The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts

by James Rollins

  Had he done that to shake a tail?

  Kowalski tried the door handle. “Unlocked,” he said and proved it by swinging the door open.

  The dark space ahead smelled of dust, dry hay, and a hint of cedar.

  Gray reached inside and found a light switch. He flicked it on. Racks and shelves filled the back half of a cavernous space. Wooden crates with shipping labels stapled to them were stacked in a pile along one side. Several had been cracked open. Old packing straw and more modern Styrofoam packing peanuts littered the floor.

  A storage room.

  To the left of the door, a single desk supported a computer and printer. Tables stretched along the other side, crowded with pottery and sections of decorated stone blocks. Someone had been taking inventory. Several larger objects rested on wooden floor pallets deeper in the room: a marble statue of a woman with her arms broken away, a corroded bronze sculpture of a bull’s head, a base of a stone pillar.

  Gray followed the trail inside, wondering what had led the professor to trespass here. Had he just been hiding from a passing guard? But the professor’s path seemed direct. It led straight to one of the objects on the floor pallets, a dome of carved rock. The artifact stood waist-high with a hole on top. It looked like a granite model of a volcano, except it was covered with writing. Gray leaned closer to the inscriptions.

  Ancient Greek.

  Frowning, Gray tested it with the Gamma-Scout reader.

  Polk’s trail circled around the pallet.

  Gray traced the dead man’s footsteps. Why had Polk been fascinated with this artifact?

  Before he could contemplate it further, a crash sounded to his left. He turned to see Kowalski backing away from one of the tables. He held the handle of an urn in his fingers. The rest of the vase lay shattered at his toes. “It…it broke.”

  The man had a gift for the obvious.

  Gray shook his head. He should have left Kowalski out in the hallway. He was like a bull in a china shop—only a bull had better self-control.

  “It was wobbly, goddamn it.” Still, he sounded angry more at himself. “Come over here and see this.” He pointed the broken handle toward the table.

  Gray stepped to his side. On the table were stacks of ancient Greek coins. From the gap in the second row, one of the coins was missing. Could it be Polk’s coin? Was this where he’d got ahold of it?

  “I bumped the base. Tried to catch it.” Kowalski carefully placed the broken handle on the table. “It came apart in my hands.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They’ll just take it out of your paycheck.”

  “Damn it. How much do you think it cost?”

  “A few hundred.”

  A relieved whistle escaped him. “Well, that’s not too bad.”

  “A few hundred thousand,” Gray clarified.

  “Oh, sweet motherfu—”

  Kowalski’s reaction was cut off by the rattle of the doorknob. Gray started to turn, but Kowalski’s thick mitt of a hand grabbed Gray’s upper arm and yanked him back. He shielded Gray with his own body while smoothly pulling a .45-caliber pistol from a shoulder holster.

  The slight figure of a young woman entered. She was fumbling with her purse, oblivious of the two in the room. She even swiped blindly for the light switch until she seemed to realize two things at once: the lights were already on and a massive mountain of a man had a pistol leveled at her chest.

  She squeaked and backed into the jamb, unable to find the doorway in her fright.

  “Sorry,” Kowalski said and shifted his pistol toward the ceiling.

  Gray hurried around the befuddled bodyguard. “It’s all right, ma’am. We’re museum security. We’re investigating a break-in.”

  Kowalski pointed his pistol at the shattered vase on the floor. “Yeah, someone broke that.” He glanced to Gray for confirmation and collaboration as he holstered his weapon.

  She clutched her purse to her chest. Her other hand fixed a pair of petite eyeglasses higher on her nose. With her chestnut hair cut in a bob and her small frame, she appeared to be no more than a college sophomore, but from the crinkled pinch of her eyes, bright with suspicion, she was probably a decade older.

  “Can I see some identification?” she asked firmly and kept close to the open doorway.

  Gray held up his black I.D. pass. It displayed his picture, along with the presidential seal embossed in gold. “I have a number you can call to confirm who we are.”

  She squinted at the pass and seemed to relax slightly, but a tension remained in her shoulders. She stared around the room. “Was anything stolen?”

  “Maybe you can better answer that,” Gray said, hoping she could help. “I noticed that there seems to be a coin conspicuously missing from the table here.”

  “What?” She hurried over, abandoning any hesitation. With one look at the table, her expression fell into a forlorn look. “Oh, no…we had the collection on loan from the Delphi museum.”

  Delphi again.

  She glanced to the carved dome of rock, the one that seemed to have attracted Polk’s attention. It may have been because Kowalski was leaning on it. “Please don’t touch that.”

  Kowalski straightened. He looked at his palm, as if it were to blame. He had the decency to blush around the collar. “Sorry.”

  “May I ask what that is?” Gray said casually, nodding to the stone.

  Her hands wrung together with worry. “The prize of the collection. For the upcoming exhibit. Thank God, it wasn’t vandalized by the thieves.” She circled it to be sure. “It’s over sixteen hundred years old.”

  “But what is it?” Gray pressed.

  “It’s called an omphalos. Which roughly translates as “navel.” In ancient Greece, the omphalos was considered to be the point around which the universe turned. There are many mythologies and stories associated with the omphalos, great powers attributed to it.”

  “And how did you acquire it?”

  She nodded to the table. “It came from the same collection as the rest. On loan from the museum at Delphi.”

  “Delphi? Where the Oracle of Delphi had her temple?”

  She glanced toward Gray, her expression surprised. “That’s right. The omphalos graced the inner sanctum of the temple. Its most holy chamber.”

  “And this is that stone.”

  “No. Sadly it’s only a replica. Until just recently, everyone thought this was the original omphalos, as described in the ancient histories of Plutarch and Socrates. But the sisterhood of Delphic oracles goes back three millennia, and this stone has been dated to half that age.”

  “What happened to the original?”

  “Lost to history. No one knows.”

  She straightened and strode over to a smock hung on a peg by the door. Donning it, she removed her museum identification tag from her shirt and fixed it to the smock.

  It was only then that Gray noted the tag. It bore her picture and her name beneath it.

  POLK, E.

  “Polk…,” he read aloud.

  “Dr. Elizabeth Polk,” she said.

  A tingle of misgiving iced through Gray. He suddenly knew why the professor had come here. “By any chance do you know an Archibald Polk?”

  She fixed him with a more solid stare. “My father? Why?”

  Chapter 3

  September 5, 7:22 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  “Dead?”

  Gray sat on the edge of the desk in the museum’s storage room. He knew the pain of what he had to tell her. Elizabeth Polk slumped in the chair, collapsed within her lab coat. There were no tears. Shock locked them away, but she took off her slim eyeglasses, as if readying herself.

  “I heard about the shooting on the Mall,” she mumbled. “But I never thought…” She shook her head. “I’ve been in the cellars here all day.”

  Where there was no cell phone reception, Gray noted silently. Painter had mentioned trying to reach Polk’s daughter. And she was right across the Mall the entire time.
<
br />   “I’m sorry to press you on this, Elizabeth,” he said, “but when did you last see your father?”

  She swallowed hard, starting to lose control. Her voice quavered. “I…I’m not sure. A year ago. We had a falling-out. Oh, God, what I said to him…” She placed a hand on her forehead.

  Gray read the regret and pain in her eyes. “I’m sure he knew you loved him.”

  Her eyes flashed to him, going harder. “Thank you for your words. But you didn’t know him, did you?”

  Gray sensed the tough core hidden behind that mousy, bookish exterior. He faced her anger, knowing it was directed inward rather than at him. Kowalski had retreated to the far side of the room, plainly uncomfortable with the whole scene.

  Gray twisted where he sat and pointed to the desktop. The rows of ancient coins still lined a paper blotter there. “I know because we found a coin on your father’s body.” Gray recalled what Painter had told him about it. “A coin with the bust of Faustina the Elder on one side and the Temple of Delphi on the other.”

  Her eyes widened. She stared down at the gap in the row where the coin once lay.

  Gray lifted an arm. “He came here before he was shot. To your office.”

  “It’s not my office,” she mumbled, glancing around, as if searching for the ghost of her father. “I’m doing research for my doctoral dissertation. In fact, it was my father who pulled some strings and got me this graduate position at the Delphi Museum in Greece. I’d been out there until a month ago. I’m overseeing the installation of this exhibit. I didn’t think my father knew I was here. Especially after our—” She waved away what she was going to say next.

  “He must’ve been keeping tabs on you.”

  A few tears did flow, just enough to trickle down one cheek. She brusquely dabbed her face with the sleeve of her lab coat.

  Gray gave her a moment. He stared over at Kowalski, who was walking in a bored circle around the stone omphalos, like a slow orbiting moon. Gray knew Elizabeth’s father had followed that same orbit. But why?

  Elizabeth voiced the same question. “Why did my father come here? Why did he take the coin?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m fairly certain your father knew he was being tracked, hunted.” He pictured Polk haunting the edges of the Mall, seeking some way of contacting Sigma in person, staying hidden. “He might have taken the coin in case he was murdered. The coin was grimy, easy to miss in a pocket if the assailant did a cursory search of the body. But a more thorough exam at a morgue would’ve revealed the strangeness of the coin. I think he hoped it would lead here. To this office where he would’ve known you’d report it stolen.”

  The woman’s tears had dried as he spoke. “But why would he do that?”

  Gray closed his eyes, thinking hard, putting himself in the man’s shoes. “If I’m right about the coin, your father was worried he would be searched. He must’ve known the hunters were after something. Something he possessed…”

  Of course.

  Gray opened his eyes and stood. He drew Elizabeth up, too. Her eyes studied the room, but not for ghosts this time. Gray saw the understanding in the pinch of her brows. She donned her eyeglasses.

  “My father might have hidden here what his murderers were looking for.”

  Gray headed to where Kowalski waited beside the conical-shaped stone. “Your father seemed particularly interested in the temple’s omphalos.”

  Elizabeth followed with a frown. “How could you possibly know that?”

  Gray briefly explained about the radiation exposure and lifted the Gamma-Scout. “Your father’s trail led here, and for me to get such a strong reading from it, he must have spent some time near the artifact.”

  Elizabeth had paled a bit upon hearing of her father’s affliction. Still, she waved to Kowalski. “There’s an emergency flashlight plugged into that wall over there.”

  He nodded and fetched it.

  She approached the stone. “While it looks solid, it’s actually hollow inside. No more than an upended bowl of carved granite.” She pointed to the hole at the top.

  Gray understood. Her father could have easily dropped something inside it. He accepted the flashlight from Kowalski, leaned over the stone, and pointed the beam down into the heart of it. It was indeed hollow. At the bottom, the slats of the pallet that supported the stone were illuminated. He shifted the beam around and spotted something off to one side. It looked like a polished stone, roughly the size of a cantaloupe.

  “Can’t tell what it is,” he mumbled and straightened. “We need to lift the stone.”

  “It’s heavy,” Elizabeth explained. “Took six men to uncrate it. But there’s a crowbar among the tools in back. We should be able to tilt it up. But we’ll have to be careful.”

  “I’ll go get it,” Kowalski said.

  As he stepped away, the telephone on Elizabeth’s desk rang. She crossed toward it and checked the caller ID on the handset. “It’s security.” She checked her wristwatch, then glanced to Gray. “It’s already after closing hours. They must be checking on how long I’ll be working down here.”

  “Tell them at least another hour.”

  She nodded and picked up the phone. She confirmed who she was, then listened. Her eyes widened. “I understand. We’ll be right up.” She hung up the phone and turned to Gray. “Someone called in a bomb threat. Here at the museum. They’re evacuating the building.”

  Gray remained silent. He knew such a threat, especially now, was no coincidence. He read the same understanding in the woman’s eyes. “Someone knows,” he said slowly. “After today’s shooting on the Mall, no one will dismiss a bomb threat. It’s the perfect cover to run a covert sweep of the building.”

  He turned to study the omphalos.

  Time was running out for delicacy.

  Kowalski must have understood this, too. He returned from the back of the storage room. “I heard,” he said. Instead of the padded crowbar, he hefted a large sledgehammer on his shoulder. “Get back.”

  “No!” Elizabeth warned.

  But Kowalski clearly wasn’t taking no for an answer. He closed the distance in one stride, raised the hammer over his head, and swung it down.

  Elizabeth gasped in fear for the centuries-old artifact.

  But instead of hitting the ancient stone, the sledgehammer slammed into the slats of the pallet that supported the omphalos. Wood splintered and broke. Kowalski lifted the hammer again and cracked more slats on the same side.

  With half its weight now unsupported, the great stone tilted toward the crushed side of the pallet—then slowly toppled over, upending itself. More slats were pulverized under its weight, but it seemed undamaged from its slow roll.

  Kowalski shouldered the hammer.

  Elizabeth stared at the man, her expression wavering between horror and awe.

  Gray hurried to the pallet and dropped to a knee. The object hidden under the omphalos now rested in plain view. It was not a polished stone. Gray lifted his Gamma-Scout reader toward it. It read hot, but no worse than the binoculars they’d found earlier.

  Satisfied, Gray retrieved it and stood.

  Elizabeth stumbled back as he straightened.

  Kowalski’s eyes tightened. “A skull? Is that what this is all about?”

  Gray examined it closer. The skull was small and missing its lower jaw. He turned it over. The remaining teeth displayed prominent fangs in a protuberant muzzle. “Not human,” he said. “From the size and shape of the cranium, I’d say it’s simian. Possibly a chimpanzee.”

  Kowalski’s expression soured even further. “Great,” he drawled out. “More monkeys.”

  Gray knew the large man had developed a distaste for all things simian following a previous mission. Something to do with baboons…or apes. Gray could never get a straight story from the man.

  “But what…what’s that attached to the skull’s side?” Elizabeth pointed out.

  Gray knew what she meant. It was hard to miss. Affixed to the temporal bone,
just above the opening to the ear canal, rested a curved block of stainless steel.

  “I’m not sure,” he answered. “Maybe a hearing aid. Perhaps even one of the new cochlear implants.”

  “For a damn monkey?” Kowalski asked.

  Gray shrugged. “We’ll have to examine it later.”

  “Why did my father bring that here?”

  Gray shook his head. “I don’t know. But someone wanted to stop him. And someone still wants it back.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We find a way out of here. Before anyone knows we recovered it.”

  Gray took a moment to search the rest of the pallet, in case the professor had left anything else here. Like a note explaining everything. One could always hope. He pointed his flashlight into the hollow cavity of the upended omphalos.

  Nothing.

  As he swung the beam away, the light glanced over the inner surface. Something caught his eye there. It looked like a spiraling groove carved into its surface, starting at the lip and corkscrewing up toward the hole. He reached a finger to it and realized it was a single long line of cursive script. Leaning over, he narrowed the flashlight’s beam upon the writing.

  Elizabeth noted his attention. “Ancient Sanskrit.”

  Gray straightened back. “What’s Sanskrit doing on the inside—?”

  Kowalski cut him off. “Does it friggin’ matter already?” He pointed a thumb toward the door. “Remember that bomb scare. Shouldn’t we be haulin’ ass out of here?”

  Gray straightened. The man had a point. They’d wasted enough time. The sweep of the building was probably already—

  A muffled shout echoed from the hallway.

  Kowalski rolled his eyes in a plain expression of I told you so.

  “What do we do?” Elizabeth asked.