Текст книги "The Bourne Imperative (Крах Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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“I don’t—”

“She has betrayed us.” The Director swung back, leaned forward, his bulk making his chair squeal in protest. The full force of his authority was explicit behind each word he spoke. “She is a traitor. We will treat her as such.”

“ Memune, I wonder at the wisdom of rushing to judgment.” Amit had used the Director’s internal title, first among equals.

The bullet and bombproof windows were coated with a film that reflected light as well as the possibility of long-range surveillance, lending the room a distinctly aqueous quality. The Director’s eyes seemed to glimmer in the office’s low lamplight like a deep-sea fish rising into the beacon of a diver’s headlamp. “It isn’t lost on me that she has been your pet project, but it is time now to admit your

mistake. Even if I were inclined to give Rebeka the benefit of the doubt, we are out of time. Events threaten to overrun us. We are old friends as well as comrades in arms. Don’t force me to call in the Duvdevan.”

Invoking the specter of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite strike unit caused a blade of anxiety to knife through Amit. It was a measure of Rebeka’s extreme importance to Israeli security that the Director would even use the threat of the Duvdevan to induce Amit to do what the Director knew full well he was reluctant to do.

“Who will you use?” The Director said this conversationally, as if he were asking after Amit’s wife and children.

“What about her unique skills, her usefulness—”

“Her betrayal has trumped everything, Amit, even those extraordinary skills. We must assume that what she discovered has sent her to ground. What if her intent is to sell that knowledge to the highest—”

“Impossible,” Amit flared.

The Director contemplated him for a moment from beneath halfclosed eyelids. “And I daresay up until today you would have said her disappearing off the grid was impossible.” He waited. “Am I wrong?”

Amit hung his head. “You’re not.”

“So.” The Director knit his fingers together. “Who will it be?”

“Ilan Halevy,” Amit said with a heavy heart.

“The Babylonian.” The Director nodded, seemingly impressed. Ilan had garnered his operations name by almost single-handedly shutting down the Iraqi Babylon Advanced Weapons Project. He had killed more than a dozen enemy operatives in that pursuit. “Well, now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.”

TheDirectorlovednothingbetter;it was one of his many admirable traits. His inflexibility was not. However, it was his iron hand on the tiller that for the past five years had guided them successfully through the rough seas of international espionage, clandestine forays into the territories of their enemies, and state-sanctioned executions while keeping their casualties to a minimum. He felt the deaths of his people like body blows, which was why, when they occurred, he needed to take to the sea. Out there, he buried his sorrow and cleared his head.

“You’ll start him—”

“Immediately,” Amit said. “He knows Rebeka well, better than most.”

“Except you.”

Amit knew what the Director was implying but as yet he was unwilling to engage the notion. “I will brief the Babylonian myself. He will know everything I know.”

That was a lie, and Amit suspected his old friend knew it, but mercifully the Director remained silent. How could he tell the Babylonian everything he knew about Rebeka? That was a betrayal he was not about to commit, even to curry favor with the Director. He had lied to forestall the possibility of being given a direct order to divulge all he knew to the Babylonian. Such a moral choice might possibly spell the end of him or, at the very least, his effectiveness within Mossad.

The chair squealed again as the Director returned to his survey of the port city. Who knew what he was thinking? “Then it’s settled.” He said this as if he were speaking to himself. “It’s done.”

Amit rose and silently departed. There was no need for the two men to continue the conversation.

Out in the hall, the air-conditioning was fierce. For a moment, Amit stood immobile, as if lost. Occasionally, when it was appropriate, the Director requested that Amit go sailing with him, mourning side by side the man or woman they knew well who had delivered up their life to keep their country secure. Amit imagined this necessary ritual would come again after Rebeka was dead.

2

WHEN HE AWOKE, he was still swimming through frigid water, black as night. It had already infiltrated his nostrils, burning them, threatened to surge down his throat and inundate his lungs. Drowning, he was drowning. He kicked off his shoes, scrabbled in his pockets, divesting himself of keys, wallet, a thick roll of krona, anything that might have been weighing him down. Still he spiraled downward.

He would have screamed, but he was terrified that opening his mouth would let the water gush in, filling him up. Instead, he rose off the bed and, his torso shaking, his limbs spasming, shook himself violently as he tried to claw his way up through the icy water to the surface.

Something grabbed his arms, trying to restrain him, and he opened his eyes into aqueous semi-darkness. His dread bloomed anew. He was at the bottom of the sea, hallucinating as he drowned.

“It’s okay,” someone said. “You’re safe. Everything’s all right now.”

It took moments—moments that felt like an eternity. Intense anxiety clamped him in its tenacious grip. He heard the words spoken again, but they still made no sense: the brightness, the fact that he could breathe, the sight of two faces in front of him, breathing quite normally, which was inexplicable because they were all under water.

“The light,” a second voice said. “He thinks... Turn up the lights.” A sudden blaze made him squint. Could there be such a dazzle on the sea floor? The third time he heard the words repeated, they began to seep through cracks in the armor of his anxiety, and he realized that he was breathing as normally as they were, which must mean that he was no longer in danger of drowning.

With that dawning came the realization of the pain in his head, and at the next pulse, he winced. But at least his body relaxed; he ceased fighting against the hands that held him. He let them lay him back down. He felt something soft beneath him, dry and solid—a mattress—and knew he wasn’t on the floor of the sea, there to die while he stared up helplessly into swaying nothingness.

He sighed deeply, and his legs relaxed, his arms came down to his sides and were released. He stared up into the face swimming above him, shuddering at the recurring thought of the water closing over him. He’d never go out on a boat again or even plunge through breakers as he used to do when he was a child. He frowned. Had he really done that? With an enormous effort to focus himself, he realized that he couldn’t remember his childhood. His frown deepened. How was that possible?

He was distracted by the face above him speaking to him. “My name is Christien. What is yours?” Christien repeated the question in a number of languages, all of which he understood, though he had no idea how he understood them. He had no memory of learning any language.

After Christien had finished, he said automatically, “My name is—” and then stopped.

“What is it?” Christien said. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.” He looked around the room, almost in panic. “I can’t remember my name.”

Christien, who had been leaning over, now stood up and, turning, said something he couldn’t make out to a shadowy figure behind and just to the right of him. He strained to make out the face, but then the figure stepped into the light.

“You can’t remember your name?” the second man said.

He shook his head, but that caused a fierce throbbing.

“What do you remember?”

He took a moment, but this only made him break out into a cold sweat as, his brow deeply furrowed, he strained to recall anything– even a single memory.

“Relax,” the second man said. He seemed to have taken over from Christien.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name is Jason. You’re in a private clinic in Stockholm. Christien and I were out fishing when you surfaced. We pulled you into our boat and flew you here. You were suffering from hypoxia and hypothermia.”

He thought, I should ask Jason what those words mean, but to his shock, he already knew. He licked his lips and Christien, leaning over, poured water from a carafe into a plastic cup and stuck a bendy straw in it. Christien stepped on a pedal, and his head and torso were raised to a modified sitting position. He took the cup gratefully and sipped the water. He felt parched, as if his thirst would never be slaked.

“What... what happened to me?”

“You were shot,” Jason said. “A bullet grazed the left side of your head.”

Automatically his left hand went to the side of his head, felt the thick layers of bandages. He had identified the source of his headache.

“Do you know who shot you? Why you were shot?”

“No,” he said. He drained the cup, held it out for more.

While Christien refilled it, Jason said, “Do you know whereyou were shot, where you went into the water?”

At the mention of going into the water he shuddered. “No.”

Christien handed him the cup. “It was Sadelöga.”

“Do you remember Sadelöga?” Jason said. “Does the name sound familiar?”

“Not in the least.” He was about to shake his head again, but stopped himself in time. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I remember.”

This seemed to interest Jason. “Nothing at all?” he said.

He stopped sipping his water. “Not where I was born, who my parents are, who I am, what I was doing in—where did you say?”

“Sadelöga,” Christien said.

“Maybe I was fishing there,” he said hopefully, “like you.”

“I very much doubt that fishing involves being shot, and there’s no hunting to speak of there,” Jason said. “No, you were in Sadelöga for another reason entirely.”

“I wish I knew what it was,” he said sincerely.

“There’s another thing,” Jason said. “You had no identification on you—no wallet, passport, keys, money.”

He thought a moment. “I threw them all away, along with my shoes, to lighten myself. I was desperate to get back to the surface. They must all be at the bottom of the sea now.”

“You remember getting rid of these things,” Jason said.

“I... Yes, I do.”

“You said that you remembered nothing.”

“ ThatI remember. Nothing else.” He looked at Jason. “I don’t recall you pulling me out of the water, or the trip here. Only those first panic-stricken moments after I went under, not going under itself. Nothing of that.”

Jason seemed lost in thought. “Maybe when you’re sufficiently recovered we should take you back to Sadelöga.”

“Would you agree to that?” Christien asked.

He thought about that for a moment. On the one hand, the idea of returning to the spot where he went into the water terrified him; on the other, he felt an overwhelming, desperate desire to know who he was.

“When can we leave?” he said at last.

What do you think?”

Bourne looked at Christien. They were downstairs in the lounge of the private clinic owned by Christien’s company. Outside, the traffic along Staligatan was fierce, but the clinic’s thick windows muffled all noise. Clouds were gathering as if for a battle. Once again, it looked like snow. They sat on low Swedish-modern furniture, stylish as well as practical: a sofa in a sturdy print, its colors suitably muted, that was the focal point of one of several conversation areas.

“He reminds me of me,” Bourne said.

Christien nodded. “I had the same thought, though this man’s amnesia appears virtually complete.”

“If he’s telling us the truth.”

“Jason, he was quite clearly in serious distress. Is there any reason to doubt him?”

“The bullet that grazed the side of his head,” Bourne said. “He isn’t a tourist. Also, he quite clearly, as you would say, understood all five languages you spoke to him in.”

“So he’s a linguist. So what?”

“So am I.”

“You’re also a professor of comparative linguistics.”

“Used to be.”

“He could be one, too.”

“What’s he doing out here with a bullet crease in the side of his head?”

“Noted.”

“I want to find out whether he’s in our business.”

Christien gave him a skeptical look. “Just because he’s a linguist?”

Bourne gestured. “Look, if he’s not a spy we have nothing to worry about. But given what you’ve told me...”

Christien spread his hands. “All right, what do you suggest?”

“We have some time before we can take him back to Sadelöga.”

“What does it matter? We won’t get anything out of him in his current state.”

“Untrue. We can subject him to a series of tests.”

Christien shook his head. “Tests? What do you mean?”

Bourne sat forward, perched on the edge of the sofa. “You discovered that this man speaks at least five languages when he himself didn’t know that. Let’s find out what else he doesn’t know he knows.”

Soraya and Peter left the briefing with Hendricks filled with mixed feelings.

“This so-called Nicodemo sounds like a ghost,” Soraya said. “I don’t like chasing ghosts.”

“For some reason, Hendricks is obsessed with finding and eliminating Nicodemo,” Peter said. “He gave it his highest priority. And yet, he had no specific intel, no chatter as to a clear and present attack that Nicodemo might be planning against American personnel or citizens abroad or here at home. I smell a political hot potato.”

“I never thought of that.”

Peter laughed. “That’s because you still have one foot in Paris.”

She turned to him. “Is that what you think?”

He shrugged. “Can you blame me?”

The hallway was quiet, save for the hum of the HVAC vents high up in the walls. Far away at one end, she thought she saw Dick Richards coming toward them, and she groaned inwardly. The guy was like a leech.

She gestured with her head toward Richards. “If we can’t trust each other, we’re fucked.”

“My thought exactly.”

“About your leaving...”

“Let’s not talk about that now, Peter.” She sighed. It was definitely Richards coming toward them. “So how important to us is finding Nicodemo?”

“If, as you surmise, the issue is political, not very. I didn’t take this job to carry Hendricks’s water.”

“I think I know just what to tell Mary’s little lamb.”

She smiled broadly as they met Dick Richards halfway along the hall.

Richards handed a dossier to Peter. “I have some intel briefs I thought you’d want to see,” he said helpfully.

“Thanks.” Peter, opening the file, glanced through the pages with no real interest.

Soraya shoved the fuzzy intel on Nicodemo that Hendricks had given them in the briefing at Richards.

“Peter and I would like you to run this person of interest down,” she said, “see if there’s anything substantive to him, see what level of danger he represents to US interests abroad.”

Peter looked up as Richards nodded. He gave her a sharp glance to which she responded with her sweetest smile.

“We’d appreciate your dropping whatever it is you’re working on now,” she continued, “and concentrating on this until you can give us a yea or a nay. If you need any help, ask Tricia.” She pointed in the general direction of the chubby blonde.

“Great.” Richards, having no interest in assistance of any kind, slapped the back of his hand against the thin file Soraya had given him. “I’ll get on it ASAP.”

“Atta boy,” she said. “Make it so, Number One.”

“ Star Trek TNG, right?” He gave her a lopsided grin. “I won’t let you down, Captain.” Turning on his heel, he retreated down the hallway to his cubicle to begin his data search.

Peter frowned. “That was wicked cold.”

She shrugged. “It saves us some busywork and it keeps him off our streets. Where’s the harm?”

When Dick Richards heard their muffled laughter behind him, he began to change his mind about at last feeling included. Or perhaps he only imagined their laughter. What he knew was real, however, was their contempt. Director Marks had been okay—cool, but helpful—when he had arrived at the president’s beckoning. The atmosphere started to deteriorate, however, the moment Director Moore returned from her medical leave in Paris. Regarding the codirectors of Treadstone, Richards had no more to go on than hearsay, office scuttlebutt, and, least reliable of all, the inter-agency mythos that always arose like smoke obscuring the true contours of the land.

The president’s orders had been most specific. He had come to the great man’s attention through his job at the NSA, cracking the core code to the horrific Stuxnet worm, the most advanced malicious software worm to date, the first to be called a cyberweapon, that had baffled the best cyber security analysts for months. Variations on the Stuxnet worm had sucked up information on US advanced weapons systems, clandestine asset locations, forward initiatives by the military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and drone strike targets in western Pakistan. He had also been the one to realize that the SecurID tokens the federal clandestine operatives used had been hacked. He identified the security flaw that had allowed the breach and sealed it.

He was like Einstein formulating the equation for the speed of light. At least that was how he had been described to the president by Mike Holmes, his former boss at NSA. Now he worked strictly for the president, reported to him directly. Their relationship was unprecedented, and quite naturally caused no end of jealousy among the members of the president’s cabinet, who resented his presence, let alone his cyber triumphs. What it boiled down to, Richards thought now, as he climbed into his chair and faced his computer screen, was that they didn’t understand him. Human beings, he had discovered, hated and feared anyone or anything they couldn’t understand.

Now his new directors were firmly in that restive camp. Pity. He had begun to like Director Marks, and he might have felt the same way about Director Moore had either of them given him a chance. Someone else might have been angry at them for this gross disservice, but Richards’s mind didn’t work that way. He knew, also from experience, that the best way for him to not only survive at Treadstone, but to flourish, serving the president as he was expected to do, was to change the co-directors’ opinion of him.

Opening the slim file Director Moore had handed him, he read through the close-set typescript, which, he saw immediately, was little more than unreliable bits and pieces—ephemera from the field. Still, there remained the possibility, slim though it might be, that at the heart of this smoke-and-mirrors show there lay an actual piece of uncharted topography. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he could reveal this topography for the directors, they would begin to see him in a new light. This, more than anything else, was what he desired. It was what needed to happen. His master’s command.

He opened his Iron Key browser to the Internet and, fingers flying over the keyboard, began his search for a myth.

Rebeka stared out at the beautiful, bleak expanse of Hemviken Bay. Sitting at a waterside table at Utö Wärdshus, the only restaurant in this area of the southern Swedish archipelago, she nursed a coffee and her sore right shoulder. She’d received no more than a flesh wound from her quarry’s sudden attack. Anyone else would have berated herself for failing to deflect the attack, but not Rebeka. She had trained herself to let go, not to feel remorse or, worse, to castigate herself. She lived in the present, thinking only of the perilous future, and how to get there successfully while absorbing the minimum of damage.

Upon entering the restaurant, her practiced eye had noted all sixteen tables, only three of which were inhabited, one by a pair of old men, one of them in a wheelchair, slowly and deliberately playing chess, another by an ancient mariner with rough hands the color of a boiled lobster claw, reading a local paper while smoking a smallbowled pipe, and the third by a pregnant woman and her daughter, who Rebeka judged to be five or six. Her professional assessment was that none of them posed a threat, and she promptly forgot about them.

After her target had gone into the water, Rebeka, completely ignoring her knife wound, had spent the better part of an hour wading in looking for him. For all her efforts, standing firm against being pulled out with the tide, for the almost-frostbite in her toes, she had failed to find him. This was both unfortunate and frightening. She was fairly certain her shot had done nothing more than crease her target’s head. If she hadn’t killed him, she wanted to make certain the frigid water didn’t. She needed what was in his brain, and she cursed herself for shooting at him at all. She should have simply jumped in after him. Overpowering him in the water, she felt certain, would have been no difficult matter. Instead he was gone and, with him, the intel he carried that would save her.

Absentmindedly, she stirred more sugar into her coffee, then took a sip. Her own people were now after her. No one knew better than she how ruthless and relentless the Mossad could be when they believed one of their own had betrayed them. She fervently wished there had been another way to tackle the problem, but she knew Colonel Ari Ben David better than to think he would believe her wild tale, and there was simply no one else to go to. Well, there was one person, but her training made her reluctant to involve anyone outside Mossad.

She heard the waitress’s voice, and turning, winced. The knife wound she had received in Damascus was not yet fully healed, and certain sharp movements of her upper torso reminded her it was still there.

“Would you care for more coffee?”

The waitress smiled at her. She looked like a Valkyrie. Rebeka could imagine her, armored, riding to Ragnarök, or, more realistically, out on a fishing boat, hauling in the morning’s catch. She nodded, returning the smile.

Turning back to the bay, she saw that a storm was coming in. Fine. The increasing bleakness matched her mood. She drank her coffee, added more sugar, and reflected on her life since she had met Jason Bourne on her regularly scheduled flight to Damascus. Though it was only six weeks ago, her former cover as a flight attendant seemed like a hundred years ago. How her life had changed since then! She and Bourne had both been after the same terrorist target, Semid Abdul-Qahhar. During their showdown with him, they had both been wounded. Though he had been shot in the shoulder, Bourne had flown her in a stolen helicopter across the southern border into Lebanon and, at her whispered instructions, had set down inside the Mossad encampment in Dahr El Ahmar.

Now she had no idea where he was or whether he would even talk to her. After all, it was she who had directed him to the encampment commanded by Ben David. For all she knew, he blamed her for what had happened.

No, even if she had been able to find him, she couldn’t go to Bourne with her suspicions, in spite of the fact that they had arisen during her convalescence in Dahr El Ahmar. As far as he was concerned, she was the enemy. She had betrayed him. After what had happened, how could he think otherwise?

And, of course, she herself had come under suspicion from having brought Bourne into the encampment. Colonel Ben David was not a forgiving man—in truth, he could not afford to be—but the change in how he viewed her shocked, then saddened, her. She was inured to the byzantine ways of her world, but nothing she had experienced before could have prepared her for how quickly and thoroughly he had turned on her. In fact, he had acted more like a jilted lover than her commanding officer. It was only later, after she had left, after she had decided to act on the intel she had overheard while convalescing, after she had been in full pursuit of her target, that the nature of Ben David’s true feelings had dawned on her. In hindsight, she realized that she had never been just an agent to him. Now, of course, it was too late to do anything about that, even had she wished to.

The stormfront hurled the first fistfuls of snow against the window with a force that startled her. The glass shivered and creaked in the wind. It was then that she turned around and saw the man, thin as a blade, sitting at a table near the door farthest from her, and knew that all was lost.

One man. A single man.” Christien looked at Bourne. “His name is Nicodemo, but he is more commonly known at the Djinn Who Lights The Way.”

“Meaning?”

“He is the advance guard, the outrider.”

“In other words, he gets things done.”

Christien nodded.

Bourne stared out the window. It was late morning. Clouds kept

rolling in from the north like waves on a seashore. Off and on, snow gusted in the wind eddies. The nameless man, who Bourne had come to think of as Alef, had passed into an exhausted sleep. Bourne and Christien had decided to take a break from interrogating him, though neither of them had wanted to.

“Tell me about Nicodemo,” Bourne said. “Why are you and Don Fernando so concerned about him?”

The restaurant occupied the top floor of a chrome-and-green-glass ultramodern building on Kommendörsgatan in the posh Östermalm section of Stockholm, close to where Christien lived.

Christien shrugged. “I’ll tell you as much as I know, which, quite honestly, isn’t much; his origins are obscure. Some say he’s Portuguese, others maintain he’s Bolivian, still others swear he’s Czech. Whatever the truth, he came out of nowhere, quite literally. For some time, a decade ago, he seemed to be an investment conduit for Core Energy. During that time, the company mushroomed into a multinational powerhouse that buys and sells all forms of energy. No one seems to know whether he is still involved, or in what way. By comparison, the CEO of Core Energy, Tom Brick, is an open book. He was born in London’s World’s End, graduated from London Business School. Don’t let his lack of degrees fool you, he’s a very savvy guy.”

“Let’s get back to Nicodemo.”

“That’s the problem. Nicodemo seems inextricably linked with Core Energy.”

“Nicodemo is a terrorist,” Bourne said, “and Core Energy is a legitimate company, a leader in the burgeoning energy markets, green and otherwise.”

“That’s the most troubling part, Jason, the one Don Fernando and I have been investigating for months now. We believe that Core Energy is on the verge of making a deal that will be a game-changer, that will give it such an advantage in the new energy markets as to cause its profits to explode tenfold.”

Bourne shrugged. “Business is business, Christien.”

“Not when it leaves death and destruction in its wake.”

“Which is where, I assume, Nicodemo comes in.”

Christien nodded. “This is what we believe, yes.”

“Are you certain this man actually exists?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of Domenico Scarfo?”

Christien shook his head.

“He was a notorious boss of the Philadelphia mob in the forties and fifties. Behind his back, people called him ‘Little Nicky’ because he was five-six, but his full name was Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo.”

“What are you saying?”

Bourne set aside his menu. “I’ve come across this kind of thing several times before. A name is created, a legend is built, fed first by myth, then by rumors and innuendo, sometimes even by murders committed by a cadre of people who work for the people who created the name in the first place.”

Christien plucked a warm roll from a basket in the center of the table and began to butter it. “Your own origin, if my sources are correct.”

“The Jason Bourne identity was created this way, yes.” Bourne took a sip of fresh orange juice.

Christien spooned up some lingonberry jam. “And now you areJason Bourne.”

Bourne nodded. “I am. Identities are powerful images that often take on a life of their own and have unintended consequences. But if I hadn’t lost my memory...”

Christien nodded thoughtfully. “We’re back to Alef. I take your point.” He bit into his roll and looked up at the waiter, who had appeared by their side. He raised his eyebrows at Bourne, who ordered scrambled eggs and gravlax, toast, and more coffee. “I’ll have the same,” he said.

When the waiter left, Bourne said, “Have you or Don Fernando entertained the notion that Nicodemo is an identity Tom Brick created so that he could circumvent the law without any blowback for either him or Core Energy?”

Christien said, “Nicodemo exists, believe me.”

Bourne looked up. “You’ve met him?”

“Don Fernando believes he has.” He was speaking of Don Fernando Hererra, his sometime partner, an industrialist, banker, and friend with whom Bourne had had dealings previously.

“Even if I accept what you tell me, all we know for certain is that he’s met someone purporting to be Nicodemo. It doesn’t mean that Nicodemo actually exists.”

“I should take lessons from you on cynicism.”

“One man’s cynicism is another man’s prudence,” Bourne said. “Speaking of Don Fernando, where is he? It would be helpful to speak with him.”

“He’s away.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Bourne said shortly.

The food came then. They were both silent until the waiter left and they began to eat.

“The truth is,” Christien said, “he has asked me to keep his whereabouts secret.”

Bourne put down his fork and sat back. “Look, make a decision. Do you and Don Fernando want my help or not?”

“Either way, you’ll have to deal with this growing menace. Core Energy forced us to use subterfuge to buy into the Indigo Ridge Rare Earths mine in California. If we hadn’t, it would have bought it out from under America. We couldn’t allow that to happen. But Core has been busy elsewhere, buying up rare earth, uranium, gold, silver, copper, and base metals mines in Canada, Africa, and Australia. In the decades to come, these resources will increase in value exponentially as one nation after another is forced to phase out machines that run on oil, coal, and even natural gas. The world is running out of oil. As for coal, we’ll all be choking on the carcinogenic fumes that plague every city in China, India, and Thailand unless we abandon it as an energy source. Solar panels aren’t energy efficient and as for those much-hyped wind turbines, each one requires four hundred pounds of rare earths. Besides, you can’t put a windmill on a car or an airplane. Hybrid cars are dependent on rare earth components as well, and as for electric cars, where d’you think the electricity comes from?”