Down: Pinhole (3 page)

“We need to dial this back to twenty TeV immediately,” she said evenly. “Matthew, please take it down.”

“Overruled,” Quint said. “I take full responsibility.”

“Dr. Quint, if you don’t allow Dr. Coppens to power-down or abort I have no choice but to tender my immediate resignation.”

“You do whatever you need to do, Dr. Loughty, but this experiment will proceed at thirty TeV,” Quint said, his voice rising.

Around the control room heads were pinging from Emily to Quint. No one seemed to be paying attention to the monitors until David Laurent noticed that his muon spectrometer was going crazy.

“Hey! The detector is going off the charts!” he yelled in his high-pitched accent. “I don’t understand this activity.”

Emily was about to sprint up the stairs to his screen when something happened.

John saw it on his monitor and blinked in confusion and disbelief. Before he could say anything he heard Trevor shouting, “Jesus! What the fuck just happened?”

Emily was gone.

And someone else was standing in her spot.

Over the next hours and days they would play the recordings of that moment over and over, thousands of times, reducing them to extreme frame-by-frame slow-motion. The HD cameras recorded at sixty frames per second. Whatever happened had taken place during the fractional interval between two frames.

On every camera feed, one frame would clearly show Emily, the very next frame just as clearly would show a man.

A large man with jet-black hair.

In real-time, John first saw him in the close-up view, looking straight into the camera with a terrified look on his coarse face. Then on another monitor with a wider angle he saw the man flying up the control room stairs, violently knocking technicians out of the way as if they were bowling pins.

“Lock it down!” John screamed to Trevor. “Lock the lab down! No one gets in and no one gets out. Stay here. I’m going down to the control room.”

“All right, but what’s going on, guv?”

“I don’t have a goddamn clue.”

And as he ran for the elevator bank he drew his sidearm for the first time in anger and fear since he left the army.

John used his security key to summon the elevator. Every second seemed like a minute and when the doors closed the descent to the control room level was far too slow for his wild state of mind.

The elevator smoothed to a halt and he leapt through the opening doors and ran down the hall where knots of scientists were milling about in bafflement; a few of them who’d been toppled were limping or favoring bruises.

“Where’s Dr. Loughty?” John yelled.

Matthew Coppens looked at him in stunned silence with a pathetically blank expression.

“How did an intruder get in?” John said.

No one had an answer.

“Which way did he go?”

Someone shouted that he had headed toward the stairwell. That’s when John noticed Dr. Quint on the floor near one of the exits, pressing a hand against a profusely bleeding scalp.

John holstered his pistol and called into his walkie-talkie, “Trevor, he’s taking the stairs!” Then he bellowed, “Shut the experiment down, Dr. Coppens! And somebody get a first aid kit.”

“No, let it run! You don’t have the authority to shut it down, Mr. Camp,” Quint yelled.

“As head of security I absolutely have the authority. We’ve had a major breach. Dr. Loughty’s missing. We don’t know what the hell’s happening here. If you want to fire me later that’s fine but Matthew, shut this mother down!”

Matthew didn’t have to be told again. He ran back to his work station and initiated a power-down of the magnets, immediately slowing the collision energy. John hastily showed someone how to pressure-bandage Quint’s scalp before drawing his weapon again and taking off for the stairs.

The emergency stairs were a long climb, the equivalent of a thirty-story building. John pumped his legs and tried to raise Trevor on the walkie-talkie but the reception failed in the stairwell.

Trevor was watching the black-haired man charging up the stairs in a succession of camera views. Every couple of minutes the man stopped to catch his breath but John was never going to catch up with him. On lower-level cameras Trevor could see John trying the walkie-talkie but static was all that came through.

Trevor changed frequencies and shouted at the lobby guards to be ready to intercept the intruder. Then he panned one of the lobby cameras to get a good view of the stairwell door.

“Take him down and detain him. Use non-lethal force!” he shouted into his handset.

All the lab’s entrances and exits had now been automatically locked. Trevor was itching to get to the lobby to back up his men but protocol demanded that someone remain at the command center.

The reception guards, two sizable fellows, braced themselves and when the man burst through the door into the lobby they commanded him to stop. One of them pointed a Taser.

The man had crazy eyes. He rushed the guards like a bull charging a red cape and shouldered one of them away as if he were a boy, sending the guard winded and hurt onto the floor. The second guard shouted and fired off his Taser. The twin darts stuck to the coarse brown fabric of the man’s jacket and delivered fifty thousand volts.

The man fell to the ground. Trevor was watching on a monitor and swallowed hard when the man all too quickly picked himself up and delivered a crushing punch to the guard’s jaw before snatching the gun from his paddle holster and taking off across the lobby.

Trevor abandoned protocol and rushed to the lobby, drawing his 9mm Browning while trying to get John on comms.

“John, can you read me?”

The walkie-talkie crackled back with a breathy voice, “Almost there. Do you have him?”

Trevor hit the lobby and saw the black-haired man desperately pulling on the locked glass doors then pounding the glass with his palms.

“Stop there,” Trevor shouted, sighting his pistol.

The man ignored him and started kicking at the door.

The first guard rose and pulled his weapon.

“Stop and drop to the floor or we will shoot you,” Trevor demanded, drawing closer.

The man turned briefly. He didn't say a word. His snarling, twisted face said enough. The man turned away again and Trevor heard him fiddling with the pistol’s safety and slide.

“Put the gun down, mate,” Trevor said, “or I will put you down.” He radioed for John, “We’ve got a situation, guv. He’s got a gun. Permission to use lethal force.”

The walkie-talkie signal was strong now. “Don’t shoot if you can avoid it! We need him alive and talking. I’m almost there.”

The black-haired man fired a single shot. The glass door shattered and he put his boot to the rest of it then jumped through.

“Stop!” Trevor shouted again but when the first guard looked like he was going to squeeze his trigger Trevor demanded he lower his weapon.

Just then John burst through the stairwell door, panting for breath. He took stock of the evolving situation. One man was down, moaning, Trevor and the other guard were in a firing stance, and the black-haired man was running toward the car park.

“He put a round through the door, guv,” Trevor said.

“We can’t let him get away,” John shouted, running across the lobby. “Can you take out his leg?”

“I’ll try.”

Trevor fired once and missed then reacquired a good sight picture and fired again. The man looked down at his right thigh, wheeled and blasted the lobby with a fast four shots, blowing out more glass and sending everyone scrambling for cover.

John found himself behind one of the reception sofas and gingerly poked his head out.

“Everyone okay?” he shouted.

No one was hit.

He rose in time to see the man accosting a woman in the visitor car park, pushing her back into the driver’s side of her Ford sedan and climbing in beside her.

“He’s got one of the reporters!” John shouted. “Call the police, Trev, I’m going to try to stop him.”

John launched himself through the shattered door, skidding on broken glass before running toward the car park. But the Ford was already speeding off, wildly clipping the bumper of a parked car as it raced toward the perimeter gate.

John yelled into his walkie-talkie, “Gate A, Gate A! We’ve got an armed man with a hostage approaching you. Get the plate number but do not attempt to block him. The police are on the way.”

He could only watch helplessly as the Ford hurtled through the open gate and turned toward the Dartford city center.

The next several hours were fitful and chaotic. The first thing John did was to make sure the press got off campus with as few questions as possible. The press had assembled at the media center and fortunately, none of them had witnessed the lobby incident. They left reluctantly, to put it mildly, but with a security clampdown in effect, they had no choice. With Quint in casualty having his scalp wound stapled, John took sole charge of the post-incident investigation. The CCTV footage was dissected and interviews were conducted with control room eyewitnesses. Despite the obvious conclusion that Emily had seemingly vanished into thin air, John insisted that every inch of the lab be searched. Her mobile phone was at her work station in the control room. When the search came up empty he personally retrieved her car keys from her office and searched her vehicle in the car park.

She was gone. Missing without a trace.

While the search for Emily was ongoing, John tasked Trevor with spearheading the investigation into the mystery man. Trevor liaised with the police who were blanketing Dartford looking for the carjacked journalist, a freelance science writer from London, and worked with a police crime scene unit to dust all surfaces the man might have touched. The lab’s head of communications crafted a press statement that the MAAC had been safely powered-down following an unauthorized intrusion by an armed man who later kidnapped a journalist. That was as far as anyone was willing to go for the moment.

In two hours’ time, Quint, his head heavily bandaged, returned to the lab and assembled the management group for a crisis meeting. John briefed him on the search for Emily and the intruder and the police investigations. Matthew Coppens, who had not been able to stop shaking since the incident, summarized the shutdown protocols.

When the time came for Quint to speak, John found him tentative and unfocused. He launched into a rambling monologue on how angry the energy secretary seemed when she reached him in hospital and how difficult it was dealing with dual scientific and political agendas. That’s when John lost it.

“Look, Dr. Quint,” he said, “I don’t give a damn about your political problems right now. Dr. Loughty is missing! You haven’t even mentioned her name. I want to know what the hell happened this morning. Emily was obviously livid when the accelerator went beyond twenty TeV. She’s the head of research and it’s damned clear that you and Dr. Coppens went behind her back to exceed the limits of Hercules I.”

“Look here, Mr. Camp,” Quint said angrily. “You’re the head of security. Stick to your knitting and leave the science to the scientists. And rather than pointing an accusatory finger elsewhere I suggest you point it at yourself. You allowed an unprecedented security incident to happen on your watch. An unauthorized stranger got access to the most sensitive area of the lab. Believe me, I’ve already made the secretary aware of your failings. If heads are going to roll, yours will be the first.”

Suddenly, Matthew Coppens lifted his bowed head and shouted, “Mr. Camp is blameless here! The blame lays elsewhere, Dr. Quint. It lies with me and it lies with you.”

Quint abruptly ordered everyone but John and Matthew out.

When the room was cleared he sat back down and said, “Dr. Coppens, I won’t stand for this kind of insubordination and I am putting you on warning. And Mr. Camp, I am seriously inclined to relieve you of duty. I have been aware of your intimate relationship with Dr. Loughty and I’m afraid it has clouded your judgment. I require objectivity from members of my staff, particularly in moments of crisis.”

Matthew started sobbing. “I never should have listened to Dr. Quint,” Matthew said. “I never should have betrayed Emily.”

There was a box of tissues on the sideboard. John got it and slid it over. “Okay. Here’s what I want to know,” John said, ignoring Quint’s rant. “Why did you go beyond twenty TeV? And give me your best assessment what happened here. Emily disappeared in under one-sixtieth of a second.”

Matthew started to say something but Quint interrupted him. “Dr. Coppens, let me advise you …”

“You can’t shut me up,” Matthew said. “If we’re going to find Emily then everything needs to come out.”

“Let him speak,” John demanded, “or that head wound of yours is going to feel like a love tap.”

Quint stiffened at the threat and kept quiet.

Matthew crumpled his moist tissue and tossed it onto the table. “This was all about the merger, wasn’t it? Everyone knows that MAAC’s delays were the reason that a decision was taken to merge us with the LHC. And everyone knows that Gestner from CERN was going to be taking over responsibility for MAAC. Dr. Quint told me that the only way he’d be able to hold onto his position was for Hercules to have immediate success with something higher profile than CERN’s Higgs discovery. According to him we needed to find the graviton now, not in two year’s time with Hercules II, but now. Which meant leapfrogging to thirty TeV.”

“Even though it wasn’t safe,” John said.

“We didn’t know it wasn’t safe,” Quint said, stony-faced. “We still don’t.”

“Okay, Matthew,” John said as if Quint wasn’t even there. “What do you think happened this morning?”

Matthew looked at him squarely. “Have you ever heard of strangelets?”

Matthew raced through a layman’s primer on particle physics. John had heard some of the terms bandied about during staff meetings but he had always tuned out when the scientific patois thickened. Now he gave it his full attention.

Matthew explained that quarks were the fundamental particles of matter. They combined to form hadrons such as protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. There were six different types of quarks, all of them identified with certainty and given quirky names during the latter half of the twentieth century: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom, each with a different spin and charge. Strange quarks were highly unstable and existed for fleeting moments before decaying into lighter up and down quarks. Strangelets were hypothetical particles consisting of equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks bound together.