Chris Jordan - Measure of Darkness

“But the theory is wrong.”

“No, no, the theorem still has an elegant solution,” Elliot insists, using his expressive hands as if shaping calculations in the air. “In theory, it should be possible. But Keener’s idea about how to generate a functioning stream of entangled photons-the actual machinery of it- that turns out to be totally wrong. They haven’t been able to make it work in the real world, and he finally figured out why, and the reason is such, without getting into the math, that it will never work.”

“So the company, QuantaGate, it’s a bust?”

Sherman nods happily. “That’s about the size of it, yes.”

“What’s the word on campus? Do they expect the company to actually go bankrupt?”

“Oh no. Not with that huge DOD contract. We all expect they’ll keep milking that for years. Especially now that Professor Keener isn’t there to stop them.”

She waits until Joey is sound asleep before making her move. The boy had been awake for hours past his bedtime, fretting about his mother, who he calls Mi Ma. He’s a smart kid-some sort of musical genius or prodigy-and he knows that something is terribly wrong, how could he not? Spirited away from his piano class and put in the care of strangers, flown halfway around the world and lately locked in what amounts to a luxuriously appointed dungeon for days at a time. What is he supposed to think? He keeps asking why he can’t talk to Mi Ma on the phone and there’s no good answer, beyond “your mommy is too sick to talk but she’ll be better soon.” No surprise, the poor kid has begun to worry that Mi Ma is dead and that no one will tell him the truth.

Joey isn’t the only one who knows something is wrong. When Kathleen agreed to help, alerted by a text message from Randall Shane, she was informed that the boy’s mother had to be taken into protective custody-some sort of gang problem, apparently, or maybe the mother had been undercover, it was never made clear-and Shane needed someone he could trust to look after her five-year-old son. The strong implication was that Joey was also in danger and that the only recourse was to lie low for a few weeks while Shane straightened things out.

In the beginning it had all been very exciting. Prior to this, Randall Shane had refused her offers of assistance and eventually convinced her that focusing on missing children wasn’t the best thing for her particular situation. She hated the whole concept of getting on with her life, which is what everyone kept urging her to do, it sounded so pathetic and cheesy, but that’s what she was doing, like someone slowly awakening from an endless nightmare. Accepting the awful reality that she was alive in the world and her daughter wasn’t, and that would never change. Then, out of the blue, an urgent text to her cell, begging for her help. Sent under duress, obviously, because he was in pursuit of some bad guys. Not that he had called them bad guys-in the message he’d referred to them as “foreign agents,” which Kathleen can only imagine are some sort of spies or terrorists. Whatever, she quickly visualized them as the kind of evil, lying monsters who pretend to be good-who pretend to love you-all the while putting a mother in danger and threatening her child. The instruction had been simple: get herself to the Aircenter in Olathe at precisely 11:00 p.m. A man called Kidder would meet her there-he would know what she looked like-and she was to follow his instructions.

It was all very exciting.

Kidder, who seemed to know a lot about Randall Shane, was quite charming at first, and pretended to listen to her opinions of child rearing as they sped through a moonlit sky in a private jet with leather seats and a sleek hardwood interior that she and Kidder had all to themselves. First stop, Seattle, which she recognized from the Space Needle-Kidder wouldn’t say where they were, said it was on a need-to-know basis and she didn’t need to know. Then another long flight over open water, the Pacific, obviously, heading for a destination he at first refused to divulge but finally admitted was Hong Kong. Hong Kong! Not that she saw any of it beyond the small windows of the little jet-she was not allowed to leave the confines of the aircraft when, after many hours, it landed on a remote island runway to refuel. Just as well, she’d thought at the time. Considering that she didn’t even have a passport. Not that there had been anything like customs. No officials at all while they waited on the tarmac. The pilot and copilot had actually refueled the plane themselves, which Kathleen thought was odd, but they were of necessity all keeping a super low profile, so maybe that’s how it was done. Finally they arrived in Hong Kong in broad daylight-she could see the glittering city and the surrounding hills as they came in to land. Again they refueled and in less than an hour a shiny black SUV had appeared on the runway, and a small frightened boy was whisked into the plane and Kathleen had her hands full comforting Joey as they took off and returned to Seattle, and then eventually to the East Coast, where a very similar black SUV had met them at a private airport of some sort and then delivered them here, to the guesthouse of a remote oceanfront estate. Really to the dungeon, because that’s where Kidder has been keeping them.

There was a time when she accepted Kidder’s lies as part of the deal. It made sense that she would not be informed of everything that was going on, whatever dangers lurked or threatened. Her task was simply to care for Joey, to protect him with something like a mother’s love, while Shane did whatever he had to do to protect Joey’s real mother. It had even made sense that Shane would not be able to communicate during this dangerous time, that it was simply too risky. Texts, emails, phone calls, they could all be intercepted, used to locate those in hiding. So she had gone along, let Kidder run things the way he saw fit. After all, Shane had tasked him to be the bodyguard. So when he said he was locking them in the safe room-the entire finished basement had been fitted out as a safe room-for their own protection, who was she to argue? It was scary, but surely Shane and Kidder knew what they were doing.

Lately she’s come to doubt not only Kidder, but the whole purpose of the mission. Kidder lies about everything, even when the lie serves no purpose that she can see, and he has a creepy quality that extends much deeper than his routine lewdness. There’s something about him that scares the hell out of her, that makes her flesh crawl. Would Randall Shane, a real gentleman, the kindest and most decent human being she’d ever met, would he really employ a man like Kidder? Or was the whole thing some sort of con, initiated by a text message that she now realizes could have originated from anywhere, and which had caused her to react immediately, obeying the request without question.

There’s only one way to find out what’s really going on, and if, as she fears, she and Joey are in danger, not from some nameless “foreign agents,” but from Kidder himself. Somehow she has to contact Randall Shane, or at the very least see if she can find out what he’s involved in. There are no phones in what she has come to think of as the dungeon. Plenty of jacks but no phones. Supposedly to prevent any calls being traced back to the source. The cable connection is dead, too, meaning that she hasn’t even seen the news in almost two weeks. Because, Kidder has explained, having the cable turned on would indicate that the guesthouse is occupied, and might therefore draw attention to them. Asked if she could possibly have a radio to listen to, Kidder hadn’t even bothered to make up an excuse, he’d simply refused.