Black Rain

Now, with the hearings winding down and the transcripts in the midst of being sealed, the rumors had begun to fly. It appeared that the NRI would survive, and it was privately expected that Arnold Moore would be promoted to the director’s position, though nothing had been put in writing just yet.

Danielle shook her head. Only in Washington.

A voice called out to her and she looked over to see McCarter. She smiled. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”

“Who says I’m a nice guy?” he asked, laughing at the private joke.

“I do,” she insisted.

“They told me I could speak with you after you got out, as long as we didn’t discuss the specifics of our testimony.” He glanced toward the hearing room, its doors being closed. “Are you finished in there? Or do you have to come back?”

“We’re done,” she said. “This is the last of the hearings. And from the look of things, we seem to have held our own.”

McCarter looked around nervously, appearing uncomfortable speaking in the halls of power. “Can I walk you out?”

He offered his arm in the fashion of a gentleman and she accepted. Together they walked across the polished floor to the large foyer. A uniformed guard opened the outside door to the muted sound of softly falling rain. In late April, a mild spring storm had settled over the northeast, the third front to move through since they’d arrived home.

As they stepped under the well-lit porte cochere, a taxi came swishing down the curved driveway, lights blazing, wipers flipping back and forth. It stopped and a passenger got out and dashed inside the building.

“More rain,” she noted, gazing at the drizzle and fog.

“I don’t think I’ll ever complain about it again,” he said.

She smiled. “Neither will I.”

McCarter looked at her in a kindly way. “I was wondering if you’d heard from Hawker.”

Her smile faded. She hadn’t. “Not a word, I’m afraid. No one has.”

“Any chance they’ll let him come home?”

“I’m not done fighting with them yet,” she said. “But they’re attempting to save the organization by the looks of things, and they seem unwilling to make it harder on themselves by trying to deal with Hawker’s reputation.”

McCarter seemed greatly disappointed. They’d all grown to care deeply for Hawker.

“Don’t worry about him,” she insisted. “If my guess is right, he’s down there in the sun, tipping back a beer at some riverside café, with an absurdly pretty woman or three to help soothe his aches and pains.”

McCarter smiled at her and she wondered if he detected the jealousy in her voice. Either way, he changed the subject.

“Are they going to leave it alone?” McCarter asked.

“As far as I know,” she said. “We brought back what they were looking for. The body …” her voice trailed off. “No one’s all that interested in the effort it would take to retrieve it. It’s a long way from here, in a friendly country whose sovereignty we’ve already violated once. To go back would mean another clandestine mission or opening up a giant can of worms with the Brazilians about what we did there the first time.”

“It’s just …” he began, “I wonder if we could learn something from it. Maybe things we need to know.”

She’d thought that herself. There were clues to the future of humanity in the cells of that body. Clues that might paint a horrendous picture. Was that really mankind’s destiny? Perhaps it was better not to know. “It’s buried,” she said. “Maybe it should stay that way.”

McCarter pursed his lips and nodded. “Maybe it should.”

He smiled at her like a proud father. “You’re a good person,” he said. “I can only imagine the pressure they put on you. I’m guessing you did the best you could with the position you were in.”

She would’ve liked to think so. “No, I didn’t,” she insisted. “But I’m working on it.”

Another taxi curved down the circular drop-off in front of the building. It pulled to a stop, brakes squealing slightly, the rain falling in thin pencil lines through the beams of its headlights.

“Share a cab?” he asked. “I’m down at the Omni.”

Danielle shook her head. “I’m the other way, I’m afraid.”

“Right,” he said. “Well then, this one’s for you.” He opened the door.

She stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Give my best to Susan,” she said. “And please, take care of yourself.”

“You as well.”

Danielle climbed in and McCarter shut the door behind her, just as the taxi began to pull away. She watched through the rain-streaked window as another cab pulled in for him and then she swung her eyes forward and pressed herself into the seat.

With the taxi moving cautiously into the traffic, Danielle pulled a folded sheet of paper from her purse. It was the promotion letter that Gibbs had sent to her before she went into the Amazon. One of the senators had asked her to bring it, but when given the chance they’d chosen not to put it in the record. Their explanation was simple: they now considered it irrelevant to the investigation. One senator even suggested the promotion was probably still valid, if she wanted it.

Danielle read the letter over again, cringing in disgust at the words and the ego boost they’d once brought her. With deliberate force she crumpled it up, dropping it in the small bin between the seats, right beside an empty soda can and the wrappers from someone’s fast-food lunch.

She sighed, leaning back once again and listening to the sound of the windshield wipers, the tires on the wet road and the static-filled news on the radio. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she had absolutely nothing to do, no deadline to meet, no superior to answer to, no goal to chase with every waking moment. To her great surprise, she found it a supremely agreeable feeling.

Twenty miles away, in the basement of Building Five at the VIC, Arnold Moore stood in a darkened, lead-lined room with the NRI’s head research scientist and another specialist, who worked with fusion theory. They’d been studying the glowing, triangular stone that Danielle had brought back from the Amazon.

“It’s definitely generating power,” the head scientist told Moore. “Massive amounts of it, in fact. But how, I don’t know.”

“Not from cold fusion?” Moore asked.

The scientist shook his head. It seemed they’d been looking for one thing and found something else.

“It’s more advanced than that,” the scientist told him.

“Is it hot?” Moore asked.

“Warm,” the man said, “but the heat is the least of its manifestations.”

Moore wanted answers. “So where is the power going?”

“Most of it is being cha

The glowing stone sat in front of them. Clean and polished now; it was almost invisible from the right angle. Unlike the Martin’s crystals, it contained no inclusions or scratches. To the naked eye, at least, it appeared devoid of any internal structures at all. And yet, the white glow had to come from somewhere, as did the heat and the power.

At this point, the researchers had only just begun to study it, but Moore expected they’d find similar properties to the Martin’s crystals, including the microscopic lines, nano-tubes and other, even more exotic designs.

It was machinery, Moore knew, but it looked like art. There was something mesmerizing about it, almost hypnotic. The longer he stared, the more certain he became that he could actually see the fluctuating pulse the men were talking about. It was rhythmic, harmonic.

“Does it always do that?” Moore asked.

The scientist nodded. “That’s the pulse,” he said. “The pattern is extremely complex with rapid fluctuations. But it is a pattern and it repeats itself over and over.”