Chasing The Dawn (Luke Temple - Book 2) (Luke Temple Series) (24 page)

All of Brun’s attention was on Chung Su. Luke watched them both, both adrift, looking for something to cling to. The tidal wave was coming.

***

The wind bristled across the hill. The sun was low and getting lower in the sky, and the temperature was dropping. The man checked his watch, it was 2.30 p.m. His hip began vibrating; he unclipped the mobile phone and checked the text message.

Green.

The single word pricked him into life. He made sure all openings in his rucksack were zipped up; the package was packed tightly inside. Now was the most dangerous part, carrying the device from the hill down to the target. He stood up and carefully raised the rucksack onto his back; there was no movement from any houses, and the only noise was the rustling wind … that would soon change.

The man tightened the straps very gently and made small, cautious movements with his torso, Beginning his journey down the hill he kept his eyes on the target. He wasn’t worried about third-party damage, he had designed the device for no wastage. The force would be focused as long as the rucksack was placed correctly, facing forwards. It was all designed on plate theory, using a range of solid lead plates to tailor a cocoon-like shell.

The road was quiet; the man hugged the grass verge as he turned east and headed toward the target. The clouds cast moving shadows across the fields. The rucksack on his back pressed against his jacket, reminding him of the danger.

A red car parked further up the steep road running past the target caught his attention, he saw two men sat inside. They turned the mirror to refocus and he saw their dark features reflected.
Ok so they haven’t shifted everyone out, maybe they don’t have all that much faith in me.
He smirked at the thought. He was confident that his concoction should do the job. The gate was now looming, everything was quiet, the calm before the storm.

“Stretch your hand out, flat.” Brun spoke to Luke.

Luke held his hand out in front of his body.

“You see your hand, Mr Reid, there are a hundred
billion
neutrinos passing through your hand …” Brun paused for effect “… every second.”

Luke stared at his open hand.

“Oh you can’t see them; they are not visible to you and I. An unfathomable number of them are streaming through our atmosphere, through our walls, through our skin, completely undetectable …”

Chung Su shifted on the floor, leaning her back against the wall under the window. She knew most of what was about to come but was mesmerised by the professor, awaiting the grand reveal of how Vittorio had managed what she and her colleagues could only imagine.

“Miss Chung, I apologise if this is old ground that I am about to walk over, but I feel that Mr Reid needs to hear things from the beginning.”

She nodded.

“You see Mr Reid, what we were conducting at OPERA was not on the face of it anything new. Neutrinos are not a new phenomenon, that is the most fascinating thing about this magical particle, it was discovered with nothing more than pure theoretical physics. Imagine that, a particle almost completely undetectable that was discovered by pure, simple, theoretical physics. The neutrino was first put forward by a great physicist named Wolfgang Pauli all the way back in 1930. It was stumbled upon in previous studies on beta decay, themselves studies of nuclear fusion. Fusion, Mr Temple, is what takes place in the sun on an enormous scale. In the basic hydrogen fusion cycle, four hydrogen nuclei come together to make a helium nucleus. There are other particles too that make this fusion possible … one being the
neutrino,
but let’s not worry too much about that at this stage.” Brun was floating on his own words, the drink providing mental lubrication. “The calculations suggested that the energies of electrons emitted by beta decay had continuous rather than discrete spectrums, meaning there was not enough energy being emitted to fit the
principle of conservation of energy
. This was at the time the greatest riddle in physics.”

Luke raised his eyebrows.

“This principle states that you don’t get more energy than you had before, and you don’t have less energy, energy does not disappear. So you can see where the puzzlement came from. When the nuclei decayed the energy should have all been taken up by the electron, but the electron was not carrying as much energy away as it should. Energy was disappearing … and we know from our principle that this cannot be possible.” Brun finished the whiskey in his glass. “Put simply, Pauli hypothesised that in addition to electrons and protons, atoms must also contain an incredibly light neutral particle that he called at the time a neutron. This was the explanation for the constant energy emitted. At the risk of boring you, it was then an Italian physicist named Enrico Fermi who developed the theory and baptised the
neutrino
.”

Brun chinked the bottle against his glass and poured out a generous amount of whiskey.

“To shorten this saga slightly, the theory was taken up by the scientific community, and many felt Pauli was correct, but no one could prove the existence of this
ghost particle …
and then came something that changed everything …”

“Nuclear bombs …” Chung Su said quietly.

“Yes my dear … nuclear bombs. A physicist named Frederick Reines realised that very, very rarely a neutrino may interact with a nucleus which would eject a charged particle. This meant neutrinos could be seen by proxy, and he set about showing this interaction. He hypothesised that what you would see is a double pulse on an oscilloscope every time the neutrino interacted, one pulse for the newly ejected charged particle and one from the nucleus.” Brun’s eyes were bright with the telling. “And then deep underground in 1960s USA, an experiment conceived by Ray Davis to prove John Bahcall’s theory on the number of neutrinos generated by the sun was the step forward the community needed …. measuring the volume of neutrinos … and they discovered argon.”

Chung Su gave Brun a look, and he gave a sly smile.

“Well, of course, they didn’t
discover
argon, but its presence was all-important. Not to lose you, Mr Reid, but the experiment to discover the neutrinos consisted of a huge vat of cadmium chloride. When chlorine atoms interact with a neutrino you will not only see the tell-tale double pulse micro-seconds apart but you will also find a conversion into argon particles.”

Luke’s head was spinning. There was a lot of information to take in and process.

“What we do at OPERA has nothing to do with the discovery of neutrinos as has been misrepresented to the wider world. There was a centre in Canada and the Kamiokande experiment in Japan that were forerunners in relation to discovery and volume measurement. What we were focusing on at OPERA, well at least what we set out for, was to
understand
the neutrino … to hold it in our hands.” Brun grabbed the air.

Chung Su was now engrossed. “But Professor, it is calculated that you would need a piece of lead four light years thick to stop a neutrino.”

“Four light years?” Even Luke knew that was an unimaginable size.

Brun nodded. “Quite right my dear, quite right.” He stood up and began pacing. “We now knew that neutrinos did exist, but how did they behave? For the past decade we have been sure that neutrinos had a mass …”

“Neutrino oscillations,” Chung Su mumbled.

“What?”

Chung Su attempted to clarify. “The Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan was meant to catch muon and electron neutrinos but also, more importantly, to find out from which direction they travelled. Due to the spherical shape of the earth the experiment expected to see the same number of neutrinos travelling both from above and below, as they can travel through the earth from all angles. However, this was not the case. They noted that the number was disparate. The only difference could be the
time
it takes them to travel … and if time differed then the neutrinos must have a mass, due to the simple principle that if something has a mass it cannot move at the speed of light. In conclusion, if they have a concept of time, they must have mass, meaning they can oscillate. That is why they knew that registering the neutrino at the OPERA experiment moving faster than the speed of light would change everything.”

Brun coughed. “Miss Chung, since the birth of man, we have wrestled with theology and science. Laws of physics do not
change
anything, they are more like patterns, ways of processing the world. I know that two plus two gives me four, and if I put 1,000E into my bank account, and then add a further 1,000E then I will have 2,000E in total. Yet if I left producing that first thousand to mathematics alone then I would be forever penniless.” His eyes glazed over again.

“I don’t understand, Professor,” Chung Su said, moving closer.

“My dear, I am trying to say that the world thought it had a law that governs the particles around us … but events dictated otherwise, events that those laws can’t produce … but we produce …” Brun trailed off.

“Professor, what do you mean? That the neutrino’s mass is not stable? What? To go from the revelation of the speed to what you have now claimed about creating something from neutrinos …” Chung Su couldn’t even finish her sentence, she was desperate to hear how they did it. For years she had spent her time replicating and trying to piece together the information that was fed back to her. What had they got wrong?

Brun picked up a framed photograph of himself and Vittorio some years previously. They were sat outside on a bench, both smiling in the bright sunshine. Vittorio was wearing Brun’s cream boating hat as a joke. Brun placed the picture face down and continued. “Not claiming …
proving
. That was his genius, Ernesto, most people would have stopped at the sheer magnitude of what we had found, but not him. Oh, he knew the importance alright, but his foresight saw that we could not stop there. To truly change the world we needed to go further, to jump off the cliff again.”

Chung Su could see he was becoming agitated. Brun stifled a muffled cry, his eyes were watery.

“Professor … please?”

Brun sighed. He stared for a long time at Chung Su. “Ernesto started to look at the neutrino … but from the other side. The answer was right there in front of us, fission …”

Chung Su’s brain was a jumbled muddle of ideas. Brun’s English was impeccable but his strange rhetoric was confusing for Chung Su to follow. “Fission ... how?”

“Balance, Miss Chung … Yin and Yang. Every action must have a reaction, just as everything must have an opposite.” Brun dropped his head and wept; it was sudden and it shook his whole body. Chung Su was frozen. Brun raised his head slowly and spoke through the tears: “What have I done? They are all going to die. They are all going to die. What have I done?” He grabbed Chung Su by the shoulders, spittle lining his mouth. “I helped him, I knew and I did nothing … believe me, Miss Chung, I did it for the greater good … for science, my whole life. He showed us the way…Miss Chung, you must leave … they will all die …”

Luke broke Brun’s grip and hauled him up onto his feet by the scruff of his neck. “Who is going to die?”

Brun was a mess, tears were blinding him, his glasses were sideways on his face. “Saturday at 7 p.m. … Saturday. It is all over on Saturday. I am so sorry … so, so sorry …”

“Professor, what is over? What happens on Saturday?” Luke shook Brun hard.

Chung Su joined the shouting. “The fission, Professor … what is about fission?”

But before he could answer either question the front doorbell rang.

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 flipped the phone shut and threw it next to him. He was speeding along the motorway, making his way back to Teramo. He glanced over at the folder on the passenger seat.

My God, I can’t believe it …

Sara Festino had taken great pride in what she had managed to pull together with nothing more than a few hours’ preparation.
It’s what I do
. She had used her myriad of screens to show him something he was still struggling to come to terms with. Yet he had seen it with his own eyes … there in black and white. The folder backed it up.

Where the hell is Beltrano?

He took deep breaths, unsure about how to act. Did he phone this in to the central Carabinieri superiors? Beltrano had made himself very clear about not acting without his knowledge, and Delvechi knew Beltrano wielded power. But this was big, national security big.

His mind jumped back to the blacked out room with Miss Festino, the images and what she had shown him. She had delved back in the archives and had found something quite unexpected. It would appear that for the last six months there were structured groups of Middle Eastern or South Asian men – Delvechi guessed potentially Iranian – that were taking commercial flights from Istanbul and moving through the specialised diplomatic custom channels in Fiumicino airport. She showed him images that were repetitious: four men would exit the plane separately, and then all would pass through the special diplomatic custom bay. No one checked them, there were no issues. Delvechi had questioned what he saw, but Festino said it was easy to track. She just went through the one camera covering the custom bay and worked it back. Because of the ease with which they were entering she figured they never worried about being tracked, no one looks for
specials.

Festino’s words rang out in his head …
they would have had the paperwork … simple.
Who the hell were these men? What the hell were they doing in Italy? And what is the connection with Vittorio and the girl?

Delvechi’s thoughts were foggy; he needed to bounce everything off Beltrano.
My God, someone is helping them.
The implications were enormous, so enormous Delvechi dared not dwell on them. He had wanted to be a hero, and now he may well be involved in the biggest case Italy had seen in decades.

His phone rang, breaking his thoughts.