'Opportunity follows crisis!' Joaquin shouted. 'There is never gain without loss. I have built this, all of this, to gain the faith and trust of humanity. Mankind does not move forward in small and gradual steps. It takes a revolution to drive our progress, and I am producing one right here. This is more than just the future: this is control of the present, to bring all countries into alignment, to provide equality and safety for all.'

'And if people do not want you to control them?' Ethan asked.

'Everything I have done,' Joaquin shot back, 'every single action, has been with the intention of helping humanity climb out of its self-destructive existence and move toward a better future. Idle government will be replaced with proactive IRIS rule that protects us all against tomorrow. I built this place to protect humanity!'

Ethan finally got it, in a brief flash of clarity that shone through the gloom of Joaquin's warped ego. In a moment of inspiration he glimpsed Joaquin's vision and the fragile state of mind that harbored it.

'You haven't built a thing,' he said.

Joaquin sneered at him.

'This entire facility was built by IRIS, under my command, the better to-'

'You're nothing, Joaquin, nothing at all,' Ethan interrupted. 'This is all about little Joaquin living up to his daddy's name. You've spent your life trying to emulate a great man, but in doing so you've done nothing but revealed what a hugely inadequate son you really were to him.'

'What are you talking about?' Joaquin stammered. 'You never even knew-'

'Everybody has heard of your father,' Ethan replied, 'of the things that Isaac Abell achieved. But you? Everything people think they know about you is a lie, a mask. You've spent your life trying to convince people that you're some kind of great philanthropist, but in truth you're nothing but a spoilt little psychopath. Even this facility we're standing in was built by your father, not by you: all you've done is stand on his coat tails, adding little bits and pieces to what he himself created. Everything you are is a scam, a theft of other people's ideas.' He stepped closer to Joaquin. 'Tell me, little man, of one single item in this facility that you built or invented all by yourself.'

Joaquin stared at Ethan, his jaw agape and his skin flushing red.

Ethan took another pace forward, standing just inches from him.

'Tell me, Joaquin, what's it like to be a billionaire who can see into the future, and yet to still feel so totally and utterly inadequate?'

Joaquin quivered as psychological tremors wrought havoc in his mind. The tycoon whipped one small fist up at Ethan. The blow landed on Ethan's cheek with a sharp crack, but it lacked force. Ethan barely flinched, and smiled.

'Not much weight to anything about you, is there, Joaquin?'

Joaquin trembled with fury, as though he were struggling to keep the lid on a boiling cauldron of anger.

'You've a nerve, Mr. Warner,' he uttered, 'to insult me when your life is in my hands.'

'It's not in your hands,' Ethan replied. 'Like everything else, it's in other people's hands, because you can't do it for yourself In one way you're just like your father, Joaquin -he wasn't able to commit murder himself, either.'

Joaquin's expression fell flat, his eyes uncomprehending.

'Didn't know about that, did you, little Joaquin?' Lopez chimed in with a brittle grin. 'That your wonderful daddy murdered Montgomery Purcell all those years ago.'

Joaquin's jaw opened and closed like a beached fish as he struggled to speak.

'That's insane! You're making this all up!'

'Isaac Abell first tested the device that he built here in 1964, on the very same evening that Montgomery Purcell flew home from a meeting with him,' Ethan said. 'It was timed perfectly by Isaac, so that the magnetic fields generated by his fusion chamber would wreck the instruments in Monty Purcell's airplane as he flew overhead. The man didn't stand a chance.'

'That's bullshit!' Joaquin shouted. 'My father was an honorable man!'

'Yes, he was,' Lopez said. 'It's why he took his own life nine years later. He could not deal with the grief of having murdered a man. He killed for what he thought were good reasons, because he believed that Montgomery Purcell's mission was to make money from building weapons. But in fact Purcell simply understood that mutually assured destruction could prevent a nuclear holocaust.'

'Point is,' Ethan said, his face inches from Joaquin's, 'your father killed a man whom he thought was trying to dominate the world by using weapons against it. How do you think he would have felt about what you've done with his work since?'

Joaquin's skin flushed an unhealthy pallor, but he forced a feeble grin onto his face as he spoke.

'You'll find, Mr. Warner, that I'm made of a little more than you give me credit for.'

'Surprise me,' Ethan said.

Joaquin held out his hand past Ethan.

'My dear?' Joaquin asked.

Katherine stepped forward, and, to Ethan's dismay, turned to face them as she stood alongside her husband. Ethan saw in her features a bizarre mixture of relief and shame, as though she had been handed the secrets of the universe and then destroyed them out of spite.

'Katherine?' Lopez uttered.

'Is with me,' Joaquin said, his features locked into a smile that seemed more like a grimace. 'No matter what you may think of me, my wife has stood by my side for fourteen years and stands with me now. My dear, are they alone?'

Katherine nodded.

'It is just the three of us,' she replied. 'The other one, Bryson, quit. The marines on the yacht are under orders to stay put.'

'As I suspected,' Joaquin said. 'Your friend walked, didn't he, Mr. Warner, just as soon as you were reunited in Miami. I have been watching. The news reports on the survivors flown in to Miami you were all in the background, standing around that truck.'

Ethan shook his head slowly, ignoring Joaquin. 'This is a mistake, Katherine, and you know it.'

'There is nothing that I will not do for my children,' she replied.

'This isn't about your children!' Lopez said. 'Thousands will die because of this!'

'And thousands more will live,' Katherine shot back. 'Criminals captured, lying politicians exposed, corporate greed slain, all by IRIS's ability to see into the future. This is the greatest opportunity in the history of mankind to cleanse the legal system of its corruption and the distorted motivations of its practitioners.'

Ethan let a bitter smile curl from his lips.

'By using fraud, corruption and the manipulation of government to get your own way?'

'What I'm doing,' Katherine uttered, barely able to meet his eye, 'is morally wrong here and now, and will cost lives. But it will save countless more in the future. The needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few.'

'Bet you're glad that Bryson and I didn't feel that way when we got you out of Puerto Plata,' Lopez spat at her. 'Did you forget your husband tried to kill you there?'

Katherine refused to meet her accusing glare, but it was neither Ethan's nor Lopez's tortured cry that challenged her.

'Katherine!'

They all turned, to see Dennis Aubrey's face crippled with dismay and horror. Joaquin glared at the scientist but it was Katherine who spoke.

'I'm sorry, Dennis,' she said softly. 'This is the only way.'

'No!' Aubrey yelled. 'Think of what's really best for your children!'

'Our children are not your concern!' Joaquin snarled. 'Olaf, take him to the chamber. Take them all to the chamber!'

Ethan was prodded forward as Olaf shoved him toward the giant sphere in the center of the hangar.

63.

'Joaquin, what are you doing?' said Katherine.

Ethan thought that he heard the first ripple of concern in her voice as they were led toward the giant sphere in the center of the dome. Nearby, he saw Dennis Aubrey being lifted out of a chair by two IRIS soldiers and dragged toward the sphere.

'It is time,' Joaquin announced grandly, 'to demonstrate the power that I hold over time itself.'

Joaquin reached the sphere just before Ethan and Lopez, and turned to face them.

'Because,' he said, 'I hold the ability not just to see into the future, but also to erase any trace of the past.'

Katherine stared at her husband. 'What do you mean?'

'The black hole,' Joaquin replied ecstatically, all of his previous rage forgotten now as he returned to his scripted plan. His mood swings were like those of a child, Ethan realized, erratic and unpredictable. 'Nothing, not even light, can escape from its grasp. Even suspended within this chamber, protected as we are from its influence, time still runs slightly slower in this facility than it does in the outside world. It's a shame for our guests, because were they not about to cease to exist I would have done them a favor. They would have aged a little less than the rest of the population of our planet during the time they've spent down here.'

'Sadly,' Lopez uttered, 'the time hasn't exactly flown by.'

Joaquin grinned, not letting her jibe contaminate his obvious enjoyment.

'But it's about to,' he said. 'As one gets closer to a black hole, so time flows more slowly. If you travel to the edge of a black hole, the famous event horizon, time will seem to flow so fast outside your frame of reference that, as you pass through the horizon, it is said that you will witness the entire future of the universe outside.'

Ethan scowled at Joaquin.

'Why don't you take a running jump into it and find out?'

Joaquin let out an abrupt burst of laughter.

'An excellent idea, except that once material is inside a black hole it can never leave. Information cannot escape the event horizon, at least not in the same form as it entered. It can be released only as pure energy over time, as the black hole evaporates. And that, my friends, will take billions of years.'

'We're in no rush to see you again,' Lopez said.

'Good, because soon you'll be lost to history,' Joaquin said. 'But let me first demonstrate to you just how efficient this process is. Olaf?'

Joaquin clicked his fingers at the giant, who turned without a word and lumbered across to Dennis Aubrey. Olaf stooped and in one motion hefted the scientist onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Aubrey began screaming and pummeled Olaf's muscular back with his feeble fists. Katherine stepped into Olaf's path, forcing him to stop.

'No, please, Joaquin, don't!'

The giant turned idly to look at Joaquin.

'This is for the best, Katherine,' Joaquin said. 'Dennis betrayed us and tried to send word to the outside world about my work. Fortunately for me, it was you he chose to contact. He has to go, for the benefit of us all.'

Katherine's features were suddenly taut with horror, as though, despite everything that Joaquin had already done, she had not imagined him doing this.

'He's innocent, Joaquin! He doesn't deserve this!'

Joaquin shrugged his shoulders, as though he were considering nothing more important than what to have for lunch.

'That is a matter of personal opinion,' he replied. 'But right now I cannot take the chance that he won't betray us again.'

Olaf waited for no further encouragement and shoved his way past Katherine with the scientist writhing on his shoulder. Ethan watched as two IRIS soldiers opened a hatch attached to a small chamber on the side of the sphere. Olaf stepped onto the edge of the hatch and pitched the screaming man inside before stepping back. The two soldiers slammed the chamber door shut and sealed it.

Joaquin turned and gestured to Ethan and Lopez.

'Make sure they see everything,' Joaquin snapped, his voice taut with excitement. 'I want them to see how they're going to die in just a few moments' time.'

Olaf lumbered up behind Ethan and with a weighty shove propelled him up against the side of the sphere. One shovel-like hand twisted his wrist up into the small of his back as the other clamped the back of Ethan's head and shoved it forcefully against a glass porthole looking into the chamber's interior.

Ethan gasped, his guts convulsing with a mixture of vertigo and fear as he looked into a sphere of endless blackness suspended within, a void of such unimaginable depth that it made him feel as though he was already falling into oblivion. Flares of plasma snarled and snapped within the chamber, flashing out toward him.

Somewhere behind him, he heard Joaquin's voice.

'Open the inner hatch!'

Dennis Aubrey lay curled up on the cold metal floor of the chamber. His guts had turned to slime within him, his bowels loosening as they gurgled and writhed, infected with a fear far beyond anything that he could have imagined possible. Every muscle in his body was locked in a spasm of primal terror, his throat constricted and his eyes wet with tears that flowed beyond his control.

Aubrey had never been a religious man. He had long considered those who leaned upon the crutch of blind faith to be crippled by far more than mere dogma. He had believed them to have forgone real wonders for mythical ones, the genuine joy of discovery replaced by the hollow promises of religion. But now, faced with the might of nature's ultimate uncaring creation, he felt a lifetime of scientific confidence abandon him. Aubrey became what all human beings were before the fury of nature's wrath: feeble, inconsequential, helpless.

'Forgive me,' he whispered into his own chest as he lay coiled upon the floor. 'If there's anybody listening, forgive me.'

A silence followed that seemed to last forever, and then suddenly he heard the hiss of hydraulics as the inner hatch opened. In a moment of morbid fascination, Aubrey peered into the darkened maw of true oblivion and then screamed with all of his might as a roar filled his ears, the gruesome song of the black hole both as deep as eternity and yet howling like a banshee as every free atom in the outer chamber was yanked toward it. The moisture in the chamber condensed into a writhing cloud of vapor and zipped toward the black hole as the latent heat energy was dragged instantly from his surroundings.

Everything else happened in a flash, every millisecond seared into Dennis Aubrey's last moment as he realized a terrible truth: he was lying with his feet pointing at the black hole. At this range and with everything happening so fast, he would literally see and experience everything before the solace of death embraced him, for his eyes and brain would be the last parts of him to enter the black hole. Even before the first electrical impulse from his brain reached his limbs in a futile attempt to turn himself around and meet his death head on, he lost the ability to move. In an instant, as the inner hatch fully opened, Aubrey's skin and body became immobile as the temperature began plummeting toward minus 270 degrees.

The sweat on his skin turned to ice crystals as all of the air and the heat of his body was vacuumed toward the black hole at tremendous velocity. Aubrey's gaze registered tiny flares of red light as countless atoms of nitrogen, oxygen and methane were dragged in their billions across the event horizon and into the black hole. A flare of plasma appeared around the black hole like the rings of Saturn as other atoms on less direct trajectories were sent into rapidly decaying orbits around the black hole's circumference, accelerated to the speed of light and heated to thousands of degrees before vanishing beyond the event horizon.

Aubrey felt as though he were encased in a steel suit. The blood deep beneath the surface of his skin began to boil as though toxic acid were seething through every vein and artery in his body. His scream, long lost along with the air, lay frozen in time on his face as his lungs turned to stone in his chest cavity. His glasses shot away and vanished, instantly melted, into the disc of plasma orbiting the black hole.

Dennis Aubrey was lifted bodily from the floor of the outer chamber and flew toward the gaping black hole. The inner wall of the tokamak chamber flashed past as he caught a fleeting glimpse of faces pressed against the glass portholes, watching him with expressions of mute horror.

Aubrey saw the wall of the sphere glow as the entire universe beyond the black hole was shifted into the blue portion of the light spectrum. He had the briefest impression of individual atoms in their countless millions being dragged from his body as it passed through the event horizon. There was no pain, for his body was already too senseless to register any meaningful physical sensation, the nerves and pores either rock solid with cold or melting in the storm of plasma energy seething within the sphere.

His legs, closer to the black hole's singularity than his head, were stretched away from him in a nanosecond by the imbalanced gravitational field, tremendous tidal forces tearing his atoms apart as their nuclei and orbiting electrons scattered into the fiery plasma.

With his last moment of awareness, before even his eyeballs turned to solid ice, Aubrey glimpsed the outside world twist and spiral in a violent blur of colors as the light was distorted by the black hole's immense gravitational field, wrapping around it in dense coils like a light spectrum floating on the surface of a bubble.

In a blaze of energy, Aubrey crossed the event horizon. The kaleidoscope of colors turned suddenly bright blue and then plunged to black as Aubrey realized that no matter where he looked he saw the same thing: the oblivion within the black hole's dark heart, the singularity, where all paths inevitably led and where all histories were irrevocably erased.

And then there was nothing.