“I already checked.” Elise paused for breath.
“And?” This was killing him.
“More than a hundred leaders around the world are trying to surreptitiously sell everything they own. Dumping stocks at unprecedented rates. The financial markets are crashing, but no one can fathom what’s driving the bear market. You know what this means, don’t you?”
Sam sat back. Now the other penny had dropped, he could see where Elise had been leading him all along. His impatience vanished. “We’re closer to the final date of the event. Someone out there knows what’s going on. They’re selling companies and buildings that will soon be under the world’s oceans, concentrating their cash into gold. Preparing for the new world.”
“Thought you’d be interested,” she said, as though it were merely a new tip about the stock market.
“Thanks, Elise. Keep digging, and keep me in the loop.”
Sam considered his next move. This was bigger than the guy trying to kill him. Forget about him. Sam wanted his boss, or bosses. If Elise couldn’t find them, no one could. But he had a job to do as well. He dialed a number that only a few people had.
“What is it, Sam?” answered the Secretary of Defense.
“It’s begun.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Phoiki Hot Pond – Big Island, Hawaii
Airlie Chapman stared at the ancient world around her through dark brown, intelligent eyes, as she crept through the dense forest. She was tall and lissome, and moved with the decisive gait of someone much younger than her thirty-five years of age, as she made her way through the path that tracked upward and deeper into the jungle. She wore a bikini underneath a pair of denim shorts and a dark tank top. Her light brown hair was tied back in a French braid.
In the twilight before dawn, the mist from the various hot springs rose above the ancient forest, like something out of the Jurassic period. She left the coast of Isaac Hale Beach, in the Puna District, and headed further into the forest. Despite it being early, there was a warmth to the air that made everything feel comfortable.
She watched as her boyfriend, Adrian, jumped across the various volcanic rocks, trying to spur her to move faster.
“Come on,” he said. “We have to reach the hot springs before sunlight.”
“Why the rush?” she asked. “I’m on my first vacation in four years since I started my damned PhD. No one’s going to make me hurry.”
“I want to beat the crowds and be the first one in the water!”
He had a confident and engaging smile. With his good-natured attitude, and those boyish good looks typical of an athlete still moving toward his prime, he was fun and immature at the same time, but kind and generous – willing to do anything to please her. Not at all like the academics she tended to go for. When he’d asked her out, she surprised herself by saying yes. That was five weeks ago, and since then, Airlie had discovered that he’d brought a unique and pleasant aspect to her otherwise cumbersome and perfect little life.
“You go ahead. I’ll meet you there soon,” she said.
He made a face like a wounded puppy, and then smiled. “Okay.”
She watched him disappear over the next set of volcanic rocks that formed a small ridge. Airlie increased her stride. Thirty seconds later, she passed a large rock and came face to face with him. He kissed her on her lips. She opened her mouth and met his tongue with an eagerness that few men in her life had ever instilled in her.
And then he pulled away.
She went to kiss him again, but he pulled back, farther. “What?”
He was grinning at her.
She tried to kiss him a third time, but he simply smiled and started running along the path. “You’ll need to catch me if you want to kiss me.”
Airlie laughed. This was the price she was going to have to pay for dating a younger man. “All right.” She started to make her way quickly through the forest.
Eighty feet along the path and it opened to a large jellybean-shaped hot spring. Formed from a collapsed lava tube, its volcanic base was nearly fifteen feet deep and provided a startling green shade to the blue water. Steam rose invitingly from its surface. Airlie had never seen it before, but the sight took her breath away.
She turned to meet Adrian, as he kissed her again. When he stopped, she found herself smiling. The sight was stunning, but it was more than that. She found herself feeling a type of joy and contentment that no other man had been able to provide her.
“Beautiful isn’t it?”
“Magic,” she admitted.
“I thought you’d like it.” He smiled with genuine joy. “I was looking forward to seeing your response when you saw it. There’s something terribly endearing about the way your eyes light up in wonder. I’d like to spend a lifetime doing such simple things with you and traveling the world. What do you say, should we get married?”
“Sure,” she said, assuming he was just speaking without any conviction.
Then he got down on one knee and revealed a diamond ring.
She swore. “My God! You’re serious!”
He looked at her with a slightly confused and pained face. “I am.”
She shook her head in disbelief and kissed him again. This time he pulled back and she stopped. She stared at him.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Will you marry me?”
She beamed. “Yes!”
He kissed her again and then said, “Let’s jump in the water.”
She glanced at the water. The steam seemed to be glowing off its surface, like some sort of bubbling primordial pool. “Shouldn’t you test the water or something, first?”
Adrian shrugged his shoulders. “Why?”
“It looks pretty hot. The sign before said that the temperature can fluctuate.”
“You think it’s going to burn me?” he asked, with an incredulous grin.
“It might.”
Adrian laughed. “There’s only one way to find out.”
He took a giant run and jumped into the deepest part at the center of the hot spring. His head dipped under the water and he disappeared.
Airlie stepped to the water’s edge and watched. She felt her heart race. She stood up and chided herself. It was irrational. Her fiancé was just playing a trick. There was no reason he should simply disappear into a small hot spring.
But she found herself holding her breath.
Then Adrian surfaced. “Ah it burns! It burns… help! Quick, throw me a branch…”
Airlie, already taut with concern, reacted immediately. She ran to the edge of the hot spring, where a large vine dangled close to the water. She pulled on it, using all her weight, and the vine snapped fifteen odd feet above her.
She took the edge of the vine and threw it into the boiling water. Adrian caught it on her first throw. She quickly dragged him toward the edge, pulling it hand over hand, like a rope.
He screamed loudly.
“Give me your hand,” she shouted.
He grabbed her right hand and pulled her into the water.
It was lukewarm and felt delicious under the rising sun. She surfaced from the water, and started to scream.
“You bastard! I should kill you myself.”
Adrian was laughing uncontrollably now. He went to grab her and she shook her head. He caught his breath. “I’m sorry, but you should have seen your face.”
“You bastard!” Her heart was still racing. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”
He grabbed her and kissed her again. “I’m sorry.”
She relaxed in the water for a few minutes and then climbed out, resting on the warm volcanic rocks that lined the edge of the hot spring.
Airlie watched her now fiancé play in the water, seemingly unable to tire of playing in the crystal-clear spring. So, this was the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. The thought made her happy. His carefree and playful life was almost a polar opposite to her lifetime of research and academia. Adrian wo
uld provide the balance that she needed.
She stood up and looked at the green radiating off the blue water. A small bubble surfaced, followed by another one. Her eyes narrowed, and she studied the slight change in the water. She tried to get Adrian’s attention, but he was dipping under the water, swimming to the bottom and searching for different colored stones to show her.
The bubbles started to surface quickly – one after another – and she felt the irrational agitation of fear rising in her throat. “Adrian!”
He didn’t hear her as he dived down again.
She quickly walked to the opposite side of the hot spring, carefully jumping across the volcanic stones, racing to get his attention when he surfaced.
Bubbles more than a foot wide were now surfacing with the speed of a rapid-fire machinegun. She watched Adrian’s head break the surface.
“Get out of there!” she shouted.
Adrian turned to face her. “Hey, there’s an opening down here! It looks like the entrance to a tunnel or something that leads even deeper!”
She screamed, “Get out! Something’s not right!”
He glanced at the bubbles, making their way to the surface next to him. The last one was nearly five feet in diameter. His eyes widened. “Yeah, I think you’re right!”
Adrian tried to swim, but even larger bubbles broke directly below him. The surface tension broke way to the gas filled liquid below, and he sank.
Airlie watched, helplessly, as he fought to reach the surface again.
When he did a few moments later, his face was bright red and he was screaming again. Airlie wanted to yell at him and tell him not to make any more jokes, but even after the first glance, she knew that he wasn’t joking. His skin was blistering over. His face aghast with horror.
Airlie’s dark brown eyes fixed on him and she wanted to scream. His eyes stared vacantly back at her, and she knew there was nothing more she could do – Adrian was already dead.
Chapter Thirty-Five
University of Arizona – Tucson, Arizona
Sam walked along the northwest corner of Mountain Avenue and Speedway Boulevard. He glanced at the large building on the right. It appeared to have been designed to look more like an oversized aircraft hangar than a university building. Over the main door, were the words, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
He stepped inside and gave his name to a receptionist.
The receptionist, a twenty-something-year-old man with a poorly grown blond beard, glanced at him with recognition and said, “Professor Capel is waiting for you inside the metallurgy labs on level E. I believe your associate is already with him.”
“Thank you.” Sam ran his eyes across a map of the building.
The receptionist noticed, and said, “If you take the stairs down three flights, the metallurgy labs are the first on the right.”
“They’re underground?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, it’s a precaution. Some of the experiments performed here can be dangerous.”
Sam nodded. “Thanks.”
He found the metallurgy labs a couple of minutes later and tried to open the door. It was locked. He glanced at the obvious security camera fixed on him and then knocked loudly at the door. Another minute later, the door opened.
Professor Douglas Capel greeted him. He was tall for his generation, standing eye to eye with Sam. Wiry gray hair sprouted from his head, and made his eyebrows look like those of a mad scientist. The same hair sprung from his ears like coiled antennae. His skin was surprisingly smooth in contrast. His blue eyes twinkled with good-humor. A ready smile, somewhat crooked, gave him the appearance of smirking below a large, well-shaped nose.
“Ah, Mr. Reilly, I’m so glad you could make it.” The professor offered his hand.
Sam took it. The man had a firm handshake. “Thank you for your hard work, Professor Capel.”
“Not a problem. Come with me. There’s a lot for us to get through with, and your associate, Dr. Billie Swan, tells me that time is… how did she put it?” He sighed. “Of the essence.”
Sam followed the man through a series of long, empty passageways. The professor carried his head at a slight tilt, as if questioning everything about the world around him. At the end of the third corridor, the professor put his ID card to yet another security barcode reader, and a heavy steel door – the sort you might find onboard a space-shuttle – opened.
Inside, the room was a perfect sphere. Stainless steel metal shined from every end of the room like the inside of a giant globe. A thin sheet of see-through cargo nets – made of cotton rope that appeared like a direct anachronism in the otherwise space-aged lab – cut the sphere in half, providing a means of reaching the center of the room. There, the Göbekli Tepe Pillar Number 44 stood, suspended by a series of ropes, like an island at the center of the Earth. Next to it, Sam spotted Billie already examining the markings.
Sam turned to the professor. “What’s the story with the stone’s new storage facility?”
Capel grinned. “Ah, you’ll see.”
They walked across the cotton-mesh rope to the tiny island at the center.
Sam looked at Billie. “Find anything new?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s amazing, but I haven’t seen anything I couldn’t get out of the multiple photographs I’ve seen of it. But professor Capel tells me he’s been waiting until you get here to reveal the most amazing thing about it.”
He turned to the professor. “What did you find?”
Professor Capel grinned. “I can’t tell you. This, you have to experience for yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.
“You’ll see.” The professor squatted down, behind the large T-shaped astronomy stone. Four openings had been meticulously cut into the back of the Mesolithic stone. “Here, Mr. Reilly, slide one of these out, and place it on the scale.”
Sam glanced at the digital, scientific scale. “Okay. Can I examine the four stones, themselves?”
The professor nodded. “In due time. You won’t find anything extraordinary by looking at them. You already have the photos I sent you, and so you know of the pictographs depicted on them. Just go weigh it for me, will you?”
Sam nodded. Older people in general were rewarded with the respect of a greater amount of his patience, but once-in-a-generation experts like Professor Capel were granted an infinite amount of his tolerance. Instead, he turned to Billie. “You know what he’s getting at?”
“No.”
“All right. Here goes.”
Sam carefully reached into the opening. A hollow section, like a handle, had been cut into the stone inside. He slowly pulled it out. The image depicted on the outside was that of the Horseman of the Apocalypse known as Famine, below which was the Greek letter, Theta. He braced for the weight of the stone, but found it surprisingly light in his hands, as though it was made out of some sort of porous material. It was lighter than that. More like a feather. Certainly, no more than a few grams, at best.
“What is this made of?” Sam asked, staring at the strange material.
The stone itself was an intense shade of darkness, as though without the direct light shining on it, Sam wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.
Capel ignored the comment, and urged him onward. “Okay, put it on the scale, quickly now.”
Sam carried the dark stone the three or four feet required, and then waited while the professor zeroed the scientific scale. A slight nod from Capel indicated that the machine was ready, and Sam placed the dark stone gently inside.
“Good!” The professor was grinning now. “How do you feel?”
Sam was slightly taken aback by the question. He merely carried something light across a few feet. He was even going to say so, and then he noticed the strange feeling in his fingers. They were tingling. The sensation ran right up each arm, kind of like that time you fell asleep on your arm or leg for too long, and when you woke up or tried to move them the entire thing felt like
it was full of pins and needles. He wondered if he should have been wearing gloves when he handled the strange stone. It could be toxic for all he knew, emitting some sort of radiation.
The professor glanced at both of them as though they were his students. “Come closer, so you can get a good look.”
Sam and Billie both stepped right up to the scale and looked at the reading. It was set to metric, the universal measurements of science, and read less than ten grams.
“Woah, that’s amazing!” Sam shook his head in surprise, and turned to Capel. “How can it weigh so little?”
The professor ignored the comment. “Just watch.”
The scale hadn’t quite balanced, yet. The number was going up already. Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen grams. It increased slowly at first, but as it gained mass, the counter started to take-off.
Twenty-five grams.
Fifty grams
It was a parabolic curve – getting faster and faster.
Sam was holding his breath in disbelief. Next to him, he noticed the examination light flicker. It was so subtle, it wasn’t until it did it the fourth time that the sight caught his eye. The light was bending, only slightly, but it was being pulled toward the dark stone.
He glanced at the scales.
500 grams.
“That’s quite enough,” the professor said. “Let’s put it back inside the Göbekli Tepe pillar before we can no longer lift it!”
Sam reached in and grabbed the stone. It instantly felt much heavier, like carrying a brick instead of a feather. He worked quickly, and slid it back inside the ancient astronomer’s stone.
“Are we safe?” Sam asked.
The professor, now grinning like a mad scientist, nodded. “Quite safe. The Göbekli Tepe pillar appears to neutralize the stone, allowing it to return to its nominal weight of less than a single gram.”
Billie shook her head in awe. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Sam eyes narrowed. “What the hell is it?”
The professor stared at them both, wonder filling his intelligent blue eyes. “This, my friends, is the first physical evidence of the theoretical particles named Blackbody.”
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3 Page 66
