Kenner hastened forward but stopped at Rohn’s side. “Good god. What was that?”
The stricken man’s back arched, his limbs going rigid, and then his struggles ceased. He let out a tortured rasping breath, but did not draw another. Gallo pressed tighter against the rock face. She looked over at Dourado, who was similarly paralyzed by the horror they had just witnessed.
“Poison,” Rohn muttered, then turned away as if he had lost interest. He addressed the rest of the group. “Prepare the rafts.”
Kenner continued to stare at the dead man. “Some species of toad secrete deadly neurotoxins. But that was something else. A giant salamander, perhaps.”
He rounded on Gallo. “Salamanders can regrow lost limbs. An amphibious creature with extraordinary regenerative abilities and poisonous breath. Does that sound familiar to you, Augustina?”
Unfortunately, it did. Kenner had just described the Lernean Hydra. “A man just died, Liam.”
“That creature tells me the source of the mutagen is here. The Amazons must have been protecting it.” Kenner balled his fists. “We’re close. I can feel it.”
Gallo felt it, too. The Cerberus group, it seemed, was now the least of her worries.
36
Pierce stared toward the distant glow for nearly a full minute. No more shots were fired, but he was now acutely aware that the strange world at the bottom of the sinkhole was anything but silent. The air was filled with the noise of insects and a creaking sound that he hoped was just tree boughs rubbing together.
Lazarus finally broke the spell. He unzipped his thermal coveralls, revealing the tactical body-armor vest underneath, which was festooned with pouches for extra ammunition magazines, grenades and a variety of combat equipment. He discarded the jumpsuit into the water.
Carter gave Pierce what he took to be an encouraging nod. “It could mean anything,” she said. “I’m sure they’re fine.”
Pierce was not reassured, but staying where he was would not ease his concerns—or confirm his worst fears. He peeled off his wet jumpsuit and turned to Lazarus. “Oversized ex-Special Ops first. Lead the way, big guy.” Lazarus stepped into the swamp, followed by Carter and Pierce.
Pierce tried to picture the area as he had seen it during the last few seconds of the descent. He had noticed dozens of isolated stands of trees scattered across the submerged floor of the sinkhole. Getting around them would mean taking a circuitous, time consuming path, but less so than trying to blaze a trail through the densely clustered boughs. Lazarus kept close to the trees, venturing out across open water only when it was necessary to hopscotch to the next wooded patch.
As they progressed, Pierce realized that the sky was growing lighter. Dawn was approaching. Although the depths of the sinkhole would remain in shadow for most of the day, Lazarus called for a break and told them to remove their night vision goggles, not because it was bright enough to see, but because even that small amount of ambient light would overwhelm the extremely sensitive receptors in the PVS7s.
Pierce was stunned by the abrupt transition to near total darkness. “All I can see is a big red blob. Is that normal?”
“You’ve been staring into a green light for the last few hours,” Lazarus said. “Just give it a few minutes.”
Pierce stood motionless, eyes closed, trying to remember how the world had looked just before the lights went out. All he could see in his mind’s eye were trees and water. As Lazarus had promised, Pierce’s vision cleared by degrees, and soon he was able to make out the treetops and a few other details.
“Those trees look like bald cypress,” he said. “We had them in swamps near where I grew up. I wonder how they got here.”
“How does anything get anywhere,” Carter answered in an even voice. “Seeds get scattered. The wind can do some pretty crazy things. Animals transport seeds over long distances. I seem to recall that cypresses are one of the oldest extant tree families, dating back to the time of the Pangaea super-continent. There could have been cypress trees on the Roraima plateau long before it collapsed into its present state. It’s also possible that this ecosystem may not be as closed as we thought.”
“What do you mean?” Lazarus asked.
“For these trees to grow like they have,” Carter said, “the water level would have to remain fairly constant. The only way that could happen is if we’re below the water table and there’s a way for water to flow in and out.”
“Like an underground river,” Pierce said.
“Could someone have planted them?” Lazarus asked after a moment.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Pierce said, “though I can’t imagine anyone going to the trouble to plant them here.”
Lazarus made a low humming sound as if considering Pierce’s answer, then said, “Maybe it was the same people who built that.”
He stretched his arm out, pointing toward a dark shape that lay more or less in the same direction they were traveling. In the gloom, it looked no different than any of the other wooded clumps they had encountered, but as Pierce continued to stare at it, he realized that it was very different.
“What the...” Pierce started forward, slowly realizing that the land in front of him wasn’t a stand of cypress trees sprouting from the marsh, but solid ground, rising more than six feet above the water, stretching away in either direction like a jetty. Protruding above it were large blocky shapes with vertical lines too perfect to be anything but the work of human hands.
Buildings.
Lazarus laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Oversized ex-Special Ops go first, remember? We don’t know what we’ll find in there. Or who.”
“You don’t actually think anyone still lives there,” Carter said.
Pierce was tempted to don his night vision goggles once more. A quick glance at the city might answer a lot of questions, but he decided to hold off a little longer. He turned to Lazarus. “This is what Kenner is looking for. I’m sure of it. We need to get there first, and set a trap.”
The big man nodded slowly. “Stay close.” He glanced back at Carter. “You, too.”
As they got closer, Pierce saw that it was not a solid land mass at all, but a jumble of irregular stones of varying sizes, heaped up to form an artificial island. “This was debris from the collapse,” he whispered. “They must have piled it up to form the city’s foundation.”
“But who are they?” Carter asked.
“We’ll find out when we get there,” Pierce said. He had a theory about what they’d find, but he wasn’t ready to share it.
When they reached the base of the elevated mound, Lazarus signaled them to halt with an upraised hand. He pulled himself up onto the rocks, staying low in a prone firing position. He surveyed the city for nearly a full minute, and then waved them ahead. Pierce scrambled up the rocks despite the cumbersome combat gear he wore. Crouching beside Lazarus, he looked out over the ruins.
That it was deserted and forgotten was obvious from the crumbling walls and the growth of vegetation. The stone surfaces were covered in moss, and trees rose up from some of the buildings. No one had lived here in a long time, and yet the architecture was too sophisticated to be the work of the hunter-gatherer cultures that had made the Amazon Basin their home. It was much more reminiscent of the structures he had seen in the excavation in Heraklion, a fact which reinforced his suspicions about the city’s original builders.
“I think we beat them here,” Pierce said, keeping his voice low.
“I didn’t see any lights through the NODs,” Lazarus said. “But it’s an unsecured environment. Stay on your toes.”
Pierce nodded. “Right behind you.”
Lazarus rose slowly, first to his knees, then to his full height.
There was a flurry of movement from atop one of the buildings, and then something shot toward them like a guided missile. Lazarus barely had time to raise his gun toward the source of the strange projectile before it struck him squarely in the chest with a sickening crunch. The objec
t was about the size of a football but amorphous, like a cloth sack filled with stones. It rebounded away and landed on the rocky ground with a wet splat. The force of the impact knocked Lazarus back a step, and then he toppled backward, off the island’s edge.
Carter cried out, more in surprise than terror, but Pierce couldn’t tell if she was reacting to the attack on Lazarus, or warning him. Two more shapes, barely visible in the twilight, rose up from the nearest rooftop, and then swooped toward Carter and Pierce.
He had been wrong about the place being uninhabited. Although it had been abandoned by its original builders long ago, something still lived in the city. Something deadly.
37
Cerberus Headquarters
Almost being devoured by toxic carnivorous plants was not, it turned out, the lowest point of an already very bad day. After sparing her life, Tyndareus had sent two of his goons—both wearing hazmat suits—in through a concealed door to retrieve her. Fiona wondered if one of them had been in the exosuit.
If she had known what would follow, she would have opted to stay in her cell. The men took her to a tiled room where they stripped her, sprayed her with a fire hose, and scrubbed her with stiff-bristled brushes.
Following that violation, she was allowed to dress in a pair of hospital scrubs. The two men dragged her into another examination room and strapped her to a table in five-point restraints. She was then checked over, head-to-toe, by a sneering, wretched woman. As she was poked and prodded, her blood drawn, Fiona retreated into her mind, blocking out the ongoing physical assault.
She felt Nurse Wretched fumbling with her insulin pump and tried to cover it with her hands. The leather restraints stopped her, but the reflex earned her an immediate rebuke from the nurse.
“Stop. Moving. I am refilling the reservoir. You want your insulin, don’t you?” The woman had a harsh eastern European accent, similar to Rohn’s.
What I want, Fiona thought, is to smash your face with a baseball bat. It would improve your looks. But she relented, allowing the woman to finish the procedure.
The insulin recharge was welcome, though it did little to improve her physical condition. She needed to eat—real food, not college dorm crap—and she needed sleep. Most of all, she needed to be somewhere else, any place, as long as it was far away from the Nazi mad scientist who now called himself Tyndareus.
“There you go,” the nurse said, as if expecting Fiona to be grateful.
“How can you work for that monster?”
The woman harrumphed then moved away without another word. Fiona expected to be released from the restraints and ushered to yet another prison cell, but instead she found herself alone once more.
The solitude, while not entirely welcome, was all too brief. A door opened and Tyndareus rolled into the room, sitting in his motorized wheelchair. Fiona rolled her head to the side and glowered at him. “I thought you guys—Nazis, I mean—hated cripples.”
Tyndareus appeared unruffled by the barb. “Tell me more about what you saw on the map, child.”
Fiona let her head drop. She had bought her life—a few more minutes of it, at least—with a promise to cooperate. While she had no intention of helping her captor, she knew that she would have to give him something, or else the opportunity to turn the tables on him might never come. The biggest problem was that it was all a bluff. She did not really know that Kenner was on a wild goose chase in the Amazon, because she did not actually know for certain what he was looking for. Tyndareus was too canny not to know that she would attempt to play him, but if he suspected that she was unable to deliver, that would be the end for her.
“I need to see it again.”
“Dr. Kenner has the original, but I can provide you with photographs.”
“He’s in South America, right? And my Aunt Gus…Dr. Gallo, is with him?”
The old man pursed his lips. “You said that he was wrong about South America. Explain.”
“First, you tell me what it is you’re really after.”
“That is not your concern.”
Fiona shrugged. “If you don’t want to share, I can’t help you.” She rolled her head forward and closed her eyes, as if trying to grab a catnap. Her heart immediately began pounding so loud that she was sure he would be able to hear it. If she was wrong about this…
“Release her,” Tyndareus said, but not to Fiona.
She had to struggle to hide her relief as the two goons came into the room and unbuckled the straps that held her down. When she was free, they stepped aside, saying nothing.
“Come with me,” the old man said, fingering the joystick controls for his wheelchair.
The chair swung around and rolled from the room so fast that Fiona would have had to jog to keep up. She decided not to try, and instead adopted a leisurely pace that forced Tyndareus to wait for her. His men followed, matching her pace rather than his, ready to intervene if she attempted anything, but clearly giving their boss plenty of space in which to do his own thing.
He led her from the room and down a hallway identical to the others she had passed through. They all looked the same to her, and it was not until he ushered her into his private gallery of horrors that she knew where she was. She tried not to react to the macabre displays, and Tyndareus did not seem interested in showing any of them to her. Instead, he brought her to the trophy case.
“You are a remarkable young woman,” he said. He did not turn to face her, but after a moment, she realized he was staring at her reflection in the glass. She gave an involuntary shudder when she realized he was smiling.
Great. Ten minutes ago, he was trying to kill me. Now, he’s hitting on me.
“I was hasty in dismissing you because of your mixed bloodline. Old habits, you know. The Amerindians are descended from Asian stock, as were the original Aryans, so it’s little wonder that you manifest such extraordinary intelligence.”
He might have meant it as a compliment, but Fiona had no answer for him. After an uncomfortable moment, he extended a hand, pointing to something in the display case. Arranged on a swatch of red velvet, like precious gemstones, were several small ivory-colored objects that Fiona recognized immediately as bones. The way they were assembled left little doubt that they were a human hand and a foot.
“This is my brother,” Tyndareus said. Despite his wheezing delivery, there was a note of reverence in his tone, as if he was sharing a sacred mystery with her.
Fiona did not recall if Josef Mengele had any siblings, but she sensed something more than just familial affection. The old man confirmed this with his next statement.
“My twin,” he continued. “You were wondering, I’m sure, how I was able to fool the world into believing that I was dead.” He gestured to the bones again. “Castor died and was buried in my place.”
“You had a twin brother?” Given his infamous obsession with twins, Fiona felt certain that, if Mengele really did have a twin, she would have heard something about it. But it was the name that got her attention. She had been wrong about his motives for choosing the name Tyndareus, the father of twins. In Greek myths, Castor and Pollux were often called the Tyndariads. Tyndareus was meant as a family name. “He’s Castor. I suppose that would make you Pollux. The immortal son of Zeus and Leda, who begged the gods to make his human twin brother immortal, too.”
As soon as she said it aloud, more of the pieces fell into place. “You think you can bring him back. That’s what you’re really after.”
The strange blue eyes narrowed until they looked like mismatched sapphires. “As I said, remarkable.”
He drew in a raspy breath. “You will have heard stories I imagine, fanciful tales of how I planned to clone der Fuhrer and establish a new Reich.” He snorted. “Ridiculous. Why would I want that when the post-war world had so much to offer me?
“Of course, I did continue my research, and slowly I built my fortune, but as the years passed, I focused my efforts on the one thing that I did not have in sufficient quantities. Time
.
“I was not the only one doing research into artificial gestation and replication—cloning, in the common parlance—but I had the freedom to pursue the matter unfettered by tedious ethical considerations.” He spat the last two words out like a curse. “The practical application for such a technique was obvious. If I could produce clones of living humans, it would solve the most troublesome side effect of tissue transplants.”
“You wanted to clone yourself so you could have an endless supply of organ donors. Replacement parts to extend your life indefinitely.” Fiona spoke without emotion. Given the man’s past crimes, it was almost exactly what she would have expected from him. What surprised her was the fact that he was being so forthcoming. Did he actually believe that she would just forget that he had tried to kill her? Or that she would be impressed by these revelations?
Of course he does. He’s a narcissist and a sociopath.
Tyndareus nodded, but his expression was subdued. He stared into the glass, looking past the reflection, gazing at the skeletal remains. “That is what I believed, when I began. The procedure was successful. The embryo was created in the laboratory and transplanted into a surrogate. After the child was born, however, I began to feel differently toward him. You see, he was not only my offspring—and a far better son than the ungrateful spawn of my own loins—but also my genetic twin.
“In my early research, I had mistakenly attributed the bond between twins to shared experiences in the womb, but as time passed and the child grew to maturity, I recognized that it is a genetic bond. A bond that I shared with Castor.”
Fiona gave a nod. “Must have really sucked when you finally had to cut him up for spare parts.”
“I did no such thing.”
The admission surprised her, not because it seemed the likeliest explanation for Mengele’s longevity—he was at least a hundred—but because it was hard for her to believe that there was a line he wouldn’t cross.
Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) Page 22