“Well, none of us here speak Mandarin, so you have absolutely nothing to apologize for. We are incredibly grateful to you.”

Zhao nodded and then knit his fingers together. “Now I answer questions. Only way to stop weapon is destroy weapon first. After you targeted, it is too late. The speed is light, so you cannot avoid.”

“Okay, that’s what I thought,” Ben said, “but we all needed to hear you say it. Please continue.”

“The weapon compact for amount of energy it produce. Prototype is 1.5 meters by 1.5 meters by 2.25 meters.”

“That’s much smaller than I thought,” Ben said, his expression grave. “That gives plenty of flexibility for selecting a platform to deploy it.”

“Yes and no,” Zhao said. “Weapon demands large energy reservoir. To vaporize human requires three gigajoules of energy—approximately 800 kilowatt-hours.”

“Whoa,” Eli said. “That’s a lot of juice.”

“How many kilowatt-hours does, say, a Tesla car battery have?” Nisha asked.

“Top Tesla has 100 kilowatt-hour battery,” Zhao answered.

“Hold on, discharging this weapon one time is like draining the power of eight Teslas?” Jed said, dumbfounded.

Zhao nodded.

“That’s a lot of weight in batteries to have to haul around,” Nisha said.

“Yes,” Zhao said, “but we develop new battery using vapor catalyst that so much reduce weight compared to Tesla lithium-ion battery. One-hundred-kilowatt-hour battery weigh only four hundred kilos.”

“Times eight that makes thirty-two hundred kilos of battery per shot,” Jed said, doing the math in his head.

“This correct.”

“Seems like a terribly inefficient way to kill a person,” Eli said and set his service weapon on the table for effect. “I’ve got a whole magazine of death right here and each shot weighs less than fifteen grams.”

“Yes, but efficiency not purpose of directed energy weapon. Weapon made with one purpose—make people afraid.” Zhao paused to let the power of his words sink in.

“Well, it sure as hell works,” Bex said. “After what we saw in Peru, I have nightmares about being vaporized.”

“There no defense for energy weapon like this. You think safe in building, right? Wrong. If building not enough shielding, then can work through walls. Can work from long range and not affected by wind like bullet.”

Jed’s guts suddenly felt heavy, like they were filled with liquid lead. Since Peru, he’d been operating under the assumption that so long as they were covered, they were safe, at least from being individually targeted. But if that was not the case, then the risk profile had shifted dramatically. A half-dozen side conversations started up in the room as people reacted to the news.

“All right, settle down, everyone,” Ben said. “This is bad news but it’s not surprising. We’ve suspected for a while that the low-energy directed energy weapons causing Havana Syndrome could penetrate hotel room walls. This is the same situation apparently.”