The God Particle

by Daniel Danser

  The inspector turned away from the window and followed the tread marks back to the lift. From the shape and style of the imprints, Gervaux’s guess was that they were made by some kind of trainer or sneaker and, by the sharpness of the ridges, they were fairly new. He would leave the identification of the exact make, model and size to his forensics team, who he would ring once he’d checked the rest of the building.

  He took the lift down and stepped out onto the second floor, but could tell immediately that it was empty; the footprints had ventured into the office space for about ten feet and then doubled back. He walked over to the window, which afforded the same view as the one on the floor above, only at a shallower elevation. He could see Lavelle putting his notebook away as the security guard disappeared into the hut.

  After checking the first floor and coming up empty-handed, he made his way back to the car park, where Lavelle was waiting for him.

  ‘How did you get on with the security guard?’ Gervaux enquired.

  ‘He was a bit reluctant to start with,’ his sergeant replied. ‘But when I told him he could be implicated in a murder case, he was more forthcoming.’

  ‘And?’ the inspector prompted impatiently.

  Lavelle quickly retrieved his notebook from his breast pocket and found the appropriate pages. ‘His name is Ahmed Singh Lalli. He’s only been working in the job for less than a month. He’s employed by a company called Shiva and has strict instructions not to let anybody through the gate unless they carry a company identification card. He didn’t see anybody for the first two weeks, but he said that recently there has been a lot of activity; people coming and going, maybe two or three times a week.’

  ‘What about Volker and Halligan?’ asked Gervaux. ‘Did they leave through the gate just now?’

  ‘He didn’t recognise the names, but he said that nobody has left during his shift, which started at eight this morning.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  Lavelle shrugged. ‘Put it this way, after the talk I had with him, he values his freedom more than he does his job.’

  ‘Then they must still be here,’ replied Gervaux. ‘I want this place sealed off. Nobody leaves the compound unless we can verify their identity, and only then if we get a note from their mothers. Call in reinforcements if you have to. I want the entire complex searched from top to bottom with a fine-tooth comb. And call the forensics team; there are some footprints on the third floor I want analysed.’ Gervaux scanned the car park again, expecting his quarry to suddenly materialise. ‘Where are you, Halligan?’ he muttered to himself.

  CHAPTER 27

  ‘Your arrogance is responsible for that.’

  Deiter stopped in front of the television screen and pointed to the images of the devastation caused by the latest earthquake. He had been pacing back and forth in front of his captives like a caged animal. He flicked a switch on the remote control and the screen went blank. He turned round to face the three people seated in front of him, their hands and feet tied with PlastiCuffs, nylon rope binding them to their chairs. The security guard had taken up a position behind them, the muzzle of his automatic pistol resting in the crook of his arm.

  ‘Did you really think you could control the Collider?’ he was directing his question at Frederick.

  ‘We had to. We believed we could prevent the discovery of the God particle…’

  ‘And stop man destroying himself,’ Deiter finished his sentence for him. ‘Yes, yes, I’m fully aware of your beliefs,’ he added sarcastically. ‘But you failed to consider the consequences of your actions.’

  ‘Which were?’ Volker asked defiantly.

  ‘This,’ Deiter gestured to the newsreel. ‘You were right about the butterfly effect. The electro-magnetic waves generated by the Collider do have an effect on the Earth’s geomagnetic field, causing it to become unstable. But what you failed to realise is that it’s self-sustaining. By disturbing the polar equilibrium, you have set in motion a chain reaction, the balance of which cannot be restored until it has completed its inexorable march towards the final solution.’

  ‘Meaning?’ this from Serena.

  ‘Total polar reversal,’ interjected Tom. ‘What we are witnessing is a phenomenon that has taken place several times over the millennia. North becomes south and vice versa. The last one took place about eight hundred thousand years ago, but as none of us were around to see it reports on how it affected the human population are a bit sketchy. The difference between this one and all the previous ones is that this is man-made.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?’ Volker shook his head, trying to rationalise Deiter’s motives.

  ‘I didn’t – you did!’ Deiter raised his voice, pointing an accusatory finger at Volker.

  ‘But YOU could have stopped it,’ Volker spat back.

  Deiter nodded sagely, as if contemplating the suggestion for the first time. ‘Yes, I could have stopped it. I could have allowed Morantz to go to the media with his findings. But, then again, so could have you. Moranz told me before he died that he’d spoken to you and told you that he thought the Collider was responsible for the earthquakes.’ Deiter shrugged. ‘You did nothing about it.’

  ‘I didn’t believe it was true at the time.’ Volker’s response was almost inaudible, sadness clouding his eyes.

  ‘Didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe?’

  Volker was silent.

  ‘So, why didn’t you put a stop to it? It would have been the right thing to do,’ Serena asked indignantly.

  Deiter resumed his frantic pacing. He seemed to be struggling with his internal demons. ‘It would have been the right thing to do,’ he repeated over and over, mimicking Serena’s words.

  His actions were becoming more animated now, his ruddy complexion deepening to an unhealthy crimson. Serena thought he was going to have a heart attack. He stopped abruptly in front of her, turned on his heels and lurched towards her, his face stopping inches away from hers. She recoiled instinctively, but her bindings held her so she couldn’t turn from the manic eyes that were now boring into hers.

  ‘Let me tell you what happens when you do the right thing.’ His last words were delivered with a mocking sneer.

  Serena could see spittle accumulating at the corners of his mouth and she could smell his putrid breath. She tried to look away from the insanity evident behind his dilated pupils, but she was transfixed, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

  After what felt like an eternity, he released her from the spell, turning his attention to Volker. ‘Professor, I believe you knew my father?’

  Frederick stared back at him blankly.

  ‘Let me re-phase that,’ continued Deiter. ‘I believe you knew of my father?’

  The vacant expression remained on Frederick’s face.

  Deiter took a few steps back, positioning himself centrally to his captive audience and prepared himself as if he was an actor delivering a soliloquy. He took several deep breaths and trained his eyes just above his spectators’ heads.

  ‘My father was one of the greatest scientists that ever lived,’ he bellowed as if to a packed auditorium. Sensing he had grabbed everybody’s attention, he continued. ‘My father did the right thing and was castigated by his peers, the American Government and the very people whose lives he saved. It’s time the world knew the truth of what really happened during the war.’

  For the next hour, Deiter delivered a monologue on the life of his father, starting with how he had grown up in abject poverty on his parents’ farm in a small village in Bavaria. What little money they had spare was spent on doctors’ fees in an attempt to cure his affliction, which manifested itself as a severe facial tic.

  As a child he was expected to help out with the daily chores once he finished school, working long into the night when the crops needed harvesting. Exhausted, he would climb into his bed, which he shared with his four younger brothers and sisters, and read by candlelight until he fell asleep.

 
His appetite for literature was insatiable. At the age of 10 he had read an entire library of books, mainly donated to him by his teachers, who recognised the latent genius in him. He passed the necessary exams to be selected for higher education with flying colours. Unfortunately, the nearest high school – or Gymnasium, as they were then called – was in Bremen, which meant a four-hour round trip on the local bus. It suited his education as he was able to read uninterrupted for the entire journey, shunned by his fellow pupils because of his facial twitches. As a consequence of his imposed absence, the farm suffered and, eventually, his father had to sell the land that had been in the family for generations, moving closer to the city in rented accommodation so their son could be nearer to his school and have access to the necessary doctors for his treatment.

  For the next nine years, he studied classical literature. The Gymnasiums placed a heavy emphasis on Greek and Latin. This classical education aimed to produce not only educated scholars but also useful contributors to German culture, combining rationality with high cultural scholarship.

  At the conclusion of his Gymnasium studies, he received his ‘leaving certificate’, or Abiturzeugnis, which entitled him to admission to university for his professional training. He chose Berlin University because of its scientific credentials, where he was tutored by the great theoretical physicists of the time, Planck and Born.

  Having published a paper in a professional journal, which he was required to do to gain his doctorate, his next step to realising his goal of becoming a teaching professor was to attain a further degree called the Habilitation. This initially involved obtaining a temporary assistantship in an institute of his chosen field.

  The paper he published for his doctorate, entitled ‘Do atoms have sex?’ which was initially published in a locally distributed science journal, was picked up by Popular Science Monthly and reprinted in its entirety.

  With a circulation of over one hundred thousand copies, it was read and discussed by every eminent scientist on the planet, including the Director of the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for Physics in Schöneberg, who sent him a telegram stating:

  ‘I was intrigued by your article in Popular Science Monthly – stop – It would be an honour to discuss your theories further – stop – please contact me at your earliest convenience – stop – Albert Einstein – stop’

  The excitement of receiving his first telegram was surpassed only by the fact that the celebrated Director of one of the most respected institutes in Germany wanted to discuss his thesis with him.

  Within a day of their meeting, he had received an offer for an internship, which required him to teach a minimum of one seminar, with the rest of his time devoted to research. After six years, it would lead him to a major publication that he could submit for his Habilitation.

  More importantly for him, however, was that he would be getting paid – admittedly not a huge amount, but enough to be able to live on and send some money home to help his parents, who had been so supportive.

  Regrettably, he didn’t get a chance to tell his mother the good news. Not wanting to worry him whilst he was taking his exams, his father hadn’t informed him that she had fallen ill and, despite the doctor’s best efforts, she died two weeks later from typhoid. The effect on him was devastating. His tic, which he had managed to keep more or less under control, returned with a vengeance.

  On turning up at the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for his first day, nobody recognised the disheveled, embarrassingly shy individual as the confident and enthusiastic person he’d been only days before.

  For the next six years he literally kept his head down and concentrated on his chosen field of research – ‘Nuclear fusion as a source of stellar radiation’ - surfacing only occasionally to deliver the lectures that were stipulated in his contract. Over that period, he made very few friends, self-conscious that he was unable to control the blinks and twitches that made him stand out as a freak. Since his mother’s death, he and his father had grown apart. He secretly despised him for not speaking out when his mother was ill. He had reconciled the fact that he probably wouldn’t have been able to save her, but the choice of being there or not, when she needed him the most, had been taken away from him. He understood that his father had done it for what he thought were the right reasons at the time, which only added to the guilt he felt for his absence.

  His life changed drastically the day he published his Habitation thesis. If his doctorate thesis had made the science community’s tongues wag, this one had them thrashing back and forth. It didn’t harm his credibility, either, that his tutor was none other than the Nobel Prize-winning physics laureate responsible for defining the laws of relativity. Using his mentor’s rather simplistic equation E=mc2, he was able to demonstrate that the Sun’s energy is derived from a thermonuclear reaction of hydrogen fusion into helium.

  His article was published across the globe, not just in the scientific press but also in the popular newspapers, although somewhat ‘dumbed down’ for its readers. He was an overnight sensation, despite having taken six years to get there. Job offers came flooding in. From an early age, all he ever wanted to do was teach. The kindness of his tutors at school had had a deep impact on his psyche. But now, opportunities were opening up in areas he had never considered before, both at home and abroad.

  The year was 1933 and a charismatic orator by the name of Adolf Hitler had just been appointed as chancellor to the ruling National Socialist German Workers Party. He was gaining popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism. Einstein could see the writing on the wall; born to Jewish parents, his time as a respected theoretical physicist was ebbing away. He chose to emigrate to America but, before he left, he begged his young protégé to go with him. He had secured a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As tempting as it was, the newly-qualified professor wasn’t yet ready to give up on his beloved country; instead, he accepted a position at the German nuclear energy project in Leipzig, where he worked his way up to become Herr Direktor.

  During the war, he was transferred to a top secret facility in Norway, where he developed his theoretical postulations of nuclear fission into a practical application. It was a device so lethal that it was capable of turning the tide in favour of Germany, overnight.

  But he was a man of conscience. He had seen the atrocities that his compatriots were capable of. Some of his closest friends had been incarcerated for no other reason than their parents followed a certain doctrine. Many of his learned colleagues had been forced into exile rather than renounce their religious beliefs. He had been on his way home from work when he’d witnessed the rampaging mobs smashing the shop windows of anyone suspected of being Jewish, dragging the owners out into the street and beating them to a bloodied pulp, whilst the authorities looked on without intervening. It sickened him to his core; he could no longer say that he was proud to be a German.

  His conscience would not allow him to contemplate the heinous acts that could be carried out if he gave the principles of how to make an atomic bomb to the Nazis. But it wasn’t just a matter of telling his masters that he didn’t know how to make one; they would just coerce another scientist, and another, and another until finally they achieved their objective. No, he had to convince them that it could be done, but would take far more resources than was currently available and let them decide that it wouldn’t be worth it. It was a gamble. They could still decide to pursue the project to its ultimate conclusion but, with rumours that the German forces were being stretched to capacity, especially on the Eastern Front, he didn’t think they would.

  So, on that fateful day in September 1942, he did the right thing and changed the world forever. In front of some of the most powerful men of the Third Reich, he put on his best poker face and played his hand. And they fell for the bluff, hook, line and sinker. The project was abandoned within weeks as being too costly. Facilities were closed down and resources re-direc
ted to more conventional weapons. He was re-assigned to the Reich Air Ministry and stationed at Peenemünde Airfield on the Baltic Coast, where he worked on the V-1 flying bomb until the end of the war.

  Not satisfied with having averted a holocaust, the likes of which the world had never witnessed before, he had one last heroic act to perform. He believed that he could foreshorten the war, saving thousands of lives, if he could pass his findings to the Allies, on the proviso that they would never detonate the bomb but use the device as a deterrent to force Germany into an armistice. Having received the assurances via a highly-respected neutral intermediary, he handed over his entire research.

  ‘…and the rest, as they say, ladies and gentlemen, is history.’ Deiter stood his ground, waiting for the audience to burst into rapturous applause. Instead, he was greeted by three blank faces and a rather bored-looking security guard.

  ‘Your father was Reinhardt?’ Volker asked incredulously, breaking the silence.

  ‘Yes, Professor Viktor Reinhardt,’ Deiter corrected. ‘A brilliant scientist who saved the world, but couldn’t even get a job teaching physics in high school when the war ended. He was ridiculed by his so-called peers, who insisted that the errors he made when calculating the amount of radioactive material required to make a bomb weren’t deliberate, but were the actions of an incompetent fool. He took his own life – a broken man, destitute and riddled with guilt for passing his research to the Americans. And all because of some misguided loyalty to the human race.