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  He glanced at April’s expression. “It looks like you’re disappointed.”

  “I am,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “I still don’t understand why you’re colliding these hadrons,” Skarda said.

  “We’re trying to create in the laboratory the fundamental particles of matter that aren’t stable and observable in the current universe—particles that were created just fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, the creation of the universe. There’s just so much of the universe we have yet to discover—about ninety-five per cent of it is still a mystery.” He chuckled. “Well, enough of that! I could go on all day about this stuff! So Horny said you’re interested in supernovas? My specialty is theoretical particle physics, but I know my way around a star.”

  Skarda nodded. “Would it be possible for some kind of unknown element to be made in a supernova explosion that could come to Earth as a meteorite, and then be used as a power source?”

  “What kind of power source?”

  “I’m not sure. I’d say something pretty powerful, though.”

  Ezra ran a hand over his scraggly beard. “I think what you’d be looking at is what’s called an ‘isomer’. An isomer is an isotope, which is an atom of a certain element that has a different mass because while they have the same number of protons as the main element, they have different numbers of neutrons. So basically it’s the same element with a different overall mass. An isomer of an element has much more internal energy than the normal state of the element. You can think of it as a highly charged-up version of the basic element.

  “Isomers are usually produced in nuclear fusion reactions. Most of these are highly unstable and radiate away all their energy within a fraction of a second, but some of them are called ‘metastable’, meaning that they have much longer half-lives before they dissipate all their energy. The isomer of the heavy element Hafnium, for example, has a half-life of thirty-one years, and the half-life of the Tantalum isomer is something like a quadrillion years.

  “What this means is that all the extra energy of the isomer is stored in the atom and ready to go off—boom!—if you can find a way to release it. So the explosive power of about a quarter teaspoon of the Hafnium isomer would be around seven hundred pounds of TNT, and this energy would be released almost instantaneously to the power of exawatts, which is measured in the quintrillions. You could heat a hundred tons of water to the boiling point in a split second and it would keep heating from there.”

  He grinned, looking at each of them in turn. “Cool, huh? And isomers, like all the heavy elements, can be formed in supernova explosions.”

  Skarda’s pulse quickened. “But you said, ‘if you can find a way to release it’.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem, for sure. Somehow you have to pump energy into the isomer to get energy out. One way to do it is to bombard the isomer atoms with X-rays. Another way, probably better, is to use some kind of concentrated light beam, like a laser.”

  “You mean, if you shot a laser beam at this stuff, it would explode?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. Big time. Boom! And the cool thing is, the explosion shoots straight up, like a volcano—not like a conventional bomb where the energy spreads upward and outward from the epicenter.”

  April frowned. “So why doesn’t the military make bombs out of it?”

  “Because there’s so little of it to be found naturally. And it’s way too expensive to manufacture in the lab.”

  Skarda turned the information over in his mind. “So isomers can be made in supernova explosions?”

  “Sure! A lot of spooky stuff happens when a star blows up. And a lot we don’t know about yet.”

  “Okay...so let’s say a star blew up and created an isomer that doesn’t occur naturally on this planet. Could it get here in a meteorite?”

  “Sure, it’s possible, I guess. But it would be very rare. But sure.”

  Skarda turned to Flinders, giving her an “okay” sign. From her pocket she pulled out a small metal case and opened it. Inside lay the chunk of the emerald pillar and its core of orichalcum. She handed it to Ezra.

  “Take a look at this,” Skarda said.

  The scientist shook the piece into his hand and turned it over, poking at it with his index finger. “Looks like beryl. Emerald, probably.” Then he angled the rock to catch the light, bringing it up closer to his face to study the red-tinted ore inside. He glanced up, his curiosity piqued. “This is the metal you’re talking about?”

  Skarda nodded.

  Ezra stroked his beard. “Awesome! Okay, I’ll tell you what. Let’s scrape a little off and see what we can see.”

  ___

  Ezra led them down a series of narrow, windowless corridors to a whitewashed laboratory room crammed with equipment. From a metal bench he picked up what looked like a bright yellow hand-held radar gun. “This is an XRF—an X-Ray Fluorescence analyzer. It’s very awesome, like a tricorder from Star Trek. It will instantly give a readout about your sample.”

  Flinders set the chunk of metal on the bench and the scientist aimed the XRF at it. “Awesome!” Peering at the readout screen, he beat the air in a fist pump, then straightened and turned to the group. “The outer casing is definitely gem-quality emerald. And the metal’s an isomer, all right! Metastable. It’s not Hafnium, but resembles it in structure. I think what we’re looking at is an entirely new element! You’ve got to let me keep some of this—I want to do more tests on it!”

  Skarda turned to Flinders. She nodded an okay.

  “So this would explode if you hit it with a laser?” he asked.

  “Oh, God, yeah! Big boom!”

  Skarda decided to take a shot. “Let’s say you wanted to blow something up to get at a source of oil. What would you do?”

  Again his hand found his beard. “Hmmm…You talking lots of oil?”

  Skarda nodded.

  Ezra thought about it for a few seconds. “Let’s see…the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea…But you wouldn’t need to blow up anything there.” Then he laughed out loud. “The Arctic Ocean! The Arctic seabed has one of the biggest untapped oil reserves on the planet, but you can’t get to it because the polar ice is too thick. If it were me, I’d find a way to superheat the water, melt the ice, and whammo! Instant oil.”

  Skarda stared at him. Something dark and cold twisted in his gut.

  “That’s it,” April said softly. “That’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to blow up the Arctic Ocean.”

  Flinders stared in horror. “All those poor animals! The ecosystem would be destroyed!”

  “I don’t think they care about the animals,” April said. Her voice held an edge of steel. “They care about putting money in their pockets.”

  Ezra bobbed his head slowly, turning the information over in his mind. “Nobody’s supposed to know this, but we have operational spaced-based laser weapons up there. So does Russia, and China, for all I know. I’ve heard a rumor that there’s some sort of super-secret agency connected to the NSA that’s running them. It’s pretty awesome, really! Unless you get hit with one, I guess. They’re calculated to orbit in highly elliptical paths called Molniya orbits, which have a low perigee—that’s the closest point to the Earth—in the southern hemisphere and a high apogee—the furthest point away from the Earth—in the northern hemisphere, so that the satellite will orbit faster around the southern hemisphere, then slow as it rises northward. It will make one revolution every twelve hours, but about three-quarters of that time it will spend hovering over the northern hemisphere.”

  “The northern hemisphere...like the North Pole?” Skarda asked.

  “You got it! So a satellite in this orbit is the closest thing to a stationary orbit. Perfect for a firing platform for a laser weapon.”

  “How can we stop it?”

  He shook his head sadly. “At that distance the laser can easily be bloomed—that means have its energy dispersed—by cloud cover or haze. And going through all the ocean water will slow it down,
so you’d have to train it on the target for a pretty long time. But the only real way to really stop it is to crack the password and operational codes and shut it down.”

  Skarda thought about it for a moment. “Can Candy Man handle something like that?”

  A broad grin broke out on the physicist’s face. “Oh, yeah! If anybody can, he can!”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Washington, D.C.

  RACHEL entered Tomilin’s office and took a seat, opening her laptop and tapping on the keyboard. On the wall the big LED monitor lit up, displaying aerial images of the Arctic Ocean, tiled across the screen.

  The water was littered with dead marine life: the bloated bodies of whales, walruses, seabirds, and thousands upon thousands of fish of all sizes.

  “These are images from the DRO satellite over the Pole,” she explained, trying hard to keep the fury out of her voice. The thought of such wanton destruction made her want to vomit. “I ran them past my contact at Woods Hole and he said no way a volcano would cause devastation to the marine population like this.”

  Tomilin’s steel-gray eyes betrayed no emotion. The holocaust to the Arctic marine life didn’t seem to bother him at all. “So it was some kind of thermal device?”

  She met his gaze, her own eyes steely now. “Devices, I think. Plural. I’m guessing modified ATBIP’s.”

  “Russian thermobaric bombs?

  “Yes. But with modified oxidizing agents because they were underwater. The Russians have been developing bombs like this for a while now. These things can produce bursts of incredibly high temperatures and no radiation.”

  “So what are you saying? Somebody deliberately set them off?”

  “That would be my guess. They used the hulk icebreakers to position the bombs accurately on the seabed. At two miles down the pressure is intense, but if you sink the bombs in a ship filled with water, they wouldn’t be crushed. I think they wanted to make it look like dormant volcanoes were erupting.” She paused to delete the images from the monitor. “I’ve been backtracking recent sales of decommissioned icebreakers. Within the past ten months six have been sold from various shipyards along the northern coast of Norway.”

  “Any I.D. on the buyers?”

  She shook her head. “They were all cash sales. But I’m running down leads, anyway.”

  “Okay, keep at it. What about the bombs?”

  “Nothing. No thefts have been reported.”

  Tomilin sat back in his chair and considered what she had told him, running a hand over his close-cropped skull. “The only reason someone would want to set off thermal bombs in the Arctic Ocean would be to melt the ice to get at the oil reserves. It’s got to be the Russians. That’s why there haven’t been any thefts—because it’s their bombs. Everything falls into place.” A brief flicker of annoyance crossed his face, then boiled over, exploding into a snarl of anger. He sat up straight, indicating that the meeting was over. “Well, at least they didn’t pull it off.”

  Getting to her feet, Rachel stared hard at him. “What if this was just a test run?” she asked softly.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Geneva

  FROM the window of their suite at the Hotel des Bergues, Skarda watched the lowering sun strike gold on the tips of the jagged peaks of the French Alps. Behind him, sitting across from April at a table crowded with room service trays and a near-empty bottle of Château Haut-Brion, Flinders was finishing reading aloud her complete translation of the inscriptions of the Pillars of Thoth from the new Toshiba Qosmio G35 laptop he’d had sent up.

  “Okay,” he said, turning back to the room. “So here’s what we have. The Black Sea lake flooded, Atlantis sank, and the survivors of the flood carried Thoth’s mummy and the Emerald Tablet to the sacred place in the mountains. Next question—where is that?”

  Flinders brooded. “That’s the problem. That was over seven thousand years ago. It could be anywhere.”

  But Skarda shook his head. “We have to think about this logically. If the lake was being rapidly flooded by the sea, then the most obvious thing to do would be to take the Tablet to higher ground nearby. Let’s look at a map.”

  Flinders accessed a map of the Crimean Peninsula. Pointing to the eastern tip, where a strait narrowed to a bottleneck to connect the Sea of Azov with the Black Sea and mainland Russia. “This is the Kerch peninsula, where I think Atlantis was.”

  Skarda and April peered at the coastline. “So it looks like it’s pretty much of a flat plain west of Kerch,” he said. “Probably steppe land that would have been inundated by the flood. But if you go south, the coastline is mountainous. That’s where they’d go.”

  April’s eyes flashed in exasperation. “It still doesn’t do us any good. The whole coast is one mountain range after another. It could be anywhere.”

  Skarda slid his glance sideways at her. “We could use GPR.”

  Flinders looked at them, puzzled. “What’s GPR?”

  “Ground Penetrating Radar. Basically you shoot radio waves into the ground and get images of what’s underneath from the reflections.”

  Flinders nodded her understanding, but her mind was already elsewhere. She was studying the map intently. “If you’re going to hide something in a mountain, then what you want is a cave, right?” Her finger traced over an area on the southwestern edge of the peninsula. “Here’s Sevastopol, on the coast. And here’s Bakhchisarai, just north of it, in the mountains. The place is known for its natural limestone caves. It’s riddled with them.”

  “We still have the same problem,” April said. “There could be hundreds of caves.”

  Peering at the screen, Flinders suddenly pressed her face closer and laughed out loud. “In ancient Greek mythology, the Sevastopol area was where the Parthenium was supposed to have been, a temple dedicated to the virgin goddess Artemis, where, in classical times. Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, was forced to make human sacrifices on a marble altar.” She lifted her eyes to look at both of them. “Human mythmaking always operates as a continuum, an evolution of story as religious traditions evolve over time. So if there’s a mountain here dedicated to the virgin goddess Artemis, who was just one later incarnation of the great lunar Mother Goddess worshipped in the Paleolithic Era, then you can bet it was dedicated to an earlier—Neolithic—version of the same Mother Goddess. Since they were a seafaring people, the Atlanteans would have undoubtedly worshipped an earlier form of Poseidon, but like all Neolithic communities, their main religion would have been dedicated to the Mother Goddess. You have to understand the religious tradition of the Goddess. From the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the cave was considered her sacred shrine, the actual womb of the Goddess herself, where souls were born and the dead returned to be resurrected and born again. And that’s where they’d take the Tablet. To a place they considered sacred—a cave, probably one located inside the mountain. Most likely the mouth would have been on the shore of the Euxine Lake.”

  Excited, Skarda leaned forward. “Do you know where the Parthenium was?”

  “Hang on,” she said, typing in a search. A moment later she read the answer off the screen: “’Cape Fiolente’. Right here. Just to the west of Sevastopol along the coast.”

  April didn’t like the news. “Wouldn’t it be under water now?”

  But Skarda grinned and raised an eyebrow at Flinders. “Have you ever gone scuba diving?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Fort Meade

  SITTING down in the unadorned white box that was her office, Rachel booted up her computer. Something about Tomilin was making her uneasy—something she couldn’t quite pin down, but which kept nagging at the edge of her thoughts. It wasn’t his creepy sexual interest, even though that repulsed her. He was up to something. Like many of the politicians she’d met in Washington, he was a hypocrite, wrapping himself in the flag to get votes but in reality only interested in putting dollars in his pocket. Rachel had been raised as a conservative herself, but her parents had instilled in her a truly patriotic love of h
er country and her flag, values which she had taken to heart and still held dear.

  This was why she despised men like Tomilin. She’d seen the indifference on his face when she’d shown him the images of the dead animals. He truly didn’t care. He had made a fortune in the oil business with insider deals, hedge funds, and conspiring to manipulate oil production and prices worldwide.

  He didn’t care about America.

  He cared only about himself.

  And his pal, David Charbonnet, seemed only a shade of a hair worse.