by David Wood
He decided not to answer that, but gamely slipped his legs into the hoops of the harness and then helped Shah do the same. Jade did not wait for them to finish, but threaded the belay rope through the carabiner attached to the front of her harness and started up the wall.
She climbed quickly, as sure-footed as a spider, setting her first piece of protection—a spring-loaded cam that she slipped into a two-inch wide vertical crack—about twenty feet up. Limestone, formed from the calcium carbonate shells of ancient sea creatures, was sort of like nature’s concrete, but even the hardest rock could crumble under stress. If Jade fell, the camming device was just as likely to be yanked out of the wall as it was to arrest her fall. Jade however seemed unconcerned, as if setting the anchors was merely a formality. Beyond that point, she was less frugal about the gear, putting a piece in place every five feet or so, but she moved with the same purposefulness that had brought her this far. Less than ten minutes after beginning the climb, she pulled herself into the cave opening and set a final anchor.
“I’m up,” she called out.
Professor turned to Shah again. “You think you can do what she just did?”
Shah nodded but without enthusiasm. “If I must.”
Jade’s plan had been for Professor to top rope Shah—maintaining tension of the belaying line so that if Shah slipped, the rope going up to the last anchor Jade had set would keep him from falling. It was the way most beginning climbers got their start, but Professor was having second thoughts about the plan. For one thing, Shah’s safety would depend on whether or not Jade’s anchor held fast. Climbing protection was generally reliable, but if Shah repeatedly lost his grip, the anchor could conceivably come loose.
Of course, the real reason he didn’t like the plan was that it would put Shah and Jade alone together in the cave.
“That’s what I thought. I’m going to go up first. That way, I can pull you up if I have to.” He did not bother giving Shah a crash-course in climbing techniques or how to belay from below, which meant that he would be climbing more or less without anyone to arrest him in the event of a fall, but he trusted his own abilities a lot more than he trusted Shah.
Shah’s hesitancy turned into something more like suspicion, but he nodded again. “Whatever you think best.”
Professor cinched the rope to Shah’s harness with a figure-eight knot. “When I give you the signal, start climbing. I’ll be pulling in the slack from up there, so you won’t be in any danger. Just pay attention to where I put my hands and feet and do the same. Got it?”
Another nod.
“Good.” Professor turned away and, using the anchored rope Jade had set like a thread to guide him through a maze, made the ascent in half the time it had taken her.
“You were right,” he said to her, grinning. “Piece of cake.
The recess was larger than it had looked from below, though it still looked more like a scalloped depression in the limestone than an actual cave. What might once have been the front porch of the mythical Vault now seemed more like a second story exit door with no attending staircase.
Jade shone a flashlight up into the darkest reaches of the niche, revealing a shadowy hole, like the opening to a chimney. It appeared to be just barely large enough to accommodate a person. “That passage leads to the entrance to the vault,” she said, grinning triumphantly. “Believe me now?”
Shah watched from below as Professor disappeared into the shadowy niche. His eyes followed the rope that dangled from the cave entrance, zigzagged through the anchors, and then reached out, like the tentacles of some mythical sea creature to snag hold of the carabiner attached to the front of his climbing harness. His heart was racing but this had nothing at all to do with the impending climb.
This was the moment he’d been waiting for. He hastened forward, standing as close to the wall as he could to remove himself from Professor’s line of sight, and took out his phone. He knew he had only a few seconds, but that was all he needed.
Although Jade had been very secretive about their ultimate location, she had revealed enough for him to set a plan in motion. He had assembled a new team of jihadists, college students from the Arab states and Pakistan, disgruntled immigrants from the Horn of Africa, even a young convert from Beverly Hills—the son of a geologist employed by an oil company, who had learned the Prophet’s wisdom during an extended stay in Yemen. Shah had been able to make all the preparations surreptitiously, sending text messages and posting to the chatrooms whenever an opportunity presented itself. Now, his team was ready. Only one thing was lacking.
He opened the text message app and hit the menu button marked: “Send my current location.”
He returned the phone to his pocket and took a step back from the wall, looking up expectantly, awaiting the signal to begin climbing.
Despite the unpleasantness at the airport, he bore no ill-will toward Jade Ihara or her friend—she called him Professor, but he seemed more like some kind of government agent, maybe a Special Forces soldier assigned to safeguard her. All Shah cared about was preserving the status quo. He genuinely hoped no one would be hurt, not even Jade’s antagonistic companion, but he would do whatever had to be done to make sure that no one ever had cause to question the legitimacy of Islam.
After a few minutes of waiting, he heard Professor call out to him. He waved back and then put his hands on the wall. Up close, it didn’t look so daunting. There were protuberances he could hang onto and cracks he could jam his fingers into. It was not that different than climbing a ladder, albeit a ladder where the rungs were randomly spaced and no bigger than a peanut. Or at least it seemed that way until he could no longer touch the ground with an outstretched foot. Then his heart began pounding again, and this time it had everything to do with the climb. He clutched at the wall, pressing himself flat against it, afraid to move, and almost immediately felt the rock slipping away beneath his fingertips.
A terrified but incoherent cry escaped his lips. Some part of him knew that it wouldn’t be a fatal fall, but it would hurt. He might even break a bone or—
He did not fall. The rope cinched to his harness pulled taut, arresting his downward plunge, and he banged against the wall, though not with enough force to cause injury.
“Find your holds,” Professor advised from above. “Three points of contact. It’s not that hard.”
“I can’t,” Shah gasped. “Let me down.”
“If that’s what you want.”
Shah thought he heard a note of mockery in the other man’s tone. The perceived insult, coupled with the knowledge that, if he did not make this climb, he would never know what lay inside the vault, was enough to help him regain his composure. “No!” he shouted. “No. I can do it.”
“That’s the spirit,” replied Professor. “Loosen up. If you keep hugging the wall like that, you’ll wear yourself out.”
Heeding that advice was easier said than done. A primal fear of falling kept him gripping every hold so tightly that the tendons in his forearms felt like they were about to snap. Nevertheless, the further he went up the wall, the more confident he felt. The earlier mishap had taught him to trust the rope, trust that even if he lost his grip again, he would not fall. When he reached the top, Professor extended a hand to him and pulled him the rest of the way up.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re a rock climber now.”
Shah was drenched in perspiration and it took him a moment to catch his breath, but he was smiling so broadly that his jaws hurt. “That was amazing. I wouldn’t mind trying that again sometime.”
“You’ll like rappelling down even more.”
Shah looked past him. “Where’s Jade?”
“Scouting ahead.” He pointed to the impenetrable darkness at the back of the cave.
As if on cue, a faint glow appeared there, growing brighter by the second as the light source moved closer and eventually filled the mouth of the passage that led deeper into the mountain. A moment later, Jade’s face appea
red in the opening. She did not look happy.
“I know that look,” Professor said, his tone grim. “What’s wrong?”
“The entrance chamber. It’s completely flooded. And I’ll save you the trouble of asking.” She sagged in defeat. “I didn’t see that.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Shah was incredulous. “Flooded? In Arizona? How is that possible?”
Jade squeezed her eyes shut, recalling the vision from the Hypogeum. She had seen a round chamber at the end of the passage, and the three circles that appeared to be linked but really weren’t. There had not been any water. She related exactly what she had seen to Professor.
“I think…” She hesitated. “Could this be how the timelock mechanism works?”
Professor nodded in understanding. “That makes sense. Water clocks have been around a long time. The Chinese may have created water clocks as far back as six thousand years ago. Water flows at a constant rate. Even though this is the desert, there’s plenty of rainfall in the monsoon season. Rainfall on the top of the rock seeps down and recharges the reservoir. Throw in a sufficiently complex clockwork mechanism, and you could make a water clock that keeps time over very long periods.”
“So we have to wait until it drains?” Shah said. “We just come back in… Ha! We don’t even know how long to wait. Wonderful.”
“We could probably pump the water out,” Professor said, though his tone suggested that he considered this a measure of last resort rather than the best way forward. “I doubt very much we could pull that off without attracting a lot of attention.”
“If the chamber was dry, we’d be able to unlock the vault,” Jade said, thinking aloud. “Those rings are the key. They’re like a… a pass code or the combination to a safe. Maybe we don’t have to actually drain the chamber to open it.”
Professor’s eyebrows drew together. “SCUBA?”
“Why not?”
“Well, for starters, we don’t have any gear. We’d probably have to drive to Phoenix to find a dive shop, which we wouldn’t be able to do until tomorrow. And someone is bound to ask why we’re hauling gas cylinders and wetsuits up the trail. But aside from that, the biggest problem I see is hydraulic pressure. Water is heavy. About eight pounds to the gallon. I don’t know how big this chamber is, but let’s say it’s about the same size as a backyard swimming pool—roughly ten thousand gallons. That’s eighty thousand pounds. Forty tons, pressing against that locked door. I’m not sure you’d even be able to open it, but if you could, the results could be…well, unpredictable to say the least.”
Jade managed a wan smile. “We can handle unpredictable.”
Professor threw her a withering glance.
“How about this,” Jade went on. “I’ll swim into the chamber and try to get a better look at it. Maybe then we’ll have a better idea of how to get it open.”
“You want to free dive in a cave? You want to swim into a dark cave, have a looksee, and then find your way back out, all on one breath? Cave diving is insanely dangerous under the best of circumstances. Without gear? No. It’s suicide.”
“I can hold my breath for two minutes. That passage drops right into the cave, so I could spend a whole minute looking around, and have plenty of time to get back out. We can pull the rope up and I’ll tie off. That way I can’t get lost and if anything goes wrong, you can pull me back.”
Professor started to say something, but Jade cut him off. “I know, you think you’re the stronger swimmer, so you should go. But I’ve seen that chamber in my vision. I know I can figure out how to open it.”
Professor shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say that. What would be the point? Once you get an idea in your head, there’s no reasoning with you. I was going to say that maybe we can make some field expedient swim goggles so you can at least see what you’re doing.”
He took a half-filled water bottle from his back pocket, drained the contents in a long swig, and then held the empty plastic container up. “Should be able to do something with his.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Get the rope,” he said. “And give me your knife. I lost mine in Australia. Once more thing that trip cost me.”
Jade passed over her Swiss Army knife and then went to the edge of the cave mouth to gather up the belaying line. She knotted the end to her climbing harness and then threw the rest of the coil onto her shoulder. Professor, meanwhile sliced out two oval shaped pieces from the bottoms of two plastic bottles. He pressed them to his eyes and scrunched up his face to hold them in place.
“They’ll be leaky,” he said, removing them and handing them to her, “but they should be good for thirty seconds or so.”
Jade tried the makeshift lenses. The edges were sharp, digging into her skin, but the discomfort was a small price to pay for being able to see clearly underwater.
Professor wasn’t finished however. He took out the sketch of the circles and began drawing something new beneath them. “Borromean Rings are an impossibility using true circles. An optical illusion like something from Escher. But if you use slightly elliptical circles positioned at angles in three dimensions, the perspective changes make them look like circles when viewed top down. Sort of like this.”
He held up the new sketch.
“Look for something like this. Then you’ll know you’re on the right track.”
“You’re kidding. Those are the same?”
He nodded. “More or less. This is only one possible solution of course. But keep your eyes open for it.”
She squinted through the eye cups. “If I open my eyes too wide, these things will fall out, but I’ll do my best.” She handed him the climbing rope. “I tug on this as soon as I’m in the chamber. After that, if I give two sharp tugs, pull me back.”
“And if you aren’t out in sixty seconds, I’ll drag you out anyway.”
“Make it ninety. I want to be able to take my time in there.”
“Fine, but not a second longer.”
“Wish me luck.” With that, Jade turned and headed back up the narrow passage. It was cramped. Professor would probably be able to scrape through, but barely. During her earlier exploration, she had been forced to crawl backward since there was no room to turn around at the far end; merely an opening about a foot above the water’s surface.
She reached the opening and thrust her flashlight into the submerged chamber. The waterproof light revealed an enormous murky void and not much else. The water was chilly on her skin and immersion in it would be bracing, but not enough to cause hypothermia in the minute and a half she would be in it. She looked over her shoulder, back down the length of the passage but was unable to see Professor or Shah. She took several quick breaths, hyperventilating to oxygenate her blood, and then, with one hand holding the eye cups in place, she plunged forward, headfirst into the water.
The slap of cold was about what she expected and she had to fight the urge to let all her air out in a howl of dismay. Her natural buoyancy immediately tried to bring her back to the surface, and water began infiltrating the makeshift goggles, but in that first moment, she got her first real look at the entrance to the vault.
Being in the chamber was, Jade thought, like swimming in a municipal water tank. It was about twenty feet across and perfectly spherical, save for the strange and seemingly haphazard gaps and protrusions that ruined the otherwise perfect symmetry. As she studied the relief, looking for some kind of recognizable pattern, Jade felt something tugging at her waist.
Crap. I forgot. She found the safety line with the hand that held the flashlight and gave it a single hard pull, hoping that Professor would not misinterpret the signal and drag her out. She had already been in the water for a good fifteen seconds, and something told her she had overestimated her ability to hold her breath in the chilly conditions. When the rope did not go taut again, she assumed the message had been correctly received, and returned her attention to the walls of the chamber.
The momentary distract
ion gave her a fresh perspective, though the water seeping into the eye cups left her vision blurry. She realized now that, despite differences in depth, the grooves and protrusions still reflected the curvature of the surrounding chamber. It was almost as if large square sections of the wall had been excised to reveal another sphere underneath, and then another beyond that, like the layers of an onion.
A sphere inside a sphere inside a sphere. Almost like Professor’s second drawing.
Inspired, she swam closer to the wall and pressed against one protruding square, about two feet on each side. When that yielded no results, she moved her fingers to the edge and tried pushing it sideways, like sliding a window open.
The stone moved laterally, but as it moved, it caused other sections to move as well.
It’s a puzzle, Jade realized. Like an enormous inside out Rubik’s Cube. Move one piece and the whole puzzle changes. But what’s the solution?
The answer was so obvious, she felt stupid for not realizing it immediately. The key to the puzzle, and the combination that would unlock the door to the vault, was embodied in the riddle of the Borromean Rings.
She swam sideways, trying to take in as much of the inside out orb as she could. Now that she understood what she was supposed to do, she had no difficulty visualizing the finished product.
There were four layers in all. The deepest was a perfect sphere. The squares of varying thickness would have to be moved around to form concentric circular bands that corresponded to the arrangement in the drawing Professor had shown her. None of the square sections was perfectly flat, nor were any two the same, even those that were of the same layer. Some of the edges met perfectly, while others differed by as much as an inch.
The longer she studied it, the more obvious the solution became.
I can do this. But I need time.
The burning in her lungs and the involuntary spasms in her chest told her that she was already out of time. She needed to breathe, needed to be out of the cold water. She followed the safety rope up through the murk to the top of the spherical chamber. There was a small air pocket there, supplied by the opening through which she had entered, and she floated there for a moment, greedily sucking in fresh air. The rope hung down a few feet away, marking the location off the exit. She could just pull herself up, back into the passage, crawl back and tell Professor what she had discovered. They could come back with SCUBA gear, wetsuits and high-powered lanterns…maybe sneak them in after nightfall. The Vault wasn’t going anywhere, after all. What was another twenty-four hours?
