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  Sam Mannino typed a command into his desktop computer. “SAIC was awarded a $121.5 million firm fixed-price contract to produce thirteen prototype amphibious vehicles, with options for 60 low-rate initial production vehicles and 148 full-rate production vehicles. The full value of the contract is just over $1 billion.”

  “Correct. However, the base period of performance for the new program was expected to be completed in September. Before he left office, you petitioned my predecessor for another eight months. Why the delay?”

  “Son, when I took over as CEO of SAIC, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York had just won a $500 million judgment against us for over-billing on a project to modernize the city’s payroll and timekeeping system. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, even for a corporate giant like SAIC. We had to make cutbacks, and cutbacks lead to extensions.”

  “And delays on contracts lead to fines. Like when Kemp Aerospace was ten days late on one of our contracts to provide circuit boards to SAIC because one of our suppliers in the Midwest was held up due to a snowstorm—an act of God which cost us $40,000. To a small supplier like Kemp, that’s a lot of money. But, as they say, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Translated: Paybacks are a bitch.”

  Sam Mannino’s face paled.

  “Hey now, no worries; September’s still two months away.”

  “Mr. Under Secretary, surely we can work something out? Perhaps we can subcontract Kemp to help us on the Amphibious CVs?”

  “That smells too much like a bribe to me. Strong-arming suppliers isn’t what I’m about; nor is creating an adversarial relationship. My goal is to work with you, Mr. Mannino. You’ve got your eight months, not a day longer.”

  The CEO smiled in relief. “Thank you. And yes, I want to work with you, too.”

  “Just make sure every one of those ACVs performs as advertised. I don’t want our marines getting their socks wet because something leaked; if that happens you’re gonna need more than a plumber to save your ass from me.”

  “Understood.” Sam Mannino shook Captain Shariak’s hand. “How about lunch? There’s a terrific Italian place a few miles from here.”

  “I’d love to, but I have to be at MITRE Corp. in forty minutes. However, there is someone I’d like to say hello to while I’m here.”

  * * *

  Adam followed the armed security guard out of the elevator onto the seventh floor. They passed through a gated checkpoint and proceeded down a white-tiled corridor, security cameras sealed in tinted purple globes were mounted along the ceiling.

  The guard led him to a bank of three elevators. “These three shafts run to our sub-basement levels.” The guard swiped his passkey and entered his security code. The middle door opened and they stepped inside.

  There was no control panel; no buttons to push. The guard looked up at a camera lens. “SB-5.”

  Before Adam could grab hold of the interior rail, the floor beneath his feet plummeted and stopped, the entire descent taking less than two breathless seconds.

  The guard smiled as the door hissed opened. “Pretty cool, huh? For a moment you were actually suspended in mid-air. It’s like a rush of butterflies in your gut.”

  “Felt more like I swallowed my gut.”

  Adam followed him off the elevator and down another corridor, this one interspaced with metal doors. They stopped at a sealed room labeled LAB SB-5.

  The guard swiped his card, causing the door to unlock. “Dr. Manley is expecting you. I’ll wait for you out here.”

  “Thank you.” Adam entered, the door requiring extra effort to push in against a cushion of air. The moment the door clicked shut a green light flashed on above an identical door six feet away. Pushing the handle down, he again fought a cushion of air and entered.

  “Wow.”

  It was as if he had been transported to a tropical island—twenty feet of pink sand and a cluster of coconut palm trees were all that separated the lab’s covered, open patio from an azure sea. Small waves lapped gently along the shoreline with a soothing crash and sizzle; cool gusts of briny air ruffled his hair. So realistic was the effect that for a confusing moment Adam was actually convinced he was in the Caribbean.

  “It’s the latest in holographic design.”

  He turned to find a white male in his early sixties, dressed in a floral Tommy Bahama shirt, shorts, and sandals. His chestnut-brown hair was long and graying around the temples, his tan complexion contrasting nicely with his gray goatee.

  Adam extended his hand. “Shariak. I’m the new DoD Comptroller.”

  “I suppose that makes you the most powerful man in Washington—after the Vice President and dog catcher.”

  “Are you Dr. Neale Manley?”

  “Who else would I be?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re his cabana boy.”

  The older man walked to the porch’s bamboo rail. As he touched it, that section of the holographic projection materialized into a door. Opening it revealed a bathroom.

  The physicist removed a white lab coat from a hook and slipped it on. “Do I pass inspection, Mr. Under Secretary?”

  “Actually, this is more of a social call. About five years ago you worked on a project with Dr. Jessica Marulli. She asked me to say hello.”

  “Ah, Juice Marulli … what a sweetheart. How do you know her?”

  “We’re engaged.”

  “Then that makes you a lucky man, though still no more important than dog-catcher.”

  “I’m in town over the next three days; thought maybe I could treat you to dinner.”

  “Is Jessica with you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Dr. Manley removed a tube of antibiotic gel from his coat pocket, squeezed a drop of the clear liquid onto his palm, and rubbed his hands together. “Nothing personal, Mr. Deputy, but it’s not like we can talk shop, and I have no time for meaningless acquaintances.”

  Adam withdrew a business card from his pants pocket and handed it to the physicist. “In case you change your mind.”

  Dr. Manley waved it off. “If I need you I know where to find you. Your fiancée’s a good egg. Tell her I said hello.”

  The scientist surprised Adam by extending his hand.

  He dutifully shook it, the physicist’s palm still slightly moist with gel.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Adam climbed back into his jeep. Well, that was a waste of time.

  As he started the car he noticed his right palm was tingling. He rubbed it against his pant leg, only it grew worse, becoming sharp pins and needles.

  Adam stared at the flesh, which had turned bright pink where he had shaken hands with Manley.

  The gel? What was in it? Did he poison me?

  As he watched, a message appeared in his normal skin tone, the scrawled words standing out against his flushed, irritated flesh:

  8:15 p.m. Miyagi’s Sushi Bar. McLean, VA.

  7

  McLean, Virginia

  8:04 p.m.

  FOLLOWING HIS IPHONE’S DIRECTIONS, Adam turned on Chain Bridge Road and then made a left onto Curran Street. He saw the restaurant and parked; the lot half empty.

  Miyagi’s was a small private establishment, the tables packed close together on a bamboo wood floor, its two sushi chefs working in tandem behind the glass-enclosed bar.

  Adam stood at the counter behind a party of four waiting for a table and a man paying for takeout. He searched the dining area, only Dr. Manley wasn’t there.

  An Asian girl in her mid-teens gave him a warm smile. “For here or to go?”

  “Table for two. I’m meeting a friend, only he’s not here yet.”

  She glanced at one of the chefs, who signaled her very subtlety with two fingers. “Okay. We seat you first.”

  Overhearing their conversation, one of the women in the party of four protested. “Excuse me, but we were next.”

  “Hai. You are next party of four.” Grabbing two menus, she motion
ed for Adam to follow her. She led him around a maze of tables and past the sushi bar, then beyond a red and white checkered curtain separating the kitchen and restrooms from the dining area. Turning left, they followed a small corridor past cases of bottled water, empty syrup canisters, and kegs of beer to a door labeled PRIVATE.

  She knocked twice, paused and knocked twice again.

  A dead bolt slid back and the door opened, revealing a Japanese man in his fifties, dressed in a white collared shirt, red bow tie, and black slacks. He nodded to Adam and then stepped back, allowing him to enter the small office.

  Neale Manley was seated behind a desk, feasting on sushi rolls stacked on a decorative miniature wood boat. He waved Adam inside.

  “This is Komura, the owner of this fine establishment.”

  The Asian bowed his head. “Mr. Ambassador, it is an honor.”

  Squeezing past Adam, he closed the door behind him.

  “Mr. Ambassador?”

  “I told him you were the Deputy Ambassador to Japan. Bolt the door and sit down, we don’t have much time.”

  Adam slid the dead bolt in place and sat in the folding chair across the desk from Dr. Manley, who was unscrewing a pen, refitting the ink cartridge backwards inside the barrel shell—the connection causing a faint high-decibel sound.

  “White noise. In case anyone’s listening.”

  “Is that why you were so short with me this morning?”

  “SAIC’s ceilings have eyes; its walls have ears. Now pay attention, we only have about twenty minutes before your to-go order is ready and you’re out of here.”

  “My to-go order?”

  “I can’t be seen with you, Shariak. I agreed to brief you and point you in the right direction, but after tonight we don’t cross paths again. Is that understood?”

  Adam grabbed two spider rolls off the back of the serving boat, shoving them in his mouth. “I’m listening.”

  Dr. Manley pulled the food out of Adam’s reach. “What I’m about to tell you represents the tiniest acorn in the forest of the biggest kept secret in the history of the planet. If the world’s population knew how they’ve been lied to … how they’ve been purposely denied the good life that can be provided by free, clean energy systems because of a few selfish, greedy sociopaths, there’d be anarchy. There needs to be a revolt, the public needs to demand these technologies be made available. Not to bring them out is nothing short of a crime against humanity.

  “Since you’re not a quantum physicist like your fiancée, I’ll try to explain this in terms as simple as possible. Whether you accept what I say or not is ultimately up to you, but like that prosthetic limb you’re limping around on, reality is simply reality and the truth is the truth. To begin, our third-dimensional physical universe is literally swimming in an all-pervasive sea of quantum energy; only, like ignorant fish, we remain unaware of the water’s existence. Maybe a more appropriate metaphor is that, from our perspective, we can’t see the forest for the trees. For scientists, the clues have been around for over a century but one has to think outside the box in order to understand them.

  “Dr. Harold Puthoff was one of the first to conduct a search for this quantum sea of energy. Minus 273 degrees Celsius or zero degrees Kelvin is the absolute lowest temperature in the universe. According to the laws of Newtonian physics, all molecular activity should cease at absolute zero and no energy should exist. Of course, scientists used to say the same thing about the bottom of the ocean—no light, no energy—no life. And then we actually bothered to send a submersible into the depths to check things out for ourselves and, lo and behold, we found energy spewing out of hydrothermal vents and an entire food chain existing on chemosynthesis—the primordial soup that led to the origin of life on this planet.

  “Dr. Puthoff made a similar discovery. When he measured absolute zero, instead of an empty vacuum he was shocked to find a ‘seething cauldron’ of energy—a plenum of space where every square centimeter was filled with matter. Appropriately, he named it zero-point-energy. I prefer to call it the domain of W.S.F.M.—Weird Science and Freakin’ Magic.

  “It is zero-point-energy that causes subatomic particles to jiggle and then literally jump in and out of existence. What is actually happening is that the photons collide and are absorbed by other subatomic particles. The process excites them into a higher energy state, creating an energy exchange between the zero-point field and our physical world. Although they appear for only thousandths or millionths of a second, their appearance is yet another indication that something truly magnificent lies just beyond the physical realm and the limitations of our five senses—an endless supply of energy.

  “Two more experiments have proven the existence of the zero-point-energy field. The first is the Casimir Effect. By placing two plates made of conductive materials in a vacuum facing each other, Hendrick Casimir theorized that if zero-point-energy actually existed the total amount of energy between the surfaces of the plates would be less than the amount elsewhere, leading them to be drawn together—which is exactly what happened. A more dramatic experiment and an example of the W.S.F.M. deals with a ZPE-related phenomenon called sonoluminescense—the transformation of sound waves into light energy. If you fill a small spherical glass with water, resonate it with harmonious sound waves of 20 KHertz, and then blow a very tiny air bubble into the center of the flask the air bubble will rhythmically heat up to an incredible 30,000 degrees Celsius before imploding in an ultra short flash of light.”

  “Okay, Dr. Manley, I’m willing to accept the existence of this amazing ocean of energy we’re all swimming in. How do we tap into it to power our homes and fuel our cars?”

  “Good question. First, it’s important to understand that all of our present sources of electrical energy, from batteries to nuclear power plants, have one intrinsic problem in common. When the electrical current is fed back to the source that initiated it, it kills the source of the virtual photon flux within the vacuum.”

  “You just lost me.”

  “Let’s go back to basics. Constructed within the walls of this building is an electrical circuit made up of copper wire. Flowing through the copper wiring like a river, is an electrical current, its movement generated by the separation of positively-charged protons fixed in the copper atoms, the negatively-charged electrons moving through the wire. What initiates that separation of atoms is a dipole—an electromagnetic device.

  “Place a canoe in a river and off you go. Plug a lamp into a socket and the electric current flows through the copper wires into the bulb’s filament, and we have light. One problem: In a normal three-dimensional electrical circuit, any excess energy that is generated is lost when it kills the dipole. As a result, the energy in the magnetic field dissipates, leaving only about a 30% return for the load, making the systems we’ve been using for over a hundred years incredibly inefficient. Of course, the power company wants the circuit to be inefficient. After all, they’re profiting from every amp we use; and the fossil fuel and nuclear industries also get a nice chunk of that change since it’s their fuel that powers the dipole.

  “To figure out where things went wrong when they could have gone so right, we go back to the turn of the 20th century and Nikola Tesla. Far more brilliant than Edison or Einstein, Tesla realized more than a hundred years ago that humans may exist and think in three dimensions, but nature actually prefers to work in four dimensions—the fourth being time-space. By applying a high-voltage system to an electromagnetic field in a counter-rotating vortex he allowed nature to reorganize the flow of charges within the vacuum of a generator at the speed of light, essentially incorporating the fourth dimensional aspects of zero-point-energy. What’s more, instead of fading, Tesla discovered the flow of energy in the vacuum would continue forever without losing so much as a drop of its load. Think of it as tapping into an oil well; once you hit a geyser you no longer need a drill, the pressure simply takes over. Tesla also figured out that, by using a permanent magnet as the dipole, you can pas
s the flux back through the permanent magnet and it won’t get destroyed, provided it is welded into the material.

  “Tesla’s other challenge—which you just asked about—was figuring out a way to catch the energy. His solution was fairly simple—he found a material that separated the magnetic field from the magnetic field vector which flows unceasingly from the magnet, yielding a current of energy that could last another 15 billion years and beyond—a true over-unity system.

  “In 1901, Tesla was preparing to use the planet’s own magnetic field as a giant dipole in order to broadcast electricity to ships at sea without wires—an experiment that would lead to free energy and change the world … only J.P. Morgan intervened. The wealthy industrialist had invested in copper wire to use in homes and businesses and he decided that giving energy to the people without charging them for it was simply un-American. Before Tesla could conduct his experiment, J. P. Morgan got his cronies in Washington to shut it down and confiscate all of the scientist’s papers and inventions, leaving him destitute.

  “It’s a pattern that repeats itself throughout our history, every scientist who has ever figured out how to tap into the zero-point-energy field is shut down or silenced by the powers that be. Remember, it’s not enough to invent a ZPE device, you also have to sell it to the right people who won’t quash it, otherwise you must manufacture the design yourself and that requires money. Either way you’ll need a patent, and therein lies the second problem. Section 181 of the U.S. Patent law allows the government to arbitrarily determine if a technology or device poses a danger to our national security. Rogue elements within the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Energy have abused this interpretation of the law in their attempt to safeguard the world’s status quo. T. Henry Moray’s breakthrough work was ignored by the patent office, his lab ransacked. You want flying cars running on free, clean energy? T. Townsend Brown, one of the founding fathers of electrogravitics, discovered that he could access zero-point-energy by utilizing high voltages of 20,000 to 200,000 volts, causing his charged capacitors to lose their vessel’s mass and levitate off the ground. Big Oil wasn’t too keen on the competition so the authorities denied Brown a patent and confiscated all of his work. Other inventors are lured into partnering with bogus companies that black-shelf their inventions.