Breathless
bolt,which begins to turn. Puzzle’s calm—and Riddle’s—is a grace of their condition, their unique position. She relies—he relies—on the highest knowledge that precedes all learning, and they know that whatever will be will be for the best.
And now their freedom is half won.
Sixty-two
S hortly after seven o’clock, Grady and Cammy were reviewing the contents of the refrigerator and freezer, deciding what to have for dinner: salads and frozen pizza or salads and frozen fettuccine Alfredo, or salads and frozen homemade meatloaf, or just beer and chips.
Usually, Merlin would be at the refrigerator door, alert to the discussion, hoping to discern what kind of scraps he might be able to wheedle from them at the end of the meal. Instead, he prowled the room, sniffing here and there, and Grady had no doubt that the scents he ceaselessly reviewed were those left by Puzzle and Riddle.
As the dinner decision seemed to be sliding toward grilled-cheese sandwiches, cole slaw, and frozen waffle-cut french fries, a knock came at the door. For privacy from the Homeland horde, they had not raised the blinds at either the window or the French door, which Paul Jardine had lowered during the laser-polygraph sessions.
When he answered the knock, Grady expected to find someone with an agenda that would make him want to throw a punch, butthe identity of the visitor surprised him. “Dr. Woolsey. Come in, come in. What brings you here?”
“The fate of the nation,” said Lamar Woolsey with a sly smile. He closed the door behind him, and nodded to Cammy. “Dr. Rivers, I have the advantage. I’m Lamar Woolsey, but please call me Lamar.”
Grady said, “He’s Marcus Pipp’s father.”
“Stepfather,” Lamar corrected. “Mr. Pipp died when Marcus was three. I married Estelle, his mother, when he was seven, raised him from then.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Lamar. Grady speaks so highly of your son.”
“He had a great heart,” Lamar said, “and a mind to match it. I don’t go a day without thinking of him.”
Abruptly tumbling to the truth, Grady said, “You’re part of the crisis team.”
“Now don’t hold that against me, son. Often, Homeland Security does good and necessary work. This just isn’t one of those times.”
Merlin came to stand before Lamar, gazing up at him solemnly before breaking into a grin and wagging his tail.
Pulling a chair from the table and sitting down, the better to rub the dog’s head, Lamar said, “This one could eat the hound of the Baskervilles in a single bite.”
Grady had met Lamar only once, eleven years before, between overseas tours of duty, when he had gone home with Marcus for a week while on leave.
“What do they have you doing in something like this?” Grady asked.
“There’s never been something like this. Previously, in a crisisresponse, I’ve had two roles. Probability analysis—such as reviewing a planned response to a terrorist event that’s still under way and developing a best-guess report on the likelihood that the proposed response would work as intended, work at all, or exacerbate the crisis. And pattern recognition in apparent chaos.”
Cammy swung a chair away from the table, positioned it behind Merlin, and sat facing the mathematician, with the dog between them. “You said there’s never been something like this. That’s been obvious to Grady and me since we first saw Puzzle and Riddle. But what is it, Lamar? What’s happening?”
“The end of one thing and the beginning of another.”
“Lamar is a mathematician and a physicist, but he can go mystical on you,” Grady warned.
“When a scientist tells you that ‘the science is settled’ in regard to
any
subject,” Lamar said, “he’s ceased to be a scientist, and he’s become an evangelist for one cult or another. The entire history of science is that nothing in science is
ever
settled. New discoveries are continuously made, and they upend old certainties.”
“Isn’t that obvious?” Cammy asked.
“Most people tend to believe that the scientific theories of their time are the right ones, and that what remains for scientists to do is find ways to develop wondrous new technologies from their absolute understanding of nature’s laws, structures, and mechanisms. Even many scientists succumb to the illusion that they live in the age of ultimate enlightenment. They become so committed to a theory that they spend entire careers ever more desperately defending it as
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