Apocalypse (12 page)

Joaquin surveyed the guests with a serious expression, and then nodded.

‘That, gentlemen, has been my intention all along. I will show you this afternoon, aboard my yacht, the
Event Horizon
. I take it that all of you will be able to make space in your
diaries?’

One of the gathered men, a property developer named Benjamin Tyler, stood up from the group.

‘No, I won’t,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t care what you’ve got on these guys, there’s nothing for me to fear from you, Joaquin. I haven’t slept with
anyone other than my wife, I haven’t cheated anybody, lied to people or swindled anyone out of money. So what the hell am I doing here?’

Joaquin sighed and his face fell as he looked at Tyler.

‘You’re not here because you’ve muddied your reputation, Benjamin. You’re here because you have only months to live, and I’m hoping that I can help you.’
Tyler’s anger dissipated as he stared at Joaquin, who spoke softly. ‘I will show you at the yacht. Be there at three o’clock, please.’

June 28, 10:42

‘What do you mean the code
is
the names?’

Lopez moved to stand beside Ethan and looked at the list.

‘They’re all recorded as surnames,’ Ethan said, ‘except these two.’

He flipped between the pages and pointed to two of the names.

‘Nancy . . . and William,’ Lopez read.

Ryker peered over the top of the diary, then grabbed his cellphone and began typing in the phone number alongside the name Nancy.

‘Let’s see who’s home,’ he suggested, and held his cell to his ear.

After a few moments he lowered the phone again and shook his head.

‘Number doesn’t exist,’ he said.

‘Try the other one,’ Ethan said, gesturing to the name William and reading the number out. Moments later, Ryker shook his head again.

Ethan thought for a moment. Charles Purcell had gone to great lengths to leave codes behind at his apartment, but then had left a blatant message for Ethan scrawled in big letters across his
wall. As Lopez had said, it seemed as though he were both leaving a trail for Ethan and at the same time attempting to conceal what his intentions were from other as-yet-unnamed individuals,
presumably those who he said intended to murder him.

‘You guys got a notepad?’ he asked Ryker, who handed him a pad and a pen.

Ethan wrote down the two numbers and stared at them for a few moments.

‘Those codes don’t match any region in the United States,’ Doug Jarvis said as he looked down at the numbers. ‘Could be international.’

‘I doubt it,’ Ethan replied. ‘I think they denote something else.’ He looked up at Ryker. ‘You said that you might have some idea of how Charles Purcell could see
into the future. This would be a good time to share it.’

‘It’s really radical stuff,’ Ryker muttered, ‘things that Charlie’s father, Montgomery Purcell, was working on back in the day.’

‘How far back?’ Lopez asked.

‘The Manhattan Project,’ Ryker said.

‘The building of the first atomic bombs,’ Ethan said, recognizing the name of the project that resulted in America dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and ending
the Second World War.

‘Charlie’s father was one of the scientists who helped build the weapons,’ Ryker confirmed. ‘They were using the results of theoretical physics based upon Albert
Einstein’s field equations, his work on Special and General Relativity. These equations predicted that the energy contained in atoms, if released, would be more powerful than any other kind
of bomb in existence at the time. Turned out he was proven right, yet again.’

‘So Charles Purcell’s father was working on something else at the same time?’ Jarvis hazarded.

‘Just after the war,’ Ryker replied. ‘Montgomery Purcell took the field equations much further than anybody else had dared. Using theoretical physics that, frankly, we still
don’t quite understand today, he began a thought experiment that devised a means of using gravity to affect the flow of time.’

‘How?’ Ethan asked, intrigued.

‘Well,’ Ryker said, ‘his idea was to place some kind of camera aboard a spaceship and send it into orbit around the sun for long periods of time at a very high velocity. The
camera, which would require a very high resolution, would be pointed back at earth. The ship would then return to earth, and the record of its cameras would be analyzed: the idea was that the high
velocities and close presence of the sun’s immense mass would allow the cameras to peek into earth’s future, just by a few minutes.’

Ethan digested the idea slowly.

‘Would it have worked?’

‘No,’ Mitch Hannah cut in. ‘The distance from earth to the orbiting camera would have negated any advantage in time because there was no way of getting the information
instantaneously back to earth. That’s something that Einstein also predicted correctly – that information, which is what light effectively carries, cannot breach the laws of
causality.’

Lopez frowned in confusion.

‘Which laws are they?’

‘Simply put,’ Ryker explained, ‘it means that, in our universe,
cause
cannot precede
effect
, otherwise our lives would be filled with paradoxes, so therefore time
travel is not possible. So the old example goes, if I were to travel back in time and kill my grandparents before they could meet and give birth to my parents, then I myself could not exist and
therefore could not have travelled into the past in the first place.’

Lopez blinked. ‘Sure, but what kind of idiot would go back in time and erase themselves? The paradox is pointless.’

Mitch Hannah smiled ruefully.

‘Cause cannot precede effect, that much is true, but it’s also true that although the speed of light cannot be exceeded, if one were to travel at
close
to its velocity, on a
big journey around the galaxy, for instance, then upon your return to earth far more time would have passed for people here than on your spaceship. If you travelled for one week in your own time at
that velocity, when you returned to earth one hundred years would have passed by. You would have genuinely travelled into the future. The speeds required are far beyond our technology now, but the
physics is well understood and the potential effects solidly proven.’

Ethan looked thoughtfully down at the diary in his hand.

‘Charles Purcell wouldn’t have had to go that far,’ he pointed out. ‘Judging from what he’s done so far, he might only have had to see twenty-four hours into the
future.’

‘But if he could see that far into the future, why didn’t he prevent the murder of his family?’ Lopez asked. ‘Surely that would have been his priority?’

‘It would have been,’ Ryker confirmed. ‘He loved his family, just like I said. Something, somehow, must have prevented him from reaching them in time. He somehow saw what was
going to happen, then tried to prevent it but failed.’

Jarvis walked up and down with his hands in his pockets as he tried to fathom what Charles Purcell had done.

‘And the diary proves that, however he’s managed to see the future, it’s real. Otherwise he can’t possibly have known that you’d come here, not when he posted the
diary before he wrote the messages on the wall of that apartment. Even then, he can’t have known which path you might take in this investigation. Coming here was only one of many different
options.’

Ethan looked at the diary in his hand and then at the numbers he’d written on the pad.

‘Which brings us back to the telephone numbers,’ he said. ‘They must mean something.’

Sears rubbed his temples with one hand.

‘Most of this stuff is frying my brain. God only knows what Purcell is thinking or where the hell he was when he posted that diary.’

A moment of silence passed, and then Lopez stared at the numbers again as a little light of realization flickered within the darkness of her eyes.

‘Where
he was,’ she said.

‘What?’ Ethan asked, excited that she might have made a breakthrough before him.

‘They’re not telephone codes,’ Lopez replied, and reached up to tap her knuckles on Ethan’s head. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t see it.’

Ethan counted the number of digits in each telephone number, and the answer instantly leapt out at him. ‘Damn, it’s right in front of us.’

‘Care to share?’ Mitch Hannah uttered, looking at each of them in turn.

‘Nancy,’ Lopez said to Mitch, ‘William. Don’t you get it? Why he’d mark those names out? To identify which numbers were the codes, it’s the only
reason.’

Lopez grabbed Ethan’s pen and rewrote the numbers beneath the originals on the pad, but this time she spaced the digits differently and changed the names.

‘Coordinates,’ Mitch Hannah said, before offering them both a wry smile. ‘You two should do this sort of thing for a living.’

‘Do we have a map?’ Ethan asked.

‘I’ll find one,’ Jarvis replied and hurried out of the room.

Ethan turned to Ryker.

‘Charles had a glimpse into the future and he’s used it to try to prove his innocence. One way or the other we need to find out how he did it.’

Jarvis came back into the room and handed Ethan a map of Florida. Ethan spread the map out across a nearby table and with Mitch Hannah traced the coordinates out until they found the exact spot.
He stood up and frowned, his finger hovering over open water.

‘It’s out in the Florida Straits,’ he said in confusion.

Jarvis moved to stand alongside Ethan.

‘On the edge of the Bermuda Triangle,’ the old man pointed out. ‘Between South Bimini and Florida.’

‘Didn’t Purcell’s father vanish into the Bermuda Triangle?’ Ryker asked.

Ethan nodded and looked at Lopez. ‘And he’s not the only one.’

Lopez saw the connection instantly.

‘The downed aircraft, N-2764C. It’s gotta be. That’s why Purcell left us the airplane’s tailcodes in his apartment – for us to be able to identify it and its
location.’

‘We need to get out there and take a look,’ Ethan said, then turned to Jarvis. ‘You got anybody able to sail us out there today?’

‘I can find someone,’ Jarvis promised. ‘There’s a lot of ex-navy guys running fishing boats down in Miami, people who can keep this discreet.’

‘We’ve got to follow this trail,’ Lopez said. ‘We need to find out whatever it is that Charles Purcell wants us to see.’

Ethan looked again at the message in the diary.

‘And we need to find out who Ivy Mike is and locate him,’ he said.

Mitch Hannah chuckled as Ethan looked quizzically up at him.

‘
Ivy Mike
is not a person,’ Mitch said. ‘It’s the code name for an event, the first ever detonation of a thermonuclear fusion bomb by the United States, back in
the Cold War.’

‘Just like the first atomic bombs of the Manhattan Project,’ Lopez said. ‘But why would an event from that era have any bearing on what Charles Purcell is doing?’

Ryker leaned back against the edge of the table as he tugged at his beard.

‘It’s not about Charles,’ he replied. ‘Charlie wasn’t involved in the Ivy program, he’s too young. But he inherited his mathematical genius from his father,
Montgomery Purcell.’

‘Who was a NASA scientist too,’ Ethan recalled. ‘He was one of the chief scientists who worked on
Ivy Mike
and the United States’ entire thermonuclear program
during the fifties,’ Ryker confirmed. ‘He was a pioneer, one of the greatest physicists to have come out of the Manhattan Project.’ Ryker looked up at them. ‘Charlie’s
telling us that if we want to find out what’s going on here, we need to find out exactly what his father was doing during the Cold War.’

‘Get on it,’ Jarvis ordered him. ‘Find out everything you can on Montgomery Purcell. Ethan, Nicola, with me. We’re going to find that downed aeroplane.’

June 28, 10:51

‘I want to know exactly what’s going on here.’

Dennis Aubrey joined Joaquin Abell on the quarterdeck of the
Event Horizon
as the engines churned the crystalline waters of the Florida Straits and rotated the yacht gracefully into the
current, her captain skillfully programming the engines to maintain precise position in waters too deep for an anchor. Large enough for a helicopter pad to be located near the stern, the vessel
shone a brilliant white beneath the sun. Aubrey watched as dozens of crewmen in identical, dark-blue IRIS jumpsuits swarmed down from the bridge to where a pair of large, bulbous-looking craft sat
on the open deck.

‘All in good time, Dennis,’ Joaquin replied as he surveyed the yacht.

The deep-sea submersibles – named
Intrepid
, and
Isaac
, after Joaquin’s father – were painted a bright orange and consisted of three large oval chambers, each
tightly connected to the other and festooned with a complex assembly of robotic arms, multi-directional propellers, lights and small portholes of 6-inch-thick glass. The bow sphere was dominated by
a single, larger acrylic dome, within which Dennis could see the cockpit. The craft had the appearance of giant, brightly colored insects.

‘I’ve never done this before,’ Aubrey pointed out.

‘Don’t fret, Dennis. It’s perfectly safe, although at a depth of two thousand feet it only takes a crack two microns thick to collapse the hull and kill everybody
inside.’

Dennis shot Joaquin a glance of concern. Joaquin burst out laughing and clapped his hand on Dennis’s back with enough force to dislodge his spectacles.

‘Relax, Dennis. The
Isaac
and the
Intrepid
are as safe as can be. Come on, let’s go, shall we?’

Aubrey straightened his glasses and followed as Joaquin strode across to the
Isaac
and climbed a ladder set alongside the hull toward an open hatch above the central oval. Aubrey
reluctantly followed the younger man down into the cramped interior, which was filled with a dazzling array of equipment and instruments. Joaquin made his way forward into the cockpit and settled
down behind the control console as Aubrey joined him in the cockpit and strapped himself into a spare seat.