The Jungle

Mohammad was their bodyguard for two weeks, and their full-time employee ever since.

They used him for their own corporate security as well as what they dubbed “special projects.” These ranged from corporate espionage to kidnapping rivals’ family members in order to win contracts at lower bids. The Bahar brothers, and then only Gunawan after Setiawan died of lung cancer, were very careful to shield themselves from any consequences of their more aggressive business dealings. The fact that the Corporation couldn’t trace their ownership of the J-61 oil platform was a testament to their care and caution.

What had bonded the three men originally was their belief that Bin Laden’s tactics were doomed to fail. They agreed that they wanted the West to end its persistent meddling in the Middle East, but terrorism would never bring that about. In fact, it caused more interference. What the Muslim world needed was leverage over the United States. Since both sides needed oil, the one to run its factories and cars, the other for the tremendous revenue, something else had to be found.

It was four years earlier when Gunawan had read an article in a science magazine—in his dentist’s office, of all places—that he found a way to get that leverage. He had placed Abdul in charge of the venture and gave him near-limitless resources. The very best and brightest in Bahar’s vast empire were put to the task, and outside contractors were brought in as needed. The project was so cutting-edge that secrecy was a given and needn’t be explained to the employees, while only a select few knew the ultimate use of the device they worked feverishly to build.

They had been ready for nearly a year except for one critical component and that’s what Abdul had finally found, thanks to an obscure British researcher who’d put together the pieces of an eight-hundred-year-old legend and led Mohammad to a remote temple lost in one of the most impenetrable jungles in the world.

Muhammad unslung the bag from his shoulder and carefully opened the top. The bright sunshine beating down on the airport tarmac made the crystals gleam like solid fire.

“Congratulations, my friend,” Bahar said warmly. They started toward a waiting limousine. “This has become your obsession as well as mine. Tell me, was the temple as Marco Polo described it to Rustichello?”

“No. The monks expanded it greatly over the years. The original cave where the crystals were first mined was still there, but they had constructed buildings going down to it from the cliffs above and had started carving more idolatrous images on the opposite side of the chasm. Judging by the level of decay, I would say it was abandoned at about the time the current junta took control.”

“Interesting that they left the last of the stones behind,” Bahar mused as a chauffeur held open the door for him.

“They took their foolish statue but abandoned the gems. Perhaps over the centuries they lost the knowledge of their existence. Polo said that only the head priest knew about them, and that he was told only because he carried the Khan’s seal.”

“Perhaps,” Bahar muttered, already uninterested in the conversation. “It’s enough that you were able to track them down at all.”

Abdul had had teams of researchers and archivists searching the globe for these particular crystals after finding a tiny sample in the shop of a Hong Kong antiquities dealer and learning they possessed the special internal structure needed to make their device work. And his superior was correct in saying this had become an obsession. He had amassed and retained so much information about crystals that he could probably get his gemology certification. He’d personally visited stores and mines from Scotland to Japan, but his break came after one of the hired researchers, a bit of a Marco Polo fanatic himself, had sat in on William Cantor’s moneygrubbing lecture in Coventry, England. When Mohammad heard the tale about crystal-powered weapons, he had flown to England that night with an assistant and met with Cantor when he gave his next lecture. He had to give Cantor credit—he’d actually tried to hold off telling Abdul who the actual owner of the Rustichello Folio was and where he lived. Once they’d disposed of Cantor’s body, they’d broken into the drafty mansion in the southern part of England, killed the old man, taken the Folio, and staged the scene to look like a robbery gone bad.

They were safely out of the country before either crime was discovered.

A hired translator then spent several weeks on the document, eliciting details of Polo’s observations of the battle and his later journey to find the mine where the crystals that had blinded the village’s watchkeepers had originated. Abdul knew that the mine held the same stones as the tiny sliver he’d found in Hong Kong.

Of course they would need to be tested, but the optical properties Polo described were the same as they needed for their project. It couldn’t be coincidence.

“And the sinking?” Bahar inquired. “Did it go as pla

“We had to hurry but were only a few miles from our target area, and no one spotted us heading back to Brunei in the Hercules’s lifeboats. Our American mole had reported that the ship they used is much faster than we were led to believe. He should call me soon to tell me how it went, but I think we destroyed all traces of the Oracle before they reached it.”

“That is good. As it turns out, the Oracle was right about the Corporation posing a potential threat. They did manage to escape Insein Prison, a feat I don’t believe has been accomplished by many.”

Abdul recalled his meeting with Cabrillo in Singapore. He’d had a feeling then that the man was dangerous. That reminded him of another loose end that needed seeing to. “What of Pramana?”

“We’re going to see him now. That is the reason for our delay here in Jakarta. I knew after his failure in Singapore that you would wish to speak with him. It was only your quick thinking that prevented it from becoming a fatal mistake. Once your chat is over we’ll head to Europe with the crystals. Oh, what about Croissard?”

“Weighted down and tossed into the Malacca Strait.”

Thirty minutes later the sleek Mercedes limousine pulled into the parking lot of a run-down warehouse on the outskirts of the teeming city of ten million. The lot was cracked and weed choked, and the building looked as though it hadn’t seen paint since the Dutch granted Indonesia its independence.

“I can’t believe that fool Pramana didn’t have tighter control of his people,” Mohammad said, his temper begi

Some of the enforcers he employed came from the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah. In fact, Pramana had accompanied him to England and had carried out the torture of William Cantor. What Abdul hadn’t known is that when Pramana sent two of his men to the Singapore meeting as lobby backup in case something went wrong, they brought suicide vests on the private jet with the intention of killing the very men Abdul was there to meet. Abdul didn’t know the reason or particularly care. He supposed it was to avenge the fellow Muslims the Corporation had killed in Pakistan. Abdul himself had warned them all about how good these operators were, so perhaps they’d decided to martyr themselves by taking out such a formidable foe.

It mattered little. What mattered was that Pramana had betrayed them either deliberately or by not being able to control his men, and they’d nearly ruined everything. Had Mohammad not realized the situation and quickly improvised another explosive device with gunpowder from his pistol and chemicals he found on a maid’s cart, he felt certain that Cabrillo would have realized the meeting had been a trap and not taken the contract. The third blast he’d set off in the casino had been just enough to convince the two Americans that they had been in an unfortunate place at an unfortunate time.