Balance of Power Shifted (34 page)

Four local police cruisers arrived at the scene just seconds after the van sped away and waited for their swat team to arrive before entering the building.  Five minutes later two Clavis people arrived and showed the lead detective the live surveillance footage they were able to access on the
ir mobile command post.  After looking at the footage, the police decided to enter the building and check on the Clavis guards inside.  As they were entering the building, Jeremy showed up in a suit, with his wife Mary in the car, and had a quick conference with the officer in charge.  The officer in charge received an all clear from inside and announced that there were two unconscious male victims and an unidentified dead third person.  An emergency medical team got permission to enter the building to administer to the victims.  Fifteen minutes later, both security guards drove away in ambulances and were awake and talking complaining of a major headache.

Jeremy stepped away from the police for a moment and dialed a number on his phone.  Back in New Jersey, agent Morgan was winding down the night with hopes of companionship with the beautiful woman across from him. 
The evening included great company, interesting discussion, and a delicious albeit expensive dinner.   Both were enjoying drinks in a quiet Hoboken bar, which ended the instant his phone rang.  Answering his phone “Morgan here,” he listened for a few minutes asked a few questions and said, “thanks Jeremy I‘ll get right on it.”  Sighing he grabbed Blair’s hand and said “I have to work right now.  Let me drive you home while I make a few calls.”  He was glad to see she appeared just as disappointed as he felt.

Back at the crime
scene, Sergeant Flood received a call from his Captain who told him the FBI was going to take over the scene and to pull his men back and secure the area.  Somewhat surprised, he complied and a half hour later, a team of eight FBI agents with their own crime scene investigators swarmed the place.

By 7 am Eastern time,  Agent Morgan was reading a 20 page preliminary report that confirmed suspicions that there had been sophisticated break in at the Efficio California lab using high tech chemical compounds that melted hardened steel in seconds and the residual gas contained in the
canisters still to be identified.  The injured Clavis employees would be fine and there did not appear to be any lasting effects of the gas.  The last section of the report dealt with the mystery man with the broken neck.  He was an employee at a high-tech Silicon Valley firm making specialty electronic chipsets for the last five years however he had no history further out than five years.  They contacted the dead man’s employer and the response was that he had been a model employee and promoted a couple of times over the last 3 years.  He said he was Chinese and that Tan’s family all lived on the East coast.  Agent Morgan would have to wait until the two agents sent to Tan’s last address could report.

Mike and Fiona were still
deep asleep when their phone rang at 7:30.  They had been up almost all night dealing with the events of yesterday afternoon and last night.  The 23 billion dollar conference call with the team was contentious at best.  Knowing how much money was on the table did have some, double guessing their previous statements.  In the end, Mike let the discussion run its course with very little input from him.  Even though the meeting ended up the way that he had hoped, it did not mean that is was not without some self-doubts.  In the end, everyone reaffirmed their desire to see things through which had nothing to do with greed or prestige, but because they felt obligated to their families, friends and people worldwide not to allow Electricus to pushed out of sight.

Fiona had also worked hard to put an inventory of all the technology stolen
from our California site and provided it to the FBI.  The telephone rang and Mike answered it and said, “Good morning Jeremy.”  He quietly listened as Jeremy apprised him of the FBI findings.  The consensus was that the Chinese were now involved and this was a state sponsored attack on an industrial target.  Looking at Fiona, who was quietly listening to the conversation, I asked Jeremy if the FBI was on board with operation Fly Fishing and operation Houdini. Smiling for the first time in a while, I said great.  Before Jeremy hung up, I said the words “23 billion” into the phone and listened for a response.  It took about 10 seconds, but Jeremy said “that is a whole hell of a lot of money…and?”  I simply said, “We will be turning them down” and hung up the phone.

Fiona looked up and said
I will start monitoring my command and control servers for any data and I will make sure that the FBI has access to everything.  Smiling I said to Fiona, “that was a pretty wild plan you and Jeremy dreamed up.  How Clavis was able to re-engineer the Stuxnet virus for use in this scenario is right out of a spy novel and it was your idea to imbed it in our hard drives.  I still want to understand how you created the trigger to have it report back to our own command center and how it was engineered to propagate.”  As I was heading to the bathroom Fiona asked me what was operation ‘Houdini?’  That honey you will have to wait on, but I can tell you it is good stuff.

Mike headed back to the office on the base and gave Steve an update.  Steve was upset about the California incident and concerned at the same time about delivering the Army with enough Electricus to get the manufacturing and retrofitting of Army vehicles going for the huge pilot program they wanted.  “Steve, I got some news for
you,” I said.  Bill and I have a secret facility where we stored the barrels of Electricus from California and have created 20,000 gallons more.  “Bill had been monitoring things for us before he got hurt and I have to go there to check on the product as well as ship a tanker truck full of it here.  I am going to leave in about an hour after I notify Charles that we are turning down the offer and will be gone the rest of the week.  You are the only other person on staff who knows about the secret facility and Fiona will know shortly since I want her to come with me and I would like to keep it that way.”  Shaking his head in wonder, Steve responded to the news with “shit Mike, you and Bill are quite a pair getting all kinds of 007 and stuff.  Great job!”

Next Mike drafted and redrafted a short email letter to Consortium in care of
Charles, which said:

The Consortium,

Charles has presented Efficio with your generous offer regarding the purchase of Electricus.  After careful consideration, the management of Efficio has chosen to decline your offer in favor of responsibly controlling the rollout of Electricus through Efficio.

It is certainly not a secret that Electricus will dramatically change the current reliance on the use of fossil
fuels.  This will severely affect global corporations as well as nations dependent on the revenue brought in by oil and gas production.  It is our sincere objective to minimize the impact of forthcoming changes on those affected most.  Efficio would be willing to authorize certain production rights on Electricus based products to organizations and countries most impacted.  This will not result in the same revenue streams, but will help bolster things until new endeavors spawned by this new technology can result in the formation of new business.

We look forward to further discussion and sharing of ideas.

Sincerely

Michael Carter

CEO

Efficio Corporation

Without hesitation he hit the send button, whispered, “And let the games begin.”

Catching Fiona back at the base housing, he let her in on the secret Electricus production location and the plans to keeping it secret.  He told her that for now, this is where they would create and ship new product.  Without out waiting for him to finish Fiona ordered that she was going with him with a face that dared him to say no.  “Hey no need to get rough with me Hon, I was telling you about it since I wanted you to come.” I said.  “Well I’m glad that is settled then, when are we leaving” she asked?  When I said 15 minutes, she threw the couch pillow at my head and then rushed to pack a bag.

In order to make sure
no one was following us, Jeremy had provided us with a routine to follow which we executed fully.  First, Steve dropped us off at the Dover bus station 10 minutes before our bus to the
Port Authority Bus Terminal
was to leave.  We then took a taxi to Penn Station and bought tickets using cash to Amsterdam, New York.  Here we were picked by Miguel in a black SUV and driven about 10 miles away to a little town near Saratoga Springs called Ballston Spa.  After driving to the fringe of the town, we pulled to the curb of a nondescript building that was once a secure storage facility for companies to store their paper documents.  There were only a couple of small windows and the site was completely fenced in.  We drove around back to the rear entrance, which automatically opened by a Clavis guard inside.

After passing through a mantrap security entrance and having my hand scan pass the biometric challenge
, I gained access to a large room and stood there taking in the site of ten 2000 gallon fiberglass tanks that filled the room.  Bill had been able to put this together on the sly in only a few weeks’ time and Mike’s admiration of his friend went up another notch.  Fiona had not yet scanned her handprint into the system and had to go through the registration process joining me ten minutes later.  Her mouth appeared to scrape her shoe tops as she stared in amazement at the site.  “Is this what I think it is Mike?” she asked.  “Yup it sure is” he quipped.  “There are 20,000 gallons of fully activated Electricus in those containers,” he confirmed.

Miguel
came in and stood next to Mike and Fiona and said, “It has been a pleasure keeping watch over this.  This is the future and I’m glad to play some small role and with that he clapped me on my back and added, “And to keep your ass in one piece Mr. Carter.”  “Is our first class suite ready for us?” I asked.  Miguel grinned and playing along said “Follow me to your deluxe accommodations sir.”  Following Miguel, we entered a back room where a couple of cots were set.  Fiona looked at me and “said you’re joking…right?” “Nope, security comes first around here.  We stay here overnight and we will be gone by tomorrow evening.”  First thing in the morning, we will have two 5000-gallon tanker trucks come in one at a time.  Miguel will disable the truck GPS devices and he will drive each vehicle and turn them over to a long distance driver to head back to Picatinny at a truck stop 25 miles away.  Next, we will refill the five empty containers from tankers carrying pure seawater, which Miguel will once again pick up from local storage yard and drive here.  When the tanks are full, I will add some Electricus and other special ingredients to create the reproduction reaction.  I hope that by around six or 7 pm the reaction will be complete and we can leave.

General
Hu hung up the phone and even though impatient for a breakthrough, was happy this morning with the outcome of the raid in San Diego except for the loss of one of his most talented operators Tan.  The person on the other end of the phone was tracking a special flight headed to Beijing carrying among chemical plant ‘process control systems’, all the hard drives from the raid.  Once here, his specialist would try to break any encryption on the drives and if needed, the General could get unlimited access to a secret super computer located 5 stories underground in the very building he was sitting in.  The super computer was primarily the result of technology stolen from the US and was estimated to be the third or fourth most powerful computer in the world.  Depending on the encryption algorithm, the computer may help them crack the encryption in weeks instead of years.

A week later, the General
focused his thoughts to the report on his desk, and contemplated how he felt about Electricus.  His team had taken the organism back to a secret lab they used periodically to pick apart other technologies and their report was unbelievable.  Electricus was the most amazing discovery on this planet since the first time man controlled fire.  The organism did everything as reported and the simplicity of how it did it defied belief.  China must have access to it at all costs.  The troubling information to date was the lack of understanding how the organism reproduces. His team had run some experiments and had witnessed some reproduction, but at some point in the process, it stopped and actually reversed to the point the entire sample died off.  His techs were busy trying to acquire specialized lab gear to perform all types of sampling to better understand the composition of Electricus.  Patience General, patience he muttered to himself.

Back in New Jersey,
Nasir calmly walked down the corridor of the second floor of the hospital.  He could feel the thin dagger strapped to his calf and thought about the target and his lucky escape from death from the first assassination attempt.  About six doors further along the hallway sat a police officer in uniform outside of the door.  Looking past the officer, he could just make out Abdul coming down the hall towards him.  Making the briefest of eye contract with Abdul, they continued with the plan.  Nasir walked right up to the door of his target and walked in, which caused the officer to get off his chair while ordering him to stop where he was.  Since Nasir was a couple steps into the room the officer came in after him.  Without uttering a word, Abdul slipped in behind the officer and shot him with a stun gun.  The officer’s body contorted as his muscles spasm’d due to the application of high voltage and he slowly toppled over onto the hard floor and was still.

  Nasir quickly pulled up his pant leg and disengaged the knife from the sheaf.  Quickly walking over to the
bed, he saw his target with his head bound in white bandages and heard his vitals beeping on the machine beside the bed.  Gripping the knife, he targeted the heart for his plunge of death.  He drove down hard and was shocked to realize that the target was wearing a plastic shield to protect his ribs.  As he tensed his arm to drive the knife home into the throat, he felt a tremendous blow against his backside and felt himself tossed into the machinery.  With a final thought of what went wrong, he passed into darkness as his heart pumped out volumes of blood onto the white hospital room floor.