Assim leaned his weight into the blade.
And then a gunshot smacked the hot air.
The bullet slammed upward through Assim’s hip, shattering bone and ploughing through his internal organs before bursting from his shoulder in a fine mist of bright blood. Lopez smashed the blade clear of her throat as Assim shuddered from the blast and rolled onto his side.
Ethan burst into the heating chamber and stared at Lopez. ‘Are you okay?!’
‘About time!’ Lopez gasped.
Assim Khan groaned as Lopez looked at him. ‘Christ, won’t this asshole ever die?’
Ethan glanced at Mary, who was standing over the fusion cage, and then he saw something outside of the chamber. A brilliant, blinding flare of light that began to grow as though a star had suddenly burst into life out on the desert plains.
‘The mirrors are working!’ he yelled.
Ethan grabbed Lopez and propelled her toward the stairwell as he dashed to Mary’s side. ‘Move, now!’
‘No! I must start it up!’
‘It’s too late!’ Ethan insisted. ‘We’re about to be fried! Come on!’
Mary tried to activate the device and she hit a switch that lit up with a green glow before Ethan yanked her away from the fusion cage and they ran for the stairwell.
A terrible, fearsome heat seared the air as Ethan followed Mary and pushed her down ahead of him. They dashed down the stairs together, the heat in the chamber swelling with a remorseless power that seemed to burn the air around Ethan. He felt his eyes dry out, his skin seared and then he dashed through a series of heavy doors and saw Lopez slam them shut behind him.
Assim Khan staggered to his feet and grasped for the stairwell. The metal touched his hand and he saw his skin slough off in a bloody mess. He turned, delirious with pain and blood loss, barely able to see in the searing heat as a brilliant halo of light burned into his retina with the strength of a thousand suns.
To one side, he saw Huck Seaver’s body consumed by flames, thick smoke billowing from the corpse as it burned.
To the other, he saw the fusion cage burst into life.
Assim screamed as a fearsome heat ignited his clothes and then his skin, as he felt his flesh and his bone seared by thousands of degrees of pure energy. With the last remaining synapses functioning in his body he dashed for the open air of the ledge outside, but he barely made two steps before his body was charred into an unrecognisable black mess of bone and tissue that burst into a flaming pyre and collapsed, smouldering ashes billowing out over the tower’s ledge and into the desert sky.
Ethan staggered out into the open air beneath the huge tower, just in time to hear the sound of dozens of shotguns, rifles and pistols being cocked.
He looked up to see a dozen or so police cars, their lights flickering with brilliant colors before them and countless officers glaring at him down the barrels of their weapons.
Ethan dropped the pistol he still held in one hand and slowly raised his hands, Mary beside him doing the same as he watched Lopez standing with her hands in the air, her dark hair billowing in the hot desert wind.
‘On your knees, hands behind your heads!’
The voice bellowed at them from a loud hailer and Ethan obeyed, placing his hands atop his head as he knelt down on the hard desert soil and watched as two FBI agents advanced toward them, pistols pointing at Ethan and Mary.
‘My daughter,’ Mary cried out. ‘Is she okay?’
The two agents said nothing. One of them was a young guy, late twenties Ethan guessed, who covered his partner as she advanced. The partner was a little older, with long auburn hair and a determined expression, all cold blue eyes and no smiles.
‘Ethan Warner,’ she said as she looked at him. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you for quite a while, but you keep avoiding me?’
Ethan managed a shrug and a grin.
‘I won’t avoid you anymore, let’s be friends. What’s your name?’
Special Agent Hannah Ford offered Ethan a tight grin devoid of warmth as she produced a set of hand cuffs.
‘My name is: you’re under arrest, asshole.’
‘That from your mother’s side?’
Ethan winced as Hannah Ford slammed the cuffs brutally hard around his wrists.
XLIV
‘I’ve been waiting for this moment.’
Special Agent Hannah Ford sat opposite Ethan Warner in the interview room, smiling as she glanced at the hand cuffs around Warner’s wrists, manacling him to the table.
‘So have I,’ Ethan replied. ‘I don’t feel we got off to the best start in Virginia.’
‘Running away does that,’ Hannah pointed out.
‘It wasn’t like we were on a date.’
‘Thankfully.’
‘You’d have been disappointed if I’d run away?’ Ethan asked with interest.
‘Mister Warner, you’ve been embroiled in an international conspiracy that has resulted in several deaths.’
‘I killed nobody,’ Ethan replied. ‘I did however see Huck Seavers before what happened in the tower. You know … ’
‘The incineration,’ Hannah confirmed. ‘We didn’t recover much.’
‘And Stanley Meyer was almost certainly murdered by a man named Aaron Mitchell, who escaped the scene at Crescent Dunes. Nicola Lopez, Mary Meyer and I were witnesses alone to everything that happened.’
Hannah looked down at her notes.
‘The District Attorney won’t see it like that. You left Saudi Arabia without a passport or papers, entered the United States illegally and then proceeded to injure several people, acquire a firearm for which you were not licensed and commit a homicide for which the FBI have been hunting you.’ Hannah grinned. ‘And that’s the way I’ll be presenting it.’
‘You ever considered the fact that you might be missing the larger picture here? Aaron Mitchell is behind all of this. He’s working for a cabal known as Majestic Twelve. They are dangerous, this isn’t a game.’
‘And this supposed fusion cage,’ Hannah replied as she glanced down at her notes. ‘Which cannot be found.’
‘The solar array at Crescent Dunes produced energy for a brief few moments before those solar panels lined up on the tower,’ Ethan replied. ‘I take it that Vegas got its power back before the solar plant was producing electricity?’
‘I checked that out for you,’ Hannah replied. ‘Turns out the salts atop the tower retain their heat for up to twelve hours after the sun’s gone down, providing power even when they’re not being directly heated. As soon as the engineers corrected what Mary Meyer had done, the plant operated as normal. As for this Majestic Twelve — I think you’ve been watching far too many episodes of The Blacklist, Mister Warner.’
‘Check it out on the Internet for yourself,’ Ethan muttered. ‘Documents pertaining to MJ–12 have been available for decades. This isn’t some kind of new conspiracy. Bilderberg is the same, it even has its own website.’
‘So does Santa Claus I expect,’ Hannah replied, ‘but I’m not about to go to Lapland to arrest him for illegally crossing borders now, am I?’
‘Check the pistol you took from me,’ Ethan insisted. ‘It will have my prints on it, but it will also have those of Aaron Mitchell.’
‘The other assassin?’ Hannah asked airily. ‘Lots of assassins in your story, Ethan, and yet you expect me to believe that you have killed nobody. According to your testimony you and your partner, Nicola Lopez, work for the Defense Intelligence Agency and are merely the innocent victims of a multi — national cat and mouse game of corporate espionage.’ She sighed, tilted her head to one side. ‘How adorable. And you’re also James Bond in your spare time?’