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She peeled off her buttery leather jacket. She was long and shapely and expensively dressed. The modeling business appeared to be treating her well.

“I’m seeing someone, if that’s what you’re asking. Drink?”

“Remember the way I like my martinis? Can you make one?”

“I do and I can.”

He got some ice from the freezer and filled the shaker while she draped herself on the sofa.

“Surely you’re not watching cricket.”

He turned the TV off and mumbled, “Any port in a storm.”

“You don’t seem happy to see me.”

“Actually I’m not best pleased.”

He poured the martini into a tumbler and apologized for not having olives or proper glasses.

She took a long sip and asked, “It’s all a bit hazy. Did I break up with you or did you break up with me?”

He cracked another can of beer. “You were cheating on me and I was cheating on you. But I recall that I took more umbrage.”

“I always hated it when you used words I didn’t understand.”

“I was more pissed off.”

“Men are so delicate,” she sniffed. “What’s she like?”

“Who?”

“Your new girlfriend.”

“None of your business.”

“Okay. Why’d you leave the diplomatic corps?”

“On reflection I decided I really didn’t want to take a bullet for the ambassador. He’s a dick.”

“Can’t you give a real answer to a real question?”

“I hit twenty years and took my pension. A private job opened up here. Besides I’ve developed a taste for English beer.”

“And your girlfriend? Is she English too?”

“Like I said, none of your business.”

“Can I smoke?”

“Outside is that way.”

She downed the martini fast and asked for another. There was one more in the shaker.

“You don’t mind if I stay, do you? It’s a long way back to London.”

He shrugged. “The sheets in the guest bedroom are clean. I leave for work early.”

“Is there a shower I can use?”

He pointed. “Through there.”

She smiled and took the martini with her.

He listened to the sound of running water and found himself remembering the way she looked naked. She was thin but unlike many of her runway brethren she was ample and curvy where it counted. In the old days he used to climb into the shower behind her for a bit of wet fun. Then he remembered what a bitch she was and he shut off his mind-porn like a spigot.

When she reappeared he swore out loud because she had chosen to emerge in a black bra and thong, her wet hair in a towel turban, looking like some sort of darkly exotic goddess.

“Christ, Darlene, I’m just not interested in re-engaging with you.”

She came closer. “Is that what it’s called? Re-engagement?”

He stood his ground. “Look. You don’t like me and I don’t like you. That’s the way we left it. Remember?”

“We’re two consenting adults. I’ll be gone tomorrow. What’s the big deal? Did I mention I missed you?”

“You don’t miss me. You’re a little drunk and a lot horny.”

She closed the gap between them and ran her hands down his back and under the elastic of his sweat pants.

“What happens in Dartford stays in Dartford, right, John?”

He closed his eyes and smelled the fresh perfume she’d applied between her cleavage. It would be so easy to let his hands do some roaming.

But his feverish thoughts crashed to a halt at the sound of a key in the lock.

He managed to separate himself from Darlene but she was only a foot away when Emily came in, her smile melting as fast as butter in a hot pan.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” he croaked.

“You can’t be serious,” Emily said.

Darlene made no attempt at modesty. “Hi. I’m Darlene. I’m an old friend of John’s.”

“She arrived unexpectedly from New York,” John said weakly. “Emily, I had no intention …”

Emily wasn’t going to let him finish. She delivered a furiously cold stare and without uttering another word, turned her back and slammed the door behind her.

Darlene crossed her arms and said with a sly smile, “She seemed nice.”

John started for the door but decided it was pointless. She’d never believe him. She knew all about his reputation and regularly chided him about it in jest. There wouldn’t be any levity tonight and no forgiveness. To be truthful, he didn’t even believe himself. For all he knew he might not have been able to tear himself away from Darlene’s fragrant curves. He slumped onto a chair, his face in his hands.

Darlene pulled a throw off the sofa and covered herself as if suddenly ashamed of her skimpiness.

“Jesus, John, I thought I’d never see the day.”

“What day is that?”

“The day you were actually in love with someone.”

The Americans at MAAC called it game day, the Brits, match day. Hercules was a go and at five a.m. the car park was filling up with personnel for the ten a.m. initiation.

John had arrived an hour before everyone else, parking in his designated director of security spot. From his above-ground office he kept an eye on the arrivals and when he spotted Emily getting out of her car he made sure he was walking across the lobby when she entered.

“Hey,” was the best he could do.

“I don’t want to speak with you.”

She had avoided him the previous day and refused to pick up his calls or respond to texts. At the Hercules staff meeting where the go decision was made she had been sitting across the table from John for over an hour assiduously avoiding eye contact.

He kept his voice low. Two of his men were on the reception desk.

“I’ve been miserable.”

“Good to hear. I’ve got to go, John. My mind’s far from you today.”

“Can we talk later?”

She brushed past.

“I’m sorry,” he called after her softly, and she was gone. He knew how much today meant to her so he added “good luck,” under his breath.

Back in his office John’s deputy head of security, Trevor Jones, came in for their scheduled pow-wow on handling the media scrum. Trevor was second-generation Jamaican with no trace of his parent’s island accents. He was a pure East-Ender with the kind of swagger you get from growing up as a street-savvy London kid. At twenty he had joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable and within three years he’d been promoted to sergeant and was well on his way to a fast-track career. Then 7/7 hit. He had been personally responsible for securing the bus-bombing scene. Then and there he decided he wanted to do something about it. He enlisted in the army and rose through the ranks to become a heavily decorated colour sergeant in the Royal Dragoon Guards. When John had looked to hire a deputy at the lab, Trevor’s application had glowed in the dark. The security function at MAAC was as tame as things got in the private sector but John trusted a man with his kind of experience. Trevor had tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan in hot spots where John had served his own tours as a major in the Green Berets. As far as John was concerned if you had the character to successfully command men in combat you could reliably be expected to manage security details at a civilian high-energy physics lab.

Trevor was ebullient. “Everyone all set to kick some proton backside all ’round London today?”

“The countdown’s still active,” John said dully.

Trevor inspected him as if he were some sort of specimen. “You look like shit if I may say so,” he clucked, sitting down. “All right?”

“Couldn’t be better,” John said unconvincingly. “Let’s review our protocols one last time, all right?”

Trevor flashed his trademark sunny grin. “That’s precisely why I’m here, guv.”

At T-minus-fifteen minutes, Emily was at her mission station in the cavernous underground control room with a wall of LED screens arrayed before her. Matthew Coppens and the rest of her deputies and staff members were at their work stations deployed in a theatrical layout of concentrically elevated semi-circles. Henry Quint had no direct responsibilities during the start-up procedure except for authorizing the final countdown and he stood at the top tier fingering his tie and obsessively clicking his ballpoint pen.

“What’s our temperature?” Emily called out, the tension in her voice barely disguised.

“We’re stable at 1.7 K,” her coolant specialist replied.

“All right. Let's power-up the synchrotron.”

MAAC was now officially the coldest place on Earth, colder than outer space.

Approximately forty thousand tons of liquid nitrogen had cooled five hundred tons of helium down to 4.5 K, or

-268.7ºC. The super-cooled helium had then been pumped into MAAC’s twenty-five thousand magnets where the refrigeration units took the magnets down to the operational temperature of 1.7 K, just above absolute zero.

Each magnet was fifteen meters long and weighed thirty-five tons. The magnetic coils were made of coiled niobium-titanium filaments seven times thinner than human hairs. If unraveled the fibers would stretch to the sun and back twenty-five times. At 1.7 K they became superconducting, conducting electricity without resistance, and creating the powerful magnetic fields needed to bend the proton beams around the massive oval.

Lead ion gas would be injected into boosters and channeled into the synchrotron where they would be accelerated and transferred into the MAAC where two beams of proton particles, one clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, would be further accelerated within minuscule cavities to their collision speed of 20 TeV, making the one hundred eighty kilometer circuit around London at near light speed, or eleven thousand times per second.

As the beams approached the collision point within the muon spectrometer detector, a seven-story tall behemoth located only three meters below the well of the Dartford control room, they would be squeezed to about sixteen millimeters, a third of the width of a human hair, to increase the chance of proton-proton collisions. And when the beams collided they would produce a collision energy of two thousand TeV, the highest ever achieved in an accelerator, each lead-ion collision generating temperatures five hundred thousand times hotter than the center of the sun.

John was surveying the control room and various points around the lab’s perimeter from a bank of CCTV monitors in his office. He watched the media gathering in the visitor’s center and a scrum of satellite trucks in the car park. But mostly he watched Emily and he had turned up the volume to capture the control room chatter.

At T-minus-five minutes Emily called out, “All right, let me know when the synchrotron is at full power.”

“Full power, two hundred GeV acceleration,” a technician soon replied.

“Okay then,” she said. “We’re on the final four-minute count till MAAC injection.”

She shifted to French to ask David Laurent, her spectroscopy chief, whether the muon detector was online. It was a running joke between them. Her German was excellent as she had done a post-doc in Ulm, but her French was more rudimentary. Laurent smiled at her and said his systems were operational.

At T-minus-one minute Emily initiated the injection and filling of the particle guns with the lead gas, and at thirty seconds she formally asked Henry Quint for the final authorization to launch the beams.

At ten seconds Quint simply said, “Proceed.”

Emily gave Matthew Coppens a quick nod.

John watched her lips on the monitor as she intoned the final countdown and wondered if he’d ever kiss her again.

“…four-three-two-one. Initiate firing.”

On the elliptical map of MAAC displayed on the largest of the control-room screens, two dots, one red, one green appeared at the synchrotron’s location just west of Dartford. Each dot began to travel in opposite directions around London. Although the paths of the proton beams were graphically portrayed with a periodicity of one orbit per second, every sweep represented ever-increasing thousands of orbits.

There were cheers around the control room but Emily quieted everyone by calling out the rising collision energies.

This time in English she asked Laurent, “David, how does the detector look?”

“We’ve got the first collision tracings appearing.”

“One down, hundreds of trillions to come,” she replied.

John had kept the camera zoomed in on her. He thought she looked sublimely happy.

She kept relaying the energy read-outs. “Fifteen TeV, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty TeV. We’re at full power!”

There was a smattering of applause in the room.

Suddenly Emily gasped. Her monitor was showing a rising energy level.

“Matthew!” she said. “What’s going on? We’re at twenty-two TeV and climbing?”

Matthew looked at her and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean you’re sorry? Who authorized this?”

From the top of the theater, Henry Quint said, “I did, Dr. Loughty.”

“Why wasn’t I informed?” she demanded.

“Let’s discuss this later, in private, shall we?” Quint said.

“That’s not acceptable. Tell me now. Why wasn’t I informed?”

“Because you wouldn’t have agreed. This was my decision and my decision alone,” Quint said. “It’s necessary for the operational survival of MAAC. Now please carry on to thirty TeV.”

Emily looked at Matthew furiously. “You went behind my back?”

“He forced me, Emily,” he said mournfully. “He told me I’d be dismissed if I told you.”

Up in his office John’s blood boiled. He could see the hurt and betrayal on Emily’s face. Henry Quint was John’s boss too and he shared Emily’s dim opinion of him. Now he wanted to sink a fist into that face.

Hovering over him, Trevor Jones asked, “Is this safe, guv?”

John mumbled, “It doesn’t look like Emily thinks so.”

Emily watched mutely as the collision energy crept upwards. The primary goal of Hercules I was to gauge the safety of 20 TeV before upping the threshold. She knew exactly what Quint was doing. In one fell swoop he had thrown safety out the window for the sake of politics.

She whispered, “Twenty-six TeV, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”

When the system read-out 30 TeV she walked down into the large crescent-shaped well and turned her back on the LED screens to address Quint and her hushed team of scientists. John tracked her on one of the cameras, alarmed by the fear on her face.