by Fritz Galt
“Shoot.”
“I want you to tell me who belongs to SATO.”
Trevor broke into a laugh. “So you know about SATO.”
“Not enough. I need to know exactly who’s in it. Otherwise we don’t have a deal.”
“Fine, listen. It will all become clear at the Jardin tomorrow morning.”
“You’ll give me the names of the members of SATO?”
“At the Jardin.”
Mick turned off the phone.
Doug Mayfield was gaping at him. “I wouldn’t normally let you give that substrate away to terrorists.”
“As you said, it’s a worthless piece of junk.”
Junk that could return his wife and brother, expose SATO and save the president’s life. He couldn’t do much better than that.
Except that it all sounded a bit too easy.
Having visited the Bernese Alps, President Charles Damon turned his attention to a different part of the country.
In Meiringen, he arrived at the base of Reichenbach Falls, a tall, rocky precipice where the villain Moriarty had thrown Sherlock Holmes to his death.
He suddenly shivered in the mist, and a Secret Service agent whipped out an umbrella.
“Put that thing away,” he growled. “What’s wrong with a little water?”
“Having a nice day?” Pauline Troutman, his Protocol Secretary, asked.
Charles looked around at the army of Secret Service agents, the press pool and the onlookers. “Relaxing as hell.”
His head bodyguard began to herd people away.
“No. I didn’t say that,” Charles snapped. “Let them enjoy the falls.”
Someone pushed a small, sturdy man through the crowd. He wore suspenders and sported a thick mustache.
“The mayor of Meiringen,” Pauline whispered.
“At last,” Charles muttered. “A real person.”
As the mayor approached, he reached for his pocket.
The team of agents leapt into action.
As the mayor’s hand disappeared into the bulging pocket, the nearest agent threw his body in the path of the mayor. Another pounced on the man.
The agents nearest Charles performed a choreographed maneuver, one throwing an armored coat over Charles and two others whisking him to the ground and throwing themselves on top of him.
“Get off of me!”
When Charles finally managed to look around, he saw the mayor on the ground with both hands pinned behind his back.
“No gun, sir,” the agent at the mayor’s side reported. “He’s clean.”
The mayor had an astonished look on his face.
“Chill out, will you?” Charles thundered.
The agents helped the president and mayor regain their feet, and an agent held up a Sherlock Holmes-style pipe. He briefly examined it and gave it back to the mayor.
“Sorry about that, Mr. Mayor,” Charles said. He shook the man’s hand. “Do you speak English?”
“Nein,” the man said. No.
Pauline froze.
“Sehr gut.” Very good. Charles put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Kommen Sie mit mir.” Come with me.
He led the mayor around to the far side of the wild, erratic waterfall. The mayor handed the pipe to him and in German welcomed him to Meiringen.
“Herzlichen Dank.” Thank you. Charles fingered the smooth bowl and bent wood stem. “Haben Sie ein wenig Tabak?” Did he have some tobacco?
The mayor looked through the curtain of water at the security agents.
“Don’t worry about them,” Charles muttered.
Reassured, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a pouch of pipe tobacco and a book of matches.
The two men sat on a rock and shared a smoke. As the sweet, charred smell wafted through the air and mingled with the mist, Charles stared at the flat stones on which Holmes must have landed.
It was a cold, hard end for a man who was idolized by millions. As far as Holmes’ fans were concerned, the death of that fictional character was as real as the stones onto which he had tumbled.
When all was said and done, how would President Charles Damon be remembered? As a die-hard who had long surpassed his usefulness to society? As a pioneer to his very end?
Would his death trigger an annual flood of pilgrims?
He laughed at himself. He hardly thought so. And he wouldn’t want to be deified, either. Let the heroes of literature be the true gods.
He, like the mayor, was just a guy doing a job.
Only, he was a guy bearing a message to the world.
And if the damned vipers and piranhas didn’t bring him down first, he would get his message across in his speech the next day.
He closed his eyes and smiled.
Some message it would be.
On his way out of Oak Ridge and heading back to the Knoxville airport, Mick drove past the motel from which he had just checked out.
In an otherwise empty parking lot, two white vans glinted in the sunlight.
They were parked at odd angles in front of the very room in which he had stayed.
Mick didn’t slow down, but kept looking. Passing the vehicles, he saw two hefty, darkly dressed men step out of the room.
Revolvers hung from their hands as they looked around in frustration.
They had just narrowly missed their quarry.
Mick placed a thick hand on top of the steering wheel and eased on past. He checked his rearview mirror. They weren’t following him.
He grabbed Eli’s mobile phone and jabbed in the number for Langley.
Eli picked up.
“I’m heading back to Switzerland,” Mick said, trying to control his heightened emotions. “I’ve got a deal with O’Smythe to clear up this whole matter and stop the assassination.”
“What kind of deal?”
“It involves freeing Alec and Natalie from captivity.”
“They’re hostages?”
“And Eli? You’ve got to figure out what the hell is going on here,” he said. “Another hit squad just came after me. They’re all over the country.”
Chapter 53
It was Everett’s second day investigating CERN before the president arrived that evening.
He sped in his antique convertible from Switzerland across the fertile French countryside. One hundred and fifty meters below him lay the Large Electron Positron, otherwise known as LEP. The problem from a security standpoint was its size. The contraption was too big.
Housed in a ring-shaped subterranean tunnel over eight kilometers wide the LEP was the dream machine that Earth’s physicists used to explore the building blocks of the universe.
It could take the police well over an hour to drive around the perimeter of the machine.
Only counter-rotating bursts of electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, called positrons, pumped into the ring by a series of smaller accelerators could circle the machine in a timely fashion, near the speed of light.
A scientist had taken Everett into the tunnel the day before to explain all that.
Deep below the pastoral farmland and the bordering Jura Mountains, three thousand dipole magnets gradually bent the high-energy particle beams on an octagonal path through a foot-square vacuum chamber made of aluminum alloy.
A clean, lighted tunnel that was four meters wide and twenty-seven kilometers long enclosed the airless tube. Inside the tunnel also ran the usual assortment of electrical and plumbing conduits one would expect to see under a city street, along with super-cooled helium and wires linking sensors and switches to computers.
Aside from the main tunnel, the LEP included nineteen access shafts, sixty underground side galleries, four detector areas for experiments, numerous clusters of surface buildings and an ancillary power plant.
“We’re talking about securing over eighty square kilometers of inhabited hilly terrain and 1.4 million cubic meters of underground passageways and alcoves complete with complex machinery,” he had informed the advance team the
previous day. “A presidential tour is out of the question.”
“There will be no tour,” Paul had assured him. “But the speech is still on, and we don’t want anything exploding.”
Explosions didn’t seem out of the question under normal circumstances at CERN. The sheer physical forces at work terrified Everett.
By the end of a typical six-hour journey, each particle had zinged around the ring farther than the distance from Earth to Neptune.
The beams skidding around the ring emitted dangerous radiation. The aluminum alloy tubes trapped only half of the radiation. Were it not for an additional shield of lead, the remaining radiation would escape into the tunnel and disintegrate all organic material such as rubber gaskets, electrical insulation and human beings. Radiation could also transform any humidity into highly corrosive nitric acid.
Then there were the separate beams circling in opposite directions. With the flip of a switch, electrostatic plates that separated the two beams shut off. Squeezed and aimed by superconducting quadrupole magnets, the one hundred billion-electron-volt beams collided head-on in one of the four detectors situated on the circumference.
Scientists stood around those enormous house-sized detectors, named L3, OPAL, DELPHI and ALEPH, in a spray of armor-piercing muons and neutrinos and excitedly recorded the resultant split second of fireworks.
Everett would sooner have the president stand under a solid rocket booster.
His final fear was the very nature of the physics involved. As the scientist had explained to him, “Sure we’re only firing around electrons, but you know the old E=mc2 equation. As we increase the energy of the beams, the mass after the collision will increase. The resulting particles from those nearly mass-less electrons emerge one hundred times larger than a heavy old proton.”
The entire concept of creating mass out of energy seemed like an attempt to create something out of nothing. It violated his basic Catholicism. Worse, it might even help confirm the Big Bang theory, the fear of any Creationist.
If for no other reason, he should keep the president out of CERN to prevent him from losing his good old-time religion.
Nevertheless, waves of scientists from Bombay to Helsinki lined up for months to run their tests, and the Americans wanted in.
The future was closing in fast.
He grudgingly steered up a mountain road toward the farthest point on the collider. As a public servant, he knew it was his job to accomplish the wishes of the public, but he doubted if Joe Taxpayer knew what his money was buying.
Mick had flown all night from Knoxville via Washington to Geneva. But he was eager to stop the assassination plot, free his wife and brother and learn the identities of people behind SATO in exchange for the defective substrate. He’d let the jetlag catch up with him later.
When his taxi approached a low-arched bridge on the tightly curved western crescent of Lake Geneva, Mick told the driver to stop. He paid the fare and stepped out.
He was in Switzerland once again.
To one side of the bridge, sailboats and steamers politely negotiated the tranquil lake. Beneath him, the swirling Rhône River rushed toward massive stone hotels and office buildings.
Ahead, children ran about gleefully and dashed through sprinklers at the Jardin Anglais. Young lovers strolled through the garden with their heads inclined toward each other.
He checked his wrist for the time. It was a reflex action, and useless. He no longer had his watch.
Still, he was in the land of clocks. At the entrance to the park was an enormous flowerbed that formed the face of a clock. The ticking arms read nine o’clock.
The English clothier’s suit that he was wearing was rumpled from the night in economy class. Nevertheless, he smoothed out his sleeves and approached the park’s café.
The waiter there let him choose a table. They were all empty.
Mick selected a table under an ornamental lime tree and the young man helped him with his wrought-iron chair.
“Your order?” he asked.
Mick ran his tongue over his clean teeth. He took pleasure in ordering food again. “A glass of Coke, please.”
The waiter cleared some clutter away, and left.
Along the lakefront esplanade, he noticed a colorful sari. An Indian family was walking along with casual dignity. He picked up the thread of an old conversation he had been having with himself. He might consider India for his next assignment, if the Agency still wanted him.
And if he could ever face life at post without Natalie.
The waiter brought his Coke, and Mick delighted in his first swig.
He tuned into the voices of children playing. Behind them, a chorus of sirens filled the air. Then he spotted flashing lights. It was an official motorcade.
Gleaming black sedans and colorful American flags flashed behind a hedgerow.
Was that the president?
Then he noticed a young blonde who had turned to watch the speeding cars. She looked like a student or a dancer with her fingers hooked in her bib overalls.
Then she turned toward him, and their eyes locked.
He recognized her at once. It was the girl that had accompanied Alec at the airport in Casablanca.
Shivering slightly, she clutched her tanned arms, changed course and set out in his direction. As she approached, her expression shifted subtly from curiosity to general gloom.
He stood up. “What are you doing here?”
She shook his hand and glanced around the café. Assured of their privacy, she dragged an iron chair up to the table.
“Let’s sit down,” she said nervously.
“Okay.”
“Let me just set the record straight.” She perched on the edge of her chair. “I’m doing this because I want to.”
“Doing what?”
“Monsieur O’Smythe asked me to do this, and I don’t want to lose my apartment. So that’s that. It’s a simple matter.”
O’Smythe had sent her. She was the messenger.
She seemed to wait for a rebuke, but he didn’t have one to offer.
“He’s dying, you know,” she said.
“Who?”
“Trevor.”
“Good riddance. Breaks my heart.”
“He could be a worse man, of course. Someone else in his position might want money or power. All he wants is a cure.”
“At everyone else’s expense,” Mick muttered. He was hardly moved. “Where’s Natalie?”
“You aren’t to worry. You’ll find her and Alec at CERN.”
“How do I know that?”
“I came back with them from Morocco.”
“Was Natalie harmed in any way?”
“She’s in one piece. I think she still loves you.”
He laughed. “You’re hardly one to talk.”
“Don’t think badly of me,” she said. “A person must make a living.”
He recognized that she was being honest with herself. Bouncing around from one foreign assignment to the next, Alec could never provide her a stable life.
Mick cleared his throat. “Trevor said that you would give me a list of names. People who work for SATO.”
She looked at him sharply. “I don’t know what SATO is, and I never worked for them.”
“He said that you would know who does.”
She blinked. “Natalie and Alec work for them.”
Mick felt the muscles of his face sag. “Natalie and Alec?”
“As I said, they’re at CERN. You can ask them yourself.”
He slowly slid the substrate across the table toward her, its polished side reflecting the soft blue sky.
He might never gaze into Natalie’s blue eyes on a summer day again.
If he hadn’t completely believed her betrayal, this made it crystal clear. He had seen the videotape where she had slept with the stranger, she hadn’t followed him out of the cemetery in Settat when he had given her the opportunity to be rescued, and now he discovered that she worked for a cover
t organization that wanted to assassinate the president.
He stood, numb, and searched his pockets for some francs.
“You may not believe me,” she said. “But I still love Alec.”
He dropped the coins on the table beside the substrate and the unfinished drink.
“Take my advice,” he said. “Steer clear of him.”
He left her there, her eyes swimming in a pool of tears.
Out beyond the trees, a puff of wind caught the Jet d’Eau and sprayed it over the lake. He passed several waiters who were drawing straws over who got to comfort the unhappy girl.
The breeze was chilly and blew straight through Mick. The summer was coming to an early end.
He tried to see things from Natalie’s point of view. So what was wrong with a little tryst, a little larceny, a little murder, a little treason? She had ended up in Switzerland. Did she really think she could seek asylum there?
He looked down at Eli Shaw’s mobile phone. It was as stealthy and powerful as the CIA, and could reach anywhere in the world.
It was time to turn in his wife.
Eli Shaw picked up the line on the first ring. “Hello?”
“I’m back in Geneva.”
“Is that you, Mick?”
“The one and only.”
“Did you find out who works for SATO?”
“Yeah. You can have the police pick them up at CERN.”
Eli gasped. “Where the president is going? What are their names?”
“Their names are Natalie and Alec Pierce.”
Mick didn’t wait for a response.
Behind him, heavy footsteps were approaching fast.
Chapter 54
Alec and Natalie were stuck at a French border crossing, a guard booth in the middle of rolling hayfields.
“The damn thing’s so big,” Alec was explaining to her as they waited in their rental car, “it straddles two countries.”
“But I’ve never had to show my passport to cross to the other side,” she countered. “I want to start looking for Brahim.”
The hefty French officer had taken their passports and disappeared into the booth. Natalie was right, Alec thought. Usually the blue CERN ID card was sufficient to pass into the French half of the ring. The additional passport check was taking valuable time.