Piranha

Kensit typed in some coordinates and the foyer of a mansion appeared on the big screen. Washburn frowned until he realized what he was looking at.

“That’s my house in Miami! When did you get this video?”

“It’s not a recording. This is a real-time feed. Let’s see if anyone’s home.” He rolled a trackball and it was as if a camera were moving up the winding stairs until he was looking down from the balcony. He wandered down one hall until he reached a closed door. He pushed right through and a woman in lingerie was putting on a skirt.

Washburn lunged toward the screen. “That’s my wife!” He wheeled around with balled-up fists. “You—”

“No, no, Governor. Remember, I have guards right outside this door. We can do this just as well with you tied up.”

“This is a trick. You’ve planted a camera in my house.”

Kensit nodded appreciatively. “Good for you. That would be a logical assumption. It is, of course, wrong.”

“Prove it.”

“I will. Tell me someplace where you are absolutely positive I could not have planted a camera.”

Washburn shrugged, and said sarcastically, “The Oval Office.”

“I was hoping you’d choose something more unusual, but that will do.”

The White House was one of the easiest places on earth to locate. He typed the name in and a satellite view of the familiar white structure was displayed on-screen.

“Is that all?” Washburn scoffed. “I could do that with Google maps and an iPhone.”

“Really?” Kensit said. “Can you also do this?”

He zoomed down, the roof of the West Wing racing toward them until the view plunged through. Kensit stopped it when it reached the most recognizable office in the world.

If the room had been empty, Washburn might not have been so flabbergasted. But Kensit had anticipated his choice and knew that the president was meeting with his senior advisers that morning.

“This farm bill is causing us all kinds of problems in the polls, Mr. President,” his chief of staff said. “We can’t cut subsidies as much as the Senate wants or our party will get killed in the next election.”

“Let Sandecker handle it,” the president replied. He looked as relaxed as ever, lounging in his chair with a mug of coffee in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other, reading glasses perched on his nose. “He’ll be back from Brazil in a couple of days.”

“Do you think the vice president can talk them down?”

“Sandecker’s a clever guy. If he can’t convince them, they’re certainly not going to listen to me. Now, what’s on the agenda for the military briefing today?”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs sat forward. “There was another terrorist bombing in northern Pakistan this morning. Six dead, twenty wounded. North Korea is moving a thousand troops to the demilitarized zone, but we think it’s just a pla

“Good. What about the trip to California next week that . . .”

Kensit turned down the volume. “Satisfied?”

If Washburn’s jaw were any lower, he could have swallowed an ostrich egg.

“They have no clue we’re watching them?”

“No.”

“And you can see anywhere you want?”

Kensit gri

“How . . . How are you doing this?”

Kensit paused as he thought about how much he would have to dumb down his explanation. “It’s called a neutrino telescope. I had been calling it a quantum receiver, but I like Eric Stone’s name for it better. My code name for it is Sentinel, for obvious reasons. Do you know what a neutrino is?”

Washburn shook his head slowly, still gaping like a simpleton at the continuing video feed from the Oval Office.

“A neutrino is a subatomic particle created by nuclear reactions, such as those within the sun or from cosmic rays. Normally, they’re very hard to detect.”

“Why?”

“Because they are so small they can pass through matter without stopping. It would take six trillion miles of lead to stop half the neutrinos flowing through the earth, so the earth and everything on it are subjected to constant bombardment from them. But suppose we had a way to observe those few neutrinos that did interact with their surroundings. My long-lost great-uncle, a brilliant physicist named Gunther Lutzen, anticipated neutrinos decades before they were discovered. Not only that, he provided a basis for intercepting them and deciphering the spatial equations that would allow us to view the matter they had already passed through. If his work had been taken seriously at the time, he would have won the Nobel Prize and been mentioned in the same breath as Einstein.”

“And the equipment in that Haitian cave is the neutrino telescope? That’s Sentinel?”

“Yes. Uncle Lutzen theorized that he would need a very particular environment in which to build the telescope, a cavern that had the perfect level of natural radioactive ore and copper impurities to allow for the right conditions. He tracked a rare sample of the ore to Haiti and was about to return to Germany with his discovery when his ship was destroyed by a volcano. He called the cave Oz, but because of the green tinge from the copper in the cave’s selenium crystals, I think he should have called it the Emerald City.”

Washburn nodded in agreement. “So how are you seeing the images from here?”

“I have a transducer that uses the same technology to beam the images directly here from Sentinel, so I can be anywhere in the world and use it. I prefer to be mobile.”

“But you could make millions of dollars with this technology,” Washburn said in awe. “Imagine the potential.”

“Billions of dollars, actually. Perhaps even trillions. And I will make that much. But you aren’t imagining the true potential. I don’t limit myself to thinking of what I can attain financially. Don’t you realize that with Sentinel at our disposal, we can change the world? And I mean that literally. Shaping the future of the United States is only the first step.”

“What more could there be?”

Kensit sighed. He supposed he shouldn’t have been so surprised at such limited thinking. “In this day and age, there is only so much one country can accomplish on its own. Think what I can do when I have control of Russia, China, and the European Union.”

“You? What about me?”

Kensit shook his head. “You still don’t understand, do you? I am the only indispensable part of this equation. I’m the only one who knows how to build the neutrino telescope. And you’re looking at Phase One. Currently, I can see only a single location at a time, a distinct disadvantage that I will improve upon soon. I’ve found a second underground cavern even bigger than Oz and I’ve already purchased the land around it for miles. Once Phase Two is built there, I will be able to view as many as a dozen locations at once. With advances in real-time translation software, I will be able to pass on secrets even the NSA can’t deliver to you when you’re president.”

“And that’s how you plan to get me elected,” Washburn said, finally comprehending the possibilities.

“You will know every strategy your opponents plan to use, every secret they want to keep, every scandal they try to hide. You’ll be able to anticipate their every move. Or I will, and then I will pass it on to you. So don’t ever think about betraying me or getting the deluded notion that you could do any of this without me. Because I will find someone who does understand that I am the one making the rules from now on.”

Washburn swallowed hard and nodded. He understood. Kensit had no doubt he would do as instructed.