Sherman pauses to take a sip of his wine. Unlike his voice, his smile is shy, unassuming.
“No doubt you’ll think I’m being paranoid—I think that myself, when I’m not being afraid—but Professor Keener warned me about them, the men who were out to get him, and once I saw them, I knew he was speaking the truth.”
“And what men would those be?” Naomi asks, by way of prompting him.
“The men who came through the lab the morning he was killed.”
“The lab at QuantaGate?” Jack asks.
“No, at MIT. Keener’s teaching lab. Where he keeps the electron gun.”
“Electron gun? Is that a weapon?”
Sherman smiles a little sadly. “I wish. No, Professor Keener used it in his lectures. There’s nothing special about an electron gun, anyone can buy one. Any school, I mean, they’re pretty expensive. The lab is where we keep all of the toys. The electron gun, a couple of lasers and the single-photon generators. It’s all gone. They took everything. He told me they’d be coming but I didn’t believe him.”
“Who came, Sherman, can you give us a description?”
He shrugs. “Dudes in uniform. Security guards from his company, they showed up after hours, when nobody was around but me. They marched into the lab and took everything there. Papers, files, personal computers. Seized for evidence, they said. They packed everything in boxes and took it away. And then one of them, this dude who acted like it was all very amusing, he comes up to me in the lab and he says they’ll be wanting to ask me a few questions, and that I’d better tell the truth or I’d end up in Gitmo, and nobody would ever know I was there. And I said I thought Gitmo was closed and he just laughed. That’s what really scared me, the way he laughed.”
“A security detail from QuantaGate,” Naomi tells us. “I checked with the university and also with Quanta Gate. Gama Guards security detail was dispatched to seize all computers and equipment associated with Keener’s research. Evidence was sealed and placed in the secure labs at QuantaGate, where it remains. Nobody is disputing Mr. Elliot’s version of events, except for the part about threatening him with rendition, which they say must have been a misunderstanding.”
“Not the FBI,” Jack says. “This was initiated by the company itself?”
Naomi nods. “Apparently by instruction of the Department of Defense. That’s yet to be confirmed, but it sounds right. They’d have been concerned the professor might have brought sensitive materials from the company lab to the university, and wanted to round it all up and keep it in one place, under lock and key.”
“Standard procedure, more or less,” Jack says. “Except I would have expected the FBI to be tasked, not corporate rent-a-cops.”
Sherman pipes up in his resonant voice. “That’s who he was afraid of, the professor. He said his own company was spying on him, that they didn’t believe him.”
“This is the interesting part,” says Naomi. “Go ahead. Tell us what he said.”
“They didn’t believe him about the research. That he’d got it wrong. It was never going to work, you see, because there’s no practical application for the theory, that’s what he discovered. Not now and maybe not ever.”
Jack puts down his glass of wine, a look of surprise passing over his handsome face. “You’re saying that whatever QuantaGate is trying to make for the Defense Department, it isn’t working?”
Sherman Elliot nods eagerly. “Exactly,” he says. “Professor Keener managed to pull off an experimental version in the lab, using paired photons over a long distance, but when it comes to a full stream of gated photons, which is what you need for real communication, there’s just no way. The method has an inherent flaw that simply can’t be overcome, without changing the laws of physics, and no one can do that, not even Joseph Keener.”
Jack puts up a hand, as if stopping traffic. “Hold on there, son. If you’re about to divulge secret information, we’d rather you didn’t. We’re not in the spy business here.”
Young Sherman smiles for the first time in our company, and it’s a rather splendid smile. Handsome, almost. “No worries, mate. Isn’t that what the Aussies say? Look, I’m a grad student at a university lab. I never worked for QuantaGate, I don’t have security clearance and everything I’m telling you has already been published. It’s out there. Except the part about it not working. Is that a top secret, if something doesn’t work?”
“Actually, it might be,” Jack says. “You already know about this part, right, Naomi?”
“I do,” she says. “The information is not confined to Mr. Elliot. It’s been a matter of open speculation on various scientific forums, dating back several months. Go ahead, Mr. Elliot, explain. As if you’re teaching not-very-bright students.”
“Really? Okay. Let me see. You guys know about binary computer language, right? Ones and zeros? When you boil it down to the basics, that’s how all software is written, in a string of ones and zeros. Dots and dashes is another way to think about it. No matter how complicated the message, it can be translated into dots and dashes, like in Morse code. Anyhow, the professor had this idea for a practical application, using quantum dots, a particular type of photon. That probably sounds complicated, but really it isn’t, not in concept. The laws of quantum physics predict that two photons that have interacted together are somehow bonded forever, by a phenomenon known as ‘entanglement.’ That means that if you observe one of the paired photons, the other photon will collapse into the same state as the first, no matter how far away it is.”
“Totally lost,” Jack says. “What’s a photon again? Is it like a little flashlight?”
Sherman begins to giggle. A deep giggle, but a giggle just the same. “Sure, why not?” he says. “Like a very small flashlight. The smallest flashlight that can possibly exist. A single quantum of light. Look, you don’t have to understand that part, all you have to know is that Keener’s Theorem predicts a way to use a stream of entangled photons to communicate over a long distance, without resorting to fiber optic cables, or satellites, or radio waves. According to the theorem, if you typed a message into a quantum computer here in this room, the identical message would appear in an identical quantum computer, a ‘paired’ computer, on the other side of the world. Or the other side of the universe, for that matter. In real time. There would be no possible way to intercept the message. No need for encoded messages or firewalls. Perfect, instantaneous communication that can never be hacked.”
“But the theory is wrong.”
“No, no, the theorem still has an elegant solution,” Elliot insists, using his expressive hands as if shaping calculations in the air. “In theory, it should be possible. But Keener’s idea about how to generate a functioning stream of entangled photons—the actual machinery of it—that turns out to be totally wrong. They haven’t been able to make it work in the real world, and he finally figured out why, and the reason is such, without getting into the math, that it will never work.”
“So the company, QuantaGate, it’s a bust?”
Sherman nods happily. “That’s about the size of it, yes.”
“What’s the word on campus? Do they expect the company to actually go bankrupt?”
“Oh no. Not with that huge DOD contract. We all expect they’ll keep milking that for years. Especially now that Professor Keener isn’t there to stop them.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Say a Little Prayer
She waits until Joey is sound asleep before making her move. The boy had been awake for hours past his bedtime, fretting about his mother, who he calls Mi Ma. He’s a smart kid—some sort of musical genius or prodigy—and he knows that something is terribly wrong, how could he not? Spirited away from his piano class and put in the care of strangers, flown halfway around the world and lately locked in what amounts to a luxuriously appointed dungeon for days at a time. What is he supposed to think? He keeps asking why he can’t talk to Mi Ma on the phone and there’s no good answer, beyond “your mommy is too sick to talk but she’ll be better soon.” No surprise, the poor kid has begun to worry that Mi Ma is dead and that no one will tell him the truth.