The Third Day Read online

  The Third Day

  by David Epperson

  The Third Day is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Third Day

  Copyright © 2011 by David Epperson.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please respect the hard work of the author and purchase only authorized electronic editions.

  Cover art and design by Svetlana Uscumlic. Copyright © 2011 by David Epperson.

  ISBN 978-0-9838411-0-4 (Kindle edition)

  Please visit the author web site at http://www.davidepperson.com.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following – all rights reserved; used by permission:

  The Map Jerusalem During the Time of Christ is taken from Vista Bible Royalty, copyright © used by permission of Zondervan, www.zondervan.com.

  The illustrations of 1) Jerusalem Through the Ages and 2) Herod’s Temple are taken from Fernando Batista/National Geographic Stock, used by permission of the National Geographic Society, www.nationalgeographicstock.com.

  The research assistant’s description of his work in Chapter 12 is taken from “Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 80, 1083-1159 (2008), used by permission of Dr. Michael Freedman.

  Version 2011.08.03

  Dedication

  To my parents, Marcus and Ann Epperson, who instilled in me a love of books at an early age and for whom I can never be thankful enough.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to extend my profound gratitude to readers of my early drafts who offered such helpful insights along with the vital encouragement that pushed me to see this novel through to completion.

  In addition to my wonderful sisters-in-law Mary and Susan Epperson, I would like to convey my most heartfelt appreciation to:

  Cherie Gary, David Wilkie, Elizabeth Dame, Kent Roberts, Gwynn Gorsuch, Dr. Richard and Jackie Hirshberg, Martha Sonnier, Dr. Kim Martin, Marc Thompson, Geoff Lawson, Ron and JoLynne Carlo, Leon Gary, Jr., Candace Gary, Elizabeth and Larry Jones, Joe B. Fortson, Pat Akroyd, and Dr. Kimberly Aaron.

  I could not have done this without you.

  I would also like to thank David Gary for IT/Web support, Dr. Sharon Skeans for editorial and proofing review, and Biblical scholar Allen Houk for first-century fact-checking. Any mistakes that remain are entirely my own.

  Chapter 1

  The line between brilliance and insanity is often quite blurred.

  I had always known this – after all, the artist Van Gogh sliced off his own ear – yet as I looked back on the past few weeks, I could only hope that I would never again see this principle demonstrated so convincingly; or at such grave risk to my own life and limb.

  My unusual journey began with a simple request, as such things so often do. I had retired from the military a few years earlier but wasn’t yet ready for the rocking chair.

  Since one of my postings had been in Intelligence, an old friend suggested that I hang out my shingle as a private investigator. She even referred me to my first client, a “widow” whose husband had faked his own death in an attempt to avoid going to prison for embezzlement.

  Success with that case led to others, and before long, I had grown more prosperous than I deserved, sifting through the detritus of human folly.

  Thus, it came as no surprise that one fine spring morning, I found myself in Greenwich, Connecticut, seated in the office of Jonah Markowitz – the manager of one of the city’s innumerable hedge funds – listening to his suspicions about a physicist he had hired three years earlier.

  He held up his cell phone.

  “I haven’t been able to reach him in over a month,” he complained. “We used to chat at least once a week. I try not to micromanage, but it is my money they’re spending.”

  I had worked with Markowitz before and knew he had a paranoid streak – reinforced by years on Wall Street – so my first instinct was to discount his grumbling. Nobel Prize winning physicists didn’t just vanish into the ether.

  “What about Juliet?” I asked. “What does she say?”

  Henry’s wife, Dr. Juliet Bryson, had shared in his Nobel Prize.

  “She told me he had been burning the midnight oil and needed a break. First, it was an offshore fishing charter; now, he’s supposedly spelunking in New Hampshire somewhere.”

  I considered this for a moment. “Places with conveniently limited cell phone reception?”

  “It’s hard to stay out of touch that long unless you’re really trying.”

  I glanced down at the phone I had laid on Markowitz’s desk and sighed. Fewer than ten minutes had passed, and the counter already displayed eleven unopened emails.

  “We all have reasons to try, Jonah,” I said.

  Markowitz had no hard evidence that the good professor had done anything other than take a well-deserved break from his labors.

  But if I had learned anything during my years of investigative work, it was that happy clients pay better than unhappy ones – and faster, too. Since my firm had conducted the initial background check, I agreed to run the traps to find out what was going on, just to be sure.

  ***

  I sent my assistant a quick message to retrieve the Brysons’ file while I spent the next half hour fighting traffic on the way back to my office and pondering what might be happening.

  The notion of physicists working in the investment world was no longer out of the mainstream. For the past two decades, leading Wall Street houses had raided university physics and mathematics departments in an ever escalating arms race to develop the algorithms that would give them the slightest edge over their competitors.

  In the intense, aggressive world of high finance, the burgeoning hedge funds soon joined the fun – much to the joy of the scientists themselves, who had undoubtedly grown weary of scraping by on university salaries while their colleagues in the computer and biotech fields struck it rich.

  Markowitz, a man whose net worth Forbes had recently pegged at $3 billion, had snatched the Brysons away from MIT with a mandate to develop a state-of-the-art trading algorithm and to build the quantum computer on which to run it. He told me at the time that he had envisioned spending up to $200 million on the venture – though he’d recoup the money in weeks if all went according to plan.

  I had the average layman’s comprehension of quantum mechanics, which is to say I knew slightly more about the subject than did a house plant. Quite frankly, the concepts – electron spins and simultaneous states of matter, being both here and there at the same time – made my head hurt.

  Still, my time in Army Intelligence had given me enough exposure to the topic to make me aware of the enormous advantages that would accrue to whoever managed to develop a working prototype of a quantum device.

  ***

  I pulled into the parking garage and made my way up the stairs to my desk. What I found in the Brysons’ file confirmed my recollections. Other than being the two smartest people I had ever met, I couldn’t remember anything particularly unusual about either one.

  The couple lived in a quaint brownstone a few blocks from ca
mpus, which they had decorated with tasteful but not overly expensive furniture. They drove ordinary middle-class cars. By all appearances, Henry and Juliet Bryson lived the quiet, modest lives of career academics.

  They met their teaching requirements in a tag-team fashion which proved highly popular with MIT’s undergraduates. The only complaint I could recall was that the couple were not known for being liberal with partial credit – though neither was the world; something these students would learn soon enough.

  The Brysons had few hobbies, which came as no surprise. Their only real interests outside of work consisted of Henry’s fanatical devotion to the Boston Red Sox and the couple’s odd fascination with creation stories across the globe – though I suppose that was only natural for scientists whose research explored what had happened during the most infinitesimal fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

  I couldn’t blame them for wanting to cash in, either, since the proposition carried such little risk.

  If their venture with Markowitz blew up, they could always return to what they had been doing before. In fact, MIT, unwilling to admit their stars had moved elsewhere, persisted in calling their departure a leave of absence.

  ***

  Still, people changed; and in my experience, usually not for the better. People disappeared all the time, too. The FBI’s database listed over 51,000 missing adults in the US alone, though I doubted any of them had picked up prizes in Stockholm.

  I called in one of my newer associates, a CPA I had lured away from one of the big firm sweatshops, and assigned her the task of updating the Bryson’s financial records. I thought about driving to Boston to ask Juliet directly, but Markowitz had instructed me not to provoke a confrontation until we had better information.

  Chapter 2

  Susan, the CPA, greeted me a couple of days later with a worried look on her face; the kind that told me she knew something was wrong without being able to explain why.

  That was a feeling I knew all too well. The solution, in my experience, was just to lay everything out on the table and let the chips fall where they may, though as soon as she did so, I wished that she hadn’t.

  I stared at the figures and turned pale.

  “762 million dollars?”

  This, according to the statements, was the happy couple’s present net worth.

  Susan nodded. “Their contract with Markowitz allowed me to call the bank to confirm the numbers. By the way, they’ve parked it all in 180 day T-Bills, set to roll over automatically.”

  I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes and took a deep breath; though at that moment, I’ll have to admit I was less concerned about the specifics of what my accountant had found than in how I could explain an oversight of this magnitude to my client and keep even a shred of my professional reputation.

  “How in the world did they make it?” I finally asked.

  “Let’s just say that Warren Buffett is a rank amateur by comparison.”

  I motioned for her to hand me her notes. As it turned out, the Brysons had bought $10,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock in December 1973, which had grown to $2.5 million by the time they finally sold in June 1990.

  “That’s a good start,” I said. “What did they do next?”

  Susan laughed.

  “Not being content with winning the lottery, our brilliant physicists went out and plunked it all on a single number on the IPO roulette wheel.”

  “What did they buy, Microsoft?”

  “Even better: Cisco. Our intrepid investors took their Wal-Mart profits and bought 80,000 shares of Cisco in August of 1990 – not long after the IPO. Between then and the new millennium, the stock split almost every year. They ended up with roughly 11.5 million shares, which they sold in February 2000 – right at the top, mind you – for an average of $120 per share. You do the math.”

  I did. Even after capital gains taxes, the Brysons were billionaires.

  “But their house is still mortgaged!” I said.

  She nodded. “They took out a standard 30 year fixed at 5 1/4 percent when they bought the place ten years ago. I had a lawyer run by the courthouse yesterday to look at the documents. It’s all standard stuff. They even took advantage of the down payment assistance program the university offers so promising faculty can afford to live near campus.”

  “Did they refinance?”

  “No.”

  “And their cars?”

  “State registration data still list the same ones they owned when you conducted the first background check – an Explorer and a Camry.”

  Markowitz would at least get a laugh out of that. Bonus time in Greenwich kept Lamborghini dealers in fine fettle. Any of his traders driving a Camry would have been either laughed out of the building or dismissed as a hopeless eccentric.

  “A billion dollars, huh?”

  “Afraid so. If it’s any consolation, you weren’t the only one to miss it. A billion got you on the Forbes 400 in those years.”

  At the moment, that was small comfort.

  “What about their taxes? Could you get hold of their returns?”

  She smiled as she opened her briefcase and extracted the documents. She slid them across the desk.

  “Paid in full,” she said.

  I made a note to speak to my contact at the IRS, whose reliability suddenly fell into serious doubt.

  “Are they amended returns?”

  “No, as best I can tell, these are originals.”

  I thanked her and then poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, though I was sorely tempted to go for something stronger.

  I supposed it was possible. Despite the popular images on celebrity TV, the truly wealthy people of my personal acquaintance took pains to avoid ostentatious display. Even Sam Walton, with all his billions, drove an old pickup truck – though I suspected that after a while, this became part of a carefully crafted PR campaign.

  And the question remained: why? Why would a couple of billionaires seek investor money when they could have just as easily set up shop on their own?

  ***

  What the television dramas don’t show – for obvious reasons – is the unbearable monotony that constitutes much of an investigator’s lot.

  The Brysons’ contract obligated them to send quarterly financial statements to their benefactor, along with copies of the invoices for all major equipment purchases. Sorting through these was the clear first step.

  My staff and I spent the next week examining purchase orders, matching the requisitions with legitimate vendors, and confirming shipments with FedEx and UPS – mind-numbing tedium, to be sure, but it had to be done.

  We even visited suppliers to verify that the prices the Brysons had paid reflected economic reality and didn’t involve hidden kickbacks between the lab and their confederates at the equipment dealers – an all too common scam.

  The net result of our endless hours of toil: if the Brysons had been cheating their patron, we didn’t have the slightest idea how.

  ***

  What was even more bizarre was our realization, as we waded through spreadsheets and sifted through endless piles of paper, that the intrepid physicists had poured millions of their own stock market winnings into the project.

  When we added it all up, their own contributions had matched, or even slightly exceeded, what Markowitz himself had invested, and all of this had occurred within the previous nine months.

  I gave my office a few well-earned days off as I considered what to do. We had found no other trading accounts, so it didn’t appear that the Brysons had set up their own hedge fund – though my client would surely point out that we hadn’t found their billion dollars the first time around, either.

  One more issue nagged me as well. I flipped open the folder and re-read their bios. Henry Bryson, born Buffalo, New York, October 12, 1958. Juliet McGovern Bryson, born Sweetwater, Texas, August 4, 1963.

  So, when they bought their first Wal-Mart shares, he was chasing girls at the local burger stand, while she was a ha
ppy fifth grader playing hopscotch in a small town 1,500 miles away. Compounding the mystery, we had found no family fortunes on either side. Henry’s father worked as an electrician; hers ran a drug store. Both mothers stayed home.

  None of this made any sense.

  I put off calling Markowitz as long as I could, but eventually I had no choice but to pick up the phone.

  Over the course of my years in the Army, I had learned that I was usually better off just admitting that I didn’t know something rather than trying to BS my way through, so I just laid out the facts as we had found them.

  Markowitz appreciated the candor. Though he still suspected that we had botched the initial background investigation, he admitted that he found the lack of overt fraud as puzzling as I did.

  We concluded that our logical next step was to go to Boston and confront Juliet directly – though he added a catch.

  “I’m sending Ray with you,” he said.

  I had met his son once. The boy – actually a young man in his late twenties – seemed bright enough, and unlike so many of his wealthy peers, his vices didn’t extend to the white powder and club-hopping. Instead, the kid spent his family’s fortune on his obsession with adventure sports.

  “I’m not sure what he could do,” I said. “What does he know about any of this?”

  Markowitz, to his credit, restrained himself from snide comment; and I had the sense to realize that this was a battle I couldn’t win. He wanted another set of eyes – completely reliable eyes – and I was in no position to refuse.

  Chapter 3

  Ray met me in my office the next morning, and we drove up to Boston together. Alicia, the receptionist, greeted us with a friendly smile, though I could detect a faint whiff of irritation that our presence had forced her away from her primary duties – split between the latest fashion magazine and a half-finished game of solitaire.