Clo stuck an open file between Quinn’s face and the screen he was using to conference with Armani Kane.
“Excuse you,” he said, leaning back. “I happen to be in the middle of a debrief.”
“Tell her you’ll call her back,” Clo said. “Sorry, Armani,” she called to the mic.
Quinn pushed the file out of his face.
“It’s okay,” Armani said, but the look on her face said the opposite. “That’s probably enough for now anyway. If you can think of anything else, let me know.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. And he meant it.
“It’s fine,” she said tersely. Then she hung up.
Quinn leaned back in his chair. “That was rude.”
Not that he expected Clo to care. He’d already noticed how she seemed to resent the attention Armani got from men and women alike.
“She’ll get over it.” Clo was grinning viciously. She held out the file again. “Read.”
“What is this?” Quinn took it.
It was a lab report. His eyes went right to the bolded two-line conclusion at the bottom. His face drained. He read the lines again.
“A match?” he asked in disbelief.
Clo sat on the corner of his desk. “The tissue sample that guy brought is President. Kennedy’s. Brain.”
Quinn scanned the report again for a margin of error or anything that he might use to impeach the conclusion. But there was nothing. 99.999%.
“Three times . . .” he read softly to himself. That was how many times Shepard’s former student, Minerva Wong, had checked the sample. Quinn wondered how much hiring her would put them over budget.
“Yup,” Clo said victoriously.
Quinn dropped the file on his desk. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, even taking time travel off the table, where would you get something like that. Where would it be preserved?”
Quinn suddenly had a thought. He opened the file again out of fear. “Did you tell her where the samples came from?”
“Of course not!” Clo snatched the file out of his hands. “All she did was compare DNA.”
Quinn was dumbfounded. “There has to be some other explanation.”
“For what?” Dr. Kripke asked, shuffling past them on his way to his desk. There was a tepid cup of coffee in his hand. “And while we’re at it, what would it take for us to get our own machine down here?”
“Ez was brewing his own,” Clo said.
“He was?” Quinn asked, momentarily distracted by the prospect of fresh coffee in the lab.
“Yeah.” She nodded toward the back. “He used some of the chemistry equipment we’ve never touched.”
“Shit. Has anyone heard from Ez?”
Clo shook her head. “Not since yesterday. Why? You worried?”
Quinn thought for a moment, but Clo could tell it clearly wasn’t about the wayward Ezra. His eyes were on the folder on his desk.
“Dunno. But someone should probably track him down, make sure he’s okay.”
“He’s with an entire flotilla of Federal Marshals. I’m pretty sure he’s safer than we are.”
“Yeah . . .” Quinn said distractedly.
He got up suddenly and walked to the back rooms. Clo heard the door to the evidence vault. He returned a moment later with the colorful backpack left by the man in the ball cap. He dropped it on his desk and pulled it open. Inside was the mechanical pencil and the lined notebook. Quinn removed the latter and flipped to the grid of handwritten numbers.
“Mean anything to you?” He showed Clo, but she shook her head. He took it to Dr. Kripke. “What do you think? Some kind of cipher?”
Dr. Kripke fixed his glasses, felt for the power switch on the tall scanner on his desk, and put the notebook inside. Moments later, clusters of dots raised from the Braille screen near his right hand, and he ran his fingers over it.
“Hard to say. But I would guess that’s what we’re meant to think.”
Dr. Kripke flipped through the notebook with his left hand while feeling the screen with his right, but it appeared otherwise empty.
“Care to take a stab at it?” Quinn asked.
“Cryptography was never my strong suit.”
“But you know the math.”
“Some. But you’ll have to tell me whether this is more or less important than our lingering paperwork.”
Quinn glanced to Clo. “More,” he said.
Dr. Kripke moved some files to the side with an air of frustration. “Alright. Let me see what I can do. There are some transformations we can try. But I might need to consult some cryptography resources.”
“Whatever you need, Doc.”
“Can I at least know what this is about?”
“Kennedy’s brain,” Clo said matter-of-factly.
“Oh.” Dr. Kripke seemed alarmed. “Oh,” he repeated. “Okay, then. I will do my best.”
The phones rang and Clo answered. “Section 08.” She looked to Quinn as she listened to someone speak on the other end.
“I’m not here,” he said softly, backing away.
She held out the phone. “It’s the Commissioner.”
Quinn made a face. “I’ll take it in Interview B.”
He walked to the back and entered his code on a keypad by a slim door, which buzzed and let him inside. Beyond was a small interview room with two-way mirror that could also serve as a temporary holding cell. Quinn sat at the table and hit the button on the wall screen which warned him there was an incoming call.
Dr. Chang’s simian face appeared. Whatever camera he was using was very close and it distorted his features. Quinn heard traffic noise.
“Sir.”
“Agent Quinn. I just wanted to let you know that I have just gotten off the phone with the State Department and members of the DoD. Ms. Tesla is being released pending a full investigation.”
“That’s good news, sir.”
“Quite. Apparently, she had a chance to flee but did not. That may have tipped the deliberations in our favor. But she will need to be made available if the Canadians request it. People are dead. More than that, the security of two nations was contravened.”
“Heads will roll,” Quinn said.
“Something like that. But thankfully, not hers. For now, at least. But as part of the agreement, she’s not free on her own recognizance. She’s being released into our custody. We’re operating on the assumption that someone is trying to kill her, so she will need to stay at Section 08 until further notice.”
Quinn fought back a smile. Dr. Chang had been trying to get Nio to the SCA for longer than he had. He was sure it wasn’t difficult for the Chair of the Science Control Commission to agree to those terms.
“I trust, with experience, that you can do a better job of keeping her safe than you did last time, Agent Quinn.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone else with this matter. I’ve known Nio since she was a child, and so far, you are the only one in the world who’s been able to keep her . . .” He searched for the appropriate word.
“Focused?” Quinn suggested.
“Yes. Something like that.”
“Well, I won’t let it go to my head, sir.”
Dr. Chang chuckled, legitimately. “No, quite. Commercial flights are still grounded, so she’ll be on a military transport first thing in the morning. Please let my assistant know when she arrives.”
“Will do.”
“Thank you, Agent Quinn.”
“Sir, I know you’re very busy, but I would very much appreciate a couple minutes if you can spare them. Or even if you can’t, frankly.”
“That sounds serious. Of all the senior members of our organization, you have made the least demands on my time. If anything, I suspect you have a credit. But it will have to be quick.”
“Yes, sir. It’s about the director, sir.”
“Indeed. I have gathered you two aren’t getting along.”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“Unfortunately . . .” Dr. Chang removed his glasses. He sounded utterly defeated. “I can sympathize.”
“Sir?”
“Any political capital I had left, I just spent bringing Ms. Tesla home. I’m afraid that leaves you short, Agent Quinn.”
“Between the two of us, sir, I think you made the right decision.”
“That has yet to be seen. You know I believe in Niobium, but her talents come at a very high cost. I’m not sure I can pay it anymore.”
He sighed. Deeply.
“Sir?”
“I wish I could tell you more, Agent Quinn. Orlando. I hope I can call you that. But it is because of my concern for you and your team that I’m afraid the only thing I can say is that when it comes to Director Ogada, for good or ill, you are on your own.”
Quinn nodded and looked down. “Understood, sir.”
“I doubt it, but you are being very kind.”
Quinn heard a vehicle stop.
“Unfortunately, Agent Quinn, I really do have to go.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you for your time.”
But the call had already ended.
“No signal!” an older woman called as she approached. She had frizzy, graying red hair, no makeup, and a fancy ID badge on the left breast of her suit.
Sitting on the concrete with his phone in his hand, Ezra confirmed what he’d just been told. No signal. He put his phone away and stood.
Across the tracked roadway, the large self-driving semi containing the spherical anomaly beeped loudly as it inched backward toward a loading dock. The sound echoed off the rock ceiling of the man-made cavern that held them.
“I assume you have some ID?” she said over the noise.
The caravan of US Marshals that had escorted the truck to Nevada didn’t have clearance to enter the classified site and had waited at the compound gate, leaving Ezra in the cab to enter alone.
He pulled his custom wallet from his back pocket and showed her his badge. As she examined it, Ezra straightened his back and thought for a moment about lowering his voice.
“You’re not what I expected the science police to look like,” she told him skeptically.
“What did you expect?”
“To listen to the news, you’d think it was all jackboots and black armbands.” She looked at the kid’s scrawny body. “I suppose I was expecting burly ex-cops pinching graduate students for not fitting up their applications in triplicate.”
“Yeah,” Ezra said with a despondent air.
She returned his ID. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No.” He perked up. “No. Sorry. It’s just that’s kind of exactly what I was sitting here thinking.”
“Oh?” The woman with the frizzy hair waited for more. When it didn’t come, she guessed. “Job not what you expected?”
“Something like that,” he said coolly, trying to end the conversation.
Ezra glanced at her fancy ID badge: Eleanor Frisk, Chief Archivist. He motioned across the roadway to the metallic sphere, which was being carefully removed from the trailer by a tracked robot.
“Anyway. Here it is. All yours.”
“If you’re having a crisis of conscience, you’ll need a better view. You don’t want to be doing it in the loading bay, do you?”
“I’m okay. Really. It’s just been a long couple days.”
“I’m sure it has. But I still need you to sign some documents.” She stepped to the side and raised her hand toward the main door. “Shall we?”
Ezra paused. He didn’t want to go in. He wanted to get back on the road. It was nearly thre hours to the nearest motel.
But it seemed he didn’t have a choice.
Beyond the door was a receiving warehouse. On the wall, next to a square logo that looked suspiciously like medieval heraldry, were enormous letters:
YUCCA FLAT CONTAINMENT FACILITY
US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
“Big,” Ezra said, craning his neck to catch the high rock ceiling directly overhead.
It took him a moment to notice there were only a few other people in the long, high space. The forklifts moving about were empty. All automated.
“The fewer people here,” Eleanor explained as if reading his mind, “the fewer people get hurt if anything goes wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“The elevators are this way.”
She swiped her key card at another set of doors and entered a code. The doors buzzed, and they walked down a short hall, where they turned left. There, two elevators waited. The large painted number on the wall opposite them told Ezra they were on the second floor, but that meant the second floor down. Ezra wondered how deep it went.
“We have a full staff,” she explained, “but we rotate them every six hours for safety. Everyone but me.”
“You must really like your job.”
They got out on sublevel five, and Ezra wondered why they didn’t just take the stairs.
Eleanor swiped her security card again and entered another code—longer, it seemed—and they entered a curved hall with identical doors staggered on both sides. There was nothing to indicate any difference between them except a two-digit number next to each.
“This is me,” she said, stopping at number 17.
She unlocked the door with a metal key, one of a very large set which jangled. Inside was a spacious but crowded office clad entirely in browns. Brown bookcases full of browned books lined the tan side walls. In the center, a cracked brown leather sofa sat facing two equally cracked brown leather chairs. Beyond them, sitting on a raised dais at the back, an antique wood desk faced the door wearily but proudly. Even the sole potted plant was dry and browning at the edges.
Behind it, inside the back wall, was the one thing in the room that didn’t fit. A large glass view port gave a stunning view of an enormous space beyond.
Eleanor smiled at Ezra’s reaction. “I still get a kick out of that,” she said softly.
But he wasn’t listening. He shuffled to the back without asking and stood before the glass, nearly kicking over the plant.
“Wow . . .”
It was a giant cavernous hole lined in curved walkways regularly spaced in numbered vault doors, each top-lit by a single LED.
Ezra pressed his forehead to the glass to see if he could spot the bottom, but it was just out of view.
“What do you think of our little secret?” Eleanor asked, dropping her keys on the desk.
“Secret?”
Speaking made Ezra engage the world again, and hr realized the shock of seeing that place had made his eyes water. The tears had run down to his throat, and he had to cough once to clear it.
“Secret?” he repeated.
“They didn’t tell you?” Eleanor nodded to the cell-lined cavity. “Mention this to anyone and you’re going to be in big trouble.”
“Where did this place come from? Did they really hollow all this out?”
“Oh, no,” she said, stopping at the desk. “This cavity was created a century ago, when the Department of Energy detonated a a series of nuclear weapons underground.”
“Nuclear?” He stepped back from the glass. “Is it radioactive?”
“More at the depths than up here. But yes. I wouldn’t go into the lower stacks without protective gear. But the cells are all lined and impermeable. Not even gamma rays will go through. A thousand islands of nothingness.”
“What do they keep here?” he asked as if he were afraid to know.
“Anything, really. Anything they don’t want out in the world. Anything they don’t want everyone to see.”
“People?”
She laughed once. “God, I hope not.”
When Ezra looked at her quizzically, she clarified. “I doubt it, but the truth is I don’t always know what’s in the parcels I receive, which is ironic, really.”
“Ironic?”
She walked around the desk and joined him at the glass.
“The walls of this cavern were fused solid by a nuclear explosion. Everything we added was built to last multiple half-lives of plutonium. We don’t want some gel-frozen pathogen to accidentally escape in a thousand years and kill everyone, do we?”
“Why not just destroy it?”
She smiled at him. “Why do you think?”
He thought for a moment. “Because they might want to use it.”
“When our civilization finally does collapse and beings in the deep future come to dig everything up, like we do with those cities in Mesopotamia, this place is all that will be left. All our dirty little secrets.” She nodded out the window. “This is what we’re saving for posterity. Not art or literature but weapons and plagues and tiny bottled calamities. We won’t talk about any of it now. We can’t even mention it. But in 30,000 years, we’ll have nothing else to say. This is what we’ve bequeathed the future. Our species will live for a time and consider ourselves very bright, but when we die, only our monsters will remain. The objects stored in this facility, and any others like it, are humanity’s only true and lasting legacy. Pandora’s box.”
“That’s the codename for this place,” Ezra realized out loud.
He’d had to look it up. “Yucca Flat Containment Facility” wasn’t on the self-driving government truck’s list of pre-approved destinations. But “The Box” was.
Chief Archivist Eleanor Frisk walked back around her desk to her couch and sat down.
“But none of that is your concern. Humanity’s demons are my problem. I’d still like to hear yours.”
“It’s nothing,” Ezra said, feeling embarrassed. His problems seemed so tiny next to that awesome space. “Really. I shouldn’t’ve said anything. I’m just tired.”
“Well. It’s up to you, of course. But you can’t leave until you get a receipt, and you can get a receipt until your stowage is cleared, and we can’t clear your stowage until all the safety checks are complete, which will take a few hours. If you want, you can sit in the cafeteria. It has four lovely white walls for you to enjoy. Or . . .” She motioned to the open chair opposite her.
But Ezra didn’t sit. It seemed like an imposition somehow. Instead, he leaned against the sill of the view port.
“Did you hear anything about what happened in Texas?” he asked cautiously.
“Just what was on the news, but I know better than to believe that. But don’t tell me. I’d rather not know. I take it you were there?”
Ezra nodded. “My boss is this really big guy. Closer to what you were expecting.”
“And he waltzed right in?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s probably had more experience than you.”
“That’s not it.” Ezra shook his head.
“Then what is it?”
“You always think of yourself as a good person, right? You read about bad things happening somewhere and you can’t help but imagine what you would do.”
“Of course.”
He blushed.
“In college, I spent a semester in Mumbai. Robotics stuff. I didn’t really know anyone. It’s a beautiful country, but it’s a mess. Prostitutes and pickpockets and homeless people and stray dogs and sewage in the street. Cars drive everywhere, even in the oncoming lanes. Most of the time, I felt pretty alone. On my short walk to campus every day, there were throngs of cars and people and autorickshaws. More even than you can imagine. But no one looks at you. No one says hi. They’re all yelling at each other and honking and rushing around. The people at school were nice, I guess, but for them, I was just another pass-through. There were a couple dozen of us, and next semester, there’d be a couple dozen more. I wanted them to like me, and sometimes, when I was walking to school, I would imagine seeing a kid in the street about to get hit or something, and in my head, I would rush out to save him.”
Ezra blushed again.
“That’s not a bad thing,” Eleanor told him. “There are much worse things to want to be noticed for.”
“But that’s just it,” he said flatly. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t rush to save the kid. Before, I thought all I was missing was the chance. But when it came, all I could think about was the rules. Not getting into trouble. What my old professor would think. Or my parents.”
“But you still went in?”
“Only because I was too embarrassed not to. What would all those people down there have thought if I came back by myself? They’d know I was scared. And what if something happened to my boss? Everybody would look at me like it was my fault. ‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ Even when we found actual kids to save. Like, no joke. I still wanted to leave. I wasn’t thinking about saving them. I just wanted to get out of there before we got trapped. It just so happened that saving them was the fastest way to do that.”
“I don’t think that’s unusual.” Eleanor leaned forward. “I imagine that’s how most people react in dangerous situations. Very few of us are as exceptional as we all imagine ourselves to be.”
Ezra looked her in the eyes finally. “My boss was straight-up ordered by the government—like, the entire government—to stand down, and he went anyway. And completely inexplicably—”
Ezra thought about the bomb being dragged off course by the media drone.
“He what?” Eleanor asked.
Ezra shook his head. “It’s not important. The point is, he saved those kids. And probably lots of other people. I thought I was that guy, ya know? Deep down, I really believed that, that given the opportunity, that’s what I’d do.” His mouth hung open. “But I didn’t. And now I have this job, and it looks like I’m gonna be reminded that I’m a coward all the time.”
“I see.” Leather creaked as Eleanor sat back on the couch. “So, you want to quit.”
He nodded. Then he groaned like he wasn’t sure. “If I do, then what? How do I just go on with my life after admitting I’m a coward? Hi, I’m Ezra the coward. Nice to meet you. Wanna get married?”
“These are all very normal feelings,” Eleanor said softly. “I don’t think being afraid of something that could legitimately kill you makes you a coward. It might mean you’re not the hero you wanted to be, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a good person. Being the hero isn’t for everyone. It’s lot harder than it looks.”
“Yeah . . .”
Eleanor studied him. Then she stood. “But if it bothers you that much, how about a test?”
“Test?”
“Sure.”
She swiped her keys from the desk, which is when Ezra noticed there wasn’t a computer. Just stacks of files.
Eleanor walked to the door.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“I think there’s something you need to see.”
She led him back to the elevators and down to sublevel nine, where around a long curving hallway, a white vault the size of a large racquetball court sat open. Inside was a long metal box, white with black trim. Taller and wider than a coffin but not quite as long, it had a flat base and beveled edges at the top. At the side, there was some kind of small, dark panel. It seemed like it had been powered at one point but wasn’t any longer.
“What is it?” Ezra asked. His voice echoed slightly in the all-white room.
“I don’t know,” Eleanor told him.
The box didn’t appear to be fixed in place. In fact, it was very slightly tilted relative to the walls and to the colored tape that stretched around it on the floor, as if in warning. Red marked the interior, closest to the box. A yellow rectangle stood further out, but only at the front. Green tape made a wide margin around everything.
“Cross into the yellow section slowly,” Eleanor said. “But whatever you do, don’t cross the red boundary. Understand?”
“What will it do?”
“You’ll see.”
Ezra moved forward. Then he stopped.
“Is it safe?”
“No,” she said flatly. “If it was, it wouldn’t be much of a test, would it?”
Ezra slipped the tip of one sneaker over the green line, his eyes fixed on the white box, but nothing happened, and after a short pause, he moved both feet inside.
He looked down at the scuffed and torn front strip of yellow tape. It was dirty at the edges, as if from years of being trod.
“How many people have done this?” he asked.
“I dunno. A lot, I suppose. They used to use the box for hazing. It was a right of passage every new employee had to pass.”
“Had?”
“I stopped that,” she explained. “Whatever this is”—she nodded to a cluster of fine blood splatter barely visible at the corner of the box—“it isn’t a game.”
Ezra looked at the fine splatter, which had faded to pale orange. “Then why am I here?”
“You’ll see.” Eleanor nodded for him to proceed. When he didn’t, she urged him with her hands. “Go on. Stay out of the red area and nothing will happen to you, I promise.”
Ezra lifted his foot over the yellow box and held it threateningly, but nothing happened.
“Bring your foot down slowl—”
The box jumped before Ezra’s shoe touched the floor. One side went up and fell again with a thud heavy enough to shake the concrete floor, and Ezra jumped back beyond the green line.
He froze.
But that was it. The great noise it made faded to echo, and silence returned.
“What the hell’s in there?” he whispered.
“I have no idea,” Eleanor whispered back. “But it’s been here longer than I have. And I’ve been here a long time.”
“Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s inside it? Why did it move like that?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never so much as touched it.”
“Then . . .” Ezra got stuck contemplating the significance of that.
Eleanor smiled patiently at Ezra’s face. “Young man, in my life, in my work, I’ve found there are two kinds of people: those who can abide a mystery and those who can’t. Now, I don’t mean a puzzle or riddle. A puzzle is a toy. I mean a genuine mystery, the kind that might drag you to obsession—or get you killed. We like to think they all get wrapped up, especially the ones with murder at the end, but they don’t. I think you know that. But even the hardest murder is easy. At least you know what happened. Someone killed someone else. You just don’t know who. But real mysteries, like the one inside that box, won’t admit even what they could be, let alone what they are.
“Those who can’t abide such things make very bad archivists. We’re like couriers. But instead of delivering to a person, we’re delivering to a time: the future. If you can’t deliver a letter without tearing it open and reading it, even if you know there is some great secret inside, then you have no business in preservation. We don’t pass judgment on what we keep. That’s posterity’s job. We just make sure it gets there.
“I’ve never worked in law enforcement. I haven’t even known anyone who has. But I would guess there it’s the opposite—or should be. I suppose there’s no shortage of shabby detectives, but it seems to me those who are good at it are not those who can go home at night and sleep comfortably not knowing what could persist inside a box without food or sleep or breath for four decades.”
She watched Ezra stare at it.
“So, you see, it’s a simple empirical test. Tonight, in your hotel room, you’ll either fall asleep soundly, or else you’ll lie awake, wondering what’s in the box. And that will be your answer.”