Black Rain: A Thriller (11 page)

He allowed his gaze to return to the screen. The symbols carved in gold stared back at him and he thought of the contrast: Tulan Zuyua and Xibalba, a form of paradise and the very gates of hell. He couldn’t help but wonder which one they would find.

P
ale light from the risen moon filtered through gaps in the trees, illuminating the uneven ground. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by, enough for the young man, a member of the Nuree tribe, to track his prey.

He cut through the forest silently, following the scuffed trail of the animal he hunted—a large brown tapir, two hundred and fifty pounds. He trod cautiously, not willing to lose the chance that lay before him. It had been a long hunt and this animal was the first major game he’d seen in weeks. If it heard him it would race back to the river, where tapirs spent their days hiding and waiting for nightfall, when they foraged for food.

He moved carefully, pausing as he detected a new scent: smoke. Not the pleasant, woody scent of a good fire, but the stale, acrid smell of soot from a dead, burned-out blaze.

A minute later he came upon the source of that smell. In a small space between the trees, what looked like a compost heap smoldered; piles of leaves and branches
and the fired remnants of dried fronds lay blackened and spent. A wisp of gray smoke lingered around it, hugging the mound like an apparition.

He stepped closer to the pile. The burned mess had been compromised, one side had fallen away and the top layer had slid off. Included in that layer was the body of a human being, burned beyond recognition. He looked over the blackened bones.

“Chokawa,”
he mumbled in disgust, the Nuree word for the Chollokwan people, the strange tribe that bordered them at times, attacking anyone who entered their territory. His uncle feared these people—the Shadow Men, he called them—claiming they did evil things and begging him not to go this way.

The young man was less afraid, but at this strange site he paused. For a moment he thought about turning back, but his eyes fell upon the tapir’s trail once again and he chose to push on.

Minutes later, he came within earshot of the foraging creature. He stopped, seeing it for the first time, rooting through the undergrowth for a particular type of vegetation. He tensed his body, raised his spear and flung it forward.

The weapon flew straight, hitting the animal in the side. It squealed with pain and bolted into the forest. The hunter raced after it, trees and brush whipping by on either side of him. He tracked the fleeing creature by the sounds it made, the labored breathing, the grunting and the crunching foliage.

Up ahead he heard a sharp, sudden squeal. He assumed the tapir had fallen, but he arrived at the spot to
find only his spear lying on the ground, soaked with blood and surrounded by tufts of dark fur. The animal was nowhere to be seen.

He wondered if it had shaken the spear loose and escaped, but its tracks simply ended. As if it had disappeared in midstride.

He picked up his fallen weapon, examining the tip to make sure it was intact. As he did, his ears caught a slight rustle coming from the bushes ahead of him. He was still, listening. In the quiet, he heard the sound of shallow breathing. He crept toward the shrubs, raised the spear above his head and drove it down with all his weight.

The tip hit something solid and glanced off. The shaft cracked, ringing his hands as a black shape launched itself at him from the thicket. He saw the flash of jaws and knife-edged teeth, smelled the stench of rotting meat.

He flew backward at the impact, with twin gashes across his chest in diagonal cuts. He slammed into the ground, twisted and tried to scramble away. But daggers pierced his calves and he screamed.

He slid across the ground as the thing dragged him backward. Shouting in pain, he managed to grab an exposed tree root. He wrapped his hands around it, halting his slide for the moment and wrenching in anguish as his attacker pulled on him and his body drew up into the air like a rope stretched taut.

His face hit the dirt and he realized he’d been released. He pulled himself forward. But the reprieve lasted only a second, and he howled in anguish and
arched his back as the teeth plunged into his legs once again, this time into thick muscles on the backs of his thighs.

Suddenly his body wrenched and his hands ripped free. He flew backward, scraping across the ground and shrieking in fear as he disappeared into the tangled brush.

D
arkness filled the lab’s interior, broken only by the pinpoints of colored LEDs and the glow of several rows of computer monitors. The room’s precise, symmetrical organization brought to mind a top-level government facility, like NASA’s Johnson Space Center or the darkened rooms of Air Traffic Control. But the lab was not a government facility, and the two men who occupied it were unaffiliated with the federal bureaucracy. That is, aside from the fact that they were studying information hacked from the database of the National Research Institute.

As the data ticked in and the numbers on the screen slowly changed, the two men reacted with opposite expressions. The first man—tall, charcoal-haired and in his midfifties—broke into a satisfied grin; a smug, confident look accentuated by his relaxed, commanding posture and an expensive, custom-tailored suit.

His name was Richard Alexander Kaufman. The lab belonged to him, as did the twenty-story building surrounding it, with its rakish, angled lines and a facade of sapphire blue glass.

Kaufman was CEO and principal owner of Futrex
Systems Inc., one of the largest privately held defense contractors in the world. And while Futrex raked in a fortune from the yearly defense budget, it made neither missiles nor bombs. Instead, Futrex created power through the virtual world of zeros and ones; it designed computer systems, data networks and hyper-fast programs that relied on a type of architecture called massive parallel processing.

Futrex programs were used in the design and testing of weapons platforms; they linked AWACS aircraft and satellites to ships, tanks and men on the ground. It was said that battles were not won or lost with weapons but with information, and Futrex Systems enabled American soldiers on the street to see the same information their counterparts in the air and back at headquarters had access to. The military considered this particular data-stream so vital to national security that its contracts included a healthy premium paid specifically to prevent Futrex from adapting the technology for any other purpose. Because of this Futrex had no presence in the civilian world and, as they were privately held, no ticker on any stock market. The result was an oddity in the modern industrial world: a twenty-billion-dollar corporation that almost no one had heard of.

Two decades of such success would have been enough for most people, but not for Richard Kaufman. He wanted more. Kaufman wanted the next wave: an unconditional chance at success, a chance to change the world and, perhaps more important, to tell everyone that he’d done just that.

He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. He had friends in high places and low places, he
had the money, power and expertise to do anything. All he needed was the right vehicle, something he’d spent the better part of a decade searching for.

Kaufman looked to his left. “What do you think?”

The man beside him appeared exasperated. Norman Lang was close to forty but he dressed in the wrinkled casual way of a college student: corduroys and an untucked flannel shirt, now covered by a lab coat. His thin hair was buzzed and his goatee neatly trimmed.

Lang was Kaufman’s chief scientist in areas of unusual interest—the head skunk in the skunk-works, as it were. A brilliant scientist, Lang had fallen into disgrace when he’d been caught falsifying the data on some experiments, ending up in the academic world’s version of purgatory, until Kaufman had hired him.

To some extent, Kaufman admired a man with a little larceny in his heart, and at the very least, Lang’s record gave him nowhere else to go, something Kaufman knew would make him extremely loyal. And so he’d brought Lang on board, given him an almost unlimited budget and sent him to work on the long shots, to swing for the fences. Lang’s marching orders were simple: to find Kaufman’s next wave, to bridge the gap between the theoretical and feasible. So far Lang had struggled.

The scientist scratched his head and then pulled the black plastic-framed glasses from his face, rubbing at the indentions they left behind on the bridge of his nose. As was his habit, he answered a question with a question.

“Why are there no abstracts or explanations attached to any of this?” he asked. “Why all this raw data?”

Kaufman had wondered about that himself, but in
truth he liked the raw data approach—it forced Lang to reach his own conclusions. “I don’t know,” he said. “Is it a problem for you?”

Lang put his glasses back on. “I can run it. The problem is, a lot of it seems …”

“Fabricated?” Kaufman asked.

“Beyond the realm of current theory,” Lang replied.

Kaufman exhaled. He had always been an expert at reading people and knowing which buttons to push. With some he used kindness, on others force; with Lang it was constant reminders of his failure to spur him on, to push him into taking steps he would otherwise avoid.

“As a research scientist,” he said, “you are without peer, but your thinking is shallow. The NRI stole these crystals from the Museum of Natural History and created a fake story to cover the theft. Spent millions of dollars testing them and then encrypted the results in the highest level of code. They then dispatched two separate teams to the depths of the Amazon to find the source of these crystals. Now, what does the scientific method tell you about that?”

Lang held his tongue.

“I’ll answer for you,” Kaufman said. “They think they’ve discovered a new source of power—a clean, unlimited source of power, nuclear energy without that annoying little problem known as nuclear waste.”

Lang nodded. “Fusion.”

“Exactly,” Kaufman said.

Nuclear fusion was considered by many to be the energy source of the twenty-first century—the solution to a world choking on fumes, sweating under global warming
and allegedly running short of fossil fuels. After all, nuclear fusion had already given us the hydrogen bomb, and a similar type of reaction powers the sun. As the theory went, if such a process could be harnessed without incinerating entire cities, fusion could power the world. And as a result, nations around the world were studying it, and almost universally they were focused on a particular type of fusion: hot fusion.

To be a player in the hot fusion game required a massive entrance fee. The effort cost billions, took years, and so far had led only to monstrous machines that actually used more energy than they produced, the equivalent of burning two barrels of oil to pump one more up to the surface.

Despite that fact, billions more were going into the next step, a sprawling project in the south of France called the ITER, an acronym which in Latin meant “the passage” or “the way.” Whether that moniker would prove true or false was anyone’s guess, but certainly it would take a long time to find out. The latest estimates had construction of the ITER lasting through 2018. And even if all went as planned, it would only lead to bigger, more expensive prototypes before any working reactors were produced.

Estimates on the debut of a viable system ranged from fifty to a hundred years. And in all likelihood, the energy source of the twenty-first century wouldn’t actually arrive until sometime in the twenty-second. A date that was too far off for Richard Kaufman.

Instead, he pursued a different goal, a smaller, more controversial form, one forever tainted by the scandal of its birth: cold fusion.

“Now,” Kaufman began, “assuming they’re not the village idiots, are they or are they not onto something?”

Lang hedged.
“If
their measurements are accurate, then yes, they may be on to something.”

“Explain.”

“Based on their descriptions, it appears that they studied four crystals, two of which contained inclusions, filaments of palladium. And yes, almost every successful cold fusion experiment that’s been run has used palladium. Even Fleishman and Pons used palladium before they were burned at the stake as heretics.”

Fleishman and Pons were the researchers who’d first discovered cold fusion. They were hailed for a while, before the hot fusion community, fearing for their grants and endowments, attacked and savaged both them and their experiments. Very quickly Fleishman and Pons found their reputations destroyed, their concept shunned and treated as a hoax. In the aftermath, scientific journals followed suit, refusing to publish papers on cold fusion, while mainstream universities barred their fellows from working the field. To even express an interest in the subject was considered the death knell for a career.

“Palladium,” Kaufman repeated, one eyebrow raised. “Interesting. What else?”

Lang plucked one of the printouts from the stack and handed it to Kaufman. “If the NRI is correct, the crystals show the following: a background level of radiation consistent with a low energy reaction, indications of metallic transmutation on the inclusion, primarily streaks of silver and copper at the tip. A high concentration of sulfur in the quartz. And a measurable residue of trapped, gaseous tritium.”

Kaufman studied the printout, moved by the magnitude of the moment. Tritium was the one element they’d been looking for, a radioactive waste product that could only form during a nuclear reaction of some kind. The inclusion’s other properties were rare and extremely odd, and they could almost be explained, except for the presence of the tritium. It proved that the crystal had been used in a reaction that released nuclear energy. Its continued existence could only mean that the reaction had been a type of cold fusion.

“If their data are correct,” Lang repeated.

Kaufman had no doubt that the NRI had gotten its data correct. “What else does the data describe?”