Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

“A CIA profile your government shared with us concluded exactly that. He’s a paranoid bugger. That seems to be what drives him. Shortly after Y2K, he fled the U.S. and came to Australia.”

“Why Australia?” Kurt asked. “From what I recall, you guys don’t even use nuclear power.”

“We don’t,” Bradshaw said. “And that’s exactly why he came here. He figured that would level the playing field. That, along with the fact that Australia and New Zealand were pushing back against visits by American nuclear warships. From what I understand, he seemed to think my government would embrace him.”

“Did they?”

“At first,” Bradshaw said. “He received the first real grant he’d ever seen and found work as a professor at the University of Sydney, while trying to perfect his theory. By ’05 he claimed he was only a year away from a workable system. But before he could run his big test, my government got involved and shut him down.”

“Why?”

“I have no answer to that,” Bradshaw said, “but there were people who thought his experiments were dangerous.”

That really wasn’t a surprise. Paranoid nuclear scientists doing unregulated trials in the dark tended to make people nervous.

“How does Hayley fit into all this?”

“She’s a physicist. She was a grad student when Thero arrived. She worked with him the entire time he was here. Hayley, along with Thero’s son, George, and his daughter, Tessa, all of whom were physicists, formed a tight little triangle looking up to Thero.”

“All part of the crusade,” Kurt guessed.

“True believers.”

“So you guys shut him down eight years ago,” Kurt noted. “Somehow, I’m guessing that’s not the end of his story.”

“It’s not. Thero and his family were ordered to leave the country or be deported. They might have gone back to the U.S., but a Japanese venture capitalist named Tokada gave him a lifeline. As near as we can tell, Tokada promised that Japan, unlike your country or mine, would support his work.”

“Makes sense,” Kurt said. “Japan has always been dependent on imported energy.”

“Massively dependent,” Bradshaw said. “They import ninety-eight percent of their oil and ninety percent of their coal. Their nuclear industry is pretty large, but because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power has always been a sore spot, even before the tsunami wiped out those reactors on the coast.”

Kurt could see the dominoes lining up. “So if Thero could tap into this zero-point energy, Japan could do away with all of that, and the whole country would hail him as a hero and probably make him a billionaire overnight.”

Bradshaw nodded again. “Thero moved there in ’06, setting up shop in a secret laboratory on a small island in the north known as Yagishiri. His son and daughter went with him. Hayley stayed behind.”

“Why?”

Bradshaw tried to make himself more comfortable, pulling at a pillow. “Well, for one thing, she’d begun to think they were headed down a dangerous path. Beyond that, she suffers from a debilitating fear of travel. She doesn’t fly, doesn’t even own a car. She mostly walks or takes the train. Until yesterday, she hadn’t been out of Sydney for nine years.”

That surprised Kurt, considering the bravery he’d seen in her.

“How’d you get her out here?”

“Sedatives.”

Kurt laughed.

Bradshaw coughed again and cleared his throat. “Two years after Thero went to Japan, there was an incident, a massive explosion on Yagishiri. His lab was completely obliterated.”

“What happened?”

“No one knows for sure. Some say his experiments literally blew up in his face. Satellite photos showed nothing left but a smoking hole in the ground. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived. Funerals were held for everyone believed to be present, including Thero and his children.”

“Case closed,” Kurt said. “A little too easy.”

“Yeah,” Bradshaw agreed. “Fast-forward to last year, and my government received a letter, claiming to be from Thero. It insists he’s come for revenge and that he intends to tear Australia apart, the way his family was torn apart.”

Kurt sat back. “Tear Australia apart? As in create chaos, social upheaval, or something like that?”