Chapter 6
On his next day off, Lincoln borrowed Benito’s pickup and drove into downtown Kona.
He’d rented the penthouse suite at the Seaside Paradise, a boutique hotel that sat on the shoreline like a cruise ship about to set sail.
He’d booked it for a month, but had only stayed in it twice so far.
At least his laptop was getting plenty of downtime in these luxury surroundings, as were all the expensive clothes that might make people question his identity.
The intruder at the hale had sent him a message by dropping his name. Tanaka knew he was around. The game was on, or some game, anyway. He needed to know more.
After making sure no one had followed him from the Royal Leilani, he entered the code and slipped into the room. First things first: a shower. Sleeping in the linen closet, he was only able to manage a sponge bath at the end of each sweaty, back-breaking day.
He groaned with relief as the water pummeled the sore muscles of his back. Between the hard work and sleeping on blankets on the floor, his body had plenty to complain about. How did people do this day in and day out? Would he get ever used to it?
And why had he never given a second’s thought to how hard manual labor was? And how little it paid? As soon as he got his life straightened out, he was going to double the pay of all his groundskeepers. Kitchen staff too, while he was at it. Vernon, too. He’d quadruple Vernon’s pay, just because.
His house manager would complain, but screw that guy. His only job was ordering everyone else around. He didn’t know what it felt like to work bent over until your lower back screamed for relief.
After about an hour in the shower, he wandered out to the living room and stood for a moment gazing out the window at the ocean.
Since Kona was on the west side of the Big Island, the next landfall would be Maui, then the rest of the string of islands and then…
Japan or the Philippines, perhaps. Past Japan would be South Korea.
Here in Kona, he was a couple thousand miles closer to his father than when he was home in California.
Hi Dad, he thought sarcastically as he waved out the window. Bet you miss me, don’t you? Bet you’re wondering why I’ve dropped out of sight and gone no contact with everyone. Yeah right. You probably haven’t even noticed.
On impulse, he raised his middle finger and flashed it at the ocean, as if his angry gesture might carry all the way across the Pacific. Then he laughed out loud at himself. “Idiot.”
Zara’s schtick about triggers and denial flashed back to his mind, and he found himself chuckling out loud. If she could see him now, flipping the bird at a man an entire ocean away, she’d be “I told you so”-ing all over the place.
He sat on the couch and logged onto his laptop.
Before he’d come back to Hawaii, his IT supervisor had set it up so his identity was masked behind a top-tier VPN.
For some time, he’d been searching for Rory Baker, his former pilot, who had been present when the crystal disappeared.
Rory had gone completely off the grid, and Lincoln couldn’t blame him for that.
Better than anyone, Rory knew how powerful the CHUM technology could be.
Lincoln could still hear the accusations Rory had leveled at him. You’re going to keep this technology for the zero point zero zero percent while the rest of our bills keep going up? Win win lose?
Rory just didn’t understand how the world worked. One person couldn’t change it, not even a billionaire. Why couldn’t he get that?
His computer pinged. He’d set up a very complicated alert that would tell him if anyone posted about his missing tech.
He clicked on the alert and a shiver went through his body. The post was on a subreddit page devoted to alternative energy. It showed a meme of a two-inch tall bluish crystal object against a starry background.
This will change the world, the text on the meme read. Want to know more? Check the comments.
He had to wade through a hellscape of comments before finding the website. The comments said things like, Vaguepost much?…The world’s a steaming dumpster fire of toxic waste, what’s the point? …That’s alien tech from Planet 18973, I saw it when I got abducted.
Finally, there was a website link. FreeEnergyForAll dot com.
Another tremor shuddered through his body.
If his investors saw this shit, they’d throw a fit.
It wouldn’t benefit Higher Ground to produce something that provided free energy.
The opposite, in fact. It would make his company the enemy of every utility, oil company, generator manufacturer, even solar panel company in the world. No one wanted free energy.
Except the general population, of course.
He clicked on the site and scanned the text.
The promise and potential of harmonic magnifiers.
Imagine a device so powerful it can amplify the nearest electric current to a hundred or even a thousandfold.
That’s the power of this small crystalline object.
If properly controlled, it could allow the smallest light bulb to provide enough energy to run an entire house, or even a city block, and perhaps even a town.
It sounds impossible, and yet, for weeks, rumors have been flying that such a thing exists. This photo was taken from a recent sighting, but it disappeared shortly afterwards.
Your challenge, should you accept it, is to track down this world-transforming object before the billionaires lock it up forever.
This technology should not be gate-kept by people who don’t have our best interests at heart.
This mission is hazardous.
The most powerful elites in the world don’t want you to find it.
They don’t want us to be free from energy costs.
Too many people make too much money off our backs.
That’s the way things have always been. But ask yourself, do they have to be that way?
What could humanity accomplish without the restrictions of costly energy production?
Lincoln stared at his laptop screen and swore out loud. This was his worst nightmare. The CHUM could be dangerous in the wrong hands. This was why he had to find the damn thing before this got out of control. He didn’t need to be fending off internet conspiracy theorists while he did so.
Had Rory posted this? Or maybe it was someone on Tanaka’s team, trying to flush out whoever currently had possession of the CHUM crystal?
He fired off an email to his IT team to find out where the meme had originated.
But face it—this was his fault, full stop. He’d had possession of the only surviving sample of the CHUM and he’d let it get away. Okay, it had taken two plane crashes and a coma to make that happen. Nonetheless, he had no one to blame but himself.
The sick taste of failure soured his stomach.
At this rate, he was going to end up with nothing.
He’d put all his eggs in this one basket.
In the settlement with his sister Maureen, he’d stepped down from every part of Kerr Enterprises other than Higher Ground LLC.
Everyone in his world had been mystified by that choice.
Why, out of all the companies in the Kerr portfolio, had he chosen the one no one had heard of?
The one that seemed to be little more than a research lab that hadn’t produced anything yet?
He got to his feet and paced around the room.
Maybe he should take Zara’s advice and not jump to the worst conclusion.
Obviously the CHUM was still out there, or there wouldn’t be any push to locate it.
That was something. If Rory had posted this, he might know something by now.
Lincoln should be able to locate Rory; he wouldn’t be far from Mathilda.
Lincoln had seen the way those two looked at each other.
He also had an alert set up for Mathilda Wheeler.
She was the last known person to have had contact with the CHUM.
Checking the most recent report from his investigators, he saw that she’d landed at the Hilo airport two days earlier.
Now that she was moving around freely, out of the hospital and away from her family, he wanted to talk to her.
She might be preparing to go back to Nahele Research Camp.
That would be unfortunate. The last time he’d been at that camp, he’d experienced a coma, a kidnapping, and a helicopter crash.
Who knew what could happen if he went back.
He should try to intercept Mathilda before she headed to those lush northeast valleys.
He checked the weather on the east side of the island. The west side was generally dry and sunny, though not always. The east side, on the other hand…yup, nothing but rain for the next week.
He posted an email in the draft folder of an account that only he and his chief of security had access to.
Mathilda Wheeler is back in Hilo. Monitor her movements and lmk if she’s prepping to go back to the jungle.
I want to interrogate her before then. Don’t scare her off. No one talks to her except me.
These days, he didn’t trust anyone on his staff.
He’d made an exception for Rory because he’d needed a pilot.
And he was keeping his fingers crossed about his IT guy.
But no way was he going to allow his security team to interview Mathilda Wheeler.
That was his job. In fact, he had two completely separate security teams on the case, neither of which knew about the other.
Paranoid? Sure, he could see why someone might think that. But when billions were at stake, it was probably closer to realism than paranoia.
Before he logged off, on a whim he Googled Zara and the Royal Leilani. They didn’t list the names of their staff members, so that didn’t give him anything. But the name Zara did surface in a short newspaper item from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
At the Hawaii Surfing Association competition in Haleiwa, a young new star burst on the scene.
Thirteen-year-old Zara Morrissey shocked everyone when she won the Girls 17 and Under category in her very first surfing competition.
Zara grew up in Kailua-Kona, and has been surfing since she was five.
In a short interview, she said she was just trying to have fun, and dedicated her trophy to her mother, who taught her how to surf before passing away several years ago.
A photo accompanied the article. It showed a brightly smiling girl in a red bikini. She held a surfboard that must be several feet taller than she was. Her hair was cut short and curled in wild waves around her ears.
He’d know that hair anywhere after getting so close and personal with it.
So Zara was a surfer, and her last name was Morrissey.
He googled Zara Morrissey, but nothing else came up that seemed relevant. Maybe her surfing career had ended after that competition. The only other mention of a Morrissey came in an article about a Louis Morrissey who’d been convicted of fraud.
The story was devoted to his escape from custody. During a parole hearing, someone had released a herd of feral cats in the courthouse hallway. During the ensuing chaos, Morrissey had hidden in a coffee cart. He became something of a folk hero during the manhunt and acquired the nickname Lucky Lou.
But his luck ran out when someone spotted him selling “lucky lava charms” to tourists on Ali’i Drive. His defense to the charge of selling lava, which was highly illegal in Hawaii, was that it was obviously fake.
Interesting character, to say the least, and apparently not one to learn from his past mistakes.
He sold the story of his escape to a movie producer, and then a podcaster, and then a publisher, none of whom knew that they’d all purchased “exclusive” rights.
Not a dangerous crime, but a third strike after his escape.
The judge had shown no mercy, and now he was back behind bars.
The photo of “Lucky Lou,” with his trademark sunny smile, looked a bit like Zara around the mouth. She too had an easy smile and that same carefree quality. It radiated from Louis Morrissey even though he wore a prison jumpsuit in the photo.
Feeling a little queasy, he shut down his laptop. If there was any chance at all that Zara was related to Lucky Lou Morrissey, he needed to stay far away from her. The last thing he needed was to let more criminals into his life. Tanaka was more than enough.