Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(30)

“This one must be in its element, then.”

“Yeah, but it’s probably not local. At a guess, I’d say . . .”

But I grew wary of the camera once more, and of what I was about to say.

Angel, sat back, sipped her coffee, and said, “Well, either tell him or don’t.”

I hesitated.

I remembered Silverman in Melody’s apartment, freaked out and thrown into a crazy situation. But he’d handled it. He’d handled it.

I told him, “Turn the camera off.”

“But—”

“Turn it off, or we change the subject. OK?”

He turned the camera off.

“Some history. Prehistory, more like.” I eyed the camera again. The light was off, but he set it on the tabletop, to reassure me. “What we call gods are agglomerations of energy. We’re not sure where they came from, but it seems they have, or had, some sort of relationship with us, which may have a connection with our own evolutionary development. Maybe we were symbiotes, once upon a time. Or parasites. Whatever the link, it’s an old one, and they get stronger when we take an interest in them. They like attention. Most people don’t realize they’re there, but we have instruments—”

“Readers,” he said.

“Yeah. So, we go round, we drain the gods. You did your exhibition. Twenty, thirty years, we’ve supplemented the domestic grid with that. Electric power, right from the gods. This wasn’t widely publicized. Always a bit of trouble with that word ‘gods,’ you know? Especially over here.”

“But,” he said.

“It seems we have a situation now where somebody—we don’t know who—is passing around pieces of a god. Or gods. You saw the end result, back in New York. I think this is probably another one, right here.”

“The miracle cure? Div, divinity?”

“I’d say that’s more of same. And so is this, that we’ve got here.”

Silverman watched me for a long time. Then he asked the one question that I’d rather he hadn’t.

“These pieces of god. They’re Registry, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know yet. They’re doing an analysis on what we got from Melody. I don’t know the results.”

“But you can guess.”

He’d taken a while to get up to speed, but he was there now. I thought I’d probably preferred him ignorant.

“So. The power from the Registry. It’s not contained, like we were told it is.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s not safe, either.”

“Nothing’s safe. You know how many people died in coal mines?”

“I’m just trying to get a clearer picture here,” he said.

One hand twitched towards his camera, but I shook my head.

“All right,” I said. “You probably know this, but for a long time, if we used a god for power, then that was it: no more god. Another limited resource. At the Indiana facility, and later, in Chicago, they tried a different tack, just bleeding off the power intermittently. Small, steady supply. It was . . . problematic. But it meant that, for a time, we had a stock of god-matter. Divinity in physical form.”

“Div.”

“If you like. And I think that’s where our friend in the pond probably started out. Some piece of something grown in a containment field. That’s my guess. Which means, Pastor Clear-eye’s very own pet god is Registry property, legally owned and waiting to be taken back. Of course, we could go through the courts, but the Registry’s impatient, sometimes.”

“If it’s yours.”

“We’ll know that when we’ve got it.”

“By which time, it’ll be yours anyway . . . ?”

“The Registry giveth, and the Registry taketh away.” I watched him taking all this in. “Doesn’t sound so Indiana Jones now, does it?”





Chapter 27

The Look of a Tall Man




It bothered me she’d come up with a plan. Bothered me more that it had a chance of success.

It was the kind of plan I’d probably have dreamed up, too.

So maybe we could do it on the battery. We’d have no margin for error, no safety net, but if things went well, the whole job would be done in minutes.

A water retrieval, though? Was it worth the risk?

And would I feel like this if I’d been training someone else? Someone I didn’t know, didn’t care about? And wasn’t sleeping with?

I wondered who to call up for advice. Fredericks, my old mentor, would have lots to say, I knew, a stack of stories and opinions. Then, at the end of the day, he’d hum and hah, and tell me, yes, it might work, if I chose to take the risk . . . And I’d be in the dark, just like before.

When you’re a kid, it feels like everything is either/or. You do your sums, you pass or fail. You’re good or bad. Then you grow up, and life’s not like that. Everything’s a chance. Everything’s a risk. The ground’s not solid any more, even if you wish it were.

So did that make me an adult, now? If so, it wasn’t something I enjoyed.

I had a vague idea, in the back of my mind, that I’d let Angel set the whole thing up, then, at the last minute, just before it all got dangerous, I’d step in and take over. Have her step back, out the way.