AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nicholas did some quick research on his own computer. Nothing popped. He wished he had the mainframe at MI5 at his disposal again.
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when he walked back into the living room to see Adam slouched over his laptop, asleep. Everyone else was dragging. Time to hang it up. He sent Kitsune with Louisa to bunk down with her. “Be back here in the suite at nine. We’ll have breakfast and decide our next step.”
He looked over at Mike, who was headed toward the second bedroom. “Mike.”
She turned, leaned against the door of the second bedroom, as if she needed to prop herself up, and gave him a silly grin. “Sure was a long day, Nicholas,” and she yawned. Her hair was ratty, half out of its ponytail, her clothes wrinkled, and she was lightly rubbing her wounded arm. She looked ready to fall over.
He raised a brow. “Yes. It’s time to fold down your angel wings. Don’t you think it would be safer for both of us if we slept in one room? There’s only the two of us now, no more safety in numbers.”
Mike kept rubbing her arm, aware of only a low throbbing pain now. She stared at the man she’d give her life for, his clothes as wrinkled as hers. He badly needed a shave, although she liked the beard scruff. His shirt was half hanging out of his pants, and he looked so perfect to her she wanted to leap on him and kiss him until her mouth went numb.
Instead, she took off her glasses and started polishing them on the edge of her shirt. “You’ve had lots of good ideas today, Nicholas, but you want to know what?”
“What?”
She slipped her glasses back on. “This one’s the best. I’ll race you.”
She dashed past him, into his bedroom, and jumped on the bed, bounced a few times, then looked around the bedroom. “Now, this is pretty fancy. I’ll have to thank your blond admirer for treating you so well. You should give her a call, Nicholas, it’d be a great reward.”
“Hold that thought,” he said. “You want the bathroom first?”
“Nope, you go on.”
When he came out, all the lights were still on and he saw Mike sprawled on her back in the middle of the bed, fully clothed, deeply asleep.
“Well, bloody hell.” He pulled off her biker boots, slipped her Glock out of its clip at her waist, started to unbutton her blouse, then yawned and plugged in their cell phones. He carefully laid her glasses next to them. He crawled in next to her, pulled the covers to their chins, and was asleep beside her in under a minute.
• • •
Savich called Nicholas at 7:00 a.m. Venice time. It was Mike who answered after four rings.
“If this is God, I swear I didn’t do it.”
Savich laughed. “Good morning, Mike. Give me Nicholas.”
Nicholas was immediately alert, synapses firing. He put his cell phone on speaker. “Please tell me I’m not bonkers and MAX has banned me.”
“No and no. Hurricane Katrina first. There were many very big winners, from the oil companies to contractors hired to repair and replace hundreds of houses and businesses in New Orleans. You were right, the Genesis Group cashed in to the tune of one hundred million dollars, give or take. Even though their buys were diverse, you’d see the pattern if you were looking at them specifically. It’s all there—oil stocks, gas stocks, a number of publicly owned contractor firms, furniture and appliances chains, medical equipment, just to name a few—whatever was critical to rebuilding New Orleans, they invested in the public companies and made a killing.”
“But the profits weren’t out of line with other profiteers from Katrina?”
“Only if examined closely, then, as I said, the pattern is clear. Someone studied this extensively, then bought huge blocks of shares in the key industries.”
“Better and better.”
“As for people building machines to try to control the weather, MAX found nothing of any legitimacy, though there is plenty of scientific research work being done, and weather control for creating rain—cloud seeding and such—has been around for decades. However, I did find information that sparked my imagination. What do you know about Nikola Tesla?”
“About the same as anyone, I suppose. He was a genius, way ahead of his time, what we’d now call a futurist, with his uses of electromagnetic forces, briefly worked with Thomas Edison. Some weird explosion he was blamed for, that’s about it.”
“That’s a good start. What drew me was Tesla’s Coil. As you said, he worked with electromagnetic force and resonance. What caught me was how his Coil was said to shoot lightning bolts and create electron winds.
“In 1908, during experiments with electromagnetic force in the ionosphere, there was a sudden horrific explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia. It destroyed everything within hundreds of miles, flattened thousands of trees. Many blamed Tesla’s Coil for the explosion. Does this have anything to do with possible attempts to influence weather conditions? I don’t know, but he was toying with forces that could certainly influence the weather.”
“And perhaps someone took that technology and has privately engineered it.”
“Nicholas, weather manipulation at that level is the stuff of science fiction. I hope. But the Gobi storm—you’ll find out. Now, speaking practically, you already have more than enough enemies—hiding in the shadows, even in the Carabinieri itself. Be very careful. If I can offer any other help, let me know. Ah, I suppose you’re bringing Kitsune in, aren’t you?”
“Oh, absolutely. The moment we track all this down, we’re on the plane, the Fox in handcuffs.”
