The CIA became her family. In her early twenties, that family had betrayed her, and after setting up a digital trail for a new identity, she disappeared. Since then she’d been working with Sam Reilly, who recognized her unique skill set. The crew of the Maria Helena were her new family and she was happy. Eight weeks ago, in the Amazon jungle, some truths she had often wondered about, came to surface, and she knew what she’d always known – she was genetically different. She had purple eyes, inhuman reflexes, and shared an active posterior lobe in her cerebellum that was dormant in others, and was capable of receiving high frequency radio waves in the form of images.
Sam Reilly had informed her that the Secretary of Defense said that she was found as a baby, inside an ancient temple discovered in the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. The temple revealed the first existence of the ancient race of Master Builders. Many questions had haunted her since that day. Who were her parents and where were they? She recalled the most disturbing question being the one the Secretary of Defense had asked Sam.
The Master Builders plan everything precisely. If they intentionally left Elise to be found by the elite specialist military team I sent to examine the temple, it begs the question, why? More importantly, if there is a war with Master Builders, what side of it will Elise be on?
With her heart in her mouth, she prayed that the answer to the question wasn’t written inside the temple. She followed the monk up the stairs and inside the main domed section of the Dagoba. It was dark inside and she struggled to follow the monk who appeared to walk with the familiarity of the blind.
She switched on her pen-flashlight and used its dim light to follow the monk into a deeper chamber, where the ancient relics of Buddha were theoretically stored. The path descended more than thirty flights of stairs, before opening into a small domed chamber.
Elise flicked the beam of her flashlight across the dome-shaped ceiling. It was made with a foundation of bricks, the same as the main outer dome. There were no frescoes or murals and not even any references to Buddha.
Her eyes darted toward the monk, who was grinning peacefully. “What is it you expect me to see here?”
“You will need to turn off the light if you want to see it.”
Elise stared at him. Beneath his shaved head he was still smiling. He wore an orange kashaya robe wrapped around under the right arm and back over the left shoulder. There were not a lot of places for him to conceal a weapon, but it was possible. For a moment she had to swallow the fear that rose in her throat like bile. Could she have misjudged him? Was it all a ruse? Had he taken her here to hurt her? It seemed unlikely, but so was the thought that the truth about her past was written on the walls of the dilapidating monument to Buddha.
“Why?” she asked.
“Only you can answer that. I can only take you here. If you want to go further, you will need to open your heart.”
Conflict twisted her face into a grimace of indecision. It was unlike her, but these were unlikely times. Elise took a deep breath in, took a leap of faith, and switched off her flashlight.
The darkness enveloped the room instantly
She glanced above and expelled the breath audibly, certain she’d made the right decision. A series of bricks glowed with purple fluorescence. There were eight in total and when you drew an imaginary line between them, they formed the Greek letter Phi. Her eyes darted to the base, where a large stone depicted a horse in the same purple glow.
Elise recalled Tom and Genevieve’s description of the hypogeum in the Orvieto Underground. They had used a black light wand to reveal the hidden keys of phosphorescent markings, leading to the queen’s sarcophagus.
“I don’t understand,” she said to the monk. “We don’t have a black light, so why do the markings phosphoresce?”
She couldn’t see the monk, but she could hear him laugh. “Markings? I see no markings.”
“You don’t?”
“No. The final chamber is only to be revealed to you.”
“I can see ultraviolet light?”
The monk was still laughing. “How would I know what you can see?”
Elise thought about it. Reindeer relied on ultraviolet light to spot lichens that they could eat. Some scorpions released a purple ultraviolet glow to distinguish between their family and predators. Butterflies are able to see and emit ultraviolet light as a hidden means of communicating with other butterflies. To this effect, many flowers have evolved to display ultraviolet patterns that help butterflies directly land on their nectaries, resulting in pollination of the flower. And now, she too, had been given the gift of vision within the ultraviolet spectrum.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Do you want to find out more, or have you had enough of the truth?”
“I want answers.”
“Good. Then only you can lead the way.”
Elise stared at the ultraviolet markers in the brickwork above. She felt the first brick. It had a little movement. It could be potentially put down to age and dilapidation, but she knew better. She pressed it hard, and the brick appeared to move inward. She repeated the process on the other seven glowing bricks. She then gently put her weight on the glowing horse on the floor.
She grinned.
And the stone on which the horse had been secretly painted now moved down and forward – revealing a set of hidden stairs, leading deeper into the Dagoba.
Chapter Sixty
Ese-Khayya, Siberia
The Russian built Ka-32A11BC helicopter seemed unnatural to Sam as it whirred its way across the eastern Siberian landscape. With its dual rotor blades that spun in alternative directions, negating the need for a tail rotor to counteract the torque generated by the single blade on a traditional helicopter, the helicopter appeared more like the shape of a strange toy than a functional aircraft. The helicopter had been chartered at the last minute with great expense. In addition to the two pilots, on board were Sam, Tom, Genevieve, Billie and Demyan.
The Gulfstream G650 had been left in Zhigansk Airport, roughly three hundred miles to the west, where it was being refueled. If their mission was a success, the jet would need to be ready to race back to Sigiriya with the final sacred stone. Sam looked at the dark clouds that seemed to encapsulate every end of the world, slowly suffocating the light. He made a silent prayer that there was still time.
He glanced across at Demyan. “You’re sure you dad still has the blueprints for the tunnels?”
“Certain,” Demyan replied, but his grimace appeared less than certain.
“But what?”
“My dad has some cognitive impairment. It might be difficult trying to find them.”
“He has dementia?” Sam asked.
“No. Profound guilt.”
“What?”
“When I was still a kid my mother died. A week later, my father took a new job working for Leo Botkin, to put in place a secret tunnel to an enormous underground cavern. At the time, he thought he was doing the right thing. He was trading his own happiness for the survival of my brother and I. When the project was nearing completion, Botkin betrayed my father by trying to kill him and all his men in order to maintain the secret of the tunnels.”
“How did he escape?”
“My father climbed out through a ventilation shaft. Then, when he came home to find out what became of my brother and I, we were both gone and one of our neighbors told my father that my brother and I drowned in Boot Lake.”
“Under which the colony exists?”
“Exactly.”
“Why did your neighbors think you were dead?” Sam asked.
“My brother did drown in Boot Lake.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. He was an angry kid and we never really got along, but after my mother died I was determined to be a better brother to him.”
“It must have been hard.”
“You have no idea. When I got home Leo Botkin was there. He told me my father had died in a mining accident and gave me the
Russian equivalent of a hundred thousand US dollars at the time, for compensation. I knew the story was all crap and that Botkin was lying to me, but what could I do?”
“What did you do?” Sam asked.
“I took the money and fled to Moscow. I hid most of the money, but spent enough to get an education. As it turned out, I had a strong ability in mathematics and the sciences. I studied geology and that led to my interest in volcanoes.”
Sam smiled at the revelation. “Why did you study geology of all things?”
“Because I was angry at Botkin. I was certain he’d lied to me about how my father had died, and that the money was his way of offloading some guilt – although at the time I had no idea about what.”
“So, you studied geology?”
“I was angry. In the course of a single week I’d lost my entire family. We weren’t local to Oymyakon. My father had moved us there only the year before to be closer to work, but we were outsiders and never really belonged within the close-knit community.”
“And you wanted revenge?”
“Yes. Stupidly, I assumed that if I became a leading geologist I could ruin Botkin.”
“You planned your revenge nearly a lifetime ago?”
“Sure. It was a crazy idea and by the time I finished my first degree and then moved to the U.S. to study my doctorate at Harvard I’d lost all interest in revenge and turned my efforts toward volcanology.”
The helicopter banked to the left, dipped its nose and ran along the Yana River. “What changed?”
Demyan sighed, as though serendipity was hard to swallow. “I watched the BBC.”
“Come again?”
“About ten years ago the BBC did a program on the Batagaika Crater, a tadpole shaped thermokarsk of melting permafrost in eastern Siberia, for the Discovery Channel. In the recording there were a few people from one of the local villages, searching the base of the crater searching for ice-age fossils to sell to interested archeologists. It was extremely dangerous work because of the constantly shifting and collapsing nature of the landscape. As it was, I happened to spot my father among the scavenges.”
Sam’s lips curled in an upward and incredulous smile. “You recognized him from a nature show?”
“Yeah. I had to contact the network and buy a copy just to get a better look, but it was definitely my father.”
“What did you do?”
“I flew out meet him straight away.”
“How did that go?” Sam asked, intrigued.
“He was in complete denial. He didn’t recognize me. Told me his sons had died years ago.”
“That must have been hard.”
“Yeah, it was devastating. I kept coming back to the Batagaika Crater to talk to my father. Some days he would talk, other times he would ignore me completely. Sometimes he would assume I was the ghost of his lost son and he would tell me things. That’s how I learned about the colony and what Leo Botkin had done.”
“I bet that stirred up some old wounds.”
“Yes. The desire for revenge raged like it had never done before. I thought about killing Botkin, but it was too easy. Instead, I needed him to suffer. I needed to ruin him. I needed to bankrupt him until he was destitute living on the street. Then and only then would I come to him, and let him know that I was the cause of all of his misfortune.”
“How did you set about doing that?” Sam asked with genuine curiosity.
“I studied with a man who worked on high frequency microwaves for the HAARP project. Have you heard of it?”
Sam nodded. “The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program was initiated as an ionospheric research grant to investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance.” He grinned. “But the conspiracy theorists all assumed it was related to mind and weather control.”
Demyan nodded. “Right. Mind control through microwaves was nothing more than science fiction, but weather control was conceivably possible – if the UN hadn’t expressly sanctioned against such research.”
“I was told some of the intellectual property was sold,” Sam said.
“And I was the one who bought it.”
“Why?”
“My friend failed because he lost funding for his specific research at HAARP. Out of a job, he approached me for another possibility. I used my knowledge of geology and high pressures alongside his microwave technologies to produce high quality, undetectable, synthetic diamonds.”
The Ka-32A11BC helicopter circled a small village. Its pilot picked out a landing site, hovered, and gently set down on a small field of frozen soil. The pilots switched the engines off, and the alternating rotor blades began to slow.
“It was you that set about to crash the diamond markets?” Sam asked.
“Yes.”
“And destroyed Botkin’s property?”
“Yes. He’s been suffering a long run of bad luck for nearly two years now. But he’s always been protected. He’s too big, to rich, and too well insured for me to cause any lasting damage – until now.”
“Until now,” Sam repeated. “If we do this, it will destroy everything Leo Botkin has worked on for more than twenty years!”
Chapter Sixty-One
Sam followed Demyan along the unsealed road into the village of Ese-Khayya and up to a log-piled house at the edge of a gently sloping hill. It was dark and both needed flashlights just to follow the road. The darkness was less unusual in this part of the world, given that it was early winter.
Demyan knocked loudly several times until a man came to the door. A combination of urine, feces and continuous rot wafted from inside. The stranger was unkept and obviously malnourished. He walked with a significant limp, due to what appeared to be a once massively crushed lower leg.
“Sam Reilly, meet my dad, Anotoly Yezhov.”
Sam offered his outstretched hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Yezhov rejected it. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“He’s a friend and he needs your help.”
“I don’t have any help to give anyone.” Yezhov threw his hands downward, in frustration. “Can’t you see, I can’t even look after myself!”
Demyan glanced at the putrid mess from inside the house. “I thought I told you to get some help?”
The old man held his palm outward in a placating gesture. “With what? I’ve got no money!”
“Dad!” Demyan shook his head. “I gave you one of the best diamonds in the world what did you do with it?”
Through heavily aged creases, Yezhov studied Demyan. “That was you, was it?”
“Yes. What did you do with the diamond? That was supposed to let you live out your old age in comfort and peace. Away from all this cold and hardship.”
“I gave it away.”
“You gave it away?” Demyan sighed heavily. “Dad, that was a hundred-million-dollar diamond!”
“I didn’t want it.”
“But you can’t live like this.”
“Did you ever stop and question if maybe I liked the cold and all this hardship. I deserve it, you know. I might as well have killed my entire family.”
“No, you didn’t dad. You were just trying to do what you could to provide for your family. That was all. I’m still alive.”
Yezhov studied Demyan’s face. “Your eyes are the same. I’ll give you that. But you’re not the same man I left all those years ago. Demyan’s dead. He drowned in Boot Lake along with his brother, and there’s nothing I can do about that except repent. You want to help me? Let’s have a drink.”
Demyan nodded and followed him inside. This was where he’d gotten to a hundred times since he’d found his father still alive. He would have intermittent periods of lucidity, followed by the utter gibberish of a confused old man. But when they drank vodka, his father would treat him as a drinking buddy and no longer a stranger. His dad had always been an alcoholic. Even in Oymyakon, their family were outcasts, because of the viol
ent way his father became when he started drinking – and he drank every day.
Yezhov poured all three of them a shot of vodka.
Sam looked at the glasses and said, “None for me…”
Yezhov handed him a shot. “Drink!”
Sam glanced at Demyan, who gestured that it was the easiest way to deal with this. Sam raised the shot up to his lips. It burned for a second and then he downed the entire thing. It tasted like something that should be used on a jet engine and for a moment he wondered if he’d done permanent damage, despite the fact that the two Yezhov men had consumed the same thing and appeared unfazed.
“Another one?” Yezhov asked, filling all three glasses.
“Dad,” Demyan said. “We need to talk about the blueprints.”
“What blueprints?” Yezhov drank all three glasses.
Sam said, “The ones for the secret tunnels you built to the ancient catacombs beneath Boot Lake, in Oymyakon.”
Yezhov paused, carefully studying Sam’s face. “Who are you? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Secret tunnels. I know about no such thing.”
“Dad. We need the blueprints. It’s important. We have to get inside.”
“Inside?” Yezhov’s eyes were now wide. “No one goes inside anymore. Thousands of people once entered those tunnels, but no one’s ever come out again.”
“All the same, we need to find those tunnels.”
Yezhov poured another drink. “What tunnels.”
Sam said, “Sir, we need your help to go back there. The entire world is counting on your help.”
Yezhov shrugged. “And why should I help the world out? It never done nothing for me!”
Demyan downed another shot of vodka and then looked at his father directly in his eyes. “Because we want to kill Leo Botkin.”
Yezhov’s eyes went livid. He no longer appeared disoriented when he spoke. “That I can help you.”
Code to Extinction Page 25