A standard SWAT invasion of the house, executed even with the swiftest and most overpowering force, had at best a 90 percent chance of success. But it couldn’t guarantee that the precious key to everything would be captured, that Coltrane and his daughter would not teleport out to a parallel world.

If Falkirk didn’t nail them this time and seize the key, he very likely would never have another chance. If he failed, his future would be as empty as the glass on the drainboard.

He must set aside conventional thinking, abandon the protocols of standard SWAT assaults, and go big, as the Oracle of the Empty Glass had undoubtedly been instructing him. Instead of armored men battering down doors and shattering through windows and shooting everyone in sight as they exploded into the house, a better plan would be to gas everyone inside. Creep up on the house without alerting those within. Introduce a powerful, rapidly expanding gas that would render the occupants unconscious in a few seconds and dead soon after. Coltrane would have no time to use the key to everything.

When the gas dissipated, Falkirk and crew could enter without personal risk. A story could be concocted to explain the gas as issuing from a device that Coltrane had been cobbling together for a terrorist attack. It malfunctioned, taking out its maker instead of the innocent people he intended to kill. Irony. Karma. The press would never question the story. Most repeated as fact whatever was fed to them by a deep-state source with whom they were sympathetic.

79

Duke mainly listened. As a detective, he’d spent a lot of time listening to moral degenerates denying their crimes, spinning their elaborate alibis, and eventually confessing to mayhem and murder.

His guests had eaten breakfast. A fresh pot of fragrant coffee—the third—finished brewing. Everyone except the girl seemed to be flying on a caffeine jag. She didn’t appear to need a stimulant to remain hyper alert and engaged, as though her body regularly produced caffeine along with new blood cells.

Everyone had stories to tell, amazing experiences to relate. Not a little of the talking was done by Ed Harkenbach. The scientist had a plan. He kept saying that he could resolve all the problems that his key to everything had caused in the lives of those gathered here. But before he would reveal what needed to be done next, he wanted them to better understand the multiverse—how it worked, why the key to everything was an existential threat to everyone in all the parallel worlds, and how he intended to mitigate or eliminate the threat that he—more times than he yet quite knew—had created when pride rather than reason guided him.

So for an hour and then another hour, Duke listened for lies, for evasions, for any indication that Ed was not giving it to them straight. There were more than a few moments when he felt that he had fallen down a rabbit hole and passed through a looking glass to a place where he would never be comfortable again.

Duke Pellafino’s life was one of routines and habits. He moved day to day in a pleasant well-worn groove. Successful police work depended on operating according to proven investigative techniques and procedures. Hotel security was more of the same. In his leisure time, he favored activities—golf, tennis, the piano—that required the development of skills, which demanded routine practice. He loved dogs for the reasons that everyone loved them, but also because they were happiest when they rose for the day, were fed, were taken for walks, and had play sessions according to an unvarying schedule. Aside from those rare moments during his years as a cop when bad guys felt compelled to prove their badness, Duke’s life involved little drama. And zero weirdness. He had no patience for talk of ghosts, reincarnation, fortune-telling. He believed the world was only what your five senses told you it was; there were no unseen presences or mysteries concealed behind mere veils of reality.

But then Ed Harkenbach said that when someone saw a ghost, he might be seeing a person in a parallel world, when timelines for a moment crossed instead of being neatly lined up next to one another or being wound around one another like filaments in a cable.

And in a strange way, reincarnation was real, though not in the sense that after death you returned in a new identity. However, you were incarnate as yourself in numerous timelines, living many lives.

Fortune-telling? Who was to say? According to Ed and quantum mechanics, all of time—past, present, and future—was complete in the instant of the big bang. Therefore the past and the future were contained in the present. If the future of this timeline was here to be known right now, there might be people gifted enough to see what most could not.

If earlier Duke hadn’t been hurled to an apocalyptic parallel world and escaped it with Amity, there were moments during Ed’s explanation that he would have gotten up, stopped listening, and washed the dishes, certain that all this was bushwa. Instead he remained at the table with a coffee mug in hand, in front of a plate on which a residue of egg congealed, and gradually he listened less for lies and more like a child sitting with his troop around a campfire in an eerie wilderness.

At last, Ed got to their predicament, for which he claimed to have a resolution. “You,” he said to Jeffrey and Amity, “can never go back to your bungalow. They know you have the key. Even if you surrendered it, they wouldn’t let you live, because you’d still know the key exists. They’ll never tolerate that knowledge being spread beyond those involved with Project Everett Highways.”

“I wish I’d never met that other you,” Jeffrey lamented. “No offense.”

“None taken. In some timelines I can be a quite difficult genius, given to paranoia and borderline megalomania. Even a mad genius in some versions. Although in my defense, I’ve not yet encountered a me who was a flat-out evil genius.”

“I’m not a guy who can live on the run,” Jeffrey said.

“Might have some cool adventures,” Amity said.

Putting a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, Jeffrey said, “From now on, the only adventures we need are those in books.”

To Michelle, Ed said, “And you can’t go home with Jeffrey and Amity to the bungalow in your timeline, because . . . well, you won’t be able to explain how they came back from the dead.” He glanced at Jeffrey. “Sorry. My condolences.”

“De nada. I’m not sensitive about being dead in other timelines as long as the me in this one stays alive.”

Unable any longer to contain himself, Duke said, “This is the craziest shit I’ve ever heard, and crazier still is it makes sense.”

“But if we can’t stay here in Jeffy’s timeline,” Michelle said, “and if we can’t live in mine . . . where do we go?”

Grinning broadly, Ed made fists of his hands and thumped them a few times against his chest. “I’m so pleased with myself. I found the perfect place for you.”

“There better not be bug-form robots,” Amity said.

“Not a one!” Ed declared. He got up and, carrying his empty mug, went around the table to the girl. He tapped her nose with his index finger, and he said, “Cute as a button,” which she clearly did not appreciate. “It’s a great world, Amity, a delightful timeline. Best of all, Jeffrey’s mom and dad, Frank and Imogene, your much-loved grandparents a few towns north of here—they’re long dead in the world you’ll be going to, and your father was never born there, and neither were you. Isn’t that perfect?” When the reaction around the table was one of baffled dismay, the physicist realized that he needed to explain. “So Frank and Imogene can go with you under new identities. To your new world. Three generations of Coltranes making a fresh start.”

After taking a moment to absorb the increasing immensity of what Harkenbach was proposing, Jeffrey said, “Dad and Mom love the life they have in Huntington Beach. They’re set in their ways. They won’t want to pull up their roots and go to a parallel world.”

Moving to the coffeemaker on the counter behind Jeffrey, Ed said, “Of course, if they stay here, they’ll be murdered. Can I pour coffee for anyone? No?”

Coltrane appeared to be baffled by the scientist’s assertion or reluctant to believe anyone would really want to kill his parents.

Sharing his experience of the psychology of sociopaths, Duke said, “If this Falkirk asshole can’t get his hands on you, he’ll assume you’re still in this world, because he won’t believe you’ve skipped across the multiverse and left your folks grieving, thinking you’re dead. He’ll torture them until they tell him where you are, when you’re coming back, or until they die. So they’ll die.”

Filling his mug with coffee, Ed said, “Anyway, they already agreed to it.”

Coltrane turned in his chair. “They agreed, what do you mean they agreed, when did they agree?”

“The morning of April eleventh, two days ago. I paid them a visit and explained the situation. They were so happy you’d have Michelle again. I gave them a tour of the new timeline, and they fell in love with it.”