Dangerous Minds

by Janet Evanovich

  “Sure,” Emerson said. “I read about it in a book.” He pointed at the barrel. “This is the end where projectiles exit, right?”

  “Maybe Riley should be in charge of firearms,” Alani said.

  “Emerson don’t need a gun,” Vernon said. “He can do all kinds of lethal stuff. You should see him do the Vulcan nerve pinch.”

  “There’s no such thing,” Alani said. “That was made up for Star Trek.”

  “Excuse me, but that is a total load of baloney,” Vernon said. “I’ve seen him do it. We were in this fight at the Pig ’n’ Whistle bar one time, and I saw him do the pinch. You probably don’t believe in Bigfoot either.”

  Alani did a gigantic eye roll. “You are so gullible,” she said to Vernon.

  “Yeah and you are so—”

  “So what?” Alani asked.

  “I don’t know. Actually, you’re kind of pretty.”

  “Oh jeez!” Alani said.

  “Anybody got a Snickers?” Vernon said. “I really need a Snickers.”

  Emerson pulled a roll of antacids out of his pack. “This is all I’ve got,” he said.

  “Good enough,” Vernon said. “Hand them over.”

  “We’re losing time,” Riley said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Emerson and Riley walked into the tube. Almost immediately they came to a large diesel generator that hummed and buzzed, providing power to the flickering electric lights lining the slick black rock walls.

  “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but this is even spookier than the fog,” Riley said.

  “I rather like it,” Emerson said.

  The tunnel opened up into a large man-made cavern with a poured cement floor. The SUV was in the corner of the room, parked next to several Ford F-150 pickups, a bunch of ATVs, some heavy machinery, and a military transport like the one at Sour Creek Dome.

  Riley inspected the SUV. “Looks like we found the bad guys’ secret hollowed-out volcano parking lot. But where are the bad guys?”

  Emerson pointed to the other side of the cavern. “The lava tube continues that way.”

  Riley crossed the cavern with Emerson and peered into the adjacent tunnel. There was a heavy-looking steel double door blocking their path and muffled voices on the other side. She put her ear to the door.

  “It sounds like someone is crying and calling for help,” Riley said.

  Emerson carefully opened the door and peeked inside. “It’s a bunch of jail cells lining one side of the lava tube. There’s a woman in one. I don’t see any sign of Tin Man or the guards.”

  “If we’re caught, there’s nowhere to run. We’re trapped in this tunnel,” Riley said. “We’ll end up in one of those cells.”

  Emerson pushed the door open wide enough for them to squeeze through and closed it quietly behind them. The woman in the cell was standing at the bars and sobbing hysterically.

  “Are you okay?” Riley asked.

  The woman scrambled away from them into a corner of the cell.

  Riley stepped closer. “I’m Riley and this is Emerson. Maybe we can help you.”

  The woman cautiously approached the bars. “I’m Margo Tanner. We were hiking in Kilauea and got lost. We ended up spending the night in a cave. The park rangers who found us told us we were trespassing in a restricted area.”

  “Did you see anything unusual?”

  “They were drilling for oil,” Margo said. “I didn’t even know there was oil under Hawaii.”

  Emerson and Riley exchanged glances. “We have to get her out of there,” Riley said. “I’d shoot the lock, but the gunshot would definitely be heard.”

  Margo pointed at the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel. “There’s an electrical panel over there that locks and unlocks the doors.”

  Emerson pushed the button marked CELL THREE. There was an audible click, and the door popped open. The woman rushed out and hugged Riley.

  Emerson looked around the room at the other cells. They were empty.

  “You said ‘We were hiking.’ Is there somebody else here too?”

  Margo nodded. “His name is Richard. I don’t really know him. We met on the hiking trail and were walking together when we got lost.” She pointed down the tunnel. “About half an hour ago some scary military-looking guy with a close-shaved head and a three-day-old beard came and dragged him away. I thought I was next when you two came in.”

  Riley grimaced. “Tin Man.”

  “You’re in a lava tube underneath Mauna Kea,” Emerson said to the woman. “There’s a bunch of ATVs in the next room. Take one and follow the tube about a half mile to the exit. We have some friends there, and they’ll help you get back to the main road.”

  Margo looked nervously in the direction Tin Man had taken Richard. “What about my friend?”

  “We’ll try to find him,” Riley said. “You just get out of here, and don’t tell anybody about what you saw. You can’t trust anybody.”

  Margo ran down the tube, and Riley turned to Emerson. “What do you suppose Tin Man did with the other hiker?”

  “He didn’t take him to Disneyland,” Emerson said. “You stay here. I’m going to go further down the tube and look for him.”

  “We’ll both look for him. I don’t want you to have to rely on that pathetic Vulcan nerve pinch if you run into the bad guys.”

  They walked past the cells and down the tunnel for another hundred yards before it opened up into a large, clean, well-lit room set up similarly to the laboratory in Yellowstone, minus the equipment for processing the magma.

  Riley and Emerson paused, plastered themselves against the side of the dark lava tube, and looked inside. A large Penning trap sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by four smaller portable traps. Tin Man and Bart Young were there, as well as a dozen soldiers wearing Rough Rider uniforms. They were all standing around watching a glass cage in the southwest corner.

  A small Asian woman, dressed entirely in black, was manning a control booth in front of the cage. She had a slim, athletic build and long black hair, and she was wearing large, round glasses with black frames.

  A middle-aged man with a bloody lip and a bruised eye stood in the center of the cage, shackled to the floor, like a zoo animal.

  “That must be the hiker,” Riley whispered.

  Bart Young was fixated on the enclosure. “Berta, are you certain we’re safe out here?” he asked the Asian woman.

  “Absolutely. I can’t say the same for him,” Berta said, gesturing toward the man in the glass cage.

  “How does it work?” the director asked.

  “The enclosure was built based on the same principles behind the Penning trap. There’s a magnetic field surrounding it and acting as a barrier between what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside. Everything outside the case is safe, and the glass is also protected. You will soon see what happens inside the case.”

  Tin Man was staring at Richard. “And if the magnetic field fails?”

  “We’ll all be destroyed. Possibly the whole mountain will be destroyed. It’s hard to say how far it would progress before reaching a state of equilibrium. That’s why we need to conduct more field experiments before we load it into the weapon. I don’t want a repeat of the fiasco in Samoa.”

  “In a way, I’m jealous of him,” Tin Man said, motioning toward the man in the cage. “This is a historic moment. No one in the history of the world has ever died this way. It’s like being the first person to walk on the moon.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Bart Young said. “Enough talking. Let’s see the demonstration.”

  “We need to do something,” Riley whispered to Emerson.

  “You would need to take out almost everyone in the room,” Emerson said. “You’re not the only one with a weapon. And the lady in black has the ultimate weapon.”

  “I’m turning on the magnetic field now,” Berta said, pushing a button on the controls in front of her.

  The
re was a low hum from the direction of the cage, and the man inside struggled against his chains.

  “Is he in pain?” the director asked.

  “No. Just scared,” Berta said. “The magnetic field is harmless to him. Its only purpose is to contain the strange matter.”

  Emerson did an audible intake of air. “They’re not using the Penning trap to contain plasma. They’re using it to contain strange matter.”

  “What’s strange matter?” Riley whispered.

  “Do you remember in Yellowstone I said there were four types of ordinary matter—solids, liquids, gasses, and plasmas?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, there are other theoretical forms of matter, called exotic matter. Forms that exist in the far reaches of space, but not on earth. At least, nobody thought they existed on earth.”

  “Like what?”

  “All the matter on earth is what physicists call baryonic, which is just a fancy way to say that things are made up of protons and neutrons. The number of protons and neutrons in an atom determine whether something is made of helium or carbon or uranium or some other element in the periodic table. Strange matter is, in very basic terms, stuff that’s not made up of protons and neutrons, because all the protons and neutrons have been squished superhumanly hard into a mass of disorganized basic particles called quarks. Under the right conditions, it could be, to put it mildly, dangerous.”

  Riley lowered the rifle and watched as Berta pressed another button. A robotic arm dropped a small canister into the enclosure. It shattered on the floor next to Richard, revealing a tiny dollop of what looked like a shimmering, rainbow-colored bit of liquid mercury. The cement floor collapsed and was consumed by the shimmering little blob. Everything went quickly after that. The chains were compressed and sucked into the tiny ball, and Richard followed. He screamed in pain and horror and then he was gone. Ten seconds later, the little ball stopped shimmering, turned a gray color, and melted away into a flat mass. All that was left of the little glass room was the enclosure itself protected by the invisible magnetic field.

  “What the heck just happened?” Riley asked Emerson.

  No response. Emerson was gone. He was standing in the center of the room by the Penning traps. He waved at Riley and held his breath as he unplugged one of the four portable traps from a wall outlet. The machine switched to battery power. Emerson picked it up and walked back over to her, cradling the trap in his arms.

  Everyone else in the room was gobsmacked, stupidly staring open-mouthed at the glass enclosure. No one seemed to notice Emerson skulking away with a Penning trap.

  “Crap on a cracker,” Riley whispered to Emerson. “What…did…you…do?”

  “I know. I clouded their minds. Great idea, right?”

  “Wrong. You’re holding enough strange matter to probably destroy the entire island of Hawaii.”

  “Or…I just got the evidence we need to put the bad guys out of business.”

  “Okay,” Riley said. “Let’s very quietly leave with the evidence.”

  Tin Man was the first to turn away from the glass enclosure and the first to see Emerson and Riley. He snatched a rifle from one of the soldiers and fired off a shot.

  The director knocked the gun out of Tin Man’s hands. “You fool. They’ve got one of the traps. If you hit it, we’re all dead.”

  “Run!” Riley said to Emerson. “Run fast.”

  “Go after them,” the director ordered. “Don’t let them get away, but be careful of the trap.”

  Tin Man and a handful of Rough Riders ran toward the tunnel. Riley fired off a round and the soldiers scattered, taking cover behind whatever they could find.

  “I’ll buy you some time,” Riley said to Emerson. “That Penning trap probably weighs at least fifty pounds, and it will slow you down.”

  Emerson looked at Riley and shook his head. “I’m not leaving you.”

  Riley took aim at where Tin Man was hiding. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you. I’m just going to buy you a thirty-second head start. Go.”

  Emerson ran in the direction of the jail cells, and Riley fired a couple more shots into the laboratory room.

  “There’s no escape,” Bart Young shouted. “You’re just delaying the inevitable.”

  Riley backed into the tunnel, took a final shot, turned, and sprinted through the passageway. She reached the metal double door and heard footsteps behind her. Tin Man and two guards were no more than fifty feet away at the other end of the line of cells.

  Tin Man raised his gun and pointed it in Riley’s direction. She ran through the metal door, slammed it shut, and heard the bullets ricochet off the door on the other side.

  Emerson was waiting for her in the back seat of an ATV. The Penning trap was sitting next to him.

  “They’re going to be in a lot of trouble with the director,” Emerson said. “They aren’t supposed to be shooting at the Penning trap.”

  Riley jammed her rifle through the handles of the double door, barricading Tin Man on the other side. She jumped into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and raced down the tunnel in the direction of the exit.

  “It’s only a matter of time before they break through,” she said. “Hang on to the Penning trap.”

  Riley could see the light from the tunnel’s entrance in front of her, and she could hear Emerson behind her. He was blowing on the slide whistle, trying to alert Vernon and Alani.

  Riley burst out of the tunnel entrance and into the fog, braking hard and coming to a sudden stop in front of Vernon and Alani.

  “Get in,” Riley said. “We don’t have much time.”

  Vernon and Alani piled into the ATV, Riley floored the gas pedal, and they took off along the Jeep trail, back toward Wayan Bagus.

  “What is that thing?” Vernon asked, pointing at the Penning trap.

  “A doomsday machine filled with strange matter,” Riley said.

  Vernon eyed the trap. “Is it dangerous?”

  Alani rolled her eyes. “What do you think, dumb-dumb? It’s a doomsday machine.”

  “It contains some thick liquidy substance that sucked a guy right into itself, like some little black hole,” Riley said.

  Emerson patted the Penning trap. “Not exactly. The simplest analogy is that it ate him.”

  “No kidding? Like the Blob,” Vernon said.

  “Under the right conditions, strange matter will attract normal matter and convert it into strange matter. That’s what happened to the man in the cave. The strange matter came in contact with the floor and converted it into more strange matter and that came in contact with the man and converted him into a little superdense ball of strange matter too.”

  “So it’s a chain reaction,” Riley said. “Little by little, everything gets converted.”

  Emerson held his hand over the trap to stabilize it as they bumped along the road. “Yes and no. Like I said, there are certain conditions that must be met. The first is that the strange matter has to be more stable than the normal matter.”

  “And the second?”

  “It has to be negatively charged,” Emerson said. “That’s also why it can be contained safely within a magnetic field.”

  Riley scanned the road ahead for Wayan Bagus. Still no sign, but she thought she heard faint sounds of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” through the fog.

  “All the baryonic matter on earth has positively charged atomic nuclei,” Emerson said. “For the strange matter to be attracted to the normal matter on earth, it would need an opposite negative charge. Otherwise, the two would repel each other, kind of like two positively charged magnets. Positively charged strange matter would just sit in a glob, not eating anything in its path.”

  “And if you had a stable supply of negatively charged strange matter?”

  “Theoretically, under ideal conditions, it could destroy the earth, gobbling up everything until there was nothing left but a little superdense ball of strange matter.”

  “Arm
ageddon,” Vernon said.

  Emerson nodded. “Under ideal conditions, so to speak.”

  Riley looked at Emerson in the rearview mirror. “You know a lot about strange matter.”

  Emerson shrugged. “I’ve been told on occasion I’m a strange man.”

  “We study strange matter at the Keck Observatory,” Alani said. “Astronomers believe that on a cosmic level, exotic matter is much more common than normal matter and was probably created during the early stages of the universe. Around ninety-six percent of the universe is exotic matter. It’s just that none of it, before now, was ever discovered on the earth.”

  Riley saw the outline of Wayan Bagus’s ATV ahead through the fog and slowed down.

  “That doesn’t exactly explain how the National Park Service got their hands on it,” Riley said.

  “I have a working theory, but it will have to wait,” Emerson said. “We’re about to get company. I can hear ATVs on the trail behind us.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Emerson quickly transferred the Penning trap to Wayan Bagus’s ATV.

  “Here’s the plan,” Emerson said. “They don’t know we have a second ATV, and they’re going to assume we’ll try to outrun them down the mountain.”

  Riley looked down the mountain. The undulate terrain looked very steep and treacherous.

  “Do you think we can outrun them?” she asked.

  “Doubtful,” Emerson said. “That’s why Alani, Vernon, and Wayan Bagus will take the ATV with the Penning trap up the mountain to the summit and hide out at the Keck Observatory while you and I act as decoys and lead them down the mountain.”

  “What about the unexploded ordnance?” Riley asked. “It’s one thing if we blow up. It’s another if the entire island of Hawaii is destroyed.”

  Emerson nodded. “The bad guys won’t be looking for Alani and Vernon’s ATV, so they can drive at a safe speed, sticking to the Jeep trail and main roads.”

  “And what about us?” Riley asked.

  “We’ll be off-road, speeding down the mountain in the fog at breakneck speeds, trying to avoid hitting any explosives.”