Chasing The Dawn (Luke Temple - Book 2) (Luke Temple Series)

by James Flynn

  15.

  The gate slid shut with a metallic grinding that pierced the quiet street. Brun took a moment to absorb the crisp night air; the cold clung to his face. Teramo stretched out below, the lights a twinkling mass of life.

  The lights were on in the house and his shadow followed behind as he approached the front door.

  “Professor? Well I’ll be damned, it is you. What an honour, it has been such a long time.”

  Brun swung around, shocked by the unfamiliar voice. Striding toward him was the outline of a man. “How are you, dear Professor?” Before Brun could focus, Luke was upon him, wearing a beaming smile. Without dropping the smile Luke lowered his voice and spoke in perfect German.

  “Professor, do not panic and keep calm. I want to ask you a few questions, nothing more. We are going to go inside; I am not here to hurt you or your wife, only to talk.”

  Luke pawed his waistband without lifting up his jacket, and Brun understood; his eyes lingered on the shape of the pistol. He stared for a moment into Luke’s eyes, then turned his head to face the front door. He hesitated as he heard his wife inside.

  “Just to talk, nothing more,” Luke reassured him. “We will go inside and say I am a colleague and I am here to talk business, then we will find somewhere private.”

  Brun took his keys out and unlocked the door, the warmth from inside poured out, accompanied by a sweet pungent aroma. He stepped inside and Luke followed.

  The house was a simple design; the downstairs was open plan, each room connected to the next with only archways separating them. The whole place was a mismatch of styles, old oil paintings were crammed onto the small wall space, depicting various landscape views. Alongside the pictures were modern white tables adorned with plastic flowers and various framed photos. It occurred to Luke that intelligence and taste did not go hand in hand.

  Brun led them round to the left and they passed through the living room. In the far corner were two leather chairs facing a huge flat-screen television. Luke noted an array of photographs on one shelf, each one a different shot of Brun and Vittorio, all smiles and closeness. Luke lingered on Vittorio’s face, dark-skinned with intense dark eyes; he looked younger than his years – a vitality oozed from each picture.

  Brun didn’t say a word; he walked through the living area and turned into the kitchen at the rear of the house. Luke noted two incense candles burning under the large bay window. Brun’s wife was busying herself in a cupboard. “Dinner is on the side, nothing special I’m afraid, just some bits I had to use up.”

  Luke noted her German words held a thick Austrian accent. As she turned she let out a friendly yelp as she saw her husband was not alone. Switching to a harsh English she exclaimed: “Oh, it would appear you are not alone, my dear, my apologies.” She flashed Luke a smile.

  Brun did not talk, an awkward silence hung in the air. Luke quickly stepped in and greeted her in German and introduced himself as Robert Reid. Shocked that he spoke German, she introduced herself as Pearl. “I’m afraid I only cooked for two, Roland did not inform me that we were going to be having guests.” She gave her husband a knowing look.

  Brun finally spoke. “It was all very impromptu, Robert and I were discussing something and wanted to carry it on in comfier surroundings, probably best we carry it on in the outhouse. Weren’t you going out tonight?”

  “No … I never had plans.”

  Luke could feel Brun trying to indicate to his wife, pleading with his eyes but she did not register any danger.

  “Forgive my husband, Robert, he has a rather childish urge to show everyone who passes through the door his glorified shed.” She switched to a mock-whisper. “I feel it is a man thing I shall never understand.”

  Luke smiled.

  “Right, ok then, I suppose I shall pop this back in to warm.” She flipped open the oven and slid one of the plates inside. “Nice to meet you Robert.” She walked out of the kitchen.

  Brun didn’t say a word. He moved over towards a small drawer; before he could open it Luke gave a whistle and Brun froze.

  “I need the key,” Brun said in a hushed whisper.

  Luke moved over to the drawer and motioned for Brun to step back. When he was at a safe distance Luke opened the drawer. The only things inside were four boxes of strike anywhere matches and a large bunch of keys. Luke picked them up and tossed them at Brun.

  “Slowly.”

  Brun’s hands were shaking as he began unlocking the back door. He led Luke out into the garden, and two bright searchlights on the back of the property exploded into life. The garden was not well kept, the grass was dead or dying and no plants were to be seen.

  Brun led them over to a large wooden structure stuck at the back of the garden. He unlocked a solid-looking padlock and opened the wooden door. As he stepped inside he flicked a switch and a bright white neon strip light flickered and flashed into life. Luke closed the door and took in his surroundings. The shed was large enough for five people to interact comfortably; three wooden chairs sat facing each other, a series of shelves housed numerous small machine-like parts such as large interlinked cogs and glass lenses of all shapes and sizes. The air smelt of motor oil and in the centre of the space stood a wooden workbench with a solid lead top. It all made for a cramped space, but one that obviously got a lot of use.

  “Sit.” Luke gestured to one of the chairs.

  Brun took a seat and sat forward, looking at the floor. Luke remained standing.

  Brun leaned back and took off his glasses, rubbing behind his ears in a circular motion. Then he spoke in English. “I can assure you Robert the gun really isn’t necessary.”

  ‘Not your decision.’ Luke looked around the oversized shed. Pinned to the ceiling was a map of star constellations. They were not the basic ones that were taught in school, these were strange shapes with diagrams and numbers written all over them “Quite a space you have here.”

  Brun nodded. “I suppose we all have our own temples.”

  “A religious man?” Luke asked

  “Define religion?” Brun stared, not blinking. He was wringing his hands, trying to interact in a calm manner. “Forgive my bluntness but let’s get on with talking about Ernesto.”

  Luke kept his eyes locked on Brun. “Who else has been asking questions?”

  “Not the types that show up on your doorstep at night and threaten you with a gun.”

  “What were the officers’ names?” Luke didn’t want to engage immediately about Vittorio, he wanted to tread a less obvious path.

  “Questions, questions, questions. You live your life letting questions drive you forward and suddenly they become the very thing that haunts you … ironic, don’t you think?” Brun spoke to the floor.

  “Names? What officers have been asking questions?” Luke persisted.

  “Does it really matter? You are here to know about Professor Vittorio’s …”

  Luke kicked Brun backwards off the chair, he needed to shock him, intimidate him, and brutality worked fast. Brun rolled onto his side and gently stood back up, trying to regain composure. He straightened the seat and Luke motioned for him to re-take it.

  “Names?” Luke growled.

  Brun rubbed behind his ears. “There were a number of provincial officers that were swarming round when we first reported Ernesto missing.”

  Brun didn’t know what to do with his hands; slowly he held them up in a yielding gesture, showing Luke there was no threat, he then turned and opened a metal case in the corner, it was a mini fridge and inside were several bottles of Tannen Zapfle. He lifted two out and offered one to Luke, who shook his head. Brun shut the fridge and re-took his seat. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I do, she doesn’t like me drinking anymore, claims at my age health is all-important, so I keep a stash in here.” Brun’s light tone was paper-thin. He unwrapped the gold foil from around the cap, opened the colourful bottle and took a big swig.

  Luke said nothing as Brun drank; he waited for the first swigs to settle. �
��Names?”

  “The man who has now taken over the investigation is Carabinieri Beltrano, and he has a colleague … Officer Delvechi.”

  Luke’s mind replayed the image of the two men he had seen at the Gran Sasso Institute’s car park; the older one would be Beltrano.

  “What sort of questions have they been asking?”

  Brun thought a moment before answering. “Do you mean general or specific?”

  “I mean leading or non-leading?”

  Brun looked quizzical.

  “For example, did they give you information then look for a confirmation? Such as ‘I know two men were seen with Professor Vittorio, who were they?’ Or did they just ask plain questions like, ‘What was the last thing you remember?’”

  “The latter,” Brun replied.

  Luke figured either Beltrano didn’t know anything or, more likely, he was a professional who didn’t want to give anything away. “And were you honest with him?”

  Brun took another swig of lager. “Yes.”

  Luke paused a moment. “You were completely honest with him?’

  “Why would I lie?” Brun shrugged.

  “As you said, Professor, he is not the type to show up on your doorstep at night and threaten you with a gun.”

  Brun gave a soft nod. “I didn’t withhold anything from him, I do not know where Ernesto has gone or who may have been involved.” Brun’s voice cracked.

  Luke had seen enough people under extreme stress. He knew how to pick his way through normal and abnormal behaviour. Brun so far was a strange one, there was obvious fear, but under the circumstances Luke would expect anyone to be scared – a man shows up at the door unannounced with a gun within a few days of a close colleague going missing. Yet Brun did not seem inquisitive at all. Luke would have expected many questions pushed out by the fear and anxiety … yet Brun had none.

  “What did Professor Vittorio tend to wear every day?” Luke purposefully changed gear.

  Brun was caught off-guard; he stumbled for a second. “What did he wear? Erm … well … nothing out of the ordinary. He liked to wear smart shoes, and various combinations of shirts and jumpers.”

  “Where did he come from originally?”

  Again Brun shifted awkwardly, not understanding the line of questioning. “Well he is Italian … I assume, I mean, we never spoke about it.”

  “You were close, weren’t you? You and Vittorio worked together for many years?”

  Brun took a big swig of beer. He choked as the liquid lodged in his throat, his face reddened. “Yes … yes we were.” Emotion was bubbling up.

  “This must all be very hard …”

  Brun didn’t respond.

  “Can you think of anyone who would want to harm Professor Vittorio?”

  Brun seemingly pondered, then shook his head. “No.”

  “And any reason for him to just up and leave?”

  Brun shook his head. “No.”

  A distance had come over the professor. It was not a melancholy daydream, but he seemed to have disappeared into his head, his hands were playing incessantly with the bottle, tearing little shreds of coloured paper away.

  “I don’t know where he is, I haven’t heard from him … who are you? Why are you here?”

  Luke weighed up the professor, he was tired and looked frayed. Is it just an emotional response to losing a friend?

  “Where did Vittorio live, Professor?”

  Brun became agitated. “Somewhere in L’Aquila, what does this have to do with anything? Who are you?”

  “Did he have a wife, children, a girlfriend, a boyfriend?”

  Brun shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know … no, I don’t think so, I am not sure. He never spoke of them if he did.” Brun was struggling.

  “When was the last time you saw Vittorio?”

  Then, in a tiny move of the pupil, Luke saw Brun flick his eyes up to the left, just for a moment, then he responded. “I saw him last Tuesday, which is the last time anyone seems to have seen him. Everything seemed normal, an uneventful day revising some data analysis. We had worked late, until 11 p.m. I said goodbye to him at the laboratory and we went our separate ways … that is the last time I saw him.”

  Luke rested against the counter. He could sense Brun was beginning to harden. “Professor, tell me about the work you and Vittorio were doing together.”

  Brun took another hit of lager. “You want me to talk about years’ worth of research in one evening?”

  “No, I want the condensed version. It seems to me, Professor, you are not so shocked that a man has shown up here with a gun demanding to talk to you, which leads me to believe that the work you have been doing would have been a cause for Ernesto Vittorio to disappear in a suspicious manner … talk.”

  Brun said nothing for a long time, he focused only on the lager bottle, frozen in thought, eventually he spoke. “You asked me if I was a religious man, and I suppose the answer must be yes. But I worship God in the purest form, I do not worship God as an entity with any physical representation. I worship the very essence of all Gods and all religions and that is the giving and taking of life.” Brun rested back in the chair, his eyes were unfocused. “Ancient civilisations used to look at the giver of life and drop to their knees. That giver of life was the sun, and it provided two important outputs that allowed it to be all-powerful: one was heat, the other … light. I have spent my life studying or worshipping the sun.”

  The semi-preacher rhetoric was a personal monologue; he continued: “But it is the detail, the minutiae of what makes up those outputs …” he let out a long breath. “If I were to ask you what the fastest thing known to man was what would your answer be?”

  Luke raised his eyebrows. “I would say the speed of light.”

  Brun nodded. “Exactly, as would most people on the planet, it is what we are all taught from a very young age, two plus two is four, the sky is blue and nothing can go faster than the speed of light.”

  Luke’s memory jumped back to a time before he had transformed into a new being. Alex Rowland was sat in a science class in his teens being taught about Einstein’s theory of relativity. “I assume you are talking about E = MC2?”

  ‘Very good, Mr Reid, that is exactly it. Where E is energy, M is mass and C is the speed of light in a vacuum. I shall not give you a science lesson but that formula always stated that nothing with a mass can move faster than the speed of light.”

  “How does this relate to Vittorio?”

  “Because it relates to all of us.” Brun had drifted. He seemed to wake gently from his reverie and saw Luke staring. “Put simply, Einstein was wrong, and Vittorio proved it.”

  Luke vaguely remembered reading something a few weeks ago in a newspaper. “I see, so you found something that does move faster.”

  Brun shook his head. “You say that so flippantly, such a discovery changes everything as we know it, across the whole universe and our understanding of our limitations within it.”

  “I remember reading something about it a few weeks ago …”

  “I fear you are indicative of the mass of human society, not fully grasping the concept. Six years ago Vittorio and I discovered ghostly sub-atomic particles called neutrinos that we clocked arriving at our facility billionths of a second faster than light. This was not a one-off, this happened over 15,000 times.”

  Luke sat and processed the information. “A neutrino?”

  “Yes … a most beautiful particle. It streams through the earth in abundance, multi-trillions. We had once believed it to be a massless particle as it can pass through solid matter … but that is not the case … this is why it is quite a baffling and troubling discovery for the scientific community.”

  Luke did not care about the details, something else had pricked him. “Six years ago? I read an article only a few weeks ago claiming this was a new discovery.” Luke wished he had read the article in full.

  Brun gave a wry smile. “Surely someone in your line of work can ap
preciate that releasing information is often a far more strategic process than just shouting loudly and instantly.” Brun’s eyes began to lose focus, he caught Luke’s eye. “I’m sorry …”

  “Why the apology?”

  A door that had opened within the professor seemed to have now shut tight. “There is nothing more to say, Mr Reid.”

  “Who was the girl? The girl who came to visit you at the lab today, you dropped her off before coming here.”

  Brun was thrown, realising he had been followed. “Er ... her name is Chung Su, she is a physicist from North Korea.”

  Luke gave a look, and Brun read his mind. “She is a quite brilliant scientist, we do not all see the negative in a culture.”

  “What is she here for?”

  Brun hesitated and Luke could tell he was holding back; he pawed the Sig Sauer.

  Brun spoke quietly. “She is here for a scientific convention that is hosted every year by us and CERN, it is an invite-only event for the top scientists in their field from across the world, a celebration of sublime minds. For the past ten years it has been in conjunction with select charities … this year because of Vittorio’s discovery it was being held here … he was due to be the keynote speaker ... so now it has fallen to me.” Brun fell into deep thought.

  Luke’s mind worked fast, it reeled back to Davison’s phone call the previous night. In two evenings’ time we feel it would be best for you to start looking to the stars a bit more, charity is something that you will need to look at, we don’t have all the answers but we have the ticket on this one.

  “Where is the event taking place?” Luke asked sharply.

  Brun didn’t answer.

  “Where?” Luke bellowed.

  “The Observatory … there is a hall that is under the ground just near the Teramo Observatory, it is only known to a handful of top people.” Brun was barely audible.