Jason Garner had made the decision in a moment of pain, and now he regretted it.  It had seemed so rational at the time.

Looking at the smoking ruins of his brother's house, and knowing that someone was trying to suppress the knowledge of cold fusion, Jason had decided that he had been the target.  It fit the facts.  It was logical.  He had been using Jacob's basement for a laboratory.  What else could he believe?

The decision to let himself die and Jacob live would throw the killers off his trail, as long as he could convince the police.  For a hacker of his talents, the alibi had been ridiculously simple.  A few hours of hacking and a few hours of driving, and he, "Jacob," had been retroactively checked into a hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, at the time the fire started.  The details he verified and fudged would have taken nearly as long to describe as to accomplish, but he had
done them.

He'd also checked out Jacob's accountant and lawyer and publisher, making sure that there was no reason that they would have had him murdered.  Everything checked out clean, with some minor vague issues that certainly wouldn't be worth killing anyone over, so he checked them off his list.

And so, the death certificate and the name at the funeral home both said "Jason Garner."  And it was his friends here at the funeral home, mourning his death, and it was Jacob's friends calling with condolences.  He was the ghost at the wake, wandering in the mists of his former life.

The woman in black approached him tentatively, extending her hand.  "Jacob?  I'm Beverly Dunn."

He was surprised to see her, although he wasn't surprised that she looked marvelous in black, even with smeared mascara.  Beverly was a marketing analyst for Dallcomm, the telecommunications company where he, or "his brother Jason," he corrected himself, used to work.  They had been on very friendly terms, but she had never seemed interested in pursuing anything.

"A pleasure, Beverly.  Are you the marketing person that Jason liked so much?"

Her face registered shock.  "He...  He did?"

Switch immediately regretted... many things.  "He mentioned you several times.  I think... well, I can see why he thought you were wonderful."  Using the third person was difficult for him.  God, he had walked away from so much.

She looked at Switch, briefly wondering if this was all some elaborate hoax.  This person in the Brooks Brothers suit seemed like a mirror image of JJ.  She had known that he had a twin brother, in fact seen the pictures of them in high school, but this guy really seemed like JJ in a Halloween costume, pretending to be a banker or something.  And leaning forward toward her, as if towards a fire on a cold night.  What was there to say?  "Thank you."

"I can't take credit for Jason's thoughts."  Today.  He forced himself to assume a more neutral position.  "Thank you for coming."

Beverly looked at the closed casket, and the picture of JJ in his clubbing clothes.  At least the brother understood what JJ would want.  The guy had been a freak sometimes,  but he had been a lot of fun.  She wished she'd taken him up on an invitation or two.  "He was a good guy."

Switch shook her hand, holding it for a moment too long, then watched her go.

He stared at his hand, still feeling the sensation of holding hers.  Several fingers were still tender from where he had burned in the new prints, but somehow the feeling of her hand...

He let it all go.  There was work to do.

Despite his protests to the police that his brother was murdered, they had closed the investigation suspiciously quickly.  As he left, he fumed.  The detectives on the case were jerks, especially that good ol' boy Dawson, who'd jacked him around before patting him on the head and sending him home.

According to Dawson, who was now on his shit list for life, the Fire Marshall had found no accellerants, in fact no suspicious chemicals of any kind, once the palladium was identified as "his brother's" experiment.  The fire was caused by a tipped over lamp in the living room, which just happened to set off an electrical arc with the entertainment unit.  They said that "his" terrier had accidentally knocked over the appliance, causing a spark, and ultimately started the fire that burned the house down and killed both the dog and his brother. It sounded just ludicrous enough to be possible.  Ironically, years before, Jacob had named the dog "Sparky."

Switch walked down the steps from the courthouse, shaking his head in disgust.  Either the police were incredibly incompetent, the killers were incredibly competent, or the police and the killers were working together.  The Fire Marshall's version was just too stupid a way to die.

There was a white Grand Am by the curb, just starting to pull away.  He didn't catch the driver's face, but the plate was FP 011, very close to the one the other night, FP 018.  They must buy their automobiles in bulk lots.  Were there sixteen other colors, FP 001 to 010 and 012 to 017, out there driving around for him to spot?  He shook the nonsense out of his head.

Breaking into the DPS to determine the owners hadn't been difficult, but it also hadn't been very informative.  FP meant Federal Powers Commission, and there was an agency address in Austin, but otherwise no reference to who or what that might be.

His first guess, that they investigated and regulated metahumans, turned out to be a wild goose chase.  The Republican Congress had yet to put together a legislative response to the suddenly increasing numbers of  metahumans, preferring to leave regulation to the states and existing property laws.  There were apparently some specific codes in force for police agencies and military, but these were not widely disseminated.  And in any case, that wouldn't have anything to do with cold fusion, or with Jacob or Jason.

The Federal Powers Commission apparently had something to do with oversight into the proper use of government resources, but the agency had no web site of its own, and other Internet sites had only vague references to it, often in conjunction with Congressional oversight committees of various types.  So far, he had found nothing to hack.

He drove to a Starbuck's, turning several times to check whether he was being followed.  No cars stayed with him.  Using his brand new computer, purchased with a replacement credit card shipped overnight to "Jacob," he tapped into the Internet and continued to trace down his murderers.

If people were being murdered to prevent them from learning certain scientific principles, then scientists should be disappearing or dying mysteriously fairly often.  He had already started to research that before "Jason's" death.  He decided it was time to look into the work of  USC's Dr. Winston, who according to some reports had committed a murder-suicide at his home near Los Angeles.  Some tabloids reported that he was shot with an alien weapon, not found at the scene.  Other reports noted strange burn marks in his office at the University of Southern California, and some quick hacking had found that the coroner's reports were strangely missing from the server at LAPD. It was time to dig further.

Switch looked up Dr. Winston's work on the Internet.  It read like a Who's Who of Modern Physics.  Winston was one of only three people to have ever won a physics bet with Kip Thorne of Cal Tech.  In theoretical physics, that was more prestigious than a Nobel Prize.  After all, they gave out Nobel Prizes every year.

He also appeared to be incredibly gregarious, as scientist collaborationists went.  Switch recognized several of the names with whom he had co-authored white papers.  Dr. Ka Ching Lee, coauthor of "Polyspace Manifolds,"  was the person who had come up with the mathematical model which predicted Maxwell's Blanket.  It was a theoretical material that could pass energy in a single direction, and remain a perfect insulator the other direction. There were rumours that Dow Chemical, makers of the Duralon fiber that toughened some superheroes' wardrobes, was attempting to put the theory into practice.  This wasn't related to cold
fusion.

Dr. Lee seemed to be a dead end, anyway.  He had disappeared a few years back, allegedly defecting to the People's Republic of China, although no one had seen him since, and several of his friends protested that that didn't sound like him, since he was a third generation New Yorker. Switch put Lee's name aside.

The name "Dr. Wilhelm Shreck" rung some vague bells.  While it wasn't possible for Switch to actually "forget" anything, he nonetheless couldn't keep it all in his head at the same time.  His mind could only organize so much information.  The title of the paper was a clue, however.  "Gravity Dynamics."  Probably not related to Cold Fusion.  He started to put Shreck's name aside, then sighed.  Better be thorough.  He looked some more.

Dr. Shreck, as Switch had suspected, didn't seem to have any cold fusion ties.  He was largely a gravity theorist, and most of his work was an extension of the work of Dr. Robert Kaminski.  Kaminski was the developer of the first intrinsic gravity field, whose patent was apparently held by the US Government.  While gravity theory was useful and interesting, it still probably wasn't related to the work that disappeared off the Internet, or whatever killed Jacob.  Switch sighed.  He'd keep it in the scope for now.  After all, the Federal Powers Commission was US Government, too.

Then came Dr. Mira Johannessen.  Winston had co-authored "Perfect Entropy" and "Infinite Energy" with her.  Infinite energy sounded like a great big ringing bell to him.  If cold fusion had any truth at all, it was cheap energy.  He would have to read her papers.  Dr. Johannessen seemed to be just the kind of person he would love to meet.  She aimed her research at finding better power sources for the world.  Better, cleaner, cheaper.  Definitely someone to study up on.

A little more background and he discovered something, well, either intriguing or disturbing.  Her funding, or most of it, came from Maximillian Powers, New York's leading broker of the other kind of power.  Hmmm.  Three kinds of "power" in one thought.  How odd.  Anyway, Powers was suspected of having heavy ties to organized crime, or even being a king-pin himself.  His accountant was the one who was splattered all over the sidewalk a few months back, after jumping through a 40th storey window.  Johannessen and Powers both go to the top of the pile.

Switch sat looking around the hotel room, holding the last of Jason's proofs.  He had finished reading and memorizing the pile of material sent by the publisher, and was none the wiser.  Asking for electronic copies of everything burned in the fire had given him a valuable excuse for looking over all of Jacob's -- "his" unpublished work, so he could clue himself in to his current status, and look for any motive for a high-powered hit man in Jacob's life.

Jacob had been a pop psychologist and novelist of international reknown, so there was no shortage of work to read.  None of it apparently relevant.  Switch threw the pages down in disgust.

He supposed he should be happy about the way that things were working out. No one was tailing him.  His phone hadn't been bugged. The trap was nearly set.  There was just a feeling of anxiety, that maybe, after all this, it had really been just a stupid dog and a stupid accident.  He was trying to make connections that weren't really there, that only existed in the mists of his mind.

He sighed.

The artist's loft in Santa Fe was purchased and nearly outfitted, under a separate identity created for the occasion.  Nothing restricted, or identifiable as cold fusion related, had been installed yet -- that bait would wait until after the trap was laid. If someone was trying to eliminate cold fusion knowledge, the truth would out, soon enough.

If only there were more information.

Switch sorted through his dead brother's mail, forwarded to him at the hotel until the insurance investigation and rebuilding of the house were completed.  Minor bills, advertisements, some personal correspondence and a pack of fan mail.  He idly handled each piece, pretending for a moment that he really was Jacob, handling his own fan mail and credit card and telephone bills.  Staring at a phone call to Poland.  Warsaw, Poland.

What the hell was in Warsaw, Poland?

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