“And you threw it in the water?”
“Past that beaver dam. Like you said.”
Monk nodded. His hospital nightshirt had been soiled with blood and sweat. One of the kids had stolen it from his room after he’d changed. It was smart thinking. If they’d left the shirt, his captors would have known he’d changed.
It also came in handy in laying a false trail. He had further soiled the shirt by wiping sweat from his brow and underarms. He had done the same with the kids and the chimpanzee, too. The riper garment should leave a stronger trail, a false trail. Hopefully the scent would send the hunters searching in the wrong direction.
“Help me with this,” Monk said to Konstantin and leaned down to the log they’d used to cross.
Together, the two got the log rocking, but they still couldn’t dislodge it. Monk then felt a huff at his cheek. He turned to see Marta shouldering into the log. With a single heave, the chimpanzee rolled the fallen log into the stream. She was strong. The log fell with a heavy splash, then bobbed and teetered down the waterway. Monk watched it float away. The more ways they could break their trail, all the better.
Satisfied, Monk headed out.
Konstantin kept up, but Kiska and Pyotr struggled. The way was steep. Monk and Marta both helped the smaller children, hauling them up the harder patches. Finally, they reached the top of the rise. Ahead, more hills spread in all directions, mostly wooded with a few open meadows. Off to the left, not too far away, a wide patch of silver marked a large lake.
Monk stepped in that direction. With a lake like that, there should be people, someone who could help them.
Konstantin grabbed his elbow. “We can’t go that way. Only death lies that way.” His other hand squeezed the badge affixed to his belt, a radiation monitor.
In such verdant surroundings, Monk had forgotten about that danger. He flipped his badge up. Its surface was white, but as the radiation levels rose, it would begin to turn pink, then red, then dark crimson, then black. Sort of like a drugstore pregnancy test—
Photo-flashes of memory cracked across his vision.
—a laughing blue eye, tiny fingernails—
Then nothing again.
His head throbbed. He fingered the tender suture line through his wool cap. Konstantin looked at him with narrow, concerned eyes.
Kiska, who Monk had learned was Konstantin’s sister, hugged her arms around her belly. “I’m hungry,” she whispered, as if fearful of both being heard and of showing weakness.
Konstantin frowned in his sister’s direction, but Monk knew they all should eat to keep their strength up. After their panicked flight, they needed a moment to regroup, to plan some strategy beyond running. Monk stared toward the lake while fingering his badge.
Only death lies that way.
He needed to better understand their situation.
“We’ll find a place to shelter and eat quickly,” Monk said.
He crossed down into the next valley. A series of small ponds cascaded through a set of terraced ledges. The place sparkled with a dozen waterfalls and cataracts. The air smelled loamy and damp. Halfway down, a fern-strewn cliff side had been eroded into a pocket with an overhang. He led the children to it.
They hunkered down and opened packs. Protein bars and bottled water were passed around.
Monk searched his pack. No weapons, but he did find a topographic map. He unfolded it on the ground. The header was in Cyrillic. Konstantin joined him, chewing on a peanut-butter-flavored bar. Monk noted the mountainous landscape was marked with scores of tiny Xs.
“Mines,” Konstantin said. “Uranium mines.” He ran a finger along the Cyrillic header, then waved an arm to encompass the area. “The Southern Ural Mountains. Chelyabinsk district. Center of old weapons factories. Very dangerous.”
The boy tapped all around the map where radiological hazard symbols dotted the terrain. “Many open mines, old radiochemical and plutonium plants. Nuclear waste facilities. All shut down, except for one or two.” He waved to indicate a far distance away.
Monk mumbled with a shake of his head, staring down at all the hazard symbols. “And all I wanted to know was where we were.”
“Very dangerous, da,” Konstantin warned. He pointed an arm in the direction of the large lake, now out of sight. “Lake Karachay. Liquid waste dumping ground for old Mayak atomic complex. You stand one hour by the lake and you will be dead a week later. We must go around.”
Konstantin leaned closer to the map and tapped in the center of a cluster of mines and radiation plants. “We come from here. The Warren. An old underground city—Chelyabinsk 88—where thousands of prisoners were housed who worked the mines. One of many such places.”
Monk pictured the industrial-looking buildings he had seen in the cavern. Obviously someone else had found a new use for the abandoned place.
Konstantin continued, “We must go around Lake Karachay—but not too near.” He glanced up to Monk to make sure he understood. “Which means we must cross the Asanov swamp to reach here.”
The boy held his finger over another mine opening on the far side of the lake.
Monk didn’t understand. Weren’t they seeking to escape, to get to someone who could help them?
“What’s there?” Monk asked, nodding to the mine marker.
“We must stop them.” Konstantin glanced to Pyotr, who cradled with Marta on a bed of moss.
“Stop who?” Monk remembered the young boy’s words to him.
Save us.
Konstantin turned back to Monk. “It is why we brought you here.”
11:30 A.M.
General-Major Savina Martov glowered at the assembled children. They were in the school’s main auditorium. A photograph of the American glowed from a large LCD screen behind her.
“Has anyone seen this man lurking around early this morning? He may have been wearing a hospital gown.”
The children stared blankly at her from banks of wooden seats. They’d all been rousted early from their dormitories. More than sixty children sat in tiers, designated by the color of their shirts. The white-shirted sat at the back, those who carried the genetic markers but showed little talent. The grays sat in the middle, mildly talented, but not remarkable.
Unlike the ten who shared the front seats.
These last wore uniforms with black shirts. Omega class. Those rare few who displayed astounding talents. The dozen best, selected to serve Savina’s son, Nicolas, in the hard times to come, to be his inner council with Savina as its head.
Nicolas was a sore point for Savina, a disappointment. He’d been born a white shirt. A loss of the genetic dice. Savina had impregnated herself via artificial insemination from one of the first generation. She’d been rash and paid dearly for it. She’d acted before they fully understood the genetics. There had been complications during the birth. She could have no other children. But she had developed a new purpose for Nicolas, one that would bring about true and lasting change. It became her life’s work after Nicolas was born.
And they were so close.
She stared at the row of black shirts.
And the two empty seats in the Omega-class section.
One child had vanished last night.
Pyotr.
His sister had vanished at the same time from a zoo in America. Savina still had heard no update on the girl’s status from Yuri. The man had gone strangely silent, not even responding to a transmitted emergency code.
Something was happening.
She needed answers. Her voice grew sharper. “And no one saw Konstantin, Kiska, or Pyotr leaving their dorm rooms? No one!”
Again the blank stares.
Motion at the back of the room drew her eye. A toadish-looking man stepped into the room and nodded to her. Lieutenant Borsakov, her second in command. He was dressed in his usual gray uniform, including a stiff black-brimmed cap. He’d found something.
At last.
She turned to the trio of teachers standing to the side. �
�Confine them to their dormitories. Under close guard. Until the matter is settled.”
She climbed the stairs and exited the auditorium, drawing Borsakov in her wake. Pock-faced and scarred, he stood only as high as her shoulders, which she preferred. She liked men shorter than herself. But he was bulky with muscle, and sometimes she caught him staring at her with a flicker of hunger. She preferred that, too.
He trailed a step behind her as they crossed through the school to the exit. Once outside, she found two of his men. One had a chained Russian wolf at his side. It growled and rumbled, curling back lips to expose sharp teeth. The guard yanked on the lead, scolding it.
Savina gave the creature a wide berth. A mix of Russian wolfhound and Siberian wolf, its muscular form stood almost to Borsakov’s chest. The beast came from their animal research facility—nicknamed the Menagerie. It was where they experimented with new augments and tested various applications, using all manner of higher mammals: dogs, cats, pigs, sheep, chimps. It also served as a macabre petting zoo for the village. They’d found over the years that the children bonded with the animals and the relationship helped stabilize them psychologically. And maybe the bond wasn’t entirely human-animal, but also augment to augment, a shared commonality.
Even the wolf bore a surgical steel device.
The augment capped the base of the dog’s skull, attached via titanium screws and wired in place. With the touch of a button on the radio-transmitter, they could feed pain or pleasure, enhance aggression or docility, dull senses or stimulate arousal.
“What have you found, Lieutenant?” she asked.
“The children are not in the cavern,” he said.
She stopped and turned.
“We searched the entire village, even the deserted apartment complex, but when we circled wider, we discovered a scent trail along a back wall, behind the animal facility. It led to one of the service hatches to the surface.”
“They went outside?”
“We believe with the American from the hospital. The children’s trail came from the hospital.”
So that at least answered one question. The American hadn’t escaped, then kidnapped the children. It seemed it was the other way around. The children must have helped him escape.
But why?
What was so important about the man?
It was a question that had nagged Savina since the man had first arrived. Two months ago, Russian intelligence had been alerted about a plague ship that had been pirated in the Indonesian seas. Intelligence services around the world were looking for it. She had been tasked to see if her subjects could find it. A test. One she had passed. Primed, the twelve Omegas had pinpointed the island where the ship was being held. A Russian submersible was sent to investigate and came upon the lagoon just as the ship was sinking.
It was victory enough—until Sasha had begun scribbling with a fervor that almost burnt her augment out. A dozen pictures, from a dozen views, of a drowning man, being dragged down by a net. Believing this was significant—and being curious herself—Savina had alerted the Russian submariners. They already had divers in the water.
They found such a man, barely conscious, tangled in a net. They rushed up in diving sleds, forced a respirator into his mouth, and rescued him back to their submersible.
Savina had ordered the man brought here, believing he must be significant. But once at Chelyabinsk 88, he claimed to be just one of the cruise ship’s electricians. During their interrogation, the man had not seemed especially bright to her, just a scarred and shaven brute of a man with a coarse vocabulary and missing one hand. Likewise, Sasha had showed no interest in him. Neither did any of her fellow Omega-class subjects.
It made no sense, and the man proved to be a nuisance, caught one day tapping into a surface broadcast trunk, wired to his prosthetic cuff. They did not know what he was doing nor what type of signal he had sent out, but in the end, it had no repercussions. For security’s sake, they had the cuff surgically removed.
Over the weeks, Savina had grown to believe that the girl’s intensity had just been a childish fear for the drowning man’s life. Done with the matter, she had turned the American over to the care of the laboratory group at the Menagerie. They were studying memory, and a living human subject was raw material not to be wasted.
Savina had sat in on his surgery.
What they had done to him…
It still made her shudder.
But now he was gone—vanished with the brother of Sasha, who was also missing. What game were these children playing?
She didn’t know, and this late in her own plans, she didn’t have time to figure it out.
“Your orders, General-Major?”
“Search the surface.”
“I’ll bring all the dogs,” his voice snapped.
She stopped him. “Not just the dogs.”
Borsakov stared at her, his eyebrows pinched questioningly. But he knew what she wanted done. “General-Major? What about the children?”
She strode away. Now was not the time for subtle actions. She still had ten children. That would be enough.
She confirmed her order. “Loose the cats, too.”
11:45 A.M.
Pyotr sat between Marta’s legs. Her strong, warm arms wrapped around him. He didn’t like to be touched, but he let her. The sweet earthy smell of her damp fur swelled around him. He heard the hush-hush of her breathing, felt the beat of her large heart in his own spine. He had known Marta all his life. He had known these arms. After Pyotr’s first operation at the age of five, she was brought to his room.
He remembered her large hand. It had scared him, but she lay there for most of the day, her head resting on the edge of his bed, staring at him. Finally, one of his hands had drifted to hers. His fingers danced along the wrinkled lines of her overturned paw, curious. She had stared at him with large brown eyes, moist and knowing. Long fingers wrapped around his.
He knew what it was.
A promise.
Others would play with her, cry in her arms, sit long nights with her…but Pyotr knew a truth that morning. She had secrets that were his alone. And his secret was hers.
In those arms, he stared out at the strange woods. They were allowed up here sometimes, to wander the forest with a teacher, to sit in the quietness. But it still frightened Pyotr. A wind whispered through the forest, knocking limbs and shedding twirling falls of leaves. He watched them and knew something was coming.
He was not like his sister.
But some things he knew. He leaned deeper into Marta, away from the leaves. His heart beat faster and the world faded, all except for the leaves. Drifting, twirling, dancing…terrifying…
Marta hooted quietly in his ear. What is wrong?
He trembled and quaked. His heart was in his throat, pounding a warning as more and more leaves fell. He searched in the spaces among the leaves. Konstantin had once told him how he could multiply so fast in his head.
Every number has a shape…even the biggest, longest number is a shape. So when I calculate, I look to the empty space between those two numbers. The gap also has a shape, formed by the boundaries of the other two numbers. And that empty shape, too, is a number. And that number is always the answer.
Pyotr didn’t fully understand. He could not do math like Konstantin, nor could he solve puzzles like Kiska, nor could he see far like his sister. But Pyotr knew no one else who could do what he could do.
He could read hearts…all sorts of hearts.
Great and small.
And something was coming, something with a dark, hungry heart.
Pyotr searched among the falling leaves as his own small heart hammered. He filled in the emptiness one space at a time.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. The world was just falling leaves and the dark spaces between, swirling and churning, reaching for him. In the distance, he heard Konstantin shout his name.
Marta’s arms tightened around him—not protecting him against the others, but holdin
g him safe. She knew his heart, too.
He had to see.
Had to know.
Something was coming.
He filled the spaces with ink and shadow, with the teeth and growl, with the pound of pad on hard ground. He saw what was coming.
SECOND
Chapter 8
September 6, 12:05 P.M.
48,000 feet over the Caspian Sea
Two hours until touchdown.
Gray stared out the windows of the Bombardier Global Express XRS. The day wore rapidly onward as the private jet streaked across the sky. During the course of their journey, the sun had risen on a new day, climbed over their heads, and had begun to fall again behind them. They would be landing on fumes, traveling at a squeak over supersonic speeds. The modified corporate jet had been gifted to Sigma by the billionaire aeronautics financier Ryder Blunt for past services rendered. Two U.S. Air Force pilots pushed the engines to get them to India by midafternoon local time.
Gray turned his attention back to the group assembled around a teak table. He had allowed everyone to sleep for six hours, but most looked exhausted. Kowalski still had his chair reclined flat, snoring in time with the engines. Gray saw no reason to disturb him. They all could use more sleep.
Focused on the dossier in front of her, the only person who showed no weariness was the newcomer to their small group. With expertise in neurology and neurochemistry, the same disciplines as Archibald Polk, it was no wonder Painter had assigned this member of Sigma to join their band.
Dr. Shay Rosauro was a little over average height, her complexion a cinnamon mocha, and her dark amber eyes sparked with flecks of gold and a fierce intelligence. Her shoulder-length black hair was bound back from her face with a black bandanna. She had served in the air force, and from her records, she could have piloted the Bombardier herself. She even wore a uniform blouse top with a wide black belt over khakis and boots.
And while Gray had never worked with her before, it seemed she had met Kowalski. She had done a double take when the large man had stepped into view. Kowalski had grinned, given her a bear hug of a greeting, then passed to climb into the plane. As she followed, she had stared back at Gray with an expression that read you’ve got to be kidding.
The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts Page 54