“I don’t need you anymore,” Gregor said coldly. “If you and your daughter want to die now, so be it.”
Tom looked from Gregor to Kelly to Cricket. “Stay here,” he said.
“No, Dad,” she whispered. “Not with him.”
“I promise you, I’ll be back,” he said.
“Not with him, Daddy, please.”
“We’ve got no choice.”
Kelly grabbed Cricket by the upper arm and held her while Gregor disappeared around the corner. Tom held Cricket’s gaze, sickened by the tears that gushed down her face, then he followed. He rounded the bend in the passage and immediately threw up his arm to shield his eyes from the brilliant throbbing light.
He stood at the entrance to a cavern perhaps twenty-five feet high, thirty yards wide, and again as long. Tom’s first impressions were of the walls, the ceiling and the floor, how they all appeared to be composed of a slaglike metal that had been seared to a coarse, stygian pigment Three-quarters of the way across the cavern, a jagged wound ten inches wide rent the floor from side to side. The gash was so black it seemed capable of sucking light into itself. And it stank. The crack was the source of those caustic electrical fumes, now so strong and rank that Tom felt his throat begin to close and his stomach turn over.
Close to the gash in the floor, moon rock 66095 sat atop what appeared to have been some sort of burnished altar. A singed and blistered rubberized box rested at the base of the blackened pedestal. Heavily insulated cables ran out of the case to a geodesic cobweb of wires that encircled the stone. Within the cobweb, the visual effect was similar to pictures Tom had seen of total eclipses of the sun; the center of the rock appeared dark and solid, but there was a thin, electric-blue corona of light hovering just above the stone’s many concave planes and extrusions. Spiking off the stone’s surface were flares of energy like the flames of welders’ torches gone amok. Each whipsaw was accompanied by that resonant buzzing that filled the cavern. The longer Tom stood there, the more he became convinced that the stone had to be throwing some exotic form of radiation. He had to get out of there.
Then he noticed that Gregor was advancing toward the stone, removing his helmet. A look of crazed ecstasy came over the scientist’s face. He got within five feet of the flaring rock and stopped just outside the reach of the dancing fingers of energy. For Tom it was like looking at an X-ray picture; in the presence of the light, Gregor’s skin turned an opaque aluminum, and Tom swore he could see the shades of his bones and the suggestion of his arteries and veins. Gregor’s heart seemed to pump in time with the vibrations coming off the rock His blood moved through his capillaries like shadows on a tormented sea.
Gregor turned toward Tom and exulted, “It was worth every step getting here, wasn’t it? I’ve done it Transmutation on a massive scale. Look at this place! Look at me! From the time of the great pharaohs, the adepts believed that the ultimate purpose of the stone was becoming one with the universe. You’re my witness, Burke. Robert Gregor is consumed and reborn in fire, whole with the mystery at last!”
Feverish with accomplishment feeding on the mysterious energy pulsing off the stone and whatever bizarre theories he’d developed to explain the workings of moon rock 66095, Gregor struck Tom as suddenly vulnerable.
“All there is is burnt rock here,” he snorted. “And you look like you just walked in from Nagasaki. Kelly will break your neck when he sees this.”
“Those are transmuted ores!” Gregor cried furiously, waving his pistol at Tom. “I am a transmuted man! The scientific significance of this is overwhelming. The world will roar its applause!”
“Roar with laughter is more like it,” Tom shot back. “All you created is black rock and a body savaged by radiation sickness. You failed, Gregor. You are a failure.”
“Silence!” Gregor screamed, then pointed at the flaring stone. “They’ll remember me like Newton. Like Galileo. Like Bohr!”
Tom took a careful step toward the physicist, his peripheral attention on the pistol in Gregor’s right hand. “No one will remember you, Gregor. No one. They’ll forget you, like they forgot your …” He remembered something Cricket had told him the night before, something about what Gregor had said as she’d brought him down the rope in Dante’s Tubes. “They’ll forget you like they forgot your mother, Gregor. In the history books, you’ll just be an overeducated trailer-trash boy who went nuts and killed his supervisor. A failure like your mother. Buried in a pauper’s grave.”
Gregor began to quiver so hard with rage that Tom believed he was no longer aware of his surroundings. He saw his chance and rushed the physicist, his body bent low. He tackled Gregor at the knees and together they crashed to the floor of the cave. Gregor’s pistol spun across the floor.
Tom swung his fist overhand, punching Gregor twice high in the ribs; then he closed his hands around Gregor’s throat. The scientist writhed and struggled. Tom dug his fingers into the impossibly strong muscles of his neck. For a moment, he believed that he had him that he felt the life force beginning to drain out of this ravaged thing that used to be a man. Then there was an explosion in Gregor’s eyes, as startling as the energy coming off the stone; he grinned evilly, then whipped his head left and bit Tom on the wrist. His teeth reached bone
Tom howled and released his hold. Gregor clubbed Tom’s face with the butt of his fist. White spots flashed through Tom’s brain and he felt himself fall to his side. There was a moment of confusion, punctuated by heated pain and the awareness that his wrist was gushing blood. Then his vision cleared. Tom rolled over and came up on his knees. Gregor sat with his back to the altar below the flaring rock, aiming the pistol at Tom, an expression of pure malice on his face.
“Everyone will remember me,” Gregor said. “No one will ever remember you.”
8:30 A.M.
VIRGIL ENTRANCE
LABYRINTH CAVE
On the surface, the wind blew to a gale, driving the rain in horizontal lines across the top of the ridge. The sky had turned an iron gray splotched with dark purple. Booming claps of thunder all but drowned out the wailing of the shaft-boring rig. Lightning struck less than a half mile to the west, above the narrow valley between Tower and Walker Ridges.
“Those strikes are getting damn close!” Angelis yelled.
“We better take cover!” Boulter screamed back.
Swain, meanwhile, was looking in the direction of the gaping hole the boring rig had augered into the hillside. White dust billowed and plumed from the shaft, mixed with the rain, and fell like wet chalk. A lightning bolt razored down from the sky and struck the ridge three hundred yards above the hole. At that the physicist panicked. If what Chester had hypothesized about the stone and lightning was true—?
“Uncle Jeff,” Chester yelled. “Those men!”
“I know!” Swain cried, turning and running at Major General Hayes. “You’ve got to get those workers out of that hole! They’re in great danger.”
“Can’t do that,” the general replied. “We’ve got to get to that stone without delay.”
“If one of these bolts grounds into the cave and reaches the rock it could be amplified and accelerated,” Swain insisted. “They could all be killed. Everyone on this mountain could be killed.”
“You know this for sure?”
“No, but …”
“I have my orders, Doctor.”
“I’m holding you responsible for those men’s lives, General!” Swain bellowed. “Too many people have died going after this rock!”
Hayes shook his head. “Leave if you wish, Dr. Swain. But we’re going into that mountain the fastest way we can.”
8:32 A.M.
SHAMAN’S CATACOMB
LABYRINTH CAVE
A gunshot rang out over the buzzing roar emanating from the cave ahead.
Cricket kicked Kelly in the shin, wrenched free of his grasp, and hobbled as fast as she could down the tunnel toward the pulsing metallic light.
“You fucking bitch, get back here,�
�� Kelly bellowed. “I’ve had it with you!”
Cricket rounded the bend in the passage and halted at the sight of the stone and the silhouette of Gregor standing over the prone figure of her father. Gregor yanked the trigger of the pistol over and over again, infuriated beyond reason by the dull clicking noise the gun made. He was out of bullets.
“Daddy!” Cricket screamed again and raced to her father’s side. Blood and chips of bone oozed from a gaping wound above Tom’s right elbow.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said weakly, trying to rise.
“Shoot him, Kelly!” Gregor barked. “Shoot them both!”
But Kelly was looking wildly from the flaring stone to the walls of the cavern. “There’s no gold,” he mumbled. “There’s no nothing.”
“Give me that gun!” Gregor yelled, coming at Kelly.
Kelly swung the shotgun around and jabbed the muzzle into the physicist’s throat, backing him away from Tom and Cricket. “I’m gonna shoot you, you fuck, you lousy lunatic fuck. There’s no gold in here!”
“Who cares about gold?” Gregor croaked. “It’s the science!”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the science.” Kelly was now pressing Gregor against the cave wall. “I risked my life for—”
The convict flipped off the safety on the pump-action and began to squeeze the trigger. Cricket watched Gregor stare down the gun barrel in complete disbelief, then his eyes darted left, passed, returned, and locked.
“There!” he crowed. “In the cracks, Kelly. It’s there!”
The strangler hesitated at the trigger, then aimed his headlamp along Gregor’s line of sight.
Cricket looked, too. So did her father. And now they all saw for the first time that the grotto was not completely blackened, but webbed with minute veins of a hundred different alloys. Some had the consistency and patina of hammered silver. Others were liquid, reflective, almost like mercury. But every few feet or so, there were set in the slag intricate capillaries of a metal so beautiful that it took Cricket’s breath away. Richer than opal, paler than gold, more lustrous than platinum, it was an ore that looked as if it had been shot through with moonlight.
Kelly clicked the safety back on and drew back the shotgun’s muzzle from Gregor’s throat. He stepped to the wall and ran his fingers with unbridled desire over the alluring veins of the precious metal.
“You see?” Gregor said, rubbing his throat. “I told you. Rarer than gold. More valuable than gold. Like nothing ever seen before on Earth.”
“It’s true,” Kelly whispered in rapture. Then he spun around, homicidal again. “But what good does this do me? You’d have to mine it. It would take months.”
“The stone, you fool!” Gregor replied through gritted teeth. “Don’t you see? This was only my first experiment with large-scale transmutation, and look at the results! Look at it! Help me get the stone out of here. We can take it far away. We can do it again. We can turn whole rooms into that lovely metal. We’ll be the richest, most powerful men in the world!”
Kelly’s attention jumped to moon rock 66095, then to the ore in the blackened wall, then back to Gregor. He eased the shotgun to his side. “They’re drilling above us,” he said. “They got to be guarding all the entrances, too.”
“Doesn’t m-m-matter,” Gregor said, gesturing to the far side of the grotto and the beginnings of a crawlway that was as scorched as the crack in the floor. “My grandfather said there was another way out of the cave, the way the Shawnee believed the souls of the dead left. We’ll escape this cave with the stone and go overland from there.”
Gregor went by Cricket and her dad to the rubberized box at the altar’s base and opened it to reveal a half dozen wet-cell batteries. He reached past them and brought out a handheld computer linked between the batteries and the coils of wire that surrounded the stone. He began punching in a series of codes on the keypad.
“What about them?” Kelly asked.
Gregor looked over his shoulder and shrugged. “You’ve suffered enough at their hands. They’re yours.”
Kelly turned the shotgun toward Cricket. Then he seemed to think better of it. He set the gun down, reached into his pack, drew out a pocket knife, and snapped it open. “I want this to hurt.”
“Please!” Cricket said, shielding her father. “You’ve got your stone. Let us go!”
Kelly scowled and advanced toward them. “I still got dung in my pants, you little cunt. Your time has come.”
“Not before yours does, bastard!” Whitney yelled.
Kelly twisted to find Whitney and Finnerty crouched in the archway of the grotto, each with a machine pistol trained directly on him.
“U.S. marshal,” Finnerty barked. “Drop the knife. Move away from the girl.”
“Mommy!” Cricket cried.
“Whit!” her dad gasped.
“I’ve come to take you both home,” Whitney said.
“Drop it Kelly,” Finnerty said, easing into the room. “Do it now. And you, Dr. Gregor, get away from that box.”
Cricket saw Kelly’s eyes narrow to slits, then he let his arm down and his hand relax. The knife dangled at his fingertips. Gregor took a step from the box toward the stone. For a split second, Finnerty’s attention left Kelly for Gregor. That was all it took.
Kelly flicked his wrist and dived. The blade rotated through the air and buried itself beneath the marshal’s left clavicle with the sound of a pillow being plumped. Finnerty grunted and spiraled down, losing control of the machine pistol just before he crashed to the cave floor. The gun twirled crazily through the air, bounced once, then slid to the edge of the dark crack in the cavern floor.
Cricket saw it, but was frozen by the events. Kelly rolled toward the shotgun.
“Shoot him!” Finnerty yelled at her mother.
Whitney stuck the automatic weapon out in front of her, her arm shaking as if she were about to bat at a hornet’s nest with a broom handle. She closed her eyes and jerked the trigger. A long staccato burst of deafening explosions echoed through the chamber and the gun bucked under repeated recoil. The spray of .9 mm rounds tore through Kelly’s torso just as he reached the shotgun. It raked along the floor toward Gregor. The physicist threw himself backward, but the barrage of bullets peppered the black box housing the power pack and controls of the electromagnetic source charging moon rock 66095.
Kelly convulsed at the bullet impacts, then sprawled on his side. The strangler peered down, bewildered by the multiple wounds in his chest and abdomen. He brought up his index finger and touched one. He looked right at Cricket as if expecting understanding. “It burns,” he said. “Never expected fire.”
Bright frothy blood bubbled up at Kelly’s lips and choked off whatever else he had to say. His skin blued. His eyes went wide, then dulled, and he slumped.
Cricket hobbled toward her mom and dad. Whitney dropped the gun and embraced them both. “Thank God,” she sobbed. “You’re both alive. Both alive.”
“Love you, Whit,” Tom said. “Nothing more important than you. Ever.”
Cricket started to cry, thinking it was all over. Then she saw Gregor over her mother’s shoulder. Twenty feet away, the pale scientist rocked back and forth on his haunches, staring at the laptop computer, which had been gouged by the bullets. Sparks flew from the keyboard. The screen flashed a gibberish of numbers and codes. Fierce arcs of electricity leaped within the cobweb of wires surrounding the stone. The buzzing tone emanating from the moon rock changed, became shriller, more erratic. “You’ve ruined it!” he moaned. “My work! My life! Ruined!”
“Get him away from it,” Finnerty gasped. “Swain said the stone could destabilize if it wasn’t deactivated correctly.”
The marshal had gotten himself up into a sitting position. The knife was embedded to the hilt in his chest so tight that it acted as a plug preventing the blood from gushing forth. Gregor heard Finnerty and looked around as if he were waking from a terrible dream. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the marshal�
��s machine pistol lying there on the other side of the cavern and went for it on his hands and knees, screaming, “I’ll kill you all!”
“The gun, Mom!” Cricket yelled.
Whitney tore herself free of their embrace and scrambled toward the machine pistol, too. Out of the corner of her eye, Cricket caught a moving shadow in the entrance to the cavern. The shadow became a blur and Billy Lyons charged in like a wounded bull, soaking wet, his face a sculpture of violent intent. Gregor reached for the gun. Lyons rammed a knee into the scientist’s stomach and knocked him flat. The guard snatched up the machine pistol, dropped, and rolled out into the sniper’s prone position, the barrel of his weapon swinging among them all. “No one moves, no one dies!”
8:40 A.M.
VIRGIL ENTRANCE
LABYRINTH CAVE
High over tower ridge, a massive lightning strike erupted, a taproot of energy that hurtled toward the earth in a single stout trunk that grew limbs and then lesser branches, all of it curling toward the dome of the mountain like a willow tree canting in a storm. The canopy of electricity encircled the ridge for one terrifying instant that was wedded to a single clap of thunder as loud and destructive as an aerial bombardment.
The concussion hurled Swain, Chester, Boulter, Angelis, and Major General Hayes off their feet. Then the entire ridge began to fluctuate beneath them.
A two-hundred-foot chunk sheared off the mountainside like a slab of windblown snow avalanching. The landslide rumbled downhill, throwing mature oaks like javelins, flipping tanks and armored personnel carriers like they were toys.
Inside the tunnel the boring machine had dug, the walls disintegrated, crushing the massive drilling head as if it were aluminum foil. The diesel engine driving the borer ruptured, then exploded in a mushrooming ball of orange and scarlet flame.
8:37 A.M.
SHAMAN’S CATACOMB
LABYRINTH CAVE
“Hands up, lady,” Lyons shouted at Whitney.
She hesitated, then raised her hands. “Please,” she pleaded. “No more.”
Lyons ignored her and pointed the muzzle of his weapon at Finnerty. “Identify yourself!”
Labyrinth Page 30