by Ethan Cross
“I need to bring LJ to see this,” Nic said.
Allanon pushed past them and dropped into his chair, “You guys have no idea what you’ve stumbled into, do you?”
“Enlighten us. What did you recover?” Burke asked.
“Just a few bits and pieces here and there. But enough to know that we’re dealing with some serious next-level craziness.”
Allanon leaned back in his throne with a keyboard and trackpad on his lap. The three of them stepped behind him as he brought up the information on his massive collection of display screens. Burke noticed Nic look back at the dragon with his brows furrowed, as if the thing may wake up and breathe fire at any moment.
“You’ve heard of the Powerwall, right?” Allanon said.
“Of course,” Burke replied.
“Please remember to explain all this to Nic and me like we are mentally handicapped five-year-olds,” Carter said. “What’s a Powerwall?”
Burke rolled his eyes. “You’ve heard of Elon Musk and Tesla Motors, right?”
“The electric car manufacturer?”
“Yes, but they’re involved in other areas of research and development as well. They currently have the most practical and efficient home battery on the market. It’s called the Powerwall, and the commercial version is called the Powerpack, which looks like a big air conditioning unit. Powerwall is a home battery that charges itself using solar panels, or when utility rates are low, and then powers your home in the evening. It also works as a backup during power outages.”
“But Powerwall isn’t an off-the-grid solution,” Allanon said. “It uses solar energy and is about the most efficient battery for its size on the market today, but if you wanted it to power your house without being connected to the grid, you’d need to fill your garage with the things and cover your yard with panels, and you would probably still have sags and brownouts. Plus, that’s really not a viable solution, and it’s certainly nothing that the average homeowner could afford. So there’s a big race right now to design a battery that’s efficient enough to store up the energy necessary to power a home without being connected to the power grid.”
Allanon ran his fingers over the keys and all the displays connected to form one image of a schematic for a device the size of a large duffle bag. “I wasn’t able to recover enough to get the full picture of what you have here,” he announced, “but whoever’s hard drives these were, was working on the smallest and most powerful battery the world has ever seen.”
Burke’s eyes flew over the schematics, and he said, “It looks they were able to increase the energy density of Vanadium flow batteries by switching the electrolyte formulation to some kind of microbial bath and then created a sort of hybrid system by combining Vanadium flow battery concepts with zinc oxide nanowire.”
Allanon grinned from ear to ear. “That’s what I’ve postulated as well. The nanowire uses a Piezoelectric effect to convert sound-caused vibrations into electricity. I just read an article about scientists from Nokia and Queen Mary University of London using a similar technique. But they were only trying to generate enough power to charge up a cell phone. Basically the nanowire vibrates when exposed to any kind of ambient sound, so their battery actually recharges itself from ambient sound waves. These designs take the concept to a whole new level. The storage capacity and output levels are staggering.”
“Boys, English, please,” Carter said.
His eyes still scanning the screen as Allanon brought up different pieces of information he was able to recover, Burke said, “If they were actually able to create a battery like this, the ramifications would touch nearly every aspect of our lives. We’re talking about world-changing technology.”
“They killed Strom and all those people to steal a big battery?” Nic asked.
Burke turned to his companions, eyes wide with wonder and excitement. He could feel his heart racing and the adrenaline pumping through his veins. “Don’t you see what a battery like this could do? First of all, say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. That’s gone the way of the dinosaur because you could drive across the whole country without ever stopping to charge up. Then take it another step. Instead of being connected to the power grid and having power lines crisscrossing our skies and streets, a company comes in with a truck and switches out a box the size of a central air unit that powers your whole house for months.”
Carter nodded. “Something like that would be worth billions.”
“Probably more, and people will kill over a whole lot less than that.”
Allanon’s face went dark, and his eyes narrowed. “But I also learned from the hard drives that these batteries weren’t designed for use by consumers. Number one, they’re too expensive right now. But number two …”
Allanon brought up another set of concept renderings and schematics. This time, the screen didn’t show a revolutionary power source, but a weapon of war.
Chapter 85
Kruger stared out the high-rise window at the dazzling lights of Las Vegas. He knew that the place had once been called Sin City, and it still had its share of debauchery, but most of the attractions had now become more like amusement park rides and scenic vistas. He wondered how many families in South Africa and Mozambique could be fed with only one night’s profits from a single one of the neon monstrosities. Yet, these people would be among the first to call him a monster, to judge his actions.
The window ran from the floor to the ceiling. The floor was carpeted, but the ceiling was still a mass of exposed pipes and wiring. Some of the rooms on this floor had unfinished drywall hung while others were bare studs. Verbeek had told him that before the investors went bankrupt, this casino was to be the third largest on the strip with over 4,000 rooms. It was to be called The Jade Dragon and showcase the wonders of imperial China. He had seen the replicas of the famous terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, in the condemned casino’s massive entry hall, the soldiers lined up as if preparing for a war that would never come.
The room was dark, since they didn’t want to take any chances of alerting someone to their presence. Kruger could see his own reflection in the glass. He felt like one of those terra-cotta statues, already dead, buried in stone for 2,000 years. Everything had gone as planned, but somehow he felt even more dejected than before. The depression felt like weights dragging him down to his knees. A part of him welcomed death, but a more dominant part of him feared it more than anything.
He thought of his little girl, back home in South Africa in the care of trusted servants. The girl needed her father, and yet, he didn’t know who her father was. How could he hold her tiny hand as the monster that was Kruger? How could he kiss her forehead and tell her that the world was safe and beautiful when he had killed so many, children as young as her, mothers, fathers, whole families. Kruger, the man who had once been his shield and armor, had now become a cancer that was slowly killing him. He feared that when he did return home to his little girl, that there would be no more Idris Madeira, no more Papa, only the monster.
Zarina was in the corner, doing some kind of elaborate yoga stretches, while Raskin played on her laptop, the dim light of the screen illuminating her pale, pouty features and red hair.
Raskin looked over and said, “Don’t you ever relax? Smile or something. We won. We’re multi-millionaires.”
“I’ll smile when the money is in my bank account, and I’m back home in my own bed.”
“I don’t have a home anymore, but I suppose I’ll have plenty of scratch to buy a new one. Speaking of which, why are we waiting to meet up with our buyer until tomorrow? Let’s just get it over with.”
Kruger sighed. They had been over this once already. “Because transport out of the country will not be ready until tomorrow afternoon. We’ll make the exchange tomorrow as planned. Patience, Dr. Raskin, is a virtue.”
She snorted a laugh. “My mother always used to say things like that. Be patient, Julia. You’ll hit a growth spurt and lose that weig
ht. Your boobs will fill out eventually. Patience, the boys will notice you. Patience, someone will ask you to prom. It was all bullshit. If you want something in this world, you can’t just wait in patient desperation. You have to get off your ass and go get it. If I’d have been a little less patient back then, maybe I would have had a date for that prom instead of spending the whole night at home, crying with Ben and Jerry.”
Kruger rolled his eyes. “A very sad story. Let’s see, a girl goes to prom around age seventeen or eighteen, correct? Where were we then, Zarina? That would have been about the time of the Liberian civil war, we were working for a gun runner selling to a member of the Sarpo tribe who claimed that the Devil appeared to him during a ritual and told him he was destined to become a great warrior. But in order to do this, he needed to sacrifice humans and eat their flesh to fulfill his potential. He would typically sacrifice a child before entering battle. I watched him do this at least three times, my employer at the time actually found this baby-eater amusing, mainly because he would go into battle naked.”
Zarina signed something, and Kruger laughed. “You’re right. I had forgotten that.”
“What did she say?” Raskin asked.
“The warlord who did all that later became a Christian minister. You see, doctor, we had to associate with such people since we were children in order to keep from starving. We had to become predators to keep from becoming the prey of others. So I apologize if I’m less than sympathetic to your years of teenage angst and bullying. I’m sorry that you were the fat girl at the party, but you should count yourself blessed that your family had the means to raise you up to be a spoiled little American hog.”
“You know, it’s not supposed to be a contest of suffering. It’s not my fault that you were squeezed out between someone’s legs in a hut rather than a condo. And there are plenty of poor folk who don’t take to murdering and chopping people’s limbs off for a living. So you can take your sob story and stick it right up your self-righteous ass.”
Kruger walked over to the table where she sat and pulled out one of the other chairs. “I’ve known more vile creatures than you, Dr. Raskin, but in this moment, I cannot recall hating any of them quite so much.”
“Ah, ain’t that sweet. You sure know how to make a girl feel special. While we’re having such a nice little chat, I’ve been thinking.”
“I thought I smelled bacon grease sizzling,” he said.
“Well, look at that, it’s trying to make a joke like a real person. That’s adorable. Here’s the thing. You obviously think that I had something to do with what happened at that squatter camp.”
“Choose your words carefully, doctor.”
“My instructions were clear, and the infection should have been contained to only the eight target subjects. Three jugs of the water you passed out to those specific people were supposed to be infected.”
“But you obviously didn’t know what you were doing because the infection spread like wildfire.”
“That’s the thing, Mr. Kruger. The virus doesn’t work that way. I thought that you got trigger happy or couldn’t follow instructions and poisoned all of the jugs.”
“That’s ridiculous. I can follow orders.”
“So you injected the jugs of water yourself?”
“Well, no, I was driving the van and …”
“That’s what I thought. I wanted to make sure that the infected jugs of water were teeming with the virus, and so I gave you a lot more than you needed. A syringe of the virus for each jug. There’s no way that the virus could have accidentally travelled between jugs. But, with the way this pathogen reproduces, someone could have shot only a small amount of the liquid into each jug and stretched out the supply to poison them all.”
Kruger considered the implications, her words like a blade of ice to his chest. He knew she was right. He supposed that he had always known but hadn’t wanted to believe it. “Why would my Zarina do such a thing? Why would she want to kill all those people?”
“Because she’s batshit crazy?”
He growled and shot from his chair, knocking over half the other chairs along with his own. Then he grabbed her laptop and tore it in half amid a shower of sparks and the sizzle of dying capacitors. He threw the two pieces to opposite corners of the room.
Afraid that he would kill the insolent American if he had to look at her trollish face for one more second, he headed toward the partially-finished space that he and Zarina had chosen as their bedroom.
As he stomped his way out in a rage, he glanced back at Zarina. She still practiced her yoga positions, but now, there was a faint smile on her lips.
Chapter 86
Burke’s jaw clenched and his nostrils flared as he stared at the screens. Allanon’s massive display wall showed what looked like a fighter jet but was clearly an unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone. The design was a cross between the Northrop B-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber, and the MQ-9 Reaper drone, currently in use by the military and CIA for intelligence gathering and ground strikes. Pilots sitting in trailers halfway around the world controlled the Reaper drones and used them to rain fire down upon America’s enemies.
“These amazing batteries aren’t being designed to power our homes or help eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels,” Allanon said. “The CIA is designing them to power their new toys.”
Burke felt sick to his stomach. “This kind of technology could make the world a better place. Help to stop pollution, global warming, our dependence on foreign oil, help bring power to impoverished nations, the list goes on … But, of course, our first thought is to use it as a weapon.”
“We’re already using drones to strike terrorists,” Nic said. “How does this battery change anything?”
Burke leaned back on Allanon’s glass desk, crossed his arms, with one hand stroking the stubble on his chin. “An American aerospace company recently developed a light-weight solar-powered drone that can fly at 65,000 feet for five years. But that’s only good for use as a sort of mini-satellite. It’s basically just a remote-controlled glider covered in solar panels. But this thing has teeth. Right now, there are drones being developed similar to the Reapers and Predators that can fly for eighteen to twenty-four hours without landing to refuel. But imagine something like this in the sky. Something completely invisible, the size of a stealth bomber, able to carry damn near any ordnance you want and equipped with the most sophisticated scanning and surveillance capabilities. If they cracked this battery technology, and it looks like they have, then the CIA could manufacture a fleet of drones that basically never has to land and can fly forever, undetected, whisper quiet, and rain hell down at their leisure. This is the real deal. Big brother. Eye in the sky. The CIA would no longer need aircraft carriers or military bases to launch drones for them. They could operate on their own with very little oversight or interference. Launch these suckers up from Langley and own the skies.”
“I can definitely see why they would want to keep this secret, and why someone would want to steal it,” Carter said. “If our giant South African decided to sell this technology to China or North Korea, it could reshape the world as we know it.”
Nic shook his head. “All because of a souped-up battery. What do we do now? Maybe we could reach out to Yoshida. Tell him we know what they were developing and try to get back into the loop.”
“Let’s hold off on that a minute,” Burke said. “I texted Albert—”
“Allanon, please, Sir Eric.”
“Sorry, I texted Allanon earlier and asked him to break into the passenger lists for flights coming into Vegas over the past few days.”
Carter narrowed his eyes. “Why are we violating federal laws to get passenger lists? You realize I could request that kind of information legally. We do work for the FBI, remember?”
“I didn’t want to take a chance of throwing up any red flags. Remember when we first met Yoshida? He wore clothes that looked like they came from a local gift shop, and he said that the ai
rline had lost his luggage.”
“That’s right. He was in flip-flops and a Las Vegas T-shirt.”
“Two things about that. One, flight times from Washington, DC, to Vegas are about five hours. There’s no way he could have flown in after learning about the incident. And two, even if he had, he would still be wearing the same clothes he had on for the flight. Allanon, did you find anything for me?”
“Yeah, your Mr. Yoshida flew in first-class on Delta, the day before your incident.”
“Are you suggesting that Yoshida knew that the robbery was coming?” Carter said. “He knew what was about to happen and flew in the day before to be ready for it?”
Burke shrugged. “It seems pretty suspicious to me that he would just happen to fly out the day before all this goes down. And if he had some kind of credible intel that the facility was going to be attacked, why not have fortifications in place?”
“He told me that they were his people, and he seemed genuinely upset about their deaths,” Nic said.
“Spies lie for a living.”
“I don’t know guys. The flight thing is purely circumstantial. Loria lives out here. They could have had a meeting scheduled. And if he was in charge and wanted that tech, why not just walk in there and take it himself?”
“Because I think we made an incorrect assumption from the start,” Burke said. “We assumed that the primary goal was to steal something, but I think that this plan was designed to accomplish multiple objectives. A major question we have yet to answer is how did our giant South African friend and his two female accomplices even learn about the secret lab. They knew what was down there, and how to access it. All information that they could have received from Yoshida.”
Carter pulled over a chair—which looked like one that could have sat around King Arthur’s table—and dropped into it. “My knees are killing me, and I’m dead tired,” he said. “Even if Yoshida is in on it, for whatever reason, how does that help us find our perps and discover a way to help those poor people who are bleeding to death across town?”