The Tesla Experiment

Chapter 3

Sam woke up way too late. He had missed breakfast by hours and he had well a way to go before lunch would be served. And as he always had a solution for such little problems, he made for the mini fridge instead — to keep him occupied, as it were. The party from the night before turned out to be quite the anti-climax. Even though his intention was to gather information there, he ended up hoping for more and ended up being sorely disappointed. Her name was Lily and she would have been the perfect night cap, but she left with someone else before Sam could close the deal.

His cell phone shattered his hung over thoughts.

“Cleave,” he grunted, wondering where his clothes were shed the night before as if the caller could see him.

“Sam Cleave! This is Penny Richards from the Cornwall Institute of the Sciences,” a female voice chimed.

“Cornwall… in Ireland,” Sam stated with distinct uncertainty.

“It’s a surname, Mr. Cleave,” she chuckled. “Bernard Cornwall was the benefactor of our foundation, hence the name.”

“Ah! I see,” Sam replied, looking for his pants. “For a moment I thought I was caught in a science fiction novel, or perhaps a scientific experiment in the Bermuda Triangle.”

He could tell the woman was smiling and did her best to be friendly, but her words were somewhat impatient. “Listen, Mr. Cleave, I was wondering if you have any new information on the imminent sabotage of the CERN LHC site.”

She cleared her throat uncomfortably.

“I spoke to several people last night, Miss Richards,” he reported, “but I’m afraid there was not much I could ascertain from the faculty. As I told your colleague Mr. Somanko yesterday, I don’t think his ex-employee is involved in the sabotage. These threats came from someone more professional, a group of people rather than just one individual.”

“So you are saying it is more serious than we thought?” she asked.

“Aye,” Sam nodded. “I suggest you tighten up on security.”

She paused for a moment, allowing Sam some time to locate his pants and open a tiny bottle of Southern Comfort for breakfast. He could hear her composing herself.

“Mr. Cleave, have you read the morning paper?” she asked in a much more serious tone. “Have you seen the morning news?”

“I have not,” he admitted, although it was a terrible confession to make at this hour of the day.

She sighed hard, “A fire ravaged two kilometers of the CERN tube last night, Mr. Cleave. Were you sleeping on the job?”

“I’m sorry, I was ill during the night and only fell asleep at dawn, Miss Richards,” he lied, swallowing the bourbon to get some hair of the dog. He felt ashamed for being so out of synch, so off kilter in his career. Of all people a Pulitzer winner, a renowned investigative journalist such as himself, should be on top of things. It was a shame that he was fraying at the ends like this to have lost his focus for but a night, yet neglected to know what the rest of the world already knew and looking utterly inept at his job.

“Look,” she said more gently, “I understand that you do not need our support and that you are a celebrity journalist and author, but you accepted this assignment, Mr. Cleave, so please, I implore you to please show more enthusiasm for the case. If anything it would help us avoid another, perhaps bigger, catastrophe.”

“You are correct, Penny. You are absolutely correct,” Sam agreed sincerely. “I have been distracted and overslept this morning which does not reflect well on my reputation, but I assure you I will be following up on this incident.”

“We will appreciate that, Mr. Cleave,” she replied in clear relief. “Please make your way to tomorrow’s conference in Geneva as soon as possible to see if you can shed some light on the arsonist in the meantime. I don’t think it was any coincidence that some of our investment was destroyed within a week from the anonymous threat we received. God knows, I do hope it was just an accident, but we need to be sure.”

“I shall leave this afternoon. Can you arrange a press pass or something similar for me at your convention? It is called the Cornwall…?” Sam asked, penning down the details.

“Bernard Cornwall Trust. That is the name you should look for at the Vidal Lux Hotel. I shall book a reservation for you there so long,” she informed him.

“Got it. Thank you, Miss Richards,” Sam said, relishing the warmth of the bourbon in his throat. He pressed the red button on his phone. “Jesus, could do with a fag now,” he lamented, having run out of cigarettes just before he passed out on the bed a few hours before.

The whole thing with the CERN threats had him bothered. He was not hired by Penny’s organization, but it was more like a mutual professional courtesy between them. The Cornwall Institute contacted Sam in hopes of him exposing an enemy of theirs that had been imperiling their projects for months. In return, should he find the culprit he would have exclusive rights to the story and yet again prove his worth in gold at exposing criminals to the world. It was a good deal for Sam. His book was still doing well, but he would not soon be donating sports stadiums to cities or buying yachts for random laid off fathers for charities. Now and then Sam Cleave still took on a worthy story to see if he could get to the bottom of the sewer of deception to retrieve what was left of fairness.

“Well, Sam, no time like the present,” he sighed to himself as he headed for the shower. With heavy feet he sauntered into the overwhelming white plastic environment of the en suite bathroom. Maggie’s Bed & Breakfast certainly knew how to make cheap look pretty, but he was not about to judge an establishment with such a good array of liquor stashed in their rooms.

After checking out just before 2pm, Sam made it just in time for his 3.40pm flight from Dublin to Heathrow. He hoped that no unforeseen obstacles like weather or mechanical problems would perturb his urgent trip to Geneva, but for now such concerns would not benefit him. What did vex Sam while he found himself in lonely moments on the plane, was that he had no idea exactly why someone would sabotage the CERN project, since it was not something substantial for the criminal world.

Next to him sat a gentleman who, to Sam’s relief, was not a talker. However, he did look like a complete drip from an old horror film. Small, round spectacles rested on a long, crooked nose and his white grey hair stood on end as if he had poked his index finger at a power point. A small goatee extended from his chin, but it was horribly untidy and frizzled. Sam taxed his ocular muscles to look at the man without turning his head. As the image dictated, the man wore a bowtie with his cardigan and brown pants.

The old man caught Sam glaring, even in his meager glances.

“Hello,” he said to Sam.

“Good afternoon,” Sam smiled self-consciously.

“Anything interesting about me, then?” he asked the journalist outright.

Sam felt awful for being discovered in his curiosity. It was a first class flight, therefore he knew that the old man who spoke to him could not have been just any old fool. Quickly Sam paged through his mind’s reserves for a proper explanation and, to his own surprise, he found a good one.

“My apologies for staring, sir. And I hope you don’t take insult to this, but…” Sam hesitated, “…you remind me of a young Albert Einstein.”

“Agh, vell!” the man exclaimed with a hearty grin. “Einstein is one of my idols. In fact, had it not been for his Unified Field Theory, I would not be sitting here next to you right now!”

“Really?” Sam smiled with relief.

“Yesh, yesh,” the man replied gleefully in his heavy Dutch accent, “he was my inspiration to become a theoretical physicist.”

“You are a theoretical physicist?” Sam gasped. He was truly surprised to have run into someone who happened to be in the same line of the people he was snooping for.

“Yesh, I am. Professor Martin Westdijk, University of Utrecht Applied Physics,” the old man smiled, extending a hand to Sam.

“Sam Cleave. Journalist, among other things,” Sam replied, but he could not help but feel that he sounded extremely inadequate in title compared to the professor.

“Journalist? Interesting. Have you heard about the fire?” he asked Sam, as if he knew the Scotsman’s business.

“Aye, this morning I… heard,” Sam said.

“I tell you, those damn religious freaks always get in the way of scientific research. Why can’t they just admit that science IS God and get a life, hey? Hey?” he shook his head, ordering a drink from the stewardess.

“Wait, what do you mean, Professor?” Sam asked, taking the same drink as his new friend.

“Well, CERN is constructing the super collider to mimic the Big Bang, so to speak, right? Now you have these fanatics going on about scientists ‘playing God’ and that we are going to cause the destruction of the planet if we create another Big Bang, destroying the world as we know it,” he exclaimed, obviously caught in disbelief of the narrow mindedness of the people he referred to.

Sam shook his head. “I know. But they would be insane to set fire to something they already deem to be so unstable, right?” He had to fish a bit, even if it was just to obtain some background on the politics involved.

The old man grunted, chugged back his whiskey and looked at Sam though his small goggles with bloodshot eyes, “Correct! But then again, with what they know about the research we are trying to conduct, I would not be bloody surprised if they had no idea what could happen.”

“Do they belong to an organization? Or is it just a group of people with similar beliefs?” Sam asked.

“I don’t think so. Not the people who caused the fire,” he told Sam. Professor Westdijk leaned closer, “To be frank, I think the very people who worked on that section did it.”

“But why would they?” Sam whispered. “All their work down the drain, or were they just working there because they infiltrated the project just to sabotage it?”

The old man waved off Sam’s speculation with a frown and a shake of his head, “No, no, my boy. I can promise you they would not do all that just to destroy their own work. What I think is that it was two or three engineers or maybe electricians, sabotaging the working of the machine by just making a deliberate electrical mistake, hey?”

Sam gave it some thought. “Could very well be, but there must be more to it?”

“Look, from what I know in this life, I can tell you that sometimes you only need a force of morality, pressed on by fear, to do such drastic things. Whoever caused the fire caused the wires to short circuit and that takes skill, hey?” the old man argued.

“So you are saying that they just wanted to win time by setting back the construction and working of the machine?” Sam asked under his breath.

The old man tapped his hand with a crooked finger, “That is what I was thinking, Sam Cleave.”

“Who would do that?” he wondered out loud.

“Other scientists,” Prof. Westdijk answered.

“But why?” Sam asked him.

The old man shrugged, “Maybe they were busy with an experiment of their own. Maybe they were onto something bigger than just smashing particles together like a bloody toddler, hoping to see an effect.”

Sam watched the old man’s annoyance take form. He slowly peeked over the frame of his glasses. “Maybe they were upset that something as pointless as the LHC got funding while they were onto something so much bigger.”