by Mark Alpert
His only hope was momentum. He lowered his right shoulder and charged toward the agent like a battering ram, his torso parallel with the floor. But Brock saw him coming. At the last moment he stepped to the side and extended his foot into David’s path to trip him. For an instant David hung in the air, weightless. And then, because he couldn’t break his fall with his hands, he landed on his face. His forehead cracked against the concrete. Blood streamed from his nostrils into his mouth.
Brock laughed. “Nice move, shit-for-brains.”
The room darkened and wheeled around him. David blacked out for a few seconds, and when he opened his eyes he saw Monique running toward the agent. Her attempt proved equally futile. As soon as she came close, Brock slammed his fist into her chest. She tumbled backward and the agent laughed again. His face had flushed bright pink around the bruises and his eyes were exultant. Looming over Monique, he transferred the Uzi to his left hand and slipped his right hand into his pants pocket. It looked like he was going to pull out another weapon, a switchblade or a garrote or a set of brass knuckles, but Brock kept his hand in his pocket and moved it slowly up and down. The bastard was rubbing himself.
Brock suddenly turned around and went back to the tank of mineral oil. This time he let the Uzi hang from its shoulder strap and dipped both hands into the pool. “Come on, Swift!” he yelled. “Don’t you have any fight left in you? Or are you just gonna sit there and watch?”
David clenched his teeth. Get up, he told himself, get up! He clambered to his feet and lurched forward, but now he seemed to be moving in slow motion. Brock sidestepped again and grabbed the cord binding David’s wrists, then spun him around and forced him to his knees. The agent’s hands were greasy and cold. “The nigger will be fun,” he whispered. “But not as much fun as your wife. I’m gonna take off her gag so you can hear her scream.”
Brock threw him to the floor. David’s head hit the concrete a second time and the pain knifed into his skull. But he didn’t black out. He dug his fingernails into his palms and bit his lower lip until it bled, putting all his will into remaining conscious.
Woozy, nauseated, and terrified, he saw Brock pull Karen away from Jonah and drag her toward the steel tank. He watched the agent tear the gag off Karen’s mouth and he heard her make a barely audible whimper, which was more heartrending than any scream. The sound drove David into a frenzy. He thrashed on the floor, trying to rise to his feet again. And as he struggled, his right hand slipped out of the loop of electrical cord that Brock had inadvertently moistened with mineral oil.
David was so surprised that he stayed there on the floor for a few seconds, keeping both hands behind his back. All at once his wooziness dissipated and he could think clearly again. He knew he was too weak to fight. If he tried to wrest the Uzi from Brock, the agent would simply push him away and start firing. He needed to incapacitate the bastard, and in his sudden clarity of mind he saw exactly how to do it. He reached into his back pocket and gripped the cigarette lighter he’d taken from Agent Parker, the Zippo em-bossed with the Lone Star of Texas.
Pretending his hands were still tied, David stumbled to his feet. Brock smiled and let go of Karen. “That’s more like it!” he crowed, stepping over her and squaring off. “Bring it on, big guy! Let’s see what you can do!”
He didn’t run this time. He staggered forward until he stood right in front of the agent. Brock shook his head, disappointed. “You don’t look so good, you know that? You look like—”
David spun the Zippo’s flint wheel and thrust the lighter into Brock’s face. The agent raised his arms, reflexively warding off the blow, and both of his oily hands caught fire.
With all his remaining strength, David grabbed Brock by the waist and started pushing him backward. The agent madly flapped his hands, but this only fanned the flames. David counted two steps, three steps, four. Then he shoved Brock into the tank of mineral oil.
The flames spread across the pool as soon as Brock’s hands hit the surface. But even if it weren’t for the fire, the agent would have been doomed. He sank into the liquid like a stone, disappearing immediately. In addition to being highly flammable, mineral oil is less dense than water. And because the human body is mostly water, it’s impossible to swim in any fluid that’s much lighter. David had forgotten a good deal of the physics he’d learned in school, but fortunately not that part.
THE SIGNAL IN THE CONTROL room no longer sounded like a heartbeat. The pitch had steadily risen until each beep was a shrill inhuman cry. It sounded like an alarm, an automated warning of some mechanical breakdown, but Professor Gupta didn’t seem concerned. He looked up at the ceiling again, and when he turned back to Simon there was an openmouthed smile of ecstasy on his face. “The beam is strong,” he declared. “I can tell just by listening to the signal. All the protons are in the ring.”
Wonderful, Simon thought. Now let’s finish the job. “So are we ready to input the target coordinates?”
“Yes, that’s the next step. Then we’ll load the antiprotons into the collider.”
The professor moved toward the console manned by Richard Chan and Scott Krinsky, the pale, bespectacled physicists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But before Gupta could issue any instructions to the men, Simon grasped the professor’s arm and aimed the Uzi at his forehead. “Wait a moment. We need to make a small adjustment. I have a new set of coordinates for the burst.”
Gupta gaped at him, uncomprehending. “What are you doing? Get your hands off me!”
Richard, Scott, and all the other students turned their heads. Several rose from their seats when they saw what has happening, but Simon wasn’t worried. No one else in the control room was armed. “If you value your professor’s life, I suggest that you sit down,” he said calmly. To underline his point, he dug the muzzle of the Uzi into Gupta’s temple.
The students obediently sank to their chairs.
“WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME? You don’t work for me anymore.”
Lucille hardly recognized the Bureau director’s voice. It snarled out of the earpiece of her telephone. “Sir,” she started again, “I have some new—”
“No, I don’t want to hear it! You’re retired now. Hand in your gun and badge and get out of the building.”
“Please, sir, listen! I’ve identified a cell-phone number that may belong to one of the—”
“No, you listen! I just lost my job because of you, Parker! The vice president has already chosen my replacement and leaked his name to Fox News!”
She took a deep breath. The only way to make him listen was to get it out fast. “This suspect could be working with Amil Gupta. His phone number is registered to an alias, a Mr. George Osmond. Fake identity, fake address. According to the cellular company’s records, for the past two weeks he’s turned on his phone once a day, to receive a call from Gupta, and then immediately turned it off. But I think Mr. Osmond just made a mistake. At one o’clock this morning he turned on the phone and left it on, and it’s been tracking his position ever since.”
“You know what, Lucy? It’s not my problem anymore. By this afternoon I’m gonna be back in the private sector.”
“I got the tracking data from the cellular carrier. It looks like the suspect traveled along secondary roads to Batavia, Illinois. That’s where he is right now, at the Fermi National—”
“Look, why are you telling me all this? You should be talking to Defense. They’re in charge now.”
“I tried, sir, but they won’t listen! Those idiots at DIA keep saying they don’t need any assistance!”
“Well, let them hang, then! Let them all go to hell!”
“Sir, if you could just—”
“No, I’m through. Fuck the Pentagon, fuck the White House, fuck the whole administration!”
“But all you need to do is—”
She heard a click. The FBI director had just hung up on her.
DAVID LED KAREN, JONAH, AND Monique out of the underground lab and back to the truck. Although th
e lab’s sprinkler system had already extinguished the fire in the mineral oil tank, they were still eager to get the hell out of there. Once they were outside, David untied the cords on their wrists. Karen and Jonah fell into his arms, weeping, but Monique ran back into the lab.
“Wait a second!” David called. “Where are you going?”
“We gotta find a phone! They took our cell phones!”
Gently disentangling himself from his ex-wife and son, David returned to the lab’s doorway. Monique was pacing across the room, searching for a telephone amid the long banks of computers. “Jesus!” she cried. “Where’s the phone in this place? They got a million dollars’ worth of equipment here, but not a single damn phone!”
David remained in the doorway, reluctant to step inside. “Let’s go,” he urged. “That Russian bastard might send reinforcements any minute.”
Monique shook her head. “We gotta call for help first. Gupta’s made all the preparations for the spacetime rupture. If they’re targeting Washington now, they’re gonna—whoa, what’s this?” She pointed at a metal panel on the wall, not too far from the doorway. “Is it an intercom?”
Against his better judgment, David stepped into the room to take a closer look. It did indeed look like an intercom, with a row of colored buttons below the grille of a loudspeaker. The buttons were labeled CONTROL ROOM, BOOSTER, MAIN INJECTOR, TEVATRON, and COLLISION HALL. “Don’t press Control Room,” David warned. “That’s probably where Gupta is.”
“Maybe we can reach an office they haven’t taken over yet. If we can find one of the Tevatron’s engineers, maybe we can convince him to turn off the power for the collider.” She studied the row of buttons for a moment, then pressed the one labeled TEVATRON. “Hello? Hello?”
No one answered. But when David cocked his ear toward the panel he heard a rapid, high-pitched beeping.
“Shit,” Monique whispered. “I know that signal.” She grasped his arm to steady herself. “The beams are almost ready.”
“What? What do—”
“No time, no time!” She headed for the doorway, pulling him along. “We got ten minutes, fifteen minutes at the most!”
She raced to the truck and grasped the handle of the driver’s-side door. Unfortunately, it was locked. The keys were probably still in Brock’s trousers, at the bottom of the tank of mineral oil. “Damn!” she yelled. “We’re gonna have to run!”
“Where? Where are we going?”
“The beam tunnel! It’s this way!”
While Monique dashed ahead, running south toward the Tevatron ring, David rushed over to Karen, who was kneeling on the ground beside Jonah. Leaving them alone scared the shit out of David, but what was happening in the collider was even more frightening. “We have to split up,” he said. “You and Jonah should get away from here as fast as you can.” He pointed at a strip of pavement about two hundred yards to the north. “Go to that road and make a left. If you see any security guards or police, tell them there’s a fire in the beam tunnel and they need to shut off the power. Got that?”
Karen nodded. David was amazed at how calm she was. She took his hand and squeezed it, then pushed him in the direction of the beam tunnel. “Go, David,” she said. “Before it’s too late.”
SIMON WAS IN A QUANDARY. He’d just tried calling Brock on the radio, but there was no response. He tried three more times and heard nothing but static. It was hard to imagine that a man armed with an Uzi could’ve been overcome by a handful of bound-and-gagged hostages. But there it was.
Simon was still holding Professor Gupta at gunpoint, and the students in the control room were still monitoring the Tevatron, obediently adjusting the proton and antiproton beams so that they conformed to the new target coordinates. In about ten minutes the particle beams would be ready, and after another two minutes of acceleration the collisions would begin. But if Swift and Reynolds had indeed escaped from Brock, there was a good chance that they’d head for the beam tunnel and try to disrupt the experiment. Now Simon had to choose between going after them and staying in the control room.
After several seconds of thought, he jammed his Uzi against Gupta’s skull and shoved him forward. The old man was so terrified, he could barely stand up. Holding him by the scruff of his neck, Simon addressed the students. “Professor Gupta and I are going to observe the experiment at another location, not very far away. I expect all of you to follow the orders I’ve given. If the demonstration fails, I plan to kill your professor in the most painful way imaginable. And then I’ll come back here and kill each one of you.”
The students nodded and turned back to their screens. They were weak and frightened and easily cowed, and Simon had no doubt that they would comply. He went to the back of the control room and opened the cabinet that held the keys to the beam tunnel’s access points. The professor’s idiot grandson stared at them for a moment, uncomprehending. Then he lowered his head and returned his attention to the Game Boy as Simon dragged the professor out the door.
IT WAS HALF A MILE to the Tevatron. David and Monique ran down a paved road for several hundred yards, then dashed across a muddy field. Soon they could see the grass-covered ridge that ran above the beam tunnel and a low cinder-block structure with a chain-link gate instead of a door at its entrance. There were no vehicles parked nearby and not a person in sight.
Monique pointed at the structure. “That’s one of the tunnel entrances. The F-Two access point.”
“Shit,” David panted. “The gate’s probably locked. How the hell are we gonna get inside?”
“Fire axes,” she replied. “They’re at every access point, in case there’s an emergency in the tunnel. I remember seeing them the last time I worked on an experiment here.”
“What about the control panels for shutting down the beams? Do you remember where they are?”
“There are manual shutdown switches inside the tunnel, but Gupta probably disabled them. I bet that was one of the first things he did.”
With a final sprint they arrived at the cinder-block building and quickly located the fire-safety cabinet, which was mounted on an exterior wall. Monique removed the ax and rushed to the building’s entrance. Through the chain-link gate, David saw a stairway going down to the tunnel. He gripped Monique’s elbow. “Wait a second! How are you going to shut down the accelerator if the switches are disabled?”
Monique hefted the ax. “With this thing. One clean cut through the beam pipe should do the trick.”
“But if the beam’s running, the protons are gonna spray everywhere! You’re gonna get showered with radiation!”
She nodded grimly. “That’s why you’re gonna stay up here and guard the entrance. There’s no sense in both of us getting fried.”
David tightened his grip on her elbow. “Let me do it. I’ll go down instead.”
Her brow creased. She looked at him as if he’d just said something asinine. “That’s ridiculous. You have a kid, a family. I don’t have anyone. It’s a simple calculation.” She jerked her arm out of his grasp and positioned herself in front of the gate.
“No, wait! Maybe we can—”
She raised the ax over her head and was just about to bring it down on the gate’s lock when the bullet tore through her. David heard the shot and saw the blood spurt out of her side, just above the waistline of her shorts. She let out a surprised “Uhhh” and dropped the ax. He grabbed her shoulders as she collapsed and swiftly pulled her around the corner of the building. “Jesus!” he screamed. “Monique!”
Her face contorted in pain. She clutched David’s biceps as he laid her on the ground and pulled up her shirt. There was an entry wound on the left side of her abdomen and an exit wound on the right. Blood flowed freely from both. “Fuck!” she gasped. “What happened?”
He peered around the corner. About fifty yards away he spotted a pair of Gupta’s students hugging the wall of another cinder-block building. Although both of them carried Uzis, the students just stood there, frozen in place, evidently
shell-shocked by their first taste of gunplay. One of them was speaking into a radio.
David turned back to Monique. “There’s two, but more are coming,” he reported. Kneeling beside her, he slipped one arm under her back and the other under her knees. “I’m getting you out of here.” But she screamed as he tried to lift her, and blood gushed from her exit wound, soaking his pants.
“Put me down, put me down!” she groaned. “You’ll have to do it yourself. There’s another access point a half mile south of here.”
“I can’t—”
“There’s no time to argue! Just take the ax and go!”
SIMON LOCKED PROFESSOR GUPTA INSIDE a storage closet in Collision Hall. Once they were out of earshot of the control room, he could’ve easily killed the old man without anyone knowing, but he decided it would be more fitting if the professor lived to see the results of his experiment.
Just as Simon was leaving Collision Hall, he received a radio transmission from the pair of students he’d assigned to patrol the beam tunnel. Three minutes later Simon arrived at the F-Two tunnel entrance. The students stood about ten meters away from Reynolds, both nervously training their submachine guns at her even though she was obviously in no condition to return fire. She lay on her back in a pool of blood, still alive but just barely.
“Was she alone?” Simon asked them. “Did you see anyone else?”
The fat student shook his head, but the skinny one looked uncertain. He wiped the sweat from his brow and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “After Gary shot her, I’m pretty sure that someone pulled her around the corner. But I didn’t get a good look at him.”
Simon stepped toward the myopic dunce. “Which way did he go?” “I don’t know, I didn’t see him again. I was busy calling you on the radio, and by the time we—”
With a pull of the trigger Simon silenced the fool. Then he turned on his heel and executed the fat one, too. These students were useless. Now Swift was on the loose, probably running to another tunnel entrance, and Simon had no idea which point on the four-mile ring he was aiming for. Infuriated, he stomped on the face of the first student he’d shot, breaking the corpse’s glasses.
