Emerald Page 12

  Rachel switched the cross of her legs. “So is that what happened? It was in the same area.”

  Hatcher frowned, then sat forward, grabbing a pencil and drumming it against the desk. “Has to be. We have a seismometer drifting on the ice floes, but we lost the signal when the volcano went off.”

  He frowned again and she leaned forward at a sharp angle, a new question in her eyes. “Is something bothering you about it?”

  The drumming increased in tempo. Then abruptly the scientist became aware of what he was doing and tossed the pencil away. “The only ones near that area now are the Russians—some kind of political thing going on—so we have only one source for data. These things aren’t easy to measure, you know. I took a look at what they sent through to us, and to me, it looks—well, doctored.”

  “You mean faked?”

  Now the frown was deepening into a scowl. “Faked? I never thought of it that way. Sure. I guess it could have been faked. But why would they want to do that? It’s a volcano. Scientific data. Why would they want to fake that?”

  “Maybe they had something to hide.”

  Hatcher laughed. “Like what? A bomb?”

  Rachel stood and put out her hand. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Hatcher.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Island of Gozo, Maltese Archipelago

  “HER name is Jasmine Penz,” Skarda said.

  He was reading a message on the Stealth screen, a response to the blonde woman’s physical description he’d texted to Candy Man. “Goes by Jaz, J-A-Z. Age twenty-eight, born in Los Angeles. Four years in the Army, now a professional mercenary. Hires out to the highest bidder. History of steroid abuse. Psychological profile is sociopathic. Considered lethal and dangerous.”

  Flinders shivered. “You can say that again.”

  They were sitting on the terrace of Skarda’s villa on Gozo, the northernmost of the three Mediterranean islands that form the Maltese archipelago. Built from local Coralline limestone and mortared boulders, the house consisted of a main building that faced a vista of carob groves and undulating farmland, with a clear view of the distant strait and the blue-hazed hump of rock that was Malta. At right angles to the house a series of tiered terraces led to a tiled courtyard with a fountain shaded by palm trees. Below this level a pool deck bumped up against a honey-colored limestone cliff that dropped precipitously down to the turquoise and cobalt sea below. Steps cut in the solid rock wound down from the main terrace to a stone jetty and boathouse and a small private beach.

  They hadn’t been stranded at the Oracle for long. OSR had chartered a helicopter to take them from Siwa to Alexandria, where Skarda rented a private jet for April to fly them to Luqa Airport at Malta. Here they’d boarded the Cirkewwa ferry to Gozo. By the time they’d arrived at the villa they were hungry, but too exhausted to enjoy a full meal, so Skarda brought out a plate of peppered gbejna cheese with local bread and fresh tomatoes and opened a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino.

  And now the bottle was almost empty.

  “I’ve got more in the wine cellar,” he said, and disappeared into the house.

  Taking her glass, April pushed away from the table, crossing the flagstones of the terrace to lean against the balustrade. Down below, two sailboats glided past, heading for Mgarr Harbor.

  For a while Flinders sat in silence, sipping her wine, stretching her legs out in front of her. Then finally she said, “This Brunello is very good.”

  April’s head gave a little nod of acknowledgement, but she didn’t turn around. “The man knows his wine.”

  “He seems like a nice guy.”

  “He’s a good man to have at your back.”

  Flinders let another few seconds slide past. Then she asked, “I’m just curious. Are you and he—?” She broke off, letting the rest of the sentence hang in the air.

  “No.”

  “He’s very good-looking.”

  Suddenly April spun around, her eyes blazing with a ferocity that made Flinders shrink back. “When his wife died, the man’s heart was ripped into a million pieces. I don’t want him getting hurt again.”

  Flinders gaped at her, her mouth dropping open. Bright spots of color rose in her cheeks. “I’m not going to hurt him.”

  Her body rigid, April stood in place, her black eyes like gun muzzles. Then she moved her head, and some of the hardness drained out of her expression. “I believe you.” But her voice still held an edge of steel. Crossing to the table, she lowered herself down, her gaze fixed on Flinders’ face. “I apologize. You have to understand, I’m very protective of Park. It’s going to be a long time before he heals.”

  “It’s cool. I understand.” Flinders fought to find a smile. “It’d be nice to have someone who cares about me that deeply.”

  There was a noise at the open French door and Skarda stepped back onto the terrace, holding up the second bottle of Brunello. “Last one! Got to order another couple of cases!” If he had any inkling of the tension between the two women, he didn’t show it on his face. Pulling out the cork, he asked, “So what do we know for sure? Time to figure out our next step.”

  April had instantly regained her normal composure. Popping a slice of tomato into her mouth, she chewed on it thoughtfully. “We’ve got Jaz and a bunch of Bad Guys, and the Mi-25 Bad Guys, all looking for the Tablet.”

  “Which proves Flinders is right,” Skarda said. “The Tablet must give the location of the source of the orichalcum.”

  Still a bit shaken by April’s reaction, Flinders covered it up by concentrating on spearing a hunk of cheese with her fork. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “There are several stories in ancient literature about meteorites falling from the sky and being worshipped as magical objects of power sent by the gods. They were kept in shrines in Greece, Italy, Egypt, and Asia Minor, to name a few. So why couldn’t the orichalcum be some kind of metallic element that fell down from space in a meteor, like what we were talking about before? It’s what the inscriptions say on the Pillars.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “I remember reading something about this. Something about supernova explosions making heavy elements that aren’t found naturally on Earth.”

  April frowned. “But Jaz told you this thing is about oil. What do meteorites and supernova elements have to do with oil?”

  Skarda shook his head. “No clue. But we need to find out. Fast.”

  Flinders blinked as a thought struck her. Her face brightened. “One thing I forgot to tell you—when you were out in the desert I sort of messed with the translation a little. A professional scholar would notice, but they wouldn’t. It might be enough to throw them off the track, at least for a little while.”

  Skarda laughed out loud. “Beautiful! That tips the odds a little in our favor, I guess.”

  “We have another advantage,” April said. “They think we’re dead.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sackler Library, Oxford, England

  THE bell was insistent.

  Dr. Thomas Kirkland frowned. The bloody noise was tugging at him, like a lifeline tethered to a diver, jerking him from the dark depths back to the surface.

  “It’s time, sir. The bell has rung three times”

  The voice came from a passing security guard. Very polite, but overlaid with a trace of impatience.

  Glancing at his laptop’s clock, Kirkland scowled. Ten minutes until closing and the woman still hadn’t shown up. Not that he minded the extra money in his pocket, but he hated to wait. With a sigh he hunched forward, adjusting his glasses to better peer at the photographs of incised glyphs on his monitor.

  Someone had made a mess of the translation. Not that he was an expert in Old European scripts, but he knew enough to know that this was a botch. He shook his head and rolled his shoulders, wincing at the pain of stiff muscles. Little hammers of pain pounded inside his eyeballs. Maybe he needed new glasses. In this section of the library the lights were low, intensifying the glow
from the screen. But he’d purposefully chosen to sit in this secluded corner, facing the wall, so that no one would bother him.

  From behind him came the muffled scuffle of a footstep. The bloody guard again. Well, he wasn’t leaving until the last second. Too bad if the man wanted to get home. He needed his money.

  A shadow, deeper than the gloom around him, enveloped him.

  “I’m finishing now,” Kirkland said, not turning around. He let some exasperation leak into his voice, just enough to let the man know he was irritated. He knew how they were here—closing time meant closing time. It was aggravating.

  Kirkland’s fingers pecked at the keyboard, putting the finishing touches on his version of the translation, flicking his eyes up and down to make sure he wasn’t making his usual typing errors. He leaned forward, knitting his eyebrows in concentration.

  “Done?”

  Kirkland twisted around at the sound of the female voice. It was the muscle-bound blonde American woman he’d been waiting for.

  He nodded. “I don’t know who translated this for you, but they really bollocksed it up.” He used the crude expression in the hope it would offend her, because he was irritated by her waiting until the last moment to show up.

  But nothing registered on her face.

  American, he thought. Can’t understand the language.

  “Did you get it right?” she asked.

  “As much as I can. I also constructed the alphabet transcription you asked for, plus a basic dictionary.” He tugged his glasses down his nose and stared at her. He was dying to ask where she’d come across such an important manuscript, but he didn’t dare. He needed the money too badly. “If I were you, I’d consult Dr. Laura Carlson. She’s undoubtedly the best in the world with these kinds of scripts.”

  “She’s unavailable.”

  Kirkland shrugged and glanced at his watch. “There is the matter of my payment?”

  The blonde woman tilted her head at an odd angle and grinned. Then she took a quick step to close the gap between them, reaching out with both hands to grab the sides of his head and twist. There was a sharp muffled crack and one of Kirkland’s vertebrae shot out of his neck like the point of an arrow.

  He slumped, his sagging lips drooling bright blood on the desktop.

  Jaz picked up the laptop and strolled away just as the bell was ringing for the final time.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Geneva, Switzerland

  THE sky was heavy with cumulus clouds by the time April bought a tax vignette from the customs officer at Saint-Julien-en-Genevoisand merged the Aston Martin Vantage into traffic on the motorway into the city of Geneva. This was one of the fast cars she owned, housed in Skarda’s eight-car garage on Gozo. Skarda owned several cars as well, including a Bentley Azure, but he hated to drive. Whether it had wheels, wings, or sails, he wanted only to be a passenger. Which was just one more reason he felt lucky to have been teamed up with April—she liked nothing more than to have the pulse of a big V12 pounding under her feet and the wind whipping her long dark hair into a frenzy.

  It had been best to drive one of their cars, Skarda had thought, to keep their names off rental and passenger lists. As routine business, OSR’s document division supplied them with passports under various pseudonyms, but they couldn’t fake their photos. And Flinders only had her own I.D. So they’d taken the ferry from Valetta to Pazzallo, on the southern coast of Sicily, and headed up through the boot of Italy to the Swiss border towards the CERN campus, where Candy Man had set up a meeting with a physicist friend he’d known at MIT.

  Now to the southeast Skarda could see the television tower thrusting up from the summit of Mount Saleve, the first ridge of the Bernese Alps, and opposite, to the northwest, the distant humped blue shoulders of the Juras, their peaks whitened by crusts of snow. Deep under the ground, he knew, the seventeen-mile-long ring of the Large Hadron Collider lay buried, straddling the Swiss and French border.

  The appearance of the CERN complex surprised Skarda, looking more like a campus of white concrete bunkers and warehouses than a world-famous scientific research institute. Turning into the visitors’ lot, April slotted the Vantage into a space in front of a concrete-and-glass building marked “33”, where a man in faded jeans and hiking boots was waiting for them. When they climbed out of the car he broke into a smile, waved, and trotted over. Skarda liked him immediately. He was in his mid-twenties and skinny to the point of emaciation, with a scruffy light brown beard and a T-shirt littered with advanced mathematical symbols.

  He stuck out his hand. “I’m Ezra Yadin. You’re Park, April, and Flinders, right? Recognized you right away from Horny’s description. Welcome to CERN!”

  Skarda took his hand, looking puzzled. “’Horny?’”

  Ezra cocked his head, scrutinizing him with a curious grin. “Mike Hornblower. ‘Horny’. We called him that because he was scared to death of girls. Never went near one without wanting to hurl.”

  Skarda laughed. “’Horny’? That’s funny! To us he’s ‘Candy Man’.”

  “That sure fits! I remember seeing him sitting at his desk with about twenty Hershey bars in front of him. Two hours later they were gone.” He bobbed his head in recollection. “I tell you what—all of us at MIT were a bunch of Uber-nerds and pretty smart, I guess, but Horny blew us all out of the water. Did you know he dropped out after his junior year? The professors told him he should be teaching their classes. He wasn’t much on physics, but I’ve never seen anyone better with computers. He could hack into anything.” His voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “Word is, he hacked into the NSA supercomputer at Ft. Meade! Pretty awesome, huh?

  “Anyway…” He lifted his hand and flourished it at the campus. “This is it! Not much to see up here, except the Globe.” He pointed across the street at what looked like a hundred-foot-tall rusty golf ball jammed halfway into the ground. “They show movies in there, have conferences—that sort of thing. It’s sort of our trademark. Looks like it’s made out of metal, doesn’t it? It’s really made out of wood.” He pointed at the ground. “But the really cool stuff is down there. Come on. I’ll show you!”

  ___

  Skarda’s ears were popping by the time the service elevator doors valved open and Ezra ushered them into a lobby made of concrete blocks. “Welcome to the LHC,” he said. “The world’s largest particle accelerator. You are now three hundred and fifty feet under Switzerland.”

  He had issued them red hard hats and brought along a steel oxygen tank. “Just in case anybody needs some down there,” he’d said with a grin.

  Leading them down a short cement hallway, he held open a wooden gate, then ushered them into a glassed-in room crammed with computers, electronic gear, and monitors. Two men and a woman in hard hats sat at computer stations and didn’t look up as they entered.

  Through the glass Skarda could see the collider itself. It looked like a oversized, silver sewer pipe intersected by a series of cobalt blue rings and adorned with bolts, cables, and magnets.

  “This tube is the particle accelerator,” Ezra explained. “It has to be kept really, really cold—just a couple of degrees above absolute zero, which is just about minus four hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “So what exactly do you do here?” Skarda asked. His ears were popping again and claustrophobia was beginning to gnaw at him, intensified by a constant pounding noise in the background that sounded like someone beating on a thousand drums all at once.

  “Well, to give you the basics, we break up a bunch of hydrogen atoms, harvest the protons, then accelerate bunches of these protons—called ‘hadrons’—around the tube at about three meters per second slower than the speed of light—pretty fast! But we fire more than one beam of protons, one going clockwise, the other going counter-clockwise, and then let them smash into each other. The idea is to break these particles down into their own constituent smaller particles to see just what matter is ultimately made of. Once we do that, there are five detectors
along the path of the ring—ATLAS is one of them, where I work—where there are powerful magnets that deflect the trajectory of the beams to spray the particles resulting from the collisions into the detectors where they can be trapped, photographed, measured, and studied.”

  April adjusted her hard hat. Even she was looking curious. “Is that when the black hole happens?”

  Ezra threw his head back and laughed. “One of the first things I’ll say is that nothing’s impossible, but that’s pretty much of a myth that the media glommed onto. Look at it this way—in space black holes are caused by the collapse of massive stars, so in other words, you need a lot of mass to create a black hole, which is why they exert such an enormous gravitational pull on the objects around them and why they can suck in matter and light. But a micro-sized black hole, which is the only kind that could possibly be created here, would have almost no mass, and so would have an almost zero gravitational pull and so would not grow. As a matter of fact, even if we could generate one here, which is doubtful, all it would do would be to almost instantaneously evaporate.”