The Fusion Cage

XXXVI

The massive C–5A Galaxy of the 167th Airlift Wing out of Shepherd Field Air National Guard Base in Virginia had landed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada just before sunset, the sprawling military airfield within sight of Las Vegas’s glittering galaxy of lights already shimmering in the fading light of dusk as Ethan watched the sun setting behind the sandy colored mountains of the Sierra Nevada range.

Despite General Nellis’s lofty rank, the airfield was not named after him, but Ethan felt as though the senior officer deserved such an accolade for taking the chances that he had, along with Jarvis’s mysterious assistant, Hellerman. Ethan walked with Lopez off the C–5A along with the crew, both of them wearing uniforms that made them appear as nothing more remarkable than loadmasters or engineers.

‘This way.’

An Air Force sergeant guided them toward a dark blue personnel truck destined to carry the crew across the airfield to the crew rooms. There, Ethan and Lopez would split off from the main group and leave the base on their desperate mission to locate Mary Meyer and Amber.

‘Why do you think that she’s in Vegas?’ Lopez asked quietly as they rode in the truck with the tanker’s crew. ‘Can’t be the bright lights or the gambling, even with the money she must have taken from Majestic Twelve.’

‘Not with the money she’s got now,’ Ethan agreed. ‘I don’t know what she’s up to, but my guess is that she’s going to try to do something with the fusion cage and it involves Vegas. Think about it, both she and Stanley hated capitalism, and what better icon to money than Sin City?’

‘Good place to pick,’ Lopez observed as she looked out of one of the windows to the west, where the glow of the city was easily visible against the darkening mountains. ‘This place is lit up like Christmas every night of the year.’

On the journey down from Virginia, which had taken four hours in the C–5A as it travelled to take part in Nellis Air Force Base’s annual international ‘Red Flag’ combat exercise, Ethan had taken the opportunity to try to figure out why Mary would have chosen to conceal herself in such a brazenly excessive location.

A haven of pomp and glitz, Las Vegas was globally infamous for its excesses. The state of Nevada consumed more than twenty eight million megawatt — hours of power annually, that power drawn from the US national grid, which was supplied by more than six thousand power stations. However, Vegas’s City Center complex of hotels and casinos was so large that it had developed its own ‘off grid’ electricity power plant.

‘The whole central complex of one of the most illuminated cities on Earth is also completely off the US national grid,’ Ethan said to Lopez as he read from the screen of his cell phone a file sent to him by Hellerman at the DIA. ‘It has its own power station along with power supplied from the Hoover Dam complex. Most of Nevada’s energy comes from out of state and has few fossil fuel resources but substantial potential for geothermal, solar, and some wind power development. According to this, Nevada’s economy is not energy — intensive and consumption is well below the national average despite heavy use of air conditioning.’

‘So Nevada’s not as bad as people think?’

‘Depends on how you look at it. Two thirds of the state’s net electricity generation comes from natural gas fired plants but the state’s consumption exceeds in — state generation, the excess being supplied by high — voltage lines from Arizona and the Pacific Northwest.’

‘So it’s worse than people think too?’

‘Nevada takes fully one quarter of the energy created by the Hoover Dam,’ Ethan said. ‘Plus its two grids supply Vegas and the northern part of the state respectively, with a solar plant at a place called Crescent Dunes powering the strip in support. Only California takes more energy from the Hoover Dam. If there was ever a place where Mary might be able to make some kind of dramatic demonstration of what the fusion cage can do, it would be here.’

Lopez frowned.

‘You think that she’s going to do something dramatic? Cut the power off and then start things up again?’

‘It’s what I’d do in her position. There’s no hiding now. She’s taken the money from Majestic Twelve and run with it, and they’ll be hot on her tail. Internet releases about what’s happened and even print publications won’t be enough to save her. The only way she can save herself is to do something so spectacular that everybody on the planet will hear her name and see her face. Majestic Twelve will be rendered powerless to touch her — if she reveals the scale of the conspiracy her family has been hiding from and then she’s killed … ’

‘Too many questions,’ Lopez agreed. ‘It’ll be enough to turn world attention on to the Bilderberg conference and, by extension, Majestic Twelve.’

‘They’ve got to stop her or they’ll lose control of the energy industry,’ Ethan said as the truck slowed alongside the crew buildings on one side of the huge airbase. ‘Mitchell will be here by now and looking for Mary in the city.’

The truck came to a halt and the tanker crew disembarked as the sergeant led Ethan and Lopez through a side building. The flight bags they carried, ostensibly filled with flying regalia, instead contained their civilian clothes.

‘You can change in there,’ the sergeant said, clearly uncomfortable with the covert nature of what was transpiring. ‘A vehicle is awaiting you outside, silver, here’s the key.’

The sergeant handed Ethan a key. ‘You’re already cleared to leave the base but once off site you’re on your own, understood?’

‘Understood,’ Ethan replied.

With that, the sergeant turned on his heel and marched away as quickly as he could as Ethan and Lopez quickly changed out of their flight suits and back into civilian clothes. Ethan led the way outside to a large parking lot and hit the ‘unlock’ button on the key fob the sergeant had handed him. To his right, parked among a myriad of cars, a silver sedan’s lights blinked and a short beep from the alarm rang out.

‘Where do we start?’ Lopez asked as they walked toward the car. ‘Mary could be anywhere in the city and the FBI won’t be far behind us.’

‘She must have some kind of target in mind, something that she can both attack and then save at the last moment, that will be visual enough and obvious enough that the whole damned world will have to sit up and take notice.’

Lopez climbed into the sedan and opened a tablet computer she found in the glove compartment. She tapped in a few commands as Ethan started the engine and switched on the air conditioning to cool the vehicle’s sweltering interior.

‘According to this, the main supply of power to the Las Vegas area is delivered by the Edward Clark Generating Station in Whitney, east Las Vegas. It’s a major station, over a thousand megawatts of power.’

Ethan nodded. ‘That sounds like a good place to start. Mary and Amber must be together by now and she’ll know that her husband is dead and that she’s running out of time. Whatever she’s got planned, it’s going to happen tonight.’

‘There can be no further mistakes.’

Aaron Mitchell sat inside the limousine that had ferried him from the airport and into Las Vegas. The car cruised in silence, the tinted windows veiling Mitchell from the view of the countless tourists and residents flowing along the sidewalks and reflecting some of the glare from the myriad lights of equally countless casinos and hotels.

The voice he had heard was that of the same man he had met in Holland, his distinct tone and accent audible even over the digital scrambling that protected their conversation from even the most adept of hackers.

‘There can be little time remaining,’ Mitchell replied. ‘Mary Meyer knows by now that her husband is dead. She may not suspect us of involvement, but given Stanley’s deception it is my opinion that this was all pre — planned directly because of their mutual suspicion of government involvement in the cover — up of the cold fusion debacle of the 1980s.’

‘Then our cause is under direct threat,’ the voice said.

‘We have contained the Internet leaks,’ Aaron assured him, ‘and all other media outlets that Mary Meyer approached have been silenced on this matter. I can only assume that she now intends to do something direct in an attempt to draw attention to herself, and Stanley said that his fusion cage was not the only one in existence. We must assume that Mary Meyer, the actual inventor of the device, possesses another of its kind and may be building more of them as we speak.’

‘I do not need to impress upon you how vital it is that any fusion cages in her possession be retrieved and their security maintained indefinitely. The consequences of their appearance in the public realm would be catastrophic, would see trillions wiped off the market share of every major fuel and oil company across the globe. The economic ramifications, not to mention the political fall — out and the collapse of financial markets globally would be unmatched by any prior economic event in history. Find Mary Meyer, find the fusion cage, and destroy them.’

The line went dead and Aaron Mitchell leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His head still throbbed from where Huck Seavers had hit him with the vase, and despite pain — killers and the attentions of a skilled make — up artist to conceal the wound, Mitchell was for the first time in a long time at a disadvantage. His main concern was locating Mary Meyer or Amber Ryan, either of whom would give him the required leverage to bring the entire charade down and prevent a catastrophe that would end his career and ruin the reputations of many other men vastly more powerful than he. However, his second major concern was Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez.

Mitchell felt certain that Warner would already be in the city. The men he had dispatched to Virginia had reported that both Warner and Lopez had escaped local police and the FBI once again, this time commandeering an elderly couple’s vehicle and covering forty miles to the outskirts of Richmond before vanishing once again. Mitchell suspected General Nellis’s involvement but could not prove it and didn’t have the time right now anyway. Likewise he wondered whether Jarvis had somehow been able to slip Warner a warning of some kind before he had been forcibly ejected from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, hopefully for the last time.

Both Warner and Lopez had developed a nasty habit of appearing at the most vital moments and throwing spanners in the works of Mitchell’s missions, and he was growing tired of hearing their names. Freelancers, and bail — bondsmen at that, were harder both to control and to predict than paid employees of the government or armed forces.

Defense Intelligence Agency operative Douglas Jarvis had played a clever hand, keeping his own agents at arms — length and off the radar of the government, but that hand was now — defunct. Mitchell looked out of the windows at the glowing lights of the Las Vegas strip and cleared his mind of thought as he focused in on Mary Meyer and her single — minded mission to devastate the entire United States economy in a single, crushing blow. If Mitchell were in her shoes, where would he go and what would he do to complete his task before he was found and silenced?

Aaron’s eyes focused on the bright shimmering lights of the strip, and in an instant he knew that Mary intended to somehow subvert the power supply to the strip itself, and to do that she would need access to at least one of the main power stations serving the Las Vegas area.

A moment’s work brought up a series of power stations connected to the Nevada grid, and Mitchell knew that he would not have time to search them all in order to root out a single individual. More to the point, it would not be possible for Mary to hijack such vast industrialised sites in order to plug — in a fusion cage. In addition, how would Mary publicise the event? Nobody would know, and she had just one night in which to complete her task on her own…

Aaron thought of the commune that Stanley Meyer had hidden in, and in an instant he realized what Mary would most likely have done.

He reached for his cell phone, speed dialled a number and waited for the line to hook up.

‘What is it?’

‘I need every single resource we have in Nevada within the hour,’ Aaron snarled. ‘She’s not here on her own, she’s bought an army with her.’