by Sean Ellis
He studied their movements for a few minutes, identifying the weakest points in their defensive line, discerning the routines and patterns of the foot patrols. The average man in the ranks probably had no idea what they were even supposed to be looking for, no idea that there might be people inside the palace trying to get out. Without dogs or night vision technology, there was little chance of them spotting him. The real trick would be getting out of Lhasa, out of Tibet, but even that was a task that fell within his range of skills. The important thing was to keep moving, accomplish the mission.
Now that Mira was gone, there was no one else who could.
39.
Washington D.C.
During her first ill-fated bid for the Oval Office the president had authorized a campaign advertisement drawing attention to her political rival’s inexperience by asking voters to think about which candidate was ready to take a 2 a.m. phone call about some international crisis in progress. It had been a mistake. Already trailing in the primaries, the television spot had come across as mean-spirited, and that tone didn’t resonate with voters.
It occurred to her only now that she was wrong about the 2 a.m. phone call as well. The real crises didn’t come in the middle of the night, not in D.C. at any rate. Two in the morning was the middle of the day for most of the rest of the world, and nobody ever started a crisis at lunchtime.
It was 11:30 a.m. in Washington. The clocks on the wall informed her that it was exactly twelve hours earlier—or was it later?—in Tibet.
The president read the document again, gripping the paper so tautly that it seemed about to rip apart in her hands, and then raised her eyes to the group gathered around the table in the White House situation room. Her gaze settled on the Director of National Intelligence.
“Is there any truth to this?”
“A Tibetan revolutionary group hiding out in Potala Palace?” The man shook his head.
She shook the paper emphatically. “They’re blaming us for this.”
The Secretary of State shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “In a way, we are to blame.”
“Would you care to explain that?” snapped the president. “Try to use small words so I’ll understand.”
“It’s this religious summit. China sees your invitation of the Dalai Lama as tacit recognition of his legitimacy.”
“He is a legitimate religious leader. That doesn’t change our policy stance on Tibet at all. Hell, we’ve invited Dorje Shugden leaders as well. That should tell the Chinese that we aren’t playing favorites.”
A few days ago, the president had barely been aware of the existence of Dorje Shugden, an entity revered by a sect of Tibetan Buddhism that openly repudiated the authority of the Dalai Lama and received no small amount of support from the Chinese government. Organizing the largest-ever interfaith summit had necessitated a crash course in religious diversity.
“I’m not sure they see it that way.”
“Bullshit. I may not be able to stop them from killing their own people, but I’ll be damned if I stand idly by and let them blame us.”
The Director of National Intelligence coughed to get her attention. “Madame President, I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help our situation. The language in that statement was chosen carefully. They’ve indicated that this is the beginning of a campaign to root out these so-called terrorists.”
“You just said that there aren’t any terrorists.”
“No real ones, but that won’t stop them.”
“What will stop them?” There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. “I should cancel the summit? Is that your advice?”
Their continued silence was answer enough. Finally, her Chief of Staff spoke up. “Maybe we should consider narrowing the focus a little. Stick with mainstream Christian religions. That would play a lot better on—”
She waited for him to finish the sentence, more out of courtesy than curiosity. She knew what he was going to say because he had said as much from the start. But he didn’t finish. Instead, he just sat there, his mouth agape but no sound issuing from it. She stared at him for five full seconds before she realized what had happened.
“Damn it, if you want to talk to me, make an appointment.”
“I don’t have time to wait on appointments, Madame President,” Eric Collier said as he stepped into view. “And I’m afraid your people are more interested in protecting you from me.”
The president sighed. “I suppose you heard what happened in Tibet?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” She gestured to the men and women frozen statue-still around the table. “They want me to postpone the summit. Should I?”
“The summit must proceed, exactly as planned.”
“The Chinese are threatening a massacre in Tibet if we go ahead with it.”
Collier made a dismissive gesture. “They’re being played. They have no idea what’s really going on.”
“Suppose you tell me what’s really going on?”
“They are puppets for the ancient enemy, the one who seeks to destroy all that the Wise Father has accomplished.”
The president shook her head helplessly. “That’s not really very helpful.”
“The ancient enemy—”
“The devil?”
Collier offered a humorless smile. “You would know him as Marquand Atlas, but his treachery is remembered in countless myths and legends. Atlas maneuvered the Chinese into attacking Potala Palace in order to prevent Booker and Mira Raiden from restoring the Trinity. He was partly successful. The city of Shambala was destroyed. Mira Raiden was lost—”
“Dead?”
“Presumably.” Collier spoke dispassionately, as if commenting on the weather. “Booker is going to continue on to Lemuria. The site is in the South Pacific Ocean. Atlas will undoubtedly continue to employ the Chinese against us. We must respond in kind.”
“I’m not sure what I can do. The Chinese government has made it clear that they’ll carry out more attacks in Tibet if we don’t back down on the summit. Leaving aside the fact that they’ve got us by the balls economically, I don’t want to be responsible for a massacre in Tibet.”
Collier leaned forward, fixing her with an unblinking stare. “You do understand that this is a war.”
The president stared back, wondering if she had heard him correctly. “War?”
“There can be no retreat. No surrender. Atlas will do anything to stop us, to stop the Trinity from being restored and stop all humanity from coming together in united worship of the Wise Father. He will do anything, and so we must also be prepared to do anything.”
“We can’t go to war with China. That’s off the table.”
Collier leaned closer. “I would strongly suggest that you put it back on the table.”
40.
Under Shambala
She did not lose consciousness, though how she knew this, or for that matter, whether it was even true, she could not say. She fell for a long time, and then she wasn’t falling anymore. The transition, like everything else that had happened to her since the collapse of the landing, was a confusing jumble of sensations. Falling, floating, and then suddenly she was standing again.
She waited there unmoving, expecting at any moment to be crushed under an avalanche of stone and broken wood, but nothing of the sort happened. There was only the quiet and the darkness.
“Del?”
Her voice echoed weirdly, giving her a rough impression of the space she now occupied. When the last reverberations died away, the oppressive silence returned.
Booker wasn’t there. Her last memory was of him, hand outstretched, reaching for her across a widening chasm, and then everything had collapsed.
An earthquake?
No. Nothing that simple. That she was still alive was proof enough of that.
Am I still alive?
Nothing that simple.
She reached out a hand, strange
ly comforted by the subtle tangibility of her own body. This wasn’t some dream-like experience; she could feel her muscles moving and shifting beneath her skin, the refreshing pop of her elbow joint displacing synovial fluid. Yes, I’m alive. I am made of flesh and bone. Tired flesh and thankfully, intact bone.
Alive and in some kind of cave at the bottom of the abyss.
If she had survived, then perhaps Booker had as well. Maybe he was down here somewhere. She preferred believing that to the alternative.
The hand encountered only air. She took a cautious step forward, her foot brushing across an irregular rock surface. Another step and another until her outstretched hand finally touched cool, damp stone. She kept moving, one hand trailing along the wall and the other held out before her at head height.
Her intuition was telling her nothing, which meant at least that she wasn’t moving toward danger. Whether blindly groping in the dark would lead to an exit, or whether there was any exit to be found, was another matter, but she certainly would not escape this subterranean hell by standing still.
Something moved in the darkness nearby. She heard it, and strangely, thought she could see it, too—something on the ground squirming and twisting like the tentacle of an octopus. There was a faint rasping sound, as of something sliding across the stone floor, and then silence again.
Her physical senses told her it—something alive, something that called this Stygian darkness home—was right in front of her, and yet her psychic abilities told her that there was no danger whatsoever.
She felt a panic completely unlike the extra-sensory warnings to which she was accustomed.
What if I’ve lost my ability and don’t even know it?
The Trinity had been created for the express purpose of shutting down the psychic powers of the Ascendant Ones. Mira herself had once been overwhelmed by the Trinity’s presence, and it was not beyond the realm of possibility that something in Shambala was now having a similar effect. As frightening as the idea of such a loss was, the thing slithering in the darkness nearby was a much more immediate concern.
Several seconds passed without any more movement or sound.
Was it just my imagination? Is the darkness and isolation getting to me?
“Del? Are you there?”
Nothing. She started forward again. A few steps later, she heard the noise again, a rustling sound behind her. She whirled, and this time was certain that she could see something moving in the inky blackness. Something very large.
Once more, she sensed nothing dangerous.
She decided to trust her precognition. If there was no danger, then there was no reason to let fear cripple her. And if there was a real threat hidden from her extrasensory capabilities, there was not much she could do to fight it.
As she progressed, the frequency of the noises increased to the point where they were almost constant. Without even trying, she visualized gigantic snakes, big enough to swallow her whole, slithering on their bellies to and fro in the darkness. At one point, her outstretched hand encountered something, cool against her fingertips and moving, and she drew back reflexively. When she overcame her surprise and reached out again, there was nothing there by empty air.
This is another test, she realized. The snakes weren’t really there at all, but were a manifestation or possibly a hallucination, not altogether different from the pain and hunger she had felt when circling the chortens. This cave was probably an alternate passage between the real world and the dimension where Shambala had been hidden away, a back door, guarded by a test of primal fear.
The realization bolstered her, but only a little. She had already determined that the snakes, or whatever they were, were no threat. The real challenge remained in trying to find her way through the absolute darkness. She knew she was moving at a glacial pace, just a few inches with every step, so it was impossible to judge how much progress, if any, she was making. For all she knew, she might have been circling the perimeter of a closed cavern. The only thing that changed was the increasing activity of the snake-things, always just beyond her reach, and probably not even real.
When light finally appeared in the distance, it was with the suddenness of a lightning strike. From one second to the next, her world was filled with brilliant illumination, or rather what seemed like it. The light itself was not that bright, but after uncounted minutes, or perhaps even hours of total darkness, her pupils had fully dilated, and even the distant flashlight beam felt like a hot poker through her corneas. Yet, even as she looked away from the light, she glimpsed serpentine figures, always at the edge of her vision, disappearing into the shadows before her gaze could settle on them.
No matter. There was light at the end of the tunnel now, figuratively if not also literally. She quickened her pace, squinting to stay focused on the light ahead. She was now able to see a little of her surroundings, though there wasn’t much to look at.
It was impossible to tell anything about the source of the light, except that looking at it was a little like trying to stare at the sun, but try as she might, her eyes were drawn to it. To make matters worse, the person holding the flashlight—she was certain that was what it was—seemed to be aiming it directly at her face. Fortunately, the ambient light made it possible to quicken her pace, and in a matter of just a few seconds she was close enough to call out.
“Del? Is that you?”
The beam of light lowered to point at the ground in front of her. The person with the light was showing her the path, but said nothing.
Mira felt a growing apprehension, but as with the snake things, there was no sense of imminent danger.
Maybe it was a local, a Tibetan who didn’t speak English. That was a good sign; it meant that she had probably found a passage back to the “real” world.
“Thank you,” she said, trying again to establish contact. “I got lost.”
The light abruptly swung up to point toward the ceiling, and in its beam, the face of her savior was revealed. The light cast weird angular shadows on the face, giving the man a ghoulish look that seemed strangely appropriate when she realized who it was.
“You do seem to get lost a lot, Mira,” Marquand Atlas said. “It’s a good thing I’m always here to find you.”
41.
For a fleeting second, Mira considered turning around and running back the way she’d come, but she knew that such a panicked response would accomplish nothing. Atlas stood between her and the only possibility of escape, which meant that she was going to have to go through him and whatever army he’d brought along to back him up.
Fine, she thought. I can do that.
“I’m not here to harm you,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.
“Is that a fact?” She sensed no malice at all about him, but she sometimes had difficulty reading him. He’d completely fooled her on the slopes of Mount Everest, though she wasn’t certain at all if what she had experienced there was a hallucination from the depths of her own imagination, or something he had controlled.
“It is,” he replied simply. “The truth is, I want us to be friends again. We both want the same thing. It’s time we worked together.”
“You killed Curtis. You abducted me, tortured me, kept me prisoner for months.”
“And you put a bullet through my eye. Trust me, your accommodations in Libya were a five-star resort compared to what I had to go through to recover from that. But I bear you no ill will.”
He was alone. That was good. It would make it easier to take him out. Maybe this time, he would stay dead.
She tensed her muscles, preparing to lunge at him.
“Did you get it?” he asked, oblivious to what she was about to do.
It was not the question so much as the way he asked it that stopped her. His voice was an odd mix of fear, dread and hope, and he spoke the last word “it” like a curse. “Is that why you’re here? Waiting for me to bring you the Trinity?”
“Good heavens, no. I’m here to warn you about it. And stop you fro
m making it whole again, if it’s not already too late.”
“Stop me?” She recalled that he had left the incomplete Trinity behind in Libya, wired to explosives which he hoped would destroy it utterly. Yet, it had been his search for the Trinity that had first brought them together. What had changed?
“Come. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not have this conversation here.”
Once again, his tone spoke volumes. “What is this place? How did you know to find me here?”
He made a grunting noise as if he found the topic distasteful. “I assumed you already knew what this place was. It’s the path to Shambala. One of them anyway.”
“We found Shambala by following the path of enlightenment.”
“We?” He shone the light past her, probing the darkness.
“We got separated,” she answered, revealing nothing about Booker’s identity. If he didn’t already know, then he wasn’t going to learn it from her.
“Well, I don’t know about a path of enlightenment, but I can tell you that this path is definitely not that.”
“There were snakes.”
He narrowed his eyes, scrutinizing her, and said just one word. “Naga.”
Mira had encountered the term before. Naga were spirit creatures that had the appearance of snakes. They appeared in Hindu and Buddhist myths, sometimes as evil creatures, and sometimes as wise, beneficent forces. “They left me alone. I wasn’t even sure they were real.”
“Well, I’d just as soon not tempt them to correct your ignorance,” Atlas said, a bit testily. “Will you come with me? I’ll be happy to explain everything once we’re on the move, but moving is the important thing. There are dangers other than Naga, and many other reasons for us to hurry.”
Mira did not trust him, and she certainly hadn’t forgiven him for any of his crimes against her, but for the moment, getting out of the cave was a goal they shared, so she moved forward to walk beside him. “Start talking.”