Apocalypse

41

‘What’s Joaquin’s endgame?’ Ethan asked Purcell, as they stood on the little spit of land. ‘What’s he going to do with this black hole of his?’

Charles Purcell sighed.

‘Joaquin’s great plan is to use the enormous energy contained within his black hole to create seismic events in the deep-water channel off the coast of Puerto Rico. It’s a geologically volatile area, one that could easily be destabilized by the gravitational influence of Joaquin’s device.’

Ethan and Lopez shared a confused glance.

‘What’s the point of that?’ Ethan asked. ‘He’s going to wreck countries and hold them to ransom?’

‘No,’ Purcell shook his head. ‘He’ll appear to be the only private company willing to help developing countries hit by natural disasters because he’ll have foreseen the disaster and will be on the scene first, which will continue to increase his international popularity. But even that’s not why he’s doing all of this.’

‘What then?’ Lopez asked.

‘Have either of you ever heard of something called economic shock-therapy?’

‘Economic enhancement, used to break communist state-controlled economies and replace them with capitalist free markets,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s been the way forward for decades.’

Purcell grinned tightly.

‘The way forward is one way of putting it,’ he replied, ‘but it’s also been the cause of the collapse of economies, the murders of millions of people and the transformation of governments into regimes as bad as anything communism had to offer.’

‘How come, and what’s this got to do with Joaquin’s insane plan?’ Lopez asked.

‘Joaquin’s plan is a natural extension of economic shock-therapy. It happened under Reagan here in America, under Thatcher in the UK, under Gorbachev in the former Soviet Union, Pinochet in Chile… the list is endless.’

‘Wait,’ Ethan said, ‘you’re talking about privatization, right?’

‘At the expense of human rights,’ Purcell replied, ‘to the financial benefit of foreign governments and large corporations bent on securing the profits to be had. Essentially, economic shock-therapy is used to take over entire countries and bind them to debts that they cannot possibly repay.’

Lopez began putting the pieces together.

‘You think that Joaquin is targeting countries hit by disasters, providing them with funds to rebuild, and then tying them into debts to IRIS.’

‘Precisely,’ Purcell nodded. ‘This is what economic shock-therapy is designed to do — to convert a struggling country’s economy to free-market capitalism, with loans provided by organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But in doing so the country in question is placed forever in thrall to world markets and its own debt. A country’s natural resources are partitioned out to major corporations who have a stake in the funding, so the country loses its own natural wealth and the profits that it could have reaped from those resources. No self-respecting government would admit to being so heavily indebted to a private company, so IRIS would remain free from public criticism of his charitable status.’

‘Iraq,’ Ethan said, as images flashed in his mind of the destruction wrought there by the coalition forces. ‘Huge sums of money were handed to private companies by our government to rebuild Iraq, but instead of hiring local people the big corporations went in with their own staff, did nothing, blamed their lack of activity on insurgent attacks and then left. Before we even got there the oil fields had been divided up between international petrochemical companies. Iraq never needed rebuilding at all until it had the crap bombed out of it, and we saw half of the population out of work, while foreign corporations kept their staff in luxury compounds. The supposed handing back of the oil fields to the Iraqi people is just a thin veneer, a corporate subterfuge — America owns Iraq’s oil because we own their debt.’

‘And Joaquin Abell intends to do something similar,’ Lopez surmised, ‘but this time causing the catastrophe that drives the economic change.’

‘He intends to test the device off the coast of the Dominican Republic this afternoon,’ Purcell confirmed, ‘as a proof of concept to major figures in government and business. Once he has their support he can move forward and start lobbying Congress. The lawmakers will easily be won over by the colossal advantage the IRIS device will bring to American supremacy, both economically and militarily, and Joaquin will almost certainly engineer the nomination of a suitably obedient president. Anybody who opposes him will be branded in the same way that anybody who opposes unbridled capitalism: as un-American or unpatriotic. Joaquin needs to make a lot of money to fill the gaps in IRIS’s accounts, to replace the money he has laundered over the years to build his device. Holding entire countries to debt is the perfect way of doing that. If he achieves his goal, there will be nothing to stop him, because the missing money will have been replaced, and IRIS will appear to be saving lives instead of destroying them.’

‘We need to stop him,’ Ethan said, ‘and we need your help to do it.’

‘You are already helping to stop it,’ Purcell replied.

‘By changing the future that you saw?’ Lopez asked.

‘No,’ Purcell smiled, ‘by fulfilling it. Joaquin Abell has the ability to see into the future, but just as he does not know the true scope of what he has achieved, so he does not know of its limitations.’

‘What limitations?’ Ethan asked, frustrated. Time was running out.

‘His device can only capture light,’ Purcell explained. ‘There is no sound to accompany what he sees on these cameras. Therefore, the images can be taken out of context.’

Purcell explained how the cameras viewed the rolling news feeds capturing not only footage of future events but also the anchors as they narrated at their desks.

‘He must rely on the scrolling text banners as much as the speaking anchors,’ Lopez guessed.

‘Exactly,’ Purcell agreed. ‘He always employs somebody on his team who can lip-read, which gets him some extra information from the reports; but often the image quality means he must rely purely on the pictures.’

‘He still has the advantage,’ Ethan said.

‘Only to a certain extent,’ Purcell replied. ‘There’s something else about light that Joaquin does not know, and it could tip the balance in your favor, if only for a while.’

‘We’re listening,’ Lopez said impatiently.

‘It’s called the Observer Effect,’ Purcell said, ‘one of the deepest mysteries of quantum theory. Put in the simplest terms, the world around us reacts to the act of us looking upon it.’

‘It does what?’ Lopez uttered.

‘It reacts to us observing it,’ Purcell repeated. ‘A stream of photons of light fired through a single opening onto a screen that are not observed produce multiple patterns on the screen instead of a single dot, as though they had passed through several openings and not one.’

‘Does the stream spread or something?’ Ethan asked. ‘Like a shotgun cartridge?’

‘In a sense,’ Purcell agreed. ‘It happens because the quantum duality of photons allows light to act as both a particle and a wave at the same time, just one of many bizarre properties found at quantum scales. But as soon as the photons are observed they act as you would expect through common sense — they form an orderly line and produce a single spot of light on the screen.’

Lopez blinked. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Nor do most people, but it is an aspect of quantum physics experimentally verified by a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Electrons perform in exactly the same manner, and the resulting pattern is known as interference. What it means is that particles can act as either particles or waves depending on whether or not they’re being observed.’

‘So reality literally reacts to us being here,’ Lopez surmised.

‘It reacts to any observation, not just human,’ Purcell said. ‘Even a camera observing the experiment will cause interference.’

Ethan made a connection.

‘So the future that Joaquin Abell has seen may be affected by the fact that it has already been observed by that camera?’

‘Yes,’ Purcell said. ‘Finding me is not Joaquin’s priority. It’s this camera that he wants. It alone has seen the electrons and photons of reality streamed into its lens for months to come, whereas Joaquin only has a small part of the picture. To put it simply, his limited view of the future through news broadcasts might allow him to win the battle, but this camera will tell him if he’s going to win the war.’

‘It’s only fixed for him once he observes what happens himself?’ Ethan said, gradually piecing together the bizarre links that joined reality with what Joaquin Abell and Charles Purcell had witnessed.

Purcell nodded, apparently pleased with their progress.

‘There is a similar phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. If particles are split into pairs and separated, then when one is observed and its wave function collapses, the same effect will occur in the other particle even if it is on the other side of the universe.’

Lopez’s expression brightened.

‘The future for any individual can only be fixed once it has been observed,’ she said. ‘Until then, it’s just…’

‘Just a wave,’ Purcell finished the sentence for her. ‘It’s vague and unmeasured, nebulous and unclear, constantly being shaped by events in the present. Electrons behave in this way — it’s called the uncertainty principle, because you can locate an electron but then you can’t measure its energy state. Likewise, you can measure its energy state but then you can’t precisely fix its position. Reality has a way of preventing us from knowing absolutely everything.’

Ethan looked at the camera that Purcell held, and he finally got it.

‘Only you have seen the future that awaits you personally,’ he said to Purcell. ‘As long as Joaquin can’t see what’s on that camera, your future will be one that sees him pay for his crimes, because that’s what you saw.’

‘Precisely,’ Purcell confirmed. ‘When I realized what Joaquin intended to do I lied to him, telling him that the future could only be seen a certain distance ahead because of a property of black holes known as the Schwarzschild Radius. I said that the cameras would be fried if left too close to the event horizon for too long, which is true, in some respects. Part of my job was to place and retrieve each of these cameras once every forty-eight hours or so. I altered this one by enclosing it in a Faraday cage to protect it from electrical forces within the black-hole chamber, and then left it in place for several weeks and used a spare camera instead to cover for it. Joaquin never knew what I’d done until I was forced to flee when I looked at the future as seen by this camera, and saw what would happen to me and my family.’

‘Joaquin realized what you’d done,’ Ethan put the pieces together, ‘and sent his people to try to silence you. They headed for your family home first in case you were there…’

Purcell nodded, tears welling in his eyes as he struggled to keep his emotions in check.

‘I couldn’t get to them in time,’ he uttered.

Lopez clenched her raised fist as she spoke.

‘Well, now’s your chance for payback. I’d say we’ve got IRIS by the balls. Let’s get out of here and find out what happens.’

Ethan saw Purcell’s smile fade.

‘You’ve seen the camera’s images, though,’ he said to Purcell.

‘I’ve seen everything right up to tonight. The future can never be seen in its entirety because it is always in motion, affected by events in the present. The only future we can see is the one viewed from our own perspective.’

‘Tell us,’ Lopez urged. ‘We can help you.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Purcell replied. ‘I’ve already seen what will happen. I’ve caused the interference myself by viewing the future, and in doing so I’ve fixed it into place. My destiny cannot now be changed.’

‘Yes it can,’ Lopez insisted. ‘You can get out of here right now and into protective custody. We know you didn’t murder your family, Charles. You’re innocent.’

‘Yes I am,’ Purcell said as tears formed at the corners of his eyes and his voice choked, ‘and Joaquin Abell is guilty. But for him to be brought to justice…’

‘You have to die,’ Ethan said, ‘because you saw it happen, didn’t you? If you don’t fulfill your own role within it, then you think that the future might change and Joaquin Abell might get away with what he did.’

Purcell’s jaw quivered as he fought back indescribable fear, weighed down by the burden of a moral dilemma greater than anything Ethan could imagine.

‘I saw my own death,’ he whispered, as the tears now ran freely down his face. ‘But I saw more than that, and I cannot tell you any of it. While it was alongside the event horizon of Joaquin’s black hole this camera saw a future that included both my death and the fall of IRIS. It doesn’t matter where it goes now, whether or not it’s turned on or off or who possesses it. Its own future is recorded here, on its hard drive memory. And in order for it to be fulfilled, I must play my part. You must journey onward alone now, for my time has come to an end.’

‘No way,’ Lopez said, taking a step forward, ‘you’re out of here.’

Purcell raised a desperate hand and waved her back, swiping the tears from his face on the back of his sleeve.

‘No! Please, do this for my wife, for my daughter. Let me go, because if you don’t, then their killer will never be found.’

‘What makes you so damned sure that they’ll be found if you’re dead?’ Lopez snapped.

Purcell looked again at his watch, then turned and pointed to a large tree some twenty yards to his right. He spoke quickly, as though to hesitate any further would make him lose his resolve.

‘The bullet that you’ll find in that tree will lead you to my killer,’ he said. ‘Retrieve it and look for traces of Rubidium-82.’

‘We found that compound on the bullets that killed your wife and daughter,’ Ethan said.

‘And you’ll find it on all ammunition used by personnel at IRIS,’ Purcell said. ‘I took the liberty of dousing all of their weapons and ammunition in the armory before I fled.’

‘What armory? And how do we find the black hole that IRIS is using?’ Lopez asked.

‘Wait for the earthquake,’ Purcell said, ‘at precisely sixteen-seventeen hundred hours and twelve seconds this afternoon, off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Search for electromagnetic anomalies in the Bermuda Triangle at the same time. You’ll find IRIS there.’

‘There must be another way,’ Ethan pleaded. ‘Some other path that will still ensure justice for your family.’

‘That’s not a chance I’m willing to take,’ Purcell said. ‘Katherine Abell is innocent of any crime. She may be able to help you bring him to justice, if you can prove to her that he is behind all that has happened, and that it is better to oppose him than stand with him.’

‘She’s devoted to him, it’s no use,’ Lopez replied. ‘We need you, Charles.’

Purcell checked his watch again and then suddenly stood up straight and lifted his chin. He wiped the rest of the tears from his face. There was a terminal determination in his eyes.

‘Good luck, both of you,’ he said. ‘Find the man who killed my family.’

Lopez shook her head and leapt forward. ‘No!’

Ethan opened his mouth to speak but a sharp crack split the air around him.

Lopez slammed into Purcell, the pair of them spinning sideways in a gruesome pirouette. As if in slow motion, Purcell shuddered as a bullet slammed into his side and a fine mist of crimson spray exploded from his shirt as the projectile smashed through his chest cavity and exited from between his ribs. The scientist’s body went limp as it fell, Lopez rolling with him through the air as they plunged down onto the soft sand.

Ethan saw the tree that Purcell had indicated shudder as a spray of bark fell from its trunk and the bullet buried itself in the wood. He leapt forward, hurling himself down on the sand alongside Purcell as Lopez grabbed his face in desperation, her other hand pressed against the exit wound spilling bright blood across his white shirt.

‘Stay with me, Charles!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t goddamn quit now! Where are those documents?’

Purcell looked at her as Ethan watched, his eyes hooded and his expression sagging as he whispered. ‘My father took his secrets to the grave, as shall I,’ he murmured. ‘Time will tell, Nicola.’

Ethan felt his heart sink as Purcell gasped, and then the life in his eyes was extinguished like a distant dying star.

A burst of automatic fire raked the bushes around them, and Ethan grabbed Lopez by the arm.

‘He’s gone!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back!’