by P. W. Child
The weather rumbled, but Lydia heard nothing. Only Healy discerned something with his keen ears aided by the slight cold draft that crept under the door down the hallway. While they did not need him he quietly made his way to the kitchen and the back door to ascertain the authenticity of the sensation.
“Oh my God!” he gasped as he entered the dark kitchen, the only normal room in the entire mansion. The windows clanged with the heavy downpour which had broken out over Lyon in the last fifteen minutes. Under the door the water was spraying in, wetting the tiles. As the butler placed some newspapers in the slit under the door the thunder bellowed, releasing three rapid flashes of lightning before he pulled his hand away in fright. Healy was a tough, steely operative in his day and even now there were few targets that could elude his aim. But one thing nobody knew was that Rupert Healy was terrified of thunder and lightning.
Petrified, but aware that his job could never suffer under his phobias, he slipped away and returned to the lower level of the house where there was life, and safety from the horrendous nature that sought to do him harm. But as Healy turned the corner into the corridor that led to Lydia and her friends he noticed that the lights were flickering profusely. Clearing his throat under the discomfort of the situation Healy progressed down the almost dark passage, certain that he should not share the weather conditions with an already on-edge Lydia.
A leak inside the wall moistened the plating, an honest mistake by Lydia and Healy not to have noticed before. Rains like these were not a common thing and they had no way of knowing that the plating in the chamber room was being compromised. At the height of the ignition the small window to the chamber was illuminated entirely in bright white light. Sam filmed, but his terrified frozen gaze was fixed on the rays that had now eaten up Purdue’s silhouette.
But Lydia paid no attention. She turned a huge dial, and old fashioned knob that initiated the sound factor, a pulsing ultrasound wave that sounded like an unborn heart on sonar, only deeper and slower. Lydia’s chest heaved with the excitement of her experiment coming to fruition and a crack of a smile started on her face. A mighty clash cracked in a majestic bouquet of sparks from the wall plating and throughout the house the power died instantly.
“Oh, Jesus Christ! No! Oh my God, no!” Healy heard Lydia scream. She was hysterical, going off on a surge of curses as she frantically flicked switches in the dark. “Healy! Do something! Get the circuits running!”
“On it, Madam!” Healy cried as he scuttled for the circuit board.
“What do I do, Lydia?” Sam shouted.
“Just keep filming,” she said with an uncontrolled quiver in her voice.
With a jolt the electricity came on, but what they could not hear sealed Purdue’s fate. Outside a massive bolt of lightning struck the house, utilizing the reinforced walls to conduct the overloaded current. Its force intensified not only the marked fields but also overloaded the sonic aspect. Healy covered Lydia with his body while Sam fell backward to the floor as the chamber glowed with fire, but as soon as they beheld it, space swallowed it up.
“The fire disappeared into nothing!” Sam screamed, recalling Tägtgren’s story vividly.
Panting and terrified Sam and Healy stood helplessly waiting for the chamber to cool down. They had no idea if Purdue was alive. Behind them in the stench of fire and smoke Lydia smiled with relieved satisfaction.
“Sam,” she said calmly, “tell me you captured that on film.”
Chapter 13
Nina Gould was home for the first time in months. Her restored home in Oban, Scotland, needed a serious cleaning. Thanks to the superstitious folk of her home town, whereto she had returned two years before with the purchase of said house, few cleaning ladies agreed to keep up the place while she was away. Once or twice a month the forty one year old history lecturer and advisor would fork out some extra dough to bring a cleaning service in from Edinburgh. She also used to hire McDusty Domestics from Argylle when she lived in Ediburgh, because she was pedantic about service. This was why she figured they would do nicely for the old property in Oban she almost lost two years ago, hardly two days after she had purchased it.
Yet another clumsy experiment, but then courtesy of another academic, was the reason for the near destruction of her house and it took her months to persuade the town council not to demolish her home. It was after all a historical landmark, even though it had been the focus of much superstition and old fashioned witch hunting since she was a child from another part of town.
“Mrs. Manning, I will pay you double if you and the girls could come tomorrow,” Nina said, pacing around barefoot in her jeans. “You know that the house has been quiet since we had the renovators over, so what is the problem?”
Clearly the manager of the cleaning service gave Nina an uphill battle, unwilling to abandon the old reputation of the house. Nina reached for her pack of Marlboros and put the phone on speaker so that she could light one before she lost her temper.
‘Dr. Gould, I appreciate your attempts to fix that place, but we simply do not want to come in there. And that is our prerogative, don’t you think?’ the woman’s mature voice explained in a Scots-Gaelic drawl that irritated Nina beyond reason.
“Well, then, can you refer me to someone? Someone who is not going to charge me too much,” Nina muttered around the fag between her lips, sucking on it for just a morsel of relief from the frustration. “My house is too big for me alone to clean.”
‘I’ll see what I can do, dear. Will pass around your number, alright? I’m so sorry,’ Mrs. Manning lamented.
“Aye, I’m sure you’re real fucking sorry,” Nina growled after the call disconnected from the other side, surrounding her head with glorious billows of tobacco and tar. “Fucking cowards. Chicken shit bitches,” she kept cussing by herself as she went to the kitchen for some wine. Nina caught a glimpse of the trapdoor that peeked out slightly from under the large woven mat. It gave her the chills, the incidents of that day still reminiscent in her recollection, that day that was the genesis of her friend’s eventual demise at the hand of the Order of the Black Sun. She used the ball of her foot to push the mat over the trapdoor, hoping that keeping it from her sight would alleviate her from past nightmares.
Other than the trapdoor in the kitchen and the attic’s hollowed wall, her house was far from sinister to her. As a matter of fact Nina was quite surprised at how harmoniously she lived here, without incident, no ghosts or strange phenomena as dictated by the house’s reputation. Sure, those rumors were once true, but after the big happening in the basement all those months before things changed completely. Purdue helped her fund the renovations, alterations and repairs so that Nina would have a lot to show the town council in defense against their decisions to demolish the place.
Downstairs the wicked well was filled and covered, but she never went down there unless absolutely necessary. As she poured her wine it tainted her thoughts and memories just a little.
‘Imagine if something pushed up through that well, Nina. Imagine if they did a half assed job and the cement is cracking as we speak,’ her inner voice, one which obviously belonged to a sadist, presented her with impossible possibilities. Nina took a big swig of the wine to put to sleep her rising gloom. Cleaning. Cleaning services. Stubborn old Scottish wenches and cleaning; that was what she would think of. Profusely, at that.
The phone rang suddenly and Nina uttered a little yelp, spilling some of her drink in startled awkwardness.
“Jesus, Mrs. Manning!” she gasped. She grabbed the phone and answered, “Please tell me you got me someone to clean out my attic.”
A male voice replied, “Is that a metaphor? I am sure a beautiful woman such as yourself would have no problem finding a cleaner or two.”
“Fuck you, Sam,” Nina smiled.
“That is what I implied, yes,” he retorted. “You do catch on quickly.”
Nina shook her head, chuckling at her old boyfriend’s wit. “How have you been? Heard you were
covering the CERN incident,” she said.
“Well, this is why I am calling, actually. I was wondering if you would care to join me for a while,” Sam said, suddenly sounding a bit unsure of himself.
“In Geneva?” she asked, sitting down at the kitchen table.
“Actually, in Lyon. In France. I’m in France for the next…um, indefinitely,” he told Nina. She could hear that something was amiss.
“What are you doing there?” she asked, sipping the remaining wine she had no spilled.
“I was helping Purdue…” he started.
“Wait, wait, wait!” she cut him short. “You and Purdue? Again? Sam, you have to stop calling me with ‘you and Purdue’ matters. I am tired of almost dying.”
“This is different,” Sam replied, not once denying that she had every right to decline on her grounds.
“How is it in any way different, Sam? If Purdue is involved it is dangerous. If you are involved it is worth exposing. Those two factors pretty much narrows it down to one thing – my life will be in danger!” she moaned, looking for more wine.
Sam knew she was right and with her feisty nature she would have no reservation to hanging up on him. It was no use to convince her that this case was different from the typical excursion they usually ended up on, so he went with humor.
“At least you’ll be in great company again.”
“Sam.”
“This is really something unique, Nina. It is somewhat unbelievable, actually. We really need you for this, otherwise we might never see Purdue again,” he explained hesitantly. He did not want to say that, but he knew Purdue being in peril would impress upon Nina the seriousness of the matter. He was correct in his assumption.
“Excuse me? Where is Purdue?” she asked, frowning over the revelation and the lack of wine in her alcohol cabinet.
Sam resisted the temptation to refer to ‘where’ as ‘when’ again and promptly answered, “We don’t know. We have some idea, but we will need an expert on German history to help us find him.”
He was content with the formulation of that statement. It sounded sane enough to make her come without sounding too trivial for her to decline. Sam waited on the other side of the line. Nina could hear the almost inaudible buzz of the active call.
She had to concede that getting a cleaning service for her house this week was futile anyway and that she could do with a bit of company away from the sneers and scowls of Oban’s small minded. “Alright. Where are you in Lyon? And Sam, if anyone tries to kill me we never sleep together again.”
“Ouch!” he replied.
“I am really done with these treasure hunts,” she reiterated.
“I know, love. And I promise you one hundred percent that this is not a treasure hunt in any form,” he assured her. “It’s a hunt for Purdue.”
Chapter 14
Penny Richards held the handset against her ear, but she said nothing for a long while. Her eyes stared ahead of her, past her desk and her visitor chairs into the black throat of the fireplace on the other side of her office at the Institute.
“Miss Richards,” the voice on the phone pressed. “Did you hear what I said?”
“How did it happen?” she asked slowly.
“His Volvo was obliterated by a runaway 16 wheeler on a back road off the highway between CERN and his resident town of Meyrin. The truck driver told the police that his brakes failed him after he was directed onto the particular road by traffic officers. They stood at a detour sign at the junction of the opposite direction from which Albert was coming,” the man on the phone said.
“Thank you so much for letting me know, Martin. Did he work with you on the CMS too?” Penny asked, playing the naïve card.
“No, my dear. I tried to get him to work with us after I got his resume from you, but they delegated his skills to the Alice team. I suppose they needed more expertise than us,” he teased.
Penny knew there was an endearing competition between the scientists and engineers of the two detectors since the super Collider’s inception. She had contacted Martin Westdijk when the threats started against the Institute, using the premise that Albert Tägtgren was her brother-in-law. With subterfuge she convinced Westdijk and his colleagues that Albert would be the right acquisition for their cause, to facilitate his infiltration of the laboratory effectively.
“My husband is going to take this very hard,” she sighed, sounding positively morose.
“Again, my dear Penny, my sincerest condolences. I told him that very morning to wait for me so that we could have dinner, but he chose to leave in the middle of the day,” the old professor complained. “Agh, had he only stayed till I got off he would never have taken that bloody road.”
“Oh, Martin, we shouldn’t bemoan things we cannot change, especially things that are not our fault,” Penny consoled the old man she met years ago when he worked with her husband on a project in the Netherlands. She fondly recollected their late nights in the recreational room, playing billiards and drinking. Not one for particle physics she would just sit and listen to their playful arguments about quantum gravity and Einstein’s unified field theory. It was fascinating how much they knew, eventually sounding like inebriated gods challenging the science of Creation. But after the end of the project their roads just drifted apart over the years to come; that was, until Penny needed a favor from Professor Westdijk to get Albert into CERN. If he only knew what the Swedish engineer was really doing there.
“Well, Martin, thank you again for giving me the real story. I don’t trust the media or the police with the truth, as you know,” she said, lighting one of her long, slender cigarettes.
“You are welcome. I know. Your family deserved to hear it from a friend, not some bloody investigator or reporter. I bid you adieu, my dear Penny. We’ll speak soon once I have some time off to catch up, yes?” Professor Westdijk said.
“That’d be lovely, Martin. My love to Gerda.”
Penny sat bewildered, resting her chin on folded hands as she leaned on her elbows. It was too uncanny that her spy ended up dead right after he spoke to the media, after he spoke to Sam Cleave. Her heart raced with rage. Sam Cleave had betrayed her trust. It was not the first time he was associated with questionable organizations. Reputedly he was a member of the Brigade Apostate, a clandestine order of scientists, soldiers, historians and moguls – in fact, influential men and women the highest of their respective disciplines and vocation. She did not know what they stood for, really, but any club that recruits so many brilliant people in so wide a spectrum globally was to be wary of, she thought.
Penny picked up the phone. “Caitlin, please get Foster to come and see me. Thank you.”
Christian Foster was a free agent – quite literally. He worked for the Cornwall Institute on many occasions before but respectfully declined becoming a permanent fixture in their security arena. He worked by contract only and strictly adhered to specific rules. Sometimes he would even take on assassination jobs, but they left a bad taste in his moral mouth. Christian was just what his name implied. His God-fearing ways made him very trustworthy, but for those organizations who needed a little chilli with their serving of punishment, he was not the best chef. He loathed unnecessary violence.
“Christian, so good of you to come,” Penny nodded as the man she summoned knocked on the open door of her office.
“Good afternoon, Miss Richards. How are you?” he smiled.
“I’m not too well, I’m afraid. That is why I need to discuss something with you,” she said cordially. “Please, sit.”
“That is the downside of my reputation, regrettably,” he replied as he sat down opposite her at her desk.
“What is that?” she asked, gesturing to her assistant outside the doorway.
“My name only comes up when something unpleasant is afoot,” he lamented. “It would have been nice to be called to rescue someone for a change.”
Penny looked at the very attractive Nordic looking man. He was remarkable on so
many levels, even more by his dress sense. “Well, Christian, I never find it unpleasant to be paid a visit by you, if that is any consolation,” she flirted lightly.
“It is quite the reprieve for me, yes, for what I am usually summoned for,” he chuckled. “What is on your mind, Miss Richards?”
Penny sighed. She took the time to look at his exceptionally tall and powerful frame, clothed in all black. Around his neck hung a diamond Christian cross, the crusts of the pristine gem embedded in silver or steel, the difference of which was indiscernible to Penny’s untrained eye. Nevertheless it was beautiful against the black background of his Oriental shirt.
“We hired a journalist to do a harmless interview for us. Now the man he interviewed has perished under suspicious circumstances and the journalist has disappeared. But he vanished after being seen on a security monitor trespassing in a section of CERN he had no permission for, Christian,” she informed him, feeling uncomfortable under his narrow grey eyes. “He was seen recording footage of something rather valuable to this institute, something that needed to remain undiscovered,” she explained.
Christian’s gaze tore from Penny. He looked up at the ceiling, mulling the information over. Christian Foster’s ash blond hair fell to his chest, looking even lighter against his dark clothing. Penny admired his angelic semblance.
‘If he were an angel, I bet he’d be Michael,’ she thought, just before his face sank back to lock eyes with her.
“Do you have a credit card trail, something to steer me to a point of origin from where I might track him? I doubt the nuclear laboratory in Switzerland would have any trace of him that they would be willing to share with me?” he asked Penny.
“Actually, Christian, that was precisely the route I was going to suggest you employ to start you on your way. Would that be too difficult for you?” she asked innocently, masking her reverse psychology with a tone of accommodation.