The Doomsday Key

by James Rollins

  Rachel wanted to let her go, but the woman was her only lifeline.

  The floor shook again. A piece of the cavern roof broke away. A large slab dropped, and shattered against the spikes.

  She closed her eyes and prayed for some way out.

  Her angelic answer came from the most unlikely of sources.

  “What the fuck!”

  The shout came from the other side of the tilted floor, where the tunnel led up to Lord Newborough’s crypt.

  It was Kowalski. He must have come down either out of impatience or because he had heard the booby trap being sprung.

  “Help!” Rachel yelled, but with her chest stretched and her belly squeezed, it came out as a squeak.

  “Hello!” Kowalski called. Plainly he hadn’t heard her.

  Gray bellowed as he hung. “Kowalski!”

  “Pierce? Where are you? All I see is a pit and a blank wall. How did you all get across?”

  From Kowalski’s vantage point in the tunnel, all he must see was the underside of the fake floor—and the pit.

  Gray yelled again. “Go back and pull the bar!”

  “Pull my what?” He sounded offended.

  “The lever! Up the tunnel!”

  “Oh, okay! Hang on!”

  Rachel stared down at Seichan, then over to Gray. Hang on. That’s all they could do.

  “Hurry!” Gray called out. He had begun to slip again.

  Kowalski’s voice came back fainter. “Quit nagging me!”

  Rachel clung as tightly as she could. She closed her eyes and pictured the bar sticking out of the floor. She had spotted it earlier. It made sense that there would be a reset button for this trap. While the mechanism might kill any thieves who stumbled down here, the engineers of the trap would have needed a way to reset it. Otherwise, they’d be cut off from the key, too. Some sort of reset had to lie outside the chamber.

  But was it the lever?

  She prayed Gray’s intuition was right.

  She had her answer a moment later.

  The entire floor suddenly vibrated. A great grinding of gears shook through the room. The floor began to tilt again—but the wrong way. It started to rotate upside down. Rachel dared not even scream as her body began to slip across the stone. They were going to flip over.

  Then something caught. The floor stopped with a stomach-jarring jolt. With a harsher grinding of gears, the floor slowly reversed itself. It swung back in the proper direction.

  Rachel clung hard, her lips moving as she said the Lord’s Prayer.

  She watched the floor’s edge rise under Gray’s toes and push him back up. She rolled off the side of the sarcophagus and onto the leveling floor. They all lay flat, breathing hard. Even Gray slumped to his rear beside the cross.

  Kowalski came back with a flashlight. “If you’re done playing down here …”

  Rachel glared in his direction.

  “I came to tell you that the storm’s getting fierce. Lyle says we better move it if we want to get off this godforsaken island.”

  Before anyone could move or respond, another section of the roof crashed down, striking the floor like a bomb. Water and a flow of bricks came next. The tower was coming down on top of them.

  “Out!” Gray yelled.

  They all shot to their feet and ran for the exit. A resounding snap jolted the entire floor. It began to wobble, teeter-tottering as something broke in the ancient mechanism.

  Off balance, Rachel tumbled to the side, but Gray caught her around the waist and rushed with her toward the tunnel. They all flew into it as more of the cavern imploded.

  A last glance showed the floor tilted askew as a waterfall of bricks and rain flooded into the room. Then she was too far up the tunnel to see any more. A moment later, an earthshaking crash chased them. A flume of rock dust rolled up the tunnel and over them.

  Coughing, they reached the exit and climbed up, one after the other, back into the storm. Up top, a stunned Lyle offered them umbrellas.

  Rachel took one, but she kept her face turned up toward the sky. She let rainwater wash over her.

  We made it, Rachel thought.

  1:42 P.M.

  Gray stared over at the wreckage of the abbey tower. It was now only a tumbled pile of rubble sunk halfway into the ground. Water had already begun to pool around it.

  The cavern was surely gone.

  A roar rose behind him as Lyle started the tractor. The storm wailed—the winds had picked up while they’d been down there. Rain pelted out of the sky, whipping horizontal at times as the winds swept off the Irish Sea and across the island. Even the lightning had grown more subdued, as if cowed by the growing intensity of the storm.

  They loaded up into the trailer for the ride back over the hill to the harbor. Lyle hunched in his seat and pushed the tractor into gear. The trailer lurched as it began to move.

  They all crouched low, trying to keep out of the rain and the wind.

  Wallace gazed back at the fallen ruins of Saint Mary’s Abbey. “First rule of archaeology,” he said, then glanced sidelong at Gray. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Gray did not blame the professor for scolding him. He had acted without properly considering the dangers. He had been so shocked to discover that the cross predated Christianity, that the wheel component actually turned. He leaped before looking. Unlike Father Giovanni. Judging by all the priest’s calculations, he had gone after the puzzle in a systematic and studied way.

  But then again, the priest had been trained as an archaeologist. And Father Giovanni didn’t have a woman’s life hanging in the balance.

  His group had only another two days to solve this mystery. Gray wouldn’t apologize for pushing their investigation hard, for taking chances, for eschewing caution to get results.

  Still, as he pictured the painstaking notations and calculations done by Father Giovanni, he knew there was something he was still missing. The more he tried to pin it down, the more it slipped away.

  Wallace shook his head. “Just think what we might have learned if we’d had more time with that cross …”

  Gray heard the accusation behind his words. The man’s usual joviality had been worn away by exhaustion, terror, and not a small amount of disappointment. With one mistake, they’d destroyed a priceless illuminated treasure and lost access to whatever the cross had kept hidden.

  “What if the key is still down there?” Wallace asked pointedly.

  Gray had had enough. “You don’t believe that. And neither do I.” The words came out more harshly than he intended, but he was tired, too.

  “How can you be so sure?” Wallace asked.

  “Because Father Giovanni left. He continued his search. I think he solved the riddle of the cross, found an empty vault that once held the key, then moved on, taking the one object he needed to continue his search.”

  “The relic from the grave,” Rachel said.

  Gray stared out into the storm. “The key is still out there. I don’t think the cross offered Father Giovanni that much help. So he moved on, just as we must.”

  “But where?” Wallace asked. “Where do we even begin to look? We’re right back where we started.” “No, we’re not,” Gray said. “How can you say that?”

  He ignored the professor’s question and turned to Rachel. “How did you know so much about Saint Malachy?”

  She shifted on the floorboards, clearly caught by surprise. “It was Uncle Vigor. The prophecies intrigued him. He could talk for hours about Saint Malachy.”

  Gray had suspected as much. Monsignor Verona had always been passionate about the mysteries of the early Church, seeking truths behind miracles. Such a figure as Malachy would have captured both his attention and his imagination.

  “That’s why Father Giovanni sought out your uncle,” Gray said. “He knew the key to solving this mystery lay in the life of that saint. So Giovanni went to the best source he knew.”

  “Vigor Verona.” Wallace sat straighter, ignoring the wind and rain.
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br />   “Maybe Marco knew about the plot by Viatus, or maybe he just had an inkling. But I suspect that the further he delved into this matter of curses and miracles, the more he knew he was in over his head. That he needed the expertise and protection of the Church behind him.”

  Seichan added her own bleak viewpoint from the back of the trailer. “But he sought them out too late. Someone knew of his plan.”

  Gray nodded. “If we’re going to discover where the Doomsday key was hidden, we’re going to need an expert on Saint Malachy.”

  “But Verona is still in a coma,” Wallace said.

  “It doesn’t matter. We have someone who knows just as much.” He turned to Rachel.

  “Me?”

  “You’re going to have to help us from here.”

  “How?”

  “Because I know where the key is hidden.”

  Wallace looked hard at him. “What? … Where?”

  “Malachy’s Bible was left in that sarcophagus for a reason. More than just to sanctify a relic. It was left behind as a symbol, a bread crumb to lead to the key’s new resting place. Prior to the coming of the Romans, the key and the grave of this ancient royal were always kept together. They were bound together. And in the sarcophagus, we discovered Malachy’s Bible binding a relic of this ancient person, binding it to him.”

  “So what are you saying?” Wallace pressed him.

  “I think Saint Malachy has taken the place of this ancient. That he’s become the proverbial keeper of the key.”

  Wallace’s eyes grew wide. “If you’re right, then the key …”

  “It’s in Saint Malachy’s tomb.”

  Kowalski groaned and picked at a fingernail with a piece of straw. “Of course it is. But I’m telling you flat out, I’m not going in there.”

  Before they could discuss it further, the trailer jerked to a stop. Gray was surprised to see that they’d already reached the harbor.

  Lyle hopped down and waved them out. “You can hole up in the old harbor house. Get yourselves out of the rain, right enough. I’ll fetch my da.”

  As Gray hurried down the path toward the stone house, he stared out to sea. The waters rolled with frothing whitecaps. Closer at hand, the ferry rocked and teetered in its slip, even sheltered within the harbor’s breakwater. It was going to be a hellish ride back over to the mainland.

  But for now, the windows of the harbor house glowed and flickered with the promise of a crackling fire. They all piled through the door, shutting out the storm behind them. The room was paneled in raw pine, with heavy exposed beams. The floor creaked underfoot. The place smelled of wood smoke and pipe tobacco. Candles lit a few tables. But it was the fire that drew them all deeper inside. They gladly shed their coats over a few chairs.

  Gray stood with his back to the fire, appreciating the heat from his heels to the top of his head. The warmth and the cheery dance of flames went a long way to beat back the hopelessness that had begun to settle over them.

  But now they had a course of action.

  A place to look next.

  The door slammed open as the wind ripped the knob from Owen Bryce’s fingers. He caught it again and forced it closed. Drenched, he stomped and shook off the worst of the rainwater.

  “It’s parky weather out, that’s for sure,” the boatman said with a crooked grin at his understatement. “And I’m afraid I have some good news and some bad.”

  Such a preamble never boded well.

  Gray stepped away from the fire.

  “The bad news is that we won’t be able to make the crossing today. The storm has blown the seas into a treacherous state. If’n you didn’t know, the Welsh name for the island is Ynys Enlli, which means ‘island of bad currents.’ And that’s on a sunny day.”

  “So what’s the good news?” Kowalski asked.

  “I’ve checked and I can get you rooms here for the night at half off. Good for the entire week.”

  Gray felt his stomach sink. “How soon do you expect we can make it off the island?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. Electricity and phones are down all over the island. We have to get the all-clear from the harbormaster in Aberdaron before we can even think of throwing off our ties here.”

  “Your best estimate?”

  “We had some tourists here last year that got stranded for seventeen days due to storms.”

  Gray waited for the answer to his question. He looked sternly at the man.

  Owen finally relented, running a hand over the top of his head. “I’m sure we can get you back to Aberdaron in two days. Three days tops.”

  Off to the side, Rachel sank into one of the chairs.

  She didn’t have that many days.

  24

  October 13, 1:35 P.M.

  Svalbard, Norway

  Monk lay flat across the roof of the Sno-Cat as it trundled through the snowstorm. Painter shared his perch. They were both tethered to the roof rack like luggage. The harder gusts of wind continually fought to rip them from the roof. Snow frosted them like icing on a cake.

  Each man had an assault rifle snugged to his shoulder, and the Norwegian soldier had supplied them both with one additional piece of gear, essential for cold-weather fighting.

  Monk adjusted the infrared goggles on his face. They darkened the view ahead. Not that it mattered—the blizzard’s whiteout conditions had lowered visibility to mere yards. But the scopes built into the eyepieces captured any ambient heat signatures and brought them into focus. Below their perch, the hot engine of their Sno-Cat glowed a soft orange.

  Out in the storm, their targets came into view. Seven or eight snowmobiles crisscrossed up from the lower mountain slopes, glowing a soft amber through the scopes. The vehicles were just now cresting into the upper valley where Monk had spent much of his time spying on the Svalbard seed vault.

  It was here that Monk and the others would make their stand, using every resource available to them.

  Monk patted a hand on the rocket-propelled grenade launcher next to him. Before setting out, they had scoured the avalanche’s path for additional weapons and found the launcher. Along with a wooden box of ammunition.

  Below, the senator and the CEO shared the cab with the Norwegian soldier, manning rifles. One pointed out the passenger side, the other out the rear.

  They were armed to the teeth, but their enemy outnumbered them at least ten to one.

  As the advance team of the assault party rode into the valley on snowmobiles, the Norwegian driver lunged their vehicle to the side. He was doing his best to keep a snowbank between the Cat and the smaller, faster snow machines.

  Through the goggles, Monk watched a pair of snowmobiles, double mounted by mercenary soldiers, skim past far to the right. The enemy failed to spot the Cat half-hidden behind the snowbank, suggesting that the enemy either didn’t have infrared or were too focused on the seed vault ahead.

  Monk and Painter let them pass without firing.

  The smaller vehicles were not their primary target.

  More snowmobiles shot past with a whining rip of their engines, deafening the riders to the low rumble of the Sno-Cat. Ahead, a massive vehicle loomed into view. Its heat signature was nearly blinding. It rose up out of the lower slopes and dropped heavily into the upper valley.

  It was a Hagglund troop carrier.

  The main body of the assault force remained inside that vehicle. It had to be taken out. Their Sno-Cat was no match for the swifter snowmobiles, but against this behemoth, the Sno-Cat would be the nimbler one. If they could take out the Hagglund, it would demoralize the enemy. Perhaps enough to encourage them to give up the assault and turn back.

  Either way, Monk and the others couldn’t let the assault force reach the seed vault. According to Painter, there were over forty people still alive in there.

  As the Hagglund lumbered along the valley floor, Painter exchanged his rifle for the grenade launcher. They would have only one chance. Once they fired, they would draw the full wrath of the forc
e toward them.

  Monk slapped his palm twice on the roof of the Sno-Cat.

  Obeying the signal, the driver slowed to a stop.

  Painter swung the weapon up and aimed. Monk pulled his goggles off. The fiery flash of the launcher might blind him. Without the goggles, he could see nothing. The blizzard swirled and spun, erasing the world. It was like being trapped in a snow globe that someone had tossed into a paint shaker.

  No wonder the enemy hadn’t spotted them.

  “Fire in the hole,” Painter said and pulled the trigger.

  The launcher belched out smoke and flames, and the grenade rocketed through the curtain of snow.

  Monk shoved his goggles back in place. He got them seated in time to see the hot passage of the grenade slam into the treads of the Hagglund. A bloom of fiery orange marked the impact. Hit broadside, the troop carrier tipped up on one tread.

  Monk willed it to topple over.

  It didn’t. It crashed back down on its treads. The Hagglund tried to move, but with one set of tracks ruined, it foundered in the snow, turning in place. Doors popped open, and smaller heat signatures abandoned the vehicle, diving flat against the snow. The soldiers knew they were under attack, sitting ducks in the Hagglund.

  “Firing!” Painter yelled.

  Monk covered his eyes, heard the launcher roar, then looked up again. Painter’s aim was perfect. The rocket crashed through the front windshield of the vehicle and exploded inside. Windows blew out in a fiery ruin. Bodies tumbled through the air, blazing brightly through the goggles.

  Painter dropped flat.

  Bullets whined past overhead.

  Firing the grenade launcher had given away their position.

  With their cover blown, Monk slapped the roof, and the Sno-Cat kicked into gear. The driver quickly gained speed going downhill, then tore the vehicle to the right. The Sno-Cat lifted up off one tread.

  Monk held tight. Painter knocked into him.

  The Cat jumped the snowbank and went airborne for a stomach-rising moment, then slammed back down. Monk crashed to the roof and took a glancing blow to his ribs against a roof rail.

  But he didn’t complain.

  They had only a short window of time to take advantage of the confusion. During the short run down the slope, they had gotten below the Hagglund’s position. They had to attack before the assault force was entrenched.