“Think! The bomb was invented near the end of World War Two, so the scientists who invented it must have been born around 1900, same as Kobinski. Maybe they knew Kobinski. Maybe he had something to do with it.” Aharon went back to his array, but he was feeling infinitely self-admiring.

Binyamin scratched at himself. “So that might be why he’s in the Torah so many times?”

Aharon held up both hands in an “of course” gesture. “If he had something to do with the discovery of atomic bombs, what could be more important than that?”

“Cool.”

Aharon was in too good a mood to correct the boy’s lingo. He had an urge to share the discovery with someone else, but who? The yeshiva’s dean? No, Dean Horowitz and he were oil and water; the man was too liberal. Besides which, Horowitz had never been a true advocate of the code. Someone else then. There was his contact at the Mossad—so often he’d avoided Aharon’s phone calls. This would change his tune.

“Um… Rabbi Handalman?”

“Eh?”

“Found something.”

Binyamin marked the find lightly with a pencil underline, as Aharon had taught him to do, and passed the binder. Aharon looked at it. The boy had found the word weapon on a diagonal, but it didn’t end there. The encoded phrase continued:

Weapon loosing demons.

The flesh on Aharon’s arms stood up in ridges. Seeing it hidden in the text that way, text he had stared at for so long, was like seeing an evil face appear outside your bedroom window.

“Is that talking about the atomic bomb, do you think, Rabbi?”

“It must be,” Aharon answered gruffly. “Yes, it could be. I could see that. Keep looking.”

But as he went back to search, Rabbi Handalman was no longer quite so sure.

Aharon used the school’s phone to place a long-distance call to a synagogue in Warsaw. The rabbi put Aharon in contact with a synagogue member who taught at the university, a man named Lestchinsky. Lestchinsky was pleased to help. A week later, he e-mailed Aharon the details.

Kobinski had enrolled at the University of Warsaw in 1918. His hometown was listed as a small shetl near Brezeziny. In 1924 he’d earned his degree and begun to teach. He was employed by the university only a few short years, leaving unexpectedly in 1927. Aharon assumed that was when he decided to study kabbalah with Eleazar Zaks.

From the records, it appeared that Yosef Kobinski was an exceptionally brilliant student. Certainly he was the best of his class, though a Christian won top honors the year Kobinski graduated, naturally. After 1924, he taught in the physics department. Kobinski was listed in the annual reports as specializing in the “quantum theory of atoms.” As far as Lestchinsky could tell, there was no research related to atomic fission going on in Warsaw during those years. None at all.

Aharon was disappointed, but the news didn’t come as a big shock. While waiting for the professor’s reply, he and Binyamin had searched on the keywords nuclear, atomic, fission, and bomb. They found no hits within the Kobinski arrays. So Aharon had checked some history books. Fermi’s work did not begin in earnest on atomics until the mid-1930s. Uranium fission was not discovered until 1939, over ten years after Kobinski had left the University of Warsaw, and then it was discovered by Germans. That was not to say that a smart Jew in Warsaw couldn’t have been ten years ahead of German scientists or even that they might not have stolen his work. But the news from Lestchinsky combined with a lack of confirmation in the arrays… Aharon had to admit, it didn’t look good.

But. But. If Kobinski had not contributed to the invention of the atomic bomb, then what weapon were the arrays talking about? It came down to that; that was the thing. What weapon?

4.3. Denton Wyle

Denton’s mother met him in the foyer and air-kissed his cheeks. He had a compulsion, as he always did, to shift, force her lips to make actual contact with his actual skin. But she’d ignore it, and he’d look childish. He refrained.

“Denton, it’s so lovely to see you.”

His mother looked more plastic than usual. She must have had another face-lift and/or eye job. Her expensive black pantsuit couldn’t hide her anorexic dimensions. Her patrician blond beauty, so like his own, had not aged well. It was depressing.

She led the way to the white-and-gold reception room and called Carter to serve tea.

“How are you, sir?” Carter asked Denton, pausing before leaving the room.

“Great! It’s nice to see you.”

Carter returned the sentiment with genuine feeling.

Jeez, his mother should get the number of Carter’s plastic surgeon. The man hadn’t changed in twenty years. It really was a kick seeing him. When Denton was young he’d been convinced Carter was a cat burglar. It was the silent, fluid way he had of moving, never making so much as a footfall. Denton had followed him for months around the house while his parents were gone, sneaking behind him with Carter patiently ignoring him. It all made so much sense at the time. Denton smiled.

“Will you stay for lunch?” his mother asked. “I’ll be out, I’m afraid. I have an appointment at noon; then I’m luncheoning with friends. But I’m sure Carter can whip something up.”

Denton felt a grinding resentment, fleeting and futile. “If you’re not going to be here, Mother, why invite me to stay?”

“I thought you might be hungry.”

“I can feed myself. They taught me that at NYU.”

Denton liked mentioning NYU because his mother was disappointed he hadn’t gotten into one of the better schools. Well, his grades hadn’t cut it—his parents’ fault for traveling so much.

“As you wish.” Mother used her polite, put-upon voice.

Denton’s anger soured. “Why can’t you stay?”

“I have a fitting. You wouldn’t believe how difficult they are to get.”

“Well, I appreciate you having Carter send me your itinerary so that if I decide to take the trouble to fly across the country to see you, I can get half an hour of your time!”

“Don’t be dramatic. If you don’t give me notice, what do you expect? Besides, I’ve visited you in LA.”

“During layovers. I appreciate it.”

Mother fiddled with her teacup, her face distant. She was no fun to fight with. She just refused to engage. And the worst part was, in a half hour she’d be off again and he’d not see her for the rest of the year, and he would have wasted what little time they had.

Denton’s resentment shifted into clutching anxiety. “I’m sorry.”

Her face lightened. “So… are you still writing for that magazine?”

He was pathetically eager to tell her. “Wait till you hear—something very big has come up. I was working on an article, and I came across a Polish rabbi who died at Auschwitz, right? He was writing a book called The Book of Torment, and he had to hide the pages around the camp. Isn’t that cool? I got a section of it through this antique dealer in Zurich, and it’s this amazing thing…”

Denton babbled on like an agitated sports commentator. His mother’s expression was slightly puzzled or slightly disapproving or slightly troubled, or she thought there was something wrong with tea—he couldn’t tell which. He hardly ever knew what she was thinking.

“…It’s so major. I’m thinking I might…” He bit his lip slyly, like a naughty boy. His vision of what he wanted to do with the Kobinski material had come to him slowly, but it was indeed monstrously huge. “I might try to gather the complete manuscript and publish it—publish The Book of Torment. You know, give it a ‘lost treasure of the Holocaust’ spin. Isn’t that great? There might even be a movie deal in it. It’s got a lot more human interest than Schindler’s List. Don’t you think so? Huh? I think so.”