Before this new revelation, plans were well under way to use a combination of artificial and genuine stones — d’Avejan had one stone from America and another that had been passed down to him from his great-uncle (who himself had acquired it mysteriously as a young man in the Orient). Professor Jean-Robert Fortescue, a gifted scientist who worked for d’Avejan in Eurodyne’s sophisticated labs, had taken d’Avejan’s sample and figured out how to coax it to grow, which had led to the discovery of the stones’ true potential. Fortescue had synthesized the crystals using a massive press machine that exerted tremendous force, while at the same time heating the seed crystals to 1,000 degrees centigrade. In this hellish place, tiny bits of the original shard were forced to grow once again, adding to themselves the way a lizard regrows a tail. And like the reptile, the new appendage wasn’t quite as good as the original. Fortescue was as eager as d’Avejan to obtain a larger selection of real gems, though for him this was an intellectual exercise rather than a quest for profit.
Fortescue had already run the numbers twice and had come up with the same location for the lost aviatrix as the one that had been intercepted in Washington. He was a cautious person and never accepted another man’s work if he could do it himself. The measurements of the sample’s electrical properties jibed with his own work, and the assumptions seemed reasonable and in line with what he would have done. But he also knew that a minute deviation from the starting point could have profound implications at the end. Whoever the American had used to do the work had been very, very good. So much so that Fortescue would have welcomed the scientist into his own lab as an assistant.
Like many academicians, Jean-Robert Fortescue neglected the passage of time when he was engrossed in a problem. He could spend hours working and forget to eat, or entire weekends and forget to shower. His single-mindedness could be off-putting.
Fortescue had wanted to explore the crystals’ remarkable shielding ability. His initial thought was that the crystal could offer unprecedented protection to microelectronics for nano-scalar circuitry, but soon after Fortescue instead found himself drawn into a geoengineering experiment to try to strengthen Earth’s magnetic field. D’Avejan had told him his work would help avert a global climate catastrophe. Jean-Robert wasn’t so certain about that side of the experiment, but with d’Avejan’s encouragement he was eager to continue.
Fortescue was in his tenth straight hour of work, having stopped only to relieve pressure in his bladder and force himself to swallow some electrolyte-infused sports drink. He was clicking through the images the American had snapped of the Afghan geode that had yielded the amazing gems. Fortescue had seen the geode already, in a series of photos taken by a Pakistani soldier they’d hired to track the American in the dangerous tribal regions bordering the two countries.
Fortescue should have missed the anomaly. The inside of the geode was roughly bathtub size, with a honeycomb surface where the accretion matrix had once held the dun-colored crystals. It was intricate — so complex it became featureless, like looking at faces in a crowd. In their multitude they lost their individuality. An earlier computer match of some of the pictures had shown the topography to be identical in both sets of photographs, but somehow, comparing the two side by side on a pair of monitors, Fortescue now noted a difference. As soon as he did he cursed.
“Oh, you are indeed a clever one,” he said to the empty room. “You were so smart and so good that you even fooled my computers. Ha! You did not fool me.”
For the next hour, Jean-Robert redid all the work he’d so laboriously produced already, only this time he adjusted his own calculations about the size of the geode. He didn’t understand how a filtering program through which he’d washed the American’s pictures hadn’t detected the difference. The filters analyzed at the bit level, searching for statistical anomalies or signs of infilling, and had found nothing. The technology he was up against was indeed formidable, but sometimes what a computer cannot see, a human can. And after the first hour’s work he knew that the pictures sent to him from Washington, D.C., had been doctored.
The size — and yield — of the geode had been reduced by 9.681 percent. That’s when Fortescue realized his opponent was making a fool out of him. This was a slap in the face — and Fortescue threw himself into the contest. He ran numbers for another couple of hours, churning simulation after simulation through the mainframe so intensely that the ship’s engineer had detected a spike in the nuclear plant’s output and called to the control center to inquire if everything was all right.
“Better than all right, Chief, I assure you,” Fortescue said into the phone embedded in his workstation. “But you must excuse me. I need to speak to Monsieur d’Avejan right away.”
23
The adjacent islands of Futuna and Alofi crouched low on the horizon, clinging to the line where earth met sky, humpbacked and verdant and about as unspoiled as any place on Earth. The larger, Futuna, was on the left as they approached out of the south, and was separated from its neighbor by a two-mile-deep channel. Alofi was craggier from this vantage, with volcanic cliffs not yet pounded flat by the relentless action of wave and tide, but the rest of the island was reef-lined white sand beaches. The forest canopy covering the island looked primeval, though the captain assured his passengers that there were a handful of small plantations carved into the jungle by Futuna islanders to grow tobacco and taro.
The boat was a sixty-footer rented out of Fiji, and no amount of money would convince her captain and owner, an expatriate Australian named Rory Reyes, to let his two clients take her on their own. She had a tall fly bridge for fish spotting, a rear dive platform and compressor for recharging scuba tanks, a small Zodiac for trips to shore, and sleeping accommodations for seven. Reyes had his cabin just off the main bridge below the fly tower. Mercer and Book had flipped a coin for the master suite located in the broad V of the bow under the main deck, and the coin had come up in Book’s favor. The second day aboard, Sykes informed Mercer the bed was like a cloud; Mercer told him his was a foam affair stuffed into a box frame that smelled of feet.
Through a combination of accrued vacation days and some successful lobbying by both Book and his girlfriend Stacy, Sykes had been able to spring himself a week early from his final tour in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor. It had cost him the promise to Stacy that he wouldn’t go back to Kabul, and the assurance that he and Mercer weren’t off to bed native girls in the South Pacific. Stacy liked Mercer, but she didn’t necessarily trust him and Booker together. Freely borrowing Aretha Franklin’s line from the movie The Blues Brothers, she called him Book’s “white hoodlum friend.”
After successfully staging Jason’s “mugging” in D.C., Mercer and Book had driven down to Sykes’s bungalow near Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where they’d made lists and then refined those lists until they knew exactly what they would need for their trip. The following morning, Book went on a shopping spree, while Mercer’s main task was to get the right kind of charter boat in Fiji. He spent hours on Book’s laptop, and more time on the phone, until he found Captain Rory Reyes of the Suva Surprise, a nice wide-hulled sport fisherman named for Fiji’s capital. The ship was fitted with extended fuel tanks to cover long distances.
Mercer attempted to rent the boat for himself, but that was a nonstarter and the weathered Aussie insisted he come with them. Reyes was in his late fifties, with bright blue eyes held in creased pouches of skin in a broad friendly face. His handshake had been firm when he’d met them at Nadi International Airport. His accent was pure outback, and he had a good sense of humor and an honest laugh. One of the first things he’d said, though, was that judging by the looks of his latest clients he was glad he hadn’t let them take the boat themselves.