The Fusion Cage (Warner & Lopez Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘Stanley did not invent the fusion cage,’ Ethan replied. ‘He deliberately drew attention to himself by fleeing, and of course given his history everybody assumed that he was the inventor. We’ve all spent this time chasing the wrong person around the globe.’

  ‘Then who invented it?’

  Ethan smiled, impressed by the ingenuity of it all.

  ‘The only other person who disappeared but was not paid off,’ he replied. ‘Stanley’s wife, Mary.’

  Lopez stared into space for a moment and then her eyes lit up. ‘Stanley said that she was a biochemist.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Ethan said. ‘By the time she retired, Fleischmann and Pons had already had their cold fusion scandal. She would have been working at the time and would have had access to the data they produced in order to replicate the success, or alleged success, of their experiments. What if she saw something in the experiments that the others did not?’

  ‘Maybe she decided not to report her findings,’ Lopez echoed his thoughts, extrapolating what might have gone through Mary Meyer’s head. ‘Maybe she saw through the MIT fudging of the test results and realised that there was a conspiracy behind attempts to suppress the technology. If she is anywhere near as determined as her husband was, she might have decided to forge ahead alone.’

  ‘And then planned to give the device away, for free,’ Ethan finished the story. ‘They’ve been in this together from the start. Mary did not flee because she was afraid of persecution, Mary was the target that should have been. Now she knows what’s happened to Stanley, my guess is that she’ll do everything she can to expose the technology and spread word of it before Majestic Twelve are able to pin her down.’

  ‘We need to find her,’ Lopez said urgently. ‘We can use Amber’s cell phone and … ’

  Ethan was about to agree with Lopez when suddenly he heard a car door slamming. Ethan whirled in time to see their escorts leaving in the people carrier, the vehicle cruising away from the hotel.

  ‘Where the hell are they going?’ Lopez snapped.

  ‘Damn it, Amber’s taking off on her own,’ Ethan said. ‘The only person who could have found us so accurately and sent heavies has to be somebody that Amber spoke to.’

  Lopez closed her eyes. ‘Amber’s damned phone. She contacted her mother.’

  ‘Mary’s got a fortune to play with if Stanley did what I think he did, and sold out before sending the money to Mary. She’d have hired professional bodyguards to grab Amber – we just got carried along for the ride. Now, Amber’s going to join her mother.’

  Lopez watched as the vehicle disappeared down the drive and then she grabbed Ethan’s arm.

  ‘Majestic Twelve would do anything now to stop Mary from broadcasting anything about the fusion cage. They’ll send that agent we ran into in Argentina, the tall guy, Mitchell?’

  Ethan nodded. ‘He’ll stop at nothing. The moment Amber makes her move he’ll cut her down without hesitation. Majestic Twelve are protecting him from prosecution, including this.’

  Ethan gestured to the hotel behind them.

  ‘You think that Mitchell did this?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘I think that he realised what Stanley had done, what Mary has done,’ Ethan replied. ‘Stanley didn’t want to die, and had family relying upon him. Yes, he would fight tooth and nail, but throwing himself over a balcony would serve no purpose. He must have been pushed.’

  As Ethan finished speaking the police officer hurried back down to the cordon. He had a cell phone in one hand and excited looking on his face.

  ‘Looks like you were right,’ he said conspiratorially as he handed Ethan the cell phone. ‘The detective on site is not certain, but she thinks there’s a second person involved. There are traces of blood on the balcony, and drag marks in the carpet that she thinks may have been caused by somebody dragging a body and throwing it over the balcony. So that means there’s a homicide here. I passed on your description of the perpetrator to the team.’

  ‘Thanks, I appreciate it,’ Ethan said as he took the cell phone and dialled a number. ‘The FBI can talk to our senior officer at the DIA, Doug Jarvis. I’m calling him right now.’

  The line rang repeatedly for several long seconds, and then finally picked up.

  ‘Hellerman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Warner, is that you?’

  ‘Where’s Jarvis?’

  ‘Long story, man. Listen, get yourself under cover as fast as possible. There’s a whole crap storm brewing here and yours and Lopez’s names are all over it!’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Jarvis has been forcibly retired and you’re both being hunted again by the FBI for the murders of a bunch of tree–huggers in Virginia and some guy in a hotel.’

  Ethan felt his blood run cold as he looked at the hotel.

  ‘Okay,’ Ethan said, keeping his voice calm in front of the police officer. ‘We need a ride out of here as fast as possible. We’re at that hotel.’

  ‘You’re what?!’ Hellerman replied. ‘Get out of there now! Where do you need to go?’

  ‘Las Vegas,’ Ethan replied. ‘Mary Meyer is the one behind all of this, she invented the device and now she’s about to release it to the public across just about any channel she can find. Majestic Twelve will do anything they can to stop her. They’ve already murdered Stanley Meyer, and I believe the agent we encountered in Argentina was behind it. Mitchell.’

  ‘There’s a plan in place,’ Hellerman replied. ‘Get to Shepherd Field Air National Guard Base in Martinsburg, West Virgnia, as fast as you can. Transport will await. Use the clearance code Have Gray at the gates, it’ll get you through, now get out of there!’

  Even as Ethan shut off the phone, he saw FBI agents emerging from the hotel and looking around, and saw one of them point in his direction. A woman, with long auburn hair and a fresh face, reached for a radio at her belt.

  ‘Time to leave,’ Lopez said.

  The police officer’s radio crackled and he reached for it as a stern–sounding female voice shouted at him. Ethan lunged forward and un–holstered the officer’s service pistol, yanked it free as he tucked one boot in behind the officer’s ankle and shoved him onto the grass. He turned the pistol over in his hands as he and Lopez whirled and dashed across the lawns.

  ‘Wait!’

  Ethan plunged into the woods lining the hotel drive and followed Lopez through the thickets until they burst out onto the drive as a smart looking Lexus appeared ahead, driven by an elderly couple. Ethan stood in the middle of the road as he aimed the pistol at the car. The driver panicked and stopped, his eyes wide as he threw his hands up beside his head.

  Ethan rushed forward and opened the driver’s door.

  ‘You’re in no danger,’ he said in a perfectly reasonable voice. ‘We’re working with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Get in back, and we’ll give you back your car in a short while.’

  The old man nodded frantically as on the other side Lopez helped the elderly wife out of her seat and installed her in the back.

  Ethan jumped into the driver’s seat and turned the Lexus around as they fled the scene, the sound of sirens somewhere behind them. Ethan turned hard right out of the hotel’s drive and then took the first left he encountered, putting distance and direction to good use to avoid any pursuit.

  ‘They won’t take long to figure out what happened to us,’ Lopez pointed out.

  ‘This’ll dupe them for a while,’ Ethan replied. ‘Mitchell has a head start on us, and he’ll fly on a private jet no doubt with diplomatic immunity of some kind. The only advantage we have is that we know which vehicle Amber is travelling in and where it’s headed. We’ve got to get to them before Mitchell or this is all over.’

  ***

  XXXVI

  Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada

  The massive C–5A Galaxy of the 167th Airlift Wing out of Shepherd Field Air National Guard Base in Virgin
ia had landed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada just before sunset, the sprawling military airfield within sight of Las Vegas’s glittering galaxy of lights already shimmering in the fading light of dusk as Ethan watched the sun setting behind the sandy colored mountains of the Sierra Nevada range.

  Despite General Nellis’s lofty rank, the airfield was not named after him, but Ethan felt as though the senior officer deserved such an accolade for taking the chances that he had, along with Jarvis’s mysterious assistant, Hellerman. Ethan walked with Lopez off the C–5A along with the crew, both of them wearing uniforms that made them appear as nothing more remarkable than loadmasters or engineers.

  ‘This way.’

  An Air Force sergeant guided them toward a dark blue personnel truck destined to carry the crew across the airfield to the crew rooms. There, Ethan and Lopez would split off from the main group and leave the base on their desperate mission to locate Mary Meyer and Amber.

  ‘Why do you think that she’s in Vegas?’ Lopez asked quietly as they rode in the truck with the tanker’s crew. ‘Can’t be the bright lights or the gambling, even with the money she must have taken from Majestic Twelve.’

  ‘Not with the money she’s got now,’ Ethan agreed. ‘I don’t know what she’s up to, but my guess is that she’s going to try to do something with the fusion cage and it involves Vegas. Think about it, both she and Stanley hated capitalism, and what better icon to money than Sin City?’

  ‘Good place to pick,’ Lopez observed as she looked out of one of the windows to the west, where the glow of the city was easily visible against the darkening mountains. ‘This place is lit up like Christmas every night of the year.’

  On the journey down from Virginia, which had taken four hours in the C–5A as it travelled to take part in Nellis Air Force Base’s annual international ‘Red Flag’ combat exercise, Ethan had taken the opportunity to try to figure out why Mary would have chosen to conceal herself in such a brazenly excessive location.

  A haven of pomp and glitz, Las Vegas was globally infamous for its excesses. The state of Nevada consumed more than twenty eight million megawatt–hours of power annually, that power drawn from the US national grid, which was supplied by more than six thousand power stations. However, Vegas’s City Center complex of hotels and casinos was so large that it had developed its own ‘off grid’ electricity power plant.

  ‘The whole central complex of one of the most illuminated cities on Earth is also completely off the US national grid,’ Ethan said to Lopez as he read from the screen of his cell phone a file sent to him by Hellerman at the DIA. ‘It has its own power station along with power supplied from the Hoover Dam complex. Most of Nevada’s energy comes from out of state and has few fossil fuel resources but substantial potential for geothermal, solar, and some wind power development. According to this, Nevada’s economy is not energy–intensive and consumption is well below the national average despite heavy use of air conditioning.’

  ‘So Nevada’s not as bad as people think?’

  ‘Depends on how you look at it. Two thirds of the state’s net electricity generation comes from natural gas fired plants but the state’s consumption exceeds in–state generation, the excess being supplied by high–voltage lines from Arizona and the Pacific Northwest.’

  ‘So it’s worse than people think too?’

  ‘Nevada takes fully one quarter of the energy created by the Hoover Dam,’ Ethan said. ‘Plus its two grids supply Vegas and the northern part of the state respectively, with a solar plant at a place called Crescent Dunes powering the strip in support. Only California takes more energy from the Hoover Dam. If there was ever a place where Mary might be able to make some kind of dramatic demonstration of what the fusion cage can do, it would be here.’

  Lopez frowned.

  ‘You think that she’s going to do something dramatic? Cut the power off and then start things up again?’

  ‘It’s what I’d do in her position. There’s no hiding now. She’s taken the money from Majestic Twelve and run with it, and they’ll be hot on her tail. Internet releases about what’s happened and even print publications won’t be enough to save her. The only way she can save herself is to do something so spectacular that everybody on the planet will hear her name and see her face. Majestic Twelve will be rendered powerless to touch her–if she reveals the scale of the conspiracy her family has been hiding from and then she’s killed … ’

  ‘Too many questions,’ Lopez agreed. ‘It’ll be enough to turn world attention on to the Bilderberg conference and, by extension, Majestic Twelve.’

  ‘They’ve got to stop her or they’ll lose control of the energy industry,’ Ethan said as the truck slowed alongside the crew buildings on one side of the huge airbase. ‘Mitchell will be here by now and looking for Mary in the city.’

  The truck came to a halt and the tanker crew disembarked as the sergeant led Ethan and Lopez through a side building. The flight bags they carried, ostensibly filled with flying regalia, instead contained their civilian clothes.

  ‘You can change in there,’ the sergeant said, clearly uncomfortable with the covert nature of what was transpiring. ‘A vehicle is awaiting you outside, silver, here’s the key.’

  The sergeant handed Ethan a key. ‘You’re already cleared to leave the base but once off site you’re on your own, understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ Ethan replied.

  With that, the sergeant turned on his heel and marched away as quickly as he could as Ethan and Lopez quickly changed out of their flight suits and back into civilian clothes. Ethan led the way outside to a large parking lot and hit the ‘unlock’ button on the key fob the sergeant had handed him. To his right, parked among a myriad of cars, a silver sedan’s lights blinked and a short beep from the alarm rang out.

  ‘Where do we start?’ Lopez asked as they walked toward the car. ‘Mary could be anywhere in the city and the FBI won’t be far behind us.’

  ‘She must have some kind of target in mind, something that she can both attack and then save at the last moment, that will be visual enough and obvious enough that the whole damned world will have to sit up and take notice.’

  Lopez climbed into the sedan and opened a tablet computer she found in the glove compartment. She tapped in a few commands as Ethan started the engine and switched on the air conditioning to cool the vehicle’s sweltering interior.

  ‘According to this, the main supply of power to the Las Vegas area is delivered by the Edward Clark Generating Station in Whitney, east Las Vegas. It’s a major station, over a thousand megawatts of power.’

  Ethan nodded. ‘That sounds like a good place to start. Mary and Amber must be together by now and she’ll know that her husband is dead and that she’s running out of time. Whatever she’s got planned, it’s going to happen tonight.’

  *

  ‘There can be no further mistakes.’

  Aaron Mitchell sat inside the limousine that had ferried him from the airport and into Las Vegas. The car cruised in silence, the tinted windows veiling Mitchell from the view of the countless tourists and residents flowing along the sidewalks and reflecting some of the glare from the myriad lights of equally countless casinos and hotels.

  The voice he had heard was that of the same man he had met in Holland, his distinct tone and accent audible even over the digital scrambling that protected their conversation from even the most adept of hackers.

  ‘There can be little time remaining,’ Mitchell replied. ‘Mary Meyer knows by now that her husband is dead. She may not suspect us of involvement, but given Stanley’s deception it is my opinion that this was all pre–planned directly because of their mutual suspicion of government involvement in the cover–up of the cold fusion debacle of the 1980s.’

  ‘Then our cause is under direct threat,’ the voice said.

  ‘We have contained the Internet leaks,’ Aaron assured him, ‘and all other media outlets that Mary Meyer approached have been silenced on this matter. I can only a
ssume that she now intends to do something direct in an attempt to draw attention to herself, and Stanley said that his fusion cage was not the only one in existence. We must assume that Mary Meyer, the actual inventor of the device, possesses another of its kind and may be building more of them as we speak.’

  ‘I do not need to impress upon you how vital it is that any fusion cages in her possession be retrieved and their security maintained indefinitely. The consequences of their appearance in the public realm would be catastrophic, would see trillions wiped off the market share of every major fuel and oil company across the globe. The economic ramifications, not to mention the political fall–out and the collapse of financial markets globally would be unmatched by any prior economic event in history. Find Mary Meyer, find the fusion cage, and destroy them.’

  The line went dead and Aaron Mitchell leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His head still throbbed from where Huck Seavers had hit him with the vase, and despite pain–killers and the attentions of a skilled make–up artist to conceal the wound, Mitchell was for the first time in a long time at a disadvantage. His main concern was locating Mary Meyer or Amber Ryan, either of whom would give him the required leverage to bring the entire charade down and prevent a catastrophe that would end his career and ruin the reputations of many other men vastly more powerful than he. However, his second major concern was Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez.

  Mitchell felt certain that Warner would already be in the city. The men he had dispatched to Virginia had reported that both Warner and Lopez had escaped local police and the FBI once again, this time commandeering an elderly couple’s vehicle and covering forty miles to the outskirts of Richmond before vanishing once again. Mitchell suspected General Nellis’s involvement but could not prove it and didn’t have the time right now anyway. Likewise he wondered whether Jarvis had somehow been able to slip Warner a warning of some kind before he had been forcibly ejected from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, hopefully for the last time.