‘Matt!’ Lynn’s voice called out, and his head snapped round at the sound.
He could see Lynn with a newborn baby — his baby — cradled in her arms, mother and child both teetering on the edge of a cliff, about to fall.
He looked at the clock on the truck’s wall. Ten seconds.
He turned back to Lynn and the child. Her foot slipped, rock and shale falling into the chasm below, her balance lost.
Adams froze, unable to move, caught in indecision. In the truck were thousands, millions of people to be rescued. On the cliff was the woman he loved, and his own child, a part of himself given life through that love.
What should he do? How could he save both sets of people in the time he had available? He had to do something but he couldn’t move; he just didn’t know which way to turn.
An alarm sounded, and he turned to the truck; and then Lynn screamed, and he turned to the cliff.
His mouth went wide as he saw Lynn and their baby fall over the cliff edge, and he started towards them, but was halted by the screams behind him, the cries of millions of souls in torment.
The sun above him seemed to grow larger, increasing in size as it came towards him, bigger and bigger, hotter and hotter, until it was all he could see, all he could feel.
And then Adams did the only thing he could do; he collapsed to his knees and screamed.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ the portly Texan next to Adams said with concern, shaking him awake.
Adams snapped out of it immediately, doing his best not to look around the cabin and bring even more attention to himself. ‘Yes, I’m OK,’ he said to the kindly man. ‘Thank you. Just a bad dream.’
The Texan nodded his head in understanding. ‘I know what that’s like, son,’ he said. ‘Ain’t nothing you can do about your dreams.’
Adams nodded his head. ‘I guess not,’ he said, giving the man a reassuring smile, making clear that he was now OK.
The dream was new, but it was most definitely bad. Was there truly nothing that he could do about it?
Adams felt a drop in altitude, heard the change in engine speed, and then saw the seat-belt lights come on. They were coming in to land, and he rested back into his seat, understanding that he was probably about to find out.
3
The sight was glorious as always, the myriad buildings that made up the ground-level complex of the LHC facility. They were not at all beautiful in and of themselves; rather it was what they represented that was glorious.
The wormhole device was so secret that it didn’t even have a code name; only those few selected knew of its existence, apart from the specialist technicians who worked on it, and who would never see the light of day again after it became operational.
Jacobs’ limousine passed through the main gateposts, and he wondered how long it would take to gather everyone together. Most of the Bilderberg Hundred had been at the dinner the night before, but some members had still to make it to Switzerland. He hoped they would be here before the device went operational; they wouldn’t want to be caught outside after the Anunnaki had returned.
The car continued on through the outlying buildings, winding through the snow-covered inner roads until it came to a stop outside the main administrative building.
Jacobs’ driver went round to open his door, and as he stepped out, he was pleased to see Philippe Messier striding out to meet him, hand extended.
‘Philippe,’ Jacobs said in greeting as he shook the proffered hand. ‘How are we looking?’
Messier smiled in answer and escorted Jacobs towards the entrance. ‘Let’s just say I hope the others get here soon.’
Eighteen hours after boarding the flight at Reno-Tahoe, Adams found himself in Das Central, the main square in the old historic area of Zurich.
He stood at the barrier overlooking the Limmat, a chillingly cold body of water that nevertheless sparkled under the rays of the winter sun. He took up a position where he could monitor both banks of the river, checking on the comings and goings of the streams of people, ever vigilant against the threat of surveillance.
He hadn’t been stopped at the airport, and as far as he could tell nor had Lynn or the others, which indicated that they were not under observation but he knew he couldn’t be sure.
His counter-surveillance picked up both Lynn and Ayita long before they arrived at his position by the bridge. He was careful not to show too much emotion as Lynn approached, although he was overjoyed to see her; they were just a group of friends taking a tour of the city. Stephenfield arrived last, and although he was the least observable, Adams was pleased that he was still able to pick him up before he was upon them; if he could spot an intelligence operative as good as Stephenfield, then his skills were probably sufficient to spot anyone else that might be observing them.
‘Was anyone followed?’ Ayita asked when they were all together. When they all replied in the negative, he turned to the north. ‘Come on then. The train to Geneva leaves in twenty minutes.’
As they set out along the Neumühlequai, Ayita continued, ‘We’ll board the train and get our tickets from the inspector once we’re travelling. We don’t have time to get them in the office, and anyway, the purchase doesn’t get reported this way.’
They turned north-west along Museumstrasse, all of them keyed up, constantly checking about them. But as they neared the Hauptbahnhof, the city’s main train station, they realized that no one was watching them, and they might yet reach Geneva unopposed.
Philippe Messier was proud; indeed, this week was surely to prove the proudest of his incredible career.
As Director General of CERN, Messier was directly responsible for the success of the Large Hadron Collider project. The LHC, like the invention of the internet before it, had given CERN its current status as the world’s primary scientific research centre. The main work of CERN was now particle physics research, and the LHC — as well as the other experimental particle accelerators and the single decelerator that were also to be found on the site — was rightfully famous around the world for both its scale and its cost.
Particle physics centres on the study of subatomic particles, and how they create matter. The trouble is, to thoroughly understand such a subject, the particles themselves have to be broken down into smaller parts, and the only way to achieve this is to have them crash into one another at incredible speed.
Thus particle accelerators came into being, designed to fire particles up to the required speeds for such a collision. The LHC is the world’s largest such ‘collider’, and consists of a circular tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference, buried a hundred metres underground. The extreme length is to give the particle beams the distance necessary to accelerate to the required speed. The beams are fired in opposite directions, in the hope that they will collide upon meeting. However this is, in the words of the LHC’s chief engineer, ‘like firing two needles across the Atlantic and getting them to hit each other’.
Messier smiled when he thought of this quote, knowing that it was in fact easier than the public at large was led to believe. The technology that the Anunnaki had gifted the Bilderbergers essentially ensured that each time the machine was fired up, there was a hit. But even within CERN, only a handful of trusted staff knew that this was the case, because the purpose of getting the beams to collide was to carry out research, not to harvest the energy that resulted from such super-collisions. But harvesting the energy was exactly what Messier had been doing, and transmitting it to the secret experiment further underground.
The wormhole device required power, and lots of it. Controlling the bending of space-time as it did, a normal power source was simply not enough. The experiments going on above with the LHC, however, created a constant stream of antimatter, the most powerful energy source in the known universe. It was the need for antimatter as an energy source that had led Charles Whitworth to lead the drive for CERN’s creation in the first place, back in 1954, and it had taken since then — even with external help — to perfect the technology.