8:15 am Central European Time
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Meyrin (suburb of Geneva)
Switzerland
“Watch everything carefully,” Miquel said. “From the large to the small. Take nothing for granted.”
They were sitting in a smallish black SUV, waiting in a line of three cars stopped at the gate of Entrance A. The gate was a simple metal arm with red and yellow reflectors that came down after each vehicle passed through. There was a scanner next to the gate that read ID cards. A couple of people had passed through by opening their windows and waving their cards at the scanner. There was one guard on duty, a man in a smart-looking police-type uniform, and he was stationed in a small building that reminded Troy of a tollbooth.
Miquel was in the driver’s seat of the SUV, with Dubois in the front passenger seat. Troy and Jan Bakker, by far the largest humans in this group, sat in the back with their knees pressed against the seats in front of them. This was like some bizarre family outing, with Dubois and Miquel as the mother and father, and Troy and Bakker as the two big teenage sons.
“Okay Dad,” Troy nearly said.
As he watched, a man on a racing bicycle zipped around the gate and onto a pedestrian sidewalk. He waved a card at the security guard as he passed. The guard raised a hand as if to say, “Hi.”
“You mean like that guy who just entered the campus with no security check of any kind?” Troy said. “That’s the kind of thing you don’t want us to take for granted?”
“Yes,” Miquel said. “But don’t stop there. Keep your eyes open.”
“I imagine,” Dubois said, “he’s an employee who the guard recognizes.”
“I’m sure he is an employee,” Troy said. “He’s a man who everybody likes, and everybody trusts, and he was planted here three years ago by Iranian intelligence to quietly collect data.”
Jan smirked and shook his head. “I doubt he’s an Iranian intelligence asset, but I do agree with you. The security is lax.”
They reached the guard. He came out of his little tollbooth and up to the window. Miquel handed him his identification.
“We are the contingent from the European Rapid Response Investigation Unit.”
“You said a mouthful,” Troy said.
The guard looked down at the ID card, then back at Miquel.
“Again?” he said. “Please?”
“Interpol,” Miquel said. “We’re from Interpol. We have a meeting with Dr. Tremaine from the public information office. She is expecting us.”
A light went on in the guard’s eyes. “Ah. Yes. You are expected.” He disappeared into the tollbooth, then came out again with four plain black badges. Each one had a silver metal clip on it. He handed them to Miquel.
“Day passes, for both campuses. Attach to your clothing, please, in a visible place. Dr. Tremaine will meet you in front of Building 432. Building 432 is straight ahead, and then bear to your left. It’s where her office is located. Enjoy your visit.”
The gate opened and Miquel drove through. Now they were inside. They cruised slowly through what resembled a fairly typical university campus. In this case, the cluster of buildings and thoroughfares was set against the backdrop of low green and brown mountains in the near distance.
“He checked your ID, but no one else’s,” Dubois said.
Miquel shrugged. “Well, mine was probably good enough in this case. I am the director, after all.”
They passed what appeared to be a large brown orb, eight or ten stories high, possibly made of wood. There was a parking lot and open plaza across the road from it. The parking lot had several school buses and dozens of cars in it. Flags of different nations fluttered in a light breeze.
“The Museum of Science and Innovation,” Jan said. “It has a lot of informational programs for kids.”
“Are you the tour guide?” Troy said.
A little way farther, and they pulled into the parking lot for Building 432. The building was a concrete and glass modern construction three stories high. It was probably designed to bring in natural ambient light from the outside.
An older woman with white hair close cropped to her scalp stood waiting for them in front of the building, in a long skirt and light jacket. Miquel pulled up next to her. She came up to the SUV and Miquel powered down the window.
“Hello!” the woman said. She had deep crow’s feet around her eyes and smile lines around her mouth. Her eyes were bright, intelligent, and pale blue. She was very pretty and seemed to give off an almost animal energy. She was cruising into late middle age without hitting any speed bumps.
Troy reflected that she was perfect for greeting the public.
“Are you the…”
“Yes, we are,” Miquel said. “Are you Dr. Tremaine?”
“Please call me Sylvia,” she said. “Are you ready to have a look around?”
Have a look around.
Troy noticed a glance pass between Dubois and Bakker in the rear-view mirror. These people simply refused to believe they could be the target of an attack.
“It should be fun,” Troy said.
Sylvia looked back at him. “Oh, most definitely. It will be fun. And I hope very informative. And I suspect it will put your minds at ease.”
“I will be happy to have my concerns eased,” Miquel said. His voice was flat and deadpan.
Troy nearly laughed. He was just coming to know Miquel a little bit. This was a man who had pulled a loaded gun on his superiors so they couldn’t stop a mission in progress. This was a man who deliberately set up an exercise where Troy got his partner killed, just to teach him a lesson. If ever there was a person whose concerns would not be eased, it was Miquel.
Sylvia’s smile redoubled, brighter than ever.
“I’m excited to show you.”
* * *
“Our name is actually a misname,” Sylvia said.
They were sitting in a conference room in Building 432. Troy imagined that this was how the dog and pony show tended to begin—with food and drinks and some general information. It was still early, and since this little meeting was scheduled to take the entire morning, might as well start the day out right.
He sat next to Dubois, with Miquel and Jan across from them. Sylvia stood at the head of the table, in front of a large video monitor mounted to the wall. The room was sleek, long, and very clean. The table could have sat twenty or more. Behind Troy was a line of windows, looking out on the campus with the ever-present mountains in the distance. With the touch of a button from Sylvia, a set of near transparent blinds had slid down silently, limiting the outdoor light, but still giving the view.
There was delicious coffee, which Troy took black. There was fresh bread and soft cheese, along with sugary confections. There was orange juice in tiny four-ounce glasses, the way God intended orange juice to be served. Miquel was the only one who didn’t eat. It seemed that the very pleasantness of the presentation was putting him in a sour mood. He did drink the coffee, though.
“We are called the European Organization for Nuclear Research. We don’t really do that. And our acronym CERN is even more inaccurate. In French, it stands for the European Council for Nuclear Research, which stems from a treaty agreement signed by the original twelve member states in 1954, before there even was an organization.”
She looked at each of them in turn. They stared back at her. Troy sipped his coffee. Man, it was good.
“What we really are is the European Organization for Particle Physics Research. And even that is a slight misname, because Israel was granted membership in 2014. Now we have twenty-two European member states and Israel. We have ten more associates that are in the process of applying for membership, and these include Turkey, India, and Pakistan. So, we are gradually moving beyond a strictly European focus.”
“Any questions so far?”
“Who makes the coffee?” Troy said.
Sylvia smiled. It would take a nuclear bomb to make that smile falter. Apparently, nuclear bombs weren’t what they did here.
“A local service provider in a nearby town brings it. It’s very good.”
Troy nodded. “Yeah. It is. If everything here is this good…”
He let that hang there.
Sylvia marched on. Coffee was on the menu, but not on the agenda. “Any other questions?”
“Russia?” Jan Bakker said. “China?”
Troy realized that Jan must already know the answer to that.
Sylvia shook her head. “Not at this time. They have their own programs. And perhaps they are less interested in the spirit of cooperation that we try to foster here.”
She clicked a button on the device in her hand and two photographs abruptly appeared on the screen behind her. The first image was of what looked like a large pipe, disappearing into the distance down a long, curving corridor. Two men wearing safety glasses were in the foreground, one on his knees, and they appeared to be elbow-deep in the guts of the thing. Troy was well familiar with photos like this by now. She was showing them a particle accelerator.
He glanced at his watch. It was 8:45.
In the second photo, there was a map with two circles superimposed on it. One was big and took up nearly the entire space of the map. The other was smaller, a concentric circle within the larger one. The two circles touched at a point on the left side of the photograph.
Sylvia pointed at the photo.
“Our work here is primarily with the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which you probably know is recreating the conditions of the universe that existed right after the Big Bang. In 2012, we were very excited because we believe that the LHC discovered evidence of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle, a subatomic particle which had been proposed nearly fifty years earlier. And as you can see from this image, both the Meyrin site in Switzerland, where we are now, and the nearby Prévessin site in France, are quite small, when compared to the size of the LHC.”
“Therefore, the name,” Jan said.
Sylvia nodded. “Yes. The collider is very large, twenty-seven kilometers long, which is about sixteen miles.” She looked directly at Troy, who was the only one in the room who couldn’t instantly understand the size of twenty-seven kilometers.
“Thank you,” he said.
“The LHC lives in a tunnel that runs underneath the surrounding Swiss and French villages, and out into open country. The smaller ring that you see is the old Super Proton Synchrotron collider, or the SPS, which was built in the early 1970s. The SPS is not to be confused with the original Proton Synchrotron, which was built in the 1950s, and is still in operation. The SPS is seven kilometers long, which seemed enormous when it was first opened. Nowadays, it mainly exists to speed up particles and feed them into the LHC. But also bear in mind that there are a dozen accelerators and decelerators currently active here, including the LHC, and that there are no fewer than eight large-scale individual experiments being conducted along the length…”
Miquel raised a hand, like a kid at school. “Sylvia?”
“Yes? Miquel.”
“This is all very interesting, and we are grateful for the education. But we are mostly interested in a looming terrorist attack, which we think may occur here, possibly as soon as two days from now, when your big celebration begins. It’s probably best if we learn about the security provisions you have in place.”
The smile faltered…for a second. Then it was back, not quite as bright as before.
“There’s just a bit more of the science to cover,” she said. “I find it fascinating, and I hope you will too.”
“We aren’t science students,” Miquel said. “I’m sure you understand.”
She nodded, the smile wilting and dying now, like a piece of lettuce on a bright, hot day. Miquel could kill anyone’s smile. He was worse than a nuclear bomb.
“I do,” Sylvia said. “Of course.”
Half an hour later, they were in a control room in France. They had traveled through a car tunnel across the border, open only to the denizens of CERN. The setup was similar to the entry gate they had first passed through—a narrow security arm, a card reader, and a single guard in a glorified tollbooth.
Now, they stood back from a large bank of stacked video displays and computer monitors, taking up three entire walls. A counter ran along the length of it, a desk of sorts, where eight people, most dressed in business casual, a few dressed in white lab coats, sat in rolling desk chairs, typing into keyboards and watching the information on the screens. On several of the screens, people were inside the collider tunnel, apparently examining the machine itself.
The group from Interpol had added one more. His name was Eduard. He was a tall man with a mustache. He wore work pants and a red linen button-down shirt. He was not the Director of Security. He had been very clear about that. He was an Associate Director.
Eduard had just given a rundown on cyber security, which was similar to just about any government agency or large corporation with giant network systems. They had a modern firewall to guard against external attacks, which had been upgraded in the past two years. They had a single sign-on portal for all system users, with enhanced security key features for remote logins. They had mandatory operating system upgrades, which happened automatically on start-up when the system detected a machine that was behind the times. They had permissible and impermissible software packages. They had training for all staff not to click on malicious email messages or download malicious attachments.
Troy shook his head. You didn’t have to be Jan Bakker to know that it was just about impossible to make thousands of people conform perfectly to computer security measures. People weren’t paying attention. People made mistakes. People had their little guilty pleasures they liked to indulge, which brought them to the shadier parts of the internet. These were scientists, not saints.
Troy caught himself musing about this, even though it was Jan’s department. In the meantime, Eduard had moved on.
“As you can see,” Eduard said, gesturing at the busy control room around them, “there is a great deal of work happening today, in preparation for the upcoming celebration.”
“How do people go inside the collider?” Miquel said.
“There are several access points, two of which are in this facility. Others are offsite, along the length of the device.”
“What are the security arrangements?” Dubois said.
“It is the highest-level clearance we have. No one can enter the tunnel without authorization. Generally, the only people with authorization are scientists and mechanics who maintain and repair the device. I would take you inside, but we couldn’t grant you authorization in this short of a time frame. I don’t have authorization myself, and I’ve worked here twelve years.”
“How do you keep unauthorized people out?”
“We use iris scan technology, which examines the colored part of the human eye. It is a much more accurate scan than either fingerprints or facial recognition. The iris has 240 specific data points for comparison, making each one unique to the individual. Even identical twins have starkly different iris readings. The scans are done by devices at each access point, and take just a couple of seconds. The door will only unlock if the scan is an exact match to the existing digital file.”
“Are the access points manned by security personnel?” Troy said.
“No. The scans make it unnecessary. Redundant, if you will. Also, people with authorization may enter the tunnel twenty-four hours a day, at their discretion. To have a security guard posted at an access point in the countryside all night on the chance that a scientist might appear there…”
Eduard trailed off, as if the sentence finished itself.
“Let me give you a hypothetical scenario,” Troy said. “Suppose a scientist did decide to enter the tunnel in the middle of the night. And suppose I was waiting there with a gun, which I put to the scientist’s head. He does the iris scan, and I go in with him. What then?”
“It seems a bit extreme, does it not?” Eduard said.
“No. Not to me. Where I come from, things like that happen all the time.”
Eduard shrugged. “Well, the system would detect one iris scan and two people entering the tunnel. It would alert security staff, who are on-call in the command center twety-four hours a day, and they would bring up the scene on a monitor. Within a short time, they would intervene, both by mobilizing CERN personnel and by contacting the local police in the area where the offense took place.”
“What if I were dressed like the scientist and went in by myself?”
Eduard shook his head. “What would you hope to accomplish?”
“I’d hope to lay down a series of connected explosive charges and blow the whole thing sky high.”
“Sir, this is all very far-fetched. This facility was in operation during the depths of the Cold War, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, civil war in the Balkans, through decades of war in the Middle East and in Africa, and Islamic and left-wing terrorism on the continent. We came through it all.”
A man in a lab coat turned around to face them. He was an old man with bright white hair. His face was deeply lined. He was holding a clipboard.
“In the Cold War, security was much tighter than it is now,” he said. He spoke with an accent. Troy guessed Russian. “I promise you that.”
“Thank you, Oleg,” Eduard said. Troy wouldn’t be surprised if the next words out of his mouth were, “Now please sit down.”
Oleg smiled. “Things are much more, what would the capitalists call it? Things are more laissez faire now. We must let nature take its course.”
“Thank you,” Eduard said again.
The old man shrugged and turned back to whatever he had been doing.
Eduard looked at Troy again. “Anyway, nothing like you describe has ever happened here.”
There was a long, somewhat awkward pause. Troy stood silent. He hoped he didn’t need to mention all the things that happened, that until they happened, had never happened before.
The Oklahoma City bombing came to mind. The Chernobyl meltdown came to mind. People hijacking and then deliberately crashing passenger planes into tall buildings came to mind.
He could stand here all day, thinking of these things, and he was pretty sure a new one would pop up every ten seconds or so. Things that never happened before tended to happen with startling regularity.
“In any event, CERN security will be fully staffed, and there will be an additional one hundred Swiss and French police on the sites during the ceremonies. That doesn’t count personal bodyguards that a handful of our guests will also bring with them, and whom we have extended the right to carry...”
“You will do a demonstration of the collider in operation during the symposium?” Jan Bakker said.
Eduard nodded. “Yes. It will be a centerpiece of the entire event. People are coming from all over the world, including media. The leaders of CERN imagine that our visitors would like to see the device work. It’s a great opportunity to showcase the frontiers being reached here.”
“The device generates a great deal of radiation while in operation, does it not?”
Eduard was still nodding. “Enormous amounts, as I understand it. But they are captured within the collider. If the integrity of the collider were to fail, which is nearly impossible, and all these people you see here now are making sure of that…”
He gestured at the mostly young people working the monitors.
“But if its integrity were to fail, it is still deep underground, in a tunnel made of thick concrete. In a worst-case scenario, the radiation would be captured within the tunnel. Which again, is why access is so limited. In the event of such an accident, the countryside would be evacuated, and highly trained teams would go into action, either sealing the radiation underground permanently, or more likely, releasing it in a controlled fashion over a long period of time.”
“How much?” Jan said.
Eduard looked at him. “How much what?”
“How much radiation, exactly, is generated?”
“I’m not a scientist,” Eduard said.
“Maybe you should ask one.”
Abruptly, Eduard called to one of the workers sitting along the counter. He said something to the man in a language Troy neither understood nor even recognized.
The young man said something back.
“He is the lead scientist here today,” Eduard said. “His name is Yuri. He and I both come from the Czech Republic. We are proud that our country became a CERN member state in 1993. I asked him how much radiation is generated. He said we wouldn’t understand the amount, but it’s a lot. A terrible amount.”
“And you feel there is no chance the radiation could be released to the surface?”
Eduard nodded calmly. His faith wasn’t shaken by this line of questioning. “The official policy of the organization, and the member countries, is that such an event is of such vanishingly small probability, as to be the closest thing to impossible. The facility wouldn’t be located here if it was possible.”
“How many people live in this region?” Miquel said.
“Well, obviously Geneva is nearby. That’s 200,000 in the city.”
“And in the village near the CERN sites?”
Eduard shrugged. “Oh, I imagine about 40,000 in the villages and towns right here.”
“Some of whom live directly above the accelerator?”
Eduard nodded. “Some do, yes.”
“In a couple of days, they could be sitting on top of a bomb,” Miquel said.
“If it puts your mind at ease,” Eduard said. “I assure you we will take your concerns into account during our preparations.”