Cam suddenly found himself out of the loop. “Hold on, what are you guys talking about? What castaways?”
“Four men were picked up from a deserted island in ’62,” answered Rand. “They had a piece of technology, apparently this piece of technology.”
“And how the hell would you know that?” Cam pressed.
“Because it was in a CIA field report attached to the Maersk Burgundy robbery file—your file.”
“What’s that have to do with me? And who exactly were these castaways?”
“Their identities were classified,” Marco announced. “I know that one died shortly after their arrival. The other three were moved to a base in New Mexico. One fled a few years later, another was killed during an undisclosed accident. All but one was gone by the time I arrived, but our work on the project continued long after. We spent years trying to break the code.”
“What code?” Cam was now being pulled deeper in.
“The time-space continuum, of course. We just needed to crack the code and all the secrets of the universe would be revealed. It was a very exciting time.”
“Cam,” Rand uttered, still seated at the bar, now examining the photographs with a magnifying glass he’d found nearby. He was mesmerized by one particular image, blinking in disbelief. “Cam!” he repeated.
“What is it, Rand?”
“This photo. You need to see this photo.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Rand held the photograph to the light above him and squinted through the magnifying glass. It showed seven, middle-aged, white men standing in an open desert with the sun brutally beating down on them: three in the foreground, four scattered in the distance.
“What is it?” Cam asked, snatching the photo from the air.
“Look,” Rand said, pointing. “There’s Marco in front with a few other men. And then there’s this guy here in the back.”
The details of the men were barely visible in the old grainy photograph. As Cam grabbed the lens and scanned through the image, an intense tingling sensation shot up his spine, the hairs on his arms stood up straight. One of the faces in the background was eerily familiar. It was him.
Rand took a step back and reached for his gun. “What the fuck is going on here?” he asked. He raised his weapon to Cam. “Why are you in that picture?”
“That’s not me, Rand. Now put the gun down before somebody gets hurt.”
“Actually,” Marco corrected. “It is you, Mr. Lyle. But lower your weapon regardless, Mr. Kershaw. Our friend is unaware that it’s him in the photo.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Rand shouted, still aiming the gun at Cam’s body mass.
“He’s lying,” Cam urged, as he rose to his feet, his hands slightly raised in surrender.
“Mr. Kershaw,” Marco pleaded. “Cameron is telling the truth. He doesn’t believe that it’s him in the photograph…because the photograph hasn’t been taken yet.”
A wave of confusion washed over Rand. He appeared dangerous and unhinged, yet the pistol remained firmly pointed at Cam.
“What is that thing?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
Marco remained calm. “It is known as the Medina Device.”
“So, you are one of the Knights of Medina!” Rand accused, as he switched his aim from Cam to Marco.
“Correct. And until last week, we were many in number. Only myself and one other remain. Our ranks were destroyed by a rather new enemy, but, nonetheless, an enemy worthy enough to bring us to our knees.”
“What happened?” Rand asked, now training his weapon back on Cam.
“Carson attempted to wipe us out once and for all,” Marco replied.
“Who’s Carson?”
“The same rogue CIA officer who’s trying to kill you. I only survived because of my position. I am, in fact, the Seneschal of the Knights of Medina, and I serve alongside our Grand Master. My identity, along with the identities of the 486 seneschals that came before me, have never been recorded or documented. And, for the last twelve hundred years we’ve sacrificed everything for the sole purpose of protecting man’s greatest discoveries from himself. Ancient technology that some civilizations use as a means of advancement, but others use as a form of destruction. Our oath is to protect this knowledge from civilizations that are unprepared and undeserving.”
Rand finally lowered his gun. Everything had suddenly changed. The walls of reality were starting to crack—the questions mounted.
“I can’t allow you to simply hand this over to them,” Marco warned. “I hope you can understand that, Cameron.” It had been some time since he’d spoken the name. It almost felt foreign to him now.
“They’re going to kill Michael,” Cam argued.
“You’re underestimating the power you wield,” Marco corrected. “The Medina Device, at its fundamental core, is the key to the universe. It’s the key to our reality.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rand chided.
“By the fall of 1966,” Marco began, “we had been experiencing tremendous breakthroughs in what is today known as the God Particle. This was forty years before CERN and the work that’s being done there, which isn’t exactly groundbreaking. No, the ground had already been broken long before.”
“Then why wasn’t it revealed to the scientific community?” asked Cam.
“It was far too dangerous. The power of particle physics is too complex for our modern-day character flaws and social behaviors. Besides, back then resources were hard to come by in private research, the big stuff was all run by the government. That’s all changed now, but our research in the late sixties was unlike anything we had ever dreamed of. And it was all sparked by the discovery of the Medina Device.”
Cameron and Rand listened carefully as the physicist continued in detail.
“It all starts with cosmic string, you see. It’s a very distinct process of expansion in the universe. There is a hidden order in the chaos that surrounds us, an order that applies constant adaptation to itself. Our research led us to understand that nothing in the universe was random. In fact, the violent chaos of the universe proved to be a finely tuned organism. Every event since the Big Bang was executed with surgical precision. And it was all understood through the mathematics of expansion and growth.”
“What, like pre-determined reality? Destiny?” Cam guessed.
“Not really,” Marco chuckled. “They eventually named it the God Particle out of irony. You have to understand, we had proven that science is god.” He took a casual sip from his wine glass. “Life itself is built from ultra-microscopic, vibrating strains, the result of which is everything you see around you. But there is so much more in front of us that we cannot see with our eyes. You can’t see other dimensions because the laws of physics only work within our four-dimensional universe.”
“You’re losing me, Doc,” quipped Rand.
“A lot of people initially believed there were multiple universes overlapping each other. It was the only way to make the math work. Laziness, if you ask me. But it turned out that it was dimensions of time and space that were overlapping, not universes themselves. It’s something we can explain with mathematics but not with physics. When we began to look at the universe through the right lens, we could see what was truly happening. But we had been using the wrong lens prior to that. Make sense?”
“Sure,” Rand replied. “You said ‘cosmic string,’ so what, this is like String Theory or something?”
“It is. But the biggest discovery came after we realized that the overlapping dimensions were not interacting through the laws of physics. We could calculate and measure the existence of the dimensions,
but it essentially destroyed all the laws of the universe that we thought were true. Then something strange happened, we noticed that there were certain particles that had the ability to move from dimension to dimension,” Marco explained. “Think of the Big Bang as a crime scene. If we could go back to it and take a snapshot of the crime being committed, we would inevitably identify the criminal. Or, in this case, the creator.”
“The God Particle,” Cam repeated.
“Yes, the God Particle,” Marco confirmed. “We were able to recreate the Big Bang, or at least we tried. Which is exactly what the CERN team is currently doing with the Large Hadron Collider today. By the summer of 1972, we made a giant leap. Up to that point, we could only recreate the Big Bang up to a fraction of a second after, not the exact moment, of creation. And then…we did. And we found the maker’s mark.”
The words hung in the air like a surreal fog.
“That would be the single greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind,” Rand quietly noted.
“You’d be surprised,” Marco cautioned.
“So, if the Medina Device is the key to the universe, how do you use it?” Cam wondered.
“I’m glad you asked. When the device was initially brought to us, it was like we had gotten the key to the house. The only problem was, we couldn’t find the right house. Without understanding the universe, the device was useless. But when we saw the Big Bang in its very moment of creation, we found the architect of the cosmic string—the creator of the code. The only problem was the Law of Physics couldn’t explain what we had seen. That’s why we turned to mathematics. It was like trying to read Chinese with an English legend. After that, the flood gates opened, we could barely keep up with our own discoveries! We were learning more about the universe in ten-hour shifts than scientists had learned over hundreds of years.”
“So, all you did was apply math to the Big Bang? And now what? You can bounce through space?” Rand asked.
The doctor was amused. “I guess you could say that. Before long we disproved Singularity and the No Boundary Theories. You see, the rate of expansion was different, time and space were separated. We had to completely rewrite every Law of Nature that existed prior to that. It opened doors we never thought possible. There was nothing we couldn’t manipulate.”
“I still don’t understand,” Cam stated. “What does this device have to do with the Big Bang?”
“The Big Bang turned out to be no more than the opening of a black hole. And, at the exact moment of creation, we got a glimpse into that hole. It revealed our creator.”
“What did you see?” Rand anxiously questioned.
“It was another universe,” Marco answered. “A living, intelligent, transcendent universe that purposely took chaotic nothingness and sparked it into a very mathematical, organized universe of fundamental constants.”
“Holy shit,” Cam mumbled. His eyes wandered the bar before coming to a stop at the Medina Device. “And it’s all controlled by this?”
“Sort of,” Marco confirmed. “There is still work to be done. But that won’t happen for a very long time. The laws created by the universe are constantly evolving and being remeasured due to the rate of expansion. But from time to time, a civilization comes along that has the ability to pick up where a far previous one had left off.”
“You still haven’t told us what this is, and why it’s so important,” Rand pointed out.
Marco’s eyes dove into the device, locking on for several seconds. “This device is the most powerful magnet ever created by man. It is indeed a mechanism that can transport particles to various points in the universe.”
“And time?” Cam asked.
“This isn’t a science fiction movie, Mr. Lyle. It doesn’t exactly work the way you’re imagining it. But, yes,” confessed Marco. “In theory, you can transport through time. The past is merely a different point in what makes up space. You just have to find it.”
Cam soaked it all in, trying desperately to wrap his head around everything. Marco had been part of a team that discovered the true nature of our universe. Clearly, in the wrong hands it could mean the catastrophic end to humanity as he knew it. But there was still the problem of Michael. And that wasn’t about to magically go away.
“I’m saving my brother tonight, Marco,” he said with a deflated sigh. “With or without your help.”
“Cameron, let me make something perfectly clear,” the physicist retorted. “In your reasoning, there is no outcome where you or Michael survive. Even if Carson hands over your brother tonight in exchange for the device, you’ll both be dead by morning. They will not allow you to walk away from this. You’ve seen the device, you know what it is, and Michael has deciphered the tablet. You’ve both seen too much for them to let you live. And on the other hand, if you attempt a daring rescue of your brother, it will mean certain death for all of us.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Cam countered. “Like you said before, there is no good outcome.”
“Or maybe there is,” Rand wondered aloud. “If that device is everything Marco says it is, then why don’t we just zap Michael back to this room right now? Or go back and make sure none of this ever happens. I mean, unless you’re full of shit, Dr. Damion, we can manipulate reality to our liking, can we not?”
“I wish it worked that way, Mr. Kershaw. Sadly, it does not.”
“Then why don’t you tell us exactly how it does work,” Cam countered. “Because I think you have no idea what this thing is and you’re playing games with us. We’re taking the device and the photos and exchanging them for Michael. End of story.”
“He’s right,” Rand agreed. “We’re taking the device.”
“The universe is a perfectly oiled machine, a beautiful organism that makes order from chaos,” the aging physicist mumbled.
“You’re talking in circles,” Rand scoffed.
Marco smiled through his soft beard. “No, I’m talking in physics. What if I told you there was another option? Perhaps, your only option.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Midnight was quickly approaching. The sky above Paris hung dark with the onset of clouds and a cold breeze. The streetlights of the Pont de l’Archevêché bridge produced a hazy, dotted glow through the darkness. Cam could hear the waters of the Seine River as they approached.
The three men arrived at the head of the bridge and gazed a few hundred feet to the other side. It was completely quiet, the tourists had long since left and the surrounding city blocks had drifted to sleep. Cam took the point position as they paced their way across the bridge, Rand covered the rear with his hand hidden on the trigger of a .40 caliber tucked into his jacket.
Once across the bridge, they stood at the southeast corner of Square Jean-XXIII, with the Notre-Dame Cathedral looming over them from across the lawn. The exterior lights of the cathedral illuminated the walls of its prolific architecture. To their right were the small iron gates that led to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation.
As they cautiously took their first steps toward the narrow entrance, the bells of a distant clock tower struck midnight. Its echoing ring felt ominous, daring them to continue on. With a last look around the park, Cam entered through the waist-high gates and now stood on the monument grounds.
The memorial pays tribute to the 200,000 people who were taken from Vichy and deported to Nazi-Germany during World War II. Most of those memorialized here died in concentration camps, never seen by their loved ones again. Cam could feel their tortured souls hovering in the night and silently asked for their protection.
The monument itself was surrounded by a low cement wall with inscriptions honoring the dead. Beyond the encasement, a set of staircases led down to a smal
l rotunda. Cam and Rand drew their guns as Marco strolled to the staircase between them and stood anxiously at the top. A hush fell over the small island, which split the surrounding Seine in two. Cam stepped past Marco to the edge of the stairs and peered down at the shadowy rotunda below. It was empty.
With a silent nod, Cam shuffled his way down the steps. Once at the bottom, he was surrounded by a hexagonal wall. Glancing around, Cam noticed a dark opening in the wall to his left. It was the entrance to one of several crypts, which wove even further below the monument.
Rand quickly made his way down the steps behind Cam, followed by Marco. Just then, a figure appeared from the crypt. Cam raised his 9mm and gently rested his finger on the trigger.
To his surprise, the street lamps lining the bridge above them began to dim, then went out completely. As did all ancillary lighting that had been beaming from Notre-Dame Cathedral. The entire area around them went pitch black. The figure that Cam had seen near the crypt was now camouflaged in complete darkness. The soldier could barely see his own hand in front of his face.
A faint wind whispered through the memorial as a candle flickered to life from a far corner of the open-air rotunda. The candlelight steadied, and for a fleeting second the glow again revealed the strange figure standing in the crypt entrance.
Then—the candle went out. Complete darkness again.
“We meet at last,” the voice said, remarkably closer now.
With his gun still raised, Cam shivered with agitation. His eyes tried to adjust to the blackness, he could now make out a man standing only feet in front of him. He steadied his weapon and took a small step backward.
“Lower your gun, Mr. Lyle,” the voice requested. “No one needs to die here tonight.”
“Where’s Michael?” Cam demanded.
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