Rogue command a troy sta.., p.23
Rogue Command (A Troy Stark Thriller—Book #2), page 23
In his left hand was a shot glass half full of vodka. The bottle sat on a pile of notebooks in front of him. In one sudden movement, he tilted his head back and poured the vodka down his throat. The delightful burn came to him like a line of fire along his throat and into his belly.
God. That was good.
Below him, he could hear the strains of background music—the organization had hired a cellist and piano player for the check-in period. He could hear the hum of people talking as the crowd accumulated.
Oh, the important people! They were pushing at the frontiers of science! They were lighting our way through the darkness. Right now, they must be sipping wine, eating cheese, and chatting together in a polyglot of languages about the wonderful progress they were making. They were very pleased with themselves.
The overall event, the Triumph of Knowledge, was an insult. If they had been trying to humiliate and further break the spirit of a broken old man, they couldn’t do a better job than they had done.
For many years, Oleg had been the lead researcher on a dismal failure of a project that once seemed to hold so much promise. Indeed, you might even say he was the only researcher left. Everyone from his generation had retired or died. Younger people had moved on to other ideas with better funding and better opportunities to step into the limelight. The romance of laboring anonymously and secretly no longer held much allure. Oleg had defected to the West from the Soviet Union decades ago, in an era when nearly everything that mattered was done in secret. He was highly esteemed in those days. It was a coup to steal him away from the communists!
Had he just thought that younger people had moved on to other ideas with better funding? It wasn’t quite true, was it? No. They had moved on to better ideas in general. The idea that Oleg had spent his entire adult life on had turned out to be a colossal waste of time, money, his own personal energies, his enthusiasm, optimism, youth, and then his middle age. All slowly drained away.
The famous American inventor Edison was said to have once remarked after one of thousands of botched attempts to perfect the incandescent light bulb, “I have not failed ten thousand times. I’ve successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work.”
This quote was almost certainly spurious, a capitalist old wives’ tale spawned to convince mediocre American minds that anyone could become a great captain of industry if they only tried hard and long enough.
But it was applicable to Oleg’s life, if only in an ironic way. For long years, he had discovered, over and over again, countless ways not to make a particle beam weapon. He supposed it was his own fault. If he searched his heart, he could see that he already knew it was impossible, given the limitations of human understanding twenty years ago. He should have moved on then. But he had already invested twenty years at that point.
He could scream. Forty years had been squandered. It was too much to accept. Even allowing himself to think about it was too much. He would slam the door of his mind shut if he could.
It wasn’t that a particle beam weapon was impossible. That wasn’t accurate. Given current technologies, particle beams as we understood them had to run along a pre-existing track. They ran particle beams in the various accelerators here at CERN night and day. That problem was solved in the 1950s.
But what good was it? A particle beam weapon implied that there was no track to guide it. If you were to fire a particle beam at a naval destroyer in the ocean, the enemy navy wasn’t going to stand idly by for years while you spent millions of dollars constructing an accelerator up to the side of their precious ship.
His life’s work was a bust. It was a disaster. He still dutifully sent encrypted reports to the American military intelligence agencies that sponsored his work here, but he knew what they thought of him. He was an embarrassment. He was a Cold War relic. His budget was a rounding error. If anyone spoke of him at all, it was probably to make a joke by the water cooler. He was a laughingstock.
They were waiting for him to die, and then they would close the book on yet another stupid episode in the history of American-Soviet relations. Remember how they were going to race each other across the solar system, claiming and colonizing the outer planets? Remember how they were going to defeat each other using remote viewing and other psychic phenomena? Remember the mobile nuclear missiles on truck beds along the line of contact? Remember how the Americans were hiding the bodies of four crashed aliens from outer space and were learning to use captured alien technologies?
Oleg’s efforts belonged to that silly and dangerous era. He was inventing a space age weapon for a space age that never arrived. It was a curiosity, an artifact of another time. He could be a man in a wax museum, except there was no reason to celebrate him in a museum because his ideas didn’t work.
Sometime in the past two years (he didn’t remember exactly when—the vodka had begun to cloud his thinking), he had taken to sending encrypted emails out into the world, hinting there had been a breakthrough in the study of particle beam weapons. It was the adolescent vandal in him coming to the fore.
He sent the emails to dummy civilian email accounts he had created himself. He received them off-campus, sometimes at his own home, masking the whereabouts of the accounts using a VPN. It was a rudimentary, off-the-shelf security setup with encryption that any intelligence agency should easily break. But no one did. That was because no one cared. No one was monitoring his activities. He was well and truly forgotten.
Below him, the sounds of the gala continued to rise up through the building. It was like a gathering storm that would blow his house down. He was thinking very seriously about ruining their party by shooting himself in the head.
The giant handgun was absurdly powerful, a leftover from his days of being enamored with everything American. One shot under the chin should blast a catastrophic hole up through his brain and out the top of his skull. A bit more vodka and he might have the courage to go through with it.
In front of him on the desk was a piece of paper with a scribbled note on it. Before today, he had thought long and hard about what such a note should entail, but today, nothing would come to him. The words on that paper were the best he could do:
Messy, isn’t it?
He giggled quietly. If nothing else, perhaps people would remember and respect him for his sense of humor.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
6:20 pm Central European Time
The Antimatter Factory
The Antiproton Decelerator
CERN
Meyrin, Switzerland
“These clothes are too much,” Princess Dye said.
The other two didn’t respond to her.
It was a cool evening, and might become a cold night, but she was wearing three layers of clothes, not counting her underwear. She had a white lab coat on top with a lightweight black jumpsuit underneath.
Beneath the jumpsuit were the black pants and white dress shirt of the catering staff. Beneath that was a wrinkle-free shimmering blue dress, mostly bunched around her waist, that if necessary, would indicate she was an invited guest to the gala.
She could change identities at a moment’s notice. In fact, the three of them had entered the campus dressed as caterers and driving a catering van. Where the identities as caterers had come from, and how they passed muster with the guard at the gate, wasn’t her department.
The science clothes were in the back of the van, piled behind the cakes, pies, and other dessert goodies they were supposedly bringing in for the event. But they weren’t going to the event.
Right now, there was a heavy backpack over her shoulder, filled with explosive charges. Both Thomas and Izzy Bad were carrying similar backpacks. They were ready to make a mighty big bang.
The three of them stood near a small, one-story concrete outbuilding on a grassy knoll. There was a large tree overhead. The night was already dark, and they almost seemed like the shadows of the tree’s branches.
As they watched, a man in a dark sweatshirt, his hood pulled up to hide his face, walked toward them. He didn’t acknowledge or even look at them. Instead he went straight to the concrete pillbox. A card reader stood on one spindly leg next to the metal door to the building.
The man went to the card reader and flashed a white employee card in front of it. Then he grasped the door handle, turned it, and pushed the door open. A second later, and without a word, he turned and walked back the way he had come.
Thomas darted to the door and caught it before it closed. He turned, looked at her and Izzy, and smiled. “Masks up,” he said. “We’re in.”
He pulled the black bandana from around his throat, up over the lower parts of his face, and then finally over his nose. He tightened it around the back of his head.
Princess Dye glanced past him into the building. This was a utility entrance. The doorway opened to an iron stairwell that went nowhere but down. The stairwell was lit with weak overhead lights.
She pulled her balaclava up over her face.
She, Thomas, and Izzy were now three sets of eyes staring at each other.
“Ready?” Thomas said. “Almost the same exact thing as before.”
Princess Dye nodded. “Ready.”
“Ready,” Izzy said.
“This is for all the marbles,” Thomas said.
He turned and went down the stairs, Princess Dye just two steps behind him, and Izzy right on her heels.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
6:25 pm Central European Time
Suisse Extended Stay Suites
Geneva Airport
Meyrin, Switzerland
“What are you doing, Jan?”
They were all in various parts of the hotel suite. Troy was lounging on a flower-patterned easy chair, the chair kicked all the way back like a dentist’s chair, the footrest and the headrest extended. He was tired, nearly exhausted, after the night he’d had.
These guys had slept last night, at least a little bit. He hadn’t.
Troy was wearing the new Interpol jumpsuit that Miquel had conjured. It had a base layer of super-light dragon skin armor, fit his body well, and had pockets galore. There was a vest that went with it that he hadn’t put on yet. The vest had plate inserts for added protection. The suit also came with a helmet with radio functionality inside of it. That hadn’t been tested yet in the field.
His boots were on. His gun, a standard-issue Glock 19 was sitting on the little table at his elbow. That was the best Miquel could get authorization for them to carry. It was a very good gun, but it meant they were going in light.
He was sipping a can of cold Rock Star Zero he’d found in the refrigerator. They must sell them around here somewhere. It had two cups of coffee worth of caffeine in it, along with a massive dose of vitamin B for energy. He didn’t want to get caught napping. Everyone was dressed and ready for action. They could get called any minute, or they could spend the entire weekend hanging around and never do anything.
There wasn’t a real good reason for the terrorists to hit tonight. Tomorrow was the big demonstration of the Large Hadron Collider. Tomorrow was when the most visiting dignitaries would be on campus, the most media, and even a couple of Nobel Prize winners. Tonight was just the welcome.
Jan’s workstation had morphed into seven monitors in a row on two long tables, four of which were laptops. There were two other sets of keyboards. There was an additional server under the table, and three other smaller black devices with red and green LED lights. Wires snaked to three different surge protectors, taking up nearly every wall socket in the room.
“I’m monitoring the environment for anomalies,” Jan said. His broad back was to Troy, and his hands moved from keyboard to keyboard as images flitted across each screen, changing every few seconds. He was wearing the same headset with earphones and extended microphone he’d been wearing earlier.
“I’ve been doing this for much of the day. I was trying to do it in Geneva, hoping to catch the terrorist group gathering, but, of course, the city is too big for discrepancies to stand out.”
“As a practical matter,” Carl Gallo said, “they probably know someone is doing what you’re doing, and they’ve taken steps to stay invisible to you.”
Gallo was sprawled out on a couch with a pile of pillows under his head, and his black boots up on a new coffee table.
Jan nodded his big bald head. “Yes. In the city, they can do that. Once they emerge on the CERN campus, if they do, I will spot them.”
Troy watched the screens. There was a curving underground tunnel, with a super collider running along it. In the right-hand corner were the letters LHC. There were people in matching black pants and white shirts setting up inside an event space, getting ready for tonight’s opening party. Center 42, it said in the corner of the screen. There was an aerial shot of the campus, cars flowing along and people moving like ants, the sun fading to the west over the curving horizon line. There was a ground-level shot taken at one of the entry gates, as two guards checked the credentials of people in a line of cars snaking from the roadway.
More views popped up, staying for several seconds, then disappeared again. Jan’s hands moved like those of a piano player, from keyboard to keyboard. His head swiveled side to side, eyes bouncing from one screen to the next.
Troy glanced into the nearest bedroom. Dubois was in there, sitting on the bed, disarming dummy versions of the explosives used in the Massachusetts attack. They were flat circular charges, roughly the size and shape of hockey pucks. There was adhesive backing on each one.
They were essentially containers holding small round bricks of C4, with a chemical accelerant in a glass ampule to ignite the C4. The accelerant was protected inside a tiny steel box. To arm the charge, the terrorist needed only to twist it open, which slid one wall of the steel box away, exposing the ampule. Then the terrorist could stick it to a wall or other surface and move on.
By planting one every twenty or thirty meters, you were creating a daisy chain where each new explosion ignited the next one in line. To disarm it, a person had to peel the charge off whatever surface it was stuck to, then carefully twist the device closed again, making sure the tiny steel box shut firmly and completely. Dubois was practicing this, again and again, getting it into her motor memory.
Troy and Dubois had barely spoken.
“I’m still here because I’m a professional,” she had told him, in the few words she had been willing to share. “But please know that I resent you compromising missions and putting my life in danger on a whim.”
It was hardly a whim, he had almost said but didn’t.
“I respect that,” he’d said instead. “And I promise I’m going to do better.”
Troy didn’t know how he was supposed to make good on that promise. The bad thing that he had done, he would do again.
“How did you get that underground collider footage?” he said now to Jan. “Did they authorize that?”
Jan shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. I’ve had to take extraordinary measures to gain access to as many of the video feeds on campus as I can.”
Troy glanced at Miquel, who was in the other bedroom. He was sitting on a bed in there, murmuring to someone on a cell phone.
“You hacked it,” Gallo said. “You hacked the CERN security footage?”
Jan shrugged. “In a word, yes. I had no choice. It would have taken days or weeks to gain access to their security system, and there was no guarantee that they would even comply with my request. They’re certainly under no mandate to do so. And we need the data now. It’s best for everyone that we have it. Miquel agreed with me on this. He said he would manage any concerns with CERN if they catch us at it.”
“Do you have the entry codes, the names on the ID cards, all that stuff?” Troy said.
“Of course. The footage wouldn’t be much good by itself, would it? It’s too easy to misinterpret. I decided I should just take everything.”
“Well, so much for their cutting-edge security system.”
Jan nodded. “So it would seem.”
Troy took a sip of his Rock Star. He was going to have to sleep at some point, maybe tonight after the first gala was over. But just because the party ended didn’t mean the danger did. The attack in Massachusetts took place in the middle of the night when no one was around.
The Rock Star didn’t seem to be helping. Troy felt that if he closed his eyes right now, he would drift off. He looked at Jan again. Jan seemed fresh and alert.
Troy should just let go for a bit. If something happened, he was right here. They could wake him up.
He took a deep breath. Okay. His eyelids fluttered down. He was sitting across from Aliz Willems in the outdoor Madrid restaurant again, the jet fireplace a few feet to his right, casting a warm glow on his face.
“I have something,” Jan said. He said it calmly, dispassionately, as if having something was the same as not having anything.
“What is it?” Gallo said.
“Three people. They appear to be two men and a woman. They’re wearing lab smocks and black masks. They’re carrying backpacks. They entered the facility for the Antiproton Decelerator through a utility entrance, not the main entrance. One identity card swiped, three people entered.”
Gallo was already on his feet, moving in behind Jan to watch the screen.
Troy moved his chair into the upright position, eyes blinking. He grunted. He had been ten seconds from fast asleep.
He looked at the screen. It showed a wide angle view of what looked like a large concrete warehouse or loading dock. It was brightly lit. A thick yellow stripe ran along the ground. Banks of machines stood in a row. It was hard to say what they were. Iron stairs with no-slip runners climbed two stories to another platform with a yellow metal fence around it. Across the way there was a similar blue-caged platform.
