“Together,” she answered.
Gray met her eyes and saw her determination.
“Trust me,” she said.
Gray took a deep breath, and the two of them stood up. Gray expected to be cut in half, but the floor remained quiet.
“A safe zone,” Rachel said. “In the center of the star. The lasers never crossed this part.”
Gray kept his arm around Rachel. It fit like it belonged there.
“Keep back or you’ll be shot,” Raoul warned. He stood up next, stretched a kink, and reached into a pocket. “Now to see what prize you delivered to us.”
Raoul pulled out the key, bent down, and shoved it into the keyhole.
“A perfect fit,” Raoul mumbled.
Gray pulled Rachel tighter into his arms, fearful of what would happen next, certain of only one thing.
In her ear, he whispered the secret he had been holding from everyone since Alexandria.
“The key’s a fake.”
7:54 A.M.
GENERAL RENDE had come down to oversee the first load of treasure. They could not take everything, so someone had to perform triage, pick the choicest bits of antiquity, art, and ancient texts. He stood near the landing with inventory pad in hand. His men crawled along the topmost tier of the massive structure.
Then a strange rumble vibrated through the cavern.
It wasn’t an earthquake.
More like something shook all his senses at once. His balance shifted a few degrees off kilter. His hearing roared. His skin chilled like someone had just walked over his grave. But worst of all, his vision shimmered. It was like the world became a bad television picture tube, fritzing the screen image, playing with perspective. Three dimensions dissolved to a flat two.
Rende fell back to the stairwell.
Something was happening. Something wrong.
He felt it down to his bones.
He fled up the stairs.
7:55 A.M.
RACHEL CLUNG to Gray as the vibration worsened. The floor under them pulsed with white light. With each beat, arcs of electricity raced outward along the lines of platinum, crackling and flaring. In seconds, the entire labyrinth shone with an inner fire.
Gray’s words echoed in her ears. The key’s a fake.
And the labyrinth responded.
A deep tone chimed beneath them, ominous and foreboding.
Pressure again built, closing and squeezing.
A new Meissner field grew, strangely skewing perception.
Overhead, the entire complex seemed to vibrate, like a flickering filament of a lightbulb.
Reality bent.
A meter away, Raoul straightened from where he crouched over the inserted key, unsure of what was happening. But he must have sensed it, too. An overwhelming sense of wrongness. It nauseated the senses.
Rachel clung to Gray, glad for the support.
Raoul swung toward them and brought his pistol up. He came to the truth too late. “Back at the castle. You gave us the wrong goddamn key.”
Gray stared at him. “And you lose.”
Raoul pointed his gun.
Around them, the fiery star shattered back into existence, blasting forth from all the windows simultaneously. Raoul crouched lower, fearful of being cut in half.
Overhead the stone pedestal broke free from its magnetic attachment to the lodestone arches. It plummeted back to the ground. Raoul looked up too late. The edge of the stone caught him in the shoulder and crushed him to the floor.
As the pillar struck, the glass shattered like ice under them, skittering out in all directions. From the cracks, a blinding brilliance erupted.
Gray and Rachel remained standing.
“Hold tight,” Gray whispered.
Rachel sensed it, too. A rising vibration of power, under them, around them, through them. She needed to be closer. He responded, turning her to face him, arms crushing her to his chest, leaving no space. She pulled hard to him, feeling his heart beat through his rib cage.
Something was rushing up from below.
A bubble of black energy. It was about to strike.
She closed her eyes as the world exploded with light.
ON THE FLOOR, Raoul’s shoulder flamed with white-hot agony. Crushed bones ground together. He fought to escape, panicked.
Then a supernova exploded under and through him, so bright it penetrated to the back of his skull. It spread through his brain. He fought its penetration, knowing it would undo him.
He felt violated, splayed open, every thought, action, desire bared.
No…
He could not shut it out. It was larger than him, more than him, undeniable. All his being was drawn out along a shining white thread. Stretched to the point of breaking, agonized, but it left no room for anger, self-hatred, shame, loathing, fear, or recrimination. Only a purity. An unadulterated essence of being. This is who he could be, who he was born to be.
No…
He didn’t want to see this. But he could not turn away. Time stretched toward the infinite. He was trapped, aflame in a cleansing light, far more painful than any Hell.
He faced himself, his life, his possibility, his ruin, his salvation…
He saw the truth—and it burned.
No more…
But the worst was still to come.
SEICHAN CLUTCHED the old man to her chest. Both kept their heads bowed from the blinding eruption of light, but Seichan caught glimpses from the corner of her eyes.
The fiery star blasted skyward on a fountain of light, rising from the center of the labyrinth and spinning upward into the dark cathedral above. Other glass mirrors, embedded in the vast library, caught the starshine and reflected it back a hundredfold, feeding the rising maelstrom. A cascade reaction spread through the entire complex. In a heartbeat, the two-dimensional star unfolded into a giant three-dimensional sphere of laser light, spinning within and around the subterranean cathedral.
Energy scintillated and crackled out from it, sweeping the tiers.
Screams bellowed and rang.
Over her head, one soldier leapt from the tier above, trying to get to the floor below. But there was no sanctuary for him. Bolts struck him before he ever hit the ground, burning him to bone by the time he crashed to the labyrinth floor.
But most disturbing of all, something had happened to the arched cathedral itself. The view seemed to flatten, losing all sense of depth. And even this image shimmered, as if what hung above her was merely a reflection in water, not real, a mirage.
Seichan closed her eyes, afraid to watch, terrified to the core.
GRAY HELD Rachel. The world was pure light. He sensed the chaos beyond, but here it was just the two of them. The droning hum again rose around them, coming from within the light, a threshold he could not cross or comprehend.
He remembered Vigor’s words.
Primordial light.
Rachel lifted her face. Her eyes were so bright in the reflected light that he could almost sense her thoughts. She seemed to read him, too.
Something in the character of the light, a permanence that could not be denied, an agelessness that made everything small.
Except for one thing.
Gray leaned down, lips brushing hers, breaths shared.
It wasn’t love. Not yet. Just a promise.
The light flared brighter as Gray deepened his kiss, tasting her. What once droned, now sang. His eyes closed, but he still saw her. Her smile, her flash of eye, the angle of her neck, the curve of her breast. He felt that permanence again, that ageless presence.
Was it the light? Was it the two of them?
Only time would tell.
GENERAL RENDE fled with the first screams. He didn’t need to investigate further. As he clambered out of the stairwell into the kitchen, he had seen the sheen of energies reflected up from below.
He had not gotten this far in the Court from being foolhardy.
That he left to lieutenants like Raoul.
Flanked
by two soldiers, he retreated out of the palace, winding toward the main courtyard. He would commandeer the truck, return to the warehouse, regroup there, and strategize a new plan.
He needed to be back in Rome before noon.
As he exited the door, he noted that the exterior guard, still in police uniforms, maintained the gate. He also noted the rain had slowed to a drizzling mist.
Good.
It would hasten his retreat.
Near the truck, the driver and another four uniformed guards noticed his approach and came forward to meet him.
“We must leave immediately,” Rende ordered in Italian.
“Somehow I don’t see that happening,” the driver said in English, pulling back his cap.
The four uniformed guards raised weapons at his group.
General Rende took a step back.
These were real French police…except for the driver. From his accent, he was obviously an American.
Rende glanced back to the gateway. More French policemen stood guard. He’d been betrayed by his own ruse.
“If you’re looking for your men,” the American said, “they’re already secured in the back of the truck.”
General Rende stared at the driver. Black hair, blue eyes. He didn’t recognize him, but he knew the voice from conversations over the phone.
“Painter Crowe,” he said.
PAINTER SPOTTED a flash of muzzle fire. From the second-story window of the palace. A lone sniper. Someone they had missed.
“Back!” he yelled to the patrol around him.
Bullets chewed across the wet pavement, strafing between Painter and the general. The police scattered to the side.
Rende fled back, yanking out his pistol.
Ignoring the automatic fire, Painter dropped to one knee, lifting two weapons, one in each fist. Aiming instinctively, Painter pointed one pistol toward the upper window.
Pop, pop, pop…
The general dropped to the ground.
A cry sounded from the second story. A body tumbled out.
But Painter noted it only from the corner of his eye. His full focus was on General Rende. They both pointed guns at the other, both kneeling, weapons almost touching.
“Back away from the truck!” Rende said. “All of you!”
Painter stared hard at the man, judging him. He read the raw fury in the other’s eyes, everything falling apart around him. Rende would shoot, even if it meant forfeiting his life.
The man offered him no choice.
Painter dropped his first pistol, then lowered the second gun away from Rende’s face, pointing it at the ground.
The general grinned triumphantly.
Painter squeezed the trigger. An arc of brilliance shot out from the tip of the second pistol. The taser barbs struck the puddle at the general’s knee. The jolt of electricity blew Rende off his legs, slamming him onto his back, gun flying.
He screamed.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Painter said, snatching up his regular pistol and covering the general.
The police swarmed around the fallen man.
“Are you all right?” one of the patrolman asked Painter.
“Fine.” He stood. “But damn…I really miss fieldwork.”
7:57 A.M.
DOWN IN the cavern, the fireworks had only lasted a little over a minute.
Vigor lay on his back, staring up. The screaming had stopped. He had opened his eyes, sensing at the primitive level of his brain that it was over. He caught the last spin of the sphere of coherent light, then watched it collapse inward on itself like a dying sun.
Above stretched empty space.
The entire cathedral had flickered and vanished with the star.
Seichan stirred from where she had sheltered beside him. Her eyes were also fixed above. “It’s all gone.”
“If it was ever there,” Vigor said, weak from blood loss.
7:58 A.M.
GRAY BROKE the embrace with Rachel, the acuity of his senses fading with the light. But he still tasted her on his lips. That was enough.
For now.
Some of the shine remained in her eyes as she searched around. The others were stirring from where they had flattened themselves against the ground. Rachel spotted Vigor, struggling to sit up.
“Oh God…” she said.
She slipped out of Gray’s arm to check on her uncle. Monk headed in the same direction, ready to employ his medical training.
Gray kept guard, staring at the heights around him.
No shots rang out. The soldiers were gone…along with the library. It was as if something had cored out the center, leaving only the amphitheater-like rings of ascending tiers.
Where had it all gone?
A moan drew his attention to the floor.
Raoul lay crumpled nearby, curled around his trapped arm, crushed under the fallen pillar. Gray stepped over and kicked his pistol aside. It skittered across the glass floor, now a cracked and scattered jigsaw.
Kat came over.
“Leave him for now,” Gray said. “He’s not going anywhere. We’d best collect as many weapons as we can. There’s no telling how many others might be up there.”
She nodded.
Raoul rolled onto his back, stirred by Gray’s voice.
Gray expected some final curse or threat, but Raoul’s face was twisted in agony. Tears rolled down his cheeks. But Gray suspected it wasn’t the crushed arm that was triggering this misery. Something had changed in Raoul’s face. The perpetual hard edge and glint of disdain had vanished, replaced with something softer, more human.
“I didn’t ask to be forgiven,” he keened out in anguish.
Gray frowned at this statement. Forgiven by whom? He remembered his own exposure to the light a moment ago. Primordial light. Something beyond comprehension, beyond the dawn of creation. Something had transformed Raoul.
He recalled the naval research done on superconductors, how the brain communicated via superconductivity, even maintained memory that way, stored as energy or possibly light.
Gray glanced to the shattered floor. Was there more than light stored in the superconducting glass? He remembered his own sensation during that moment. A sense of something greater.
On the floor, Raoul covered his face with one hand.
Had something rewired the man’s soul? Could there be hope for him?
Movement drew Gray’s eye. He saw the danger immediately.
He moved to stop her.
Ignoring him, Seichan lifted Raoul’s gun. She pointed it at the trapped man.
Raoul turned to face the barrel. His expression remained anguished, but now a flicker of raw fear lit his eyes. Gray recognized that shine of black terror in the man—not for the gun, nor for the pain of death, but for what lay beyond.
“No!” Gray called.
Seichan pulled the trigger. Raoul’s head snapped back to the glass with a crack as loud as the pistol shot.
The others froze in shock.
“Why?” Gray asked, stunned, stepping forward.
Seichan rubbed her wounded shoulder with the butt of her pistol. “Payback. Remember we had a deal, Gray.” She nodded to Raoul’s body. “Besides, like the man said, he wasn’t looking for forgiveness.”
7:59 A.M.
PAINTER HEARD the echo of the gunshot through the palace. He motioned the French patrol to pause. Someone was still fighting in here.
Was it his team?
“Slowly,” he warned, waving them forward. “Be ready.”
He continued deeper into the palace. He had come to France on his own. Not even Sean McKnight knew he had undertaken this assignment, but Painter’s Europol credentials had gotten him the field support he needed in Marseilles. It had taken the entire length of a transatlantic trip to track General Rende, first to a warehouse outside Avignon, then to the Pope’s Palace. Painter remembered his mentor’s warning that a director’s position was behind a desk, not out in the field.
But that was Sean.
Not Painter.
Sigma was now his organization, and he had his own way of solving problems. He gripped his gun and led the way.
Upon first hearing of a possible leak from Gray, Painter made one decision. To trust his own organization. He had put the new Sigma together from the ground up. If there was a leak, it had to be an unintentional one.
So he had done the next logical thing: followed the trail of intel.
From Gray…to Sigma…to their Carabinieri liaison out in Rome.
General Rende had been kept abreast of every detail of the operation.
It had taken some careful prying to follow the man’s tracks, which included suspicious trips to Switzerland and back. Eventually Painter had discovered one thin tie back to the Dragon Court. A distant relative of Rende who had been arrested two years ago for trafficking in stolen antiquities, in Oman of all places. The thief had gained his freedom from pressure by the Imperial Dragon Court.
As he’d investigated deeper, Painter had kept Logan Gregory out of the loop, so the man could continue his role as Sigma liaison. He hadn’t wanted to spook Rende, not until he could be sure.
Now that his suspicions had been verified, Painter had another concern.
Was he too late?
8:00 A.M.
RACHEL AND Monk secured her uncle’s temporary belly wrap, using Gray’s shirt. Uncle Vigor had lost a fair amount of blood, but the bullet had passed clean through. According to Monk, nothing major seemed to have been hit, but he needed immediate medical attention.
Uncle Vigor patted her hand once she was finished, then Monk helped him to his feet and half carried him.
Rachel hovered alongside them. Gray joined her, putting an arm around her waist. She leaned a bit into him, drawing strength from him.
“Vigor will be fine,” Gray promised. “He’s tough. He’s come this far.”
She smiled up at him, but she was too tired to put much emotion behind it.
Before they even reached the first tier, a booming voice echoed down to them, using a bullhorn again. “SORTEZ AVEC VOS MAINS SUR LA TÊTE!” The command echoed away, to come out with their hands up.
“Déjà vu,” Monk sighed. “Pardon my French.”
Rachel lifted her rifle.
Map of Bones: A Sigma Force Novel Page 44