Chapter 29
The deep green of the jungle gave way to the starker colors of the northern Kona district.
The gray-brown parched grass and the rough black lava fields were punctuated by oases of green where resorts had been built.
Rory headed for the shoreline, where lines of white foam lapped against promontories and sandy beaches.
Kawaihae had no boats resembling the one that had taken Mathilda.
Neither did the marina near the Kona airport, or the one on Ali’i Drive.
As they searched, he kept an eye on the blazing fireball of the sun, which was inching quickly toward the horizon.
If they didn’t locate the boat before dark, their chances of finding it would go down significantly.
This wasn’t a police helicopter equipped with spotlights, after all.
As the sun slipped into the ocean, he swore out loud. “No point in searching after dark. Now I have to figure out where to land this thing.”
“The airport’s back that way.” Lincoln gestured behind him.
“Yeah, but I don’t even know this bird’s call sign. I was thinking about landing at that helicopter tour outfit up the coast. They’ll be closed by the time we get up there. We can just leave it there and let them sort it out.”
Lincoln chuckled. “Quite a surprise to wake up to. A stolen helicopter. What about us then?”
“We’ll be long gone. We can search the harbors on foot, ask if anyone has seen a pretty blond woman with a crystal. How many could there be in Hawaii? Hundreds, maybe thousands if you count necklaces?”
“No mentioning that crystal,” Lincoln snapped.
“It was a joke. You know me, so irreverent and all.”
Lincoln didn’t seem to think it was funny. “Just don’t forget your contract. You are still working for me.”
Rory stiffened. Was his boss really going to pull that, after everything they’d been through? Maybe tigers never did change their stripes. “I have an emergency exit clause.”
“Yes, you do. Too bad you’d have to give back your signing bonus.”
Rory’s jaw flexed. That signing bonus had paid for ten years of Ethan’s care in advance. It probably wasn’t even possible to get it back, even if he wanted to.
“But luckily, it doesn’t have to come to that,” said Lincoln mildly. “Our interests are aligned. You want to find Mathilda, I want to find the crystal.”
Rory wrestled with his anger, and decided to postpone his outrage over Lincoln’s controlling tactics. He didn’t have time for it now, and besides, Lincoln was right. At the moment, they wanted the same thing.
“Maybe I could be more helpful in the search if you tell me what that fucking crystal thing is,” he growled. “Why is it so important? Is it a gigantic diamond?”
“It’s a lot more valuable than that.”
“Okay…why?”
The sky was darkening, a sliver of pure orange hovering between sky and ocean. Rory looked down at the metropolis of Kailua-Kona spread out below. Lights were beginning to twinkle on, here, there, across the city, into the hills.
He adjusted the pitch control to make the wide circle that would put them on a northward heading, to the helicopter flightseeing outfit he’d spotted. Sorry, Mathilda. Gotta park this chopper for the night, but I’m not giving up yet. I’m still coming for you.
Lincoln watched the ground, the binoculars glued to his face. “Hang on, let’s not go north yet.”
“You see something?”
“Maybe.”
Rory peered out the pilot’s side, but he couldn’t make out much. It was too dark by now.
Much too dark. Where were the lights of Kona and all the neighborhoods nestled in the hills above it? In the last few minutes, most of them had gone out, it seemed.
“What’s going on down there?”
“Looks like a power outage. The entire grid is going down. Everyone who doesn’t have solar just lost their power.” Lincoln was carefully scanning the ground, but Rory still couldn’t understand what that had to do with Mathilda.
“That sucks, but it’s just going to make it harder to find her, isn’t it? We can’t see a damn thing.”
“There.” Lincoln pointed farther south, to an area between Kona and Captain Cook, the little town where the infamous captain had met his gory end. “That’s the darkest area, the epicenter of the outage. That’s where Mathilda must be.”
Rory stared over at his boss. “I’m going to need a little more explanation before I head to some random spot that happens to have a power outage.”
“Trust me, we’ll find her there.” Lincoln adjusted his binoculars to bring something into better focus.
“How about you trust me?” Rory said sharply.
“Don’t you think it’s time? I’ve already signed an NDA, whatever you tell me isn’t going anywhere.
Personally, I think we should land this bird and search on foot.
I don’t even know what that place is. I can’t just set a helicopter down in a dark unknown spot. ”
“It’s a resort. I’ve been there. Very exclusive, very pricey. There’s an open courtyard type of space in the middle surrounded by private cottages. You can land there.”
Rory gritted his teeth. “Trust goes both ways, Lincoln. If I’m going to trust you to guide me in for a landing, you have to trust me with why we’re going there.”
Lincoln lowered the binoculars and muttered something under his breath. It sounded like cursing, so Rory tuned it out. But he didn’t change their heading. He wasn’t turning this helicopter around until he got some damn information.
“Okay. This is top-secret, and I mean, military-level classified. If you say anything, you won’t just be breaking an NDA, you’ll be pissing off the federal government, multiple governments. This is very, very serious. Do you understand?”
Rory banished every trace of irreverence from his voice. “Yes, I understand.”
“That crystal is a harmonic magnifier. When it’s activated, whatever power source is nearby, it amplifies it a hundred fold, a thousand fold, they haven’t actually found the limits yet. The applications are…” He shook his head. “World-changing.”
That was enough for him. Rory turned the helicopter in the tightest circle he could manage. “You could power a whole town with a light bulb, that kind of thing?”
“Exactly. We wouldn’t need to produce so much energy. We could cut our production a hundred fold and deploy the crystals as amplifiers.”
The implications were mind-boggling. “That would change the entire world economy.”
“Yes, it would. Obviously, some people don’t want that to happen. A lot of people have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. If there’s a source of cheap or even nearly free energy? Everything will change.”
“Where did you find it? Is it naturally occurring?”
“It was, but the mine got destroyed by an earthquake last year. I’m sorry but I can’t tell you where it was.
Before the earthquake hit, I had already bought a company that could create a lab-grown version of it.
They’ve been working on it around the clock, and finally came up with something that seems to work.
That’s the sample that was in my med kit.
I was under strict instructions not to expose it to direct sunlight. ”
“Oh shit.” Now he was finally getting the connection to Mathilda. Dread gathered in his stomach. “What happens then?”
“It emits such a strong magnetic pulse that all nearby electrical currents are disrupted. Power outage, at the very least. They weren’t entirely sure what other effect it would have.
It hasn’t been tested. That’s why I wanted to get it back from Mathilda before she did something careless with it. Clearly we were too late.”
They both looked down at the ground, where the wave of darkness kept spreading, one transformer at a time going down.
“Don’t call Mathilda careless,” Rory snapped. “She didn’t know any of this. Not warning her was careless. Keeping so much to yourself that the rest of us have been in danger this entire time was careless. Careless is—”
“All right, all right, I get it. I should have warned you both. I was more worried about other people getting their hands on it. It could be reverse engineered. That’s why Tanaka wants it.
He already tried infiltrating the lab, but that went wrong and a firefight broke out.
Half of our equipment got destroyed by gunfire.
That makes my sample even more valuable.
It’ll be months before they can produce another one. ”
“Then why didn’t you have ten armed guards with us on the plane to Maui, if that sample was so important?”
“I thought a low profile would be safer. I think my head of security might be double-crossing me.”
“Max? Really? I always thought he was very loyal.” And a real asshole, but Rory kept that part to himself.
“It could be someone else. Possibly one of my assistants. Maybe someone connected with my sister or someone else in my family. I can’t trust anyone until I find out who’s passing information to my competitors, Tanaka and others.”
“So you’re saying I’m the only one you trust, and that’s only because I didn’t know shit about what you were doing?”
“More or less,” Lincoln admitted.
“But you didn’t trust me enough to warn me that crystal might be dangerous.”
After a long silence, save for the drone of the engine, Lincoln said, grudgingly, “I suppose I could have said something before we crashed.”
“You think? Or maybe later, before I slipped it to Mathilda?” That was the part he couldn’t quite get over. She was a completely innocent victim in all this.
“Point taken. Here’s the thing, Pilot Rory. The thing no one tells you about being a billionaire. It makes you paranoid as fuck.”