Superposition (28 page)

I dropped into a chair across from him. “You here to post my bail?” I asked sarcastically.

“No.”

“It's only ten million dollars. A nice round number.”

“Mr. Kelley, I was at your trial.”

“Yes, I know. For the prosecution. You told the jury all about my motive for murder.”

The blotches on Peyton's face grew more pronounced. “I'm sorry about that.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“I saw what happened in court today.” He said it quietly, almost whispering, as if he were having trouble getting the words out. “There were two of you, just like you said. I saw you both as clearly as I can see you now. Unless you have a secret twin brother that there was no record of, you must be telling the truth.”

“Imagine that.”

“If you're telling the truth about that, then maybe you're telling the truth about the rest, too. That there were two of your friend Vanderhall and you really did see him at your home at the same time that he was dead in the bunker.”

“So you believe me now,” I said.

“Some of it, anyway,” Peyton said.

“Fat lot of good that does me. Tomorrow is when they decide to put me away for life.”

Peyton shrugged. “Maybe they'll find you innocent.”

“I can't say how encouraged I am by your legal expertise,” I said.

“It could happen. They were talking a long time in there, and they didn't decide yet. Maybe this whole thing will just blow away.”

I jumped to my feet, shaking. It had been weeks since I punched anything, and I was only barely restraining myself from knocking that soft, pale face of his inside out. “I found the dead bodies of my wife and daughter and son. Everyone I know thinks I'm a murderer.” I leaned over and shouted into his face. “This thing will not just
blow away
!”

The guard outside yanked open the soundproof door. “Everything all right in here?”

“We're fine,” Peyton said. “We're not done yet.”

The guard gave his stick a menacing wave in my direction. “Sit down,” he said. I threw myself back into the chair. The guard left.

“That day when I came to your house, I saw something,” Peyton said. “Something I never told anyone else about.” He hesitated. “I saw a ghost in your back yard.” He looked at me expectantly, but I just stared back at him. “Esposito and Ashford walked around the house first, and they didn't see anything, but I took a look afterward. There was a ghost standing in the middle of your yard, no footprints anywhere around, just standing there surrounded by smooth, unbroken snow. And then it was gone.”

He waited again for a reaction, but I didn't give him the satisfaction.

“The ghost just disappeared,” Peyton went on. “But it was like turning more than disappearing, you know? Like going around a corner, but there was no corner there. Have you ever seen anything like that?” He sounded desperate for me to validate his experience, to confirm he wasn't crazy.

“You didn't think this was important to mention in your report?”

“No, of course not. What would I say, that I saw a ghost in your back yard? I wasn't even certain I saw it.”

“Don't give me that. You were certain. But in your testimony in court, you told the jury that your search turned up nothing, no evidence of any other person besides Elena and me who could have fired that gun. You lied to save yourself from ridicule. At my expense.”

“How would it have helped you if I admitted to seeing a ghost? They wouldn't even have let me testify.”

“What you saw was what we have been calling a
varcolac
,” I said. “And maybe the prosecution wouldn't have called you as a witness, but the defense might have. You want me to tell you that you aren't crazy. Why weren't you willing to return the favor?”

“Look, I was just doing my job. I came; I took your statements; I filled out my report. When it comes down to it, I don't know that you didn't shoot your friend. Or that your twin didn't.”

“Neither of us did. I hadn't been near the NJSC in years when Brian died. If he'd bothered to take my name off his lock when I stopped working there, the police never would have come looking for me. They would never have connected me to this crime at all.”

“That's not true. They had a tip that put them on your trail before forensics ever deciphered the lock.”

“A tip? You mean somebody actually called the New Jersey State Police and gave them my name in connection with Brian's murder?”

Peyton nodded. “McBride made it seem in the trial like it was his smart police work that made the connection between you and the weapon and the murder, but that wasn't really the case. An anonymous caller made the connection, and then Media and New Jersey started talking and matched the gun with the bullets. It was only afterward that they connected your name with the lock, and it seemed pretty cut and dried from there. The evidence was fitting together.”

“Except that I didn't do it.”

“The jury's supposed to decide that. That's how the system works. We just try to collect enough evidence to be confident enough to make an arrest.”

“And then you only testify in court to the parts that make me look bad.”

Peyton stood up. “I'm done here. I'm sorry I came. If you really didn't kill him, I hope the jury finds you innocent.”

He stood and motioned at the guard to unlock the door. The guard came in, but just as Peyton was about to leave, I cleared my throat.

“Listen,” I said, “the man you saw: it wasn't really a man. It was a different kind of being, a creature made up of quantum entanglement. If you ever see it again, just run.”

“Man? What man?”

“The ghost you saw in my back yard.”

“It wasn't a man.”

“What? I thought you said—”

“The ghost I saw was a woman.”

CHAPTER 29

UP-SPIN

Jean, Alex, Marek, and I found a dirt path leading from the highway into the pine forest that must have been used by construction vehicles when the accelerator tunnel had first been dug. I moved the chain while Jean drove the car through, then I reattached the chain on the other side. This allowed us to park in a less conspicuous place, off the main road, where passing troopers were less likely to spot an abandoned car. I draped a few fallen pine branches over it, just to make sure.

This was the emergency exit that Marek and I had come through before, but I still needed GPS to find it. The ground was covered with needles, and the pine trees all looked the same. I had hoped to take the freight elevator down, but it needed a key to start, so we were stuck with the stairs, all twenty stories of them. Marek and I were fine, but Jean was panting when we reached the bottom, and Alex was breathing hard, though she hid it well. It wasn't going to be easy to get everyone back up top again.

I led the way toward the CATHIE bunker itself, listening for any unexpected sounds. The door to the bunker was taped off with yellow crime scene banners, which I tore away. Inside, the trash and broken instruments and glass shards had been cleared away, tagged and stored as evidence. Most of the surfaces had been dusted with aluminum powder in the search for fingerprints. I took a step inside. Nothing happened.

The others followed me in. There was nothing left to find here. There was still some equipment and most of the tables and wires, but the resonator experiment had been destroyed, and the police had certainly already found anything of interest. Against a table leaned two push brooms that the police must have left behind. Certainly Brian had never swept the floor, but it was clean now. Marek picked up one of the brooms and started sweeping it through the dust on the floor, but I doubted he'd find anything.

The mirror was still on the wall. I peered into it. It showed me my reflection. I studied the eyes, but they were just my eyes.

“This is where Brian first made contact with them, using the resonators as a kind of quantum radio,” I said. “At first, they were helpful, providing him with the information for the Higgs projector, but at some point he must have harmed or betrayed them.”

“Why do you say that?” Jean asked.

“Well, the varcolac has been pretty hostile. The first thing it did when it came out of the mirror was to destroy the resonator equipment. Maybe that was random destruction—even exploratory destruction, like a toddler dropping a glass to see what will happen—but maybe not. Maybe Brian had previously trapped it and forced it to do what he wanted.”

“What, by drawing a pentagram on the ground and burning candles?” Jean asked.

“I'm just theorizing.” A sudden surge of frustration made me pound both my fists on the tabletop and yell.

Both Jean and Alex jumped. “What?” Jean asked.

“I have no idea what to do here. We're just spinning our wheels. We can't recreate Brian's work, because it's destroyed. We can't summon a varcolac, and even if we could, we wouldn't know how to learn anything from it. We don't know anything at all.”

“Let me see the Higgs projector,” Jean said.

“What are you going to do?”

She pulled a folded sheet of smartpaper out of her pocket. “I've been dabbling with some code,” she said. “Diagnostic only—it might help us understand how Brian used the projector to summon the varcolac and keep it at bay.”

I hesitated. The potential dangers of fooling around with the projector were serious, but it wasn't reasonable for me to keep it solely to myself. Jean had been a faithful friend through all this, and there was no questioning her quick intelligence. If she thought she knew a way to use it to find out more than we knew now, I trusted her. I handed her the projector.

She synched the data on her smartpaper to the projector, and I could tell by the way her eyes flicked back and forth that she was interacting with it through her lenses. I was amazed that, given the brief look she had gotten at the programming before, she could have remembered enough of the interface to write subroutines of her own.

I felt the now-familiar tugging sensation in my chest, and I knew the projector had been turned on. “What are you doing, Jeannie?” I asked. I hoped she had more of a clue than I did. The device held incredible power, perhaps even the ability to summon and control a varcolac. But what was it doing, right now, to the integrity of my DNA, or my cellular structure, or my identity? To the basic laws of our universe? We just didn't know.

I got a partial answer pretty quickly when Alex suddenly clutched my arm and gasped. I looked up to see that the room contained, not one, but dozens of varcolacs. Surrounding us.

“Turn it off, Jean,” I said. “Whatever you're doing, turn it off.”

The varcolacs all had the same not-quite-human look about them, as if taken apart and put together too hastily, but they weren't all identical. There were male and female faces in the crowd, but they didn't always correspond to the male and female bodies. There were some different skin colors, but racial characteristics were as mixed up as everything else. Disturbingly, several of the faces bore some resemblance to Elena, Claire, Alex, and Sean. They were preternaturally still.

“What do we do?” Alex whispered, turning her head toward me slightly, but unwilling to take her eyes from the varcolacs. “Tell them we come in peace?”

The creatures glided forward, joints bending awkwardly, giving the impression of a nest of spiders. There was no way around them.

I cast around for some kind of weapon. The iron bar I'd used down here before had made no impression whatsoever, and in my house the man with no eyes had effortlessly snapped a poker in two. Standard weapons weren't going to accomplish anything.

The varcolacs closed around us. I'd seen what could happen if they got too close, seen them kill Elena and Brian, seen a steel microscope crumpled like paper, seen Marek torn limb from limb. I pushed Alex behind me, shielding her with my body, for all the good that would do. They didn't speak or make any expression of hostility or hatred. They just kept coming.

Marek wielded his broom like a quarterstaff and stepped forward, cursing loudly in Romanian. He swept the handle in an arc through three varcolac bodies, but they shimmered and diffracted around it just like before. There was no way to touch them.

Jean was hastily doing something with the projector. She stepped forward, holding it out like a charm, and incredibly the varcolacs drew back. The projector seemed to be causing them some kind of pain; when she pointed it in their direction, they shied away, back against the walls, and they shimmered, seeming to become more insubstantial. They had no eyes to track her movements, but their attention was clearly on her and on the projector in her hand.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

It didn't hold them back for long. As she was pushing them back in one direction, they circled around and approached her from the rear.

“Watch out!” Alex said, and Jean spun in time to push them back the other way.

“I'm going to clear the door,” Jean said. “You won't have much time.” She held the projector out in front of her and stepped toward the door, clearing an escape path. “Run!”

We all ran, Jean right behind us. Alex headed back toward the stairs, but I knew there was no way we were going to make it back up twenty stories with any speed. Perhaps the varcolacs would find the stairs just as difficult, but I wasn't counting on it, and once we were stuck in the stairwell with them coming up behind us, there wouldn't be any other options. We'd be trapped.

“This way,” I said. I ran the other direction, into the accelerator tunnel. I hoped that the golf cart Marek and I had driven might still be there, or else that the police or a maintenance guy had left one behind, but no such luck.

Alex tried to use her phone to call for help, but of course she got no reception. “There are call stations every mile,” I shouted. “If we can make it there, we can ask them to send a vehicle to come and pick us up.”