by James Flynn
68.
The foyer door crashed open and Delvechi made his way over to the reception desk.
“Good evening, I am Carabinieri Delvechi. I spoke with …”
The stout receptionist shushed Delvechi and spoke in a whisper. “I think we should be discreet. The lady was down here earlier and I saw the man return about thirty minutes ago.”
“I need to know what room they are in,” Delvechi demanded.
“Of course, of course, come this way.” He led Vittorio over to the desk.
Delvechi leant in to the receptionist, catching a glimpse of the man’s yellow front teeth. “How many exits do they have?”
“That door,” he pointed toward the main entrance. “We lock all other exits and entrances in winter …” The receptionist suddenly realised it was illegal to lock the exits and blushed.
Delvechi hadn’t even registered it. “Good, I don’t want them disturbed …”
“What? But sir, they are dangerous. We cannot have them here, we …”
Delvechi raised a giant paw and the receptionist fell silent. “I do not want them disturbed. I will be outside, parked up watching the exit, so they cannot go anywhere. You are in no danger here. However, if you want me to burst in and start World War III then I can do that …”
“No, that’s fine, perhaps waiting until they leave is for the best.”
“I think so too …” Delvechi responded with a hint of sarcasm. “If they come out you are not to treat them any differently at all, ok?”
The receptionist nodded; sweat was gathering on his brow.
“Ok, I will be outside.”
With that, Delvechi turned on his heels and marched outside. He moved across the road and took up a seat in his Alfa. He needed to talk to the pair, but approaching them would be tricky. They would be on edge and it was certain after the devastation they had left across Teramo the pair wouldn’t come quietly. I am not here to hurt them, if only they knew. He pressed a number on his phone. This is Chief Officer Beltrano, I cannot take your call at this moment, but please leave me a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can, or if your call is an emergency dial …
Delvechi sighed, no longer surprised, and hunkered down in his cold car, preparing himself for the wait.
69.
Chung Su was sat on the bed with the phone in her hands.
“Did I get anything?” Luke asked.
Chung Su didn’t answer; she sat glued to the screen, her head shaking from side to side as she muttered something in Korean.
“What is it?” Luke asked again. Chung Su finally looked in his direction, staring straight through him. After a moment of deep thought she shot across the room and into the bathroom. Luke followed.
The bathroom still contained residual steam, creating a damp, close air. Chung Su was stood in front of the sink, phone in one hand, with the index finger of her other hand pressed against the fogged-up mirror. Her head began flicking rapidly between the image on the phone and the glass. Her finger started to draw. Luke stood silently behind her, observing but not wanting to disturb her trance-like state. It was like watching a Victorian medium being compelled by spirits. With every jerk of her finger a new line was drawn, each one precise and measured. The muttering continued, the endless head loop of phone to mirror, phone to mirror.
After a short time, Luke started to recognise the shape being drawn, it was a replica of the blueprint he had found at Vittorio’s. As he looked closer he noticed that in fact the image taking shape on the mirror was not an exact replica. The simple outline was the same, but Chung Su had added some extra details, extensions running off in various directions and random numbers anchored to lines.
She turned to Luke and her eyes now sparkled. “Where did you find this blueprint?” She held up the phone.
“It was hidden away under a desk at Vittorio’s. Out of sight.”
“Was there anything else with it?”
“No, just this, why?”
Chung Su turned back to the mirror. “This is not the only design … there must be others.”
Luke took a step closer. “Why, what is it?”
“It can’t be …” Her voice had lowered to a whisper.
“Chung Su, you need to be clear about this. What am I looking at?”
Chung Su looked into his eyes. “It looks like … no it is the blueprint for a nuclear detonation site.”
A nuclear detonation site? He repeated the words to Chung Su.
“Yes, but not an ordinary construction. The numbers and verticals are different, they don’t work.” She passed a hand over the mirror. “I cannot get the numbers to add up. This circle here … see it?”
Luke nodded.
“That is where the nuclear detonation will take place, but some of these …” she went quiet. “It is covered by something …”
“Covered by something?”
“Yes … a liquid … maybe water. That may explain the number oddities.” She was talking to herself. “And look …” She snapped round. “The numbers don’t make sense. You see these two lines?” She pointed at the two lines on the mirror running horizontally from the left of the circle. “I have drawn them as lines, but they aren’t … they are phantom lines.”
Luke raised his eyebrows. Alex Rowland’s GCSE physics was pathetically useless.
Chung Su continued, “This line is not what you would call a physical wall, but it is a phantom wall … actually, it is more like two focal points … created by two magnetic lenses …”
“Focusing what?” Luke asked.
Chung Su took a moment, as if still working it out for herself. “I have seen this kind of set-up before … I have created a set-up like this before … sort of. I think it’s designed to focus proton beams … specifically particles called pions and kaons.”
Luke kept focused on what was being said, but he was struggling.
“But it doesn’t make sense … there is no barrier. And there is another magnetic line here.” She pointed at a single line running from the heart of the drawing.
“Listen, I need to be able to understand this, Chung Su. Slow down. You are going to have to talk to me as if I am stupid.”
Chung Su nodded and then headed back into the bedroom. Luke followed.
“Ok, sit down.” Chung Su guided Luke to the edge of the bed. “Do you know how CERN fires the neutrino particles through the rock to the Gran Sasso Laboratory?”
Luke shook his head.
“At CERN they have an intricate and giant machine called the Super Proton Synchrotron. It is seven kilometres in circumference. In simple terms, it produces and fires beams of protons into what is called a graphite target. From this impact a new range of particles appear called pions and kaons, which are fed into a system of two magnetic lenses that focus the beams through the earth toward Gran Sasso. The idea being that the rock beyond stops all particles except neutrinos …”
“The rock?”
“Yes, neutrinos can travel through solid rock whereas other particles can’t. Then it was OPERA’s role to measure the point of impact at the facility to gauge the speed of the particle.”
Luke nodded.
“This design here has scarily similar mechanisms. It has the magnetic lenses, but no graphite target. It doesn’t make sense … there is more that we can’t see. But everything points to this being a nuclear detonation site. I have seen them and worked on them.” She gingerly caught Luke’s eye. “I do not apologise for my country trying to secure the same protection that you have.”
Luke jumped in. “Help me piece the puzzle together. The experiment that Brun and Vittorio were working on at OPERA was to test the speed of neutrinos, which they did …”
Chung Su nodded.
“Then, according to Brun’s claims, they took this further and actually took this … particle … and made it so it can now interact … meaning it can now be used.”
“Well, on a very, very basic level, yes. We know now that neutrinos do have ma
ss; they are subject to laws of time. Neutrinos come in what we scientists call three different flavours, muon, tau and electron. Some years ago it was proven that these neutrinos can oscillate between types.”
“You mean they can swap around?” Luke asked.
“Sort of. They actually change into each other, meaning a muon can become an electron, a tau can become a muon and so on. This is very important. They do this over time, and as stated by Albert Einstein, if something does not have mass it travels at the speed of light, which in turn renders time a non-entity.’
Luke let out a sigh, his confusion was growing.
“So the fact that these particles alter over time must mean they have a concept of time …”
“They have to have a mass?” Luke ventured.
“Exactly!” Chung Su smiled like a teacher at a slow pupil.
“But Brun said they had clocked the particle moving faster than the speed of light?”
Chung Su frowned. “I know. This is why it changes everything. This is why my country has put so much into replicating the experiment. It alters the laws of physics as we know them. Vittorio had already moved past this … into harnessing the neutrino in some way.” It still pained her that she could not understand how.
Luke’s mind went back to what Brun had said at his house. There are a hundred billion neutrinos passing through your hand every second. “So this blueprint we have here is for what? What would you do with a nuclear detonation site and the other instruments?” Luke rested his head in his hands, trying to process the information.
“I cannot be completely certain …” Chung Su’s voice wobbled.
“But if you had to guess?”
“This is how Vittorio was processing neutrinos for practical use …” The words sounded absurd.
Luke pressed his eyes shut. “Walk me through it …”
“I don’t know …” Chung Su could feel the frustration building. She was a scientist and by nature competitive – her environment pushed her to be – but she couldn’t find the answers.
“Go through it, step by step.” Luke became stern.
“Well, neutrinos are the product of a certain type of radioactive decay. The kind you find in the sun, nuclear reactors … or nuclear explosions. It is no coincidence, they must be letting off nuclear explosions to produce certain particles. I just don’t know what type of nuclear explosion.”
“Type?” Luke figured nuclear explosions were all the same. They certainly had the same outcome, total devastation.
“Yes, there are two different types of nuclear bomb, fission and fusion.”
A flare went up in Luke’s mind. “Hang on, didn’t Brun mention fission?”
Chung Su had forgotten the professor had mentioned fission. “Yes, he did, you’re right. A nuclear fission bomb is created by firing free-floating neutrons into a radioactive atom, usually uranium-235. This impact then splits the radioactive atom into pieces, including into more neutrons. With more and more free neutrons available, more and more atoms start fissioning. That is where the massive amounts of energy are created, causing the enormous explosions seen in nuclear bombs.” Chung Su knew that the fissioning atoms could double the number of neutrons in a contained environment more than eighty times in one microsecond, causing the device to expand with tremendous force, and also releasing radioactive particles. “But that’s interesting …”
Luke was becoming very uneasy at all the talk of nuclear explosions. “Doesn’t sound interesting to me, just worrying.”
“It’s interesting because nuclear fusion is what happens in the sun, not fission. In the sun it is the fusing of hydrogen atoms.” She tucked her hair behind her ear in deep thought. “Why would they use fission?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Luke was trying to catch up.
“Fission was used in the early atomic bombs, such as the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they were not very efficient. Science soon moved on to testing whether the opposite would work better … fusion. And it did, considerably. It was a far more efficient reaction.”
Luke could sense her mind was working. “Go on … what does it mean?”
Chung Su shook her head. “I can only assume that there must be something in the process of fission …” she furrowed her brow and stared at the phone, “but this is just a piece of the puzzle, the graphite target and the magnetic lenses should not be that close, it’s not the right measuring equipment for what they are trying to achieve. There are bits missing … the equipment I see in this section of the blueprint …” Chung Su stopped mid-sentence, and then disappeared back into the bathroom. Luke followed.
She guided him to the mirror. The lines had started to fade but were still visible. “The magnetic lenses are not being used for newly produced neutrinos, that’s why there is no graphite target. They are being used to capture and focus neutrinos that are being directed there from another area. It would appear almost like reverse engineering.”
“CERN?” Luke asked.
“No, I don’t think so … I think this is linked to the Gran Sasso OPERA experiment. I …” she again stopped, unsure whether to say what she was about to. “I do not think this is based at the Gran Sasso Laboratory …”
Luke stared at the image on the mirror.
Chung Su continued, “The intelligence we were receiving said there was one beam of neutrinos coming in from CERN … this means two things. One: the beam being used for this must be coming from Gran Sasso, redirected to here.” She pointed at the mirror. “Two: if this is in fact what I think it is then the redirection point is a nuclear detonation site … close to Gran Sasso and underground.”
Luke listened intently, attempting to connect the dots.
Chung Su whispered to herself as she looked at the mirror. Where do you fit in? She traced the circular lines with her finger.
“Listen to your instinct, you have an idea, I can feel it. Trust it and tell me what you think,” Luke tried to coax her.
“The transition must lie within the heart of the nuclear reaction. These two magnetic phantom lines are to guide neutrinos towards the experiment not away from it … which means this single phantom magnetic line is to carry something away from the experiment … the liquid … so much occurs at the heart of a nuclear explosion, including decay, electromagnetic force … so much.” Her mind whirled and flashed as the thoughts formed. “There is more to this, sections we don’t have, there must be more than this rough blueprint, this would be early work …”
That made sense to Luke; perhaps Vittorio had kept it as a personal memory, a keepsake on the path to what he had achieved.
Chung Su turned to face Luke. “To test this, to actually get this running underground, a huge explosion must be recorded, and I can’t see that it is possible undetected.”
Luke was replaying things, rotating them and fixing them in place like a metaphorical Rubik’s Cube. There was another laboratory? Was that why there was such little activity around the Gran Sasso Institute? If there was another laboratory then Brun must have known about it. Luke trusted Chung Su’s instinct. He knew that the little voice in someone’s head should be trusted. This was her area of expertise.
A huge explosion. Luke kept replaying Chung Su’s words. Something in them was fighting to be understood. He walked into the bedroom and went over to the window, lifting up the blind. The night was calm, a streetlight let out an orange glow. Peering through his own reflection he could just make out the opaque silhouette of the Gran Sasso mountain range looming in the distance … then it hit him.
“A huge explosion?” he called back into the bathroom.
Chung Su emerged. “Yes, it would have to be a substantial nuclear force, not the largest but at least two kilotons. There is no way such a thing could go unreported.”
Luke walked slowly up to her. “Could such a thing be misinterpreted as an earthquake?”
Chung Su’s brow furrowed. She wasn’t sure where the comment had come from. It sounded absurd, but as her
synapses fired she began to see the logic.
“Yes … I suppose so. The seismic activity of an underground nuclear explosion could look very much like an earthquake, especially with the wave-like nature … why?”
“Chung Su, if this set-up was located under L’Aquila would that distance stay in line with your theory on what they were doing?”
After a moment she nodded. “Yes. That is possible … oh my God …” The horror struck her all at once.
Luke sat down; the puzzle was starting to take shape. The L’Aquila earthquake had not been an earthquake at all; it had been an experimental nuclear explosion under the earth. “You can detonate a nuclear explosion underground?”
Chung Su nodded. “Of course, if you have the right calculations. They have been testing underground since the 1950s. Some have gone horribly wrong, but it is a far safer way to test than out in the atmosphere. We looked at it ourselves …” she hesitated, then thought there were more important things at hand than national security. “We examined the possibility but calculated that a kiloton-yield bomb needs to be at least ninety metres underground in order for its explosion to be fully contained. Putting that into context the bomb that was detonated in Nagasaki in 1945 was twenty-two kilotons. Ultimately, we found it too costly to build an underground facility.”
“Cost is not an issue here …” Luke said the words under his breath. “This other potential laboratory must be that deep under the ground?”
“I would have thought deeper, but to be clear this blueprint does not give depth, it is not three-dimensional …”
Luke looked at her.
“The technical areas of the laboratory won’t have to be as deep as the explosion site; it may be CERN, Luke, but they don’t have unlimited resources, and the lower you go with your technical readout equipment, such as computers and other things, the more money you have to put into connections and increasing rock stability.”
“Do you believe this is a real-life creation? Not just a design on a piece of paper?” Luke already felt he knew the answer. It explained so much, but he wanted to hear it from her.