The man’s expression was guarded, but it was evident that he considered the nomination of Arkaim a great professional honor. He smiled. “Forgive. I am Sergei Zdanovich. I am… How do you say? The boss, here.”
So much for technology, Pierce thought, tapping a button on the babelfish to mute the feed. He extended his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Zdanovich. We’re in the early stages of the nomination. Nothing formal yet. That’s why we’re here.”
“Excellent. Yes. I will give you tour.”
Pierce smiled. “That’s not necessary. In fact, if it’s all the same to you, we’d prefer to just wander around for a while. Take a few pictures. Nothing intrusive, of course.”
Zdanovich registered mild irritation at the suggestion, but then spread his hands in a gesture of accommodation. “Of course.”
“Thank you.” Pierce started to turn away, but then stopped himself as if remembering something. “Oh, I heard that you discovered the entrance to a series of subterranean passages. Could you point me in the right direction?”
The Russian’s frown deepened. “What is name again?”
Pierce sensed the cracks appearing in his cover story, but he answered truthfully. “Professor George Pierce. University of Athens.”
Zdanovich gave a little nod and turned to the young man who had led them to the excavation. He mumbled something in Russian, prompting Pierce to reactivate the babelfish a little too late, then added, “Gennaidy will show you.”
The young man in the red shirt gestured for them to follow and struck out across the site. After a few steps, Pierce glanced back and saw Zdanovich heading toward the administrative center.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Lazarus asked in a low voice.
“Maybe,” Pierce admitted. “Depends on how hard he shakes it.”
“We should have just snuck in after dark,” Fiona whispered.
Although it had been his decision to make the initial survey in the open, Pierce wondered if his young protégé wasn’t right about that. He had considered but rejected a clandestine approach, for the simple reason that the potential risk outweighed the potential reward. They didn’t even know what they were looking for, or if there was anything to be found at all. What they needed more than anything else was time. Unfortunately, Zdanovich was turning out to be Pierce’s worst nightmare come true: a Russian bureaucrat, protecting his little fiefdom.
He tapped the Bluetooth device again to open a direct line to Dourado. “Cintia, can you monitor the site for outgoing phone calls?”
“Piece of cake,” Dourado promised.
“We stick to the plan,” he told the others. “If we find something, we can always try Fiona’s plan.”
Gennaidy, ignorant of his superior’s suspicions, led them across the site, which consisted of bare earth, pock-marked with exploratory trenches. Pierce’s practiced eye spotted the curving foundation of the old city. It wasn’t hard to imagine moving through the city as it had once been, a massive walled citadel rising from the steppe, with streets and channels to supply fresh water. At the outer edge of the circle, on the western side, near what had once been the main entrance, a rope barrier had been erected around a sheet of plywood lying flat on the ground. Gennaidy held the ropes down for them and then pointed to the plywood.
Under there.
Pierce thanked the young man and dismissed him. “We can take it from here.”
Gennaidy appeared confused and uncertain about what to do next, so Lazarus placed a hand on his shoulder and made a gesture that, while not threatening, conveyed the message: Get lost.
As the young man slunk away, Dourado’s voice chirped in Pierce’s ear. “You were right. Zdanovich is calling it in.”
Pierce grimaced. “Keep me posted.” He turned to the others. “The clock is ticking. Let’s get to work.”
TWO
Beneath the plywood, they found a square vertical shaft cut into the stone. The bottom, glistening with seepage, was eight feet down, but there was an opening and a wooden ladder on the east wall of the pit that looked promising. Lazarus opened his backpack and took out four small LED headlamps, which he distributed to the others. He also produced and began snapping together the disassembled pieces of what looked like a metal detector. The device—a Nitek Groundshark—was a portable, ground-penetrating radar unit.
Unlike a metal detector, which could, with varying degrees of success, locate metallic objects buried a foot or so below the surface, the Groundshark’s GPR could detect non-metallic objects, density changes, and void spaces. Any of those might indicate sealed chambers and passages, and the Groundshark could detect them through several feet of solid ground. While ground penetrating radar could not plumb all the secrets of Arkaim, a quick sweep of the site could point the way to those secrets, or confirm that there were none to be found. Once the GPR unit was assembled, they descended the ladder and headed into the passage.
As they moved forward, Pierce moved the Groundshark back and forth, not only across the floor, but also up and down the walls. Although the uniform dimensions of the tunnel bore witness to the labor of the ancient artisans, the meandering course of the tunnel suggested that the workers had enlarged naturally occurring fissures in the limestone, which the GPR revealed to be solid.
After fifty feet, the tunnel opened into a large chamber, with three more passages radiating away in different directions like the spokes of a wheel.
“I’ll sweep this room,” Pierce said. “You guys scout the passages. Be careful. We can’t afford to lose anyone in here.”
“Yes, dad,” Gallo said.
Fiona giggled for a moment, but then seemed to grow more serious. As she studied the passages, contemplating the choices, Pierce saw her lips moving ever so slightly. He exchanged a glance with Gallo, who just nodded, confirming his suspicions.
Fiona was using the Mother Tongue, asking the earth to tell her which way to go. Or trying to, anyway. After a few seconds of this, she started down the middle passage, but whether it was because the ground had spoken to her, or just a lucky guess, there was no telling.
“You think she knows something?” he whispered.
Gallo shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against her.”
Pierce checked the display on his phone and saw a circle-slash where the signal bars should have been. Zdanovich had likely already discovered that they weren’t there in any official capacity, and might even have contacted the authorities. Pierce didn’t think their deception would warrant an arrest, but they could be kicked off the site and deported.
Gambling on whether or not Fiona had sensed something during her communion with the stone was exactly what he was going to have to do, and time was the currency at stake.
“All in,” he said, heading after the young woman. Gallo and Lazarus fell in behind him.
The passage sloped downward, the gradient slight but constant. The wall curved as they continued onward, spiraling down. It wasn’t perfect evidence of Originator influence, but it was very suggestive.
He quickened his pace, catching up with Fiona, but they were forced to stop. Although the passage continued at least as far as their flashlights could reveal, it was flooded.
“Must be a cave-in further down,” Pierce said. He glanced over at Fiona. “Is there something important down there?”
Fiona shook her head, uncertain. “I’m not… I don’t know what this is. It’s like this whole place is talking to me.” She turned, a guilty look on her face. “Not literally, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything, Fi.” Pierce studied the flooded passage, wondering if he should try wading out into it with the GPR unit.
And if I find something, he thought, then what?
“If we could shift whatever’s blocking the passage,” Lazarus said, “it might drain out. A small shaped charge might do the trick.”
“Or it might bring the roof down on our heads,” Pierce countered, shaking his head. “Let’s keep that plan in res
erve. Fi, I hate to ask, but do you think you could…” He left the question unfinished, dangling in the air between them.
“Use the Force? That’s why you brought me along, isn’t it?”
Pierce forced a smile. “Can you do it?”
“I can try.” She turned to the flooded passage again, took a deep breath and closed her eyes. A minute passed with no visible effect, then two. Pierce was just about to call the attempt a failure when ripples began to distort the mirror-like surface of the water. Then the flood disappeared, revealing damp stone. Further down the passage, where the water was deeper, the process was more gradual, but the water line dropped. Somewhere further down the tunnel, the dam had broken.
It’s working, Pierce thought. He turned to Fiona, ready to congratulate her when she left off her efforts. He was surprised to find her staring back at him, wide-eyed and horrified.
“It wasn’t me.”
“Not—”
A deep boom, like the inside of a thunderclap, interrupted. The sound was so loud, so intense, that Pierce was knocked off his feet. He lay on the cave floor, stunned, lying beside the others. He struggled to rise, but the disorientation lingered. The ground shook beneath him.
Cracks appeared in the limestone walls, radiating out like tongues of lightning. The air grew thick with grit and dust.
“Fi!” Gallo shouted. “Whatever you’re doing—”
“I’m not doing anything!”
Lazarus’s voice roared above the din. “It’s an earthquake! We need to move!”
The big man reached out from the gloom, pulling Pierce to his feet, but the ground was still lurching back and forth like the deck of a storm-tossed ship. Pierce reached out to Fiona, but another shift threw him against the wall. Lazarus succeeded where he had failed, scooping Fiona up in his arms. “Go!”
Pierce found Gallo leaning against the opposite wall. He took her hand, but before they could start back up the passage, another thunderous detonation wrenched their world sideways. The dust cloud, illuminated by the diffused light of their headlamps, began swirling. A blast of air, like the wind ahead of an approaching subway train, raced down the passage. There could only be one explanation.
“It’s collapsing,” Pierce shouted.
Large pieces of rubble began raining down on them.
“What do we do?” Gallo said.
Pierce turned, whipping her around to face the other direction. “Run!” And then a second later, Pierce yelled again, “Down!”
THREE
Cerberus Headquarters, Rome, Italy
Although she had lived most of her life in the stable—geologically speaking—Seattle area, Felice Carter knew an earthquake when she felt one. The floor lurched beneath her, the jolt strong enough to bounce the lab table and everything on it into the air. The heavier pieces of equipment began vibrating across the tabletop. Lighter items—mostly glassware—went flying, shattering on impact with the floor or the walls.
Carter’s first thought was outrage at the hours, days even, worth of research that had just been destroyed. None of the genetic samples or chemical agents were dangerous, but replacing them would be time-consuming and expensive.
Her second thought was that she needed to get to safety.
The floor was still moving, though not with the same violence as the initial bump, and she was able to stay upright. The question was, where to go? She recalled hearing that the safest place to be in an earthquake was a doorway—something about load-bearing walls and the shape of the door frame.
Was that still true when the doorway in question was in a subterranean laboratory, a hundred feet below the foundation of a thousand-plus-year-old tower?
Absent any better options, she decided she should give it a try.
As she reached the open door, hugging the upright frame to stay on her feet, the scientist in her wondered about the epicenter and the magnitude of the temblor. Her field was biology—specifically biochemistry and genetic engineering. Seismology was a different branch of the science tree, but thinking in terms of data and numbers—the universal language of all the sciences—made it seem a little less frightening.
She remembered a few things from her general science courses. Earthquakes occurred when there was movement along fault lines, cracks in the Earth’s crust that were sometimes pushed together or pulled apart by geological forces. The initial jolt at the beginning, when the stored energy in the opposing land masses was released, was the moment of greatest violence—like a stone cast into a lake, disrupting the surface with a chaotic splash. The subsequent shaking was the ripple effect, the shockwave spreading out from the epicenter. That was not to say that the gentler shaking wasn’t dangerous. As long as the earth was moving, there was risk, but Carter took comfort in the fact that the worst had passed. Aside from a few broken test tubes, the damage appeared to be minimal.
Then the lights went out.
The desolate blackness lasted only a fraction of a second before battery-powered emergency lights flashed on, illuminating the path to safety. But they left most of her world shrouded in funereal shadows. She stayed where she was, praying to gods she didn’t even believe in for the ground to stop moving.
One of them must have been listening. Although Carter thought she could still feel the world rocking beneath her, the shattered fragments of glass on the floor laid still. The quake appeared to be over.
She pushed away from the doorframe and hurried down the hall. There would be aftershocks, and she didn’t want to be underground when things started moving again. But getting out of the subterranean complex was not her first priority.
“Cintia?”
“Dr. Carter?” A quiet voice reached out to her from the gloom. “Are you okay?”
Carter felt a surge of relief. “I’m coming.”
A few more steps brought her to Dourado’s office. The room was in disarray, but the strangest part was the absence of light emanating from the multiple LED screens that lined the room. Dourado, her face and fuchsia hair coated with plaster dust, sat in her ergonomic chair surrounded by the lifeless monitors, looking bereft, like someone struck deaf, dumb, and blind.
“Cintia, come on,” Carter urged. “We need to get out of here.”
The computer expert looked up at her and blinked. “The generators should kick on soon.”
“That doesn’t matter. We can’t stay down here.”
“But Dr. Pierce… The team… They need us.”
Carter glanced at the black screens. Dourado’s computers weren’t just magic windows through which she could escape reality. They were her connection to the rest of the team at the Russian archaeological site. More importantly, the computers were the team’s connection to her, their lifeline if something went wrong.
The hardware in the room wouldn’t be of much use to the team or anyone else if the ceiling crashed down on them, though. Carter was about to tell Dourado as much when the screens began lighting up, displaying a welcome message, as the central operating system booted up. The overhead lights flickered to life as well.
Dourado breathed a sigh of relief. “See?”
Carter pursed her lips. “Can’t you do this from your tablet?”
Dourado shook her head. “There are too many systems running. Too much data to manage.”
Carter sank into an empty chair. Dourado was not going to budge, that much was clear. Maybe Pierce would be able to talk sense into her. “How long until you can re-establish contact with them?”
“That’s the other problem. They went underground. We’ll have to wait until they come out. And they don’t even know what’s happening.”
“The earthquake?”
Dourado shook her head. “The Russians. They didn’t buy Dr. Pierce’s cover story. They’re sending FSB officers to detain them.”
Carter forgot all about aftershocks. “And you don’t have any way to contact them?”
“Not until they come up for air.” She frowned at the screens. The welcome message was
gone, but now another notification was being displayed:
Unable to connect to network.
“And not if I can’t get online.” Dourado grabbed a wireless keyboard off the nearest desk and began typing.
Carter tried to follow what she was doing, but the dialogue boxes and command prompts were popping up and disappearing too quickly for her to make sense out of any of it. “Maybe the quake knocked out the Internet.”
“It did,” Dourado confirmed. “Local lines are down. But we have a satellite back-up. No way the quake touched that.”
A few seconds later, a new message appeared:
Connection established.
Dourado pumped the air with her fist and then resumed typing. A new page opened on one of the screens, a blank white square, just waiting to be filled up with information. After about thirty seconds, more words appeared:
Connection timed out.
Dourado spat out an oath in her native Portuguese, and started over, but the results were the same.
“Is the satellite out, too?” Carter asked.
“No. I mean, I don’t know.”
“Maybe the lines are jammed,” Carter suggested. “Too many people trying to use it at the same time. That’s a thing, right?”
“For cellular and land-lines, yes.” Dourado’s expression twisted in disdain. “This is something else. Let me try something.”
The woman’s fingers flew over the keys and then she pumped her fist in success. “Yes! I’m on a restricted military satellite. Let’s see how bad this earthquake was.”
She entered a new command, and the white window was replaced with the logo of the United States Geological Survey. A moment later, it was replaced by a map of the world, with the continents rendered in white and the oceans in gray. Both land and sea were marked with dots of varying size.
The dots, Carter realized, were individual earthquakes recorded by USGS instruments over the course of a week, and the sizes of the dots were a measure of the respective intensity of each quake. According to the legend at the bottom of the map, yellow dots indicated quakes older than twenty-four hours, tan meant quakes less than a day old, and red was reserved for quakes less than an hour old.
Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Page 3