The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts

by James Rollins

  “You can do it,” a voice said behind him.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Seichan stood there. The others had joined Kowalski in the tunnel. “Get back,” he said harshly.

  She ignored him, not even reacting. “It may take two people. One to hold the cross steady at the proper angle, the other to dial the combination with the wheel.”

  He wanted to argue, but he recognized she was right. A part of him also had to admit that he didn’t want to be alone.

  “Let’s do it then,” he said.

  Gray again crouched to peer through the hollow arm of the cross. Like a telescope, he thought, remembering how the words had unlocked the knowledge inside him. They had come from Seichan.

  He knew what had to be done. He reached to the cross and pulled the arm down. The entire sculpture tilted, pivoting on the spherical base. As soon as he moved it, a massive clank echoed up from under the floor.

  There was no turning back.

  Gray swung the arm so it pointed north. Staring through the barrel of the armpiece, he searched the starry dome. Seichan helped by keeping her flashlight pointed at the chunk of quartz that marked the north star.

  After a moment of searching, he spotted the star and centered the scope on it. As he did so, a loud gong sounded. It came from overhead and reverberated through the space.

  What did that mean?

  From the roof, hundreds of stone plugs popped free and rained down. One struck Gray on the shoulder. Startled, he almost dropped the cross. Seichan swore and pressed a hand to her forehead. Blood seeped between her fingers.

  She continued to stare up.

  Gray followed her line of sight. From the roof, bronze spikes pushed out of a hundred holes. They lowered swiftly on long poles toward the floor. Behind them, a slab of stone dropped over the tunnel exit.

  Gray and Seichan would never make it to the door in time.

  It was a reverse of the trap at Bardsey. Instead of being dumped atop a sea of spikes, they were to be impaled from above.

  Either way, the meaning was the same.

  Gray had failed.

  31

  October 14, 4:04 P.M.

  Clairvaux, France

  “Are you sure this will blow that secret passage open?” Krista asked.

  The demolition was taking longer than expected. After further calculations, the munitions expert had wanted to drill more holes into the crater, to spread the charges out for a more controlled blast.

  The man shrugged as he worked. He was using an awl to hand drill the last of his mouse holes. The cubes of C-4 still waited to be molded and packed. He answered in Arabic. Her second-in-command translated.

  “He says that it will blow open only if Allah wishes it.”

  Krista had her hand clutched on her holstered pistol. Allah had better wish it, or that bastard was going to get a bullet through his skull.

  “How much longer?” she asked instead.

  “Still another ten minutes.”

  Krista wanted to scream, but she simply turned and strode away.

  Overhead, one of the helicopters swept past. Its rotors stirred the thick pall of smoke. Sunlight dappled brighter, then sank back to a murky twilight. The air reeked of oil fires and cordite.

  She heard the helicopter’s guns chatter as it sped toward the skirmish line. Her forces fought to keep the prison war from spilling over them. Orders were bellowed. Men cried and screamed. The fighting was unusually brutal. She watched one of her commandos drag a fellow soldier into the cloister. The man on the ground writhed, pressing his guts into his belly with a fist.

  Like the fallen soldier, they couldn’t hold out forever.

  She turned to Khattab.

  He raised nine fingers.

  She took a deep breath to calm herself. They could last that long. Once the tunnel was opened, she was going down that hole and laying waste to all that stood between her and the key.

  She glanced down to the suitcase at her feet.

  Nothing would stop her.

  4:05 P.M.

  Seichan steadied Gray with a hand on his shoulder. He had stepped away from the cross, but he continued to hold it with one arm. She knew what he was thinking as he stared up at the spears sweeping down from above. Lines of agony etched his face.

  “Should I yank the lever?” Kowalski hollered. He was on his knees, yelling under the closing slab of rock as it sealed the only exit.

  “No!” Gray called back.

  The others were safely in the tunnel, out of immediate danger from the impaling spikes. Only she and Gray were at risk. She knew the choice Gray had to make. If the lever was yanked, the trap would reset, but it might also open the secret door, allowing the soldiers to flood inside. If they saved themselves, the others would die.

  There was no winning here.

  All Gray’s decision did was buy the others a slim chance. If Krista’s forces were chased off before the door was blown open, the others might still live.

  It was long odds, but it was a chance.

  She stared upward.

  She would take those odds right now.

  Seichan stopped and faced Gray. She drew his eyes from the death descending on them. He had to know the truth.

  What did secrets matter now?

  But Gray suddenly twisted away. “What if I wasn’t wrong?”

  “What?”

  “Hold the cross steady while I turn the wheel,” he ordered.

  She obeyed, baffled.

  “Maybe it’s not a booby trap. Maybe it’s a timer. Once you attempt to solve the combination, you’re allowed only a certain length of time to complete it.” He motioned to the roof of spikes.

  “So we’re not allowed to guess. No trial and error.”

  “Exactly.”

  Gray reached to the weighted string of sinew and made sure it draped smoothly. He ran his fingers along the wheel of the cross. His lips moved as he counted the marks. He reached a spot that must have corresponded to his calculation.

  “Here goes,” he whispered.

  He gripped the wheel and turned it until the spot he marked drew even with the weighted plumb line. He stopped and held his breath, his lips stretched thin with tension.

  A gong sounded like before.

  “That’s got to be it!” he said.

  Unfortunately, the spikes dropped even faster now. They plummeted toward the floor.

  “Gray!”

  He saw and counted quickly. Out loud this time. “Eight, seven, six, five, four.”

  Reaching the proper mark, he held his finger there and spun the wheel the other way. It required turning it almost a full circle.

  Seichan ducked as a spike headed for her face. They were both driven to their knees. Seichan held one arm high, supporting the cross. Gray had both limbs up: one to hold the marked position, the other to spin the wheel.

  As she watched, a spear point sliced along her arm.

  Gray cried out as a spike stabbed into the back of his hand and pushed his arm off the wheel.

  Kneeling in a slightly different position, Seichan snaked her arm between two spikes and got her hand on another section of the wheel.

  “Tell me when to stop turning!” she gasped out.

  It required shifting up to gain leverage. The wheel was hard to spin. She pressed her cheek into a spike. It pierced all the way through. Blood filled her mouth, flowed down her neck.

  She struggled to turn the wheel, but it was too tight.

  Panicked, her eyes caught Gray’s. She couldn’t talk with her cheek impaled. Agony wracked her. She willed all her grief and agony into that one glance, bared herself to the man, hiding nothing for once.

  Not even her heart.

  His eyes widened, perhaps truly seeing her for the first time, recognizing what lay hidden between them. A hand crossed that gulf and found her leg. He squeezed her knee and whispered three words that no one had ever uttered to her and meant.

  “I trust you.”

  What pain failed t
o do, his words accomplished. Tears welled and flowed down her cheeks. She pushed into the spear, driving it deeper. Her fingers gripped harder. She tugged on the wheel. It slowly turned.

  Time stretched to a razor’s edge.

  Pain tore through her.

  She felt the spear tip on her tongue.

  Still, she turned.

  “Stop!” Gray finally called out.

  She let go. She slumped, sliding off the impaling spear and onto the floor. Distantly, a third gong sounded.

  Three spirals, three gongs.

  Her vision darkened at the edges, but she saw the spikes pull back, retracting slowly toward the roof. With her skull on the floor, she heard huge gears turning below, like listening to God’s pocket watch.

  Closer at hand, the cross straightened and righted itself.

  Gray was suddenly at her side. He scooped her up and dragged her onto his lap. She curled around him, hugging him. He held her tight.

  “You did it. Look.”

  He lifted her higher in his arms. She stared out across the room.

  As the gears wound below, each of the three spirals began to flip, revealing false floors. The sections rotated full around. The spiral sides vanished, turning upside down to reveal what had been hidden for all these centuries.

  Bolted to the underside of each floor was a glass cradle.

  As the three floors settled to a stop, the three cradles swung in their stanchions.

  Even from here, Seichan knew they weren’t babies in those oversized cradles, but bodies.

  The cradles were actually caskets.

  “It’s the tombs,” Gray said.

  Across the chamber, the door unsealed, and the slab pulled back up. The others rushed into the chamber.

  Wallace’s eyes were huge. “You did it!”

  “Gray …?” Rachel called out.

  Tears streamed down her face. She must have thought he was dead. Relief and horror mixed in her expression at finding him alive but covered in blood.

  Seichan tried to stand but was too weak.

  Gray lifted her to her feet. He supported her with one arm. Blood still flowed from her stabbed cheek, but not as heavily. Wallace offered his handkerchief. She balled it up and pressed it to her face.

  Gray stared at her, his eyes questioning. She nodded and took a stumbling step out of his arms. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done. But she didn’t belong there.

  Rachel rushed to him and helped bind Gray’s hand.

  Wallace came with Kowalski. “They’re glass coffins …”

  “Of course they are,” Kowalski said.

  Gray gave his bandage a final cinch. Blood still dripped from his fingertips as he pointed toward the tombs. “We need to find that key.”

  4:08 P.M.

  Gray knew where to look first.

  He led the others to the one casket that was unlike the other two. Fine dust covered the glass, but the motif was clear. Flashlights focused on it, their glows igniting its brilliance.

  The sides and top of the coffin were forged out of intricately designed panels of stained glass. The colors were as bright as jewels, and the images all too familiar. Sculpted out of shards of glass and slivers of gems were rows of tiny hawks, jackals, winged lions, beetles, hands, eyes, feathers, along with angular stylized symbols.

  “They’re Egyptian hieroglyphs,” Wallace noted with a gasp.

  “Formed out of stained glass.” Rachel sounded equally awed.

  Wallace leaned closer. “The glyphs, though, are very old. Early Egyptian. Old Kingdom, I imagine. The Church must have copied them from some original funeral stele. Perhaps they were once carved on that sarcophagus in Bardsey. Before scrubbing them off, some monk must have kept a record, then re-created them here in stained glass.”

  “Can you read it?” Gray asked, hoping it held some clue to the key.

  Wallace ran a finger through the dust. “‘Here lies Meritaten, daughter of King Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. She who crossed the seas and brought the sun god Ra to these cold lands.’”

  By the time the professor was done, his hands trembled as much as his voice. “The dark queen.” He turned, his eyes wide with shock. “She’s an Egyptian princess.”

  “Could that be possible?” Rachel asked.

  Gray stared through the stained glass. He remembered Father Rye’s tale of Bardsey Island, of the claim that the wizard Merlin was buried there in a glass coffin. Was this the true source of that myth? Had word whispered out of the entombment here, confusing the name Meritaten with Merlin?

  Gray ran the mythic history of the British Isles through his head. He remembered the priest’s description of the war of the Celts against a tribe of black-skinned monsters, the Fomorians. To the Celts, a tribe of displaced Egyptians would have seemed foreign and strange. And according to those same stories, the Fomorians shared their abundant knowledge of agriculture, a skill well honed by the Egyptians along the Nile.

  Wallace straightened, deep in thought. “Some historians claim the ancient stone builders of England might have been Egyptian. At a Neolithic burial site at Tara in Ireland, they found a body decorated with ceramic faience beads, a skill not known to such people—but the beads were almost identical to those found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. And in England, near the city of Hull, massive boats were discovered preserved in a peat marsh. They were distinctly Egyptian in design and dated to 1400 B.C., well before Vikings or any other seafaring people came to our shores. I myself viewed an ancient stone at the British Museum, unearthed by a farmer in Wales. It shows a figure in Egyptian garb with pyramids in the background.”

  Wallace shook his head, as if still struggling to believe it himself. “But here … here’s true proof.”

  “And the key?” Seichan reminded them, coughing hoarsely, still holding a bloody cloth to her cheek.

  Beyond the glass, a figure lay in the coffin. A bronze clasp closed the hinged lid. Gray knew they had to disturb the rest of this Egyptian princess. He reached and undid the clasp. He pulled the lid up and leaned it back.

  A sweetly sick scent wafted out.

  “My God!” Rachel exclaimed.

  Though withered and desiccated, the body was still strangely preserved. Long black hair draped the reclining figure. Her dark skin was stretched smooth. Even her eyelashes were intact. Fine cloth wrapped her body from toe to neck. A gold crown topped her head, clearly Egyptian in design from the decorations in lapis lazuli.

  The only other exposed parts of her body were her hands. They were folded over her chest, clutching a stone jug carved with more hieroglyphs. The jar was sealed on top with a gold lid in the shape of a hawk’s head.

  “Look at her right hand,” Rachel said.

  Gray noted the missing index finger.

  Wallace’s attention fixed on the stone-and-gold jug. “The design looks like a canopic jar. Used to hold the embalmed organs of a king or queen.”

  Gray knew they had to look inside. The Doomsday key had always been connected to the body of the dark queen. He reached into the casket and slipped the heavy container from the queen’s withered fingers.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Kowalski mumbled and backed up a step. “No way, no how. Thing’s got to be cursed.”

  Or it’s the cure, Gray thought.

  With their skill in agriculture, the Egyptians must have discovered some type of fungal parasite that could wreak havoc and lay waste to a village. A form of biowarfare. But did they also possess the counteragent?

  Gray cradled the jar, gripped the hawk’s head, and tugged the lid off. He cringed inwardly, not knowing what to expect.

  Curse or cure?

  Wallace held a flashlight steady as Gray tipped it over.

  From inside, a snow-white powder spilled out, so fine it poured like water. He remembered the story of Bernard and the Lactation Miracle, how the Black Madonna wept milk and cured him.

  Gray knew what pooled in his palm. “It’s the cure,” he said, knowing it to be true. �
��This is the key.”

  He poured the powder back into the canopic jar and sealed it tight.

  “You might want to see this,” Seichan coughed out. She had moved to another of the caskets and opened it.

  They joined her.

  She pointed her light into the glass casket. A body lay wrapped in cloths, wearing a simple white robe with a cowl. His hands were also folded, clutching a small leather-bound book.

  But it was the body’s face on which Seichan focused her light. The man looked as if he could have died yesterday. His skin, while slightly sunken, was unblemished, his lips red, his eyes closed as if in slumber. His brown hair looked freshly combed and trimmed straight across his brow.

  “He’s not decayed at all,” Seichan said.

  Rachel placed a hand to her throat. “The bodies of saints are said to be incorruptible. They don’t decay. This has to be Saint Malachy”—she glanced at the third coffin where a vague outline of another body could be seen—”or Saint Bernard.”

  Wallace had another thought on the miraculous nature of the body’s incorruptibility. He stared over at the jar in Gray’s arms, then back to the remains.

  “Canopic jars didn’t always hold embalmed organs.” He nodded toward the jug. “Sometimes they just stored embalming compounds. Oils, unguents, powders.”

  Gray understood. “If the key was a curative, specifically against the fungal scourge, the powder must possess strong antifungal properties … possibly antibacterial, too.” He stared at the face of the saint. “And the main sources of bodily decay are fungi and bacteria. Embalm a corpse with such a compound, seal the coffin tight, and it would appear incorruptible.”

  He also remembered the unusual health and longevity attributed to the monks of Bardsey Island. Such a powerful curative would have protected the monks against the usual pathogens that swept through the Middle Ages. No wonder the island had a reputation for healing.

  Wallace’s eyes widened. “So the key …”

  “It must originally have been an embalming compound. Perhaps one brought from Egypt or discovered in their new land. Either way, its medicinal use must have quickly been recognized. Back in those times, such a cure must have seemed miraculous.”