The Lightning Stones

by Jack Du Brul

  “You are all fighting the good fight,” he replied.

  “But it gets tougher all the time,” the nonprofit’s director lamented. “Just a few years ago climate change was on everyone’s mind. Money poured into our coffers, and we could organize rallies of a thousand or more on short notice. We had just a few hundred here today, and many of them are paid staffers.”

  “When the real estate bubble burst both here in Europe and in America it gave people the excuse to forget problems other than their own immediate situation,” d’Avejan said, as he’d opined many times.

  “My grandmother used to say that the lighter the purse becomes, the tighter are its strings.”

  “Wise woman,” Roland conceded. “It does not help that current model predictions and the reality of global temperatures are continuing to diverge. We are well into our second decade with no appreciable increase in surface temperatures.”

  “That doesn’t concern me,” the environmental crusader replied. “Every few months a new paper comes out to explain away the issue. What does bother me is the way some in the media are reporting that the pause was unexpected, and questioning our excuses for it because for years we said the science was settled.”

  “That was a mistake from the beginning.” D’Avejan frowned. “The physics of how carbon dioxide traps heat is well established. The claimed science behind all future scenarios relies on a lot of assumptions that are essentially unverifiable. But it is too late to point out that distinction without hurting our cause.”

  Reno nodded. “I agree. In the beginning things became so alarming so quickly, and now we have little choice but to keep going in that direction. If we attempt to walk back some of our earlier claims we will lose credibility and our planet will surely be doomed.”

  “That’s why you have me.” The industrialist had to smile. “I will make sure Earth is here for our children and theirs too, my friend.”

  Enthusiastic applause broke out among the small group, and d’Avejan ended the conversation, and any opportunity to chat up some of the prettier hangers-on. A few journalists asked him some questions as he made his way from the university auditorium, but he politely declined comment, saying he was late for a meeting. Outside, tables had been set up on the Parisian sidewalk for passersby to take leaflets and study posters on the dangers of fossil fuels in general and hydraulic fracturing in particular.

  D’Avejan didn’t think any of the young protesters knew fracking had been around for a generation, and had been proven safe time after time. He was again grateful that the youth took so much on faith and never investigated a subject on their own. Often attributed to either Lenin or Stalin, the term “useful idiots” came to mind. A bit harsh, he thought, but not too far off the mark.

  The so-called fracking revolution in America had vastly increased the United States’ supplies of natural gas. If allowed to happen in Europe, Roland thought, it would devastate his company’s financial position in renewable energy. This wasn’t about lowering carbon footprints by using gas as a bridge fuel or staving off climate change. It was simple capitalistic necessity. If Europe allowed fracking, energy prices would plummet, and every wind farm and solar array under development would be abandoned, leaving the bulk of Eurodyne in ruin. D’Avejan would do anything to prevent men like Ralph Pickford from scavenging the bones of the company he’d built, and that included financing rabble like the Earth Action League, or being party to violent operations in the States. It was what had to be done.

  When the dust settled he’d make sure to plant some extra trees someplace.

  In keeping with his well-tended eco-image, his car was a new Tesla S sedan. His chauffer had been waiting just down the block and was up to the curb even before d’Avejan could hail him. A small crowd of EAL staffers was congregated nearby, and d’Avejan choked when hit by a waft of patchouli oil and cannabis smoke. He opened the rear car door for himself rather than wait for the driver.

  “Sorry I wasn’t quicker, sir,” the man apologized.

  “Not your fault,” d’Avejan said as the car silently pulled away, watched by a few of the tech-savvy eco-warriors who recognized the sleek car for what it was. “I had to get away from the stench. My father used to complain about how hippies smelled in the sixties. I don’t think their aroma has much changed.”

  “Non, monsieur. Or their politics. It’s the women, you know.”

  “The women?” Roland asked, intrigued.

  “Oui, monsieur. At least that’s what my father told me. He said back then the women saw makeup and hair care as signs of male oppression, so they stopped all that and went au naturel. When the odor got too bad they doused themselves in funky oils, not perfume, mind you, but some gunk called—”

  “Patchouli. I just got a noseful.”

  “That’s the stuff. Well, since this was how the women were protesting, the guys back then had to go along with it if they wanted to sleep with any of them. The guys stopped shaving and let their hair grow, and before you knew it a whole generation of nonconformists looked exactly alike. And still do to this day.”

  “So it’s all about having sex?”

  “Isn’t it always, sir?”

  D’Avejan smirked. Michel had driven him to his various mistresses over the years and waited in the car while he was in their arms. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Heading home, monsieur?”

  Roland was checking for messages on his two phones. There were several missed calls on his personal phone, most of which he could ignore. The smartphone he treated as disposable showed a missed text. It simply said “Call me.” And had come through when he was donating the money to the EAL. “Not just yet,” he said and slid the phone into his pocket. “I need to get back to the office for a minute.”

  “Mais bien sûr, monsieur.”

  Thirty minutes later, d’Avejan was in his electronically swept office. He poured himself a drink and watched the lights coming on all over his magical city. He dialed out on a new phone to replace the one he’d just fed through the shredder. From up here the traffic-choked streets were transformed into somnolent rivers of light, while the Eiffel Tower shone like a beacon pointing to the heavens.

  “Niklaas?” he said when the phone was answered but no one spoke.

  “Ja, sorry. I was taking a sip of water.”

  “How did it go?”

  “As we suspected,” the mercenary replied.

  D’Avejan cursed, but mostly at himself for getting his hopes up. “The American had already come and gone?”

  “No. The Pakistani team made contact. They reached the coordinates Mike Dillman provided almost a century ago, but there was nothing there. The Afghan guide was questioned about any kind of mining done in the area. He told them there was an old stone quarry several miles from where they were searching but then mentioned something interesting, a mountain that his grandparents said used to attract lightning. I’ll give it to my old friend Parvez to pick up on a possible connection. He and his team headed for this mountain and when they arrived, the American was already there with a group of hired guns out of Kabul. Not sure which company yet, but Parvez thinks one of them was a black man named Sykes who was Delta but now works for Gen-D Systems.”

  “Get on with it, man,” d’Avejan insisted.

  “Ja. Okay. So the ISI guys we hired made contact when they thought they had the best advantage, but their assault went to crap pretty quick. The Gen-D fighters had a chopper fitted with rockets. Parvez lost six men KIA and another eight wounded.”

  “I thought you said they were good, these Pakistanis you knew.”

  “When I met Parvez Najam in Somalia he was part of the Pakistani contingent of UN troops trying to stabilize the country during the whole Blackhawk incident. He was and remains a top-notch soldier, meneer, but sometimes combat does not go as planned. Especially when he had no warning that the geologist would have air cover.”

  “Okay.” Roland blew a breath and took a gulp of his vodka soda. “Did they
learn anything?”

  “Yes. They found a cave. He sent me video. There was an old body in it that looked like it had been there for years and a natural grotto that appeared to have been picked clean, but there were no minerals of any note, at least none he could determine. I have uploaded everything from his report to the secure account you set up.”

  “Anything else?”

  “One odd thing. There was a storm during the firefight, and one of his men was struck by lightning and several more bolts landed extremely close. You told me this mineral might have odd electromagnetic powers. It stands to reason that if lightning was striking so hard and so fast, then perhaps the American managed to secure a small sample.”

  D’Avejan snapped, “Small? Why small? He could have carried out sacks of the stuff.”

  “No, meneer, the men identified him quite clearly and saw he carried nothing with him but a pistol. He was not the one who looted the cave. That had to have been Dillman years ago.”

  “So the bulk of mineral is still out there? That is what you are saying?”

  “Yes, and I think I know how to find it.”

  D’Avejan listened while his special facilitator outlined his proposal, nodding approvingly as its chance of success sounded high. Outsourcing contractors from the Pakistani intelligence service had been a gamble that hadn’t paid off, but what he heard now sounded like a winning plan to secure the last of the mineral for use aboard the Akademik Nikolay Zhukovsky.

  “All right,” d’Avejan said when his subaltern finished. “Make it happen and I’ll give you a bonus large enough to retire on.”

  The former mercenary started a sarcastic reply but held his tongue. He may have worked for Roland d’Avejan and Eurodyne for the past two years, but being part of a corporation hadn’t blunted the rougher edges of a lifetime spent in and around combat zones stretching across three continents.

  “Dankie, meneer.”

  16

  Mercer downloaded e-mails to his tablet from a Wi-Fi hotspot in the New Delhi airport. He had been bcc’d on a note from one of Abe Jacobs’s office mates at Hardt College. In it, Professor Wotz outlined, as best he knew, what Abe had been helping Dr. Tunis with. Mercer suspected the two schools, Hardt and Northwestern, were still stonewalling direct access, so someone had asked around casually. Judging by the dates, this appeared to be something Kelly Hepburn had set in motion before her accident.

  Mercer read with increasing interest. Their work was indeed groundbreaking, and given the right set of circumstances, their research was something any number of groups would never want to see reach the light of day. This made the list of suspects impossibly long.

  Wotz’s description of Abe’s research into Sample 681 had jibed with what little Mercer had learned himself of the odd crystal’s electromagnetic properties. Wotz was a field biologist, so he was pretty light on the details, but he said Abe believed the mineral could help deflect deep-penetrating cosmic rays, so scientists could run subterranean cloud chamber tests that were uncontaminated by all outside influences—without having to run those tests in some of South Africa’s ultra-deep gold mines. He saw the mineral as a way to vastly reduce the cost of experimental climatology and cosmology.

  Mercer thought Abe and Tunis were missing out on something far more important than climate science, although that was Susan Tunis’s specialty. If it were possible to replicate Sample 681’s properties in the lab, it would help solve one of the problems facing microelectronics products—they are constantly bombarded with cosmic rays, and each strike increases the chance of a glitch. A Qantas flight from Singapore had to make an emergency landing in 2008 when a pair of rapid descents injured more than a hundred passengers. Investigators thought it likely that a cosmic ray collision had interfered with data from an inertial referencing computer, which had caused the aircraft to plummet. Communication and other satellites had their service lives severely compromised because of the constant assault of supercharged elementary particles sweeping across the cosmos. An effective shield that didn’t add unnecessary weight would be a godsend to both industries, Mercer surmised. Even PCs on the ground suffered faults that erased unimaginable amounts of data.

  Then there were massive solar discharges that have the potential to crash entire electrical grids, as happened in Quebec in 1989. Protecting power supplies from such storms was an expensive but necessary priority to utilities all over the world.

  On top of that, doctors attributed a portion of cancers to cosmic rays hitting DNA at the exact moment of replication. Earth’s magnetic field routinely blocked most interstellar rays, but enough got through to cause noticeable trends in cancer rates.

  It was laudable that Tunis and Jacobs were pushing the envelope in terms of climate and weather forecasting, but they were missing the true potential of what Abe had somehow inherited from Herbert Hoover.

  Mercer’s flight was called. He tucked away the tablet and tried calling Agent Hepburn. Her Neanderthal partner, Nate Lowell, didn’t pick up, so the phone went to voice mail. He left her a generic message about following a lead, wished her a speedy recovery, and said he would call later. He tried reaching her through the George Washington University Hospital switchboard, but they could neither confirm nor deny a Kelly Hepburn was a patient there.

  He called home. Jordan answered on the second ring. “You’ve reached the home of Philip Mercer.”

  “Call the police,” Mercer said. “There’s a strange woman in my house insisting on answering my phone.”

  “Mercer!” she cried. “I’ve been so worried. Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Tired, actually, but everything went well. How are you doing?”

  “Bored without you. My arm’s feeling better and there are some things I want to try out with it.”

  “Really. Like what?” Mercer asked as if he didn’t understand where the conversation was going. To his shock and utter delight Jordan spelled out some very erotic and explicit activities she had planned for the two of them upon his return.

  “Anything you’d like to add?” she asked with a husky chuckle.

  “No, I think that covers the bases, and the outfield and the stands and a good part of the parking lot.”

  “So are you heading home now?”

  “I am,” he told her, “but I have to stop in Mumbai.”

  “Why?” she asked, failing to mask her disappointment.

  “I found a body inside a cave near the coordinates. I did some research, and I think he was a guru who died around 1881. The real expert on him is a professor in Mumbai, and since it’s a short detour I thought it better to meet face-to-face than to ask a bunch of potentially disrespectful questions over the phone. Apparently the academic is a descendant.”

  “And you think knowing more about the dead guy can help.”

  “It’s more of a case of it not hurting, I suppose,” he replied. “They just called my flight. I’ll give you a ring when I get the chance. How’s Harry?”

  “He’s given up smoking, embraced temperance, and has started doing Zumba.”

  Mercer laughed. “That sounds like Harry, always striving to make himself a better person.”

  “Oh wait,” Jordan said as if giving color commentary at a sporting event. “What’s this? Yes, he just shut off the workout DVD, poured a Jack and ginger, and he’s fishing in his pocket for his Chesterfields. He was a better person for all of…eight seconds, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Mercer heard Harry over Jordan’s teasing chuckle. “I’d give you a spanking, young lady, but your behind’s so tight I’d probably break my hand.”

  “Talk to you soon,” Mercer said with a smile. “And watch yourself because he’s more than willing to test that hypothesis.”

  He didn’t like lying to her, but if his suspicions were right it would be better for them both that he had. At least in the short term. Long term? Who knew? He boarded the Boeing jumbo jet and took his seat in first class. He was asleep before the plane even left the ground, and only had a vague re
collection of being awoken for a meal.

  —

  It was pouring rain when he finally left the climate-controlled confines of the modern air transportation system, once again stepping back into nature. The sky was pewter colored and blotchy and looked like it hovered just a few feet over the ground. The concrete and asphalt around the terminal ran with runoff that poured through downspouts with the force of fire hoses. The sound of rain muted the occasional honks of taxis jostling for position, the cried greetings of drivers picking up loved ones, and the rumble of shuttle buses as lumbering and ponderous as dinosaurs. Passing cars hydroplaned as they went, kicking up rooster tails that rivaled those of offshore racing boats. The air was chilled and heavy. Mercer’s leather bomber was more than adequate, but he ducked back into the terminal and bought the first baseball cap he could find, a black one with a stylized red bird above the brim.

  He had to wait with a dozen other passengers for a minibus to take him to the closest rental car lot, but as a preferred customer he found his name on a lighted board outside their office/garage directing him to his vehicle, an SUV only slightly smaller than the beast he’d driven just a few days earlier.

  He plugged his destination into the satellite navigation system, thankful for it since he had no idea where he really was. He tried the radio, got a slot of static and something that sounded even more jarring than what had been playing at the Gen-D Systems compound in Kabul, and decided to let the storm be his companion.

  By the looks of things he had a couple-hour drive, and once again marveled at the vast expanses of the American Midwest. Iowa in particular, even under a biblical storm, looked like it was nothing but wide-open spaces.

  —

  Sherman Smithson turned the lock on his front door and sniffled. He was coming down with a cold, which made the past week of rain even more miserable. Despite his somewhat precise nature, what others called prissy, Smithson wasn’t a small man. He topped out at over six feet, and for a year back at Iowa State he had been on the Cyclones football practice squad. He was forty-seven now, and what physique he had once possessed had slouched into humped shoulders and a pronounced belly that he couldn’t muster enough pride to be ashamed of. What bothered him was the retreat of his ginger hair that had left him just a horseshoe fringe around his shiny scalp. Mrs. Jenkins, one of the volunteers at the Hoover Presidential Library, had rightly dissuaded him from the comb-over several years back.