Rory wrestled with his anger, and decided to postpone his outrage over Lincoln’s controlling tactics. He didn’t have time for it now, and besides, Lincoln was right. At the moment, they wanted the same thing.
“Maybe I could be more helpful in the search if you tell me what that fucking crystal thing is,” he growled. “Why is it so important? Is it a gigantic diamond?”
“It’s a lot more valuable than that.”
“Okay…why?”
The sky was darkening, a sliver of pure orange hovering between sky and ocean. Rory looked down at the metropolis of Kailua-Kona spread out below. Lights were beginning to twinkle on, here, there, across the city, into the hills.
He adjusted the pitch control to make the wide circle that would put them on a northward heading, to the helicopter flightseeing outfit he’d spotted. Sorry, Mathilda. Gotta park this chopper for the night, but I’m not giving up yet. I’m still coming for you.
Lincoln watched the ground, the binoculars glued to his face. “Hang on, let’s not go north yet.”
“You see something?”
“Maybe.”
Rory peered out the pilot’s side, but he couldn’t make out much. It was too dark by now.
Much too dark. Where were the lights of Kona and all the neighborhoods nestled in the hills above it? In the last few minutes, most of them had gone out, it seemed.
“What’s going on down there?”
“Looks like a power outage. The entire grid is going down. Everyone who doesn’t have solar just lost their power.” Lincoln was carefully scanning the ground, but Rory still couldn’t understand what that had to do with Mathilda.
“That sucks, but it’s just going to make it harder to find her, isn’t it? We can’t see a damn thing.”
“There.” Lincoln pointed farther south, to an area between Kona and Captain Cook, the little town where the infamous captain had met his gory end. “That’s the darkest area, the epicenter of the outage. That’s where Mathilda must be.”
Rory stared over at his boss. “I’m going to need a little more explanation before I head to some random spot that happens to have a power outage.”
“Trust me, we’ll find her there.” Lincoln adjusted his binoculars to bring something into better focus.
“How about you trust me?” Rory said sharply. “Don’t you think it’s time? I’ve already signed an NDA, whatever you tell me isn’t going anywhere. Personally, I think we should land this bird and search on foot. I don’t even know what that place is. I can’t just set a helicopter down in a dark unknown spot.”
“It’s a resort. I’ve been there. Very exclusive, very pricey. There’s an open courtyard type of space in the middle surrounded by private cottages. You can land there.”
Rory gritted his teeth. “Trust goes both ways, Lincoln. If I’m going to trust you to guide me in for a landing, you have to trust me with why we’re going there.”
Lincoln lowered the binoculars and muttered something under his breath. It sounded like cursing, so Rory tuned it out. But he didn’t change their heading. He wasn’t turning this helicopter around until he got some damn information.
“Okay. This is top-secret, and I mean, military-level classified. If you say anything, you won’t just be breaking an NDA, you’ll be pissing off the federal government, multiple governments. This is very, very serious. Do you understand?”
Rory banished every trace of irreverence from his voice. “Yes, I understand.”
“That crystal is a harmonic magnifier. When it’s activated, whatever power source is nearby, it amplifies it a hundred fold, a thousand fold, they haven’t actually found the limits yet. The applications are…” He shook his head. “World-changing.”
That was enough for him. Rory turned the helicopter in the tightest circle he could manage. “You could power a whole town with a light bulb, that kind of thing?”
“Exactly. We wouldn’t need to produce so much energy. We could cut our production a hundred fold and deploy the crystals as amplifiers.”
The implications were mind-boggling. “That would change the entire world economy.”
“Yes, it would. Obviously, some people don’t want that to happen. A lot of people have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. If there’s a source of cheap or even nearly free energy? Everything will change.”
“Where did you find it? Is it naturally occurring?”
“It was, but the mine got destroyed by an earthquake last year. I’m sorry but I can’t tell you where it was. Before the earthquake hit, I had already bought a company that could create a lab-grown version of it. They’ve been working on it around the clock, and finally came up with something that seems to work. That’s the sample that was in my med kit. I was under strict instructions not to expose it to direct sunlight.”
