The Jungle

felt the Corporation represented a direct threat to whatever he had planned. “Two final pieces,” he added as a further aside. “Linda saw a bunch of foot-long polished rubies in the bag we recovered in Myanmar, and I discovered that two decks of the oil platform had been converted into a massive server farm. Any thoughts?”

The two young geniuses glanced at each other for a moment as if syncing their minds. Mark finally spoke up. “Whatever they were, they weren’t rubies. Corundum, the base material for both rubies and sapphires—the difference being the presence of trace minerals that give them color, chromium for ruby, iron or titanium for sapphire—has a hexagonal crystal structure, but it’s tabular rather than linear.”

Cabrillo kept his face impassive while inside he was screaming, Speak English!

“What he’s saying,” Stone translated, “is that rubies don’t grow lengthwise like emerald or quartz, so it is unlikely that Linda saw foot-long rubies. They were some other type of crystals.”

That supported Juan’s theory that this wasn’t about gem smuggling, but this information got him no closer to the truth. “What about all the computers?”

Mark said, “Obviously Bahar needed to crunch some major numbers, but without knowing more about him or his goals it’s impossible to say exactly what or why.”

“Then you have your marching orders. I want answers.”

“You got it, boss man,” Stoney replied.

17

JOHN SMITH STEPPED OFF THE BOARDING STAIRS OF THE private jet and into the arms of Gunawan Bahar. The two embraced like brothers.

“You have done well,” Bahar said, holding Smith at arm’s length to look him in the eye.

“It was easier than we anticipated, especially after you brokered the deal with the army.” They spoke in English, the only language they had in common.

Smith really had taken the anonymous nom de guerre when he’d joined the Foreign Legion. He’d been born Abdul Mohammad in Algeria and, like many in his homeland, had a great deal of French blood in his veins after one hundred and thirty years of colonial occupation. Also, like many in his homeland, more than forty years of independence hadn’t eroded the hatred he felt for his nation’s former overlords. But rather than fight as an insurgent in his own country against a government he saw as corrupted by Western influences, he had decided to fight the beast from within and joined the Legion as a way of gaining military training and learning how to ingratiate himself with Europeans so that he could easily pass as one.

After his initial five-year contract, he left to join the Mujahadin, fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The warfare he enjoyed, but the level of ignorance he encountered among the people came as a shock. He found they were all superstitious peasants who spent as much time warring among themselves as they did fighting the Soviets. Even the Great Sheik Bin Laden was a paranoid fanatic who actually believed that once the Russians were expelled they should take the fight directly to the infidels in the West. Though he’d been a playboy in his youth and enjoyed himself in European cities, Osama never understood the true might of a Western army. Battling Russian conscripts on soil that was foreign to them was a far cry from taking on the United States.

Bin Laden came to believe that martyrdom operations, as he liked to call suicide bombers, would bring about the destruction of the Western world. Abdul Mohammad wanted to see America brought to its knees, but he understood that blowing up a few buildings wasn’t going to change anything. In fact, it would harden the victims’ resolve and bring swift and deadly reprisals.

Though he did not know how, he knew there was a better way. It wasn’t until years later, long after Bin Laden took down the Twin Towers and ignited a powder keg that had hurt the Muslim world far more than the West, that Mohammad met Setiawan Bahar, Gunawan’s brother and namesake to his son. (The boy used in the Afghan operation had been a street urchin they had carefully coached not to talk to the infidels.) By the time they met, Mohammad was working for a private security company in Saudi Arabia, the flames of jihad having cooled in his belly. The Bahar brothers were in the country at a time when Wahabi fundamentalists were targeting Western interests. The pair was touring oil production facilities that were interested in buying electronic controls from one of their companies back in Jakarta.

Mohammad was their bodyguard for two weeks, and their full-time employee ever since.

They used him for their own corporate security as well as what they dubbed “special projects.” These ranged from corporate espionage to kidnapping rivals’ family members in order to win contracts at lower bids. The Bahar brothers, and then only Gunawan after Setiawan died of lung cancer, were very careful to shield themselves from any consequences of their more aggressive business dealings. The fact that the Corporation couldn’t trace their ownership of the J-61 oil platform was a testament to their care and caution.

What had bonded the three men originally was their belief that Bin Laden’s tactics were doomed to fail. They agreed that they wanted the West to end its persistent meddling in the Middle East, but terrorism would never bring that about. In fact, it caused more interference. What the Muslim world needed was leverage over the United States. Since both sides needed oil, the one to run its factories and cars, the other for the tremendous revenue, something else had to be found.

It was four years earlier when Gunawan had read an article in a science magazine—in his dentist’s office, of all places—that he found a way to get that leverage. He had placed Abdul in charge of the venture and gave him near-limitless resources. The very best and brightest in Bahar’s vast empire were put to the task, and outside contractors were brought in as needed. The project was so cutting-edge that secrecy was a given and needn’t be explained to the employees, while only a select few knew the ultimate use of the device they worked feverishly to build.

They had been ready for nearly a year except for one critical component and that’s what Abdul had finally found, thanks to an obscure British researcher who’d put together the pieces of an eight-hundred-year-old legend and led Mohammad to a remote temple lost in one of the most impenetrable jungles in the world.

Muhammad unslung the bag from his shoulder and carefully opened the top. The bright sunshine beating down on the airport tarmac made the crystals gleam like solid fire.

“Congratulations, my friend,” Bahar said warmly. They started toward a waiting limousine. “This has become your obsession as well as mine. Tell me, was the temple as Marco Polo described it to Rustichello?”

“No. The monks expanded it greatly over the years. The original cave where the crystals were first mined was still there, but they had constructed buildings going down to it from the cliffs above and had started carving more idolatrous images on the opposite side of the chasm. Judging by the level of decay, I would say it was abandoned at about the time the current junta took control.”

“Interesting that they left the last of the stones behind,” Bahar mused as a chauffeur held open the door for him.

“They took their foolish statue but abandoned the gems. Perhaps over the centuries they lost the knowledge of their existence. Polo said that only the head priest knew about them, and that he was told only because he carried the Khan’s seal.”

“Perhaps,” Bahar muttered, already uninterested in the conversation. “It’s enough that you were able to track them down at all.”

Abdul had had teams of researchers and archivists searching the globe for these particular crystals after finding a tiny sample in the shop of a Hong Kong antiquities dealer and learning they possessed the special internal structure needed to make their device work. And his superior was correct in saying this had become an obsession. He had amassed and retained so much information about crystals that he could probably get his gemology certification. He’d personally visited stores and mines from Scotland to Japan, but his break came after one of the hired researchers, a bit of a Marco Polo fanatic himself, had sat in on William Cantor’s moneygrubbing lecture in Coventry, England. When Mohammad heard the tale about crystal-powered weapons, he had flown to England that night with an assistant and met with Cantor when he gave his next lecture. He had to give Cantor credit—he’d actually tried to hold off telling Abdul who the actual owner of the Rustichello Folio was and where he lived. Once they’d disposed of Cantor’s body, they’d broken into the drafty mansion in the southern part of England, killed the old man, taken the Folio, and staged the scene to look like a robbery gone bad.