Root of Unity (17 page)

“Yeah, that was us,” I said. “We’ve been poking the bear. You do it enough times, he runs into a trap.”

“Forgive me for saying so,” said Halliday, gazing down her nose at me a little like she had back in her office, “but the bear does not appear trapped to me.”

For some reason Halliday’s doubtfulness amused me this time. The woman had a spine—excellent. “Oh, that’s because you don’t know me,” I said, hoping it was true. “I’m very good.”

“At what?”

“Math.”

Halliday blinked at me, then said with a perfectly straight face, “As am I. I do not believe that’s given me a solution for escaping through solid walls.”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said. I leaned on the table and pushed myself up, ignoring the fact that I had to lean on it hard, or that I needed a moment to get my balance.

The pages covering the table were filled with dense mathematical writing, in what I could only assume to be Halliday’s precise hand. I covered for my lack of equilibrium by frowning at them. The printed papers stacked to the side weren’t Halliday’s work, from what I could see—just background references. And the longhand sheets…

“These are the notes you had stolen?” The bits of the algorithm matched up only raggedly, the connections between the insights missing. “Sorry, Professor, but this doesn’t exactly look complete.”

“I know.” Frustration bled into her voice. “I can’t—this was decades of work. I can’t recreate every—” She took a deep, shuddering breath.

She wasn’t making sense. I hadn’t figured I was
that
out of it. “I thought they had the proof already, and they only needed you to interpret it. Wasn’t that the whole point? That they stole it from you?”

“Yes, except whoever stole it—” She took another breath and moderated her tone, as if she were back at the university about to address a lecture full of students. “It wasn’t them. They don’t seem to be in possession of it.”

“Wait, so there’s someone
else
out there with your proof?” I sat back down in the chair, hard. Maybe I needed another minute before getting up after all. “Say that again.”

“They aren’t the ones who stole it,” she repeated. “I believe they are the people who attacked you and Arthur, to avoid word of my work getting out—they must have been watching, or listening. I presume they escalated in order to beat whomever does have my work, but they’re not the ones who took it. They kept haranguing me at first, insisting I tell them who had stolen it, or accusing me of lying and demanding where I’d hidden it all.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“That there would be more than one interested party?” she asked. “Why not? I think…I forget sometimes, that mathematics is not merely a playground of ideas, but intersects with the real world in profound ways.”

“So we have to get out of here,
and
still find out who took your proof and get it back from them?” That sounded like a lot more work, work I wasn’t in shape to tackle.

Whatever. Getting Halliday out of danger was the first priority; I’d think about the rest of the job after that.

“The man who has me—he is obsessed with the P versus NP problem and efficient solutions for any question that might lead him there,” said Halliday. “Though I do believe he intends to use my work for economic gain, I gather his greater dream is for it to lead to a proof that P equals NP.”

“That’s idiotic,” I said. “Factoring isn’t NP-complete. There’s no reason your proof would mean—”

“I know,” she said. “But he’s said things—said he’ll keep me here until I generalize my work to an NP-hard problem, which does not make the least bit of sense, but he said he’ll do—he’ll do things to me if I can’t…” Her voice trailed off. “He won’t hesitate to hurt us. I think he’s delusional.”

Delusional was right. Halliday had a fantastic result, but it sounded like the Lancer was after the Holy Grail of mathematics.

I remembered the notated shelves of binders. Someone with a middling talent for mathematics who had become obsessed—obsessed with a dream he’d never be good enough to realize.

I pressed a palm against my temple, hard, trying to think. “So this guy’s a computer expert and, uh, let’s say an armchair mathematician, and he’s got a fanatical obsession with algorithmic complexity. Okay. So he’s probably keeping up with the pros who are doing this work, maybe hacked your email along with the email of every other person who’s working on this stuff, and wrote a program scanning for whoever might be close to solving it.” Dr. Martinez’s words came back to me:
You could write a program that scans for keywords quite easily. It’s not paranoia, it’s just fact; you accept it and live in the modern world or you don’t.
“His program gives him a ping when you email the NSA and talk to your friend Zhang. So he starts spying on you, arranging to kidnap you. If he bugged your phone, too, at that point—he would’ve picked up your first conversation with Arthur, when you told him your work was stolen. When he had his guys run us off the road, I’m betting he wasn’t so much worried about us knowing what was going on as that he knew we were going after the missing proof, too, and he’d go to any lengths to stop us from getting there first.”

It fit. Christ. We were lucky the Lancer hadn’t bugged Halliday’s office; if he had, he’d have known I’d just met her then, and we wouldn’t have been able to pretend I’d been helping her all along. “That still doesn’t tell us who stole your work in the first place.”

“The worst part is, I don’t think I can do it.” Halliday lowered herself to sit on the mattress. “I don’t think I can recreate it. I’ve been trying—slowly, because I knew Arthur would be coming, but…the man who has me—has us—he knows enough to check my work, so I can’t stall too much. And most of my hesitation…it hasn’t been faked.” I could tell she was trying to speak plainly, but her shoulders hunched, and her fingers clenched against the mattress as if she was fighting to keep her composure. “I don’t think I can do it. I think…I’ve lost it. That’s the worst part of all.”

Personally, I thought the potential bodily harm to us and the potential economic threat to the world at large from whoever
did
have the proof ranked as being a lot worse than Halliday not being able to recreate her notes, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I pulled over some of the pages and flipped through them.

Interesting. The structure of the proof was scattered but apparent—I could see it, one insight that should jump to the next, but with the steps in between left blank and unarticulated.

Well, that was only a little harder than reading a particularly dense paper. The intuitive leaps were already there. “Don’t let that get you down. I think I could finish it from here.”

She stared at me, her face going very stiff and still. “You’re joking.”

“No. You have most of it already.” It was a killer result, if I was honest. Creative and brilliant, turning complexity theory inside out before inverting it back again. I was impressed.

But I wasn’t going to tell Halliday that and ruin my fun. I flicked her papers back down. “It’s just connect-the-dots. Child’s play.”

It was hard to say whether in that moment Professor Halliday would have preferred to shoot me or hug me.

Chapter 17

“First things
first,” I said. “We get you out of here. Then we can worry about the proof.” I stayed sitting and pointed at the door. “When do they open that?”

“Since I’ve been here? Never. Except for my blood sugar episode. And when they brought you in.”

Dammit. If I’d been on my toes, I could have mowed down the guards the instant I saw Halliday and gotten us both out then. I hadn’t been thinking fast enough. “Fake an attack, then,” I said.

“You think that would work?”

I pondered it. Probably not, actually. If they were smart, they’d watch through the slot in the door until I was safely on the other side of the room and come in with weapons trained on us.

Ordinarily that might still change enough variables for me to find an opening and get us out. In my current condition, and with Halliday to protect…

“What about food?” I asked. “They have to bring food.”

She pointed at the slot in the door. Definitely enough room for a tray.

“We need a reason for them to come in,” I said, thinking out loud. “Something that will surprise them. Throw them off. Panic them.”

“And then what?” Halliday’s dark skin had a slightly greenish cast in the fluorescent light. “We’ll never get past them. We’ll die.”

“Aren’t you a party pooper,” I said. “Professor, I can protect you. I promise.”

“You can barely stand up on your own.” The words could have been mean, but instead her voice was empty and factual.

Her skepticism made me even more determined. “I told you, it’s not that bad. I’ll deal with it. Besides, what choice do we have? You’d rather stay here?”

She didn’t answer, just pressed her lips together for a moment. “Where’s Arthur?” she asked finally.

“With the NSA. I beat them to finding you.” I bared my teeth in something like a smile.

“What? We should wait for them, then!”

I knew Halliday’s opinion didn’t
matter,
but her reaction was still like a spike in my chest. “We don’t know they’ll find us,” I argued. “The guys who’ve got us are
good,
maybe good enough to evade the NSA, and this situation could go very bad at any moment. What if they decide to kill us and rabbit? What if the Feds do track us down, and these guys blow us all to kingdom come to avoid capture? You really want to sit on our hands and hope the government rides out of the woods on white horses?”

“If Arthur said he’s coming, he’ll be here,” said Halliday. “He’ll come for us.”

“I’d rather we came for us.”

She tilted her head at me. “You don’t trust him.”

“What? No, I do!” I protested, surprised and disconcerted at the conversational left turn. “But trusting Arthur doesn’t mean—come on, there are a thousand things he can’t control. Just because he would
want
to help us doesn’t mean he’ll be able to come through.”

“He trusts you to come through,” she said softly. “I can tell.”

“But I’m—listen, Arthur’s handy with a gun, but I’m way,
way
better than he is. He trusts me to come through for him because he knows I can.”

“Because he knows you
will,”
she insisted.

“I really don’t know what point you’re trying to make,” I said, my emotions prickling. “What you’re saying doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t matter what he wants to do or how much you trust him to want it, because sometimes no matter how hard you try, there are still going to be things you can’t make happen.”

“I know,” she said, the weight of the universe in those words.

I was starting to get angry. “So…?”

“What you’re saying is, is rational, but—I do trust Arthur that much, despite everything. Regardless of how illogical it seems. And I think…I think it’s sad you don’t. That’s all.”

The only person I trusted to have my back to that level was Rio, and for good reason. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to Halliday stiffly. “You’re not talking about trust. You’re talking about faith.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Is faith so bad?”

“Faith
by definition
is unsubstantiated belief!” I tried to keep my voice low enough so anyone lurking outside wouldn’t hear me through the metal door, and I managed the decibel level, barely. The wound in my side wrenched. “For Christ’s sake, aren’t you a mathematician?”

“Mathematics doesn’t preclude faith.”

“Of course it does!”

“Then I feel sorry for you,” she said.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. I didn’t need Halliday’s okay to break us out. All I needed was a reason for our captors to burst in here without thinking about it.

With a clang of metal, a tray with two small meals appeared through the slot in the door. Halliday hastened up to get it. “Ever since I had that attack, they’ve been bringing food every hour or so,” she explained. “More than I’ve needed, so if you want some of mine…”

They were lucky she hadn’t tried going on a hunger strike. “Have you been stockpiling it?”

Her head came around to me in surprise as she put the food on the table. “No. Why would I do that? I put the extra back on the tray.”

“Well, start,” I said. “Eat what you need to and stick the rest in pockets. My half, too.”

“What will you eat?”

“We’re not going to be in here long enough for it to matter,” I said. The thought of food still made nausea nibble around the corners of my stomach anyway. “Meals might get a whole lot less regular once we’re running, and I don’t want you fainting on me. Now, tell me. Do they come by exactly on the hour, every time?” I checked my watch. The tray had come through at thirty-three seconds past two p.m. If that timing was consistent, it might be exact enough to use for the execution of our escape.

“I don’t know,” Halliday said. “They took my phone.”

“We’ll time the next one, then. And then the next one is when we’re out of here. Before dark.”

“I still think we should wait for Arthur,” said Halliday. “This is foolhardy. Reckless.”

“Reckless is where I live.” I tried to grin and failed. “It’s too dangerous to wait, Professor. I’m not giving you a choice.”

“What’s your plan, then?” She addressed the question as if she were giving an oral exam, one she expected me to fail.

I hadn’t quite worked out what our best shot would be myself, but I didn’t say so, instead ignoring the professor and taking a moment to think. The regular meals gave us scheduled opportunities of contact with our captors, which meant I could try something timed. And what would throw them into a panic more than the chance of losing their bosses’ assets?

Those assets being the half-finished proof, Professor Halliday, and me.

She was going to kill me.

“We only need them to open that door,” I said slowly, “and they’d rush in to save us, if we were in danger. From, say, a fire.”

“A
what?”

“We’ve got plenty of fuel right here,” I said, nodding at the papers on the table.

The look of horror on her face was almost comical.