Chapter 56: Energy Device Rollout

Kevin and his group arrived at Emma’s estate at 5:45 p.m.; they had taken the M11 and beaten the evening rush hour out of London. Kevin was driving one of the embassy vehicles, courtesy of Warren Porter, and since he had some experience with driving in England, Japan, and Indonesia, he was familiar with left-hand traffic.

Emma had returned from her office a few minutes earlier and met them as they pulled up.

“This is quite a spread,” Kevin remarked to her as they walked to the front door. “The grounds are like a park.”

“It is. I’m so happy the trustees decided not to sell it when Grandma died. They folded it into the real estate operation and set it up to hold events and small conferences. The university uses it a fair amount for housing for visiting faculty too. That’s why there’s a staff, and I decided to keep them and continue the leasing when I’m not in residence—I keep one wing for my exclusive use and it’s self-contained too; it’s private from the rest of the main building. Now go freshen up and put on your dressy togs like I told you to bring; we’re going to a great restaurant for dinner and they require jacket and tie, semi-formal for the gals.”

At the restaurant, they were shown to a private room; several people were already there. Emma introduced them.

“Tamara and Andrew, you’ve already met our dinner guests. You other ladies and gents, gather ‘round. Dr Sir Henry Stafford, Dr Nils Thomassan, Dr Beverly Norris, and Mrs Wilma Carter. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Mr Kevin Coris GBE and Miss Denise Roberts GBE, to Dame Amelia Hadad and Sir Jeremy Porter, and to Mr Peter Winsberg, my guests for tomorrow’s event. My friends, Dr Stafford is our president and CEO; Dr Thomassan is our chief technology officer; Dr Norris is our director of research, and Mrs Carter is our chief financial officer. Sir Gregory Hodges, who’s the vice chair of EEC Energy, is in Scotland and couldn’t be here this evening, and our manufacturing operations director also couldn’t be here—he’s making the last-minute preparations for tomorrow.

“My company executives, I wanted you to meet these very special people whom I only met last week but have already become quite dear to me, and as well, apparently to Tamara. She’s told me that she feels that somehow our futures are linked, very likely through our energy business and my friends’ ties to projects to improve conditions in third-world countries. So I wanted you all to get to know each other.”

They had a pleasant meal and had a far-ranging discussion about the company’s plans, Kevin’s foundation, and all of their education plans. Emma told them that she would be giving them a tour in the morning and that Andrew would be joining them after a morning meeting he had at the university’s Economics Department.

They parted after promising to chat after Friday’s event.

Tamara and Peter woke up early the next morning and got ready to meet the others for breakfast.

While they were getting ready, Peter remarked to Tamara, “Damn, sweetie, I don’t know what’s the matter with me ... I feel jumpy and unsettled. Felt it all night and didn’t sleep very well.”

“Yeah, me too,” she replied. “So that’s another ability you’ve gained, you know. Dad has it too; it’s not quite precognition where you know what’s gonna happen. It’s a premonition ability. Something’s gonna happen today; I feel it too. It could be either good or bad, you know, but my feeling leans to bad right now. I don’t have any idea what will happen, though. When I get this feeling, I just stay alert. You should do that too, and if some thought pops into your head suddenly, pay attention. It could be a message from a lwa.”

“Damn, really? That’s crazy. Okay, I’ll keep alert. This is such weird shit.”

They met the others for breakfast. Emma had gone to the facility earlier, the housekeeper told them, and that she would be meeting them to give them a brief tour before the unveiling event. Andrew would be joining them from his meeting at some time this morning.

They left Emma’s estate at 8:45 a.m. in the estate’s limousine. It was just a short ride to the EEC Energy Solutions facility which was located on the River Cam in Grantchester Meadows, just inside the Cambridge city limits.

As the limousine carrying Tamara’s group drove down the lane leading into the facility, they could see a number of buildings of varying height on the site, dominated by a modern six-story office building, and between the buildings were several large parking areas, nicely landscaped and arranged to fit into the terrain. One of the parking areas had a large tent set up at one side of it.

The limousine stopped in front of the office building and as they climbed out of it, Peter remarked to Tamara, “You’re not taking that backpack of yours with you, are you, sweetie?”

Tamara grinned at him. “Peter, you know that I go just about everywhere with it, so why do you bother asking? This time there’s no electronics lab in there—instead I’ve got your Harry Potter cloak and stuff there.”

He just shrugged, “Oh, right.”

They walked into the lobby of the building and stopped at the security desk.

The guard was watching them enter and as they approached, asked, “Hello, Tamara; this is your Coris, Roberts, Porter, et al, group?”

She answered, “Yes, sir; that’s us.”

“Excellent,” the guard responded. “Tamara’s already all set. You others, sign in here, please. I’ll need to see your IDs and then I’ll call Dr Clarke.”

After the guard gave them their facility ID cards on lanyards, he made a call, and a minute later, a woman came out of the office area entrance.

“I’m Helene Steward, Dr Clarke’s admin assistant. Hello, Tamara. She sent me to fetch you lot. She’s been on the bell all morning getting important news. We need to take the lift here.”

Steward led them to a conference room on the top floor and a minute later, Emma came in.

“‘Morning,” she greeted them. “I’ve been busy—Sir George rang me last night and told me that earlier in the day, there was a huge explosion in a building in Bedford, about 25 miles west of here. The building used to be a warehouse and distribution center but was unoccupied until about a year ago but no one knew how it was being used then—no cargo lorries were arriving. The blast leveled the building and the debris closed the road out in front. The surrounding structures only had minor damage, fortunately; it was a big open building and the explosion just popped the walls open like a balloon. There were eleven people inside, all Russians, and they all died. There was a lot of electronics equipment in there too. One of the deceased was our missing former engineering aide, so we now know where those stolen polymer sheets went.

“Sir George told me that MI5 was involved with our industrial espionage case now and told me that I should ring the inspector in charge this morning; they’ll be visiting here later today.”

“What’s MI5?” Kevin asked. “I heard of MI6, that’s like the CIA, right?”

“Right. MI5 is internal U.K. domestic security and MI6 is the foreign intelligence service,” Emma told him. “I’ve spent much of the past hour talking to the MI5 inspector and a detective. They’ve been aware that there are Russian agents in the country who were sent here to try to learn about our energy device. They have info that the Russian government is worried about how the device will impact their export of oil and natural gas to Europe. About a quarter of the EU’s natural gas comes from Russia now, down from 40 percent, and it seems that the Russians are worried that our energy-storage device will cut into that number even more.

“The MI5 agency people are fairly certain now that the Russian government is behind the spying here. They think that their objective is to learn about the device, how it works, and perhaps if it’s vulnerable to sabotage or other kinds of tampering. I asked him if there’s anything we should change about our security here and he told me that he’s been told that we have excellent physical security in place. They will be giving us some further advice about operational security. He said we need to be alert for any overt attempts to break in here or other direct action against the company. I told him that we had increased our security staff following the theft of the parts and he said that was good, but to stay alert. As well, they are working on some other leads they have on our spying case. Well, that’s all he would tell me.

“So let’s go look at our facilities now. Tamara’s seen everything earlier, obviously. You can view the labs but we can’t enter the manufacturing area itself, although I have photos I can show you. Then I’ll show you a video of the manufacturing process. We have about ninety minutes before we’ll go to that big tent outside where you’ll get a close look at the unit. The show starts in a little more than two hours from now.”

Emma took them through the labs and they noticed that there seemed to be many uniformed security people present.

Kevin asked Emma, “You really do have lots of security here. Is that all because of the espionage or for the event today?”

“After discovering that those device components went missing, we did add a few more personnel to cover the area, especially the lab buildings, yes,” she answered. “And a few more when we found out about the explosion last week.”

“But they’re not armed...” Kevin went on.

“Can’t be,” she told him. “In the U.K., even the routine police patrols aren’t armed. Carrying any kind of weapon, except by special police units, is illegal here, even batons, knives, and defensive agents like pepper spray aren’t allowed.”

She brought them into a room set up like a classroom lecture hall.

“We do our presentations here. Our facility has a sizable scientific and engineering staff and we do a lot of basic research too,” she told the group proudly. “I’ll show you the photos and videos of the manufacturing area now. Please remember that this information is proprietary; you signed those NDAs that bind you from spilling our secrets, didn’t you.”

They all acknowledged that they understood and Emma began the show. Then it was time to go to the tent where the device would be unveiled. Emma led the group out of a side door of the building. To the right, they saw a series of single and two-story buildings surrounded by a four-foot concrete wall topped by a chain-link fence, which in turn was topped by a concertina wire coil.

“Looks like a high-security area, almost like a prison, over there,” Kevin remarked.

“Exactly,” Emma told him. “The manufacturing area there is very high security. That area is just like a military-grade security installation. The concrete walls deter a vehicle crash-through. That’s where the clean rooms are located and where the energy-storage units are manufactured.”

To the left was a large parking area and a tent had been set up at one side of it.

“The unveiling of the unit will be out there,” Emma told them. “We’ll get our private peek now.”

Several people were already walking over to the tent from a far parking lot. A uniformed security guard approached them, holding a cell phone, and calling Emma’s name. Both Tamara and Peter had noticed him and were watching him using a cell phone; that looked unusual since they had noticed that the guards carried radios. When the guard looked at Emma and called her name, they both stiffened.

“Emma!” Tamara called urgently as Peter stepped between her and the guard as the guard started to run toward the group. “He’s an imposter! Get back to the building!”

Suddenly a van roared up the nearby drive, about a hundred feet away, jumped the curb, and stopped about twenty feet away. Five men started to get out, two were carrying what appeared to be pistols. The approaching guard, now within arm’s reach of the group, reached to grab Amelia, who was closest to him. She twisted in his grip, grabbed his arm, and holding onto it, twisted her body and pulled him around into a shoulder throw and they all could hear the muted crack of a breaking bone just before the sharp thud of the guy landing on the concrete walk sounded as he screamed in pain. Then Amelia took off, running after Tamara and Emma, who had reached the building door, while Peter turned and ran to intercept the men from the van.

Amelia looked around, expecting to see Jeremy and the others following, but they had turned toward the van and were closing on it, trying to get there before the men could get themselves oriented. They had all seen that the men from the van had been distracted by the screaming of the ersatz guard, who was lying on the ground, and one of the men from the van had moved toward him but another called him back. Kevin and the others had stopped, however, when several men quickly recovered, pulled two AK47s out of the van, and began pointing the weapons at them, shouting that they were to walk ahead of them toward the building door where Emma had re-entered the building.

Emma, now inside the building, pulled out her mobile phone and began dialing, but Tamara turned away from her and Amelia and opened her backpack. Shielding her actions from the others, she reached into a compartment and pulled out three two-inch-diameter silvery rods and quickly fitted them together to form a ten-inch-long tube.

“What can we do?” cried Amelia, watching through the door. “Denise—Jeremy—they’re in trouble!”

“I’m on it,” Tamara grunted. “Wait here,” she said as she hid what she was doing.

She quickly pulled on a tab on the side of the middle cylinder and a silvery mesh web unfolded like a little parasol umbrella from its side. Then she slipped out through the building door, pointing the concave side of the umbrella-shaped tube toward the armed men, who were standing ten feet away from Kevin’s group, one of whom was shouting at them to move toward the building while Kevin was shouting back in Japanese, pretending that he didn’t understand, and the armed men were looking at each other in confusion.

Damn, that’s clever thinking, Kevin, Tamara thought as she activated the device she had assembled, her Mod 5 maser, now powered by an internal high-output accumulator. The maser’s excitation chamber wasn’t air this time; it was a mixture of nitrogen, argon, and helium that she had developed, and the maser energy that it produced would heat metals and other dense solids very rapidly. This device was an offshoot of her latest attempt to build a collimated microwave beam power transmitter and this device produced a relatively efficiently focused beam.

Within fifteen to twenty seconds, the attackers began shouting in alarm and began dropping their weapons as they were becoming too hot to hold and one man was screaming and slapping at his waist. Seeing this, Kevin, Jeremy, and Peter, followed by Denise, moved in on the men and, in a very rapid series of moves, had them all down on the ground. Tamara quickly disassembled her device and stowed it back in her backpack as Amelia came flying out of the door. She ran out to Jeremy as Andrew came running out the door with Emma.

“What the hell, Emma?” Andrew asked as he looked at the carnage.

“Some miracle work by Tamara,” Emma told him. “That girl is bloomin’ deadly. She’s definitely very much like her dad. Tell you later, honey.”

Several minutes later, in addition to the small crowd gathering around the screaming, writhing men on the ground, several police units arrived. Some of them had already been enroute to the facility to prepare to set up traffic control for the upcoming event. Emma had also phoned her security supervisor, who had come running from the tent, to tell him to get the crowd to stay away. Then the police took over, called for medical aid, and began asking questions, only to be stopped by two plainclothes officials who had arrived and identified themselves as MI5 officers. They had already been enroute to interview Emma about the warehouse explosion.

The MI5 officials told Emma and the others with Kevin to stand by and then began examining the area, noting the weapons and the attackers’ burned hands.

Meanwhile, Tamara had whispered to Emma. “Quick! Is there anyone in the tent that you can trust who can operate the storage unit?”

Emma nodded. “Dr Thomassan should be there.”

“Call him and let me talk, okay?”

Emma made the call and told Thomassan to do whatever Tamara said to do, then handed the phone to Tamara.

Tamara got on the phone. “Listen, it’s Tamara. Yes, it’s me; we’re all okay. Point the unit’s microwave broadcast antenna at the commotion near the west building door; that’s where we’re at. Do that now.”

“...”

“We’re okay, tell you later what happened, okay? Listen, when the police ask, if they ask, tell them that Emma called you and said to turn on the broadcast power to max. You know the settings?”

“...”

“Right. Then she told you to turn it off after twenty seconds. Don’t change what I told you and don’t ask why. Just remember what I said.”

“...”

Tamara whispered to Emma, “That should explain how the guns got hot. Tell the cops you had a wild idea; that they were just in the right place to point the beam at and that microwave power feature is still experimental. It heats metal quickly but it’s not harmful to people in small doses. Ad lib as needed.”

Emma smiled at her. “Again, you saved the day and saved all of us too.”

Tamara grinned mirthlessly. “Had a premonition this morning and it got very strong as we went out to the tent. The fake guard? When I first saw him, I could sense his evil but he wasn’t acting right. He also had a bulge under his arm. You said that guards can’t be armed but he was packing a gun. Shit, did you see the move Amelia put on him?”

Emma nodded. “She’s a real firecracker, isn’t she? And damn dangerous herself, as well.”

The police were primarily questioning the others—Kevin, Jeremy, Peter, and Denise, since they had been identified as the people who were being held at gunpoint. Only after further questioning did they learn about Amelia’s role. Since Emma and Tamara were inside the building at the door, the police and the MI5 officials were treating them as just witnesses.

“Ma’am, I’m Officer Bixby and this is Officer McDougal, MI5. Can we go to a quiet location?” Bixby asked Emma. “I understand you’re in charge?”

“Not operationally; I’m the chairperson of the directors,” Emma told him. “The CEO is in charge and he’s probably still with the device in the tent, getting things ready to begin the unveiling. How long shall I ask him to delay it?”

“Perhaps a half hour? We need to get some final details sorted.”

“I’ll ring him and let him know. Are the others all right? Those talking to the officers over there.”

“Excellent shape, no injuries. We’ll tell you their details after your interview,” Bixby said.

Emma called Stafford to have him delay things if needed and then took the MI5 officers inside to a quiet room where she explained how they had been accosted as they were walking to the tent.