Bashert Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface: Tenth Anniversary Edition

  Prologue

  Part One: Karl 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Part Two: Mitchell 19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Part Three: Shira 30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Author’s Note

  Appendix: An Inspiring Hacker

  About the Author

  TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  by Lior Samson

  Gesher Press

  Rowley, Massachusetts

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, incidents, and places are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, locales, or events is purely coincidental. Any trademarks or service marks referred to are the properties of their respective owners.

  Copyright © 2007, 2010, 2020, L. L. Constantine, all world rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission.

  Gesher Press and the bridge logo are trademarks of

  Gesher Press.

  Cover and book design: Larry Constantine

  Cover photo: Tal Paz-Fridman, talpazfridman.com

  Copyright © Tal Paz-Fridman, used with permission

  For Lucy, my bashert, whose believing buoys me through my days, and for Frank Samson, z”l, my father, whose lessons in responsibility still reverberate.

  ~ ~ ~

  In memoriam

  David Arthur Hahn, 1944-1976

  You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

  – Steve Jobs

  Preface:

  Tenth Anniversary Edition

  Milestones abound. Many of them are arbitrary, based on nothing more than numbers and their origins in counting on our fingers, then further enshrined by our elliptical travels around the sun. A decade. A century. These are only significant if we make them so.

  Writers write to be read, to leave some manner of legacy, fingerprints in the minds of readers and footprints in the sands of an unseen future. Most writers likely never know what imprint, if any, they might leave, or whether their writings will even survive them. By a twist of fate, I can say with some confidence that my first novel will still be read in 2067, because a copy was chosen to be included in a time capsule buried at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary reunion of its one hundredth graduating class—my class, the class of 1967, and, by no coincidence, also the graduating class of Karl Lustig, a protagonist of the novel.

  But those are all just numbers: 10, 50, 100. The real reason for releasing a new edition of Bashert is to put in place, while I still can, a definitive record, a “director’s cut” of that first novel. The opportunity to fill out the record is irresistable, so fill I will. The book has been re-edited, reset, and reproofed in hopes of finally excorcising the last of the typographical demons and to make this edition easier and more gratifying to read, not only with some more transparent organization, but with the addition of supplemental material that further grounds the story. It is still the same story, but, I hope, told and presented better.

  I started the story in 2006, on a day spent bedridden by a bug that had been a nuisance to my children but had laid their father flat. I spent much of the day musing about an all-but-forgotten episode from my college days and wondering about what might have been the outcome had a brash bunch of student friends actually carried through on their fantasied exploits. At the end of the day, my wife teased me by asking what I had accomplished, lying in bed all day, and I told her that I had outlined a novel.

  “Oh, really? Tell me about it,” she said.

  So, I did. And then she told me what was wrong with the storyline, thus establishing the precedent for a highly successful mode of collaboration that has since seen me through thirteen novels and two collections of short stories. I write something, and then she tells me what I need to do to make it work.

  It took me a year of research and writing to complete the first full manuscript, a year during which I had been traveling extensively on business, punctuated by teaching a course at the University of Madeira, in Portugal. I had promised that I would finish the manuscript before returning at the end of the semester. On 17 May 2007, I finished the final paragraph of the last chapter and saved off the Word file just as a Lufthansa flight attendant reminded me for the third time that I must shut down and stow my laptop because we were about to land in Boston. One minute later, we were on the ground.

  The rest of that year was spent in editing and rewriting, getting further feedback from my wife and other readers, and putting together a private, limited-edition printing distributed to family and close friends for Hanukkah and Christmas presents. Then began the long slog of finding an agent and a publisher.

  I was, at the time, already an established, award-winning author. I had sold my first magazine article when I was twenty-one, had a sizable advance on my first book before I turned thirty, and had subsequently placed nearly a dozen books with major publishing houses, but, three years after finishing my first novel, I was still agentless and without a publisher. Keenly aware of the ticking clock and the flipping calendar, I reluctantly decided to take things into my own hands. My background in publishing went all the way back to the computer consulting start-up I launched before I finished college, in which my diverse duties included editing and doing cover art and book design for its publishing arm.

  When the first, privately published edition of Bashert appeared, my then school-age son read it and enthusiastically encouraged me to write more about the characters I had created. So I did. And again.

  In the three years plus that I spent looking for an agent and publisher for Bashert, I continued to write, finishing two more novels, The Dome and Web Games, which meant that the newborn Gesher Press published three titles in its first year. All three are being re-released in new Tenth Anniversary Editions. Technically, I was not (ugh) self-publishing; Gesher Press actually began as an imprint of the publishing division of a full-blown corporation—the consulting company owned by my wife.

  As Steve Jobs once said, we do not connect the dots ahead of time; the dots connect in retrospect. After a gap of four decades, I was returning to my early roots in publishing, trying my hand at modern book design, and relearning the manifold pitfalls of the manuscript-to-print process. When I first started, the state-of-the-art for small publishers was IBM’s novel Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer and photo-offset printing. By the time of my return, print-on-demand had arrived, complexified by the requirements of electronic publishing for Kindle and other eBooks.

  In writing and polishing Bashert, I had already mapped out, not always with fully conscious intent, an itinerary for a journey that would finally extend through six more novels and come to be known collectively as The Homeland Connection. In returning to the 2010 editions of the first stories in that long story arc, I have been confronted wit
h how much of what followed grew from well-prepared ground. The dots connect.

  Here, in this story, is where the dotted line began. Whether you are entering for the first time this particular world of adventure and discovery, of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and facing exceptional challenges, or whether, like me, you are retracing a road once traveled, I hope your journey proves rewarding.

  Also coming in 2020, with new material -

  The Dome: Tenth Anniversary Edition

  Web Games: Tenth Anniversary Edition

  Prologue

  1963 — The door was unmarked. Every other door along the gray-green basement corridor had a number, as did, to the best of Mitchell Rossing’s knowledge, every door to every office, lecture hall, bathroom, or storage closet anywhere on campus. He ran his hand through his sandy, crew-cut hair and stared. He had passed the door on his rounds for weeks without paying any notice, but now, intrigued, he reached for the master key on the ring hanging from his belt.

  Mitchell was not supposed to have the master key, but then Mitchell was not even supposed to be at MIT, much less working the night shift as a janitor. In the student records, he was a nineteen-year-old sophomore physics major, class of ’66, living, until recently, in Burton House, one of the on-campus dorms; in the personnel records of Buildings and Power, MIT’s maintenance and custodial services department, he was twenty-two, a resident of Somerville. To a few close friends—a very few—he was a brilliant, bored kid from Milwaukee who had faked his high school records to get into MIT at the age of sixteen. His friends fully expected him to graduate in a few years at the top of his class. Or end up in jail.

  The master key had been easy. By comparing every office key he could get his hands on, he had deduced what he needed to file away to turn one of his restricted keys into a master that would open any door he wanted.

  He glanced up and down the hallway, listening for a moment to the muffled chuffing of a vacuum pump in one of the labs. When he was sure no one was coming around the corner, he inserted and twisted the key. It didn’t budge. He jiggled it in and out a few times before the pins dropped into place and the cylinder finally turned.

  The door was unexpectedly heavy, and Mitchell had to heave his chunky body against it to get it ajar. He slipped in and partly closed it behind him before turning on his flashlight. The room was narrow and deep and appeared to be nearly full of metallic cylinders in waist-high wooden shipping frames.

  “Holy shit!” he whispered as he backed quickly out of the room and closed the heavy door after him. The resonant bang, like the closing of a vault door, echoed down the empty corridor.

  Part One: Karl

  1

  Fate … is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought—for causes which are unpenetrated. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

  2003 — The distant thrumming grew louder as the gurney bounced and rattled down the endless gray hallway. Karl’s head hurt and his back ached. What was he doing here? How had he gotten here? He struggled to sort out his surroundings. A nurse leaned over the gurney, a look of concern and annoyance on his face. Suddenly, an astringent mix of aftershave and disinfectant assaulted Karl’s nostrils, jerking him fully awake. The gurney dissolved beneath him, and the hospital corridor morphed into the gray and gold interior of an Airbus 340. With courteous impatience, a Lufthansa flight attendant stood beside him, holding out a hot towel saturated with the airline’s strangely medicinal signature scent.

  “Nein, danke, no thanks,” Karl said, waving the towel away while still struggling with his sense of disorientation. For reasons he had never fully deciphered, hospitals had become a recurrent element in his dreams whenever he traveled. They had fascinated and repelled him ever since his emergency surgery as a young man in college.

  He twisted around to check the lines at the lavatories four rows back. He was hoping there would be time to wash up and shave. He fiddled unsuccessfully with the elaborate array of buttons on the seat control but managed only to get his seat part way toward vertical before he gave up and muscled himself erect. A consummate techie, Karl prided himself in his ability to decipher any new technology, but he had a special place on his personal blacklist for Airbus engineers, who, in his opinion, never seemed to get the human factors right, an opinion he was more than ready to express to any traveling companion fortune might put in the adjacent seat.

  The line at the toilets was still three deep when the seatbelt light flashed on and the captain came on the PA to request that everyone return to their seats. Karl, one of those rare Americans who truly believed that rules and regulations were for the greater good of all, was the only one who headed back to his seat. As he squeezed past the flight attendant he nodded toward the queue at the back, smiled, and shrugged, as if to say, “What can you do?” It seemed to Karl that modern society, particularly in his own country, was drowning in entitlement, in people who thought themselves somehow exempt from the rules.

  Karl pressed button after button on the control unit in the arm of his seat until it was finally restored to its fully upright position. He sat down and settled in. He was already thinking about his Plan B, a stop at the Lufthansa lounge before leaving Frankfurt airport. The whole trip had been improvised: an unplanned response to a last-minute call from one of his oldest clients who wanted him to sit in on a product review at the request of a subcontractor in Israel. It did not impress him as cost effective and was not likely to be all that interesting, but he hated to turn down good money.

  Boston-Frankfurt was yet another routine that Karl Lustig had mastered in his enduring struggle to order the chaos of his peripatetic life. The moment he boarded the flight he would reset his watch to European time, stare at it for a few moments, then shake his head saying aloud, “Whoa, way past my bedtime.” Resetting the mental clock, he called it. Rejecting the trendy tee-totaling approach to air travel of the water-bottle toting set, he always accepted the proffered champagne before takeoff, followed it once airborne with two glasses of whatever passably good German white was being served, and then collapsed into dream-tormented sleep for the remaining five hours over the Atlantic.

  As other passengers downed the last bits of what passed for breakfast in an era of airline cutbacks and minimalist amenities, Karl flipped absent-mindedly through the duty-free catalog, then drifted in and out of sleep until the plane hit the tarmac.

  The flight, which had been delayed out of Boston for never-specified mechanical reasons, was more than an hour late, so by the time Karl reached the maze of Terminal 1, Frankfurt Airport was becoming an absolute zoo awash in every variant of the human animal. Even the Lufthansa business-class lounge was wall-to-wall with travelers between flights. Karl pushed through a knot of Russian businessmen to reach the bathrooms. On returning, he looked around for a vacant seat. Seeing none, he headed toward the racks of newspapers and searched for the comforting peach color of the Financial Times. Slipping one under his arm, he strode back past the courtesy desk and headed down the stairs again. With his laptop over his shoulder and his monogrammed Tumi trailing behind him, Karl zigzagged through the crowds, stopping briefly at the Hertz Gold counter to pick up his keys before heading for the car park.

  A light dusting of dry snow, as fine as confectioner’s sugar, eddied and swirled on the road as he pulled onto the A3 heading toward Nürnberg. The sun, now risen just above the tree line, sparkled through the airy waves of crystal washing over the Autobahn, creating tiny evanescent rainbows. Accelerating hard, Karl deftly shifted into the high-speed lane with one hand while tuning in “Antenne Bayern” with the other. The mostly American rock interspersed with light chatter in German provided just enough stimulation to help keep him alert without distracting him from the demands of driving.

  Traffic was heavy but steady at a hundred-and-forty for several minutes before some perturbation sent a double dotted red line of flashing brake lights zipping toward him. Karl smiled. He slowed and expertly shifted lanes in the quick ogive f
avored by European drivers. To him, this was sport, like a sort of 3D video game requiring three-sixty-degree situational awareness and hair-trigger reflexes. Nearly two hundred kilometers-an-hour one minute and down to eighty the next, with only a car length or two between you and the Mercedes in front. For Karl, the only child of two engineers, it was not a matter of thrills but the challenge of meshing with precision as one more cog among thousands in the fast and fluctuating German highway machine.

  Totally absorbed in his driving, Karl almost missed the exit sign for the Rasthof Weiskirchen, the rest area that had become his customary stop for coffee and pastry en route. He checked his mirror, then slowed quickly, calibrating his braking by the blue-and-white striped marker posts streaming past, counting down each 100 meters, all the while conscious of the Fiat on his tail that followed him onto the exit ramp. Once in the rest area, he drove past the pumps and the café to park his blue Audi well down the lot and away from other cars. He tucked his newspaper under his arm, and headed back to the café, striding briskly in the crisp air.

  Inside, the café was bright and noisy. A line had already formed in the self-service area, but there were still plenty of empty tables, particularly in the central non-smoking section. As Karl grabbed a tray, a middle-aged woman in business attire pushed ahead, limping slightly, to slip into line behind him, just edging out a group of loud-talking young Germans. As he slid his tray along past the glass cases filled with sandwiches, pastries, and salads, he fished out a ten-Euro note from his passport wallet and placed it beside his plate. Hearing the woman behind him mutter something in English, he turned just in time to see her fish a credit card from her purse and lay it on her tray. She smiled at him and said, almost apologetically, “I meant to stop at the Geldautomat to get some cash. I really hate to charge just a cup of coffee.”