12:22 P.M.
Maggie stood only couple of yards from the cave entrance. They hadn’t gotten very far before the circus found them.
Bright camera lights pointed at her, pinning them all down. A step away, she recognized the chiseled features, white hair, and ice-blue eyes of an investigative reporter from CNN. The governor of Utah accompanied him. No wonder the National Guard hadn’t stopped this news crew from coming down here. Nothing like a photo op to bolster the governor’s reelection campaign.
Of course, along with the news crew came the usual suspects, dancing for the national spotlight and playing for the cameras.
“You’re stealing our heritage!” came a shout from the mass of people.
She spotted the heckler, dressed in buckskin, his face painted. He had an iPhone raised and recorded the events. She expected she’d be on YouTube within the hour.
Maggie bit her tongue, knowing any response from her would only stoke the fires here.
Moments ago, as Maggie’s group stepped from the cave and was spotted, the crowd surged past the governor, who was conducting an on-air interview. Several people were knocked down. Fights broke out, and a miniriot threatened. Major Ryan rallied a cordon of Guard soldiers, instantly stemming the tide and restoring a semblance of order.
In the meantime, Hank and the other guardsmen formed a wall between her and the pack of cameras and protesters.
Hank held up a hand. “If you want to see the artifact,” he boomed out, “we’ll show you. But then Dr. Grantham will be heading straight to BYU with it, where it will be studied by historians from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Indians.”
Another angry shout cut him off. “So you’re going to do to this skull what they did to the body of Black Hawk!”
Maggie winced inside. It was a sore bit of Utah history. Black Hawk had been a Ute Indian leader who died during a conflict with settlers back in the mid-1800s. Afterward, his body had been put on display at various museums, then subsequently lost. It wasn’t until a Boy Scout, completing an Eagle project, found the skeleton in a storage facility at the Mormon Church’s historical department. The bones eventually were reburied.
Maggie had heard enough. Standing beside the green transport crate, she raised her arm. All eyes and camera lenses focused on her.
“We have nothing to hide!” she called out. “Clearly strong emotions surround this discovery. But let me assure everyone that all will be handled with the utmost respect.”
“Enough talking! If there’s nothing to hide, then show us the skull!”
This call was taken up by others and became a chant.
Maggie caught the gaze of the governor. He made a slight motion for her to obey. She suspected the golden totem had become a novelty for a majority of the crowd rather than an artifact of historical significance. So if this was a circus, she might as well be its ringmaster.
Turning her back, she bent down to the crate and struggled to undo the tight latches. Her arthritic fingers made it difficult. Plus, the mist in the valley had begun to turn into a thin drizzle. Droplets pattered against the plastic top of the crate. A hush fell over the crowd.
She finally freed the latches and hauled the top open. With the rain falling, she would not expose the artifact for longer than a minute. She stared down at the gold skull nestled in its foam cocoon. Even in the wan light down here, it shone brilliantly.
She stepped back to open the view to the cameras and the crowd, but she could not take her eyes off the skull. A misty haze coalesced over its surface. She watched a drop of rain strike the golden surface—then freeze immediately into an icy teardrop.
A collective gasp rose from the crowd behind her.
She thought they’d witnessed the event, too—then she heard a scuff of boot on rock. She glanced up to see a thin girl in black jeans and jacket come leaping out of the cave a yard away, her ebony hair fanning out like wings of a raven. She clutched an arm around her jacket, but something slipped from beneath it and hit the stone with a clanging thud.
It was one of the gold tablets.
Ryan shouted for the thief to halt.
Ignoring him, the girl turned, ready to flee toward the woods, but her foot slipped on the rain-dampened stone outside the cave. She stumbled, one arm pinwheeling for balance, sending her backpack tumbling. It rolled and came to rest near the crate. The girl came close to crashing down after it, but she gained her footing as effortlessly as a startled deer, turned on a toe, and leaped toward the edge of the forest.
Maggie remained fixed in place, crouched over the open crate to protect it. She stared down, making sure the artifact was safe. In that short time, more raindrops had fallen—and frozen—decorating the golden surface with beads of ice.
She reached and foolishly touched one, triggering a stinging snap. A painful jolt shot up her arm, but instead of being thrown back, she felt her arm pulled forward. Her palm struck the golden surface. With contact, the bones of her fingers suddenly ignited, burning through her flesh. Shock and horror clamped her throat shut. Her knees weakened.
She heard Hank shout at her.
Ryan bellowed, too.
One word cut through the agony.
Bomb!
12:34 P.M.
The brilliant flash blinded Hank. One moment he was shouting at Maggie, the next his vision went white. A clap of thunder tried to crush his skull, immediately deafening him. An icy shock wave knocked him back like a cold slap from God. He hit the ground on his back, then he felt a strange tug on his body, pulling him toward the explosion.
He fought against it, panicked down to the core. The sensation felt not only wrong, but fundamentally unnatural. He struggled against that tide with every fiber of his being.
Then it was over, as quickly as it had begun.
The inexorable pull popped away, releasing him. His senses snapped back. His ears filled with wails and screams. Images swirled into focus. He lay on his side, facing toward where Maggie had stood. He didn’t move, too stunned.
She was gone—so were the crate, the skull, and most of the cliff, including the cave entrance.
He raised up to an elbow and searched.
There was no sign of her, no charred remains, no mangled body. Nothing but a blackened circle of steaming rock.
He struggled up. Kawtch shimmied closer on his belly, cowering, tail between his leg. If Hank had a tail, he’d have done the same. He placed a reassuring palm on the dog’s side.
“It’ll be okay.”
He hoped it was true.
By now, the crowd had regained its collective footing. A panicked exodus began. The news crew retreated to higher ground, shuffled back by a cordon of National Guard. Two soldiers manhandled the governor up the trail, a precaution in case there was another attack.
Harry pictured the bag tossed by the girl. When it had landed by the crate, it had flapped open and its contents spilled out: cubes of yellowish-gray clay, embedded with wires.
Major Ryan had immediately recognized the threat.
Bomb.
But the warning had come too late for Maggie.
A knot of anger burned in the pit of his belly. He let it settle there as he pictured the attacker. From the girl’s burnished copper skin, brown eyes, and black hair, she was definitely Native American. A homegrown terrorist. As if matters here weren’t bad enough.
Numb with grief, he stumbled toward the blast zone, needing to understand. To the side, Major Ryan picked up his helmet and placed it back on his head.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ryan said, still dazed. “The force of this explosion should have taken out half the crowd. Including us.” He held up an open palm. “And just feel that heat.”
Hank did. It felt like a blast furnace. The air reeked of burning brimstone, turning his stomach.
As they watched, a la
rge boulder crumbled apart within the blast zone, breaking down into smaller rocks. The face of the cliff began to do the same, disintegrating into a flow of boulders and sand. It was as if the hard granite had become loose sandstone, friable and weak.
“Look at the ground,” Ryan said.
Hank stared at the blasted rock, steaming and awash with a swirl of mist. The drizzling rain hissed and spattered as it struck. Still, he didn’t see what had Major Ryan so agitated. Then again, the man had much younger eyes.
Hank dropped to a knee to inspect the ground more closely. Then he saw it, too. He’d missed it through the swirl of steam. The stone surface wasn’t solid, more like a ground pepper—and it was moving!
The grains jittered and trembled as if they were drops of oil simmering atop a hot skillet. He watched a small pebble on the surface dissolve into coarse sand, then into a dusty powder. A drop of rain struck the ground and blasted a crater. Like a pebble hitting a still pond, ripples spread outward across the microfine surface
Hank shook his head in disbelief. Fearful, he studied where the blast zone ended and solid ground began. As he stared, the bordering edge of stone crumbled to sand, incrementally expanding the blast zone.
“It’s spreading,” Hank realized, and pushed Ryan back.
“What are you talking about?”
Hank had no answers, only a growing certainty. “Something is still active. It’s eating away the rock and radiating outward.”
“Are you nuts? Nothing can—”
From the center of the blast zone, a belch of water burst upward from below and coughed into a steaming column, rising several yards into the air. A scalding heat chased them farther off.
By the time they stopped, Hank’s skin burned, and his eyes felt parboiled. He gasped and choked out a few words.
“Must’ve cracked into the geothermal spring . . . under the valley.”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan pulled his jacket collar over his mouth and nose. The burning sulfur made even breathing dangerous.
“Whatever’s happening here, it’s not only spreading outward—”
Hank pointed to the minigeyser.
“—it’s also heading down.”
Chapter 3
May 30, 3:39 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
So much for dinner plans.
Though the explosion in Utah was only an hour old, Painter Crowe knew he’d be in his office all night. Details continued to flow in by the minute, but information remained sketchy due to the remote mountainous location of the blast. All of Washington’s intelligence communities were on high alert and mobilizing to bear on the situation.
Including Sigma.
Painter’s group operated as a covert wing for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. His team was composed of handpicked Special Forces soldiers—those whose IQs tested off the scales or who showed unique mental acumen. He recruited and retrained them in various scientific disciplines to act as field operatives for the Defense Department’s research-and-development wing. Teams were sent out into the world to protect against global threats.
Normally, such a domestic attack as in Utah would not fall within his team’s purview, but a few anomalous details had drawn the interest of his boss, the head of DARPA, General Gregory Metcalf. Painter might have still argued against utilizing Sigma’s resources for such a messy business, but as a result of the controversy surrounding the blast, even the president—who owed his life to Sigma in the past—had personally requested their assistance in this delicate matter.
And one does not say no to President James T. Gant.
So Painter’s barbecue plans with his girlfriend were put on hold for the night.
Instead, he stood with his back to his desk and studied the large flat-panel monitors mounted on the three walls of his office. They depicted various views of the blast. The best footage came from the CNN cameras that had recorded the event. The other monitors flowed with grainy video and photos captured from cell phones, the millennium’s new digital eyes on the world.
For the hundredth time, he watched the looping feed from CNN. He saw an older woman—Dr. Margaret Grantham, an anthropologist—leaning over a green military transport crate. She undid the latches and lifted the lid. A commotion ensued, jittering the camera feed. The view swung wildly. He caught a glimpse of a figure behind the woman, fleeing away—then a blinding flash of light.
Using a remote control, he froze the footage. He stared into the heart of the blast. If he squinted, he could make out the shadow of the woman within that glare, a dark ghost within the blaze. He moved the image forward frame by frame and watched her shadow slowly consumed by the brightness, whittled away to nothing.
With a heavy heart, he hit the fast-forward button. From there, the footage became chaotic and jostled: trees, sky, running figures. Eventually the cameraman found a vantage point from which he felt safe enough to resume shooting. The view swung back to the steaming blast zone. Chaos still reigned as people fled the site. A handful of others remained below, cautiously examining the scene. Moments later, a steaming geyser erupted and chased even the stragglers away.
A preliminary report already sat on his desk from Sigma’s resident geologist. He estimated the blast had cracked into a “subsurface geothermal stream.”
Painter stared again at the geyser. It wasn’t subsurface any longer. The geologist’s assessment had included a topographic map dotted with hot springs in the vicinity. Even in the dry technical jargon of the report, Painter could sense the enthusiasm brimming in the young geologist, the raw desire to investigate the site firsthand.
While he appreciated such passion, the National Guard had the place locked down. A search was under way for the shadowy figure behind the blast. Using the remote control again, he froze the fleeting image of the bomber, blurry and indistinct, caught for less than a second.
According to interviews, it was a young woman. She had tossed a backpack full of C4, wired with detonators, then fled into the woods. The National Guard, local police forces, and agents from Salt Lake City’s FBI field office were attempting to seal off the area, but the mountainous terrain, rugged and thickly wooded, posed a challenge to finding her, especially if she knew the area.
To make matters worse, eyewitnesses reported that the woman was Native American. If true, that would mean even more political tension.
Painter caught his reflection in the monitor and searched for his own ancestry. He was a half-blooded Pequot Indian, on his father’s side, but his blue eyes and light skin came from his Italian mother. Most never pegged him as Native American, but the features were there, if you looked hard enough: the wide, high cheekbones, the deep black hair. But as he aged, those Indian traits shone more strongly.
Lisa had commented on it only last month. They had been spending a lazy Sunday in bed, reading the paper, finding no reason to get up. She had leaned on an elbow and traced a finger down his face. “You’re keeping your tan longer, and these sun crinkles are deepening. You’re getting to look a lot like that old photo of your father.”
Not exactly something you wanted to hear when lounging in bed with your girlfriend.
She had reached and fingered the single lock of white hair behind his ear, tucked like a snowy feather against the field of black. “Or maybe it’s just that you’re letting your hair grow out. I could almost tie this into a warrior’s braid.”
In fact, he hadn’t been growing his hair out. He just hadn’t had a chance to get it cut for a couple of months. He’d been spending more and more time at Sigma Command. The covert facility lay buried beneath the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall, occupying what had once been bomb shelters during World War II. The location had been picked for both its convenient access to the halls of power and for its proximity to the Smithsonian Institution’s many research facilities.
It was where
Painter spent most of his days. His only windows on the world of late were his office’s three giant monitors.
He turned away and crossed back to his desk, contemplating the implication of a homegrown terrorist, one with a Native American background. He seldom gave his own heritage much thought, especially after spending most of his youth in a series of foster homes. His mother, suffering from depression, had stabbed his father to death after seven years of marriage and the birth of their son. Afterward, Painter continued to have some contact with his Native American roots, fostered through the extended family of his father’s tribe. But after such a hardscrabble and chaotic upbringing, he’d grown to place more emphasis on the American part of his Native American ancestry.
A knock on his open office door interrupted him. He glanced up to see Ronald Chin, Sigma’s geology expert, standing in the doorway. “Thought you should see this.”
Painter waved the geologist inside, almost expecting him to have to duck through the doorway. Chin stood just shy of six feet, missing that mark only because he kept his head shaved to the skin. He wore a gray lab jumpsuit, zippered half down to reveal an Army Ranger T-shirt.
“What is it?” Painter asked.
“I was poring through some of the reports and came across something that could be important.” He placed a file atop the desk. “It was from a debriefing of a National Guardsman on the scene, a Major Ashley Ryan. Most of the questions centered on the identity of the bomber, along with events leading up to the blast. But Major Ryan seemed mighty agitated about the blast itself.”
Painter sat up straighter and reached to the file.
“If you look at page eighteen, I’ve highlighted the key passages.”
Painter opened the report, flipped pages, and read what was marked in yellow. There were only a handful of exchanges, but the major’s last statement sent a chill through his blood.
He read it aloud. “ ‘The ground . . . it looked like it was dissolving away.’ ”
Chin stood with hands behind his back on the far side of his desk. “From the beginning, I thought there was something odd about that blast. So I consulted Sigma’s demolition expert. He came to the same conclusion. For a detonation strong enough to break through bedrock and crack open a geothermal spring, the concussive blast radius should have been tenfold larger.”
The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts Page 87