Diamond Rain: Adventure Science Fiction Mossad Thriller (The Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue Series Book 2) (22 page)

Diamond Rain

Lau tried to leave his compound but found Chou
had managed to replenish the guards near him and, though they could not defeat
Lau, they could contain him.  He went back into his home and opened a seldom
used door into a duplicate control center, containing all of the systems he
used in Chou’s headquarters.  Lau watched the streaming news on his monitors. 
He’s
done it.  He’s collapsed the world financial system.  He’s no more than a
glorified bank robber.
  Sue Ann came up beside him and watched the news.

“He can’t be stopped,
can he?” she asked.

Lau shook his head.

“There may be one way. 
Come with me.”

They went to Lau’s
workstation.  Lau sat and Sue Ann stood behind him holding his shoulders.  His
suit was typing for him at super speed and screen after screen popped up in
front of them.  After a few seconds, the Macaulay
jpeg
picture popped up
and flashed.

“What are you doing?”
Sue Ann asked.

“I won’t sit back and
watch while a bank robber, a criminal, pillages the world financial system.”

“But what can you do?”

“My suit’s memory just
opened backdoor pathways to every important nerve center in our computer
system.”

“And?”

“Your friends have
molecules that can enter our systems and smash Chou’s hold on the world
monetary system.”

“What’s stopping you,
then?  Do it.”

“I wanted to do good
with this power.  I thought I could control Chou.  Believe me.  I’m not a
monster.”

“I believe you, Zhang
Wei.”

“No one calls me by
that name, only my mother.”

Lau turned around and
clicked on the mouse.  The picture left the screen and made its way through
Macaulay’s clandestine network of computers.

The file popped up on Macaulay’s phone.  He
was sitting in Ekaterina’s headquarters and he showed Jean Pierre first.  The
young systems genius jumped up and ran to get Thomas and Kefira.  He barged
into Kefira’s room without knocking.

“Sorry, but this is
important,” he said, blushing from ear to ear at the sight of the two of them
entangled in repose on the bed.

“What is it, Lanky?”
asked Thomas.

“Lau opened the doors. 
Send the attack molecules before Chou manages to close the back doors Lau
cleared.”

Kefira and Thomas both
jumped up at once, their suits forming around them at their respective
commands.  They wrapped tentacles of brilliantly bright red and white light
around him and swept Jean Pierre along with them as they passed through the
walls to arrive in Ekaterina’s headquarters instantaneously.  Lanky took a deep
breath when they deposited him on a leather chair.

“You sure you can
manage this?” asked Ekaterina.

“We're sure,” responded
both Kefira and Thomas.

A swirling strobe
formed in the room.  It became concentrated and focused all of its energy on
Macaulay’s phone.  The phone leaped from the ex-Fenian’s hand and remained
suspended in the air.  A line of light penetrated the electronics and suffused
the satellite connection to begin the journey across the Net.  Macaulay tried
to reach for his phone as it dropped through the air.  He missed and it crashed
onto the rug with a thud.  Jean Pierre was typing wildly. Macaulay took
advantage of the commotion to slip out. He had been coming and going freely so
his departure didn't cause a stir. He winked at the young agent in the
hairdressing salon, producing a blush and was gone.

“They showed me how
they do it while I was inside the swirl.  The math overwhelms me.  I have to
record it on my drive before I forget some of it,” Jean Pierre said, as he
clicked on menus and typed frantically.

At that moment a plasma
screen burst into life, showing the entrance to Lau’s underground home and
headquarters.  It was surrounded by Chinese ‘walkers’ struggling to breach Lau’s
security.  His energy field repulsed them again and again, but weakness, in the
form of shimmering instead of solid glow, appeared to be spreading.  Thomas and
Kefira arrived in a blinding eddy just above the energy shield.  The ‘walkers’
paused to evaluate the new arrivals, but before they could regroup, the two
agents accelerated their spin again.  Red and white light pulsed outwards in an
ever more widening yet alternating shape.  Shards in the shape of diamonds
broke off the main form.  They sought out the ‘walkers’ and tore holes in their
auras, deflating them instantly, leaving them ordinary men, bleeding but not
dead.  Then the diamond shapes glowed red for an instant before they settled
down.  Thomas and Kefira, holding hands at arm’s length, appeared brilliantly
lit in their suits, surrounded by an impenetrable aura.

Lau and Sue Ann emerged
from the door of Lau’s underground lair.  He recognized the molecular structure
surrounding the two people in front of him and dropped his suit’s architecture
without a question.

“Thomas...” said Sue
Ann.

Thomas raised his right
hand to stop her from continuing.  Kefira followed suit.  They both pointed
their energy at the Chinese pair in front of them.  A rush of light left their
palms and encircled Lau and Sue Ann.  It coalesced into two new suits appearing
on the Chinese couple.

“Why have you done
this?” asked Lau.

The reply took the form
of an exchange of data.  At first a trickle, it soon developed into an
overwhelming flood.  After a few moments Lau and Sue Ann were the wearers of
the second diamond-based molecular suit in existence.  The energy between them
coalesced in the formation of an almost complete diamond suit. Though the
molecules communicated that their union would make it stronger, its present
power level was enough to confront Chou. They looked at each other and knew
what had to be done. The rest could come later.

They reproduced the
strobe pattern that Kefira and Thomas used it to drill down to Chou’s
laboratory.  There they found Chou standing with Colonel Wu and Yatsick.

“You!” shouted Chou.  His exclamation came
just before the darts of diamond light penetrated his aura, leaving him wounded
but normal.

Colonel Wu touched his
chest where the light had entered and blood squeezed through his fingers.  He
staggered but regained his balance.  The wound was not mortal.  It was directed
at the suit he wore, not him. 

Yatsick’s diamond
molecules spun erratically around him, creating a cocoon that shone brightly as
it lifted him through the levels and rock above him.  He appeared on the
surface near Kefira and Thomas.  They repeated their swirling red and white
light and projected themselves and Yatsick through the electronic connections
in Lau’s underground headquarters to return via the Net to Ekaterina’s head
quarters on Yona Street.

On screens all around
the room and all around the world, every network was frantically reporting the
news.  Stories of the blinding light that escaped from every electronic communication
gadget in the world, and which stopped the Chinese ‘walkers’ in their tracks,
flooded every system.  Monies stolen from the banking systems of the world
started trickling back to the world’s monetary systems, slowly at first then in
a cascading avalanche of returning funds.  The monetary system demonstrated its
traditional resilience by recovering almost overnight.  Unemployment would take
rather longer to recover, but recover it would.  Chinese ‘walkers’, became just
that, people who could walk.  Confused by the changes in them, they headed
unsteadily towards the port areas of each of the cities where they had once
overrun the native population.

Lau and Sue Ann
willingly accepted their new roles.  They freed the Central Committee from Chou’s
control.  Once the men of power were in command of their own thoughts and
opinions they readily accepted the suggestion to send transports to every city
where Chou’s ‘walkers’ had invaded.  Much to the world’s surprise, single woman
from all walks of life flocked to the staging areas and started up
conversations with young and old men waiting to return to mainland China.  Most
exchanged email addresses, some agreed to visit one another and some felt that
most unexplainable emotion of all, love at first sight.  Over the next several
years, a baby boom resulted from marriages built on the strength of growing
communication between peoples all over the world.  Sue Ann, Zhang Wei, Thomas
and Kefira made their way around the globe.  To the disappointment of the
world's Intelligence Agencies they were unable to copy or clone their suits
again.

Yochana and Ekaterina
passed the baton to the younger generation, both of them reticent about the
security lapse that let Macaulay vanish into thin air.

The End

Your opinion really counts. I will be forever
indebted to you and give you a free book, dear reader, if you take a few
minutes to post an honest
review on Amazon
.  Keep reading to find out how to get your free thriller.

I was standing in front of a class of
thoroughly engaged teenagers a few years ago when my career took an unlikely
turn. One of my favorite students asked me about dancing tango with my wife. I
thought,
Amazing! Maybe I can teach basic English as a second language by
getting my students to learn some kind of line dancing tango steps. Who knows?
There are lots of kids from Latin America in the class. It might work. Anything
to remove those passive looks
. I went on to push the desks out of the way
and teach most of the curriculum for about a month, while instructing basic
tango classes in English.

That led to people in the class wanting to
put the lessons on the Internet, and one thing led to another before I moved to
another school. The school director drew the line at Internet tango.

Tango sparked up my professional life for a
month and woke up a dormant desire in me to live a lifelong dream. I'd always
wanted to write thrillers, and now I'd discovered that tango was a contagious passion.
The trick remained finding a way to combine tango and espionage. Kefira, my
ravishing sleeper agent in strapped black stilettos, came to life on the page
and my dream started taking shape. To get more of Kefira pick up
Tsunami Connection Part
One of the Spy Story and Tales of Intrigue Series
.

I hope I was able to communicate two of my
passions to you with the book you're holding in your hands, and that you've
enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. I will be forever indebted to
you if you communicate your appreciation of the book in an honest review at
Goodreads or Amazon if you have an account in your country.

If you take the time to send me the link of your
review
to
[email protected]
,
I will offer you a 100% discount (in the form of a digital gift from Amazon) on
Tsunami Connection
,
Part One of the Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue Series
.

I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave
comments on my blog or send emails to
[email protected]
and I'll get back to you promptly. When you comment, I become a better writer
and we get to be partners. Thanks again.

 
Michael
James Gallagher is an established author who began his writing journey with a
gripping, post-cold-war espionage thriller: "Tsunami Connection". His
strong-willed heroine Kefira delighted readers worldwide as she overcame
enormous odds in preventing genocide and finding a way to trap a cunning and
resourceful ex-Fenian terrorist named Macaulay.

Following strong
sales in the English-speaking world, Michael's work has recently been
translated for distribution in Turkey and Germany. Michael's fast-moving style
and unfailing eye for detail make his books very hard to put down once started.
 

Diamond
Rain
, the second book
in the
Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue Series
, introduces Thomas, a loner with an
uncanny ability to chase down details in the pursuit of truth. Believing he has
found the foundations of love, he sees everything snatched away from him by
technology he can barely comprehend. But the object of his desire has given him
a gift before she is lost to him, a gift so precious and powerful that Thomas
believes he has the means find her again and, in the process, defeat a
reincarnated Mao Tse Tung in Central China.

When not writing
or dancing tango, Michael spends his time developing hilariously informative
Internet-ready learning modules for his adult students studying in their homes.
Planning and editing numerous language textbooks complements his writing
experience. He has encouraged high school dropouts to realize their academic
dreams for 35 years in Montreal, Canada.

Best regards,

Michael