Branch Off Page 4

  At Léa’s silence, the man changed topic. “So, did you make up your mind?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  ***

  The helicopter shook and quivered in the turbulent atmosphere above the city. A pungent smell of kerosene lingered in the cabin.

  From up in the air, Geneva looked almost like any other city—roofs, terraces, streets, and cars—but here and there, darker spots marked the ground where those deadly shots had fallen, crumbling buildings and burying people beneath piles of rubble.

  Not one of the medical personnel on board spoke, not because they didn’t get a headset, but because there was nothing to say. At least, Léa didn’t have anything to say.

  She recognized parts of the landscape below. Streets she liked to walk on, or places she used to go for lunch sometimes, when there wasn’t an emergency. At the same time, it was a different city. Except for the occasional military patrol, no one was in the streets, and Léa felt her guts clench at the thought that she might not return home for a long time. She could very well not have a home anymore.

  A violent jerk rocked the aircraft for a moment, prompting everyone to hold on to the handrails near the large windows.

  Another shallow crater flew by below, with something burning at its center.

  ER duty had kept her hostage for forty-eight hours straight. Working, hearing distant explosions and dull tremors through the floor, and only seeing the effects of the attack on other people. But at least the hospital hadn’t been hit.

  Judging by the noises, she had pictured Geneva as an expanse of debris, but there were only a few craters here and there. Those scars on the ground didn’t follow a pattern she could recognize, and they seemed to have hit in random places. What kind of enemy wouldn’t use logic and strategy during war? They hadn’t even hit the obvious infrastructure, like power plants and railways and airports.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Léa said, without hearing her own voice through the roar of the engine and rotor blades.

  “What?” the nurse in front of her yelled. Her name was Adèle, the same as Lea’s sister.

  “Nothing.”

  The urban landscape beneath the helicopter gave way to the silvery surface of Lake Geneva, calm and sparkly.

  Léa’s eyelids turned heavy, and she fell asleep.

  ***

  Someone shook her awake.

  The few minutes of sleep she had enjoyed had only produced the effect of turning her limbs into clumsy appendices. She was suddenly aware of her soaked clothes, wet and cold.

  From the open door of the helicopter, she could see the refugee camp a few hundred meters away, with a long queue of trucks waiting at the gate. People—men, women, and children—jumped down from the back of the vehicles and made a few tentative steps, looking at their surroundings, with soldiers motioning for them to go through the gate. Cries raised in the air.

  With her joints crunching, Léa slid off the helicopter seat and landed onto the grills of the makeshift helipad. She stretched her back and arms and then followed the other doctors and nurses that were walking toward the camp.

  On the other side of the low fence that enclosed the field, row upon row of large tents lay, lined with perfect accuracy. With their white tarps, sloped roofs, and doors framed in aluminum, they looked brand-new.

  An entire row of those tents had a big, red cross above the doors.

  No real hospital awaited Léa.

  Seven

  “Damn!” Will exclaimed as the two of them made their way through the thick crowd that had already thronged against the white-and-red striped police line.

  An entire building was gone, imploded by the aircraft that had hit it. Its upper five or six stories weren’t there—or rather, they were scattered on the street below. A large mound of debris with sloping edges hid the lower two or three floors.

  A million pieces of papers fluttered in the breeze.

  Sarah coughed at the acrid smell of burned rubber and kerosene that lingered in the air, watching the firefighters inundating the area with thousands of liters of water, even if there were no visible flames.

  “What building was it?” Will asked.

  “Maybe an office complex. Not sure.”

  Blue flashing lights blinked away at the edges of the perimeter. Cops and paramedics scurried up and down, helping the several dozen people injured by shrapnel and falling fragments.

  Sarah’s guts clenched at the sight of clothes in the pile of debris; their bright colors made a stark contrast against the greyness of shattered concrete.

  The flow coming from the hydrants diminished, and a team of firefighters ventured nearer the collapsed building, climbing up the mountain of rubble.

  “You know anyone who works there?”

  She shook her head.

  Blocks of debris rumbled off the mound, pushed downward by the feet of the rescue squad.

  “Do you know what happened?” a woman at her side asked. The feeble breeze moved her dark, curly hair.

  Sarah stared at her for a moment, and she opened her mouth to speak, but she hadn’t seen the jet or anything else. Well, she had spotted something in the sky, but she hadn’t made its shape out.

  “A terrorist attack?” the woman pressed.

  “I doubt it.”

  “I bet it’s one of those Muslim terrorist groups.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Are you a Muslim?”

  “What if I am?” Sarah kept her gaze on her.

  Without speaking again, the woman turned and looked at the destruction in front of them.

  “Not much to see,” Sarah said as she started making her way out of the crowd. “I’d better go to work.”

  The number of people had increased a bit, and the street was packed full of men and women with bewildered looks and phones at their ears or in front of their faces to take pictures. Even more flowed in at the back of the throng.

  “Feeling better now?” Will asked.

  “Yes.”

  “OK.”

  “Thank you for asking.”

  ***

  Despite it being almost ten in the morning, the control room was empty, except for three other scientists she seldom worked with. She waved hi to them on her way in.

  Richards was nowhere to be seen, and even Frank’s desk was vacant.

  All wall screens were black, as were most monitors in the double round desks.

  Sarah loaded the latest version of the data collected the day before and studied it for a couple of minutes. She remembered it well: a strange shape that didn’t quite abide by the laws of physics that were found in books.

  It wasn’t the first time that a particle accelerator showed something unexpected, but this data was inexplicable. From what was in front of her, she could only deduce that those particles had gone upward, concentrating in a beam pointing at the sky, with very high energy detected in one small spot.

  Like a fighter jet striking through the detector.

  She rapped her fingers on the desk, losing her gaze beyond the monitor. Her mind kept returning to that explosion. In the silence of the control room, her ears still produced a faint ringing. She fired up a web browser and hit a newspaper’s website. The number of deaths was still unknown, but authorities had already counted more than thirty wounded.

  The airplane could have hit her lab or her home. She could have been dead by now.

  News reports confirmed that it was indeed a fighter jet, or so several eyewitnesses had said. Grainy footage from mobile phones showed the aircraft falling out of the sky without control, damaged, and leaving a trail of smoke behind. From the images, the pilot did not eject from the vehicle before crashing, making that the first death. The body was still missing.

  Both Swiss and French Air Force denied that it was one of their units but refused to release radar tracks. Civil aviation officers said that they had detected the plane for only a few seconds before it went off the grid when it crashed.

  No one knew where
that fighter jet had come from, and some declared that it was a Mirage, while others swore that it was an F/A-18.

  “Rubbish,” she mumbled.

  Another news report lower in the page caught her attention. “Twenty People Appeared out of Nowhere North of Geneva,” it was titled. It explained that a group of men, women, and children, disoriented and in a state of shock, but otherwise in good health, had been spotted walking in a meadow in the northern outskirts of the city. A map showed the area with a red circle.

  She found the place familiar in some way, but she didn’t recognize the names of the towns. For her, Geneva’s suburbs were still unexplored territory. Her eyes spotted the line of the border with France. “Of course!”

  “What?” Frank asked from behind her.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Discovered anything?”

  “Well, no. I was reading about the crash and came across this news.”

  He read the title and frowned.

  “It’s near the eastern section of the accelerator.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing, I just recognized the place.”

  Frank shrugged. “They must have been drunk or stoned.”

  “There were four children.”

  Another shrug.

  When she returned to the home page, the article had been updated. More small parties were being identified. In the next hour, the count reached a hundred, and the fighter jet crash disappeared below the several photographs of people of all ages and both sexes walking in normal clothes, only just a little dirty and battered.

  A new map appeared on the website, with a circle indicating each of the six groups found so far.

  Sarah loaded a map of the particle accelerator. Onto it she drew a dot for each of the circles, and then one last, large circle across all the dots.

  Her heart missed a beat.

  “This can’t be.”

  “What?”

  “It must be a coincidence.”

  Frank peeked at the monitor above her shoulder. He came closer and squinted his eyes. “How accurate is that?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty meters?”

  “How is it that no one has figured it out yet?”

  “No idea. Someone probably will very soon.” She got up from the chair and put on her greatcoat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Onto the roof.”

  “You won’t see anything.”

  “But it won’t hurt, either,” she replied with a wink.

  Up above the building, her breath drew puffy clouds of vapor in the chilly air. She glanced up at the whitish sky and squinted her eyes in the intense refracting light. Sarah stood there on the roof, towering over the other lower buildings and looking about, arms crossed and scarf wound around her neck.

  The sounds of the city came in far and distorted. A honking car, a stuttering diesel engine, and a million tiny voices. No more police and ambulance sirens, though.

  Not too distantly, a thin cloud of smoke still lingered above the fighter jet crash site.

  Indeed, there wasn’t much to see. That section of the accelerator was too far from the campus and the air too hazy below the cloud cover. She wasn’t sure if, even with a crystalline atmosphere, she would be able to see ten kilometers away.

  She scanned the horizon. Judging distances proved to be impossible. She saw a few small buildings in the distance, sparse across the countryside covered in snow and set against the background of snowy mountains. She could make out the Geneva International Airport slightly to her left, not even two kilometers afar, but other than that it all looked like an alien landscape of dormant fields and scattered, misty groves.

  Her urge to go there and see startled her. Perhaps it was because the problem was physical, tangible, and not only a bunch of invisible particles running in a vacuum tube. Actual living people were appearing out of nowhere, near the path of the accelerator. The coincidence was too obvious to ignore. Sarah had to go there.

  Eight

  The tent Léa had been assigned to was cramped, with only half a meter between each bed. “You get a bunk and a locker,” they had told her. All the beds were pristine and the small cabinets empty, with keys dangling from their doors. Her mouth produced faint puffs of mist. She touched the thin tarp that the walls were made of, glancing around to search for some kind of heating and finding none. A rough, brown woolen blanket lay at the center of the cot beneath a pack of white bedsheets and a small, slim cushion. An expanse of grey plastic, laid on top of something stiff, was the floor. Stepping inside the tent, she had left a trail of mud and torn blades of grass behind her, for which she felt guilty.

  Léa opened her locker and squeezed her bag into it. Closing the door and locking it, she put the key in the right front pocket of her jeans.

  Outside, a constant stream of people flowed from the gate of the camp, guided and steered by armed guards. Voices were low, and the few crying children stood out from the otherwise silent atmosphere. Families held each other’s hands and walked without talking, their faces worried.

  One of the soldiers jogged forward from the direction of the gate with his submachine gun slung on his back.

  Moving a few steps over to the side of the tent, she pulled out her phone and speed-dialed her sister. Léa had sent her a text every now and then during the whole duration of the attacks, just to let her know that everything was fine. That she was still alive.

  “Hey, how are you? Are you OK?” Adèle asked with a worried tone.

  “Yes, I’m fine, Ade.”

  “Where are you now? I heard Geneva is being evacuated. Why don’t you come here to Zurich?”

  “I’m at a camp near Lausanne.”

  “So it’s true. Is it a refugee camp?”

  For a moment Léa watched the people walking around and occupying the tents. Their shoes were clogged with mud, and some of them had dirty clothes and bloodied gauzes. “Well…”

  “Léa, I’m worried about you. I can drive there and get you. It won’t take more than three hours. How about that?”

  “No, don’t worry. And I don’t want you out there alone in this mess.”

  “But I don’t want you out there either!”

  Léa sighed. “I’m fine, really. There’s the army, and anyway, I’m here to work. There are people who need help.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Bosshart,” someone called.

  Léa turned and saw Lieutenant Gagnier coming toward her with a brisk pace.

  “Look, I have to go now.”

  “OK. Léa, take care.”

  “I will.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Of course. Love you. Bye.”

  Gagnier reached her. “We need you.”

  “What happened?” Léa spoke as she followed him.

  “It’s better if you see it for yourself.”

  They walked for a minute over muddy paths between the tents, to avoid walking upstream through the flow of incoming refugees. Léa’s feet were freezing inside her soaked shoes, and her fingers hurt.

  The man stopped in front of a nondescript tent. He hesitated for a moment, but then he opened the flimsy door, stepped in, and kept it open for her.

  “A birth clinic was hit and…” His voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.

  Two rows of tiny beds were inside. A nurse sat opposite the door, between the lines, on the far side. A desk with a couple chairs lay to the left near the entrance.

  Léa made a few steps forward, looking inside the cribs nearest to her. Some of the infants had monitoring equipment and intravenous feeds attached to their minuscule limbs. The others seemed fast asleep.

  “We don’t know who they are or where their parents are.”

  “Are they in good health?”

  “Mostly. Dr. Chabert and his team ran all the tests. He leads the medical staff in the camp, and I thought you could give them a hand.”

  “Of course,” she said in a low
voice. “What are you doing to track down their families?”

  “Asking around near the clinic, before the evacuation. Digging up documents through the debris. The problem is that the hospital used only digital records. It’s a real mess, and we might never find out.” Gagnier looked at her with a grave expression and then glanced outside through the door’s window. “Dr. Chabert’s arriving.”

  The door opened and a bulky, bald man stepped in. He removed his coat and tossed it on a chair. “Hello,” he said with a dark face. “I’m Dr. Chabert. And you must be Dr. Bosshart.”

  “Yes. Nice to meet you,” she said, eyeing the nurse at the back of the tent, who had stood.

  “I’ll leave you to your work,” Gagnier said. “I will be in the headquarters near the main gate if you need me.”

  “Dr. Bosshart, do you have experience with infants?”

  “No, I’m afraid. Before this,” she said with a gesture pointing around her, “I was training in neurosurgery. In the last forty-eight hours I helped in emergency.”

  “I see. Well, we can certainly use you for other patients, but these need special care.”

  Chabert’s dismissive attitude prompted her to send him a frown, but he didn’t notice it and walked past her to begin checking the first child.

  She followed him and asked, “What do I do?”

  “You said you worked for two days.” The man observed her for a moment. “You look very tired. Sleep for a few hours.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not, Doctor,” he said with a gentle voice. “Trust me, we have the situation under control for now. Have some rest.”

  ***

  With the front tents filling up, the queue of people had gotten longer, and now it reached the back of the camp. The flow had also slowed, and refugees trudged forward with blank faces, one short step after another.

  The sky was white with a thin layer of clouds. No snow, just a cold blanket over the camp.

  As she walked back in the general direction of her tent, not sure about its exact location, Léa though about those children. The medical tent was quiet and none of them were crying. She had hardly ever seen a still, silent nursery like that in a proper hospital, and she didn’t expect finding it in the middle of a muddy meadow.