She killed the lights on her Lincoln sedan and eased into the sidewalk. The car was facing downhill, a deliberate ploy on her part to give her better acceleration if she had to get out of dodge in a hurry. From the top of the low hill she could see the illuminated dome of the Capitol and the glittering city street lights flickering in the bitter cold around it. Her position was literally just a couple hundred yards from Anacostia–Bolling base, the home of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The fact that she could be sitting in an area of such cataclysmic social decline while simultaneously within sight of the country’s beating heart of power and one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world spoke volumes to her about the precarious state of the nation, more than any presidential address. This was America’s rotting core laid bare, right on the doorstep of the White House. The wolves at the door…
A movement in her rear view mirror caught her attention and she spotted a hooded youth walking with his hands shoved into his pockets and his head low. The youth crossed the street beneath the sickly glow of one of the few remaining street lights, looking this way and that as he closed in on her car. Allison tensed, and she reached down to her thigh and once again checked the location of a can of pepper spray lodged there. She would have preferred a gun, but even in self defense the risk of being hauled before a court for homicide was too great a fear for her, especially if Mitchell was right and the Russians were already on to her.
The youth closed in on her car and she could see that he was peering from beneath the rim of his hood, dark eyes searching the shadows as though demons were crouching and waiting to pounce. His gaze switched briefly to her license plate and then he reached out for the door and opened it.
The youth climbed in and shut the door, casting a single hostile glance at her to ensure that it wasn’t a gunman awaiting him before he spoke.
‘Kill the engine, you drawin’ attention to us as it is.’
Allison obeyed and shut the engine off as the youth rubbed his hands together to warm them.
‘I switched off my lights when I got here,’ she said defensively.
The kid shot her a wince. ‘You’s driving last year’s Lincoln. Ain’t nobody on these streets owns wheels like this. Coulda turned up here in a helicopter and you wouldn’t have stood out mo’.’
Allison said nothing. Although she couldn’t see his face very well she judged him to be in his early twenties perhaps, a stocky Afro–American. She assumed that he was a gang–banger, a member of one of the many hardened gangs that prowled the streets south of the Anacostia plying their particular trade in drugs, violence and mayhem.
‘Yo’ got the money?’
The kid didn’t hesitate to get down to business. His gaze rarely met hers, constantly scanning the street outside the car for any evidence of other parties that might be watching them.
‘I got the money,’ Allison replied, subconsciously mimicking the kid’s tone and dialect, an old psychological trick known to engender trust in a stranger; make your voice sound a little like theirs and they’ll speak more easily. ‘What I don’t got is the story I need.’
‘You’re asking a lot. I get seen here talkin’ to you, I’ll be wearing 9mm jewellery by tomorrow mornin’ so I want assurances.’
‘Assurances of what?’
‘Immunity from prosecution,’ the kid replied. ‘For anythin’ I done or might be accused of doin’ for five years after.’
‘I don’t have any kind of power to grant that kind of legal…’
The door opened and the kid made to climb out of the car. On impulse Allison grabbed his arm to hold him back and in an instant the kid whirled and a blade flashed in the weak street lights filtering into the Lincoln. Allison felt a cold blade pressed against her throat and the kid’s dark eyes bored into hers.
‘Lose the piece,’ he growled.
‘I’m not carrying.’
‘Right leg,’ he snarled and pushed the blade harder.
‘It’s pepper spray!’ Allison pleaded, suddenly aware that the kid was deadly serious and would slice into her throat in an instant if he sensed a lie.
He reached down for her thigh and grabbed the can, glanced at it and then stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He watched her for a moment longer and then he jerked the blade away from her throat and pulled back, his eyes never leaving hers as he spoke.
‘This is how it’s gonna go down. You’re gonna give me the money, and then I’m gonna get out of this car and disappear and you’re gonna forget you ever saw me. You come after me, or you send anybody else after me, we’ll be having another meeting like this one and you won’t be goin’ home after, you feel me?’
Allison nodded, unable to speak and the sensation of the cold metal against the thread of her pulsing arteries fresh in her mind. She stared wide–eyed at the youth as she handed him a thick envelope stuffed with used fifties. The kid opened and checked the envelope, counting briefly before he closed it and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. Allison figured that he would get out of the car and just vanish, but instead to her amazement he upheld his side of the bargain and started talking.
‘They showed up last summer,’ he said simply. ‘We knew they were foreign, Eastern European is what they claimed to be but we figured them for Russians. They had money, most of it dirty but they offered the gang bosses as much as most of ‘em could earn in a year to run for ‘em.’
‘Drugs?’ Allison asked.
The kid shook his head. ‘Computer equipment, chips, modems, all that.’ Allison frowned and the kid nodded. ‘Tha’s what we thought, didn’t get it. We figured that the stuff was hot, y’know, something that needed movin’ from state to state or somethin’, but they told us the stuff wasn’t hot, just important to them and needed protectin’ while in transit.’
‘Do you know anything about what the computer equipment was for?’
‘They didn’t tell us anythin’, we was just running the gear for them and doin’ as we was told. Then the bosses hightailed it with the payments, just took off and the gang fell apart. The Russians or whoever they were disappeared too, just a few months ago, like the whole show was over and they’d gone back to wherever the hell they’d come from.’
‘Did you get any names, any images or anything that could be used to track these foreigners down?’
This time, the kid nodded.
‘We got nothin’ on the Russian’s names but they had a contact in DC, and right before the bosses took off a few of us knew something was up so we followed one of them to a meetin’ they held down in Hyde Field, Maryland.’
The kid handed Allison a cell phone.
‘The cell’s hot, but the images on there should tell you everythin’ you need to know. Don’t ever call or contact me again, y’hear?’
Before Allison could answer the kid was out of the car and walking quickly away down the hill. Allison opened the cell’s menu and selected the gallery, and instantly she saw a series of high resolution images depicting a man getting out of a smart black limousine surrounded by what looked like a security detail. Allison gasped as she recognized the man as Congressman Milton Keyes. The images showed him meeting with a pair of aggressive looking gang–bangers whom she assumed were the bosses the kid had worked for, and alongside them four Caucasian males who looked a little older but no less rough around the edges.
The cell’s powerful camera had captured images sufficiently sharp that identifying Keyes was beyond doubt, provided she could get the assistance she required to ensure that a legal defense could not claim that the images were faked using digital artwork. Even before that, she knew that this evidence was explosive. Hyde Field sported a private airfield, and given that the congressman and his entourage were in a vehicle, that meant that there was a strong likelihood that the other participants in the meeting might have flown out of the area – the kid had said that his bosses and the Russians vanished right after the meeting and were never seen or heard from again.
Allison checked the time
stamps on the images and smiled as she saw that they were correctly recorded and matched the kid’s description of the meeting taking place sometime late the previous year. That meant she could call up the details of any flight that departed Hyde Field and find out who was aboard, who owned the aircraft and where it went after taking off from the airport.
Allison reached down to start the car’s engine when she heard two loud claps somewhere ahead of her. She looked up sharply as she saw a vehicle turn onto the hill just as she saw the kid she’d spoken to tumble and fall in the vehicle’s headlights.
Panic hit her as she saw the vehicle accelerate and to her horror it smashed over the kid’s body. She heard the suspension thump as the car bounced and then turned as it headed straight toward her. The kid’s words echoed in her mind as she considered ducking down in the hopes that the shooters would pass her by: ain’t nobody on these streets owns wheels like this.
Allison fired the engine as the car screeched toward her and in the flare of its headlights she saw a youth hanging from the rear window with a pistol in his grip. Allison slammed the Lincoln into drive and rammed the accelerator down as she purposefully mounted the sidewalk and drove down it, using the other parked vehicles as a shield as she ducked down behind the wheel.
A clatter of gunshots rattled outside the Lincoln and Allison flinched as she heard glass shattering and a squeal of tires on asphalt as the shooters braked and swung around to pursue her. Allison swerved off the sidewalk between two parked vehicles and the car shuddered as it thumped back down onto the road. She turned for the bottom of the hill and accelerated wildly for the safety of the city.
The car headlights behind her flashed as the vehicle accelerated in pursuit and Allison hauled the wheel hard to the right as she skidded across the intersection and headed north with the car full of gunmen close behind her. She saw the vehicle slide onto the intersection in her mirror, the gunman still hanging out of the rear window and trying to draw a bead on her as she accelerated away from them. Another gunshot cracked the cold night air and she ducked instinctively as the shot snapped by her window just inches from her head.
Allison grabbed the cell phone the kid had given her and dialled 911 as she strove to keep the vehicle behind her and not let them past. She swerved left and right as the call connected and she heard a voice on the line.
‘Nine–one–one, what is your emergency?’
‘I’m being shot at!’ Allison shrieked. ‘I’m in a car on 4th Street headed north, hurry!’
The reply came through garbled as she drove down one hill and began ascending another toward a high school, the cell’s signal broken intermittently as she struggled to prevent the gunmen from getting past her.
The Lincoln surged up the hill and then she was shunted forward in her seat as the gunmen’s car slammed into her tailgate and she heard a crunch of smashed plastic and the clatter of metal fragments on asphalt. Allison managed not to scream as she kept the accelerator pressed to the floor and rocketed up the hillside.
The pursuing car slammed into her again and the back of the Lincoln drifted as she lost control. The car raced over the brow of the hill and straight across a broad intersection lined with chainlink fencing. Allison got a brief glimpse of a large red brick building ahead as the Lincoln’s tires suddenly gripped again as the car slid sideways across the intersection.
The Lincoln tipped up on its side and Allison screamed as the wheel was snatched from her hands. The car rolled onto its roof amid a shower of bright sparks that flared all around her and then it slammed into a fire station wall at the top of the hill. Allison’s head hit the window with a dull crunch and her vision blurred and filled with whorls of color.
The engine coughed into silence as she hung from her safety belt, her hair dangling and her head pounding with pain as she tried to free herself from the vehicle. She could see a faint haze of blue smoke in the car around her and could smell gasoline that she feared might be leaking from the upturned engine.
Allison reached up as she regained her senses and supported her bodyweight with one hand as with the other she released her belt and slumped down into the inverted Lincoln. The windows around her had shattered in the final impact and she crawled through the nearest of them, trying not to scrape her knees and hands on the shards of glass all over the asphalt.
The sound of sirens alerted her as two police cars rushed toward her location from the distance, their flashing lights reflecting off distant buildings and the sound of their engines rising in volume, and she heard the faint sound of the dispatcher’s voice from the cell still inside the car.
‘Stay on the line ma’am, can you hear me?’
Allison tried to clear her head as a noise beside her made her turn. She saw a figure silhouetted against the street lights. For a moment she was convinced that he was going to shoot her, but then he glanced in the direction of the police cars racing toward them and he whirled and sprinted into the darkness. She heard a car pull away, its headlights out as it vanished into the night.
Allison slumped onto the cold, damp ground, her head spinning and a nausea poisoning her stomach as two squad cars squealed into the fire station lot and four officers leaped out and rushed toward her with their weapons drawn. Allison felt the last vestiges of her strength fade and her consciousness slipped slowly away into darkness.
***
XVIII
Jakarta, Indonesia
The flare of the sun glittered off the surface of a large harbor and the hulls of yachts moored alongside the city as Ethan and Nicola walked down a long jetty to where two very large vessels were moored. Both were white hulled and one had a helicopter upon a landing pad on its stern, a dramatic image of opulence compared to the tin–shed slums that filled the rest of the city.
Arnie Hackett’s Catalina had landed half an hour previously after a long flight south east from India, hugging the coastline down through the great continent and then crossing the expanses of the Bay of Bengal before tracking south again along the coast of Sumatra. Ethan and Lopez had managed only fitful sleep aboard the noisy, rattling vintage aircraft as it flew through the night to evade any Russian pursuit.
There was no boarding ramp, the yacht’s sheer sides far too steep for the owners to have any fear of thieves getting aboard. It was only as they approached that a ramp unfolded automatically from near the stern and touched down on the jetty to allow them access.
Ethan led the way aboard into the yacht’s cool interior, a bay where jet skis and diving gear was stowed neatly. A young man in blue shorts and a T–shirt met them and beckoned for them to follow as he led them through the plush interior of the yacht and out into a dining area high on the bow where a small group awaited them.
‘About time,’ Jarvis greeted them as they walked out into the sunshine.
Beside Jarvis was Rhys Garrett, their billionaire benefactor and the man who had helped them squirrel away Majestic Twelve’s lost billions. He greeted them both with a warm handshake. Dressed in casual clothes that somehow still seemed to appear formal, Garrett’s personal mission to expose and eradicate MJ–12, the people responsible for his father’s murder decades before, had led him to join their crusade.
Sitting near them and working on a laptop computer was Joseph Hellerman, totally engrossed in his work as they gathered around. Ethan could see on the screen the images that he and Lopez had taken inside the submerged temple off the Dwarka coast before their Russian friends had arrived.
‘Any luck, genius?’ Lopez asked as she ruffled Hellerman’s hair with one hand.
Hellerman nodded.
‘It’s fascinating,’ he said in reply.
‘So is Donald Trump’s hair,’ Jarvis pointed out, ‘but do the images tell us anything about where to go next?’
Hellerman leaned back in his chair and stretched as he replied.
‘The direction indicated by the engraving in the floor of the temple is clear, and passes directly through India and the Bay of Bengal, on thro
ugh Indonesia and beyond across Northern Australia and the Coral Sea before extending out into the Pacific Ocean. Along that line, somewhere, is what Lucy found in her video and where her trail goes cold.’
Ethan folded his arms.
‘And you haven’t learned anything yet?’
‘About the distance from the underwater temple to Lucy’s location, no,’ Hellerman admitted, ‘but I have pretty much solved one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution while working on this, so y’know, you’re welcome.’
‘Do enlighten us,’ Jarvis prompted.
Hellerman gestured to an image of the pointing Krishna found on the floor of the submerged temple.
‘One of the biggest mysteries mankind has struggled to solve is not so much about how mankind suddenly began building complex cities after thousands of years of hunter–gatherer lifestyles, although that in itself is a mystery, but how they managed to do it on separate continents at almost precisely the same time. No theories exist that explain how so many ancient cultures also developed such similar scripts at the same time thousands of years ago despite being separated by vast distances, even by oceans.’ He tapped the image of Krishna. ‘Well, there’s your answer right there.’
‘Krishna?’ Ethan asked.
‘Not so much the person, but the fact that the god is portrayed as pointing to something despite having been created as long ago as nine thousand years. From that we can presume that the god is referencing something of great importance located to the south east of India.’
‘That could just as easily be a natural formation or location,’ Garrett pointed out. ‘Maybe these folks worshipped a volcano, or Krishna is pointing toward the site of a great victory in battle or something.’
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