“No luck. She says it might take some time. The system is stored separately to the main security room.” Sam gritted his teeth. “Veyron, any chance you can break into it the old fashioned way?”
“With brute force?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure I can, but it will take me a few days without any heavy machinery. I’ve looked at the elevators, they’re built to be watertight.”
“All right. You’d better make a start on it until we come up with a better plan. We’re going to need those screws turning if we’re to move the Antarctic Solace out of the Weddell Sea before it gets frozen in permanently.”
“Okay, will do.”
Sam hung up the phone.
Elise stared at him, feigning a hurt expression. “I didn’t say I can’t hack into it.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I said I can’t do it from here. There must be a separate storage section for the security cards. It’s not attached to the security center, but I’ll find it.”
“Can you see inside down there?”
“No. Per the owners of the Antarctic Solace, the crew and entertainers opted to have all security cameras removed from their deck due to concerns for privacy.”
“So we’re looking at the possibility the entire passenger list have been trapped down there?” Alexis asked.
“No,” Sam said emphatically. “You can’t hide two hundred people on a boat without making a sound. If they were trapped below we would have heard them by now.”
The security phone rang. Sam answered the phone and placed it on speaker. “What have you got, Veyron?”
“I just remembered,” Veyron said. “The owners of the Antarctic Solace or someone from her onshore team should have the security codes. Get the codes and you can input them into a security card and gain access.”
“But we don’t have blank cards?” Tom said.
“Yeah we do. There’s a whole bunch in the second drawer on your left, Tom. I checked before.”
“Thanks Veyron. Have you got their number?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. I’ll give them a call and let you know once we have access.”
“Thanks.”
The phone line went dead.
“You want me to keep working on the elevators — see if I can beat the owners of the Antarctic Solace in finding the security code?” Elise asked.
“No. Leave it to Veyron to work out. How long will it take you to find the deleted security tapes?”
“Could take an hour. Might be days if they were clever enough.”
“Is there anything you need to do? Or is it just your computer program working?”
“Just my computer program. What do you need?”
“I want you back on board the Maria Helena — we have to find out where the scientists of the Pegasus station went. While you’re appropriating the satellites overhead, you’d better include in your search any ships or landmasses with an extra couple hundred people on board. We now have two groups to rescue and I intend to do so before the entire Weddell Sea freezes over and we become the third group who need rescuing.”
“Sure, Sam,” Elise said.
Alexis put her hand to her mouth. “The scientists from the Pegasus station are missing?”
Sam looked at her for a moment. She appeared unusually concerned after the news of the lost Pegasus scientists. “Yeah, that’s who we came down here to rescue. They sent a mayday call fifteen days ago. Apparently their ship had become stuck in ice when a large iceberg, the size of a small island, floated into the peninsula. They were unequipped to survive the upcoming winter on board their ship, which was now frozen in the ice, and returned to the Pegasus station.”
“But you never made it because you found the Antarctic Solace in trouble instead?” Alexis asked.
“No,” Sam said. “We made it to the Pegasus station, but no one was home. That’s when the storm hit. Tom and I waited inside for two days. When the storm finished this morning we came straight back to our own ship, the Maria Helena, and discovered the Antarctic Solace in trouble and came to investigate.”
“Are you talking about the French science station, Pegasus?”
“Yes. They had a French flag out the front of their ice station, but I couldn’t tell you where they had come from or what they were doing there.” Sam sighed. “In fact, I have no idea what they were doing there — the place looked like it had never been lived in despite clothing, food and boots all still being there.”
Alexis took a deep breath. “I can tell you why it looked unlived in.”
“Why?”
“Because it wasn’t their ice station.”
“What do you mean? They gave us the coordinates fifteen days ago. We lost communication with them after the second radio transmission, but they were able to provide their GPS location.”
Alexis’s ordinarily soft and innocent façade took on an authoritative stance that took Sam by surprise. “Whoever it was you spoke to, it wasn’t the scientists from the Pegasus station — that’s for sure.”
“What makes you say that?” Sam asked.
“Because the real Pegasus station is situated in East Antarctica, two hundred miles Southeast of McMurdo Sound — nowhere near the Weddell Sea.”
“Perhaps they set up a second camp on this side of the Antarctic Ridge?”
“Definitely not. Their secret research for CERN was in East Antarctica.”
Sam stared at her; a wry smile opened in his otherwise stern face. “How could you possibly know what they were doing there?”
Alexis crossed her arms. “Because I sent them.”
Chapter Nineteen
“You sent them?” Sam asked.
“I’m a physicist at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in Geneva, known as CERN,” Alexis said. “Last year, a group of researchers discovered that the Antarctic was full of ancient ice tunnels. Most likely caused by ancient meltwater which eroded the weakest parts of the ice over millennia — some of these are said to be in excess of a hundred and fifty miles long.”
“Okay, so what interest does a quantum physicist have in ice tunnels?”
“None. I don’t care at all about them.” Alexis turned serious again. “Most of my research involves accelerating tiny particles and then colliding them together at unimaginable speeds.”
“The Hadron collider,” Sam said.
“She’s my little baby. Without her, all of my work would have remained in the field of theoretic physics. Unfortunately, my current research requires something a little larger — about ten times as large.”
“You’re looking at building a new particle accelerator inside ancient ice tubes?”
“That’s it.”
“What were you researching, specifically?”
“It’s a long story, quite complicated — you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Have you heard of the Higg’s Boson — erroneously dubbed the God Particle?”
“Yeah, didn’t they prove it didn’t exist?”
“No. They proved it exists, just that they can’t reproduce it or control it because it’s too unstable. My research suggests we could build more of them. I have a theory for how we could store them and if my research can one day prove it, we’ll have enough power to finally send people out into space. We’re talking about a totally different jump in the way we transport people. The sort of leap the human race got when they discovered the internal combustion engine.”
Sam shook his head. “So that’s what this is all about.”
“You think someone’s attacked the men from the Pegasus station and abducted every other person on board the Antarctic Solace, leaving me isolated, because of my research?”