Apocalypse

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Katherine Abell,’ Lopez suggested. ‘Purcell claimed that she was innocent of any crime. We could use her, if she can be convinced of her husband’s guilt.’

  ‘Do it,’ Jarvis said, and glanced at his watch. ‘That earthquake is due in a couple of hours, and if Charles Purcell’s predictions are true, he’s now aiming it at the very island his wife has fled to’.

  ‘Katherine’s in the Dominican Republic?’ Ethan asked in amazement.

  ‘Flew there from Miami International less than an hour ago,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘Looks like Joaquin’s own family might be a target too. He may have even planned deliberately to silence Katherine. Something must have happened between them – maybe she’s started to suspect that Joaquin’s not quite the philanthropist he’s claimed to be, and we can use that to our advantage. Lopez, you go after Katherine and make sure Bryson helps you out. Ethan, you get back to Cape Canaveral and track down Joaquin via his assassin.’

  ‘What are you going to do? We need all the help we can get,’ Lopez asked.

  ‘I’ll go with Ethan for now.’

  ‘And what about if we have to go underwater to find Joaquin’s base?’ she pressed.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ Jarvis interjected.

  ‘Well then make time,’ Lopez insisted. ‘You’re asking us to go into an area that’s due a major earthquake, then infiltrate a hidden underwater base against unknown and armed opposition. I wouldn’t mind so much except that you and your cavalry only ever turn up after the shooting’s done.’

  Jarvis recoiled, and then his bright blue eyes turned hard and cold.

  ‘I can’t just whistle up military intervention whenever it suits the two of you by making a quick phone call or calling in a debt. Do you have any idea how much it costs to support you both, especially when you insist on tearing up the countryside wherever you go? Scrambling those two F-15s earlier, plus the ride down from Illinois, plus this team of police and their transports, has set our budget back by almost a hundred thousand dollars in just one day. Think about that for a moment: a hundred thousand dollars in a little over six hours, is what it’s cost my department to keep the pair of you in goddamned work.’

  Lopez exhaled and closed her eyes. ‘And we appreciate it.’

  Jarvis kept his gaze on her for a moment, then looked across at Ethan.

  ‘Stopping IRIS is a priority, but so is convincing the DIA that their taxpayers’ dollars are being wisely spent. Recovering that camera and what it contains might just ensure that the Defense Department has the upper hand against rogue nations for several months to come. The intelligence could be priceless and I intend that our department recovers it. Is that understood?’

  Ethan nodded, and saw Lopez do the same. Jarvis gathered himself.

  ‘Ethan, let’s get back to Watchman and find out where that asshole who took the camera went. Lopez, when you return from the Dominican Republic we’ll send the pair of you to shut him down. Any further questions?’

  Ethan was about to turn for the nearby airboat when a police officer hurried up alongside them and raised an evidence bag to Jarvis.

  ‘The bullet that killed Charles Purcell,’ the officer said, then looked at Ethan. ‘We found it right where you said it would be, lodged in that tree trunk.’

  ‘How long will it take to have the casing analyzed?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘We can rush it through back at base, sir,’ the officer replied. ‘We already know the compound you’re looking for, so it should only take a couple of hours or so to confirm its presence, if it’s there.’

  ‘Enough time for the assassin to make it back to Miami,’ Ethan said to Jarvis.

  ‘And enough for us to track him to wherever IRIS is hiding,’ Jarvis agreed, and then looked at his watch. ‘We’d better hurry – we’ve an earthquake to catch.’

  Another police officer rushed up to them.

  ‘Crime scene investigators are working on Purcell’s body,’ the cop said to Kyle Sears. ‘You need to see this, captain.’

  Ethan followed Sears as he was led to Purcell’s body, Lopez and Jarvis behind him. As they reached the spit of sand, Ethan could see that the CSI team had removed the shirt from the scientist’s corpse, to photograph more clearly the entrance and exit wounds. Now, Ethan could see what had not been visible beforehand.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Lopez uttered.

  Across Purcell’s chest was scrawled lines of letters.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ Sears asked.

  frsbz racjotrl kbnq sf bpuzl

  mibmo yuwtez jrrwe

  Lopez stepped forward.

  ‘Charles said that he would take the secret of where he had put the documents to the grave,’ she said. ‘If he already knew that he was to be killed, then he might also have known that we would find this on his body. It must be another code of some kind, maybe the location of the documents.’

  ‘It looks like a cipher code,’ Jarvis said. ‘Not complex in itself, but the number of possible combinations runs into the tens of millions.’

  ‘What do we need?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘It’ll be a string of numbers, used to scramble the alphabet,’ Jarvis said. ‘Could be two numbers, could be ten, even a hundred. I could send this to the NSA and get them to work on it, but it could still take days, weeks even, and we only have a few hours.’

  Lopez stared at Purcell’s body.

  ‘He wouldn’t have made it that difficult,’ she said. ‘He was only covering his tracks. He must have left us a clue somewhere.’

  ‘Well, right now we don’t have the time to decode it, not here anyway,’ Sears said, and turned to the nearest police officer. ‘Have the remains flown out of here immediately. I want a lid kept on this: no media, no leaks, understood?’

  The officer was about to carry out the order when Ethan stepped in.

  ‘Wait. If this is Joaquin’s work, then how did he know where to send his assassin?’

  Sears stared blankly at Ethan for a moment. ‘Maybe he followed the two of you?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Lopez said. ‘Ethan’s right. He ran like hell to get away from us in Miami, remember? Tracking us since then, from Cape Canaveral and then out here on these airboats, would have been next to impossible.’ She looked at Ethan. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Well,’ Ethan began, ‘if Joaquin uses television reports to judge what’s happening in the future, then maybe he saw one that showed Purcell’s body being recovered.’

  Sears rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Jesus, this is going to really start messing with my head.’

  ‘Point is, Joaquin would have to have known about what would happen out here in order to have sent his man in to try and recover that camera,’ Lopez said.

  ‘You think that we should let him see he’s been successful?’ Jarvis asked. ‘Fulfill what Charles Purcell himself saw?’

  ‘Damn right,’ Ethan said. ‘Put this on the news, tell everyone. Suspected murderer found dead in the Everglades.’

  ‘That’s a mighty big risk,’ Jarvis said. ‘And anyway, does any of it matter? Surely from Joaquin’s perspective anything we do now has already been preordained. Whatever we choose to do with news reports he’ll have already seen.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ethan nodded, ‘but Purcell said that what Joaquin sees isn’t necessarily precisely what happened. We can use that to our advantage. Joaquin will be searching for something like this to confirm that what he saw in the future has actually now happened. If he sees it, it will boost his confidence, and that might make him drop his guard. We shouldn’t disappoint.’

  Jarvis finally nodded in agreement and turned to the officer.

  ‘Have the body recovered, then inform the local PD and the press. I want everybody else out of here within fifteen minutes, is that understood?’

  ‘Yessir!’

  The officer left and Ethan looked at the old man.

  ‘Time to turn the tables and give Joaquin what he wants to see, right?’

  ‘I’ll h
andle the press release,’ Jarvis said, looking at his watch. ‘You concentrate on finding IRIS. We don’t have much time.’

  As Lopez and the cops turned away, Ethan grabbed Jarvis’s arm and leaned in close.

  ‘Work or no work, I’m not going up against IRIS alone without something in return.’

  Jarvis shot him a look of concern, as though he knew exactly what he was suggesting, but Ethan released him before he could respond and strode away toward the waiting airboats.

  45

  IRIS, DEEP BLUE RESEARCH STATION, FLORIDA STRAITS

  June 28, 16:12

  Joaquin Abell stood at the control panel and watched ten armed guards led by Olaf Jorgenson escorting Governor MacKenzie, Harry Reed, Robert Murtaugh, Congressman Goldberg and property tycoon Benjamin Tyler into the hub. Dennis Aubrey stood behind the control panel and as far away from Joaquin as he could.

  Aubrey had heard that Olaf had returned barely half an hour before, Joaquin meeting the giant aboard the yacht before travelling down to the facility aboard the Isaac as his guests followed aboard the Intrepid. On his arrival, Joaquin had handed Aubrey a camera identical to those in the black-hole chamber and ordered it to be locked away until further notice.

  The five men were looking about them with uncomfortable expressions, set somewhere between curiosity and disgust. Men of power, Aubrey guessed, were not used to being kept in the dark and disliked being told what to do and when to do it. Effectively brought here against their wishes, and without their bodyguards and other familiar security measures, they probably felt precisely as Joaquin wanted them to feel: exposed and alone.

  Joaquin spread his hands in a gesture of welcome.

  ‘Gentlemen, thank you for coming.’

  Robert Murtaugh scowled up at him.

  ‘We’re only here because you’ve forced our hands, so don’t presume to believe that we’re willing visitors.’

  Governor MacKenzie nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’ve had to put a major meeting on hold for this, Joaquin. It had better be worth it. You said we were meeting on your yacht. Why the hell are we down here? What is this place?’

  The Texan, Harry Reed, pointed to the huge metallic sphere dominating the center of the hub.

  ‘What in the name of darnation is that goddamn thing?’

  Congressman Goldberg scanned the large plasma screens lining the walls of the hub, their coalesced news feeds taunting them with hundreds of voices.

  ‘Why all the news channels?’

  ‘All will be revealed,’ Joaquin said as he stepped down off the control platform. ‘For now, suffice to say that this hub is the center of my organization, the beating heart of what will, in time, become the most powerful company on earth.’

  Robert Murtaugh coughed out a bitter laugh and shook his head, his jowls swinging beneath his chin.

  ‘My ass, Joaquin. Your jumped-up little outfit isn’t worth a tenth of what my broadcasting network turns over.’

  ‘Not right now,’ Joaquin agreed, refusing to be baited. ‘But tomorrow . . .’

  ‘Something else you’ve seen in your damned visions?’ Governor MacKenzie uttered.

  Joaquin smiled and extended one hand toward the metallic sphere nearby.

  ‘You will observe, gentlemen, that the sphere in the center of the hub has windows, and that those windows look out toward the television screens around the walls of the hub.’ The men glanced up at the various news-feeds. ‘We see those feeds in the present, but from within the metal sphere, those newsfeeds are greatly accelerated by time dilation, allowing me to see tomorrow’s news today.’

  Robert Murtaugh glanced at the contraption. ‘Caused by what, exactly?’

  Joaquin did not reply, and Dennis Aubrey took his cue.

  ‘A black hole,’ he explained, his own voice sounding small in his own ears, ‘large enough to cause sufficient time dilation to allow IRIS to see into the future, small enough to remain under our control.’

  Robert Murtaugh spat his response.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he uttered. ‘I studied physics at college. Black holes form from collapsed stars of tremendous mass. You can’t possibly have achieved such energies. It would take a particle accelerator the size of our solar system to generate enough pressure to produce a black hole. Human technology doesn’t even come close to what would be required to . . .’

  ‘I haven’t captured a star,’ Joaquin replied.

  ‘You’re no scientist,’ Reed sneered at Joaquin in his Texan drawl, ‘so how could you have . . . ?’

  ‘I have people,’ Joaquin cut him off. ‘People who know how to achieve the impossible.’ He gestured to the chamber before them. ‘Do you even know what a black hole is?’

  When none of the gathered men responded and Murtaugh simply scowled, Joaquin looked across at Aubrey and raised an eyebrow. The scientist took a breath.

  ‘Black holes are formed when giant stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and begin to collapse under their own gravity,’ he explained, finding solace from his fears in the knowledge accumulated from a life’s work. ‘Stars ordinarily are a balancing act, with the force of gravity that formed the star in the first place trying to crush it ever further inward, balanced by the energy from nuclear fusion in the star’s core blazing outward. But when the fuel is exhausted, the nuclear fusion ends. With the core of the star no longer burning, there is no force to prevent the star from being crushed by its own weight. Eventually, the core of the star collapses into itself with immense force, blasting the outer layers of the star away in what’s called a supernova. The super-dense core usually remains as a smoldering remnant, but if the parent star was massive enough the core is crushed with such gravitational force that nothing can stop the collapse of its entire mass into an infinitely small space. A singularity is formed, the heart of a black hole. It is a place without dimension, yet of incredible mass, where time literally comes to a stop.’

  Joaquin nodded.

  ‘Absolutely correct,’ he agreed, as he strolled off the platform and surveyed the control room. ‘However, in the event that formed our universe, the Big Bang, there were such pressures and densities that much smaller, micro black holes were formed in their billions. More are produced daily by cosmic rays from the sun that collide at almost the speed of light with particles in our earth’s atmosphere, creating micro black holes that pass through the earth at close to light-speed. All of these tiny black holes possess little more mass than a grapefruit and pass through the earth almost unnoticed.’

  Benjamin Tyler frowned. ‘Almost?’

  Joaquin turned and lithely leapt up to the control panel.

  ‘Time-slips,’ he said grandly. ‘They produce tiny slips in time, their gravity distorting the flow of time around an observer just enough to cause them to experience events that some people refer to, rather naively, as supernatural.’

  ‘Such as?’ Governor MacKenzie asked.

  ‘Déjà vu,’ Joaquin replied. ‘The feeling that you’ve been somewhere before. The reason for that is because you have been there before, moments before you actually arrived. The micro black hole causes a tiny loop in time, too small to detect with the senses but enough that the human subconscious remembers what’s about to happen after one of these micro black holes flash through your brain.’

  ‘That’s pure speculation,’ Murtaugh argued, leaning on a thin white cane. ‘You have no evidence to support it.’

  ‘What about ghosts?’ Joaquin suggested. ‘Albert Einstein himself stated that time can flip and loop over on itself, and it takes little imagination to picture the past replaying itself before the eyes of those in the present. It wouldn’t take much for a small swarm of micro black holes passing through the earth to generate such a loop in time, the shadowy past temporarily revived.’ Joaquin shrugged. ‘But I digress – I take it that you can see the basic structure of the device, now that you know its purpose. It contains an object of tremendous power. Dennis, if you will?’

  Aubrey gestured
to the giant tokamak chamber and the huge magnetic-field generators.

  ‘A magnetic field is generated around the central sphere to attract and capture passing micro black holes as they travel through the earth,’ he said. ‘Black holes can carry a charge depending on the particles they consume from matter around them. If any black holes captured are given a negative charge by firing electrons at them from a cathode-ray tube, they become entrapped within the negatively charged surface of the chamber’s interior and forced into suspension in the center. They are repelled by the surrounding plates and thus combine.’

  Joaquin clapped his hands in delight as he addressed the guests.

  ‘The chamber contains a pure vacuum which stops the black hole from consuming any particles and getting bigger,’ he explained. ‘We couldn’t create the pure vacuum on our own, of course: what particles remained within the chamber were consumed by the first micro black holes that we caught.’

  ‘But how did you know where the micro black holes would be?’ Murtaugh asked. ‘It should have taken millions of years to have accumulated so many, even if solar cosmic rays were producing them in our atmosphere.’

  Joaquin smiled, expanding his arms to encompass the entire underwater complex.

  ‘Our planet has a number of what are known as magnetic anomalies,’ he explained. ‘They are regions where compasses fail, radio devices are cut off and all manner of atmospheric phenomena prevail. The two best known are the Devil’s Triangle off the coast of Japan, a place so dangerous that it is actually a controlled area which is avoided by aircraft and vessels. The other, here in the Florida Straits, is the Bermuda Triangle.’

  Aubrey took over, the eyes of the guests fixed upon him.

  ‘The anomalies are caused by the micro black holes passing through the earth’s magnetic field, which directs them toward these points on the earth’s surface. This is why so many anomalies seem compacted into a small geographic area. It’s why the facility was built here; Isaac Abell was trying to capture neutrinos, but instead the facility has been capturing black holes.’