Fearless (Dominion Trilogy #2)

by Robin Parrish

  Chief Inspector Walden, a local acquaintance from an international case or two Ethan had been involved with, met him inside the car and directed him to the special seat they'd set aside for him. Handcuffs were attached to the seat, a pair locked onto the rails on each side.

  Ethan's heart fluttered with excitement as he sat and Walden locked the cuffs around his wrists.

  "You sure I can't talk you out of this one, lad?" Walden asked in his thick Scottish accent.

  Ethan smiled at him. "It'll work. I'll be incapacitated and unable to control my actions, and the car's movement will be completely maintained by inertia. There's no way to turn back."

  Walden clearly wasn't convinced. He placed a locket around Ethan's left wrist. No ordinary locket, this one had a small metal box attached and rigged to open on a timer device.

  "You just be sure not to drop these," Walden said, placing the keys to the cuffs inside the lockbox on Ethan's wrist. "Once I set this, it'll open after ten minutes, come what may."

  Ethan nodded. His heart was pumping like mad, but he savored the feeling. He was ready.

  Walden ordered the rest of his men out of the car. Everyone was to clear the area, with the sole exception of Walden himself, who would activate the engine car behind Ethan. As the other British officers vanished one by one, Walden leaned in closely to Ethan.

  "You'll do well to remember two things. First, whoever or whatever you encounter on the other side of that barrier will have no notion that you're coming, so I wouldn't be expecting a warm welcome. And second, there's no evidence that once you're inside the barrier, your mental state will return to normal. But there's not much we can do about that bit, is there?"

  Yeah, thanks for pointing that out.

  "I'm ready," Ethan said, adjusting his sitting position.

  "We'll have no way of knowing what happens to you," Walden replied, "so best of luck to you, laddie."

  That was a sobering thought. No one would come to his rescue if this went badly. He was about to be cut off from the entire world.

  Walden clicked the LED timer on the device on Ethan's hand, and it began counting down from 10:00.

  The Inspector exited the car, shut the sliding side door, and disappeared from Ethan's sight. Ethan waited impatiently for the car to begin moving. A slight bump from behind was followed by forward motion, building faster and faster.

  They had agreed to start the train half a kilometer out from the edge of the barrier. That would give them enough time to build up some nice momentum on the passenger car, but still allow the engine, with Walden inside, to stop before hitting the barrier.

  At least, that was the plan.

  The running lights inside the tunnel started to flash by at a steady rate, and Ethan suddenly felt the loss of speed as the engine braked from behind. The engine was stopping already? That was fast.

  His passenger car kept moving forward, but he estimated the car couldn't have been going more than thirty miles an hour, and it was starting to slow. Would it be enough?

  He pulled instinctively at the cuffs, enjoying the rush provided by his immobilization inside the moving train. He glanced at the timer on the lockbox. 7:21 to go and counting.

  The train approached a red flag that had been planted marking the spot where British agents first began feeling the fearful sensations associated with the barrier.

  The flag passed, and Ethan was instantly filled with an overwhelming desire to get off of the train. The need to turn back consumed his mind.

  Why had he done this? What was he thinking?!

  Absolutely convinced that his life depended on not being on this train, he worked up a terrific sweat straining against the cuffs. He tried squeezing his hands through the holes, but they had been fastened too tight. He grabbed hold of the steel sidebars the handcuffs were attached to and tried to rip them free. But he couldn't get good leverage on the bars in his seated position. He stood, his arms pulled behind him, and he tried yanking the entire seat free from the car.

  He had to get out! NOW!

  Panic filled every pore of his body, and his wrists had ugly red marks on them. He noticed that the shining steel cuff on one of his wrists was covered in blood, and he grew clammy and cold. He'd cut a vein, the same way suicidals slice their wrists. He'd seen it enough times to know what it looked like.

  And then just as fast as it had set in, the fearful sensation was gone. The car slowed to a crawl, and he plopped back into his seat, out of breath. The panic and fear subsided. He'd made it.

  But his wrist was bleeding out, and the timer on the key mechanism still had more than five minutes left.

  The adrenaline coursing through his body masked the light-headedness that kept him from returning to his feet. He was already feeling weak, and the blood was gushing out of his wrist, all over his clothes and the seat, and even down to the floor.

  He couldn't get free from the cuffs to apply pressure to stop the bleeding for another four and a half minutes.

  And no one would be coming to help him.

  Ever so slowly, the car drifted to a stop in the middle of a nondescript Underground tunnel. Westminster Station, the Tube station they'd been aiming for, was nowhere in sight. Adding insult to injury, the tunnel was powered down here and completely dark. Whatever was happening inside the barrier, maintaining electricity in the Underground wasn't a priority.

  Ethan wanted to pass out. Oh, how he wanted to sleep so very much.

  Instead, he blinked through the sensation, and a glimmer shone in his eyes.

  Well, he smiled determinedly, this will be a new personal best.

  Dawn was about an hour away when Grant and Alex followed the directions Fletcher had given them to what would be their new safe house. When they arrived, they found it to be a three-story flat about five blocks northwest of the river. Already furnished, the apartment had three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, dining space, and a large living room. A small coffee table in the center of the living room had already been claimed by Fletcher, who was using it as a pared-down, makeshift version of his computer workstation in L.A.

  Grant wasn't sure how they had managed to acquire such a comfortable living space. Given the secrets he was keeping about both Lisa and Nora, there were any number of possibilities for making something like this happen. He decided he was happier not knowing the details.

  "Did you find anything?" Morgan asked as soon as they'd walked in the door.

  "Hand over fist," Alex replied unpleasantly. "Literally."

  Grant seated himself next to his sister at the quaint dining room table. Morgan sat across from him, along with Fletcher, who'd brought one of his laptops along and typed on it while they talked. Alex sat at one end of the table and Lisa took the other end. She waited first to see if Daniel would take the remaining seat, but he preferred standing in the shadows at the back of the room. Grant assumed that Hector and Nora were asleep, or at least trying to sleep, elsewhere in the apartment.

  "Omega Prime," Grant said without preamble. "That's what we found. Sound familiar?"

  Morgan's eyes lit up. "More Greek," she said knowingly. "Yes. Yes, yes, of course ..."

  "I don't follow," Lisa spoke up.

  "Substation Lambda Alpha," Morgan explained. "That was the name of the underground facility beneath the Wagner Building in Los Angeles. `Lambda' and `Alpha' are both Greek letters. As are `Tau' and `Epsilon', from the door Payton found in Jerusalem. `Omega' is also a Greek letter."

  "`Omega Prime' must be the name of another one of these substations," Grant concluded, cutting to the chase.

  "Also consider," Morgan went on, "that `Omega' is the last letter of the Greek alphabet. It adds a note of finality or supremacy to the title. And the inclusion of the word `Prime' is also likely a connotation of added importance or significance. We could be looking at something a bit more critical than just another substation."

  Morgan paused, rubbing at her temples. A migraine, Grant surmised. She suffered from them frequently. But she was
also thinking something through, adding another layer to the secrets she was keeping. Finally, she nodded to herself.

  "You were expecting to find something like this," Grant stated.

  "After a fashion," Morgan replied thoughtfully. "I had a theory that this `repository' Payton found evidence of might be a collection not of books or information-but of people. Secretum of Six people. I think what we're talking about here-this Substation Omega Prime ... it could be their primary base of operations. It could be the central location where their key players live and breathe and operate from. And if that's the case-"

  "We have to find it," Grant finished for her. He understood now why she had kept this particular theory to herself; the ramifications were too big to get everyone's hopes up. "So where is it?" he asked. "I mean, we're assuming it's underground somewhere, right?"

  "Highly likely," Morgan replied. "I've given this considerable thought, and I think we can narrow it down a bit."

  "How?" Alex asked, leaning forward.

  "Grant's grandfather told him that the Secretum had been `waiting for millennia for the coming of the Bringer.' That means, rather obviously, that the Secretum has been in existence for millennia. Let's assume for a moment that they've been operating out of the same location for all these thousands of years. What would that tell us?"

  "That this Substation Omega Prime," Fletcher spoke up, getting there faster than everyone else, "would be in a place of specifically ancient significance."

  "Yes, precisely," Morgan replied. "Global civilization as we know it today did not exist thousands of years ago. An organization with the kinds of resources that the Secretum has at its disposal would have needed to remain in a fairly centralized location to the smaller civilizations of the time. Which means that wherever this substation is, we'll find it beneath a place that's been populated by mankind for thousands of years. For all that time, it's been part of the known world."

  "Meaning they have to be in Europe or Asia," Julie added, catching on.

  "Or Africa?" Alex offered.

  "Yes," Morgan said. "So we've narrowed down the possibilities already. Next, we must consider the Secretum's affinity for prophecies and ancient objects such as the Dominion Stone. The Stone, this ancient location, the Secretum's obsession with manipulation ... it's all about one thing."

  "Power," Fletcher concluded.

  "They would select a location of great symbolic power for their headquarters," Morgan nodded, concluding her theory. "Either a symbol of power or a physical location where power is believed to subsist. Possibly both."

  Grant and the others digested this. "So, we're looking for someplace ancient and significant for being a seat of great power ..."

  "What do you mean-like the Bermuda Triangle?" Lisa interjected.

  "Right line of thinking," Morgan replied, "but let's assume for the moment that they'd build their headquarters in someplace a little more accessible than miles beneath the ocean floor."

  Brows furrowed all around the table. Alex spoke first.

  "What about Stonehenge? It's seriously ancient, and it's thought to be some sort of temple or observatory, right? Wouldn't that be considered a `place of power'?"

  "I think," Morgan replied thoughtfully, "we can rule out Stonehenge. Given the number of excavations that have been done there and all the tourists that have trampled its sod, it's likely safe to assume that if anything more were there to find, it would have been uncovered already."

  Alex frowned.

  "But you're on the right track," Morgan added encouragingly. "I'm thinking of places like the Great Pyramid at Giza, Petra in Jordan, Mount Olympus, Mount Parnassus in Greece, the spring at Lourdes in France, Newgrange in Ireland, Teotihuacan in Mexico, India's Kailasa Temple, the Nazca Lines of Peru, or Machu Picchu, Easter Island-"

  "I thought it wouldn't be anywhere in the Western world," Julie interrupted, the college professor in her coming out. She massaged a mug of coffee as she continued. "You said it had to be someplace that existed in the center of ancient society. Civilizations existed in the Americas then, but they were hardly at the heart of the global community."

  Morgan shrugged. "Yes, probably not in the Americas. But it never hurts to be thorough."

  "What's Mount Parnassus?" Grant asked.

  "Ever heard of the Oracle at Delphi?" Morgan replied. "Mount Parnassus is where she made her predictions, though she owed more to the hallucinogenic ethylene gas emanating from a fissure in the rock there than to any supernatural conduit."

  "Sounds interesting, maybe we should look into it," Fletcher remarked off-handedly, glancing briefly at Grant. "Didn't a lot of people seek her out for ... romantic advice?"

  Alex kicked him under the table. He flinched but covered it by continuing to type on his computer.

  "Maybe it's beneath the Vatican," Alex offered, half-joking, in an attempt to change the subject.

  "Actually, I wouldn't rule out any historic sites around Rome," Morgan rebutted. "From the Coliseum to the Parthenon, ancient Rome was rife with locales of significant power and influence." She sighed and then settled her shoulders. "We can't afford to waste time guessing like this; it could go on forever. If we want to find Omega Prime, it will require access to records we can't reach through the Internet or any other usual channels. Records that stretch back hundreds, even thousands of years into human history. Fortunately, such records can be found nearby, right here inside the barrier."

  "You serious?" Fletcher asked with a single cocked eyebrow. "Never thought I'd see the day ..."

  "Desperate times," Morgan replied. "We'll leave in a few hours, after everyone has a chance to catch a few winks."

  "What are you two talking about?" Lisa asked.

  "The Library," Morgan replied, resolute.

  "The Library?" Grant asked, surprised. "The London Library? That's the place where you used to work, before you were Shifted, isn't it? Wait, didn't you tell me the London Library was where you were Shifted?"

  "I swore I'd never return." Morgan nodded grimly. "But it's time."

  Rome

  Barely any light illuminated the drab alleyway, making it even more difficult for Payton to check for traps. A recent rainstorm had left the ground wet; it reflected moonlight back at his face from the otherwise dark pavement.

  He held one hand on the hilt of his sword at all times, prepared for anything. The alley may have looked abandoned, but Payton knew better than to trust his eyes.

  He walked through narrow passages, following the signs that had been left for him. The signs in question were nothing more than scratches against old buildings, shutters, and doors, but Payton recognized them all too well. The buildings on either side of him were several stories tall-old storage facilities for moving grain, meat, and other commodities.

  A barely perceptible scratch on an overhang above his head caught his attention.

  This would be the place.

  His eyes fell upon the door behind the post. It was hingeless, instead sliding on rusted bearings, and Payton flung it aside.

  The interior of the building had a high ceiling with catwalks two stories above. The ground level was cordoned off with thatched wire fencing. Only moonlight cast any shadows.

  But Payton knew he was not alone.

  "You've been sticking your nose in places it doesn't belong," called a voice from the blackness. "A propensity you've long had, as I recall."

  Payton didn't bother looking up, though his instincts told him exactly where on the catwalk the voice had originated.

  "Yes, well I learned from the best, didn't I?" he responded calmly.

  He heard footsteps clanging against the catwalk, and then the footsteps were descending. Payton could only assume there were stairs somewhere up there.

  "Hello, Payton."

  Payton turned; his opponent had managed to appear behind him. His body stood silhouetted in the still-open doorway. His silver hair gleamed in the moonlight, his outline formed by a knee-length trench coat.

  I
n a flash, Payton had withdrawn his sword and was holding it in a defensive position.

  "Devlin," Payton acknowledged, noting a very important accessory that Devlin wore. "The ruling council has placed you in charge?"

  "I am the Secretum of Six," Devlin replied, repeating an ancient recitation. Fitting to their location, Devlin had chosen an Italian accent today. "In all matters, I speak and act on behalf of they who serve the Great Task. I am their hand. I live in the in-between and the everlasting. Thus shall I serve, until my dying breath."

  Payton was unimpressed. "If you have not summoned me here to put an end to your existence, then you're about to suffer a grave disappointment."

  "I thought we should have a chat," Devlin replied, clasping his hands in front. "Yes, I lied to you. The Secretum lied to you. For years, you were trained and tasked to carry out our purposes under false pretenses. I know how much you must hate me for this-"

  "You really don't," Payton replied, his teeth clenched tightly.

  Devlin allowed a courteous nod. "Fair to say. But I have to believe that somewhere beneath all that anger there is still some modicum of respect for your former mentor?"

  Payton didn't reply. He merely tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword. His breath came out in hot wisps of air.

  "Whether you like it or not," Devlin went on, "you have served the Secretum's interests, and served them well. So we are offering you a chance at a reward."

  "I want nothing that passes through your hands."

  "It's not a material thing I came to offer you," Devlin calmly replied. "I simply want you to know that it is not too late. You can still take your rightful place as a servant of the Secretum. You could be a great military leader among our people. Come back to the fold, and all will be forgiven."

  Payton didn't take time to consider the offer. He merely spat on the ground, very close to Devlin's high-priced shoes.

  "You went to all this trouble to get me here so you could tell me I can come back? Why am I so important to you? I thought your interest was in the Bringer." Payton found that he still had trouble speaking that title without anger boiling in him inwardly. They had trained him to destroy the Bringer, and they had done their jobs very, very well.