Chapter 4
Big Greg knew that life was hard on the street, moving from one place to the next, avoiding the drunken louts who on the way home from the pub wanted to bang dustbin lids. Or else evading the police or sometimes decent-minded citizens aiming to help. Regardless of all the negatives, there was one thing that Big Greg knew above everything else: he wanted to be left alone.
He remembered the day well, the day when his life changed, not for the better, but for the inevitable. There were, he knew, others who were still looking for him, others who would take the information from him by force, others who would kill him on the spot.
If Bob Robertson, a friend, and Big Greg knew he had precious few of them, had not become inquisitive, then he would still be alive. And what if there was someone out there monitoring the internet? Someone so savvy that one of his formulas entered into the search bar would be triggering an alarm, an IP address, a location.
Bob Robertson had opened a can of worms, a can of intrigue and deception. Big Greg wondered if it would ever close again. He knew that he could be violent – hadn’t that happened that last day of his suffering.
He remembered it so clearly, even though it had been over eleven years ago. There he had been, a member of a team attempting to solve an imponderable that had confounded many for years, still did, yet it had been him who had come up with the solution. He remembered those who had held him captive for the next ten days after he had refused to give them what they wanted, and had beaten and tortured him relentlessly, drugged him with truth serum.
It had been a feat of superhuman strength that he had overpowered the men holding him, allowing him to escape. There had been bad years after that, years when he could not communicate with his family, never let them know that he was still alive, although he had kept a watch from a distance. He saw them daily: his daughter now a grown woman with a family of her own, his wife with another man.
It saddened him that he had been forced to kill another man to protect himself, but it was the solution, contained in the complex formulas and the technical drawings, that was all important. He had considered taking his life, but that was not the answer, and if he did, then what? Who would keep an eye on his family, who would protect the people of the country from what he had discovered? There were others, members of his team, who were still working on the problem, getting nowhere, but if they did, if he believed that they were getting close, he would have to act; he would have to kill again.
There had been one, a smart young woman whom he had admired. Her genius level intellect was close to his. It was unfortunate, the day he had to push her in front of an express train as it passed through the railway station where she was waiting for the train to take her back to her small flat. That had caused him anguish for some months afterwards, but his secret had remained safe.
It had not been easy, after killing Bob Robertson. He had kept out of sight since then by hiding in an abandoned warehouse, scavenging at night for scraps of food. He knew the police would be looking for him, not necessarily as the murderer, but he had been at the hostel that night, and he had disappeared after the killing. He knew the police were not stupid, and that they’d put two and two together and realise that he was a principal witness. He knew that he had perfected his disguise: the beard, the old clothes, the rank smell. He didn’t like any of them, but the alternative was not preferable.
The tenuous political situation all those years ago remained the same today. Some people would take the efforts of his research and use it as a weapon. The death of a few individuals and his less than satisfactory lifestyle were a small cost.
Big Greg sat in a corner of the warehouse, its construction half complete. He missed those who had become his friends, the downtrodden, the incoherent, the brain-addled, yet he did not know why. He had grown up in a comfortable middle-class household, shown brilliance at a young age, left Oxford University with an honours degree in mathematics.
The mandate of his last position in the government research department had been clear: the development of low-cost energy. Idealistic, he had thought at the time, but he and the others had applied their collective wisdom to the solution.
That had been fine for the six years they had worked as a team on the problem. It had been him who had come up with the final solution, the stabilising of the energy, the directional control of the microwave beam from the solar collectors in low-level orbit, and he was willing to reveal it at an upcoming presentation, including to his team, but then he had overheard their director talking in the conference room to some men in uniform.
Three men. One was the director of the government department where the research department was located, a decent man, idealistic, the same as he was, Big Greg knew that. The other two were clearly military. The discussion: the military implications of what he alone had solved.
Big Greg, although that was
