Down: Pinhole (5 page)

He clicked on it and a grainy photo of Brandon Woodbourne filled a quarter of the computer screen.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Trevor gasped.

John blinked at the image of the black-haired young man and pulled out the screen shot from the lab’s CCTV footage he’d been carrying around in his pocket. He unfolded the paper and held it next to the computer.

There was no doubt.

It was the same man.

“Do you expect me to believe this?”

Sir George Lawrence, the director-general of MI5, leaned forward, his head nearly filling the video conference screen in Henry Quint’s private conference room.

“Sir George,” Quint said into the camera, “I don’t expect anyone to believe or disbelieve. My job here is to present the facts.”

The director of the FBI, Cambell Bates, chimed in from Washington. “My people have looked at the fingerprints and photos of Brandon Woodbourne from 1949 and compared them with the prints and security camera photos from yesterday’s incident. They’re telling me that the fingerprint match is a hundred percent and that the biometric photo match is ninety-nine point something percent. The FBI’s conclusion is that it’s the same man. Don’t ask me how or why but it’s the same man.”

There were two other participants on the video conference, the US energy secretary, Leroy Bitterman, who was with Bates at FBI headquarters and the UK secretary of state for energy and climate change, Karen Smithwick, who sat beside Quint.

Bitterman was the only other scientist participating. Before entering government he had been a professor of geophysics at Cal Tech.

“The footage of Dr. Loughty’s disappearance and Woodbourne’s simultaneous appearance is striking, to say the least,” Bitterman said.

“Yes, to say the least,” Smithwick parroted.

“The muon spectrometer was about ten feet below the exact spot where Dr. Loughty was standing?”

“That’s correct, Dr. Bitterman,” Quint said.

“And was there any damage to the spectrometer or the collision vessel?”

“None whatsoever. When we powered down our engineers did a thorough inspection. All the components were normal.”

“No abnormal radiation levels?”

“None.”

“Now tell me, Dr. Quint,” Bitterman said, fiddling with his bow tie, “why is it that you exceeded the parameters of Hercules I? Your limit was twenty TeV.”

Quint had spent the night preparing for the question. “It was my judgment that given the program delays we had experienced it was worth the calculated risk to judiciously boost the collision energies to Hercules II levels in an attempt to elucidate the graviton.”

Smithwick, a career politician whose hopes for elevation to home secretary in the next cabinet reshuffle had disappeared as quickly as Emily, looked to the camera rather than Quint.

“Dr. Quint, I believe this was a reckless decision. The prime minister would be delighted to receive your head on a platter.”

Bitterman was scanning some papers and looked up and opened his mouth. Quint looked relieved that Bitterman had chosen to speak before he had to respond to Smithwick. “I’ve reviewed this report from your Dr. Coppens. It looks like you may have found your graviton, Dr. Quint. That’s the good news. The bad news is you also found strangelets.”

“The data is very preliminary but yes,” Quint said. “It appears to be a good news and bad news scenario.”

George Lawrence had risen to the top of the Security Service on the back of a second in politics from Cambridge and he had been fidgeting at all the technical talk.

With unbridled contempt he said, “Look, I’ve no time for your scientific achievements or lack thereof. I want a plausible explanation for the disappearance of this Loughty woman and the appearance of a man who’s been dead for sixty-five years! A dead man who was alive enough to murder a woman yesterday and who is still at large!”

“Well don’t look at me,” Bitterman said. “I have absolutely nothing intelligent to say.”

“Dr. Coppens has a theory,” Quint said. “It is, on its face, wildly controversial.”

“To fit these facts, it would have to be,” Bates said.

“He’s waiting outside,” Quint said. “I’d like him to address the group.”

Quint had designated a sub-set of his senior staff as a crisis management team. The group initially included Matthew Coppens, David Laurent, John Camp, and Stuart Binford, MAAC’s publicity director, but John insisted that Trevor Jones be brought inside the tent since he was liaising with the police on the search for Woodbourne. Quint assembled the team in his office and laid down the law: the rest of the staff would be kept in the dark until he decided otherwise.

John sat stiffly at the table, drinking coffee. He hadn’t slept. He was angry, irritable. He may have been part of a team but he didn’t feel like a team player. He had the urge to do what he did best, destroy the enemy to achieve his objective. He just didn’t know who the enemy was.

“Before we go any further,” Quint said, his hands tented like a headmaster about to discipline a student, “I want to tell you that our British and American masters are unified in their desire to control the flow of information concerning our incident.”

John cringed at the way he said incident. It wasn’t an incident; it was a goddamn disaster of epic proportions.

Binford had been a science journalist for
The Times
before jumping on the MAAC bandwagon several years earlier. He was a nervous type who seemed twitchy on a good day. Now he looked strung out, like a meth addict who might never come down.

“Do you have any idea what I’ve got to contend with?” he moaned. “The press is like a pack of hounds and that makes me the bloody fox.”

“I appreciate that these people are your former colleagues, Stuart, but you have to stick to the script,” Quint said.

“The script is a cover-up,” Binford said. “All we’re saying is that there was an unauthorized breach of lab security by an unknown assailant and that we powered down the accelerator as a result. There’s nothing about the collision energies we reached. There’s nothing about Emily. There’s nothing about the fact that the assailant is a dead man!”

“Cover-up is not the word I would use,” Quint said. “We are in an information-gathering stage. We can all agree that we are not fully in command of the facts. The security services on both sides of the Atlantic insist we keep a lid on public disclosures. We don’t wish to cause a panic by putting out unfiltered and unverified information.”

“I might as well go off to the pub then and let my phone go into voice mail,” Binford said. “No one’s buying what I’m selling.”

“You’ll do what you need to do,” Quint said icily. “We all have our functions in this crisis. If you must know, I’m in hot enough water to scald my hide. They’ve insinuated that my function is to manage the crisis then fall on my sword at the appropriate time.”

“I’d hold it,” John mumbled.

“What did you say?” Quint demanded.

“I said I’d hold your sword. To make sure it doesn’t slip.”

“Thank you for that,” Quint said. “It’s good to know who your supporters are.”

“I’ll support you right up to the time we find Emily. Then you’re on your own,” John said.

Quint gave him a thin-lipped smile. “I think we can all agree that finding out what happened to Dr. Loughty is our prime objective. If she is alive then we must bring her back to us if that is remotely possible. Matthew reported to our masters this morning. I’d like him to brief this group on his theories.”

Matthew stood reflexively then decided to sit back down again. “I don’t have any answers,” he began. “I only have ideas based on the facts as we know them. Fact number one: we took our collision energies to the highest level ever tested, thirty TeV. Fact two: even with the brief window of data collection we have the telltale signatures of gravitons and strangelets. It would take a much longer window and many more collisions to get the results to statistical significance at five sigma but I think we have a pretty good handle on what we’re seeing. Fact three: Emily was standing directly over the collider. Fact four: she disappeared in anywhere from microseconds to nano-seconds or less. The video recording won’t allow us to get to any more precision. Fact five: a man who’s been identified as someone who was put to death in Dartford sixty-five years ago appeared in her place in the same micro-to-nano-second interval. According to John and Trevor there’s no doubt that it’s the same man, Brandon Woodbourne, who is now at large and responsible for a murder. Those are the facts. Would everyone agree?”

There were nods around the table.

“Now for the speculation,” he continued. “Let me stress that there is no empirical basis for my theory. I’ve tried to put aside my own preconceived notions of the cosmos and I’m merely attempting to fit the facts to an explanatory framework. I’ve told you already about my ideas on extra-dimensionality and strangelet-produced graviton-matter tunnels. I think that Emily may have been, quote-unquote, pulled into a kind of tunnel, a warp between two dimensions. The fact that Brandon Woodbourne, a dead man, appeared in her place suggests that she traded places with him, matter-for-matter, as if some kind of symmetry had to be maintained for the passage to work.”

Trevor’s mouth had involuntarily opened while listening to Matthew. He interrupted, “Look here, I was raised a Christian and all that, but Woodbourne’s been dead for a long time, fellows. Are you saying that he’s from the hereafter or whatever you want to call it?”

There was a pregnant pause until Matthew simply said, “Yes. That’s what I’m proposing. Much to the disappointment of my parents, I’m not religious myself. I am agnostic at best about notions of a supreme deity, the afterlife and all that, but this man died quite a while ago and here he is, materialized and appearing much the same age as when he was hanged by the neck till dead in Dartford Prison which, as you told me Trevor, was close to this very site until it was razed in the nineteen sixties. My working theory is that MAAC created a tunnel, a small one, no more than a pinhole in the fabric of the cosmos, connecting our dimension with another.”

“And you think Emily is there?” John said.

“I hope so. In much the same way that Brandon Woodbourne is here. Alive and kicking.”

David Laurent clearly wasn’t having any of it. “Did you actually propose this nonsense to the Americans and the British?”

“I’m afraid I did.”

“And what did they say?”

“There was no shortage of incredulity. But they listened and asked reasonably appropriate questions. Especially Bitterman. He’s a physicist unlike our energy lady who I believe had a carpet-cleaning business before going into Parliament.”

“There’s only one thing I want to know,” John said. “How do we get Emily back?”

Matthew took a deep breath and let it out noisily through his pursed lips. “We need to re-open the pinhole.”

“How?” John asked.

“My best guess would be to recreate the original conditions. We have to repeat the experiment exactly as before.”

Quint was the first to respond. “I had rather hoped that Matthew would have spoken to me about this before bringing it up to our masters but it’s out there now.”

“What did they say?” John asked.

“They surprised me by saying that they would take it under advisement. They’re in a panic about any of this getting out. They want Woodbourne found and handed over to MI5, not the police. And they want Dr. Loughty, of course. Her parents have been ringing my office desperate to hear from her, what with all the publicity about the incident. A chap from MI5 had me tell them a cock and bull story about her being just fine but in quarantine because of a radiation leak. They’ve dispatched officers to Edinburgh to commit them to the Official Secrets Act. They’re getting her sister in Croydon to sign on too. We can keep this under wraps for a while but not indefinitely. These things always come out.”

“So let’s say the Americans and the Brits give us the green light,” John said. “How do we do it?”

“Well,” Matthew said, “ideally I would think that we would place Woodbourne on the same spot above the collider that Emily stood on and have Emily stand on the same spot where she materialized on the other side of the pinhole.”

John threw up his hands in frustration. “That’s ridiculous! It assumes one thing that’s uncertain—capturing Woodbourne and bringing him back here in one piece—and one thing that’s impossible—getting Emily, wherever she is, and assuming she’s alive, to be standing on the exact spot at the exact time the collider’s on full power. For Christ’s sake—it’s not like we can send her a text message.”

Suddenly David spoke up. “I can’t believe I’m even participating in this insane discussion but if Matthew is right, the only way for an exchange to work would be for someone to go through the tunnel, locate her and get her to be on the right spot at the right time.”

“But if someone went through,” Trevor said, “wouldn’t another one like Woodbourne pop out on our side?”

Matthew said, “Maybe, if there’s a mass-balance phenomenon in play. But we could be ready this time, couldn’t we? You could grab him straight off and hold him. Woodbourne would have to be found. Our new traveller would need to make sure Emily was where she needed to be at the appointed time. Then we’d run the collider and hopefully exchange both of them for Woodbourne One and Woodbourne Two.”

“All well and good,” Quint said, “but who would we send through?”

“That part’s easy,” John said. “It’s going to be me.”

John remembered how slowly time had passed during the last week of his last tour in Afghanistan. His unit hadn’t exactly been sitting on their hands waiting for wheels-up from Bagram. There were training and tactical operations every day that week and one intense firefight. He had figured that if he could just get his ass onto the plane stateside he’d have a reasonable chance for a longish life. But he could vividly remember how the hour hand on his wristwatch never seemed to move.

As stuck in tar as that week had seemed, this week ran slower.

There were endless meetings with MI5 and FBI agents and Bitterman and Smithwick arrived in person for command performances. Led by Matthew, the technical and engineering staffs began the process of preparing the collider for another restart.