The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts

by James Rollins

  Not on our soil was the new American credo.

  And she’d been happy at the time to exploit that.

  Still, the loss of Yuri and the child was not insurmountable. It only required accelerating her timetable. Her operation—titled Saturn—was supposed to follow Nicolas’s actions in Chernobyl by a week. Now the two would commence on the same day.

  Tomorrow.

  The two operations—Uranus and Saturn—were named after two strategic offenses during World War II, when Soviet forces defeated the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in human history. Close to two million were killed in that battle, including vast numbers of civilian casualties. Still, the Germans’ defeat was considered the turning point of the war.

  A glorious victory for the Motherland.

  And as in the past, Operation Uranus and Saturn would once again free Russia and change the course of world history.

  And likewise, not without casualties.

  Necessity was a cruel master.

  Savina reached the far wall of the cavern. A tunnel opened, framed by thick lead blast doors, miniature versions of the same doors that closed the main tunnel into Chelyabinsk 88.

  Just inside the mouth of the tunnel rested a train and bumper stops. The electrified tracks carried a single train back and forth between the Warren and the heart of Operation Saturn, on the far side of Lake Karachay. The old tunnel went under the toxic lake, allowing for fast transport between the two sites without risk of exposure to the lake’s hot radiological soup of strontium 90 and cesium 137.

  The train was already waiting for her.

  Savina climbed into one of the lead-lined cabs. There were only two enclosed cars, one on either end of the train. The remaining four sections were open ore cars for hauling supplies, mining gear, and rocks.

  As the train sidled out with a clack of wheels and sizzle of electricity, the blast doors sealed behind her. The tunnel went dark. She stared up as the train began the five-minute journey. As it accelerated, Savina pictured the weight of water overhead, insulated by a quarter mile of rock.

  The region above was the heart of the Soviet Union’s uranium and plutonium production. Mostly now defunct, the facility had once had seven active plutonium production reactors and three plutonium separation plants. It was all sloppily run. Since 1948, the production facilities had leaked five times more radiation than Chernobyl and all of the world’s atmospheric nuclear tests combined.

  And half that radiation was still stored in Lake Karachay.

  The radiation level on the lake’s shore measured six hundred roentgens per hour. Sufficient to deliver a lethal dose in one hour.

  Savina remembered where the maintenance worker from Ozyorsk had found Dr. Archibald Polk’s abandoned truck.

  On the shore of that lake.

  She shook her head. There had been no need to hunt down Dr. Polk. He’d been dead already.

  Lights appeared ahead.

  It glowed with the hope for a brighter future.

  The heart of Operation Saturn.

  3:15 P.M.

  “They’re planning on doing what?” Monk said, a bit too loudly as he walked alongside the riverbank.

  He and the kids had been walking alongside the churning river for the past hour. It was not the same waterway as where they’d encountered the bear. Monk had forded that turbulent stream by using a series of boulders and followed it down to this larger river, buried in a dense fir forest. Monk had studied the topographic map several times. It seemed they were following along the watershed that drained the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains. On the western side, the Urals shed their rainwater and snowmelt into the Caspian Sea; on this side, it all flowed into a region of massive rivers and hundreds of lakes, all of which eventually emptied into the Arctic Ocean.

  What the Russians were planning…

  Shock had rung in his voice.

  Konstantin winced at his sharpness.

  “I’m sorry,” Monk said more quietly, knowing voices traveled far in the mountains. He had been the one to warn the children to speak only in whispers. He obeyed his own rule now, though his voice was still strained. “Even with the hole in my memory, I know what they’re planning is madness.”

  “They will succeed,” Konstantin countered matter-of-factly. “It is not difficult. A simple strategy. We”—he waved to Pyotr and Kiska, then in a general motion behind him, indicating the other children like him at the underground compound—“have run scenarios and models, judged probable outcomes, analyzed statistical global data, studied environmental impact, and extrapolated end results. It is far from madness.”

  Monk listened to the boy. He sounded more like a computer than a teenager. Then again, Monk remembered the cold steel behind Konstantin’s ear. They all had them. Even Marta bore a thumb-size block of surgical steel buried in the fur behind her ear. During the past hour, Konstantin had also used the time to demonstrate his skill at calculations. The mental exercise had seemed to calm him. Kiska showed him how she could identify a bird’s song and mimic it in perfect pitch.

  Only Pyotr seemed shy about his abilities.

  “Empath,” Konstantin had explained. “He can read someone’s emotions, even when they’re hiding it, or acting contrarily. One teacher said he was a living lie detector. Because of this, he prefers the company of animals, spends much of his time at the Menagerie. He’s the one who insisted we bring Marta.”

  Monk stared at where the boy walked with the elderly chimpanzee. He had been studying the boy, watching how he interacted. The two seemed to be in constant communication, silent glances, a pinch of brow or pucker of lip, a swing of arm.

  He watched Pyotr suddenly stiffen and stop. Marta did, too. Pyotr swung to Konstantin and spoke in a rush, a frightened babble, first in Russian, then English. His small eyes turned up to Monk, searching for some miraculous salvation.

  “They’re here,” the boy whispered.

  Monk didn’t have to ask who Pyotr meant. It was plain from the raw terror in his voice.

  Arkady and Zakhar.

  The two Siberian tigers.

  “Go!” Monk said. They ran down the riverbank. Konstantin led the way. His sister, Kiska, as fleet-footed as a gazelle, followed behind him. Monk allowed Konstantin to pick the best path through the blueberry bushes, scraggly brush, and boulders that lined the riverbanks. Monk kept a watch on their back trail. He had to be careful. Streams of straw-yellow spruce needles flowed from the thick forest to the river’s edge and created patches as slick as ice underfoot.

  Pyotr slipped on a patch and landed hard on his backside. Marta scooped him under a hairy arm and got him back on his feet. Monk herded them forward. Konstantin and Kiska widened the distance ahead of them.

  They ran for five minutes, but exhaustion quickly began to slow them. Even adrenaline and terror fired you for only so long. Ten minutes more and they were slogging at a stumbling half trot.

  The group closed together again.

  There remained no sound of pursuit, no crash of branches or snap of twigs. No sign of the tigers.

  Konstantin, panting and red-faced, glared at Pyotr and spoke harshly in Russian, plainly berating the boy for the false alarm.

  Monk waved Konstantin off. “It’s not his fault,” he gasped out.

  Pyotr wore a wounded yet still terrified expression.

  Marta hooted softly, bumping Konstantin.

  Kiska also scolded her brother in Russian.

  Monk had been warned that Pyotr could not judge distances well, only intent. He had to trust that when the tigers got really close—

  —Pyotr went ramrod stiff, his eyes huge.

  He opened his mouth, but terror choked him silent.

  No words were necessary.

  “Now!” Monk screamed.

  Turning as one, they all ran—straight for the swift-flowing river as planned. Monk grabbed Pyotr, hugged him tight, and leaped from the bank. He heard twin splashes as Kiska and Konstantin hit the water downs
tream a few yards.

  Monk surfaced in the icy-cold flow with the boy clinging like a vine to his neck. He twisted in time to see Marta swing up into the branches of a tree, climbing fast.

  Deeper in the forest…motion…swift…a flash of fiery fur…

  Monk kicked for the deepest and fastest current. He spotted Marta leaping from one tree to another in the dense forest. Chimpanzees could not swim and had no natural buoyancy. She had to take another path.

  Forest shadows shattered as a huge shape burst into view, low, muzzle rippling, paws wide, striped tail high and stiff.

  The tiger leaped straight from the riverbank at Monk.

  He back-paddled and kicked, dragged by the weight of his pack and the boy. Pyotr tightened his arms, strangling him.

  The tiger flew, legs out wide, black claws bared, a scream of feral fury.

  Monk could not swim fast enough.

  But the river’s flow made up for it.

  The tiger crashed into the water a few yards away, missing its prey.

  Monk angled into a swift channel between two boulders. He got dumped into a churning hole, thrown down deep, then back up again.

  Pyotr choked and coughed.

  Monk twisted and spotted the tiger thrashing upriver. It spun in an eddy of current. Despite the myths of cats and water, tigers were not averse to water. Still, the beast paddled for the shore. It was not how cats hunted.

  Cats were all about the ambush.

  The tigers had plainly stalked them, following them quietly through the forest as they fled away, driven by Pyotr’s initial warning. The boy had been right. Following age-old instincts and cunning, the pair had tracked them, waited until their prey had tired before charging. Tigers were sprinters, not long-distance runners. They timed their charge so they could strike at the perfect moment.

  Along the river’s edge, another tiger appeared, stalking back and forth, thwarted. The first cat hauled out of the river, waterlogged and drenched. It shook its laden pelt and sprayed water.

  Monk got a good look at the pair. Though still muscular, they looked emaciated, starved. Their fur had a ragged appearance. He noted matching steel skullcaps, like on the wolves. One tiger’s ear was gnarled, shredded from an old hunting injury. Zakhar, according to Konstantin’s description. Born siblings, it was the only way they could be told apart.

  In a single smooth motion, as if responding to a silent whistle, the pair turned and vanished into the darkness.

  Monk knew it wasn’t over.

  The hunt was just beginning.

  He twisted and saw Konstantin and Kiska disappear around a bend in the river. Monk sidestroked after them. Pyotr shivered against him. Monk knew the boy was not trembling from the cold, nor even from fear of the tigers. His huge, panicked eyes were not on the riverbank, but on the flow of water all around him.

  What was terrifying him?

  3:35 P.M.

  Pyotr clung to the large man. He kept his arms tight around his neck, his legs around his waist. Water flowed all around him, filling his world. He tasted it on his lips, felt it in his ears, smelled its sweetness and green rot. Its ice cold cut to his bones.

  He could not swim.

  Like Marta.

  He searched the far bank as it swept past, searching for his friend.

  Pyotr knew much of his fear of water came from her heart. Deep water was death to her. He had felt the quickening thud of her heart when they crossed on the boulders earlier today, saw the tightening of her jaw, the glassy wideness to her eyes.

  Her terror was his.

  Pyotr clasped tighter to the man.

  But the true heart of Marta’s terror lay deeper than any sea. He had known it from the moment she had come to his bedside, laying a lined paw upon his sheets, inviting friendship. Most thought she had come to comfort him as he recovered from his first surgery.

  But in that long breathless moment, staring into her caramel-brown eyes, Pyotr had known her secret. She had come to him, seeking comfort for herself, reassurance from him.

  From that moment, terror and love had bonded them equally.

  Along with a dark secret.

  4:28 P.M.

  New Delhi, India

  “Did you know man can see into the future?” Dr. Hayden Masterson asked as he tapped at the computer.

  Gray stirred from studying the depths of his coffee. The group shared one of the private rooms at the Delhi Internet Café and Video. Kowalski leaned against the frosted glass door, ensuring their privacy. He picked at an adhesive bandage on his chin. Elizabeth had tended to the man’s scrapes and was now stacking the pages coming out of the laser printer beside the workstation. It was just the four of them. Rosauro and Luca had gone out to rent them a new car for the journey ahead.

  Though Gray still wasn’t sure where they were going.

  That all depended on Masterson—and he wasn’t in a talking mood. The professor had spoken hardly a word since they’d escaped from the attack at the hotel. Attempts to draw the man out, to get him to reveal why he might be the target of assassination, had only seemed to make him withdraw.

  He just continued to study the marred ivory handle of his cane. His eyes glazed—not with shock, but in deep concentration.

  Elizabeth had given Gray a quiet shake of her head.

  Don’t press him.

  So they’d driven north out of Agra, aiming for the capital of India, New Delhi. During the ninety-mile trek, Gray had them change vehicles twice along the way.

  Once they reached the teeming outskirts of the city, Masterson had given only one instruction: I need access to a computer.

  So here they were, in a cramped back room of an Internet café. The professor had promptly logged on to a private address on the University of Mumbai’s Web site, requiring three levels of code to access it.

  “Archibald’s research,” Masterson had explained and had begun printing it all out. He had remained silent until this cryptic statement about mankind seeing the future.

  “How do you mean?” Gray asked.

  Masterson pushed back from his workstation. “Well, many people don’t know this, but it’s been scientifically proven in the last couple of years that man has the ability to see a short span into the future. About three seconds or so.”

  “Three seconds?” Kowalski said. “Lot of good that’ll do you.”

  “It does plenty,” Masterson replied.

  Gray frowned at Kowalski and turned back to the professor. “But what do you mean by scientifically proven?”

  “Are you familiar with the CIA’s Stargate project?”

  Gray shared a glance with Elizabeth. “The project Dr. Polk worked on for a while.”

  “Another researcher on the project, Dr. Dean Radin, performed a series of experiments on volunteers. He wired them up with lie detectors, measuring skin conductivity, and began showing them a series of images on a screen. A random mix of horrible and soothing photos. The violent and explicit images would trigger a strong response on the lie detector, an electronic wince. After a few minutes, the subjects began to wince before a horrible image would appear on the screen, reacting up to three seconds in advance. It happened time and again. Other scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, repeated these tests at both Edinburgh and Cornell universities. With the same statistical results.”

  Elizabeth shook her head with disbelief. “How could that be?”

  Masterson shrugged. “I have no idea. But the experiment was extended to gamblers, too. They were monitored while playing cards. They began showing the same pattern, reacting seconds before a card would turn over. A positive response when the turn was favorable, and negative when it wasn’t. This so intrigued a Nobel-winning physicist from Cambridge University that he performed a more elaborate study, hooking such test subjects to MRI scanners in order to study their brain activity. He found that the source of this premonition seemed to lie in the brain. This Nobel Prize winner—and keep in mind, not some bloody quack—concluded that ordinary p
eople can see for short spans into the future.”

  “That’s amazing,” Elizabeth said.

  Masterson fixed her with a steady stare. “It’s what drove your father,” he said gently. “To determine how and why this could be. If ordinary people could see for three seconds into the future, why not longer? Hours, days, weeks, years. For physicists, such a concept is not beyond comprehension. Even Albert Einstein once said that the difference between the past and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time is just another dimension, like distance. We have no trouble looking forward or backward along a path. So why not along time, too?”

  Gray pictured the strange girl. Her charcoal sketch of the Taj Mahal. If man could look through time, as Dr. Masterson reported, then why not across great distances? He remembered Director Crowe’s statement about the successes the CIA project had with remote viewing.

  “All it would take,” Masterson said, “would be to find those rare individuals who could see farther than the ordinary. To study them.”

  Or exploit them, Gray thought, still thinking of the girl.

  Elizabeth passed the last page from the printer to the stack. She handed it to Masterson. “My father…he was looking for these rare individuals.”

  “No, my dear, he wasn’t looking for them.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes pinched in confusion.

  Masterson patted her hand. “Your father found them.”

  Gray perked up. “What?”

  A knock on the door interrupted the professor before he could explain. Kowalski shifted, checked who it was, and opened the door.

  Rosauro poked in her head and passed to Gray a heavy set of rental keys. “All done in here?”

  “No,” Gray answered.

  Masterson bowled past him with an armload of papers under his arm. “Yes, we are.”

  Gray rolled his eyes and waved to the others. “C’mon.”