Read Online The Omega Theory by Mark Alpert - Free Book Online Page B

door opened and the FBI agent with the blond crew cut ushered Adam Bennett back into the room. His face looked even pinker than before and his eyes were bloodshot. David got the feeling that he might’ve been crying in the men’s room. Or throwing up. There were wet spots on the front of his jacket.
    Lucille leaned back in her chair and swiveled to face Bennett. “Feeling better?”
    He took a deep breath and nodded. It seemed that Agent Parker’s prediction had been correct. The man was ready to talk now.
    She held up the ion trap for Bennett to see. “While you were gone, we found one of Jacob’s toys. And Dr. Reynolds was kind enough to explain how it works.” She glanced at Monique, who’d folded her arms across her chest and propped her butt on the edge of the desk. “So how close was Jacob to building his quantum computer?”
    Bennett stared at the ion trap for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Then he shook his head. “He wasn’t close.” His voice was low and ragged. “That was the trouble.”
    “Really?” She placed the device on the desk and tapped her fingernail on its glass top. “Even after you gave him all those millions of dollars?”
    He kept shaking his head. David had never seen anyone look so defeated. “The last prototype he built for us could perform calculations with a string of sixteen ions. That was a record, better than anything built by other research teams. But it was still light-years away from a practical machine.”
    Lucille gave Bennett a skeptical look. “I thought a quantum computer didn’t need a lot of ions. Isn’t that the whole point?”
    “Well, you need more than sixteen if you want the computer to do something that ordinary computers can’t do. You need at least fifty. And Jacob was finding it difficult to scale up his prototypes. He ran into technical problems.” He grimaced. “The truth is, the technology isn’t ready yet. Sooner or later, physicists will build a practical quantum computer, but it’s going to take time. Maybe five years, maybe ten. And Jacob didn’t have that kind of time.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Bennett turned to David. The man had ignored him and Monique ever since Lucille began her interrogation, but now he looked David in the eye. “You saw Jacob this afternoon? Before he was . . .” His voice trailed off. “How did he look to you?”
    David remembered the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “He looked terrible. He had leukemia, didn’t he?”
    “Jacob had fought it for several years but he was losing the battle. I visited him every six months to check the progress of his research, and he seemed more depressed and bitter each time. He told me that he’d wasted his life. That he’d accomplished nothing of significance in physics, and no one would remember him.” He turned away from David and stared at the floor. “Jacob was desperate to do something important before he died. And he knew he couldn’t achieve a breakthrough in quantum computing. I think that’s why he began diverting his grant funds.”
    Lucille sat up straight. This was the piece of embarrassing information she’d been waiting for. “You mean he was spending DARPA’s money on something else?”
    Bennett took another deep breath. “I saw the first evidence of it a year ago. When I reviewed his progress reports, I noticed that he’d ordered the installation of dedicated fiber-optic lines. They were expensive, heavy-duty cables linking his laboratory’s server to the phone company’s trunk line.”
    David remembered the severed fiber-optic lines he’d seen in the charred laboratory, hanging from the ceiling like dead snakes. It occurred to him now that the number of communication lines was unusually large, much more than a typical laboratory would need. “What was he using them for?”
    “Jacob was vague when I asked him about it. He said he needed a faster Internet connection. But the fiber-optic lines he’d ordered went way beyond his personal needs.