The Tesla Experiment

Chapter 11

At CERN the day was drawing into an atmosphere as volatile as the weather.

Albert Tägtgren rushed through the large crowd of white coats and hard hats to get to the main office to take a call. He had just arrived for his shift, but his superior told him that there was an urgent message for him to call the Cornwall Institute in connection with a bursary for his son.

“Go on, Al. Just make sure you get back here before Greenley knocks off. I need at least one structural engineer at Alice at all times,” his superior told him before he headed for the office. He could not use his cell phone, for security reasons.

Fortunately the staff and workers at the laboratory were of such a vast number that nobody really kept up with anyone else unless they were close friends. Albert’s colleagues did not know that he had no son and that the Cornwall Institute did not give bursaries. In fact, they did not know what the Cornwall Institute was. But Albert did. He also knew that the message was code for an urgent request to fix a problem.

“Miss Richards, it is Albert Tägtgren.”

“Albert, did you speak to Sam Cleave yesterday?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I told him what I knew and then he left,” Albert said.

“Good. We do have one problem, though. We have reason to believe that there are more than a few moles in your section, so we would like you to listen and observe, see if anyone is acting strangely. We have a lot of money invested in this mission, so we cannot afford to have more hold ups by our opposition, understand?” she told the engineer.

“I will. So far I have not detected any odd doings,” he reported.

“Just stay on your toes. Time is running out on all levels, so you know that soon something, somewhere, will transpire. The closer we get to the activation of the Super Collider the more trouble we can expect to surface,” Penny reminded him with a tone of warning, fraught with worry. “And please don’t let anyone guess at your true reasons for being there, Al. You would be in deep trouble if they knew that you were involved in the Tesla Experiment.”

“Yes, Miss Richards. Don’t worry. Nobody has any idea what I am doing here,” he comforted her concerns. He ended the call with a renewed worry about the facts he gave that Scottish journalist the day before. Albert could kick himself for his cavalier disclosure of such a sensitive matter, but he could not help himself. Never before had he been in such an important position or known such weighty things and it felt good to be able to tell the secret. To share such an awe inspiring fact such as witnessing someone employ quantum mechanics in front of his eyes was just too much of a temptation. Besides, the journalist did not take pictures or film him, so there was always the comfort that he could deny anything Cleave placed on him, although Penny Richards would get word of it without a doubt, and he would be fired by the Institute.

“Tägtgren!” the Alice head engineer shouted. For a brisk moment Albert’s guilt ridden heart stopped in fear of having been discovered. “Quick, come with me!”

“What is the matter, sir?” the covert engineer asked.

He walked with the head of the section’s staff as the man went on about bad security and how his hide was up for tanning now. “I’m going to be in some deep shit, my friend. I hope you know what happened here of we are going to have a bloody media mess on our hands!”

“What happened?” he asked again as they approached the remnants of the burnt mess behind the security barriers where Tägtgren remembered showing the secret evidence to the journalist.

His heart pounded. The fact that he did not know what was amiss was almost worse than knowing how guilty he was of abetting the trespassing journalist. He lamented Penny Richards sending the man in the first place he would not have had to suffer this sheer stress. Why did she have to send Sam Cleave to probe the secret just so that she could find out how probable discovery of the true story would be by the media? Richards reckoned that, if a potent investigative journalist like Cleave could not figure out what really caused the fire, then the Institute’s secret was safe against the lesser media vultures.

Now he, Albert Tägtgren was in hot water from all sides, because what Penny Richards did not know was that he was a double agent. The opposition of the Cornwall Institute paid better and they were aware that he worked for Penny, so he had no fear of being exposed from that side. Still, he was not supposed to entertain the journalist, let alone disclose the details of the truth to him.

All Tägtgren could do now, was to hope that neither Penny nor her opposition would find out that he showed Sam Cleave the cordoned off site of the Alice detector, there where no-one was supposed to go. All he was supposed to do after Penny told him to speak to Cleave, was to play dumb and keep to the short circuit story, according to the other faction he worked for. But in his fascination and the thrill of knowing what others did not, the first-time spy appeared to have royally fucked himself. He could recover from this heinous mistake only if his revelation remained undetected.

“Look,” Albert’s superior announced, “look over there, but the storage pod. Do you see what I see?”

Albert’s skull started pounding under the torment of a terrible headache. In all honesty he could not see what his boss referred to, which gave him a faintly soothing feeling of sincere innocence. Any ignorance would be true while he could not discern what he was supposed to. “I see nothing out of the ordinary, sir.”

“Listen Al, during your shift last night a fully functional capacitor disappeared from the little amount of operational material we still had left after the bloody fire,” the man noted angrily. He stared furiously at Albert, waiting for an answer. “Do you know that anything missing on you watch will be charged to you? Worse yet, you might be sited for theft.”

“No!” Albert cried inadvertently. “I’m sorry. I just… I am not responsible for this.”

“You damn well are responsible for it!” his boss sneered.

“No, I mean. I did not steal it. I am not responsible for the theft. I do realize that I must be at fault for allowing it to be taken, indirectly, I suppose,” he confessed in disappointment.

“I’m going to have to write a report about this to the company. I will let you know tomorrow what the board decided to do about this,” the head engineer sighed. Shaking his head, he walked away, “You are excused for today, Tägtgren. Go home.”

“I wish I could. Wish I never left Sweden,” he retorted just soft enough not to be heard by the livid supervisor who disappeared among the staff. “That goddamn journalist stole it.”

He took the boss’ advice and truthfully he was quite relieved about the dismissal for the day. There was too much going on at work that added to his constant anxiety and a break would do him well. In fact, in this angry weather Albert elected to drop in on one of the local bars in Meyrin that was not too far from his apartment. It was his intention to get hammered and forget about his troubles, at least for the day. But not before he called Sam Cleave to pick that bone.

He was met with more disappointment, getting only Sam’s voicemail.

“This is Albert Tägtgren, the idiot who foolishly trusted you yesterday. You are a coward, Cleave! You don’t even have the balls to pick up the phone, you bastard! I know what you did! And you knew I could not implicate you, because then my employers would know that I told you about the storage container and what I saw there,” he shouted on the phone. Albert was livid. “I am going to track you down and we will sort this out, you and I. You can count on that!” He ended the call there and flung his phone on the passenger seat of his car as he neared the checkpoint from his section.

From the perimeter of the compound the Volvo roared, liberated from the security check and leaving behind a myriad of questions, cover-ups and clandestine espionage. Albert finally allowed himself to smile as he looked in his rear view mirror, watching the particle physics laboratory grow smaller in his wake. It felt wonderful, even with the sudden shower of rain that assaulted the area with a positively vicious trajectory that clapped against his wind shield. He winced at the impact, hoping there would not be any impending hail to damage his luxury car before he got to park it under cover.

Thunder shook the ground as the heavy electrical storm system spread out as predicted by the weather bureau. By nightfall torrential havoc would apparently have reached a radius spanning Lyon, Tarare and Villefranche-sur-Saône in neighboring France.

In the near distance two gray figures came into view from the predominantly white environment of mist and showers. They came into view as he slowly drew closer. Two traffic officers were redirecting cars into the detour set up away from the main road.

“Now? In the rain we have to take some shitty pot-hole path?” he grunted, vexed by the extra time he would have to spend on the road. His phone rang. He stopped his car. Was it Sam Cleave?

Albert placed his phone on the hands-free station and answered as he slowly pulled away from the shoulder of the road again. A scratchy sound came across the speaker, then the voice he dreaded most — his other employer, the man who paid him more than Penny did.

“Albert, you told the journalist things you shouldn’t have.”

“No. No, I told him nothing, sir. Nothing.”

“Really? Then what was he doing in the prohibited area with you?” the stern man asked, provoking a renewed panic in Tägtgren. He stopped his car again, barely 200m from the detour sign.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he swallowed hard.

“CCTV, you blithering idiot!” his employer roared. “For an engineer you are exceedingly stupid! But worse, Albert, you are a liar.”

With that the call was cut and the engineer swore he could hear his heart clamoring in his body. His transgression was discovered. It was time to get away, go back home to his country.

Albert decided to turn up the radio to drown out the din of the downpour as he carefully navigated the rather narrow tarmac ribbon he had turned off on toward Meyrin. He reduced speed as he allowed the music to lull his sensibilities and calm his nerves, even when his hands refused to stop shaking.

He looked back to see the unfortunate officers having to stand in the rain and wait for the next cars to direct away. Albert watched the dwindling figures in his rear view mirror. But when the next cars came they had removed the detour sign. The rest of the cars passed on the highway. Completely perplexed the engineer frowned, paying too much attention to what was going on behind him to see what was coming from ahead.