The Lightning Stones

4

Marcel Roland d’Avejan’s hand tightened on the smartphone until his knuckles went white and an unconscious part of his brain realized he might crush the device.

“You did what?” he demanded in a rising shout, his normally accent-free English showing its rural French roots.

“It got out of hand,” the man in America replied. “What can I say? They’re all dead.” It sounded like he was sucking on a piece of hard candy. His speech was garbled and wet.

“You can say,” d’Avejan ranted with little-suppressed fury, “that you are a complete moron who can’t follow instructions. You were supposed to steal some goddamn rocks from a bunch of academics, not gun them down.”

The caller was a professional and knew that part of his job was calming clients when things didn’t go their way. A great deal of that process was just letting them vent. Corporate types like d’Avejan were the worst. They thought they ran in a hard and cruel world, but when the true levels of human depravity were opened up to them, they whined like frightened children. His opinion wasn’t swayed either way by the fact he’d been in d’Avejan’s exclusive employ for the better part of two years as special facilitator for his company’s global security arm.

“I will not say it was strictly necessary,” the ex-soldier replied. “However, their deaths will slow the investigation.”

“You can’t be serious,” the Frenchman scoffed.

“They are looking into a mass murder, not a theft. Totally different type of investigation. Trust me. For the first week the FBI will be turning over every rock in Minnesota looking for Al Qaeda operatives. Part of my team has already crossed into Canada with the sample and will be airborne in less than two hours. We will finish up here in the States and be out of the country no later than tomorrow at noon. The feds from D.C. won’t even have landed in St. Paul by the time we’re clear.”

Several long seconds passed. The security contractor knew exactly what was going through Roland d’Avejan’s mind. It was the same thing that had gone through his when the newest member of his team had opened fire hours earlier, without orders. The young security contractor thought one of the students had been reaching for a weapon. Of course there was no weapon. These were college kids and a couple of doddering professors. No matter the mistake, he realized even before the last victim bled out that he had no choice but to accept the circumstances and make the best of them. Accept, adapt, and overcome. It was a motto learned long ago.

He could almost feel his employer’s anger moderating as he came to understand there were some circumstances beyond his control. The quicker he recognized this, the quicker he could move on to the next phase of their operation.

“Are you sure no one followed you?” d’Avejan asked. He was once more in control. He was over the initial shock of being an accessory to a number of murders even if he hadn’t been directly complicit.

“Someone on a loader tried to ram us, meneer,” the mercenary admitted. “He missed and we left him in a ditch. We abandoned the truck two miles from the target site as planned and took to our secondary escape vehicles. No one saw them and we were well clear by the time the police were called in.”

“I don’t like the idea that a workman tried to stop you,” d’Avejan said.

“I wasn’t too keen either,” the man in America admitted. “I don’t know how he knew to come after us, but he was hell-bent to keep us from leaving.”

“Could he have seen what happened down in the mine?”

“No way.” On this point the security specialist was adamant. “Most likely he was responding to the shooting of the hoist operator and believed for a minute that he was Rambo. In the end his efforts were inconsequential. This was nothing to worry yourself about, meneer.”

Marcel Roland d’Avejan finally relaxed his grip on the smartphone. Not that it mattered if he crushed it. He treated the four-hundred-euro phones as burners, the way drug dealers used prepaids from a corner tabac. One and done. As in one call and toss the phone and its associated number.

“Call when your task is complete.” D’Avejan killed the connection and forcibly smashed the phone open to remove the battery before feeding the pieces into an industrial-style shredder behind his desk. The machine made an awful sound for just a few seconds and yet rendered the electronic marvel into so much ruined solder, copper, and plastic. The battery went into a recycling basket next to the shredder. Just because he trashed a few of these phones a week didn’t mean he wanted to trash the environment.

After all, saving the planet was what this whole mission was about.

He took a few breaths. His hands were shaky, and his stomach suddenly felt like it was filled with coiling snakes. Men were dead because of a decision he had made — not as the result of a horrible accident at one of the many industrial facilities d’Avejan controlled, but because they had been murdered. Gunned down in cold blood, for the simple fact they were witnesses and it was easier to kill them than deal with them.

One of the snakes lurched up his esophagus, forcing him to choke back a searing bolus of vomit. He ran for his office’s marble en suite bathroom and just reached the commode before his stomach heaved again and his breakfast spewed into the bowl. He gagged and spat, trying to clear his mouth as if he could also clear his conscience. His stomach heaved again, a powerful paroxysm that seemed to tear through his gut but produced nothing but a thin rope of foul liquid that he had to wipe from his mouth with a wad of tissue. He flushed away the evidence of his guilt but remained on his knees, repeatedly spitting into the bowl as his saliva seemed to have soured as much as the contents of his stomach.

Two full minutes elapsed before he hauled himself to his feet and brushed his teeth at the nearby sink. Only when he was finished rinsing with a swig of antiseptic mouthwash did he look at himself in the mirror in front of him.

D’Avejan was fifty-four, and thanks to regular tennis with two different pros, he remained in good shape. His hair, still more pepper than salt, had needed help, so he had the most expensive plugs money could buy, not that anyone could tell, and his skin remained taut thanks to subtle yet frequent bouts under a surgeon’s knife.

D’Avejan’s goal was to maintain what nature had molded him into on his forty-fifth birthday. He had read that was the peak age for many men. They had strength and masculinity, as well as the fine wrinkles and depth of expression that came with maturity and acquired wisdom. D’Avejan had set about stopping the hands of time, and had succeeded for the most part. He looked a decade younger than his actual age, and many of his friends teased him, saying that he kept a moldering portrait of himself in an attic to age for him. He would chuckle at that and also cross his mouth with a finger, entreating the person to keep his or her silence on the subject.

Today his looks were betrayed by a pallor that had washed away the tan he’d recently honed following a business trip to Dubai. And his normally bright blue eyes, undoubtedly his best feature, were haunted and red-rimmed as though he’d been crying. He touched a finger to the corner of one eye and felt liquid transfer to his skin. He had been crying, only in his gastric distress he’d not noticed.

He coughed, embarrassed by his appearance. Marcel Roland d’Avejan — he detested being called Marcel, and only allowed his wife to call him Rollie — was a self-made mega-millionaire. He had inherited a specialty welding company decades earlier from his bachelor great-uncle and turned it into one of the largest industrial combines in the European Union. Thanks in part to owning old rights to titanium-cutting machinery, the company had been poised to enter the lucrative aerospace business when d’Avejan’s aging uncle had succumbed to a strange immune system deficiency that would only later be known in France as SIDA — and as AIDS in the English-speaking world.

Young Roland had been his uncle’s right-hand man, and took over the rebranding of what had up until then been Nantes Metalworks, as named by d’Avejan’s great-grandfather upon his demobilization following the First World War. Roland d’Avejan shifted focus and built the company into Eurodyne, a conglomerate with annual sales of four billion euros and nearly eighty thousand employees in five distinct corporate divisions. Eurodyne dominated the manufacture of nearly all the jet turbine blades used in most of Europe’s military and civilian aircraft. Under his stewardship the company had long ago branched out from metals manufacturing into precision hydraulic systems, rail stock for freight and passenger service, consumer appliances like vacuum cleaners and refrigerators sold under a number of trade names, as well as energy production — following the acquisition of a power company running four nuclear plants in France and another in the Czech Republic.

In his climb to success, Roland had blurred countless ethical lines. He’d even paid, early on, to have a competitor’s son beaten in order to intimidate the rival and force him to relocate. Of course he’d cheated on taxes, raided workers’ pension funds, price gouged, engaged in price fixing, bribed, blackmailed, and knowingly sold defective equipment, but being party to murder was something he never would have considered.

Now that line had been crossed, and there was nothing for him to do but accept it and move on. He felt steadier. He noticed a few rust-colored vomit stains on his shirtfront. He worked himself out of his jacket, slipped the knot of his two-hundred-dollar tie, and peeled off the shirt. One of his many foibles was the fact he only wore a shirt once. It had started out as a bit of bravado when he first started making money, as if to say “look at me, I am so successful that my shirts are always new.”

Recently, though, as business stresses mounted, his onetime affectation was now the most visible sign of a burgeoning fear of germs. He had a grip on it, for the most part, but when people weren’t around to judge he would indulge in long showers with the most corrosive soaps he could find. Through an OCD Internet chat room he discovered a specialist who made custom lye-based cleaners that were barely fit for human use and would leave his skin rapturously parboiled.

When he was forced to be around others, he kept water-free hand sanitizer on him at all times. If questioned, he would explain he had developed a skin condition that caused him to break out at the slightest brush with unnatural chemicals. Given his well-established credentials as an environmental crusader who had turned Eurodyne “green” before it had been fashionable, people gave him a pass as a bit of an eco-kook and never mentioned it again.

From an eighteenth-century ormolu-accented bureau in a closet near the private en suite he plucked out one of twenty identical bespoke shirts with his monogram on the right cuff and real bone buttons. The cotton was so smooth it felt like silk against his skin. His wife had been out with friends the night before, so d’Avejan had taken one of his special showers. His torso looked like it had been scoured with a commercial sandblaster.

He dressed, knotting his tie so that the dimple was precisely centered, and stepped back out into his main office. The picture window from his thirty-fifth-story corner office looked out from Paris’s commercial center of La Défense over the Bois de Boulogne, the city’s second-largest park and home to the famous Hippodrome de Longchamp horse-racing track, and afforded him a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower. It was midmorning. The roads were snarled with traffic, the Seine teeming with early-season tourist boats, and yet the city had never looked fresher or cleaner.

D’Avejan helped himself to a Perrier from the wet bar tucked into a low credenza under the window and belched out the last of his inner turmoil. So what if the science team with Jacobs was dead? He didn’t know any of them personally, and their deaths would save untold millions, even billions of people in the not-too-distant future. Was their sacrifice high? Even d’Avejan was sorrowful that they had paid the ultimate price, but it was for a better future for the rest of humanity. He further assured himself that they hadn’t suffered. His special facilitator was too professional to have prolonged their agony. He imagined clean kill shots and vowed not to read any media accounts in case that wasn’t what had actually transpired. Better for his conscience if he could maintain the illusion that they had quick deaths rather than discovering the six scientists had died slowly over time.

He tossed the empty green bottle into the recycling bin and turned his attention to the Bloomberg terminal standing on a rolling cart he could hide away when he had guests. The high-tech portal into the financial world was an invaluable tool but ruined the elegant decor of his office suite with its industrial functionality. Better it remained out of sight when not in use.

He checked the latest price on Eurodyne and made the inevitable comparison to its peak a few years earlier. They were partly the victim of the credit crunch that followed the global real estate market implosion, but the steady downward spiral of his company’s worth could also be blamed on a feckless society that couldn’t see the woods for the trees. Eurodyne had been in position to become a world leader at the forefront of energy production, distribution, and storage. Instead, the energy arm of Eurodyne was slowly eroding away the profits made by the other divisions and dragging the company into the red. Share prices were down another half euro this morning because a contract with a Spanish utility was being “reevaluated,” which in the real world meant canceled.

No sooner had that sour thought raced across his mind than his private secretary buzzed him on the intercom. “Monsieur d’Avejan, Monsieur Pickford is on the line for you. As always, he claims it is urgent.”

D’Avejan’s eye gave a spasmodic tic. Ralph Pickford was a bottom-feeding parasite in the energy market. Or at least that’s what Roland liked to tell himself. In truth, the American billionaire was one of the shrewdest speculators in the business and happened to be the largest shareholder in Eurodyne outside of d’Avejan’s own voting bloc. It was why the Texan had unfettered access to the Frenchman and why he let his secretary’s “as always” gibe go without comment. She hated the abrasive American even more than d’Avejan did himself.

D’Avejan let out a frustrated breath, cleared his throat, and barked, “Put him through, Odette.” He didn’t wait for Pickford to say anything. “Ralph, this is not a good time. If you are calling to tell me the Spanish are pulling out of the deal, it is something I knew last night but could not divulge as it was an inside secret. I also know the stock is down another half euro, and I need not be reminded that if the price falls a further ten percent you will sell in order to claim the loss on your taxes, and that your withdrawal would have catastrophic consequences for my company. Have I hit all the highlights?”

In the six years since the oilman from Houston had acquired such a large stake in Eurodyne, Roland d’Avejan had been cordial at worst and obsequious at best to Pickford. He had no idea where he’d gotten the wherewithal just now to speak so forcefully to a man who could effectively ruin him with a single phone call.

It was obvious that Pickford hadn’t expected such a forceful greeting either because the line buzzed with stunned silence for several long seconds. “Well,” Pickford drawled, drawing out the word for several long, chuckling syllables. “Sounds like someone found a pair in their briefs this morning.”

Having spent so much time around Americans, d’Avejan understood the insult immediately.

“I wear boxers, Ralph, and my testicles have been there all along. Do you have anything constructive to say this morning or are you just calling to complain that you’ve lost fifty million dollars since the opening bell.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Roland. I lost fifty on your stock but made a hundred shorting the Spaniards. That info wasn’t insider at all. The writing’s been on the wall for a month that they were going to back out at the last minute. That country’s broke, but they can’t afford to piss off their trade unions, so they make sweetheart deals worth all kinds of bucks to the labor wonks then yank the plug and plead poverty and blame outside forces.

“They did it to you today just like they torpedoed that Chinese solar firm two months ago. You might recall that company went tits-up as a result, and the CEO had the good sense to wash down a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of vodka. When the Chicom government is your biggest backer, it’s better to off yourself when you torch a few hundred million yuan betting on a bunch of lazy-ass spics from the mother country.”

“All very colloquial and interesting, Ralph, but what’s your point?” Again, Roland was surprised that he was holding firm against his biggest shareholder. That suicide reference would have normally had him at least apologizing about the Spanish deal.

“Point is”—Pickford began getting a little hot, his Texas drawl much more clipped—“I’ve had my accountants going over Eurodyne’s records again, and for the life of them they can’t figure out what happened to the eighty-seven million dollars you spent buying something called Luck Dragon Trading of Guangzhou, China, eight months ago. Luck Dragon was created the day it was acquired, and as far as anyone can tell it has no assets other than a box number at the Guangzhou central post office.”

“Luck Dragon is to be our entrepôt into southern China,” d’Avejan said with a trace of boredom at such a nothing question. “Since it’s you and I talking and I know this is a secure phone, the seven million was for the legitimate trade name and all the other typical bullshit needed to set up a business in China. No surprises there. The rest, however, is to pay bribes. Some now and some doubtlessly in the future. However, it is better to have the slush fund in place on the outset than have to create it down the road.”

“Seems pretty damned steep to me,” Pickford groused.

Roland tried to put it in language the American would understand. “China has come a long way in the past decade. You can no longer secure the locals’ cooperation with a handful of beads and some pretty cloth, the way your forefathers bought America from the Indians. The Chinese play some of the meanest hardball on the planet. Trust me. Anything less than a hundred million is a steal, and I am referring to euros and not your severely devalued greenbacks.”

“And what do we get for this money?” the oilman asked dubiously.

“Manufacturing rights with labor at roughly forty cents per hour per employee, a dollar an hour for supervisors and semiskilled techs, and absolutely no environmental oversight during construction. Further, we will be able to label the building a green project and use its operation as a carbon offset to one of our factories in the European Union.”

“How do you get the green certification? I thought there had been a crackdown on scam companies claiming bogus carbon credits on projects that had already been built or that had no environmental sustainability.”

“There was,” d’Avejan told him. “What do you think we’re buying with that eighty million? On carbon credits alone we should pocket that much by our third year in operation.”

“And what do we plan on manufacturing?” Pickford was beginning to understand the deal, but like any old-school capitalist, he distrusted revenue streams he didn’t fully comprehend. Being paid not to produce carbon dioxide was something he hadn’t yet been able to get his mind around.

“Doesn’t matter,” the Frenchman replied. “The credits are already built into the numbers. We could make solar panels or rubber dog crap and the money is guaranteed through the ETS.” This was the Emissions Trading Scheme, the Europe-wide cap-and-trade system to limit dangerous levels of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere. To some it was a way to save the planet from catastrophic global warming, to others it was a waste of nearly $300 billion, and to others still it was a new playing field for questionable but lucrative financial transactions.

Men like Roland d’Avejan saw it as a little of all three. Being eco-minded didn’t mean one couldn’t game the system a little and turn a profit. He went on. “Ralph, as I have said on more than one occasion, if you question my handling of Eurodyne I suggest you put me up for a vote of no confidence with the board of directors. If I lose, then I might have time to see my family for a change. My wife tells me my daughter has just been awarded a scholarship to the University of Basel in Switzerland and that my son is set to race a full season in Formula 3000 in hopes of attracting the attention of a Formula One team for next year. The last I really recall of them, my daughter was thirteen and in love with all things horse, and my son believed he was a black American rap star and called himself Jay Hop or Lil Hop or something equally ridiculous. So either call the directors or let me run my company as I see fit, and I will have the stock back up to its highs within twelve months.”

“Is that a promise?” Pickford asked a little snidely.

“This is business, Ralph. There are no promises except the tax man always wants his cut, and some asshole always thinks he can do your job better than you. I have to go now. Au revoir.” Roland d’Avejan hung up the phone before Pickford could say anything.

D’Avejan sat stunned for several seconds, half tempted to buzz his secretary and have her deflect the call if the Texas oil baron rang back, but in his gut he knew Pickford wouldn’t. He’d been soundly told to go to hell, and for the time being that’s exactly what he would do. It took little thought for Roland to understand where his newfound confidence had come from.

He felt stronger than he had in a long time, more vibrant, like he’d just come off his greatest tennis victory or had just sent his mistress to a screaming orgasm and she still begged for more. His member was even a little tumescent. He wouldn’t have time to see his mistress tonight, but Odette hadn’t been hired solely for her typing skills.

He had to force his mind back to business. That Pickford had spotted the anomaly surrounding the Luck Dragon Trading deal wasn’t too surprising. Despite his vast financial holdings, the American knew where every one of his dollars, dimes, and pennies was at any given time. No doubt he would spend the day harassing CEOs of other companies he had a stake in, cajoling and chiding and fighting for any edge he could get to increase his worth just that tiny bit more. The man was a greedy pig, but a smart one, and eventually he would wonder why Luck Dragon posted no more business.

D’Avejan opened a top desk drawer and pulled out a fresh cell phone from the pile. He had to call a legitimate number, but at least his end of the conversation was entirely anonymous. He dialed and waited while the signal bounced halfway around the globe, switching from phone to satellite feed to radio transceiver and finally through an antiquated PBX machine tucked into the dim corner of a ship’s radio room.

“Where are you?” d’Avejan asked by way of greeting. He spoke in English, the only language he and the man he had phoned shared.

“At my desk doing paperwork. What about you?”

“Don’t get smart, Lev. Are you still in Vladivostok?”

“Nyet,” replied the captain of the Akademik Nikolay Zhukovsky. “We left about five hours ago.”

“Is everything set?” D’Avejan regretted asking the question as soon as it passed his lips. Lev Shukov wouldn’t have slipped out of Russia’s easternmost port had he not been ready.

Fortunately the taciturn sea captain kept his biting retort to himself and simply said, “Everything except the most important thing.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” the Frenchman responded quickly. “I’m working on it.”

“You might want to work quicker. We have a hard deadline for the first shot, and so far the ionizing medium we have aboard won’t — how you say — cut it. I can pump terawatts of energy into the stratosphere, but without the right medium is like pissing through a fire hose. Try all you want you will not put out fire.”

“Lev, it’s not as bad,” d’Avejan countered. “Our lab-grown crystals are just slower. But as of today we have another piece of real crystal. I will make arrangements to chopper it out to the ship while you’re en route.”

“And you? Do you come to see your triumph?”

“I don’t know yet. My real triumph won’t happen for months. But I might join you anyway to at least witness the beginning of this historic endeavor.”

“Either way,” Shukov grunted, “send Marlboros. I could not find any in Vladivostok, and I’m stuck smoking these Turkish cigarettes that taste like donkey ass.”

“You’d know, Lev,” d’Avejan teased, obviously relieved that the ship was away and now beyond Pickford’s reach. Unbeknownst to but a handful of people at Eurodyne, the whole Luck Dragon Trading deal was cover to acquire the specialized Russian ship and finance certain modifications to her.

“Ha, you French and your sense of humor. For record, Jerry Lewis is not funny and neither is that douchebag mime.”

“No arguments there.” Roland’s father had loved Marcel Marceau. Roland had hated both his father and his given name, and thus France’s most beloved street performer as well. He turned serious. “Just make sure you get into position on time. There’s too much riding on this operation to blow it now.”

He clicked off the phone and fed it to the shredder. He was pleased. Things were in motion now, and soon momentum would reach a point where they couldn’t be stopped. He brushed a hand down the front of his suit pants, felt his arousal becoming even stronger than before, and reached for the intercom on his desk. “Odette, would you please lock the outer door and come in here.”