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  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 app
lause 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.

  “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.

  2

  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 a
nd 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.