by Gabriel Kron
Adjusting the microscope, I focused in on the split in the brush. The split ran the whole length of it and once the surface was cleaned a little, revealed a thin layer of a bluey white substance. It was probably a paper or card insulator, or maybe even a layer of mica, a popular insulator in electronics. Truth was, it was hard to tell from just a visual inspection.
I connected a cheap digital camera to the eyepiece of the microscope, holding it in place with a large doughnut shaped ring of BluTack. I let the camera auto-focus and took several shots. It was a cheapish camera of adequate resolution of around 5Mp, but it was the lens quality that let it down. As I reviewed each shot, lens flare was spoiling the shots.
From outside I could hear my phone begin to ring. Because the containers acted like large Faraday cages, shielding the interiors from any external radio signals, my phone had to live by the main workshop entrance.
I was expecting a call from Mark Stacey, who I was beginning to trust having met with him again since he had saved me at Jack’s funeral.
“Hello,” I answered as I walked outside and sat down under the covering.
“Daniel, it’s Mark. Can you talk?” I recognised Mark’s voice. “Did you get another phone?”
“I did, got several like you said,”
“Good, you’d better ditch this one after this, I’m being continually bombarded with attempted hacks right now and I think it maybe has something to do with you,” Mark said.
“Okay. Better order some more I guess,” I said thankful for the pound shop in town that did the cheapest pay as you go cell phones ever.
“Listen, I’ve let my programs do some digging around and have come up with some worrying connections.”
“Connections, where to?” I knew Mark was going to investigate who was giving him his orders.
“Oh you’re going to like this, or not. Westminster, the Houses of fucking Parliament,” Mark said. “Seems that Colin Mundy was kind of telling me the truth about who he works for.”
“So you’re saying our government assassinated the Lockes, Jack, and Dominik and have been trying to frame me for it?”
“Well, it might not be the government. There’s the House of Commons and the House of Lords along with many different committees, quangos, lobby groups, offices, libraries and so on. I’ll need to get physical access to their network to start digging further if you want hard evidence.”
“What? You can actually find out who is doing this to us?” I had spent hours trying to work out who would orchestrate such malevolence towards myself and those around me.
“Probably. It’s not guaranteed, but I’d bet on it. Have you made any progress yet? You know, like getting it working?”
“Slowly, but no breakthroughs yet...But I wonder if you can help out on that as well?”
“After what I did to you guys, anything. What?”
“What are you like at cryptography?”
“Depends if it’s a basic Caesar cipher, Feistel Network or even an asymmetric Lucifer encryption. Some encryption is becoming too hard to crack these days, without some extra hacking, but generally given time, it is possible.” Mark sounded more than confident about the subject. “Why, what you got?”
I told Mark about the page of code I had found with the only brush we had as a sample of what we needed to make for the prototype replications.
“And it’s not just a plain substitution pad that’s been used?” Mark asked after I described the page of typed numbers.
“Not that we’ve been able to work out, but I’m no cryptologist and I don’t think Clive or Lee are either. I’ll get a copy sent to you this afternoon. Can you see what you can do? It might just be the last piece of the puzzle.”
Mark was proving to be a valuable ally, who it seemed might be able to not only crack the Locke cipher, enabling us to proceed to the next step of replicating the Lockridge device, but also be able to prove that I was innocent and name those responsible.
I sat back on the wooden bench and took a deep breath. It felt good. For once I felt as if I had taken one step closer to the powers-that-be without them knowing. Could we really expose such a force without becoming victims? I felt as if I had no choice but to try.
The rain had suddenly increased so I decided to carry on working in the workshop. The sound of driving rain against the metal container roof was something I was going to have to address if living at the Yard was going to be prolonged. I played music to try and cancel it out and continued studying the carbon brush under the microscope.
A little more polishing of the brush and it appeared that the two halves were held together with little flush mounted wooden pegs, probably something like matchsticks.
As I changed the main objective lens to get a closer look, there was a sudden bang, exactly like a gunshot. I had found that I was quite nervous with sudden bangs. I rubbed my side where I had been shot and jumped when the generator outside backfired and then abruptly stopped.
All power suddenly went off, plunging the workshop into darkness. I fumbled and knocked the camera off the microscope. I saw its bright LCD screen bounce off the bench and onto the floor where the batteries fell out. Now I was in complete darkness.
“Argh shit!” I made a mental note to install at least one emergency light that would kick in at times like this.
As I stood up, a light caught the corner of my vision. It was faint but was coming from the microscope. I peered down the eyepiece which showed the carbon brush in a radiant blue light that appeared to be coming from the split in the brush itself. Looking directly at the brush, the thin blue line of light was clearly visible. I hadn’t noticed before, probably because it was dirty or it wasn’t dark enough.
I stumbled across the workshop and made my way outside and dialled Clive’s new home number. When Clive finally answered I was finding it hard to remain calm and collected.
“Clive. I think I’ve found it. I think I’ve actually found what makes it work,” I blurted.
“What? Found what?”
“The secret to the Lockridge device. If what I’ve just seen is what I think it is.” Trouble was I didn’t really know what it was.
“What is it you’ve seen then?”
“The light!” I laughed. “The brush glows in the dark. Well not the brush, the separator, and not just a dim glow. I think the brushes are radioactive!”
SIS HQ, Basement Carpark. Day 51.
Agent Cornell rubbed his forehead. It was still smarting from hitting the steering wheel of the black taxi cab he had written off that morning on Vauxhall Bridge. In hindsight, he wished he had chosen the white Ford Transit from the pound. It at least had air bags.
This time he did select the white Transit. He strapped a bottle of nitrogen gas to one of the bulkhead loops and checked to make sure the valve was tightly closed. The trip to Selsey was long enough for any leak from the bottle to cause him problems. He would still drive with the windows open.
Being the southernmost point of the Manhood Peninsula of West Sussex, Selsey is almost cut off from the mainland. A single road, the B2145, serves as the only access. The white Transit was ideal. They were so common that no-one would remember it.
The Yard. 7:50am Day 51.
I was eager for Clive to arrive at the Yard. We had spoken at length on the phone the previous night about the split carbon brushes being radioactive. It was an interesting development because Clive pointed out that if it was actually radio-luminescence that was causing it to glow and not phosphorescence then there were major health risks.
“Bloody hell, can you imagine the risk assessment for a device that creates radioactive carbon dust?”
“Wasn’t a problem for smoke alarms. They’ve got caesium in, not that they produce dust of course, but they managed to get them passed under whatever regulations there were at the time. Anyhow, I’m not going to worry about that yet. We can be careful with it, but I want to know how this works, because once we know that, we can work around, re-engineer, redevelop, re
design, whatever we need to do to make it safe. But only once we know how it works,” I said, realising that I knew little about radioactivity other than the standard high school physics lessons of alpha, beta and gamma radiations. Generally, radioactive materials were like explosives, fascinating but too dangerous for hands on experimentation.
Clive’s Toyota Prius pulled up to the gates of the Yard just after 8:00am. Clive was as keen as I was to see if this was the breakthrough we needed.
“Wow, this place is changing every time I visit,” Clive said having parked. “Where are those PV panels?”
“Flat on the roof at the moment but I need to angle them up before the winter.”
Clive handed me a large rectangular baking dish. “Brenda made this for you, should last you a couple of days.”
The dish was a home-made lasagne that I knew was going to be delicious.
“Thank you. I’ll have to get Becs to learn from your Brenda,” I said and put the dish in my outside fridge.
“You two all right then?”
“Oh yeah. I have to say that getting shot does have some advantages. She should be here later today. She said she’d check in on my folks first and then head back here.”
Becs was a rock in my life right now and appeared to be taking the whole situation in her stride. She had reported her Fiat 500 stolen after abandoning it in the NCP and was now driving her parent’s old but reliable Volvo 740.
Getting down to Selsey without a car was hard work and despite speaking to my mum and dad several times a week on the phone, Becs insisted I pay them a visit once a week. It was something I usually looked forward to doing. Today, I felt the need to concentrate on the Lockridge device.
Getting it actually working would be a huge step towards proving my innocence. Or maybe it was the need to feel as if it had all been worthwhile. With a price so high in human life, to fail to replicate a functioning device would be devastating. And without a working device, my story would be seen as nothing more than the usual paranoid conspiracy theory.
Clive was eager to see the brush close up again. Unlike before, he now wore a pair of latex gloves. He set the brush up under the microscope and inspected the detail of the split. I switched the lights off and closed the workshop door so Clive could inspect the split in its own light.
“It’s like a miniature fluorescent tube. Quite beautiful,” Clive said as he gazed through the microscope eyepiece. “I wanted to bring a Geiger counter to check for radiation, but since leaving the College, I don’t have access to stuff like that any-more, so I phoned Lee. He does have a Geiger and said he would bring it today. Hope you don’t mind?”
“What that Lee’s on his way? No, I don’t mind at all, it’s great. What time do you think he’ll arrive?”
“No idea, sorry.”
“I’ve realised that I saw it before, at the Friedmann’s. I thought it was the light from a mobile phone or something. Now I realise it must have been the brush,” I said as I switched the lights back on.
On the bench in the middle of the workshop was the replication attempt of the Lockridge device so far. I showed Clive the progress on the converted Bosch starter motor. It was mostly in pieces, awaiting assembly. I was still reshaping the last large section called a stator iron. The notebook gave precise instructions on winding the new “pancake” shaped coils needed for these. Seven pancakes per stator. All twenty-eight coils were neatly laid out on the work bench.
“Looks like you're nearly done,” Clive said as he studied the parts.
As I showed Clive how the pancake coils stacked up onto the iron stators, I became aware that a horn was sounding in the background. As I opened the workshop door, I realised it was a car horn. Lee had arrived driving his own white BMW 5 series.
“Sorry about the horn,” Lee shouted out as I opened the gates. “Clive said to call you when I arrived, but I couldn’t get through.”
“It’s the containers, they’re like Faraday cages. Good to see you. No Wendy?”
“Too short notice for her, but I just had to come and see. Hope you don’t mind?” Lee said.
“Mind? I don’t mind at all. It’s great you’re here, the more brains we throw at this the more likely we are to succeed. And you’ve bought toys,” I said, referring to the Geiger Muller Counter I could see in the top of a large box.
Lee had two boxes of components and test equipment with him, including the Geiger Muller Counter. This was a detector of nuclear emissions, capable of counting the amount of ionising radiation from an object.
“Part of me wants this not to be radioactive,” Clive said as Lee unpacked the shoe box sized piece of kit.
As he switched the device on, it clicked a few times from the background radiation that usually exists everywhere. I placed the brush on the bench. Lee brought the detector tube closer to it and the clicking started speeding up to a steady stream. The brush was most definitely radioactive.
“Well that answers that then,” Lee said. “Let’s see what kind we’ve got here.”
He placed a sheet of paper over the brush and then measured it again. Again the counter burst into life. “Okay, so it’s not just alpha particles, let’s try some foil.” The paper was replaced by a sheet of aluminium foil and again tested. This time the count was lower, but still a lot higher than the back-ground radiation count.
“Well it appears to be quite radioactive, probably with alpha, beta and some gamma. This has to be integral to the working of it, but how?” Lee stood back looking at the small dark carbon brush on the work bench.
“It'll be good if the Locke cipher confirms this and hopefully tells us exactly what it is. Talking of which, Clive, I meant to ask you yesterday to forward a copy of the cipher to Mark Stacey.”
I had told both Lee and Clive about Mark Stacey and how he had helped us to escape from Jack’s funeral. I’d also explained how he had started to track down those responsible for trying to suppress this technology.
“Do you trust him?” Lee asked. “He admitted to screwing all our accounts up. Not sure I’d trust him.”
“You may have a point. He might just be playing us to get closer, but why would he need to do that? He found me, just like that. No, I think he truly does want to help us now. In any case, he says he can prove I’m innocent and to date I don’t know of any other way of doing that. What he did to us, he said, was just following orders.”
“So does he still work for them?” asked Clive.
“That’s what he wants them to believe. Apparently only his controller knows what he looks like.”
“Daniel, can I use your blackboard?” Lee asked.
“Help yourself.”
“Look, I’m not a nuclear physicist, but it’s not alien to me,” Lee said as he started to draw a representation of the brush and the associated circuit he had committed to memory from the notebooks.
It wasn’t a complicated circuit, but did highlight the complexity in the tuning of a purely analogue machine. Electrical switching was mechanical, done via the rotation of the axle of the motor generator which incorporated the radioactive split carbon brushes.
“…So, if these split brushes are supposed to take this device over the top, then, then, with what? Electron avalanche?” Lee added to the many arrows of differing colours on the black board. “I checked out nuclear batteries last night, after Clive told me what you thought you’d found. They do exist, have done since nineteen thirteen and are actually called alpha and beta cells. They’re small photovoltaic cells designed for use with a source of either alpha or beta radiation. Stick it in a tube and bingo — a battery that lasts twenty years.”
“And they make those now?” I asked. I’d never even heard of nuclear batteries being available despite having served a Royal Navy engineering apprenticeship.
“For all sorts of stuff apparently, from deep space probes and satellites to heart pacemakers and hearing aids,” Lee said as he rubbed out part of his drawing from the board.
“Nuclear or atomi
c batteries produce electricity from the radioactive decay of something like tritium, but they are only between 0.1% and 8% efficient.”
“Ah, the efficiency doesn’t mean much really if what it produces is free and long-lasting,” Clive added whilst still studying the brush under the microscope. “There is a way we can find out exactly what this is made of, although I don’t have access any more. You do Lee?”
“Access to what?” Lee asked
“To a mass-spectrometry lab.”
“Not me, not easily anyhow,” Lee said shaking his head.
“I’ll ask Karin Friedmann. I think she has access to one,” Clive said. “Can I borrow your mobile?”
Five minutes later and Clive returned.
“Can she get it analysed?” I asked.
“Only if someone can take it to her. I did ask about posting it or using a courier, but she’s right in pointing out that we probably don’t want to let it out of our sight and something radioactive would trigger the postal scanners.”
Clive was right to agree with Karin. The brush was the only physical part of the Lockridge device we had, and it seemed that it was the most important component.
“You can’t go,” Clive said pointing at me, “and I can’t go either at the moment, as much as—”
“I can go,” Lee said cutting in, “I want to go. I’ve got the time and I can go today if that’s convenient for Karin.”
“I’ll call her and let her know,” Clive said.
After at least another hour of discussion, Lee placed the brush in an envelope and tucked it into his shirt pocket before heading off to the Eurotunnel.
West Street Retirement Cottages. 8:30pm Day 51.
Becs enjoyed the journey down to Selsey. She enjoyed it more when she had her Fiat instead of her parent’s huge Volvo 740. The Volvo was big and heavy but easy to drive with “powered” everything from steering to seat heaters. The car stereo was big as well, a proper sound system, far larger than she imagined her parents would ever need. She was listening to whatever the radio station was that the scan had found once she was out of range of her favourite station, LBC 97.3.