Painter imagined the worldwide starvation, the chaos, the death. He remembered Gray’s description of the Laki eruption in Iceland shortly after the founding of America. That small-by-comparison volcanic event killed six million people.
He stared at Chin’s ashen face. “You’re talking about an extinction-level event, aren’t you?”
“It’s happened before. Only seventy thousand years ago. A supervolcano erupted in Sumatra. The volcanic winter that followed in its wake wiped out most of the human population, dropping our numbers down to only a few thousand breeding pairs worldwide. The human species survived that eruption by the breadth of a hair.” Chin fixed Painter with a dead stare. “We won’t be so lucky this time.”
12:28 A.M.
Seated in the back office, Hank listened to Chin’s dire prediction.
His hands rested on the computer keyboard, but his eyes had gone blind to the screen. He imagined all of civilization wiped out. He remembered the Ute elder’s apocalyptic prophecy concerning that cave up in the Utah mountains, how the Great Spirit would rise up and destroy the world if anyone dared trespass.
It was now coming true.
A shadow stretched over his long, knobby fingers. A warm hand, unlined by age, squeezed his own.
“It’s okay, Professor,” Jordan said. The youth was seated beside him, where he’d been collating pages from a laser printer. “Maybe Yellowstone isn’t even the right place.”
“It is.”
Hank could not shake his despair, made worse by his memories of Maggie and all of the others who had died.
All this death.
He grew suddenly resentful of his companion’s youth, of his unflagging optimism and his steadfast belief in his own immortality. He glanced up at Jordan—but what he found in the young man’s face told a different story. The black eyes, the bruised features, the fear expressed in every muscle—it was not a lack of maturity that engendered such hope in the young man. It was simply who Jordan was.
Hank took a deep shuddering breath, casting back the shrouds of the dead. He was still alive. So was this resolute young man. A tail thumped under the table.
You, too, Kawtch.
Hank returned Jordan’s support, momentarily sharing that warm squeeze, before his focus returned to the situation at hand. He still hadn’t changed his opinion concerning the final resting place of the Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev. Painter’s colleague out east had read that golden map correctly.
At least, Hank believed so.
“What did you find?” Jordan asked.
“I’ve been reading through reams of Native American lore concerning Yellowstone, attempting to discern possible correlations among the various myths and legends that would support the existence of a lost city hidden in that valley. It’s been frustrating. Native Americans have been living in this region for over ten thousand years. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Shoshone, Blackfeet, and more recently, the Crows. But so little is spoken among all these tribes about this unique valley. It’s a resounding and loud silence, suspiciously so.”
“Maybe they didn’t know about it.”
“No, they had names for it. The Crows called it land of burning ground or sometimes the land of vapors. The Blackfeet described it as many smokes. The Flatheads used the phrase smoke from the ground. Can’t be more accurate than that, can you? Those early tribes definitely knew about this place.”
“Then maybe they didn’t talk about it because they were scared.”
“That was the view that was held for the longest time. That Indians believed the hissing and roaring of the geysers were the voices of evil spirits. It’s still bandied about in some circles, but it’s pure hogwash. The newest anthropological studies have revealed that not to be the case. The early Indians had no fear of this steaming land. Instead, that false story got told and retold, mostly by early white settlers, perhaps to make their savage neighbors appear foolish and dull of mind . . . or maybe to help justify the taking of their lands. If the pioneers could claim that Indians were too scared to enter Yellowstone, then the entire territory was up for grabs.”
“Then what is the true story?”
Hank pointed to the screen. “The evidence confounded the scholars of the time. This is what historian Hiram Chittenden wrote about it back in 1895. ‘It is a singular fact that in Yellowstone National Park, no knowledge of the country seems to have been derived from the Indians . . . Their deep silence concerning it is therefore no less remarkable than mysterious.’ ”
“Doesn’t sound like they were scared,” Jordan said. “More like they were hiding something.”
Hank touched his nose—dead on, my boy—then pointed to the screen. “Look at this. I found this passage in a recent study; it’s an excerpt from an old journal of one of the earliest settlers, John Hamilcar Hollister. I could find nothing like this anywhere else, but it speaks volumes on that deep Indian silence.”
Jordan leaned closer.
Hank read the words quietly again alongside him.
There are but few Indian legends which refer to this purposely unknown land. Of these I have found but one, and that is this—that no white man should ever be told of this inferno, lest he should enter that region and form a league with the devils, and by their aid come forth and destroy all Indians.
Jordan sat back, stunned. “So they were hiding something.”
“Something our ancestors didn’t want to have fall into the wrong hands, fearing it would be used against them.”
“That lost city must be there.”
But where?
Hank checked his watch, fighting against a return of the paralyzing despair that had gripped him moments before. He would follow Jordan’s example. He would not give up hope. He caught the young man staring out the window toward the lights of Flagstaff in the distance. But Hank knew his mind was much farther away, with a worry that had nothing to do with volcanoes and lost cities.
This time it was Hank who reached over and gave Jordan’s hand a squeeze of reassurance. “We’ll get her back.”
1:38 A.M.
Salt Lake City, Utah
It had been almost an hour since Kai had spoken to Uncle Crowe. She sat in a dining room chair, unbound, but there was nothing she could do, except chew at her thumbnail.
The suite of rooms bustled with activity. Commandos had shed combat gear for civilian clothing that looked ill-suited to such hardened mercenaries. They set about packing, storing gear, breaking down weapons. They were readying to move out.
Even the computer equipment had been racked up inside a tall, wheeled cargo case, modified out of a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. From the stack, several lines of cable trailed back to Jordan’s gutted cell phone.
Rafael paced around the container, waiting for Kai’s uncle’s call.
She lowered her hand to her lap, clasping her palms between her legs, just as anxious as the man who kept her prisoner, balancing on a razor of terror.
Before Painter’s call, convinced he was dead, she had been locked in one of the bedrooms of the suite. At the time she knew these people were going to kill her. She didn’t care. Drained to a hollow shell of herself, she had simply sat on the bed’s edge. She was still aware of feeling fear, coiled around the base of her spine, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of desolation that gripped her. She had seen too much blood, too much death. Her own life held little meaning. She considered breaking the mirror in the bathroom and using a shard of glass to spill her own blood, as if by so doing she could wrest back some modicum of control.
But even that had felt too much like fighting.
She simply didn’t have the strength.
Then the call had come. Her uncle was alive, so were the professor and Jordan, and even that walking refrigerator called Kowalski. She’d seen their picture on Rafael’s computer screen, some frozen image from a broadcast of the group’s rescue.
After the call, jubilation filled those hollow spaces inside her, shining a warm light into that dark vacuum.
Her uncle’s last words stayed with her.
I’m going to come get you. I promise.
He’d said he would not abandon her—and she believed him, which is what ignited the keening terror inside her now. She suddenly wanted to live, and in allowing herself to feel that desire, she realized that once again she had everything to lose.
But there was no escape.
She glanced over to her sole companion at the dining room table. It was the muscular African woman named Ashanda. Kai had initially been terrified of the woman, but then, at the time, the woman had been heating irons in the fire, carrying out a torture upon Rafael’s orders. But over time, that fear mellowed into something that resembled discomfort mixed with a kind of curiosity.
Who was she?
The woman was so unlike the others, clearly not a soldier, though she fought for Rafael. Kai pictured Ashanda rising from the shadows of the mud-heated cavern, running with a lithe speed that defied her size. Kai had also seen Ashanda working at the computer as she herself talked to Painter, the woman’s dark fingers racing over a keyboard. It was clear that she was more than a technician.
In the bright light of the room, Kai noted vague scars thickening the woman’s skin, forming rows of small dots that made stripes along her arms, looking almost like the skin of a crocodile. Her face was similarly scarred but in a more decorative pattern, one that accentuated her dark eyes and swept in wings to her temples. Her hair was done in tight, dark braids that spread from the crown of her head and draped gracefully to her forehead and shoulders.
Kai watched the woman staring at Rafael. Before she had seen only emptiness in those eyes, but this was no longer true. Deep within those dark mirrors, Kai knew, stirred a well of sadness. Ashanda sat so very still, as if afraid of being seen, yet at the same time, wanting more. There was devotion in that gaze, too, along with weariness. She sat like a dog waiting for a touch from its master, knowing that a mere touch was all she was ever going to get.
The reverie ended with the chiming ring of a phone.
Kai swung around.
At last.
1:44 A.M.
Rafael appreciated punctuality. The director of Sigma had placed his follow-up call precisely at the time he had promised. It was not the call itself, but what the man offered when he spoke, that dismayed the Frenchman, coming as it did so unexpectedly.
“A truce?” Rafe asked. “Between us? How does that serve me?”
Painter’s voice remained urgent. “As promised, I’ll tell you where the Fourteenth Colony is located. But it will do you no good. The cache is set to explode in approximately four and a half hours.”
“Then, Monsieur Crowe, if you wish your niece to live, you’d best make this exchange as quickly as possible.”
“Listen to me, Rafael. I’ll tell you the location now. The Fourteenth Colony is hidden somewhere in Yellowstone National Park. I’m sure that such a resting place makes sense to you, does it not?”
Rafe fought to understand such a drastic turn of events.
Is this a ruse? To what end?
Painter did not let up, speaking rapidly. “Give me an e-mail address. I’ll send you all the relevant data. But in a few short hours, that cache is going to go critical, triggering a blast over a hundredfold stronger than the one in Iceland. But you know that’s not the true danger. That explosion will release a mass of nanobots. They’ll start disassembling any matter they encounter and keep spreading and growing larger. The nano-nest will eat its way down until it reaches the magma chamber under Yellowstone, where it will ignite the supervolcano buried beneath that park. The resulting cataclysm will be the equivalent of a mile-wide asteroid slamming into the earth. It means the end of most life, certainly all human life.”
Rafe found himself breathing harder. Could he be telling the truth?
“I doubt that such destruction will serve even your aims,” Painter continued. “Or those of anyone you work with, for that matter. We either team up, share our knowledge, in order to stop this from happening, or it’s the end of everything.”
“I . . . I will need time to think about this.” Rafe hated to hear the stammer in his own voice.
“Don’t take long,” Painter warned. “Again I will send you all of our data—whatever you want. But Yellowstone is spread over two million acres, and this creates a huge challenge to us. We must still discover and pinpoint the lost city’s exact location, and we must do it while the clock keeps ticking downward.”
Rafe checked his wristwatch. If the director was telling the truth, they had until 6:15 A.M. to find the lost city and neutralize the material that was hidden there.
“Send me what you have,” Rafe said, and gave him an e-mail address.
“You have my number.” Painter signed off.
Rafael lowered the phone, hanging his head in thought.
Do I believe you, Monsieur Crowe? Could you be telling the truth?
Rafe lifted his head enough to glance toward Kai Quocheets.
The director had never asked once about his niece. That, more than anything, spoke to his honesty. What did it matter if he negotiated for one life when the lives of all of mankind were at risk?
The phone rang again, making Rafe jump. He stared down at the mobile device in his hand, wired to the encrypting software. But that wasn’t the source of the ringing. He turned to the dining room buffet, where his personal laptop and cell phone rested. He watched his phone vibrate and heard it ring again.
Leaning more heavily on his cane than he usually did, he stepped over and retrieved the device. His personal phone was meant only for direct communication with his family, along with a few of his associates at the research facilities back in the French Alps. But the caller ID simply listed the caller’s name as blocked. That made no sense. His phone didn’t accept blocked calls.
He was ready to dismiss the matter and not respond, but the phone was already in his hand and he needed something to distract himself with while he awaited the data from Painter Crowe.
Irritated, Rafe lifted the device to his ear. “Who is this?”
The voice was American, soft-spoken, nondescript, perhaps a hint of a Southern accent, but too faint for Rafe to tell anything more than that. The man told him his name.
Rafe’s cane slipped from his hand and clattered to the marble floor. He reached back to the buffet to catch himself. He noted Ashanda rising, ready to come to his aid. He sternly shook his head at her.
The caller spoke calmly, distinctly, with no threat in his voice, only certainty. “We’ve heard the news. You’ll cooperate with Sigma to the fullest extent. What is to come must be stopped for all our sakes. We have full confidence in your abilities.”
“Je vous en prie,” he said breathlessly, cringing to note that he’d slipped into French inadvertently.
“Once you’ve accomplished your goal, anyone outside your party who has knowledge of what is discovered must be destroyed. But be warned. Director Crowe has been underestimated in the past.”
Rafe’s gaze flicked to Kai. “I may have a way of neutralizing any threat he poses, but I will still be careful.”
“With such brittle bones, I’m sure that is a trait you’ve honed well.”
While this might be taken as a vague insult, the gentle amusement—even in such trying times—made it clear that the speaker’s intent was nothing but good-natured.
“Adieu,” the man said in French, equally accommodating. “I have matters I must address out east here.”
The phone clicked off.
Rafe turned promptly to TJ, who was packing the last of the computer gear. “Raise Painter Crowe for me.” To Bern, he said, “Have the men ready to leave in fifteen minutes.”
“Where are we headed?” Bern asked. He wasn’t prying; it was just a need-to-know inquiry to better prepare his team.
“To Yellowstone.”
TJ interrupted. “Connection’s ringing, sir.”
Rafe took the phone, ready to make the deal.
; He knew better than to disobey. The honor of the moment warmed through him, hardening his resolve, if not his bones. He was the first in his family to ever speak to a member of the True Bloodline.
Chapter 34
June 1, 4:34 A.M.
Outside Nashville, Tennessee
It would soon be getting lighter.
Gray wasn’t sure if this was a positive development. They’d barely made it out of Nashville, having to take surface streets and back roads, sticking to the speed limits. Monk had done the driving while Gray coordinated matters with Painter Crowe.
With one goal accomplished, the director had assigned him another: to attempt to narrow down the location of the Fourteenth Colony settlement by following the historical trail. They’d dogged Archard Fortescue’s path to Iceland and back. Now they had to see if they could track the Frenchman’s subsequent footsteps.
That meant they weren’t the only ones who were getting no sleep.
“Calling this early is becoming a habit, Mr. Pierce,” Eric Heisman said over the phone, but rather than irritated, he sounded excited.
Kat had arranged the call, passing it through the Sigma switchboard to scramble the connection.
“I’ve got you on speaker,” Gray said. He needed everyone’s input. Now was not the time to miss a critical insight or overlook an important detail. Gray wanted everybody’s fingerprints all over this case.
Seichan sat up from the backseat, listening in.
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