The Project 05 - The Tesla Secret

a religious man?"
    Krushenko looked at the phone. What kind of question was that? It gave him a bad feeling.
    "No. Why are you asking this?"
    "Just wondering." Foxworth pressed a button. The signal went to the same satellite that carried Krushenko's encrypted transmission, then relayed down to another phone hidden in the hold of the motor launch and wired into three blocks of Semtex. A second later the launch disintegrated in an eruption of flame and debris. The sound of the explosion rolled across the waters.
    Foxworth listened to the sudden silence and turned off his phone. He remembered something Benjamin Franklin had said. Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Foxworth thought Franklin a wise man.
    It hadn't been easy to arrange everything. But with enough money, anything was possible.

CHAPTER SIXTY-S EVEN

    It was an Indian Summer day, warm for early November. Elizabeth, Selena and Stephanie were eating lunch outside in the sheltered garden at the rear of the Project. They sat in the sun in the far corner, away from the building. A group of six analysts sat talking and laughing at one of the tables by the doors leading into the building.
    The garden was two hundred feet long, surrounded by high concrete walls painted in desert earth tones. On the back wall was an exit door with an emergency bar on it. No one had ever needed to use it. The walls caught and held the warmth of the sun in the winter and provided seclusion and shade in summer. It was popular with everyone who worked at the Project, a favorite spot for a quick cigarette or a coffee break. Graveled walks meandered through decorative beds of flowers and under tall shade trees. This late in the year the leaves were down. The flowers were gone except for a few purple mums.
    The paths intersected in the middle at a low fountain shaped like a smooth, gray boulder. Water flowed over artfully placed rocks , murmuring like a mountain stream. The sound made Elizabeth think of other places, other times. If she closed her eyes she could imagine the sound of the creek that ran behind her childhood home in Colorado.
    Nick and Ronnie came out with trays and headed toward them. Nick had abandoned the sling but he had to be careful about the stitches. He looked at Selena and felt something close down.
    Lamont was at a hospital in the city. His mom was ill again.
    Ronnie and Nick were almost across the garden when something screamed out of the sky and exploded in the front of the building. The blast picked them up and tossed them aside. The air filled with flying debris. Blocks of concrete slammed into the earth and smashed against the garden walls. Pieces of the building rained from the sky.
    In the aftermath, it seemed as if time had frozen and sound had ceased to exist.
    Nick couldn't understand what had happened. He was lying on gravel. The stones dug into his face. The stitches in his back were torn open and bleeding. He couldn't hear anything. He tried to comprehend what he was doing there. Ronnie lay twenty feet away, not moving. A thick cloud of white dust drifted down on everything.
    Hearing began to return. It brought the crackling of flames and the sound of things falling inside the building. Nick started to get to his knees and hit something with his head. A jagged spear of steel had embedded itself in a tree next to him. He saw Selena on her knees, bent over someone on the ground. The side of her face was covered in blood. Director Harker lay on her side, her back against the garden wall. Her black skirt was pushed up above her knees.
    Nick struggled to his feet and looked back at Project headquarters. Black smoke and orange flame rose over the building, climbing into the blue Virginia sky. The rear wall was rubble. The roof was gone. He remembered that people had been talking and eating near the building entrance. They were buried under the remains of the wall. He could see a woman's leg sticking out from under concrete and twisted rebar.
    He stumbled over to where Ronnie lay unconscious. The back of his head was covered with blood. Nick turned him over and lifted an eyelid, then the other. One pupil was large, the other small. A bad concussion, or worse. He pulled off his jacket and wadded it up into a pillow.
    He looked again at the devastation. He wiped his forehead and his hand came away bloody. He had a headache. Ronnie's eyes fluttered and opened.
    "What..."
    "Easy, amigo. You're all right. Don't move." Gently, he put the makeshift