Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation: Chapters 14–26

They were parked right on the tarmac and facilitated a fast transit through customs.

The woman actually was Israeli by birth, but looked stereotypically Californian, with blond hair, a dark tan, and a lithe, limber body.

“Those aren’t code names,” Barbie said curtly.

Charlie had expected a certain amount of humorless, down-to-business attitude, but these two had been cold and brusque since the jet had landed.

The center of the campus was at the crest of the hill, a wide lawn flanked by 1950s buildings and abutted by what had once been the National Library of Israel but was now just the library for the university.

Charlie sullenly slumped in her seat. “I flew halfway around the world to get here and now I’m supposed to just wait in the car? This sucks.”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you to hear that Einstein was a voracious reader,” Golda said.

“Oh. The book can’t leave the archives. That was Einstein’s stipulation for all of his donations.”

Two college employees, most likely professors, given their manner and dress, were glaring at the skateboarders disdainfully as they passed, but not actually saying anything, as though their harsh glares alone would be enough to get the point across.

Marko was the youngest of the Furies, the same age as most of the students at this university, but while the students all had the luxury of taking four years to study for high-paying jobs in medicine and law and engineering, Marko had been scrounging for menial work ever since he was fourteen and his mother had died.

Everyone stopped in their tracks to determine if the alarm was the warning signal for an incoming missile attack. When they realized that wasn’t the case, they were slow to return to what they had just been doing, because the alarm had reminded them that when you lived in the Middle East, you couldn’t afford to be complacent.

A concrete path meandered across the lawn, forcing her to weave back and forth to stay on it, dodging all the people as well.

The instructors in her self-defense classes had been going easy on her. She was only a beginner, able to take down an uncoordinated lummox like the pool guy back in Snowmass—but she was in serious danger now that she was facing a brutal, talented fighter like Marko.

It looked as though a slit had been made in the inside of the cover, then painstakingly patched up again.

“Running is not my plan at all. We have a contingency.”

Oleg’s anger instantly dissipated. And then he began to laugh.

There was derision in his gaze—as if he was thinking that maybe Charlie wasn’t as smart as he’d heard she was.

Dante added, “Physics is getting far more complex as we delve to the subatomic level. Quantum physics isn’t as easy to describe as gravitation.”

He believed there had to be a more concise formula for explaining everything, which put him at odds with virtually everyone in physics.

By the end of his life, the general population might have revered Einstein, but in the scientific world, he had become a crotchety old stick-in-the-mud who refused to be open to new ideas.

"Look,” Charlie said testily. "The man who created this clue had an IQ of 230. Mine’s 220 at best, so it’s going to take me a little while to figure this thing out.”

It had been built and rebuilt so many times that street level had risen fifty feet over the centuries and now sat atop the detritus of a hundred civilizations.

Pi is useful if you need to calculate the area of a circle, but it’s an extremely unwieldy result for a complex formula.

“I’m going to assume this is a cipher, and your most basic form of cipher is a cryptogram. That’s where one character or group of characters stands for another. This would be the simplest version.”

Dante’s face remained stoic, but Charlie noticed the tips of his ears turn red from embarrassment.

Her ruse had bought her only a few seconds.

Dante wrapped his arms around her from behind, pinioning her arms to her sides, and carried her up the steps while she kicked and writhed.

“All the talent in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you squander it,” Dante said.

It had once been a living room, but the CIA had modified it into a workspace. It was sterile and official in design.

"I’m sure I would figure it out soon enough,” he said pompously.

The roof wasn’t only the roof of the safe house, but of all the roofs of the connected houses, an enormous swath of white plaster, blinding in the sun.

In parts of the Old City of Jerusalem, the rooftops were as much of a thoroughfare as the streets.

The big, amorphous blocks of homes were topped by wide, flat spaces and connected to one another by bridges and arches that spanned the narrow streets.

All lay down flat when they heard the gunfire, trying to stay low, although Charlie noticed no one panicked. Jaded by years of living in a dangerous city, the Jerusalem citizens calmly made sure they weren’t the targets, then stayed low to ensure they weren’t hit by stray bullets.

Charlie knew she had been barely using her gifts. In fact, she had been perversely proud of that.

But now you can make a difference, Dante had added. Which had a much greater resonance now that he had sacrificed his life to protect hers.

It was difficult enough to hit a stationary target with it, let alone one zigzagging erratically.

After Bern, the CIA had been flummoxed, its plans to track down Pandora in shambles.

Milana caught Fez and used his momentum against him, whirling him away from Charlie and flinging him into a butcher shop, where he skidded on the blood-slicked floor and face-planted in a pile of innards.

In the butcher shop, Fez got back to his feet, grabbed a cleaver from a carving block, and charged. Milana lifted an entire sheep's leg off a hook and parried the attack.