“Are bad men coming for us, Mama?”
“There are always bad men, but we are Kohaths, we are the chosen ones. We alone can protect the Ark, and you and your brother, as twins, are the most powerful of any Kohath who’s lived in the past two centuries. When we find the Ark, I want you and Ajax to open it together.”
“I want to open it myself.”
She saw a flash of concern in her mother’s eyes, but she said calmly, sweetly, “No. You must work with your brother. You must share. It is never more true than with the Ark. Now, hurry, grab your bag, let us go find your brother. Our adventures are only beginning.”
And Helen stepped back into the doorway. The air began to chill, the light became brighter, and her mother slowly faded away. Cassandra felt tears running down her cheeks, mixing with blood from the wound on her forehead. She was alone, she’d always been alone, even when she’d had to share with her twin, but not like this, no, not like this.
She remembered that trip, hot and boring and they dug in the sand all day, until that morning she and Ajax had wandered off and fallen into a partially dug well and had to be rescued. Helen had sent them back to England.
A small light appeared, and Helen was back, in the far corner of the vault. Cassandra ran to her.
“Mama! Where did you go?”
But Helen didn’t appear to hear her, didn’t look at her or acknowledge her. She was there, yet she wasn’t. Suddenly, Cassandra saw her standing on the edge of a mighty cliff, its granite sides flat and smooth. She was wearing a flowing robe and she looked young and incredibly beautiful. She was shading her eyes, looking into the distance. Once again she faded away.
She appeared again, this time near the door, and Cassandra didn’t understand. “Mama, why are you playing like this? I’m here, I finally found you.”
Helen wasn’t alone. She was arguing with their father. Then David Maynes slowly turned empty eyes toward Cassandra. “You killed me, my own daughter killed me, and she knows, oh yes, your mother knows.” When he reached out his hand to her, she couldn’t move, could barely breathe. She saw the flesh fall from his arm and his skeletal hand locked hard around her throat. “My only daughter, my favorite child, you know I always loved you more than Ajax, my second Helen. But you didn’t love me, did you? It was always your mother and only your mother, only the damned Kohaths. And then you had me poisoned. Your own father. It is time you answered for your sins.”
Cassandra felt those skeletal fingers begin to tighten around her neck. Still she couldn’t move. But then she realized she was alone, her father’s hand wasn’t choking her to death, her father was gone.
Her mother’s notebook, it was putting these visions into her mind. She threw it against the far wall, watched it bounce off onto the floor. But the visions wouldn’t stop.
She saw her grandfather sit up from his grave, burial earth falling off his body, and he was holding the cherubim’s wing. “I gave you and your brother everything I had, yet Ajax murdered me. I knew you carried insanity from your father’s line, yet I hoped and prayed, as did your mother.
“You have murdered wantonly, even my poor Burnley, devoted, loyal to me, a better person than either of you. You and you brother are damned, Cassandra. I denounce you. You do not deserve to be Kohaths.”
She wanted to scream it wasn’t so, she wanted to explain, but the words choked in her throat. She saw all of them then, standing in the doorway, shaking their heads at her—from Appleton Kohath to her brother—and there was Lilith and that bitch, Elizabeth St. Germaine, who would have exposed them all if Cassandra hadn’t stopped her. She screamed, “You failed, Lilith, you deserved to die! Mother, it wasn’t me, it was Ajax. Not me, really, not me!”
There were so many of them, faces she was sure she’d never seen before, and they were advancing on her and she knew they would kill her. She yelled, “Mama, help me!”
But Helen stayed in the doorway and watched them drag her down to her knees.
“I am sorry,” she heard her mother’s sad voice, “We tried so hard to teach you, to show you what you must do. You and your brother are so very smart, so focused, but you were twisted, I saw it, as did your grandfather, yet we continued to pray, to hope. Until I had to face the truth. Your grandfather tried and tried to help you, until you came to kill him.
“Your grandfather was forced to kill so many thousands of innocent lives in Beijing for you to find my camp and the cherubim’s wing and the misleading map of the Ark I created for you. And I saw clearly that neither of you looked upon the wing or the map as the path to learn and understand and embrace your calling. You wanted the Ark for the power it would give you.
“I am sorry, Cassandra. Your brother is dead, lost forever, and you will join him shortly.”
“But where is the Ark? Please, Mama, tell me, I want to see it, I have to open the Ark, feel its power filling me. You’ll see, it wants me, it will recognize me. I will become one with it. You have to believe me, I swear I will use the power only for the good of the world. I swear it!”
Tears ran down Helen’s face. “It breaks my heart, even though I knew this would come to pass. The Ark will always be safe, now and forever.”
Her mother was gone and Cassandra was alone. The room was chill again, the air dry. The dead were no longer there to kill her. She rose slowly to her feet. The notebook, where was it? She had to find it, it had to be here, the ghost of her mother couldn’t have taken it.
She looked wildly around, then ran into the antechamber. She saw her enemies standing there, staring at her. Nicholas Drummond held her mother’s notebook in his hands. How had he gotten it without her seeing him?
Grant was yelling, “The clock that’s tied to the explosives, it hasn’t stopped! We’ve only got one minute and ten seconds.”
Cassandra knew it was a lie, another vision, and Grant Thornton was dead, he had to be, the guards would have killed him. But hadn’t she seen the guards were both dead? None of this was real. But her mother’s notebook? She saw it in Drummond’s hands, but no, that couldn’t be right.
It was a vision, like the others, but—
Cassandra screamed and charged at them.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Mike yelled, “Grab her! We can’t just leave her here. Hurry.”
Kitsune grabbed Cassandra, slapped her hard, once, twice. “Snap out of it!”
Cassandra stopped struggling. She stood still. She raised her hand to her face and rubbed where Kitsune had struck her. She said in a singsong voice, “Are you here to arrest me? Because I’ve committed murder? But not all of them, I swear not all of them.” She rounded on Nicholas. “Give me my mother’s notebook.”
“I don’t know anything about your mother’s notebook.”
“You have it! I saw it, you have it!”
“We don’t have time for this.” Nicholas cuffed the screaming Cassandra and threw her over his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. Go, go!”
Grant slammed the steel vault door shut, and they ran.
Moments later, the explosion knocked Nicholas forward, and he lost his hold on Cassandra as he fell into darkness.
He didn’t know how long he was out, but he came to when he felt Mike shaking his arm. “Nicholas, are you all right? Come on, come on! Come back to me.”
He shook his head, focused his eyes on Mike’s face above him. “Mike?”
“Yes, I’m here. Are you all right?”
“I’m okay. Where’s Cassandra?”
“I don’t know. The explosion, there’s so much dust. Grant was trying to find Kitsune, and I was looking for you.”
Cassandra was gone.
They ran back to the control center. Nicholas grabbed Mike’s arms. “I don’t know where Kitsune and Grant are, but they can take care of themselves. Mike, you go on, get out of here. I see the storm’s going to hit Washington very soon. I’ve got to try to shut it down.”
“Agent Drummond,” Amos shouted. He was still on the floor holding Jason
Kohath in his arms.
“Hang on, Amos.” He said to Mike, “Get everyone out, now. I’ll follow.”
“You swear?”
Amos shouted. “The vault blew?”
“Yes. Cassandra got loose. Do you know where she is, where she might go?”
Amos shook his head.
“You and Mr. Kohath are going with Mike.”
“Not yet. Jason is trying to say something, come quickly.”
Mike and Nicholas came down on their knees on each side of him. Amos was leaning close. “It sounds like—yes, he’s saying ‘palm, eye, command X.’ I don’t know what that means.”
“I do.” Nicholas leaned down, now face-to-face with Kohath. “Must you do this yourself?”
Jason blinked.
Nicholas lifted Jason in his arms and carried him to the console. “Mike, Amos, go. Hurry. Find Kitsune and Grant, all of you get to the boat. Watch out for Cassandra. I’ll be right behind you.”
Amos didn’t want to leave Jason, but Mike grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out.
Nicholas eased the old man down in the chair, gently laid his hand on the biometric reader. He saw it was designed specifically to measure a heartbeat beneath the palm. A dead man’s hand wouldn’t work.
He pressed his own hand over Jason’s, helped him flatten his palm on the reader.
The screen in front of them whirred to life, and a protocol began running that Nicholas could barely follow. The language was incredibly complex, the coding sophisticated beyond anything Nicholas had ever seen, had ever even conceived of. Nicholas gently laid Jason’s fingers on the keyboard, helped him press two keys, a J and a G, no more, only two keys.
He watched in astonishment as the giant spinning cloud hovering near Washington, D.C., grew smaller and slower until it broke apart and gradually faded away, disappeared into nothingness. It was incredible, unbelievable, and he knew he would never understand how it worked. The storm that would have destroyed Washington had simply vanished, as if it had been sucked up in a vacuum and all with two key strokes. And he realized that was it exactly, the storm had been funneled away. There would be no incredible winds, no massive storm surge. Without the energy to keep it running, it would slow and dissipate as well.
Nicholas pulled a thumb drive from his key ring and showed it to Kohath. “It would be a travesty to lose all your work. May I have this coding?”
Kohath blinked his eyes again, then whispered, “Not the twins, never the twins.”
He didn’t tell Kohath that he’d killed his grandson, that his granddaughter was insane and he didn’t know where she was. “No, don’t worry, the twins won’t get it.” Nicholas slid the thumb drive into a slot. It only took a moment to transfer, and that was amazing. He’d never seen code work so fast. He slipped the thumb drive back onto his key ring.
Jason’s hand slipped from the console and Nicholas caught it, pressed his palm back onto the pad.
“Help me destroy this.” He flipped open the second stage reader, and leaned Jason forward. He held Jason’s head still, and with a great effort, Jason opened his eyes. He rested his head against the plastic, waited for the biometric reader to take full measure of his iris.
There was a click. The two forms of identification were registered, accepted. Jason Kohath’s head slumped forward, and Nicholas knew he was dead. Still, Nicholas checked for a pulse, found nothing. He felt both anger and loss for this man he would never know, a genius responsible for great destruction and death and greater sacrifice.
Nicholas hit Command X on the computer keyboard.
The room began to shake.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
The huge wall screens began to crack one after the other, shattering glass flying everywhere. The floor was suddenly moving, thick slabs roiling upward at crazy angles. Nicholas tried to leap over the steepening slabs, but it was too late. He lost his footing and went down, rolling toward a huge chasm that split open the floor. He grabbed a corner of the console, managed to drag himself upward. The floor shuddered again and swelled and heaved and split apart. There was nowhere to go, every direction blocked by metal and glass and huge chasms in the floor.
The temperature spiked and he saw lava begin to bubble up through the cracks and widening crevasses. The room was steaming, thick jets of hot air rising all around him and he couldn’t see, could only go by the faint sound he heard over the eruption. Was it Mike? He didn’t know.
He had to get out of this inferno or he would die.
He staggered to another shattered console, hoping to get out that way, but a huge jagged rock cut through the control center itself. He realized this wasn’t a dormant volcano magically come to life, no, Jason Kohath had built his control center on top of an active volcano and he’d managed to contain it, but no longer. Now it was free and it would destroy the island.
He tried to get around a huge shaft of boiling hot rock, but a table blocked him. It fell into one of the huge splits in the floor.
He was stuck in the center of the room, Jason Kohath’s body on fire at his feet, his grandson stretched out ten feet away, the body sliding toward a canyon of glass and molten rock, clothes burning.
Nicholas didn’t want to die with the Kohaths, but he was choking, the steam from the lava burning his hands, his skin—
And then Mike was there, in the room, he could hear her now shouting at him above the din and through the steam and the billowing lava. Where was she?
“Up,” she was screaming. “Nicholas, look up!”
And he saw Kitsune on the catwalk twenty feet above his head, the lava making her hair glow red.
A catwalk he hadn’t noticed before. He couldn’t go across, but he could go up.
Without hesitation he leaped up on the table that was sliding inexorably toward a gaping hole in the center of the room, gathered himself and leaped as high as he could. His hand grabbed around the bottom rung of the railing just as the desk slid into the pit and sank out of sight. The floor around it disappeared into the widening pit, lava bubbling high, swallowing everything. The whole room was shaking now, shuddering, and the railing swung wildly and he knew he was losing his grip. He tried to catch the railing with his right hand, but his hand slipped. He looked down to see the control center disappear into the red gaping mouth to be burned away by the molten fire. No way was he going to fall in that pit. He hung there for a second, legs dangling over bubbling lava, and the metal railing was heating up, his hands burning. He couldn’t die, he couldn’t leave Mike.
Then he heard Kitsune’s voice, yelling, “Give me your hand, Nicholas! Hurry!”
He stuck out his right hand and she grabbed it, pulling, her legs wrapped around a metal pylon so she wouldn’t lose her balance and be jerked forward. She was strong. Finally, he got his leg up and over the railing and she hauled him up onto the metal mesh floor of the catwalk.
He was on his feet in an instant. “Kitsune, get out of here. Go! I’m right behind you.”
She turned and ran down the catwalk, yelling over her shoulder, “Mike’s at the intersection, about forty feet ahead.”
No time to catch his breath, the metal would melt next. He ran.
He couldn’t believe it. He saw Cassandra, twenty feet ahead of him, not moving, staring down at the devastation, and she was smiling. She’d made no move to stop Kitsune as she’d run past. “There they go, Ajax and Grandfather, into hell where they belong.” She repeated it again, standing there, and Nicholas would swear she was happy.
He tried to grab her arm. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”
His hands were blistered, and he couldn’t hold her. She pulled away. Oddly, she smiled at him and he saw the emptying madness in her eyes, the complete loss of self. She still had the handcuffs around her wrists. And in her arms she held a golden wing. “Mother wouldn’t save me. Perhaps this will.” And she leaped from the railing into the lava below.
He saw her and the cherubim’s wing disappear into the fire, the wing still clutch
ed to her chest.
Nothing he could do, nothing. He ran. The catwalk ended at the doorway to the dock. Mike was there screaming at him to hurry. He put on a burst of speed and jumped from the catwalk toward the open door. He landed in a heap, and she yanked him to his feet.
“Hurry, hurry,” and they ran down the hallway, the lava swelling, beginning to flow behind them.
He felt the unbelievable heat, saw the floor turning red, and he didn’t know if they were going to make it.
But they burst through the door and the boat was on the dock waiting for them, the engine running. Amos and Grant were on board, screaming, waving. Kitsune was in front of them, she leaped onto the boat. He grabbed Mike’s hand and poured on the speed.
They jumped from the dock onto the deck and Grant slammed the boat into gear and it shot away from the dock just as the lava reached the water and steam gushed up, making the water hiss and roil.
They motored into the open water away from the devastation. Nicholas was on his hands and knees, Mike running her hands all over him. She was yelling at him, and he thought he heard, “Lamebrain,” and then she was kissing him all over his face, hugging him, kissing him more, and he smiled and knew he was alive. Both of them were alive.
When he opened his eyes, Mike was staring at him. She sounded like she was in a bottle, something about she couldn’t get to him, but Kitsune could, and was he okay, but he couldn’t quite make out the words, but he nodded. He moved, sitting up, and his ears popped, and he could hear clearly again. He saw Kitsune and Grant, both of them huddled over the wheel, the throttle fully open, the boat at its maximum speed. Amos was hanging on to the boat rail, water splashing the tears from his face.
Mike was pointing and he turned to look back toward the island. The volcano, unfettered, had roared to life, sending huge spumes of lava high into the air and with it an immense ash cloud, and then the lava began sliding down the side.
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