Page 71 of Exit Party

“You should be.” He seemed to be looking through files, in an unhurried way. He had a placidity about him that I knew to be entirely false, because I’d trained under him. Alberto was a master interrogator. He noticed everything. “I want you to know, I like that you spent some time in a lower-level position before you started moving up through the ranks.”

“Why’s that?”

“It isn’t good, Ibari—Detective Waker—only doing one thing with your life. You were excellent in your cover life, by all accounts. There was some concern that you’d abandon Service.”

“The thought never crossed my mind, but I did like the college,” I said. “It was interesting work.” Remembering my years in Fillmore was like remembering a different life. No, it was remembering a different life.

“I have people who’ve been Service since middle school and done nothing else, and they’re good at their jobs, but there’s a narrowness in that.”

Service since middle school wasn’t something I especially wanted to think about. He looked at me in a blandly appraising way. “When was the last time you saw Nico Li?”

Here it was. I ran the calculations: Service likely knew that Nico had been in Ohio, but Nico had left her phone and watch in the car, which meant that most likely Service didn’t know what she’d said.

“She came to visit me in Ohio this past weekend,” I said.

“Why did you hesitate just now?”

“She was distressed about a personal matter. I didn’t want to betray a friend’s confidence.”

He nodded. “I believe in humanity,” he said.

Low bar, I thought, but nodded back instead of speaking.

“Nonetheless,” he said, “I do have to ask.”

“Of course. I understand. She was . . . she’s been having some marital difficulties,” I said.

“Of what nature?”

“Tension related to the balance of childcare.”

“Ah. When my wife was pregnant, she had me sign a contract,” he said. My gaze flickered to his left hand, which was of course ringless. The suggestion of a life outside Service was an extraordinary concession, coming from him. “It seemed a little extra at the time, but in retrospect I’m grateful. There’s no room for misunderstanding when you’ve got it on paper.”

“Is Nico why you asked me to come here?” I asked.

“A case has come in that concerns her.” There was a heaviness about Alberto, a suggestion of pain in the way he hesitated. He’d mentioned his wife because he was stalling. “We’re trying to piece together exactly what happened, but it seems that there was some kind of accident at UCLA last night. As best as we can determine, a small group of physicists decided to run an illegal experiment involving quantum entanglement.” He stopped talking, and turned his gaze to the fish. He seemed at a loss for words. “This is going to sound insane, but stay with me. The experiment began with four scientists. One of them was only there to operate the controls. The other three participated in some way, as subjects in their own experiment. Of those, two apparently disappeared into thin air, but the third . . . seemingly doubled.”

“What do you mean by ‘doubled’?” Now I was stalling too. Nico was gone.

“I mean that at the beginning of the experiment there was one man named Kareem Fayed, and at the end there were two. Two Kareem Fayeds. Both are being held here while we run testing and interrogations.”

“Kareem Fayed as in Nico’s husband?”

“Yes. Now there seem to be two of him,” Alberto said. “I don’t know that I can explain it better than that. They’re not exact copies. They’ve lived different lives. There’s your friend’s husband, and then there’s the other man, and he seems to have come from, well, from some other place. The men are genetically identical.”

“What about Nico?”

“Nico Li and Saraya de Santos are missing. They disappeared in the course of the experiment. I’m sorry.”

“Can you tell me what you mean by ‘disappeared’?” The word that flitted through my mind was escaped. Nico had gotten out, I thought. She’d told me about an experiment that would transport people out of the State, and now she was gone. I was surprised by the jealousy that overcame me.

“They were testing a technology that could be used to transport people long distances,” Alberto said, “in my understanding. But in this case, because they were still in experimental phases, they tried to transport three scientists across the length of a room.”

“What happened?”

“They’re gone,” he said. “Those two, Nico and Saraya, disappeared from one side of the room, and never reappeared.”

“No one knows where they went?” I felt like I was falling.