Vaughn sighed but he offered her a faint smile. ‘It’s not an easy case.’
They both turned as they heard boots approaching, and saw Valery Jenkins striding toward them, flanked by two senior agents from the Las Vegas field office.
‘Ford!’
Hannah felt her shoulders sink as she turned to face Jenkins. ‘I can explain.’
‘You can explain all you want! You’re off the case, and suspended until further notice, is that clear?!’
Vaughn stepped forward. ‘This was a legitimate lead. Hannah had good intel that could have led us to … ’
‘To what?!’ Jenkins demanded. ‘A different career?! You disobeyed a direct order, subverted the chain of command and caused a major operation out here for nothing, all in one evening! You’re both done, understood? Now get out of here before I have you arrested!’
Hannah turned and walked away, her strides feeling stiff and unnatural as she set off for the vehicles they had left at the roadside. She heard Vaughn following her, pursued by Valery Jenkin’s outraged voice.
‘If I have my way, you’ll never work an FBI case again. This was a farce, Ford. Nobody’s ever going to destroy a power station like this one, and you’re a fool for believing they’d even try to … ’
Hannah saw the blast before she heard it, a blossoming ball of flame to her left as something detonated beneath the southern towers. The shockwave hit her a moment later, a solid wall of air moving at high speed that hurled her off her feet and sent her tumbling across the dusty earth.
The explosion lit up the power station as the failed tower toppled, power lines falling with it in a shower of bright sparks as though a billion stars were falling all at once from the night sky. Hannah covered her head with her hands as the tower crashed down to the sound of wrending metal and a snarl of wild electricity that ran like bright snakes up and down the severed wires and across the tower’s superstructure.
Hannah, her ears ringing from the blast, pulled her head up to see the tower on its side and flames licking around the remains of its metal legs, high–voltage power cables draped across it and spitting sparks crackling with energy.
She staggered to her feet as Vaughn joined her.
‘What the hell?’ he uttered.
Hannah struggled to think straight, but she could see Jenkins and her entourage clambering to their feet nearby, and then Vaughn’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it, and then looked sharply at Hannah.
‘Half of the Vegas Strip has lost its power supply,’ he reported.
‘Damn it,’ Hannah cursed and kicked the dust. ‘What the hell is going on here? We’re one step behind all the time!’ She ran her hands through her hair. ‘I just don’t know what to do here.’
Vaughn grinned as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line.
‘Well, I do. Local law enforcement just received a call that a hire vehicle that matches the one hired by Assim Khan has been spotted by a traffic camera headed north on the I95, for Tonopah.’
Hannah whirled to face Vaughn. ‘What the hell’s up there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Vaughn admitted, ‘but it’s our only remaining lead and Assim Khan clearly doesn’t care what’s happening in Vegas.’
Hannah glanced at the power station one last time, at Jenkin’s bedraggled appearance, and then made her decision. ‘Let’s go.’
***
XL
Crescent Dunes, Nevada
The sun.
Mary Meyer had always loved the sight of the sun rising on a clear dawn, ever since her parents had taken her early morning fishing out on the lakes of her Missouri childhood home. Few things were more peaceful than a wilderness sunrise, all the more surprising considering how lethal was the sun’s heat, how fatal exposure to its radiation could be for humans.
The solar plant was deserted, only a small number of employees based on site to monitor the tower and its boilers. Situated far enough out into the desert for Mary to have driven to its gates unnoticed, her headlamps extinguished to further conceal her approach, Mary had driven her car off the road and approached the site from across the dusty desert, aiming for a series of narrow trails that intersected the gigantic field of mirrors arrayed in a disc around the immense tower at the plant’s centre.
The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project was a one hundred ten megawatt solar plant surrounded by seventeen and a half thousand heliostat mirrors. The immense array of mirrors collected and focused sunlight onto a five hundred forty foot tower, atop which was a huge chamber which contained flowing molten salts. Those salts, superheated by the sunlight, flowed to a storage tank where the energy was used to produce steam which then powered turbines to produce electricity. A marvel of human engineering, all of which would be rendered useless by Mary Meyer this very morning.
The horizon to her left beyond the mountains was aglow with the promise of another of those perfect dawns and this one she hoped would be more memorable than any of the others she cherished so dearly. It was just such a shame that she would have to do things this way, instead of the way that Stanley would have wanted – via the people themselves, rising up together as one and showing the governments and the corporations that they were nothing without the people themselves.
Instead she held a pistol firmly in her grip, pointed at a young, bearded technician cowering behind his computer panel.
‘This won’t take long,’ she said. ‘Do as I say and I absolutely promise that neither you or your colleagues will be harmed, okay?’
The man cowering before her glanced to his right, where half a dozen engineers lay with their wrists bound to their ankles, their backs arched as they lay facing the walls of the office that Mary had stormed barely ten minutes before.
‘Okay.’
The man’s voice was thin and reedy. Mary recognized him as an academic, not the kind of man used to being in physically stressful situations, which was precisely why she had chosen him. He would bend to her will for fear of his life and would not be prone to heroic defiance. If he knew what she intended, what she and her family had been through, he might well have helped her but Mary was already well–used to the response of scientists to her work, their dismissals and their ostracising of anybody who dared to think out of their comfortable little boxes.
The bearded man, who went by the name of Alan, had followed her very precise instructions after tying up his colleagues, and re–programmed the mirrors across the array. Now, there would be no power getting to Las Vegas, which was stricken by the power outage blackening the strip so beloved of the casinos and corporations.
‘Get up,’ she said softly.
Alan did not move, his eyes wide behind his thin–rimmed spectacles.
‘I said get up, now!!’
Mary fired the pistol into the nearest wall and Alan shrieked in terror as he struggled up onto legs weak with fear.
‘Out the door, move!’
Alan hurried away with Mary following, the gun never straying far from his back as they walked outside into the cool night air, the tremendous array of silent mirrors pointed straight upward into the blackness. Mary gestured toward the car she had travelled in, and she walked around to the passenger’s side and ordered Alan into the driver’s seat.
‘Drive to the tower,’ she commanded.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you don’t I’ll have to shoot you and pick another of your colleagues to do so, understood?’
Something in Mary’s tone and expression convinced Alan that she was serious and he obeyed without further question. The car traversed the distance from the control station to the tower in less than a minute, its tires crunching along the track between the huge mirrors, each the size of an eighteen–wheeler truck, and Alan pulled up alongside the tower’s main entrance.
Mary could see huge buildings, the size of aircraft hangars, and massive pipes and conduits of polished aluminium shining in the dawn light. Further back, on the far side of the tower, the two huge
water tanks loomed.
‘Get out.’
Mary kept her gun trained on Alan as she walked to the car’s trunk and gestured to him. ‘Open it.’
Whether Alan thought that he was going to be placed in the trunk or not, she couldn’t be sure, but his legs almost gave way beneath him and he struggled to open and lift the trunk. Mary looked down and inside the trunk she saw the object for which governments had killed, for which businessmen had killed, for which so much had been lost and so many denied so much for so long. The answer to mankind’s dreams.
‘What’s that?’
Alan’s fear had vanished to be replaced with something that almost sounded like disappointment. A metallic box, no larger than a suitcase, was caged in aluminium tubes and attached to what looked like an oxygen cylinder. The whole device fitted easily into the trunk of the sedan.
‘Lift it out.’
Alan reached in, somewhat emboldened by the fact that whatever it was, it wasn’t a bomb. He hefted it out of the trunk and set it down on the ground before looking up at Mary.
‘Now what?’
‘Now, you carry it up there for me,’ Mary replied.
She gestured with a nod of her head up to the top of the tower. Alan swallowed thickly and his fear returned.
‘I don’t like heights.’
‘Do you like being shot?’
*
The horizon was awash with a pink glow as Huck Seavers drove off the main road and into the large open lot that served Crescent Dunes. He could see the main service building ahead of him, immaculate and white amid smaller out buildings and parked lorries.
His eyes ached from the long drive, his head fuzzy with weariness and worry for his wife and children as he pulled into a parking slot and killed the engine, wondering just what the hell he was going to do next. A local radio station had reported explosions at a major power station outside Las Vegas, half of the strip going dark, the presence of FBI agents at the scene and chaos as engineers struggled to restore the power.
The desert was silent as he got out of the car and began walking across the lot, and for a moment he felt as though he were in one of those post–apocalyptic movies, a last survivor of some global pandemic wandering a lonely planet. The stillness of the air and the silence did little to comfort him as he strode across toward the service building and peered into a window.
The interior was dark, the reception area devoid of personnel, to be expected at this early hour he supposed. He glanced left and right and then he saw it. A single door, the locks bust off, perhaps using a crowbar or similar. The door was ajar, a blackness inside that Huck did not want to confront. He spared a thought for his family, for Stanley Meyer, and then he took a breath and walked across to the door and swung it open.
Silence and darkness greeted him, but at the end of the hall he could see an open doorway from which spilled light. Emboldened, Huck walked down the corridor, trying to keep his footfalls as silent as possible as he approached the open door. Beyond, he could see flashing lights that looked like some kind of control room and then he heard the low, muffled moaning.
Huck stopped, listening intently and acutely aware that he was stranded half–way down the corridor with nowhere to hide. He watched and waited, listening to the low moaning and once again reminded of those horrible zombie movies, but then he pushed forward to the doorway and peered inside.
He saw the men tied up on the floor and immediately he hurried across to one of them and leaned down. The man was gagged, his wrists tied behind his back and bound to his ankles. Huck reached down and pulled off the gag.
‘Call the police!’ the man coughed as he gasped for air. ‘She’s insane and she’s got a hostage!’
‘Who? What did she look like?’
‘Who the hell cares?! Call the police!’
Huck looked up at the control panels. Mary must have come through here and picked up a hostage for some reason, perhaps protection against Majestic Twelve should they manage to locate her in time, although it seemed MJ–12 cared little for collateral damage. She must have travelled to the tower, but he could not fathom what she intended to do.
‘She reprogrammed the panels,’ the scientist said in dismay. ‘They’re deactivated. You need to call the police and inform them of what’s happened before … ’
Huck replaced the man’s gag to a groan of protest as he stood up. The moment the police were called, Majestic Twelve would send people and Mary would be killed, if they weren’t on their way already. Huck knew that his best bet was to reach out to her himself, to do something, anything, to join forces with her and bring the fusion cage to the world.
Huck ran out of the service building, turned and sprinted into the massive mirror array as he headed toward the tower. Maybe, just maybe, he could get Mary out of here before it was too late.
*
She recognized the arrogant stride as soon as she saw it.
Huck Seavers walked from his car to the service building, and emerged a few minutes later at a run, headed toward the tower. He looked strange in the low light, disembodied, seen through a tunnel of darkness as a shadowy figure flashing past one solar mirror stand after another as he ran the five hundred metres from the service building to the tower’s base.
Amber Ryan lay prone in a low depression alongside a heliostat, her position perfectly masked by the mirror itself. The rifle in her grasp was perfect for the job and it felt natural in her grasp, the telescopic optics perfectly aligned after she had “zeroed” them to her eyesight further out in the desert. The winds were light, the bullet drop at two hundred fifty yards already calibrated on the scope and range–finder.
Amber could hit a small bird at this range, even in a breeze.
Cover me, Mary had begged. Just until this is over, so that they can’t do to us what they did to Stanley.
Mary had been in tears, shivering, shaking and her eyes both wide with fear and yet hard with determination. For Stanley.
The crosshairs tracked Huck as he moved but at a sprint and at such range and with the solar array supports forming a forest before her, Amber knew that a wild shot would be unlikely to finds its target and would only serve to alert Huck Seavers to Amber’s presence. Besides, that was not what Mary wanted. Her instructions had been clear: she wanted no innocent people involved and Amber was just to be a back–up. If somebody tried to kill Mary, then she should act accordingly before fleeing the scene.
Huck was on his way to prevent Mary from revealing something amazing and wonderful to the world.
Huck had killed Stanley Meyer.
Amber kept him in her sights as he entered the tower, and prepared to pick him up again when he emerged at the top.
***
XLI
‘Put it there.’
Alan set the fusion cage down on the floor alongside a set of steel doors, access panels that opened out onto a walkway that encircled the tower just below the salt chamber at the top.
The tower’s base possessed only a narrow entrance, used to bring in the vast lengths of steel pipe used to transport the salts up and down the tower. The heat inside was intense, Mary’s shirt soaked through and Alan’s hair matted flat against his head, his beard glistening with sweat and his face sheened.
Mary could feel the even more intense heat generated by the chamber above them permeating the air and the walls as she positioned the fusion cage beneath the chamber and looked up to the ceiling. When the solar array was active, it directed the light from the mirrors to the heating chamber where they now stood and at the salt tower above them, heating those salts to more than a thousand degrees centigrade.
Alan stepped back from the fusion cage, staring at it as though confused.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘It’s not a bomb, there’s no timer.’
‘Be quiet.’
Mary turned to the steel doors. From her pocket she pulled a small set of folding bolt croppers and h
anded them to Alan.
‘Break the lock,’ she ordered.
‘I don’t know if I can,’ Alan whimpered, the fear returning once more as he looked at the padlock holding the door latch in place.
‘Try,’ Mary replied, and jabbed the barrel of her pistol against his ribs.
Alan winced and turned, trying to fit the croppers around the padlock’s thick steel bar.
‘The latch,’ Mary uttered as she rolled her eyes. ‘It’ll be easier to cut the latch.’
Alan shifted the croppers to the thinner metal of the latch and dug his shoulders in as he heaved the croppers closed around it. The pincers bit into the metal, and from her vantage point behind him Mary could see them cut through the latch a bit at a time.
Alan heaved and huffed as he fought his way through the unyielding metal, but eventually the croppers sliced through the last of the latch with a sharp click.
‘Good, now open the doors.’
‘We’re three hundred feet above the desert!’ Alan gasped. ‘It’s dangerous to … ’
‘Now!’
Mary’s enraged yell was amplified by the confines of the chamber, and Alan visibly jumped in fright as he looked again at the gun in her hand and then turned and wrenched open a series of deadbolts keeping the doors in place. As the last of them was freed he reached for the handles and pulled the massive doors open.
A blaze of sunlight burst into the chamber as the doors opened to reveal the desert in all of its glory, a vast panorama of sandy terrain tiger–striped with black shadows as the sun began to rise on the far horizon. Mary was taken aback by the sheer spectacle of the huge heliostat array before her as a gust of fresh desert air billowed into the chamber.
Alan whimpered again and his knees buckled as he staggered back from the doors.
‘Please, no more,’ he begged.
‘Sorry, Alan, but you’re my insurance,’ she replied. ‘Out you go.’
Alan’s eyes widened in terror and he shook his head. ‘No, I won’t go.’
The Fusion Cage (Warner & Lopez Book 2) Page 30