Chapter 20
Moore led the president and the confused head of the CIA down the hall. The president’s security detail followed them until the three men stepped onto a secured elevator, where the president held out a hand.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em, boys,” he said. “This is going to take awhile.”
Moore punched in a code and the doors closed, leaving security behind. He thought of making a last-ditch plea to the president, but one look at Henderson’s stern face told him the time for discussion was over. The president wanted the CIA informed and involved.
Moments later the three men stepped out into a darkened laboratory. The hum of an air filtration system was the only real sound. The light around them was soft and off-color, coming from special blue and white LEDs embedded in the wall.
In the quiet darkness, two NRI technicians monitored computer readouts. They stood awkwardly when they realized who their guests were.
“As you were,” the president said.
Moore walked to a pane of glass in front of them. Inclined forward at forty-five degrees to allow easy viewing of an object below, the “glass” was actually a two-inch-thick plate of clear Kevlar, strong enough to stop a high-powered rifle bullet.
Five feet below them, lit by a circle of LEDs and raised up on prongs like the setting of an engagement ring, lay a triangular stone with softly beveled edges.
The stone was the size and thickness of a large dictionary and as clear as any glass ever made. Where the blue light caught its edges, they shone like thin strands of neon, while the white light seemed to penetrate and reflect from deeper within.
“Any change?” Moore asked.
“No, sir,” the lead technician replied. “Nothing since the twenty-first.”
Stecker stared at the object. Moore could not help but do the same, despite having seen it many times. He’d even held it once, one of the few in the NRI to have done so.
The president had only seen it on two occasions, but he seemed to regard it with a new unease this time. Moore understood that, too: Events and time had changed things and the stone had gone from an object of curiosity to a subject of concern.
“What am I looking at here?” Stecker asked.
“We call it the Brazil stone,” Moore said. “A group of our operatives recovered it from the Amazon, two years ago.” He nodded toward Henderson. “The president was informed along with ranking members of Congress.”
Moore walked to a different position, one where he could see both the president and Stecker. He needed to be able to read their faces to know where he stood.
“What does it do?”
“It creates energy,” Moore said. “How, why, or for what, we’re not exactly sure.”
“Why is it down here?” Stecker asked. “Is it radioactive or something?”
“No,” Moore said. “But this vault is designed to contain it and to protect the population above.” He pointed to the walls around them. “We’re fifty feet below ground level. The vault around us is constructed of a titanium box, lined with sixteen inches of lead, a four-inch layer of ceramic silicon, and a solid foot of steel-reinforced concrete. In addition we’ve set up monitors and a powerful electromagnetic dampening field.”
“What the hell are you protecting us from, Arnold?”
“Electromagnetic discharges, including gamma and X-ray spikes: high-energy surges that not only fry electronic equipment, but can damage human tissue.”
Stecker looked around. “All your equipment here seems to be working fine,” he said.
“The bursts come at precise, regular time intervals, seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes apart. We lock down the system and shield all equipment prior to the pulse. We power back up again once it passes. Easy as pie for the most part. At least it was until November twenty-first.”
“November twenty-first,” Stecker repeated. “The date rings a bell.”
“That’s right,” Moore said. “The same day the Russians and Chinese launched their search parties. The same day we recorded a gamma-ray burst from a spot near the Arctic Circle that damaged a group of our GPS satellites.”
Stecker seemed agitated, swimming in the deep water now, not knowing which facts to connect. If Moore was right, he didn’t know what to make of the situation; anger, curiosity, confusion, all three emotions were probably racing through his mind at the moment.
The president took over. “On the same day Arnold and I spoke about the incursion into Hong Kong, we had another conversation, centered on the Russian and Chinese actions. Like you and the chiefs of staff, he saw their fleet movements as a search party, only the NRI had one piece of information no one else had: a recording of this energy burst. Initially we guessed that one of those two countries had created some type of directed energy weapon and might have lost it up there. But we could find no evidence of that, and then one of his techs here was able to match the signature of that power burst to a minor fluctuation in the output of this object.”
“You’re telling me this thing had something to do with that?” Stecker said bluntly.
“No,” Moore replied, “but something connected with it might have.”
Stecker’s eyes went from the glowing object to Moore to the president, as if to make sure everything around him was real and on the level.
“Is this some kind of an experiment?”
“No,” Moore said. “We didn’t develop this stone; we found it. We’re studying it, and we’re not yet certain about the implications of what we’re learning.”
“Which are?”
“I told you. This stone seems to create power. Manufacturing energy in a way we don’t yet understand. One that violates the first law of physics.”
“I’m not one of your scientists, Arnold. But I’m not an idiot. Talk to me in terms I’ll understand.”
This was the reason Moore dreaded bringing the CIA in the mix. The NRI was primarily a scientific organization, even if one wing of it was dedicated to stealing science from other nations. The CIA was about power, gathering knowledge on a more tactical scale. If we do this, then they will do that. Neither Stecker nor anyone else at the CIA would easily grasp what Moore and his people now believed.
“The First Law of Physics,” Moore said. “Energy can neither be created or destroyed. To power your car you burn gasoline, the combustion creates heat, the heat creates pressure to expand the gases, and the rapid expansion drives the pistons. The energy is derived from the breaking of chemical bonds in the petroleum distillates. Chemical bonds that were slowly built up over thousands of years as the poor, dead dinosaurs turned themselves into crude oil.”
He paused to make sure Stecker was with him.
“When you run your car you’re releasing stored energy, not creating it. A nuclear plant does the same thing in a different way. It splits atoms, and the breaking of that bond does exactly what the breaking of the chemical bond in the petroleum does: It releases stored energy, but on a much greater scale. In both cases, however, the energy was always present, and its potential could be determined before it was used.”
He pointed toward the stone. “But this thing is different. It’s emitting energy through no process we are able to understand—at times, massive amounts of it. Our best explanation is that it is somehow creating energy or perhaps drawing it from a quantum background.”
Stecker looked dizzy. He responded less arrogantly than Moore would have expected, perhaps because he was off balance.
“Okay,” he said. “So that’s what it does. You have a stone here that makes energy. Great, let’s hook it up to the grid and stop the global warming everyone’s so worried about. But that doesn’t explain why it’s so important, why so few people were told about it in the first place, or why you’re telling me about it now.”
Moore looked to the president. He nodded; it was time for the whole truth.
“Because,” Moore said, “the stone is not some naturally occurring entity. It’s not a rock, or some exotic new element found in the depths of the earth. It’s a piece of machinery constructed by the hands of men and women. One that was found along with a horribly mutated human skeleton and a prophecy of doom, predicting the downfall of civilization. Billions killed in war, waves of disease and famine, punishment for the sins of human pride. All of it stemming from an event on December twenty-first, 2012.”
Stecker scoffed at what he was hearing. “The Mayan prophecy,” he said. “The one I can’t turn on the damn TV without hearing about. Is that what we’re talking about here?”
Moore nodded. “The glyphs McCarter found refer to it as the day of Black Sun.”
“Black Sun? Like an eclipse? Like from a solar flare?”
“We don’t know,” Moore said.
“You don’t know?”
“No, Byron,” Moore said, exasperated. “We don’t know. In case you didn’t realize it, hieroglyphics don’t come with footnotes and a commentary. So we’re figuring it out as we go along.”
Stecker didn’t look convinced. “Come on, Arnold,” he said finally. “The world is full of lunatics telling us the end is near; you can find them on any street corner if you want. Why the hell should we care about this one?”
“Because,” Moore said, “in our case, the lunatic wasn’t a prophet but a historian.”
“Excuse me?”
The president stepped in and lowered the hammer of truth as bluntly as possible.
“Byron, we care about this doomsday prophecy because of its origin, because the NRI believes that it, and this stone, were created not thousands of years ago, but eleven centuries from now, by our descendants, three hundred generations removed.”
Stecker’s eyes went wide at what the president was saying.
Moore tried to explain. “The body I spoke of bore the remnants of advanced prosthetics that had been implanted into it or had been grown over by the living bone. From the description and its surroundings, our conclusions were that this person had suffered massive mutation or even purposeful genetic modification designed to help it survive life in a sulfurous acidic environment.”
“I can’t believe you’re—”
“This is no joke,” Moore insisted.
Stecker looked at the president, who shook his head solemnly.
Stecker exhaled sharply. Whether he believed what he was being told or not, Moore couldn’t decide, but at least he’d stopped arguing the point. “So this thing’s a problem?”
“Yes,” Moore replied. “And it’s not the only one. One of my people, a scholar named McCarter, studied the hieroglyphic data we brought back from Brazil. He concluded that this stone is one of four.”
“There are three others out there?”
“We think so,” Moore said. “Two in Central America, one somewhere in the Eurasian plain, probably central Russia.”
“Have we told them about this?” Stecker asked the president.
Henderson shook his head.
“Well, that’s something,” Stecker said. “You got anyone looking for that one?” he asked Moore.
“Can you think of a way to do it, without alerting them?”
“No,” Stecker said. “Good move.” He appeared cordial for the first time. It didn’t last long. “Okay,” he continued. “So let’s say I believe all this. What’s the point?”
“We’re not sure,” Moore said. “But we come to one possible conclusion: A thousand years from now the world is not like the one we live in today. Our best guess: radioactive background, skies of acid rain filled with carbon and sulfur.”
“And this … stone … is supposed to do something about that?”
“It seems logical,” Moore said.
“Then why are you telling me about it?”
Moore looked at the president.
“Because,” President Henderson said, “I want both of you working on it, both agencies, along with the best minds you can find.”
“Why now?”
This time Moore answered. “Because the stone is building up a wave of energy, priming itself for something massive and sending out a signal that diminishes slightly in length with each new iteration. A signal that will reach zero, eleven days from now on December 21, 2012.”