 
# The Tesla Secret, Book 1

## Mike Wells

Copyright © 2019 by Mike Wells

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

### Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Book 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28
"If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration."—Nikola Tesla

* * *

"...our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe."

—Nikola Tesla

# Introduction

On January 9th, 1943, FBI agents stormed Nikola Tesla's lodgings and seized all of his laboratory notebooks. This occurred only two days after the Serbian-American scientist's death, when the U.S. Government declared all of his work CLASSIFIED.

Officially, this was to prevent Tesla's weapons research from falling into the hands of enemies. But some experts believe that the confiscated papers also contained details of Nikola Tesla's closely-guarded alternative energy work.

Between the time of Tesla's death and the seizure of these documents, a certain black notebook was not accounted for, nor has it ever been. Tesla's nephew, diplomat Sava Kosanovic, knew that his enigmatic uncle kept the two-hundred page digest close by at all times. But upon searching the premises after his brilliant nephew died, it was nowhere to be found. He assumed it had been stolen.

Many experts believe the missing notebook contained the working plans for a 'free energy machine'—a device that can extract unlimited electrical energy, or "zero-point energy" from the earth's magnetic field.

If such a device existed, it would turn the world's energy industry on its head.

# Prologue

_Dubai, United Arab Emirates_

"Ladies and gentlemen," the Viper said in his soft Dutch accent, "I apologize for any inconvenience this impromptu gathering may have caused you." His masked face turned to the Saudi prince. "And I thank you, Your Royal Highness, for arranging this secure location on such short notice."

"Holding this meeting so far from my home is an imposition," the queen said huffily. "Not to mention the risk involved." She fingered a gold necklace, from which hung a pendant engraved with an ibis, or Nile bird. It was the symbol for the one hundred-year-old group. "I do hope it will be justified."

Due to the highly irregular nature of the emergency gathering, only ten of the twelve Benefactors' Elders were able to attend. In addition to the European queen, who currently served as chairman, and the Saudi prince, who represented OPEC, the others were: the CEO of the largest American oil corporation; the dictator of a South American country; the prime minister of a former Soviet republic; the owner of the largest Asian energy conglomerate; a Russian oil and gas oligarch who was also a high ranking member of the Russian parliament; the great-great grandson of a Chinese emperor; the president of one of the largest utility companies in Europe; and the heiress of the Malaysian energy cartel which controlled the lion's share of the market in that region.

The eleven individuals sitting around the table commandeered, either directly or through their political spheres of influence, more than seventy percent of the world's energy resources. Add the two missing Elders, and the figure jumped to a mind-numbing eight-six percent. The sum of the wealth they represented far exceeded the GNPs of the most developed nations.

"As you all know from the encrypted communiqué," the Viper began, "one of the Elders has received a rather disturbing message." Behind the Viper, on the wall of the ultra-secure meeting room, the screen came to life. The scanned image was composed of letters cut out from newspapers:

* * *

ImPOrtAnT inFORmaTION foR YoUr GroUP: wE ARe BuiLDiNG A FRee EnERgy MAchInE iN RuSSia. PrOfEssOR STepHen SAWyer WiLL HeLp fiNisH. YOu MUsT sTOP uS aNd HiM.

—YouR FRiEnD

* * *

"Jesus Christ," the American CEO said.

" _Us_ and him?" the prime minister said.

The queen looked alarmed. "Does this have any credibility?"

The Viper peered at her, only his grey eyes visible behind the mask. "I'm afraid it may." He clicked a new slide onto the screen. It was the title page of an academic paper, by Stephen Sawyer. Stamped diagonally across it in thick red letters were the words TESLA CONFIDENTIAL.

"I thought we made that paper disappear," the American said.

"We should have made Sawyer disappear, too," the dictator said. "I recommended that, if you remember."

"What's happened in the past is irrelevant," the queen said testily." She looked back at the Viper. "Please continue."

He gave her a deferential nod, then turned to the others, his expression impossible to read behind the mask. "We did eradicate this paper ten years ago—Technical Paper Number 634, to be exact—and quite effectively. All known copies were eliminated, with the exception of those in Sawyer's personal files."

"Could Sawyer have given it to these Russians, whoever they are, himself?" the Chinese Elder asked. "Sold it to them?"

"That's certainly a possibility. As some of you may remember, he spent a year teaching in Russia, at Moscow State, shortly after he attempted to publish this."

"But our people kept a tight watch on him," the Russian parliament member said. "He behaved himself."

"Yes. He responded well to the usual...deterrents. He's been on our A Watch List ever since he attempted to publish this paper, and hasn't engaged in any suspicious activity."

"What I want to know," the Saudi prince said, "is how this situation has progressed this far." He motioned angrily to the Viper. "Do we have to remind you that your job is to detect and eliminate this kind of activity long before it becomes a serious threat?"

"We have yet to confirm the existence of a such free energy machine in Russia," the Viper said smoothly. He nodded to the member of the Russian parliament, who concurred. "If such a device is actually under development, our Sentries will track it down, I assure you. They're working the problem 24/7."

The Saudi looked at the queen. "With all due respect, Your Majesty, if he cannot do his job—"

"I believe he is doing his job very well," she said. "And I warn you not to try and take this situation into your own hands, or to pass any of this information on to OPEC."

The Viper gave the queen a deferential bow, then pushed another button on his computer. A photograph of a slender middle-aged man appeared on the wall. He was smiling, standing casually on the sidewalk of a college campus, one hand in his pocket, a satchel slung over his shoulder, chatting with two students whose backs were to the camera.

"If Sawyer does prove to be involved in a project like this," the Viper said, "we have a decision to make."

"Indeed we do," the queen said. With a sigh, she opened the wooden box in front of her. The mahogany container was ancient and well worn, the ibis symbol inlaid in blue pearl on its cover. Underneath the symbol, carved into the wood in Latin, was the Benefactors' motto:

_Status Quo Conservo_ , or Maintain the Status Quo.

Her bejeweled hands carefully removed eleven of the twelve Voting Tokens from their felt-padded slots and distributed them to the other Elders. The weighty round disks were white on one side, engraved with the ibis symbol. The other side was polished to a smooth black sheen.

One by one, the Elders went through the one hundred-year-old ritual, sliding their tokens forward. The disks formed a rough circle in the center of the table.

Black.

Black.

Black....

# Book 1

# 1

_Las Vegas, Nevada_

Professor Stephen Sawyer was snoring, his mouth half open. He was having a disjointed dream, an unpleasant montage of blackjack tables, one-armed bandits, and endlessly spinning roulette wheels. He'd spent most of the evening at the casino with his old friend Jack Waterman, performing an "experiment" of sorts—to see if the laws of physics still applied to a tumbling pair of white cubes with little dots scattered on their faces.

The laws still applied. Sawyer's wallet was five hundred dollars lighter to prove it.

He rolled over and felt something touching his forehead. Thinking it was a bug or a feather from the pillow, he took a swat at it.

That's when his fingers made contact with the gun barrel.

"You must help me," a voice said.

Sawyer opened his eyes. Through the Mai Tai-induced haze, he dimly understood that the voice belonged to the female holding the pistol to his head. Encased almost entirely in black leather, she looked like she was in her late twenties. Straight black hair, with bangs cropped straight across her dark eyebrows.

She looked like a hooker.

Adrenaline began pumping frantically into Sawyer's sleep-fogged brain. His eyes flicked to the right and he spotted his blue blazer hanging over the back of a chair, his name tag clipped to his pocket. DR. STEPHEN SAWYER, STANFORD UNIVERSITY.

He was attending a conference on polymer physics. And this was his room at the Flamingo hotel. How the hell did a hooker—

"You must help me," she repeated.

Sawyer was too terrified to move. Somewhere in the back of his mind he understood that she was Russian—he recognized the accent. _You must hyelp me_.

He finally found his voice. "Look, if you need money, my wallet is over there—"

"Stand up," she said, her tone becoming firm. She motioned with the pistol to Sawyer's slacks, which lay across the arm of an easy chair. "Put zem on."

Her features—the cat-like blue eyes, the long, straight nose, and the triangular jawline—were Slavic-looking. She was definitely Russian.

"Move!" the girl hissed, motioning again to his slacks.

Sawyer stumbled over to the chair, thankful that he had been too tired last night to take off his jockey shorts before collapsing into bed. As he stepped into his pants and zipped them up, he watched her with trepidation. If he turned and started pounding on the wall, Jack would wake up, he was in the next room...

"Ze shirt," she said, pointing with the pistol.

Sawyer stepped over to pick it up off the back of the desk chair. He glanced at the telephone—it was within easy reach.

"Do not be stupid," she said.

Sawyer put on the wrinkled garment and buttoned it up with trembling fingers _. Keep it together_ , he told himself. He knew he had been in worse situations, although at the moment, he couldn't actually think of one. _She won't shoot you_ , he told himself _, not in the middle of a large hotel..._

"Jacket," the girl said, motioning again with the gun.

As soon as he donned the blazer, she yanked the name tag off, then shoved the pistol in his back and guided him towards the door.

It only now dawned on Sawyer that she planned on taking him somewhere.

Across the street, in the parking lot of the Tropicana Hotel, a woman in an unmarked van was engaged in a frenzy of activity. Four minutes ago she had been jarred awake by the alarm from the sensor that she had attached to the top of Stephen Sawyer's hotel room door.

One hand held her secure satellite phone, a monotonous ringing on the line. Her other hand manipulated one of the electronic consoles, replaying the conversation that had just been recorded—some female had entered Sawyer's room and abducted him. A Russian, by the sound of the accent.

A kidnapping operation was not something for which the Viper had briefed her. If Sawyer was helping the Russians develop a free energy machine, she had assumed he was a voluntarily participant. Her job was to immediately report any suspicious contact Sawyer made and wait for further instructions.

She listened to the endless ringing on her satellite phone and cut the connection. It figured—the Viper always seemed to be unavailable at the worst times.

She'd just have to wing it. She certainly couldn't let Sawyer out of her hands. To hell with the Viper if he didn't like how she handled this.

After starting the engine, she drove the van to a spot where she had a clear view of all the Flamingo's exits.

# 2

Sawyer found himself in the rear seat of a black limo, the girl in the opposing seat, facing him. She held the gun in her lap casually, on its side, but it was still pointed at him. At his crotch, actually.

To his left was a huge guy with a crew cut, about the same age as the young woman. He had an ugly scar across the back of his neck which looked like it could have been from a knife or bullet wound. Sawyer couldn't see the driver, or the limo's front seats, as the partition was closed.

Only in the last few moments had he realized who these people probably were—a couple of the Crazies. Since his book had made it big, they had come out of the woodwork. Knowing who they were made him somewhat less afraid—most of the Crazies were not particularly dangerous, just slightly obsessive folks who insisted that he listen to their ideas about how to build free energy machines and tell them they would become overnight multimillionaires. Still, she had a pistol pointed at him.

Sometimes he'd regretted ever publishing his book. _Blind Spot: How In-the-Box Thinking is Thwarting the Development of New Technology_ had first been rejected by Stanford University Press for being "too unscholarly," then he had been rebuffed by all the commercial houses for being "too academic." Frustrated but firmly convinced that he had something important to say, Sawyer had finally paid a local printer to make 5,000 copies and organized his own low-cost and unconventional promotional campaign.

As soon as the spring semester ended, he began a tour of California—on his bicycle—to demonstrate his commitment to energy conservation. His secretary sent press releases to each city or town, announcing the day of his arrival, and would also coordinate the delivery of a box of his books to some independently-owned bookstore, which knew nothing of him or his tour. When he rolled into town, he would pedal directly to one of the radio talk show stations and politely annoy them until they gave him a little air time. However, the moment he sat front of the microphone and started talking about how in-the-box thinking by government, big business, and academia were impeding the flow of fresh new technology— particularly the development of cheap, non-polluting sources of energy, to make the world less dependent on Middle Eastern oil—the telephone switchboard would light up like a Christmas tree, and the DJ would be ecstatic. Sawyer would often speak to callers for an hour or more.

At the end, the DJ would ask, "And Dr. Sawyer, where can listeners buy a copy of your book?" Sawyer would give the name of the store where he'd sent his parcel and say that he would be there in a few minutes to autograph copies. The bookstore owners were usually dumbfounded when this unannounced "celebrity" showed up, climbed off his bike, covered in road grit, greeted by a few fans who were already waiting for him and clamoring for a signed copy of his book, a whole box of which—miraculously—had just arrived the day before...

By the time he finished his tour of California, the book had gotten so much publicity he arranged for a second printing of thirty thousand copies and flew out to Raleigh, North Carolina, where he began a bike tour up the East Coast. He rode to Richmond, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City...when he arrived in Hartford, he was greeted by a crowd of two thousand college students and environmentalists, along with a TV crew. By mid-August, when he finally reached Boston, _Blind Spot_ was selling in such large numbers that it broke into the bottom of the non-fiction bestseller lists. He was also in better physical shape than he'd ever been in his life. Just a week before classes started again, Prentice Hall bought the rights for his book for $1.6 million. The peak of his publicity came the second week of the semester, when he was flown back to New York, first class, to be a guest on _The David Letterman Show._

But now, as he sat in the back of the limo with these two Russian nutcases, he wondered if he should have ever published it in the first place. Stanford certainly wasn't thrilled about it, neither with the subject matter nor the fact that it drew so many of the Crazies onto the campus, seeking him out in his office. A few had become aggressive—one factory worker who had driven all the way from Michigan had to be cuffed and escorted out of the building by Security when Sawyer told him why his idea was not feasible. Another, a pig farmer from Tennessee, had become so upset Sawyer thought things might get violent. After the overalls-clad man had drawn a sketch of his idea on the board, Sawyer had calmly explained how his machine would consume more Joules (of energy) than it generated. The farmer had become red in the face and had screamed, "It don't need no _jewels_ to operate—no gold, diamonds, nothin' like that. This machine runs on _electricity_!"

The young Russian woman was silently watching him as the limo made its way through the parking lot.

"Can I ask where we're going?" Sawyer said.

She didn't respond. There was an odd look on her face—her dark red lips hinted at a smile. Sawyer shifted in his seat—the girl's legs were so long her knees were pressed against his. With the refrigerator-sized man's shoulder crowding his own, he felt cramped, almost claustrophobic.

The car stopped momentarily and the partition slid open slightly. A voice from the front said, "Stanislav, _cartochka_."

The side of beef sitting next to Sawyer leaned forward and passed a magnetic card through the opening. The partition slid closed again.

The limo rolled out of the Flamingo's VIP parking garage and turned left onto the Strip, heading south. To their right, behind Caesar's Palace, the sharp silhouette of the Sierra Nevada Mountains was visible. The range was backlit by the first light of dawn, the orange light muted by the limo's heavily tinted windows.

"Look," Sawyer said, "I really don't understand what's going on here. You—"

"We go to Russia," Stanislav said, gazing at the hotels, looking bored.

Sawyer swallowed hard. To _Russia?_

The girl just gazed at Sawyer.

Trying to keep his panic under control, Sawyer said, "I'll be happy to listen to any ideas you have about free energy machines, if that's what this is about. You don't have to take me to Rus—"

"Sashenka _, davai moyu igru_ ," the man muttered to the girl. Frightened, Sawyer quickly translated it to himself: "give me the game." At least that's what he thought the cretin said. Sawyer had studied Russian during the year he'd spent teaching at Moscow State, but he was a bit rusty now.

The young woman reached into a pocket behind the passenger seat and passed a small blue-colored box to Stanislav. Sawyer breathed a sigh of relief when it started beeping and squawking—it was only some kind of electronic gambling toy. The big Russian began punching buttons with his thick fingers, snickering dumbly at the display.

The limo sped along the Strip, and the hotels began to thin out. The vehicle slowed down a bit as they approached an intersection—Sawyer glimpsed a sign that said RANDOLPH EXECUTIVE AIRPORT with an arrow to the right.

As they decelerated to make the turn, Sawyer glanced down at the door handle. It was only inches away...

"Do not be foolish, professor," the girl said, her grip tightening on the pistol. "Ze doors are locked."

Sawyer forced himself to stay calm and rational, but it took all his willpower. He kept telling himself this was just something to do with a far-fetched free energy machine idea, but he couldn't imagine these two wanting to build anything more complicated than a strip club.

The limo was flying down the highway now. Sawyer glimpsed another sign that said RANDOLPH EXECUTIVE AIRPORT – 3. Unable to keep his mouth shut any longer, he said, "What you're doing is very serious, you know. It's called kidnapping."

"Shhh," Stanislav said, still playing his gambling game. " _Dai podumat_." I'm trying to think.

Sawyer looked back at the girl. She seemed more approachable, and he thought he detected some intelligence behind her blue eyes. He had noticed that Stanislav had called her _Sashenka_. This was one of a half dozen affectionate forms of the name Alexandra—the Russian language seemed to have thousands of such variants, for both objects and names. _Sasha, Sashka, Sashenka..._

Sawyer leaned towards her a little bit. "Alexandra?"

She looked a bit surprised by this. She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to continue.

"Please hear me out for a minute. I have no idea why you want to kidnap me, but—"

"Not kidnap," Stanislav interrupted, glancing over at him. "Protect you."

Sawyer felt even more tense. Now he was sure they were Russian mafia—"protection" was their euphemism for extortion.

After a few seconds, Alexandra said to Stanislav, in Russian, "Maybe we should show him the video? It seems a little rude..."

Stanislav gave an indifferent shrug. "It's your project, Sasha. Do what you want."

Alexandra considered this, gazing out the window—there were wide expanses of desert on both sides of the highway. She finally handed the pistol to Stanislav, who took it almost absent-mindedly, then pulled a small computer out from underneath her seat. Peering at the screen, she opened her mouth to say something, but Stanislav interrupted.

"Take off that stupid hair. It makes you look provincial."

Alexandra blushed, glancing at herself in the window's reflection.

"It's supposed to look like this," she said defensively.

"And drop that overdone accent." ' _Eeetz suppozed to look like zis_.' You want him to think you grew up in Muhosransk?"

Sawyer translated this last word as "Flyshitville."

Alexandra glared at Stanislav, then pulled off the wig, revealing lush blonde hair. She gave Sawyer another rather odd glance, as though he might recognize her. Her appearance had completely altered without the bangs—she almost looked sophisticated. She had a broad, and quite lovely, forehead.

For an instant, Sawyer thought she did look familiar...could he have known her from Russia?

Alexandra looked down at the computer screen. "The video clip I am about to show you was made seven years ago, in Tajikistan." She still had a Russian accent, but it wasn't so thick—she spoke English with a precise, academic air.

The limo's partition slammed open with a bang.

" _Za nami hvost_!" the driver yelled.

Sawyer didn't understand this phrase, but Stanislav's reaction immediately made its meaning crystal clear. He had turned and peered out the back window.

Somebody was following them.

# 3

The Benefactors' sentry was steering with one hand, her satellite phone in the other—she was still trying to reach the Viper, but to no avail. She cut off the connection and slipped the phone into her jacket pocket, glancing to the left and right—this was the least populated area along the highway between Las Vegas and the private airport. It was now or never.

She stomped on the accelerator and began to close the gap between her van and the limo.

On the floor in front of the passenger seat was a small arsenal—a Scorpion machine gun, two Kalashnikovs, and an armed RPG launcher. She deftly picked up the Scorpion machine gun and leaned out of the van, squinting into the wind, taking aim. She wanted to knock out the back window of the limo before she used the RPG, as the window was likely made of reinforced glass. The RPG wouldn't strike its surface straight-on, which would weaken the impact of the grenade. She couldn't risk the bomb simply bouncing off. She only had one chance at this, and if she screwed up, the Viper would be upset. Very upset.

# 4

Sawyer was looking out the limo's rear window, watching the van close in on them. He was scared, but he was also cautiously hopeful, thinking maybe the pursuers were the police. But there were no flashing lights or sirens.

"Down!" Stanislav yelled, shoving Sawyer into the corner of the vehicle.

"Who is it?" Alexandra said.

" _Dobrazhelateli_ ," Stanislav said. Sawyer translated this in his head—it sounded like a combination of two other simple words, "well" and "wish." Well-wishers?

He hoped this was a Russian nickname for the police, but he doubted it. Before he had time to think about this any further, there was a rapid, thunderous series of explosions behind his head. Sawyer screamed, and when he turned around, he saw that the rear window was riddled with pockmarks. The glass had shattered but had not caved in.

"Get down!" Alexandra shouted, crawling on top of Sawyer and jamming her left knee into his chest. She and Stanislav both pressed their guns up against the battered back window and pulled their triggers almost simultaneously. Stanislav blasted off several deafening bursts from the machine gun, his mouth twisted into a hideous grimace, while Alexandra steadily fired the pistol. She looked scared to death, as if she wasn't accustomed to this kind of activity.

Sawyer expected glass to rain down all over him, but the window held.

_Polyvinyl butyral_ , Sawyer thought dazedly. When layered with glass, and also used as the outer sheet on one side, the special plastic could be used to create a one-way bullet resistant window. It was one of those theoretical examples he used to spice up his Flexible Materials class, but he had never dreamed he would actually witness a piece of the stuff being tested to its limit in the real world. The _very_ real world...

And why he was thinking about this right now, he had no earthly idea.

Stanislav and Alexandra stopped firing. Stanislav peered out the side window, squinting into the wind—they were still going sixty or seventy miles per hour. He screamed and yanked his head back in, throwing himself on top of Alexandra and Sawyer.

There was another deafening explosion. Glass went everywhere. Sawyer looked up and saw that the partition that separated them from the driver was gone. Beyond it, the front windshield was shattered in a spider-web pattern emanating from a small, clean hole in the middle.

The driver was unhurt but looked shaken, still driving fast, his eyes moving rapidly between the road and the rearview mirror.

Stanislav peered over the edge of the back seat, and his eyes widened. "Slam on the brakes!"

The driver glanced up in the rearview again, contorted his face, and then all three of them in the back were thrown violently forward. There was a spine-tingling screeching sound. A split second later—an impact from behind, a horrific grinding of metal. Sawyer found himself at the bottom of a tangle of arms and legs. He was face to face with something on the floorboard, only a few inches from his nose.

It looked like some kind of grenade.

Sawyer heard an elephant-like roar. Simultaneously, Stanislav's big hand snatched up the explosive and hurled it out the side window. A painfully long two seconds of silence under the crushing weight of Stanislav and Alexandra. Then another blast that knocked the wind out of Sawyer's chest.

Alexandra managed to open the door on Sawyer's side. She pushed him out and down into the gravel just beside the rear wheel. There was a burst of machine gun fire, bullets ringing off the limo's rear bumper. Sawyer felt something whip across his right thigh, like he had been lashed with a red-hot wire. Stanislav scrambled out next, machine gun in his hands. He hit the ground, rolled over once in the sand, and began firing.

The van was barreling backwards in reverse. Sawyer glimpsed the windshield cave in under Stanislav's heavy fire, but the driver was not visible. The van suddenly screeched to one side, turning complete around, and with burning rubber, sped away, back in the direction from where it had come.

Stanislav jumped to his feet and stuck his head inside the limo's passenger window. "You okay?" he said to the driver.

Sawyer had shakily stood up. Alexandra grabbed the machine gun from Stanislav and tossed it into the back seat, then climbed in and tried to pull Sawyer in alongside her, but only managed to catch the sleeve of his blazer.

Sawyer stared numbly off at the orange horizon, then looked down.

There was a rip in his right trouser leg, with a widening red spot around it.

The impulse to run was something he could not control. He wasn't conscious of the decision—he simply found his legs somehow carrying himself quickly across the desert sand, away from the limo, towards a cluster of cactus plants. He was in good shape—he no longer owned a car, lived close to campus and went everywhere by bicycle—but the sharp pain in his leg slowed him considerably.

"Professor!" Alexandra shouted from behind.

Sawyer wondered how badly he had been wounded, resisting the urge to look down again. He didn't really care, as long as his two lower limbs were intact enough to carry him away from this insanity. Beyond the cactus plants was a house—he could go there. As he continued on, he wondered when the machine gun would start firing.

Then he heard footsteps behind him, gaining on him. He kept running, or limping, along. He made it about halfway to the cactus cluster before he felt something grab hold of his collar.

"Professor, stop," Stanislav said in between gasps.

Sawyer whirled around and started swinging at the Russian, teetering on his bad leg, determined not to be recaptured.

One swing from the big Russian took Sawyer down, and, his mouth full of sand, he blacked out.

# 5

Sawyer felt like he was floating. Floating on a bed of fluffy white clouds.

He sat bolt upright in the bed, blinking a few times in the dim light. For a fleeting instant he thought he was back at the Flamingo Hotel and that maybe it had all been just a bad dream.

He was naked, with a blanket over him. The room he found himself in was tiny, the ceiling curved, like a bedroom but built into a ship, or a . . .

There was a window covered with a heavy mauve curtain. His heart thudding, he leaned over and swept it to one side. It was oval-shaped, with two panes of glass. And nothing beyond it but blackness, and few stars.

"Ah, professor, you're awake."

Alexandra was standing in the doorway, in jeans and a loose-fitting blue turtleneck sweater. She'd let her silky blonde hair down around her shoulders.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

He could only stare at her for a moment. "Where the hell are we?"

"Over the Baltic Sea. Are you hungry? You must join us and have something to eat. This will make you feel better."

The Baltic Sea.

Sawyer gazed at her another few seconds, then looked down at the blanket and felt his knee. It was bandaged.

"Only a graze," she said. "Nothing serious."

Sawyer gazed back at her. "Who—"

"Stas." She meant Stanislav—that was the short form of the name.

She added, "Please do not worry. He has training. He was in medical school."

_Was_ in medical school. Great. As in "flunked out." But Stas probably did know what he was doing—Sawyer was sure he had a wealth of real-life experience removing slugs from his own body.

"We did not expect such problems," Alexandra said.

Looking more closely at her, Sawyer noticed she seemed shaken—there were dark rings under her eyes. She motioned to a door to her right. "There is shower. You will find clean clothes in wardrobe."

Alexandra slid the door shut, leaving him alone.

Sawyer sank back into the soft bed, trying to come to grips with the fact that these two thugs had kidnapped him and taken him out of the United States.

He glanced at his watch—the only thing he was wearing—and wondered if anyone even knew he was missing.

# 6

Fifteen minutes later, Sawyer shakily emerged from the small bedroom on the jet. He wore a pair of black wool slacks and cream-colored dress shirt—he looked like a badly dressed hit man. There were no shoes in the closet, but he came across some furry blue _topochki_ —Russian style house slippers—and put them on. He felt a bit silly wearing them on the jet.

The bedroom was built into the aircraft's tail section. Ahead of him were several plush leather seats, all empty, some of them partially reclined, with pillows and a blanket scattered around. Alexandra was sitting at a conference table, her computer in front of her. Stanislav stood behind her, his back to Sawyer, in a small kitchen nook.

"Sit, please," Alexandra said to Sawyer. "Stas prepares pancakes."

The brawny Russian glanced over his shoulder at Sawyer. " _Privyet_!" he said enthusiastically.

Sawyer stared a moment, surprised by the chummy greeting, as if they were all close pals now. He was acutely aware of the dull ache in the back of his head caused by this delightful new friend.

Stanislav was wearing a knee-length cooking apron, a black holster strap snaking out of the top and around his thick neck. One mitt grasped a frying pan, which he deftly worked from side to side. The large, cast-iron "granny" style skillet looked oddly out of place inside the sleek jet. Stanislav tilted it and a perfect Russian pancake— _blin_ —slipped off and flopped atop a large stack, their edges fried a golden brown.

Sawyer looked back at Alexandra. He found he was not as afraid of them as he had been before—he suspected they had given him a tranquilizer, and its effects still lingered. He muttered, "I don't appreciate you nearly getting me killed."

Stanislav and Alexandra exchanged a look.

She said, "Professor, I think it is you who nearly got us killed."

Sawyer stared at them dully. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"You really do not understand?"

Sawyer touched two fingers to his throbbing temple. "No, I don't. All I know is that you've kidnapped an American citizen and taken that citizen across international borders, which is a very serious offense. I'd be willing to just forget the whole thing if you just land at the nearest airport and let me out. I'll even buy my own ticket home. We'll just pretend this never happened."

Alexandra said, "I am afraid it is not so simple." She motioned to the table, which was elegantly set with white china, silverware, and mauve napkins that matched the color scheme of the plane. "Please sit down and I will explain. Then all will be clear."

"I want an explanation right now."

Stanislav turned his way again, wielding the frying pan in his big hand. "Sit, professor."

Sawyer glanced around the aircraft. Knowing there wasn't much else he could do, he reluctantly eased himself down into a chair opposite Alexandra, wincing as he bent his right knee. After a moment Stanislav set the small tower of pancakes on the table. The warm, sweet aroma wafted up into Sawyer's nostrils. He realized he was hungry. Ravenous, in fact.

Stanislav seated himself and began doling out the pancakes with a fork. The two Russians spread strawberry jam and sour cream on the paper-thin pastries.

Sawyer's stomach growled so loudly that both Stanislav and Alexandra heard it. Both of them laughed. Stanislav said, "Come on, eat professor. You will feel better."

Sawyer did not move. "Look, you said you would explain. So start explaining."

Stanislav raised an eyebrow at Sawyer's tone, then casually picked up a folded pancake that bled jam down his thick fingers and bit into it.

Alexandra ate a couple of pancakes, watching Sawyer sit there, then finally slid her plate to one side. She turned her computer towards Sawyer so he could see it. "The best way to start is to show you this video clip, which I was about to do in the limo. It was made seven years ago, in Tajikistan."

Sawyer frowned, wondering what this could possibly have to do him being kidnapped. On the screen, some Russian words and numbers flashed by, too fast for him to read. Then, there was a skinny old man sitting in lotus position.

"What is this?" Sawyer said.

"Watch, please," Alexandra said.

The camera panned downward. In front of the elderly, Asian-looking man, on the dirt, was a glass bowl. He was sitting perfectly still, his eyes shut, as if meditating.

Suddenly, with a flick of his thumb, he sent a coin spinning inside the bowl. The coin glided around the inside of the basin, and then the old man picked the bowl up and started tilting it this way and that, his body rocking back and forth.

What Sawyer glimpsed next caused the hair on the back of his neck to stand on end.

# 7

"What makes you think there's been some 'funny business', Dr. Waterman?"

"Stephen wouldn't have left his cellphone and wallet behind," the professor answered.

Patricia Alamar glanced at the items spread out on the Flamingo Hotel room dresser, then back at Jack Waterman, the friend and coworker of Stephen Sawyer's. The short, disheveled man wore a frayed tweed jacket that seemed at least one size too small, and his grossly out-of-style striped tie was askew. Waterman's thinning brown hair looked like it might have been combed with a dry bar of soap. Despite his sloppy appearance, however, his mind seemed clear and sharp.

Alamar said, "Your friend might have left his wallet and cellphone here on purpose, to avoid losing them."

Waterman gestured to the shelf. "And his keys, too?"

"So what? Keys to his car, his house...why would he need those in Las Vegas?"

Waterman considered this, fidgeting with his right hand. She noticed that he looked at a set of rental car keys that were next to the others, but that was only more evidence that Sawyer was somewhere nearby. Alamar also noticed that Waterman wore a college ring and had a nervous habit of using his thumb to twirl it around his finger. "I guess Stephen wouldn't need his keys here. . . but all his money is still in his wallet."

"How do you know?" Alamar said. "Maybe he took some of his money and left the rest here, to keep himself under control. Some people have a lot of trouble with that in this city, you know."

"Well, Stephen Sawyer isn't one of them. Anyway, I know he only had three hundred dollars left when we left the casino, because he told me—he didn't want to blow any more. And that's how much is in his wallet right now."

"Maybe he took one of his credit cards and got a cash advance."

"Maybe. But what about the key to this room? It's still in his wallet, too."

Alamar gave a noncommittal nod and eyed Waterman for a moment. "You sure called us in a hurry. Your friend is probably just on a lucky streak somewhere, with a big pile of pink poker chips in front of him. And maybe a nice-looking lady on his arm."

"Yeah," Waterman said, but it was obvious he didn't buy it.

"Are you sure you're not overreacting?"

When Waterman didn't respond, Alamar narrowed her eyes and added, "You're not holding back anything from me, are you, professor?"

"No, of course not. It's just not like Stephen, that's all. I've known this guy almost my whole life, since high school—he's almost a brother to me. For him not to show up to chair his session...that's the whole reason he came to this boring conference, to chair that session." He looked around the unoccupied room. "This is totally out of character."

Alamar gave a wry smile. "Vegas has a way of making a lot of people behave out of character, Dr. Waterman."

"Yeah, maybe...." The Stanford professor looked back at the wallet, fidgeting with his ring again. "I just have a bad feeling about it, that's all."

"Well, the FBI doesn't operate on feelings, we operate on facts." Alamar glanced around the room one more time. "I'll do some checking with security here, but in the meantime, why don't you go back and give the casino another walk-through? This hotel is huge—you might have missed him. And Caesar's Palace is right across the street—maybe he went over there for a change of scenery, or thinking his luck would improve."

"All right."

"If I find out anything, I'll call you on your cell." They exchanged numbers. "If he shows up, you call me, okay?"

Waterman nodded and put her number in his pocket.

To ensure he knew she was taking him seriously, Alamar said, "You don't happen to have a photograph of your friend, do you?"

"No. But I'm sure you could get one off the Stanford University website. Or at any bookstore. It's on the back cover of his book, _Blind Spot_."

"Oh, your friend is an author, is he?"

Waterman muttered a "yeah," then hesitated at the door, taking one last uneasy look at the empty hotel room.

"Relax," Alamar told him. "Sawyer's a big boy. He'll turn up."

# 8

"That's impossible," Sawyer sputtered.

On the computer screen, the video clip was still running. The coin was still spinning inside the bowl. In fact, it had been doing so for a good four or five minutes, on its own. It was clear that after the sufi put the bowl down on the ground, the coin picked up speed, finally stabilizing in the very center of the bowl, where it was now only a gray blur.

The camera panned over to the old man—he had collapsed and was trembling, as if performing this feat had sapped all the life from his frail body.

Sawyer glanced over at Alexandra. She was peering at him with a trace of a smile on her face. It was the same expression he had noticed in the limo.

"Does this not look familiar, professor?"

It looked familiar all right—too familiar. It was almost exactly like a concept he had once written about in a paper about Nikola Tesla, a paper that had gotten him into all kinds of hot water at Stanford and nearly ruined his career.

But this couldn't be, he thought. He peered back at the screen—the camera had shifted back to the forever-spinning coin. He thought he could make out something underneath the bowl, a dark spot beneath the glass. "What's that?" he said, pointing to it.

"Very perceptive." Alexandra clicked a key on her computer and put the film into reverse. "That is the top of an iron rod that has been driven into the ground." She reversed the clip, then stopped it at a point just before the old man set the bowl down. Alexandra pointed a well-manicured nail at the little circle, which Sawyer could see was actually a silvery gray color. "The rod extends four meters into the earth."

A déjà vu-like feeling swept over Sawyer that made him seem as if the jet had just turned upside down. Staring at the screen, he heard some rational part of himself say: _This can't be genuine. It's just not possible._

"Well?" Alexandra said.

Sawyer swallowed and tried to get a grip on himself. "Well what?"

Alexandra seemed surprised by his reaction. She motioned to the screen, a half-smile on her face. "You do not notice anything familiar?" she repeated.

"Familiar?" Sawyer chuckled, hiding his feelings. "Yes, I certainly do notice something familiar. Another cheap parlor trick."

Alexandra's smile faded. "Parlor trick? What does this mean?"

"Optical illusion. Hocus-pocus."

Alexandra recoiled. "It is no hocus-pocus, Dr. Sawyer, I assure you."

"Well, you can assure me all day, but I don't believe it. There are a hundred ways that film could have been faked."

"My _father_ made this film himself. It is no fake."

"I don't care if your fairy godmother made the film. It could have been rigged in a number of ways." With a trembling hand, Sawyer motioned to the screen—the clip had reached the end again, the camera focused tightly on the spinning coin. Sawyer felt the same déjà vu-like sensation he'd felt the first time. It was like seeing the sketch in that paper he had written so long ago come to life. "Play it again. Go back to the part where the guy puts the bowl on the ground."

"He is not a 'guy,'" Alexandra said defensively. "He is a Sufi."

"Whatever," Sawyer muttered. His heart was pounding.

Clearly perturbed, Alexandra backed up the clip and started it playing again. Sawyer leaned even closer than he had the first time, watching the old man slowly set the bowl down on the dirt floor of the hut. After a moment the camera zoomed in on the spinning coin.

"There could be an air source located nearby that blows on one side of the coin to keep it spinning. Or maybe this 'Sufi' is blowing on it, somehow."

"Do you not think we have checked such things?"

Sawyer shrugged. "How would I know? I don't know a damn thing about you."

Stanislav was watching them both curiously.

Alexandra looked like she was having trouble controlling her temper.

"Another possibility," Sawyer said, "is that an electromagnetic field generator could be buried under the dirt. The power supply could be hidden somewhere nearby, the wires run underground."

Stanislav tittered at this. He shook his head, then laughed again. He opened a Russian sports newspaper and started reading.

"Dr. Sawyer," Alexandra said, "these people are nomadic tribesmen who live in the mountains of Tajikistan. They ride camels, live in tents, drift from one watering hole to another." She paused, letting that sink in. "And I am frankly astonished at you being so skeptical."

"It's my job to be skeptical," Sawyer said.

Alexandra looked put off by this. "You are the same Dr. Stephen Sawyer who wrote the bestselling book, _Blind Spot_..."

"Yes I am. And do you know how many fake perpetual motion machines I've been shown since that book came out?"

She winced at him saying the word "fake" again. She pointed to the screen. The image had freeze-framed on a close-up of the rotating disk. "But this configuration—surely you recognize it."

Sawyer motioned to the image. "What 'configuration' are you talking about? A coin spinning around inside a bowl?"

She gave Stanislav a frustrated glance.

"He does not want to believe," Stanislav muttered.

To Sawyer, Alexandra said, "It is the same configuration you described in your paper!"

"What paper is that?" Sawyer said.

"The paper you wrote about Tesl..." Her voice trailed off—she realized Sawyer was playing dumb.

She slammed the top of her computer closed. Then she stood up, carried it over to one of the seats by the opposite windows, sat back down, opened it, and began typing furiously, her lips clamped tightly together.

Stanislav regarded Sawyer for a moment with a kind of detached curiosity. He picked up his spoon and began smearing jam and sour cream on another pancake. "Eat, professor."

Sawyer glanced down at the _blini_ in his plate, he decided that eating something would buy him some time to think. He picked up his fork and took a bite, barely tasting the pancake—his mind was reeling, leaping from one train of thought to another. Could his paper about Tesla have actually been _right_? After all these years, after his tenure committee had given him such hell for publishing something they regarded as lowly "fringe science"...?

"Something wrong, professor?"

Sawyer realized he had stopped chewing. Stanislav was staring at his fork, which he held in mid-air. He looked down at the pancake as if concerned that it didn't suit Sawyer's tastes.

"No, it's great. Delicious." Sawyer took another bite and tried to smile.

Stanislav nodded, looking pleased, and went back to his newspaper.

Sawyer glanced back at Alexandra—she was still typing like a maniac, even angrier than before. Then she hit one last key with a snap of finality and looked at him. He wondered if she had just fired off an e-mail to her boss, telling him that the professor they had kidnapped wasn't cooperating.

Sawyer ate a little more, growing more and more afraid, and decided he ought to try and talk to her. Pissing her off wouldn't accomplish anything, although knowing that he'd gotten under her skin gave him some satisfaction.

He started to rise, but Stanislav looked up sharply at him. Sawyer motioned to Alexandra. "I just want to talk to her." The big Russian nodded his assent.

Alexandra was still working on her computer, clicking the mouse occasionally, but he couldn't see the screen as he approached her. She had another paper in her hand. The ride had become bumpy, the jet rocking a bit.

She gave no acknowledgement of his presence.

Sawyer cleared his throat. "Excuse me..."

Alexandra finally glanced at him, but she did not speak.

Sawyer wasn't sure how to proceed. He decided the best thing to do was come clean—he was scared shitless. "Now I see what you mean about the configuration in the video clip looking familiar."

"Wonderful."

Sawyer watched her for another few seconds, feeling awkward. He didn't know what else to say. He casually leaned forward so he could see what she was working on.

"Do you mind?" she said, slapping the top of the computer closed. She folded the piece of paper in half—it was ragged and looked like it had been carried around for quite some time.

Sawyer blinked and tried to maintain his composure. In that instant he had glimpsed something even more startling than the video clip.

"Is it your habit to read over other people's shoulders?" Alexandra snapped.

"No," he said. "I'm just trying to understand what's going on here."

"My father will explain everything to you when we arrive. Apparently you do not take _me_ very seriously."

He glanced uneasily over at Stanislav, who was watching the conversation with interest. What he'd just glimpsed had shaken him to the bones. The paper in her hand was a photocopy of one of Nikola Tesla's original laboratory notebooks, a notebook that Sawyer had never seen before. And he was familiar with all of them, at least all of the notebooks that were publicly available. In researching his Tesla paper, Sawyer had visited the Tesla Museum in Belgrade twice and had obtained special access to all of the late scientist's documents.

Who _are_ these people? Sawyer thought, looking back down at Alexandra.

Then he remembered.

From this angle, he recognized her. The silky blonde hair, the high cheekbones, the cat-like blue eyes... It was the same girl all right. Older and more mature—no longer a timid little undergraduate student, but a confident young woman. Sawyer only had the vaguest recollection of meeting her. She had shyly come into his office shortly after he had arrived at Moscow State and asked him if she could make a copy of his paper about Tesla. Back then, he still listed it on his CV, which had been posted on a bulletin board in the physics department. Surprised and pleased that a student would be interested in his research, and especially that particular piece of work—one that had been so harshly criticized by his own university—he had graciously given her a copy. And had never seen or heard from her again.

Until now.

"Please sit down and fasten your seatbelt," she said curtly. "It is unsafe to stand in the turbulence."

"I remember you."

She gazed at him a moment—an odd look crossed her face. "I congratulate you. Please take a seat."

"Are you a physicist?"

"Professor," Stanislav warned from behind, and Sawyer felt a firm grip on his arm. Before he could say anything else, Stanislav's heavy hand guided him to a seat at the very back, just in front of the door to the bedroom. The big Russian fastened the seatbelt around Sawyer himself, pulling it uncomfortably tight.

Stanislav sat back down at the table and opened his newspaper. Sawyer glanced around, trying to see outside the plane, but then realized why he had been guided to this particular seat. There were no windows nearby, which meant he would not be able to see where they landed.

Sawyer noticed Stanislav was watching him, peering over the top of the newspaper with a faint smile on his face.

"You will believe, professor. You will believe."

# 9

Jack Waterman emerged from his taxi and glanced around the park, looking for the FBI agent.

"Dr. Waterman," Alamar called quietly, from a nearby bench.

Waterman spotted her and walked over. He was wearing the same disheveled outfit he had been that morning, but he had taken off his shirt and tie. Underneath the worn brown tweed jacket was a T-shirt that said, PHYSICISTS DON'T LET PHYSICISTS DERIVE DRUNK.

Alamar gave him a dry smile after she read it and motioned for him to sit down. The park was nearly deserted—the nearest people were a couple of young women two benches down, both with baby strollers and chattering nonstop.

"Why did you want to meet here?" Waterman said.

"Didn't want to get stuck in all that Strip traffic," Alamar said. "Very busy day."

"You haven't found out anything about Stephen?"

"Unfortunately, no." She glanced at her watch. "The security people at the Flamingo are reviewing their CCTV tapes, and should be calling me back soon."

Waterman looked dejected and gazed across the little park. "I'm really worried now—it's just not like him, disappearing like this."

"I understand," Alamar said sympathetically. She pulled a document from her purse. She noticed Waterman glimpse a copy of _Blind Spot_ protruding from the side pocket of her bag, which she had picked up at Barnes & Noble. "I downloaded your friend's CV from the Stanford website. I noticed something curious, a 'glitch' I wanted to ask you about."

"Oh?" Waterman leaned forward and peered at the first page.

"There seems to be almost a two year gap in his publications, about ten years ago." She tapped on the paper with her tawny finger. "He was publishing a paper every two or three months here, at a regular clip—"

"Publish or perish," Waterman quipped wearily.

"Yeah. Must be a real grind."

"It is."

"Anyway, up to that time, he was publishing a paper every two or three months. But for no apparent reason, he stopped publishing for seventeen months in a row, if I counted right."

"Let me see that," Waterman said. He studied the thick CV for a moment, flipping back and forth between pages, then started chuckling.

"What's funny?" Alamar said.

Waterman gave her a toothy grin. "That was after he wrote that paper about Nikola Tesla." The professor gazed at her, the grin plastered to his face, as if she should get the joke.

"And who is Nikola Tesla?" she said.

"Who _was_ Nikola Tesla. A scientist who lived about a century ago. Brilliant, but a little nuts. He invented alternating current motors and generators, designed the first power generating station at Niagara Falls, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. But he also believed in free energy machines." Waterman chuckled, shaking his head.

Alamar said, "And why don't I find that hysterically funny?"

"Because there's no such thing as a free energy machine. They violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

Alamar nodded again. "Oh, I get it now. That explains the humor."

The professor studied her for a moment, then finally seemed to realize he might be talking over her head. "Let me put it this way. Free energy machines, perpetual motion machines, that type of thing—they're considered by academics, and most sane laymen, as complete and utter fantasy." Waterman shook his head, as if remembering something regrettable. "That paper Stephen wrote turned into a big embarrassment for him, caused a minor scandal in our department. They told him in so many words—his tenure committee, that is—they told him that if he ever wrote anything like that again, he could forget about becoming a tenured professor at Stanford."

Alamar looked down at the CV again, and pointed. "So this is the paper, then, _Elasticity Coefficients for Poly_ —"

"No, of course not. He doesn't have that paper listed on his CV."

"Why's that?"

Waterman cackled. "Stanford wouldn't put up with it, not a way-out paper like that. Hell's, it's fringe science, practically." He motioned to the copy of _Blind Spot_. "The kind of stuff he talks about in his book, as a matter of fact." Waterman paused. "Actually, if I remember right, the Tesla paper wasn't ever actually published. There was a fire or something at the company that was supposed to print the conference proceedings. He only presented it orally. Luckily for him."

Alamar looked confused. "I don't follow—you're telling me Stanford is embarrassed about this paper, but not about this book?" She held up _Blind Spot: How In-the-Box Thinking is Thwarting the Development of New Technology_ , then turned it over and looked at the relaxed, smiling photo of Sawyer on the back.

"Ah," Waterman said, raising a finger in the air. "When he wrote that paper ten years ago, he was actually _doing_ fringe science research." Waterman tapped on the book. "This is recent, written a couple of years ago. It's one step removed. He takes a look at free energy research from a sober academic perspective. This is more of a book on scientific philosophy. He doesn't actually _do_ that kind of research himself anymore." Waterman paused. "That may seem like a small difference to you, but in academia, it's night and day."

"Oh," Alamar said. "So the book is 'respectable,' but the Tesla paper wasn't."

"Exactly. You can't really do fringe science research in academia, not at a decent university. It's too far from the mainstream."

"I understand." She gazed at the professor a moment. "I'm no scientist, but it seems to me sometimes the far-out ideas, the ones everyone scoffs at, turn out to be breakthroughs."

"Sure, sometimes. But not the idea Stephen wrote about in that Tesla paper, believe me. Free energy machines really are impossible. He researched Tesla's work and speculated that the man might have actually built one, but that's utter nonsense. Free energy machines, perpetual motion machines—they simply cannot exist."

Alamar nodded and gave Waterman a somewhat bashful smile. "Do you think you could explain why to a thick-headed federal agent like me?"

Waterman hesitated, looking confused. "You're not thinking this has anything to do with—"

"No, no. But it is a glitch in your friend's bio." She paused and then added, "To tell you the truth, I've always kind of liked this kind of stuff, even though I don't really understand it."

Waterman hesitated, and though he clearly thought the exercise irrelevant, the pedantic part of himself could not resist the invitation. Taking Sawyer's CV from her, he said, "Is it okay if I write on the back?"

"Knock yourself out."

Waterman began to make a drawing. "This is out of Stephen's book, by the way—if you're really interested in this kind of thing, you ought to read it."

"Maybe I will."

"Okay...this is a very simple example—a refrigerator. We all have one of those at home, and they're all designed the same." He sketched the following:

* * *

* * *

"When you plug your refrigerator into the wall outlet, you're basically just plugging in an electric motor that's inside of it, located in the bottom. Its shaft turns a compressor, which cools the compartment for the food. Right?"

"I'm with you," Alamar said, looking at the drawing. "But I'm not sure exactly how a compressor works."

"Doesn't matter."

"Okay."

"Now, consider this: what if I told you I could come over to your house, take apart your refrigerator, and hook up an electrical generator to the motor, too. Add it on, like this." He erased part of his drawing. It now showed:

* * *

"And then...I told you that I could hook the generator back to the motor, to power it, like this." He traced a curvy line from the generator back to the compressor.

* * *

* * *

"And you could just unplug the refrigerator. _Voila_! It would keep on running. Forever." Waterman touched the pencil to the black dot on the drawing. "You now have a refrigerator that works for free. It costs nothing to keep your food cold."

This time it was Alamar's turn to laugh. "That's crazy."

"Well, guess what? That's a free energy machine." Waterman paused. "Why do you say it's crazy?"

Alamar chuckled. "Because it just _is_. It reminds me of that M. C. Escher picture..."

"What Escher picture is that?"

"The one of the waterwheel. I have a print of it on my wall at home. It shows water flowing over the wheel, which turns it, but then the water flows down a few little canals which eventually bring it back and it flows over the wheel again. If you look at it real close, it doesn't make any sense. The water can't go uphill again by itself."

"Yeah, I know that drawing," Waterman said, with a grin. "You're right. It's a perfect graphical depiction of a free energy machine, too." He paused, then appeared to remember that his friend Sawyer was missing. "Look, I really don't see what this has to do with—"

"This kind of machine could never work, right? I mean, it's impossible..."

Waterman glanced at his watch. "Correct. Some energy is lost in each stage of the machine, and it soon will cease running. It cannot work without defying the laws of physics...at least, as we understand them."

Alamar looked at the drawing, imagining the motor turning the generator and the compressor, and the generator supplying enough power back to the motor to keep it turning forever. "It's a paradox, isn't it? You can't get something for nothing, that's what it amounts to..."

Waterman gave a surprised chuckle. "That's exactly what we physicists say when we're talking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 'You can't get something for nothing'." He chuckled again.

Alamar glanced down at his T-shirt. "You physicists guys are a hoot, aren't you?"

Waterman smiled proudly, completely missing the sarcasm, and glanced at his watch again. "Look, if you want to know more about free energy theory, I highly recommend that you read Stephen's book. I really don't see what this has to do with—"

"I noticed your friend spent a year in Russia about the time he wrote this hysterically funny paper."

Waterman hesitated. Alamar's tone had changed, and she was watching his face very carefully. "Yes, that's right. Stephen was just teaching at Moscow State, though. Nothing sinister, believe me."

She narrowed her eyes. "Are you sure about that?"

"Positive." Waterman fidgeted. "Stephen took the time off from Stanford to do some...well, soul searching, I guess you'd call it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"He went to Russia _after_ he wrote that Tesla paper—that is, after Stanford found out about it. He got pissed off at the 'closed-minded' reaction and basically went over there to cool off, think about his future, decide whether to keep trying to publish in that area or to go back to his core research area."

"Which is..."

"Polymer physics. Same as mine."

After a long moment, Alamar said, "Okay, I guess that makes sense."

Waterman looked visibly relieved. He said nothing while she perused Sawyer's CV a little more.

She finally glanced at her watch. "I better get going—the security people at the Flamingo may have faxed me something." She started to rise from the bench, but hesitated. "Not to beat a dead horse, but you wouldn't have a copy of this Tesla paper, would you?"

"No. I don't think I ever actually had a copy."

"Where could I find one?"

"Hmm...it might be tough to locate, because the conference where he presented it was fairly obscure." Waterman paused. "I can tell you one place you definitely won't find it, though."

"Where's that?"

The professor gave a wry smile. "Stanford University Library."

Alamar smiled, too, and motioned towards her Taurus. "I'll give you a lift back to your hotel."

When they reached the car, she unlocked the doors and they both got in. As she inserted the key into the ignition, she glanced at Waterman and said, "You're sure you don't have a copy of the paper?"

"I'm positive. I never had a copy. Why?"

"I just thought since you and he are so close, he might have sent you a draft for proofing or something."

"No. We do that for each other sometimes, but he didn't send me a copy of that particular paper. Anyway, even if it did, I would have thrown it away a long time ago. I'm no packrat."

Alamar had her doubts about that, based on the gnome's slovenly appearance, but she only smiled and started the car's engine. "Buckle up."

Waterman reached for his seatbelt, pulled on it, but it wouldn't come across his chest.

"That darn thing sticks sometimes," she said.

She stole a quick glance around the car, to make sure no one was close by, then leaned across him and pretended to fiddle with the seat belt mechanism, which she had purposefully jammed on the way to the meeting. Her left hand pressed a 9mm pistol firmly into the professor's sternum.

The silenced pistol made only a muted _thump-thump-thump_ sound as Alamar fired off three rounds in rapid succession.

She reached up and clicked the seat's release mechanism and dropped it back into a reclining position, glancing around again to make sure no one had heard the shots.

Professor Jack Waterman stared up at the roof of the car, a wide-eyed expression of shock still frozen on his face.

Alamar pulled the vehicle out onto the street and dialed a number on her scrambled satellite phone, glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure there had been no witnesses.

The Viper answered on the sixth or seventh ring.

"Yes?" he said, in his soft Dutch accent.

"I had to plug the leak," Alamar said.

"I see."

"It was a judgment call—he knew too much."

"And your cover?"

"Still intact. The van was disposed of, everything's clean on this end." She glanced again at Waterman, noticing the college ring on his finger—that might be useful later. "I just have to dispose of the remains."

"Proceed as we discussed."

# 10

When the jet finally landed, Sawyer had no idea where he was, only somewhere in Russia. Stanislav blindfolded him and carefully guided him down the exit stairs, Alexandra apologizing but telling him that "unfortunately, it is absolutely necessary." Wherever they were, it was freezing outside. They had provided Sawyer with a heavy parka, thick leather gloves, and fur-lined boots that pinched his toes.

As he blindly made his way down the stairs and across the snow-covered ground, the frigid, dry air tingled his nostrils, and his cheeks stung from blowing snowflakes. The harsh weather was a stark contrast from the warm, sunny climate of Las Vegas, and only added to his feeling of disorientation.

Sawyer was hustled onto a helicopter, its spinning rotor blasting a glacial chill down the neck of his parka. After she settled him into the rearmost seat, where there were no windows, Alexandra removed the blindfold from his eyes.

Sawyer couldn't see anything out the front windows but blowing snow. Stanislav was sat next to the pilot, both men wearing big headphone sets. Alexandra seated herself just behind the two of them, three seats up from Sawyer. As soon as the aircraft rose into the night sky, she began to type on her computer again, the screen out of Sawyer's line of sight.

He settled back in his seat, trying to keep his fear in check. God only knew where they were taking him, and what might happen when they got there...

He checked his watch—he needed to do whatever he could to try and at least figure out which direction they were headed, and how long they flew. But after they flew a little while, he gave up hope. The chopper would cruise in one direction for a few minutes, then veered off and flew in a slightly different direction, then turned back... At first he thought they were doing this to throw him off, but because of the extremely low altitude the pilot maintained—only a few hundred feet above the treetops—he concluded they were avoiding radar.

After they had flown about an hour and ten minutes, the rotor slowed a bit and the helicopter started to descend. Stanislav said something to Alexandra, and she turned to Sawyer. "We soon will be arriving. You can come see the view – it is the dacha of my father."

Sawyer rose and, before he settled into the seat directly behind Alexandra, he glanced into the cockpit and caught a quick glimpse of the GPS indicator. +55.119, one of the numbers said. That was half the information he needed—the latitudinal coordinate. He repeated the number over and over in his mind, memorizing it, as he looked out the window. He saw only a pale, snow-covered landscape, illuminated occasionally by a quarter moon that intermittently peeked through the clouds. It had stopped snowing, at least temporarily. Below, patches of dark slid by. As the helicopter dropped lower, he could see the forests were composed of perfectly straight birch trees, typical in Russia. They passed over a pond or a small lake.

Sawyer glanced up at the moon—it looked a bit odd to him, the crescent turned at a steeper angle due to the fact they were so far north. He remembered noticing that when he had first come to teach at the university in Moscow. So they were at least that far north. He'd know for sure if he could catch sight of the other half of the GPS display.

The pilot flicked on the chopper's landing lights, and the ground beneath them was illuminated. They were now almost brushing the treetops.

"There is the main entrance," Alexandra said, pointing.

Sawyer expected to see something elegant—he knew Russian dachas, or country houses, ranged from small shacks to massive castle-like dwellings, and he had a feeling he was about to see the latter. He looked for a stone gate or a statue or fountains. Instead, in the white landing lights, he made out only two long fences cutting through the trees, separated by perhaps one hundred yards, which seemed to have rolled barbed wire along the tops. He also thought he saw a dog, its head tilted up, barking at the sky. But it was too dark to be sure.

They intercepted a road on the left and then the pilot turned and tracked it, the pavement disappearing under the chopper. Sawyer again saw nothing but forests on either side, and they flew for another five or ten minutes. The forests began to recede, revealing some roads and big green cylinders that looked like storage tanks for water or gasoline.

Alexandra said, "There is our dacha."

Sawyer pressed his cheek against the cold glass and saw a sprawling, Russian-style structure, turrets and arches, facing the other direction. The wood and stone mansion had to have dozens of rooms. .

A helipad came into view—a bank of bright white lights had just winked on, and the red landing circle was barely visible in the snow. Sawyer saw three men in parkas walking towards the landing area, machine guns slung over their shoulders.

As soon as the chopper touched down, Stanislav got up and opened the door. Sawyer rose, hesitantly, having just enough time to glance into the cockpit before Stanislav noticed.

"Professor," Alexandra said from behind, grabbing his arm and jerking him around towards the door. "This way."

He glanced at her, pretending he hadn't seen anything, and let her move him along. But in his mind he was repeating the longitudinal reading: +43.178.

# 11

"Welcome, professor, welcome!"

The bear of a man who greeted Sawyer was waiting just inside the foyer of the huge house. Fit, in his mid-fifties, he wore a cherry red jogging outfit that looked freshly pressed. Sawyer glanced down at his feet—he sported felt _topochki_ , though a much more expensive pair than Sawyer had worn on the plane.

"Please forgive my appearance," the Russian said, offering his open palm to Sawyer, "but it is very late. I am Sergei Voronezhsky."

Sawyer hesitated before shaking hands, not expecting such a formal reception. The man's grip was firm and self-assured—Sawyer's held felt engulfed by it. The Russian turned to Alexandra and hugged her. "My princess," he said in Russian. "Thank god you're all right." He tenderly kissed her forehead several times. "I should never have allowed you to go."

"Papa," she muttered, and gently broke free, glancing at Sawyer, embarrassed.

Voronezhsky turned to Stanislav, who was standing beside Alexandra, looking as if he felt a bit neglected. "You did well, too, my son."

Siblings, Sawyer thought. He told himself he should have known that by the way they had spoken to each other. They even looked alike, with their long, straight noses and sharp blue eyes.

Stanislav simply nodded at his father and brushed past. Sawyer wasn't sure, but it seemed like there was some animosity between the two of them. Stanislav muttered something to another tall man in grey army fatigues standing just inside the doorway, then walked down the hallway and out of sight. Sawyer noticed that the tall man wore a holster with a pistol. A patch on his shirt said SECURITY.

Voronezhsky took hold of Sawyer's arm, giving him a broad grin. "I wish to welcome you to my dacha, my friend." The Russian slung one of his big paws over Sawyer's shoulder. "You must be tired from your journey, but let us have one drink to celebrate..."

Sawyer slipped out from under the man's heavy limb, angered by all this cheery treatment.

"I don't appreciate being kidnapped," Sawyer said.

The man with the pistol took a half-step forward, but Voronezhsky held up his palm. He glanced at Alexandra, then smiled again at Sawyer. "My daughter told me you were a strong and confident man. I see that she spoke the truth."

Despite his fear, Sawyer returned Voronezhsky's steady gaze, sensing that how he behaved at this crucial moment might determine his fate. He wanted them to know they weren't dealing with a wimp, even though at this particular moment, he felt utterly helpless.

"What exactly do you want with me? I've got a hole in my leg because of all this cloak-and-dagger crap."

Voronezhsky again looked at his daughter, as if confused.

"He doesn't understand the situation, Papa," she said briskly in Russian. "I told him nothing more than you said."

"And you did well, my Sashenka," her father said softly, giving her an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder. Voronezhsky motioned to Sawyer. "Please, professor, allow me the opportunity to explain myself. I apologize for the, shall we say, unusual way in which you were brought here..." He made a gracious gesture down the hallway. "Join me for a drink, a cigar..."

Sawyer did not budge.

Voronezhsky's face darkened a shade.

"Dr. Sawyer," Alexandra said, quickly stepping in between the two of them. "Please have a drink with my father. We Russians do not simply jump into business discussions like you Americans..." Her eyes had a pleading look, as if to tell Sawyer that if he knew what was good for him, he had better back off his hardline position.

Sawyer reluctantly let Voronezhsky guide him down a tiled hallway, the man's arm over his shoulder again, though not quite as warmly as before.

_Sergei Voronezhsky_. The name rang a faint bell in Sawyer's weary brain, something he had read somewhere, or seen on the news recently. Could he hold a high post in the Russian government? The Duma? Their jet had somehow managed to bypass Russian customs and immigration controls—only the most powerful people in the world had that kind of freedom.

They entered a study which smelled strongly of birch smoke. A fire crackled in a blue-tiled hearth. Nestled against one wall was an elegant antique writing table, a heavily-carved grandfather clock flanking one side, and a shoulder-high marble statue of Pushkin flanking the other. The curly-haired head of Russian's most cherished poet was tilted down at the desk, as if gazing at the papers spread around it.

"Please, make yourself comfortable," Voronezhsky said, motioning to two high-backed leather chairs near the fireplace. There was an antique table between them with an inlaid chessboard. But Sawyer's attention was drawn to the far corner of the room, to a lighted display case. There was a faint ringing sound coming from that direction—a sound he associated with mild shock.

Sawyer made his way over to it, and Voronezhsky seemed to approve. Inside the case was a glass bowl. And inside the bowl, was a coin, or maybe a metal disk, spinning around and around, just like in the video clip on the plane.

Sawyer peered at the oddity more closely, then glanced again at Voronezhsky. The Russian stood with his arms crossed, watching Sawyer, a proud look on his face. The man clearly thought he possessed something truly extraordinary.

Sawyer leaned forward to inspect it more closely, but when he did so, he stopped abruptly. The spinning coin wavered slightly, moved a little bit off center, then returned to its original position in the center of the bowl. Sawyer moved his head slightly to the left. It happened again.

"You disturb the magnetic field," Voronezhsky explained.

Sawyer glanced at him. "What magnetic field is that?"

"The earth's magnetic field, of course."

Sawyer was dumbstruck. It was basically the same setup Sawyer had proposed in his paper—that Nikola Tesla might have found a way to turn a metallic disk into a kind of super magnet that would spin on its own by resonating with the earth's magnetic field.

Sawyer looked back at the display, peering up at the top of the cabinet, then underneath the shelf that supported the sphere. Nothing but empty space above and below.

"I see you are still the skeptic," Voronezhsky said. "Alexandra sent me a message from our aircraft, told me you needed more convincing."

Sawyer glanced back at the Russian—the word "convincing" had been uttered with what sounded like a double entendre.

A middle-aged woman entered the room, a tray in her hands. She wore a grey servant's uniform and looked at Voronezhsky expectantly. He motioned for her to set the tray down between the two chairs.

Sawyer hesitated, looking again at the spinning coin, but did as he was asked.

On the tray between them was a crystal pitcher of vodka, a deep bowl of marinated mushrooms, two forks, and two frosted shot glasses. There were also a dozen pieces of toast, each smeared with a thick layer of black caviar. The servant stole a quick, curious glance at Sawyer, as if unaccustomed to seeing visitors, or perhaps foreigners, and then left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

Sawyer looked over at the fireplace again, noticing that the room was warm, bordering on stuffy. He remembered reading that in the times of the Czars, the warmth of a man's home was a measure of his prosperity.

Voronezhsky filled both glasses to the brim. "To your successful arrival here, my friend." He threw his head back and downed the shot.

Sawyer didn't like this "my friend" bit. But he picked up his own glass and followed suit, the Russian's eyes following his movements. The chilled liquid did a fire dance as it ran down Sawyer's throat. He resisted the urge to grimace and matched Voronezhsky steady gaze.

Voronezhsky smiled, filled the glasses again. He moved slowly and confidently. His eyes, Sawyer noticed, were heavily lidded, giving him a relaxed, almost sleepy appearance. Yet there was an undercurrent of danger about the man—he reminded Sawyer of a grizzly bear.

"I have read your book, professor, this _Blind Spot_. I admire how you think. You and I, we have much in common."

Sawyer doubted that, but gave a small nod.

"And my daughter—she holds you in very high estimation."

Voronezhsky meant esteem, Sawyer knew. He was surprised by this news. Alexandra certainly didn't show it.

"This is true, professor. My Sasha is a great admirer of your work. Especially this paper you wrote about this Nikola Tesla. She says it is brilliant, the most insightful speculations about Tesla's secret free energy research that anyone has ever made."

Sawyer was determined not to let himself be swayed by flattery. "Your daughter is a physicist, then?"

"Ah, she did not tell you?" The Russian gave a big belly laugh. "She is modest, like me. My Alexandra now completes her doctorate at Moscow State." He picked up his glass and tossed back its contents, wiping his mouth on the back of his beefy hand. "As you can imagine, I am very proud of her." He gave a humble shrug. "As for me, I have no higher education. I am a simple businessman."

Sawyer glanced over at the desk, then at a bookcase behind it. On an upper shelf was a bronze plaque—he couldn't read the fine print, but he could clearly see a company logo: _SVoil_.

Now Sawyer remembered. SVoil was a large Russian oil company, and Sergei Voronezhsky was its owner and president. One of the infamous oligarchs who had become filthy rich through privatization after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With a touch of vanity, Voronezhsky said, "I see you know who I am."

"I do now."

The oil magnate poured himself another shot of vodka, then looked down at Sawyer's glass, which was still full.

Sawyer hoped this contest would stop soon, but he was determined to equal the Russian shot-for-shot. It was a kind of macho game for Russian men, he knew, and an important one.

Sawyer picked up his glass and downed the potent liquid, the second shot not burning so much—the first one had paved the way. He already felt light headed.

Voronezhsky turned to his desk and produced a jewel-studded humidor that looked like it might have belonged to one of the czars. "Cigar?"

Sawyer wished he could speed up this process and find out exactly what the man wanted. But he told himself the best thing to do was follow Alexandra's advice and let her father move at his own pace, which the man seemed determined to do anyway. Sawyer helped himself to a thick Cuban and then both men silently went through the ritual of trimming the ends and lighting them. Sawyer enjoyed smoking an occasional stogie, and he hadn't tasted a Cuban in a long time. He felt a tiny glimmer of calm, the first he had felt in the past twelve hours. His instincts told him he wasn't in any immediate danger, and however tough the man seemed, he was obviously intelligent.

Puffing steadily, Voronezhsky peered curiously at Sawyer through the growing cloud of smoke. "So, my friend, you would like to know why you were invited here."

"Kidnapped," Sawyer said. "There's a big difference." The refreshments had taken off a little of the edge, and he felt a surge of bravado.

Voronezhsky shrugged, the cigar deftly held between two thick fingers. "Invited, kidnapped—I think this depends on your perspective."

With another vodka-boosted surge of courage, Sawyer said, "If you see it as anything but kidnapping, your perspective must be badly warped."

"Warped? What is this word, warped?"

Sawyer hesitated. "Skewed. Twisted."

"Ah," Voronezhsky said, tapping his cigar over the ash tray. "Warped," he repeated, trying it out. "I very much like this word."

Sawyer wasn't surprised. He didn't know much about Sergei Voronezhsky and SVoil, only what he'd read online—after spending the year in Russia, he still liked to keep up with what was happening there. But the little he did know about the man was not reassuring. Sergei Voronezhsky was a megalomaniac and was implicated in several Russian scandals that involved staggering sums of money, though Sawyer could not remember any details.

"Let me guess why I'm here," Sawyer said almost before he knew what he was saying—he decided it might be a good tactic to try and take control of the conversation.

"Please," the Russian said, with an amiable grin.

Sawyer motioned to the display case. "You want me to help you build a free energy machine based on that little gadget."

"Wrong," Voronezhsky said flatly.

Sawyer was unprepared for that response.

"We have already built such a machine." Voronezhsky shrugged. "Of course, it is a small one, only a prototype. But it generates a significant amount of energy." With his cigar, he motioned to the chandelier. "Enough to power this dacha and the entire complex."

Sawyer tried to hide his astonishment. He had serious doubts about such a possibility, but he tried not to show them. "If that's true, then I don't understand. What do you want with me?"

Voronezhsky sighed, rolling his cigar between his thumb and forefinger. "We have a small problem..."

"Which is..."

"The machine will not start."

Just a "minor" detail. Sawyer had trouble keeping a straight face. Of course it wouldn't start, because like every other supposed "free energy" machine he had ever seen, the damn thing didn't work.

"I know what you are thinking, Dr. Sawyer, and you are dead wrong, I assure you. You must not underestimate me or our team. Our machine generates continuous, clean electrical energy _after_ it has been started. As it will do until its mechanical parts wear down, which will take many years."

Sawyer considered this. If what he had just been told was true, these people had made an incredible breakthrough. But he couldn't hide his doubt. "I'm not sure I follow—you say that you can't get the machine started, but—" he motioned to the chandelier "—it seems that it's already been started..."

Voronezhsky chuckled. "What I mean to say is, starting our machine requires human intervention, which is not acceptable. It must be completely automatic." Voronezhsky paused and gestured to Sawyer. "The old man you saw in the video clip. The Sufi?"

"Yes..."

"He—and only he—can start our machine."

Now things were getting a little weird—Sawyer wished he hadn't downed the vodka, as his thinking was a bit fuzzy. This was all beginning to sound like a hoax. "Exactly how large is this—"

"Once the Sufi makes the device reach a state of equilibrium, it runs perfectly." Voronezhsky gave a tired sigh. "But obviously, to rely on a certain human being to start the machine is not practical."

Sawyer looked back over at the display case. He remembered what he had theorized in his Tesla paper, and the parts of Tesla's research that had never been fully understood, the mysterious tower Tesla had constructed on Long Island... If the machine of theirs really worked, it would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in scientific history. The first free energy machine! The Holy Grail of the physics world. Such a device would turn the global economy upside down, the value of oil and natural gas would plummet...

Sawyer wondered: could the paper he wrote—Stephen Sawyer—actually have led to this monumental achievement?

"Professor? Are you still with me?"

Sawyer looked blankly at Voronezhsky. "How is this machine constructed? Exactly how large is the—"

The Russian cut him off with a wave of his hand. "I know you have many questions, but it is late, and we are both tired. It is better that we wait until tomorrow, you can see the machine yourself. My daughter will explain everything to you. And you can meet the Sufi."

Sawyer was a bit surprised to hear that this "Sufi" was actually here.

Voronezhsky said, "He has been with us quite some time."

"I see," Sawyer said. He wondered if the Sufi was here voluntarily, or had been "invited" here the same way Sawyer had been. "But I still don't understand something—what exactly do you expect _me_ to do?"

"Is it not obvious, professor?"

Sawyer did not immediately answer. "You want me to help you design a starter for the machine...?"

Voronezhsky smiled. "Once we have that in place, the design will be perfected." He glanced over at the display case. "I am not a technical person, such as you or my daughter, but it seems to me that the starter would be something similar to the starter for an automobile..." He looked back at Sawyer a bit uncertainly, as if he thought this might sound over-simplistic.

"I see. And what makes you think I can help you develop a starter?"

"Actually, a self-starter." Voronezhsky laughed. "Professor, your modesty exceeds both my own and my daughter's. Our machine is based on _your_ theories, on the ideas in _your_ Tesla paper. If anyone in the world can help us solve this problem, it is you."

Sawyer was slightly touched by this flattery, but he felt anger welling inside him. Trying to maintain as even a tone as possible, he said, "And so you think you can just kidnap an American professor, take him to Russia, and make him do anything you want him to do."

Voronezhsky gazed at Sawyer a moment, saying nothing. He suddenly rose, leaned over his desk and pushed a button. "It is late, and we will discuss everything tomorrow." The door opened—the security guard Sawyer had noticed in the foyer was standing at the threshold, waiting patiently. "Pavel will escort you to your room."

Sawyer didn't like the flat look in Voronezhsky's eyes—he told himself he had better not push the man any farther. He rose and went towards the door, but halfway there, he turned around. "If you can develop a starter for your machine, what do you intend to do with it?"

Voronezhsky's face brightened, and he gave another belly laugh. "Professor, I am in the energy business."

# 12

The next morning, Sawyer was awakened by a steady scraping sound coming from somewhere outside the house. The bedroom to which he'd been escorted was on the second floor of the dacha, in the guest wing. He wearily rose, limping a bit from his knee injury, and parted the thick curtains.

When he squinted out through the double paned glass, he saw the source of the scraping sound. An old woman, or _babushka,_ was shoveling the night's snow off the helipad. It was only about one hundred feet away. Bundled up in a dark brown anorak, she glanced up at him, a strip of black fur encircling her pink cheeks, vapor pluming from her half-open mouth. She quickly looked back down at the concrete and kept shoveling.

My god, he thought. I really am in Russia.

Beyond the helipad lay a perfectly flat plane of snow that stretched to the edge of a birch forest, blemished only by the cylindrical tanks he had seen the night before. Above the trees but low in the sky, a faint blotch of sun tried in vain to cut its way through the grim winter overcast.

Sawyer glanced at the antique clock on the nightstand—it was almost ten-thirty. As if on cue, the telephone next to it rang, an antique French-style model. Sawyer picked it up.

"Yes?"

"Good mornink," a female voice said, as if struggling to pronounce the English words. "Mister Voronezhsky wants meet with you soon. I bring breakfast in your room."

"Fine," Sawyer muttered, and placed the heavy beige receiver back in its cradle. He wondered if there were hidden cameras. The last thing he had done before falling into the bed was check to see if the telephone accessed an outside line. Of course it hadn't—in fact, it had been completely dead then. And his bedroom door had been locked from the outside.

Sawyer padded across the large room to the door and tried the handle.

Still locked.

He glanced around his lush accommodations—he might have been inside a palace. The furnishings included a gilded harpsichord, an ornate brass clothes rack, a roll-top desk...all looked like very expensive antiques, items that might have been here since the dacha was first constructed. He wondered if the house had been built by one of the czars, or to a member of the royal court.

He went over to the roll-top desk and poked around, opened the drawers—they were all empty. On the top of the desk was a glass paperweight that was the size of a tennis ball, and he picked it up—the thing must have weighed five pounds. Suspended inside was a large black beetle, its tiny legs splayed as if still crawling along the ground. He winced and quickly set it back down—it reminded him of himself, in this situation.

He made his way into the spacious bathroom—a large bathtub with clawed legs dominated the white-tiled floor.

He told himself to remain calm, to think things through—surely there was a way to get out of this. As soon as he climbed into the shower, he scalded himself. He forgot that in Russia, just about everything was opposite to that in the West. The hot water faucet was on the _right_ hand side of the sink, not the left. Light switches were _outside_ of rooms they illuminated, not inside. Russian calendars listed the days of the week down the side, not across the top. It was like a parallel universe where everything was backwards. Sawyer was surprised Russian clocks didn't run counter-clockwise. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought they did everything opposite to Westerners on purpose, just to be contrary.

As he lathered himself with soap, he told himself he might be able to talk Voronezhsky into letting him go—maybe he could explain that he was an academic, a theorist, not an engineer, and that he didn't know how to do anything practical, like designing starters for free energy machines. It wasn't true in his case—back when he'd still liked automobiles, he'd rebuilt engines and modified their designs, and for a while, he'd even tinkered around with his own free energy ideas in his basement, far from the prying eyes of the Stanford physics department. But he didn't think Voronezhsky knew any of this.

When he emerged from the bathroom, he found a clean set of clothes had magically appeared for him on the bed, which had been made up. And a tray with breakfast and a small bouquet of flowers had been left on the coffee table. The food brought back memories of his one-year post at Moscow State, the kind of dishes they served in the cafeteria. _Butterbrod_ —buttered toast with slices of cheese, ham, and tomatoes, salad that resembled coleslaw, potato-stuffed _blini,_ and sour cream. There was also a large glass pot of black tea that looked as potent as the vodka Voronezhsky had offered him last night.

Sawyer sat down and ate slowly. Despite his fear, he could not help feeling a tingly excitement at the thought that this machine they developed might actually work. He glanced up at the light fixture, the bulbs burning steadily on the electricity the machine generated. They'd said the device was based on the work done in his Tesla paper. My god, he thought—that paper might have been _right_. After all the flack he'd gotten...

But he immediately stopped himself—he had to be careful not to let his ego get the better of him. He had a feeling this was exactly what Voronezhsky wanted, for his scientific curiosity to get the better of him, for his excitement at what he had found here to override the fact that he had been abducted and was being held prisoner here.

The curtains had been opened. He peered across the plane of snow that stretched towards the forest. Was escape even a remote possibility? Even if he could make it off the _dacha_ property, where would he go then? His only hope would be to somehow get to Moscow, and then seek protection inside the American Embassy. But how would he get all the way to Moscow? On foot?

Looking out at the endless plane of snow, Sawyer knew he had to be realistic—if the armies of Napoleon and Hitler could not survive the Russian winter, he didn't think there was much hope for a solitary physics professor.

He took a couple of shaky sips of the tea, bolstering his courage. He would simply deal with this one step at a time, wait it out, play along with them, pretend to be willing to work on the starter—pretend to be the captivated-by-technology type scientist, like Voronezhsky seemed to expect him to be, and find a way out of this. Somebody back in the States would soon deduce that he had been kidnapped, and come after him. Jack Waterman would figure it out, surely. In the meantime, Sawyer would keep his eyes open for some way to make contact with the outside world—maybe steal someone's cellphone. If he could make a call to the States, he might have a chance—he could call Jack and quickly explain what had happened—it would only take a matter of seconds.

In his mind, he repeated the numbers he had memorized from the GPS indicator on the helicopter. +55.119, +43.178.

There was a knock at the door.

With growing apprehension, Sawyer got up. He heard a key slide into the lock, and the door opened.

A security guard in gray fatigues motioned to the stairs that led to the main part of the house. "Mister Voronezhsky waits you, please."

# 13

"Amazing, yes?" Voronezhsky said. He had to yell to be heard over the din of the machine.

Sawyer stood dumbfounded in the underground laboratory, staring at the large spherical object that dominated the room. A huge metallic disk, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, was spinning round and round inside a globe that appeared to be made of thick glass. The contraption looked like a gigantic version of the coin-and-bowl demonstration he had seen in the video clip—the disk was spinning so fast it was only a blur. The only curious difference was that the disk was not spinning in an upright position, but on its side, with its axis of rotation parallel to the floor.

"This machine generates a hundred thousand watts at maximum efficiency," Alexandra said, standing close to Sawyer but still having to raise her voice. The noise from the contraption was unsettling, a deep, resonating vibration that penetrated Sawyer's body to the core. He also thought he noticed an eerie violet glow surrounding the sphere.

Two young technicians with high Slavic cheekbones sat to the left of the prototype, a half dozen computer screens in front of them, along with some oscilloscopes and other instruments spread out on work benches. The floor around them was a rat's nest of cables.

"Of course," Alexandra said, "this is only a small prototype. Our actual machine—"

"—is at another location," her father finished, giving her a look that told her not to say anymore.

Sawyer wondered why they were so secretive about the supposed "actual" machine. He looked around a little more and noticed that there were several box-like objects attached to the outside of the sphere, with thick black cables looping down from them. Some kind of electrical transformers, Sawyer thought.

To Alexandra, he said, "Do those transformers give the disk a kick every time the disk passes by, or what?"

She smiled. "Shame on you, professor. You are thinking in terms of classical physics. On each revolution, the disk gives _them_ a kick."

Sawyer looked back at the prototype, confused.

"Every time the edge of the disk passes by one of the transformers," Alexandra explained, "it generates a pulse of electricity." She paused, and with great pride, announced, "Professor Sawyer, you are looking at the world's first absolutely fuel-less electrical power generator."

Sawyer now felt a little stupid for asking his question, but what she was telling him was difficult to believe. Even though it was very similar to the device he'd outlined in his Tesla paper, his rational mind would not accept that such an apparatus could work in reality. It had only been a theoretical example, an educated guess at what Nikola Tesla might have developed in secret, not something he ever actually expected to be constructed, at least not in his lifetime.

His eyes traced the electrical cables from transformers down to the floor, to a large brown slab which seemed to be made of ceramic material. It was as large as two refrigerators placed end to end. The cables were bolted to the slab at several points. Sawyer noticed that Stanislav, who had joined them for the demonstration, was holding his palms out towards the slab, as if warming his hands. Sawyer did the same. He could feel the heat radiating from the block, like the warmth of a fire. He noticed that there were several air conditioning vents above the slab, blasting frigid air down onto it—he assumed this was to help cool it and to maintain a relatively comfortable temperature in the room.

"That is a 'dummy load'," Alexandra explained. "It simulates the energy requirements of a small neighborhood or factory. The load is equivalent to one thousand electric light bulbs, one hundred watts each."

"I can do arithmetic," Sawyer muttered.

"Amazing, yes?" Voronezhsky said once again.

Sawyer glanced over at him, but did not respond. He found their cockiness irritating. He had seen such behavior before, and in the end, it was always without merit. Either the inventors had been perpetuating the hoax so long they had actually started believing it themselves, or they were feeding more power to their brainchild than it actually generated and were simply too dim-witted to understand that.

Sawyer turned his mind back to the prototype, trying to come to grips with its engineering construction and operation. If this device were for real, it meant the disk was spinning around by itself, generating an amazing amount of energy. The obvious question any physicist or engineer would ask was: _where was all this energy coming from?_

Alexandra had a knowing, self-satisfied gleam in her eye, as if she was waiting for him to ask just this question. He well knew what her answer would be: why, just as you speculated it in your Tesla paper, Dr. Sawyer. The energy comes from the 'aether.'

After a moment of thought, Sawyer asked, "And you say the Sufi is the only one who can get this prototype started?"

"That is correct," Alexandra said.

"How does he manage to do that?" Sawyer said, gesturing to the sphere. "The damn thing is huge."

Alexandra motioned to the bottom of the prototype. "There is a motor inside the base that we use to start the disk spinning. When the disk reaches a certain speed, we disengage it and it spins freely." She pointed back at a table to the left of the technicians. "Do you see those two joysticks?"

"Yes," Sawyer said.

"After we disengage the motor, the Sufi uses the joysticks to rock the sphere back and forth until the disk begins to resonate with the earth's magnetic field. Then he lets go and the disk continues to spin on its own, steadily, without stopping. And will do so, forever, until the mechanical parts wear out."

Sawyer nodded, though warily. He wondered if their bigger machine—the "actual" one—also had joysticks like this for the Sufi to use to start it. "If that's true, then why don't you just record the movements of the joysticks and play them back? That should start this contraption easily enough."

Alexandra looked offended, perhaps by the word "contraption." She said, "Do you not think we have tried such an approach?"

"I don't know..." Sawyer looked at the base of the prototype, his doubt rapidly rising, and smiled. "That motor wouldn't be running right now, would it?"

"I assure you, it is disengaged." Alexandra motioned to the technicians and said tersely in Russian: "Disconnect all the power."

One of the young men went over to a big electrical junction box and pulled out thick cables, one after another, until all the plugs lay on the concrete floor. Sawyer could see no more wires running to the base of the sphere.

The huge disk kept on spinning. They all watched for a couple of minutes, but there was no perceptible slowdown.

The technician smiled at Sawyer as he returned to his chair.

"Satisfied?" Alexandra asked, her hands on her hips. She stood in front of her family's creation like a model in an advertisement. He couldn't help notice her long legs and slim but well-proportioned figure—she was wearing skin-tight slacks, black high-heeled boots, and a black sleeveless turtleneck sweater that showed off her slender arms. If she would have worn a pair of thick-framed glasses, the blonde-haired Russian would have looked like the female physicist in some grade B science fiction movie, every nerd's wet dream.

It was hard for Sawyer to blame the young woman for her pride, however. The prototype was truly incredible. If it was indeed genuine...

His eyes focused on one of the transformers that were mounted at various points around the outside of the sphere. Yes, that could be the catch. A trick with the transformers would be more subtle, harder to expose. The transformers might actually be doing what Sawyer had asked about in the first place—rather than taking energy from the disk, they could be giving it a kick on each pass, keeping the disk in motion. The ceramic block that served as the "dummy load" could be heated from another power source. Which would easily explain the whole thing.

"He still doesn't believe," Stanislav muttered.

Ignoring this, Sawyer traced the thick cables that led from the transformers down to the ceramic block. He glanced over at the technicians and noticed a large ammeter laying on one of the worktables. A simple measurement of current could expose the hoax.

"Can I see that meter a minute?" Sawyer said.

The tech nearby looked at Alexandra, and she nodded her approval. He handed the heavy instrument to Sawyer. It was the kind that power companies use to measure current—it looked like a big black lobster claw. This type of electrical meter snapped closed around any electrical cable and would show not only the amount of electrical current flowing, but, more importantly in this case, the _direction_ of current. If this hard-to-believe prototype was really generating energy, the electrical current in the thick cable would be flowing _away_ from the device and towards the ceramic block.

Sawyer squeezed the meter's handle and opened the claw. Feeling the eyes of Voronezhsky, Stanislav, Alexandra and the two technicians watching him, he slipped the meter around the thick cable and snapped the jaws closed. He heard Voronezhsky asking his daughter something, as if he didn't understand what Sawyer was up to.

Looking down at the meter's display, Sawyer almost hoped the little arrow would be pointing from the ceramic block to the prototype.

It didn't, however. It pointed from the prototype to the ceramic block.

The prototype was generating energy on its own.

And from _nothing_ , it appeared.

Incredible.

Sawyer handed the meter back to the technician.

Voronezhsky chuckled. "Is it blowing up your mind, professor?"

The Russian hadn't gotten the English idiom quite right, but the feeling was on target. If this prototype could be easily duplicated—and apparently it had—it could replace hydroelectric power stations, nuclear and coal-based power plants, oil-based generators, windmills, solar cells...

Without _any_ pollution.

And no other damage to the environment, no depletion of oil, gas, or coal reserves...

Sawyer swallowed hard, trying to curb his growing excitement, but it was difficult. He studied the prototype again. He could imagine thousands of such machines, bigger and smaller...hell, forget hybrid automobiles—all vehicles could run one hundred percent on electricity. The need for oil would be virtually eliminated.

Sawyer shuddered at the impact such technology might have on the global economy, and on the balance of political power.

With a pleased look on his face, Voronezhsky said, "It seems at last you are convinced..."

Sawyer's rational side suddenly took over, telling him that he had hardly given their prototype a thorough testing. "Let's just say I'm less skeptical than I was a minute ago." He looked back at the sphere. "Exactly what kind of transformers are those? Can I see that ammeter again?"

# 14

An hour and a half later, Sawyer was back in his room in the guest wing, showering again. He had tirelessly inspected every aspect of the prototype, and became covered with dirt and grease in the process. He had traced out the path of every electrical cable; checked and re-checked the junction boxes; climbed up onto the top of the sphere, with the aid of a ladder, and inspected all the transformers...he even took apart the ammeter to make sure no one had played the sneaky trick of reversing its direction indicator.

In short, he had convinced himself beyond all reasonable doubt that the prototype was doing exactly what they claimed.

"My god," he muttered to himself, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, toweling himself dry. "Somebody finally did it."

Lost in thought, he wandered back into the bedroom and began to put on yet another fresh set of clothes that Elena, the servant, had provided. Despite how open-minded he had believed himself to be, despite his book and all his talks and constant preaching that there _were_ alternative sources of energy, if we could only find them...he was still having trouble coming to grips with this. The prototype was actually taking energy from the _aether_. That meant the aether really did exist, just like Nikola Tesla and other scientists had believed a century ago.

With his shirt only half buttoned, he plopped down on the edge of the four-poster bed, remembering the first time he turned one of his physics classes upside down with a live demonstration of "Faraday's Riddle," an odd little experiment performed by Michael Faraday in 1832. By that time, the British scientist had already established Faraday's Law, which says that whenever a piece of conducting metal—such as copper— is moved within a magnetic field, an electrical current is generated in the conductor.

In the simple experiment, Faraday glued a copper disk to the top of a cylindrical-shaped magnet and found that, when he rotated the whole thing about its axis, a current was generated in the copper disk...even though there was no relative motion between the disk and the magnet. This led Faraday to the rather bizarre conclusion that the magnetic field produced by a magnet is not attached to the magnet itself, but to the _aether_ in and around it.

Sawyer usually performed this experiment near the end of the semester, just when the students were beginning to think they knew what they were doing. The results clearly violated the laws of classical physics and, as Sawyer explained, also violated Einstein's work, as Faraday's Law is used in the mathematical derivation of the Theory of Relativity. For these reasons, Faradays' Riddle was conveniently skipped over in college physics textbooks. Sawyer would look from one stunned student face to another and say, "I performed this simple experiment for you today to make a point: the holes you find in one theory are the gateways that lead to new ones. This is why it's crucial for us, as scientists and seekers of a true understanding of our universe, to maintain open minds."

And that little experiment, so conveniently left out of physics textbooks, was also what had eventually led him to pen _Blind Spot_.

Now, sitting on the edge of the bed in his room at Voronezhsky's dacha, Sawyer felt a bit like his students must have felt whenever he did the demonstration. Only he was sure he was far more flabbergasted than any of them had been. What Sergei Voronezhsky and his family had managed to build wasn't just some laboratory experiment that showed that the aether—or something like it— _might_ exist. These people were actually drawing energy from it. _Useful_ energy.

He glanced at the clock and finished buttoning up his shirt. In a few minutes, Sawyer was supposed to meet the Sufi.

He had plenty of questions to ask.

# 15

On their way to the meeting, Voronezhsky gave Sawyer a long, detailed tour of the dacha's "health complex." The huge sprawling annex, built partially underground and attached to the main house through a glass-walled passageway, featured an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a six-lane bowling alley, a billiards hall, and an impressive exercise/workout facility. The oil oligarch took particular pride in showing Sawyer the Russian _banya_ , with a large mineral water pool surrounded by marble pillars that Voronezhsky boasted had been imported from Italy.

As this tour dragged on, Sawyer became increasingly annoyed. It seemed to him that Voronezhsky was stalling, not wanting him to meet the Sufi, or delaying the meeting for some reason. Either that, or the tour was a thinly disguised attempt to soothe any objections he might have to remaining at the dacha indefinitely. Voronezhsky kept adding, as he showed Sawyer each impressive part of the health complex, "This is available to all our staff, of course."

It began to annoy the hell out of Sawyer, once again, that the man thought he could just kidnap whoever he wanted and turn them into slaves. But as he followed Voronezhsky around the complex, he managed to keep his mouth shut. He wondered how many people were actually working at the dacha—he hadn't seen anyone inside the health complex except for a couple of babushkas who were responsible for managing the facilities. Still, he noticed that though all the exercise equipment was the highest quality, it looked worn—he had the feeling several hundred workers were living here, perhaps in underground housing.

As they walked past the mineral water pool and Voronezhsky rattled on about how this was a "real" _banya_ , where hot rocks were used to generate the steam, Sawyer's patience ran out.

"This is all very interesting," he told the Russian, "but I thought we were going to meet the Sufi."

Voronezhsky glanced at his watch. "Alexandra is busy at the moment—she prefers to be present at the meeting."

Sawyer sighed, then followed Voronezhsky out of the _banya_ and back through a different part of the annex. They passed through several doors that required a magnetic ID card, passcode, and retinal scan, and then they entered a huge room.

Sawyer was surprised to see a climbing wall. It was dotted with handholds and featured several difficult-looking outcroppings. The wall must have been three stories high. Halfway up it, dangling by what appeared to be only her fingertips, was a slender, bronze-skinned woman of about Alexandra's age.

Sawyer slowed a bit, watching in amazement as she managed to work her way along a horizontal portion of the wall and then flip around and continue straight up the next vertical portion, like a spider. Her lean, petite body was perfectly sculpted. As she glanced to one side, looking for the next handhold, he noticed that she had a striking, Tartar-like face, with high cheekbones and dark, slightly Asian eyes. Her thick, black hair was tied up in an unruly cluster of curls.

She did not look down as he and Voronezhsky passed by. Voronezhsky appeared to take no notice of her, either.

When they reached the secure door that opened to the glass passageway that led back to the dacha, Voronezhsky said, "So, how do you like our health complex, Dr. Sawyer? Are you impressed?"

Sawyer could stand it no longer—he stopped walking. "I'll tell you right now, I have no intention of staying here." He blurted the words almost before he knew they were coming out of his mouth. He had planned to keep his cool and play along until he found some way out of this, but he simply couldn't tolerate this assumption that he would stay there. Was the man crazy? Didn't he realize Sawyer had a life, students, friends...

Voronezhsky turned around and gazed at him with his droopy eyes, his hand on the door. "I am afraid you have no choice in this matter, my friend."

Sawyer felt himself losing control—for a few seconds he saw nothing but red. "How do you expect to get away with kidnapping me? People will know I'm missing. The FBI will get involved, they'll figure out your plane left Las Vegas about the time I disappeared..."

"Perhaps you are right. But they will never find this place."

Sawyer was appalled by his cockiness. "What makes you so certain? You're a businessman, you're extremely well known."

Voronezhsky smiled patiently. "Dr. Sawyer, let us not argue about this now, it is not interesting for me. Or for you, I suspect, as a physicist." He hesitated, then said, "You must meet the Sufi. Then we will talk business."

"There's no business to discuss," Sawyer muttered, but Voronezhsky had already turned away and slid his magnetic ID card through the reader.

# 16

"His name is Rashne Bashiri," Alexandra told Sawyer, as they entered the stairwell that led to the lower floor of the same wing in which Sawyer's room was located. Voronezhsky and Stanislav were right behind them. Through the window of a heavy steel door, Sawyer could see that the lower part of the wing was a stark contrast to the elegantly furnished second story. It looked like a hospital corridor, with white tiles and institutional green walls.

Alexandra paused in the stairwell and turned to Sawyer while Voronezhsky swiped his ID card through a reader next to the doorframe and peered straight into a camera lens. "I should warn you in advance that the Sufi is a bit difficult to communicate with."

"How so?"

"He speaks in riddles," Voronezhsky broke in, as his thick fingers entered a lengthy passcode into a keypad. "I do not know if he intentionally tries to confuse us, or if he is simply so different from ordinary people that we cannot understand him."

"He tries to confuse," Stanislav said darkly.

A small screen by the door said ACCESS APPROVED, in Russian, and the door buzzed. Voronezhsky pushed it open.

Alexandra said, "His granddaughter also adds to the difficulty—she's the only one who can understand his Tajik dialect, which is spoken only in their village, so we have to rely on her for translation. She's a bit..." Alexandra looked at her father for help.

"Uncooperative," Voronezhsky said, holding open the door for them.

"I see," Sawyer said. If the Sufi and his granddaughter had been kidnapped, like he had, it was no wonder that they were uncooperative.

The four of them entered the corridor. They passed a small office where a woman dressed in whites, a doctor or nurse, sat staring at a computer screen.

Alexandra led them to the next room.

Though Sawyer had already seen the Sufi on the video clip, he was shocked when he saw Rashne in person. The man in the images had seemed elderly, but this individual looked like death was knocking at his door. He lay in a hospital bed, his small head propped up on some pillows, an IV feeding one wrinkled, bronze-colored arm. Surrounding him were electronic monitors showing vital signs. His body was so decimated it could have belonged to a ten-year-old child.

"He's sleeping now," an annoyed female voice said.

Sawyer's attention was drawn to a young woman sitting on the far side of the bed, and he immediately recognized her. She was the one he had seen only a few minutes before in the health complex. There was a towel over her shoulders—she looked a bit damp, as if she'd just gotten out of the shower. Her dark eyes were focused on Alexandra, and glaring. "He must not be disturbed."

"This is Yasmin Bashiri," Alexandra muttered to Sawyer, with obvious distaste. "Rashne's granddaughter."

Sawyer tried not to stare—seeing her up close, she was even more striking. Her dark hair had been let down, the untamed tresses spilling down around her shoulders giving her a mysterious, gypsy-like appearance. Her skin was a smooth bronze shade, like her grandfather's, but glowing with vitality. Her eyes were the color of dark chocolate, and had a slight cast in them, or so it appeared. She was either looking past Sawyer or through him—he wasn't quite sure which. He detected the faint fragrance of some exotic oil which he couldn't identify.

Alexandra glanced at Sawyer and said to Yasmin, "This is a professor who will be helping us with the starter design."

Sawyer smiled awkwardly and said hello. He glanced down at Yasmin's clothes. She was wearing what he assumed to be customary Tajik attire—a cream colored peasant blouse and brick-red shalvari, wide-legged trousers that gave her the appearance of a genie. She was barefoot.

Alexandra must have noticed Sawyer's enchantment because she shot him an annoyed look. To Yasmin, she said, "Dr. Sawyer must speak to your grandfather now."

Yasmin only glowered at her.

"He is from America," Alexandra added, as if this might make Yasmin more receptive.

The young lady raised one dark eyebrow, but regarded Sawyer with cool indifference. "My grandfather is napping," she said. She had directed this at Sawyer and had spoken in a more civil tone, though there was something slightly haughty about it. He noticed she had a cultivated British accent. _My grahnd-fath-ah is nahp-ping._

"He has napped enough today," Alexandra said irritably. She motioned to the old man, and said offhandedly, "He claims he never actually sleeps, he only meditates at different levels." Speaking a little louder, she said in Russian, "Time to wake up, Rashne."

Yasmin looked like she could have slapped her.

The tension between the two young women made Sawyer uncomfortable—it was obvious they detested each other. He said, "Maybe we should come back another—"

An alarm on one of the monitors started beeping.

Sawyer started, then scanned the instruments—it was a heart monitor.

The words CARDIAC ARREST flashed on the screen in synch with the frantic alarm sound.

Sawyer watched in horror as the display showed the Sufi's heartbeat skyrocket—120, 165, 225...

He turned from Alexandra to Stanislav to Voronezhsky, but they were all just standing there, staring dully at the Sufi.

"Call a doctor, for God's sake!"

"I am a doctor," Yasmin muttered.

Sawyer stared at her for a second, then looked around the room. Nobody moved. The three Russians just stood there watching the old man, who was so still he might have been dead.

Sawyer said, "My god, are you just going to let him..." His voice dropped off. Yasmin was peering at her grandfather with an ironic expression that Sawyer couldn't fathom.

The alarm kept beeping, the heart rate still increasing: 335, 380, 420...

Someone else trotted in the door, and Sawyer turned around—the nurse, thank god. But she only glanced at the monitors from a distance, then mumbled something to herself in Russian and briskly walked out.

The blaring of the alarm stopped. The warning CARDIAC ARREST was still flashing on and off in silence. The numbers on the monitor had settled.

465 beats per minute,

Was a heartbeat that high even possible?

Then Sawyer noticed that a trace of a smile had appeared on the Sufi's ancient, weathered face. His eyes were partly open now, gazing at Yasmin.

Alexandra turned to her and snapped, "Your grandfather's theatrics are testing our patience."

Yasmin ignored her, but there was a hint of a smile on her face, too.

Alexandra abruptly turned to Sawyer and shoved a notebook and pencil at him. "I think it is best that you interview Rashne by yourself. I have no tolerance for this foolishness."

Stanislav glanced at his father, looking uncertain. Voronezhsky said, "Yasmin will translate for you, professor." He looked at the young Tajik. "Yes?"

Yasmin did not respond—she was watching the heart monitor now. Sawyer noticed that the numbers had begun to fall—395, 320, 270...

Alexandra turned and walked briskly out of the room. She paused at the door and said, "Please limit your questions to those regarding the prototype, Dr. Sawyer."

Sawyer nodded.

Stanislav said in Russian, "Papa, maybe—"

Voronezhsky led his son away.

Sawyer didn't see what difference it made whether they left him alone or not—there were two cameras in plain sight on the ceiling, recording everything, he was certain. He assumed the three Russians were simply moving to another room to watch the proceedings remotely.

Rashne's brown eyes were open now, scrutinizing Sawyer. Both orbs were infested with blue-grey cataracts—Sawyer didn't think the old man could actually see very much through them.

Yasmin said something unintelligible to the old man in what Sawyer assumed was Tajik. The Sufi nodded back. She pushed a button and raised him up a little higher, so his emaciated body was nearly in a sitting position.

Unable to control his curiosity, Sawyer said, "What was that alarm about?"

Yasmin glanced at her grandfather and gave him a conspiratorial smile. "That's his way putting of a bee under their bonnets. When he meditates, he can make his heart beat very slowly, only a few times a minute. Or he can make it flutter, up around four or five hundred beats per minute. Like he did just now."

The Sufi gave a mischievous grin, revealing several missing teeth, clearly understanding the gist of what Yasmin was telling Sawyer.

"That's amazing," Sawyer said. He now remembered reading that some people, usually those who spent many years practicing meditation, were able to control what were normally autonomous physiological functions.

The Sufi's grin faded as he gazed steadily at Sawyer. Despite the cataracts, the Rashne's stare seemed to penetrate Sawyer to the very core.

All at once, Sawyer's uneasiness left him—it was as if the choppy sea of his emotions had suddenly become calm. Sawyer's eyes seemed involuntarily pulled into the old man's—he could not seem to break his gaze away...yet he did not wish it. For this brief moment, time seemed to stand still. Sawyer felt something tender in the old man's gaze, an innocent, childlike compassion that he had not seen in anyone in a long time.

The spell was broken as quickly as it came. The Sufi turned to his granddaughter and said something in Tajik, his voice unexpectedly strong.

Yasmin looked at Sawyer as if surprised. "He says your music is mostly harmonious."

Sawyer frowned. "My music...?"

"Your soul's music."

"I see." Sawyer wasn't sure whether he should be flattered or not—the "mostly" part bothered him.

The old man gazed at him again, then turned to his daughter and said something else. She glanced at Sawyer, then looked as if she wasn't certain if she should pass it along.

"What did he say?" Sawyer asked.

"He said that he would, if it fancies you, help you make your music more harmonious."

Sawyer looked from Yasmin to the old man, unsure of what this meant.

Yasmin said, "You should be honored. I don't think he's told anyone that since we came here."

Taking a risk, Sawyer asked in a lowered voice, "And when was that?"

She looked surprised that he didn't know. After glancing up at the cameras, she said, "Seven years ago."

"Seven _years_ ago?"

Yasmin merely nodded. Sawyer was now more certain that they had been kidnapped—he remembered that on the jet, Alexandra had told him the video clip he had seen was made seven years ago.

Yasmin was studying Sawyer closely, her soft, dark eyes scanning the features of his face. Sawyer felt the same penetrating feeling as from her grandfather, though less intensely. The sensation of being probed was so vivid he had to look away, back at the Sufi. He became aware of the cameras again and decided there had been enough small talk and that he'd better do as he was expected. He pulled up a chair and opened the notebook Alexandra had given him—it looked brand new, there wasn't a mark in it.

Sawyer felt a little ill at ease, not sure exactly what to say to the Sufi. "I'd like to know how your grandfather gets the prototype started," he said awkwardly.

Yasmin raised an eyebrow. "We've been over that a hundred times."

"Well," Sawyer said, trying not to look up at the cameras, "would you mind explaining it one more time? I'd like to hear it for myself."

Yasmin said something to Rashne in Tajik—Sawyer noticed she kept addressing him as _Babajoon_ —he assumed this must mean "grandfather."

Rashne sighed. Yasmin said, "What do you wish to know about it, exactly? My grandfather has grown weary of repeating himself."

Sawyer wondered how she had managed to learn to speak such cultured-sounding English—if she was a doctor, maybe she had studied in the U.K. "This 'music' your grandfather was just talking about—does it have anything to do with him starting the prototype?"

"Muthic," Rashne said, recognizing the word. He spoke with a thick accent, lisping through his missing teeth.

Sawyer glanced at Yasmin. "Does he hear this music, or feel it, or what?"

Yasmin shrugged. "Both, or neither. Some people call it a sixth sense...but it's ever so much more. It's a different way of processing reality—everyone processes through their own senses and perception, and his reality is quite different from that of most people."

"I see," Sawyer said, again impressed with her command of English. He noticed that beside her, on Rashne's nightstand, were a stack of books. _Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms_ ; _Jung's Analysis of Dreams, Vol. III; The I-Ching Handbook._ He had also noticed another open door, beyond her, which led to a bedroom, which he assumed was hers—save the four poster bed, which was partially visible, it looked like a small library.

Yasmin noticed him looking but didn't say anything.

"I noticed you have a British accent," Sawyer could not resist telling her.

"Yes, and what of it? We study _British_ English in Tajikistan."

"Oh," Sawyer muttered.

"The British invented the language, you know."

Sawyer interpreted this as a jab at his American grammar and pronunciation. "Yes, I think I read that somewhere."

Yasmin did not smile. Her expression remained hard and businesslike.

"Can you ask your grandfather to explain what this 'music' has to do with getting the prototype started?"

"I don't need to ask him. I know this by rote, I've translated it so many times." She motioned to the notebook. "If you insist that I repeat it, please write it down, so I don't have to do it again."

Sawyer touched the pen to the paper. "Go ahead."

"First, he puts himself into a deep, meditative state."

Sawyer jotted this at the top of the page. "And then?"

"He listens to the disk's music."

Sawyer wrote _Listens to_ but then stopped. "Did you say he listens to the _disk's_ music?"

"Yes," Yasmin said, as if that was obvious.

"You're telling me the disk has music, too?"

"Of course. Everything projects its own music. Everything in the universe is _made_ of music." She said this as if it was obvious.

Sawyer felt a pang of excitement, wondering if this "music" might correspond to the aether, but checked himself. He couldn't help wondering if the two Tajiks could be a couple of clever con artists. He recalled one of the most famous scientific hoaxes of all time, the story of the Johann Bessler, a German who lived in the 18th century and claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine. To publicly "demonstrate" the device, the large, mysterious mechanism was put inside a room, set into motion, and the doors sealed. After a forty-day period, the doors were reopened and—lo and behold!—the odd contraption was still running. The machine received such widespread acclaim that Peter the Great became interested in buying it. The Russian Czar's interest waned, however, after one of Bessler's housemaids claimed that she had been paid two pennies per hour to secretly keep the machine going.

But then Sawyer reminded himself that he'd tested the Voronezhsky's machine himself. And he did not sense Yasmin trying to conceal anything—she simply seemed bored with having to repeat the explanation, and resentful for the strain put on her grandfather.

"Is something wrong?" Yasmin asked, as if she sensed what he had been thinking.

"No," Sawyer said. He motioned to Rashne. "You said your grandfather listens to the disk's music. Then what does he do?"

"He lets his own music, his inner music, resonate with it. He starts rocking back and forth to the combined rhythms. And starts moving the joysticks in a way that he feels resonates with the whole." The Sufi nodded a few times and smiled, his eyes sparkling. Sawyer could tell Rashne didn't understood much of what she was saying, but Yasmin made enough hand gestures for him to follow the conversation.

"And then...?" Sawyer said.

"Then he feels the earth's music, and he adds that into the mix. He says it's like conducting an orchestra."

"The _earth's_ music?"

Yasmin nodded. "The music of Mother Earth."

Sawyer wrote this down—and also: _earth's magnetic field?_

"And then?"

"And then?" Yasmin echoed, with a shrug. "When he feels the machine resonating, he lets go of the joysticks and the disk keeps spinning."

"Resonating...that's the exact word he uses?"

"Yes. That's exact translation from our dialect."

Sawyer wrote this down, some new ideas entering his head. "And...?"

"And that's it." She glanced at Rashne, who was smiling at her, then added, "He says the concert is beautiful, that the music is inspiring."

Rashne nodded vigorously, as if he understood these few words.

Sawyer tapped the pencil against his lips a few times, thinking. The explanation he had just received was hardly of much help. Remembering the cameras focused on them, he decided to shift to the practical. "As I'm sure you know, the movements your grandfather makes with the joysticks to start the machine have been recorded with a computer and played back exactly, but the machine won't start. How does he explain that?"

Yasmin repeated this in Tajik for her grandfather.

The Sufi giggled. He replied in several long, sing-song sentences.

"He says of course the machine won't start that way," Yasmin translated. "The music is always different, it changes with the movement of the wind, the moon, the stars...he says the disk and Mother Earth are as alive as you and I are. He says the disk even has moods."

"The disk has _moods_?" Sawyer said.

Rashne nodded as if he knew the English word.

Sawyer simply wrote _moods?_ on his pad. This was too much.

"Which means," Yasmin said, "that the starting movements he makes with the joysticks are different each time, even with the same machine."

Sawyer stared at his notebook for a moment, lost in thought. He again wondered if the whole thing could be a hoax. It was all so esoteric.

He glanced up at the cameras. "You've told Alexandra all this, of course."

"Yes, many times."

"And what does she think?"

Yasmin shrugged. "I don't know. And frankly, I don't care."

Sawyer forced himself to chuckle. "You actually expect me to believe that the disk has moods?" This was only for the benefit of anyone watching—his survival instincts were telling him to play the skeptic.

"Believe what you want," Yasmin said. But her tone was not cold, just matter-of-fact.

Rashne started coughing.

Yasmin quickly leaned over and stroked his thinning white hair. " _Babajoon_..." she said, adding some other soothing words. The coughing became worse, and he spit up some phlegm—Yasmin gave him a paper towel to wipe his mouth.

Now she glared at Sawyer, her dark eyes smoldering with anger. "My grandfather must _rest_. Don't you scientists have any feelings?"

Sawyer abruptly rose, stung by her words. He wanted to explain, but that was obviously out of the question, not with the cameras trained on them.

He muttered a thank you and awkwardly got up and headed towards the door.

He was intercepted by a guard as soon as he emerged into the hallway.

# 17

"I do not have years!" Voronezhsky shouted, slamming his fist onto his desk.

Sawyer became very still, alarmed by the outburst. The only other sounds in the study were the slow ticking of the grandfather clock and the spinning of the coin in the display case.

Sawyer had been escorted to Voronezhsky's study immediately after the interview with the Sufi. Following the usual jovial small talk, the oil oligarch had asked how long he thought it might take to "fine-tune" the starter for the machine. Sawyer had answered that based on what he knew now, it might take years to develop a starter. Whatever the Sufi was doing, Sawyer had explained, it was much more than simply moving the sphere and disk around with the joysticks.

The Russian hadn't listened to anything Sawyer said.

Now, after his outburst, Voronezhsky composed himself, running a shaking hand through his light brown hair. He spoke slowly and forcefully. "Dr. Sawyer, this project has taken us three times longer than we originally thought, and cost ten times the original budget. I have...there are people who...the machine must be _finished_ , and quickly. This is why we brought you here to work with us."

Sawyer mustered up his nerve. "And I've already told you, I have no intention of working with you."

Voronezhsky's hooded eyes gazed at Sawyer a long moment. "I'm afraid you really have no choice in the matter, my friend."

So the man has finally come out and said it, Sawyer thought. Trying to keep his voice from wavering, he said, "I think killing me would accomplish nothing."

"I totally agree with you, professor. It would be a foolish waste of a brilliant mind."

Sawyer was a bit taken aback by this response. "Then why are you threatening me?"

Voronezhsky gave a weary sigh. "You misjudge me because of lies you read in Western newspapers. I threaten you with nothing except to grant your request and send you home, which would be little more than your death sentence. You would not survive twenty-four hours without my protection. The people who are hunting you will kill you on sight. And there is nowhere to hide from them, my friend. Except here, with me."

He's bluffing, Sawyer thought. But then he remembered the gun battle back in the limousine. The _dobrazhelateli_ , or well-wishers, Stanislav had called them.

"And who do you think wants to kill me?"

Voronezhsky studied Sawyer's face. "You truly do not know, professor?"

"No, I don't." Sawyer motioned to him. "If you're talking about the people who chased us in the van back in Las Vegas, I think they were after you, not me. Your daughter already tried to pull that one."

"Come, Doctor. Surely you are not so naïve..."

"Maybe I am. I have no idea what you're talking about."

Voronezhsky's hooded eyes gazed at Sawyer a long few seconds. He picked up a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his lips, and shook one out for Sawyer.

"No thanks."

The Russian lit up himself and gazed at Sawyer curiously through the smoke as he exhaled. "I noticed that in your book, you failed to address one key issue that is blocking free energy research..."

"What issue is that?" Sawyer said, but he thought he knew what was coming.

Voronezhsky gave a little shrug. "Certain elitist groups of people who will, let us say...take the law into their own hands..."

Sawyer tried to show no reaction to this. There were a plethora of conspiracy theories about how politicians and oil companies were interfering with the development of free energy research. Many of these theories were farfetched, to say the least. Sawyer personally thought that most were little more than the sour grapes fantasies of crackpot inventors—the Crazies—whose patents had been rejected. However, there was one rumor that had persisted over the years, one that had not changed much in terms of its basic premise. It said there was a secret society composed of the most powerful people in the world, people who controlled the lion's share of the worldwide oil and gas reserves. According to the rumor, the group was behind the murders of several brilliant scientists over the years, men who were on the brink of developing breakthrough ideas that actually worked. And this group was—supposedly—also responsible for bribing and blackmailing U.S. and European patent examiners to ensure that such technology never saw the light of day.

Sawyer had purposefully avoided this issue when he had written _Blind Spot_ , afraid that it would cause him to lose most, or all, of his credibility. He was also afraid of pissing off the wrong people, though he wasn't sure how much of this fear was sheer paranoia on his part. In any case, he liked to believe that the real reason no free energy machine had ever been perfected was simply because no one had made the technological breakthroughs required to do so. In his book, he had written that the challenge was made doubly difficult by institutional, in-the-box thinking, and that such thinking was perhaps unconsciously driven by a desire for those in positions of power to continue to maintain their positions of power...

The Russian was carefully watching the professor's facial expression. "Surely you do not believe the fire that prevented your Tesla paper from being published was a mere accident."

Sawyer felt like he'd just been slugged in the stomach. "What did you say?"

Voronezhsky gave a weary-sounding sigh and looked off into the distance. "It does not matter. Whether you believe or not, I feel it is my moral obligation to protect you from these people. They will stop at nothing to destroy my machine, and everything connected with it." He looked back at Sawyer. "And that includes you, my friend."

Sawyer returned the Russian's gaze, thrown off balance by what he had just been told. "I prefer to take my chances."

"You would be wise to rethink this decision." Voronezhsky's gray eyes peered steadily at him. "If you think you are a brave man, I am afraid it is not only your own safety which you must consider."

Sawyer frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"You have a professor friend, a Dr. Jack Waterman..."

Sawyer swallowed. "Yes, what about him?"

"I am sorry to inform you—he is in grave danger."

Sawyer's heart began beating faster. "And why is that?"

"He knows about your Tesla paper, yes?"

Sawyer hesitated. "Yes, he knew about it. Why?"

"He has a copy of the document?"

Sawyer's right hand had clenched into a fist. If this son-of-a-bitch did something to Jack... "I don't know if he has a copy of that paper or not. Why are you asking, dammit?"

"Because, although your friend is not aware of it, we are protecting him. This secret group knows Professor Waterman is your close friend, and they assume he may know enough about your work to be...well, shall we say, problematic." Voronezhsky paused, taking a long drag on his cigarette. "Dr. Sawyer, it pains me to make this decision, but if you will not cooperate with us, I am afraid I will have to remove our protection."

The man is bluffing, Sawyer again tried to tell himself. But Voronezhsky was shrewd—he knew the right emotional buttons to push. Since Sawyer was single, with no children, there was no immediate family to threaten, the man had gone after the next best thing—Sawyer's closest friend.

Sawyer glared at the Russian, not knowing what to say. He felt utterly helpless, sick that Jack might have been dragged into this.

Voronezhsky spread his arms wide. "Put yourself in my place, Dr. Sawyer. I am a businessman. I make decisions on a financial basis. I cannot afford to protect both you and your friend from this group unless I receive a return on my investment." He took a final drag on his cigarette, pulling the fire down to the butt, and ground it out in the ash tray. He looked evenly at Sawyer. "I have enemies, professor, and I cannot hold them at bay much longer. The starter must be finished quickly so that our machine can be unveiled to the world. After this happens, no one can stop us. This is why we will not deviate from our current schedule, we _cannot_ deviate from it. Do you understand?"

Without waiting for an answer, the oligarch rose from behind his desk and pushed the button to call the guard. "I ask you to return to your room now and think everything over. I am sure you will reach the right decision."

# 18

"We are delighted you have joined our team!" Alexandra gushed, when she found out the news.

Now she and Sawyer were sitting at an antique writing table in her father's study, side by side, reviewing Sawyer's notes from his talk with the Sufi. She was wearing yet another provocative outfit—faded, curve-hugging blue jeans, and a black off-the-shoulder sweater—and was sitting quite close to him. There was no bra under the sweater, Sawyer could not help noticing.

"I'd like to ask you a couple of basic questions about the prototype's design."

"Of course, Stephen," she said, with a smile.

Sawyer could have slapped the arrogant bitch. And all this warm-and-fuzzy "joining the team" crap infuriated him. As if he had a real choice in the matter. He prayed that he could control his temper enough to maintain a cooperative façade.

Looking down at his notebook, he said, "I just wondered if the disk could spin in one direction, or can it spin in either direction. Does it make a difference?"

For an instant, she looked like he'd just asked her if she was a virgin.

"It makes no difference," she said quickly.

"That wouldn't have anything to do with that panel I saw that was labeled 'Reverse Mode' would it?"

She gave him a polite smile. "Next question?"

Sawyer studied her for a few seconds—he'd hit on something important, but she was trying to hide it... He had no idea why. The panel he was talking about was locked down—he hadn't been able to see whatever display or controls were underneath.

Sawyer referred back to his notes. "I also could not help noticing—obviously—that the disk was turned on its side, not like the coin in the bowl. The disk was rotating with its axis parallel to the floo—"

"That is correct," she said, cutting him off. "The prototype runs most efficiently that way."

"I see," Sawyer said. She peered back at him waiting for the next question, with that smile fixed on her face. Which made all this "part of the team" crap even more ludicrous—she wasn't telling him a damn thing about their technology. Another odd detail he'd noticed when inspecting the prototype was that it appeared to be wired so that they could, if they chose, connect the output from the prototype to the incoming line from the utility company. That didn't make any sense to him, unless they were actually selling power to the utility company...but as he looked at Alexandra, he knew there was no point in asking her about it, she would just dodge the question.

He looked down at his notes, hoping he could find a clever way to throw her and her whole family off—send them on some wild goose chase that they thought would give them the solution to their starter problem, but which would also buy himself some time to try and get out of this mess. If he could find a way to talk to Yasmin alone, and away from any cameras...

"How fast does the disk rotate when it's in equilibrium?" he suddenly asked, his temper flaring again.

Alexandra's fixed smile faded a bit. "As I told you in the lab, its outer edge spins at over three hundred kilometers per—"

"I'm not talking about speed," Sawyer snapped. "I'm talking about frequency. Revolutions per second."

Alexandra hesitated. "All these questions are irrelevant to solving the starter problem. And I do not appreciate your tone."

Making an attempt to keep the edge out of his voice, Sawyer said, "How do you know what's relevant and what's not relevant? If you know so damn much, then why do you need me to help you solve this—"

"Seven point eight three revolutions per second," she blurted.

Sawyer blinked. "What...that's the disk's spin frequency?"

"Yes."

He jotted it down— _7.83 hertz._ "Always? All the time, under all conditions?"

She nodded.

"No matter how small or large the disk?"

"No matter how small or large the disk."

Sawyer took this in for a moment, then motioned across the study at the display case, to the coin spinning around inside the bowl. "Even that little coin?"

"The same. Seven point eight three hertz."

Sawyer stared at her a moment, looked back down at the number—7.83 hertz. There was something familiar about that number. It was like _pi_ and other mathematical constants and rang a bell somewhere in the back of his mind...

Then it hit him.

"The Schumann frequency," he said, in a whisper.

Alexandra gave a reluctant nod.

Things suddenly made more sense. The Schumann frequency, or earth's natural resonance or rhythm, was first discovered by Nikola Tesla in his experiments with lightning. Tesla noticed that there was an electrical "echo" after every lightning strike that occurred about 8 times per second and faded away. Almost fifty years later, the German physicist W. O. Schumann predicted this theoretically and then went on to prove it experimentally. Hence its name, the Schumann frequency. The echo, which Schumann measured exactly at 7.83 hertz, is caused by the electromagnetic waves from the lightning bolt skipping between the upper atmosphere and the earth's surface and traveling all the way back around the planet to the original point of the strike. It can be calculated using common sense simply by dividing the earth's circumference—23,800 miles, into the speed of light—186,000 miles per second. The time it takes light to make one circuit around the earth. In short, one could say that the Schumann frequency is the earth's natural resonant frequency.

Sawyer looked back at the display case. The coin, as well as the disk in their prototype and in any other machines they had built, were driven by this resonant effect. In the paper that had never actually been published, Sawyer had proposed that Nikola Tesla might have built a free energy device with a disk that was a kind of "pulsating super magnet" which would spin around indefinitely by resonating with the Earth's magnetic field. This was based on extensive research of Tesla's publicly-available notebooks, and a lot of guesswork.

The new information explained a lot. Sawyer looked back down at his notebook, tapping his pencil on a little sketch he'd made of the prototype. Apparently, the Sufi was capable of turning the disk into such a super magnet, somehow, through his movements...

"Did that make things clearer?" Alexandra said, almost petulantly.

"Yes, somewhat." He tried to minimize the importance of what he had just learned.

"You must keep this absolutely to yourself, as only our top engineering staff has this information."

"Of course." Now he knew he would never leave the dacha alive.

He flipped back to the notes from the interview, trying to shift his thoughts back to the starter problem. "I know you've recorded the motions Rashne makes with the joysticks to start the prototype..." he paused and Alexandra nodded. "...but what about other parameters in the setup? For example, the temperature of the disk? That could make a difference if it's not the same when you play back the Sufi's movements."

"This is a good point, Stephen. But we have already addressed it. At the beginning of each session, when Rashne starts the prototype, we record everything imaginable—disk temperature, vacuum inside the sphere, and so on—and make sure all of these parameters are exactly the same when we play the recording. It does not matter—the machine fails to start."

Sawyer had guessed this much, but he wanted to make sure. Whatever the Sufi was doing to get their machines started, Sawyer now had a feeling he was doing it with his mind, not his hands. Sawyer looked back down at his notes, but then had a flash of insight. He considered it for only a couple of seconds before he acted on it.

"And time of day?" he said.

Alexandra looked confused. "Time of day?"

"Yes, _time of day_ ," Sawyer said, with annoyance again in his voice, a tone he often used with bumbling graduate students. "Do you play back the Sufi's starter program at the exact same time of day as when you recorded it?"

Alexandra looked miffed. "Well, no..."

"Why not?"

"... I fail to see why that would make a difference."

Sawyer jumped on the opportunity for payback. "Shame on you, Alexandra. You're thinking in terms of _classical physics_."

She maintained her composure, but splotches of red appeared on her cheeks. "I am afraid I do not follow."

"If the time of day is not the same, your prototype will not be located at the same point in the earth's magnetic field..." Sawyer paused, watching the red splotches grow. "You are familiar with Faraday's Riddle, of course..."

Her blue eyes slowly showed understanding. "Of course!" She slapped her broad forehead. "The earth is a spherical magnet. Which means—"

"The field remains stationary. It doesn't rotate with the earth, despite what most people believe."

Alexandra could hardly contain her excitement. "And because the Earth's magnetic field is not perfectly uniform or symmetric, its strength will vary between any two points along the longitudinal lines..."

She looked at Sawyer in awe for a moment, then began searching through files on her computer.

Sawyer said, "Did you also record time of day when you recorded the movements?"

"I believe so...I hope so..." She was already madly clicking keys on her notebook computer. "There are only two programs Rashne made after the latest prototype modifications...just a moment, I must pull the data off the lab server..."

Sawyer nodded, hoping that the trick he was about to pull would work. It was only a hunch, but he thought it had potential.

"Yes!" she said. "We have time of day recorded along with all the other parameters, very precisely, on both programs—there's a tick every one hundred microseconds."

"And how accurate is your system clock?"

She peered over the screen at Sawyer, looking insulted. " _Very_ accurate. It is synchronized every hour on the hour with an atomic clock signal broadcast from Moscow State." She paused, shaking her head. "I am very lucky. I never thought it would matter, but since the atomic clock signal was available, I used it."

"You're not lucky, you're thorough."

"Yes," she agreed, too enthralled with the new information to notice the ego stroke. "Now I have to find out..." she typed a little more "...the exact time of day we recorded..." Sawyer could see her scrolling through some very long files full of numbers and glancing at her watch. "In this program, the Sufi started the joystick movements at... exactly 17:12, plus 218.3 milliseconds."

That was 5:12 p.m., Sawyer thought, converting the time to American format. He glanced at his own watch—it was 3:40 p.m. About an hour and a half away. "And what about the season? Don't forget to account for Daylight Savings Time."

"I have not forgotten, Stephen. Our system clock keeps track of that, too."

She glanced at her watch again, a thin disk of gold, and said breathlessly, "We might have time to try it this afternoon..."

# 19

A few minutes later, deeply underground, a short, blaring alarm echoed ominously through the cavernous Bay #3.

A giant display flashed BRAKING SEQUENCE BEGINS IN 4 MINUTES, and a computerized voice announced this warning.

Alexandra gazed out through the window of the control room, past the curve of the massive sphere's three-foot-thick glass, watching dozens of technicians scurry across the floor fifteen stories below. The workers' movements appeared jerky when viewed in the eerie violet glow of the machine, through the wisps of vapor from its nitrogen cooling system. From this vantage point, in their orange SVoil jumpsuits, they looked like fire ants scrambling around a gigantic globule of food that had just miraculously fallen from the sky.

She wished she could have shown Sawyer this gargantuan piece of engineering, instead of the little prototype. The professor would surely be astounded. But it had been against her father's better judgment, and she agreed with him.

Alexandra turned and glanced at Mikhail Petrov, her computer master, who occupied his own messy cubbyhole in the far corner of the control room. "Are we ready yet?"

"Almost there," he said, his spider-like fingers flying across the keys. At 26, the rail-thin Byelorussian engineer was the only member of the senior technical staff who was younger than she was. Nicknamed "Axis," he was the sharpest computer person Alexandra had ever known—she had discovered him in the bowels of the physics department at Moscow State, maintaining their networks for pocket change, and had recommended that her father hire him. His wild brown hair seemed permanently wind-blown, and with his black rectangular wrap-around glasses, he looked like he was traveling at warp velocity even while sitting still. His behavior matched his looks—every morning he brought in a ten-pack of Coca-Cola and chugged the bottles at regular intervals for the caffeine boost. She noticed there were seven empties on the floor beside his desk right now, three unopened bottles to go.

"Alexandra Sergeevna," her chief engineer interrupted, "I have completed the stress calculations. If we stop Chudo in eighteen minutes or less, it will put too much strain on her support structure."

Most of the technical staff referred to the gigantic piece of equipment as "Chudo"—pronounced _**Choo** -da_ in Russian. After they had perfected the prototype, and begun the design of this twenty times larger version, her father had dubbed it the _Vosmoye Chudo Sveta_ , or Eighth Wonder of the World. When operating at peak efficiency, the monstrous apparatus was capable of generating eight hundred gigawatts of energy. Enough energy to power a third of Russia...or to be used for other less constructive purposes. Eventually, the staff simply referred to the machine as Chudo or "wonder," also an affectionate Russian term for children and loved ones.

"How close will we come to the structural limits?" Alexandra asked the chief engineer.

"Ninety percent of maximum."

"BRAKING SEQUENCE BEGINS IN THREE MINUTES!" the computer-generated voice boomed over the speakers.

Alexandra nervously chewed her lip, wondering if it was taking too big a risk to try and test the huge machine on such short notice. Normally it took about two hours to bring Chudo's two-hundred ton spinning disk to a stop—it was the only case in which the liquid nitrogen cooled bearings worked against them. She and the engineers had only developed a primitive braking system, similar to automotive disc brakes, to slow the spinning disk down—most of their exhaustive R&D had been to make the disk spin more freely, with less friction, rather than hinder its movement. Stopping the disk's rotation was something that they only rarely intended to do, for maintenance purposes.

One option was to wait until tomorrow, in which they could use the other starter program Sufi had recorded, at 10:39 a.m. In fact, she preferred to wait, because this second program would start the disk spinning in the opposite direction from that used in Free Energy Mode. She had lied to Sawyer. Operating the machine in what they called Reverse Mode changed its function completely, in a way she was sure the professor could never imagine.

In any case, her father had wanted to try Sawyer's idea as soon as possible. If it worked, they would have to stop the disk again tonight and put the machine into Reverse Mode at 10:39 a.m. tomorrow.

She glanced over at the chief engineer—he was watching her warily. Not only was he worried about stopping the machine so quickly, neither he nor other technical people, with the exception of Axis, knew why she and her father wanted to start the machine at an exact time, 5:12 p.m.

"Are you certain this is prudent, Alexandra Sergeevna?" he said.

"What safety margin did you use in the structural design?" she pointedly asked him. It was a rhetorical question.

"One hundred percent," he muttered.

"Then in reality, we will not even reach fifty percent of the actual stress limits. Correct?"

"Yes, that is correct."

"Which means you have nothing to worry about."

"Yes...but that is in theory. In actual practice—"

"If you have any faith in your own skills," she spat, "simply do as you're told!"

The man looked slighted. Due to the pressure she was under, her words had come out sharper than she had intended. But he only nodded humbly and took his place back at his console.

This was still a bit awkward for Alexandra—the chief engineer had been in her father's employ since before she was born, and had literally bounced her on his knee when she was a toddler. It had taken her a long time to gain his respect, as well as that of many of the other engineers and technicians on the staff. But she was the only physicist among them, and certainly the only one among them with a deep understanding of quantum mechanics, electromagnetic radiation, and Nikola Tesla's work. More importantly, she was the only person, save her father, who knew the subtle secrets of the device's operation. Even the chief engineer didn't fully understand how Chudo managed to extract staggering amounts of energy from thin air.

Alexandra glanced over at the other eight engineers who were sitting behind the row of computer screens, their faces appearing pale in the eerie violet glow from the machine. Most of them had been nervously watching her, but when they saw her looking in their direction, they peered back at their displays to scan 3D images of the disk, sphere, and dozens of graphs of measured parameters, everything from disk acceleration to sphere surface temperatures.

She wished she had as much faith in herself, and in her team, as her father had—sometimes she just had to fake it. This was one of them.

She stepped back to the window and again peered down at the technicians on the floor far below—she was relieved to see that most of them were grouped around the three service elevators at base level of the sphere, waiting their turn to ride up to safety. If something were to go wrong, and the massive, whirling six-hundred-ton disk broke loose from its bearings and it crashed through the globe, God only knew what would happen. They had built the control room above the bulk of the machine with this disaster in mind, hoping that in such a case, both it and the people inside it would survive, but Alexandra had her doubts about this. In such an event, she was certain that they would all end up pulverized to mush somewhere inside a fifteen-story-deep crater of rubble.

"BRAKING SEQUENCE BEGINS IN TWO MINUTES," the computerized voice boomed.

She turned back to Axis. "How is the playback sequence coming?"

"Locked into the system clock. Everything is GO on my end."

# 20

Sawyer followed the guard down the stairs to the first floor of the guest wing, his mind racing ahead, hoping his hunch was right. And in the slim chance that it was, that he could do what was necessary without Alexandra or anyone else catching on.

Her desire for secrecy had made things relatively easy. Though she didn't come out and say it, she did not want Sawyer to see the large machine and had readily agreed to his request to ask Rashne more questions while she performed the test. She told the guard to escort him down to the Sufi's room whenever Sawyer requested it.

The guard swiped his ID card through the reader at the entrance of the ground floor of the guest wing and quickly entered a passcode. While he peered into the camera for the retinal scan, Sawyer took the opportunity to glimpse the system time on the screen below it—4:52—and glance at his watch. It was running two minutes fast.

A second later the display showed ACCESS APPROVED.

The guard swung the door open and Sawyer stepped into the white-tiled hallway. As they passed the nurse's office, Sawyer looked inside—the middle-aged woman was sitting at her desk, eating a bowl of soup, watching what looked like a soap opera on a little TV set. When Sawyer entered the Sufi's room, he hoped the guard would remain outside. There was a chair in the corridor and the heavy man plopped into it with a bored-sounding sigh.

Rashne was sitting nearly upright in his bed, with a tray in front of him. Yasmin was feeding him something that looked like tofu.

Sawyer said a casual hello. Yasmin merely nodded to him. Alexandra had told Sawyer she would call Yasmin and make sure they were prepared for another interview, but Yasmin hardly looked receptive. Holding a fork in her hand, she said something to her grandfather in Tajik. Rashne shook his head. His thin hand trembling, he managed to pick up the glass of thick beige stuff that looked like yogurt and sipped it, then shakily set it back down. Yasmin wiped a streak off his upper lip.

"I'd like to ask your grandfather a few more questions, as soon as he's finished eating."

Yasmin did not reply. She tried to persuade her grandfather to eat some more of the tofu.

Sawyer felt awkward and shifted from one foot to another, glancing at his watch. He didn't have much time. She was making this doubly difficult, because his purpose in coming to see her and her grandfather was two-fold. One was to try his idea about starting the machine, but the other was to pass Yasmin a note he had written telling her that he wanted to talk to her privately. The tiny, folded piece of paper, torn from the middle of the laboratory notebook, was in his left front pants pocket.

Aware of the cameras trained on him, Sawyer said, "Is he feeling any better?"

Yasmin finally spoke, and when she did, it was in a slightly accusing tone. "No, he's not feeling any better. He's depressed."

Sawyer had suspected as much—the old man seemed sulky and withdrawn, and his eyes lacked the spark they had earlier that day.

Yasmin added, "You asking how long we've been here upset him."

"Sorry. That certainly wasn't my intention."

"It never is," she muttered.

Sawyer wasn't sure exactly what she meant by that. She looked sympathetically at Rashne, who now was gazing back steadily at her, with what seemed to be a pleading expression in his eyes. He said something in Tajik.

"Shhh, _Babajoon_ ," she told him, and spoke to him in a gentle but admonishing tone.

This time Sawyer gave in to the impulse to glance at his watch—5:02. That meant they would be trying to start the machine in eight minutes. He had to do something fast.

Yasmin picked up the fork again and tried to coax her grandfather into eating a small piece of tomato, but he looked away. She sighed and set down the implement. "He refuses to eat today." She rose from her chair and unclipped a paper napkin that was around Rashne's neck, crumpled it up, and set in on the tray. Sawyer noticed that the tray was mounted to a cart that was on his side of the bed. Yasmin was preparing to roll the tray back.

This was his chance to pass her the note—he could pretend to help her.

Sawyer nonchalantly slipped his hand into his left pocket.

Yasmin grabbed hold of the tray and said, "Can you give me some help with this?"

Perfect. He was about to pull his hand from his pocket, with the note hidden in his palm, and reach for the tray—but froze. There was a yellow square of paper under Yasmin's thumb.

Sawyer glanced up at her face—her dark eyes were locked on his.

He let go of the paper in his pocket and reached for the tray, hoping his own note had stayed put. He deftly put his own thumb over her note and rolled the tray cart back from the bed. As he let go of it, he palmed her note. He then picked up a chair to sit close to the Sufi, and as he set it down, he quickly shoved her note into his pocket, hoping the cameras didn't catch the movement.

He glanced down to make sure his own note hadn't fallen out of his pocket. He didn't see it anywhere on the tile floor.

Getting a note from her was the last thing he had expected. He desperately wanted to see what it said, but he thought it was far too risky to try and do that now. He wiped his brow—he had already broken into a sweat. He glanced at his watch again.

Four minutes left.

"I'd like to do a visualization exercise with your grandfather," Sawyer said quickly.

Yasmin looked surprised. "Visualization?"

"Yes. I'd like him to put himself into his meditative state, then visualize starting the machine, step by step, as if he was actually doing it." Sawyer was talking too fast, he knew, but he couldn't help it.

Yasmin looked at him as if she wanted to say, "Are you a psychologist or a physicist?" but then glanced at Rashne, who seemed a bit more alert. She spoke to him in Tajik. The old man nodded and turned to Sawyer, smiling, showing more gums than teeth.

Yasmin said, "He's willing to do it, but not sure it's wise."

"Why is that?"

"It will put too much stress on him. Starting the machine saps his energy—it's hard on his immune system."

"But this would only be a visualization. He wouldn't really be starting the machine."

"Yes, but it would be real to _him_. That's the _point_ of visualizations." She uttered this last sentence as if he ought to stick to his own field.

Sawyer glanced at his watch—only two minutes left. He tried to communicate something through his eyes to Yasmin—something like, "It will be all right, just trust me," but she looked away before it had time to register. He motioned to the monitors hooked up to Rashne. "You can keep close watch on his vital signs. You're a doctor, right?"

"Yes I am," she said tersely. "And in my professional opinion, the exercise you propose will endanger his health."

Sawyer decided it was time to pull out the big guns. "Look, I have Alexandra's authorization to do this. Should I call her and tell her you're not cooperating with me?"

Yasmin muttered something under her breath that sounded like "bastard."

Sawyer ignored this. "Tell Rashne that I want him to pretend he's sitting next to the machine. Preparing to start it, in his meditative state."

Yasmin glared at Sawyer another few seconds, then slowly translated this for Rashne, adding a few sentences that sounded like she was warning him to be careful.

The old man nodded and closed his eyes, but immediately opened them again and looked at Sawyer, asking something in Tajik.

"He wants to know which machine?" Yasmin demanded.

Sawyer hesitated. "The biggest one."

Yasmin passed this along to her grandfather.

Rashne gave a gummy smile, a smile that looked almost tender. "Chudo."

# 21

"Disk temperature!" Alexandra snapped.

"Still three degrees high."

"Vacuum!"

"Down eight percent."

"Damn!" she hissed.

She was pacing back and forth between the row of engineers, glancing every now and then at her father and Stanislav, who were standing at the window, looking out at the sphere, and at the motionless disk. They had managed to stop the machine without damaging it. Now it was almost time to test Sawyer's thesis.

Forever the optimist, her father had brought a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon and a stack of plastic cups.

She looked at the clock on the large overhead display.

17:10. Two minutes left. .

"Vacuum!" she called out again.

"Still eight percent down."

"Damn," Alexandra said again, scanning the status lights on top of the engineers' control consoles. Six of the eight of them were green—two of them had still not given GO status, the structural engineer and the vacuum systems engineer. Braking the huge disk to a full stop in such a short period of time had heated up the disk temperature far more than they had anticipated. Why the vacuum level had dropped was a mystery, but the why wasn't important right now—all that mattered was getting it back up to the same level as it had been when they had recorded the Sufi's movements.

She glanced at her father, who was watching her with paternal admiration. There was so much pressure on her she wanted to scream. Having him there, eagerly awaiting the test, showing so much faith in her ability to solve all the problems...it only made things worse.

He would always calm her with the same words. "It won't be long until prime ministers kiss your hands, and queens grovel at your feet."

She hoped he was right—then all the hell she'd been through during the past twelve years would have been worth it.

She turned back to the consoles and her eyes locked on Axis. He had just chugged his ninth Coke and set the empty on the floor. Behind his rectangular glasses, his pupils looked like pinpricks. Both his feet beat out tattoos on the floor.

Alexandra said, "Any idea how to lower the disk temperature?"

Axis shook his head. "But I'm go, go, go."

She motioned to the hydraulics engineer, Galya. "If you pump liquid nitrogen through the brakes now, will it help?"

"It cannot hurt," Galya said.

"Then do it."

Galya flipped some switches. Alexandra glanced out the window as a cloud of vapor plumed out from the brake mechanism, due to some minor leaks in the seals.

"We have target speed!" Axis called out, his feet tapping even faster. Alexandra glanced at display—the disk velocity was steady at 7.00 revolutions per second.

"Vacuum!" Alexandra said.

"Coming up, only six percent low now."

"Disk temperature!"

"Lost almost another degree."

She turned and looked at her father, who had a thin smile of anticipation on his face. "Papa, we aren't where we need to be."

"Try it anyway."

"Now I want him to imagine," Sawyer said, "that he's about to take hold of the joysticks that roll the sphere around."

Yasmin translated this for her grandfather. Rashne's eyes were closed, the lids fluttering. He gave a slight nod and Sawyer watched his hands move slightly, his bony fingers trembling a bit.

Sawyer wished there was some way to time things more accurately—using his watch, he knew there was at least a half-minute of slop in the synchronization.

"Sufi's programmed movements start in five seconds!" Axis called out. "Three...two...one..."

Alexandra glanced at the clock display as it passed through 5:12.

An instant later, the entire control room shuddered as the gargantuan sphere began to pitch and roll—a coffee cup danced across one of the consoles and Alexandra snatched it up just as it fell over the side.

Now, the Sufi was rocking slightly back and forth in the bed, smiling, his eyes still closed. About two minutes had elapsed since Sawyer had told him to imagine taking hold of the two joysticks and start his movements. Now, he held both his hands out in mid air, both in constant motion, manipulating the imaginary controls.

The old man didn't seem to be showing any signs of strain. But Yasmin was already concerned—the medical monitor showed that his heartbeat was up to one hundred and twenty beats per minute.

"We must stop this," she whispered, looking at Sawyer. "It's too dangerous."

"He looks fine to me. In fact, seems to be enjoying himself." The Sufi's eyes were closed, but he had a grin on his face, like a kid absorbed in a video game.

"In case you haven't noticed," Yasmin said bitterly, "he's not in possession of all his mental faculties." When Sawyer didn't respond, she added, "He does whatever he's asked, now; he's lost his sense of right and wrong."

Sawyer wished he could explain why he was putting her grandfather through this, but it was impossible at this point. He only hoped Alexandra had started the playback program at the right time—he had no way of knowing for sure. But Sawyer did think he felt a faint vibration in the soles of his feet.

# 22

Everyone in the control room was breathlessly watching the sphere as it rolled, pitching the axis of the disk away from them, then back towards them. Several of the engineers had white knuckles from gripping their consoles so tightly. Though they had played back this particular program dozens of times, the groans from the monstrous, pitching sphere rattled them down to the bones.

"Is it working?" Stanislav asked.

"Too early to tell," Alexandra said irritably.

"Stop!" Yasmin yelled at her grandfather.

The Sufi was wildly rocking back and forth, his eyes closed, his eyelids fluttering, his hands still clutching the imaginary joysticks. Sweat had broken out on his wrinkled brow, and the monitor on the alarm went off as his heartbeat passed through the one hundred and forty beats per minute pre-set limit.

"Stop!" Yasmin screamed again, trying to grab his shoulders. But the old man resisted her, looking surprisingly strong and unaware that she was even there.

The nurse dashed into the room. "What's wrong?" she said in Russian, looking from the gyrating old man to the monitors.

"He's out of control!" Yasmin shouted. She was now trying to hold her grandfather still by the shoulders, almost hugging him, but he was still rocking—he looked like he was possessed by a demon. "Fifty milligrams of Thorozine, stat!"

The nurse rushed over to the cabinet and pulled out a syringe.

Alexandra stepped up closer to the window, gazing out at the spinning disk.

"I see it!" one of the engineers shouted.

"Me, too!" another said.

Alexandra was afraid it might only be imagination, the result of wishful thinking. But she, too, saw the telltale violet glow.

"Yes!" her father shouted, slapping Stanislav on the back. "It's working!"

Alexandra suddenly felt an unsettling sensation. She turned around, glancing across the room at the console where the Sufi normally sat in his wheelchair when he started the machine. For an instant she thought she actually glimpsed him sitting there at this very moment, manipulating the controls with his frail hands. But it was only her imagination, of course—the console was unoccupied, and both joysticks were still, perfectly upright.

"Programmed motion stops in five seconds," Axis announced, his eyes on his display. "Three...two...one..."

The sphere stopped rolling, with the spinning disk tilted at about twenty degrees backwards and slightly to the left. The glow seemed even brighter now, but Alexandra could not tell if the disk speed was increasing or not—she resisted the temptation to look over at the display on Axis' screen. That was the true indicator the disk had begun to resonate with the earth's magnetic field and would stay in motion. If the spin frequency settled at 7.83 revolutions per second...

Her heart was in her throat. In the window's reflection, she could see everyone looking anxiously at Axis.

After a painfully long moment, Axis yelled, "We have Schumann resonance!"

Everyone in the room cheered.

Her father popped the top of the Dom Perignon, and Alexandra felt tears come to her eyes.

"I'm so proud of you, Princess," her father said, putting his arm around her.

"You should be proud of Dr. Sawyer, not me," she muttered modestly.

"Nonsense." Into her ear, he whispered, "Remember, it won't be long until prime ministers kiss your hands, and queens grovel at your feet."

# 23

Soon after Chudo started, Sawyer was sipping champagne with Voronezhsky and Alexandra in the study, celebrating their "victory." Alexandra was sitting close to him—too close—on an antique love seat. Voronezhsky sat across from them, in one of the leather armchairs, an open bottle of Dom Perignon on the table.

"I must confess," Voronezhsky said to Sawyer, "when we learned that you were in danger, I was against trying to interfere—it was Alexandra's idea to bring you here to help us." He smiled at his daughter and raised his glass to her. "Well done, princess, well done!"

She gave Sawyer a warm glance and took a gulp of her champagne.

"Drink, professor, drink," Voronezhsky said.

Sawyer took another sip of the expensive nectar, careful to drink it slowly. He needed to keep his wits about him. In the few minutes he'd been in his bedroom after visiting the Sufi, he had the chance to read the note Yasmin had slipped to him. She had written, in tiny, feminine-looking script:

* * *

_We need to talk. Come to my room tonight at 2 a.m._

_Slide this under the door so I know it's you._

* * *

Sawyer had no idea what Yasmin wanted to talk to him about. He wondered, or hoped, it might be about escaping. After seeing the Sufi in action, he was awestruck—the man ought to be working with the top scientists in the world, not these glorified thugs. How had Voronezhsky found him? He wondered what the Sufi was able to do to the disk all the way from his bedroom—direct a stream of subatomic particles at it with his mind, to change its molecular structure? Who knew?

With a twinge of guilt, Sawyer also wondered if Yasmin would even _want_ to talk to him now, after what he'd just made her grandfather do—she had been right about the "visualization" pushing Rashne too hard. Fortunately, no harm had come to the old man—he had collapsed just before the nurse had given him the injection, and his vital signs had soon returned to normal. But for a few long seconds Sawyer was afraid Rashne might have had a heart attack or stroke.

Still, Sawyer was glad he'd taken the chance—his plan had worked, at least so far. Voronezhsky and his daughter apparently believed all they needed to do was play back the Sufi's program at precisely the same time of day that it was recorded, and the machine would start. Based on his helping them, if he could get an ID card and was allowed to leave his bedroom, he thought he might be able to get to Yasmin's room at 2:00 a.m.

"The big question now," Voronezhsky was saying, looking inquisitively at Sawyer, "is if we can use this method to start machines that we choose to build at other locations..." The oligarch glanced at Alexandra—it was obvious they had already discussed the technical side of this. Sawyer suspected their real motive for their inviting him to this "celebration" was to find out the answer.

Sawyer said, "I don't think that's a problem...with certain constraints, that is." He motioned to Alexandra. "I'm sure you know how to do it."

"I believe so...we can calculate the distance from our machine here and use the same program, but shifted by the exact amount of time to account for the earth's rotation..." This was stated more like a question for Sawyer.

"Exactly," he said. This would not work, but it would be some time before they figured it out. "But the machine would have to be absolutely identical to this one here, in terms of size, and so on..."

"Not an issue," Voronezhsky said. He smiled again at Alexandra, then finished off the last of his champagne. Standing and moving to his desk, he said, "Professor, I'm sorry to cut this celebration short, but I need to speak with my daughter alone." He reached for the button to call the guard. "Perhaps we can have all have dinner together later—"

"Wait just a minute," Sawyer said.

Voronezhsky looked surprised, his finger hovering over the button. "Yes?"

"I expect you to keep your end of our agreement. I've shown you that I'll cooperate." He motioned to Voronezhsky. "You're not going to keep treating me like a prisoner, are you?"

"No, of course not," the oligarch said, though Sawyer could see mistrust in his eyes. "We will make you an ID card first thing in the morning so you can move freely about the facility."

Sawyer forced a smile. "I was really in the mood to try out that _banya_ tonight..."

Alexandra glanced at her father and gave him a glance Sawyer couldn't interpret. "Axis could make him a card right now, Papa."

Voronezhsky hesitated, then moved his finger away from the button. "Very well." He reached into a his desk drawer and handed a key to his daughter. "You may show the professor to his room."

# 24

Alexandra and Sawyer walked through the main portion of the dacha and into the guest wing, arm in arm, Russian style. Their willingness to make him the ID card made him uneasy. He hoped it was just a way they hoped to keep him occupied—he had a strong feeling that something was "up," that their belief that they could start the machine without the aid of the Sufi had set some wheels into motion. It might have just been their plan to publicly demonstrate the machine, but he wasn't sure.

As Alexandra led up to the upper level of the guest wing, he kept having visions of himself floating face down in the _banya's_ fancy mineral water pool. He kept assuring himself that they were far from completely solving their problem with the starter, so they still believed they needed to keep him alive.

As Alexandra unlocked the door to his room, she said, "Axis should be here shortly to make your photo for the retinal scan." She stepped back from the door and smiled cordially. "Perhaps we can have dinner together, later, as my father said. Stas can prepare _shashlik_ —it is delicious."

"Sounds good," Sawyer muttered, and stepped into the room.

She motioned through the doorway, at the bed. "Did you know Pushkin himself slept there once?"

"No, I didn't." Sawyer said.

"It's true, he visited this dacha when he was....well, I better not say." She started to shut the door, but said, "Oh, in all the excitement I forgot to ask—did you meet with Rashne again?"

Sawyer hesitated only a split second. "Yes, I did."

"Did you learn anything? Anything new, I mean?"

Sawyer motioned to the roll-top desk, where his notebook lay open. "I don't know yet, I haven't really had a chance to review my notes. I had him do a visualization exercise so I could look at the timing of his movements."

"Interesting. I will watch the video tomorrow and we can discuss it together."

"Fine," Sawyer said. Yet another problem to worry about. Alexandra was many things, but dumb was not one of them. He was certain she would figure out the trick he had pulled as soon as she watched the video. On top of that, after he had left the Sufi's room, he hadn't been able find the note he had intended to give to Yasmin. He had checked his pockets thoroughly, but the little paper seemed to have disappeared. He could only hope that it must have fallen onto the floor or into Rashne's bed sheets.

"So..." Sawyer said, anxious for Alexandra to leave him alone.

She smiled amiably and pulled the door shut. Sawyer glanced down at the handle, wondering if she would lock him in.

After some rattling, the deadbolt slid closed.

# 25

Sergei Voronezhsky stood behind his desk in the study, still feeling agitated. After Alexandra returned from Sawyer's room, they engaged in a heated discussion about whether or not to proceed with their "grand plan." His daughter's perfectionism was a virtue in her scientific work, but in cases like this—when time-critical, strategic decisions had to made—it only got in the way.

He knew they did not as yet have a total solution to the starter problem, but he strongly disagreed with Alexandra that it was only a stopgap measure. They had made a major breakthrough today—it was the first time, in ten long years, that they had started any of the machines without the aid of the Sufi. To him, it was an omen, a sign that the time was right.

With his hands behind his back, Sergei turned and gazed at the awards he'd received, and at his SVoil logo. He'd come a long way since his days with the KGB. His grandfather, Viktor Vasiliyevitch Voronezhsky, would certainly be proud of him now. Viktor had been a member of Nicholas II's royal court and had been executed by the Bolsheviks for defending the czar during the 1917 revolution. But he'd received a double death sentence—the second one was for sending his seven year old son—Mihail Viktorovitch Voronezhsky, Sergei's father—to safe haven in Italy. Mihail grew up in Rome and became a civil engineer, but in 1949, returned to his homeland, married a Russian woman, easily adapted to Soviet life, and quickly achieved a prominent position in the Politburo. Sergei was born in 1951. When he was in his early teens, he showed so much promise that Mihail arranged for him to be educated abroad, a rare opportunity for any Soviet citizen. Of course, the price was dear. After graduation, Sergei was committed to a lifetime career with the KGB. There were no other type of careers with the KGB.

Sergei was inserted into European society under a false identity and excelled at his studies. He graduated with a degree in political science and mastered several languages. He was given a second false identity and was controlled through the Paris KGB station. He did very well at "tradecraft." But his heart never left Mother Russia, and he often felt that he could feel the blood of his grandfather, who had been successful in commerce before the revolution, pulsing through his veins. He wanted to be rich. Not just rich—filthy rich. He longed to live in the style of the pre-Soviet Russian noblemen.

In the mid-eighties, with the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, he saw the opportunity to pursue his dream. Using a false Russian identity he created himself, he returned to his motherland and became aggressively involved in privatization. He was even able to reclaim some of his grandfather's property, including the dacha where he now stood. Using his old KGB connections, he snapped up a staggering number of oil and energy related resources at bargain basement prices. As an entrepreneur, he had found his life's calling. By 1995, SVoil was listed as one of the top ten energy concerns in Russia.

At one point, he actually believed that he could grow SVoil to the size that he could become a member of the Benefactors, the most powerful group in the world. But over time, he painfully realized that such a lofty goal was not achievable in his lifetime. Joining the elite group wasn't just about money; it was about _old_ money. He was clearly a New Russian, the most distasteful flavor of nouveau riche. In retrospect, he was thankful for running up against this obstacle, because it brought his life's work into focus: to _transcend_ the Benefactors altogether. It became his burning passion to secretly develop precisely what the secret society feared most: a free energy machine, a device that would forever eliminate the need for oil and fossil fuels. In so doing, he would not only have the satisfaction of destroying them all; he would, in one fell swoop, become the richest and most powerful human being on earth.

"Papa—you're not ready yet?" Alexandra said.

Voronezhsky turned, as if waking from a dream. His daughter was standing at the door of his study. A smart leather satchel was slung over her shoulder, she was dressed in a knee-length wool overcoat, black high heel boots, and a fur cap, her blonde hair cascading around her shoulders.

He gave her a warm smile. "Princess, you look stunning."

Alexandra blushed. "Axis is waiting for us in the helicopter. If you want to get this done, we have to hurry."

# 26

By 11 p.m. that night, Sawyer was sitting at the roll-top desk in his room, reading a Russian novel. Or trying to read it. It was the only book in the room that was printed in English, an ancient looking copy of Dostoyevsky's _Crime and Punishment_. Not the most stimulating reading under the circumstances, but it would do. He was sleepy after his trip to the _banya_ , and he needed to stay awake until 2 a.m., for his meeting with Yasmin.

Not long after Alexandra had left his room, a rather jumpy character named Axis had showed up. With a bottle of Coca-Cola in one tremulous hand, he made Sawyer's photo for the retinal scan, then returned a half hour later with a shiny new SVoil employee ID card.

A few minutes later, Sawyer heard a helicopter land. Through his window, he watched Axis trot out to the waiting chopper. Then, Alexandra and her father ran out to the helipad and climbed aboard, both dressed in long overcoats, both carrying satchels.

Just after the helicopter departed, Elena knocked on his door and informed him that Alexandra and her father would not be eating dinner with him after all, that they sent their apologies and would have breakfast with him in the morning. She brought up a steaming bowl of _pelmeni_ —Russian-style dumplings filled with meat. As Sawyer ate, he mulled everything over. Something was definitely up. Now that Alexandra and her father believed they could start the machine without the aid of the Sufi, he wondered if they were organizing a grand public demonstration. Maybe Yasmin could shed some light on this, if he could manage to talk to her. He wasn't sure if the ID card would unlock the door to her area of the guest wing or not. The only way he would know would be to try it.

Just after 9 pm, he made his way over to the health complex. His fears about being quietly knocked off there were quickly abated—the sprawling facility was packed, with both men and women. His earlier guess about hundreds of people working at this "dacha" had apparently been right. He wondered if all of them were involved with the free energy machine project, or if other things were going on here, too.

No one said a word to him as he moved about the building. Everyone kept a safe distance, as if they'd been told not to speak to him, or at least not to speak to strangers. He spent almost two hours in the _banya_. In the Russian tradition, he even allowed himself to be flogged by a surly babushka with a _venik_ , a cluster of dried birch leaves. He'd never experienced the treatment before, but it did leave the skin tingly and refreshed. He stopped short, however, of running outside in between beatings and rolling around in the snow, like some of the other men had done.

Sawyer felt a bit strange, passing through one secure door after another with his SVoil ID card, his smiling face laminated onto the front of it. Even though it had been nearly ten years since he'd written his Tesla paper, he still smarted from the wounds—when his tenure committee had found out about it, they made him feel as if the paper was the most idiotic thing any professor at Stanford had ever written. In contrast, the Voronezhskys treated him with reverence, at least relative to his Tesla work. He'd love to see the expressions on the faces of his tenure committee now, if they could witness a demonstration of one Voronezhsky's machines, running like a top, generating all that electricity out of thin air...

A part of him was sorely tempted to really join up with these people and teach everybody at Stanford a lesson.

But of course he would never do that.

He went back to his room, to the pages of _Crime and Punishment_ , and willed himself to stay awake.

# 27

At 1:40 a.m, the dacha was as quiet as a tomb. Sawyer thought Stanislav was still somewhere on the premises, but as far as he knew, Alexandra and her father had not returned. Since midnight, the only sound he'd heard, other than the monotonous ticking of the clock on the nightstand and an occasional whistle of wind around the window, had been the eerie murmur of a musical instrument coming from somewhere below. The hollow, breathy tones seemed like those of a flute. The inflections were slow and mournful, almost ghostly. That had gone on for about a half an hour, from midnight to about 12:30. He wondered if it was Rashne playing, but he couldn't imagine the old man having the breath for the long, sustained notes. He decided it must have been Yasmin.

He stepped over to a full length mirror and looked himself over. He planned on sneaking downstairs for his meeting with Yasmin in the robe and _topochki_. That way, if he bumped into anyone, he could say he simply couldn't sleep and wanted to stretch his legs, or that he was hungry and was looking for Elena. Lame excuses, but they would have to do if he got caught.

Studying his reflection, he found himself wondering—not for the first time—what _she_ would be wearing...

He felt a bit guilty—it seemed that she and her grandfather were being held prisoner here, just like he was—but ever since that damn flute had started playing, he'd been feeling sexually aroused. There was something mysteriously alluring about the young Tajik woman. Despite the cold and resentful way Yasmin had acted towards him, he sensed a vulnerability beneath the surface, a softness that was purely feminine. He found this far more attractive than Alexandra's overt sexual provocations. Yasmin is the kind of woman, Sawyer mused, that tumbled out of bed in the morning looking terrific. In contrast to Alexandra, she had a robust, natural beauty that didn't require much bolstering in the way of cosmetics. She also seemed relatively unaware of her attractiveness, as if it was something she only thought about when someone else pointed it out. He had always admired that type of woman.

He looked in the mirror at his middle-aged reflection and laughed out loud. The idea that Yasmin would find him remotely appealing was nothing short of ridiculous. This triggered a painful memory, and his face flushed. Not long after _Blind Spot_ had hit the top of the bestseller list, _San Francisco Weekly_ had listed him on their annual ranking of the Bay Area's Twenty-Five Most Eligible Bachelors. There was a photo of him, lifted from the Stanford website, where he stood in front of a classroom packed with mesmerized-looking students, his mouth half-open, his finger raised in the air, motioning to some equations projected on the screen. The writer, who had evidently read his book and thought she was being cute, quipped, "Dr. Stephen Sawyer's magnetic personality and confident, charismatic lecture style leaves many of his female students in a state of _perpetual emotion_." Sawyer was so mortified that he had called in sick and failed to show up for his classes for the next two days.

His thoughts were drawn from this reverie by the telltale chop-chop-chop of yet another helicopter.

"Dammit," he muttered. He went to the window, started to open the curtains, but changed his mind. He certainly didn't want to attract attention now. He glanced at the desk lamp, considered turning it off, then decided it was better to leave it as it was—it would look suspicious if anyone had already seen the light.

Sawyer listened as the chopper touched down on the helipad. After a few seconds he heard its door slam, the faint sound of voices, and then the roar of the aircraft lifting back into the air and departing.

He sat still for a few minutes, waiting and listening.

Then he heard footsteps in the hallway.

That's just dandy, he thought. He looked at the clock—it was 1:50. He didn't know how important it was to be downstairs at exactly 2 a.m.

There was a soft knocking at his door.

Sawyer stepped closer, but did not open it. He could now lock it and unlock it himself—Axis had given him the key along with his ID card.

"Yes?" Sawyer said cautiously.

"It is I." The deep, confident voice of Voronezhsky.

Sawyer composed himself for a second, then unlocked the door.

The Russian oligarch was still wearing his overcoat, snowflakes melting on his shoulders. "I saw your light when we landed." He glanced down at Sawyer's robe and slippers. "You are not sleeping...?"

"No. It must be jet lag." Sawyer noticed him looking across the room again, at the open book on the desk. Trying to be casual, he said, "I was just reading."

"Ah. Dostoyevsky."

Sawyer nodded and smiled.

"An excellent writer, one of our best. But maybe you should sleep now? Alexandra will return early tomorrow morning, and she wants to meet with you and discuss your interview with Rashne..."

"Yes, you're probably right."

"Elena can prepare you some hot milk and honey. This is very good for sleep."

"That's really not necessary. I'm feeling a bit tired now." Sawyer feigned a yawn, then smiled. "Dostoyevsky tends to have that effect on me..."

The big man smiled back, but he was clearly suspicious. He scanned the room once, then nodded and said, " _Spokoinoi nochi_ , professor."

" _Spokoinoi nochi_." Sawyer shut the door, but did not lock it. He listened to the man's footsteps move down the hallway, the floorboards squeaking as he made the way down the stairs. Sawyer quietly cracked the door open. He could just barely hear the slow, heavy footsteps move down the tiled hallway of the first floor, immediately below him— the oil magnate must have been checking on Yasmin and Rashne.

After a moment, he faintly heard the footsteps move back down the hallway; then the click of the door that led into the main part of the house.

Sawyer decided this was the best time to act, when Voronezhsky would least expect it.

He peered back into his room and glanced about for something he might use for protection—he felt defenseless in the thin robe and slippers. His eyes locked on the glass paperweight on the roll-top desk, the one with the beetle suspended inside.

# 28

Sawyer carefully made his way down the stairs, the hardwood creaking with each step. He cringed with each sound. If the nurse was in her office and awake, she would have surely heard him. Sawyer was betting that if the woman was there at this hour, she was sleeping—he remembered seeing a cot in her office. Voronezhsky would have probably spoken to her when he passed through if she was awake, and Sawyer hadn't heard any voices. Still, if he could get through the steel door, he would have to pass her office, and the Sufi's room, to reach Yasmin's bedroom. It would be tricky.

When Sawyer reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear some clicking of the wall radiators, but nothing else. He thought he smelled cigarette smoke, too, but he wasn't sure—maybe Voronezhsky had lit up one there on his way back to the main wing.

It was so dark he could barely make out the secure door that led to the ground floor. Not knowing what might happen, he pulled his ID card out of his robe pocket and swiped it through the reader. The display above it said PLEASE ENTER PASSCODE.

"Going somewhere, professor?"

Sawyer whirled around.

In the semi-dark, he could make out the looming silhouette of Stanislav. The broad-shouldered young man was leaning against a partially open window. Sawyer glimpsed the orange glow of a cigarette.

"I just wanted some fresh air," Sawyer said, his heart in his throat.

"No fresh air that way."

"Oh." Sawyer chuckled. He looked to the left, then to the right, trying to appear disoriented. "I guess I don't know my way around here very well yet." He slipped his ID card in his pocket and took a step back towards the stairs, but found himself blocked by Stanislav's beefy hand.

The Russian said, "Maybe you wanted to speak to Yasmin?"

"No. I just wanted some air."

Stanislav snickered. He pulled something from his shirt pocket.

A slip of white paper.

Sawyer tried to stay calm while two thick fingers held it under his nose. "What is this?" Stanislav demanded.

"I have no idea." Sawyer couldn't read the block lettering in the dim light, but he knew damn well what it said:

_I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU ALONE_

Sawyer casually slipped his right hand into the pocket of his robe. "What does it say?" He chuckled. "Is it some kind of _secret message_?"

"Do not play games, professor. Viktoria found this under the bed of Rashne. It is written from your hand."

In Sawyer's pocket, his fingers touched the heavy paperweight, feeling the rounded glass on one side and the worn felt on the other. "Well, I never saw it before." He again tried to move past the refrigerator-sized man.

The next thing he knew Stanislav's hand had grabbed him by the lapels. He began twisting the material until Sawyer started to choke.

Sawyer felt his face redden, his eyes bulging.

His feet left the floor.

In a survival reflex, his right hand flew out of his pocket and he smacked the paperweight hard against Stanislav's temple.

The Russian's head bobbed to the side and his grip loosened, but his huge hands held fast to the robe. He only seemed stunned.

With a grunt, Sawyer broke partially free. This time, he was able to wind up his swing. The paperweight connected solidly with the back of Stanislav's neck and made a sickening thud. The man grunted, saliva dribbling out his open mouth, and sunk to the floor.

"Shit," Sawyer muttered, glancing around the stairwell. He wondered if he had killed the bastard. He squatted down, trying to figure out what to do. He leaned forward to see if he could hear Stanislav breathing, but he could only heard the pounding of his own heart in his ears.

He rose and looked at the display above the ID card reader. It had timed out and returned to the first message: PLEASE SWIPE CARD.

Sawyer pulled his card from his pocket, swiped it through, then rapidly entered his passcode, squinting in the dim light to see the little keypad. His mind was racing so fast he wasn't sure if his shaking fingers had entered it correctly or not, but the display said LOOK DIRECTLY INTO CAMERA. Sawyer did so, trembling.

There was pulse of white light...then a loud click. He yanked the door open and gazed down the darkened corridor, listening. Nothing but the faint beeping of the vital signs monitor in the Sufi's room. His wobbly legs carried him down the white-tiled floor. At least it didn't creak. The first door he came to was the doctor's office. It was wide open.

He slowly approached it, peering inside. He could hear light snoring. A vague form was stretched out on the cot, under a blanket.

Sawyer slipped past her and came to another door, this one closed, on the right. It was narrow—he thought it might be a closet or storage room. He tried the handle and carefully pulled it open. It gave a soft squeak that made the hair on his forearm prickle. He was right—cabinets full of medicines, he noted by the odor.

This would do.

He slipped back past the doctor's office, made sure the nurse was still snoring, then went back out into the stairwell. He positioned Stanislav's leg so that it held the steel door open. Hauling the huge man through across the threshold without making much noise was challenging, but he managed it. He dragged the big Russian down the hallway face up and feet first. Even across the slick tile it was like dragging a huge sack full of sand. Boy, have I screwed up, Sawyer thought. He should just have tolerated whatever roughing-up Stanislav was about to give him and then gone back to his room.

At the moment he was directly outside the nurse's door, Sawyer heard a sudden break in the snoring. Then some movement in the cot.

Sawyer didn't move a muscle.

He waited a few seconds, a feeling of impending doom sweeping over him.

After a long and terrible moment, the snoring resumed.

Sawyer wiped the sweat from his forehead and dragged Stanislav the rest of the way to the storage room.

Just as he was pulling the man inside the door, he glanced down in horror.

In the dim light, he could make out a meandering dark streak on the tile floor. The back of Stanislav's head was bleeding, and it had left a nasty trail behind.

He noticed Stanislav's cigarette laying on the tile, still smoldering.

_I hope to God I didn't kill him,_ Sawyer thought, gazing at the still, dark form on the floor on the storage room floor. He fumbled around until he found white medical tape. Sawyer's eyes were now well-adjusted to the dark—he could see that all the blood had only come from a deep scratch on the back of Stanislav's neck, made by the sharp edge of the paperweight's base. The flow had already stopped.

With some effort, Sawyer rolled the big Russian over onto his side and taped his hands behind his back. Then Sawyer taped the ankles together and rolled him face up again.

To Sawyer's great relief, Stanislav made a faint moaning sound. He was alive.

Sawyer pasted several pieces of tape over his mouth, all the way around the back of his head, over the cut. Satisfied he would stay put for a while, Sawyer went back out into the hall and quietly pulled the door shut.

He stood outside Yasmin's door for a moment, trying to calm himself. He hoped she knew some way to escape. Quickly.

Like in the next twenty minutes.

He wiped his forehead and face, took a couple of deep breaths, then bent and slipped the note Yasmin had given him under the crack in the door.

And waited.

Just before he was about to softly knock, he heard a click. The handle turned and the door opened about an inch.

A dark eye peered out at him.

* * *

(End of Book 1)

To read Book 2, click here.
