The Prophet's Ledger

The woman in the red dress walked into my office at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday, which was already a bad sign. Tuesdays were for dead ends and divorce lawyers and men who thought they could buy something—anything—with money. But this woman wasn't any of those things. She was young—late twenties, early thirties—and she walked like a woman who knew she was the most interesting thing in the room. Which, in my office, was saying something.

"I'm looking for someone," she said. She didn't sit down. She stood in front of my desk like a soldier reporting for duty. "My name is Mona Voss. My father died three days ago. I need to know why."

I looked at her. She looked back. The bottle of bourbon on my desk caught the desk lamp's light and threw it across the room in a thin golden line that looked like a road leading somewhere I didn't want to go.

"Your father died," I said. "How?"

"In his apartment. Door locked from the inside. On the desk, a stack of manuscripts. He was sixty-two. He had a heart condition. The coroner said it was natural causes."

"Then what's the problem?"

She reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph. It was black and white, creased down the middle, the edges worn soft. In the photograph, a man—Asian, gaunt, wearing glasses that were too big for his face—sat at a desk covered with papers. The papers were covered with writing. Not normal writing. Equations. Numbers. Dates.

"His name was Dr. Liu Xuan," Mona said. "Most people called him Dr. Liu or 'X.' or nothing at all. He taught physics at a community college in South LA. He was thirty-eight when he came to this country. He never published a paper. He never gave a talk. He never told anyone what he was working on."

"So he was a physicist who didn't publish." I reached for the photograph. "That's not unusual. The academic system—"

"This isn't about academia." She took the photograph back. "His manuscripts. They predicted things."

I looked at her. "Predicted things."

"Dates and numbers. Like an accountant's ledger. But instead of money, he wrote dates. And next to each date, a number. And every single one of those dates, something happened."

I took a sip of bourbon. It was cheap bourbon, the kind that tastes like a mistake, but at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday, it tastes like anything. "Like what?"

"Like 1945.8.6. Hiroshima."

I put the glass down. "Like 1963.11.22. Dallas."

I looked at Mona Voss. She was still standing there, still straight, still wearing the red dress like armor.

"Like 2001.9.11. New York."

I picked up the glass again. I didn't drink. I just held it. The glass was warm from my hand. The room was warm from the heat of a Los Angeles summer that didn't end in October. Outside, a siren wailed—the sound of a city that was always calling for help and never getting it.

"You want me to believe my father died because of a notebook full of predictions," I said.

"I want you to believe that his father—my grandfather—was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. I want you to believe that in 1945, he started writing a book. I want you to believe that book contains something that people don't want people to know."

"Which is?"

"That the future can be calculated. That it's not random. That it's not free will. It's math. It's all math. And if you can calculate the future, you can control it. And if you can control it, you don't let just anyone do it."

I laughed. It was a dry laugh, like stones grinding together. "You brought me a woman in a red dress at midnight to tell me her grandfather invented time travel with a calculator."

"I brought you because you're the only private investigator in Los Angeles who's flown a fighter jet and seen a war and doesn't believe in anything except what he can prove with his own two eyes. And what I'm telling you can't be proven. It can only be calculated."

I looked at her. She was holding her breath. I could see it in the rise and fall of her chest, in the way her fingers gripped the edge of my desk.

"All right," I said. "Show me the notebook."

She put an envelope on my desk. Inside was a single sheet of paper—photocopied from something larger, something that had been handwritten in a hand so precise it looked printed. The paper had dates and numbers on it. Dozens of them. Hundreds.

I read them. 1945.8.6. 1963.11.22. 1968.6.5. 1979.3.28. 1986.1.28. 2001.9.11. 2008.9.15.

Every date was a disaster. Every number was a death toll or a financial loss or a percentage of something that had been lost.

And then, at the bottom, one date that hadn't happened yet.

2010.4.16.

Next to it, two numbers: 90%.

And one word: Don't.

I put the paper down. I looked at Mona. She was crying. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a single tear running down her cheek like a drop of rain on a window that nobody's going to wipe.

"He died on April 10," she said. "Six days before this one."

"Which one?"

"The one after this one." She pointed to a line I hadn't noticed. A line at the very bottom, in handwriting that was different from the rest—shakier, like the hand that wrote it was tired. Tired, or old, or both.

2010.4.22. 100%.

One hundred percent.

I picked up the phone. I dialed Sal. Sal Marcone was a LAPD detective who'd seen too much and understood none of it, which made him the closest thing to a philosopher I knew.

"Sal. It's Wrench. I need a favor. Can you get me files from the Manhattan Project? Specifically anything about a 'prediction calculation group' or a 'future analysis division' or anything that sounds like physicists trying to do what God does."

There was a pause. I could hear Sal on the other end—probably in a diner somewhere, eating eggs he wouldn't finish and drinking coffee he wouldn't taste.

"Jack," he said. "You're calling me at midnight about Manhattan Project files?"

"I'm calling you because I have a notebook that predicted Hiroshima, Dallas, 9/11, and the financial crisis. And I need to know who else has it."

Another pause. Longer this time. When Sal was thinking, he was silent. When Sal was lying, he talked.

"All right," he said. "I'll see what I can find. But Jack—whatever you're looking for, it's probably already dead. The people who built the thing your grandfather worked on—they don't let things like that survive."

"Thanks, Sal."

I hung up. I looked at Mona. She was still crying. I looked at the notebook page. 2010.4.16. 90%. Don't.

"What does 'don't' mean?" I asked.

Mona wiped her eye with the back of her hand. "That's what I wanted you to figure out."

"I'm a private investigator, not a mystic."

"You're the only person in Los Angeles who knows what it feels like to stand in a cockpit at thirty thousand feet and know that you're about to die and that dying doesn't matter. So yes. You're the mystic."

I looked at her. She was right. She was wrong about a lot of things—about her father, about the notebook, about the future—but she was right about that. I knew what it felt like to stand in a cockpit at thirty thousand feet over Vietnam and know that the numbers in front of you were the difference between living and dying.

I knew what it felt like to look at a set of coordinates and know they were wrong.

I knew what it felt like to be a bird that had been flown by someone else's hands.

"Get out of here, Mona," I said. "Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow, I'm going to start looking."

"Looking for what?"

I looked at the notebook page. At the dates. At the numbers. At the word at the bottom that wasn't a number.

" Don't."

She left. I locked the door. I sat at my desk. I poured another glass of bourbon. I looked at the notebook page and the dates and the numbers and the word that wasn't a number.

And I waited.

For what, I didn't know. But I knew something was coming. Something big. Something that had been calculated fifty years ago by a Chinese physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then disappeared into the community college system of South Los Angeles, writing equations in a ledger that predicted the end of the world one date at a time.

I drank the bourbon. It tasted like a mistake.

On the desk in front of me, the notebook page caught the desk lamp's light and threw it across the room in a thin golden line that looked like a road leading somewhere I didn't want to go.