by Sean Ellis
He now sought the answer to a question the ancients had never thought to ask: Why? Why had the figure known as the Wise Father given them the Trinity? It was unquestionably the product of an advanced civilization, a civilization of which even the ancients had no knowledge. Why would a representative of such a culture put this powerful tool in the hands of primitives who were incapable of comprehending how it worked and what it could do?
These were the questions that Marquand Atlas was wrestling with in his private office when the lights abruptly went out. Out of habit, he groped for the intercom on his desk, but the power outage had cut off that source of communication. The emergency battery-powered lights came on almost immediately, prompting him to leave his desk and venture into the foyer where his assistant Wallace Vaught was trying to raise the head of security on a Motorola radio.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m not certain, Mr. Atlas. It appears that power to the entire compound has been cut.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
Vaught shook his head. “It shouldn’t be. Beck thinks this might be an incursion.”
“Incursion?” Atlas frowned in thought, even as he realized the truth of what the other man was saying. “That’s exactly what it is, Wallace. It’s time for us to go.”
Vaught blinked at him, but did not question the order. Instead, he keyed the microphone. “Beck, Mr. Atlas has given the order to evacuate. Secure the artifact and meet us—”
“No,” barked Atlas. “Leave it. We’ll destroy it along with everything else. Make sure he sends someone to deal with Miss Raiden. Nothing fancy; just kill her. Leave no trace.”
A question hovered on Vaught’s lips, but once more he kept his opinions to himself as he relayed the order. “Set the charges and meet us at the plane.”
Atlas nodded, but was far from satisfied. Destroying the Trinity would not be nearly as easy as it sounded, and there was no reason to believe that doing so would make a bit of difference.
The Trinity was a tool, true, but for what purpose had it been forged? You didn’t give children matches or chainsaws to play with unless you secretly wanted them to hurt themselves. Whatever the Wise Father’s purpose in giving the Trinity to the ancients had been, it would doubtless take more to thwart than merely its physical destruction.
Yet, these revelations themselves were not as worrisome to him as the matter of the hole in his memory, not the long gap between the fall of Atlantis and his rebirth in the 1940s, but rather the missing years of his early life. He had no memory of his parents, childhood friends or why, exactly, he had aspired to conquer the ancient world. He had knowledge of that world’s origins, but none regarding his own.
This was especially troubling to Atlas because of the fact that the STEM scan of the Trinity had been virtually identical to the second scan, which was a sample of his own blood.
3.
Mira awoke with a start, convinced that something was about to happen. She was no stranger to such sensations. All her life she had possessed uncanny intuition—some had called it psychic precognition—and while her special ability, which was as innate as her other five senses, almost never provided a detailed image of what was about to happen, she did not for a second distrust it. That the feeling should be so intense, after months of imprisonment in which the only intuitive episodes she experienced were precursory to the relentless assaults by her tormentors, made her all the more alert.
Her cell was dark, but there was enough ambient light through the small window for her make out every corner of the tiny room. She swept aside her threadbare blanket and sprang for the door, pressing her ear to the solid, smooth metal. The corridor beyond was as still as a crypt, but she stayed there at the door, certain that whatever she had sensed was imminent.
The lights in the corridor abruptly winked out. At that same instant, something inside the electronic door latch mechanism clicked. Instinctively, Mira grasped the door handle and pulled, even as the emergency lights outside her cell flashed on. A bolt sprang out of the lock body, but missed the strike by a fraction of second. Between the loss of main power and the activation of back-up systems there had not been time enough to blink, but she had been ready, primed by a premonition of salvation, and now she was free. How long that state of affairs would last, she could not say, but for the first time in weeks, perhaps even months, she was the master of her own destiny and she did not intend to let this opportunity slip away. Sensing no immediate danger, she pulled the door open and embraced her freedom.
She had no idea where she was. Though she had glimpsed this corridor several times, it was always on the edge of a drug-induced fugue. Atlas’ interrogators always made sure to dope her up before entering the room in order to move her to the medical bay for questioning. Initially, they introduced sedatives into her food, but she had sensed their presence immediately. From that point forward, they had simply filled the room with anaesthetizing gas—just enough to render her quiescent before coming in and securing her to a stretcher with leather restraints.
In her previous life, working for the Agency, Mira had been thoroughly trained in resisting the crudest forms of coercion. She discovered early on that her intuition gave her an additional advantage against her captors, but Marquand Atlas was far too sophisticated to attempt simply browbeating her into submission. He had used a whole pharmacy worth of drugs on her, and she could not say with certainty what she had revealed or in what ways she might have aided him. She did remember enough however to glean the purpose of the ongoing interrogation: Atlas was after the Trinity—or rather the two pieces of it that she had managed to save from the doomed subterranean realm known in legend as Agartha. She had left the relic with her traveling companion, a New York City detective who had, in a moment of romantic gallantry, decided to tag along with her in search of the secret technology of an ancient civilization, and from that moment forward, she had no certain knowledge of its fate. Atlas either believed otherwise, or had found a way to tap into her psychic abilities while she was in a drug-induced hypnotic trance. Either way, her interrogations, at least those few that she actually remembered, always focused on the whereabouts of the Trinity. It was the only thing her nemesis seemed to care about.
It had been several days, at least by her best ability to reckon the passage of time, since gas fumes had filled her cell. She didn’t have to be psychic to realize that Atlas had succeeded in capturing his prize. However, she was psychic—after a fashion—and knew for a certainty that not only did Atlas now possess the Trinity, but it was located in the same building where she was being held captive.
She had a pretty good idea how the billionaire had survived what should have been a lethal bullet in the brain. Among its other attributes, the Trinity seemed to have the power to restore life to the dead. It was a trait that her former mentor, Walter Aimes, had counted on in his own scheme to gain control of the relics. During the Second World War, Aimes, who was in reality a former grave-robbing soldier-of-fortune named Tarrant, had hired his services out to the Nazis, procuring for them two of the three Trinity segments, which the survivors of Atlantis had strewn across the globe.
Tarrant, in his new Aimes persona, had also been Mira’s…what exactly? Teacher? Mentor? Father? In the guise of a researcher working for the Central Intelligence Agency, he had found her—an orphan bouncing like a pinball through the child welfare system—and tried to turn her into a psychic spy. She had grown up on the Farm, the Agency training facility at Camp Peary in Virginia, learning tradecraft and a broad spectrum of military skills ranging from bomb disposal to helicopter combat, as well as how to make full use of her precognitive abilities. Only later, did she realize that Aimes had been grooming her for his own selfish ambitions. As Tarrant, he had lost control of the two Trinity segments during the war, but as Aimes he had, if ever so obliquely, set Mira on the path to finding the third. He had subsequently allowed himself to be murdered—quite literally killed—so that his co-conspirators cou
ld steal the Trinity segment, which he believed—correctly, as it turned out—would restore life to his corpse, and turn him into something like a living god.
She had beaten Aimes/Tarrant, destroying the segment of the Trinity that had restored his life, but Atlas, not quite as dead as she had believed, had been waiting.
From her own handling of the relics, Mira knew that Marquand Atlas was in fact a nearly immortal survivor of the global catastrophe that had all but erased that ancient civilization from existence. He was several millennia old, so it was not much of a stretch to imagine that his exposure to the Trinity, however brief, had made it possible for his body to reanimate even months after she had put a bullet in his eye.
Next time, she promised herself, I’ll make sure he can’t ever get back up.
Getting revenge against Atlas was not her primary concern right now, but she had a feeling that the only way to get the Trinity back would be over his dead—definitely dead—body. Why exactly she felt compelled to recover the Trinity, she could not say, but as surely as she liked the taste of chocolate and despised lima beans, she knew that she had to get the talisman away from Atlas. As she stood still in the hallway, she sensed the location of the Trinity the same way that someone might catch the scent of cookies baking or a roast in the oven. It wasn’t on the same floor, but it was close, one or two floors above her present location.
Her cell was one of a dozen rooms that opened off the main corridor, all of which were secured by blank doors exactly like the one that had blocked her way for weeks. She doubted that the rooms held prisoners; the ad hoc nature of her confinement convinced her that Atlas wasn’t normally in the kidnapping business. She checked a few at random as she hastened down the hallway, but the doors were all locked with the same mechanical system that had secured her door. Whatever secrets those rooms held would remain secret from her.
One doorway, situated in the center of the corridor, was different. It was the entrance to an elevator shaft, but the summoning buttons remained dark and unresponsive to her touch. She sensed that she did not have much time left before Atlas’ security men came to check on her status. There was nowhere to hide and the only way out was through them. Nevertheless, the elevator door gave her an idea.
She placed her palms flat against the door, willing the moisture and oils in her skin to adhere to the brushed metal finish. The door offered more resistance than she expected. With the electrical servomotors out of commission, she had to struggle for every millimeter of movement. Applying steady pressure, she managed to work the door open about half an inch, just enough to first jam one of her unshod toes into the gap, and then to insinuate her fingers as well. It took her only a few seconds thereafter to force the door completely open and expose the empty elevator shaft beyond.
Aside from a rectangle of dim illumination cast against a gray cinderblock wall by the emergency lights, the shaft was shrouded in impenetrable darkness. There were no cables to grab onto, at least not that she could see, and whether the car was above or below, she could not begin to guess. Nevertheless, throwing caution to the wind, she gripped the doorframe and began probing the inky void with one bare foot.
Atlas had not seen fit to give her shoes of any kind, much less adequate clothing. For the duration of her imprisonment, she had worn what appeared to be disposable hospital scrubs; no socks, no underwear, and no spares. Invariably, when she was returned to her cell after a round of narcotic interrogation, she would find that her captors had washed and groomed her—right down to her most intimate areas, no doubt to ensure that she would be unable to gauge the passage of time by the growth of her body hair—and then dressed her in new scrubs. It had been several days since her last involuntary washing—days in which she had very little to occupy her time aside from calisthenics and shadow boxing in her cell—so she was pretty ripe, but a hot bath and some new clothes were a ways down on her list of priorities.
Mira’s foot touched a thin metal ledge, about an inch-wide, which extended away from the doorframe at floor level. She turned her foot sideways, gripping the ledge with the inside surface of her foot, but as she began transferring her body weight onto it, she felt something oozing beneath her skin. Months, perhaps years of grease, flung off by the elevator machinery had accumulated on the ledge, gathering a layer of dust. She instinctively withdrew, but at almost that very instant, an equally primal reaction stopped her in her tracks. Atlas’ guards were coming; they would be on this floor in seconds.
Gritting her teeth and steeling her resolve, she ventured once more into the elevator shaft. Her foot slipped on the grease, but she jammed her toes into the joint between horizontal and vertical surfaces to minimize her chances of slipping off altogether. She kept going, hugging the doorframe as she groped for a handhold, which she found above her head, a second ledge similarly painted in grease that extended from the top of the frame. With one hand wedged there, she worked her way around the corner and fully committed herself to the endeavor. No sooner had she released her grip on the doorframe than the noise of a distant door bursting open rattled down the empty corridor.
She could do little more than hang on, fully aware that the open elevator shaft would draw the guards in like a magnet. She had hoped to pull the elevator door closed behind her in order to fool her pursuers into believing that she had already left the floor, but there had not been enough time. Her mental image of the approaching guards soon embraced the reality as the flashing beams of LED tactical lights began searching the elevator shaft.
The cones of illumination cast by the tac-lights shrank as the guards drew closer. One beam illuminated the runners in the corners of shaft, then dipped down at an oblique angle to search its depths. The guard took another step forward. The flashlight was mounted on a rail system, married to the stock of an AKS-74 carbine, so that weapon could shoot at whatever the light revealed. As the gun barrel swept toward her, Mira snared the end of the weapon with her right hand and yanked with all her might.
The barrel erupted with a concussive vibration that left her hand too numb to feel the pain of a scorching burn. Ricocheting bullets and chips of concrete dust filled the tight enclosure, peppering Mira with debris. She let go almost right away, but not before she saw the man with the carbine stumble out into the empty shaft. There was a dismayed cry of denial, barely audible to Mira because of the ringing in her ears from the thunderous discharge, and then both man and gun vanished into the darkness.
Bombarded by sensory experiences on every level, Mira received one more frantic input of stimuli as she felt her hold on the greasy ledges begin to fail. With her location already betrayed to the remaining guard, she flung her free hand out and snared the doorframe. As her feet slipped from beneath her, she released her other hand and stretched for the frame with it as well.
Her forearms burned with the stress of supporting her weight, but this was nothing compared to the jolt of a full body impact against the concrete wall of the shaft. Still, she had anticipated those consequences and shook them off quickly as she began the tricky and exhausting process of trying to haul herself out of the shaft.
The remaining guard stared in mute disbelief as she hove into view, but retained the wherewithal to bring his carbine to bear, transfixing her in the beam of his tac-light. Mira felt his hesitation and sensed that despite the fact that he knew she had in all likelihood killed his companion, he would not fire at her—a woman—unless she posed some kind of immediate threat. It was a mistake he would regret, but not as much as his failure to maintain a standoff distance.
Mira planted the grease-slickened soles of her feet against the concrete wall beneath her, using the broad surface to maximize her purchase with a technique rock climbers called ‘smearing.’ She continued to feign a struggle, daring the guard to move even closer, even as she flexed her legs, gathering her strength like a coiled spring and then exploded out of the shaft. Without releasing her grip on the frame, she whipped her body around and swept the guard’s legs from beneath hi
m.
Like his friend at the bottom of the elevator shaft, this man’s finger was resting lightly on the trigger of his weapon, and when Mira made her move, he involuntarily squeezed, releasing a torrent of lead from the fully automatic weapon as he fell. Hot brass pelted her, but the rounds were wasted as they stitched an arc from the wall to the ceiling. Staying low, Mira pounced onto the man’s chest and rolled sideways, pinning his right arm, along with the still-chattering carbine, to the floor. Before the guard, who easily outweighed her by a hundred pounds, could even think to bring his superior strength and size to bear, Mira delivered a knife-hand blow across his throat.
The guard’s thrashing intensified, but his struggles were no longer aimed at the slight figure attempting to wrestle away control of his firearm. In fact, he let go of the trigger and squirmed his arm from beneath her in order to clutch ineffectually at his throat. Mira snatched up the now silent weapon and rolled into a kneeling stance. Her foe was already out of the fight, consumed with the struggle to draw breath past a fractured trachea, a battle he would not win without immediate medical attention.
Mira suddenly became conscious of her own breathing—fast and labored after her intense exertions—and forced her gaze away from the doomed man. She could rationalize until Judgment Day the need that had driven her to kill two men in the space of a few seconds, but that would bring little comfort when their ghosts visited her dreams. Despite the revenge fantasies that had kept her company during the long hours of her imprisonment, she wasn’t a cold-blooded killer and found no satisfaction in causing death, not even to her sworn enemies. But the last thing she needed right now was to be hampered by feelings of regret, and while she had no intention of offering aid or comfort to the fallen guard, she could not bring herself to simply bear witness to his final agonizing moments. She changed her grip on the Kalashnikov carbine and clubbed the man solidly in the side of the head. His struggles ceased immediately, and although a blue pallor crept over his face, she preferred to think that he was merely unconscious.