Cyrus pulled the phone from his pocket and entered the unlock code. He dialed a number from memory. The call was answered after one ring. “All set?” was all he asked. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line and smiled. “They’re on their way.” He clicked off.
“Okay, folks,” Cyrus said addressing the team. “As we discussed, you’re going off the grid. No outside contact until this is sorted out. I trust today has shown the kind of danger we currently face. But don’t worry, the safehouse will look like club med after that motel.”
“Where are you sending us?” Sanjay asked, as he looked at the raised platform.
“For your protection, even you won’t know the location of the safehouse. Not to worry, though, everything you need will be provided. Step right up.”
Two at a time, the team boarded the platform and were literally gone in a flash. In the span of five minutes, the team was transferred, and Cyrus stood alone in the storage unit.
He looked around the silent, empty space. It was only the platform, the SUV, and himself. The quiet and the dim light was soothing. The stabbing pain behind his eyes remained, a lingering reminder of the Taser and the men from the motel. Finally, he stepped onto the platform and tapped a series of buttons on the screen of his phone. The platform’s five-second countdown began.
It would be good to get back home.
Chapter 26
Berton Springs, Colorado
Thursday, 5:20 pm
Cyrus made a quick stop in Miami before heading home. He needed information, but showing up at Nathan’s shop twice in one day would surely draw suspicion from Nathan’s watchers. He needed to be discreet.
He stopped at a nearby messenger service and arranged for a delivery to Nathan at his shop. The package contained the cell phone and IDs taken off the three men who had attacked the motel in Bakersfield. Nathan would pull the call history from the phone and run the backgrounds of the three thugs.
Writing a note, Cyrus asked him to put a rush on the background checks. Since Nathan already had a solid lead on the Latino crew that attacked Reese’s apartment, it wouldn’t take long to confirm these three were part of the same crew, if that was the case.
After the brief side trip, it was home to Colorado. Cyrus considered his circumstances with amusement as he stepped from the platform. It was funny that the house already had the feel of home. More so than his apartment in Chicago ever had. The apartment always had a temporary sense to it. But something about the house, particularly out in the middle of nowhere, just seemed comfortable. It was quiet, safe, and secure. The feeling was starkly unfamiliar, but one he was growing to enjoy. Still, he had to wonder how much of that contentment was thanks to the seclusion and how much was the result of his time with Reese. She had had an even more profound impact on him than the house.
Cyrus found Reese sitting on the floor of the basement vault. When her eyes met his, he saw them light up. The smile on her face was twice as obvious in her brown eyes. She pulled herself up from the hard concrete floor and crossed the room with the gracefulness of a dancer, virtually throwing herself into his arms. He pulled her close and breathed her in. He had been away only a few hours, but he had missed her. It wasn’t prone to developing feelings so quickly.
As if proving their bond, Reese pulled away only far enough for her mouth to find his. Her kiss was deep and consuming. Time stood still as he held her, their kisses growing more and more impassioned, their bodies pressed more and more tightly together.
Finally they both broke for air. Cyrus looked down at the pale skin of her face. Her cheeks were a deep pink, and she was out of breath. He was too, for that matter. “I missed you,” she said quietly.
“Keep it up, and I’ll leave over and over, just so I can come back to this.” His words were quiet but his smile was wide. He still held her locked in his arms.
She laughed. Her eyes remained locked on his. He knew this was one of those moments, an important point in their relationship. He wanted to take her up to his bed right then. For that matter, he was certain she wanted the same thing. But as much as the timing felt right, it really wasn’t. Not if she was who he believed her to be. The decisions they made now would have repercussions, and it was important that they start this relationship off right. For the first time in a very long time, he felt the desire to truly connect with another person. This…this would be great. But he knew they could do better. But how could he explain as much without her misunderstanding?
Her eyes searched his for a moment before her smile shifted. He could read something different in her expression, but it wasn’t clear what she was thinking. She wasn’t disappointed… It was as if she understood. It was as if she was thinking exactly the same thing and had come to precisely the same conclusion.
“So chivalry isn’t dead?” she said with a coy, sexy smile. She kissed him gently once more before pulling herself free. “Just don’t make me wait too long,” she said in a barely perceptible whisper before stepping away.
Looking back over her shoulder, she motioned for him to follow. “Come on. It isn’t much but I made some sandwiches. We can eat while you tell me how it went.”
Cyrus stood there for a few moments and watched her prance away. She was something, there was no doubt about that.
He touched the screen of the security pad beside the wiring cabinet, and watched as the vault door slide silently shut. Then he followed Reese upstairs. She wanted to know how things had gone. That would be a story.
—————
They sat at the kitchen breakfast counter, a plate of sandwiches between them. Until he’d taken the first bite, Cyrus hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He devoured two turkey and swiss on wheats and downed a bottle Modelo before he finished the story of his run in with the thugs at the motel. He downplayed the drama of the situation, but Reese was getting good at reading between the lines.
For her part, she listened with rapt attention, stopping him only to clarify the occasional detail. By the time he’d finished recounting the events of the morning, it was clear they did in fact have a leak.
“Do you have any suspects?” Reese asked, referring to their leak.
He waggled his hand. Maybe, maybe not. “I’m working on it. I want to pick your brain. I need to know more about the project, if I’m going to put the pieces together.”
“You think the leak is on the team?”
Cyrus thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “You tell me. Other than the six members of the team, who knows else about Meridian?”
Reese sat back on her stool. Her eyes went distant as she gave the question deliberate consideration. “The question isn’t as easy to answer as it would’ve been two days ago. Two days ago, I would have said it was contained to the seven members of the team.”
Her eyes dropped and her expression deflated as something occurred to her. “Six members of the team,” she corrected. “I still can’t get used to Walter being gone.”
With a slight nod of understanding, Cyrus gave her a moment to sort her thoughts. As far as he was able to determine, she was the closest thing to family Meade had had. “What changed?”
“Those files!” she sputtered nodding her head in the direction of the floor and the basement beyond. “All the documentation Walter left you in the vault—I didn’t know anything about it. As far as I knew, Meridian started seven years ago, when I joined the project and Walter set up the lab. The current lab.”
She thought for a few moments. Cyrus could almost see the gears moving in her mind. “I should’ve known better,” she concluded.
He only gave her a questioning look.
“I thought we started the project from scratch. But if that were the case, we made some really radical leaps very early on. I guess I didn’t understand that in the beginning. My background is in electrical engineering and software design. Walter was the physicist. He assembled the team based on their specialties and pointed us in the direction we needed to go.
/> “Thinking about it now, it seems so obvious! We literally hit the ground running. Something we could only have done if our work was based on earlier research.”
Cyrus nodded. “And, as it turned out, that earlier research has been a work in progress since the early 1900s.”
Reese took a sip of her Mexican beer and looked Cyrus squarely in the eye. “If those records are accurate, American scientists have been chasing this white whale for more than a hundred years. And some of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time were found in pursuit of Meridian.”
Cyrus only nodded.
There had been a long-standing search for an energy source powerful enough to fuel the Meridian platforms. In 1939, scientists believed a fission reaction could be achieved by splitting a single atom of uranium-235. If anything could power Meridian, surely it was nuclear fission.
According to the records before them, the famed World War II Manhattan Project wasn’t an attempt to build the world’s first atomic bomb. The goal was safe, inexpensive, limitless energy. Energy enough to power Meridian. But splitting the atom turned out to be both outrageously powerful and devastatingly destructive. It was a complete failure as far as Meridian was concerned. But in the eyes of the American military, it was the ultimate weapon. So the military took that science and made it a tool of war. And thanks to revisionist history, no one would ever know the altruistic intentions of brilliant minds had been perverted into something sinister.
Somewhat ironically, the crude atomic research of that day was eventually refined to become, in some small way, the type of power source that the original Meridian team had sought. Nuclear power was used extensively in the first rounds of successful testing, decades later. At the time, a nuclear reactor was the only energy source powerful enough to entangle the contents of a platform and engage the quantum bridge. That was, until Meade and his team made a series of breakthroughs of their own.
Meade’s team managed to drastically reduce the platform’s power requirements. At the same time, they learned that a tremendous amount of energy was released from the receiving platform following the completion of a transport event. It was a revelation. At first they worked to simply dissipate the excess energy in an effort to prevent catastrophic overload. But it wasn’t long before Meade realized that the platforms were able to provide an energy surplus as a byproduct. The only hurdle that remained was to develop some sort of battery or capacitor to store the energy expelled from recipient platforms. If they could store that energy surplus, it could be used to power subsequent uses of each platform making the system self-sustaining.
“If I understand things correctly,” Cyrus began. “One technical obstacle is keeping Meridian from deployment?”
“Basically, yes. Right now we’re using Halon-Seven as a super-capacitor on the functional platforms. But the element is exceedingly rare, and we have a finite supply. Basically the platforms that are currently in operation are the extent of our capability. Our supply is depleted.”
“Halon-Seven is the ore I read about? It had some sort of unique properties allowing it to act as a battery?”
She laughed. “That’s one way to put it. If Halon-Seven is a battery, it’s the battery to end all batteries. The material has the properties of a superconductor but it functions at room temperature—something no known superconductors can do. And, unlike any conventional battery, it can charge and discharge massive levels of energy at rates so fast that we can’t properly measure them. It’s most accurately described as a super-capacitor.”
“So where does Halon-Seven come from?”
Reese’s face grew serious. “We don’t know,” she said quietly.
“What? What do you mean, you don’t know?”
How could they not know?
“Walter said that what we were using constituted the entire known supply of the material. He never told us—he never told me—where that supply came from.”
“I don’t understand,” Cyrus was absently scratching at the stubble on the side of his jaw. “How is it possible no one knows where it came from?”
“How could we not know that the origins of Meridian dated back to 1900?” she countered. “There’s a hundred plus years of skeletons in this particular closet. Halon-Seven might’ve only come into the story recently, but with the levels of secrecy we’re dealing with, nothing should surprise either of us.”
That was true.
“So far everything we needed to know has been in the vault,” Cyrus said finally.
“I was thinking the same thing. We haven’t been through all of the files. I was about to check the last file cabinet when you got back. But I still haven’t found anything, and to be honest, I don’t think what we’re looking for is there.
“In truth, Halon-Seven is a massive scientific breakthrough all by itself. A superconductor that operates at room temperature? All current superconductors must be cooled to absolute zero in order to function. Halon-Seven represents a breakthrough that would revolutionize dozens of cutting edge manufacturing processes. But it’s pretty much meaningless if we only have a finite supply.”
Cyrus saw where she was going with this. If there was no documentation explaining the origin of Halon-Seven or why there was a limited supply, it was because Meade considered the information extremely sensitive. If Meade considered the secrets of Meridian of paramount importance and chose to leave the documents in a hidden vault, what did that say about his concern for Halon-Seven? Whatever its origin, Meade must’ve considered it far more sensitive.
“Do you know why it’s called Halon-Seven?” Cyrus asked.
Reese shook her head. “Walter provided the name along with the substance. To be honest, I don’t think I ever asked.”
“What about the material itself? Why is it so hard to come by?”
She shrugged. “Another mystery, I’m afraid. Walter never said—and I never asked. All I know is that the element is exceedingly rare, and he was scouring the planet for more of it.”
Cyrus thought for a few moments. He was trying to get a bird’s eye view of the project, and the gaps in details concerned him. He decided to move on to facts with which he felt more confident. There were a few questions he suspected might be considered sensitive. He wasn’t sure how Reese would react to them.
“Tell me about Meridian,” he said. “When this technology goes public, there’ll be an amazing amount of money to be made.” He considered his words carefully. “Every home will eventually have its own platform. Many businesses will likely be equipped with several of the devices. Distribution companies will have large-scale versions to move bulk materials, and so on. There’s a lot of money to be made building and selling the platforms. Then I suppose there’s ancillary income such as patents and contracts for maintenance and a dozen other things I haven’t yet considered.
“What I’m asking is, who benefits from all of that? Where does all the money go?”
It was the basic principle for any criminal investigation. It didn’t matter if it was theft, murder, or industrial espionage—you followed the money. It might not provide all the answers, but it would get the investigation moving in the right direction.
Surprisingly, Reese’s smile only became broader. “The platforms will be built and sold at cost. Walter intended this project to better mankind, not to make him or the team wealthy. If—no, when—we solve the technical hurdles, the entire system will be run as a multi-national not-for-profit-organization. Essentially we’ll open source the technology.”
Ouch.
It was what Cyrus was afraid of. She was proud of the endeavor, and good for her. It was an admirable goal. It was altruistic. But it was unrealistic, too, because it ran counter to human nature.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She could see the answer to his question had soured his disposition.
It was time to lay it all out for her.
“A substantial problem comes to mind,” he started. “Those goals are amazing, and the world would be a better pla
ce if more people felt the same way. But there are a lot of people with a vested interest in keeping Meridian off the streets. The world wide, low cost deployment of Meridian? There’s a lot of people out there that wouldn’t want to see this reach the market.”
“I don’t understand.”
He had two ideas, but he’d considered only one well enough that he felt comfortable giving it voice.
“All of those people, companies, and organizations that have something to lose if Meridian goes public—what do you think they would be willing to do to keep it from seeing the light of day?”
She looked stricken. “You think one of them is behind the attacks?”
“I think that any or all of them might be willing to kill, just to maintain the status quo. It’s the military that really troubles me. There isn’t a military group on the planet that wouldn’t bury every one of us just to keep Meridian for themselves. We’re talking about the ultimate tactical advantage. I think the list of suspects needs to include any person or company with an interest in keeping things running the way they are, as well as every government, military, or intelligence service in the world. Hell, even terrorist organizations would see this as a potential weapon.”
Reese’s eyes were glazing over as the true weight of his words struck home.
“What I’m trying to say,” he said confidently as he took her hand, “is that the safety of the project and the safety of the team lies in anonymity. That anonymity is in danger right now. But there’s good news. I think I’ve got a bead on who’s after the team. And, if I’m right, that person won’t have shared Meridian with anyone. If I can ensure that, I can close the loop, and everyone will be safe.”
She looked him in the eye. Her eyes hinted at the question she didn’t want to ask. “When you say ‘close the loop?’”
“I mean to do whatever is necessary to ensure Meridian and this team are safe again. This is bigger than the seven of us. If it falls into the wrong hands, I can’t even imagine the potential damage.”
Halon-Seven Page 24
