by Glenn Cooper
“The other problem they have,” John added, “is that each country operates like a feudal state with a privileged few on the top and the rest just trying to survive as serfs or slaves. There’s an absence of hope, there’s no children-are-our-future mentality. It’s a completely barren environment for innovation and enterprise.”
Ben nodded. “You both talked about this Garibaldi as being a different sort of leader.”
“He is,” John said. “Very different, a man with the unusual capacity to see light in a dark place. But who knows if he has any chance? The odds are stacked against him.”
“So what kinds of ideas do you have, guv?” Trevor asked.
John pointed to his laptop on the bedside table. “I’m doing research in a bunch of areas, you know, practical improvements to weapons that don’t involve huge advances in underlying technologies. Things we can implement quickly and trade for the assistance we’re probably going to need to find our people.”
Emily screwed up her nose in disgust. “I’m sorry, John, but what you’re offering is a way to help them destroy each other more efficiently. Why don’t we bring them things to help them elevate themselves? Loftier things?”
“Like what?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Literature, poetry, religion.”
He laughed. “Well, if you can memorize the Bible between now and next week then go ahead. You can dictate it when you get there.”
She blinked a few times, something she did when an interesting idea flooded her mind. “Why don’t we just bring books? My Caravaggio sketch made it through. Why not books?”
John was about to say something snarky about Caravaggio’s infatuation with her but he caught himself. “What are books made of?”
Ben volunteered the obvious—paper and ink.
“I know that,” John said quickly. “I mean what’s the paper made of? What’s the ink made of? Are they natural materials? Do they contain synthetic additives?”
Emily rose energetically to get John’s laptop and started searching. The others let her work in silence scanning articles for a few minutes before she said with disappointment, “It appears that paper and ink manufacturers use a witch’s brew of synthetic additives. Let me narrow the search parameters a bit.” She typed, read, and finally said, “Who knew? It seems there’s a whole world of all-natural, vegetable-based inks for commercial printing and additive-free paper products—and for real tree huggers, paperless paper made from cotton, bamboo or even stone.”
“What about the book you buy in a regular bookstore?” John asked.
“It seems most of them have additives somewhere in the manufacturing,” she answered.
“Are there any all-natural printers in the UK who can make books?” John asked, leaning forward, painfully testing the limits of his stitches.
She trolled around for another minute and replied, “Seems so. Special-order type of work. Most of them do work for green companies but we could make a few calls I suppose.”
“So you think you could carry books across?” Ben asked.
“If they’re all-natural, I don’t see why not,” John said.
“All right then, which books?” Trevor asked.
John and Emily looked at each other and laughed.
“I guess she’s going to be favoring books on how to reach out and touch someone and I’ll be going for books on reaching out and crushing someone. Let’s make our own lists and narrow them down to just a few. We can’t take a whole library. We’re going to have to travel fast and light.”
“I’ll have my research people find a printing company that can securely and quickly do a job for us,” Ben offered.
John raised another of his agenda items. “Trevor, tell me about any unconventional weapons experience you might have.”
“How do you mean unconventional?”
“Hand-to-hand fighting, knives, swords, axes, bow and arrow, that kind of unconventional.”
Trevor shrugged. “I mean we had a bit of close quarter combat practice in the army though I probably did more of that in the police. I can probably get by in a pinch. Swords, axes—you must be joking.”
“Believe me, where we’re going it’s no joke. A week isn’t much time but I’d suggest finding you an instructor for some intensive training. Anyone have a recommendation.”
“Funnily enough,” Ben said, “the chap we use at MI5 for unconventional fighting skills is a bit of a celebrity. Ever hear of Brian Kilmeade?”
“The guy who does a medieval weapons show on the tele?” Trevor asked.
“The very one.”
“Is he any good?” John asked.
“I’ve heard good things,” Ben said. “I’ll make a call to see if we can get him.”
“Okay, last item,” John said. “From what I saw on the battlefield in France, King Henry survived. If he made it, my guess is he’d be sailing back to Brittania to regroup. If that’s the case we’re probably going to have to deal with him again. I need to know more about him to understand which buttons to push and which ones to avoid. I need a resource.”
Emily sounded skeptical. “I take your point, John, but he was alive for what—fifty or sixty years?—and dead for over five hundred. That experience must have shaped him more than his brief spell on Earth.”
“Maybe,” John said, “but your personality gets set early on and I don’t think you shed it so easily. He was the big dog on the porch before and he’s still the big dog. I’m just looking for an edge.”
“I can have our researchers send over a selected number of biographies,” Ben offered.
“I don’t have time to read,” John said. “I need to spend a few hours with an historian who knows Henry intimately, really understands the man.”
Ben shook his head. “I’m struggling to imagine how MI5 would describe this assignment to an historian.”
“How about tying him up under the Official Secrets Act just in case and I’ll bullshit him as best I can,” John said.
“All right. I’ll identify the best Henry authority in England and run the idea up the flagpole.”
A nurse came in, removed his spent antibiotics bag, and reminded John that it was time for his dental appointment. When she left John asked Trevor if he had any fillings or crowns.
“Why do you ask?”
“Synthetics. Your fillings won’t be there on the other side. I had a big issue with one of my teeth. I’m getting a root canal or an extraction today.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a couple.”
“Make sure you’ve got room on your dance card to visit a dentist before we’re off.”
“What do I tell the dentist?”
“That you’re off to someplace really remote for a very long time and won’t have any access to medics or dentists.”
“Got it. What about you?” Trevor asked Emily. “How were your pearly whites?”
John grinned and answered for her. “Miss Perfect never had any cavities, did she?”
Emily heard a knock on her office door and looked up. Henry Quint came in with a hat-in-hand kind of a look and asked if she had a minute. She coolly pointed at a chair.
“I know what you think of me,” he said.
“Do you? I wonder if you have any idea?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing for the good of the project by exceeding the energy protocols. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been tortured over the problems I created. I’m sorry, but you must realize that we would have taken the collider up to 30 TeV eventually.”
“Would we? My firm belief is that strangelet production is not an all-or-none phenomenon. I strongly suspect we would have seen a correlation with higher collision energies and as a result we would have been warned off going to thirty.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Pushing the boundaries of science has always been risky. Once the atom was split we could never go back. It was up to society to decide how we used the technology.”
Her voice rose. “So far we’ve been able to control
that particular genie. I’m not nearly as confident we can wrestle this one back into the bottle.”
“I didn’t come here to argue.”
“Why did you come?”
“As you’re aware, my role has been considerably diminished. They’re keeping me around only to make sure I don’t go off the reservation. My one real task is to convene a panel of scientists to help us determine how to eradicate the extra-dimensional nodes. I’d like to show you my preliminary list.”
She took the paper and read it. “It’s a good group,” she said. “My only suggestions would be to add Anton Meissner from MIT and Greta Velling from Berlin.”
“Good ideas.”
“I only wish …” She paused, blinked, and seemed to lose her train of thought.
“Wish what?”
“That we could ask Paul Loomis. His papers on strangelets are still the best work ever done.”
“Well we can’t, can we?”
She burned him with her fiery eyes.
“You must really hate me,” he said, reaching for the paper and rising.
“Put it this way, if John hadn’t punched you silly, I would have.”
Cameron Loughty put down his pipe to answer the front doorbell.
“Are you expecting someone?” he asked his wife.
“What?”
He hadn’t realized she had gone upstairs so he tried again louder.
She shouted down the stairs, “No. Who is it?”
“I’ll be sure to let you know once I’ve got the door,” he yelled back.
Their house was a comfortable Georgian in the Newington district of Edinburgh, an easy walk to the university where Cameron had taught engineering until retirement. He opened the door a cautious crack, then wider at the benign sight of a slight young man with a full mop of hair and a messenger bag across his shoulder.
“Yes?”
“Is this Professor Loughty?” the young man asked.
“It is.”
“My name is Giles Farmer. I wonder if I might have a word with you about your daughter, Emily?”
Cameron became instantly cross. “Who did you say you were?”
“Giles Farmer. I’m a blogger.”
Cameron leaned in, distrustful of his hearing. “A logger? You seem quite small for that kind of work.”
“No, a blogger. I write about physics on the web.”
“I see. And are you a colleague or an acquaintance of my daughter?”
“Not exactly, you see …”
“I’m sorry. I have nothing to say.”
“I won’t take but a minute. I came all the way from London to talk to you.”
“You might have phoned first.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I tried.”
“We don’t generally answer the phone unless we recognize the number. What is it you want?”
“I write about the potential dangers of high-energy colliders like the MAAC in Dartford. When they had their incident last month I emailed and rang your daughter countless times but they kept telling me she was unavailable. Yesterday I tried again because I heard from people who monitor the greater London power grid that there’d been another brief MAAC start-up. Thing is, she answered her phone straight away but hung up on me when I told her who it was.”
“I am about to do the equivalent with this door.”
“What’s so funny about it is that she and I‘ve spoken on many occasions in the past and though we’ve never met in person she’s always been friendly, very collegial. I know she respects at least some of my reporting. I read physics at university. The information blackout from MAAC is deeply disturbing and now this. I was hoping …”
“Look, we’ve been told not to talk to anyone about Emily or about the collider so I’m going to have to go now.”
The professor firmly shut the door but through it he heard the young man calling out, “Who told you not to talk about MAAC? What are they trying to hide?”
5
Two constables from the Essex Police Firearms Unit stood outside the detached house in relaxed postures. The police armed response vehicle turned the corner and drove down the deserted road that bisected the now-evacuated South Ockendon estate. When the large van pulled up near them their sergeant hopped out. The droning traffic from the nearby M25 forced him to raise his voice.
“What’s the hold-up?”
“You do realize we’ve searched this one twice,” one of the constables said.
“Well, search it again,” the sergeant said. “I have my orders and you have yours, all right?”
The other constable said, “I’ve asked before but do we have any further information on who exactly we’re looking for?”
“I only know what I’ve been told and I’ve been told fuck all. Just search this one and the next three on the west side of the road then report back. Clear every room, every cupboard, every closet.”
A camouflaged Land Rover came into view followed by a parade of them progressing slowly down the road.
“I still don’t know what the bloody army’s doing here?” the first constable asked. “And why they’re putting out all this nonsense about bioterror while we’re prancing about without protective gear?”
The sergeant seemed thoroughly disgusted by the situation. “Stop asking questions and start searching.”
The front door was unlocked, the way the police had left it after their last sweep. After announcing their presence with a perfunctory, “armed police,” the two men entered and started with the formal sitting room, their fingers resting above the trigger guards of their short-barreled rifles. The only place to hide was behind a sofa, which they eliminated with a glance.
“Kitchen,” one of them said.
There were plates on the table with a two-day-old, hastily abandoned lunch. They opened and closed the pantry and broom closets before progressing to the powder room, downstairs closet, and then the small den where the curtains were drawn.
One of the constables switched on the overhead light and pointed to some empty bags of crisps and chocolate bar wrappers on the floor by a chair.
“Was this mess here last time?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Me neither. These houses are all looking the same by now. Upstairs then.”
The master bedroom was en suite with fitted wardrobes along an entire wall.
The bed was unmade.
One of the officers sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “Smell that?”
“Yeah. Bloody pong. Maybe they left their moggy behind and it croaked.”
He opened the nearest wardrobe door while the other constable knelt and peered under the bed.
The kitchen knife swung into the meat of his shoulder an inch clear of his bulletproof vest.
He shouted in pain and fear and squeezed off a 9mm round wide of the mark.
His partner sprang up and confronted the wild-eyed young man wielding a bloody knife.
“Drop the weapon now!” he shouted.
The man sprang out of the wardrobe. The officer fired once, striking him below the diaphragm but he kept coming. Rather than finishing him off with a chest or head shot he rammed the steel stock of his assault rifle into his forehead, dropping him like a stone.
“All right, mate?” he called to his partner who sat on the bed, pressing his free hand against his bleeding shoulder.
“Yeah, get me a towel or something and call for an ambulance before both of us bleed out. Christ. It wasn’t a dead cat was it? He’s the one who smells to high heaven.”
“Is he out of surgery yet?” Ben asked an MI5 agent who was staking out the waiting area across from the recovery room.
“A few minutes ago.”
“And?”
“The doctor told me he’s in serious condition but he’ll live which is …”
The young man caught himself and was about to say something but Ben, who was within earshot, stopped him. There were a few people across the lounge on a vigil for a family member.
“Hold the thought, all right?” Ben said.
He knew what his colleague was thinking.
How can he live when he’s already dead?
The consultant surgeon, a Mr. Perkins, was aware of two oddities about his patient, Mr. X, beyond the fact that he had been shot by armed police. The first was that he had been told the security services “owned” the case. The second was that despite a thorough antiseptic scrub before and after surgery, his body smelled of decay. With a combination of irritation and curiosity he agreed to meet with Ben in his office.
The surgeon, a take-charge type, immediately asked Ben, “What’s this all about?”
Ben answered his question with another. “What was the nature of her injuries, doctor?”
“I can only give out his condition to immediate family. I don’t suppose you’re a member of his family.”
“I am not.”
“Then I believe we’re finished.”
“Is he conscious?”
“He is not yet conscious. Now we’re finished.”
“Hardly. This is a special situation involving national security interests,” Ben said evenly. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen. First, you’re going to give me a report on his condition and prognosis. Then you’re going to have him transferred to a private room before he is able to communicate with anyone. Neither you nor any personnel from the hospital will see him again. He will be quarantined with armed guards outside his door. A team of MI5 doctors and nurses will be arriving any time now. You will brief them on the work you performed. They will exclusively take over his care until he is ready to be discharged into our waiting arms. Is all of that perfectly clear?”
“Who do you think you are? Get out of my office!” the surgeon fumed. “The next person I’ll be calling is our chief executive who’ll be barring you and your lot from the premises.”