‘But because they’re reflected back into the Crucible and pinging around in a small space . . .’ said Nina.
‘Precisely. As the chain reaction continues, more and more neutrons enter the Crucible, but then find it hard to escape. At a certain point, they reach a critical state of their own – causing a neutron burst of such intensity that it cannot be contained. Any remaining atoms of mercury-196 that have not already been transmuted now do so, even if they are not inside the Crucible itself.’
‘So that’s why the cave walls were covered in gold?’ said Lonmore.
‘The mercury vapour inside the cave is also partially composed of mercury-196,’ Mikkelsson confirmed. ‘It too is transmuted by the neutron burst. Those atoms in contact with a surface become bonded to it.’
‘That’s what happened to Midas’s daughter,’ said Nina, remembering the faceless figure in the cave. ‘She was in there when the reaction happened. Fried by radiation, boiled like a lobster or coated in gold and suffocated: however she died, it wasn’t in any good way.’
‘Are there any good ways?’ asked Sarah quietly.
‘If you have lived a good life, you can die a good death,’ said Mikkelsson. ‘But I hope none of us will have to worry about this for some time.’ He glanced at Olivia, who as the oldest in the room by some margin was not enthused by the thought. ‘The question now is what to do about the Crucible.’
An animated discussion broke out around the table, the members of the Legacy clearly having strong – and differing – ideas. Mikkelsson tapped on the table again. ‘One at a time, please. Spencer?’
‘The answer’s obvious,’ said Lonmore. ‘We go ahead with my hedge fund proposal, and let Wall Street work its magic with the full remaining value of the Legacy. Only now, we have security. If we need more gold, we can have it. We can make it.’
‘Using what?’ demanded Olivia. ‘This place is a geothermal plant, remember, not a nuclear reactor.’
‘And the Midas Cave is on the other side of the world,’ Anastasia reminded him. ‘We can’t just drop by whenever we need more gold.’ She leaned towards the crystal. ‘There is another option. We sell the Crucible.’
Both Olivia and Lonmore regarded her in disbelief. ‘What?’ he gasped.
‘You can’t be serious,’ said Olivia.
‘I’m entirely serious. How much would a nation state, or even some ultra-wealthy individual, pay for the ability to produce unlimited gold? We could name our price. The Legacy would be secured for ever.’
Olivia shook her head. ‘That is unbelievably naive, Ana.’
‘It’d also be a one-time deal,’ Lonmore pointed out. ‘With my proposal, we keep hold of the Crucible—’
Nina couldn’t hold in her own opinion any longer. ‘Excuse me!’ she said loudly, waiting for all eyes to turn to her. ‘Hello, hi. Can I point out a few things? Firstly, the Crucible is a priceless archaeological relic, not your personal ATM. Secondly – and I could have gone with this first, as it’s the biggie – it’s not yours to use!’
‘It isn’t yours either,’ said Anastasia frostily. De Klerx edged up behind her, facing Nina, and folded his arms. The intimidating gesture did not go unnoticed by Eddie, who broke off from playing with Macy to move closer to the table.
‘If it belongs to anyone, it’s the monks of Detsen monastery,’ Nina insisted. ‘But their abbot entrusted it to me, so for now, I’m the person who decides what to do with it. That might mean handing it back to the monks, or turning it over to the IHA. But it definitely isn’t going to be put up on eBay! And as for using it to make more gold, you’ll find that kinda hard, since the Midas Cave was destroyed.’
That caused shock around the table. ‘What!’ cried Lonmore. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
Nina treated the question with richly deserved sarcasm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was your employee and was supposed to brief you the moment I arrived.’ Eddie laughed.
Lonmore was flustered, but Olivia responded with amusement. ‘She told me.’
‘And you decided not to tell us?’ he snapped. ‘It’s the same old story with you, isn’t it, Olivia? Control information, let it out in little trickles when it’s to your best advantage!’
‘Please, Spencer, be calm,’ said Mikkelsson in a placating tone. ‘Nina is right. Though it would have been better, Olivia, if you had shared what you knew before the meeting.’
‘I thought it best if Nina gave her account of events in her own time and as it suited her,’ Olivia replied, nothing but genteel innocence in her voice.
‘I can give you a very quick precis right now,’ Nina said. ‘Eddie and I went to Nepal, we convinced the monks to let us see the Midas Cave, then after we did, we were attacked.’
‘Attacked?’ said Lonmore, eyebrows rising. ‘Who attacked you?’
‘We don’t know,’ Nina admitted. ‘Most of them were Nepalese mercenaries, but the leader was a Greek called Axelos. We don’t know who he was working for, though.’
‘Greek?’ A look of perturbation crossed his face. ‘Wait – you weren’t joking about shooting down a helicopter?’ he asked Eddie.
‘Nope,’ said the Englishman. ‘There were two choppers, full of . . .’ He remembered that Macy was in earshot. ‘Bad guys. I took one out, but the other got away.’
‘With the big Crucible,’ added Nina.
‘How could anyone have known where you were?’ asked Anastasia.
‘That’s a question I’ve been asking myself. Very few people knew we were even going to Nepal. Now, I trust the people I dealt with at the United Nations, so the leak must have come from either inside the Nepalese government, or . . .’
‘Or?’ Anastasia demanded.
‘Or this end, I think she’s saying,’ Eddie finished on his wife’s behalf.
‘That’s absurd!’ Lonmore protested. ‘Why on earth would anyone here do that?’
‘I dunno, maybe to cut out the middleman – or the middlewoman, rather – and take the Crucibles for yourself.’
Lonmore reddened, about to object more forcefully to the accusation, but Mikkelsson interceded calmly. ‘I understand why you might think that, but there is a flaw in your reasoning. If we already had the large Crucible, we would not be interested in the small one. We would also have known that the Midas Cave had been destroyed. So there would be no need for you to come here.’
‘Yeah, that’s . . . actually quite a good point,’ Nina admitted.
‘There’s another reason why the leak couldn’t have been from the Legacy,’ said Olivia. ‘It’s a very simple one: I didn’t tell any of the other members enough to act upon it.’
‘You hardly told us anything at all,’ complained Petra.
‘I did as much as I needed to, according to our own rules.’
‘After you ignored those same rules when you brought Nina into this,’ said Mikkelsson acerbically.
‘Do you tell the rest of us every time you discuss something related to the Legacy with a member of your family? I’ve held the chair too, Fenrir; I know all the procedural games.’
‘The point still stands, though,’ the impatient Anastasia said to Nina. ‘None of us would have anything to gain from attacking you in Nepal. So who did?’
‘We all know a Greek,’ said Olivia. Though addressing the whole table, her eyes were fixed upon Lonmore. ‘Some of us better than others.’
‘What? Yes, I know a Greek,’ he spluttered, ‘but I’ve never told him anything about the Midas Cave, the Legacy – anything like that!’
‘He is your friend, though,’ Mikkelsson said.
‘And I haven’t spoken to him for . . . for almost a year. Olivia only got Dr Wilde involved in this less than two weeks ago.’ The others seemed unconvinced. ‘Oh come on! As you said, you all know Augustine. Just because one of these
mercenaries was Greek doesn’t mean he hired him.’
‘Nina, do you know anything else that might identify the person who sent these men?’ asked Mikkelsson. ‘Or you, Mr Chase?’
Nina shook her head. ‘Axelos spoke to him – assuming it was a him – on a satellite phone, but we never heard his voice.’
‘In what language?’ said Anastasia.
‘Greek.’
All eyes darted back to the increasingly uncomfortable Lonmore. ‘That still doesn’t prove that Augustine had anything to do with this,’ he said, though with noticeably less conviction than before.
Mikkelsson addressed Nina and Eddie again. ‘What about the helicopters? Was there anything that might help trace them?’
Nina gave a helpless shrug. ‘I’m not really the expert. There was a big one and a smaller one, but that’s about as much as I know. Eddie?’
Her husband stood beside her. ‘The little one that got blown up was a Mi-2, and there are thousands of ’em. The big one was a Westland 169 . . . but the registration was covered up,’ he recalled.
‘They must have been worried that it could be traced,’ said Olivia.
‘They’d covered something else too!’ Nina said, suddenly remembering her last view of the helicopter as it swept past them. ‘But the plastic got torn when the monastery tower slid down the mountain . . . Long story,’ she added, seeing the confusion of the others.
‘Happens to us a lot,’ said Eddie. ‘She just didn’t put any of this kind of stuff in her book. The film’s actually closer to reality.’
‘It is not,’ Nina insisted firmly.
‘Do you remember the tail number?’ Mikkelsson asked.
‘No, but . . . there was a logo on its side.’ She closed her eyes, trying to visualise the aircraft. ‘It was yellow.’
‘A yellow circle,’ her husband added. ‘With—’
‘With five triangles radiating outwards from the centre,’ said Mikkelsson.
Nina was startled. ‘Yes. How did you . . .’
Lonmore finished his drink in a single gulp, then slumped in his seat, ashen. ‘It’s the logo of Augustine Trakas’s company. The Greek – my friend,’ he clarified. ‘He’s in shipping. Well, transport in general. He owns a cargo airline as well as ships. And I’m sure he has helicopters in his fleet.’
Anastasia fixed him with an accusatory glare. ‘How the hell did he find out about the Midas Cave?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘He obviously knows more than you think he does,’ said Nina. ‘How do you know him? How well do you know him?’
‘We’ve known each other since the 1970s,’ said Lonmore. ‘The members of the Legacy at the time thought we might be able to locate the Midas Cave by finding Atlantis itself, based on what our ancestors had learned about Talonor’s journey. Our theory was that Atlantis was in the sea off the island of Santorini, in Greece.’
‘Yeah, I know where that is. I’m kind of an expert on Atlantis.’
He looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, of course. But at the time, it seemed a good bet. So we arranged an expedition. Augustine was a nobody at the time, starting out in business with just one ship. We hired it to use for our dives.’
‘Laura would have come with us,’ Mikkelsson told Nina, ‘but then she met your father, and after reading his work she dismissed Santorini as a possible location. So she did not join us. A great shame.’
‘I became friends with Augustine,’ Lonmore went on. ‘In a way, I’m responsible for his success, as I gave him tips on how to run a business, and put him in touch with people who could help him—’
‘And look how he repaid you,’ Olivia interrupted, her tone caustic. ‘He tried to kill Nina, and he stole the Crucible!’
‘What’s he going to do with it, though?’ Eddie asked. ‘The Midas Cave’s now the Midas Rockpile. It’d take months to dig back into it, if you even could. Unless he’s got a nuclear reactor in his back garden, the most he can use the big Crucible for is a hot tub.’
‘Actually,’ said Mikkelsson, ‘that is not true. The Crucible would not need a nuclear reactor to create gold from mercury. A particle accelerator would also work. The source of the neutrons needed to produce nuclear transmutation does not matter; the effect will be the same.’
‘Well, he’s not going to have a particle accelerator in his back garden either, is he?’ Eddie scoffed. ‘Unless he lives next to the Large Hardon Collider.’ Nina held in a laugh.
‘That is “Hadron”,’ Mikkelsson corrected.
‘I know, but my version’s funnier.’
The diplomat did not appreciate his joke. ‘Do you know how many particle accelerators there are in the world, Mr Chase?’
‘Twenty, thirty? I dunno.’
‘I know they’re not all as big as the Large Hadron Collider,’ said Nina, enunciating the word carefully. ‘Two hundred, maybe?’
Mikkelsson allowed himself a little smile. ‘Over thirty thousand.’ At the couple’s surprise, he went on: ‘And that is only counting the high-powered ones. There are many more that are smaller. They are used for physics research, but also by industry and the medical profession, for all kinds of purposes. The technology is simple; even an old cathode-ray tube television is technically a particle accelerator. Scaling it up to the size of the LHC is when it becomes difficult and expensive.’
‘So does Trakas have a particle accelerator?’ Olivia demanded of Lonmore.
‘How would I know?’ he shot back. ‘He has all kinds of business interests. I don’t have a list.’
‘Perhaps you should ask him,’ said Mikkelsson.
‘What, you’re suggesting I go to Greece and accuse my friend of stealing something that doesn’t actually belong to us, but that he ought to hand over anyway? That would mean revealing the Legacy’s existence!’
‘I think that bird has already flown, Spencer,’ said Olivia. ‘Although I have another proposal.’ She turned to her granddaughter. ‘Nina should see him.’
‘What?’ Nina said, taken aback.
Eddie was also far from enthusiastic. ‘Are you kidding? He tried to kill us!’
‘I still can’t believe that he would do that,’ said Lonmore, shaking his head.
‘I can,’ Nina told him scathingly, before responding to Olivia. ‘Why me? Eddie’s right: the last person I want to go see is someone who sent a gang of mercenaries after me!’
‘Because you can offer him both a carrot and a stick,’ said the elderly lady. ‘The carrot is simple enough: a share of the gold created by the Crucibles. As for the stick, the threat of the IHA and international law enforcement coming down upon him ought to convince him to see sense.’
Anastasia’s expression was one of sour disapproval. ‘So you’re saying we should cut him in on the Legacy? Give him a quarter of everything we have as a reward for what he’s done?’
‘Not the Legacy, no,’ Olivia replied. ‘The promise of an equal share of any new gold, though? Augustine is a businessman, after all. A quarter of something is better than all of nothing – or a spell in jail.’
‘Or,’ said Eddie, ‘he might just try to make sure we never tell anyone.’
‘I don’t think he will,’ said Lonmore. ‘Not if . . . if I go with you. He is my friend, after all. If I’m there, I’m sure I can convince him. An extra carrot, so to speak.’
‘Some kind of vegetable, certainly,’ Anastasia said under her breath. Lonmore, across the table, did not hear her, but Nina did – as did Mikkelsson, his mouth twitching into a small smile.
‘This isn’t our problem,’ Eddie objected. ‘We went to Nepal to find this thing – which I was against doing from the start,’ he reminded his wife, ‘and almost died doing it. But we got it, so I think we should hand it over to the IHA.’
The proposal aroused varying degrees of
outrage from around the table. Anastasia was the most vocal. ‘You can’t do that!’ she cried, half rising from her chair.
‘Yeah, we can,’ said Eddie, noticing De Klerx’s fingers flexing as if about to draw six-guns from imaginary holsters. He gave the Dutchman a warning look. ‘Unless someone’s going to try to stop us?’
‘Of course not,’ said Mikkelsson. De Klerx retreated, hands stiffening. ‘That decision is Nina’s. But I would hope you will hear us out,’ he continued, addressing the redhead.
‘Remember what I said, Nina.’ Olivia turned to her. ‘This isn’t just about the six of us here. It’s about you too – your family, your legacy. And your mother’s legacy. That was once her seat; it’s yours now, if you’re willing to take it. You said that the monks entrusted the Crucible to you? We’re also entrusting something to you: our future.’
Before Nina could answer, a small voice caught her attention. ‘Mommy, what’s going on?’ Macy joined her parents, regarding their hosts with concern. ‘Why is everybody angry with you?’
‘Nobody’s angry, honey,’ said Nina. ‘These people just have . . . some differences of opinion, that’s all. They want me to do one thing, and your daddy wants me to do something else.’
‘What thing?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Because I already decided what I’m going to do.’
The others almost unconsciously leaned forward, anxious to hear her decision. Nina faced them again. ‘I’m going to go back to New York and turn the Crucible over to the IHA. Like I should have done in the first place.’ She raised her voice over the protestations. ‘They can work with Interpol to investigate Trakas and find out if he really has got the other Crucible, and if he has, then the international courts can deal with him. But Eddie’s right: this isn’t my problem. And I don’t want to discuss it any more. After everything I’ve been through, I just want to go home and be with my family.’