A Vision of Fire

Mikel Jasso — born in Pamplona, educated at Harvard, elite member of the Group — was the aircraft’s sole passenger. He had begun the two-thousand-mile journey alone with his thoughts, his camera case, and a celebratory glass of Royal Salute scotch — a tradition after every successful mission. The Group routinely monitored that large southern swath of the hemisphere, and in ten years Mikel had successfully retrieved all eight of the relics they had instructed him to acquire. The relics came from museums, scientific research ships, military vessels, and tourists. This time the quest had begun four days earlier, when they intercepted a cell phone message from a Dr. Story to a colleague at Oxford. Jasso had been dispatched to the Falklands immediately by private jet. He had booked a room at the Malvina House Hotel, waited for the Captain Fallow to arrive, talked to the crew, studied plans the Group had obtained from contacts at the admiralty, and made his move the next night.

As heists go, this one had been relatively effortless. Jasso knew that daytime on the vessel was used for repairs and provisioning, after which most of the crew went ashore. The watch at night was lax: no one, neither thief nor stowaway, had reason to board a geological survey ship that was about to head back into the cold, unwelcoming Southern Atlantic.

There had been no problem finding Dr. Story’s cabin. Jasso had taken care to stay on the port side, where there was no moonlight and the shadows were long and deep. If he had been caught, that too would have been easily taken care of. Jasso was publicly, aggressively opposed to drilling in these waters in general and on the Patagonian Shelf in particular. It was a useful cover story for a man who spent so much time on Group business in that region, from the Humboldt Plain in South America to the Agulhas Plateau in Africa. If he had been detained by seamen or law enforcement, he would have claimed that Falkland Advanced Petroleum was not only harming the environment, they were recklessly destroying submerged historical treasures. The company would have wanted nothing more than to be rid of him. At worst, he would have had to turn over the relic. It would have ended up in a local museum from which, one day, it would disappear.

But he had not been caught. The artifact was his.

As soon as the jet was airborne, Jasso set his tablet on the table beside his scotch and established a Skype connection to New York. In less than fifteen seconds the thin face of Chairwoman Flora Davies filled the screen. Her eyes were alert, expectant. She smiled when she saw Jasso’s grin.

“You did it.”

He raised the glass to himself.

“Show me,” she said. “Please.”

Jasso hefted the camera case to his lap and opened it. He removed a pair of rubber gloves, slipped them on, and withdrew the swaddled artifact. He placed the face of it in front of the red eye of the camera. Though it was probably just the glow of the computer screen, the object seemed luminescent.

“It’s a symbol,” she said.

“It appears so,” Jasso agreed. “Something I’ve never seen.”

“Nor I. It’s beautiful,” the woman remarked, leaning forward. “Turn it around.”

Carefully rotating the object, he showed her the reverse side. Seeing the markings facing him, in the dark, they really did have an inner radiance of their own.

“The finger of God,” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“Jehovah on Sinai, writing the tablets,” he said. “I was just thinking — the markings are still visible even away from the light.”

“That’s the metal content reflecting ambient light, I would suppose.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’ll bet this is what the tablets of law may have looked like to Moses after they were cut from the rock.”

She smiled. “A theological side, Mr. Jasso? You?”

“I’d describe it as more poetic,” he said.

“Either applies,” she said.

Jasso did not disagree. He was not a religious man. He believed in the aspirational power of human beings, not in the interference of gods and demigods. Still, the impact of religion and mythology on what every civilization dreamed of and strived for could not be ignored.

“Excellent job,” she said, sitting back. “Thank you.”

“An honor, as always,” Jasso said.

He closed the tablet and nestled into the seat. His eyes yearned for sleep but he wanted to savor the moment a little longer. The artifact’s presence weighed heavily in his left hand. It was probably just his imagination, but it seemed to have the faintest vibration, like a tuning fork. He switched on the overhead light and brought it closer to his face.

“What kind of metal are you, I wonder.”

If it was of meteoric origin, it would be iron, but it seemed lighter than that. Silver? Aluminum? Magnesium? It had the look of those metals, but in a form unlike any he’d ever seen.

As he stared at it, the artifact had an almost mesmeric quality. It was something like watching a gyroscope: you couldn’t see it moving, but you felt somehow that it was.