Simon Sees Read online

  Simon Sees

  An Art Jefferson Thriller

  Ryne Douglas Pearson

  © 2018 Ryne Douglas Pearson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief passages used for review purposes.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Visit the author’s website:

  http://www.rynedouglaspearson.com

  The Art Jefferson Thriller Series

  Cloudburst

  October’s Ghost

  Capitol Punishment

  Simple Simon

  Simon Sees

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Thirty Two

  Thirty Three

  Thirty Four

  Thirty Five

  Thirty Six

  Thirty Seven

  Thirty Eight

  Thirty Nine

  Forty

  Forty One

  Forty Two

  Forty Three

  Forty Four

  Forty Five

  Forty Six

  Forty Seven

  Forty Eight

  Forty Nine

  Fifty

  Thank You

  About

  One

  Stanislaw Venn stared at the cascade of numbers on the monitor and marveled at the violence of the universe.

  Born in a maelstrom of incomprehensible forces, all that had existed at that instant, billions of years ago, he saw again, before him, on the feed from the collider just fifty meters away. A subatomic symphony of compounding impacts that he was conducting. That he had conceived.

  “It is quite energetic,” Yevgeny Trutich commented. He stood behind Venn, looking over the seated man’s shoulders at the array of displays receiving data from sensors embedded in the kilometer-wide instrument. “Quite energetic.”

  Venn sensed the man’s concern. At another time he might have shared it, considering their proximity to the troubled instrument of research. Previous difficulties and technical failures dictated that the experiment he had proposed be limited to certain levels of power. Other precautions, too, had been insisted upon by the Direktor of the Institute. Even three thousand kilometers from Moscow, the man was sheepish.

  Venn, though, had ignored the limitations. What lay before him, before them all, required that fear of failure, fear of any consequences, be abandoned. The moment for bold thought, and bold action, was at hand.

  “Velikov would be…”

  “Impressed,” Venn said, invoking the Direktor’s name to complete his associate’s thought.

  “Concerned,” Trutich corrected.

  Venn smiled and nodded as he savored the spikes and pulses registering on the displays.

  He should be, Venn thought to himself. Everyone should be.

  A sensor readout began to flash green. Trutich stepped away from Venn and took his seat at the long console, activating a series of switches.

  “The stream is approaching viability.”

  “Good,” Venn said, glancing to where his fellow physicist had placed himself, the light on the panel changing now, glowing steady green.

  “Ready for injection,” Trutich said.

  “Adjust the target,” Venn instructed.

  Yevgeny Trutich looked to the feed from a remote camera. Bursts of static danced on the screen, an object, small and cylindrical, resolving through the electronic snow. He placed a hand on a joystick control before him and moved it slightly. On screen, the object shifted atop an articulated platform, mimicking the motion of the joystick.

  “Aligning target,” Trutich said. His hand molded itself tightly around the joystick, an intensity in his eyes. A wariness as well as he began manipulating the target object, making it rise.

  “Give me a weight,” Venn said, never taking his eyes off the displays, colored lines spiking.

  Trutich glanced to a readout just above the joystick.

  “Four grams.”

  “It hasn’t degraded!” Venn reacted, relieved and buoyed. “We have a stable reactant!”

  A few yards from his excited colleague, Trutich nodded to himself, a single bead of sweat forming on his forehead. He ignored it and focused, maneuvering the target higher, squinting at the staticky image.

  “Feedback is elevating,” Trutich reported, more sweat glistening above his brow. “The image is not stable. I can’t see what I’m doing.”

  “Maintain the insertion!” Venn snapped, dismissing the man’s concern.

  Trutich put his free hand atop the other, steadying his hold on the joystick as the small cylinder rose higher on his distorted screen. And higher. Until its silvery surface began to luminesce, the metallic sheen shifting through a spectrum of brilliant blues and whites as trillions of protons racing through the accelerator smashed into it.

  “Target is in the stream,” Trutich said, his hands shaking, voice on the verge of cracking.

  “Hold it steady!” Venn ordered, looking away now from his readouts, every computer-generated line displayed now pegged at the top of every scale. He reached to a spot on his console and flipped a safety cover up, revealing a small circle of red plastic beneath. His finger hovered over the button. “I’m engaging the reflectant!”

  Trutich’s face snapped toward his colleague, more than concern in his gaze now. Terror had replaced its minor cousin.

  “Stanislaw! It is too energetic!”

  Venn didn’t hear the protest. If he had, it would have mattered not one bit. He’d worked to reach this moment. Risked much. Sacrificed. And any hesitance voiced by a glorified assistant, the Direktor’s mentee, was meaningless.

  “On my mark,” Venn said, his voice calm now. Almost reverent.

  “Stanislaw!”

  Venn let one hand slide to a keyboard, his fingers typing in a quick command. Almost immediately a pegged line on one of the displays dropped to virtually nothing.

  “What are you doing?!” Trutich shouted, his fear doubling on itself. “The containment! You can’t reduce it!”

  “Reflectant stream…now.”

  Venn pressed the small red button and the world changed.

  “Stanis—”

  All that happened next had been dictated by the laws of physics. And by the folly of man’s attempt to harness what nature had made possible, but not advisable. In a measure of time that was as difficult to comprehend as infinity, albeit on the opposite end of that linear reference, a series of events occurred. A beam of protons, which had been racing at the speed of light through the accelerator’s magnetically shielded circular ‘racetrack’, began interacting with the target, a minute quantity of uranium 235. This energized interaction was then met by another force. A weaker force interjected at an angle where the stream of protons penetrated the target. This ‘sub-beam’ consis
ted of an unfocused scatter of neutrons which were not special in any way. Neither was the contents of the target, a quantity of uranium weighing hardly more than an ounce.

  What was special was the precisely calculated angle at which all three came together—beam, target, and reflectant.

  Reflectant…

  That had been Venn’s concept. His theory. And now, his breakthrough. This mating of forces. A combination of the seen and unseen. The redirection of one by another through the third. A ping-ponging rampage of invisible forces. The result being a success the Ukrainian born physicist would never live to fully appreciate.

  The fifty-meter separation from the massive accelerator’s experiment chamber, where beams sliced through the target and sensors recorded effects, was not nearly far enough to protect Venn and Trutich, or any of the more than two hundred workers on site, from what could only be termed an incredibly devastating success.

  In an instant, that same wonder which had awed the man as a flow of numbers on an electronic display now manifested itself in the physical world, much as the beginnings of the universe had—in a pulse of energy so briefly intense that all matter within two hundred meters was vaporized.

  Stanislaw Venn and scores of others were simply gone. The physicist’s final thought, though, which came just before the microsecond of his death, was one of recognition. Of awe, even.

  He was right, Venn had thought. The idiot was right.

  * * *

  “Whoa.”

  “Airman…”

  The 2nd lieutenant in charge of the watch in the monitoring center of the 2nd Space Warning Squadron chided her subordinate with the single word. It was continually drilled into the young Air Force airmen that injections of emotion or superlatives were inappropriate, and detracted from their prime mission—deciding if what the array of early warning satellites was seeing was the reflection off a rogue wave in the south Atlantic at midday, or the bloom of a gas purge igniting at some oil field in the Urals.

  Or if it heralded the beginning of World War Three.

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  The lieutenant stepped toward the young man’s station. He was just one of the eleven she supervised, all trained to monitor the displays before them with vigilance. Each had experienced false alarms, both in the darkened space in which they worked, and in simulations designed to hone their skills. She was confident that all of those under her command could discern between harmless anomalies relayed to their ground station by the satellites high above and the real thing. Even if none of them had experienced the real thing.

  “What do you have?” the lieutenant asked.

  The airman pointed to an infrared signature warning, little more than a fast spike in in one window on his display.

  “That’s as hot as I’ve ever seen,” the airman commented.

  She’d approached her airman’s station with every belief that she’d simply be using the moment as a teaching opportunity. That she’d be pointing out to the young Air Force volunteer that the event he was witnessing was yet another false alarm, as they all were. But when she took note of the reading which had outright startled the airman, the lieutenant felt her spine stiffen.

  “Bring that up on visual IR,” she instructed.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The airman typed a series of commands into his console and looked to a separate screen, the lieutenant’s attention already fixed there as a mix of greys and whites and blacks resolved, the heat signature detected by a Defense Support Program satellite transmitted 22,000 miles from its position above east Asia.

  “There’s no plume,” the airman said.

  That was good news, the lieutenant knew. No plume of superheated gas dragged into the atmosphere meant that no missile had been launched. Something, though, had definitely happened.

  “Do we have stored video?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Play it back.”

  The airman followed his commander’s directive, retrieving a clip of the event from his system’s memory. He pressed play and experienced again what had caused his initial reaction.

  The lieutenant, though, was seeing it for the first time. A bright pulse of white bloomed on the screen, erasing the monochromatic hues of rolling terrain and angular structures. The distortion, caused by an explosion hotter than any she’d ever seen, receded quickly, revealing what they saw now—a landscape shattered and smoldering.

  “Jesus…”

  The airman looked to his lieutenant, who’d broken the very rule she’d reminded him of.

  “Ma’am?”

  She composed herself and stayed fixed on the display. Her mouth had gone dry.

  “Pull up the location, airman.”

  He did as instructed, the location of the event overlaying on another screen, English translations below Cyrillic labeling of towns and rivers and installations.

  “Novosibirsk,” the airman reported. “Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics.” He looked again to the infrared images of what had just occurred and noted one glaring change. “That’s what should be there.”

  The lieutenant nodded and took a moment, running through the procedure in her head. All that would transpire over the next few minutes had been laid out in the manual, and perfected in training sessions. None of that, though, had fully prepared her for what was actually happening. Right before her eyes.

  It’s the real thing…

  “Lock your data down, airman.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The lieutenant stepped away from the airman’s position and crossed the monitoring center to a door with a window set into it, the space beyond dark. She entered a code into a keypad lock and the door mechanism clicked softly as it released, a light beyond activating at the same instant, revealing a desk within the small room, but no chair. And upon that single piece of government furniture sat a phone.

  She entered the room and closed the door behind, the lock setting again as she did, sealing her in. Without hesitation she picked up the phone’s handset, made of a black plastic, not red. There were no buttons to press. The mere act of lifting the handset initiated the call she had hoped she’d never have to place.

  “Duty Officer, NORAD,” a man on the other end of call said.

  All that she was about to speak into the secure telephone was critical information in succinct verbiage, a mix of clear language and military nomenclature that had been refined over the years. It was the first two words, though, that made all that followed of the highest importance to national security.

  “Pinnacle Nucflash, OPREP Three, Novosibirsk, Russia, detonation observed…”

  She continued relaying the relevant data to the duty officer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command. From NORAD the report would be disseminated through higher chains of command without delay, until what she’d just witnessed was shared with the President of the United States.

  That, though, mattered little to her right then. The unknown did. World War Three might not have just started, but something had.

  * * *

  The needle hurt.

  “Okay, Simon, that’s it,” Dr. Warren Michaels said, easing the slender syringe away and holding a cotton ball over the puncture in the man’s upper arm. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  Simon turned his head a bit so that he could see where Dr. Michaels had given him the shot. An ‘injection’ it was called. Like the others he’d had. Like the other fifty this doctor had given him in the past one hundred and twenty-two days.

  All the injections had hurt.

  “Number fifty-one,” Dr. Leah Poole said, looking on as her colleague finished the simple procedure, some gravity to her voice that seemed to impart a specialness to the number. Just as there was a specialness to their…

  She almost thought ‘subject’. In all honesty, that would be a more accurate term than patient. Because what else could one term the focus of an experiment?

  “How long?” Leah asked.

  Michaels dr
opped the syringe into the sharps container affixed to the examination room’s wall and rinsed his hands in the sink. “We’re in uncharted territory, Leah.”

  “We’ve been in uncharted territory since this started,” she told him.

  Simon heard the doctors talking. They’d spoken two thousand four hundred and twelve words since coming into the room where he waited. Seven thousand seven hundred and sixty-three syllables. Fourteen thousand two hundred and nine letters. With those letters it was possible to spell forty-three trillion two hundred billion ninety million two hundred seven thousand one hundred and twenty-four word combinations using the English alphabet.

  “Simon, I’d like you to do something for me,” Michaels said. He retrieved a small white dry erase board from the counter and a black marker that lay next to it.

  “Warren, we’ve done this baseline a hundred times.”

  “No, Leah, we’ve done it fifty times,” he corrected her, then held the board and marker out to Simon. “You remember this, don’t you, Simon?”

  Simon did. It was the board he wrote on when they told him to write on the board. When they tested him after each injection.

  “Simon, will you write the alphabet for me?” Dr. Michaels asked. “Will you do that for me?”

  They wanted to test him again. They wanted him to write letters.

  “Here, Simon,” Dr. Michaels prompted him, holding the board and marker closer still.

  Simon reached up and took the objects from the doctor, letting the board rest on his lap. He took the marker in hand.

  “Take the cap off, Simon,” Leah said. “The same as you did last time.”

  He had taken the cap off before. Fifty times before, as Dr. Michaels had said. He’d held the marker in his right hand and removed the cap with his left. It made a ‘pop’ sound when he’d done that. Simon pulled the cap and it made the same sound.

  “Very good, Simon,” Dr. Poole said, holding out her hand. Simon placed the cap in her palm.

  “All right, Simon,” Dr. Michaels said. “Please write the alphabet.”

  The English alphabet was twenty-six letters, not twenty-five. That was what the doctors wanted him to write. Those twenty-six letters. Not twenty-five.