The God Particle (18 page)

Gervaux and Lavelle reached the underground car park in less
than five minutes, where they found the two abandoned golf buggies and the
black BMW.

‘You go interview the security guard on the gate, I’ll
search the building,’ Gervaux ordered.

The inspector scanned the car park for any signs of life
before approaching the lift. He pressed the button and heard the muffled whir
of the winch mechanism behind the double stainless steel doors. It took several
seconds for the sound to stop and the doors to hiss open. He stepped in.
Deciding to work from the top down, he pressed the third floor button.

Seconds later, he was standing in an empty office, which
clearly hadn’t been commissioned since it was built. Electric cables protruded
out of bare walls, waiting for the new occupants to decide where they were
going to position the sockets. The floor tiles were covered in a thick layer of
dust, in which Gervaux could make out the impression of a single set of
footprints leading off to the far side of the room. He followed the trail to a
large, panoramic window and looked out. He could see his sergeant talking to
the security guard at the perimeter of the compound. They were standing outside
what looked like a sentry hut. Lavelle had his notebook out and was jotting
something in it.

The inspector turned away from the window and followed the
tread marks back to the lift. From the shape and style of the imprints,
Gervaux’s guess was that they were made by some kind of trainer or sneaker and,
by the sharpness of the ridges, they were fairly new. He would leave the
identification of the exact make, model and size to his forensics team, who he
would ring once he’d checked the rest of the building.

He took the lift down and stepped out onto the second floor,
but could tell immediately that it was empty; the footprints had ventured into
the office space for about ten feet and then doubled back. He walked over to
the window, which afforded the same view as the one on the floor above, only at
a shallower elevation. He could see Lavelle putting his notebook away as the
security guard disappeared into the hut.

After checking the first floor and coming up empty-handed,
he made his way back to the car park, where Lavelle was waiting for him.

‘How did you get on with the security guard?’ Gervaux
enquired.

‘He was a bit reluctant to start with,’ his sergeant
replied. ‘But when I told him he could be implicated in a murder case, he was
more forthcoming.’

‘And?’ the inspector prompted impatiently.

Lavelle quickly retrieved his notebook from his breast
pocket and found the appropriate pages. ‘His name is Ahmed Singh Lalli. He’s
only been working in the job for less than a month. He’s employed by a company
called Shiva and has strict instructions not to let anybody through the gate
unless they carry a company identification card. He didn’t see anybody for the
first two weeks, but he said that recently there has been a lot of activity;
people coming and going, maybe two or three times a week.’

‘What about Volker and Halligan?’ asked Gervaux. ‘Did they leave
through the gate just now?’

‘He didn’t recognise the names, but he said that nobody has
left during his shift, which started at eight this morning.’

‘Do you believe him?’

Lavelle shrugged. ‘Put it this way, after the talk I had
with him, he values his freedom more than he does his job.’

‘Then they must still be here,’ replied Gervaux. ‘I want
this place sealed off. Nobody leaves the compound unless we can verify their
identity, and only then if we get a note from their mothers. Call in
reinforcements if you have to. I want the entire complex searched from top to
bottom with a fine-tooth comb. And call the forensics team; there are some
footprints on the third floor I want analysed.’ Gervaux scanned the car park
again, expecting his quarry to suddenly materialise. ‘Where are you, Halligan?’
he muttered to himself.

‘Your arrogance is responsible for that.’

Deiter stopped in front of the television screen and pointed
to the images of the devastation caused by the latest earthquake. He had been
pacing back and forth in front of his captives like a caged animal. He flicked
a switch on the remote control and the screen went blank. He turned round to
face the three people seated in front of him, their hands and feet tied with
PlastiCuffs, nylon rope binding them to their chairs. The security guard had
taken up a position behind them, the muzzle of his automatic pistol resting in
the crook of his arm.

‘Did you really think you could control the Collider?’ he
was directing his question at Frederick.

‘We had to. We believed we could prevent the discovery of
the God particle…’

‘And stop man destroying himself,’ Deiter finished his
sentence for him. ‘Yes, yes, I’m fully aware of your
beliefs
,’ he added
sarcastically. ‘But you failed to consider the consequences of your actions.’

‘Which were?’ Volker asked defiantly.

‘This,’ Deiter gestured to the newsreel. ‘You were right
about the butterfly effect. The electro-magnetic waves generated by the
Collider
do
have an effect on the Earth’s geomagnetic field, causing it
to become unstable. But what you failed to realise is that it’s
self-sustaining. By disturbing the polar equilibrium, you have set in motion a
chain reaction, the balance of which cannot be restored until it has completed
its inexorable march towards the final solution.’

‘Meaning?’ this from Serena.

‘Total polar reversal,’ interjected Tom. ‘What we are
witnessing is a phenomenon that has taken place several times over the
millennia. North becomes south and vice versa. The last one took place about
eight hundred thousand years ago, but as none of us were around to see it reports
on how it affected the human population are a bit sketchy. The difference
between this one and all the previous ones is that this is man-made.’

‘I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?’ Volker shook
his head, trying to rationalise Deiter’s motives.

‘I didn’t –
you
did!’ Deiter raised his voice,
pointing an accusatory finger at Volker.

‘But YOU could have stopped it,’ Volker spat back.

Deiter nodded sagely, as if contemplating the suggestion for
the first time. ‘Yes, I
could
have stopped it. I
could
have
allowed Morantz to go to the media with his findings. But, then again, so could
have you. Moranz told me before he died that he’d spoken to you and told you
that he thought the Collider was responsible for the earthquakes.’ Deiter
shrugged. ‘You did nothing about it.’

‘I didn’t believe it was true at the time.’ Volker’s
response was almost inaudible, sadness clouding his eyes.

‘Didn’t believe, or didn’t
want
to believe?’

Volker was silent.

‘So, why didn’t you put a stop to it? It would have been the
right thing to do,’ Serena asked indignantly.

Deiter resumed his frantic pacing. He seemed to be
struggling with his internal demons. ‘It would have been the right thing to
do,’ he repeated over and over, mimicking Serena’s words.

His actions were becoming more animated now, his ruddy
complexion deepening to an unhealthy crimson. Serena thought he was going to
have a heart attack. He stopped abruptly in front of her, turned on his heels
and lurched towards her, his face stopping inches away from hers. She recoiled
instinctively, but her bindings held her so she couldn’t turn from the manic
eyes that were now boring into hers.

‘Let me tell you what happens when you
do the right
thing.’
His last words were delivered with a mocking sneer.

Serena could see spittle accumulating at the corners of his
mouth and she could smell his putrid breath. She tried to look away from the
insanity evident behind his dilated pupils, but she was transfixed, like a
rabbit caught in the headlights.

After what felt like an eternity, he released her from the
spell, turning his attention to Volker. ‘Professor, I believe you knew my
father?’

Frederick stared back at him blankly.

‘Let me re-phase that,’ continued Deiter. ‘I believe you
knew
of
my father?’

The vacant expression remained on Frederick’s face.

Deiter took a few steps back, positioning himself centrally
to his captive audience and prepared himself as if he was an actor delivering a
soliloquy. He took several deep breaths and trained his eyes just above his
spectators’ heads.

‘My father was one of the greatest scientists that ever
lived,’ he bellowed as if to a packed auditorium. Sensing he had grabbed
everybody’s attention, he continued. ‘My father
did the right thing
and
was castigated by his peers, the American Government and the very people whose
lives he saved. It’s time the world knew the truth of what
really
happened during the war.’

For the next hour, Deiter delivered a monologue on the life
of his father, starting with how he had grown up in abject poverty on his
parents’ farm in a small village in Bavaria. What little money they had spare
was spent on doctors’ fees in an attempt to cure his affliction, which
manifested itself as a severe facial tic.

As a child he was expected to help out with the daily chores
once he finished school, working long into the night when the crops needed
harvesting. Exhausted, he would climb into his bed, which he shared with his
four younger brothers and sisters, and read by candlelight until he fell
asleep.

His appetite for literature was insatiable. At the age of 10
he had read an entire library of books, mainly donated to him by his teachers,
who recognised the latent genius in him. He passed the necessary exams to be
selected for higher education with flying colours. Unfortunately, the nearest
high school – or Gymnasium, as they were then called – was in Bremen, which
meant a four-hour round trip on the local bus. It suited his education as he
was able to read uninterrupted for the entire journey, shunned by his fellow
pupils because of his facial twitches. As a consequence of his imposed absence,
the farm suffered and, eventually, his father had to sell the land that had been
in the family for generations, moving closer to the city in rented
accommodation so their son could be nearer to his school and have access to the
necessary doctors for his treatment.

For the next nine years, he studied
classical
literature. The Gymnasiums placed a heavy emphasis on Greek and Latin. This
classical education aimed to produce not only educated scholars but also useful
contributors to German culture, combining rationality with high cultural
scholarship.

At the conclusion of his Gymnasium studies,
he received his ‘leaving certificate’, or Abiturzeugnis, which entitled him to
admission to university for his professional training. He chose Berlin
University because of its scientific credentials, where he was tutored by the
great
theoretical physicists
of the time, Planck and
Born.

Having published a paper in a professional
journal, which he was required to do to gain his doctorate, his next step to
realising his goal of becoming a teaching professor was to attain a further
degree called the Habilitation. This initially involved obtaining a temporary
assistantship in an institute of his chosen field.

The paper he published for his doctorate, entitled ‘Do atoms
have sex?’ which was initially published in a locally distributed science
journal, was picked up by
Popular
Science
Monthly
and
reprinted in its entirety.

With a circulation of over one hundred
thousand copies, it was read and discussed by every eminent scientist on the
planet, including the Director of the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for Physics in
Schöneberg,
who sent him a telegram stating:

‘I was intrigued by your article in
Popular Science Monthly – stop – It would be an honour to discuss your theories
further – stop – please contact me at your earliest convenience – stop – Albert
Einstein – stop’

The excitement of receiving his first telegram was surpassed
only by the fact that the celebrated Director of one of the most respected
institutes in Germany wanted to discuss his thesis with him.

Within a day of their meeting, he had received an offer for
an internship, which required him to teach a minimum of one seminar, with the
rest of his time devoted to research. After six years, it would lead him to a
major publication that he could submit for his Habilitation.

More importantly for him, however, was that he would be
getting paid – admittedly not a huge amount, but enough to be able to live on
and send some money home to help his parents, who had been so supportive.

Regrettably, he didn’t get a chance to tell his mother the
good news. Not wanting to worry him whilst he was taking his exams, his father
hadn’t informed him that she had fallen ill and, despite the doctor’s best
efforts, she died two weeks later from typhoid. The effect on him was
devastating. His tic, which he had managed to keep more or less under control,
returned with a vengeance.

On turning up at the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for his first
day, nobody recognised the disheveled, embarrassingly shy individual as the
confident and enthusiastic person he’d been only days before.

For the next six years he literally kept his head down and
concentrated on his chosen field of research –
‘Nuclear fusion as a source
of stellar radiation’ -
surfacing only occasionally to deliver the lectures
that were stipulated in his contract. Over that period, he made very few
friends, self-conscious that he was unable to control the blinks and twitches
that made him stand out as a freak. Since his mother’s death, he and his father
had grown apart. He secretly despised him for not speaking out when his mother
was ill. He had reconciled the fact that he probably wouldn’t have been able to
save her, but the choice of being there or not, when she needed him the most,
had been taken away from him. He understood that his father had done it for
what he thought were the right reasons at the time, which only added to the
guilt he felt for his absence.

His life changed drastically the day he published his
Habitation thesis. If his doctorate thesis had made the science community’s
tongues wag, this one had them thrashing back and forth. It didn’t harm his
credibility, either, that his tutor was none other than the Nobel Prize-winning
physics laureate responsible for defining the laws of relativity. Using his
mentor’s rather simplistic equation E=mc
²
, he was able to
demonstrate that the Sun’s energy is derived from a thermonuclear reaction of
hydrogen fusion into helium.

His article was published across the globe, not just in the
scientific press but also in the popular newspapers, although somewhat ‘dumbed
down’ for its readers. He was an overnight sensation, despite having taken six
years to get there. Job offers came flooding in. From an early age, all he ever
wanted to do was teach. The kindness of his tutors at school had had a deep
impact on his psyche. But now, opportunities were opening up in areas he had
never considered before, both at home and abroad.

The year was 1933 and a charismatic orator by the name of
Adolf Hitler had just been appointed as chancellor to the ruling National
Socialist German Workers Party. He was gaining popular support by attacking the
Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism.
Einstein could see the writing on the wall; born to Jewish parents, his time as
a respected theoretical physicist was ebbing away. He chose to emigrate to
America but, before he left, he begged his young protégé to go with him. He had
secured a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New
Jersey. As tempting as it was, the newly-qualified professor wasn’t yet ready
to give up on his beloved country; instead, he accepted a position at the
German nuclear energy project in
Leipzig
, where he worked his way up to become
Herr Direktor.

During the war, he was transferred to a top secret facility
in Norway, where he developed his theoretical postulations of nuclear fission
into a practical application. It was a device so lethal that it was capable of
turning the tide in favour of Germany, overnight.

But he was a man of conscience. He had seen the atrocities
that his compatriots were capable of. Some of his closest friends had been
incarcerated for no other reason than their parents followed a certain
doctrine. Many of his learned colleagues had been forced into exile rather than
renounce their religious beliefs. He had been on his way home from work when
he’d witnessed the rampaging mobs smashing the shop windows of anyone suspected
of being Jewish, dragging the owners out into the street and beating them to a
bloodied pulp, whilst the authorities looked on without intervening. It
sickened him to his core; he could no longer say that he was proud to be a
German.

His conscience would not allow him to contemplate the
heinous acts that could be carried out if he gave the principles of how to make
an atomic bomb to the Nazis. But it wasn’t just a matter of telling his masters
that he didn’t know how to make one; they would just coerce another scientist,
and another, and another until finally they achieved their objective. No, he
had to convince them that it
could
be done, but would take far more
resources than was currently available and let them decide that it wouldn’t be
worth it. It was a gamble. They could still decide to pursue the project to its
ultimate conclusion but, with rumours that the German forces were being
stretched to capacity, especially on the Eastern Front, he didn’t think they
would.