by Sean Ellis
As his fingers grazed and then curled around the silvery metal, he thought he heard a voice cry out in warning.
6.
Mira was still experimenting with the ring of keys when she heard the crack of gunfire echoing in the stairwell beyond the heavy metal door that blocked her way. She was immediately wary, dropping the keys and raising her carbine to the ready even though the shots didn’t sound that close. Without even knowing why, she stepped sideways, away from the door, half-expecting someone to come bursting through.
Even with her psychic intuition, she was completely unprepared for what happened next.
She did not see CPO Ball cover the grenades with his body, but she saw the ultimate result of his sacrifice.
The interlocking plates of Ball’s Dragon Skin armor turned the fragmentation grenade into a shaped charge, focusing most of its energy down, into the concrete landing. The effect had been ruinous, both to Ball’s torso, which despite being protected from the shrapnel, was nevertheless pulverized by the kinetic energy of the blast, and also to the landing. The explosion shattered the concrete, which, due to the cost-cutting decisions of a local contractor, had not been reinforced with steel rebar. The entire slab broke into three sections and plummeted into the stairwell. A cascade of destruction followed, with the entire flight of stairs leading up and several feet of the descending staircase collapsing as well.
Mira saw none of this, but the force of the explosion and the energy of the collapsing stairs hit the door like a pile driver. It exploded inward and would have obliterated her completely had she not moved out of the way a nanosecond ahead of the blast. Even with her prudent sidestep, she was still engulfed in a cloud of fine dust and felt tiny stings on her exposed flesh as a torrent of gritty particles swept in on the secondary shockwave of the collapsing stairwell.
She resisted the urge to breathe, and stood motionless for nearly a minute before cautiously squinting through slitted eyes to see if the debris shower was subsiding. Though her first cautious sniff found the air reeking of explosives, she risked taking a breath and moved forward to explore the damage.
Before she could take a step however, another round of reports—four shots in two quick bursts—thundered in the stairwell. Evidently, the battle that had demolished a fair portion of the building was still underway. With her own weapon at the ready, she crept to the mangled doorframe and peered into the hazy darkness beyond. The landing was gone, as were the stairs above and below, at least as far as she could see in gloom. She risked playing the beam of the tac-light mounted to her carbine into the depths below and found a heap of gray rubble, stained in places with a viscous red residue, some fifteen feet below the doorway.
The sequence of events—the power failure, the mobilization of Atlas’ guards, the gun battle and subsequent explosions—all pointed to an obvious conclusion. Someone had come after the Trinity. The proximity of the violence underscored the one thing of which she was certain: the Trinity was close, probably on the next floor up. Whoever had survived the battle—likely the person who had fired the shots she had just heard—now had control of the talisman.
Impelled by this realization, she began scanning the walls of the stairwell for a way to ascend. The stairs had not collapsed entirely, but rather had broken apart, leaving pieces still attached to the wall like broken teeth in the mouth of a mugging victim, along with most of the metal handrail. The concrete stumps looked substantive enough for her to make an ascent, but they followed the stairs, which rose half a story before turning and going the rest of the way along the exterior wall. With no other way forward, she slung her carbine across her back and extended one bare foot onto the first of the cracked steps.
Despite the near total darkness, she moved with a surefootedness that was only possible because of the combination of her intuition and her experience as a climber. She did not second-guess whether the holds she chose would crumble beneath her weight or whether her strength would fail at a critical moment. The only respite would come when the climb was finished, so she suborned her adrenaline-fueled apprehension to the task of finishing the route as quickly as possible. As she rounded the halfway point, her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she was able to pick out the fractured remnants of the ascending staircase in the ambient illumination cast by the battery powered emergency lights that shone out from the open door above. The lights also revealed a scene of absolute carnage.
Dark blood splattered the walls and had collected in pools on what remained of the third floor landing. As her eyes gradually brought the tableau into focus, she realized that the irregular shapes laying amidst the blood spots were not pieces of debris, but human bodies. She looked away. The explosion that had brought down the stairwell had originated here. This close to the epicenter, it seemed impossible that anyone could have survived, but the shots she had heard suggested that someone was still alive.
With the goal in sight, she made a couple of dynamic leaps and scrambled to the open doorway where she found more bodies. The bloody corpses were relatively intact; these men had fallen in a gun battle. Most wore desert-pattern camouflage and carried M-4 carbines, standard U.S. military issue, but the two nearest the door wore the charcoal gray uniforms of Atlas’ security force. Both men had died from headshots. Mira hastened past them with the stock of her own weapon braced against her shoulder, muzzle at the ready.
The Trinity’s presence was strong now. It was very close. She sensed that something bad was about to happen—not to her, but to the relic itself—and quickened her pace. She sprinted down a short hallway, following the scent of the ancient artifact like a beacon, and entered a large laboratory dominated by several enormous pieces of equipment. In the center of that space, sitting innocuously on a stainless steel table, but shimmering with invisible psychic energy, was the object of her search. She saw the Trinity first, and it overwhelmed her psychic senses like a floodlight, almost blinding her to anything else.
She didn’t even see the man standing in front of the table until his hand closed on the relic, by which time it was already too late for her to stop him.
7.
More than a mile away and safely ensconced in an armored Mercedes, Marquand Atlas did not hear the twin grenade explosions that brought down the stairwell of the main laboratory building, but he was quickly briefed on the aftermath by Vaught.
“Sir, we’ve lost contact with the teams that were cleaning up at the lab.”
Atlas’ frown was enough to elicit further elaboration.
“Commander Beck reported that he lost contact with the team that was supposed to…ah, deal with Mira Raiden a few minutes ago. Then the team that was placing the demolition charges in the lab engaged with an unknown force of intruders. That was the last he heard from either group. He wants permission to go in and investigate.”
Atlas drummed his fingers on the armrest. The sequence of events told him everything he needed to know. Mira Raiden was free and going after the Trinity. If she got her hands on it….
“Blow the charges.”
Vaught swallowed nervously. “Beck won’t do it while his men are still in there.”
Atlas snatched the handset from Vaught. “Beck, your men are already dead. Blow the lab now, before it’s too late.”
8.
Mira saw the man go rigid and then slump forward across the table. She sprinted the last few steps and tried to catch him as he rebounded and slid toward the floor. His dead weight and the heavy load of combat equipment made such an arrest impossible for someone with her build and body mass. She did her best to guide him down without becoming pinned underneath him.
Based on his uniform and weapons, she felt certain that he was a member of a U.S. military or law enforcement special operations group. His black hair was longer than that favored by most military units, but she knew that it was a common practice for Spec Ops shooters to eschew the normal razor-shorn look of the ranks in order to carry out undercover operations. His facial features were sharp, even i
n repose, with not a trace of baby fat. He was attractive in a rough, dangerous way, and reminded her of….
Of someone she preferred not to think about.
She quickly checked his pulse and verified that he was still breathing. He seemed completely unhurt, but also completely unresponsive. He still held the Trinity; his clenched hand was the one part of his body that had not gone limp, and she did not bother trying to wrestle it free. She had a pretty good idea what was happening to him and knew that what was now inside the man’s head was almost as important as the fate of the relic itself.
Almost.
Many months before, when she and her traveling companion—detective Michael DiLorenzo—had joined two pieces of the Trinity together, they had experienced a fantastic vision of the distant past, as if the Trinity had downloaded thousands of years of its memory into their brains. In a matter of mere seconds, she had witnessed a version of human history unimagined by anthropologists and archaeologists; seen a world where the original human race was naturally endowed with psychic powers, greater than her own prescience by an order of magnitude. It was an era she now thought of as the “time of the Ascendant Ones.” She had experienced the rise of an ancient civilization from which had sprung the Trinity artifact, and had seen those ancients use the Trinity to decimate the Ascendant Ones, and subsequently to build mythic cities that had become fixtures in the collective memories of human society. Then she had watched those cities destroyed in a power struggle between the king of the city that would eventually be remembered as Atlantis and a man that she now knew to be Marquand Atlas.
She did not understand all the mysteries of the Trinity, its function or more importantly its purpose, but in that rush of information, she had become intimately familiar with an antediluvian world remembered only in myths and legends. A similar download was going on now in the mind of the handsome Spec Ops soldier, and while she doubted that he would be getting any information that she did not already have, she thought better of trying to sever the connection before it was done.
The one question that she felt even the Trinity would not be able to answer was why Atlas had allowed the relic to be so easily recaptured. She could only imagine the extraordinary lengths he must have gone to in order to gain control of it in the first place; it was inconceivable that he would not have left it under heavy guard, or even unleashed its supernatural puissance in the same fashion that he had used to kill….
She winced involuntarily at the memory and forced it away.
The question however remained, and as she gazed about the laboratory, looking for answers, she found something even more inexplicable: a thin strand of speaker wire trailing away from beneath the table where the Trinity had rested. Even as she shifted position to investigate, she knew what the wire signified. It sprouted from a reddish-orange block affixed to the underside of the tabletop with several strips of heavy-duty tape.
“Semtex.” For a fleeting instant, Mira thought that Atlas’ men had booby-trapped the table.
No, it would have gone off when he picked it up.
Or, that the Trinity she now saw must be a duplicate, bait for a trap.
But no, it was the real thing. She could feel its psychic essence, radiating like heat from a light bulb. Why would Atlas leave it here, wired to blow?
Impulsively, she reached out for the wire and gave a sharp tug. It pulled free of the explosive charge, and took with it the blasting cap, a silver tube about two inches in length. Now, if the detonator switch was thrown, only the blasting cap would blow up, with a force equal to a large firecracker. But, as she tossed it away, she realized that the charge set under the table was merely one of several that were daisy-chained together throughout the floor, and presumably, the whole building.
My God, he really means to destroy it.
There was only one course of action. As much as she wanted to keep the American soldier alive, as much as she wanted to know what the relic had shown him, she knew that she might have only a few seconds in which to make good her escape.
She turned back to the supine form and attempted to pry his fingers loose from the Trinity.
His eyes flew open at once and she felt his right hand close around her throat. Then, in those dark eyes, she saw a flicker of recognition, and heard him whisper, “You?”
9.
Booker’s first instinct had been to kill, to protect the Trinity from this unknown thief. But, as she came into focus, he realized that she wasn’t unknown after all.
The miracle?
He knew this woman as he might know a face from a dream. When he tried to affix a name to her, it came back a meaningless jumble. The only word that made any sense was miracle, and even that wasn’t quite right.
Then a different memory emerged, a different part of his brain fired and he knew who she was. Nevertheless, this realization unlocked a whole different set of questions.
“You’re her,” he said, not relaxing his grip. Her face had gone slightly purple, but thus far, she had not fought him, had not struggled. “You found this thing, found Atlantis, right?”
He felt a tremor in his fingertips as she tried to nod.
“What the hell are you doing here? Are you working for Atlas?”
He could read the denial in the flicker of her eyes. By itself, that would not have been enough to win him over. There was no conceivable reason for this woman to be here, but the Trinity had shown him…he struggled to grasp the elusive memory, but it was gone already. Still, he felt he should trust her. He relaxed his hold enough to let her draw breath. She started to speak, but her first word came out with a cough. She tried again. “There’s no time to explain. We have to get out of here. The whole place is wired.”
He remembered the last words of the two hostiles he had waxed. How long ago was that? Time was a mushy concept. He had experienced thousands of years while holding the relic, but knew instinctively only a few minutes had passed.
We were supposed to blow the place anyway.
Galvanized, he released her and struggled to his feet, though at no time did his grip on the Trinity falter. “How? The stairs collapsed; there’s no way down.”
“There must be another stairwell.”
He shook his head, remembering the floor plan he had glimpsed earlier. “This place was built for security, not fire code.”
The woman glanced around as if searching for inspiration and Booker got his first real look at her. His initial impression was that she looked like an elf warrior princess, and despite the urgency of the moment, that thought made him chuckle. I’ve been playing too much World of Warcraft, he thought. Still, it wasn’t far from the truth. Small and slight, with short but unruly dark hair, high cheekbones and a pert nose—features that were both cute and sexy, if not exactly beautiful—she certainly could have answered a casting call for the role of an elf princess. He’d added the warrior part mostly because she was streaked with dirt and sweat, and hefting a Kalashnikov carbine and a chest rig full of combat gear.
“Okay, I’ve got an idea.” She reached under the table and pulled loose a block of what he instantly recognized as Semtex A. She then produced a flash-bang grenade and pushed it into the malleable plastic explosive compound.
The primary difference between a fragmentation grenade and a concussion grenade or “flash-bang” was the outer package—the former was designed to fly apart in a blizzard of deadly shrapnel while the latter simply released a lot of energy in the form of light and noise. Booker immediately grasped her intent; she was going to use the grenade in lieu of a blasting cap, and that meant she planned to blow something up. Even before she finished arming the improvised explosive, she started moving back toward the stairwell.
“Are you sure that’s wise? You could bring this whole place down around our ears.”
“It’s coming down anyway,” she answered without looking back. “You’d better be ready to move.”
He hastened ahead of her. “Just give me a few seconds.”
Without waiting for an answer, he ducked through the doorway and located the unmoving form of his commanding officer. Collier did not appear to be breathing and Booker assumed that he had already passed. Nevertheless, he knelt beside his teammate and pressed the Trinity into the man’s limp hands.
“We got it, sir,” he murmured. “Mission accomplished.”
Booker crossed Collier’s arms over the relic, which he placed squarely over the commander’s heart, and with all the gentleness he could manage, dragged the man bodily through the doorway and several steps into the hall.
The woman—Mira. Mira Raiden, that’s her name—watched patiently at first, but then without warning hissed: “Time’s up. We’ve got to do this now.”
She didn’t give him a chance to assent, but pulled the pin on the grenade and pitched the makeshift bomb into the stairwell. Booker flinched knowing that if any others of his team still lived, buried in the rubble, the blast would almost certainly finish them off. However, the firm cool metal of the Trinity in his left hand served as a constant reminder of a maxim every SEAL lived by: accomplish the mission…never quit. He tugged the Trinity from Collier’s fingers and hunkered down in anticipation of the blast.
10.
From his over watch position on the roof of the adjacent multi-story building—designated Building #3—Stewart Beck peered anxiously through a night-vision scope at the entrance doors of the main laboratory building—Building #1—for any sign of Wolf Team, the four man unit he had sent in to place the demo charges and liquidate the prisoner. His efforts to raise the team had been futile, but the radio had not exactly been silent.