THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 2021
McGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, TRENTON, NEW JERSEY
THE PASSENGERS trundle toward the hangar in single file between two columns of armed soldiers in yellow anticontamination suits. They walk through a radioactivity detector and an antibacterial airlock before arriving in dribs and drabs under the huge dome; soldiers in a row write down their first and last names and their seat numbers. Very few of them make any protest. Irritation and then anger have given way to exhaustion and anxiety. Only one incensed lawyer finds the energy to hand around her business cards.
Inside the hangar, soldiers have set up showers, mobile toilets, hundreds of tents, and some long tables. They serve hot meals, and some of the passengers try to rest on the mattresses provided in the tents, but everything reverberates under the steel vault; children shriek, arguments break out. Dozens of soldiers patrol the building, filter every move; in the northern corner, a medical unit has the use of a laboratory in a sterile tent, and a team of twelve nurses take saliva samples from all the passengers; in prefabricated units in the eastern corner, the newly arrived PsyOps psychologists start their one-to-one interrogations, following a questionnaire hastily put together by Miller and Brewster-Wang. Protocol 42 has been substantially elaborated in the last few hours.
On the western side, the hangar is dominated by a huge metal platform five meters above the ground. The task force team has moved into one of the rooms overlooking the hangar, and through its floor-to-ceiling windows they can watch the noisy, chaotic hive of activity. Their tablets constantly display new information. The NSA has geolocated most of the passengers and crew members from the Paris–New York flight of March 10. Around one hundred of them are already under house arrest with police surveillance. Biologists compare their DNA with that of their counterparts being held in the hangar: they are absolutely identical. The plane grounded at McGuire is an exact replica of the one that landed just under four months earlier.
Mitnick, the NSA geek, projects onto a screen two images of the cabin.
“What we’re looking at side by side are videos from the camera in first class: on the left is the image from the first plane from March 10, on the right the one from the plane that landed today. If I pause it…On the time codes for the images it’s 16:26 and 30 seconds…the two images are the same. We’re right in the middle of the turbulence. And now image by image…”
Up on the screen, at 16 hours 26 minutes 34 seconds and 20 hundredths, the videos diverge, and the split screen becomes a game of spot the difference: on the left a passenger watches her glasses fly off, while on the right they stay on her nose, here an overhead locker opens, whereas there it stays shut. And most noticeably, it’s dark on the left, while the cabin on the right is illuminated by radiant sunlight. The first plane is still making bumpy progress through the terrible storm of March 10 when the second emerges into the calm skies of June 24 at 18:07.
There is such an uproar that Mitnick has to shout to be heard.
“There,” he says in a gleeful, overexcited voice. “That’s when it all happens—at 16 hours 26 minutes 34 seconds and 20 hundredths…and this extraordinary fact just keeps going. We chose three cameras from onboard the Boeing 787: one at the front, one in the center, and one at the back. There are twelve meters between each of them. At 900 kilometers an hour, which is 250 meters per second, the Boeing covers these twelve meters in one twenty-fifth of a second and—what a miracle!—these cameras take twenty-five images per second…do you follow?”
Mitnick gets no response, so he keeps going.
“I’ll split the screen in three. On the left the video from the first camera, in the middle the center camera, and on the right the camera at the back. So, at 16 hours 26 minutes 34 seconds and 20 hundredths, sunlight suddenly floods into the cabin according to the first camera, but on the next image it’s at 16 hours 26 minutes 34 seconds and 24 hundredths. And on the third camera the sunlight appears at 16 hours 26 minutes 34 seconds and 28 hundredths.”
“And? What does that mean?” Silveria asks.
Mitnick is exultant.
“There’s a discrepancy of one twenty-fifth of a second between each camera. It’s as if our second plane appears out of nowhere through an unmoving vertical window. Before the window, there’s the storm, once it’s come through it, the sky’s blue. According to our observation satellites, this window was at precisely N 42°8’50”, W 65°25’9”, but the plane reappeared today a little further southwest, and there’s about sixty kilometers between the two.”
“What do you conclude from this, Mitnick?”
“Oh, me? Nothing, nothing at all. It’s just another fact to put into the mix for the eggheads from Princeton,” he says, turning to the two mathematicians.
“It operated a little like a photocopier, then?” Tina Brewster-Wang asks. “A scan taken in one place and a copy delivered somewhere else, like a sheet of paper coming out of a machine?”
Mitnick hesitates. The concept had struck him as too absurd to put forward.
Silence is returning. Air-conditioning units have not yet been installed, and a clammy heat hangs over everything. A message buzzes on the cellphone of the man from National Security. He reads it and sighs.
“The president of the United States is insisting that the NSA check whether there was a Russian or Chinese ship near our Atlantic coastline on March 10…that could have carried out a time travel experiment…”
A peevish despondency washes over General Silveria. He leans his head against the window, gazes out over the hangar filled with harsh light.
“Where the hell did this plane come from?” he sighs. “You must have a theory, Professor Brewster-Wang? A professor without a theory’s like a dog without fleas.” “Really sorry, right now I don’t have any fleas.”
“We hope to track everybody down within forty-eight hours,” Silveria continues, “including foreign passengers who’ve returned to their own countries since March 10. Between now and then you’d better come up with an explanation for us.”
“We need to expand the scientific team,” suggests Adrian. “Quantum physics, astrophysics, molecular biology…the team needs to be on the premises by dawn.” “We’ll give you a list of scientists in thirty minutes,” Tina Brewster-Wang adds. “Two or three philosophers as well.”
“Really? Why?” Silveria asks.
“Why should scientists always be the only people woken in the night?”
Silveria gives a shrug.
“Don’t be afraid to name anyone you like, I have full authority to kidnap every Nobel winner in the field. The exact wording is ‘to ask them to cooperate at the express request of the president of the United States.’ ”
“And find us a hypothesis room too,” Tina continues. “A really big communal work room with lots of different spaces, several tables, some easy chairs, sofas, blackboards, chalk, well, you get the picture…”
“The boards will be white and interactive, will that be okay?” Silveria asks without a trace of irony.
“And anti-sleep pills too.”
“We’ll pump you full of modafinil. We have hundreds of boxes of it…”
“We’ll need a specialist in continuity in space,” Adrian pitches in, “she can help with graph theory.” “Why ‘she’? Do you have someone in mind?”
Adrian has someone in mind.
“Professor Harper, from Princeton. Meredith Harper. A few hours ago, she and I…as it happens, we were talking about Grothendieck’s topoi in geometry.”
“I’ll send a military vehicle for her right away. Is she…reliable? In terms of national security?”
“Absolutely. Particularly as she’s English. Is that a problem?”
General Silveria has his doubts.
“There are thirteen English people on this damn plane anyway. So long as she’s not Russian, Chinese, or French. And we’re going to be collaborating with the British services anyway.”
“And a coffee machine, a real one, that makes espresso,” Adrian adds.
“Don’t ask the impossible,” the general replies with a grimace.
SHORTLY BEFORE 11:00 PM, a swirl of gray smoke rises in the northern corner of the hangar, a harmless plume at first, but it gradually becomes blacker and denser. A man’s voice cries “Fire!” and a wave of panic spreads through the crowd: Passengers race toward the closed doors, jostling the soldiers guarding them. Teams of security officers surge forward to help the soldiers.
The fire is quickly brought under control, but Silveria reaches for the mic.
“This is General Patrick Silveria. Please don’t give in to panic. I’ll come down and give you the explanations you deserve.”
A rising hubbub fills the room.
“What can you possibly tell these people?” Tina Brewster-Wang asks as the officer prepares to climb down from the platform. “I don’t recommend you tell them that they all already exist in duplicate somewhere in the world and they darn well shouldn’t be on this earth at all…”
“I’ll improvise. Who knows what we’re all doing on this planet, anyway?”
While Silveria is at the mic in front of the two hundred passengers, launching into his misleading explanations concerning national security, piracy, and public health, the soldiers examine the damage: the fire started under one of the mattresses and quickly spread through the whole tent. A deliberate act.
Thirty meters away, a narrow metal door with access to the outside has been forced with a crowbar. During the panic, the soldiers guarding it relaxed their vigilance. After another ten minutes a five-meter gap is found, where the perimeter fence has been torn open by a vehicle. It was gray, as indicated by flakes of paint; but the parking lot close to the hangar, and from which it must have been stolen, has more than three hundred vehicles in it.
A passenger has escaped and vanished into the night.
AT MIDNIGHT the list for the multidisciplinary team is ready: Nobel Prizes, Abel Prizes, Fields Medals—either actual or potential winners. Thirty minutes later, the FBI start ringing doorbells, interrupting all sorts of nocturnal activities, although sleep is the most common. The “express request of the president of the United States” and the flashing lights piercing the darkness do their job. And it’s not yet one in the morning before a choreography of cars, helicopters, and jets is bringing the scientists to McGuire Air Base.
Meredith is here too, recognizable from her smell of vodka and toothpaste. She’s clearly been hauled out of bed, and when Adrian launches into a—muddled—exposition of the situation, her anger is already long gone. She listens, frowning, and looks out at the crowd below without a word.
“Don’t you have any questions?” Adrian asks, amazed. “Would you have any answers?”
Adrian shakes his head, disconcerted, and hands her a modafinil. To stop you sleeping, he wants to say, but she’s already swallowed it without any protest.
“You should have told me you were a secret agent, Adrian.”
“That’s…that’s not exactly true. Um…come, I’ll take you to the control room.”
“Tut-tut. Princeton mathematician, what an off-the-wall cover for a spy…”
When Adrian opens the door, Meredith stands openmouthed at the scene.
“Oh, Adrian, I love it,” she whispers. “We’re in Dr. Strangelove.”
Each new piece of information on the screens confirms the impossible. The plane on the runway is in every way identical to the 787 that landed on March 10. Granted, that aircraft has been repaired, and granted, the passengers have aged: this very evening in Chicago people are celebrating the six-month “birthday” of a baby that, in the hangar, is a screaming two-month-old. In the one hundred six days that separate the two landings, of the two hundred thirty passengers and thirteen crew members, one woman has given birth and two men have died. But genetically they’re the same individuals. Silveria is taking stock of the figures with a select committee, and completely ignores the mathematicians.
“And the interrogations?”
“We’re adding to the questionnaire devised by Professors Wang and Miller,” replies Jamy Pudlowski, the woman from Psychological Operations. “We’re introducing faulty details to produce reactions that will confirm identities. At least initially, the passengers’ names must remain secret.”
The man from the NSA is waggling his tablet again.
“We’re monitoring social networks for alerts on keywords, from ‘Boeing’ to ‘McGuire.’ When this story explodes, we’ll be able to identify who’s posting and to limit the spread of information. But this isn’t China or Iran, we can’t block the internet. For now, only one page, attributed to a soldier at the base, mentions the plane, and we’ve erased it. Thank God…”
“On the subject of God…” says Pudlowski.
The word “God” has the gift of creating silence. The woman from the FBI shakes her head, and under the lights, a narrow lock of black disrupts the arrangement of her white hair.
“Well…God is likely to prove a problem. In our country, as in many others, there’ll be talk of an act of God. Or of the devil. We won’t be able to stop outbursts of superstition and the reckless behavior of visionaries. I’ve taken the initiative of summoning a committee of spiritual leaders from all religions. The president’s religious advisors are all evangelists, we can’t be criticized for limiting ourselves to them. On board that plane there were Christians, Muslims, Buddhists…Time is against us, and religious individuals are unpredictable by nature.”
“You have carte blanche, Jamy,” the general says. “With its nine-billion-dollar budget, I’m sure your bureau can achieve something.”
“What about the French, the other Europeans, the Chinese, and all the rest…what do we do?” Mitnick asks. “Should we contact their embassies?”
“To tell them we’re illegally detaining their citizens? We’re not going to do anything. We’ll wait for a decision from the president. Anything else?”
At the back of the room, Adrian raises his finger shyly.
“We need a code to distinguish the people on the first plane that landed in March from those on the second: one and two? Alpha and beta? Or colors: blue and green, blue and red?”
“Tom and Jerry?” suggests Meredith. “Laurel and Hardy?”
“Excellent ideas, but no,” Silveria says decisively. “Let’s make it simple: March for the first one, which landed in March, June for the one that landed in June.”
TIME IS ALL-IMPORTANT, Blake knows that. Fifteen minutes in the hangar are all it takes for him to exploit a chink in the security setup, another seven and he’s driving toward New York in an old Ford F-150 pickup, the most unremarkable vehicle there is, “borrowed” from the parking lot at the air base. Always have just a backpack as luggage. Of course, he didn’t give the cabin crew the disposable cellphone he’d bought in Paris, and obviously he avoided the DNA test. He reaches New York at two in the morning, throws away the Australian passport he used for his outward journey, parks the pickup in a dark street, cleans all traces from the steering wheel and seat, before setting fire to it in spite of these measures, to be extra sure.
It’s an archetypal summer’s night, sweltering even, and Blake—who’s astonished to see on a newspaper that the date is June 24—at least finds the temperature logical. In a twenty-four-hour cybercafe, he scrolls through the news for the last few months, learning that on March 21 a certain Frank Stone was assassinated in Quogue; someone carried out his contract. He wants to check his secret bank accounts, but the codes have changed. He visits the Facebook page for his Paris restaurant, then Flora’s page. In a photo posted on June 20, a man who looks confoundingly like him has his daughter on his knee and a bandage around his forehead, and Flora has captioned it: “The dangers of horseback riding—and that was just the box stall!” He studies his own forehead: no scar, no bruising. Just for a moment, Blake considered the lazy but crazy explanation of amnesia. It’s no longer an option.
His pragmatism wins the day, as it always does. He needs to get back to base: he takes a taxi to JFK, then uses cash and a new identity to buy a ticket on the next flight to Europe. The New York–Brussels plane takes off at 6:15. At nine o’clock on Saturday evening he’ll be back on European soil, and there’s a bus to Paris every hour. Blake has many hours to sleep, and if not to understand, to think.