The Fusion Cage

IX

The quiet, leafy cul — de — sac that Ethan and Lopez drove into was a far cry from the cramped surroundings of Clearwater some fifty miles to the south. Large, modern homes with double garages overlooked perfectly manicured lawns, flawless asphalt roads and spotless sidewalks as Ethan pulled into the curb and switched off the engine.

‘Looks like somebody’s gone up in the world,’ Lopez observed as she climbed out of the vehicle, the sun warm on her face and the sky flecked with a handful of white clouds.

Amber climbed out behind Lopez as Ethan glanced at a photograph of a man named Red McKenzie, or Mac for short. Mac had worked in the town of Clearwater for more than thirty years as an automobile repair man, carving a trade fixing the four — wheel drives of loggers moving in and out of the town. His property in Clearwater had been in a trailer park out back of the town and fairly close to the local bar, presumably so he could stagger his way home with greater ease at night.

Ethan looked up at the five bedroom house before him, complete with double garage and what looked like a brand — new Ford Ranger parked on the drive. The garage was open, as was the hood of the Ford Ranger, and he could hear somebody tinkering with tools as they walked up the drive.

Ethan glanced at Lopez, who understood what Ethan wanted without even so much as a gesture. Lopez walked up one side of the truck as Ethan walked up the other, Amber hanging back out of sight as they approached Mac.

It was possible that Mac was partially deaf, or more likely that he was so engrossed in tinkering beneath the hood of the Ford that he did not notice either Ethan or Lopez moving to stand either side of him. Despite the immaculate house and brand — new vehicle, Mac was dressed in an ancient pair of dungarees smeared with paint, grease and oil, and he was wearing a baseball cap of a similar vintage. His jaw was heavily forested with silvery stubble and there was a faint whiff of cigarettes and alcohol about the guy as Ethan rapped his knuckles on the Ford’s hood.

Mac McKenzie jerked upright and a pair of hazy gray eyes fixed upon Ethan in surprise.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he croaked, one hand tightly gripping a wrench.

‘Take it easy,’ Ethan said as he raised his hands. ‘We’re just here to ask you some questions.’

Mac turned and saw Lopez standing behind him, and his frosty demeanour changed instantly.

‘Well you can ask me any questions you like, honey,’ he said as a toothy yellow grin spread across his features.

‘That’s just as well, because we’ve got a lot of questions to ask,’ Lopez purred in reply. ‘How’s the new house working out?’

McKenzie peered back and forth between Ethan and Lopez, and he replied carefully.

‘Me, I’ve lived here all my life. My Pa and my grandpa both lived just down the road, you can check the census if you like.’

Ethan grinned, McKenzie’s response clearly a patter taught by whoever paid him off.

‘Yeah, we know,’ Ethan replied. ‘The census will show exactly what the people that paid you to come here want it to show, and there will be no record of you or your family ever living in a town called Clearwater.’

McKenzie shrugged vaguely. ‘Clearwater? Don’t recall me ever hearing of a town called that.’

At that moment, Amber strode around from the rear of the Ford Ranger and pointed at McKenzie.

‘The hell you don’t, Mac!’ she snapped furiously. ‘What the hell are you doing here and how did you come by this house?!’

McKenzie’s eyes flew wide as he looked at Amber, and then he struggled to drag a look of confusion across his face.

‘I’m sorry Missy but I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you?’

Amber took a single pace forward and Ethan winced as he heard a sharp crack as the girl’s knuckles collided with McKenzie’s jaw and sent him sprawling across the wing of the Ford Ranger.

‘You know damn well who I am and why I’m here!’ Amber almost shouted. ‘Where the hell are my folks?! Who paid you all this money to come and live out here!’

McKenzie’s shock was replaced with an anger sufficient for Ethan to step forward in front of Amber and pin McKenzie’s wrist down to prevent him from using the wrench.

‘We know you were all paid off,’ Ethan said.

‘And we know that you’re not going to talk and risk losing everything you’ve gained here,’ Lopez added. ‘But not everybody was as lucky as you, and we need to know what the hell happened in Clearwater.’

Ethan released McKenzie’s wrist and the old man pulled himself off the Ranger’s hood and glared at them.

‘I got nothing to say to you folks. I don’t know any Clearwater.’

Amber seemed to get control of her anger as she hissed at McKenzie.

‘Paid you a lot of money, didn’t they,’ Amber said as she gestured to the house and the new truck. ‘I expect you’re looking forward to a nice future without the need to work. But my father has disappeared, and he was going to be worth a thousand times what you’ve been paid to keep your rotting mouth shut. You really think that Stan would have abandoned his friends, not brought them along with him? He shared that device with all of you, took away your energy bills, and this is how you repay him?’

McKenzie’s face fell in shame but he clung to his fortune and future as tightly as he did the wrench in his hand.

‘We didn’t have no choice,’ he uttered. ‘It was accept the terms or walk with nothing. What would you expect us all to have done? Stanley took off, fled before the troops arrived. They sat me down, offered me more money than I could have earned in ten lifetimes to just up sticks somewhere else and say nothing to anybody about it.’

‘Who?’ Ethan asked. ‘Who offered you money?’

McKenzie beckoned them in closer, looking about him as though suddenly nervous that they were being listened to.

‘I don’t know who they were and frankly I don’t give a damn. They were good to their word and I’ve never seen them again since.’

‘Tell us,’ Lopez insisted. ‘We not going to go to these people and tell them that Mac McKenzie ratted them out. We’re already on their trail, you’ll just be saving us some time and I have a feeling that they’re not likely to take away what they’ve given you for fear of you shouting about it. Tell us what you know, and we’ll be on our way.’

McKenzie peered at them certainly. ‘Who are you folks?’

‘Truthfully?’ Ethan said. ‘We’re working for the Defense Intelligence Agency and we know what happened at Clearwater stinks. We know that the entire town was paid off to remain silent, and that the money offered was a powerful incentive to do so. We’re not here to take it from you, just to find out what happened.’

‘It’s important, Mac,’ Amber insisted. ‘What my father did may now cost him his life, and if somebody doesn’t help us then we can’t help him. Just tell us what happened.’

McKenzie sighed and tossed his wrench down alongside the Ford as he rubbed his temples with his fingers, leaving greasy smears across his forehead.

‘Old Stan called a meeting down in the town hall, one night during the week. The councillors were there too and a couple of the bosses of the local logging firms. Stan told them that he wanted to wire up the town’s electricity supply to something he had designed. He said that if it didn’t work out, then they would simply rewire to the National Grid and carry on as normal. But he said that if it did work, we’d never pay another energy bill as long as we lived.’ McKenzie chuckled. ‘That got everybody’s attention. We figured we had nothing to lose, so we went ahead and let ‘im do it.’

‘What happened after that?’ Lopez asked.

‘Stan was as good as his word. The power supply went off while he wired up this device of his, and then suddenly the power was back on and that was that. Nothing changed, except the fact that our electricity bills stopped coming in, because all the bills read zero.’

‘Didn’t the local electricity companies come in and ask what was going on?’ Ethan asked. ‘Surely they must have had a stake in it all?’

‘They showed up a couple of days later,’ McKenzie said. ‘We all just said the same thing, that we were on oil burners now and we didn’t need an external electricity supply. That’s what Stan told us to say, that we were to say nothing about the device he had installed. Those electricity company guys weren’t impressed and they didn’t like it, but using oil burners is quite common in these parts and there’s really nothing they could do about it. We didn’t hear anything from them after that.’

‘Somebody must have noticed though,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘How long was it before the troops showed up?’

McKenzie leaned against the Ford and folded his arms as he frowned thoughtfully.

‘About a week. Things were going great and everyone was really excited about getting energy for free. Many of the houses that had previously been on oil burners took advantage of Stan’s device and were delighted at the savings they were making. Everybody was really amped I guess, about what might happen in the future. Stan was adamant that we must keep quiet about it, that there’d be those who’d attempt to stop him from developing the device further, especially the oil and gas companies. But the town’s council were keen to publicise what had happened, because they knew it would stop that local company from mining the mountaintops outside of Clearwater.’ McKenzie looked at Ethan. ‘Stan was against that, of course. He said we should wait, get things more sorted before we started advertising what had happened.’

‘Did the council listen to him?’ Ethan asked.

‘Yeah, they listened,’ McKenzie said. ‘They knew how Seavers Incorporated had used dirty tactics in the past to gain mining rights in other towns in other states, so they knew they had to play their hand right. All of the councillors were on board and agreed to say nothing about the device.’ McKenzie sighed again. ‘That’s the damnedest thing about it. Stanley insisted that when the time came, the device schematics, the plans for making these things were to be distributed by mail and by Internet across the globe as fast as possible. He had this crazy plan of printing thousands and thousands of copies of the blueprints and just mailing them to all corners of the country, so that people could build these things for themselves rather than buy them from Stan.’

Ethan looked at Lopez and she shook her head in amazement.

‘I’ll be damned, he really was planning to give it all away for nothing,’ she said.

‘Just like I told you,’ Amber replied. ‘My father wasn’t going to make a fortune from this, he was going to give it away to humanity for the better of us all.’

McKenzie nodded, clearly ashamed at his own selling out in the face of Stanley Meyer’s extraordinary altruism.

‘Stan was apparently about to get ready to distribute his plans when suddenly he and his wife just took off as fast as they could in the middle of the night. Only reason I knew they’d gone was because I was on my way home from the local bar and saw their car leave, the trunk packed full of suitcases. I was pretty much drunk at the time, but in the morning I figured that they decided to get themselves out of sight before the storm broke just in case Stan was right and somebody was out to get them.’

‘And you never saw them again?’ Ethan pressed.

‘Nope,’ McKenzie replied. ‘That was the last I ever saw of Stan and Mary, and the soldiers showed up less than two days later.’

‘Tell us about them,’ Amber insisted. ‘Anything you can remember.’

‘That is pretty much everything,’ McKenzie admitted with a frown. ‘It’s not every day your town gets shut off by the military, and men in sharp suits offer you twenty million bucks to say nothin’.’

‘Twenty million,’ Ethan echoed. ‘That was the price of silence for you?’

‘For all of us,’ McKenzie replied. ‘It was a once only deal, take it or leave it. No taxes, paperwork all sorted. New name, new home, family included. They just wanted us to disappear and say nothing ‘bout what happened, and they made it real clear that we should never, ever return to Clearwater or mention it ever again.’

‘And what about Stan’s device, the one that was powering the town?’ Ethan asked.

‘Whisked away as soon as we’d all agreed to the deal,’ McKenzie replied. ‘I was one of the last to leave, mostly because I hadn’t tidied my trailer in years and it took me forever to find all the crap I wanted to take with me. The power went out just before I was finished, and I saw them taking away some sort of bright device that they had shielded with large tarpaulins and placed on the back of a truck. I’d have taken the damn thing to be a UFO or something if I hadn’t known what Stan had been up to.’

‘What about the men who offered you the deal?’ Lopez asked. ‘Did they identify the agency with which they were working, or give any clue as to who they were?’

‘Nothing,’ McKenzie said. ‘They were straight — talking folk, no wasted words, and made clear that time was of the essence, if y’know what I mean. From what I saw of the troops outside the barricade around town, their uniforms carried no insignia and their vehicles were unmarked. I did some time in the army back in the day, and I’ve never seen soldiers moving without any insignia like that on US soil.’

‘Paramilitary,’ Ethan said, ‘pretty much what we already knew.’

‘Twenty million,’ Amber murmured. ‘There are not many families who would have turned down a sum of money like that. It’s the kind of cash sufficient to last a lifetime if it’s handled well.’

‘Yeah, there were conditions,’ McKenzie admitted. ‘At least half a million committed to the purchasin’ of a property, and a limit on how much we could spend each year. It was all in the contract, which we signed, some kind of nondisclosure agreement.’

‘Clever,’ Lopez observed. ‘They were trying to minimise the chances of any of you being tracked down by overspending or drawing attention to yourselves.’

‘That figures,’ McKenzie admitted. ‘They wanted everything to be done on the quiet, no big fuss, no big announcements. Just get out of Clearwater, never come back and never say anything about what happened.’

‘You got any idea where everybody else went?’ Amber asked. ‘Old Jeff, Lauren Gardener, any of the logging contractors or hotel staff?’

‘Nope,’ McKenzie said. ‘We were all questioned separately and it was intimated that we should not discuss with any of the other folk what we’d been promised or where we were headed. I don’t think any of us were thinking of anything but the twenty million bucks that were waitin’ for us outside of Clearwater. Which reminds me, you all should be goin’ now, ‘cause I ain’t risking losing my fortune talking to you.’

Ethan figured that the old man had risked enough, and after thanking him he led Lopez and Amber back to their car.

‘He’s the smoking gun,’ Amber said. ‘If we can get him to go public, it’ll blow the whole thing wide open.’

‘Nobody will believe a word of it,’ Ethan said, ‘and I don’t think that Mac there is going to sing for us and lose his new fortune. We need a different angle here.’

‘Is there anybody your father might have confided in, a long — time friend perhaps?’

Amber nodded.

‘Doctor Cecil Grant,’ she replied. ‘He works at the National Ignition Facility in California, was there with my dad for years.’

‘We need to pay him a visit.’

Lopez glanced at Amber with interest. ‘And what about your angle, Amber? There’s twenty million bucks out there waiting for you and your own silence. Have you not thought about heading back to college and letting Majestic Twelve come striding into your life?’

Amber offered Lopez a curt smile. ‘I have something called integrity. You ever heard of it?’

Amber opened the car door and got in, slamming it behind her.

‘Glad I asked,’ Lopez replied.