“And with that settled,” the president added, “let me bring everyone onto the same page and back to the real reason we’re here.”

Apparently the first payment was about to come due.

“Less than twenty-four hours ago, Byron came to me with some disturbing information,” he said. “It seems the CIA has heard rumors about your organization that go beyond the travel plans of its director. One rumor that caught my attention was that the NRI has built some type of experimental fusion reactor beneath this building, one that might be endangering the good citizens of the capital.”

Moore remained quiet. The details of the rumors were false, but there was a kernel of truth in the story. The president knew this, of course. He’d been briefed from day one, and he could have easily given the details to Stecker or whomever else he chose to inform. There was no need for the trip to Virginia to get that done.

So there had to be another reason for the drive out, one that Moore guessed at easily: It was time to come clean.

Moore had long dreaded this day’s arrival, doing all he could to postpone it. But it appeared the president wanted the CIA informed and perhaps involved with what the NRI had hidden beneath Building Five. And to really understand what that meant, the truth had to be seen.

“So we’re here for show-and-tell,” he said.

The president nodded and Moore rose from his seat. “With your permission.”

CHAPTER 20

Moore led the president and the confused head of the CIA down the hall. The president’s security detail followed them until the three men stepped onto a secured elevator, where the president held out a hand.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em, boys,” he said. “This is going to take awhile.”

Moore punched in a code and the doors closed, leaving security behind. He thought of making a last-ditch plea to the president, but one look at Henderson’s stern face told him the time for discussion was over. The president wanted the CIA informed and involved.

Moments later the three men stepped out into a darkened laboratory. The hum of an air filtration system was the only real sound. The light around them was soft and off-color, coming from special blue and white LEDs embedded in the wall.

In the quiet darkness, two NRI technicians monitored computer readouts. They stood awkwardly when they realized who their guests were.

“As you were,” the president said.

Moore walked to a pane of glass in front of them. Inclined forward at forty-five degrees to allow easy viewing of an object below, the “glass” was actually a two-inch-thick plate of clear Kevlar, strong enough to stop a high-powered rifle bullet.

Five feet below them, lit by a circle of LEDs and raised up on prongs like the setting of an engagement ring, lay a triangular stone with softly beveled edges.

The stone was the size and thickness of a large dictionary and as clear as any glass ever made. Where the blue light caught its edges, they shone like thin strands of neon, while the white light seemed to penetrate and reflect from deeper within.

“Any change?” Moore asked.

“No, sir,” the lead technician replied. “Nothing since the twenty-first.”

Stecker stared at the object. Moore could not help but do the same, despite having seen it many times. He’d even held it once, one of the few in the NRI to have done so.

The president had only seen it on two occasions, but he seemed to regard it with a new unease this time. Moore understood that, too: Events and time had changed things and the stone had gone from an object of curiosity to a subject of concern.

“What am I looking at here?” Stecker asked.

“We call it the Brazil stone,” Moore said. “A group of our operatives recovered it from the Amazon, two years ago.” He nodded toward Henderson. “The president was informed along with ranking members of Congress.”

Moore walked to a different position, one where he could see both the president and Stecker. He needed to be able to read their faces to know where he stood.

“What does it do?”

“It creates energy,” Moore said. “How, why, or for what, we’re not exactly sure.”

“Why is it down here?” Stecker asked. “Is it radioactive or something?”

“No,” Moore said. “But this vault is designed to contain it and to protect the population above.” He pointed to the walls around them. “We’re fifty feet below ground level. The vault around us is constructed of a titanium box, lined with sixteen inches of lead, a four-inch layer of ceramic silicon, and a solid foot of steel-reinforced concrete. In addition we’ve set up monitors and a powerful electromagnetic dampening field.”

“What the hell are you protecting us from, Arnold?”

“Electromagnetic discharges, including gamma and X-ray spikes: high-energy surges that not only fry electronic equipment, but can damage human tissue.”

Stecker looked around. “All your equipment here seems to be working fine,” he said.

“The bursts come at precise, regular time intervals, seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes apart. We lock down the system and shield all equipment prior to the pulse. We power back up again once it passes. Easy as pie for the most part. At least it was until November twenty-first.”

“November twenty-first,” Stecker repeated. “The date rings a bell.”

“That’s right,” Moore said. “The same day the Russians and Chinese launched their search parties. The same day we recorded a gamma-ray burst from a spot near the Arctic Circle that damaged a group of our GPS satellites.”

Stecker seemed agitated, swimming in the deep water now, not knowing which facts to connect. If Moore was right, he didn’t know what to make of the situation; anger, curiosity, confusion, all three emotions were probably racing through his mind at the moment.

The president took over. “On the same day Arnold and I spoke about the incursion into Hong Kong, we had another conversation, centered on the Russian and Chinese actions. Like you and the chiefs of staff, he saw their fleet movements as a search party, only the NRI had one piece of information no one else had: a recording of this energy burst. Initially we guessed that one of those two countries had created some type of directed energy weapon and might have lost it up there. But we could find no evidence of that, and then one of his techs here was able to match the signature of that power burst to a minor fluctuation in the output of this object.”

“You’re telling me this thing had something to do with that?” Stecker said bluntly.

“No,” Moore replied, “but something connected with it might have.”

Stecker’s eyes went from the glowing object to Moore to the president, as if to make sure everything around him was real and on the level.

“Is this some kind of an experiment?”

“No,” Moore said. “We didn’t develop this stone; we found it. We’re studying it, and we’re not yet certain about the implications of what we’re learning.”

“Which are?”

“I told you. This stone seems to create power. Manufacturing energy in a way we don’t yet understand. One that violates the first law of physics.”

“I’m not one of your scientists, Arnold. But I’m not an idiot. Talk to me in terms I’ll understand.”

This was the reason Moore dreaded bringing the CIA in the mix. The NRI was primarily a scientific organization, even if one wing of it was dedicated to stealing science from other nations. The CIA was about power, gathering knowledge on a more tactical scale. If we do this, then they will do that. Neither Stecker nor anyone else at the CIA would easily grasp what Moore and his people now believed.

“The First Law of Physics,” Moore said. “Energy can neither be created or destroyed. To power your car you burn gasoline, the combustion creates heat, the heat creates pressure to expand the gases, and the rapid expansion drives the pistons. The energy is derived from the breaking of chemical bonds in the petroleum distillates. Chemical bonds that were slowly built up over thousands of years as the poor, dead dinosaurs turned themselves into crude oil.”