“Somebody hook the doc up with his Kevlar,” Macon grunts.
In short order, a heavy bulletproof vest is thrown Jonas’s way. For an instant, he debates whether to put it on. He’ll only have to remove it later, and that could end up costing him precious seconds. On the other hand, he doesn’t know what kind of resistance they’ll encounter. There’s what we plan for, Macon had observed, and there’s what actually happens.
Jonas tries to put on the vest but struggles with its complex system of folding plates and Velcro fasteners. The other men smirk and titter, finding humor in Jonas’s inexpertness.
“Help you out?” Macon asks, more impatient than amused. Without waiting for an answer, he manhandles Jonas, spinning him around and slapping the Kevlar into place.
One of the mercenaries throws Macon a wary glance. “Hope you got us paid first.” The other men laugh. Macon just points Jonas toward his seat and dons a Kevlar vest of his own.
As Jonas straps himself in, he feels the mercenaries studying him. Assessing. Judging. Considering whether his inexperience will get one or more of them killed today.
The fuselage vibrates as the rotors begin to pick up speed, and the helicopter lurches upward. As it climbs, Jonas cracks his knuckles. He feels a coldness form in his chest as his heart begins to gallop. He considers the ring on his hand. Sunlight streams in from the helicopter’s windows, glancing off its matte silver finish. Its white light pulses, as reliable as a promise. Everything will be all right. Everything will work out.
He takes a deep breath. But it will take more than that to calm him.
The Control Centre building is five minutes away.
The Dauphin’s rotor wash sways the stalks of corn growing on the fringes of the Conseil European Pour La Recherche Nucléaire laboratory, more commonly referred to as CERN. The facility has two entrances, one on the Swiss side of the border and its twin to the northwest, on the French side. The helicopter is making for France, where the Centre de Contrôle du CERN—CERN’s Control Centre building—sits amid a two-square-mile cluster of low-slung buildings, each as unremarkable as the next. From the sky, one of the most advanced and sophisticated scientific complexes in the world resembles an office park.
Although the security is nowhere near commensurate with a place that houses the globe’s largest science experiment, the gate at Route Dirac is formidable enough that Macon had recommended the helicopter. Why figure out a way around the guard and gate when they can merely go over both? The plan also has the added virtue of circumventing border patrol.
A snowcapped mountain range looms in the distance as the helicopter descends. Jonas watches the mercenaries, their eyes—visible through the holes of their ebony balaclavas—filled with steel and resolve. Jonas dons a balaclava of his own. In failure, it will be best if his face isn’t caught on any security cameras. Then he pulls on the padded black gloves he’ll need for the elevator shaft later.
“Just like we drilled, all right?” Macon says. “Move fast. Stay sharp. Keep up.” Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech it’s not. Jonas just bobs his head.
The helicopter touches down outside the Control Centre. Within seconds of its skids hitting the asphalt, they’re spilling out, just as they drilled. The helicopter remains behind, its rotors still spinning, to spirit Macon and his men away before the Police Nationale can arrive.
If all goes according to plan, Jonas won’t be leaving with them.
One of the mercenaries carries a small battering ram, the kind favored by SWAT units and their equivalents all around the world, but it proves unnecessary as the building’s double doors are unlocked. The ram is quickly discarded—dead weight that will only slow them down—as the men lead Jonas inside.
The lobby could be mistaken for a doctor’s or dentist’s. Linoleum flooring. Wood appliqué everywhere. To the right is a unisex restroom. Next to the door hangs a poster of the Compact Muon Solenoid, known as the CMS. The receptionist’s desk stands unmanned, the building empty. Dawn is barely an hour old.
Expecting no resistance but prepared for any, the mercenaries push left, a pair of sliding glass doors parting to allow them access. Jonas follows them into the control room, a huge space with blue-gray flooring. Twelve flat-screens hang around the circumference of the room. Beneath them are filing cabinets topped with empty champagne bottles, each one representing some team achievement. No one is working at this early hour. Jonas inwardly sighs in relief.
The room’s computers are arrayed on four “islands” throughout the space, each curved like a magnet. Jonas moves to the one labeled “LHC,” the Large Hadron Collider. The largest and most powerful particle collider in the world. His fingers dance across the keyboard like a concert pianist’s. The monitor directly overhead comes to life. Colorful data and computer graphics spill across the flat-screens, confirming that Jonas has successfully brought the LHC online.
Satisfied, he moves to a huge metal box nestled between a passel of computer screens. It looks like a prop from a 1960s science fiction movie, a beige box covered with rows of yellow and red and green buttons. Keys dangle from a series of locks. Jonas turns one and is rewarded with a blinking green light. He’s just opened up access to the collider itself. He turns to Macon and gives a thumbs-up.
Macon turns to his men. “Next phase.”
Jonas leads Macon and the mercenaries out to a small hallway that terminates at a set of elevator doors. Macon wedges them open, revealing a column of thick cables. One mercenary keeps watch while another—Perez, Jonas thinks his name is—disappears inside the dark elevator shaft.
Macon gestures to Jonas. You’re up.
Jonas approaches the elevator’s maw. Of all the steps in the plan, this one frightens him most, but he sees no alternative. The LHC is twenty-seven stories down, and a proper elevator ride would cost minutes that Jonas doesn’t have. He takes hold of one of the cables with both of his padded gloves and steps into the shaft.
Gravity throws him down. Jonas tightens his grip on the cable. The gloves, coated in nylon and Teflon, do their work, slowing his descent enough so that he’s like a firefighter going down a pole. The cables shimmy, making a deep, echoing twang. The sound of Macon and the other mercenaries’ descents echo from above. Jonas turns and sees that Perez has already opened the elevator doors. They are now over 260 feet underground. The height of a small building. As Jonas steps out of the elevator shaft, he’s greeted with the persistent hum of the three hundred industrial fans that work around the clock to keep billions of dollars’ worth of technology cool enough to operate.
Macon lands. “Let’s move.” He’s already stepping past Jonas and Perez, deeper into the facility. Jonas has been here three times before and knows the layout best, but Macon has spent weeks studying blueprints and schematics. By this point, he may know this part of the LHC better than the dozens of scientists and support staff who work at the facility.
As a group, they plunge farther into the subterranean space. Computing equipment in blue casings lines the walls of the corridor. It took CERN seven years to tunnel out nearly fifty-five million gallons of soil and rock, and the engineers dug so deep into the earth that they wound up excavating an ancient Roman villa.
“Watch your step,” Jonas warns.
The narrow corridor is a warren of jutting conduits and low-hanging piping, and it takes the men a minute to make it into the LHC tunnel, the seventeen-mile subterranean loop that straddles the French-Swiss border. Jonas takes the lead, moving fast. He’s close. After two years, he’s so close. The mercenaries keep pace with his urgency. Jonas knows that Macon is mentally calculating how long their luck will hold out. Whether a worker or, worse, a security guard will arrive for duty early. Whether they’ve tripped some hidden alarm. Whether something transpires that their thorough planning doesn’t account for.
The Compact Muon Solenoid is anything but compact. Rather, it’s the size of a four-story apartment building. Its endcap alone is fifty feet wide, conjuring the giant eye of a massive robot. It holds seventy-six thousand lead-tungstate crystals, but the most important component—the reason Jonas is here—is the large circular ring that constitutes the world’s most powerful superconducting solenoid magnet.
Ladders and stairways abound. At the top of one flight is a set of controls of such complexity that they look like they could operate a fleet of Space Shuttles. Jonas has barely gripped the stairway railing when the metal in front of him sparks. The sound of multiple gunshots echo from below in the cavernous space.
He’s out of luck. And time.
“Move your ass, Doc,” Macon barks as he and his men exchange gunfire with an enemy Jonas can’t see.
Jonas throws himself up the stairs, two at a time, shedding his Kevlar vest and balaclava on his way up to the instrumentation panel. As he climbs, he steals a glance below. A small war has broken out, which means either the police have arrived much faster than anticipated or CERN’s security team is better equipped than Jonas knew. In any case, this is why he hired a group of trained mercenaries. But he pushes the thought aside. He has work to do.
Reaching the CMS’s controls, Jonas begins flipping switches and turning dials. He pulls up his sleeve to consult his tattoo, a formality—given that he remembers every element of it—but a necessary one. Leave nothing to chance. He enters a complex series of instructions into the keyboard mounted against the CMS and is rewarded with an earthshaking thrum from the huge machinery surrounding him. Energies intended to reveal the secrets of the universe begin powering up.
Jonas chances another glance at the firefight below. Perez and a second mercenary are both down, bleeding onto the concrete, their bulletproof vests having proved impotent against shots to the head.
A zipping sound above him steals his attention, and he sees three men fast-roping down. Their fatigues mark them as Armée de Terre, the French Army. Jonas blinks. What’s the military doing here? Were they nearby? Maybe on maneuvers? Or were they stationed here? Did they know we were coming?
But there’s no time for such questions. The soldiers are nearly on top of Jonas and the remaining mercenaries. The Armée de Terre are equipped with M4 carbine assault rifles but wouldn’t risk harming the sensitive technology Jonas is operating. His proximity to it is probably the only reason he is still alive, he reasons. He continues to work.
Suddenly, footfalls behind him. Rubber on steel, pounding hard. Jonas peels his attention away from the terminal. Behind him, Macon is bounding up the stairs, his Glock belching fire. Chak. Chak. Chak. Three precise shots, and a trio of French soldiers drops at Jonas’s feet, seconds away from arresting him. Or worse.
“Hurry,” Macon says. His voice carries no urgency, only iron.
Jonas returns his attention to the instrumentation. A panel of glowing lights confirms it’s time for the next phase. He’s about to say as much to Macon when the mercenary’s head snaps back, trailing crimson like a comet. Blood sprays over the terminal’s buttons and dials and across Jonas’s face. He feels a pang. Macon was the furthest thing from a friend, but Jonas had gotten to know him well enough to feel his passing.
Macon’s impact on the steel floor is the equivalent of a starting gun. Jonas takes off. More gunfire dogs his heels. Bullets blur past him like murder hornets. He continues to sprint as fast as he can off the platform and onto a catwalk. Bullets spark and ricochet around him. Whatever compunction the French Army had about damaging equipment worth billions of dollars has apparently been set aside.
As he runs, Jonas produces the Glock he’d been given. But despite the fact that he’s being shot at, he tosses the gun away. He can’t take it where he’s headed. A clanking noise resounds as the gun pinballs down the chasm.
Jonas vaults a railing and free-falls before landing on a sister catwalk stretching six feet below. He maneuvers across it toward a component of the CMS called the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter. It’s aptly named, looking for all the world like the mouth of a massive cannon. Overhead, the Hadronic calorimeter, a towering ring of brass and steel, emits a rising groan.
It’s almost time.
Jonas peers down at his ring. Its white light pulsates. It’s ready. He’s ready. In seconds, the CMS will be ready. Metal vibrates beneath his feet. The entire cavern quivers with enough power to hurl protons and electrons at velocities close to the speed of light. Depending on the experiment, these particles explode into a target or each other, and their collisions create new particles—entirely new forms of matter—recreating the conditions just after the big bang. Such acts of universal creation are the province of gods.
Then, a voice echoes through the metal and concrete canyon. “Halt! Arrêtez!” Jonas wheels to see a French soldier, eighteen years old if he’s a day. The kid is white-knuckling his M4, his face pale as he makes his way down the catwalk, closing in. “Éloignez-vous de la machine. Descendez par terre.” He sounds as afraid as Jonas feels. The barrel of a machine gun ratchets up and down in his trembling hands.
Jonas grips the railing with one hand. The catwalk now shakes with the force of the machinery he’s put in motion. The light on his ring pulses. He’s standing dead center in front of the Calorimeter Barrel. He scrutinizes the formulae inked into his arm. Not for the first time, he questions whether his calculations are correct.
The soldier chances another step forward.
