The next slap was harder than anything her late husband had ever doled out, and Veronica Butler realized she wasn’t going to make it nearly as long as she’d first thought.
Twenty minutes later, Niklaas Coetzer hid the remains of the Zodiac underneath a rusted car in the barn behind the farmhouse. The car itself was covered by a tarp that looked like it hadn’t been removed in a generation. The old woman he buried in a stand of trees about two hundred yards from the road. The rain had turned the ground into a soupy mess that made digging difficult, so the grave was much shallower than he would have liked.
On the other hand, he figured that once the evacuees returned, they would care more about rebuilding their lives than searching for the body of their elderly neighbor who had refused to evacuate. If by some miracle Philip Mercer survived, he would suspect what had happened to her, and he might be able to galvanize a search, but ultimately to what end? Coetzer himself would be long gone, and what the Butler woman had told him meant the trail for the last of the mineral had gone cold for them both. The mission was over.
He scoped out another four houses until he found another one that hadn’t been destroyed by the flood. There was no car in the driveway, but in the barn he found a small off-road buggy with knobby tires and a fifteen-horse engine. The key was in the ignition.
Coetzer motored out of the area heading west, away from the Mississippi and the rescue efforts that would be launched as soon as the rain let up, and a little more than an hour later he came across a town large enough to have a bus terminal. He hid the ATV and joined a dozen other wet-weather refugees who boarded the next Greyhound, not knowing or caring its destination so long as it took him away.
Tradecraft dictated he switch buses a couple of times before he eventually found himself in Dallas, Texas. He booked himself into an anonymous hotel near the airport, took one of the longest showers of his life, and slept for twelve straight hours. When he woke, he ate breakfast in his room while his clothes were being laundered, feeling very much like a new man.
Only then did he check in with Roland d’Avejan. As expected, his employer wasn’t pleased with the news Coetzer related.
“Amelia Earhart?” d’Avejan scoffed after spewing profanities for a solid minute. “She had to be lying.”
“That’s what she said, and by that point she was no longer capable of holding anything back from me.”
There was a pause. Coetzer could sense that the Frenchman wanted to ask how he could be certain but was hesitant to know the details. Instead he asked, “What about the American who has been such a thorn in our side?”
“Philip Mercer? I have every reason to believe he is dead, meneer.”
“But you did not see him die?”
“That is correct. The last time I saw him he was trapped in a house that was being swept down a river. Moments after I left him I saw the house smash into a bridge. It was totally destroyed. However, until his body is recovered I will always assume that he somehow managed to survive.”
“Your famous caution?” This was said with some snide derision.
“It has kept me alive while so many of my comrades have fallen,” Coetzer replied without rancor.
He recognized that his employer was still seething mad and just wanted to goad somebody so he would feel in control again. Coetzer kept regular tabs on d’Avejan, and several other key people at Eurodyne, in case he ever needed leverage. He was aware, therefore, of d’Avejan’s escalating OCD and suspected that as soon as the call ended, the Frenchman would step into his en suite shower and sear his body with custom-made acidic soap. He supposed this behavior was preferable to beating his wife or mistress, but the fetish unnerved Coetzer.
D’Avejan grunted. “I guess we will have to make do with the sample passed down to me through my family, and the shard you recovered in the mine in Minnesota. Along with the artificial crystal we managed to grow in the lab we can go forward, but it will take a great deal more time for the effects to become noticeable. And that always leads to the possibility that we will be discovered.”
“That explains the need for the Zhukovsky?” Coetzer knew the true purpose behind the shell company called Luck Dragon had been to shield the stockholders from knowing they had purchased a mothballed Soviet-era research ship. “Because she can remain at sea she will be much harder to detect than a land-based antenna array.”
“That is correct,” d’Avejan said. “Also, she is nuclear powered, so she is one hundred percent self-sufficient. No one can track her power usage from a grid and ask why we are using so many megawatts of electricity. Once we start operations, the change will be slow but steady, and most importantly the atmosphere will react exactly as the climate models predicted. In ten months or so, the world will once again clamor for Eurodyne’s products.”
Coetzer allowed d’Avejan’s words to echo uninterrupted for a moment. “Beaming energy into the sky to raise the world’s average temperature seems dangerous to me, meneer.”
“The energy itself does nothing. The change is created in the way the energy is channeled through the crystals and affects the magnetic fields around the earth. By marginally strengthening the fields, we will allow fewer cosmic rays to penetrate the atmosphere and help seed cloud formation. Because of their albedo properties, clouds reflect sunlight back into space and reduce planetary heat absorption. Fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds, which means Earth’s temperature will start to rise after a nearly two-decade-long pause. Scientists have been unable to explain why this happened, but now they won’t have to.
“Climate change will once again become a dominant issue, and not just among the Western elites. When the thermometer really starts to rise, everyone will demand their governments do something. Europe, America. China. It doesn’t matter where. They will all feel the heat, so to speak. Coal markets will collapse while investments in wind and solar will double, triple even, and Eurodyne will be right there to fill the need.
“But more important than our stock price is the fact that mankind will actually confront the realities of global warming and deal with the issue once and for all. Levels of carbon pollution will actually go down, and the catastrophic rise in temperature so long predicted will never materialize. When enough of the world’s energy needs are met with renewables, we will dial back the beam transmitted from the Zhukovsky, cloud cover will return to normal, and the excess heat we helped generate will dissipate. Like a vaccine, we will give the world a mild dose of global warming so that nations can build a real defense against it.”
“So there is no real danger?”
“I am not a scientist,” d’Avejan said. “But I’ve been told the Americans have a system called HAARP in Alaska that fiddles with the upper atmosphere and magnetic fields all the time to no great detriment. I have been assured our system is not dissimilar. It would have been better if we had been able to find the original cache of gems, but our artificial ones will have to do.”
“I tried my best, Monsieur d’Avejan, but the stones have been lost for all time.”
“Yes, well, there are things even beyond my control. Take a few days for yourself and return to Paris by week’s end.”
“Yes, sir. I will be in the office Monday.”
“And Niklaas,” d’Avejan added, “even though you failed to find the stones, you managed to double the amount of natural crystal at our disposal, and I will not forget that. I will see to it that some sort of bonus is forthcoming.”