Deep Fire Rising Page 21

  Tisa felt his presence and quickly put on her glasses. She turned to face him. She looked guilty. “Do you want to talk here?”

  Mercer grinned. “Nope. I want a drink. I spotted the hotel bar two floors above us.”

  Five minutes later they were seated at an intimate table overlooking the caldera. The night had turned chilly and tall gas heaters threw coronas of warmth over them both. Not trusting an unfamiliar bartender with his usual, though not usually popular, vodka gimlet, Mercer had a double vodka and soda with a standing order for at least two more. Tisa drank water.

  “Okay, now we can talk,” he said, feeling the knots of muscle at his shoulders losing a fraction of their rigidity. “Tell me about the tower.”

  “In order for you to understand, I have to give you a little background. Do you know anything about acupuncture?”

  Mercer hadn’t expected such an odd question and was taken aback. For a fleeting moment he was back in an underground cell in Panama with a psychotic Chinese torturer named Mr. Sun, his skin pierced with hundreds of tiny needles that Sun used to induce unimaginable pain from all parts of his body. The memory was fresh and while Mercer hadn’t been physically harmed, the mental scars still felt raw. The old terror welled up, forcing him to swallow heavily at his drink to cleanse his throat. “I know a bit.”

  Tisa hadn’t seen his discomfort. “Then you know that the body is connected by force lines that transfer a person’s chi, or essence, and that these pathways can be manipulated to relieve stress or pain.”

  “Or to cause it,” Mercer said mildly.

  “There is a dark side to the art,” she acknowledged. “But used properly, acupuncture is a proven healing technique that works on animals as well as people. Do you believe that?”

  “How’s this? I don’t not believe it.”

  “Good enough. Now, what if I told you the earth was like the human body and that it too has pathways for a chi force.”

  “Are you talking about magnetic lines?”

  “No, not a tangible force. Something more”—she sought the right word and failed—“intangible.” She paused again. “I will give you the proof in a while, but for the sake of this discussion, accept that the earth has a life force, like a person.

  Mercer nodded. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. For now.”

  She shot him a secretive smile, as if she would make him pay for his skepticism. “This force is very real, you’ll see. Now if someone can detect the force and understand how it concentrates in certain places on the earth’s surface, they can also manipulate it.”

  Mercer raised an eyebrow. “Acupuncture for a whole planet?”

  “Exactly!” Tisa was delighted he understood.

  “Please don’t tell me you built the tower as a giant acupuncture needle to ease earth’s aches and pains.”

  She frowned at his mocking tone. “In a sense, that’s exactly what it is. What I’m about to tell you can be verified by checking oceanographic data. Over the past fifteen years a new ocean current has developed in the Pacific that is raising mean bottom temperatures.”

  “Yes, I know. I spoke with scientists aboard the Sea Surveyor. My theory is that your group knew about it, and also knew that a large hydrate deposit was right in the current’s path. You built the tower to keep it stable.”

  “You do understand. Methane hydrate can exist in only a very narrow range of temperatures and pressures and the new, warmer current would eventually cause a tremendous release. We had to do something. The tower uses the current itself to power machinery to chill a special liquid that keeps the deposit from erupting. Some methane manages to escape, however. That’s what I thought the Sea Surveyor would find and follow back to the site.”

  “You said that you monitor other sites for your organization.”

  “The Order.”

  “Yes, the Order. Are there other towers like the one I was just at?”

  “That’s the only one, but I think I know what you’re really asking. Are there other installations that can be used to harm people? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes. But I don’t know if my—if the splinter faction I mentioned has tried to gain control of them. I doubt it because many sites have full-time employees. The tower was easy for them to commandeer because it ran autonomously.”

  “If you knew about the current and the methane hydrates, why not tell the world? The UN or someone? Why do it yourselves.”

  “Because that is what we do, or at least that’s what we’ve been doing for almost twenty years.”

  That shook Mercer and he asked incredulously, “Your group is a hundred years old?”

  “Oh, gosh no. Its roots date back almost five hundred years. It’s only been the past two decades that we’ve done anything other than monitor the earth’s chi.”

  “Five hundred?” Mercer rocked back in his seat. He had assumed the Order had only formed recently, another New Age fringe group speaking of chi and force lines. Five hundred years made it feel more like a religion.

  “Yes, since the time of Admiral Zheng He and China’s treasure fleets.”

  “I’m not familiar with—”

  “Not too many people are,” Tisa said. “Zheng He was a eunuch slave who became one of China’s greatest military commanders. From 1405 to 1433 he was in command of seven epic journeys that ranged as far as the Persian Gulf, Madagascar and the mainland of Africa. Some say he went to South America too, and there’s archaeological evidence to back that claim. His ships were the most magnificent ever built and the largest too. The treasure ships were four hundred feet long at a time before Christopher Columbus used a puny ninety-footer to discover America. If I’m not mistaken, Admiral He’s ships were the biggest until the Industrial Revolution.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “You’re the victim of a Western-biased education,” she said to tease. “This period during the Ming Dynasty was the only time in China’s history that they looked beyond the Middle Kingdom and sought trade with other nations rather than wait for traders to come to them. The Ottoman and Persian empires were in full flower and the trade of goods and knowledge were unprecedented. The Ming navy was the most powerful in the world and stood poised to dominate the sea-lanes had they chosen. No nation could have stopped them. And then the emperor decreed an end to ocean commerce and China once again closed her borders to all but a few struggling along the Silk Road. The fleet of ships was destroyed, crews and captains who’d seen the distant lands were put to death. Much of what had been brought to China was burned.”

  Mercer was enthralled with her story, imagining the vast wealth the Chinese must have accumulated. “Why?”

  “No reason need be given. No one dared question the orders of the emperor. But one man did. He was a Confucian scholar named Zhu Zhanji, a master scribe in the emperor’s court who decried the destruction and risked his life to spirit away the best of what the traders had brought back. The cache included scrolls and texts gathered from the four corners of the globe, works of advanced mathematics being developed in the Arab world, as well as priceless pieces of art, ivory carvings, gems and tons of gold. It was a storehouse of knowledge and human ingenuity, perhaps the greatest ever amassed.”

  “You’re describing something along the lines of the Library of Alexandria.”

  “Perhaps some of that collection was part of what Zhu gathered. Who knows? Legend has it that an observer standing on a tall mountain couldn’t see the entire length of the caravan. Zhu Zhanji took the treasure trove deep into western China, into an isolated valley called Rinpoche-La, and bade the local people to guard it well. Zhu died on his return to the imperial court and the archive appeared lost for all time. But Zhu hadn’t chosen this valley by accident.

  “Rinpoche-La was an enigmatic place, fabled because even though it was high in the foothills of the Himalayas, it remains warm year-round. The village was built near geothermal springs deep inside the mountains, allowing for a standard of living not found anywhere else in that barren
part of the country.”

  “Sounds like James Hilton’s book, Lost Horizon.”

  “His story of Shangri-La is very likely based on the legend of Rinpoche-La,” she concurred, “similar to how Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula after hearing of the Transylvanian king Vlad the Impaler. For a hundred years the archive was left in vast underground storehouses beneath the monastery. Then some of the monks began to decipher what Zhu had left them. One particular part of the treasure caught their attention.”

  “I assume the gold.”

  “More Western bias,” she teased. “No, it was a set of blueprints and some texts, a gift to the emperor from the Sultan of Muscat, perhaps the richest man in the world at the time the treasure fleets roamed the Persian Gulf. No one knows how he came about the documents. It is believed they were created by one of his great mathematicians. When I heard these stories as a child, I imagined him to be like an Arab Leonardo da Vinci. It took generations for the monks at Rinpoche-La to understand the full potential of what they were studying, and many more years, centuries, in fact, for them to attempt to build the oracle described in the sultan’s plans.”

  “An oracle?”

  “They called it the Navel of the World, a machine that could accurately measure the earth’s chi. They completed the work in the 1850s and set about to see if the machine was right. And soon found it was. Uncannily so. For years they sent people to chronicle the effects of the chi and report back to the Lama what they’d seen. And that’s the way it remained until the summer of 1908 when a cataclysmic event upset the planet’s delicate balance of forces.”

  The year triggered another memory for Mercer. “Can I venture a guess as to the exact date? June thirtieth, 1908.”

  This time it was Tisa’s turn for a moment of stunned silence. “How did you . . . ?”

  “That’s when a meteorite slammed into Siberia near the village of Tunguska and leveled several thousand square miles of forest. The blast was heard in Scandinavia and darkened the sky as far as London. Can’t be too many other cataclysmic events that year.”

  Her eyes were still wide. “Few people have even heard of the event and yet you know the exact date.”

  “I’ll tell you the story why sometime,” he said evasively, then steered the conversation back to her tale. “You believe the impact changed the earth’s balance in some way.”

  “Not the planet’s, obviously, but the chi forces. Up until then, the earth behaved as the oracle at Rinpoche-La predicted. After the event, the predictions were no longer accurate. The Lama and his acolytes became concerned. The times and locations between predicted events diverged further as the years passed. Twenty years ago it was decided that the Order had to do something to correct it. We would heal the earth and restore its proper balance of chi.”

  “And the tower is one way you do this?”

  “Oh, no,” Tisa dismissed. “That is just one small project. A short-term, ah, Band-Aid.” She smiled at her turn of phrase. “Our main efforts are a little more subtle. You see, to rebalance the world we must focus on points where the earth’s chi lines intersect. This is becoming more difficult because humanity is also beginning to affect chi with such things as atomic bomb tests and hydroelectric dams that shift rivers. These all change the force lines.”

  Mercer was having a hard time keeping the skepticism from his expression. There could be some truth in the history Tisa had told him, but he didn’t believe a word about the interpretation. He was taunting when he said, “So you guys must hate what China is doing at the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest hydro project in history.”

  “On the contrary,” she replied quickly. “Members of our group were on the committee to see it built. Three Gorges is an important nexus point for chi. The weight of the water is helping to bring the earth balance.”

  Mercer scoffed. “Come on, Tisa. This is ridiculous.”

  “Eight years ago you were approached by a company called Jaeger Metals to help them in the development of a copper mine in Brazil. Do you remember that?”

  “Vaguely,” Mercer said uneasily. “I turned them down. How do you know about that?”

  “Because the Order controls Jaeger Metals. Do you recall why you refused the job?”

  “They wanted to shift billions of tons of overburden for a copper deposit that didn’t justify the expense. I tried to tell them they were pouring money into a hole with no bottom but no one on the board of directors cared.”

  “Do you know what happened to Jaeger?”

  “Yeah, they went ahead with the project, dug a three-mile-wide, eight-hundred-foot-deep pit in the middle of the jungle and went bankrupt.”

  “What you didn’t know, what no one knew, is that spot in the jungle was a chi point and by removing all that dirt we managed to regain five minutes of accuracy.”

  “I—” Mercer checked his sarcasm. Could that possibly be true? At the time, he’d suspected that the whole debacle was a financial swindle of some sort. He’d followed the story in trade magazines after bowing out and recalled that Jaeger had blown about seventy million dollars before giving up, but when the mining company folded no one came forward with a complaint. An SEC investigation after the collapse found all the money had come from a private source that was satisfied with Jaeger’s “good faith” efforts. Could Tisa’s group be that private source? Could all they have wanted was a giant hole and not the copper?

  They did build an undersea tower just to keep a hydrate deposit stable, a little voice reminded him. This appeared to be an organization where you couldn’t question their methods or their motivation.

  Tisa watched the play of conflicting thoughts in Mercer’s eyes. She looked pleased. “Jaeger’s just another example of how we work. You should see the oil field we paid a company to develop in the middle of Australia, about a thousand miles from the nearest oil deposit. They thought we were nuts but took our money and drilled eleven hundred wells for us, every one of them dry.” She frowned. “I hate to admit all that work only corrected another six minutes. Don’t worry, you’ll understand better tomorrow.”

  “What happens tomorrow?”

  “You just have to wait and see. I ask for one night of patience. If you don’t think I’m right then, well, nothing matters much after that.”

  She spoke earnestly, and Mercer recalled what she’d said the night they met. “The end of the world?”

  “As we know it, yes.” In the moonlight, her eyes began to glisten.

  Mercer knew it didn’t matter if he believed what she was saying. It was abundantly clear that Tisa was certain. The deep melancholy that so wracked her features was back, worse than ever.

  “What time is it?” she asked, just to say something.

  “Eight o’clock. That reminds me. I have something for you.” Mercer hastily reached into his jacket pocket. He opened and then handed across a slim black case. Inside on a bed of satin was a woman’s gold Raymond Weil watch. “I remembered you don’t have one and always seem to ask for the time. I bought it for you at Dulles on the way to Greece.”

  Mercer had expected her to be delighted. Instead Tisa regarded the watch as though it were a poisonous snake. He was at a loss.

  She quickly regained her composure. “I’m sorry. It’s beautiful. It’s just that I, well, I’ve never gotten in the habit of wearing one, but for you I will.” She snapped it around her slender wrist and studied it for a moment. “Thank you.”

  He hadn’t known what to expect when he saw her again. But certainly it wasn’t the disaster this night was turning out to be. He reached across the table and took her hand. “I’m sorry about the watch. Obviously I hit a nerve. How’s this? For the rest of the night we’ll just be two people on a date in the most romantic place I’ve ever seen. We will eat too much for dinner, have too much ouzo and forget the rest of the world even exists. What do you say?”

  Tisa wiped at her eyes and smiled. “A date? I guess that wouldn’t be too bad.”

  He stood and set a handf
ul of bills on the table, eager to get away from the dark mood he’d seemed to create at the bar. “Then let’s get at it.”

  They climbed back to Ipapantis Street, flowing with the tide of revelers until they came upon a tiny restaurant that had an even more spectacular view than the hotel bar. There were only six tables. The elderly owner was in the kitchen. His spry wife served as waitress. She brought a bottle of wine without waiting to take their order and a moment later brought bread and garlic-scented olive oil. She never asked what they wanted to eat. Apparently the restaurant didn’t have menus. Their dinner was going to be whatever the chef decided. And by the second course they knew to trust his decisions. The meal was excellent.

  For a while, Mercer and Tisa were uncomfortable together. The conversation started and stopped a dozen times. After her second glass of wine she admitted that this was the first date she’d been on in a long time.

  “I find that hard to believe. You’re beautiful. You must have to beat men off with a stick.”

  She looked into his eyes. “You think I’m beautiful?”

  “Good God, don’t you own a mirror? You’re stunning.”

  Her smile spread and her cheeks turned flush with embarrassment and delight. “Thank you.”

  “If I knew you could smile like that, I’d have told you hours ago.” Mercer was pleased with himself. “And truth be told I haven’t been on a real date in a while either.”

  “Oh, please. You must have had dozens of women.”

  “I—well, yes, sort of.” The comment had caught him off guard. “What I mean was I don’t date that much. I’m traveling seven or eight months out of the year, and I don’t think much of the idea of a one-night stand.”

  “Though you have had them.”

  “Uh, a few,” he admitted, not wanting to tell her the truth but unwilling to hide it from her. “I guess I just haven’t taken the time to get involved with anyone seriously.”

  “Maybe you haven’t found the right person.”

  Mercer laughed. “You don’t happen to know a guy named Harry White, do you?”