re gunning for me, they might try to use her.”

“I’ll assign a security detail to her.”

“You’ll assign more than a detail,” Miller said. “The men who came for me were good, well armed, and weren’t afraid to pull the trigger. If they come for her, the D.C. police and FBI won’t be able to—”

“Secret Service,” Bensson said. “She’ll have the same level of protection as me.”

Miller nodded and said, “That will work. Just make sure they look like Jay-Z’s security.”

After a chuckle, Bensson said, “Will do.”

“I’m going to chase down a lead,” Miller said. “I’ll be in touch in the morning, but I’m hoping to—”

“A lead?”

Miller could hear the eagerness in the president’s voice. The FBI, CIA, and Homeland were most likely clueless, or being derailed from the inside. Bensson would be desperate for some nugget of good news. But he’d have to wait. Miller was in the habit of keeping his cards close during an investigation. It kept him from being distracted. Plus, he had no idea what Adler had in her bag or if it was worthwhile. “If it turns out to be big, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I knew you were the right man for the job,” Bensson said.

“Thought I was the only man for the job,” Miller said, half-smiling.

“You’re both,” the president said. “Godspeed, Miller.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Miller hung up, pocketed the phone, and stared out the tiny windshield of Adler’s Mini Cooper. Night had fallen as they’d crossed into Pennsylvania. For a moment he just watched the reflective mile markers pass by, his anger slowly drifting away like steam.

He glanced over at Adler and found her wide eyes on him.

“That was the president?” she asked.

“The one and only,” Miller said. “We go to the same church.”

Her eyes widened a bit more, which seemed impossible.

The look of shock on Adler’s face made her look like some kind of circus clown. Miller grinned, revealing the joke. His smile turned into a laugh, and Adler joined in. They laughed for nearly a minute, expunging the tension of nearly being killed. Miller watched her laugh. She was a stranger to him and nationality marked her as a potential enemy. But he felt glad to have her there.

Of course, that might change after he got a look at what was in her purse. Remembering the purse sapped the remaining humor from him and he turned back to the road. A Best Western sign appeared in the distance.

“Take the next exit,” he said.

Adler’s smile disappeared when she heard the serious tone in Miller’s voice again. She put on the blinker and eased onto the off-ramp. Ten minutes later, they were checked into the Best Western, having paid in cash and used fake names.

The room was typical—two twin beds, a desk, two uncomfortable chairs, a large poster of a Western scene hung over each bed and screwed to the wall as though someone might actually steal them. The bathroom was small, but clean.

Adler opened the window.

“Better keep that closed.”

“Smells in here.”

She was right. The room reeked of cheap cleaning supplies. “You’ll get used to it,” he said as he stepped around her and closed the window.

“Why?”

“So we’re not overheard.”

A quick flash of fear appeared on Adler’s face. She didn’t know him any better than he did her. He realized this and said, “We need to talk.”

Miller took a seat at the small round table and motioned to the other chair.

“About what?” Adler said, sitting down across from him.

Miller really wanted to take a shower. He’d never felt so dirty before and was sure the stench rising from his body would soon overpower the room’s chemical odor. But the sooner he put his mind to work on what Adler was hiding, the better. “About what’s in your purse and why your boss tried to kill you over it.”

Adler sat still for a moment. Then her shoulders sagged. She lifted the large purse onto the table, opened it, and pulled out a small leather-bound book. “It’s my grandmother’s journal.”

Miller fought against the sigh of frustration building in his chest. What could a grandmother’s journal have to do with the attacks? And then she laid it out in the simplest terms possible.

“She was a mathematician and professor at the University of Königsberg. She was… brilliant.” Her face churned with ancestral guilt. “They couldn’t have done it without her.”

“Done what without her?” Miller asked.

Adler studied the table’s drab mustard yellow surface for a moment. “The attacks. The timing. The ratios of iron to oxygen. Particle accelerations. All the calculations required to pull off the extinction of the human race. These things were not her ideas, but the math that made them possible was, is, hers.”

“Your grandmother was a Nazi?”

“She was a German during the Third Reich. Many of the scientists that worked on projects for the Reich didn’t agree with what they were doing. There was no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Miller said.

“She would have been shot, and my mother with her.”

“And yet here you are, risking your life to stop the same evil sixty-something years later. And if you die in the effort, your family’s bloodline will end with you anyway. Sure, you might not have been born, and that’s sad, but your grandmother handed over the keys to genocide to save her family? C’mon.”

Adler’s head bowed back toward the table. “You’re right.”

Miller took the book from Adler. The leather cover was worn and cracking. He opened it and found a name scrawled on the inside cover. “Elizabeth Adler. You were named for her?”

“I was her jewel, she said.” Adler wiped a tear from her eye. “She was a good woman. A loving woman. She believed the SS men in charge of the project had died toward the end of the war. Some of the other scientists survived, but they became U.S. citizens.”

Miller flipped through the diary. The first fifty pages were complex mathematical computations.

“She replicated the math from memory,” Adler said. “And told my mother, and eventually me, that if red poison ever fell from the sky that we should get her diary to someone who could do something to stop it.”

“And that someone was me.”

“You weren’t my first choice, remember?”

As she turned toward the window and looked at her reflection, he saw the bruising around her neck. He remembered.

“So this explains what, how it’s done?”

Adler shook her head. “In theory, yes, but the equations are just part of the puzzle. There were others working on real-world applications. They never told her about the rest of the project, only what she needed to know to work out the math. But after calculating how much oxidized iron it would take to remove the oxygen from the lower atmosphere, she recognized the project’s success could lead to a global mass extinction. She began duplicating her equations and keeping notes about everyone she knew to be involved and the small amount of information they revealed.”

Miller flipped through the journal. The last one hundred pages were handwritten notes in German. “You’ve read this?”

“Several times.”

“Other than the equations, is there anything that might help us?”

“Most of it is notes about her equations and what she believed the possible real-world applications of them could be, which may not be relevant because the world has already experienced the real-world applications. I’m not sure if the book will be of any use to anyone who can’t understand the math.”