“Aren’t you going with me?” Kurt asked.

The guard stood with his hands behind his back. He said nothing.

“Guess not.”

Kurt took a deep breath and moved slowly down the hall until he reached the third door. He twisted the handle and stepped into a moderately lit room with all the equipment of an ICU. Lying in a bed on the right — with an oxygen line attached to his nose and an IV drip hooked up to his arm — was Cecil Bradshaw. He did not look well.

Kurt closed the door.

Bradshaw turned his head. His eyes were dark, sunken, and half closed.

“Glad to see you,” Kurt said. “Thought I was about to get hooked up to the power grid for a moment.”

Bradshaw’s eyes crinkled a bit, the closest he could come to a smile. He stretched for the switch that controlled the hospital bed, but he couldn’t reach it.

“Prop me up, will ya?”

Kurt found the button that raised the back of the bed and pressed it, holding it down until Bradshaw was almost in a sitting position.

An alarm began to flash on the monitor for a second, indicating Bradshaw’s pulse had dropped into the fifties and that his pressure was a little low.

“That’s what happens when you lose half your blood,” Bradshaw said. “They’ve been pumping it back in all night.”

“Surprised you had any left to begin with,” Kurt said.

“I’m a heartless bastard,” Bradshaw insisted. “We don’t require much.”

“Lucky for you.”

“I made them take me off the painkillers,” the ASIO chief went on to explain, “so I could talk to you clearly. First, I want to thank you for being the type of idiot who doesn’t know when to quit. I reckon that Hayley, Wiggins, and I all owe you our lives.”

Kurt appreciated the sentiment. “There’s a rugby match I’ve been wanting to see. Get me good seats, and we’ll call it even.”

Bradshaw laughed a little, but it made him cough. “The other night, after you intervened at the Opera House, I almost asked you to help out. I had a feeling about you. But once you mentioned the decompression sickness, I was able to put the puzzle together, so I let it go. Good thing I did or you’d have been right alongside us when we got hit. And then we’d all be dead.”

“A bit of luck,” Kurt noted.

“Seems so,” Bradshaw agreed. “I hope there’s more where that came from. I don’t have enough wind to beat around the bush, so I’ll just say it straight. I want you to take over the investigation.”

Kurt’s eyes narrowed.

“You guessed right,” Bradshaw explained, “I have a leak in my department. I don’t know how it’s possible, but it’s the only logical explanation. Despite my efforts, someone seems to know what we’re doing almost before we do. They’re batting a perfect record at beating us to the punch.”

“Is that why we’re here on the air base instead of in a civilian hospital?”

“That’s exactly the reason,” Bradshaw said. “My men are being told I’m still in surgery, and then they’ll hear that I haven’t regained consciousness. Aside from Wiggins and Hayley — who are temporarily being held in solitary like you and Zavala — no one is being informed of your presence or interference.”

“These things have a way of leaking out,” Kurt noted, “especially if we start poking around asking questions. Which, considering that we’re Americans, might be a little tricky down here on Australian soil.”

“It would be tricky,” Bradshaw agreed, “if you were staying on Australian soil.”

Kurt leaned against a desk. “What are you saying?”

“We’re dealing with terrorists here,” Bradshaw replied. “We believe the next phase of their plan will be launched from somewhere offshore.”

“Based on what?”

“Our informant,” Bradshaw said. “We’ve been told the project in the outback has been superseded by a larger, more dangerous plan. Evidence bears that out. Considering the effort it must have taken to build and hide that lab — or whatever you might call it — it’s completely irrational to blow it up unless you have something else to fall back on.”

Kurt nodded. It made sense to him.

“In addition to that,” Bradshaw added, “the shipment of mining equipment we intercepted was some of the latest self-contained, oceangoing gear available. It’s designed for use in the most hazardous environments and the worst weather. We plucked it off a freighter that left Perth and was officially bound for Cape Town, but the ship’s track was southbound, toward Antarctic waters, not west to South Africa.”

“There’s no accounting for bad navigation these days,” Kurt joked. “Where do you think they were headed?”

“We think Thero is hiding on the Antarctic shelf.”

“Thero?”

“The leader of this mess.”

Kurt pulled up a chair, swung it around, and sat down with his arms resting on the back, leaning toward Bradshaw. He considered what the man was asking. His own curiosity spurred him on, but there were bigger issues.

“NUMA is not exactly a law enforcement agency. Maybe you want to contact Interpol.”

“And wait six months for the paperwork to clear?”

Bradshaw shook his head in answer to his own question. “Besides,” he added, “this is a science problem as much as it is a terrorist threat. From what I’ve heard, you NUMA guys seem to specialize in that combination. And if they’re using the ocean as cover… well, that’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

Kurt nodded. “It is.”

“Then let me pass the baton.”

“It’s not my call,” Kurt explained. “All this… our involvement… It was just me being an idiot, like you said. But if we’re going to involve NUMA officially, I have to run it up the flagpole. I can’t promise you anything. But from what you’ve told me, I think our Director will see it your way.”

“Pitt?” Bradshaw said. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Sounds like a good man.”

“The best,” Kurt said. “But before I go to him, I have to know exactly what we’re dealing with. What are these people up to? Who is this guy Thero and what does he want?”

Bradshaw didn’t hesitate. He’d brought Kurt here to talk and he was ready. “Have you ever heard of zero-point energy?”

Truth was, Kurt hadn’t. At least not until he’d done the Internet search on Hayley Anderson.

“I saw the term on a scientific paper,” he admitted. “Can’t say I read more than a paragraph or two, but it sounded like some type of power source.”

“I won’t pretend to understand the physics,” Bradshaw said, “but the concept involves drawing energy from background fields that are supposedly all around us. As the theory goes, tapping into these fields would provide an unlimited and inexhaustible source of energy for the whole world, one that would cost almost nothing to use and distribute.”

“Sounds like a pipe dream,” Kurt said.

“Maybe it is,” Bradshaw said. “Who knows? But this group we’re dealing with believes in it. They claim they’ve unlocked its secret.”

Bully for them, Kurt thought. “How does that turn into what we saw today? If free energy is all about peace, love, and kilowatts, why are people getting shot and blown up?”

Bradshaw coughed and winced in pain. “I’ll give you a file with everything we think we know, but here’s the short version. As I told you, it starts with a guy named Thero, Maxmillian Thero. He’s an American, actually. A nuclear engineer by trade and a self-taught physicist. He spent eight years in your navy, working on submarines and aircraft carriers. He was discharged in 1978 and began work at Three Mile Island a few months before the meltdown in 1979.”

“Great timing,” Kurt noted.

“It was for him, apparently. Feeling like the world had narrowly avoided an epic disaster, he began to rethink his career choice. He bounced around a lot and eventually launched a crusade to find an alternate system of generating power. At some point, he hit on the idea of zero-point energy. As near as we can tell, he spent years trying to get funding and prove the concept was workable. Unfortunately, he was never taken seriously.