“What could that be?” Jenson asked.
Brooke held up her arms, “This!”
“What do you mean this, you mean here?” Lustig said.
“Yes, he’s here at the collider! This is our guy, or the guy who could lead us to our guy. I recommend we do low profile surveillance, because he can be in on it or is being pressured to be in on it. Either way he may have accomplices and they may speed up their time table if we spook ’em.”
Jenson went into hysterics. “Wait. You come in here, at midnight, on the weekend and tell me you have been investigating my facility — for what? Sabotage! And this is the first I am hearing of it! And now I am supposed to not act to remove this cancer from my system? On what or whose authority do you make such a request?”
“Jenson, I am sorry my friend, but this is bigger than FedPol. The Americans are running this show by the invitation of our government. This is a most sensitive matter and I am going to have to ask you and your man here to come along with me to our offices.”
“You are arresting us?” Jenson’s indignation was punctuated with his foot slamming the floor.
“No, I am simply asking you both to come down and be apprised of the situation so that you will not pose a security risk to the investigation. I assure you that you will be back here, at your post, on Monday.”
“Captain Lustig, we are going to need to ramp up surveillance and intelligence on Raffael. I am going to call Agent Palumbo and have him meet us here,” Brooke said.
∞§∞
By noon Sunday, every aspect of Raffael Juth’s life was on the conference table. Unmarked police cars were staking out his home, which he shared with his sister and her daughter. A new employee appeared at the Hadron Monitoring Division, an undercover policewoman who was subtly learning what she could about Raffey.
“Brooke, what’s your take on what we are dealing with here?” Bill asked over the secure teleconference from the Paris Embassy to FedPol.
“Bill, since no one has seen his sister or her little girl lately and we have no visa or passport records of them leaving the country, they may be hostages. In which case he is possibly a pawn in all this.”
“Or he’s a pathological maniac and they are stuffed in a freezer in the basement,” Bill said.
“Could be, but I agree with Brooke’s theory. Someone is pulling the strings on this kid and he’s toeing the line,” Joey added.
“Okay then, I’ll take your recommendation. Tell me what you need and I’ll get it going immediately.”
“We’re still pulling together our operational plan; as soon as we have it we’ll get back to you, Bill.”
“I’ll be waiting. Oh, how did we get here? How did this guy come on to our radar?” Bill asked.
“Blame Brooke. She was freelancing as a do-gooder; and she stumbled on the kid while investigating a murder here in Switzerland.”
“That’s sounds like a long story over a tall drink. I can’t wait.”
∞§∞
Two FedPol officers moved into the house across the street from Raffey’s and set up laser listening devices and a piece of equipment from America, an infrared camera that can see through walls. Down the block, taps were placed on the phone wires, and a small device, which sensed and transmitted electromagnetic spectrum emissions from the house, was thrown over the back fence. When washed through a computer program, they could read the key clicks and screen raster from his computer, and even the time and cook settings on his microwave. Three of Switzerland’s best teams trailed Mr. Juth every time he went to work or the store and home again. By opening his phone records through a special warrant from the Swiss court, his IMEI (International Mobile Station Equipment Identity) and ICCID (Integrated Circuit Card Identifier) codes were obtained and his phone cloned. All incoming and outgoing calls were now monitored and recorded; except there were none.
∞§∞
By the third day, Brooke was frustrated. Mr. Juth did nothing different in his routine every day. He never changed the route he drove to work, never spoke with anybody, never made any contact with another human. Brooke could not fathom how ‘Mr. Leather Pants,’ the not so wild and crazy guy from the disco, could all of a sudden live such a monastic life. He made and received no phone calls. He only worked on local files from the hard drive on his computer, no Internet, no e-mails, Facebook, or messaging. She reached out to Kronos when she saw that he had no social network presence. That was unfortunate, because nowadays a ton of potentially incriminating or exculpatory evidence was available, voluntarily offered up by the eight hundred million citizens of the virtual nations of Facebook, Twitter, Four Square, Tumblr, Instagram and the like as social data, just waiting to be scraped by police agencies around the globe. Kronos assured her that once something is posted online it never goes away.
Except in the case of Raffael Juth; even Kronos couldn’t figure how he did it. Not a trace of him. Even the founder of Facebook had his personal pictures hacked, yet Raffey was off the grid. Kronos, not one for complimenting another genius, said, “This guy is good!”
To Brooke the total impression of all Raffey’s inactivity was almost as if he knew he was being — watched, she thought.
∞§∞
“Okay, where are we?” Bill asked in the conference room of FedPol. After a great four days in Paris together, they flew to Geneva now that the lead Brooke, Joey and Parnell Sicard were following was getting hotter.
Sicard started first, “It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs. Hiccock.”
“Nice to meet you too, Mr. Sicard.” Janice looked over to Bill as if to say, “He’s not only good looking, he’s got manners as well.” Bill gave a sour look as he stuck his tongue out.
Sicard continued, “Our man, Juth, is a mid-level programmer at the Hadron Collider; he has distinguished himself and received awards. He is an exemplary employee and never absent a day’s work.”
Joey clicked a mouse, which brought up two side-by-side photos on the eighty-inch plasma screen at the end of the table. “The security camera, which scans the entrance he uses every day, shows a bruise under his left eye, and a day or so old, bloody fat lip, the Monday after the murder. It is not there on the tape from the Friday before.”
“How do you know it’s a day old?” Janice asked.
“I used to box on the FBI team,” Joey said.
“So he’s our Arab’s killer?” Bill looked at the two candid photos on the screen.
“If that were the case, we would have simply turned him over to the Swiss. But there’s more here.” Brooke took the mouse and brought up two other files. “These photos were taken of his desk in the office. In the picture frame there, that’s his sister and her daughter; they live with him, or lived with him. In the four days since we began watching him, they haven’t been home.”
Sicard referred to a folder. “There are no out of country passports scanned or stamped, no visa or other travel records that Captain Lustig here at FedPol could find, so they are still somewhere in Switzerland. Or the continent if they drove across the border off road.”
“There is only one family member outside the country; we had local constabulary check them out and the mother and daughter weren’t staying with them. Of the four relatives in country, they have not seen or talked to the brother, the sister or the little girl since before the murder,” Joey added.
“I know I have asked this before, but could he have killed them?” Bill flipped back the mouse and brought up Raffey’s photos again.
“Bill, since she accompanied you on this trip, I took the liberty of asking Janice to profile our Raffey. Janice, will you share with us your thoughts.” Brooke gestured to her.
Janice read the puzzled expression on Sicard’s face, “Parnell, I run the Behavioral Sciences Department at George Washington University Hospital, and I have worked with and been a part of this team in the past.”
“In fact,” Bill jumped in, “Janice has personally briefed the President of the United States and was dead-
on accurate in her assessment of the threat matrix we faced at that time,” Bill said like a proud dad bragging about his son’s touchdown. “So her analysis of who we are up against is something you could take to the bank.” He turned to his wife, “Janice.”
“Well, it’s quick and preliminary; I just got all of the information this morning, but outside the slim chance of total schizophrenia, he’s no killer. His actions are defensive, not offensive, and from his lifestyle to his chosen profession, he is a thinker, not a person who acts. His seemingly sudden shutting out of the outside world is more an act of isolation or self-imprisonment.”
“Janice, could that self-detachment be a result of extreme guilt of getting his family out of the way?” Bill asked.
“You mean like he locked himself up in his own jail for killing his family? Not likely, Bill, because the rest of his pattern is wholly unaffected. It would be quite rare that his self-imposed sentence would be that surgically exact. Remorse or conscience would have a widening effect on the mode of behavior, which is not evident from what I have reviewed.”
“Janice, could we be looking at a bi-current… er, whatever it was that we dealt with during the Eighth Day affair?” Joey asked.
“You mean, induced bi-stable concurrent schizophrenia?” Janice said.
“Yeah, that,” Joey said.
“To be sure, we should also have Kronos run a scan on his computer just to check for the interstitial images that triggered those individuals, but that only affected those perpetrators when they were seeking or were close to their particular targets. In his case, he is living this reality twenty-four/seven. That fact alone doesn’t rule subliminal programming out, but it’s just not in keeping with what I have observed before.”
Bill thought for a second, then closed his briefing book. “Brooke, get Kronos to take a look, but I am going to go with the notion that we left that brain-scrambling hardware and software twenty thousand feet below the Pacific Ocean in a deep trench. Thanks Janice, glad you are here.” He smiled at her and placed his hand over hers on the tabletop.
“Nice to be back with the team again,” Janice said with a genuine smile.
“Bill, I heard they captured the whale. Any leads?” Joey said.
“Naval Warfare and Tactics has it, and a team from NCIS is processing it for any traces or prints. The unfortunate thing, and who could have known this, is that when the SEALS took the machine they used high-voltage, which expanded the fluid to the degree that the one, sole pilot who was driving the thing was crushed to death.
“How did the pilot breathe?” Joey said.
“Blowhole, just like a real whale. Two bladders in the compartment expanded and contracted forcing bad air out and pulling in 20 minutes or so of new air whenever it was running on the surface. It was those bladders that over-expanded under the high voltage, crushing him to death.”
“Do we know who he is?” Brooke said.
He had no ID on him. They are doing a workup on his bio-metrics now, but no clues as to who was behind it.”
“Shame, those tests are going to take time we don’t have.” Joey said.
“So absent any evidence from that end, what’s your operating theory, Brooke?” Bill asked.
“Well, Joey and I concur on most of this. The murder took place three days before the day Parnell was coming to Geneva. So this crime happened 24 hours prior to our two day crime computer search on each side of that date.”
“That’s why it wasn’t listed in our printouts.” Joey said.
“We agree that Raffey was set up and the Arab security guard tripped over the attempted abduction and was killed for his trouble. Juth then escaped his kidnappers so they counter-moved, or were planning all along to take his sister and niece, who are in all likelihood being held by someone who wants Raffey to do something at the collider.” Brooke paused to see if Bill had any questions.
“Seems like it fits the facts; go on,” Bill said.
“Now, here’s where Joey and I part opinions. I think they are going to get him to do something major against the facility.”
“And I think, and Janice touched on this, he’s not an action player; they may just be using him to gain access or let in the real perpetrators who will wreak havoc,” Joey said.
“Either way, both of you are saying the collider is the target and whether it’s Raffey pulling the trigger or unlocking the door, this is your plot. So who’s pulling his strings? The Architect? The Engineer? What do you think, Parnell?” Bill sat back to hear his answer.
“I turn it around but it comes out the same, I have it as the Arab was an enforcer in the plot, probably emanating out of a Wahabi Saudi sect. Raffey gets lucky and kills Abrim. They counter and take his family so it’s all for naught and he settles down into the pattern.”
Bill stopped listening when he heard the word ‘Wahabi.’ If this was an extremist Muslim plot, then there was not necessarily a rationale to the attack. In that, it would not be an attack to leverage against another country or a statement made to cower the world. Fanatics of any religion, who believe that they are doing their God’s work, have no limits. This whole plan could be to trigger Armageddon.
“Bill. Bill?” Joey tapped the table. “Where did you go, buddy?”
“Parnell, why were the Knights so interested in this?”
“We protect the rings, the ring or crown of thorns. And by extension all first class artifacts of Christianity,” Sicard said.
“No, Parnell, why does the Vatican and, by extension, you, have an interest in these rings, the rings of science, in your cross hairs?”
“You don’t know?” Sicard said.
“I am afraid that I do know. In fact, I am scared out of my wits that I know,” Bill said.
“Wanna clue the rest of us in?” Joey held his palms up.
“Dead-enders, of the extremist variety.”
“Okay, so what is their end game?” Brooke asked.
“The end is their game. The end of everything,” Parnell added.
“So it isn’t blow up the rings to strike a blow against modernism or European Society. It’s ‘get the rings to trigger a black hole,’” Joey reasoned out. He looked over to Bill, his best friend since second grade. The emotions that passed between them at that moment suspended time. The look was a mixture of ‘I told you so!’ mixed with ‘Oh God, what do we do?’
For Bill’s part, his expression was one of extreme intensity; his mind working it’s hardest to crunch the problem down to its basic components. Then, in an instant, he looked at his wife, but what he saw was his son in her arms, and the reasoned calculus of the previous second dissolved into a primal need to ward off the predator that endangered them.
So pronounced was the impact of Bill’s deliberation that it mesmerized everyone in the room. All fell to silence as the downward force from the weight of what they now faced compressed their spines and increased their blood pressure.
After a few moments, Joey broke the stillness. “If Raffey is the key, we take him out of the equation. They lose their operational ability.”
“If we move on Juth, we may spook them back under their rocks; we’ll never find them,” Parnell said.
“I think through a massive police effort we could smoke ’em out, but removing Raffey may not end this,” Brooke said.
“How so?” Bill asked.
“What if Raffey is just one of many?”
“Good point; once we alert them, if they have redundant capability, all we may accomplish is accelerating their time line,” Bill said.
“Yet, this isn’t a fish that you give a lot of line to, and if you lose him, all you have is a ‘one that got away’ story. I say shutting them down is paramount to the world’s survival. If we try to accomplish too much police work, we increase our chances of miscalculation, with the most unthinkable consequences,” Parnell said.
“But what if he isn’t a pawn and we are reading these tea leaves wrong? What if he’s the chess master; he’s the total t
hreat? He dispatches his family because everyone’s going to die anyway, and having them around could only betray his plans. What if he is the one and only bad guy here?” Joey said.
“In that case, every minute we delay allows him more time to act,” Parnell added.
Bill considered the arguments before him. He encouraged out-of-the-box thinking; it had been the cornerstone of his strategy in defeating every major terror event he and his team had faced. But here, all the theories were just different paths within the same box. The outcome was the same for each connection of facts and intuition. Maybe I should call the president? But that would only delay everything.
Besides, when compared to the extinguishing of the known universe and every life form in it, the president’s mere U.S. constitutionally defined authority was so parochial as to make it a non-issue. The leader of the free world would have no better handle on this than that of any other human who was facing extinction. And Bill had a room full of humans right now. He doubted the president would add anything new. No, he was going to have to make this call. Raffey could be counting down to turning the universe into a null void as they spoke. On the other hand, if he was just a cog in the plan, his handlers might have protected against losing him by having others in a similar position, as Brooke had pointed out. That would be the military or intelligence communities’ way of mounting such an operation. He looked one more time to Janice. He was deciding for her and Richie as well.
He tried to elevate his thinking to a higher perspective so as not to be emotionally swayed, but in the end, it was all about them. At that moment, the actual weight of history was on his shoulders. Then a thought snapped all into alignment and he had his way through the maze of the known and unknown.
“Okay, here’s how I see it; if you disagree, now is the time. There is no reason for Raffey or his controllers to delay his plan if it is to detonate the collider. The optimum time would be when the machine goes operational at the sub-sub atomic level running the Landau Protocols in two days.”
The God Particle Page 32
