As she went down, she saw Nicholas and one more man, this one even bigger, punching each other, twisting, kicking. But this Rat wasn’t März. Nicholas kneed him in the face, then knocked him onto his back. Then he was on him, his neck between his hands, and Nicholas was choking him. It didn’t take long. When Nicholas let his head drop, he came slowly to his feet.
“Mike?”
“Here. I’m okay, but this idiot is unconscious and he’s pinned my leg. Where are Sophie and Commander Dendritte?” She yelled their names, and their names came back to her as a hollow echo.
She yelled again. There was no answer. The two women were gone.
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Nicholas heaved the man off Mike’s leg and pulled her to her feet. She cursed under her breath, but Nicholas heard her and tightened his hold around her. “My ankle’s sprained and isn’t that just wonderful?”
He said, “At least your thick boots kept the ankle from breaking. Can you walk?”
She gritted her teeth and took a couple of steps. It hurt, but she could do it. Mike said, “Those two men—the Rats—they ambushed us to take the commander and Sophie?”
He played the light in the tunnel behind them, then up ahead. “Maybe. Havelock knew we would come down here after him. How, I have no idea.”
They found Dendritte in an adjoining tunnel. She was moaning softly. Nicholas knelt beside her, felt the pulse in her throat. It was steady. “Are you all right, Commander?”
“Bad knock on the head,” she whispered. “The Rat must have flung a rock at me. Go, go, find Sophie. I’ll be all right.”
Nicholas said, “Where do we go from here, Commander?”
But Dendritte’s eyes were closed.
“Nicholas, look!” Mike shone her light on the wall, to the spot where the two Rats had burst out. She realized it was cracked open, meant as the escape for the Rats after they’d killed her and Nicholas. “Through here, look, there’s another tunnel. See, the floor slopes down, going even deeper than where we are now. This is it, Nicholas.”
He felt Dendritte’s pulse again. Still steady.
There was nothing they could do for her. He stood. “Let’s go.”
Nicholas shoved against the walled door. It was old, maybe built by Rats in the nineteenth century. Once through, he shined his flashlight on the ground. “Yes, this is it.” Nicholas leaned down to look at the scuff marks in the dirt floor, long drags. “There was at least one more Rat. He took Sophie and dragged her through here. Can you walk, Mike?”
Oh, yes, she could run now, if she had to.
They went deeper, slapping away cobwebs. The smell of rot and slime was nearly overwhelming. Something skittered away from Nicholas’s foot. This narrow tunnel seemed untouched by man for a very long time—maybe since Madame Curie had walked through here a hundred years ago.
The corridor narrowed. Nicholas’s shoulders touched the wet walls. He closed his eyes a moment, breathed through his nose. This was worse than diving to the sub.
Mike called out, “It widens out again down here, Nicholas. And I see it, a chamber.”
He swallowed and followed her. She was right. The tunnel was getting wider, the ceiling higher. His breath came easier now.
Mike was shining her flashlight along one long tunnel wall. They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring at four side-by-side wooden doors, each with warped brown wood panels and rusted black hinges. They looked half a foot thick. On each door was a big lock. “They look like dungeon doors,” Mike said, only to hear her own voice echo back to her. “Why four doors? Are there labs behind all of them?”
“Look above the doors, at the carvings,” Nicholas said. “Gargoyles of sorts, mythical figures—griffins and dragons and chimeras.”
Mike whispered, “They’re meant as warnings, to scare away anyone who stumbled across this place. But why four doors? Are there chambers behind each one? Did she use them all?” She looked back over her shoulder and gave him a smile. “Four doors—you pick the one you think is Curie’s main lab.”
He whispered in her ear, “Step back. I’ll shut off my torch. Radium can be luminescent; perhaps Curie’s new polonium is as well. Let’s see if it can help us choose the right one.”
They shut off their lights, and the world turned black. And they saw that the third door glowed in the darkness, a bluish light that seemed to seep out of the wood itself. They realized the door wasn’t completely closed.
“I have a theory,” Nicholas whispered.
“And what would that be?”
He looked dead serious. “If you do bad things, bad people will come visit you.” He pulled his Glock and started to push the door open.
He sensed the slash of a knife through the darkness.
Another Rat, this one bigger than the other two. He seemed to come out of nowhere, with no warning. Nicholas caught his arm as the blade came down, and the knife disappeared between them.
The man was growling, panting, cursing him in French. They grappled in the dark. Slowly, inch by inch, Nicholas was turning the Ka-Bar knife until he had the Rat pressed back against the tunnel wall. He jerked the man’s hand up, twisted the knife inward and shoved it into the big man’s throat.
88
Madame Curie’s Lost Laboratory
Paris Underground
3:00 a.m.
Havelock was sadly disappointed when he’d unlocked the third door. The lab was old, but then what could he expect? He couldn’t imagine having to work day in and day out in this dank hollowed-out room with its dead air, a hundred feet below the street. There weren’t any precautions then against radioactive materials. He thought of Curie’s long, slow death.
Beakers were lined up on the counters with liquid still in them; the chamber was practically airtight. There were two microscopes, state-of-the-art for the time, that is. Was one for the assistant who’d betrayed her?
Havelock found the small microgram of super-polonium in a cabinet, unsecured, in a glass bottle with a stopper. It glowed an eerie kind of bluish yellow in the tube. It was lovely, a color not on the spectrum. He supposed he’d have to name that as well. Elise. He’d name it for her.
It wasn’t safe to transport as is, but that was no matter. Using specially made gloves, he picked up the tube, and brought it over to Sophie Pearce.
Havelock’s heart speeded up as he looked at her. He wanted to see the marks of his whip on her back. He knew she was frightened, her face utterly white in the soft lights in Curie’s old lab. He wondered if the Rat who’d taken her from the tunnels and was now guarding the door had been more frightened than she was when he’d looked around Madame Curie’s lab. He’d hired him and his two cohorts because they knew the tunnels well and they knew how to kill.
He said in a voice eerie and strangely hollow in the closed confines of the ancient lab, “You do realize, Ms. Pearce, that you are in the presence of genius and a hundred-year-old weapon of such magnitude, only I can make it what it was meant to be? I thought it only fitting that Rothschild’s blood was here in the chamber with me. When I finish the assembly, I will take you back to the house and kill both you and your wretched brother.” And he and Elise would celebrate.
He wanted to sing. He’d won, he’d won. Soon his Rats would be back from finally ridding him of those FBI agents.
“You’re scared, aren’t you? But you’re trying to act brave. It’s charming.”
Sophie stared through him, saying nothing.
If only he had a whip with him. He wanted to kiss that pale pinched mouth, but he’d have to remove the crude gag. And then she would scream, and he didn’t want that, it would break the exalted moment.
“Isn’t it pretty, my dear? Something worth dying for, don’t you think?” He mimed pouring the small bottle on her, and he thought she’d faint, but she made no sound.
He laughed, moved back to the table. The microsco
pes still worked, though they were in poor condition. It was a crude workplace, but serviceable. He prepared his station. A scalpel to break open the seal on the tube, then to work the stopper free. The polonium, warmed by the movement, glowed merrily, as if happy to see him.
Using a specially made pipette, he gently extracted a tiny amount from the tube, and carefully, carefully, placed it into the trigger mechanism from the small box sitting on the table.
The reaction was immediate. The bluish yellow turned a deep violet, the color of a dying sunset, or a freshly made bruise. The atoms bonded together, and the new element was formed. He’d done it!
He reverently closed the lid. He’d made the world’s first micro–nuclear weapon, ready to be deployed, with a payload that could kill thousands of people with a single small explosion. His own personalized MNW.
His other miniaturized bombs were paltry in comparison. This was his masterpiece. The explosion itself would take down a block at least, and the radioactive cloud would disperse into the air and people would breathe it in. Death on the wind. And he controlled it all.
He stashed the MNW into the metal briefcase he’d made for it, secured the polonium in its own separate metal casing, then put both back into his backpack. They were ready to go.
He reached for Sophie’s arm. “Shall we, my dear?”
A man’s voice said from behind him, “Yes, we shall.”
Havelock turned slowly. The two accursed FBI agents stood in the door to the lab. His Rats had failed.
Havelock jerked Sophie to his side, and pressed the tip of the scalpel into her neck. “No, the two of you will stay right there. Agent Drummond, you killed März. I must admit that astonished me. No one’s ever beaten him before. However, enough is enough. I have had it with you people. You need to learn how to die.”
Drummond said, “No, I don’t believe so. Put down the backpack, Havelock, and let Sophie go.”
Havelock laughed. “You haven’t a clue, do you? There is nothing you can do to stop me.”
Mike said, “We can shoot you.”
He laughed again. “And risk poor Sophie’s life?” He pressed the scalpel in, and a drop of blood appeared. Sophie stared out at them, white-faced, silent.
“And you. I know all about you, Michaela Caine. You are not like your partner here, Nicholas Drummond. He would have no qualms about shooting me dead where I stand. He’s done it before, he’ll do it again. But—” He pressed the scalpel deeper into Sophie’s neck, her blood now a steady drizzle. “I suggest you put down your weapons, or I will dig around until I slice her carotid artery.
“You see my backpack? If you try to shoot me, Drummond, I’ll drop my precious little bundle, and it will go boom and we will go boom with it. How much of the world up there will it bring down? You want to test it out?”
Nicholas said, “Nothing will happen.” He looked around. “You can’t make your weapon in this lab, it’s a wreck. I’ve seen your files, I know what you need, and it wasn’t here. Put the knife down, now.”
“Snooping into my company? You and young Adam. You don’t seem to understand what I have in my hands, Drummond. No great need for modern equipment, Madame Curie left me the final ingredient I needed. Now both of you will immediately place your guns on the floor and kick them to me, or I will slit this sweet girl’s throat. Can you imagine how much blood will spray out of her?”
Nicholas and Mike slowly bent over and set the guns on the wooden floor.
“Kick them to me!”
They did. Now they were unarmed, and he had the control, the power. Havelock breathed in deep and smelled the strawberry scent of Sophie’s hair mixing with the sulfur breath of the room, the perfect combination of heaven and hell.
“Tell me why, Havelock,” Nicholas said. “Tell me why you murdered your own father, betrayed your friends and all you’ve ever known to get this weapon.”
“Betrayal, murder? Who truly decides these things, my dear Drummond? Even Madame Curie had to make a choice all those years ago. She could have given the polonium to the Order, as they’d planned. Instead, she decided to keep it all to herself, and hide it down here. And it’s taken someone like me to find it. I know exactly how to use her weapon to its best advantage. Listen to me, both of you, and listen carefully. I will stop wars. I will end centuries of violence. I am giving the world a gift.
“With my technology, with my tiny little implants, you’ll be able to see things happen even as they’re being communicated. I have single-handedly changed the gathering of intelligence. I will be able to target the real villains, our true enemies, and I will destroy them before they do any more harm.”
Nicholas said, “You actually believe that another weapon of mass destruction will save the world?”
“Of course. With my power, and your knowledge and acceptance of my power, every country in the world will do exactly as I say. No longer will one country have dominance over another. No longer will one country be rich at the expense of another. All the power will reside in the palm of my hand, in a four-inch-square box. I will give the world peace and hope, and the will to lead a better life.”
“With you making all the decisions? How people will act, what their futures hold? Will you have everyone bow before you? Will you have huge statues of yourself erected everywhere so that people may bow down and worship you?”
Havelock appeared to consider this. He smiled. “Perhaps inside buildings there will be walls with my image on them, always watching. So no one will forget.”
Mike said, “Every law enforcement agency on the planet is after you. There is no way you will make people bow down in front of you. You’re certifiable.”
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Havelock merely nodded at his backpack. “Ah, Agent Caine, how little imagination you have. Think, dear girl, I will be the one giving all those precious law enforcement agencies the orders.”
The longer he talked, Nicholas knew, the more likely it was that the commander’s people would come looking. Keep him talking, it was their best chance.
Sophie’s hands were tied in front of her, Havelock’s scalpel digging into her neck. She couldn’t move, except for her eyes. She was staring at Nicholas, and she began to blink rapidly, her eyes never leaving his face. Then she turned her head a bit to the right. He looked, but didn’t see anything. What was she trying to tell him?
And then he saw it, a small glass beaker with a yellowish substance inside, and it was within her reach, if only she could pull free of Havelock.
Havelock was still talking about how he wouldn’t dismantle the law enforcement agencies because, after all, there were still criminals in the world. Nicholas began coughing, bending over, grabbing his stomach.
Havelock yelled, “What is wrong with you?” In that instant of distraction, Sophie jerked away from him and grabbed the glass beaker. Before he could stab her, she whirled around and smashed the beaker into Havelock’s face. The glass shattered, and he started to scream.
Nicholas sprang forward, stopped in his tracks. Havelock’s face was melting, the skin pouring off the bone. Whatever the acid in the beaker was, it had sat brewing one hundred years.
Nicholas grabbed the backpack from Havelock’s arms as he fell to the ground, screaming, screaming, clutching at his face, and screaming.
Mike picked up her Glock, put the muzzle against Havelock’s head, and pulled the trigger.
Havelock’s body twitched, then went still. Eyeballs stared blankly from the bones of his face at the ceiling of Curie’s lab.
“You okay?” Nicholas said and she looked at him and smiled faintly. “I am.”
Sophie pulled the gag out of her mouth. She stood over him. “He was a monster and he was mad.” Sophie suddenly sucked in her breath and looked down at her hand. A tiny bit of the acid had gotten on her skin and had left an angry red burn. Who cared? She looked up. “Thank you both for saving my li
fe.”
Mike untied her wrists, cupped Sophie’s hand. “We need to get you aboveground, quickly. We have no idea what that acid is.”
“It’s esprite de sel. Spirits of salt, also known as muriatic acid,” Sophie said. “It was on the label, and I knew what it would do.” She laughed through a sob. “I wonder why Madame Curie abandoned this lab but left the muriatic acid behind. Was she using it in her experiments?”
“We’ll never know,” Mike said. “There’s no one left to tell us.”
Nicholas took Sophie’s arms between his hands. “We didn’t save you, Sophie, you saved us. Well done.”
“We need to go get Adam,” Sophie said, but Nicholas held up a hand. They could hear Dendritte and her people shouting from higher in the tunnel.
Nicholas picked up the backpack that held Havelock’s MNW. “No one can ever say a word about what is in this box. We can’t let anyone, any government, any technology company, get their hands on this weapon. Agreed?”
Mike and Sophie nodded. Mike watched him shoulder the backpack. The shouting grew closer. Commander Dendritte burst into the room with several cops on her heels.
She took in the scene, eyes wide when they landed on Havelock, and then she reholstered her weapon, and said, “C’est fini, non?”
Nicholas nodded. “Oui. C’est fini.”
90
Paris
6:00 a.m.
The Paris dawn was bright and fresh, a new day beginning. The people of the city were waking up and preparing for their day completely unaware of the battle that had raged beneath their streets overnight.
The Lost Key Page 33
