Piranha

Juan nodded slowly as the ramifications jelled in his mind. He now understood why the discovery that Kensit was the survivor alarmed Locke and Westfield. And while they knew he had killed three men to cover up his death, they didn’t know he was now employing Haitian death squads that had nearly wiped out Oregon’s entire crew by using an untraceable means of spying on them. Based on the assassin’s pronouncement that the world would change in less than four days, the physicist was either completely off his rocker or he was bringing to fruition a goal that was equally insane.

“Did Kensit have any friends at all? Anyone close that might have suspected his plans?”

“He had no family, and he didn’t hang out with anyone outside of work. One of his coworkers mentioned overhearing Kensit speaking to Pearson about a diary he’d received as an inheritance. Pearson spoke German and Kensit wanted him to do some translation. The coworker thought it unusual because it was the only time Kensit talked about a personal matter. And he remembered there were just a few snippets of the conversation before Kensit abruptly shut Pearson down and never spoke about it again: something about a German scientist, a ship called the Roraima, and a reference to Oz.”

“Oz as in The Wizard of Oz?” Eric asked.

“I asked the same thing,” Westfield said. “He said that’s what it sounded like.”

“Kensit could have been referring to Australia,” Juan said, meaning the nickname Aussies gave their own country.

Westfield shrugged. “It’s hard to know without more to go on. We looked up the Roraima. There are three that we know of. One is a small cargo ship currently sailing under a Brazilian flag. The second was a nineteenth-century steamship that ran aground, but the vessel was saved and the captain subsequently built a Victorian mansion named after the ship. It’s a bed-and-breakfast now.”

“And the third?” Juan asked.

“That’s the most interesting one,” Locke said. “It sunk in Saint-Pierre Harbor in 1902 when Mount Pelée erupted. I understand it’s a tourist attraction now. The question is why Kensit would be interested in any of those ships. We couldn’t come up with a reason.”

“I know someone who might be able to.” And it was just their luck, Juan thought, that St. Julien Perlmutter was only a short drive away in Washington, D.C.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

The stench from the harbor made checking the cargo an odious task, but this equipment was too important for Lawrence Kensit to leave to the crew of Russian scientists and technicians he had hired from a defunct nuclear fusion weapons laboratory. The contents of this container were critical if testing for Sentinel Phase 2 was to finish on schedule. He had to know right away if anything was damaged or missing, which was a distinct possibility considering he was buying all of his hardware on the black market.

The physicist called out the checklist to the team unpacking the crates that were to be loaded onto trucks for the rough ride over cracked and potholed roads to their final destination. Despite his small stature and reedy voice, Kensit was confident that his team would follow his orders to ensure the fragile instruments would make the trip intact and be ready for testing.

The barely functional harbor, severely damaged by the 2010 earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people, served as a strong reminder of why the world needed Kensit to take drastic action to save it from itself. Garbage was piled everywhere. Buildings that had crumbled in the temblor remained unusable. A gantry crane teetered in the middle of the harbor like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, its base completely submerged. Gaunt children rooted around in the refuse for whatever useful scraps they could find and sell.

The scene was representative of the laziness, corruption, and lack of will rampant in every country. Kensit thought of himself as too intelligent to believe in fate or destiny, but he did know an opportunity when it presented itself and the inheritance he had received nearly three years before was just that. If it had gone to anyone else, it would have been wasted; in his hands, the radical theories could usher in a new direction for civilization, with Kensit as its guide.

Lawrence Kensit had been unlike anyone else as far back as he could remember, which he saw as their deficiency, not his. His parents constantly told him that he was special, a fact that he considered self-evident in his ability to master calculus by the age of ten. He didn’t co

Kensit found the isolation strangely appealing. People were a

After graduating from Caltech at eighteen with Ph.D.s in both physics and computer science, he had been recruited by the top universities. Although the idea of shutting himself away to ponder the deepest questions of the universe was intriguing, weapons design was far more fascinating to him. Drone warfare was in its infancy, but he saw the potential for transforming his video game experiences into reality.

The end result was more frustrating than he’d imagined it would be. His elegant software designs were used inefficiently by politicians who were more concerned about limiting civilian casualties than killing the terrorists or wi

Then one day three years ago a lawyer called him up and told him that a great-aunt he’d never met had died. Because his parents had both succumbed to cancer at an early age, Kensit was his aunt’s last living relative and she had left him a small inheritance that included a diary from her uncle, a German scientist named Gunther Lutzen who had died in the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pelée in 1902. Kensit nearly chucked the thing without reading it, but he casually flipped it open and found his uncle’s equations, one of the few times in his life that he’d been truly stu

Kensit at once recognized that his genius had been familial. The equations he understood, but Pearson’s prying when Kensit had asked him to translate some of the words made him realize he would need a professional translator to decipher the German text for him. When Kensit read the results, he knew he alone had to carry on his distant relative’s work. If he turned the radical concepts over to his employer, the U.S. government, they would just waste them like they wasted his drone technology.

That was the day he began plotting to fake his death. It took two years to accomplish, followed by another nine months of eighteen-hour days, but he was nearly finished with the next step toward attaining the power to remake the world however he saw fit.