Heaven's Gate Read online

  Archangels / Book 1

  HEAVEN’S GATE

  Jan Dunlap

  FaithHappenings Publishers

  Copyright © 2016 by Jan Dunlap

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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  Heaven’s Gate / Jan Dunlap. -- 1st ed.

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  For everyone who believes that science, as well as faith, is

  the dominion of God

  “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called...”

  1 Timothy 6:12

  Prologue

  He looked beautiful. Even in the darkness, his moonlit face etched in shadows, he could take her breath away.

  Temptation, she thought.

  No more, she vowed again.

  She took a last glance through the side window of the door and placed her hand on the knob. Temptation or not, she owed him this much. She had, after all, been the one to start it, and she wasn’t such a coward that she couldn’t face him when she ended it.

  She could do this.

  As she opened the door, a sudden gust of icy wind clutched at her, chilling her to the bone. Shivering, she looked up into his beautiful face.

  “It is over, Elise,” he said, smiling. “In more ways than you can possibly know. And for that, I have you to thank.”

  He put a bullet between her eyes, and she dropped dead to the floor.

  “Too easy,” he said, noting a spray of blood on the back of his gun hand. He pulled a linen handkerchief from his overcoat pocket and wiped his hand clean. Then he turned and walked back into the night.

  Chapter One

  I am so close.

  Sitting alone in his darkened lab, Dr. Michael Carilion held his head in his hands, a single high-intensity lamp throwing a halo of light across his broad shoulders and onto the pages of calculations that littered the desk’s work surface.

  It was almost midnight in the fourth-floor physics lab of Barnet College, the Harvard of Wisconsin, and the rest of his research team had left hours ago. As usual, Michael had remained, wrapped in a world of his own—a world composed of complex mathematical equations, scientific anomalies, wormholes and the mind-bending, multi-dimensional possibilities of String theory, the spoiled darling of theoretical physics. But even though his eyes were aching and his brain literally hurt, Michael wasn’t about to call it a day and go home.

  Not now.

  Not tonight.

  Not when he was this close.

  And he knew he was close. He was sure of it. So close he could feel it in his bones. So close he could almost taste it, touch it.

  “It” being not just another physics theory.

  “It” being the physics theory—unification, the Unified Field Theory, the Holy Grail of theoretical physics. Also known as the One Theory of Everything, it would explain how the universe ultimately worked, from the smallest subatomic particles to the inconceivably massive galaxies of the universe. With unification, scientists could ask—and finally find the answers to—the questions that had intrigued humanity since the dawn of time. The answers to “how did the universe begin?” and “how did life start?” would no longer be the raw material of intellectual or spiritual speculation, but instead, footnotes in scientific texts.

  In fact, with unification, there wouldn’t be the need for speculation of any kind anymore. The mystery of life itself would become an open book that everyone could read. Who knew what might be possible when scientists had all the answers? Would weather be controllable? Could life be extended indefinitely? Would new power sources revolutionize transportation, manufacturing, communication, or even human relationships themselves?

  For a moment, Michael allowed himself a reprieve from his calculations. He pulled his time-worn Rubik’s cube from his pocket and idly twirled the rows, remembering how he’d once heard a colleague refer to the quest for unification as “the desire to know the mind of God.” That was taking it a bit far, Michael thought. Divinity wasn’t involved in the equations he attempted; the behavior of physical objects and forces was.

  Let the theologians look for the One God.

  Michael was looking for the One Theory.

  Granted, he certainly wasn’t the first. There had been others before him—Sir Isaac Newton, James Clark Maxwell, Albert Einstein. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity had even made him a celebrity of the day, making headlines, attracting photographers, attending soirees of the rich and famous.

  But Michael also knew that Einstein’s career didn’t end with the theoretical physics that helped birth the space age. Unknown to many, the scientist with the wild white hair had believed there was a master pattern in the universe, a master equation. His belief became an obsession. The great man had spent the last two decades of his life in his second-floor study, trying to formulate a single theory so powerful it would describe the complexity of the universe. He stopped reading the work of other physicists, unaware of the newest developments in atomic research, focusing only on his quest for unification. He began to spout philosophy, talking about his “cosmic religion,” the “big picture,” and the “perfect harmony of the universe.” Other physicists shied away from him, afraid he was losing his mind. Yet to the very last of his life, he kept searching for the theory.

  Michael sighed.

  Einstein was the reason he’d gone into the field of theoretical physics more than twenty years ago. Entranced with the man’s genius, Michael had not only been drawn inescapably to mathematics, but he had also felt an immediate connection to the man the first time he’d seen a photo of the intellectual giant in his high school physics textbook. Not that there was any physical resemblance between the two—at forty-three years of age, Michael still had the tall, muscled frame of his youth, whereas Einstein had gone soft and bent, with that wild mane of white hair in contrast to the stark black curls that grazed Michael’s shirt collar.

  “Angel’s curls,” Elise had called them.

  Elise.

  He didn’t have to look at a calendar to know it had been eight months and six days since her death. Some of those days he couldn’t remember now and didn’t want to. Other days, he’d thought he would go crazy with anger and confusion and depression and grief. There were nights he couldn’t sleep, and the nights when he did sleep, he dreamed dreams he didn’t want to have, dreams he didn’t want to recall when he woke up.

  His friends had been worried about him, and with good reason. Michael had lost interest in his research, dropped too much weight, and taken up drinking. His graduate assistants had done an adequate job teaching his classes during his leave of absence, but the work in the lab had faltered, placing both research grant renewals and the continued allotment of university funding in serious jeopardy—not to mention the future of his academic and professional career.

  But fortunately, somewhere amidst the disaster his life was becoming, Michael had heard the One Theory of Everything calling to him, and he’d dried out, hit the weight room, and returned to work. Without Elise, work
was the only thing that mattered anymore. He’d pushed hard with this last project—the Strings Project—the past six months, and its results lay thick on his desk. And somewhere among them, he had all the pieces to the puzzle. Unification was within his grasp. He just had to put it all together in the right pattern.

  Rubbing his temples, Michael looked again at the papers and photographs strewn across his desk.

  The halogen lamp illuminated the mess, making an oasis of light in the corner of the deserted lab. He focused again on the mathematical models of string theory, the theory that had given his project its name, its elegant computations that described the tiniest bits inside an atom as vibrating strings of energy, not particles. As a popular candidate for the One Theory, string theory had been tantalizing physicists for decades, and if it was correct, it was also Einstein’s principle of ultimate unification.

  The problem was the “if.”

  Before it could be crowned the One Theory, string theory had two small problems that needed to be resolved. The first was that it predicted eleven dimensions, and though theoretical physicists could find ten, they had yet to locate the eleventh.

  The other problem was equally troublesome: with strings being so infinitely small, there was no way to prove they even existed.

  Yet Michael was convinced his Strings Project was on the verge of doing both.

  I am so close!

  “Michael? It is very late. You should go home.”

  The woman’s voice was an unwelcome jolt that shot straight to his nerve endings. Michael abruptly turned in his chair to peer through the dim lab to see a tall, slim woman standing in the open doorway. Backlit by the hallway lighting, her face was indiscernible, but he knew the accented voice.

  Unfortunately.

  “Khristina,” he said, his own voice flat. “What do you need?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “It is very late,” she repeated.

  Michael could feel the annoyance rising in his chest. Khristina Tupikova was the one member of their research team that he’d fought tooth and nail to keep out of his lab. But Lucas Scranton, Michael’s unconventional, brilliant research partner, had insisted they needed Khristina to succeed in finding the One Theory.

  Because she was a medium.

  “I know it’s late, Khristina,” he said. “I work best when the lab is empty.”

  He hoped her psychic “sensitivities” picked up his emphasis on the word empty, and she would leave, but he’d already noticed in the lab that the nuances of the English language were occasionally lost on the Russian woman.

  This time, though, he lucked out. He could see her silhouette shrink back from the door frame.

  “Then I will leave you to your work, Michael,” she said. “Good night.”

  He listened to her footsteps receding down the hallway.

  “Good riddance,” he muttered, turning back to his calculations.

  Instead of returning to his mathematical models, though, he picked up one of the photographs on the desk. This was the reason behind Lucas’s insistence to bring Khristina into the Strings Project. Taken while Khristina did her “readings,” they were a collection of Kirlian photographs that captured incredible images of colored waves of energy emanating from her body. Lucas was convinced that the fluctuations of the magnetic fields documented in the photos would lead them to the One Theory. As intriguing as Lucas’s speculations were, though, Michael could only shake his head at the crazy impulse that had forced him to agree to include a psychic in their work.

  “There’s a key in there,” Lucas had argued with Michael. “If we’re looking for the Theory of Everything, we’ve got to turn over the rocks other physicists have missed. You’re the one who keeps saying we have to think outside the box, try something new, something creative. You can’t deny that something of a physical nature is happening when a medium’s magnetic aura changes. You’ve seen that research. Something’s going on. I say we take it the next step. Spectral analysis of the energy. Trace the changes of the emanations to try to find the source of the effect.”

  And then Lucas had grasped Michael’s shoulder, looked directly into his eyes and whispered, “What if the source is the eleventh dimension? The one everyone’s been looking for, the one that will prove—prove!—that string theory is the One Theory of Everything? What have we got to lose? It’s a whole field of inquiry that has barely been tapped—”

  “What have we got to lose?” Michael had scoffed. “Dead people sending messages to the living is going to prove the most sought-after theory in the history of all science? Are you out of your mind? Messages from dead people? We’d be laughed right out of our conference chairs, not to mention any kind of university or research funds.”

  He’d shrugged off his colleague’s hand and rolled his eyes. “Think about what you’re saying, Lucas. Our peers wouldn’t even let us in to the conference if word got out we were using psychic readers in the lab. Gee, maybe that’s why the ‘field of inquiry’ hasn’t been tapped. Because it’s woo-woo science. Fakery. Fraud. It has nothing to do with legitimate scientific research and certainly, nothing to do with what we are trying to accomplish here.”

  “But you’ve seen the aura research. It can’t be explained—”

  “It can’t be explained! You’re right! So let someone else figure it out. Someone with the time and money and resources! Not us!”

  Even now, six months later, alone in the lab, the argument still rang in Michael’s head. Lucas, a natural wizard when it came to applied physics, had become obsessed with the possibility of uncovering the sub-atomic strings of String theory in the electromagnetic auras of human beings. Whereas Lucas couldn’t find a single reason not to pursue the idea, Michael, the devoted theoretician, believed it was professional suicide. Finally, in frustration, he’d lost his temper and thrown it right at Lucas.

  “What we have got to lose is the one thing we absolutely have to have in this project—complete credibility! Are you nuts?”

  But Lucas hadn’t backed down, and in the end, Michael had unaccountably caved and told Lucas to go ahead and set up the experiment. By the next morning, Lucas had Khristina Tupikova on her way to their lab. Within weeks, they had reams of psychic reading session transcripts, piles of computerized readouts, and the Kirlian photographs, photos that recorded the variations in the energy waves surrounding Khristina as she delivered messages from the other side of the grave.

  Or so she claimed.

  Personally, Michael didn’t believe there was another “side” to the grave.

  Dead was dead, and death was a door that closed shut once you walked through it. The day he watched Elise buried in the ground, he said goodbye.

  At least, he had tried to.

  Somehow, though, it wasn’t enough. Some nights he dreamed of her, vivid dreams that woke him, shaking, imagining he’d heard the gunshot that killed her. Some days, he almost felt her breath on his cheek. That was when he wished, just for a moment, that he did believe in some kind of ‘other side,’ some place where Elise might still be, whole and happy and knowing he loved her.

  But then he’d give himself a mental shake and tell himself to snap out of it. He was a physicist, a man who looked at the reality of the world as it revealed itself through concrete behaviors and physical relationships. As a trained scientist, Michael didn’t “believe” in anything he couldn’t explain with a formula or mathematical model.

  Except for one thing: the Theory of Everything. And he believed he was the one who was going to find it.

  He pushed the photos further to the side of his desk and concentrated again on the sheets of calculations he’d been tinkering with all afternoon and into the night.

  Some of the mathematical formulas were as familiar to him as his own face, formulas he’d been manipulating ever since he attended the String theory conference back in 1995 at the University of Southern California. Ed Witten, one of the world’s greatest physicists, had stood up and presented M Theory, a whole new perspec
tive on String theory, a perspective that not only electrified all the scientists there but reconciled all the existing theories into one simple package, a package that revolutionized the search for the Theory of Everything. It was that package that Michael had torn apart and reassembled almost every day since, every minute he could spare from his teaching duties at the university. It was the motivation for all his research, and since losing Elise, it was the only reason he had for getting up every morning.

  Once before, he’d thought he was on the brink of breakthrough. It was eight months and six days ago.

  He’d been working late, as usual, and had managed to isolate some variables in his calculations. All at once, he’d seen the resolution, the mysterious eleventh dimension unfolding in his head, and he’d begun frantically scribbling down the equations. But halfway to his destination, the phone rang and rang, short-circuiting what was going on in his brain. He’d grabbed the phone in a fury, picked up the receiver and shouted into it, “What?”

  It was the hospital.

  Elise had been shot.

  Stunned, he’d flown out of the office, down the four flights of stairs to the faculty parking lot and then driven without any recall to Johnson Memorial Hospital. By the time he arrived in the emergency room, Elise was dead. The neighbors in their normally quiet neighborhood had heard a single gunshot and called 9-1-1. The first policeman on the scene had found Elise just inside the front door, a bullet lodged in her brain. She’d apparently opened the door to her killer, who shot her at point-blank range. There were no leads, no clues, nothing, as to why Elise Carilion was murdered in her own doorway. In the months since, Michael had battled guilt along with grief and depression. If only he’d been home and not working late in his lab . . .

  And why did she open the door? Late at night, alone?

  Michael shut the thoughts away as he had taught himself to do. It was the only way he could deal with it. At some point, he knew he would have to make peace with Elise’s death, but it wasn’t going to be tonight.