‘Yes.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Okay, you can stop with the attempts at humour now.’
‘I am being serious,’ he said. ‘It is extremely unlikely that the Emir knows we are in the country. Therefore he will have had no need to revoke my access.’
‘You hope,’ scoffed Eddie. ‘And what about us?’
‘This is my facility as much as the Emir’s. If I tell the gate guard you are my VIP guests, he will accept that. As long as you do not appear to be making me act under duress.’
‘I’ll put on my nicest smile, then.’ The Yorkshireman drew his lips back wolfishly.
‘Please don’t,’ said Nina. ‘You’ll get us both shot.’
‘Tchah!’
They descended into the shallow bowl. A striped barrier blocked the entrance in the outer fence, a white building with mirrored windows beside it. As the SUV approached, two men emerged.
‘They’ve got guns,’ Eddie noted as he slowed.
Lobato was unconcerned. ‘I will speak to them.’ He lowered his window.
The Toyota stopped between the two Dhajanis. Even behind sunglasses, the guard on Eddie’s side was clearly suspicious, but his partner snapped to attention on seeing the man in the passenger seat. ‘Mr Lobato, sir! Good morning. We were not expecting you.’
‘I am here to show my guests the Raiju,’ Lobato replied.
The guard nodded. ‘Yes, sir. May I take their names?’
Lobato froze, apparently not having expected the question, but Eddie leaned across the console to speak for him. ‘I’m Tarquin Bostick, and this is Mabel Otterthorpe. Amazing place you’ve got here. Must get warm in that hut, though.’
‘It does, sir,’ said the guard, tapping the pseudonyms into a tablet computer. ‘But we have air conditioning.’
‘Good to know that Mr Lobato cares about his people.’ Eddie smiled and sat back. He rested his foot on the accelerator, then subtly moved his hand to the drive selector, ready to go forward – or back – at high speed.
But the guard merely checked the tablet’s screen before giving the visitors a respectful bow of the head. ‘Enjoy your visit, Mr Bostick, Mrs Otterthorpe.’
‘I’m sure we will,’ said Nina.
The man returned to the hut. After a few seconds, the barrier rose. Eddie drove through, keeping his eyes on the second guard in the mirror. No sign of alarm, or hostility. The car had barely gone a hundred feet before the Dhajani strode back to the welcoming air-conditioned cool of the gatehouse. ‘Looks like we’re clear.’
‘As I predicted,’ said Lobato, a little smugly.
‘All right, smart-arse. But we’ve still got to get the spearhead, if it’s even here. What about security at the antimatter facility?’
‘There may be more guards,’ the thin man admitted. ‘But we have the advantage of surprise.’
‘We’ll see,’ Eddie said dubiously.
They drove down the access road, passing beneath the test track at an intersection before entering the field of solar panels. The photovoltaic arrays, each bank the size of an articulated lorry, were fixed in position, the majority facing due south to capture the most sunlight, with the remainder angled to catch the rising and setting sun. Once they reached the heliostats, though, it felt more like entering a forest. The mirrors were mounted on hefty steel masts, a universal joint allowing them to rotate and tilt to track the sun. This close, dust in the air caught the beams reflecting up at the towers, turning the deep blue sky a sickly yellow.
Lobato directed them left at a junction. ‘There is the operations centre.’
Eddie saw the buildings through the steel thickets. A few cars were parked beneath sunshades. ‘Doesn’t look too busy.’
‘The plant is mostly automated. Apart from the guards, there are probably no more than ten people here.’
‘How many in the antimatter facility?’ asked Nina.
‘Four technicians at most. There may also be some security personnel.’
‘Hopefully not too many.’ Eddie brought the car to the complex and parked under a shade. The antimatter facility was a smaller block behind the main centre. He noticed a large helipad nearby, but it was empty. ‘Okay, the quicker we do this, the better. I’ll get the guns.’ He looked at the billionaire. ‘Do you know how to use one?’
‘In theory,’ Lobato replied.
Nina eyed him. ‘And in practice?’
‘You ever actually held one?’ Eddie demanded.
‘No . . . but the operating principles are very simple. I am sure that—’
‘So just you and me, love.’ He got out and went to the tailgate.
She followed, frowning as the heat hit her. ‘Nothing I love more than waving guns around.’
‘Better than walking in there and waving bananas around.’ He opened a floor compartment, finding the promised weapons: a pair of compact Beretta Nano handguns. ‘Ha! Rahji didn’t think Lobato could handle a gun either. Here.’ He checked both were loaded, then handed one to Nina. ‘Keep it out of sight until we’re inside.’
She tucked the automatic as best she could into a pocket, hiding the protruding grip with her right hand. Eddie shoved his own weapon inside his leather jacket. ‘It’s a hundred degrees out here,’ Nina said as they started towards the building, Lobato joining them. ‘Don’t you ever get hot in those damn jackets of yours?’
‘Nope,’ he replied.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they make me cool.’ She groaned.
Lobato gave him a puzzled look. ‘But you are sweating. You cannot be . . . Oh, I see. “Cool” in the sense of—’
‘Of something you’ll never know,’ Eddie interrupted. They reached the entrance. ‘Okay. Play everything cool – in a non-temperature sense – until we find the spearhead. Then we grab it and get the fuck out of here. You go first and do the talking,’ he told the other man.
Lobato took the lead. The reception area felt almost arctic compared to the desert heat. A guard sat behind a desk, reading his phone; he stood in surprise on seeing the man in white. ‘Mr Lobato! I did not know you were coming. I will—’
‘That is all right,’ Lobato replied. ‘Is Dr Oto here?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The man nodded towards a metal door. ‘In the test chamber.’
‘Thank you.’ Lobato led Eddie and Nina to it, placing his hand on a palm-print reader. It lit up to scan his hand, then flashed green. The door slid open. ‘Follow me,’ he told them.
They went through, leaving the guard behind. Beyond was an airlock chamber. Lobato scanned his hand again to enter the large room beyond.
The gleaming machinery within was oddly familiar. ‘It’s a particle accelerator,’ Nina whispered, taking in the wiring-entwined metal cylinder occupying most of the room. The ceiling above it was almost lost to sight behind a mass of stainless-steel pipes: a coolant system. ‘Like the ones we saw in Greece and North Korea.’
‘It is not an accelerator,’ Lobato corrected. ‘It is a storage system for antiparticles – a Penning trap. They are confined in a vacuum by magnetic fields so they do not collide with matter.’
He brought them to the machine’s far end. Three men in lab coats were there, as surprised to see him as the guard outside had been. ‘Mr Lobato?’ said a balding Asian. ‘My apologies, we were not expecting you.’
‘That is all right, Dr Oto,’ the billionaire replied. ‘I wanted to see the spearhead as soon as possible, so I flew in this morning.’
The explanation seemed to satisfy them. ‘Of course,’ said Oto. ‘It arrived in the middle of the night. We immediately placed it in the vacuum chamber. But I regret to say we have not yet managed to extract any antiparticles. It is . . . something we do not understand.’ He sounded embarrassed by the admission.
Lobato peered through a small window in a thick metal sphere attached to the Penning trap. Light shimmered within: the spearhead.
Nina looked around him. ‘It’s changed,’ she said, trying to contain her alarm. ‘The li
ght’s different.’ There was now a blue tint to the glow, and the flickering inside the crystal was more intense, almost violent, as if the infinitesimal points of light were battering against an invisible barrier. ‘It’s reached stage two.’
Oto regarded her uncertainly. ‘Stage two?’ he said. ‘Are you familiar with its nature?’
‘Yeah. It goes boom,’ said Eddie.
One of the other scientists looked between Lobato’s companions and his boss. ‘Sir, may I ask,’ he began, his accent Russian, ‘who these people are? I know they are your guests, but you have many times told us of the need for secrecy.’
‘They are indeed my guests,’ Lobato said firmly. ‘That is all you need to know.’
‘Of course.’ The Russian backed down, but his gaze kept going to Nina’s right hand.
Eddie had a good idea what had drawn his attention; she had unconsciously closed her hand around the gun’s grip in a way that was hard to mistake. ‘Let’s have a look at it,’ he said, moving between Nina and the technicians. ‘A proper look.’
Lobato stepped back to address his staff. ‘Repressurise the chamber and open it, please.’
He may have been their employer, but the command still sent concerned looks between the three men. ‘With all respect, Mr Lobato,’ said Oto, ‘are you sure? Our orders were—’
‘I am giving you new orders,’ he replied. ‘Open the chamber.’
More hesitation. Eddie sighed – then drew his gun. ‘All right, bollocks to this. Get that box open. Now!’ He thrust the Beretta at the three startled scientists as Nina pulled out her own weapon.
‘Mr Lobato!’ Oto cried, looking to the skinny man for support, and finding none.
‘Come on,’ Eddie said impatiently. ‘Open it up.’
Oto hesitated, then went to a control panel. ‘It will take a few minutes to repressurise,’ he said nervously. ‘We do not want to risk a sudden pressure change damaging the spearhead.’
‘He’s not stalling for time, is he?’ Nina asked Lobato.
‘No, the system was designed to work that way,’ the billionaire replied. ‘But it should take no more than three minutes.’
‘Great, I’ll boil an egg,’ said Eddie. He watched the other two technicians as Oto worked the controls. ‘Keep an eye on the door,’ he told Nina, ‘in case that guard comes in.’ She shifted position.
A rumbling thrum came from the chamber as valves opened, followed by the hiss of air through pipes. A digital counter slowly ticked upwards. The Russian kept glancing towards Nina, as if contemplating lunging at her, but his eyes hurriedly went to the floor when he realised Eddie was glaring at him.
A minute passed, two, the hiss becoming louder as enough air entered the vacuum chamber to transmit sound. ‘Open it as soon as the pressure has equalised,’ Lobato said.
‘If I may ask, sir,’ said Oto, ‘why are you doing this? We have only just begun our work – there has not even been time to calculate how much antimatter is trapped inside the spearhead.’
‘Too much,’ said Nina. ‘And the Emir isn’t planning to use it to keep Dhajan’s air con running. It’s a bomb.’
All three scientists expressed shocked disbelief. ‘I – I refuse to accept that,’ said Oto. ‘The Emir has always assured us this technology will be used for peaceful purposes.’
‘Well, gee, I guess he lied.’
The Japanese scientist was about to respond when a shrill bleep came from the panel. ‘The chamber is fully pressurised,’ he announced.
‘Open it,’ Lobato told him. Oto operated controls. The hiss of air faded, but the rumble continued, now seeming to come through the floor. Nina had no time to consider the oddity, as motors purred and the chamber’s heavy door opened. The polished stainless-steel tray bearing the spearhead slid out.
She quickly moved to examine the crystal. ‘It looks intact,’ she said with relief. ‘I was worried it was damaged when it fell.’
‘It was dropped?’ said Oto in concern.
‘Yeah. It didn’t exactly arrive here legitimately – the Emir’s people tried to kill us for it. All of us.’ She indicated Lobato.
‘The Emir tried to kill you?’ gasped the Russian.
‘There’s been a whole lot of double-crossing going on,’ Nina told him. ‘But right now, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that this thing is going to explode – before sunset, and probably a lot sooner.’
Oto’s eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’
‘I read the manual. The moment it was removed from the vault where it had been kept, whatever field keeps the antimatter contained began to deteriorate. At stage one, you can just put it back and it’ll be as if nothing’s happened. Stage two – this,’ she said, pointing at the seething cloud of lights inside the spearhead, ‘means the particles are starting to escape and hit the inside of the crystal. Each one of those flashes is a little antimatter explosion.’
The three men were horrified. ‘We detected gamma radiation,’ said the Russian, ‘but at a low level only. We thought it was the item’s natural state.’
‘Well, think again. The whole thing’s being eaten away from the inside, atom by atom. Up to a certain point, the field can still be restored by putting it back in the vault. After that, though, it enters stage three, where it’s so damaged that nothing can stop it from collapsing. When it does, the antimatter escapes—’
‘And like I said,’ Eddie concluded for her, ‘boom.’
‘That would be . . .’ Oto struggled to find a suitable word, ‘catastrophic.’
Nina nodded. ‘So we need to get this thing as far from Dhajan as we can before it blows up. As far from anything, actually.’
Her revelation was greeted with stunned silence. She belatedly registered that the rumbling had stopped, but by then Oto had overcome his shock to speak to Lobato. ‘Is this true? Has the Emir lied to us?’
‘I am afraid so,’ the billionaire told him solemnly. ‘So now the spearhead must be removed, and quickly. If it explodes, the blast could destroy Dhajan City, even from this distance. Over half a million people would die. I cannot allow that to happen, and I hope that you could not too.’
‘Of course not!’ the Russian cried.
‘Then let’s get it out of here,’ said Nina. She checked Eddie was still covering the technicians, just in case any placed loyalty to the Emir over Lobato, then pocketed her weapon and picked up the spearhead.
‘What’s wrong?’ Eddie asked, seeing her shudder.
‘I just remembered,’ she replied, unsettled. ‘These guys said it’s pumping out gamma radiation!’
‘The emissions have not yet reached a harmful level,’ Oto noted.
‘Easy for you to say; you don’t have to take the damn thing with you!’ She held the shimmering crystal at arm’s length, then turned to Lobato. ‘Okay, so we get in the car, cross back into Saudi, get to your jet, and either head to Turkey to put this back into the vault, or throw it out in the most isolated place we can find. Good plan?’
‘It could be finessed,’ Lobato replied, ‘but it is all we have, so yes.’
‘Let’s get the fuck out of here, then,’ said Eddie. He started towards the exit only to hear a bleep from the other side. ‘Shit! Someone’s coming!’
The airlock’s inner door slid open, to reveal the Emir of Dhajan.
37
The Emir stared in surprise at the group. ‘Gideon?’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you so soon.’
Eddie snapped his gun up at the startled Arab, but others emerged behind him. The Emir’s sister, Alula; two uniformed members of the royal guard; the security guard from the lobby . . . and Hashim al-Asim.
‘Guns down or I shoot the Emir!’ the Englishman barked, but the ruler’s protectors had already snatched out their own weapons. He couldn’t cover them all—
The besuited monarch shouted a command. His men froze. ‘Stop, stop!’ he repeated in English. ‘What is going on here?’ He regarded Nina in puzzlement before recognising the now black-h
aired woman in a headscarf. ‘Dr Wilde!’
‘Hello, hi,’ Nina replied, trying to control her fear. The Emir might have stopped his guards shooting them, but their guns were still drawn and ready – and now al-Asim had produced one too, positioning himself before Alula. ‘I guess you weren’t expecting to see me again, huh?’
‘I said drop your weapons!’ growled Eddie, tightening his finger on the trigger.
‘You cannot escape,’ sneered al-Asim. ‘Put down your gun.’ He gave an order, and one of the other men switched targets, locking on to Nina. ‘Do it now, or your wife dies.’
The Emir was shocked. ‘Nobody is going to die!’ He put his hands on his hips, issuing more commands. His men looked to al-Asim for confirmation. He nodded, with clear reluctance, then all four holstered their weapons. ‘Now, Mr Chase, I have given you a show of good faith. Would you be so kind as to lower your gun?’
The Yorkshireman was not so ready to surrender his advantage. ‘Should’ve thought of that before you sent this arsehole to try to kill us.’ He glanced at al-Asim.
The Emir frowned. ‘I do not know what you are talking about. Gideon, what is going on?’
‘There is no point continuing this deception, Fadil,’ said Lobato. ‘You betrayed me to use the spearhead as a weapon. I cannot allow that.’
‘A weapon!’ The Emir’s eyes went to the glowing crystal. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘It’s funny,’ said Nina, nodding towards al-Asim, ‘but when someone literally says “we’re going to use this as a bomb” and then tries to kill me while they steal it, I’m inclined to take their word for it. And he works for you.’
‘He does, yes, but – but I did not order him to kill you. I did not order him to kill anyone! Gideon and I deceived you, yes, but it was necessary to find the spearhead. For that, I apologise. I will make sure all is put right with the authorities, and that you are compensated for the inconvenience.’
‘Mighty generous of you,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Inconvenience, my arse,’ snapped Eddie. ‘He was going to fucking execute us! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t do the same to you.’
His gun had not wavered from its target: the Emir’s heart. Al-Asim’s hand shifted millimetre by millimetre back towards his holster – but the monarch picked up on it, issuing another order. Visibly angry, al-Asim lowered his arm.
The Spear of Atlantis (Wilde/Chase 14) Page 38