“Maybe he is important. Or will be.” Binyamin poked his glasses up with an extended middle finger.

“He’s dead. Somehow I don’t think he has any more tricks up his sleeve.”

“So whaddya wanna do?”

Aharon frowned at the boy from under bushy eyebrows. “What do I want to do? Is that what you’re trying to ask, with your fine language? I’ll tell you. We’re going to see if there’s something special about our new friend. We’ll take a few other words from the biography. Let’s see.” He scrabbled for a pencil and notepad. “Brezeziny. Eleazar Zaks. The Book of Mercy. Auschwitz.” He tore off the page and handed it to Binyamin.

“All together?” Binyamin regarded the list with a squint.

“No,” Aharon said, with a martyr’s sigh. “No, no, no. Run each of them separately as keywords. See if you can find any of those words in these three hundred arrays.” He fanned the stack on the desk.

Binyamin shoved up his glasses again, his mouth open in an “oh.” “That will take a while.”

“Nu? You have better things to do?”

Aharon went to the hook on the back of the door and took up his prayer shawl. It was time for his first class of the day. He opened the door, waited. Binyamin just stood there lumpishly.

“After class?” Aharon reminded him.

As they walked down the hall, Aharon felt a new lift in his step. He had the distinct feeling he had just had a stroke of luck. That in itself was not so amazing. The sages say, “Even a fool has luck.” What you did with the luck, that was the tricky part.

Fortunately for him, and perhaps for the cause of Torah code also, Rabbi Aharon Handalman was no fool.

1.3. Calder Farris

The Doubletree hotel where the convention was being held was large and generic and smelled of suntan oil. Calder Farris made his way to the registration desk, where he would use his own name but not his rank. No one would take him for a soldier in his civvies.

He kept his sunglasses on.

He didn’t expect a lot from the convention. Its title, Holism and the New Physics, was typically lame. Still, it was his job and he had other reasons to visit Orlando. Dear old Dad.

The woman at Registration had long gray hair and a gauzy skirt-and-top ensemble. People like her were into ESP or auras or some such shit, but she obviously couldn’t have read vibes with a manual, because she made the mistake of flirting with him. She tittered on about the sessions, laying her pink hand on Calder’s black-sweatered arm.

“My goodness!” she gasped, squeezing the unyielding muscle. She gave him a predatory gleam, her eyes telling him that she liked the iron hardness of his arm and that she’d love to explore other hard things of his as well.

Calder had an overpowered urge to smack her. Instead, he removed his dark sunglasses and inspected them casually.

The woman’s hand fell to her side. For a second he got the satisfaction of her queasy face as she stared into his eyes, mesmerized; then she busied herself with someone else. He put the glasses back on and walked away, registration packet in hand.

There was nothing wrong with Calder Farris’s face—it was a tad lumpy, a result of teenage acne, but it had improved with age. At thirty-two it looked more rugged than pockmarked. He was six-foot-three and he ran and pumped weights obsessively. With his sunglasses on he could be mistaken for the tall, dark, and handsome type. But sooner or later he had to take them off.

It was his eyes. His irises were a blue so light they were nearly white. People didn’t like that. It was as if they made a window where the cold inside him seeped through. He couldn’t hide his essential nature when people looked into his eyes. The demon peered out. It was fucking inconvenient.

But, like everything else, it had its uses.

He sat down in the hotel bar and ordered a coffee. He went through the list of sessions, slashing with a felt-tipped pen.

Healing and Synchronicity. Slash.

Wormholes and Frank Herbert’s Folding Space. Slash.

Quantum Leaps: Leapfrogging the Laws of Physics.

He’d been to so many of these things, he could practically give the lectures himself. But there was always the remote possibility something useful would turn up someday, the proverbial pearl among the swine. This topic had potential. He flipped to the credentials of the speaker. He recognized the name; the guy was a hack. He slashed out the session.

The bartender refilled his coffee. A few stools away sat two young men engaged in casual conversation. They were obviously a couple. That was nothing out of the ordinary for Florida or for weird science conventions like this one, wherever they might be. That was the fucking state of the fucking country he’d vowed his life to serve and protect.

Calder’s body tightened. A feral smile bared his teeth.

He wished the faggots would approach him. He’d take them out to the parking lot and teach them the true meaning of male–male penetration—his fist down their throats.

The rage inside him flared momentarily, like a black sun. He tamped it down. Of course, he wouldn’t really do anything, not even if provoked. He wouldn’t touch the young men if they stuck their hands down his pants and said howdy-do. Beating up civilians of whatever proclivity did not look good on a service record, and Calder cared very much about his service record.

Besides, he was a trained professional. He didn’t kick ass pro bono.

A flicker of humor assuaged his anger. He refocused on the schedule of events.

A Symphony of Strings and the Theory of Everything.

Calder glanced at his watch. It had started ten minutes ago. He gathered up his papers and went to find the room. He didn’t leave a tip.

The conference room held about sixty chairs and most of them were full. Calder settled down in the back and looked up the lecturer’s bio. Dr. Larch was a young professor at Florida State. Probably half the listeners were his students, brownnosing. Calder sized him up. Intelligent-looking. Showy. The guy had the style of a talk show host. Calder hated that. He folded his arms over his chest and settled in to listen.

Forty-five minutes later, Calder watched the rabble stream out and kept his seat. As usual, there were three or four supergeeks hanging around the lecturer chatting him up. Calder doodled on his pad—guns, stark faces, dark slashes on white paper. Once or twice Larch glanced at him curiously.

The professor finally walked by, heading for the exit. Calder unfolded himself from the chair with a deliberate display of strength.

“Dr. Larch? I’m Calder Farris.”

Calder held out his hand. Larch shook it. His grip was damp but not completely mealy.

“Hello.” Larch’s greeting had the lilt of a question. And you want…?

“I’d like to speak with you about your lecture. Can I buy you lunch?”

“I’m… rather busy.”

Calder smiled. “How about a drink then? And it’s Lieutenant Calder Farris. United States Marines.”

Half an hour later, Calder sat across from Larch at an Italian restaurant down the street. Getting out of the hotel had been Farris’s idea. The Italian place, Larch’s. He’d decided to get a free meal for his trouble after all. The Marines bit had done it. Larch probably didn’t meet a lot of Marines. Not a lot of Marines would be caught dead anywhere in his orbit.

“So, Lieutenant Farris, what exactly do you do for the military?”

Farris poked at his salad. “I’m in Intelligence.”

“Oh?”

“I really can’t say anything more than that.”

Larch smirked, so Calder pulled out his wallet and showed him ID. The identification was official United States Marine Corps, had “Intelligence Division” written on it and a tough-looking picture of himself in uniform.