by Gus Ross
But I could not have been more wrong.
Chapter 6: Who really understands Quantum Mechanics anyway?
At around the same time that the first of the three fire engines was pulling up to the blazing inferno that had once been my home, a red light that sat atop of an uninspiring, grey plastic phone, lit up intermittently. The annoying new-age ringing tone had long since been turned to mute by the hand that lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hello Sir. I’m afraid we have a bit of a problem,” said the voice at the other end of the line.
It was an educated voice, probably one that mummy and daddy had mortgaged themselves to the hilt to help get on the ladder, but it sounded young and weak to him. He was thankful that he no longer had to go through all the stuff that the voice that was just about to deliver the bad news would have to. He was getting on a bit now and he was not sure how much more of this he needed, or could take for that matter. He had never really considered retirement before now, but it was beginning to look appealing.
The hand replaced the receiver in its cradle and thumped the desk with a clenched fist. The caller had been brief and to the point, which was how he liked things, but he cared little for the message. After a brief pause for thought he punched one of the many stored numbers on the phone keypad and waited.
“Thompson. Good evening to you. Haven’t had the pleasure for some while. What can I do you for?” The voice at the other end was overly enthusiastic and polite.
Thompson hated that phoney American – “how are you today” – type bull. He was pretty sure you could be on your way to the chair and some dimwit American guard would still leave you with the inevitable parting phrase – “have a nice day.”
He also hated the way the voice on the end of the line always turned “what can I do for you” into, “what can I do you for.” He hated such so called witticisms, although on some level he knew that Charles Hanson really meant the words in that order.
“Good evening to you too Charles. I was wondering how you were placed tomorrow for lunch. Keen to catch up.” He was damned sure that if he had to brief him then he would do it tomorrow and not tonight.
“Lunch would be great. Get your girl to call mine and set it up, and I’ll see you then.”
The phone clicked and Charles Hanson allowed himself a grin; he already knew the content of tomorrow’s lunch discussion, but he would enjoy stringing it out with Thompson. He had quite a lot of respect for the old man, even if he was ‘dyed in the wool’ old school, but he was not going to allow that to get in the way of some fun.
Thomson sat drumming his fingers on the desk for what must have been the best part of five minutes, before clicking off the monitor and placing his laptop in his bottom drawer. Turn of the lock, key in pocket (autopilot stuff), and with that he grabbed his battered old briefcase and left the office for the evening.
Old Pug had decided that he needed a drink, it had been a pretty bad week and he was fairly sure that the whole body in the river thing was about to be moved upstairs so to speak, and the big boys were never much fun to play with.
He ordered a pint of Best and sat himself down in a corner as far away as possible from the oversized flat-screen hanging on the wall that was currently showing some inane sport that looked like a bunch of kids on motorbikes trying to kill themselves doing stupid things that motorbikes were not supposed to do. He never had any interest in sport, not even real sport like football, or golf, or rugby. He took a huge gulp from the pint glass and let out a sigh.
The bar was not particularly busy, few were these days given the cost of a pint, well except for those trendy namby-pamby wine bars full of overpaid, overdressed, clientele and they weren’t what he would call real bars. He took another large gulp and decided that tonight drinking was very much on his agenda. Three hours and eight pints, not to mention a few good whisky chasers later, and old double ugly left the bar to the time honoured cry of, “time gentlemen please.”
He was a big man, but even he could feel that reassuring sense of inebriation that followed a good skin-full. The cool night air made no impact on his already reddening face and he decided to walk home. It was less than mile and he generally felt invincible even without a drink in him.
He was the type of character that, had he been in uniform, he would have gladly given the full stop a search routine; obligatory hoody, worn under a big bulky anorak that could have had the QE2 under it for all anyone would know, scarf pulled up over the mouth and the kind of swagger that belonged to someone he would just love to punch out. He was coming directly towards him and the particular street he had just turned down was dark and quiet. Pug breathed in a lungful of the good stuff (if you could call it that, he worked in a rural cop shop but he lived in the city and the air was never good in the city), and puffed up his already considerable chest. He could feel his fists starting to clench inside his jacket pockets as he started to brace himself for the inevitable. The hoody, with the very large ship stuffed down his jacket, walked straight by without even making eye contact. Satisfied that he probably was invincible, Old Pug continued his lonely walk home. No one else passed him and soon he was tucked up like a baby in his one bedroom flat, snoring like an avalanche.
Across town, Buckfield was having a lot more difficulty sleeping; in fact he had long since given up trying. He had caught it on the local news of all things and at first had not made the connection. The call that he had received not long after had helped spell it out to him. Now he really was worried. He would pace the floor for a further few hours before finally succumbing to a few more on the sofa. He would wake the next day with a very stiff neck and a blinding headache. Pug would wake with a pretty impressive headache of his own, but he was not one to dwell on such things.
My own personal headache was also pretty impressive. I had managed to ascertain that Sternie had actually been responsible for the crack on the head and although he may have saved my life from the hands of the mad shark eyed man, I was not really in the mood to forgive him yet (I don’t do headaches).
Finally we stopped driving. I had no clue as to where we were, having long since lost the slightest idea of which direction we were travelling in around about the third detour. Sternie silenced the engine. We sat in the driveway of what looked like a fairly bog standard kind of detached home, in fact not a million miles away from the kind I had previously been wishing I had stayed in. It was dark but I could make out matching houses on either side and probably for the next square mile or so. I sometimes wondered how the men folk who lived in estates like this one found their way back to the correct ‘indifferent home’ when they had been out on the ran-dan, but then again the homing instinct of the drunk is pretty impressive when it kicks in.
Sternie made it quite clear that I should keep my mouth shut as we left the car and that any attempt to make a run for it would lead to another blow to the head. I decided to comply (after all, where was I likely to go, it felt like half the world were trying to kill me and at least Sternie didn’t seem to have that on his agenda).
When you think about it, the bog standard house on the bog standard estate is the perfect place for laying low and blending in. It is a bit like trying to pick out one penguin from the thousands of the little blighters that are all huddled together on the ice; anyway, incredibly, I was beginning to feel safe.
Buckfield cocked his head slowly from side to side, but it made no difference, he had not long since emerged from the shower but that hadn’t helped either; this was one of those stiff necks that would take its own time to ease. As for his headache, that would remain with him for the remaining few hours of his life.
Pug had been in the station at 6.30 am on the dot as usual, had drank his first of many mugs of hot tea, and was currently sifting through a pile of paperwork that looked to have been simply strewn across his desk. He would still be there, working his way through the papers in an ordered fashion that only he could follow, when he checked his watch for the seco
nd time. It was now close to nine and Buckfield really was late.
A women, in her early thirties, sat on the top deck of a bus that was working its way laboriously through the busy London traffic; she was not concerned as to its destination and had in fact been on three separate underground lines in the last hour or so before taking her seat.
The day before she had also been extremely elaborate in her travel and had left nothing to chance. She had been aware of at least two of them but they were clumsy and slow. Perhaps the standards were slipping now that everyone was pretending to be on the same side.
Her long, newly blonde hair was neatly tucked away into a large, grey, woolly hat that had been brought down at the back to meet its matching scarf. It was late November and there had been quite a cold snap and the hat and scarf routine was pretty much de-rigour. The owner of this particular hat and scarf was very attractive but had done little to enhance her looks that morning; she wanted to blend and, to be fair, there were times when she hated the ‘need’ for makeup.
She sat staring out at the rows of buildings that crept past as the bus continued at walking pace, by her side was a small plastic carrier bag. At the next stop she would leave the bus and the bag as agreed and no one would notice. The man who boarded the bus as she departed would not even acknowledge her, and soon he would get off, with the carrier tucked neatly into his man bag. Assuming anyone had even bothered to re-run the on-bus video footage, there would be nothing to see, apart that was from the fact that two random people had chosen to sit on exactly the same seat on the top deck of a close to empty bus.
Lunch at Nic’s Bar and Grill was the usual over-priced, over-rated affair with the obligatory wine list that was too large to read and most likely designed only for the purposes of show (I had once played a little game in a rather fine dining establishment, that shall remain nameless, where I decided to test the Sommelier to see just how many of the ‘fine’ wines they really had in the cellar and which of them he would recommend. I did this for a full ten minutes, running through a vast array of overpriced plonk, before settling for a bottle of house red. Nic’s was the kind of place where I would have liked to play that game again). The food was passable but none too inspiring and Thompson was not really that hungry anyway.
They had managed to secure a rather intimate little table for two that sat in the corner of the upstairs section of the restaurant, and that had brought a wry smile to Charles’s face; he found himself half wishing he had bought a red rose from one of those street peddlers that frequented the area, just to see Thompson’s reaction.
Of course he had played the role of daft laddie to a tee as he mocked surprise at the old man’s briefing. He could tell it was painful for him and so he had deliberately dragged out lunch as long as possible and was now considering whether to order a second cup of coffee.
“So, just to make sure I have understood everything, you have lost both of them and we have some collateral damage?” asked Charles, but it wasn’t really a question.
“It is only temporary. I expect to have things in hand by the end of the day.” Thompson knew that this was wildly optimistic but he hated when Charles Hanson got one over on him, and he knew that this time it would appear he had been caught by the short and curlies.
The trouble was that Hanson also knew that the statement was wildly optimistic, but he would park that for now. He would shortly go against all protocol and take matters into his own hands; the stakes were too high to allow Thompson and his archaic bureaucracy to deal with things, and ultimately he did not want it to be his short and curlies that were up for grabs.
The woman with the grey hat and scarf had walked quickly from the bus stop and had made her way to Waterloo station; she had made a brief pit stop at the ladies before purchasing three train tickets, two with plastic and one with cash. She would later join the crowds of rush hour drones as she boarded the train that related to the second plastic ticket, before walking the length of the carriage, neatly switching her hat from grey to the red one she had in her shoulder bag, and then departing from the next doorway. Five minutes later an attractive woman in a red hat, whose scarf did not match, would board the 17.20 to Bournemouth, using a ticket bought with cash.
Deep under the earth, close to the French / Swiss border, Alexander Boardman had just left the office of Mr Stephan Meyer. As usual, they had exchanged some interesting views on next steps without ever really reaching a consensus on the findings to date. There was just too much uncertainty and too many permutations and it was still all just theoretical and Boardman would find it all so frustrating. He had a huge respect for his boss; if anyone understood beams then it was Meyer, but there were times when he really did want to tell him more, but unfortunately he could not.
Boardman had been fascinated with fundamental physics ever since leaving London University with his first class Mathematics degree; here were the real mathematic equations that he wanted to be part of solving. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or C.E.R.N., was the ideal place for someone of his intellect and the current round of Large Hadron Collider experiments were throwing up all sorts of new data to analyse and debate. He loved his job, and he loved Geneva and the Swiss way of life almost as much, but Alexander Boardman loved knowledge more than any of the above, and one day he had been offered a chance to obtain knowledge that was beyond even what he thought might be possible.
It was bizarre really. To think that as long ago as his first application to London University that he was being vetted. That his childhood, his friends, his family, every aspect of his lineage and associations were being put through the grinder to see if anything odd popped out: the left wing activist granny, the pacifist great uncle who had received the white feather that no one spoke about, the brother in law who was a part time drug dealer, the friend with strange allegiances to the Middle East – but of course he had no such skeletons in his closet. He had been approached not long before his acceptance to C.E.R.N., and he had often questioned just how much of that had really been his own doing.
The research into fundamental physics in Europe had been mandated in the early 1950’s under the French Conseil Europeen pour la Recherché Nucleaire, or C.E.R.N., and had been concentrated in researching the inside of the humble atom.
Although the Conseil had been replaced by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in 1954, and current day research had gone way past the atom, into what was now termed Particle Physics, the name C.E.R.N. had stuck. The mission and aims of C.E.R.N. were never in doubt and were always above board, the real problem came about in terms of its membership and, more importantly, the status of its non members and observers. Although non members states could attain Observer status, which would bring with it the ability to attend Council Meetings and receive documents, it did not provide decision making authority, and this was just a bit too much to stomach for some of the more important non member nations.
The whole question of exactly what was to be shared with whom was always going to be an uncomfortable one behind closed doors, although C.E.R.N. itself worked and welcomed cooperation from around the globe. In fact almost half of the world’s particle physicists from more than one hundred nations regularly utilised C.E.R.N’s facilities and contributed to the science.
The primary Observer state, being more than a little disgruntled with its status, and its little lapdog had been putting in place their own, highly secretive, equivalent well before the wheels had really got in motion back in mainland Europe. And that particular equivalent had been benefiting from the duplicitous roles of the likes of Alexander Boardman for many, many, years. In fact, the Anglo American Particle Research Institute, or A.P.R.I.L., was now probably at least two decades ahead of the most recently published findings from C.E.R.N.; partly based on the knowledge gleaned from Geneva and the misinformation that was occasionally thrown into the mix at C.E.R.N., but also because of the concentration of the finest minds from the US and UK; minds which were generally vetted, approa
ched, and placed, well in advance of them becoming public knowledge.
Keeping the operation a priority one national secret was by no stretch of the imagination an easy feat, and in fact the original site for the A.P.R.I.L. testing chambers was planned to have been beneath the ground in what is now widely known as Area 51, however, this was quickly discounted in favour of a particularly remote region of Highland Scotland, a decision that to date had proven to be a very good one, especially given the notoriety and public attention that eventually came to bear on Groom Lake Air Force Base.
The fact that the United States also openly had more particle accelerators than anyone else; situated at their major universities and national laboratories throughout the land, including the underground facility in Dakota, made it just that bit easier to conceal the thirty mile circumference tunnel they had burrowed a hundred or so metres into the remote Scottish wilderness.
There were many times in conversation that Boardman had to stop himself from going too far and providing answers to questions that he could not possibly have known about to Meyer; sometimes he just wanted to provide a snippet, something that would at least steer them in the right direction and save years of wasted effort, but it was literally more than his life was worth.
If he had known that the most important piece of knowledge he had at his disposal, and that he had just three weeks earlier completed the testing of, was now sitting, momentarily unaccompanied, in a 1p plastic bag aboard a number thirty seven London bus, he would have been physically sick.
If he had known the identity of the man who was about to become the proud owner of said 1p bag and its contents, he would have thrown himself in front of the next speeding particle beam and secured his name in scientific history for time immemorial.
Chapter 7: Hats off to Mrs Edgerton