The noise was coming from the stairs. Six pairs of feet, booted, heavy, as if each person carried something. It could be luggage of course, but it could just as easily be weaponry of some kind. There was a defined movement to the footsteps, a rhythm, a sense of cohesion that felt vaguely military.
He felt his old senses coming back to him slowly, crawling out of the veil they had been hiding behind since that day in the desert.
He sniffed the air, and smelled no cologne, no deodorant, just a faint hint of natural soap, enough to disguise the more potent smell of body odour.
And then he picked up the breathing — regular, even, paced, but slightly elevated, and not by the exercise but by anticipation.
‘Hit team,’ he said to Lynn finally. ‘Six men, armed, turning down the hallway now. We’ve got ten seconds.’
7
CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, is based near Geneva, Switzerland. Famous across the world for its search for the ‘God Particle’ at its Large Hadron Collider facility, the institution was originally founded in 1954 to unite Europe’s — and later the world’s — foremost nuclear physicists. Since then, its particle physics research has taken over to a large extent, and its discovery and then its creation of antimatter is both admired and feared in equal measure.
Many members of the general public were genuinely terrified when the collider — more commonly known as the LHC — was first switched on. Consisting of billions of particles being deliberately smashed together along miles of underground piping — sometimes as many as ten thousand per second — it was thought in some quarters that the device might create a black hole that would destroy the entire world in the blink of an eye.
Of course, no such thing ever happened, and the LHC has hummed away safely ever since, on a constant quest for the explanation of the beginnings of the universe.
Professor Philippe Messier considered the history of the LHC laboratory as he entered the elevator. He had just finished examining a damaged portion of the pipeline, which was getting the full attention of an army of engineers and machinists. Satisfied that everything that could be done was being done, he decided to check on the more important project, three hundred feet further under the surface.
Whereas the LHC was very much the public face of CERN, the project below — even though it had cost close to several trillion euros over the decades — was unknown by all but a handful of select people in the outside world, all part of the elite organization headed by Stephen Jacobs. The others — engineers, technicians, physicists, mathematicians, machinists, and hundreds of skilled and unskilled workers — were not part of the chosen, and would never be allowed to leave the facility. In a way, they were slaves to the machine, destined to work until they perished.
Messier smiled as he descended lower in the elevator, excited whenever he thought about the project. As the elevator came to a smooth stop, and the doors opened, the vast machine was revealed in all its glory.
Although it depended to a large extent on the power secretly generated by the LHC above, the technology that this secret device relied upon was more esoteric by far, unknown to the vast majority of the human populace. It was a gift from the gods, almost literally, Messier thought as he approached it.
Soon, he thought as he neared it. Soon.
A shiver of excitement ran through him as he looked through the huge observation windows. Soon it would be fully operational, and it mattered to him not one iota that the result might well be the destruction of the human race, except for the chosen few.
The chosen few who would soon be as gods themselves.
Adams ran past Lynn, who stood rooted to the spot, clutching her backpack. He looked through the window on the opposite side of the room, across the Avenue Santa Maria to the block opposite.
Within two seconds, he had spotted the sharpshooter on the roof, rifle aimed at the window, as well as the reflection in the shopfronts opposite of two men waiting by the Hostal Americano foyer below him.
‘Get by the side of the window!’ Adams whispered forcefully to Lynn. Then he pulled the nearest bed across the floor, using it to barricade the door. It wouldn’t stop the team for more than a few extra seconds, but it would be enough.
Eldridge had met up with his men at the hotel at three in the morning. He had listened to their briefing, drawn his own equipment, and laid out the plans for the capture of the fugitives.
At seven o’clock the same morning, he had led his team down the stairs and watched as his two lead men had raced at the door, small metal battering ram held between them. The strategy was pure ‘shock and awe’ on the small unit tactical level — smash through the door, disorientate the targets with stun grenades, and effect a quick arrest, subduing both people with force if necessary.
But although the door had shattered, it had not caved forwards into the room as expected. Why the hell not?
‘Murphy!’ he called. ‘What’s the hold-up?’
As the man on the right used the ram again, he called back, ‘There’s a bed behind the door! They knew we were coming!’
Eldridge pressed the toggle on his tactical mic, speaking directly to the sharpshooter on the opposite roof. He would have liked to have more men outside, but their resources were necessarily limited in such a remote location.
‘Williams, what do you see?’
‘Nothing, movement at the window a moment ago — wait a second, they’ve broken through the window, the male target has something in his hand, he — arrgghh!’
Eldridge’s blood went cold as the connection went dead.
Sprinting once more towards the window, Adams had grabbed Lynn by the hand, dragging her with him. In his other hand, he had snatched up a large mirror from the dressing table. At the window he pulled the curtain back and slammed his booted foot straight through it; the glass shattered, falling to the ground two storeys below.
An instant later, ignoring the cries of Lynn as he secured his grip on her wrist, Adams thrust the mirror up and out, angling its reflection straight at the sniper opposite. He saw the man recoil instinctively from the sudden, intense reflection of sunlight that hit him in the eye through the telescopic lens of his rifle, then heard the team behind him thumping against the door, breaking it down, and in that tiny window of opportunity, he pulled Lynn forward and jumped with her straight out of the window.
Adams had seen the wide, canvas awning over the entrance to the hotel’s foyer when he had arrived, and then later confirmed that Lynn’s room was directly above it, two floors up.
Jumping was a risk — they could easily hit a metal support strut — but the odds were more favourable than staying in the room and taking on six armed men.
Adams was pleased that Lynn didn’t scream on the way down, although he didn’t know if it was bravery or shock. Either way, though, silence was a good thing — he hoped that the men below hadn’t already been alerted by the broken glass, as he would need every advantage he could get.
They hit the fabric straight on and, using the bounce from the awning, Adams gripped the edge rail with one hand, his other arm going round Lynn’s waist, and swung round and down, letting go at the end of the swing and dropping lightly to the ground, right in front of the two men he had seen earlier.
As he landed he let go of Lynn, who staggered disorientated to the side. The men’s eyes went wide as they saw him, hands on their earpieces, obviously receiving communication from the team above.