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say”—he chuckled—“that our memories of events are accurate, just that our memories are the results of events. But can an event with no results be said to have happened at all?”
    I took a deep breath. “Dr. Rezaei, would it be possible for quantum mechanics to somehow make it so a person could not be remembered after he was gone? Kind of like there are two possible memories, that he was there and that he wasn’t there, and then even though he was there the memory that he wasn’t there is the one that gets remembered?”
    He wrinkled his brow and stared at me. “You mean a causal event happens, but then is erased from the past so that its effects are not felt?”
    As I was trying to parse through that to figure out what it meant, he went on, “Some of the quantum eraser experiments appear to do so, but so far not on a macroscopic scale.” He picked up a spiral-bound notebook off the table, scribbled on it a bit, then said, “It is an interesting concept. What on Earth made you even think of such a thing?”
    I debated telling him about my talent, but for some reason the bodyguards made me uneasy. I decided it was best to extricate myself. “Just a little debate with a friend. Nothing important. Sorry to have troubled you with it.”
    “Oh, it is no trouble at all,” he said, still scribbling on his notebook. “I love to think tangentially. It is a great exercise of the mind.”
    At the very least he had given me a place to start—I could do some research on quantum eraser experiments to see if they might have some connection to my talent.
    But I still had one job left to do.
    As I stood up, I loosened my grip on the papers I was holding, and the middle bunch of about thirty pages spilled onto the coffee table and luxuriously thick carpet. “Whoops!”
    “Oh my,” Rezaei said.
    I got down on all fours and began scooping up the papers. Rezaei leaned forward on the couch and tried to help.
    “Don’t worry, I’ve got them,” I said, as I let some of the papers I had just picked up fall again, this time onto his feet. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
    I reached forward and got my hand under the paper. The tracer—a device smaller than a thumbtack head and almost transparent—had two adhesive sides. One was a light adhesive kind of like Post-it notes, and one was a very powerful adhesive sealed in microscopic bubbles. The light adhesive had kept it stuck to the tip of my right index finger since I put it there about fifteen minutes earlier. Now, under cover of the paper, I jabbed my finger to Rezaei’s shoe. The sudden pressure burst the bubbles, the powerful adhesive took hold, and I felt a slight tug on my skin as I pulled my finger away from the tracer.
    “Sorry,” I repeated as I gathered up the papers and rose to my feet.
    One of the bodyguards escorted me to the door and out.
    With my primary mission accomplished, I could now focus on my secondary mission: finding Yelena.
    In the hotel lobby, I was about to throw the papers into a trash can when I noticed one of them did not have smooth edges, but rather had been torn out of a spiral notebook. I pulled that sheet out and saw, in scribbled handwriting, the words: “I am a prisoner forced to work against my will.”

Chapter Eight
    After my usual phone authentication routine with Edward, he took a couple of minutes to review the latest notes he had made in my file. “So your primary mission was to plant a tracer on this quantum physics guy. How’d it go?”
    “No problem,” I said. “But there was an unexpected development.”
    “Oh?”
    “He slipped me a note saying he was a prisoner being forced to work against his will.”
    “Really? That’s a twist. Thought Jamshidi had recruited the guy out of Iranian patriotism. I’ll note that down.”
    “Umm,” I said. “Shouldn’t we do something to help him?”
    “You planted the tracer on him, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “The most important thing is to find the lab where he’s working. Once