Hannah turned and walked away, her strides feeling stiff and unnatural as she set off for the vehicles they had left at the roadside. She heard Vaughn following her, pursued by Valery Jenkin’s outraged voice.
‘If I have my way, you’ll never work an FBI case again. This was a farce, Ford. Nobody’s ever going to destroy a power station like this one, and you’re a fool for believing they’d even try to … ’
Hannah saw the blast before she heard it, a blossoming ball of flame to her left as something detonated beneath the southern towers. The shockwave hit her a moment later, a solid wall of air moving at high speed that hurled her off her feet and sent her tumbling across the dusty earth.
The explosion lit up the power station as the failed tower toppled, power lines falling with it in a shower of bright sparks as though a billion stars were falling all at once from the night sky. Hannah covered her head with her hands as the tower crashed down to the sound of wrending metal and a snarl of wild electricity that ran like bright snakes up and down the severed wires and across the tower’s superstructure.
Hannah, her ears ringing from the blast, pulled her head up to see the tower on its side and flames licking around the remains of its metal legs, high — voltage power cables draped across it and spitting sparks crackling with energy.
She staggered to her feet as Vaughn joined her.
‘What the hell?’ he uttered.
Hannah struggled to think straight, but she could see Jenkins and her entourage clambering to their feet nearby, and then Vaughn’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it, and then looked sharply at Hannah.
‘Half of the Vegas Strip has lost its power supply,’ he reported.
‘Damn it,’ Hannah cursed and kicked the dust. ‘What the hell is going on here? We’re one step behind all the time!’ She ran her hands through her hair. ‘I just don’t know what to do here.’
Vaughn grinned as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line.
‘Well, I do. Local law enforcement just received a call that a hire vehicle that matches the one hired by Assim Khan has been spotted by a traffic camera headed north on the I95, for Tonopah.’
Hannah whirled to face Vaughn. ‘What the hell’s up there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Vaughn admitted, ‘but it’s our only remaining lead and Assim Khan clearly doesn’t care what’s happening in Vegas.’
Hannah glanced at the power station one last time, at Jenkin’s bedraggled appearance, and then made her decision. ‘Let’s go.’
XL
The sun.
Mary Meyer had always loved the sight of the sun rising on a clear dawn, ever since her parents had taken her early morning fishing out on the lakes of her Missouri childhood home. Few things were more peaceful than a wilderness sunrise, all the more surprising considering how lethal was the sun’s heat, how fatal exposure to its radiation could be for humans.
The solar plant was deserted, only a small number of employees based on site to monitor the tower and its boilers. Situated far enough out into the desert for Mary to have driven to its gates unnoticed, her headlamps extinguished to further conceal her approach, Mary had driven her car off the road and approached the site from across the dusty desert, aiming for a series of narrow trails that intersected the gigantic field of mirrors arrayed in a disc around the immense tower at the plant’s centre.
The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project was a one hundred ten megawatt solar plant surrounded by seventeen and a half thousand heliostat mirrors. The immense array of mirrors collected and focused sunlight onto a five hundred forty foot tower, atop which was a huge chamber which contained flowing molten salts. Those salts, superheated by the sunlight, flowed to a storage tank where the energy was used to produce steam which then powered turbines to produce electricity. A marvel of human engineering, all of which would be rendered useless by Mary Meyer this very morning.
The horizon to her left beyond the mountains was aglow with the promise of another of those perfect dawns and this one she hoped would be more memorable than any of the others she cherished so dearly. It was just such a shame that she would have to do things this way, instead of the way that Stanley would have wanted — via the people themselves, rising up together as one and showing the governments and the corporations that they were nothing without the people themselves.
Instead she held a pistol firmly in her grip, pointed at a young, bearded technician cowering behind his computer panel.
‘This won’t take long,’ she said. ‘Do as I say and I absolutely promise that neither you or your colleagues will be harmed, okay?’
The man cowering before her glanced to his right, where half a dozen engineers lay with their wrists bound to their ankles, their backs arched as they lay facing the walls of the office that Mary had stormed barely ten minutes before.
‘Okay.’
The man’s voice was thin and reedy. Mary recognized him as an academic, not the kind of man used to being in physically stressful situations, which was precisely why she had chosen him. He would bend to her will for fear of his life and would not be prone to heroic defiance. If he knew what she intended, what she and her family had been through, he might well have helped her but Mary was already well — used to the response of scientists to her work, their dismissals and their ostracising of anybody who dared to think out of their comfortable little boxes.
The bearded man, who went by the name of Alan, had followed her very precise instructions after tying up his colleagues, and re — programmed the mirrors across the array. Now, there would be no power getting to Las Vegas, which was stricken by the power outage blackening the strip so beloved of the casinos and corporations.
‘Get up,’ she said softly.
Alan did not move, his eyes wide behind his thin — rimmed spectacles.
‘I said get up, now!!’
Mary fired the pistol into the nearest wall and Alan shrieked in terror as he struggled up onto legs weak with fear.
‘Out the door, move!’
Alan hurried away with Mary following, the gun never straying far from his back as they walked outside into the cool night air, the tremendous array of silent mirrors pointed straight upward into the blackness. Mary gestured toward the car she had travelled in, and she walked around to the passenger’s side and ordered Alan into the driver’s seat.
‘Drive to the tower,’ she commanded.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you don’t I’ll have to shoot you and pick another of your colleagues to do so, understood?’
Something in Mary’s tone and expression convinced Alan that she was serious and he obeyed without further question. The car traversed the distance from the control station to the tower in less than a minute, its tires crunching along the track between the huge mirrors, each the size of an eighteen — wheeler truck, and Alan pulled up alongside the tower’s main entrance.
Mary could see huge buildings, the size of aircraft hangars, and massive pipes and conduits of polished aluminium shining in the dawn light. Further back, on the far side of the tower, the two huge water tanks loomed.
‘Get out.’
Mary kept her gun trained on Alan as she walked to the car’s trunk and gestured to him. ‘Open it.’
Whether Alan thought that he was going to be placed in the trunk or not, she couldn’t be sure, but his legs almost gave way beneath him and he struggled to open and lift the trunk. Mary looked down and inside the trunk she saw the object for which governments had killed, for which businessmen had killed, for which so much had been lost and so many denied so much for so long. The answer to mankind’s dreams.