Theodore Danton was bored. It was an emotion he cherished in his line of work, which usually included a lot of exciting violence. Yet, he considered that kind of excitement unprofessional.
Theodore was many things, many bad things, but he was never unprofessional.
Even though his actual profession was ill-defined, and shot him deep beneath, what could be called a gray moral area, and right into the black abyss below, he did not see a reason to be crass about it.
Hopscotching between assignments that were not technically crimes, only because there usually was no one high enough in the chain of command to judge their legality, or because he had a carte blanche from one shady government or another, he saw himself less as a mercenary, and more like a plumber. Someone who had to do the dirty, wet jobs in the underbelly of the world, so that the governments and corporations could keep on working with their hands squeaky-clean.
Annoyingly, just as he was bored with the current mission, the men assigned to his command were anxious, and more than a little terrified of him.
Now, while Theo was definitely someone to be terrified of, he did not plan for them to be so scared.
At least, not yet.
Among the black-bag specialists like him, there was a certain fashion of radiating menace and barely contained sociopathy, combined with overinflated egos. It made men in his line of work want to appear as terrifying and evil as possible.
For Theo, this kind of thinking was profoundly silly. He preferred to be liked and respected than feared and wielded his charisma with as much care and focus as any other weapon. He learned long ago that to successfully lead and command mercenaries of the worst moral sort, it was much better to appear as a reasonable and friendly authority figure, instead of a monster.
It was easier to make them obey orders this way, and easier to surprise them if they needed to be removed from the equation later.
Unfortunately, with this current assignment, he had become sloppy, likely out of impatience. His last dozen missions had him perform fixes all over Africa and the Middle East, places where he could easily afford to be heavy-handed. Places where he could give his men a lot of leeway in how they operated.
But this fix was all about subtlety. Silencing or kidnapping researchers and scientists, and stealing cutting-edge scientific equipment right from under the nose of a very serious corporation monitored by an even more serious government agency, required a gentler touch.
Delicate fixes require a delicate approach so, when some of his minions took too much liberties with the capture and were a bit overzealous with getting rid of potential loose ends, he had to unceremoniously cull their numbers.
Now, he wasn't against creative violence, in fact, he often encouraged it, but in this particular situation, he wanted his underlings to tread lightly. One can get away with massacring witnesses when, say, purging a research compound in the middle of rural Rwanda, but doing the same in a small town in the idyllic pastoral countryside of Switzerland?
That was another thing entirely.
He had sent his team to retrieve one of the key scientists responsible for Project Echo. He insisted repeatedly that they do it quietly and professionally, with minimum fuss. The plan was simple, as all best plans are, and yet, he took the time to explain it to them repeatedly, in detail, to reach through even the thickest skulls among them. All they had to do was wait until the head scientists left work for home. Grab him from the parking lot, drug him, and put him in the car.
A simple grab-and-bag job, that was about six hours of waiting, and all five seconds of actual work.
Instead, one of the operators, although in retrospect he probably didn't deserve the title, decided to be an inpatient moron. Rather than waiting for the elderly scientist to leave on their own, he decided to storm the lab, grab the guy, and drag him out. Worse still, the rest of the team, instead of staying put, decided to follow him, and they did it in such an indiscreet manner that the commotion attracted the attention of the underpaid and yet, overzealous, facility security. The guards, of course, had to be silenced, a simple thing which again, the supposedly experienced Special Operators managed to fumble, by shooting the guards in full view of a security camera.
Which in turn forced them to storm the monitoring room, wipe out the camera records, and kill the last security guy. Hell, they even shot a luckless cleaning lady who stumbled onto their path at the worst possible time.
What should have been a simple bloodless kidnapping turned into a bloodbath instead, with seven dead bodies, spent shells everywhere, and the worst of all, fingerprints, all over the place.
Before taking the job Theo was informed that the men he would be working with were professionals.
But it turned out they were just over-eager boys with guns.
And so, he found himself leaning over the corpse of the main culprit of the whole shitshow. The one guy who screwed up the operation, whom he had just knifed to death quickly and efficiently, letting him cool on the concrete basement floor of their temporary base of operations. Shame about the knife - he thought to himself, tossing it along with the latex gloves he took off, into a camp stove he kept lit for exactly this kind of purpose. It was a nice knife, a quality German paratrooper dagger, the kind nobody made anymore. But now he had to dispose of it, so that nothing could be traced back to him. He brushed his hands through the thinning buzz of silver on his head and squeezed his temples as if he wished to force his brain to produce more patience for fools.
"All right, boys," he said to the rest of the team wearily. He never raised his voice in a professional setting. Long ago, he learned that barking orders and cursing at the ex-military men under his command was foolish. Those were not the kind of men who could be easily browbeaten with the whole 'angry drill sergeant' routine. These were men who ate drill sergeants for breakfast.
Instead, he always assumed the cadence and speech patterns of a school teacher, patiently explaining what they did wrong. Radiating the idea that he was not angry after all, only disappointed.
"So, who can tell me, what did we learn from this fiasco?" he asked. His Second-in-command, a former Special Air Service operator, opened his mouth as if to speak, but saw it was only a rhetorical question. "Perhaps," Danton continued, "what we learned here is the virtue of patience. If Johann here," he pointed at the corpse on the floor, "was a little bit more patient, we would have easily avoided the whole mess. Instead, well, he's dead and he's not going to learn anything anymore. But I do have to congratulate you all on actually doing the job in the end. We do have Doctor Rubinstein captured and miraculously, he's still alive. So the whole thing was not a complete disaster, just ninety-nine percent of one."
"For the record, sah," Spoke his Second. "It was entirely Johann's fault. The wanker snapped for some reason, defied clear orders, and we had to follow, otherwise, he would have made an even greater cockup out of it, if he went on his bloody own."
Theo nodded and gave him a sad smile. "And whose job, pray tell me, was to rein Johann in? Who was his immediate superior, huh?"
"I was, sah."
"And who, pray tell me, was the one who recruited Johann in the first place? Who had vouched for him?"
"It was me... sah." said the Second again, in a hollow voice. Then he almost imperceptibly tensed up, like a tout string on a guitar, expecting to be the next stabbed in the neck. It seemed like he harbored an illusion that if he acted fast enough, he could defend himself from Theo. Block the knife, for they both knew Theo had more than one on him, or maybe even reach for his gun.
Or maybe the Second expected the rest of the team to back him up. To try to restrain, or even kill Theo with their superior numbers. After all, their employer would not question Theo's absence, if only they delivered the scientist as agreed.
But then, the moment passed and nobody grabbed a weapon. Everybody instinctively understood that while the room was full of killers, Theodore was by far the deadliest. he saw their body language break into that of a silent submission. ‘We are all animals,’ -he thought to himself. ‘Glad they remember I'm the Big Dog of the pack.’
"Relax, Mitch," he said to his Second, not afraid to be on a first-name basis with them since they were using fake names anyway, for most of their professional lives. "I'm not going to kill you for incompetence. If I did, I would have to replace you with another one of those... fine gentlemen," he pointed vaguely at the rest of the team, with an expression of weary disappointment, "and it would take me back to square one. If anything, the fault is mine, because I entrusted you with a job above your leadership skills. I sincerely hope you learned your lesson and will not fuck up again. At least not until the end of the month, when this contract is dissolved and I'm free of your presence.”
His Second noded with silent appreciation of being off the hook, when relief and indignation over being patronized clashed and subsumed one another.
"So, let's just assume," Theo continued, "that we agree that the bygones be bygones and not press this matter any further. If this screwup results in any one of you being put on the Interpol's radar, well, that's your problem, not mine, and I will be long gone by that time. So let's get back to the actual important part of this job. Can someone lead me to the scientist?"
One of the men, a lean, tall, former hatchet-man of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, stood up to show him the way. Theo remembered the man’s name was Joseph, and he was probably the only man among them not to use a fake identity, as he was, for some bizarre reason, granted a genuine refugee status in Switzerland.
Joseph’s job was the face of the operation when dealing with the local authorities, which made perverted sense. The sedate Swiss they encountered, were all intimidated by the ominous African looming over them, and in their racist little hearts, they suspected him of all kinds of imaginary nefarious things a black immigrant might be up to but never acted on their suspicions to not appear impolite.
This worked perfectly since Joseph was excellent at a completely different set of nefarious things, ones that few would expect an immigrant to be good at, like circumventing and disabling electronic security systems, which allowed them to break into secret laboratories, or appropriate this underground warehouse of an old winery.
Joseph also had, in Theo’s estimation, one marvelous quality.
He was a man of few words.
Since the fix started two months ago, Theo had not heard more than a dozen words from the man, and virtually all of them were confirmations of a given order, yet only given when a simple nod would not suffice. Otherwise when not following orders, Joseph just loomed silently like an assault rifle put back on the rack, bereft of personal opinions or uncalled-for initiative, and thus was by far the favorite person for Theo to work with.
He stalked after the Sierra Leonean, passing giant, musty barrels that smelled faintly of mold. Finally, after crossing a veritable maze of corridors and low-arced rooms, they found themselves in front of a door that could very easily belong in a Medieval dungeon, being made of heavy oaken planks and thick steel bands and set in a wall of carved stone.
He cocked an eyebrow at Joseph.
“You put a frail, eighty-five year old scientist in that dank prison cell? I haven’t expected you to coddle him, but this is excessive. He is our guest, to be delivered sound and whole to our friends in Italy, not a ham to be kept in a cold basement.”
Joseph shrugged, his face betraying no emotion. “Is secure.”
“I suppose. It would take a battering ram to break him out.” Theo watched Joseph unlock the door with an equally absurd giant key. Before he opened the door, and let himself in, he decided to knock. It was only polite to do so.
“Come in?” Said a small, unsure voice.
Theo ducked under the low doorway but gestured Joseph away. The Sierra Leonian had many talents, but putting scared people at ease was emphatically not one of them.
He had seen the photos and video recordings of doctor Avram Rubinstein many times while preparing for the fix.
But standing face to face with the genuine article was another thing altogether.
The old man was short, far shorter than even Theo’s unassuming height, and built in such a way that he managed to be frail like a twig at the top, yet rotund at the bottom at the same time. It was as if the majority of the doctor’s bulk concentrated around his lower stomach leaving the extremities skinny. He had an unruly mop of white hair and ludicrous mustache, a clear tribute to Albert Einstein if Theo ever saw one, a crooked yarmulka perched precariously at the top of the head, and wire-framed spectacles.
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The picture was completed by a bona fide old-school labcoat, and a tweed jacket with elbow patches.
It was as if Rubinstein, being an elderly Jewish physicist, self-proclaimed mad scientist, and a Nobel Prize laureate, decided to conform to every possible stereotype that entailed.
“I have to say Doctor Rubinstein, you look exactly like I always imagined a scientist of your caliber should,” said Theo, and sat on an ancient-looking wooden chair across the room from his captive. The doctor sat on his makeshift cot by the opposite wall, leaning against the table at which several complex-looking devices lay in various stages of disassembly, fighting for free space with what was left of the Doctor’s diner.
“And you, despite being a lowly spook and a criminal, look almost exactly like a Nazi. I should know, I met some in my youth. Though they at least dressed better.” said Rubinstein with disdain, though his voice trembled.
“You wound me, Doctor. ” Theo leaned back and smiled. He did, indeed, resemble the image of an SS officer, from the media at least, with his lean, angular face, pale blue eyes, and neatly cropped silver hair. But this is where similarities ended. For all his casual cruelty, Theo had zero affinity to any idiotic racist ideologies, mainly because they were hideously impractical and pompous. He believed that ends justify the most horrific means, but only if the ends are defined by a substantial amount of money, and the means by reasonable pragmatism, not moronic hate or sadism.
“I must take offense at the last part. Sure, the Nazis dressed… spiffily, I would say, but I take a lot of pride in my professional visage. Though, my tastes lean towards understated turtleneck sweaters and slacks, simplicity in form, over pomp.”
“Same thing, boy.” Rubinstein grimaced. “You’re just another thug in dark clothes that hide the blood stains best. I don’t care if you are CIA, GRU, Mossad, SIS, or a hyena on a private contract. You lot are all Nazis, just by different names.”
“There is no need to be uncivil to one another,” Theo said, with no particular threat in his words, and yet, letting the subtext sink in. “I sincerely apologize for what happened at the facility. It was not my intention to hurt any of your colleagues and fellow employees. One of my underlings acted grossly against orders. He had been dealt with accordingly.”
Rubinstein shook his head. “Was that supposed to make me feel better? Blood for blood? You just got rid of an expendable minion, to cut a loose end. Killing him did not bring my friends back to life.”
Theo hung his head in sincere shame. Not shame over the lives lost of course, but of the stain on his professional record, and the consequences it would surely bear once his employers hear about it. But it looked appropriately mournful anyway.
“I cannot turn back time, Doctor. I just wanted you to know that none of those deaths were intentional, and you are perfectly safe. If there is anything I can do to make your brief stay with us- ”
“Then say their names, mister Nazi.” Rubinstein cut in,” The people your minions killed. The nice cleaning lady was Anna. She brought me cookies every Friday, and showed me pictures of her grandkids. The security guards were Luca, Marco, Noah, Matteo, Gabriel, Luis, and Elias. Elias was only nineteen years old. This was his first job, you know? He applied for it to make his momma proud. And I saw your goons shoot him like an animal.”
Theo measured the Doctor for a few seconds with a calm expression. If the scientist was trying to get a rise out of him, he failed. Such mind games and guilt trips did not work on him, but it seemed prudent to pretend they did, at least this time. He sighed, in what he hoped sounded like a genuine emotion.
“Anna. Luca. Marco. Noah. Matteo. Gabriel. Luis. And Elias.”
“Glad to hear you acknowledge that they were actual people that you have killed. I don’t expect it will weigh on your conscience even a tiny bit, but it gave me an ounce of satisfaction.” The scientist straightened, and his face broke into an amused smirk. “And now, I suppose you want to question me about my research, to learn my secrets? I assure you, no torture will be necessary, for I'm willing to divulge every last detail of Project Echo, for all the good that it would do you. But if you feel torturing an old man for the sake of additional sadism is necessary, by all means, do your damned worst. I can promise you, I will die the moment you touch me. A heart condition, you see.”
“Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Doctor. ” Theo said. “You survived the shooting just fine, I don’t expect a man of your caliber to die of fright as easily. As I can see, it hasn't even spoiled your appetite.”
“I’ve been imprisoned in a death camp by actual Nazis, not just poor imitations like you are. One thing I learned there was to never miss a chance of a meal or a bit of sleep, If I can have it.” Rubinstein commented, and finished his last croissant, sending crumbs all over his labcoat. “Who knows when I will need my strength, for my inevitable escape.”
“I’d rather you not try to run, Doctor. My men would have to manhandle you on your way back, or possibly drug you, neither of which would be good for your health.”
“And I’d rather you would just let me go. There was absolutely no point in kidnapping me in the first place. Whatever your overlords planned for me, it's pointless. I can give you all the information you want, on a silver platter, and would have divulged it willingly if you people just asked. I can even jury-rig this damn device for you and give you a presentation-” he patted the biggest electronic part on the table, and brushed breadcrumbs off it.
“-but as I'm trying to tell you, it would be pointless. No doubt the men who hired you wanted to use this device and my knowledge for some nefarious scheme to make a lot of money. I bet that they wanted to use it to beat the stock market. I can promise you, and by proxy, them, that there is no money to be made off Project Echo. It does not give any gateway to some profitable or useful technology. It does not even give us any useful scientific insight. Its workings are as opaque to us as they were when we started.”
“Then what is it good for?” Theo asked. He was not sure if the elderly scientist was trying to play him somehow, but he wanted to get to the bottom of this. Normally, he thought that too much knowledge was a liability in his line of work, but this fix showed all the portents of being a failure anyway. His employers will likely be unhappy with him, and withhold pay. Best he finds a bargaining advantage through this conversation.
“Oh, you are not going to like this. The only thing this device is good for is applied theology.” Rubinstein said, crossing his arms with a triumphant smile, seeing Theo’s confused look.
“I'm afraid you lost me, Doctor. I'm just a humble hired thug, with no deep knowledge of quantum physics. Is it possible for you to take me step by step through it, so I would know what to report to my superiors?”
“I assumed just as much,” said Doctor Rubinstein. He grabbed several electronic pieces of the table and started assembling them.
“What do you know of this device they wanted you to steal?”
“It is supposed to be a Quantum Membrane Resonator, also referred to as Quantum Communicator.” Theo responded.
“It's neither of those things,” said Rubinstein, “those are just cute buzzwords we use for the corporate children to understand what they are paying for. On the level this device operates, there are no membranes to resonate. And while it can be called a communicator in a way, it is not a type of device, like they believe it is, that could be used to order pizza. To be frank, I don't even know how this device works, despite having built it. And I don't completely understand the science underneath it, even though I invented it from scratch. I just tinkered with it, until magic happened. So, I cannot really tell you the truth about it, because nobody knows it. At least nobody human. Best I can do is the so-called Lies For Children Approach in which I use a very imprecise metaphor to lie to you, and yet help you understand what's going on.”
Theo watched the device slowly take shape in front of him. Rubinstein set it aside and plugged it into the power socket. It looked ugly and curiously mundane for something supposedly worth nearly a hundred million dollars. Less like cutting-edge technology and more like something assembled at the back of an electronic chop-shop out of spare parts.
“Mmm… So what does it do exactly?”
“That nobody knows. But we can guess.” The doctor took two croissant wrappers and flattened them on the table.
“Imagine, if you will, that you want to send a signal from one place in space-time to another without it actually crossing any distance,” he drew a line with a pen from the corner of one of the wrappers to the farthest corner of another. “Because, If you want to cross the distance ordinarily, the signal would travel a certain amount of time, and if you are the kind of the person who cares about the speed of the signal very much, sooner or later you will find yourself stumped by the fundamental speed of light. In usual circumstances, you cannot accelerate things faster than light.”
Theo nodded. “That part, I know. As something approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity. And I don't think anyone would want to try that. Infinite mass doesn't sound very safe or manageable.”
The scientist smirked. “That is not exactly correct, but it's not that far from it. What we're dealing with here, are subatomic bits that don't really have a mass per se. Which introduces another host of problems to what you just said. But the gist of it is, we did, or maybe I should say, I did have found a way to send a massless signal from one point in space to another without actually crossing the distance.” Having said that, Rubinstein folded the croissant wrappers one into another connecting the opposite corners.
“I managed to send the signal along a different dimension, not the dimension of space, you understand? And finding out how to achieve that took me only something around fifty-four years. So let's just say it's not going to be something that I can explain to you in a single conversation.”
Meanwhile, the device booted up and started to hum quietly.
“So,” Theo said, “I assume you were successful, and managed to send some information faster than light or should I say, outside of the constraints of speed altogether?”
“Oh yes! I did manage to send a signal out into the Subspace, if you will. I even got a response!”
“Oh.”
“The problem is my friend, the response did not come from the partner lab. Or from this universe, I suppose.” Rubinstein said, clearly enjoying the suspense.
Theodore felt a pang of anger. Now, the old scientist was definitely pulling his leg. He did not appreciate being lied to, or his time wasted. On the other hand, this fragile but brilliant man was the ticket to his paycheck. A golden-egg-laying goose, worth billions of dollars. Wrenching the man’s neck for being annoying, regardless of how satisfying it would feel, would be a suboptimal choice.
“I assume, my good Doctor, that this is where the theological part comes in. You're trying to tell me, you sent a message to God and received a response?”
“I am saying no such thing. First of all, this device doesn't really send a message per se, so much as it forces the subatomic particles on the other end to behave in unison with the ones on this end,” he said, twisting both pieces of the wrapper in the same direction so that their corners kept facing. “We wanted it to send information, but instead we accidentally yanked someone on the other end.”
“Someone not human, I presume?” Theo asked, barely able to mask his incredulity. This was getting silly.
“You presume correct. We had sent a simple code. A bit of the Fibonacci sequence, that the team on the other end was supposed to continue so that it would be easy to distinguish the response from a background noise.”
“And what did you get in return?” Now, Theodore was intrigued. Even if the old scientist was lying, at least he was lying entertainingly.
“See, that is the best part,” Rubinstein said, “What we received as an answer was no less than a Godly Cease-and-Desist Notice. Something, or someone, had sent us the booting sequence for the device but in reverse, with energy output specifications way, waaay off the charts,” he gestured at the device that hummed louder and louder.
“Or, to put it in terms that you would understand, whoever responded, said to us to stop calling him or he will blow us up.” Rubinstein was smiling now, agitated for the grand finale of his story. He brushed the crumbs off his labcoat, and stood up, with as much dignity as his situation allowed.
“Of course, fascinated with the response, we did the most human thing and called them again and again, repeatedly. And each time, the one responding did as promised, sending back the shutdown sequence but with orders of magnitude more energy than necessary, promptly turning our device into a cloud of plasma. We lost several dozen of those devices that way, with the same result over and over, regardless of what data we tried to input, and what frequency we used. Apparently, using quantum communication is illegal around here, and whoever is in charge of our cosmic neighborhood doesn't take kindly to this rule being broken. “
“As you can see then,” the doctor continued, “your employers will not be able to use this to get even more obscenely rich than they certainly are. No instant stock trade for them. No, quantum computing. No clandestine military communication. This thing's a bust.”
Theo frowned. “But you do have a working device. You just put it together a minute ago, and it seems to be working without blowing up. So, I assume you somehow got around this universal law.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Rubinstein and smiled broadly. “I was just distracting you and stalling for time.”
Time slowed to a crawl, thick as molasses. To the tactical hyper-awareness Theo trained his mind for, several things had happened almost simultaneously.
First, as the last word of Doctor Rubinstein reverberated, the humming of the device ended, and it went quiet. Then a hollow whoosh went through the coil-wrapped tubes that ran across the device, as if the vacuum in them was suddenly replaced with something else.
Within a split second, every muscle fiber in Theo’s body tensed to eject him out of the room, through the massive door, and up the corridor. His mind planned his entire escape before even one of his muscles managed to twitch. Another subroutine of his tactical thinking considered unplugging the device, smashing it, or overturning the table, but none of those options would be fast enough in his intuitive understanding. And he always believed his intuition, especially when it came to life-and-death situations.
Even smaller part of his mind, a speck he trained to ignore, was raging furious that he allowed this supposedly harmless buffoon to play him like that. He always knew he was likely to die on the job. But he assumed he was going to get shot by some more skilled professional, not played for a fool by a decrepit old suicide bomber with croissant crumbs in his mustache.
He leaped backward, smashing the door open with his shoulder.
He never moved this fast in his entire life.
Decades of honing his body into a weapon and achieving near-serpentine dexterity almost paid off.
Almost.
He might have been fast enough to dodge a human attack. But no human in the world would be fast enough to dodge an explosion of a microscopic bit of antimatter that has just been plucked from the twisted membranes of space-time and deposited inside the main tube of the device.
That antimatter bit consisted of only, very few antiparticles that simply didn't belong in this place, and violently decided to not be there anymore. On their way, they goaded every other particle that they were close to, to rebel as well, and together they exited the premises in all due haste.
All of it happened in a span of time that could not be really called any time at all. In that instant, a sphere of space-time encompassing both of them, and most of the basement, no longer made sense by the rules of the universe they were part of, so the universe reacted quite decisively.
And then, Theo, with his face contorted in anger and desperation, and Doctor Rubinstein with his face spread in a self-congratulating grin, simply ceased to exist.