The plane jerked to the right and then the left. The lightning snapped again, a million-volt spark going off right in front of his eyes. He felt a shock through the radio and dropped the microphone like a hot potato. It swung beneath the panel on its cord.
Hudson reached for the microphone. He missed. He leaned farther forward and tried again, stretching, and then grasping it with his fingertips. He pulled it back ready to broadcast again.
And then he looked up just in time to see clouds vanish and the black waters of the Atlantic filling the horizon and rushing up toward him.
1
Geneva, Switzerland, January 19, 2011
ALEXANDER COCHRANE WALKED ALONG the quiet streets of Geneva. It was well past midnight, on a dark winter evening. Snow drifted softly from above, adding to three inches that had fallen during the day, but there was no wind to speak of, and the night was hushed and peaceful.
Cochrane pulled his knit cap down, drew his heavy wool coat tighter around him, and thrust his hands deep into the coat’s pockets. Switzerland in January. It was supposed to snow and often did, usually taking Cochrane by surprise.
The reason for that was that Cochrane spent his days three hundred feet underground in the tunnels and control room of a massive particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The LHC was run by the European Council for Nuclear Research, though it went by the acronym CERN as the French spelling used those initials (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire).
The temperature in the LHC’s control room remained a perfect 68 degrees, the lighting was constant, and the background noise was an unchanging hum of generators and pulsing energy. A few hours spent down there felt no different than a few days, or a few weeks, as if time wasn’t passing.
But of course it was, and it often stunned Cochrane how different the world appeared upon his return to the surface. He’d entered the building this morning under blue skies and a crisp, if distant, sun. Now the clouds hung thick, heavy and low, illuminated from beneath in an orange glow by the lights of Geneva. All around lay a three-inch blanket of snow that had not been present twelve hours before.
Cochrane walked through the field of white headed for the train station. The big shots at CERN — the physicists and other scientists — came and went in CERN-provided cars with drivers and heated seats.
Cochrane was not a physicist or particle theorist or any other designation of that nature. He was an educated man to be sure. He had a master’s in electromagnetic theory, twenty years of experience in the energy-transfer business, and was well compensated. But the glory of CERN went to the physicists and the others looking for the building blocks of the universe. To them Cochrane was nothing more than a highly paid mechanic. They were bigger than him. Even the machine he worked on was bigger than him. In fact, it was bigger than anyone.
The Large Hadron Collider was the largest scientific instrument in the world. Its tunnels ran in a twenty-seven-kilometer circular track that extended outside the territory of Switzerland and into France. Cochrane had helped design and build the superconducting magnets that accelerated the particles inside the tunnels. And as an employee of CERN he kept them running.
When the LHC was powered up, it used an incredible amount of energy, most of that for Cochrane’s magnets. After being chilled to 271 degrees below zero, those magnets could accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light. The particles in the LHC traveled so fast that they zipped around the twenty-seven kilometers eleven thousand times in a single second.
The only problem for Cochrane was that one magnet failure shut down the whole thing for days or even weeks at a time. He’d been particularly irked a few months back when a subcontractor installed a second-rate circuit board, which had promptly blown. Even now it boggled Cochrane’s mind; a ten-billion-dollar machine done in because someone wanted to save a couple euros.
It had taken three weeks to repair the damage, every single day spent with higher-ups breathing down his neck. Somehow it was his fault. Then again, it was always his fault.
Even though things were going well now, the physicists and the CERN leadership seemed to regard the magnets as the weak link in the system. As a result, Cochrane was held on a short leash and seemed almost to live at the facility.
It made him angry for a moment, but then he shrugged. Soon enough it would be someone else’s problem.
Cochrane continued through the snow to the train station. To some extent the snow was a plus. It would leave tracks. And he wanted there to be tracks tonight.
He climbed up onto the platform and checked the time. Five minutes till the next train. He was right on schedule. The platform was empty. In five minutes or less he’d be on his way to a new life, one he felt certain would be infinitely more rewarding than his current one.
A voice called out to him. “Alex?”
He turned and gazed down the platform. A man had come up the far stairway and was striding toward him, passing beneath the halogen lamps.
“I thought it was you,” the man said, coming closer.
Cochrane recognized him as Philippe Revior, deputy head of security at the LHC. His throat tightened. He hoped nothing was wrong. Not tonight. Not this night.
Cochrane pulled out his phone to make sure he hadn’t been summoned back. No messages. No calls. What the hell was Revior doing here?
“Philippe,” Cochrane said as cheerfully as he could. “I thought you were prepping for tomorrow’s run.”
“We’ve done our work,” Revior said. “The night crew can handle the rest.”
Cochrane felt suddenly nervous. Despite the cold, he began to sweat. He felt Revior’s arrival had to be more than coincidence. Had they found something? Did they know about him?
“Are you catching a train?” he asked.
“Of course,” the security chief said. “Who drives in this?”
Who drives in this? Three inches of snow was a normal winter day in Geneva. Everyone drove in it.
As Revior moved closer, Cochrane’s mind whirled. All he knew for sure was that he could not have the deputy head of security traveling with him. Not here, not now.
He thought of heading back to the LHC, claiming suddenly that he’d left something behind. He checked his watch. There was not enough time. He felt trapped.
“I’ll ride with you,” Revior said, producing a flask. “We can share a drink.”
Cochrane looked down the tracks. He could hear the sound of the train coming. In the far distance he saw the glow from its lights.
“I, um… I…” Cochrane began.
Before he could finish he heard footsteps from behind, someone coming up the stairs. He turned and saw two men. They wore dark overcoats, open to the elements.
For a second Cochrane assumed them to be Philippe’s men, members of security, or even the police, but the truth was laid bare in the look on Revior’s face. He studied them suspiciously, a lifetime of evaluating threats no doubt telling him what Cochrane already knew, that these men were trouble.
Cochrane tried to think, tried to come up with some solution to avoid what was about to happen, but his thoughts formed like molasses in the cold. Before he could speak the men drew weapons, short-barreled automatics. One pointed at Cochrane and one at Philippe Revior.
“Did you think we would trust you?” the leader of the two men said to Cochrane.
“What is this?” Revior said.
“Shut up,” the second man said, jabbing the gun toward Revior.
The leader of the two thugs grabbed Cochrane by the shoulder and yanked him closer. The situation was spiraling out of control.