Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation: Chapters 6–13

“I still haven’t heard of it. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t inherently know everything.”

“Now tell me what you know about special relativity.”
“Okay. Einstein published it in 1905—and the world has never been the same. Essentially, Einstein deduced that matter and energy are the same thing, which led to the most famous equation in history: E = MC². The amount of energy in something (E) is equal to the quantity of matter within it, which is its mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared. Which is the speed of light multiplied by the speed of light.”

Well, what Einstein’s equation really means is that inside even the tiniest bit of matter, there’s a staggering amount of energy.

Charlie sat forward on the couch, her eyes now riveted on Dante.

No, when Alexei and his men set off the real bombs, they would target much larger cities, places teeming with people of inferior races.

Pandora hadn’t been in Bern, but now, thanks to a fortuitous twist of fate, he knew where Einstein's equation was really hidden.

After ten days of arduous travel, Alexei and his team were almost there.

They were streaming in by the millions, leaving their own wretched countries behind to ruin others. They were disgusting, foul, uneducated people who brought nothing but trouble. Their customs were abominable, their languages shrill—and when they assimilated, they were even worse.

Restaurants filled with immigrants served repugnant food from far-off lands instead of the food Alexei had grown up with.

There were many men like him in Europe these days, idle and angry.

The old man had been a KGB spy in Eastern Europe for many years, undermining the Americans.

Many had drowned, and those who had survived had floundered in the water for days until the fishermen had rescued them.

And their methods tend to be blunt and primitive. They use pipe bombs and other rudimentary explosives. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, was carried out with box cutters.

They vanished from the city ten days ago. Interpol set up a dragnet, but somehow they slipped through.

But then, on Einstein’s deathbed, his regular doctor—a man he surely trusted—isn’t there. Instead, some naive kid shows up, disobeys the housekeeper’s orders, and gives Einstein morphine.

The Agency impounded everything Klein failed to destroy—although they quickly replaced most of the documents. That way, Princeton, which had claim to anything Einstein produced while employed there, wouldn’t realize anything had been taken.

A private meeting with President Eisenhower was arranged. Miss Dukas’s concerns were assuaged. Klein wasn’t so easy.

The great scientist had been one of the university’s founders, as well as an ardent supporter of the creation of Israel.

It made sense that if Einstein had something he really wanted to keep safe, like the hiding place for Pandora, then he had sent it there, where it would be protected for centuries, rather than keeping it in his home, which was susceptible to fire, mold, bookworms—and the CIA.

But no one had ever thought to look for a mundane Sherlock Holmes book, which was probably tucked away in a box and forgotten.

The CIA couldn’t just waltz into Hebrew University, flash their badges, and invoke the Patriot Act.

The Israelis didn’t know about Pandora, and unless Carter wanted to cut them in on it—which she didn’t—she had to make the acquisition look like routine research.

However, at the moment, all the senior agents stationed in Jerusalem were out in the field on covert operations.

The CIA jet came in low and skidded across the icy tarmac.

Dante provided her with dossiers on each member.

They were all Caucasian men, in their twenties and early thirties, but they looked older due to tough lives, bad choices, and festering anger.

They weren’t the brilliant, erudite bad guys you saw in spy movies.

They didn’t have much in the way of specialization: There were no suave ringleaders, resourceful munitions experts, or deft break-and-enter men.

They didn’t have much in the way of specialization: There were no suave ringleaders, resourceful munitions experts, or deft break-and-enter men.

But Charlie was sure Dante hadn’t said anything to Milana yet, and maybe he never would, because dating a fellow agent was probably against the rules at the CIA—or at the very least it was frowned upon. And Dante wasn’t the kind of guy who broke the rules, even if it meant having an unrequited crush.

“There’s nowhere to run. There’s no one else here but military personnel, who’ll hand you right back to me the moment they catch you—and if, by some miracle, you got past all of them, there’s nothing but a thousand miles of snow, ice, and polar bears in every direction.”

Charlie had been outside for less than a minute, but it was so cold on the tarmac that she could already feel her core temperature dropping and her extremities going numb.

Her panic had subsided, and she was beginning to feel normal again.

However, to the chagrin of her parents, Charlie wasn’t merely intelligent; she was also socially adept.

By then she had discovered that not everyone was as impressed with her unusual mental abilities as her parents were. In fact, those abilities often seemed to alienate people. So Charlie had learned to keep them a secret.

They grounded her. They took away her toys and her books. They refused to get her the puppy she longed for. And when that didn’t work, they berated her and said things no parent should ever say to their children.

She knew this for sure, because when she had developed it, she had built a back door into the code, a way to let her circumvent the security system.

Lightning had made almost no changes at all to what she had sent them. They had blatantly swiped it and were now making millions of dollars from something that belonged to her.

First, the news that Barracuda could be hacked killed the product, costing the company millions. But it was also incredibly embarrassing when one of the world's preeminent tech companies couldn’t get into its own system to fix its own website.

Charlie had a bad attitude and problems with authority, most likely stemming from the fact that the main authority figures in her life—her parents—deserved contempt.