Joaquin gestured to the black-hole chamber.

'The black hole is maintained in stasis, carefully balanced, by magnetic fields. But when we were building the device it was discovered that by temporarily destabilizing it we can direct its gravitational energy wherever we wish. Carefully manipulating the electromagnetic field produces powerful pulses of energy.'

Benjamin Tyler glanced at the metallic sphere. 'How much energy?'

Joaquin shot Tyler a mischievous grin and whispered theatrically as though imparting a childish secret.

'You will recall the earthquake that I showed you yesterday.'

A shocked silence descended upon the five men before him as they digested what he had said.

'You're going to cause that earthquake?' Goldberg uttered.

'I am.'

A flutter of Jesus Christs whispered amongst them as they looked at Joaquin.

'You'll kill millions,' Harry Reed pointed out.

'Only a few thousand, in the end,' Joaquin replied without emotion.

'You've lost your mind,' MacKenzie muttered. 'No matter how hard you try, this place will never remain totally secret forever. Sooner or later the military will uncover what you've done here and before you know what's happened you'll be locked up in Guantanamo for the rest of your miserable little life.'

Joaquin ignored the governor as he focused instead on the other men in the group.

'Electromagnetic weapons deliver heat, or mechanical or electrical energy, to a target. They can be used against electronic equipment, military targets and even humans. We adjust the fields within the tokamak chamber to act like a parabolic reflector, to direct the energy of the black hole wherever we wish, much like more conventional electromagnetic weapons.'

'Is there any defense against such an attack?' Congressman Goldberg asked.

Joaquin, caught off guard by the question, glanced up at Dennis Aubrey.

'A Faraday cage would provide protection from most directed and undirected electromagnetic pulses,' Aubrey said, 'but against gravitational forces there is absolutely no defense.'

The men remained silent, apparently unable to form a cohesive opposition to Joaquin's remarkable achievements. Aubrey watched as Joaquin took a deep breath, sucked in the moment and let it fill his lungs with the first scent of victory. Now, terrifyingly, everything that he had sought to achieve was at Joaquin's fingertips, the first steps on a final journey toward ultimate power.

'And what happens once you've installed us in the White House?' MacKenzie asked. 'What happens if any one of the many people you must have employed to build this facility decide that they will blow the whistle on you?'

'Yeah,' Reed joined in. 'What's to stop you getting some of your own goddamned medicine?'

Benjamin Tyler stepped forward.

'Speaking of medicine, why am I here? You told me that I will die, soon. I want to know how and I want to know how to stop it.'

Joaquin looked down at Tyler for a long moment.

'I can answer all of your questions at once by answering just one of them,' he said, before looking at Tyler. 'I cannot stop your illness, Benjamin,' he said. 'You have a malignant tumor deep within your brain stem that is the cause of the headaches you've been having over the past few weeks. It is inoperable. I can only make your suffering swifter and less painful.'

'What the hell are you talking about?' Tyler snapped, his fists clenched by his side.

Joaquin grinned mischievously. He turned to a DVD player laying on a table nearby, connected to a television screen. The screen lit up and a news article, distorted like the ones they had viewed in Miami, showed a news anchor, her voice silent but the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen as clear as day.

BENJAMIN TYLER COMMITS SUICIDE.

AFTER TERMINAL ILLNESS CONFIRMED.

The group read the news bulletin and gasped as one. Aubrey watched in horror as they all turned to look at Tyler. Benjamin Tyler stared at the screen in confusion.

'What the hell is that?' he uttered.

Joaquin Abell smiled, his face contorted into a chilling chimera of pity and delight.

'Your obituary, Benjamin,' he replied. 'The results of a routine health check will arrive tomorrow, revealing the presence of your malignant tumor, but it will be assumed that you already knew you were a dead man and took your own life.' Joaquin looked at Governor MacKenzie. 'You asked about how I would deal with whistle-blowers?'

Joaquin raised one hand and clicked his fingers.

Before anybody could react, ten armed IRIS troops lunged into the crowd and grabbed Benjamin Tyler. They lifted him bodily off the ground and carried him toward the chamber.

47.

'What the hell are you doing?!' Tyler bellowed in terror as he struggled. 'Put me down!'

Congressman Goldberg tried to grab one of the guards, who whirled and drove the lawman back, slamming him to the ground with a savage blow from the butt of his rifle.

'Stop them, Joaquin!' MacKenzie shouted. 'This is insane!'

'There was only one thing missing from my presentation to you,' Joaquin replied, his features hardening as he spoke. 'A demonstration of my determination to succeed.'

The guards carried Tyler to the black hole's outer chamber, opened the access door and roughly bundled the businessman into it before slamming the steel door shut. Tyler banged desperately on the thick glass, but like the news broadcast of his demise, no sound reached the horrified onlookers. Quickly, one of the soldiers carried a video camera on a tripod and stood it outside the chamber, this one looking in. Almost immediately, one of the giant plasma screens showed the black hole, flares of searing energy writhing in blue-white coils against the walls of the chamber.

Joaquin looked up at Dennis Aubrey, whose heart had begun to hammer against the walls of his chest. Prickly heat tingled across his collar as he stared back at Joaquin.

'Dennis, if you will, prepare to destabilize the black hole as soon as our unfortunate friend Mr. Tyler has been . . .' Joaquin searched for an appropriate word, 'cured.'

Aubrey, unable to believe what he was seeing and yet unable to intervene, flipped switches like an automaton on the console before him. Joaquin turned to face his guests, his expression cold.

'Gentlemen, should any of you be tempted to interfere with my campaign . . .'

He let the sentence hang in the air for a long moment and then nodded at one of the soldiers now standing beside a control panel at the black-hole chamber. The soldier flicked a switch before him and then yanked down on a large handle, tiger-striped with yellow and black chevrons.

Wailing sirens echoed around the hub and beacons span and flashed. From his vantage point Dennis Aubrey watched the screen, frozen immobile with horror, as the chamber's interior door opened agonizingly slowly.

Benjamin Tyler was hauled off of his feet by an incredible force, flying through the air toward the terrifying chamber beyond. His hands managed to grab the inside of the door as his body was held horizontally in the air as though in the grasp of a hurricane, but he wasn't able to hang on for more than a split second before the immense gravity of the black hole yanked him away.

A bright flare of electrical energy shone within the chamber, and Aubrey watched with morbid fascination as Benjamin Tyler's body shot toward the black hole. Aubrey glimpsed the tycoon's face, laced with a sheen of sparkling ice crystals as the latent heat of his body was vacuumed out, his flesh turning hard as stone and his horrified eyes turning to brittle balls of ice. Tyler's pain-racked face froze with fear as, in a millisecond, his body was unwound from its normal height to an infinite length, stretching him around the black hole's orbital axis at the speed of light as he was torn apart, atom by atom, in a flare of radiation that glowed in a brilliant disc around the black hole's circumference.

The last thing Aubrey saw was the image of Tyler's head turn a deep red as it vanished beyond the black hole's event horizon, the time dilation red-shifting the light to the extreme end of the spectrum until it could no longer emit radiation and Tyler disappeared altogether.

Aubrey realized that his breath was fluttering awkwardly in his throat, his caged heart now hammering like a convict trying to batter down the bars of a cell. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and felt cold sweat on his skin. With everybody below him staring at the screen on which Tyler had vanished, Aubrey reached out and grabbed the satellite phone from the control panel and slipped it into his pocket. Joaquin spoke to his horrified guests below, his voice devoid of any emotion.

'Gentlemen, Benjamin Tyler no longer exists. Every atom that made up his body has been destroyed within the oblivion that is the black hole.'

Joaquin turned to Aubrey and pointed at the control panel.

'Begin the second part of the demonstration,' he snapped.

Aubrey took a breath. If ever he had needed confirmation that Joaquin Abell had lost his mind as well as his humanity, then this was it. He could hear Joaquin's words ringing in his ears. Katherine has gone to work on one of our charity projects in the Dominican Republic. She won't be coming here. Joaquin was not only demonstrating the power he wielded: he was attempting to murder the only person left ashore who knew what he had achieved. Dennis made a decision that he knew could threaten his own life, but which was unavoidable.

'I'll need all of the staff's door passes,' he replied, as he grasped for the most confusing scientific terms he could summon. 'The gravitational cavitation we'll experience is capable of scrambling the polarity of the magnetic access chips at this close range.'

Joaquin glared up at him. 'You did not tell me about this.'

'You didn't tell me you were about to cause an earthquake,' Aubrey shot back, finding his rhythm. 'So I wouldn't have been able to tell you about the effect that the ensuing gravitational waves will have on magnetically polarized circuitry, or on our communications hub. The frequencies will be so high that they could rupture antennas, reverse magnetic polarity and maybe even fry circuitry. I hope that nobody here has a pacemaker? Or cares about the life-support systems that keep the air breathable down here and the lights on?'

The gathered dignitaries gawped at Aubrey as he stepped down from behind the control panel holding a small box.

'I have a pacemaker,' Murtaugh said, and tapped his chest with one crooked finger.

'This is a Faraday cage,' Aubrey explained, holding up the box. 'It will protect the access cards. Once the experiment is over they can be retrieved and will be none the worse for wear. I'll go to the communications hub and shut down the antennas and re-route the power to life-support until the experiment is over. Mr. Murtaugh, I advise you to remain at least twenty feet away from the chamber, just as a precaution, when the experiment begins.'

Aubrey boldly reached up to Olaf Jorgenson's chest and unclipped his card. Without any further prompting, Joaquin Abell removed his own and dropped it into the box. His men automatically followed suit, and Aubrey sealed the box shut and turned for the exit.

'Olaf will take the box,' Joaquin said. 'You will go to the communications hub. Olaf?' The big man raised his chin questioningly. 'Shut off the comms from here.'

Aubrey reluctantly handed the box to Olaf, who smirked down at him. Aubrey walked up to the control panel and with a heavy heart pressed a single button. Immediately the chamber began emitting a humming sound, and on the screen above them the black hole began deforming into an oval.

'It's stretching,' Congressman Goldberg said, pointing at the screen.

'No,' Joaquin corrected him. 'We have reduced the magnetic field in the lower right quadrant of the chamber. The black hole is now cavitating within the chamber at immense velocity and releasing its energy. As you may recall from high school, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.'

Governor MacKenzie turned and stared at Joaquin in horror.

'My God,' he uttered. 'You're no philanthropist. You're nothing but a mass murderer.'

'A revolutionary,' Joaquin corrected him. 'There is no gain without loss, no enlightenment without sacrifice. Mankind only moves forward through catastrophe: better one that is controlled, than one that is entirely unpredictable, I say.'

Aubrey felt snakes of disgust slither through his belly as he considered the scope of Joaquin Abell's insanity. But at the center of his thoughts was Katherine Abell. As he caught Joaquin's eye, he saw a man committed to his cause and yet quite aware of the crimes he was committing.

'I'll head for the comms hub,' Aubrey said.

Joaquin flicked his head dismissively toward the exit hatch before turning away from Aubrey, who strode from the chamber toward the exit. He didn't see Joaquin glance across at Olaf before he left.

48.

CAPE CANAVERAL.

June 28, 16:17 Ethan leapt from the helicopter that deposited them near the bunker, with Jarvis close behind, running low as the wash from the blades flattened the grass around him with rippling waves of down-force.

The guards inside the bunker had once again been forewarned of their arrival and opened the elevator doors without fuss. Moments later they were descending in the elevator shaft.

'You really think that Joaquin can cause an earthquake?' Jarvis asked as he glanced at his watch.

'Given everything else we've seen so far today, I wouldn't put anything past him,' Ethan replied. 'What really maddens me is that he's doing all of this on the back of men he has killed, the scientists who built the device that he's been using. He's a small man standing on the shoulders of giants.'

'Including his father,' Jarvis pointed out. 'A man who had some kind of genuine desire to benefit humanity, but whose work Joaquin has twisted to gain power.'

'What's his motivation?' Ethan wondered out loud. 'There must be more to this than just gaining power, or money, or even creating disasters into which IRIS can heroically sail and save lives, increasing his popularity. He must have some purpose political, maybe. Purcell said that Joaquin was flirting with high-level figures in government and congress.'

Jarvis nodded.

'It's an angle we haven't checked out. You think maybe he knows people, has friends on the inside who want to see him reach the senate, maybe even the White House?'

The elevator slowed as it reached the bottom and Ethan opened the gates.

'Men of power and influence they're exactly the kind of people who move in his circle,' he said as they walked down the corridor and into the Project Watchman facility. They hurried toward the main control panels where scientists were already programming the virtual-reality feeds.

A man was wearing a virtual-reality suit and headgear up on the platform as Michael Ottaway turned to them.

'You got the coordinates?' Ethan asked.

Ottaway nodded and gestured to a large plasma screen.

'Yes. Our man's in position. You can view his perspective on this screen,' he said, and gestured to a nearby monitor.

Ethan and Jarvis looked at the screen and saw the feed from the VR headset. They watched as the viewer zoomed in on Bryson sitting on his airboat, swigging from a bottle. Behind him, a second airboat drifted silently toward him.

'Damn it, I told you Bryson was a waster,' Ethan said.

'Speed it forward,' Jarvis muttered to the scientist. 'About five minutes.'

The scientist obeyed and the scene changed to the two airboats racing away from the spit of land. The viewer changed his position, catching them up as the airboats raced between the reed banks. Ethan saw the assassin firing bullets from his rifle, saw himself, Lopez and Bryson ducking to avoid the bullets and then the assassin broad-siding his airboat in front of theirs and shooting up their engine. Ethan watched himself leap up, sprint across the deck and hurl himself across the void between the two craft to land on the metal cage on the back of the assassin's airboat.

'Jesus Christ,' Ottaway muttered at Ethan. 'The hell you think you are, James Bond?'

'Don't encourage him,' Jarvis said. 'Keep moving forward, another couple of minutes.'

They watched as the viewer caught up with Ethan and the assassin fighting on the shore, black smoke smoldering from the crashed airboat, and then the assassin taking off into the woods with the camera.