The Fusion Cage

XXXVIII

The Las Vegas crowds were dense, rivers of humanity flowing between endless sparkling lights flashing in the darkness. The city was like that, built in the centre of a desert plain and glowing like a galaxy of stars amid the blackness of space. Noise, heat, light, vehicles rushing to and fro, laughter, and beneath the glossy veneer a grimy underbelly of crime and suffering.

Vagrants rifled through bins overflowing with the casually discarded detritus of a humanity that possessed far more than it needed. Young dudes in shades and hoodies surreptitiously exchanged wads of cash for small packages. Hookers lingered on the corners of the darker streets, not all of them women, some of them neither fully woman nor man.

Society at both its best and its worst, a modern day Sodom intoxicated by the heady elixir of unrestrained capitalism.

Mary Meyer walked through this gloating apocalypse of excess as though striding through a valley of death. She saw nothing around her that made her admire what humanity had achieved, a life where nobody cared, where nothing really mattered but the next drink, the next hit, the next woman or man for hire in some dingy low — rent motel. She glanced up at the towering casinos and hotels, magnificent in their glamor and yet rotten to the core with greed and the criminal foundations upon which they had been built. Her beloved, brave Stanley had hated this city with all of his considerable passion, and now those who had built it had consumed him and spat him out, dead and derided and forgotten. Tears blurred her eyes, the flashing lights smeared into a kaleidoscope of color that sickened her with its unnatural haze.

She forged ahead, pulled her baseball cap low over her eyes. She was hot and uncomfortable, and not just due to the heat of the Nevada night or the disgusting display of profanity all around her. The padding she had placed under the sleeves of her shirt and trousers bulked her out, changing her appearance to conceal her from easy identification. Hair dye and clothes that she would not normally be seen dead in that emulated those of the tourists oggling at the city around them completed the illusion.

Mary knew that the government possessed the ability to identify faces from the merest glimpse on a CCTV camera, so she kept her head down and hoped that the dazzling casino lights would help camouflage her appearance further and fool the cameras. In her hand she held a cell phone, purchased for cash in a store downtown as soon as she had arrived. Upon the phone she had installed an app, which she had created herself, and distributed to a small network of people whom she had confided in from the moment she had fled Clearwater.

To have abandoned Amber in the wilderness had been the most heart — breaking thing that Mary Meyer had ever had to do in her life, and that pain only cemented in her mind the importance of what she was now endeavouring to do. Had Amber been caught, she would have been used as leverage against Mary and Stanley. But far out in the woods, she was safe enough and Mary had hoped, prayed even to a god that she did not believe in, that she would realize what had happened and find her way to safety, somewhere else.

Amber was a fighter, a spirited girl whom Mary had raised from just three months old. Her mother, a drunken drug abuser out of Bedford, had abandoned the baby girl on the doorstep of All Saint’s Church in the town. Mary and Stanley had searched for just such a baby, one given no good start in life, and had been successful in adopting Amber. They had given her a life that otherwise would have been denied, for her mother had died of a drug overdose four years later in a shack in Villamont. Amber had never asked about her and Mary, with relief, had never made an attempt to speak of the dead woman.

The phone in her hand buzzed and she looked down at it.

The app revealed her location in the city, as tracked by local cell phone towers, and also displayed the location of some fifty accomplices moving through the city in various locations.

It had not been hard to recruit people to her cause. With one hundred million dollars available to her and a willingness to approach just the right kind of people for the job, she had assembled a small force of like — minded individuals who had followed her work on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions for years, and it had only cost her a couple of million dollars to do so — half the payments already in place, the other half when the task was complete. Now, her faithful minions were scurrying this way and that across the city, all of them with a small but essential task.

And now Amber was with her, and ready to play her part, a more crucial one now than Mary would ever have dared to hope for. But in the wake of Stanley’s death, Amber had been clear: she wanted in.

Mary had spent a few weeks identifying the critical power — supply lines streaming into Las Vegas from the surrounding power stations that fed the city’s enormous appetite for electrical power. Gorging itself like some gigantic, hideous monster, Las Vegas glowed with its greed for power, consuming more energy in one day than some towns did in an entire year. Each of those power cables represented a high — voltage intravenous line that kept the city alive and also prevented its inhabitants from suffering the heat of Nevada’s mid — day sun, while also providing the power for water pressure to prevent them from dying of thirst, and energy for sewage works and treatment plants that spared them the ignoble fate of drowning in their own waste.

All of it required power, and Mary Meyer now held that power in her hand. On the screen as she glanced at it, amid all the tiny green dots that represented her work force, was a single blue dot that remained steady and still, far to the bottom right of the display.

The Fusion Cage.

Mary’s plan was deceptively simple. At the required time, the minions she now employed would each detonate an explosive charge that would sever the high voltage lines coming into the city. In a single, bold stroke she would cut Las Vegas off from its energy supply, starving the beast within seconds. The lights of Las Vegas would go off, along with all computer networks, phones, Internet, air conditioning, water supply, sewage treatment, everything, gone, in an instant.

In the same instant, at a location only she herself knew, she would deactivate the only available source of power that could save Las Vegas’s poisonous strip from economic collapse. Then, and only then, would she reveal her hand.

She knew that the casinos would bend to her will. Devoid of power and reliant upon generators that only possessed enough fuel for a few hours’ of work, they would be facing ruin as the gamblers flocked away in their droves. Without power the casinos were nothing, gigantic monoliths to greed and cash that held no sway over their countless victims. But Mary could change all of that, and not only return the power to them but also provide it entirely for free, saving them millions of dollars in energy bills.

Mary had long ago accepted that to change the world, you first had to grab the people with the money by the balls.

Right now, unbeknown to the most powerful people in Las Vegas, Mary Meyer had her fingers curled tightly around their most prized possessions and was about to start squeezing.

‘She could be anywhere.’

Ethan drove slowly onto Las Vegas strip and saw the galaxy of lights stretching away before him, a highway of color amid the immense blackness of the Nevada desert.

Lopez was right. Vegas was the perfect place for Mary Meyer to hide herself, to vanish amid the roiling crowds of tourists, card — sharks, drifters and addicts that made up so many of the city’s countless inhabitants. Whatever she had in mind, and Ethan felt certain that she did indeed have a plan, it was likely going to involve switching the lights off across one of the most famously excessive cities on the planet.

‘She’ll blow the power stations,’ Lopez guessed. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

Ethan shook his head.

‘But that’s just what bothers me, it doesn’t make sense. Everything that Stanley set out to achieve involved helping the ordinary people of the world, not plunging them into darkness. Mary must share the same passion, and blowing up power stations won’t achieve anything in the long run, unless … ’

Ethan imagined the sight of Las Vegas in absolute darkness. Of course, the casinos and hotels would be able to run off generators for a while, a standard back — up system to prevent the immense loss of revenue from black — outs that afflicted all cities from time to time. But the control of that power, that ability to switch it on at will and not have to worry about revenue, was a different matter. The power companies could not do that because they would lose revenue themselves, be held to account, profits and shareholder confidence vanishing overnight. But Mary, if she did indeed have a second fusion cage, could hold the entire city to ransom and …

‘She’s not going to blow up the power stations,’ Ethan said. ‘That’s not her plan.’

‘How do you know?’ Lopez challenged. ‘Her husband was just murdered by the people she wants to stop. Revenge is a powerful motivator, believe me.’

‘She wants revenge all right,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but this has always been about hitting the corporations where it hurts the most — their pockets. She doesn’t want to destroy the city’s infrastructure, she’ll need it herself to distribute power from any fusion cage she might possess. She wants to shut down the power and then come to the rescue, to show the world that her husband was right, that Stanley Meyer was trying to save the planet and was murdered for his troubles.’

Lopez’s dark eyes flew wide.

‘The solar array!’ she said suddenly. ‘Crescent Dunes, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s the city’s back — up power source,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘Much of the power it produces is to light the Vegas Strip.’

‘But that’s solar power,’ Lopez frowned. ‘Why would she go there?’

‘That’s what she wants, the exposure, the visibility. The solar plant is iconic. If she’s figured out a way to demonstrate the fusion cage in action that nobody can deny, she’ll be untouchable — any attempt on her life will result in social unrest on a global scale.’

Ethan grabbed the wheel of the car and swerved off the main strip as he sought a fresh route out of the city.

‘It’s past midnight,’ Lopez said as she glanced at her watch. ‘Whatever she’s going to do, it’s going to be soon.’

Ethan’s cell phone rang as he drove and Lopez picked it up.

‘Ethan’s phone.’

‘I have a track for you,’ came the response, and although she had never met Hellerman, Lopez could guess from the digital hiss of distortion on the line that matched the one she had heard whenever she spoke to Jarvis that she was speaking to his faithful assistant.

‘Go ahead.’

‘It’s heading north on the I95 toward Tonopah, range twenty eight miles. The signal matches Amber’s cell phone.’

‘That’s toward the Crescent Dunes project,’ Lopez confirmed. ‘Amber must already know what Mary is about to do. But it could be a decoy, something to throw us off.’

‘We’ve got no choice but to follow her,’ Ethan said, raising his voice enough so that Hellerman could hear it. ‘There are no other leads right now and we can’t search the Vegas Strip, it would take weeks and we only have hours. We’ve got to take the chance that Amber’s letting us know where she’s going.’

Lopez switched the cell to speakerphone as Hellerman replied.

‘I can offer you no further assistance. The KH–12 Keyhole satellite I tasked for this is already moving on toward other regions and is out of range and Jarvis is out of the loop completely. Even General Nellis isn’t playing ball any longer. Majestic Twelve, whoever they are, must have got to him somehow. In addition, according to transmissions intercepted recently, the FBI are on your tail again with agents deployed into Vegas and a BOLO out with local law enforcement. You’re on your own now, I’m afraid. Good luck, Hellerman out.’

The line went dead and Lopez looked at Ethan.

‘On our own again. Color me surprised.’

Ethan smiled grimly as he accelerated out of the Vegas Strip onto the I95.