Chasing The Dawn (Luke Temple - Book 2) (Luke Temple Series) (8 page)

Luke’s mind replayed the image of the two men he had seen at the Gran Sasso Institute’s car park; the older one would be Beltrano.

“What sort of questions have they been asking?”

Brun thought a moment before answering. “Do you mean general or specific?”

“I mean leading or non-leading?”

Brun looked quizzical.

“For example, did they give you information then look for a confirmation? Such as ‘I know two men were seen with Professor Vittorio, who were they?’ Or did they just ask plain questions like, ‘What was the last thing you remember?’”

“The latter,” Brun replied.

Luke figured either Beltrano didn’t know anything or, more likely, he was a professional who didn’t want to give anything away. “And were you honest with him?”

Brun took another swig of lager. “Yes.”

Luke paused a moment. “You were
completely
honest with him?’

“Why would I lie?” Brun shrugged.

“As you said, Professor, he is not the type to show up on your doorstep at night and threaten you with a gun.”

Brun gave a soft nod. “I didn’t withhold anything from him, I do not know where Ernesto has gone or who may have been involved.” Brun’s voice cracked.

Luke had seen enough people under extreme stress. He knew how to pick his way through normal and abnormal behaviour. Brun so far was a strange one, there was obvious fear, but under the circumstances Luke would expect anyone to be scared – a man shows up at the door unannounced with a gun within a few days of a close colleague going missing. Yet Brun did not seem inquisitive at all. Luke would have expected many questions pushed out by the fear and anxiety … yet Brun had none.

“What did Professor Vittorio tend to wear every day?” Luke purposefully changed gear.

Brun was caught off-guard; he stumbled for a second. “What did he wear? Erm … well … nothing out of the ordinary. He liked to wear smart shoes, and various combinations of shirts and jumpers.”

“Where did he come from originally?”

Again Brun shifted awkwardly, not understanding the line of questioning. “Well he is Italian … I assume, I mean, we never spoke about it.”

“You were close, weren’t you? You and Vittorio worked together for many years?”

Brun took a big swig of beer. He choked as the liquid lodged in his throat, his face reddened. “Yes … yes we were.” Emotion was bubbling up.

“This must all be very hard …”

Brun didn’t respond.

“Can you think of anyone who would want to harm Professor Vittorio?”

Brun seemingly pondered, then shook his head. “No.”

“And any reason for him to just up and leave?”

Brun shook his head. “No.”

A distance had come over the professor. It was not a melancholy daydream, but he seemed to have disappeared into his head, his hands were playing incessantly with the bottle, tearing little shreds of coloured paper away.

“I don’t know where he is, I haven’t heard from him … who are you? Why are you here?”

Luke weighed up the professor, he was tired and looked frayed
. Is it just an emotional response to losing a friend?

“Where did Vittorio live, Professor?”

Brun became agitated. “Somewhere in L’Aquila, what does this have to do with anything? Who are you?”

“Did he have a wife, children, a girlfriend, a boyfriend?”

Brun shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know … no, I don’t think so, I am not sure. He never spoke of them if he did.” Brun was struggling.

“When was the last time you saw Vittorio?”

Then, in a tiny move of the pupil, Luke saw Brun flick his eyes up to the left, just for a moment, then he responded. “I saw him last Tuesday, which is the last time anyone seems to have seen him. Everything seemed normal, an uneventful day revising some data analysis. We had worked late, until 11 p.m. I said goodbye to him at the laboratory and we went our separate ways … that is the last time I saw him.”

Luke rested against the counter. He could sense Brun was beginning to harden. “Professor, tell me about the work you and Vittorio were doing together.”

Brun took another hit of lager. “You want me to talk about years’ worth of research in one evening?”

“No, I want the condensed version. It seems to me, Professor, you are not so shocked that a man has shown up here with a gun demanding to talk to you, which leads me to believe that the work you have been doing would have been a cause for Ernesto Vittorio to disappear in a suspicious manner … talk.”

Brun said nothing for a long time, he focused only on the lager bottle, frozen in thought, eventually he spoke. “You asked me if I was a religious man, and I suppose the answer must be yes. But I worship God in the purest form, I do not worship God as an entity with any physical representation. I worship the very essence of all Gods and all religions and that is the giving and taking of life.” Brun rested back in the chair, his eyes were unfocused. “Ancient civilisations used to look at the giver of life and drop to their knees. That giver of life was the sun, and it provided two important outputs that allowed it to be all-powerful: one was heat, the other … light. I have spent my life studying or
worshipping
the sun.”

The semi-preacher rhetoric was a personal monologue; he continued: “But it is the detail, the minutiae of what makes up those outputs …” he let out a long breath. “If I were to ask you what the fastest thing known to man was what would your answer be?”

Luke raised his eyebrows. “I would say the speed of light.”

Brun nodded. “Exactly, as would most people on the planet, it is what we are all taught from a very young age, two plus two is four, the sky is blue and nothing can go faster than the speed of light.”

Luke’s memory jumped back to a time before he had transformed into a new being. Alex Rowland was sat in a science class in his teens being taught about Einstein’s theory of relativity. “I assume you are talking about E = MC
²
?”

‘Very good, Mr Reid, that is exactly it. Where E is energy, M is mass and C is the speed of light in a vacuum. I shall not give you a science lesson but that formula always stated that nothing with a mass can move faster than the speed of light.”

“How does this relate to Vittorio?”

“Because it relates to all of us.” Brun had drifted. He seemed to wake gently from his reverie and saw Luke staring. “Put simply, Einstein was wrong, and Vittorio proved it.”

Luke vaguely remembered reading something a few weeks ago in a newspaper. “I see, so you found something that does move faster.”

Brun shook his head. “You say that so flippantly, such a discovery changes everything as we know it, across the whole universe and our understanding of our limitations within it.”

“I remember reading something about it a few weeks ago …”

“I fear you are indicative of the mass of human society, not fully grasping the concept. Six years ago Vittorio and I discovered ghostly sub-atomic particles called
neutrinos
that we clocked arriving at our facility billionths of a second faster than light. This was not a one-off, this happened over 15,000 times.”

Luke sat and processed the information. “A neutrino?”

“Yes … a most beautiful particle. It streams through the earth in abundance, multi-trillions. We had once believed it to be a massless particle as it can pass through solid matter … but that is not the case … this is why it is quite a baffling and troubling discovery for the scientific community.”

Luke did not care about the details, something else had pricked him. “Six years ago? I read an article only a few
weeks
ago claiming this was a new discovery.” Luke wished he had read the article in full.

Brun gave a wry smile. “Surely someone in your line of work can appreciate that releasing information is often a far more strategic process than just shouting loudly and instantly.” Brun’s eyes began to lose focus, he caught Luke’s eye. “I’m sorry …”

“Why the apology?”

A door that had opened within the professor seemed to have now shut tight. “There is nothing more to say, Mr Reid.”

“Who was the girl? The girl who came to visit you at the lab today, you dropped her off before coming here.”

Brun was thrown, realising he had been followed. “Er ... her name is Chung Su, she is a physicist from North Korea.”

Luke gave a look, and Brun read his mind. “She is a quite brilliant scientist, we do not all see the negative in a culture.”

“What is she here for?”

Brun hesitated and Luke could tell he was holding back; he pawed the Sig Sauer.

Brun spoke quietly. “She is here for a scientific convention that is hosted every year by us and CERN, it is an invite-only event for the top scientists in their field from across the world, a celebration of sublime minds. For the past ten years it has been in conjunction with select charities … this year because of Vittorio’s discovery it was being held here … he was due to be the keynote speaker ... so now it has fallen to me.” Brun fell into deep thought.

Luke’s mind worked fast, it reeled back to Davison’s phone call the previous night.
In two evenings’ time we feel it would be best for you to start looking to the stars a bit more, charity is something that you will need to look at, we don’t have all the answers but we have the ticket on this one.

“Where is the event taking place?” Luke asked sharply.

Brun didn’t answer.

“Where?” Luke bellowed.

“The Observatory … there is a hall that is under the ground just near the Teramo Observatory, it is only known to a handful of top people.” Brun was barely audible.

The location was a logical choice. Davison’s words echoed.
We feel it would be best for you to start looking to the stars. Brun had said it was an invite-only event. We don’t have all the answers but we have the ticket on this one.

Luke needed to draw this to a close,
keep the encounter short
.

“Professor, you will see me again, but we have never met, understood?”

Brun placed the now-empty bottle on the floor. He looked weary, his face was ashen and he once again removed his glasses and rubbed behind his ears.

“Understood?”

“Yes.” The professor kept his voice low.

Brun had a personality that people were drawn to, a warmth in his words and his being. This was not lost on Luke, he could see how the ease of manner was engaging, and his advanced years appeared to render him soft and calm.

“We will speak again Professor.” With that he was gone.

Brun jumped as the door slammed shut. He rested back in the chair and stared up at the constellations. After a short while he opened the fridge and took out another lager, the tears rolling down his cheeks.

Tuesday 13
^th
November

Each footstep echoed around the cavernous room. Structurally the hall was basic; the only abnormal feature was a large framework of silver industrial piping running across the ceiling, filtering in cool exterior air. The hall was three storeys below ground, located under the Osservatorio Astranomico di Collurania. It had originally been constructed as a spill-over for the Gran Sasso Laboratory functioning as a separate storage facility. As the funding streams increased more expansion occurred on the primary laboratory site and the hall became redundant and was left to abandon.

The space was filled with decorated tables covered with linen. Various shiny and expensive-looking decorations hung on the walls and a giant square clock was on the wall behind the head table. The clock face design was a range of overlapping geometric shapes that at a distance made a construct of Einstein’s face, showing the time as 6 a.m.

“What a depressing-looking room. Why do I feel like this is going to be a very boring party?” Delvechi grumbled as he weaved through the tables.

Beltrano stood at the large double doors at the opposite end of the hall surveying the room in silence. It was quiet, its atmosphere seemed disturbed by the decorations; everything hung awkwardly, as though the room was wearing a coat that didn’t quite fit. Beltrano made note of the exits, there were only two. The main one and a side exit leading out to a rickety flight of stairs to the rear of the building.

“Sir, is it necessary for us to be here this evening for this?” Delvechi whined.

“Yes … now shut up and check the stairways.”

Delvechi went to protest that he didn’t know what he was searching for but thought better of it and went out of the room.

Beltrano breathed in the air; it was stale and had a tangible weight. In the silence of a room being used out of context he felt a little uncomfortable. He knew that Professor Brun was that year’s keynote speaker and was sure to be a fascinating one.

Not too fascinating I hope …

He slowly walked amongst the tables, eyeing up the names that were printed on elaborate table signs, instructing the guests where they were to sit, each one denoting an important person in the scientific community, all being herded together for that one evening.

He stopped as he came to his place name; his eyes scanned over his table companions for the evening, a real mix of nationalities. He picked up his name and continued through the tables. He stopped again at a specific table. He lifted a place name and replaced it with his. He then walked the new name over to where his had previously been and laid it down. He glanced round at the room.

Delvechi came bursting through the main door. “It’s bloody freezing out there. The stairs are all clear, nothing to report.”

Beltrano nodded. “Ok, good.” He gave Delvechi’s shoulder a playful slap. “I hope you have a nice clean suit for this evening. I do not want you in uniform.”

Delvechi raised an eyebrow, and then smiled. “I shall wear my finest James Bond.”

Beltrano shook his head and chuckled. Just then his mobile phone erupted into tune; he lifted it out of his pocket, checked the screen and then cut the call off.

“No peace,” Delvechi joked.

“Hmm, yes.” Beltrano turned and headed for the door.

“Sir, I have been thinking …”

Beltrano turned. “I thought I heard a loud moving of rusty cogs.”