Electric fencing topped with barbed wire blocked forward progress. More placards covered the double gate, each sign warning unauthorized visitors to turn back. A blue metal billboard with white lettering announced this complex to be THE JEFFERS LARGE PARTICLE COLLIDER LABORATORY. Oh, and KEEP OUT. I left the car idling as I walked around the gatehouse, snapping pictures with my cell phone. The gatehouse was silent, its windows grimy. Past the gate lay a secondary fence, then clusters of metal-and-concrete buildings done in beige and gray. I noted an aircraft hangar and a control tower. A windsock snapped in the breeze atop a pole at the near end of a paved runway. Dried weeds and tufts of dead grass thrust upward among cracks in the tarmac.

Aerial photographs provided by Adeyemi’s lawyer revealed that this glacial basin extended many miles east and west. Light forest and meadows covered much of the area. Records indicated that necessary tracts of private farmland were purchased via eminent domain. Contractors had bulldozed multiple zones for surface infrastructure. Blueprints meticulously detailed a circuit of particle acceleration tunnels that lay one hundred and eighty feet belowground; dug by giant diesel bores, leaving much of the forest undisturbed. Regarding a composite architectural image of the collider track, it circumscribed a broken ring, a great reversed crescent moon. Most of the track was completed, concrete poured and internal sheathing tube installed; everything except for the laying of directional magnets. Shaft 40 was dead center in the rough, unfinished section of the circuit—several miles of dirt tunnels and wasted potential.

Studying the blueprints sparked an instant of recognition, and I clicked to a gruesome artifact among the Sean Pruitt case files. The autopsy photos weren’t for the squeamish. One revealed a tattoo on his right outer shoulder; a stylized sketch of the unfinished supercollider track done as a transistor-board ouroboros with a gap between its jaws and stinger tail. Weird. Weirder yet, both the collider track and the ouroboros tat reminded me of another image that I couldn’t quite pin down. Something I’d seen in passing or a fragment of a dream.

The purpose of my mission was to reconnoiter the facilities from afar, not that I expected to gather significant intelligence. I’d mildly hoped for the jackpot of a bored security guard or maintenance worker; somebody to flash my PI license at and slip a few bucks for a quick tour. No luck and I didn’t feel like waiting. I suspected it might be a while, or forever, judging by the neglect on display. Breaking and entering was another possibility; I tabled the option. Assuming law enforcement did its job, what would I uncover that the CSI team hadn’t?

Also, the property gave me the creeps. A spooky thing happened to reinforce my negative perception—on cue, the SUV engine died. One second it was humming, and the next, conked out. I turned the key and the starter wouldn’t even spark. Dead across the dashboard panel. My cell went wonky, cycling on and off with no bars. It was an unpleasant moment. I tried the key one last time and the engine turned over and I was saved.