Page 42 of Wild Oblivion

I shared a grave look with JD and filled him in on the situation.

“A bomb?” Henrik said. “Now that is concerning.”

I called the sheriff and gave him an update, then texted the audio clip of the call to Special Agent Thompson and Isabella. I set a timer on my phone for 12 hours from the time of the call.

The countdown had begun.

Thompson called. “You got any idea what he meant by the bomb finding you? Is he talking about a smart bomb? A drone?” He paused. “What did you do to this guy? Fuck his wife? Kick his dog?”

Neither of those was my style. But JD and Ihadmade a lot of enemies. “Every bomber we’ve put away is still serving time, and none have been this sophisticated.” My mind raced,deep in thought. An idea popped into my head. “The boat. Maybe he planted the bomb aboard the boat while we were out last night.”

“That’s right, you live on a boat,” he said with annoyance.

“I’m sure you know everything about me. I bet your team has done a deep dive.”

“They couldn’t find anything. Otherwise, I’d think you were on the take.” After a pause, he said, “I can send a detection team to your location.”

“I don’t think it’s going to do any good. Oblivium is a non-radioactive, non-thermal, silent material. Geiger counters, vapor detectors, sniffer dogs, EMF sensors won’t pick it up.”

Thompson sighed. "This is a real problem. If this technology spreads or becomes commonplace, we'd be flying blind.”

"I'll call Emily. Maybe she's got some method of identifying the isotope.”

I told him I'd be in touch and ended the call.

"Isotope?" Henrik asked. "What isotope?”

I gave him the background on the bomb.

His eyes sparkled with intrigue. "Now you're talking my language.” He thought about it for a moment. “If Oblivium is in a metastable quantum state before detonation, it will likely distort quantum field coherence. It's possible that a device that uses entangled photon pairs or perhaps superconducting quantum interference could detect wave function instability."

JD and I looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. Either this was a rare moment of clarity, or Henrik was as sharp as ever.

Off our dumb looks, he clarified, “Think of it as a device that scans for quantum phase jitter."

"Whatever that means,” Jack said.

I called Emily. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we've got another problem." I left out the bit about her boyfriend and told her about the new threat. Then, in an effort to sound intelligent, I said, "I was thinking it might be possible to detect the device if we had something that could scan for quantum phase jitter. You know, something that could detect distortions in quantum field coherence." I said it casually, like it was something I thought about when bored.

Emily paused for a long, impressed moment, not sure how to respond. "Yes, I suppose that would work.”

"Do you have anything like that?”

"No. Detection is something we haven't worked on yet.”

"How quickly can you throw something together?”

"When do you need it?”

"In less than 12 hours.”

20

JD and I scoured every inch of theAvventurabut didn't find a bomb or anything that looked remotely like one.

"That bastard is going to fly in a drone and blow us up as we sleep," Jack said.

“He said the device was already in position.”