The Cotten Stone Omnibus: It started with The Grail Conspiracy... (The Cotten Stone Mysteries)

by Lynn Sholes

  “It’s Tor.”

  “Is this going to upset me?”

  “Yes.”

  motnees

  “How could an eight-year-old kid that you’ve never met draw a detailed portrait of you?” John asked, staring at the sketch.

  “There’s got to be a logical explanation,” Cotten said. She watched the dribble of traffic come and go in the Tropical Breeze motel parking lot as she and John sat in the rental car.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “After all, we’re a bit on edge right now and tend to read too much into everything.” He scratched his day-old beard. “Tera must have seen a picture of you.”

  “Of course, that’s it,” Cotten said. “In the scrapbook. I found a picture of Lindsay and me back in high school. It was with the note she left me saying they were on the run.”

  “But that was an old picture. The sketch isn’t of a high school girl. It’s the way you look now. Unless, of course, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “I’d like to make that claim, but it was seventeen or eighteen years ago.” Cotten gave him a challenging glance, daring him to comment on her age.

  He seemed to pick up on her body language, and he held up a hand in defense. “I can’t imagine you being more beautiful than you are today.”

  A grin flickered across her face. “Right answer,” she said, taking his hand in hers. The playfulness drained from her eyes. “You’re right, the portrait isn’t based on my high school picture. But Tera could have seen me on TV. After the Russian incident, I was all over the press.”

  Cotten turned to look out the window as a thought bubbled up inside. “But there’s something way too coincidental going on here.” She squeezed his hand, then let go and looked at him. “I think she left the sketch behind on purpose in case we came along. I think she meant for me to find it. Like some kind of message.”

  “Which is?”

  “No idea. But we’re not going to find out sitting here.”

  “Well, that’s another problem we need to discuss.”

  “What problem?”

  “The call. The one that came from your cell phone back in Kentucky.”

  “You said it was a warning to back off. So what else is new? How many times have the Nephilim used that old, worn-out line?” She shrugged. “We’ve heard it before. You and I know that they won’t kill me. It’s against their covenant that protects the offspring of the Fallen. John, my father was Furmiel, Angel of the Eleventh Hour. If he hadn’t repented and become mortal, I would not have been born. I am Nephilim—at least half of me. So they won’t kill me.”

  “But they can hurt you,” John said. “That was the warning, Cotten. Back off or they will hurt you. Badly.” He took her hand and held it with both of his. “Maim, disfigure, take you to the edge of death—a place filled with constant pain. Is finding a kid who had a run-in with a backwoods preacher worth the risk?”

  “It’s not just that, John. You know it’s bigger than that.” Cotten leaned her head back on the headrest and stared through the windshield. “Something happened when I touched Tera’s picture. Something so odd, so intense. It was a special connection, like I was in touch with my own mortality, my own soul. My perfect reflection.” She turned and looked into his eyes. “This goes way beyond sketches, paintings, poems, and red auras around Pastor Albrecht. I’m compelled to find her.” She stopped short of revealing who she thought Tera was. John would think she’d finally lost it.

  John took the sketch and studied it for a moment before setting it on the dash. “You said ‘my reflection.’ Are you talking about Motnees, your twin?”

  Cotten nodded. God, he knows me so well, she thought. There was not another person in the world who knew so much about her—knew everything about her, the good, and the not so good. “Her name sounds so silly, now. But that’s what I called her. Her angel name. Even though she died at birth, her spirit still came to me when I was a child. I’ve told you how she would appear in my room and comfort me when I was sick—speak to me in our made-up twin-talk. When I touched Tera’s picture back at the farm, it was exactly the same memories that flooded back, the strong bond, the incredible connection. I could almost hear her calling me.”

  “In Enochian, the language of angels—your twin-talk?”

  Cotten felt tears well up. “Yes.” It took a moment to gather her composure. “If Tera is the incarnation of Motnees, it scares the hell out of me.”

  “Why would you be afraid of her? I don’t understand.”

  “No, not her. I’m afraid of what it means. Why would she come back after so many years? We may not yet know the reason, but her presence surely means something terrible is about to happen. She must be a profound threat to the Fallen. That’s why they are pursuing her so fiercely. Tera must have a key role in confronting them, and they must suspect it. They’ll never give up until they have hunted her down.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I know,” she said, leaning against him, feeling the security that his closeness always brought.

  He stroked her hair. “But, I can see I’m not going to get anywhere trying to talk you out of this. If the connection is that strong, then there must be something to it. We won’t know until we find Tera. If we just understood why they wanted to find her so badly. What threat could a child have against the Forces of Evil?”

  Suddenly, Cotten sat up in her seat. She looked at John, her eyes wide with surprise. “My God, we’re so stupid.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We want to know why they fear her? John, they’ve got my cell phone.”

  “Of course,” he said, shaking his head.

  Cotten smiled. “We’ll call and ask.”

  degrade

  “What do you mean it’s not working?” Mace said. He had left his dinner guests to take the call from Tor. With the phone to his ear, he walked out onto the river stone patio of his home overlooking the Virginia countryside.

  “It’s what I suspected all along,” Tor said. “The thodium has degraded from thousands of years of exposure in the freezing Turkish mountains.”

  “So you’re telling me that it’s not going to work?”

  “I didn’t say that. Only that it’s not 100 percent reliable. I’ll need more time to isolate a workable sample from what you gave me.”

  “How much time?”

  “Too soon to estimate.”

  “What about using the artifact I’ve got here?”

  “It’s all from the same place. I can try it, but no guarantees that it will work any better.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Unless you can find me a pure source of thodium, we’re back to the drawing board.”

  Mace rubbed his chin. “How’s it going with the kid?”

  “Slow. He’s totally unpredictable.”

  “And our banker friend?”

  “He and the kid are getting chummy. But Jackson, aka Benjamin Ray, doesn’t have much luck with the kid either. Sometimes I think we should have hacked into the CyberSys mainframe rather than dragging the code out of an eight-year-old—especially this one.”

  “It would have been the chicken and the egg routine if you had. You need a quantum computer to hack in and you need to hack in to steal the OS to run the quantum computer. The kid has got to be the easier of the two.”

  “Then you come up here in Hicksville and try your luck.”

  “I don’t have the patience for such matters. Just keep at it. In the meantime, I’ll have someone bring you the other thodium artifact. They’ll fly to Little Rock and drive it out to you.”

  “That’s fine, but like I said, no guarantees it will work any better than what you already gave me.”

  “I don’t need guarantees, just results.”

  “Have whoever’s delivering the artif
act call my cell when they get into town. This place is a bitch to find, so I’d rather go meet him. And for that matter, he’s not staying. The place is already getting too crowded with the Olsen boy and the banker. I designed this system and I can run it myself.”

  “Fine, just keep at it, and get the rest of the code from the kid.”

  Mace pushed the off button on the cordless phone. He hadn’t counted on the thodium being degraded. That could present a big problem in his timetable. Where would he find other sources? The answer was buried somewhere in the story of the Great Flood, of that he felt certain.

  Mace paced the patio, trying to recall the many facts of the Flood kept hidden or lost down through the ages. There were details of the event not documented in the Scriptures, thanks to the Fallen’s influence over the arrogance and egos of the men who approved and assembled the Bible. Many ancient writings, scrolls, and books were left out because they didn’t conform to the teachings of the Church or because the Son of the Dawn chose to have them eliminated. Selective inspiration, he called it.

  One fact dealt with the construction of the Ark. Mace knew that in Genesis, the wood used to construct the Ark was called gopher wood or resin wood—an obscure, Pre-Deluvian material that by design was not well defined—and did not exist anywhere in the world today. In reality, the wood used to construct the Ark was lumber originally cut from the Tree of Life east of the Garden of Eden. After the flood, the Ark was disassembled, and the wood carried by Noah’s descendants to faraway lands as they repopulated the world. But it was the sap the wood excreted that held the key. Once it crystallized, it transformed into a material of unusual powers and properties—fitting for a material that originated in the Garden. The crystallized resin of the Tree is what Tor called thodium, the power behind the Hades computer.

  The Tree was now gone forever, having given up its last limb and branch to the Ark five thousand years ago. But the fact that the wood was dispersed to Noah’s descendants meant that other objects may have eventually been made from the wood and may still exist.

  The small remains of the Ark on Mount Ararat had been so easy for Mace to obtain—the ransacking of the Baghdad museum a convenient diversion for stealing them. The task ahead of finding other objects from the Ark would not be so unproblematic. He’d have to consult with the Son of the Dawn and delve into his leader’s eons of wisdom and in-depth knowledge of the Bible and other ancient documents. Somewhere, a pure source of thodium waited. Now it was a matter of finding it before the Hades Project was discovered and the future of the Ruby Army was compromised.

  With a sense of renewed determination, Mace walked back into the grand study where his guests awaited and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have dessert.”

  thodium

  Max Wolf looked into the camera as the Satellite News Network reporter said, “Dr. Wolf, please let Mr. Olsen know that all our prayers are with him in the swift recovery of his son, Devin.”

  “Thank you,” Max said. “I’ll pass that on to him.” He and the reporter, along with the SNN remote location crew, were gathered in the shade of palm trees across Biscayne Boulevard from CyberSys headquarters in downtown Miami. A weather front had moved through South Florida the previous night. Now the air was cool and crisp under a pristine blue sky as the late fall breeze rustled the palm fronds and mixed with the hum of afternoon traffic.

  The reporter had wanted to hold the interview inside the company’s labs but corporate security regulations forbade cameras being brought into the restricted research areas, so they settled on the lush tropical park nearby with the CyberSys building and its dynamic cobalt blue thunderbolt logo in the background.

  “Without getting too technical, can you explain for our viewers just exactly what Project Destiny is?”

  Max said, “Destiny is the codename for what we hope will be the world’s first fully functional quantum computer.”

  “And what is a quantum computer?”

  “Perhaps a way to visualize it is to compare it to the classical PC that we’re all used to seeing. Imagine the PC as the venerable space shuttle Enterprise and a quantum computer as the fictional Starship Enterprise. One travels at tens of thousands of miles per hour, the other travels at close to the speed of light—in the movies at least. So one of the biggest differences in the two computers is the speed of performing computations.”

  “That’s quite a strong comparison, Dr. Wolf, and a huge leap in technology.”

  “Speed is everything in quantum computing,” Max said. “For example, some modern simulations that are currently taking IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer years to do would only take a quantum computer a matter of seconds.”

  “Impressive,” the editor said. “Now, many in our audience are familiar with CyberSys and the fact that you are a leader in both the development of high-speed encryption technology and quantum computing research. Tell us, what is the main obstacle standing in your way to creating a working Destiny system?”

  “In a word,” Max said, “decoherence. In a quantum computer, all data is stored in what’s called a qubit—basically one bit of information per atom. In the process of computing, we need the qubits to interact with each other, but not interact with their surroundings, which can induce noise and other undesirable results. We must keep the computer in a coherent state—the slightest interaction with the external world causes the system to decohere, thus creating our biggest enemy, decoherence and the corruption of our computations.”

  “How close are you to finding a solution?”

  “We still have a ways to go. The problem is storing the qubits. We’ve tried using just about everything. Gone through virtually all known atoms—even something as exotic as nitrogen vacancies in diamonds—to find the perfect storage material. Nothing works well enough to avoid some level of decoherence.”

  “So if you’ve tried every material there is, then can we conclude that it is impossible to build a real quantum computer?”

  “Well,” Max said with a smile, “what I meant was every known substance that we can get our hands on. Only ninety-two elements exist in nature, but scientists have discovered additional ones from time to time under specialized testing conditions. A recent discovery that we think would produce positive results is an element called thodium, a previously unknown atom high up the periodic table.”

  “How do you know it would work?”

  “So far, it’s a theory based on quantities of one or two atoms created in particle accelerator tests.”

  “Not enough for your needs?”

  “No. We can’t produce enough to positively confirm its compatibility, and unfortunately we are unaware of any natural source. At this point, the natural existence of the element is hypothetical.”

  “I must admit, I’m not familiar with thodium.”

  “Like a handful of other elements that are either theoretical or extremely rare,” Max said, “thodium is usually confined to the footnotes of science journals.”

  The reporter nodded. “I remember a couple from back in college. Never knew why we bothered studying something so scarce that the total amount in existence would fit into a thimble.”

  “You’re probably thinking of astatine or francium. It’s estimated that there is only one ounce of astatine in the entire world, and scientists tell us that there are about five hundred grams of francium in all of nature.”

  “Can you describe thodium?”

  “Technically, it is a specific form of crystallized resin. Our simulations show that it exhibits all the characteristics needed to avoid decoherence in the storage of qubits. If the theories are correct, thodium would be a perfect spectral hole-burning material. With it we could address individual thodium atoms using our lasers and read out their states with no problem. We theorize that thodium atoms interact strongly with each other, allowing us to perform fast quantum logic gates. And we believe that it possesses an atomic t
ransition of two hyperfine energy levels that are so wonderfully insulated from the surrounding environment that a qubit could live there effectively forever, undisturbed by noise or decoherence.”

  “So all you have to do is round up a batch of thodium and you can build the first fully functional Destiny system?”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  The cameraman signaled that the segment time was almost up.

  “This has been fascinating, Dr. Wolf. I know our viewers can’t wait for news from CyberSys that you’ve solved the problem of decoherence and built the first working Destiny quantum computer. When you do, we hope you’ll invite us back to cover the story.”

  “Of course,” Max said.

  “One more question, Dr. Wolf.”

  Max nodded.

  “If someone could build such a powerful computer as your Project Destiny, how would it affect us all?”

  “It would render useless all cryptographic systems in use today.” As an afterthought, Max added, “And strike fear into the hearts of every security agency in the world.”

  game room

  The door opened and Tor walked into the small dormitory. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Devin immediately started shaking his hands as if he were trying to air dry them. Ben leaned against the wall at the other end of the room and watched.

  “Devin, it’s time to go play your games,” Tor said.

  “Play, play, play, play.” Devin repeated the words at machine gun speed.

  “You know how much you like playing, Devin.” Tor stood beside the boy. “We just installed the latest version of Company of Heroes. You love that one, remember?”

  “Company of Heroes, Company of Heroes.” His chant switched to the game title.

  “You’re making things difficult, Devin,” Tor said.

  “Ben go, Ben go, Ben go.”

  “I think he wants me to tag along,” Ben said, thankful that the kid was following their plan. He hoped Devin would remember everything.