Einstein's Secret (9 page)

As we moved through the tunnels, I looked for signs that this was a dream. Unfortunately, my steps struck hard against the ground, and there was nothing dreamlike about that.

The same with Alex. There was nothing dreamlike about him. I hadn’t seen him since last winter, when he’d picked me up from Dulles for my interview with McKenzie, but nothing had changed about him. He was true to his character: focused. And right now that focus was on getting out of here.

We had talked many times since our college days, and had even visited each other at grad school a couple of times. But even though we were good friends, I’d been totally surprised by his offer to recommend me at UVA.

And grateful.

During the three days I’d stayed with him in Charlottesville, I’d found him to be just as focused as he’d been in college and grad school. Getting the appointment at UVA hadn’t changed him. He was still up at five a.m., writing and researching.

He’d always been a great student, but even so, when I read the acclaimed biography he’d written, it was hard to believe that my college buddy had created such a detailed and entertaining work. He had the ability to make historical figures come to life. It was a great payoff for his hours of hard work.

During my visit, he’d been working on his newest biography and I’d hoped to get a peek at it. But he wouldn’t say a word about it. He thought it’d be a jinx if he talked about it before he finished the first draft. The only thing I found out was that it was the reason for his sabbatical next year, and, therefore, the reason I was getting this interview at UVA.

His reticence was probably due more to his upbringing than to superstition. One night during our sophomore year in college, over Christmas break, when neither of us had gone home for the holidays, he’d opened up about his family.

I’d already known that his parents were upper-class WASPs from Connecticut who hadn’t been involved in his life, nor in the lives of their other kids. What I hadn’t known, until that night, was that as soon as Alex had left for Deerfield, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, his parents had as much as abandoned him.

He said that they saw it as a way to teach him that he could live on his own, but for a fourteen-year-old to learn that his parents didn’t expect him home for Thanksgiving or Christmas anymore… That was a bad blow. A blow that hurt. He’d been the only kid at Deerfield to stay at the school over Christmas.

And when he went home that first summer, he found that his parents had already left for a brownstone they owned in Paris. He was left alone, with two housekeepers. His older brothers weren’t there. They had long ago learned not to come home.

He returned to Deerfield without seeing his parents at all that summer. They didn’t return from Paris until after school had started. From that point on, he made every decision about his life and his studies on his own. His parents gave him a monthly allowance and paid his tuition, but otherwise, they weren’t involved in his life at all.

His opening up to me that night had bonded us for the rest of our college years and beyond. Not just because we were both kids without parents, but because we both had stories we wanted to keep buried.

*

Alex scaled the slots in the wall, pushed the trap door open, then hoisted himself up into Grace Hall. He motioned for me to hurry up. I kept my curiosity in check, which wasn’t easy, and climbed the wall.

We headed to the first floor, exited the building, and just as I was ready to pepper him with questions, a bone-chilling wind hit me full throttle. That was a shock. And more shocking was the sight of the barren trees against a sky thick with gray clouds.

The August heat was long gone. It was winter.

How long had I been unconscious?

Students were walking briskly along the brick paths, bundled up in coats, and, for the first time, I registered that Alex was wearing a thick sweater. New questions were piling up before I’d even started with my original ones.

“Alex, what’s going—?”

“It’s December, six months ago for you, and you’re back in Charlottesville. When you were visiting me from L.A.”

“Time travel.”

I said it, but I wasn’t buying it. Not yet anyway. I reached into my pocket for my iPhone, to check the date, then remembered that I’d used it as a weapon.

Alex checked behind us, still on the lookout for whoever was after him, or us. We made it to the Corner and started down University Avenue, passing the small shops. Alex was hyper-aware of his surroundings, glancing in all directions.

I veered into a coffee shop and grabbed a copy of the campus newspaper from a stack by the door—and the date confirmed Alex’s story. I spotted a copy of the
New York Times
on a table. Its owner was gabbing on a cell phone, so I lunged forward and snatched the paper up.

“Hey, I’m still reading that!”

I checked the date, and the
New York Times
, the paper of record, confirmed Alex’s story. My eyes quickly ticked over the news items to see if I recognized the stories as belonging to this past December.

I did.

“Hey, asshole, I haven’t finished with that.”

I dropped the paper back onto the table, and my mind wanted to process this, it really did, but my body was interfering. I suddenly felt queasy and unbearably exhausted. My body wanted to go to sleep and wake up healthy and ready to look for that new job.

I forced myself to go back outside.

“Satisfied?” Alex said.

“Satisfied probably isn’t the right word.”

Alex started down the sidewalk, expecting me to keep up. I barely did.

We passed Greenley’s, where Eddie had first reeled me into this nightmare, and that brought back a more recent memory. It hadn’t been me who’d been shot in the basement. At least, I didn’t remember it that way. It had been Eddie who had stumbled after the gunshot rang out.

“What happened to Eddie? He was with me at Weldon’s.”

“This is his fault.”

“What?

“Well, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Alex turned the corner and hurried to his car. “We can’t go back to my place. It’s too risky.”

“Too risky because someone is after you or too risky because there’s another one of me already there, waiting for his job interview?”

“Both.”

Finding out there were two of me running around didn’t do much to convince me that this was really happening. Two of me seemed like a time-travel trope. And that was a problem. Because the part of me that was beginning to accept time travel desperately wanted to discover that time travel wasn’t at all like it’d been depicted in science fiction. For some reason, that would’ve made it easier to accept.

What I didn’t know then was that I’d get my wish. Time travel
wasn’t
like science fiction had depicted it. But there’d be no joy in discovering that. There’d be just the opposite. I’d be desperate to have some time-travel tropes as my guide.

*

I climbed into Alex’s car, and he immediately pulled out and headed away from campus. He still hadn’t explained much—as in nothing—but I was starting to accept this new reality. So much so that I realized Alex had been hiding something from me, and he must’ve been hiding it for a while.

“You knew that Einstein’s secret had to do with time travel.” How else could he have known about the time machine? “That’s why you recommended me for the job.”

“Yeah.”

I felt betrayed, and if my stomach hadn’t already roiled with queasiness, my anger would’ve had room to grow. “You knew getting Einstein’s secret was basically my life’s work and you didn’t say anything?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Then why don’t you get started?”

“I will, but first you need to understand one thing. I don’t know what the secret is.”

“You know it’s about time travel.”

“I don’t.”

“Give me a break.” Was he trying to cover up that he’d stabbed me in the back?

“Listen, I’m not denying the time travel. I’m just saying I don’t know what the confession is about.”

“I’m not following you at all.”

“I’ll walk you through the short version.”

“Okay…”

“You connected Clavin to Einstein.”

I nodded.

“And you ended up at Harold Weldon’s estate?”

“Yeah.” Wow. He was hiding way more than I thought.

“But that doesn’t mean that Einstein’s confession has anything to do with time travel. All you know is that time travel has to do with Weldon.”

“It all starts with Einstein.”

He glanced at me with a knowing smile. “Do you have proof?”

“Of course.” I had that photo, which connected the two. Of course, that same photo used to connect Van Doran to Einstein, too, and I knew damn well what had happened to
that
connection.

“Is your proof online?”

I nodded, and he handed me his iPhone. I searched for the photo, feeling doomed, and when it came up, my queasiness grew tenfold, overwhelming my incipient anger. I magnified the image, just to make sure. There was no doubt about it.

Weldon was no longer part of the photo.

The only familiar member of the group was Einstein. This photo was no longer evidence of any connection between Weldon and Einstein.

That fact was now gone.

Einstein is the key
. I had to hold on to that. But I could already feel the doubts creeping in, reconstructing my memory. Of all people, I latched on to Eddie for help. He’d thought that Einstein’s secret had to do with time travel. And he’d been right. Hadn’t he?

“How did you find the time machine if it wasn’t through Einstein?” I blurted out.

“The Caves. I was assigned that carrel. At first, I didn’t notice anything. Then in the middle of one long night—I’d been researching for forty-eight hours straight—I thought I saw someone appear and then quickly disappear. Into the wall. I was in kind of study daze, so at first I thought maybe I’d fallen asleep. But then it happened again a week later.” He took a breath. “Here’s the thing: I was there a lot. So I’m sure that whoever had been using it was surprised that the damn place was never empty anymore.”

I believed the part about him studying down there all the time. But the rest of his story… “So it was all random? You get this carrel and it just happens to turn out to be a time-travel machine? You were never looking for it?”

“First of all, it’s not a time-travel ‘machine.’ It’s some kind of portal. And, yes, it was random. No one in The Cabal has ever said anything like, ‘Hey, we’ve assigned you a carrel that doubles as a time-travel portal.’ And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.”

Alex was now on the outskirts of Charlottesville.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’re going to stay in a motel, and I’m going to see if anything else goes wrong. If we’re in the clear, you’re going back.”

“What do you mean ‘go wrong’?”

Alex turned into the parking lot of the Valley View Motel, a rustic motel on Route 29. “Shit—
that’s
what I mean.” He nodded over to the only other car in the parking lot and instantly started to swing our car around, accelerating into the turn, setting the tires squealing.

As I lurched to the side, I caught a glimpse of the driver behind the wheel of the other car, a broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair.

Van Doran.

Alex rocketed out of the parking lot. “I don’t know who he is. The first time I saw him, I thought he was following me, but I wasn’t sure. The second time I was sure.”

Alex didn’t know it was Van Doran. But I didn’t understand how that could be if he knew about Weldon.
Because this isn’t connected to Einstein.
That was his point. Wasn’t it? The facts in my head were jumbled and I couldn’t sort them out.

But I didn’t pipe up. I didn’t tell Alex that I knew the man behind the wheel of that car. I was withholding information from him as he’d done from me. Except that my information was beginning to seem faulty. Not facts, but conjecture.

Alex checked the rearview mirror and I looked back.

Van Doran was pulling out of the parking lot.

“Why are you running from him?” I asked.

“Because the second time I saw him, he threatened to kill me if I didn’t go back.”

With the words “go back,” I suddenly understood why Alex’s biography on Eisenhower had been so detailed and entertaining. It teemed with life because he’d gone back in time and experienced that life himself.

“You went back to the fifties. That’s where you saw him.”

Alex sped up. I checked the side-view mirror again. Van Doran’s car was gaining on us.

“That’s right,” he said. “But the second time, I barely made it back here.”

So his story was starting to make sense, but the big picture was getting foggier. “I don’t understand how he could be here, Alex. He was the guy who just hunted me down through Weldon’s house.”

“You already know how.”

And I did. “There are two of him. At least. Just like there are two of me, right now.”

“One on the run and one at my place,” Alex said, “relaxing before his interview with McKenzie.”

He raced through a stop sign and ran up behind some cars. Instead of slowing down, he swerved into the lane for oncoming traffic. The lane was currently clear, but talk about out of character. Alex wasn’t in control anymore. He was running for his life.

I checked the side-view mirror. Van Doran was right behind us.

Alex veered back into the right lane, but Van Doran didn’t follow. He stayed in the lane for oncoming traffic and sped up beside us.

“What’s he do—?” I managed to blurt out before Van Doran’s car rammed into us and sent us fishtailing and skidding.

Alex fought to keep control of the car.

It swung around a hundred and eighty degrees before it came to a sudden stop, facing the wrong direction. The car bearing down on us slammed on its brakes, trying to avoid a head-on collision, and the cars behind it followed suit—

Howling tires, followed by the harsh thud of one car hitting another, filled the air. And then the scene went silent.