Devil's Gate nf-9 Read online

  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.

  “You’re coming with us,” the leader said. “We’ll make sure you get off at the right stop.”

  As the second thug laughed and glanced toward Cochrane, Revior attacked, slamming a knee into the man’s groin and tackling him.

  Cochrane wasn’t sure what to do, but when the leader turned to fire, Cochrane grabbed his arm, shoving it upward. The gun went off, the shot echoing through the dark.

  With little choice but to fight, Cochrane pushed forward, bowling the bigger man over and scuffling with him on the ground.

  A backhand to the face stunned him. A sharp elbow to the ribs sent him tumbling to the side.

  As he came up he saw Revior head butting the second thug. After putting him out of action Revior charged and tackled the leader, who’d just thrown Cochrane off him. They struggled for the gun, exchanging several vicious blows.

  A thundering sound began to fill the background as the approaching train rounded the curve a quarter mile from the station. Cochrane could already hear the brakes screeching as the steel wheels approached.

  “Alex!” Revior yelled.

  The assailant had flipped Revior over and was now trying to get the gun aimed at Revior’s head. The old security specialist held the arm off with all he had, then pulled it close, a move that seemed to surprise the assailant.

  He chomped down on the man’s hand with his teeth, and the thug whipped his arm backward instinctively. The gun flew out of his grip and landed in the snow beside Cochrane.

  “Shoot him!” Revior shouted, holding the assailant and trying to immobilize him.

  The sound of the train thundered in Cochrane’s ears. His heart pounded in his chest as he grabbed the gun.

  “Shoot him!” Revior repeated.

  Cochrane glanced down the track, he had only seconds. He had to choose. He targeted the assailant. And then he lowered his a
im and fired.

  Philippe Revior’s head snapped backward, and a spray of blood whipped across the snow-covered platform.

  Revior was dead, and the assailant in the gray coat wasted no time in dragging him back into the shadows, throwing him behind a bench, just as the approaching train passed a wall of trees at the end of the station.

  Feeling as if he might throw up, Cochrane stuffed the gun into his waistband and covered it with his shirt.

  “You should have backed off,” Cochrane said.

  “We couldn’t,” his would-be attacker replied. “No contingency for that.”

  The train was pulling into the platform, stirring up the snow and bringing a rush of wind all its own.

  “This was supposed to look like a kidnapping,” Cochrane shouted over the noise.

  “And so it will,” the man said. He swung a heavy right hand and struck Cochrane on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground, and then kicked him in the ribs.

  The train stopped beside them as both assailants pulled Cochrane up and dragged him backward toward the stairs.

  Cochrane felt dizzy as they hauled him off, disoriented and confused. He heard a pair of shots fired and a few shouts from passengers stepping off the almost empty train.

  The next thing he knew, he was in the back of a sedan, staring out the window as they raced along the streets through the falling snow.

  2

  Eastern Atlantic, June 14, 2012

  THE WATERS OF THE EASTERN ATLANTIC rolled with an easy swell as the Kinjara Maru steamed north for Gibraltar and the entrance to the Mediterranean. This ship made 8 knots, half its maximum speed but the most efficient pace in terms of burning fuel.

  Captain Heinrich Nordegrun stood inside the vessel’s air-conditioned bridge, his eyes on the radar screen. No weather to speak of and little traffic.

  There were no ships ahead of them and only a single vessel behind them, ten miles off; a VLCC, or Very Large Crude Carrier, commonly called a supertanker. VLCCs were the largest ships afloat, larger than American aircraft carriers, too large to use the Panama or Suez canals, and often topping out at 500,000 tons when fully loaded. Though the vessel behind them must have been empty, based on the speed she was making.

  Nordegrun had tried hailing the tanker earlier. He liked to know who else was out there, especially in questionable waters. Here, off the coast of West Africa, things were not as dicey as they could be on the other side of the continent, near Somalia. But it still paid to check in with other ships and find out what they knew or what they’d heard. The ship had not responded, but that was no real surprise. Some crews talked, others didn’t.

  Dismissing the tanker from his mind, Nordegrun glanced through the windows ahead of him. The open water and the calm night made for good sailing.

  “Bring us to twelve knots,” he said.

  The helmsman, a Filipino man named Isagani Talan, answered. “Aye, sir.”

  Such was the state of the world’s merchant marine that Nordegrun, a Norwegian citizen, captained a Bahamian-registered vessel, built in South Korea, owned by a Japanese company, and crewed mostly by Filipino sailors. To round out the worldly status of their voyage, they carried an African cargo of minerals bound for a factory in China.

  An outsider might have thought it madness, but the only thing that mattered was that the players knew their jobs. Nordegrun had sailed with Talan for two years and trusted him implicitly.

  The vibration in the ship changed as the engines answered the call. Nordegrun switched from the radarscope to a monitor that lay before him. It sat flat, resting on top of a block like the chart tables of old, but it was a modern high-definition touch screen. It currently displayed the waters around them and his ship’s position, course, and speed.

  All seemed well from a distance, but by tapping on the screen Nordegrun was able to zoom in and see that a southerly current had pushed them five hundred yards off course.

  Nothing to worry about, Nordegrun thought, but if perfection was possible, why not reach for it?

  “Two degrees to port,” he said.

  Talan was positioned ahead of Nordegrun on the bridge at the ship’s control panel. It also looked nothing like the setup of a classic ship. Gone was the big wheel and the image of a man whirling it to one side or the other to change course. Gone was the telegraph, the heavy brass lever that signaled the engine room to change speed.

  Instead Talan sat in a high, pedestal-like chair with a computer screen in front of him. The wheel was now a small steel hub, the throttle was a lever the size of a car’s gearshift.

  As Talan made his adjustments, electronic signals went to the rudder-control units and the engines in the stern of the ship. The course change was so slight that it couldn’t be felt or noticed visually, but the captain could see it on the screen. It took several minutes, but the big ship swung back onto course and settled in on its new speed.

  Satisfied, Nordegrun looked up.

  “Keep us on that line,” he said. “Since they’ve given us all this nice equipment, we might as well use it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Talan said.

  With the ship back on course, Nordegrun checked the chronometer. It was after ten p.m. local, the third watch was in place. Confident that the ship was in good hands, he glanced at the officer of the deck.

  “She’s all yours,” he said.

  Nordegrun turned to head below, checking the position of the tanker trailing them one last time. It had matched the Kinjara Maru’s course change and, oddly enough, had accelerated to 12 knots as well.

  “Monkey see, monkey do,” he mumbled as he walked for the door.

  Stepping out through the door and heading aft, Nordegrun squinted into the gloom. He could make out the lights on the ship following them. A strange hue, he thought. They were a bluish white, like the high-intensity headlights on modern luxury sedans.

  He’d never seen that on a ship before, even from a distance. All he could ever recall was the standard yellowish or plain white light that incandescent and fluorescent bulbs gave off. Then again, years back, no one thought they’d see a ship that was guided by a computer.

  He stepped into the stairwell and shut the hatch. Clambering down the stairs toward his quarters, Nordegrun felt a spring in his step. Unlike earlier generations, he and his officers were allowed to bring family aboard. Nordegrun’s wife of two years waited below, joining him for the first time at sea. She would go with him as far as Cairo, disembarking and flying home as the Kinjara Maru moved through the Suez Canal.

  It would be a good week, he thought, a vacation without taking one. If he hurried, he had time to join her at the ship’s mess.

  As he reached the lower deck, the lights in the stairwell dimmed. He glanced up. The filaments in the incandescent bulb above the door looked like embers on the verge of going out. Higher up, the fluorescent tubes began flickering at an odd rate.

  They returned to normal for a second, but there was no doubt in Nordegrun’s mind that they had some type of generator issue. Aggravated, he turned to climb back up the stairs.

  The lights dimmed again, then brightened until they were blazing white. The fluorescent tubes made a strange noise and then shattered simultaneously, raining glass down on him. On the wall, the incandescent bulb blew out in a loud pop, flashing the stairwell in electric blue and then plunging it into darkness.

  Nordegrun held the rail, shocked and surprised. He’d never seen anything like it. He felt the ship begin to heel over as if she were turning hard. With no idea what was going on, he raced up the darkened stairway and ran forward. Lights were blowing all over the ship.

  Nordegrun felt a spike of pain in his neck and jaw. Stress, he thought, the fight-or-flight reaction, as something went wrong with his vessel.

  He burst into the bridge. “What the devil is happening?” he shouted.

  Neither Talan nor the officer of the deck responded. Talan was busy shouting into the ship’s intercom. The OOD was wrestling with the computer, de
sperately tapping the override keys as the ship continued to turn.

  Nordegrun caught a glimpse of the rudder indicator full over to port. An instant later the screen flared and went blank. Sparks shot from another machine, and the pain in Nordegrun’s head got suddenly worse.

  At almost the same time, the officer of the deck fell to the ground, holding his head and grunting in pain.

  “Talan,” Nordegrun shouted. “Go below. Get to my wife.”

  The helmsman hesitated.

  “Now!”

  Talan left his post, Nordegrun grabbed the ship’s radio and tried to transmit. He pressed the talk switch, but the radio let out a high-pitched squeal. He reached for another device but suddenly felt his chest burning.

  Looking down, he saw the buttons on his coat glowing red. He grabbed one and pulled at it but it burned his hand. The noise in his head reached a crescendo, and Nordegrun fell to the ground. Even with his eyelids shut, he saw stars and flashes of light as if someone were pressing his eyes in with their thumbs.

  A pop in his head sent blood running out his nose. Something in his sinuses had ruptured.

  Nordegrun opened his eyes to see smoke filling the bridge. He crawled for the doorway. With blood streaming down his face, he pushed the hatch open and got partway outside. As he did, the noise in his head became a scream.

  He fell to the deck, his face angled aft. Behind him what looked like electricity was arcing between the rail and superstructure. Farther off he saw the ship with the strange lights still trailing them. It remained ten miles off but now glowed a dozen times brighter as if it were covered in Saint Elmo’s fire.

  Nordegrun’s mind was so far gone, he could do nothing but stare at it. And then his body stiffened in some type of convulsion, the pain spiked beyond anything he could have imagined, and Nordegrun screamed as his skin burst into flame.

  3

  Eastern Atlantic, June 15

  AS DAWN BROKE OVER THE ATLANTIC, Kurt Austin stood near the bow of the NUMA vessel Argo, wiping sweat off his face with a towel. He’d just finished fifty laps around the main deck. Only, because the deck did not encircle the ship, he’d been forced to enter the superstructure at the end of every lap, race up two flights of stairs and across the main transom, then down two flights and back out to begin the next lap.