Black Rain

“We ran a program with your Research Division’s permission,” Kaufman said, proudly. “Something to do with weather simulation, I think. Seems to have caused a little storm on your end, though.”

Gibbs glared at the man. Just as Blundin had predicted, the chink in the armor of Research Division had cost them. “It makes sense,” he said angrily. “A big tech company like yours would have the expertise. My question is, why? Do you have any idea what kind of hell you’re about to bring on yourself?”

Kaufman leaned back, showing little concern at Gibbs’ aggressiveness. “Under different circumstances,” Kaufman said, “you might be right. But not here. Not now. I’m offering you a way out. The best—and last—chance you’ll ever get to put this thing behind you.”

“The NRI doesn’t need your help.”

“Not the Institute, my friend, you. It’s my intention to help you.”

“Help me do what?”

“To survive, for one thing,” Kaufman said. “It took me a while to figure it out. But it’s become apparent to me that you’ve run this thing privately. You’ve used NRI assets and proxies, but it’s your operation.”

Only at this moment did Gibbs feel the true weight of his actions. They hammered him in rapid succession; decisions made, steps taken to hide his tracks, lines crossed from which there was no going back.

Kaufman appeared impressed. “I have to admit—that’s a bold play. But it puts you in a bad position now that you’ve run into problems. The simple recovery you planned for has become tangled up with all kinds of issues and delays. You’re running out of money, or close to it. You’re just about out of time too, because people are starting to ask questions—questions you can’t answer.”

Gibbs’ jaw was clenched. He tried to relax.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky,” Kaufman said, offering him a line. “Maybe you’ll find what you’re after and disappear with it before the walls come crashing down. But then what? You can’t take it back to the NRI—or any other American organization, for that matter. Not only will they wonder where it came from but they’ll want to know what the hell you’re doing with it in the first place.

“Develop it yourself, then? With what? You can’t possibly have the resources to make a play like that or you wouldn’t have tapped the NRI accounts to begin with. So you have to sell it. The only question is: to whom?”

Gibbs remained silent, his proverbial right.

“National governments are your best bet, but which ones?” Kaufman said. “You can’t turn it over to your own; we’ve already established that. So where do you go? The Japanese? Sure. Why not? They import virtually all of their energy, they’re technologically advanced and they spend millions on this kind of research every year. But in your world they’re your chief rival, the economic equivalent of the Russians in the Cold War, and while you may be a thief, you’re not a traitor. So the EU, the Russians and the Chinese are probably out as well, at least until you’ve exhausted all the other options. And that leaves mostly the destroyers.”

“The destroyers?”

Kaufman elaborated. “Those who stand to profit most, if this revolution never comes to pass: the nuclear industry, big oil, the OPEC countries.”

Kaufman’s tone became pragmatic. “If I were you, the nuclear industry would be my first choice, although they’re not exactly a monolithic group. They might even use it one day, when their trillion dollars of capital investments run out of useful life. But more than likely they’d prefer to keep building big, expensive, dirty power plants, instead of small, cheap, clean ones—there’s more responsibility to it, more prestige and of course, more money. They’d pay you handsomely for it, though. So would big oil, OPEC and the Seven Sisters, or what’s left of them. They’d bury you in petrodollars to keep this thing on the shelf, or they might bury you for real—maybe both. At the very least it’s something you’d have to worry about for the rest of your life, because as long as you live, they have exposure.” He paused, looking Gibbs in the eye. “A terrible thing,” he said, “to live with exposure.”

Gibbs listened to Kaufman’s line of reasoning with a strange sense of déjà vu. He’d run through the same process a hundred times in his own mind. He had a plan, and it involved his disappearance, something his CIA background would assist him in, but there would always be danger. He counted on being able to handle it. “Why tell me all this?” he asked, bitterly. “In other words—what the hell is your point?”

Kaufman obliged him at last. “Because what you hoped to find out there—what we both hope to find out there—is the beginning of a revolution, one that will render the industrial and computer revolutions mere blips on the time line.