is looking for someone to lead them.”
“They’ll make you Lama when old toothless kicks the bucket?”
“Without a doubt.”
“And then?”
“And then things get run my way. With the United States and Western Europe in disarray, the world’s balance of power will immediately shift to China, Japan and the nations of the Pacific. It will take a year, maybe two, before the world economy has adjusted to the fact that most of its biggest consumers are dead. By then people will have realized that the great cities that were destroyed were little more than black holes that absorbed everything and produced only more mouths to feed.
“The planet’s natural resources like coal, grain, timber and oil will not be affected, only their means of distribution, and those can be rerouted. Take away New York as a financial capital and a new one will emerge in Australia. Scour away the beaches of Miami and people will vacation someplace else. Adaptation is perhaps mankind’s greatest skill. The eruption will force humanity to realize the suicidal path they were on and buy enough time to correct it.”
“Where does that leave us? The Order, I mean.”
“Interestingly, it is the nations of the Pacific basin that will be least affected by the eruption, yet they remain the most vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanoes. We will be in position to warn them about impending catastrophes.”
“For a price?” Donny asked.
“For a price,” Luc agreed.
Where Randall saw storehouses of gold, Luc saw power, raw unadulterated power of a kind not held since the Roman Caesars. Nations would give him anything to protect themselves and perhaps even more to not warn their enemies. How much was it worth to the Saudi government to know that a major earthquake was going to strike Iran on a certain date and disrupt their oil shipments for weeks or months? How much would the Japanese pay to have enough warning to evacuate Yokohama when an undersea slide sends a tsunami washing over the port? That kind of knowledge was worth something beyond mere money.
After just one or two demonstrations Luc was certain he’d be given virtual control of the world.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Paul “Tiny” Gordon backed out of the ladies’ room brandishing a plunger and cursing the antique plumbing. He flipped the sign on the door so it read OUT OF ORDER. Not that it mattered. Sundays were notoriously slow and even on a busy night his bar catered to an almost exclusively male clientele. The few women who did venture in weren’t the type to be deterred by using the men’s lavatory.
Nursing a vodka gimlet at the bar, Mercer smiled good-naturedly. “The laundry joint again?”
Tiny’s was part of a run-down strip mall anchored by an industrial laundry facility. On a regular basis, the toilets belched thick curds of detergent foam.
Tiny tossed the plunger into the back room and stepped onto the platform behind the bar that allowed him to look his seated customers in the eye. “Damn landlord won’t do anything about it and the last time I talked to the owner of the laundry he told me that the detergent’s keeping the lines clear and I shouldn’t complain.”
“The joys of running a business.” Mercer checked his watch. It was past four in the afternoon. Lasko was running late.
The front door opened. In the reflection of the mirror behind the bar, Mercer saw Harry unclip Drag’s leash. The pooch and his master ambled into the bar, the basset making for a pile of blankets Tiny kept for him in a corner and Harry for the bar stool Tiny kept for
“Where were you last night?” For the first time in a week, Harry hadn’t slept at Mercer’s. “You didn’t come by.”
Harry shot him a lecherous smirk. “I came someplace else.”
Mercer and Tiny groaned.
“What brings you here so early?” Harry asked.
“Ira wanted to meet and I needed to get out.”
“Think they found Tisa?”
“That’s my hope.”
“And you’re going to go get her.”
Mercer sipped at his drink. “That’s my plan.”
Harry looked to Tiny. “The charming prince storming the castle to rescue the fair damsel? Is his life a cliche or what?”
“You gotta wonder what that makes us.”
Mercer indicated his glass. “Obviously you’re the alchemist who concocts the healing potions that keep me going.”
“And Harry?”
Harry straightened. “I see myself as the sage providing insightful advice.”
“Sorry, Harry. Drag’s the insightful one. You’re more like the court jester.”
The door opened again. Ira paused to let his eyes adjust to the bar’s gloom and his nose adjust to the smell of old beer and stale cigarettes. He wore khakis and a golf shirt with boat shoes on his feet. The clothes appeared fresh. Mercer suspected he’d been in his office all weekend and had changed for the meeting, which coincided with his commute home.
“Whatchya drinking, Admiral?” Tiny asked.
“Dewar’s rocks.” Ira slapped Harry on the back. “How you doing, Harry?”
“Fair to partly cloudy. How about you?”
“About the same, maybe a chance of precipitation.”
The admiral turned to Mercer. “Let’s grab a table.”
They collected their drinks and moved to a booth. Ira set a briefcase on the floor after withdrawing a file folder.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mercer asked.
Ira opened the folder and slid it across. “The valley of Rinpoche-La.”
The folder contained dozens of satellite photographs. The top picture was a wide-angle shot encompassing hundreds of square miles of rugged snowcapped mountains. Smears of clouds obscured many of the peaks.
“You’re looking at the Himalayas from one of our polar orbiting birds,” Lasko explained, his voice raspy with exhaustion. “This is the satellite’s minimum resolution but about the same as you got from that commercial platform.”
“Looks about right,” Mercer admitted.
“Using the report you prepared about geothermal activity in the valley, the photo interpreters tasked an infrared bird to shoot the region.”
Mercer turned to the next picture in the stack. The photograph was of a black field shot through with white specks.
“Each white dot represents an appreciable heat source. Everything from factory smokestacks to cooking fires. They filtered out known sites, like towns and villages, and anything along established roads.” The next picture was the same image but more than three-quarters of the white flecks were gone. “These are the spots we focused on. To be on the safe side, we did this across the entire Himalayan range. In total there were eight hundred seventy- seven targeted sites.”
“And they checked them all?”
Ira simply nodded. “If something looked promising, they cranked the resolution and fed the image to the computers for further enhancement. We found a lot of military camps that the Pentagon hadn’t known about and” — he flipped to the second-to-last picture — “one lost valley.”
Mercer studied the image. The satellite camera was looking straight down at two barren mountain ridges.
