He smiled slightly. “A ton.” It would take him all night.
She walked around the bed. “Not anymore.” She removed the laptop from his hands and climbed on top of him.
CHAPTER 19
Harmony House, Woodbury, New Jersey, May 22, 10:43 p.m.
The facility had a lights-out policy at nine thirty in the evening, and tonight was no exception. The lights in every patient’s room had already been off for over an hour. The night air was cold and still. The only sounds were the leaves crunching beneath the feet of the perimeter guard on his rounds, and those could barely be heard. You could see the man had training simply by the way he moved. His gait was rhythmic and determined. An intruder would be unfortunate to come upon him or his associates. The night security staff consisted of four personnel: one outside, one inside, one at the driveway gate, and one at the front entrance, who checked in with the other three at exactly twenty-minute intervals. “Baker, do you copy?”
The outside man answered quietly through his headset. “Baker clear, over.”
The front-desk guard tracked the locations of his two men on patrol with transmitters in their radios, which appeared on an electronic map of the facility. Surveillance cameras provided views of every inch of the grounds, both inside and out. “Copy that, Baker. Charlie, status?”
“Charlie’s clear, over.” He continued patrolling the hallways.
“Copy that, Charlie. Danger, do you copy?”
“Danger clear, over.” He continued watching the driveway-gate monitors.
“Copy that, Danger. Able out.” Able, Baker, Charlie, and Danger signified military, confirming the training evident in the gait of the outside man, Baker. Each was considerably overqualified for the job he now held. They had each taken the lives of no fewer than three people. One had killed eleven. These were men capable of becoming death machines, but only if the circumstances required it and they were ordered to do so.
Over the years, they had been required to make adjustments for Eddie. The boots initially provided to security personnel made a particular clicking sound on the linoleum floors, which disturbed Eddie’s sleep, even after the installation of the acoustic panels in his room, so he developed a composite rubber for new soles that made the boots practically silent. It turned out this new composite also lasted three times as long as the previous one, so Eddie’s composite soon became part of standard-issue US military footwear.
For someone who didn’t understand the concept of money, he was certainly doing a nice job making the government quite a bit of it.
It was exactly 10:47 p.m. when Eddie’s eyes opened. He sucked in a deep breath as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Or hit by a lightning bolt. And maybe this time, he had been. Maybe, finally, this was it. The answer. The fix. The conclusion to his equations, Eddie’s Theorems, which had eluded him for all these years. Could this really be it? Could it?
He raced to the light switch by the door, then over to his desk, where he grabbed the most recently filled book of equations and a number-two pencil. He had a cup full of them—twenty-four, to be exact, because the number was the product of two cubed times three, and Eddie liked that. Each pencil was properly sharpened and awaiting its turn.
The math was a blur, simply flying out of him at stunning speed. Lost in a torrent of thoughts, he went through one pencil quickly, maintaining its sharpness with an electric sharpener that was over ten years old. Having filled the remaining pages of the current notebook, he readily went through another. And two more pencils in the process.
Like a composer lost in his own world, the incomprehensible equations were pouring out of him so rapidly that his writing hand struggled to keep up with his brain. It was frenzied and spontaneous moments of revelation like this that had made him wonder, earlier in life, if he should learn to write with both hands simultaneously, thereby doubling his already tremendous output. But his left hand proved to be less adept at writing, and although he had two eyes, the two hemispheres of his brain refused to act independently of each other, forever condemning him to the one-handed pace of the rest of us.
Whatever he was hearing in his head, he was not hearing anything else. Nothing in his room or outside the windows. Nothing down the hall. It was as if his remarkable sense of hearing had shut down to focus all his considerable processing power on the singular task at hand. When a person experiences extreme cold, frostbite results from the body trying to survive by withdrawing blood circulation from the extremities to protect the critical organ, the heart. That same principle seemed to be at work as Eddie continued writing wildly. Two hours passed. Then three. He showed no signs of slowing down.
Eddie didn’t notice that five thirty, his usual wake-up time, had already come and gone. So did dawn’s first light. So did his would-be morning singing companions, a red-necked grebe and a northern gannet. The birds left the branches outside his window quickly, as if the light through the window of Eddie’s room told them there would be no chorus today. He was visible at his desk, still writing away furiously.
Occasionally he would pause, looking up from his notebook, staring at the wall, not looking at anything in particular. Nothing tangible, anyway. What he was seeing was anybody’s guess. His pencil would remain motionless. He wouldn’t blink, and barely seemed to breathe. A human mannequin. Just as quickly as these frozen moments would start, they would stop again, and the graphite in Eddie’s number-two pencil would resume its frenzied trail across page after page.
A short while later, Eddie put his pencil down and quickly turned on his laptop supercomputer, which he had dubbed the Hummer because of the DRONE the machine’s cooling fan produced whenever it was left on for an extended period of time. Fast, it was. Quiet, it was not. Not by Eddie’s standards, anyway. But right now, that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that his calculations would prove correct, and that the Hummer would finally be able to interpret the inaudible recordings made by the echo-box microsatellites.
CHAPTER 20
Parking Lot, Harmony House, May 23, 7:02 a.m.
Skylar pulled into the lot and quickly walked up the stairs to her small office on the second floor. The desk was utilitarian, and was probably older than she was. A scuffed Formica top with a metal frame. The sliding drawers were a little rusty, but she didn’t have much use for them, anyway. The only decoration she’d brought in so far was a photograph that sat on her desk. The five-by-seven walnut frame contained her favorite image of her and Jacob, taken while she was still at Harvard.