by James Flynn
Beltrano smiled and removed a flake of tobacco from his lip. He chuckled and shook his head. “Touché, Signor.”
“You are wrong though; I celebrate and revere simplicity as much as you apparently do. Take a diamond. Did you know, Officer Beltrano, that chemically and structurally a diamond is pure carbon, nothing more, pure carbon. Do you think diamonds are beautiful?”
“Sure, doesn’t everyone? Most women gauge their life by how many they have,” Delvechi interrupted.
“Exactly.” Brun stood up and placed the cigar in his mouth. He walked to the desk and tipped out a small plastic organiser filled with stationary. He then picked up a pencil. “Did you know that the graphite in this pencil is also pure carbon, simple, pure carbon?”
Beltrano tilted his head. “So you are telling me that diamonds and that pencil are identical?”
“On the surface they are, yes, both carbon. Simple. But a diamond is the hardest mineral known to man, a ten on the Mohs scale. Yet a pencil …” he snapped the pencil with one hand. “Graphite is one of the softest minerals at less than one on the scale.”
Beltrano rested against the window ledge and tapped ash into Delvechi’s empty coffee mug.
Brun continued, “So if they are both carbon how can they be so different? Complexities, Officer Beltrano, the clue is in little complexities.” Brun held up the pencil. “On a molecular level graphite is structurally very different to a diamond, the carbon is organised in layers, easy to break, whereas a diamond has a three-dimensional arrangement of molecules packed tightly together, adding real strength. So you see, complexity is often inescapable, even if it seems simple on the outside.”
Beltrano gave a long exhale, coughed gently and ran his fingers over his jaw. After a long silence he grabbed the spare chair and placed it opposite Brun, sitting down with a loud groan. “I swear the bed in my hotel is made out of concrete,” he let out a sigh. “Professor, you are a very intelligent man and I respect that, but let’s not mess around … you are lying, or at least there are things you are not telling me.”
Brun became animated. “Like what? How many times do I have to say that I left the laboratory at 8 p.m. and headed straight home, the last time I saw him Ernesto was sat in our office as I said goodbye, sat at his desk, normal, working … living.” After a long pause he sat back in his seat; his cigar ash dropped onto the carpet.
Delvechi observed the crescendo of the dialogue with curiosity.
Beltrano spoke softly, “I don’t doubt that part, Professor, but there is no way a man who works as closely as you did with Professor Vittorio didn’t notice anything strange or out of the ordinary leading up to his disappearance. You are holding out on me.”
Brun stared straight into Beltrano’s dark eyes, they were cold. He went to say something but stopped himself,. “Goodnight, Officer Beltrano.” He stubbed out the cigar on the desk, wiped off the ash and dumped the stub into the empty mug.
Delvechi was waiting for Beltrano to stop Brun leaving, but to his surprise he didn’t. He just turned to the window and let out a cloud of cigar smoke, pitching his head back and facing the ceiling.
“Officer Delvechi … we are going to a party.”
10.
Label on the leather chair, label off the brass candlestick and table lamp, label on the gold picture frame, label on the small lamp table. Luke had taken a different route back to his hotel, keeping a sharp eye on any followers. He was now stood outside in the shadows observing the hotel entrance, marking and un-marking his memory room. It had been a busy hour, almost all of the guests at the boutique hotel and had come and gone, some even coming and going more than once, but no new faces had appeared and Luke was satisfied he was uncompromised.
He shook the cold out of his bones and walked briskly northwards away from the hotel. Turning the corner, he was confronted with a poorly lit street, large hedgerows ran down each side. He gave a quick check around but it was quiet and most of the houses were dark; he continued down the street and came to what he was looking for. Halfway down was a gap in the houses, in that gap was a small brick structure; it was falling to pieces but Luke had seen it on an initial recce of the area and assumed it had once housed cars or vehicles of some sort. It had since fallen into disrepair and was now nothing more than a brick shell.
Luke slipped inside and sat himself down on the cold floor. He rummaged around in his coat pocket and produced his mobile phone, slipping a sock over it to dim its light. He wasn’t taking any chances. He tapped in a number from memory … a female voice answered;
“Hello, Nissell & Randall?”
“Oh hi there, yes, I wonder if you could help me. I currently have money invested with your offshore department.”
“Which division please?”
“Italy.”
“Please hold.”
There was the familiar click followed by a high-pitched singular beep. Davison’s voice came on clear and crisp. “We have a new strategy for your investment. In two evenings’ time we feel it would be best for you to start looking to the stars a bit more, charity is something that you will need to look at. We don’t have all the answers but we have the ticket on this one. That is about all we have for you, good evening Mr Reid.”
Luke signed off with pleasantries of his own to keep up the pretence, although no doubt Davison was no longer listening. He turned the phone off immediately, removing the battery, and remained crouched against the crumbled brick. The street was silent; the cold was seeping through his jeans.
Davison’s cryptic message was running through his mind. Looking to the stars, being so close to a ground-breaking physics laboratory meant it was specific wording, two evenings’ time is what Davison had said, plus we have the ticket on this one meant it was some form of ticketed event, a party of some sort, and Davison had mentioned that charity is something that you will need to look at.
Luke rubbed his hands over his scruffy jeans as he crept out of the brick structure. An obvious conclusion was that he had a ticket waiting for him at some kind of charity event taking place somewhere related to stars. Often the cryptic messages were that simple, any code in the world could be broken with time. The cryptic messages were to slow exterior entities down, but they still had to be functional for operatives.
Luke walked slowly down the road. Earlier that evening Luke had followed the man from the police station to his residence on the western outskirts of Teramo. He had recognised the elderly figure as Professor Roland Brun, a head technician at the Gran Sasso Institute. He was a prime figure in the dossier Davison had gone through briefly on the way to the airport in Denmark. Professor Brun had worked extremely closely with Vittorio on the OPERA experiments and Luke assumed the two Carabinieri had come to the conclusion that he was the logical place to start asking questions. Professor Vittorio had never married and had no children so Brun would appear to be the closest person to him.
Brun’s house had been nothing extraordinary, a small place on a quiet, shabby hillside street on the north-eastern side of Teramo. Luke had watched the house for around an hour. Brun’s wife held strong features and was well into her sixties. There had been nothing to really observe, no activity to spark concern. They appeared to live alone, no children. Luke thought if they had children they would be in their thirties anyway. He had left them to it.
Bouncing up the stone steps he entered the hotel foyer, the same attractive receptionist nodded and smiled at him as he walked past and took the stairs up to his floor. He emerged out into the corridor and strolled down to his door, ripping off the still-intact transparent piece of tape. It was rapidly approaching 1 a.m.
The orange street lights threw lava over the ceiling of his hotel room. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept all the way through the night. He was a man haunted by a nightmare, a past vision that refused to die, obstinately pulling him back to who he once was. Not sleeping brought various different waves of tiredness, one hour feeling exhausted, the next feeling ultra-alert. He
was always waiting for the intensity of sunlight to grow, and another morning to arrive. He focused on the tasks at hand and the night slowly crept away … one second at a time.
11.
Monday 12th November
Chung Su gulped down air, forcing the oxygen deep into her lungs. Regaining a steady breathing rhythm she took a swig of water from a plastic container. The early morning run had been longer than she had planned, around six miles, and she was sweating hard. She tore off the woolly beanie hat to try and cool herself and began to stretch. Her usual morning workout routine consisted of thirty minutes of yoga followed by a long run. Exercise was actively pursued by North Korean society as a healthy body and mind were imperative to a healthy spirit.
She had come to a stop in the centre of Teramo as the town was slowly waking up. People were ambling around the narrow streets, and no one seemed to be in any sort of rush. Chung Su’s run had allowed her to explore, it was her first time in Europe, in fact anywhere outside of Korea and she was amazed at how the town seemed to have grown haphazardly in all directions. Perhaps that’s how European towns and cities were. The narrow rambling streets, the quaint houses strung with washing; they were so different to those of her homeland, the stone and brick seemed to drip with history. As she had run through street after street the most powerful thing she experienced was the atmosphere, more specifically the complete lack of palpable apprehension. She was so used to existing in an atmosphere that pulsated with an undercurrent of fear and anxiety that her edginess felt out of place.
As the sweat on her exposed skin started to chill she tightened the band on her long ponytail. Her stomach rumbled slightly, reminding her she was still to have breakfast. Wiping the moisture from her face, she downed the remnants of the water bottle and scanned for a place to eat. She was stood in a small square with an old church. La Cattedrale di San Berardo said the sign. To her left Chung Su saw a small coffee shop, and decided to join the queue. She felt conspicuous stood amongst the crowd; it was clear Teramo was not accustomed to Korean citizens walking the streets, and the eyes of the men were swarming over her body. She was used to male colleagues subtly taking a look at her in her laboratory, being an attractive woman in a male-dominated environment it was to be expected but here in Italy the men were blatant about their admiration, unashamedly gawping at her tight running shorts.
The café was actually more of a restaurant but had a glass counter that displayed an array of warm pastries and freshly-made baguettes. She grabbed a fresh bottle of water from a fridge to the left of the counter and decided on a croissant. Pulling out a few euros from her hooded top she paid and walked out into the morning sun. It was bright but offered little warmth. Chung Su took a bite of the croissant, it flaked against her lips as she enjoyed her first taste of Europe.
Turning on the spot to position the sun on her face her eyes caught something that jarred against the relaxing European scene. At first it all happened on a subconscious level, a little voice within raising an alarm that was ignored by her conscious. But the voice nagged at her, it screamed and shouted until it was heard.
She was staring at a large red car parked about twenty yards away on the opposite side of the square; in the front seat sat two dark-skinned men, but what caused her to freeze was that both men were staring straight at her. As she held their gaze they stared back with raw intensity for what felt like an eternity, then as if snapping out of a dream they casually began looking around the square again. Chung Su stayed frozen for a long moment, willing herself to believe it was nothing to worry about. Perhaps it was the nature of her visit to a foreign land but her senses were on full alert. Then one of the men again fixed her with a glare. It was no coincidence.
She exited west past the side of the café and began walking down Via L. Paris. Every fibre of her being wanted to run, but a small sense of logic kept her walking. She didn’t want to alert the men in the car to the fact that she thought them a threat. Every car that rounded the bend caused her body to tense, but there was no sign of the red car. Relaxing slightly she felt stupid and cowardly to jump to silly conclusions. Then her blood ran cold, moving slowly around the ruined building the red car came into view; the two men were scanning the street. This time Chung Su didn’t control any emotion; she dumped the remaining croissant and water onto the floor and took off down the nearest street, pumping her legs hard and not daring to look back.
She ran for a full five minutes as fast as her legs would carry her, turning down street after street, entering and exiting various different alleyways. Eventually her lungs gave out and she slowed to a halt, gasping down air and holding the stitch in her side. After ten minutes’ worth of heavy panting there was no sign of the red car or the two men. The adrenaline drained from Chung Su’s body and tears began rolling down her cheeks. Her limbs were burning but her skin was ice cold, her breath clouded as the warm moisture hit the cold air. She knew the two men were there for her, it was no more than a feeling but she trusted it. A great professor she had once worked with said: People who want to separate the soul and science do not understand that human instinct is so accurate because it is shaped by both.
The reality of everything hit Chung Su hard. The mission she had been ordered to undertake was not a game, it was all too real and all too serious. She wanted to scream.
I am just a scientist … a technician … I deal with theory…
Turning her head upwards, she thought about how her whole world had been shaped by the sky above. As a child she used to constantly stare at it with her grandfather, night and day. They would take walks together in the dark nights, find a lonely hillside and lay down on the grass, lost amongst the millions of stars. He grandfather had taught her the constellations. As she had grown she had understood more about what caused the distant glow of a star, and the very warm glow of our star, the sun. She had been hooked. Every detail of the nuclear fusion reactions that were the lifeblood of the planet had to be understood, and they only inflamed her awe further.
With a heavy heart and an aching that was far more than mere fatigue Chung Su wandered slowly along the street, trying to figure out where she had ended up and hoping to come across a taxi back to her hotel. The day was slipping away and she had plans.
12.
Luke had watched the first light of day burst into the sky, beginning with a barely perceptible grey pallor, then turning gradually into a strong cloud spreading across every inch of sky, mixing with an orange glow until the final emergence of the brilliant ball of light. Now it was a crystal clear morning; the only reminder of the freezing temperature was the air seeping in from the small gap left between the window and car frame.
He had been sat in the Audi for well over three hours and his body had begun to ache an hour into that. He was parked a hundred yards up from Brun’s house. It was a modest size and sat amongst a range of other similar properties stretching up the northern hillside, the driveway separated from the road by a green grilled gate. There was always added danger when undertaking surveillance in a suburban environment; there were many external elements that couldn’t be controlled. In Luke’s case he was positioned on a quiet road that had little traffic, and he felt conspicuous sitting for three hours watching the house. The time was now 9.45 a.m. and the professor was still to emerge.
The strategy for the day was simple; follow Brun to the laboratory, observe, then intercept him on the route home. As Luke tapped his feet to keep his blood flowing, there was movement at Brun’s front door. He emerged onto the steps of the house, shouted something back inside and slammed the door before unlocking the green gate and hopping into his old white Peugeot. Luke guessed that being at the cutting edge of scientific discoveries didn’t pay much. He watched as Brun fiddled with something in the central partition before driving off, the car wheezing as it went.
Luke checked that the Sig Sauer was still tucked under his thigh, trigger exposed, and counted ten beats before starting off after the rust bucket. There were no exacts w
hen tailing a vehicle, ideally he would want to be working within a tactical surveillance team, that way a three-car rotation system could be set up. But he was alone, and that had its benefits
As they neared the laboratory Luke turned off the A24 and headed round to his covert observation post. Cautiously, he checked around on the hillside, the last thing he needed was a local rambler noticing a strange man sat with binoculars in his car.
Adjusting the telescopic sights on the binoculars Luke focused in on the Gran Sasso facility. After much scanning he spotted Brun’s white rust bucket in the vast car park; now he had to settle in for a long observation stint. An external consultant used by Group 9 claimed that static observation was the toughest part of any intelligence work; it was the least engaging but the most vital part of an operation; you switch off for a moment and you lose a vital piece of the jigsaw. Luke knew what he meant, staying alert and switched on after eight hours sat in a silent car involved an amazing amount of mental toughness.
There was a lot of activity within the compound but it all seemed everyday and normal. However, there were secrets floating around. Professor Vittorio had disappeared and someone knew something. Putting down the binoculars, Luke stared out at the compound. Not many things daunted him but looking at the strange and mysterious laboratory, knowing the work that was being undertaken below the ground, he felt slightly intimidated at the thought of unravelling its secrets. He knew he had to break it all down into smaller objectives.
Picking up the binoculars again, he noted a large sleek black coach parked on the far side of the car park, it had white German lettering along the top trim that said Travel that pushes the boundaries, and French lettering along the bottom trim that said Travel that broadens the mind. The company was called Gerhard’s. From the travel guides he had picked up Luke knew that the National Laboratory allowed educational tours of the facility, a great money-making scheme, cash was king for research institutes.
