Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [108]
“First law of physics: What goes up must come down,” she explained.
“Who said that? Copernicus or Obama?”
“Newton.”
“What did you just say?”
“Sir Isaac Newton. Obama’s a different guy. He discovered the cures for cancer, global warming, and fatty foods.”
Polly rolled over and fell asleep and my imagination kicked into gear.
Now I’m sitting in front of my laptop computer waiting for it to boot up. I make a pot of coffee.
It has been two-and-half weeks since I visited Chuck in the rain. I’m just a few days shy of the mysterious three-week deadline Pete gave me. And I’ve learned little of value that might make sense of any of it.
I looked at the public records to see about the real-estate ownership of the dental office and imaging center. They both are leased by a property management company that hasn’t returned calls.
I did finally manage to get a return call from the public relations director at Biogen. He said he’s never heard of the Human Memory Crusade or ADAM but says he’d love to take me out for coffee to talk about a new skin-softening lotion developed from biotech research. The lotion, he says, can “de-age” the derma. But he adds that we can’t meet until the merger goes through with Falcon Corp. The companies are in a quiet period while they await anti-trust approval for the deal from the European Union.
Pete, dismissed from the ICU, has gone away with his family on an extended recovery. His office won’t tell me where that is, and he isn’t returning my calls.
Adrianna won’t have anything to do with me. I beg her to help me help Lane. She says she has no idea what Pete meant by “three weeks.”
I’ve spent hours with Grandma, watching her and Harry interact with a peaceful tenderness that I’d somehow overlooked. I’m trying to accept her aging. I’m also preoccupied with Polly’s health and, for the first time, my own. I got my inaugural cholesterol test and signed up for a life-insurance policy.
My bank account is solvent, the Visa is back working, and I’ve got a BlackBerry. Polly reminds me not to text and drive.
If I will only allow it to, life would be back to relative normal.
But I’ve been haunted by the idea that the document Pete gave me contains some important secret, and that key information remains buried in Lane’s head. It’s the one thing that I can’t make sense of or explain away with the collusive rationalizations I got from Chuck and Pete and Adrianna.
I’m convinced that Adrianna intended to give me the key. But before she managed to do so she was either interrupted, intercepted, or convinced otherwise. Pete either absconded with the document or, maybe, he and Adrianna were lovers and she gave it to him to protect.
The computer comes to life. I call up a site that is a “binary decoder.”
Bullseye and I have tried repeatedly to decode Grandma’s interviews with the Human Memory Crusade. For instance, we’ve tried changing the order of her answers so that they generate a different series of ones and zeroes. If we start with “Purple Chevrolet” (which = 1) then we get a different answer than if we start with “No polio in the family” (which = 0).
We’ve also gone over her transcripts for any other keywords we’ve missed.
And we’ve also tried to determine the meaning of the commands that appear at the bottom of the piece of paper I took from Pete’s library. Those commands include such phrases as, “If union, then Yankees.”
There are several possibilities that we infer from this “if-then” statement. One is that when we hit the keyword “union” we instead put the code for “Yankees.” Another possibility is that when we hit the word “union” the program is telling us to go back through Grandma’s story to the place where she said “Yankees” and begin decrypting from there. We have found that particular interpretation to be compelling because it allows us to create numerous strands of ones and zeroes by looping us through Grandma’s keywords over and over again.
We have created dozens