by Sean Ellis
In the dim orange glow of the campfire, DiLorenzo seemed almost at peace. A long period of fitful tossing had eventually given way to a deep, healing sleep. Mira had insisted that the detective drink a great deal of water. He was obviously dehydrated and suffering from altitude sickness. Though there was nothing she could do to alleviate the latter, keeping him hydrated would at least help him to cope with the symptoms until he was better acclimated.
Her eyes lingered on him a while longer, half-heartedly pursuing random thoughts about the man and her feelings for him. Their trials together had done little to build any sort of romantic bond between them. His adolescent antics at the Cordova ranch hacienda had been more irritating than endearing, but a part of her that she could not begin to explain was secretly pleased that he had felt so threatened. Perhaps when they were back in familiar surroundings, without an army of malcontents trying to kill them, she would slow down long enough to address the riddle of her emotions.
A distant sound, probably nothing more than the movement of a small animal through the brush, broke her out of her meanderings. The noise had not startled her, but served as a reminder of a conclusion she had reached earlier when they had thrown down their bedding: they were being followed.
She remained awake, careful not to stare at the fading coals of their campfire, and focused on what she could hear, rather than trusting her sight. If they were indeed being shadowed, their pursuer was either very skilled or hanging back some distance. She prayed the latter was the case.
As the moon dipped below the horizon, she rolled stealthily from her bed. Starlight afforded little in the way of illumination, but her eyes were already becoming accustomed to the darkness. DiLorenzo snored lightly, obliterating any chance she might have to pick out distant noises in the night, but she did not disturb him. With any luck, she would be back before he knew she had gone.
She stayed low, sometimes crawling on hands and knees, working her way back down the route they had blazed. It was impossible to make out any details of their earlier passage, but she knew the signs were there; boot prints and displaced foliage carved a path that even a modestly skilled tracker could follow. She had not been overly worried about leaving a trail, initially believing that their enemies could not possibly have picked up the scent so quickly, then later realizing that keeping DiLorenzo moving would demand all of her attention.
In the darkness, she had to rely on her memory of their ascent, but soon found herself picking out notable landmarks, familiar outcroppings of rock or uniquely gnarled trees. Her visual acuity continued to improve, and soon she was moving down the slope almost as fast as she would walk under normal circumstances. Nevertheless, it was neither her eyes nor ears, nor even her sixth sense, that tipped her off to the location of their pursuer.
A faint whiff of smoke, not burning wood but the sweet aroma of tobacco, drifted across her path, stopping her instantly. Reflexively, she knelt into a defensive crouch, her right hand seeking the butt of her holstered automatic. She sniffed cautiously at the air, trying to find the source. There was virtually no wind, so she knew she was close.
She found the campsite within two minutes of first scenting the cigarette smoke. The men had camped almost exactly on top of the trail she and DiLorenzo had left during their climb. There were two of them, rough looking men whose dark complexions revealed both their aboriginal ancestry and a lifetime of toil in one of the harshest places on earth. She doubted that they were Montero’s soldiers, but it seemed reasonable to believe that the men were working under his direction.
The men had pitched bedrolls, eschewing the comfort of a campfire doubtlessly to maintain the secrecy of their pursuit. They had cloaked themselves in wool blankets, hand-woven, with geometric patterns in ochre and indigo. One of the men appeared to be sleeping while his companion kept a failing vigil. Not only had indulging his nicotine habit betrayed their location, but the man also appeared to be dozing off. Every few seconds, he would jerk spasmodically, trying in vain to raise himself back to wakefulness.
Mira pondered her options. Killing them outright was an obvious solution, but one that would not rest easy on her conscience. If the men had been overtly linked to Montero and his neo-Nazi group, she might not have hesitated. She had long ago learned that sparing an enemy simply postponed an inevitable life or death struggle. However, it was evident that these men had not been sent to kill her, and acting preemptively against them would tread too closely the fine line between war and murder, a line she had been unwilling to cross during her days as an intelligence agent.
As she watched, the sentinel’s head dipped forward once more, the man’s chin coming to rest on his chest. His cigarette had ceased glowing, but tendrils of smoke were beginning to rise at the point where the tip of the cheroot met the rough cloth of his shirt.
“Those things will be the death of you,” she murmured, creeping forward in an almost serpentine crawl. Her fingers deftly plucked the smoldering butt from the garment, removing the imminent danger. The negligent watchman offered his gratitude with a gentle snore.
She did not linger in the campsite. Her reasons for daring to move so close were two-fold, and in rescuing the oblivious sentinel from his own stupidity, both for the sake of altruism and to prevent a rude awakening, she had accomplished one of those tasks. The other promised to be more profitable.
Lying haphazardly between the sleeping men were two large packs. Mira crept past the nearby guard, entering into the heart of their campsite, and eased the packs onto her back. Each weighed about twenty pounds, a difficult burden to bear when crawling, but she kept her breathing soft and shallow as she slipped silently away from the camp.
Hiking back up the trail, her calves and thighs burning from the exertion of the added weight, she contemplated how the men would react when they awoke to discover that their camp had been raided. Their upbringing in the harsh country had likely imbued them with the necessary survival skills to survive by foraging, but with any luck they would simply turn around and head back to the city. Meanwhile, she and DiLorenzo would profit from their loss.
The sky was beginning to lighten in the east by the time she reached their campsite. A smoky odor lingered in the air, the only remnant of their fire. The thin atmosphere had quickly smothered the coals once the fuel was expended, eliminating the small corona of warmth that DiLorenzo had unconsciously huddled close to in his sleep. Though he continued snoring loudly, his fingers had pulled the sleeping bag tight around his shoulders, and were visibly clenching the fabric. Weary from the nocturnal trek, Mira eased the packs to the ground and then collapsed on top of them.
Anxiety and adrenaline prevented her from sleeping. Her eyes continually roved across the indistinguishable landscape for some sign of pursuit. Nevertheless, the rest from physical activity was hungrily welcomed. Her ribs still smarted from the blow she had taken on the Puerto Nuevo docks, only the latest in a series of scrapes and contusions that were slowly eroding her stamina. For all the discomfort, however, she could not deny the feeling of vitality that her adventures had awakened. She was also eager to learn the fate of the third Trinity relic and prepared herself to do whatever was necessary to keep Montero and Rachel Aimes from seizing its power.
Her intuition gave her no insight into the Trinity’s strange nature. That it was a talisman of supernatural power was evident, but the source of its energy was problematic. Did it derive power from the traditionally recognized sources of magic: gods and devils, angels and demons, spirits and ghosts? Or was it in actuality the product of a technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from sorcery?
Did it matter?
Without realizing it, she found herself staring at the piece of the Trinity that she had recovered from the U-boat. Though it had been securely stowed away in her backpack, she had unconsciously taken it out, lightly caressing the hexagonal gemstone. In the twilight, it almost seemed as if the crystal was glowing.
When she had been working with Atlas on the trail of S
torm Jaguar and then later in the temple in Panama, the Atlantean Trinity had exerted a gravitational pull on her, drawing her like a moth to flame across thousands of miles. And when she had stood in its presence, the “noise” from the relic had overwhelmed her prescient sensory organ, a noise that had gone silent when she damaged the crystal. By contrast, the Lemurian Trinity, as Mann had dubbed it, had not revealed its presence to her, at least on a psychic level, even though it was clearly active—active enough to reanimate Mann’s corpse.
The Trinity was proving to be a fickle conquest.
She had told DiLorenzo that there were abundant clues in Mann’s journal to lead them to the entrance of the hidden Nazi refuge, but that was only partly true. She did not need Mann’s directions; the Trinity was speaking to her again.
She held the circlet in her hands, trying to remember the sensations that had come from its Atlantean counterpart, and she felt the same kind of homing instinct that had pulled her toward the tomb in Panama. More than that, she felt attuned to the location, not only of the remaining Trinity relic—Mann had linked it to the ancient myth of Shambala, chief city of the Hollow Earth empire known as Agartha—now secreted away in the Nazi redoubt, but also the stolen Atlantean Trinity. She couldn’t fix their exact locations, but like the needle of a compass, she could track a straight line directly to either one of them. And in the case of the Shambala Trinity, she knew that she was very close.
The Trinity sensed that a reunion was near, and it was beginning to sing to her.
Abruptly, a discordant tone insinuated itself into that urgent and insistent song, compelling her to gaze toward the horizon. There she spied the blinking light of an artificial star—an aircraft, probably a helicopter, moving across the sky and descending into Ouros.
In the remote frontier of Bolivia, air travel was more a necessity than a luxury, and the arrival of an aircraft should not have been noteworthy. Even the unusual hour of arrival could be explained rationally, considering cocaine smugglers didn’t always keep banker’s hours. However, her intuition was telling her otherwise.
She nudged DiLorenzo with a booted foot. “Wake up. We’re going to have company.”
NINE
Though he was the closest thing to nobility for several hundred miles, Rafael Delacortes was deferential to the point of sycophancy. Montero strove to conceal his contempt for the half-breed drug lord as he offered thanks for the man’s cooperation. Delacortes in turn promised to continue providing whatever assistance Montero might need. Although the Argentine had brought a dozen of his best recruits—survivors of earlier skirmishes with Mira Raiden—armed to the teeth with the finest weapons money could buy, Montero did not refuse the contribution. In the uncertain terrain and altitude, it only made sense to place the local rabble in the vanguard.
Within two hours of their arrival, the sun now climbing out of the eastern sky, the expedition set out in a loose formation of jeeps and pickup trucks. Almost immediately, the impromptu caravan turned into the jungle, treading deeply rutted, smuggling roads.
In the passenger seat of Delacortes’ Ford Explorer, bathed in the cool breeze of a surprisingly functional air conditioning unit, Jorge Montero closed his eyes and tried to imagine what they would find. The relic that Tarrant hungered for was unquestionably significant, but it was a mere fraction of the wealth and power that his forefathers had likely secreted away in the subterranean fortress. Not only had the Nazis cached their plunder in the hidden redoubt, but the accumulation of their scientific knowledge was most certainly archived there as well. Although both America and Soviet Russia had plumbed the depths of Germany’s progress in the fields of atomic science and rocketry, squeamish sentiment had prevented them from making use of the information gained in medical experiments conducted in the relocation camps. Doubtless, what they had taken after Germany’s defeat was the merest tip of a juggernaut iceberg of knowledge.
Making wise use of what they would find in the Nazi fortress was perhaps more problematic. After a lifetime—make that nearly three lifetimes—of searching for the hidden treasure, the imperatives that had once driven the members of Odessa were no longer so clear. Global domination was not as attractive as it had once perhaps seemed. The world was overflowing with undesirables, too many to eradicate but of little value as subjects or even slaves. No, the real power at work in the world derived, as it always truly had, from controlling money. Though ultimately he could only begin to guess at what they would find in the Nazi redoubt, Montero was confident that he could parlay both physical riches and the treasure of knowledge into an iron fist of wealth and power that would make both superpowers and mega-corporations kneel to kiss his ring.
“Señor.” The soft voice, intentionally unobtrusive, barely broke through Montero’s grandiose idlings. He raised his eyes to find that the convoy had stopped in the middle of the wilderness road, and Delacortes was standing in front of the open door of his car.
“What is it?”
“Señor, my humblest apologies, but the men I have sent ahead to follow the woman . . . There has been no radio contact since last evening.”
“What does that mean? Are they dead? Has the Raiden woman killed them?”
Delacortes shrugged, bringing his hands together as if he were genuflecting. “I do not know. They were good men.” Montero could only assume that the cocaine seller spoke of their toughness and reliability, rather than their moral character. Delacortes continued: “I do not believe that this woman could have overwhelmed them.”
“She’s a resourceful bitch,” snarled Montero, flashing back to his encounters with Mira, one of which had left him in a New York City hospital under police custody. “The question is, can we find her without them?”
Delacortes shrugged again. “We know where they last sighted her. Perhaps we can pick up the trail from there.”
“Good. Then let us proceed with all haste.” Tarrant would soon see through the subterfuge by which he had left Argentina, and it was imperative that Montero be in possession of the Trinity relics before the old grave robber caught up to him. Though he could tell himself that he was unafraid of the old man and his mystical talismans, he knew that he was fooling no one, least of all himself.
DiLorenzo followed the invisible line, leading from the tip of Mira’s finger to a point on the rock face roughly sixty feet above their heads. A faint plume of steam was creeping from a barely discernible crack in the vertical stone wall.
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head grimly. “It’s the only way in.”
“How can you know that?” DiLorenzo’s tone was tinged with panic. “Wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t think I want to know.” He leaned back against the wall, sinking into a tired squat, and massaged his temples in search of courage.
His headache was mostly gone, conquered by hydration and acclimatization. In its place was a sort of total body ache, but even that felt good in a macho sort of way. Since rising, he had almost kept pace with Mira—a more hurried pace than the previous day.
Shortly after waking, she had passed him a steaming mug full of a rich brown liquid. Though he usually took his coffee with two creams, two sugars—regular by New York standards—he had gulped it down straight, welcoming the flow of warmth into his veins.
“Thanks,” he murmured. A moment later he spied a stack of tortillas and an array of fruit, and looked back at her in wonderment. “Did you run to the corner store for this?”
She flashed a wry smile. “In a manner of speaking.”
The provisions she had raided from the camp of their pursuers were a mixed bag indeed. The men had carried coffee, fruit and tortillas, but no fresh water. Their packs had also included a small arsenal of weapons and ammunition, from which DiLorenzo had taken a .38 revolver, while Mira had added a single-barreled pump-action shot gun to her armaments, along with a score of buckshot shells. The only other item of interest was a military-style radio. They had listened warily since dawn to the repeated inquiries from s
ome distant source, demanding a reply.
Upon breaking camp, Mira had navigated more precisely, as if following an unseen beacon. DiLorenzo had tried to solve the mystery without asking, but soon the pace she set cleared his mind of everything but exertion. It was almost noon when they reached the vertical rock face, where a wisp of vapor marked the presence of a geyser, at which point Mira had announced that they had arrived.
Though her face and manner betrayed no anxiety toward the ascent, Mira was hiding a deep-seated dread. Her concern stemmed primarily from the fact that she would have to guide her companion, doubtless a rank beginner in the world of rock climbing, up what appeared to be a very technical route. Adding to the predicament was her lack of any safety equipment, not counting the fifty feet of hemp rope, a gift of the Cordova family. She sorely missed the gear she had purchased in New York for her clandestine entry into Aimes’ apartment.
The ascent did not appear impossible by any means—Mira had trained on much more difficult routes back on the Farm—but to a neophyte like DiLorenzo, difficulty was measured on a completely different scale, on which failure meant pain, serious injury or even death.
“I’ll go up first,” she announced, trying to mask the hesitancy she felt. “I’ll take the rope with me and set a belay at the top. I won’t be able to pull you up, but it will help you make the climb.”
DiLorenzo nodded silently, unable to completely conceal his trepidation behind a brave smile.
Mira nodded in return, then slung the rope coil over her shoulder and turned to the rock. The first few steps would be easy. The base of the cliff was littered with large boulders, forming a platform from which to launch her ascent. After that, however, the angle of the stone face was just a few degrees off vertical, though thankfully the degrees were in her favor.