Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  But Race was thinking about something else entirely. They use numbers that have significance to them, numbers that they can recall by thinking of a memorable event or date . . .

  And then it hit him.

  It was the New York Times article that he had read on his way to work yesterday morning—before he had arrived at the university to find a team of Special Forces troops waiting for him in his office.

  The article had said that thieves were finding it easier to break into people’s bank accounts because 85 percent of people used their birthdays or some other significant date as their ATM number.

  “When was his birthday?” Race said suddenly.

  “Oh, I know that,” Renée said. “I saw it in his file. It was in 1914 sometime. Oh, what was it? That’s it. August 6. August 6, 1914.”

  00:00:30

  00:00:29

  00:00:28

  “What do you think?” Race yelled over the roar of the indoor rain.

  “It’s a possibility,” Renée said.

  Race thought about that for a second. He scanned the room around him as he did so—saw Ehrhardt sitting with his back up against the wall, cackling through his blood-filled mouth.

  “No,” Race said decisively. “That’s not it.”

  “What?”

  00:00:21

  00:00:20

  00:00:19

  For some reason, Race was thinking with crystal clarity now.

  “It’s too simple. If he used a date at all, it would be a significant one, but one which would be in some way clever or smug. Something which shoved it to the rest of the world. He wouldn’t use something as inane as his birthday. He would use something with meaning.”

  “Professor, we don’t have much time. What else is there?”

  Race tried to remember everything he had heard about Fritz Weber earlier.

  He had performed experiments on human subjects.

  00:00:15

  He had been tried at Nuremberg.

  00:00:14

  And sentenced to death.

  00:00:13

  And executed.

  00:00:12

  Executed.

  Executed . . . That’s it, Race thought. 00:00:11

  But when was the date?

  00:00:10

  “Renée. Quickly. What was the date of Weber’s supposed execution?”

  00:00:09

  “Oh . . . November 22, 1945.”

  00:00:08

  November 22, 1945.

  00:00:07

  Do it.

  00:00:06

  Race leaned forward, punched in the numbers on the Supernova’s keyboard.

  ENTER DISARM CODE HERE

  1 1 2 2 1 9 4 5

  Once he had entered the code—with the sprinkler rain pounding down around him and the timer in front of him rapidly counting down to zero—Race slammed his finger down on the ENTER key.

  Beep!

  Ehrhardt’s cackling stopped as soon as he heard the beep.

  Race’s face broke out into a wide grin.

  Oh my God, I did it . . .

  And then suddenly the Supernova’s screen changed:

  DISARM CODE ENTERED.

  DETONATION COUNTDOWN TERMINATED AT

  00:00:04

  MINUTES.

  ALTERNATE DETONATION SEQUENCE ACTIVATED.

  Alternate detonation sequence?

  “Oh, damn . . .” Race breathed.

  His eyes flashed over to the other timer—the one that sat on top of the hydrazine drums on the other side of the room—the timer that was set permanently at 00:00:05.

  The second timer activated, ticked over to 00:00:04.

  Ehrhardt’s eyes went wide with surprise.

  Race’s went even wider.

  “Oh, man,” he said.

  Exactly four seconds later, at the expiration of the abbreviated countdown, the hypergolic fuels in the drums mixed and the walls of the control booth blew out with shocking force.

  Its windows shattered as one, blasting out into the sky in a million fragments, closely followed by a roaring, billowing, blasting ball of flames.

  Debris shot out in every direction—doors, pieces of the Supernova, torn segments of wooden benches, sections of floor—all dispatched with such monumental force that some of them even managed to clear the rim of the crater, landing in the thick foliage that surrounded the giant earthen mine. The cracked pieces of the two thermonuclear warheads that had comprised the Supernova landed harmlessly on the floor of the crater—the hypergolic blast far too crude to split the atoms inside them.

  In a moment, all that was left of the control booth was a blackened skeletal frame—charred beyond recognition, hanging loosely above the mine—its walls gone, its windows gone, its floor and ceiling also gone.

  William Race was gone too.

  SIXTH MACHINATION

  Tuesday, January 5f 1910 hours

  The two rivercraft motored slowly across the river’s surface toward the abandoned mine.

  One of the vessels was a long sleek speedboat, the other, a battered-looking little seaplane, with only one pontoon hanging down from its right wing.

  The world was silent, the river calm.

  Leonardo Van Lewen and Doogie Kennedy peered out from their respective cockpits, stared at the deserted mine in front of them. Slowly, they both brought their vessels in toward the riverbank, ran them gently aground.

  They had heard the hypergolic explosion and now they saw the mine—the immense brown earthen crater—and the plume of black smoke rising from the charred box-shaped shell hanging in its center.

  There was no one in sight.

  Nothing stirred.

  Whatever had happened here was well and truly over.

  The two Green Berets jumped out of their vessels and walked cautiously over to the collection of old warehouse-like buildings at the edge of the canyon, guns in hand.

  Then, abruptly, Renée appeared from a door in one of the buildings. She saw them instantly, came over, and the three of them stood together at the edge of the canyon, staring out at the blackened remains of the control booth.

  “What happened here?” Van Lewen asked.

  “Ehrhardt used the idol to arm the Supernova. Then he set it to detonate,” Renée said, her voice sad and soft. “Professor Race managed to stop the detonation sequence, but no sooner had he neutralized the Supernova than the whole cabin just exploded.”

  Van Lewen turned to look out at the destroyed control booth, at the last place William Race had been seen alive.

  “The device was in there?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Renée said. “You wouldn’t have believed it. He stopped the countdown. He was amazing.”

  “What about the idol?”

  “Destroyed in the blast, I presume, along with the Supernova and Professor Race.”

  There came a rustling sound from their right.

  Van Lewen and Doogie spun, guns up.

  But when they turned, they saw nothing but trees and foliage.

  And then suddenly a drumlike cylindrical object—a capsule of some sort, about the size of a regular garbage bin—dropped out of the upper branches of a tree and bounced softly onto the thick foliage about twenty yards away from them.

  Van Lewen, Renée and Doogie all frowned, went over to it.

  The capsule must have been inside the control booth when it blew, and been blasted all the way here by the concussion wave.

  The warhead capsule rolled to a halt in the foliage, and then, oddly, it began to wobble back and forth, as if there were someone inside it wriggling around, trying to get out—

  Suddenly the lid of the capsule popped open and Race tumbled out of it and went sprawling butt-first onto the wet, muddy ground.

  Renée’s face broke out into a thousand-watt grin and she and the two Green Berets rushed over to where Race was lying in the foliage.

  The professor lay on his back in the mud—soaking wet and exhausted beyond belief. He was still wearing his
cap and his black Kevlar breastplate.

  He looked up at his three comrades as they came over, offered them a tired half-smile.

  Then he pulled his right hand out from behind his back and placed an object on the ground in front of him. Droplets of water glistened all over it, but there was no mistaking the shiny black-and-purple stone and the fierce features of the rapa’s head that had been carved into it.

  It was the idol.

  The Goose flew through the air, soaring gracefully over the Amazon rainforest.

  It was heading west in the early dark of night. Back toward the mountains, back toward Vilcafor.

  Doogie sat up front in the cockpit, flying the plane, while Van Lewen, Race, Renée and the wounded Uli sat in the back.

  Race pondered his escape from the control booth.

  In the five seconds he’d had between disarming the Supernova and the mixing of the hypergolic fuels, he had desperately searched the cabin for a way out.

  As it happened, his eyes fell upon one of the warhead capsules—a container capable of withstanding 10,000 pounds-per-square-inch of pressure since its purpose was the protection of explosive nuclear warheads.

  With nothing else to call on, he’d dived for it—snatching the idol sitting on the workbench on the way and snapping shut the capsule’s lid just as the five-second countdown expired.

  The fuels mixed and the control booth blew and he was launched high into the sky, inside the capsule. Thankfully, it had landed relatively softly in the trees surrounding the mine.

  But he was alive and that was all that mattered.

  Now, as he sat in his seat in the back of the seaplane, Race also held in his hands a tattered leather-bound book that he had found in the boathouse after his spectacular escape. It had been sitting on a shelf inside the office overlooking the mine.

  It was a book that he’d insisted on searching for before they headed back to Vilcafor.

  It was the Santiago Manuscript.

  The original Santiago Manuscript—written by Alberto Santiago in the sixteenth century, stolen from the San Sebastian Abbey by Heinrich Anistaze in the twentieth, and copied by Special Agent Uli Pieck of the Bundes Kriminal Amt not long after that.

  As he sat in the back of the little seaplane, Race gazed at the manuscript in a kind of subdued awe.

  He saw Alberto Santiago’s handwriting. The strokes and flourishes were familiar, but now he saw them on beautifully textured paper and written in rich blue ink, not some harsh, scratchy photocopy.

  He wanted to read it immediately, but no, that would have to wait. There were some other things he had to settle first.

  “Van Lewen,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about Frank Nash.”

  “What?”

  “I said, tell me about Frank Nash.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Have you worked with him before?”

  “No. This is my first time. My unit was pulled out of Bragg to come on this mission.”

  “Are you aware that Nash is a colonel in the Army’s Special Projects Unit?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “So you knew it was a lie when Nash came to my office yesterday morning with a DARPA ID and a story saying that he was a retired Army colonel now working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?”

  “I didn’t know he said that.”

  “You didn’t know?’

  Van Lewen looked at Race honestly. “Professor Race, I’m just a grunt, okay. I was told that this was to be a protective assignment. I was told to protect you. So that’s what I’m doing. If Colonel Nash lied to you, I’m sorry, but I didn’t know.”

  Race clenched his teeth. He was pissed as hell. He was furious at having been tricked into coming along on the mission.

  In addition to being angry, however, he was also determined to know everything, for if Nash wasn’t really with DARPA then it raised a whole lot of other questions. For instance, what about Lauren and Copeland? Were they with Army Special Projects too?

  Even closer to home were the questions regarding how Race himself had come to be a part of the mission. After all, Nash had claimed to have been put onto him by his brother Marty. But Race hadn’t even seen his brother in almost ten years.

  Strangely, Race found himself thinking about Marty.

  They’d been close as kids. Although Marty had been a good three years older than him, they had always played together—football, baseball, just plain running around. But will had always been better at sports, despite the age difference.

  Marty, on the other hand, was easily the cleverer of the two boys. He’d excelled at school and been ostracized for it He wasn’t handsome, and even as a nine-year-old he was the image of his father, all hunched shoulders and thick dark eyebrows, with a permanently severe expression that was reminiscent of Richard Nixon.

  Conversely, Race had his mother’s easy good looks—sandy brown hair and sky blue eyes.

  As teenagers, while will would go out on the town with his friends, Marty would just stay at home with his computers and his prized collection of Elvis Presley records. By age nineteen, Marty hadn’t even had a girlfriend. Indeed, the only girl he’d ever sent a Valentine to—a pretty young cheerleader named Jennifer Michaels—had turned out to have a crush on Will. It had devastated Marty, and he withdrew into himself. For a time there, his mother even took him to see a psychologist friend about it Whenever Race brought a girl home after that, Marty would either lapse into silence or slip quietly out of the room.

  College came and while his schoolyard tormentors went off to become bank tellers and real estate agents, Marty had headed straight for the computer labs at M.I.T.—fully paid for by his father, a computer engineer—and once again, he excelled.

  Race on the other hand—intelligent, yes, but always the lesser academically—would go to USC on his half sports scholarship. There he would meet, court, and lose Lauren O’Connor, and in between all that, study languages.

  Then came their parents’ divorce.

  It happened so suddenly. One day, Race’s father came home from the office and told his mother that he was leaving her. It turned out he’d been having an affair with his secretary for almost eleven months.

  The family split in two.

  Marty, then twenty-five, still saw their father regularly—after all, he had always been his old man’s son both in looks and manner.

  But Race never forgave his father. When he died of a heart attack in 1992, Race didn’t even go to the funeral.

  It was the classic American nuclear family—nuked from within.

  Race snapped out of it, returned to the present, to a seaplane flying over the jungles of Peru.

  “What about Lauren and Copeland?” he asked Van Lewen. “Are they with Army Special Projects too?”

  “Yes,” Van Lewen said solemnly.

  Son of a bitch.

  “All right then,” Race said, changing tack. “What do you know about the Supernova project?”

  “I swear I don’t know anything about it,” Van Lewen said.

  Race frowned, bit his lip.

  He turned to Renée. “What do you know about the American Supernova project?”

  “A little.”

  Race raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  Renée sighed. “Project approved by the Congressional Armaments Committee in closed session: January 1992. Budget of $1.8 billion approved by Senate Appropriations Committee, again in closed session: March 1992. Project was intended to be a cooperative joint venture between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the United States Navy. Project leader’s name is—”

  “Wait a second,” Race said, cutting her off. “The Supernova is a Navy project?”

  “That’s right.”

  So Frank Nash had told more than one lie to get him to come along on the mission. The Supernova wasn’t even an Army project at all.

  It was a Navy project.

  And then, suddenly,
Race found himself recalling something he had heard the previous night, when he had been imprisoned inside the Humvee, before the cats had attacked the BKA team.

  He recalled hearing a woman’s voice—Renée’s maybe-saying something in German over the radio, a sentence that he had found quite incongruous at the time, a sentence which he hadn’t translated for Nash and the others.

  Was ist mit dem anderen amerikanischen Team? Wo sind die jetzt?

  “What about the other American team? Where are they now?”

  The other American team . . .

  “I’m sorry, Renée,” he said, “who did you say was the Supernova’s project leader?”

  “His name is Romano. Doctor Julius Michael Romano.”

  And there it was.

  The mysterious Romano, revealed at last.

  Romano’s team was the other American team. A Navy team.

  Christ . . .

  “So let me just get this straight,” Race said. “The Supernova is a Navy project led by a guy named Julius Romano, right?”

  “That’s right,” Renée said.

  “And Romano and his team are in Peru right now, searching for the thyrium idol?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But Frank Nash has an Army team down here as well, also going after the idol.”

  “That’s correct,” Renée said.

  “So why? Why is a team led by a colonel from the U.S. Army’s Special Projects Division trying to beat a team of U.S. Navy people to an idol that is the key to a weapon that the Navy owns?”

  Renée said, “The answer to that question is a little more complex than it would at first appear, Professor Race.”

  “Try me.”

  “All right,” Renée said, taking a deep breath. “For the last six years, German intelligence has been looking on silently as the three branches of the United States, armed forces—the Army, the Navy and the Air Force—have engaged in a very bitter but very secret power struggle.

  “What they fight for is survival. They fight to be the preeminent armed service in the United States, so that when the U.S. Congress finally removes one of them—as it intends to do in the year 2010—it will not be their branch that takes the bullet. They fight to make themselves indispensable.”