“I believe the discovery of that cave ignited the Guild’s attention,” Gray said. “Clearly something important got lost long ago or was hidden from them.”
“And now it’s resurfaced,” Painter added.
It was an intriguing thought, and from the sophistication and brutality of the night’s assault, the attack definitely had all the earmarks of the Guild.
“I’ll keep working the angle out here,” Gray said. “See what I can dig up.”
“Do that.”
“But Kat wanted me to call you for another reason, too.”
“What’s that?”
“To pass on news of an anomaly that’s reverberating throughout the global scientific community. It seems a group of Japanese physicists have reported a strange spike in neutrino activity. It’s off the scales, from what I understand.”
“Neutrinos? As in the subatomic particles?”
“That’s right. Apparently it takes violent forces to generate a neutrino burst of this magnitude—solar fusion, nuclear explosions, sunspot flares. So this monstrous spike has got the physicists all worked up.”
“Okay, but what does this have to do with us?”
“That’s just it. The Japanese scientists were able to pinpoint the source of the neutrino spike. They know where the burst came from.”
Painter extrapolated the answer. Why else would Gray be calling? “From the blast site in the mountains,” he concluded.
“Exactly.”
Painter let the shock wash through him. What did this news mean? He questioned Gray until they were talking in circles, getting no further. He finally signed off and sank back into his seat.
“What was that about?” Kowalski asked.
Painter shook his head, causing the dull ache behind his eyes to flare. He needed time to think things through.
Earlier, he’d talked to Ron Chin, who had been monitoring the blast site. He reported a strange volatility there, described how the zone remained active, spreading deeper and wider, eating away anything that it came in contact with, possibly denaturing matter at the atomic level.
Which brought Painter’s thoughts back to the source of the explosion.
Kanosh suspected something hidden inside the golden skull, something volatile enough that just removing it from the cave had caused it to explode. He’d also found evidence that the mummified Indians—if they were Indians—possessed artifacts that indicated some sophisticated knowledge of nanotechnology, or at least some ancient recipe for manufacturing that allowed them to manipulate matter at the atomic level.
And now this news of a spike in neutrinos—particles produced by catastrophic events at the atomic level.
It all seemed to circle back to nanotechnology, to a mystery hidden amid the smallest particles of the universe. But what did it all mean? If his head wasn’t pounding like a snare drum, he might be able to figure it out.
But for the moment he had only one firm sense, a jangling warning.
That the true danger was only starting.
Part II
Firestorm
Chapter 14
May 31, 3:30 P.M.
Gifu Prefecture, Japan
“We should tell someone,” Jun Yoshida insisted.
With his usual insufferable calmness, Dr. Riku Tanaka merely cocked his head from right to left, like a heron waiting to spear a fish. The young physicist continued to study the data flowing across the monitor.
“It would be imprudent,” the small man finally mumbled, as if to himself, lost in the fog of his Asperger’s.
As director of the Kamioka Observatory, Jun had spent the entire day buried at the heart of Mount Ikeno, in the shadow of the massive Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector. So had their Stanford colleague, Dr. Janice Cooper. The three of them had been monitoring neutrino activity following the early-morning spike. The source had been pinpointed to a mountain chasm in Utah, where some explosive event had taken place. But the exact details remained sketchy.
Was it a nuclear accident? Was the United States trying to cover it up?
He wouldn’t put it past the Americans. As a precaution, Jun had already alerted the international community about the spike, refusing to let such knowledge be buried away. If this was a secret experiment gone awry, the world had a right to know. He glared a bit at Janice Cooper, as if she were to blame. Then again, her incessant cheeriness was reason enough for resentment.
“I think Riku is right,” she said, speaking respectfully to her superior. “We’re still struggling to pinpoint this new source. And besides, the pattern of this new burst doesn’t look the same as the one in Utah. Perhaps we should hold off on any official announcement until we know more.”
Jun studied the screen. A graph continued to scroll, like a digital version of a seismograph. Only this chart tracked neutrino activity rather than earthquakes—but considering what they’d found, it was earthshaking in its own right. For the past eighty minutes, they’d picked up a new surge in neutrino generation. Just as before, it appeared to be coming from earth-generated geoneutrinos.