Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “The name’s Pierce, sir. I’m Mr. Roy’s executive assistant. He wishes me to pass on the message that he is most grateful for your and Homeland Security’s efforts in returning his daughter. You have his undying gratitude and he hopes someday to be able to return the favor to Homeland as well.” Pierce stepped a bit more forward, his eyes lingering on Katie in recognition. “Your job is done now,” he told McCracken. “We’ll take things from here.”

  McCracken raised both his and Katie’s cuffed arms, as Belamo and Wareagle tensed slightly on either side of them. Wareagle’s gaze moved from one security man to the next and then back, ready to move if it came to that. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Our orders are to deliver the woman to Mr. Roy directly.”

  “We both have our orders, apparently.”

  “And unless mine are followed, we’ll be getting back onto that helicopter. All of us.”

  A few of Roy’s black-garbed security men moved to block the path between their positions and the still idling chopper. McCracken quickly sized them as ex-military selected from the ranks of private security forces. Solid operatives who’d likely seen combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  “Bad idea, Mr. Pierce,” McCracken said. “We’re on the same side here, and both of us have our orders.”

  Pierce weighed his options, picking the only realistic one he had. “Then if you’ll follow me, I’ll escort you to Mr. Roy.”

  McCracken fell into step behind him with Katie in tow, followed by Wareagle and Belamo.

  “You are aware of the condition Mr. Roy suffers from and his living situation as a result,” said Pierce.

  “We’ve been briefed, yes.”

  “Then I’ll rely on your professionalism to not gawk or stare. Mr. Roy receives extraordinarily few visitors and is not comfortable among strangers.”

  “Like his daughter, you mean.”

  The corridor was long and seemed to slope slightly downward before angling up again, perhaps to accommodate the grade of the mountain. The shiny tile flooring along a brief entry stretch gave way to a polished light hardwood, as the fortress took on more the look of an elegant home and less that of a bunker. McCracken imagined it was a combination of both and found the irony striking that Roy would never be able to safely spend time amid the lavish layout and furnishings that surrounded the hyperbaric chamber in which he lived.

  “Everything you’re looking at,” Pierce told all of them, sounding like a tour guide, “right down to the wood floors, were lifted from homes Mr. Roy will never return to again in all probability. The original plan was to convert a much larger portion of the structure to accommodate the hyperbaric conditions Mr. Roy requires, but the logistics involved proved impossible.”

  “Is the prognosis that bad?” Katie asked.

  “Ms. Roy,” Pierce said, exaggerating her real last name, “your father’s condition makes any ordinary infection potentially life-threatening. Beyond that, there is the very real possibility that his wounds will fester into gangrene and perhaps lead to the need to amputate limbs. An inevitability even. It’s just a matter of time.”

  The last of the first hallway felt more like an art gallery, with paintings hanging on both walls beautifully illuminated by invisible, focused lighting. Pierce steered them into an elevator and up three flights to the complex’s top floor where Roy’s chamber was held and where a number of his company’s top executives maintained offices in order to have regular contact with him. Folsom had mentioned that quite a power struggle was under way to determine his successor now that Christian Roy’s death had created both a crisis and an opportunity.

  Before passing through the vaultlike entrance into Roy’s private inner sanctum, Pierce instructed them to don surgical gowns and masks to further preclude any chance of leaving germs behind that could prove deadly for Sebastian Roy. Then he moved to a nearby wall-mounted intercom.

  “They’re here, Mr. Roy.”

  “Show them in, please,” a crackling, slightly raspy voice instructed.

  Pierce punched a code into a nearby keypad and the heavy vaultlike door began to ease open. McCracken felt Katie stiffen, her legs suddenly too heavy to move. He slid a key from his pocket and removed the handcuffs, easing an arm around her shoulders.

  “I need you to help me finish this,” he said softly to make sure only she could hear, maneuvering her toward the door. “Are you with me?”

  She nodded and felt him slide a pistol into her jacket pocket, whispering, “Just in case.”

  Together they followed Pierce into the hyperbaric chamber to find Sebastian Roy standing there with hands clasped behind his back, a single thick, Permaseal window uncovered to the black night beyond.

  CHAPTER 86

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  The Blackhawk helicopters carrying Shinzo Asahara and his two-dozen warriors sliced through the night sky. The helicopters were American issue, the very same model the SEALs had used in their famed raid on the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan. The Japanese government had purchased several for use exclusively by its antiterrorist forces, from which a number of his warriors had come to Aum Shinrikyo. One of these, a former colonel named Kuroda, had arranged for the appropriation of two of the Blackhawks along with a transport plane to take them to the staging area forty miles from Roy’s mountain compound.

  Asahara knew his men were ready, just as he was himself. He felt exceedingly calm in spite of the excitement over the fact he was mere minutes away from their target, which was impregnable to attack from anything but above, a full-fledged commando strike of a kind his warriors were exceedingly well versed in. Yes, mere minutes from the compound and just a few more after that from snatching the means to bring on doomsday from Sebastian Roy.

  Pandora’s jar.

  Asahara longed for a mirror, anything that could yield his father’s reflection. Not for advice or counsel, but praise. He wanted the ghost of his father to look him in the eye and say how proud he was. In death Shoho Asahara had been able to lay eyes on his son for the first time, and Shinzo so desperately wanted those same eyes to regard him fulfilling their mutual destiny.

  In contrast to him, his thirty warriors evenly split between this chopper and the trailing one were stiff and tense to a man. The logistics and timing of this nighttime raid had precluded any opportunity to stage a rehearsal in a mock-up setting, a procedure to which they were more accustomed. He had assured them that fate was on their side, that their role was predestined and meant to be. They need only trust in their own skills and the schematics of the compound they’d all committed to memory. The placement of Roy’s protective forces was predictable; they were professionals for sure but no match for these samurai-like warriors, who were even more lethal because of the singular purpose that drove them to this moment, united in their goal.

  Shinzo closed his eyes and visualized his father sitting before him smiling. He felt himself slipping into a serene trance, heard himself speaking to his father, and felt the great man lay a hand on his shoulder.

  “Shinzo-san?”

  The voice of Colonel Kuroda, formerly of the Tokushu Sakusen Gun unit, Japan’s Delta-Force-like commando force established by the Japanese Defense Agency to counter terrorist activities on Japanese soil, jarred him from his trance. The unit was based in the Narashino, Chiba garrison in Funabashi with the First Airborne Brigade from which the colonel had procured the Blackhawks and transport plane. In ironic counterpoint, the unit was established in the wake of Aum Shinrikyo’s attack on the Tokyo subway.

  Kuroda had selected Aum Shinrikyo’s commandos personally, culled from the best Tokushu Sakusen Gun had to offer whose politics proved the right fit. All had backgrounds that included the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though obviously none had been alive at the time, they understood pain and loss and believed to a man the world would be better off gone. Perhaps in their hearts they really didn’t think that would come to pass, but they reveled nonetheless in the purpose the process provided them.

 
“Shinzo-san?” Louder this time.

  Shinzo opened his eyes.

  “I didn’t hear you. Could you repeat your words?”

  “Just thinking out loud, Kuroda-sensei. Our time grows near.”

  “It does indeed,” Kuroda said, casting his gaze out the window where the shape of Sebastian Roy’s Pyrenees fortress had come into view.

  It was lit up enough for Asahara to formulate its shape and sprawl in his mind, the growing picture before him remarkably akin to the satellite photos taken from miles up in the atmosphere. The compound had been built to take full advantage of the natural defenses of the Pyrenees, and he could hardly imagine how even a man of limitless wealth like Sebastian Roy could possibly have managed a construction task so difficult.

  To begin with, no road led to the compound or even close to it. So, too, any climber attempting to reach it would have to negotiate sheer rock face on all sides, except for the rear that was layered to almost appear part of the mountain that rose jaggedly over it. The compound looked modern and modular in design and Asahara could picture massive freight helicopters toting individual sections, hovering overhead while workmen below readied to fit the sections into place one at a time. The connections had been managed so seamlessly as to make the structure look as if it had been crafted by hand out of a single slab of stone. It was four levels in the front and three where it sloped upward to conform to the pinnacle’s shape and shaded the very same grayish brown as the mountain itself. Smaller one-story subsections jutted out the side featuring a trio of helipads, two of which were currently occupied.

  Asahara had familiarized himself as much as possible with the compound’s internal structure as well. According to the plans, the design featured a maze of smaller rooms, offices, bedrooms, laundry and storage facilities, and a self-contained power station for generating its own heat and electricity. None of this told him how many security forces to expect, although he figured the number to be less than that of his warriors. Roy’s forces would never anticipate a full-scale attack under cover of darkness, and by the time they realized one was under way, his warriors would have won the day.

  From within these walls, Sebastian Roy had continued to run an empire based on control of the world’s energy supply, a quest that had brought him to the dark matter Asahara now desperately sought. He turned to the window and just for a moment, in a brief flicker of light, thought he caught his father’s reflection smiling at him.

  Shinzo glanced down at his second right hand garbed in a mitten, willing at least some feeling into it.

  I won’t let you down, Father, he thought.

  CHAPTER 87

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  “It’s been a long time, Alexandra.”

  McCracken watched Sebastian Roy shaking his head, scalding the woman who’d become Katie DeMarco with his eyes.

  “What am I to do with you?” Sebastian Roy resumed finally. “Perhaps I should let these men keep you in custody so you can be treated as the murderer that you are, all the lives you’ve taken including your own mother and brother.”

  McCracken could see Katie was shaking ever so slightly, her face a mask struggling to reconcile fear with hatred. “My brother was dead a long time before the fire. You saw to that . . . Father.” That final word was spoken venomously with her upper lip curled in the semblance of a snarl.

  “You can leave us now,” Roy addressed the others without bothering to regard them. “Show them out, Pierce. Their job is finished.”

  “No, Mr. Roy,” said McCracken, “we can’t leave, and it’s not finished.”

  Sebastian Roy seemed to regard McCracken for the first time. He let his gaze linger on him as if first studying what he saw and then nodding as if recognizing it. “It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one who stole my submarine in Greece, you and your friends here.”

  “It was nothing, believe me,” McCracken said to Roy. “I stole a space shuttle once.”

  Something changed in Roy’s expression, the tepid and then scowling reaction that had greeted the view of his long-lost daughter replaced by wonder and realization. McCracken caught the scent of something vaguely antiseptic wafting off him, as if alcohol was seeping from Roy’s pores instead of perspiration. It mixed with something stale and unsavory, and McCracken was struck by the same feeling he got when viewing a body on a pathologist’s slab, the man’s skin looking wan and gray-toned under the thin lighting.

  “You found it,” Roy managed, stumbling over the words, “you found Pandora’s Temple. . . .”

  “Indeed we did. In pretty good shape, too, for a structure that’s been at the bottom of the sea for almost four thousand years. I’m more interested in what we didn’t find: Pandora’s jar. The problem is I’m not the only one interested; someone else is after it, a Japanese doomsday cult likely on their way here now.”

  “Here?”

  McCracken nodded. “Because you’ve got the jar, Mr. Roy. You sent your teams scouring the Mediterranean for something that was here all along.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I haven’t got time to argue with you, and neither does the world. This doomsday cult arrives before we can get the jar out of here and that disease you’ve got will be the least of your problems.”

  “I think you’re lying,” Roy told him. “I think you’ve concocted this whole story in league with my daughter. I think she put you up to this. You’re not really from Homeland Security, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “As I was saying. In the future, I’d advise you not to heed the word of a killer,” Roy said to Katie.

  “There are worse crimes, Mr. Roy,” McCracken said, letting his gaze linger on him before moving it to Katie. “Like what you did in your son’s room those nights while your daughter was listening. If she’s a killer, it’s because you made her one. You’re lucky she didn’t kill you instead years ago.” McCracken hesitated to take a closer look at Roy framed in his self-imposed prison. “Or maybe you’re not.”

  Roy stiffened, eyes darting between his daughter and McCracken. “You think I should be sorry for what I did? I was once, but not anymore. If I’m still sorry at all, it’s because what I did to Christian failed to achieve its desired effects.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it produced some effects in at least one of you,” McCracken said, not bothering to disguise his meaning. “By the way, I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  “For what?”

  He glanced quickly again at Katie to find her gaze locked upon him, then back at Sebastian Roy. “For reminding me why I’m still doing this when I’m almost ready to start collecting Social Security.”

  Roy smiled tightly, smugly. “I’ve seen your kind before.”

  “My kind?”

  “I know your type, men with nothing in the world, no stake at all, who find purpose in convincing themselves they must save it because otherwise you have to face the fact that you’re nothing more than a mercenary, an assassin.” Roy paused long enough to study McCracken again. “Why, you’re as much a prisoner as I am.”

  “But I’m not a liar, Mr. Roy. You should fess up to the truth.”

  “And what truth would that be?” Roy shot back, unruffled.

  “About Stuttgart.” McCracken took a step closer to him. “The story about you rushing back into the fire to save your family—how brave and heroic. Be even more brave and heroic if it were true.”

  Roy stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. See, this friend of mine pulled all the video footage, both from security cameras and television feeds, and managed to string it all together chronologically. Know what he found?”

  Roy swallowed hard, made no response.

  “You ran at the first sign of trouble. You ran and left your family to die. Trouble was, you ran the wrong way and ended up getting caught in the flames yourself. Only thing true about your story was that getting pinned beneath other bodies is what saved your life. And your whole life,
if you want to call it that,” McCracken added, looking around him, “goes back to that lie. All this power, all this money, and this is what you’re left with. I may be little more than a killer, but I know true weakness when I’ve got it centered in my crosshairs. And you—”

  Before McCracken could finish, a crack and a slight ping sounded almost simultaneously. McCracken saw a spiderweb-shaped fissure form around a neat hole in the window; in the same moment, Pierce pitched over forward, the back of his head reduced to a pool of bone and gore as he fell to the floor.

  CHAPTER 88

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  The Tokushu Sakusen Gun snipers opened fire on their targets from perches half extended into the night air in the same moment the commandos in the lead chopper fast-roped down onto the fortress. With the chance of resistance now substantially diminished, these initial dozen would deliberately and systematically eliminate Sebastian Roy’s guards at their normal posts, revealed by the satellite reconnaissance photos thanks to their thermal heat signatures.

  Of course, Asahara’s numb hand ruled out fast roping and he lacked such specialized training anyway. So the plan was for the second chopper with the other half of his Tokushu Sakusen Gun warriors inside to land on the helipad and prepare to enter once the compound had been secured.

  In the night ahead, his warriors were mere specks of motion, which was nonetheless enough to show them reaching the fortress roof and fanning out to their assigned grids to execute Roy’s remaining guards. Asahara felt no remorse or regret, only excitement over his anticipated entry into the compound to seize Pandora’s jar.

  •

  “Down!” McCracken shouted. “Everybody down!”

  And he barreled into Katie, taking her beneath him to the floor, as more gunshots blew out the rest of the glass and peppered the room.

  “I’ve got security!” Sebastian Roy managed, having pinned himself against the wall over Pierce’s corpse still leaking fluid and brain matter from his ruptured skull. “Whoever’s out there, they’ll stop them!”