by Sean Ellis
The steam rushed through the small opening with a shrill whistle, but the net effect on the pressure inside the tank was negligible. Fired by a prodigious volume of water flowing into a volcanic furnace to rival Dante’s Inferno, the buildup to catastrophe continued unchecked.
Mira stared dumbly at the ring of armed men surrounding them, her muscles twitching defiantly with the urge to draw her pistol and fight.
“Give it up. We might let you live.” The man who spoke looked familiar to her. It was the same man she had fought with in the museum—the tuxedoed gunman that she now knew to be Jorge Montero, heir to Odessa. Once again, he was blocking her way with a machine pistol.
Mira brandished the Trinity. “You should be more worried about whether I’ll let you live.”
Montero smiled cautiously. “If you knew how to use it, I do not think you would hesitate to kill me.”
Mira matched his smile. The twinned crystals seemed to blaze empathetically. “Try me.”
Suddenly the Trinity ripped free of her grasp, spinning like a hurled discus across the chamber. Two of Montero’s soldiers ducked instinctively, then turned to see where the relic had gone, as did every other pair of eyes in the vault.
A second group of armed men had silently taken station behind Montero’s party, entering the vault through the same point of access, a long vertical shaft cut into the mountain to accommodate a mechanical lift. The steel gate securing the entrance had been torn off its hinges, and the web of brightly colored climbing ropes bore testimony to the method by which the two separate groups had found their way into the Trinity vault. The newcomers, like Montero’s men, wore military-style fatigues with combat harnesses holding additional weapons and gear. Two of this number were readily recognizable, one for his hulking size, the other for her arresting beauty.
“Rachel.” Montero’s attempt at appearing pleasantly surprised was stillborn. He could not hide the nervous quaver in his voice; a child caught with both hands in the cookie jar.
Rachel Aimes regarded him coolly, her weapon not quite pointing at him, but nonetheless ready for immediate action. She did not speak, but rather moved smoothly aside to permit another figure to step between herself and the lead mercenary. The man’s face was lost in the shadows of the hood covering his head, but Mira’s eyes were drawn to the item he held in his right hand: the Trinity, still ablaze with supernatural fire.
“Well, well. The gang’s all here.” She brought her stare to the eyes hidden beneath the hood. “I don’t think we have all been together since that night at the museum. Does that sound about right, Walter?”
The hooded man laughed, reaching up with his left hand to draw back the covering, and a pallid, gray face—the face of a bloodless corpse—was revealed. “Very perceptive, Mira.”
DiLorenzo started, visibly shaken. “Aimes?”
“It was the only explanation that made any sense,” observed Mira, calmly. “The theft of the Atlantean Trinity had to be an inside job. You were the most likely suspect, except for one almost insignificant detail.”
“I was dead.”
“I witnessed your autopsy,” protested DiLorenzo. “You couldn’t have faked that. You were laid open like a fish.”
“Such colorful simile. Mr. Turner, please disarm them.”
As the brutish mercenary collected their guns, Mira half-turned toward the stunned detective. “He didn’t have to fake it. He had the Trinity.”
“Not quite as damaged as you believed, Mira, though I confess, it took some doing to reawaken it.” Aimes, tapped his chest and smiled knowingly. “It’s a part of me now. Surgically implanted after the autopsy.”
“You mean he—”
“He brought himself back to life. Only you’re not quite alive, are you Walter? Or should I call you Tarrant?”
Aimes’ smile slipped. “Well, it would seem that now you do know all my secrets.”
“Hang on a second,” protested DiLorenzo. He began gesturing with his hands as he spoke, as if trying to physically grasp the ideas which eluded his mind. “Aimes is really Tarrant? The guy who found the other Trinity relics for the Nazis? So everything that happened at the museum—”
“All part of the plan. The shooting at the museum, the map in his apartment—all designed to maneuver me into finding the treasure for him.”
“All too easily.” Aimes’ smug grin reappeared.
“But why? You could have taken off with the Trinity any time you liked. Why . . . um, kill yourself?”
“He had to get my attention,” answered Mira, frowning at her own naiveté. She directed her words at Aimes. “As long as I thought I was following in your footsteps, fighting the same enemy that killed you, I wouldn’t stop to think about how obvious it had all been.”
“Yes, there is that,” confessed Aimes. “But death and resurrection—there’s something deeply spiritual about it all, don’t you think? All the best gods died and came back. Perhaps conquering death is the key to divinity.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Walter. You’re better suited to the opposite role.”
Aimes chuckled. “Better to rule in hell, my dear.”
“I’ll be happy to speed you on your way home, then. You may have played me, Walter, but now the cards are on the table, and I’m all in.”
“Enough.” Montero recovered from the surprise appearance of his confederates and made an attempt at asserting his authority. “Why are you wasting time talking to her? We have what we came for. Let’s kill them and be done.”
“I agree,” intoned Rachel. “She’s dangerous.”
Mira studied Montero carefully. The subtle nuances of the neo-Nazi’s relationship to Aimes, or rather Tarrant—a man that had allowed himself to be killed in order to possess intimate control of the Trinity—were not lost on her. Montero had no illusions about who was really in control. “I’m dangerous? Have you asked him what he plans to do with the Trinity? If I were you, I’d be more concerned about stopping him.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Montero tried to sound fierce, but she could sense that he already knew the truth of her words.
“Sixty years ago, a Nazi like you double-crossed him and left him for dead. Do you think he’s forgotten that? He’s playing you. And when he’s finished . . .” She drew a finger past her throat.
Tarrant inclined his head to Mira. “You are good. Mann must have written quite the tale before his timely passing. But consider this, my dear: if I wanted only to rid myself of this Nazi pest, I would have merely had Rachel shoot him. You underestimate the depth of my thirst for justice.”
“Don’t you mean revenge?”
Tarrant made a waggling gesture with his hand. “Tomato, tomahto.”
Montero’s eyes widened in surprise as he heard his fate discussed so casually, and in his very presence. The barrel of his firearm swung around to center on Tarrant. “What’s she talking about?”
“Absolute power corrupting absolutely,” explained Mira, her eyes never leaving Aimes. “He’s going to get revenge for Mann’s betrayal. Tell us, Walter, what you’re going to do now that you have reunited the Trinity.”
“I’m surprised you care, my dear. I’m going to balance the scales, something that should have been done long ago. The fascist nations of Europe and their petty squabbles have caused bloodshed beyond Genghis Khan’s wildest aspirations—”
“And you mean to do away with the lot of them?”
Tarrant shrugged indifferently. “I’ll admit, at first I was content to dream only of one day erasing Germany from the map. Of course, I couldn’t very well allow Austria to remain either. Or the spineless French for their complicity. And one mustn’t forget Spain and Italy in the equation. Do you know that to this day, the people of the European continent loathe us, considering themselves superior? The cradle of civilization? They were a conquered people, but the Allies let them escape the judgment they so richly deserved. Propped up their governments, gave them new life.” Despite his casual beginni
ng, his furor increased as he ticked off the litany of his hatred. “As the years of my forced exile passed, I realized what had to be done.”
DiLorenzo shook his head. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”
A hungry gleam alit in his dead eyes. “Ten thousand years from now, children will tell stories of how the lost continent of Europe was swallowed up by the earth.”
Only then did Montero grasp Tarrant’s intentions. “You are insane.”
Before the Argentine could tighten his finger on the trigger, the joined Trinity in Tarrant’s hand flared brightly, forcing Mira and DiLorenzo to shade their eyes from its intensity. When the brilliance subsided, they saw Montero and all of the Odessa soldiers crumpled on the floor. The handful of Bolivian locals gasped in horror at the supernatural manifestation; one of the men crossed himself, setting off a brief wave of religious supplications. DiLorenzo found himself joining in reflexively.
Tarrant chuckled, gloating. “Ah, you see? Well begun is half-done. I suppose I shall have to do some house cleaning in other parts of the globe, too.”
“Why stop there?” replied Mira, acidly. “Why not clear it all away?”
He feigned a thoughtful pose. “You may be onto something there, my dear.”
“Unbelievable,” whispered DiLorenzo. “He’s unstoppable, isn’t he?”
Mira shook her head slowly, then answered, speaking loud enough for Aimes to hear. “There’s more to this, isn’t there? You need something else. . . . The Shrine.”
DiLorenzo flashed back on the vision they had shared. “That pagoda we saw?”
“Something about that place magnifies the power of the Trinity. Only you don’t know where it is, the hidden city of Agartha. You need me to show you the way. Well, I’m done playing for you, Walter.”
Tarrant’s smile grew cold and menacing, and for the first time, Mira realized she had found a weakness in the resurrected grave robber. He stared at her for a long moment, hefting the Trinity as if to intimidate her with the power he had used to slay Montero. When she remained unbowed, he turned his gaze to DiLorenzo.
He made a claw hand gesture with his free hand, reaching toward the detective with his fingers upraised. DiLorenzo let out a gasp as invisible lines of force radiated into his chest cavity and squeezed the air from his lungs. His feet lifted off the ground. Tarrant curled his fingers, drawing DiLorenzo toward him, then squinted with his eyes, as if peering deep into the detective’s soul. “Yes. It’s in there, isn’t it? We shall have to find out what you know.”
Without releasing DiLorenzo, Tarrant turned to Mira. “It seems we won’t be needing you after all, my dear.”
Mira remained defiant, showing no fear. For a few seconds, nothing happened.
Finally, Rachel Aimes broke the impasse. “What are you waiting for?”
Tarrant’s eyes did not leave Mira, but his demeanor changed, becoming almost wistful. “You know, there was a time not long ago when I loved you. Even thought of you as a daughter. You think me a monster, but I have feelings too. I could never bring myself to harm such a thing of beauty.”
He smiled and then turned his head imperceptibly toward Rachel. “Kill her.”
Mira did not hear her death sentence declared. Even as Tarrant began speaking, she knew what was coming. Her heartbeat roared in her ears with the sound of a waterfall, her extremities began building up adrenaline for a final fight or flight. Her subconscious condemned her for what she was about to do, abandoning DiLorenzo to Tarrant’s machinations, but she knew that any other course of action would assure total failure. There were more lives at stake than just his and her own.
Rachel smiled hungrily, raising the machine pistol in her hands to deliver a long awaited coup de grace. But she was once again denied. Mira shot forward, aiming straight at Aimes’ daughter yet somehow staying out of her field of fire. Momentarily flustered, Rachel’s aim wavered.
Mira’s sudden move gave her the advantage of a millisecond—the reaction time for Turner and his mercenaries to come to Rachel’s aid. Tarrant could have permanently ended her flight with a mere thought, but he did not, perhaps trusting his human assets to accomplish what he had already publicly balked at. Whatever the case, Mira remained alive long enough to cross the distance between the Trinity altar and the stainless steel passage through which she and DiLorenzo had entered. Only then did the gunfire commence.
No less than twelve guns blazed after her, the bullets sparking and dancing along the wall of the cavern and into the polished interior of the tunnel. A roar of thunder without end assaulted her senses and a rising wave of heat, the exhaust of so many shots fired in such a small enclosure, buffeted her back.
Somehow, she slipped inside the tunnel without sustaining a single hit. Because most of the shooters were not correctly lined up with the steel shaft, their rounds impacted harmlessly on the cavern wall or struck the mouth of the corridor at an oblique angle, ricocheting harmlessly past Mira. For the handful of Turner’s mercenary soldiers who were facing directly down the tunnel however, the target was almost impossible to miss.
Caught up in a surge of adrenaline, Mira barely noticed the stripe that appeared on her upper right arm as a bullet graze left a shallow furrow in her epidermis. A few centimeters below that, another round struck closer to home, gouging a chunk of flesh just above her elbow in a spray of red. Two more rounds superficially clipped her right thigh, then a ricochet passed diagonally through the meaty part of her left calf. She felt the pain distantly, almost a memory rather than an immediate experience, but her injured muscles were quick to respond. Swelling from the trauma, she found her legs no longer striding as far or quickly as they had. A ricochet grazed her back, opening a long, ragged wound that instantly spread a dark bloodstain across her shirt.
The hollow channel formed by the tunnel focused the noise of gunfire to a deafening crescendo. The auditory assault was more painful than the wounds she had sustained, leaving her both unable to hear and mildly vertiginous. Even if she had been able to register sound, the roar of her enemies’ guns would still have prevented her from hearing the loud clicks, gradually increasing their pace, that emanated from the tunnel walls, the only indication that the trap she had disarmed with the digits of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, was about to reset. She was less than halfway down the tunnel when the clicking became a buzz, then ceased altogether. Her next footfall triggered the device.
Luck and her preternatural intuition saved her. The spring-loaded blades that suddenly materialized in her path were simply obstacles for her to jump over, roll under or dive through. The last element to the trap, however, would not be so easily avoided. She felt it first as a tickling sensation, like thousands of tiny feathers caressing her exposed skin, teasing stray hairs and drawing them away from her body.
Electricity!
The end of the metal corridor remained maddeningly close, blocked only by a pair of parallel blades. The space separating the two knives was less than a meter, a narrow but not impossible margin through which to slip. She was no longer aware of the enemies behind her, nor conscious of the fact that they had stopped shooting.
In the instant that she dove for the gap in the final barrier, an electrostatic charge was released. The entire tunnel was wired, like an enormous bug-zapper. A finger of blue flame reached out to snatch her back, stabbing through her torso to form a vicious triangle between the floor and the wall on her left.
Then she was through.
She lay dazed on the floor of the cavern they had designated the laboratory. Blood flowed from wounds too numerous to count, but the worst of it was the jarring numbness that had seized her musculature. She knew there would be pain later, but the electrical discharge must certainly have left its mark on her skin. For now however, there was only a brief moment of relief that she had survived this far, and the overwhelming imperative to race onward. She knew she was a long way from safety.
Rachel Aimes peered down the smooth metal corridor, watching in faint amazement
as the blades quietly retreated into the walls. Mira lay motionless at the far end, a barely discernible lump on the floor. Her disbelief was compounded as that lump began to stir.
“Impossible,” she whispered with grudging respect.
Aimes chuckled. “It seems I still underestimated her. A pity she could not have seen her way clear to join us, but then that, too, was never really in question.”
He turned to gaze at the unmoving form of DiLorenzo, still suspended in the air by the power of the Trinity. He knew that he could have taken control of Mira in similar fashion—not as easily perhaps, for her mind was stronger and she was much more in tune with her psychic endowments—but somehow he had known that such was never really an option. Her failure as a field officer for the Agency was not a result of any lack of will or wit, but purely the result of a moral conflict. Despite his own best efforts, he had never been able to reprogram her conscience. But regardless of his statement, he had never made the mistake of underestimating Mira Raiden.
“She’s getting away,” urged Rachel.
The man who once again called himself Tarrant closed his eyes, momentarily caught in the confluence of memories and intentions. He tightened his grip on the Trinity, holding it close to his chest, where the third segment pulsed in time with his heartbeat. “We have more important matters to concern us now.”
He extended his free hand, making a clawing gesture similar to the one he had used to seize the New York detective. This time, however, he did not turn his power against the living.
Jorge Montero and his Odessa soldiers had not been dead for more than a few minutes. Their corpses had yet to relinquish a significant degree of body heat, and it would be some time before the stiffening of rigor mortis would set in. Nevertheless, they were indisputably deceased, beyond any hope of resuscitation. With the power of the Trinity, Tarrant had destroyed their life force, slaying every living cell in their bodies in an instant of time. Yet, what the Trinity had taken away it could, after a fashion, give back.
