Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “You’re saying it wasn’t a myth at all,” McCracken concluded. “You’re saying Pandora’s jar really exists.”

  “You realize how crazy this all sounds,” Folsom said, shaking his head.

  “If you’d seen what we did on board the Venture, I believe you’d feel different, B-rat. A Level Six event, remember? And no more nuts than that alien invasion you’ve been prepping for.”

  Folsom blew out some breath.

  “You weren’t in the Mediterranean five years ago, B-rat. You didn’t see what I saw there either.”

  “Which was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Could have been the temple. Tsunami got me before I could be sure.”

  “A tsunami,” Folsom repeated. “And how long before you were rescued?”

  “A day or so.”

  “A day or more at sea with no food or water after surviving a shipwreck? Doesn’t lend much credibility to your recollection.”

  Folsom’s comment was enough to bring Captain Seven up close to him, right in his face. “Let me tell you something, B-rat. I might be a burnout, but as these boys’ll tell you, when it comes to the job, I got the clearest head known to man and I’m only telling you what the cameras showed. So kiss my ass.”

  “You try looking for the temple again?”

  “You bet. Only whatever it was I caught a glimpse of before the tsunami hit was gone. Like it flat out disappeared again. Don’t ask me how. Dudes who sent me there told me to pack it in, so I did. Didn’t want to give me the time I needed to find what I knew was down there somewhere.”

  Folsom backed off, arms raised as McCracken moved in between them. “Assuming you’re right,” he said to the captain, “how exactly did the temple end up under the Mediterranean Sea?”

  “Another part of the story, if you want to hear it.”

  “No,” snapped Folsom. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Then hear this, B-rat: How many atoms of dark matter you think it took to remake the Venture at the molecular level? Normal explosions generate incredible heat and percussion. The result is char, melting, debris, pretty much utter destruction at the physical level, which means the molecular level too. There was no heat associated with what happened on the Venture, no percussion, no searing, no residue—nothing. The dark matter atoms released by the drill encountered traditional matter atoms and, with apologies to the coneheads at CERN, you got your big bang, all right. For an immeasurable shadow of an instant, too brief to be recorded by any device in existence, the Venture, and everything on board it, ceased to exist in the sense that its atoms no longer coalesced to form recognizable matter. When they coalesced again, you ended up with what we found.”

  “You said as much on the rig,” McCracken recalled, “like somebody dumped the Venture into a blender and poured its contents back out.”

  “Now go back to your question about how many atoms of dark matter were in the collision. I don’t know that, but what I do know is that if you double whatever that amount was, you’d have a tsunami the size of a skyscraper destroying the entire Gulf coast. Double it again and you’d have a blast that would dump New Orleans and every city within a hundred miles of the southern coast into the same blender that turned the Venture into a molecular mess. Get up to ten, maybe twenty times and you’d create a cosmic blast capable of ripping a hole in the atmosphere, kind of like popping a balloon. Then it’s sayonara to life on Earth.” Captain Seven settled back with a deep breath, strangely at ease, his argument with Folsom seemingly forgotten. “Don’t you just love this shit?”

  McCracken had thought the captain’s question was posed to him, then realized the captain had aimed it at Johnny Wareagle. “Looks like you’ve got something on your mind, Indian.”

  “Ancient tales from my people and other tribes dating back thousands of years tell of a race of ‘star beings’ who were marooned on Earth and sought a way to return to their planet. Versions of the tale differ on virtually anything, with the exception of the star beings finding the means they needed to leave.” Wareagle hesitated as if to collect his thoughts. “There are drawings, Blainey, of something being drawn from the very core of the planet to fuel vast ships that have the look of spacecraft.”

  “You think these aliens used dark matter to get out of Dodge.”

  “I think history speaks to us of the inexplicable or impossible that we choose to brand as legends and wives’ tales. But the fact is the ancient legends and myths I’m speaking of weren’t limited to the Hopi in the American desert Southwest. Identical tales and drawings sprang from the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans. Separate continents with the same stories occurring at the same time on each.”

  “Chariots of the Gods, dudes,” chimed in Captain Seven. “I’ve heard they were not averse to toking up, either. In fact, I heard those Indian tribes introduced them to the original wild-grown, badass weed and peyote. Folks could’ve left anytime they wanted to but chose the natural high instead. Didn’t fly the coop until supply ran low. Or maybe they packed that shit into their cargo holds and flew off to distribute it through the final frontier where no man had gone before. Original fucking drug cartels from that perspective.”

  “So these star beings used dark matter to . . .”

  “. . . power up their flying saucers, or whatever they were driving, and get the fuck off our then primitive planet. Come to think of it, this is still a primitive planet. Until they make weed legal, we are truly in a bad state.”

  “There a point here somewhere, Captain?”

  “Plan B, MacNuts. Before the big fella’s star beings could pump dark matter gas into their engines, they’d have to figure out a way to contain it, since therein lies the real problem that’s stopped the kindergartners at CERN from getting any place in a hurry. How can you isolate and study something you can’t even keep hold of for more than a nanosecond in any truly measurable quantity? You can see what I’m getting at here.”

  “Not really. I prefer to leave the tech stuff to the experts,” McCracken told him.

  “Then kneel before me and listen. We figure out how those ancient flyboys contained dark matter and we can keep what the Venture found from blowing up the planet. That means I’m headed out,” he finished, rising and cracking his knuckles.

  “Where to, Captain?”

  “Greece, scene of the crime. Finish the work I started five years ago and find Pandora’s Temple once and for all.”

  “I need you to finish something else for me before you leave,” Blaine said. “A couple of things actually starting with all e-mails originating from the Deepwater Venture referencing supplies.”

  “Sounds pretty broad, MacNuts.”

  “Focus on ordnance.”

  “That I can do. What else?”

  Before McCracken could respond, Folsom looked up from a text message he’d just received. “We’ve got her!”

  “Who?” McCracken asked him.

  “There was a woman, an assistant to the operations manager, who fled the Venture yesterday morning just a few hours before your expert’s big bang struck. She’s now in the custody of the New Orleans police.” Folsom held the grainy picture displayed on his BlackBerry out for McCracken to see. “Don’t suppose you recognize her?”

  CHAPTER 46

  New Orleans

  “Come with me, ma’am,” the police officer said, holding the cell door open.

  He was a black man with a tight-fitting cap covering his bald dome and an accent that sounded lightly Cajun. The building’s heat had brought a light sheen of sweat to the surface of his skin although it felt cold and dank to Katie down here in the basement.

  Katie rose from the concrete slab seat of the holding cell in the bowels of the New Orleans Police Department headquarters on North Rampart Street.

  “Where we going?” she asked the officer.

  “Just come with me.”

  He took tight hold of Katie at the elbow and steered her on. One flig
ht of stairs up and a single corridor length later, she found herself inside what looked like the same interrogation room where she was questioned hours before by a detective named Hurst. Her answers had been cryptic, not about to give anything away with no clear idea of how the police had found her or why they’d been looking. Katie hadn’t asked for a lawyer because there seemed to be no point in involving yet another outside party in the muddle of the past day. She needed to collect her thoughts, buy time, and determine who out there might be able to help her.

  Katie surmised from Detective Hurst’s questions, along with his producing a grainy picture of her taken from a dock-mounted security camera, that her arrest had everything to do with her flight from the Deepwater Venture and nothing to do with all that had transpired since. No questions were posed about Japanese kidnappers, executed environmentalists in Greenland, the battle in K-Paul’s yesterday afternoon, or Twist’s murder in a movie theater the night before.

  Everything had been about her infiltrating the rig using a false identity, thereby suggesting she was up to no good.

  “I had nothing to do with what happened.”

  “Why don’t you tell us what happened exactly?” Detective Hurst asked, making Katie realize he didn’t even know as much as she did.

  That had been several hours ago, and this time she’d been brought up to a different interrogation room with brighter walls, a newer table, and floor complete with heavy-duty industrial carpeting.

  Hurst pushed his way through the door, looking ruffled and annoyed. “You really should talk to me,” he said, standing across from her with palms planted on the table. “Might be my last chance to help you out here.”

  “Why’s that, Detective?”

  “Because you’ve drawn some pretty big attention from the kind of people you don’t want noticing you.”

  Katie felt a flutter in her stomach. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Homeland Security’s on their way down now.” Hurst spun a chair around from the table and sat down, straddling it. “This stays local, maybe I can keep them off you.”

  Katie remained silent.

  Hurst shook his head and shoved the chair hard against the table as he rose. “Hey, lady, just don’t blame me when they make you disappear.” Heading for the door now. “Send me a postcard from Guantanamo,” he added, before it closed behind him.

  CHAPTER 47

  New Orleans

  Shinzo Asahara, son of the great martyr Shoho Asahara, practiced his martial arts kata in front of the full-length hotel mirror. He was naked save for his boxer shorts and ever-present mitten on his left hand.

  The practice made him feel alive, joined his mind and body in ways that led to an enlightened sense of the world from which his greatest ideas had been birthed. For Shinzo, life itself meant nothing; he had effectively died the same day his father had been executed and his father’s spirit, the great man’s very essence, had become melded to his own. In that moment, Shinzo had inherited his cause, Aum Shinrikyo, along with the cult’s overriding goal to destroy the world in all its ugliness.

  He had long believed that his father’s near blindness had imbued him with the ability to see what other men couldn’t; specifically, in this case, a vision of a world that had betrayed itself. Shoho spoke and preached about doomsday often, but the truth was that Aum Shinrikyo under his leadership had never managed to strike a balance between that stated goal and resulting deeds. The subway attack was as close as they came, feeble and ultimately pointless, leading only to the arrest and ultimate death of a great man and thus serving no purpose at all.

  Shinzo’s goal, on the other hand, was nothing less than the complete realization of Aum Shinrikyo’s true purpose that lay in the destruction of the world as it was known. Not individual attacks that branded the group as no different from any terrorist organization, but one single, final destructive action that would see the world burn.

  Shinzo continued his movements, lithe and graceful before the mirror, his skin now glowing with perspiration. He had turned the room’s heat up as high as it would go, thirsting for the discomfort he equated with pain and punishment for his failure so far to finish his great father’s work.

  He could not close his perpetually cold left hand into a fist; some days he could barely move the fingers at all. The accident had happened when Aum Shinrikyo had infiltrated a Japanese laboratory conducting experiments into re-creating the big bang theory even before CERN was up and running. Shinzo’s sources had told him that the Japanese lab, actually housed in China, had managed to isolate a minuscule quantity of dark matter. If the lab had managed to uncover the means to contain it as well, Aum Shinrikyo might at last have the means they needed to achieve their desired ends. Never mind feebly releasing toxic gas into the Tokyo subway system. Let enough dark matter loose in the world and doomsday, the group’s cherished goal and purpose, would finally dawn in the shadow of an instant.

  Shinzo recalled the day of the Tokyo subway attack with painful clarity, the memories striking him hard and fast once more as he turned to study the precision of his moves in the mirror.

  And his father looked back, eyes narrowed and squinting, disapproving as always.

  “What are you doing, my son?”

  Shinzo went cold, in spite of the sweat now soaking his body in the stifling heat of the hotel room, the blinds closed over the windows to shut out the light of the day. Was this an apparition, a product of his imagination, a ghost?

  “I am practicing, refining, perfecting.”

  “I speak of your actions out of view of this mirror.”

  “As do I, Father. To finish your work, to realize the dream on which Aum Shinrikyo was founded.”

  “The end of the world . . .”

  Shinzo bowed slightly, in affirmation as well as respect.

  In the mirror his father shook his head disparagingly. “You miss the point of all my teachings.”

  “But, Father—”

  “Do not speak; listen. My time with you is limited.”

  “I am listening, Father.”

  “I too once sought this same goal. It was my life’s singular purpose, what I believed I had been born for. Why else would I have been born without sight if not to destroy a world I could never lay eyes upon? But I learned the world itself is without sin—it’s man who has corrupted and soiled all of existence. It is man who must pay. The attack on the subway was meant to be a test, nothing more. To poison those who have corrupted and soiled while leaving the world itself intact to find its own second chance.”

  “There can be no second chance; you taught me that.”

  “As I learned it myself too late to make a difference, a task that now falls upon you.”

  “And so it will be done, Father.”

  His father’s spectral visage seemed to regard his covered left hand. “In spite of the terrible price you have already paid to fulfill my legacy.”

  “That price fuels my desires even more.”

  “I only wish I was there to stand by your side on your great day of victory.”

  “You will, Father, in death instead of life.”

  “Prove it to me.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me of that day, my son, the day you were changed forever.”

  Shinzo looked down at the mitten covering his left hand. “It was not long after your death.”

  “Clouding your judgment, perhaps.”

  “We were not expecting to encounter resistance.”

  “But you did.”

  “We were prepared.”

  “And many died, some from Aum Shinrikyo’s own ranks.”

  “Martyrs to the cause,” Shinzo said sadly. “Your cause.”

  The apparition ignored his final comment. “All that death while you ventured to the main laboratory.”

  “We’d come at the perfect time, right in the midst of their most advanced experiments into isolating dark matter. It was panic, everything I’d hoped for!”

/>   “You got our wish.”

  “Yes, Father, yes! I managed to reach the main lab before lockdown was fully achieved.” Shinzo realized his left hand felt even colder than normal, more numb. “The experiment involving dark matter was under way in a huge vacuum chamber. There was a feeling in the room—a heat, an energy—I could feel in the pit of my stomach. I thought something was trying to steal my breath. An inspiration gripped me. I thought if I broke the seal on that chamber, if I freed the dark matter, our goal would be achieved.”

  “Our legacy, my son.”

  “You died for it, Father,” Shinzo told the cloudy shape in the mirror before him. The apparition had turned fluttery now, as if losing strength. “My thoughts were of joining you in the afterlife as I threw open the seals to the laboratory’s supercollider.”

  “And the price you paid for this?”

  “A terrible one, Father, yet one that will forever remind me of my duty and obligation to complete your work, to realize your dream. I won’t let you down. I must be true to your legacy.”

  “It is your own legacy, Shinzo, that concerns me more, and accepting failure is no legacy at all.”

  “I have not accepted failure, Father! I will never accept failure!”

  “And yet you stand before me now without purpose or plan.”

  “Tell me what I must do, tell me my next step.”

  “You already know it, my son. Even if I was still blind, I’d be able to see it.”

  “Then show me what escapes my own vision.”

  “Face your fear, Shinzo.”

  “I am not a coward.”

  “And yet you cannot see the answer that lies literally before you. Because going back confronts you with the day that changed you forever. But that is what you must do to finish the work I began. So speak of it to me. Tell of how it happened so you might purge your fear.”