Stone Junction

‘Assuming mine wouldn’t work. I still haven’t heard anything that would prevent it.’

‘Well, we haven’t got to the bad part yet: the vault. It was custom built for the CIA by Seabrook Security. It’s a perfect cube, thirteen feet on a side, each wall composed of a two-foot slab of stainless steel.’

‘Great,’ Daniel said. ‘It’ll give me more room to work in.’

‘There’s more,’ Volta cautioned. ‘Each wall, except the door and the floor, is wired on the outside with an electrical sensor grid that can detect a pressure change of five hundred pounds per square inch and a temperature change of thirty degrees Centigrade. The door and floor are sensitive to changes inside the vault of five pounds p.s.i. and ten degrees Centigrade. Makes it difficult to blast or drill your way in. The grids are independently wired to each checkpoint, air base security, and a nearby CIA installation – and of course it’s a doubled system, sounding when it is broached as well as when it’s shut down by any other means than a coded sequence, which changes every day.’ Volta smiled at Daniel. ‘And how does your plan look now?’

‘Fucked,’ Daniel said disgustedly.

‘I’d have to infer you were planning to stay in the vault with the Diamond long enough that it would vanish with you.’

‘You got it. I figured I’d just walk into the vault and hang around for the thirty to forty hours you said it takes to capture an object in my force field, or whatever you call it. I guess you’d already considered that possibility.’

‘It crossed my mind, yes, but I rejected it even before I learned of the pressure-sensitive floor.’

‘Why?’

‘You risk yourself too much. Suppose you were in the vault when they came – as they often do – to take the Diamond to the CIA lab nearby?’

‘I’d vanish.’

‘And how long can you vanish for?’

‘Well, you saw me do twenty minutes, and I think I could do more.’

‘What if they stayed an hour? You’d be forced to reappear.’

‘But,’ Daniel countered, ‘not necessarily in the vault. I could go right out through the mountain, reappear, wait till they were gone, and vanish back into the vault.’

‘You might be spotted outside, since there’s virtually no cover. Besides, you’d have to break field congruence with the Diamond, forcing you to start over. It could be months before you had forty uninterrupted hours with the Diamond, and I assure you you’d be exhausted long before then. All assuming, of course, that forty hours would be sufficient to enmesh the Diamond in your force field. That forty-hour figure, as well as my purely speculative notions of intimate force fields and their powers, are based on my limited experience with ordinary objects. The Diamond, clearly, is not an ordinary object. You might well be taken into its field – a glowing six-pound spherical diamond likely exerts a considerable force.

‘Six pounds!’

Volta raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, you can check my calculations, but thirty thousand carats at two hundred milligrams per carat is roughly six pounds, or about the size of a bowling ball.’

Daniel said carefully, ‘This glowing – do you know the source?’

‘None of our people has seen it, and the information they’ve been able to gather is extremely sketchy. All we know is that light emanates from the Diamond. Very few people have actually seen it so far, and I gather they’re still having a difficult time believing it. Even the spooks are spooked. They seem to be divided into two equal factions. One faction thinks it’s some weird KGB espionage ploy. The second faction of U.S. Intelligence, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, thinks the Diamond is from outer space, likely placed here as some monitoring device, though there’s some sentiment that it’s an artifact from a lost civilization, Atlantis being the leading candidate. In short, they know what the Diamond is made of, but they don’t know what it is, what it means, or how it can be real.

‘There’ve been some hard swallows and weak smiles in the intelligence hierarchy the last few weeks. Nobody is eager to assume responsibility. You know how bureaucracies function – their most compelling concerns are always “Who else knows?” and “How can we cover our asses?” Which right now works to our advantage, though we should act soon.’

‘How soon?’

Volta smiled. ‘I think the Hour of the Wolf on April Fools’ Day would be both propitious and appropriate.’

‘Not to mention whimsical.’

‘Appropriate,’ Volta repeated firmly. ‘But you’re entitled to your opinion, however misguided.’

‘I have to admit I don’t know what the Hour of the Wolf is, though it sounds good.’

‘It comes from the late Paleolithic, the Great Spirit tradition. It’s the hour before dawn, a time of particular magic for the hunter, a heightening of psychic powers. It’s also the time when other creatures, whether asleep or tired from a night’s feeding, are most vulnerable.’

‘I’ve sort of lost track of time here, but April First couldn’t be much more than a week away.’

‘A week from tomorrow.’

‘But,’ Daniel said innocently, ‘we don’t have a plan.’

Volta feigned dismay. ‘Daniel, you couldn’t possibly believe that I, the Great Volta, wouldn’t have a plan? Plans are my specialty. My delight. I’ll outline it. You listen for flaws.

‘From the drop-off point – as yet unselected among four possibilities – you hike seven to nine miles, packing all necessary equipment, across the alkali flats to the base of Sunrise Mountain.

‘You vanish and enter the shaft, moving directly down to the vault, reconnoitering as you go.

‘Inside the vault, you reappear. As you do, you leap in the air and attach yourself to the ceiling. Remember, all