The Lightning Stones

25

It was the end of the first full day of the conference, and Jason Rutland was exhausted — and he still had to get changed for a dinner he would have rather avoided. He got back to his room, threw his briefcase on the bed, and hung his suit coat over the back of the desk chair. It was the same generic mid-price room where he’d stayed dozens of nights in dozens of cities, attending dozens of near-identical symposiums. As a fresh-faced PhD he’d loved these events — the travel, the new places — but after twelve years he found the experience tedious and, worse, pointless.

He thumbed the remote and new age music filled the room while the television screen brightened to display the events currently taking place at the hotel. He had to flick through eight more promotional screens before actually finding a television station. It was the local news, running a story on global warming. He turned the sound down and decided to close his eyes for fifteen minutes.

Rutland lay on the bed, staring at the cream-colored hotel ceiling. He had been thinking constantly about the strange crystal Mercer had brought him and its fascinating electricity-conducting properties. Jason wondered if Mercer had had success in the South Pacific based on the calculations he’d done.

Suddenly an idea jolted him out of bed as if he’d been hit with a defibrillator. Maybe it was the mention of global warming on the local news, or maybe it was just a terrifying connecting of the dots, but Rutland had an ominous thought. He grabbed his tablet and started scrolling through the notes he’d made on the crystal sample.

Rutland worked for an hour, ignoring the buzz of his cell phone from the guys he was supposed to dine with. During the second hour of work, what had begun as a crazy idea was gelling into a likely scenario. Was somebody about to tinker with the earth’s environment? Why anybody would attempt geoengineering at this scale was beyond his ability to comprehend, but it was a gamble of unimaginable consequences. If he was right, and didn’t find a way to stop it, the world would pine for the days when climate change promised just two or three degrees of additional heat.

Rutland reached for his phone and frantically dialed Philip Mercer.

It was Mercer’s old buddy who answered. “H’lo.”

“Harry, is that you?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Jason Rutland. We met at—”

“Pimlico,” Harry supplied. “You’re the young fella dating my future wife, the Weather Lady.”

The man sounded drunk but earnest. “Thanks, Harry. She told me if she ever gets tired of me, you’re the next on her list. Listen, I need to get in touch with Mercer right away. Is he still out of reach?”

Harry was suddenly all business. “Booker has a satellite phone. Give me a minute to get the number.”

When Harry came back on the line he rattled off the string of digits. Jason thanked him, killed the connection, and immediately dialed the new number.

He got a computer-generated request for him to leave a message. “Mr. Sykes, this is Jason Rutland. It’s critical that Mercer calls me. I think I know what they’re going to do with the crystals if they ever get their hands on them. It could be a disaster if they screw up…I mean a real global catastrophe. I’m going to see if I can get some help, but we need to stop them. Please tell Mercer to call me right away.” He gave his cell number and clicked off.

Rutland recalled a line from a science fiction movie, saying that in a battle with a sentient computer system, humanity had been forced to torch the sky.

It sickened him to think that someone was playing with the technology to bring that about.